The Thursday Meeting

The email had arrived on Monday at 4:43 p.m.
Subject: Status update — Thursday 10 a.m. Sender: Frédéric Lassalle, regional director. Body of the message: three lines, no more, no less. Hi Nathalie, could you come by Thursday morning for a status update? Please confirm your availability. Automatic signature with the company logo and a note about sorting emails for recycling.
Nathalie Voss had confirmed her availability within forty seconds, which was the time it took her to read the message three times to make sure she had not missed anything. She had not missed anything. There was nothing to miss. Three lines, a logo, an invitation to sort her emails responsibly.
She spent the rest of Monday not thinking about it.

Monday evening, she went through the files from the past six months. Not all of them — she stopped at November because November was fine, everything was fine, she had done nothing particularly bad and nothing particularly brilliant, which was in itself perhaps a problem, that lack of distinction, that reasonable profile which could become, in certain restructurings, the first to go because no one could remember precisely why it had been kept.
The word restructuring was not in the email. The word situation was, which was not quite the same thing but could, in certain lights, resemble it.
She closed the files and watched a programme about blue whales.

On Tuesday, she asked her colleague Sabine whether Lassalle had called in anyone else. The question was posed in the tone of someone simply trying to coordinate schedules, which did not fool Sabine but spared them both from having to respond directly.
— I don't know, said Sabine. He sent me something similar in October. It was about quarterly targets.
— Ah.
— You look worried.
— No, I'm coordinating schedules.
Sabine nodded with the goodwill of someone who decides not to press further.
Tuesday evening, Nathalie reread the email one last time. Status update. In sixteen years with this company, she had received emails of this kind roughly twenty times. Nineteen times out of twenty, it concerned quarterly targets, a file to revisit, or a departmental reorganisation that did not directly affect her. The twentieth time, it had been a request that she take on an additional team, which was not good news either, but for different reasons.
She noted these statistics in a corner of her mind, found them reassuring for approximately eight minutes, then stopped believing them.

Wednesday was the longest.
She prepared a summary document of her current projects — three pages, restrained, well structured — then wondered whether bringing a summary document to a meeting entitled status update signalled disproportionate anxiety or professional preparation. She decided the two were not mutually exclusive and printed the document.
She thought about her flat. She thought about her loan. She thought that her loan still had eleven years to run, and that eleven years was a duration which, given the current state of the job market at forty-four in her sector, warranted serious consideration. She considered it seriously for about twenty minutes, then went to make tea, because thinking seriously about one's loan in the absence of any concrete information was an exercise that cost something without producing anything.
That evening she ate little, slept unevenly, and got up at 6:15 with the feeling of having already put in a full day's work without having accomplished anything.

The Thursday meeting lasted twenty-two minutes.
Lassalle had the coffee he always had, the pen he never set down, and the mildly preoccupied air that was his resting expression. He talked to her about the quarter's results — sound —, about a client who had asked to change their point of contact — for reasons of geographic proximity, nothing personal —, and about a coordinator position opening in January in the Lyon team, if she was interested, no obligation, just so she would know.
She took notes. She said she would think about Lyon. He said that was entirely reasonable. They spoke briefly about the end-of-year holidays, about how winter had come early this year, and about the renovation of the car park in Building B, which no one could understand why it was taking so long.
She left with her summary document under her arm. She had not taken it out.

In the lift, she thought about the three and a half days she had just spent. She counted them, fairly precisely — the November files, the statistics from twenty past meetings, the eleven-year loan, the eight minutes of self-reassurance, the tea, the broken sleep. A sum of hours devoted to an event that had unfolded in a way entirely independent of everything she had anticipated, imagined, dreaded.
It was not the first time. It would probably not be the last.
The lift opened on the second floor. She went back to her desk, put the summary document in a drawer — it might come in useful for something else — and opened her emails.

There were thirty-two. None from Lassalle.
She started with the first.