There were two candidates for one equity seat, and everybody knew it by Wednesday, and nobody said it out loud for four months.
That is how these things are done. Nobody at Brenner Hale would have dreamed of putting it in an email. There was a process: a partnership panel in November, a business case, a sponsor, two years of numbers, client feedback, a presentation. There was a great deal of language about readiness.
What there was, in fact, was one chair.
"You've been up before," said Duncan.
"Twice."
"Twice. Yes." He turned his pen over. "And I want to be honest with you about that, Yasmin, because I don't think anybody has been, and I think you deserve it. The first time you were early. The second time — " he made a small regretful movement " — the second time it was the year of the merger, and there was a view that we could not take two from corporate."
"There was a view."
"There was."
"Whose?"
Duncan smiled and did not answer, and Yasmin understood that she had just been shown the shape of something she was not going to be allowed to see.
"The point," he said, "is that this is the year. That is my honest reading. But it is a panel of eleven, and a panel of eleven likes a contest, and it likes to feel it has chosen rather than waved through, and I would be doing you no favours at all if I let you go into November thinking you were being waved through."
"And Theo is the contest."
"Theo is a very good lawyer," said Duncan.
"That isn't what I asked."
"No," said Duncan pleasantly. "It isn't."
She walked back along the fourteenth floor past the glass, and through the glass she could see the corner office they had given Theo Lennox, which had been empty for two years, and which had a view of the river that her office did not have.
He was on the phone with his feet on the radiator, laughing.
7 Jan, she wrote, in the lift. Given Kenning's old office. Two years empty. I asked for it in March and was told the firm wasn't allocating.
She looked at that for a moment. Then she added:
Don't be small about the office. Everybody is small about the office and it is how they get you.
The office is not a move. The office is a message about who is making the moves.