This is going great. Agnes has chewed her way through an entire strip of nicotine gum, but she's more or less stuck to her slides, and has only run over by four and a half minutes.
The first time she and Gemma pitched Queen Bees together, Agnes spent twenty-five excruciating minutes taking six male bankers through the detail of how a drone's penis explodes and kills him during a mating flight. Somehow they never did get that loan.
Today Gemma had budgeted for Agnes to exceed her allotted time by seven minutes, which means that with 150 seconds to spare she's not even had to rush through Queen Bees' financials. She got up early this morning to edit the slide deck one last time before the gym opened. She added back the one in the middle, which tackles the profit margin question head on. Just in case Dylan was right about Nicky Lam objecting to that.
Well, he was wrong, of course. Nicky hasn't objected to slide 12, though to be fair she has kept a bit of a poker face throughout. Only to be expected. But she's paying attention and taking copious notes. In the most gorgeous emerald green Moleskine. She's wearing matching nail polish, which is daring, but she pulls it off like a … queen. Yes, Nicky is the best, the most natural fit to be Queen Bees' first external shareholder.
"That's great, really great. Thanks for sticking to time too," Nicky says when Gemma finishes, one minute ahead of schedule. She speaks fast and only with the slightest of accents: "I love your product. I love that it's all organic and I'm definitely getting more of that body butter for my son's eczema. Your packaging is great too, I love the culture of accountability and respect that you've created. I love that you've kept marketing costs so low. Getting Adele to retweet you for free was quite something."
"Thank you!"
"I chatted to your Queen of Logistics in Bolgatanga this weekend and she sounded both very happy and very on top of things. I think 15% projected growth in wax production next year is very doable."
Nicky has even started due diligence! Yes! Agnes, having looked a bit love-struck throughout the meeting, now looks ready to orgasm. Well, Hallelujah!
And also: told you so, Dyl.
Then Nicky says, in the same even tone:
"It's just a shame that I can't tell what it is you're trying to do."
x
Gemma looks at Agnes, who looks at Gemma. They both look at Nicky, who looks at them, then down at her beautiful green notebook, then up again. Is this a joke? She didn't sound like she was joking.
She does look like she wants an answer. OK, she did say she was jetlagged, perhaps her attention flagged:
"We are looking to raise equity, so that we can establish new logistic centres in Europe. We will start with opening one near Paris to cover France, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Then in phase two we'd look for one in..."
"Hamburg for Germany, the rest of the Benelux and the Scandies. Yes yes, you said that already. But what are you trying to do?"
"We're trying to sell British made beauty products to the French," Agnes quips, then throws Gemma a look of apology and pops one off a fresh strip of nicotine gum. Whoever said the French didn't have a sense of humour? Nicky smiles at Agnes, then it's straight back to Gemma with an ice-cold:
"Why?"
Why? Isn't it obvious? Never mind: if she wants to hear it again, just say it again:
"Well, Nicky, having created all these beautiful creams and lip balms, we'd like the most beautiful people in the world to use them," Gemma smiles. Nicky doesn't. Gemma soldiers on:
"…and having created a beautiful, ethical business model we'd like to grow it, together, with your help."
"You mean with my cash."
"That too, yes, but we really look forward to having your input more generally too."
"My input? I don't think this is going to work, Gemma. I'm sorry, but I don't like beating about the bush."
What?
Is this a joke? Please let this be a joke. No? No, she's definitely not joking. What is happening? Are weeks upon months of hard work and high hopes about to go down the drain? Surely not. Please. She just said how much she liked Queen Bees. Then comes the coup de grace:
"Your slide 12, Gemma. EBITDA margin of 10% - I should be looking at 30 at least, dropping down to 15% net profit margin if we up the leverage a bit. You both strike me as intelligent women, so I expect you already know that the prices you charge are too low and you're overpaying for just about everything you source except for the wax. You do pay a fair price for your wax. Now," she says as Agnes tries to interrupt, "you've both made it very clear that's the way you want to run your business and I respect that: your company, your rules. My only rule is: I don't give money to people who don't care enough not to waste it. So thank you for the sushi and good luck to both of you. I'm sure you'll have lots of…" she searches for the word, finds it, and spits it out:
"…fun, have lots of fun, young ladies. Good bye."
She stands. Agnes and Gemma follow her back to reception. Nicky swishes into the full magnificence of her floor length, ice-white cashmere coat, shakes their hand, and leaves.
"I need a cigarette," Agnes says as soon as the lift doors are shut on Nicky's back. Gemma walks back to her office and collapses into her chair. Her first conscious thought, absurd though it is, is that no one has dared call her young lady since she finished boarding school.
x
When Agnes joins her a few minutes later she sets about clearing that corner of Gemma's desk where she keeps the framed picture of all her nephews. Though naturally tidy, Gemma makes an extra effort around the office for Agnes' sake. Unless she does, Agnes will start fidgeting with whatever she finds lying around instead of focusing on what needs discussing.
Gemma is familiar with what Agnes does next, but still watches in wonder. Agnes climbs, spider like, onto the corner of the desk, sets her head upside down between her feet, which she then proceeds to raise one at a time until she is balancing upside down at a right angle to the edge of the table. She says she thinks better that way.
"It's my fault, I shouldn't have added that slide back in," Gemma says.
Agnes' face looks strange upside down. Not just upside down as in "I'm holding my phone upside down", but with gravity pulling everything the wrong way. The corners of her mouth, for instance, do pull towards her eyes, but it's not at all like a real smile. If anything, it's perhaps like how Gemma imagines the dead would smile. Agnes closes her eyes.
Gemma looks back at her computer screen and scrolls through the dashboard of daily production updates from their fifty plus Queens of Logistics across Africa. She checks the messages. The depot in Accra is asking that they send over more soap and internet data cards, but hold off on sanitary pads. Many of the Beekeeping Queens elect to be paid in kind, using items they can trade but their male family members won't try and appropriate. Obuasi's numbers could be better this month...
Soft as cats' paws, Agnes' pink Converse make it back to the edge of the desk, then back to the floor, and immediately she starts walking, circling the desk in fast, even strides, staring at the carpet. For Nicky Lam's sake she's just had to stay sat down for a whole hour and half, which is tantamount to torture and will, one day, rightfully be recognised as an abuse of her fundamental human rights. She needs to exercise her voice as well as her legs:
"It's not your fault, Gem, we talked about it. We both agreed we should put that slide back in. You did great, Gem, it's her, she's just a cow."
"Well,…"
Gemma should know better than to try and squeeze a word in, but she too feels like she could do with an outlet. She'll have to try and catch another HIIT class at the gym on the way home.
"No, listen, girlfriend, she just didn't get us," Agnes is saying, "We thought, because she was a woman and everything, that she would get us, but she didn't. She's just greedy, like the rest of them. Whatever. Fuck her. Her loss. Someone else will invest, you'll work it out. You always do. We'll be fine. You did great! I really thought you did. You put it so clearly. Plenty more fish in the sea. What a cow, what a fuckin'…"
Etc. etc. until a ping on Gemma's Mac makes Agnes stop, turn her head and see Dylan's message before Gemma has time to make it go away.
"Merde," they both say.
The message is to both of them and says just that: merde, which Agnes once taught him was French for "good luck" as well. It's rather nice of him, if a little too late and too… pointless, in retrospect. The computer's synching with Gemma's phone and starts downloading another message which Gemma, in a scramble, manages to intercept and close before its full contents are displayed at the bottom of her screen.
If only Agnes' party trick wasn't to spot the one queen in a hive of 80,000 moving bees in under two minutes. She was hardly going to miss Dylan using the words "bet" and "beard" in the first line.
Sometimes, when you think your day can't possibly get any worse, you're suddenly reminded that you've made quite the most stupid bet of your whole entire life and what's more, that one half of the world's most gossipy duo has just found out. And is finding it terribly amusing:
"Gem, you didn't? Please tell me you didn't!"
Would there be any point in denying it?
"Oh, Gem, you did, didn't you? Oh, man, you did! But why? He kind of suits a beard!"
"Does not!" Gemma protests, as if it mattered. Agnes laughs out loud. It's nice in a way. Much needed, in fact, except...
"Hey," Agnes says, catching her breath, "you'll be alright, didn't you say he was a top snog?"
Those are not the exact words Gemma used when she foolishly told Agnes about it, no. And anyway, that conversation was years ago, how does Agnes even remember? Oh, where did things start to go so wrong? Why?
"It's not fair, I never lose," she mutters to herself, and Agnes suddenly stops laughing:
"Gem, of course you never fucking lose! He's got such a huge soft bloody spot for you he never lets you!"
"What?! No! No, that's not it at all!"
"Isn't it? You think he really did believe that Adrienne could hold her breath for seven minutes?"
In hindsight, of course… but she thought at the time that maybe because of all the yoga he did and how cocky he was that…
"I… I always win at foosball!"
"True," Agnes nods, "you are much better than him at foosball. But everything else, I'm sorry: he just likes winding you up and then buying you coffee."
What? This is terribly confusing - as well as mortifying.
"Gem, honestly, don't worry about it. If Dyl really wanted to snog you he'd have found something to beat you at a long time ago, trust me. Ultimate frisbee and kite flying spring to mind."
"True…"
Gemma cannot remember feeling such humiliation since she wet her pants on the first day of pre-prep. Miss Taylor had just awarded her the class's first ever "clever bunny" stamp and she couldn't bear the thought of ruining her hard-earned cred by asking to go in front of the whole class.
"Gem? Hey, Gem! Don't panic, girlfriend. Dylan's not gonna make you do anything you don't want to, OK? Not that you shouldn't go ahead and snog him again if you fancy it, mind."
Gemma shakes a horrified head.
"Then gloss over it and he'll go right along, I promise. It's going to be fine, OK?"
"Of course. Of course it's going to be fine, I'm sorry: short night, tough day."
"And don't worry about Nicky Lam either, OK? She's a cow and we're going to find a much nicer person to invest in us."
Most people think Agnes is a total scatterbrain. That is true some of the time. OK, a lot of the time. A lot of the non-apiary time anyway. But give her a good crisis and she cuts right through it. Back in 2014 she had two hours to decide whether to burn one hundred and twenty-eight brand new hives to the ground. She did. If she hadn't, then two weeks later it could have been twice that number, and that would have been the end of Queen Bees. Compared to that small hive beetle outbreak, today's setback is nothing. A very minor bump on the road to success. Between her school friends, her Daddy's friends and her own banking friends, it's not like Gemma doesn't know any other Venture Capitalists to go and ask. In fact she's already made overtures to several. She had decided to focus on Nicky first and exclusively, but…
Now that she's calmed down about Nicky, Gemma really can't think why she got so het up about that silly bet either. That's all it is, just another bit of silliness between Dylan and her. The only thing that really was silly of hers, was to treat it seriously for even a minute. Dylan is, after all, incapable of being serious. She should know better by now.
"I don't know what came over me, Agnes, you're right. You're absolutely right, we're going to be fine. Tip top! In fact we are fine already, leastways I am. Are you?"
"Sure I am, because what are we?"
"Queens!" they say together.
x
Nine hours later, including three quarters of one spent jumping up and down and doing burpees, Gemma is unknowingly mirroring her father. With matching slow circular motions of the wrist, they both stir the ice at the bottom of their drink. They are sitting on matching dark leather chesterfields in her father's office, staring at what might be the last roaring fire they will need this Spring:
"Well," says Mr Woodhouse, "perhaps that was only to be expected. The Chinese are very greedy people."
"Daddy!"
"What? They are very hard-nosed about money."
"You can't say things like that, Daddy..."
"Can't I? I thought this was my own room in my own house and I could say whatever I liked!"
"Of course you can, but… people don't talk like that anymore, and it's only right."
"What, will I have to deny the Germans like sausages next? Not allowed to say the Dutch like cheese? So the Chinese like money: pah!"
"It's not the same and you know it, just don't speak like that outside the house, Daddy. Please?"
Mr Woodhouse shrugs good naturedly. He's not that bad: she knows he's exaggerating to tease her.
"Put it however you like," he says, "the Chinese are very mercantile, especially in Singapore, trading port and all that... but take them anywhere and they'll set up a stall."
"Queen Bees has stalls too, you know. All we do is sell lotions and potions, remember?"
"That's not the same at all!" Mr Woodhouse protests, leaning back into his chair. "Darling, you're not selling your lotions and potions to make money!"
His shock of white hair stands around his head in what others have described as an angry halo. Not so Gemma who, on each of her school holidays, has watched it turn from salt and pepper to mostly salt, to snow-white. Her father is a little set in his ways, for sure, but if all fathers are by definition old fashioned, it follows that older Dads should be a little more old-fashioned still. Under all this bluster Mr Woodhouse has a heart of gold.
"You and Agnes only set up shop to help those African ladies, you'd never dream of profiteering for yourselves. You're not extravagant - God knows Agnes could do with being a little more so," he guffaws, and raises his glass at Gemma. They both take a small sip of the light, floral, fennelly white Vermouth he buys from Italy and saves for an evening in with Gemma, who drinks little else.
"Agnes is very stylish in her own way, Daddy. It's not easy looking good in flats and a bee suit, believe me."
"Nonsense, darling. You just say that because she's skinny. I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with being skinny these days. Your mother was never skinny, never did her any harm as far as I could tell. But Lord knows she was just as obsessed as you are with dieting and such nonsense. Yes, nonsense, is what it is. Perhaps lesbians don't like curves on a woman, but for a man that's not natural."
Interestingly, Mr Woodhouse has never had any objections to Agnes' lesbianism. There's always been lesbians, he likes to say. Followed by: nothing wrong with it, people didn't use to object half so much before there was that internet to do it on.
"Isabella takes after me, and you after your mother, that's all," Mr Woodhouse concludes, "strikes me you got the lucky genes and Agnes in a bee suit has nothing on either of my daughters!"
Gemma sighs: whatever he says she'd still rather have caught the genes for her father's long legs than those for her mother's fat bottom, but...
On the armrest her phone lights up: a text from Dylan.
Sorry, Gem. Nightmare day here, Bloomberg cock up followed by back up failure, only just saw your WhatsApp. You OK?
She smiles.
"Well, that's very sweet of him, especially considering he was right all along," she muses out loud.
"Who's that?"
"Dylan. He tried to warn me Nicky would never invest, but I wouldn't listen."
"Why would you listen to Dylan."
x
Mr Woodhouse's inflection, together the look on his face, leave no room for interpreting this as a question. Mr Woodhouse does not like Dylan. Never has, never will. Gemma cannot shake the nagging suspicion that this is, in some part, based on the same sort of prejudice he holds against Nicky Lam. It doesn't help that he's still convinced Dylan was the one who almost ruined the twins' christening two years ago, when a rugby ball smashed into the side of the conservatory. The ball was kicked from the other side of the tennis courts, so when Dylan made it back to the house with Quentin Mr Woodhouse naturally assumed Dylan had done it.
Dylan swears he doesn't mind. To this day he's still terribly proud of Quentin's first drop kick. With typical Dylan logic, he says he'd never rat on such a promising young player for the sake of Mr Woodhouse's good opinion. Gemma herself only knows because she caught the two of them half-way back to the house, before they had time to cook up their story. She was very solemnly sworn to secrecy and, on the plus side, has enjoyed "cool auntie" status with Quentin ever since.
"Well anyhow," Gemma muses, "I don't know why Dyl keeps nagging on about our margins. You'd think he'd know Agnes and I aren't going to change our business model just to shut him up."
The truth is, since her chat with Agnes today she has been wondering about why Dylan does all sorts of things, besides lying about who drop-kicked rugby balls.
"The trouble is," Mr Woodhouse says without a shred of irony, "men in his culture are always telling women what to do. They expect to."
"He can be incredibly patronising, Dad, but I don't think there's any need to blame his "culture". That's just the way he is and anyhow, let's not talk about Dylan. Or Nicky: plenty more fish in the sea! Do you think I should go back to GreenSpace Capital next, or to Montage? I've had initial contacts with both, but I don't think this should be a competition so I'd put them both on the back burner while we spoke to Nicky."
Mr Woodhouse thinks about it:
"The Germans have the better expertise in logistics and sustainability, no doubt, but for sheer retail acumen I always say, go with the French."
"That's what I thought too."
"I used to know the chap that set up their London office, you know. Nice old chap by the name of Geoffrye…"
A Bee in her Bonnet is Copyright Mel Liffragh 2021, all rights reserved