Angie was stunned. Part of her thought that she couldn’t have heard properly, although she knew that she had.
It was Leon who gathered himself first.
‘But you’re a partner,’ he said. ‘The boss. They can’t do that, surely?’
‘They can,’ replied Maggie. ‘And they have.’
‘But why?’ asked Angie.
Maggie must surely have been the best lawyer in the place. Angie knew nothing about the law, but she had never once had any doubt that Maggie would be brilliant at what she did. She was just that kind of person. Her skills brushed off her all the time, like lily pollen. They were just there, obvious.
Maggie shrugged. ‘My face didn’t fit any more,’ she said. ‘Too old, too traditional, too change-averse. Too risk-averse, more like it,’ she added with a sardonic raise of an eyebrow. ‘Anyway, whatever it was, I’m out. I am unemployed. And now, no doubt, unemployable on top.’
Angie wished that she had a beer. Taking a sip of water really didn’t cut it when there had been a shock. And this was a shock. It had never once occurred to her that a disaster of any type, let alone one of this magnitude, would ever befall Maggie. Her life was bolted together with titanium: blast-proof, bomb-proof, everything-proof. It always had been, and Angie had assumed that it always would be.
‘God, Maggie, that’s crap,’ said Leon. ‘When did it happen?’
‘Three weeks ago,’ replied Maggie. ‘Technically I’m still on notice, but they made it clear that they didn’t need any help picking up my files. So they’ve put me on garden leave until the end of June. And then that’s it. On the scrapheap just before my fiftieth birthday. Could it get any shittier?’
Angie could think of various things that would actually be worse, but this clearly wasn’t the time to start pointing out how much Maggie had to be grateful for. Instead, she threw an arm around Maggie’s shoulder. She felt her tense at the unaccustomed touch, but then she leant into the gesture and Angie squeezed harder.
‘So, have you given any thought as to what you’re going to do?’ asked Leon.
Maggie threw him a look that suggested that she had thought about little else, but then she shrugged. ‘Not really. Obviously, I’m being paid until the end of June. And I have plenty of savings, so money won’t be an issue. Not for a while, at least. But after that? I have no idea. Get another job, I suppose, although who would want me is a bit of a moot point.’
‘Of course they’ll want you,’ Angie said indignantly.
But she was talking about the other Maggie, she realised, the Maggie with a rock-solid plan who always got exactly what she shot for. She wasn’t sure who this new version of her friend was. And neither, it appeared, was Maggie.
‘Do you know what the hardest part is?’ Maggie asked, without looking at either Angie or Leon but focusing instead on the bustle around the bar. ‘If I’m not a solicitor then I have no idea who I’m supposed to be. For my entire life I have either been working towards becoming a solicitor or actually being one. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t part of how I saw myself. And now that it’s gone, I’m not sure what else there is. Not much, basically.’
Her bottom lip began to tremble, revealing the effort that she was having to put into not crying.
‘But you’re still a solicitor,’ said Leon. ‘You’ll always be one.’
It wasn’t a helpful thing to say and Angie wanted to kick him under the table, but Maggie seemed to take it in the spirit that it had been offered. She gave him a wan smile.
‘Yes. But you take my point. No husband, no family, no social life to speak of, present company excepted. My work has pretty much been my life and my raison d’être. Now, if someone asks me who I am and what I do, I have absolutely nothing to say.’
Angie could see that she was really struggling to hold herself together.
‘I know it must feel like that now, Mags, but we all know that’s not true. We wouldn’t be friends with a loser like that, would we, Leon?’
Leon grinned. ‘No, we would not. Only the mega-successful can join our band,’ he said. He gave Maggie a look that Angie had never seen pass between them before, caring and almost intimate despite his jokey comment, and she wondered if there had been conversations between them that she hadn’t been privy to. She decided not. Leon was clearly as surprised by Maggie’s news as she was. But maybe there was something else that she’d missed.