Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Fenchurch Street ·
The Woman Who Is Just Introduced
A young solicitor at a Fenchurch Street firm is introduced to a woman at every office party, and by the end of each night the whole room has forgotten her name, though they all remember how warmly she shook their hands.
Priya Tennant joined the firm of Harnett and Lowe in the spring, as a trainee in the property team on the third floor. She was good at the work and quick with the clients, and within a month she had been invited to every social event the firm held. The Christmas party, the leaving drinks, the summer barbecue on the roof. At each one, Priya noticed, there was a woman she had not met before, and each time the woman was introduced to her as if they had already been friends for years.
The woman was called Mrs. Ash, or possibly Mrs. Hale. She wore a dark green dress that was always slightly out of fashion, and she had a warm, deliberate handshake, and a way of looking at you as though she had been waiting to hear your news. Priya would be told, in a low voice by someone at her elbow, "Oh, you must meet so-and-so," and the woman would already be there, holding out her hand. "Lovely to meet you," she would say. "I've heard so much about you."
Then, within a few minutes, the name would be gone.
Priya tested this. She began carrying a small notebook, and at each party she wrote down the name the first time she heard it, and then checked the page at the end of the night. The name was never there. Not because she had written it wrong, but because by the time she had turned to a clean page, the sentence in which the name had been spoken had gone too, and the woman's face had become simply the face of a pleasant stranger at the drinks table, somebody you had always known and never quite placed.
The others noticed it too, though not in the same way. Harnett, the senior partner, said he had met a delightful woman at the Christmas party, though he could not remember her name, and that he had felt for an hour afterward as though he had made an important promise to her. Lowe, his partner, said he had shaken hands with her at the barbecue and had felt, quite distinctly, that she was the one person in the firm who had never once asked him for anything. Two of the clerks said she had been very kind to them when they were low, though neither could say how.
Priya decided to ask her directly. At the next party she waited until the woman was alone by the window, looking down at the lights of the street, and she went over and said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I caught your name."
The woman turned, and smiled, and held out her hand. "Oh, don't worry, dear," she said. "Nobody ever does. It's a little tradition of ours. We're always just introduced." Her grip was very warm.
Priya felt her own name slip out of her memory as the woman said it. She felt the warmth of the handshake spread up her arm, and a sudden, deep sense of gratitude, the feeling of having been noticed and forgiven and wished well, all at once, by a stranger who had no reason to care.
She went back into the room. Nobody asked where she had been. The party went on until late. The next morning she came in to work and found she could not remember what she had done the night before, and only remembered, very clearly, that somebody had been kind to her, and that she had been meaning to thank them ever since.