HR

2 - Let me introduce the principal characters

Lucinda was, fundamentally at any rate, dim. She had been started at Miss Pemberton’s school for the daughters of gentlefolk, developed at Hinton Charterhouse College for Girls and finished in Gstad, Switzerland. Her education had prepared her for nothing but at her finishing school she had met Cecilia who had shone in the bright Alpine sunlight. Clever, beautiful and of astonishingly wealthy parentage, Cecilia had been sent to Switzerland from a well-known public school for girls (author’s note – public school in England means private school) following an unfortunate incident involving her house captain, a bottle of gin and a courgette. Exiled in disgrace, Cecilia had proved wayward and ungovernable and yet she had adopted Lucinda as one might a pet and a bond had developed between them.

Lucinda’s daddy, Commodore Sir Binky ‘Slippit’ Updyke RN ret’d, had demanded that Lucinda be made head of HR at Updyke’s on the simple basis that she could do no harm there. He allowed her to employ Cecilia because he could see no reason to separate them. Indeed on many occasions returning from London unexpectedly with his wife, Ophelia Updyke (one of the Bristols family) he had found it exceedingly difficult to separate them before his wife found them. She disapproved so strongly of leg-wrestling.

The company employed some two hundred people and the girls’ onerous duties included keeping a record of who they were and what they were paid. This took about two hours a week and the rest of the time they spent engaged in whatever tickled their fancy. This often involved gin and courgettes but rarely, these days, the house captain. They attended all the racy Bath social events, shopped, held notorious parties and engaged in scandalous behaviour. They were, like so many of Bath’s elite, wild!

Sydney Lickstensteinberg hated what she called ‘stiff-assed Brit women’ with a deadly loathing. She sat at her huge desk, dressed in a dark grey suit. Beneath the jacket she wore a sparkling white silk shirt, with a tie. Beneath the tight skirt her legs were clad in black silk stockings and her elegant feet in six inch heels. She exuded menace and authority. Her nails were perfect and her hair immaculate. She had teeth that had cost twenty thousand dollars and under her blouse, another few thousands worth of ‘perfection.’ She had dark eyes, jet black hair and pale skin. Where one to meet her at her Manhattan club on a Saturday night, one would not be at all surprised to see her in her preferred garb of tight leather, with her constant companion, Tung, a diminutive Asian girl. She pressed the button on her intercom to speak to her PA.

‘Tung, book us on a flight to England. I have some serious ass-kicking to do. And inform that brainless Brit bitch we’re coming to go through her files like Adolf went through Belgium, France and my Grandpappy’s art collection.’

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ said Tung.