Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

to eleven.
    ‘You’re too late,’ the man behind the desk said. ‘We’ve closed check-in.’
    ‘Oh, God, please don’t say that. I have to get to Paris. My job is on the line. Please?’
    ‘You’re too late,’ the man repeated.
    ‘I don’t have any luggage to check in,’ I said. ‘I can go straight to the gate. Please?’ I pleaded. He sighed.
    ‘Oh, all right then. But you must go straight to the gate. You don’t have time for shopping.’
    I was the last person onto the plane. They literally closed the doors behind me as I got on. Then the plane sat on the runway for forty minutes.
    ‘It’s your fault, you know,’ the prune-faced old woman sitting on the other side of the aisle said to me. ‘Because we were waiting for you, we missed our slot.’ Miserable old cow.
    We landed at Charles de Gaulle just before two. I sprinted to the Avis counter, picked up the keys to my Citroën ZX and purchased a map from a bookshop in the airport terminal. Annoyingly, I discovered that I was on completely the wrong side of the city. I would have to drive all the way around Paris’s answer to the M25 – the Périphérique – in order to get to the motor-way towards Orléans and the south-west. Le Périph , as it is known by the locals, is notoriously prone to traffic jams. I was just going to have to pray that today was a good traffic day in Paris.
    Fortunately, it was. I made it to the motorway by half past two which, I realised, gave me four and a half hours to drive three hundred and fifty miles. That meant I’d have to average about eighty. Oh, shit. I put my foot down. Vast swathes of France passed by in a blur; I sped past Orléans, Blois and Tours, eventually stopping near Poitiers for a cup of coffee and a ham and cheese baguette. It was quarter to five. I wolfed down my sandwich in under three minutes and got back onto the motorway.
    I made it to Rupert’s hotel in St Emilion at a quarter to eight. I leapt out of the car, grabbed the contract and my phone and ran into the lobby. There was no one there, but there were seventeen missed calls on my mobile. I didn’t bother listening to them;I rang Rupert straight away.
    ‘Where are you?’ I asked.
    ‘On my way to the Chateau Saint Martin. What the fuck happened with the contract? You told me seven o’clock. This is an almighty cock-up, Cassie.’ He put the phone down.
    Yes, Rupert, it is an almighty cock-up. Your almighty cock-up . I didn’t have time to reflect on the injustice of the whole situation, I just had to get over to the chateau. I asked the concierge for directions. He reckoned it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.
    Clutching the concierge’s hastily scrawled instructions (which were in passable English), I dashed back to the car and headed off in the direction of the chateau. I got lost twice, but not for any great length of time, and arrived at Chateau Saint Martin at twenty past eight. I hastily reapplied a bit of lipstick and mascara, brushed out my hair, spritzed myself with Chanel and rang the doorbell. An elderly gentleman opened the door. He frowned at me.
    ‘ Oui ?’
    ‘Monsieur Leveque?’
    ‘ C’est moi .’
    ‘I’m a colleague of Mr Forsythe’s. I’ve brought some papers which he needed.’
    He smiled at me.
    ‘We have another guest,’ M. Leveque announced.
‘ Mademoiselle . . .?’
    ‘Cavanagh,’ I said. ‘Cassie Cavanagh.’
    Rupert gawped at me. The elegant lady got to her feet and offered her hand.
    ‘This is my wife,’ M. Leveque said.
    ‘ Bonsoir, Madame ,’ I said, shaking her hand. There was a long, awkward pause. M. Leveque was looking at Rupert, expecting an explanation which was not forthcoming. Rupert was still gawping at me.
    ‘Perhaps the young lady would like a drink?’ Mme Leveque said eventually. ‘We were just tasting the Chateau Saint Martin from 1996. It’s really quite good.’
    Finally, Rupert spoke. ‘I wasn’t expecting you this evening, Cassie,’ he said.
    ‘Oh, I know,’ I replied, accepting a glass of red from M. Leveque, ‘I just thought I’d drop the papers round, in case you needed them this evening.’ I handed him the contract. He smiled at me, shaking his head ever so slightly.
    ‘Ah. So you do have the papers,’ M. Leveque said, looking from me to Rupert and back again, his eyebrows raised.
    ‘Yes, of course – I wouldn’t come all the way here without the contract, would I?’ Rupert said, beaming at the Frenchman.
    ‘But I thought you left