Chapter Two: The Most Honest Feedback

She read it once with her eyes half closed, the way you peek at a horror film through your fingers.

This is the most honest feedback we’ve had all year. Meet me tomorrow.

That was all. No greeting, no sign-off, no angry capital letters. Just a single glowing sentence and a timestamp: 1:04 a.m. Then, as she stared, a second message slid in beneath it, as though its author had thought better of his brevity.

Eight o’clock. Forty-first floor. Bring whatever you’ve got. And please don’t bring a resignation letter. I would only have to decline it.

Poppy sat on the floor of her bedroom and read the two messages nine times. She read them in her head. She read them aloud to the radiator. She tried to detect sarcasm in a sentence that had no sarcasm in it, and failed, because the English language is a treacherous creature and a man can say the most honest feedback we’ve had all year in exactly the voice of a person who is about to have you escorted from the building by two security guards and a retired policeman called Winston.

She did the only sensible thing available to a person in her position. She called Dee.

Dee answered on the first ring, wide awake, breathless, and already shrieking. “I have been refreshing the company chat for an hour because you sent me the screenshot from Meera in Design. Poppy. POPPY. You sent a ten-paragraph rant about Gregory Pemberton to four hundred people. I have never been so proud of anyone in my entire life. I want to put you on a stamp.”

“I’m going to be fired.”

“You’re going to be legendary.”

“The CEO messaged me.”

There was a silence on the line so absolute that Poppy checked the call had not dropped. Then there came, from the far-off kitchen of a Manchester flat, the unmistakable sound of a saucepan hitting the floor.

“Read it to me. Exactly. Do not paraphrase, do not edit.”

Poppy read it. Dee made a long, thoughtful, rising noise, like a kettle approaching the boil.

“Pops,” she said at last, in a voice of tremendous gravity. “I want you to listen carefully. A man who was planning to fire you would not say please. Nobody says please to a person they are about to fire. Nobody says I would only have to decline it. That is not the language of an executioner. That is the language of someone who is, and I cannot stress this enough, intrigued.”

“He is the chief executive, Dee. He is not intrigued by me. He is probably checking whether the company’s legal insurance covers staff who describe the head of marketing as a LinkedIn post that has learned to walk.”

“A very good line,” said Dee, with real admiration. “Very good. I laughed out loud on a night shift.”

Poppy did not sleep. She lay on her back and listened to Kevin the radiator clear his throat. At five she gave up and got into the shower. At six she changed her outfit four times, settling at last on her funeral blazer, the black one with the loose button, which she reserved for occasions when she expected to receive bad news. At seven she was on the Victoria line with a bag containing a laptop, a notebook, a packet of tissues, and a single emergency Hobnob.

The Lumen & Crane building rose out of Bishopsgate like a blade of glass that had been politely asked to be a skyscraper. Poppy had walked through its revolving doors four hundred times and had never once felt that it was looking at her. Today, she felt every single window turn its head.

“Morning, Poppy,” said Winston at the security desk, a vast and gentle man with a grey moustache and a laugh like a distant cellar door. He gave her the look of a doctor who has heard a rumour about your results. Then he lowered his voice. “Between us. I printed it. Laminated it. It’s in the guard room. Don’t tell the building manager.”

“Winston, I’m about to be fired.”

“Then you’re going out in a blaze of glory, love,” he said warmly, and buzzed her through.

The lift was worse. It filled at the third floor with a clump of strangers in lanyards who had, by some unholy synchrony, all turned their phones face-down. A thin boy from IT pressed himself against the mirrored wall and whispered, with the awe of a pilgrim, “I framed it.” A woman in Procurement murmured, “Thank you,” to nobody in particular, and got out at the ninth floor without looking back. A man Poppy had never met in her life, wearing a cycling helmet indoors, raised one fist silently in the air, as one salutes a fellow soldier at a funeral.

She had not known it was possible to be both mortified and applauded at once. It was like being ill and in love.

On the sixth floor, as the doors slid open, she saw Gregory.

He stood at the end of the corridor beside the coffee station in a suit that was too perfectly pressed to be anything but an act of aggression, his face a curious mottled shade, somewhere between salmon and grief. He did not speak. He looked at her the way a cat looks at a bird it has just realised is a hawk. His mouth opened. Then he did something extraordinary: he turned on his polished heel, and walked straight into the glass wall of the kitchen. It was a small collision, but a distinct one. A woman in Finance dropped her teaspoon.

Poppy did not laugh. She would think about that afterwards, with a certain pride. She did not laugh, and she did not smile, and she kept her face as blank as paper until the lift doors closed again and she was alone with her own reflection and a very small, very private, entirely unprofessional squeak.

The forty-first floor was quiet in the way that expensive places are quiet. The carpet swallowed footsteps. The air smelled faintly of cedar and fresh coffee and money. At the glass-walled reception sat a woman in her sixties with silver hair pinned in an immaculate knot and a cardigan the colour of ripe plums, who looked up over a pair of half-moon spectacles and examined Poppy with the thoroughness of a customs officer.

“Miss Whitlock,” she said. “I’m Imogen Pryce. I have been Mr Ellison’s assistant for nine years and I have never, in all that time, seen him arrive early. He was here at six.” She said it with delicate, devastating significance. “He is expecting you. Please go straight in. May I take your coat? You look like a woman who intends to keep it on, and I would not advise it. The sofa is very comfortable.”

The office was not what Poppy had imagined. She had pictured something cold and silver, a shrine to ambition, a cathedral of leather and steel. Instead, it was a long, untidy, sun-flooded room with a view across the whole breadth of London, the river a pewter ribbon, the Gherkin glinting like an enormous pickle. There were books stacked on the floor in leaning towers. There was a bicycle propped against a bookshelf. There was a deeply unfashionable sofa in mustard velvet, and a coffee table covered in paper cups, and in the middle of it all, standing at the window with his back to her and his sleeves rolled to the elbows, a tall man holding a piece of paper.

“Miss Whitlock,” said Theo Ellison, and turned around.

She had seen him in photographs, and from the back of boardrooms. She had not seen him close. He was taller than she expected, long-limbed and a little rumpled, with dark hair that looked as though it had lost an argument with a pillow, and grey eyes with faint shadows beneath them, the shadows of a man who works too late and sleeps too little and drinks too much coffee. His tie hung loose. There was a smudge of ink along the side of his hand. He looked, Poppy thought wildly, like somebody who had been reading all night, and she realised with a small cold lurch that he had.

In his hand, she saw now, was a printout. Her rant. Every line of it was underlined in blue pen. In the margins, in a quick slanting scrawl, were small annotations. She caught one as he lowered the page: TRUE. Another: Ha. Another, in capitals, beside the tuna: WHY.

“Please,” said Theo. “Sit. Not there.” He pointed at a stiff-backed leather chair facing the desk. “That’s the chair people sit in when I’m about to disappoint them. Take the sofa. It’s ugly, but it was my grandfather’s and I’m sentimental about it.”

Poppy sat. The sofa swallowed her whole. She clutched her bag to her stomach.

“Before you say anything,” she began, in a rush, “I want to apologise. It was a mistake. A genuine, catastrophic, thumb-based mistake. It was meant for my best friend. I didn’t mean for it to go to anyone. I’m not in the habit of insulting the senior staff in public and I understand if there are consequences. I’ll leave quietly. I wrote a letter.”

“I asked you not to bring it.”

“I brought it anyway.”

“Of course you did.” Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He looked down at the page. “May I read you a sentence?”

She nodded, mute.

“Gregory Pemberton is the most confident man I have ever met who has never once had a thought.” He read it in a perfectly level voice, and then he looked up, and his composure cracked straight down the middle. “I laughed so hard at one in the morning that my neighbour knocked on the wall. I have not laughed like that since I was nineteen. I came in at six o’clock because I could not stop thinking about it, and my assistant came in at ten past six and found me standing at this window trying not to giggle like a schoolboy. Do you know what it is like, Miss Whitlock, to run a company where everybody tells you that everything is fine?”

“I imagine it is restful,” said Poppy, faintly.

“It is terrifying.” He set the page on the desk. “It is like flying a plane where all the instruments say green. For six years I have been told by every director, every vice-president, every consultant I pay obscene amounts of money, that the culture is excellent, the morale is high, the work is flourishing. And at eleven fifty-two last night, a junior brand associate in Walthamstow told me, in capital letters, that nobody tells me anything true. And she was right. Do you know what the worst part is?”

“No,” she whispered.

“She was kind about it. She said she thought I would be horrified. She said I was very busy and very lonely up there.” He cleared his throat and looked at the carpet for a moment. “I wasn’t expecting that bit.”

Poppy’s face went the colour of a postbox. “That part was not for publication.”

“It is the only part I have not been able to put down.”

There was a pause. Outside, a helicopter crossed the window, small and indifferent. Poppy discovered that she was gripping the strap of her bag so hard that her knuckles had gone pale.

“Now,” said Theo, and sat on the edge of his own desk, folding his arms. His voice changed. It dropped into something quieter, plainer, the voice of a man who has stopped performing. “I would like you to tell me, without cushioning, without politics, and without fear, because I give you my word there is nothing to fear in this room, whether what you wrote is true.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

“Including the tuna?”

“Especially the tuna.”

Poppy took a long breath. And then, because she was tired, and because he had asked, and because something in his steady grey gaze made it very difficult to lie, she opened her bag and took out the notebook.

It was a plain black thing with a rubber band around it. She had started it eleven months ago, on the day Gregory had told a client that a campaign she had spent a month on was a little something I whipped up over the weekend. She had written the date and the incident in her small neat hand, because her mother had taught her that the truth is slippery but ink is not. She had not known why she was doing it. She had only known that the part of her brain that did not trust the world needed somewhere to stand.

She slid the band off and passed it across the coffee table.

Theo opened it. He read the first page. He turned to the second. His face, which had been warm and amused, grew slowly very still. He turned page after page. There were eleven entries, each dated. Each had a short, factual description in a flat, careful tone. 14 March: G presents my brand audit to Halloran Group as his own. Client asks me to join call; G says I’m ‘in a meeting.’ 2 June: G rewrites my pitch deck the night before, removes my name from title slide. 19 July: G asks me to work through weekend, tells HR I volunteered. And on and on, to yesterday: G calls me Penny to the board.

When he reached the end he closed the book very gently, the way one closes a door on a sleeping child.

“Why did you stay?” he asked.

“I like the work.” She said it quickly, before she lost her nerve. “I know that sounds stupid. But the work is good, and the people are good, and Barbara gives me biscuits. And I kept thinking, if I just did the work well enough, someone would see. I kept thinking that maybe, if I made the thing good enough, it would speak for itself.”

“It didn’t.”

“No. It turns out things don’t speak. People speak. And Gregory is very loud.”

“Did you go to HR?”

“In October. They asked whether I had considered that Gregory’s management style might simply be, and I quote, ‘assertive’.” She tried a smile, and it came out lopsided. “They offered me a mentoring session with him.”

Theo closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, there was something steely in them that she had not seen before.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I want to say that plainly, because nobody else will. I am sorry. I should have seen it. It is my building. It is my floor. I was too busy staring at my pen.” He gave a small, rueful half-smile. “Yes, I saw you notice the pen. You watch very closely, Miss Whitlock.”

Poppy had no reply. Nobody in the entire history of her working life had said I am sorry to her in that voice, with that look, and she discovered that her eyes had begun to sting with a ferocity that was entirely inappropriate for a woman in a funeral blazer.

“Poppy,” she managed. “It’s Poppy. Please. Miss Whitlock sounds like my headmistress.”

“Poppy.” He said it carefully, like a man trying a new key in an old lock. “Then I am Theo, and I should tell you what I am going to do, because I do not believe in ambush. First: you are not being fired. Nobody is going to fire you. If anyone so much as raises an eyebrow, you are to come straight to this floor, and Imogen will deploy the necessary weaponry. Second: I would like to offer you a job.”

“I have a job.”

“You have a position. I’m offering a purpose.” He reached behind him and picked up a thin folder. “This company has four hundred and twelve people, and as of yesterday I know that at least one of them has been quietly miserable for fourteen months while doing excellent work. I would like to know how many more there are. I want a map, Poppy. Every fracture, every place where the truth stops climbing the stairs. I would like you to build it with me. We’ll call it the Honest Feedback Project. Ninety days, a desk on the fortieth floor, a small budget, and a promise that nobody will ever be punished for telling you the truth.”

“I am a junior brand associate,” said Poppy. “I make the tea sometimes.”

“You wrote four hundred words in a single sitting that I have read five times and that made me laugh, wince, and rethink my entire leadership philosophy before breakfast. I think you can manage a spreadsheet.”

“Is this a favour?”

“It most certainly isn’t. I have been advised, by a very stern woman named Margot Finch in People and Culture whom I rang at seven this morning to her great irritation, that you will report to her, with me as a sponsor, and that I am to keep my hands entirely off your performance reviews to prevent any appearance of impropriety. She was very specific about the hands.” His mouth twitched. “I am a man of rules, Poppy. This is a rule I will follow with enthusiasm.”

“And Gregory?”

“Gregory and I,” said Theo, with the serenity of a man who has already decided, “are going to have a conversation about names.”

Poppy looked at the notebook in his hand. She looked at the city beyond the glass, the grey river, the little human cranes. She thought of the girl in the Pret toilet fourteen months ago who had cried because someone had finally said yes. And she thought, with a flicker of something very like the old gold of her campaign, that perhaps a woman who had made a notebook in the dark could, if she were brave, make a map in the light.

“Ninety days,” she said.

“Ninety days.”

“I want it in writing.”

“Imogen will have it on your desk by noon.” He held out his hand. She shook it. His fingers were warm and slightly ink-stained, and for one very small instant, before she remembered herself and let go, she was aware of a strange flutter below her ribs, as though a small bird had woken up.

It was only nerves. She was almost sure of it.

When she had gone, with Imogen escorting her out and murmuring something about a lanyard and a bigger desk, Theo remained alone in the sunlit room. He stood at the window for a long time. In the quiet, he picked up the rant again and read the last paragraph one more time, the part about the very busy and very lonely man on the top floor, and he found, to his great surprise, that he was smiling.

He had not been single by choice, exactly. He had been single by schedule. Fourteen months ago, his fiancée, Charlotte, had handed back a ring in a restaurant that served nothing but small, serious portions and said, with great gentleness, that she had been engaged to a company, and that she would like to be engaged to a man. Since then he had gone to work. He had gone to work very, very hard. He had not once, in fourteen months, been teased, challenged, corrected, or made to laugh by a person who was afraid of him and did it anyway.

He looked at the empty sofa where she had sat, the cushion still faintly dented, and he thought: Ninety days.

It was, he decided, going to be a very interesting quarter.

On the floor below, with an expression of such catlike satisfaction that even Barbara from Accounts would remark on it, Imogen Pryce slid a freshly printed contract onto a new desk beside a window, and began, quietly, to hum.