"I will just have to be direct about this", said Leslie. ''I'm sorry but there is no other way. Why are you so nervous?"
The interview was not going well. We must have been five or six minutes into it, maximum ten. It was a small, windowless, room, with a glazed wall and door bringing some natural light from the office across the corridor. There were four armchairs, in imitation leather, off-green and off-orange, between them a table so small as almost not to be one, Leslie and I.
I had come to see a consultant in a big headhunting firm, Whitehead Mann. No, it wasn't Whitehead Mann but it was a big firm, and her name is not Leslie.
It had been billed a meeting but was an interview. All job-related meetings, bar with friends, are interviews anyway, in my stage of life, mid-life unemployment. Leslie had a job in mind, she told me swiftly, in investor relations. So it was a pre-first interview interview.
The first mistake I had made was not to ring her ahead of the meeting, after it had been arranged, to ask whether she had something "on her books" that might be of interest to me. The second mistake was not getting up early, at 7.30, as alarm-clocked for, but instead lying in bed for three whole hours and ten minutes, giving myself little time to get going and get there. The meeting was at 11.30. The third mistake, the most serious of the three, was to get up at all, or rather to get up other than for one reason, to ring, postpone and return to bed.
This mistake came to me as Leslie walked me back up the corridor - we walked each other, I was her partner in this - mentioning how, if you are not in form to see someone for a job, it is best to postpone.
"Why are you so nervous?". It had been said nicely, placed half way between a real and a rhetorical question.
I accepted the charge with few words and let Leslie speak.
"You have no need to be nervous. I'm sure you have no need. You have an excellent C.V., lots of good experience. I am on your side. This is not even an interview. You are going to see lots of people besides me. You are so nervous that you are unable to communicate. You will not get a job in communications if you cannot communicate. I'm sorry but I just cannot present you to my client in a state like this because this will be immediately obvious".
All of this was also said nicely. Leslie had been in headhunting for some years.
Was I nervous? I had arrived sweating, having had more difficulty than expected finding the right building, the street having turned out, in the London manner, to have an extra stretch that I and my bicycle had not known about. And I was a few minutes late, bringing the total to five mistakes so far. I suppose that I was nervous. I was mainly aware of how unconvincingly this morning I was talking for the umpteenth time about how I had got to this point in my life.
To be continued perhaps (in the next post, like in the next newspaper issue for those nineteenth century novels).
