One early February evening, in the early 'noughties', I left my office in one of London Canary Wharf's more prominent buildings and headed to an old-fashioned style wine bar along the waterside. I was in my early forties, exhausted by a career that I had never really planned but which on the face of it was going quite well: I had to work harder than many because it didn't come naturally to me. I was married to a doctor with three children. Life managing this combination was another source of tension: our marriage was all about the practicalities and time management, and romance and bed for anything but exhausted sleep were vague memories.
I was headed to the wine bar to join the celebration hosted by Maggie, a long-time colleague, of both her fifteen years in the company and her promotion to a new role. We had joined the firm at about the same time and at first worked closely together, remaining good friends through several changes of departments. The best thing about the company was the friends I made (Okay, the money was helpful too), so I knew I would have an enjoyable evening.
By the time I arrived, the celebration was well under way and I only had time to pour a glass of wine before Maggie signalled she wanted to say a few words. As she began speaking, I looked around the crowd of about thirty people smiling hello to various colleagues. I received and gave a particularly warm smile to a woman similar in age to me. It was Cathy, who had been the department head's secretary when I joined the company in my early thirties, but who had since developed her career, against a lot of casual snobbery and had become a junior account officer.
Cathy and I had hit it off from the start, perhaps a little because we were both not quite suited to what we were doing but shared the determination to do it well. We also had a similar sense of humour and of what was right and wrong. And yes, there was an attraction that had one year got a little out of hand at a late after works' drinks - touching and kissing and expressions of desire, though nothing more. We started taking the occasional lunches together and the emotional bond grew as we shared our different problems. Cathy was divorced and having trouble with a newish relationship, and even then the strains of my marriage were evident.
There had been a risk of things getting out of hand: one evening we'd arranged to go out when my family was away visiting relatives. We both felt something momentous was possibly going to happen. But when it came to the evening, we pulled back and cancelled our plans.
Not long after I transferred to another department based in another part of the city and we rarely interacted. We did meet for a lunch a few years later when Cathy, in a new relationship, was pregnant with her first child. Although happy to be a mother, she admitted the relationship with her partner was not easy and the decisions to live together and start a family had been made somewhat unemotionally. We did enjoy our lunch, laughed over our brief near-fling and I told her she was even prettier than before - which at seven months' pregnant, had made her laugh loudly but happily.
Another few years later and we were back working in the same building in Canary Wharf. We ran into each other occasionally, and as I rose up the lower echelons of seniority, Cathy would sometimes seek me out to download her frustrations about her department colleagues and boss. She also shared that though she now had two children, her relationship remained stuck where it was. She was essentially a positive, warm-hearted and, from our brief flirtation, warm-bodied woman who was not getting the emotional or sensual benefits of a committed partnership. She knew I was in much the same situation.
So there was some history between us, an attraction that had occasionally flared up but also an emotional connection when we smiled at each other across the wine bar. We hadn't seen each other in a while, so with Maggie's speech over and the group mingling again, Cathy and I gravitated towards each other and greeted each other affectionately. After a few more glasses of wine and laughter with others in the group, the party was breaking up. I suggested to Cathy that we go to have something to eat. She readily accepted so we said our goodbyes and walked off to an Italian restaurant a few minutes away along the waterfront. Nobody would have commented on our leaving together: it is a big organisation and lots of friendships were formed across the sexes.
The night was a lot colder when we left the wine bar and the air misty around the tallest of the buildings with its pointed pyramid roof, Canary Wharf Tower. I remember Cathy, whose sometimes earthy sense of humour was one of the attractions for me, made some joke about the phallic symbol as we walked away from the building.
Over a good dinner and more wine, of course, our conversation flowed into the time-worn territory of two middle-aged colleagues of opposite sex bemoaning the lack of emotional connection in our respective relationships, coupled with some flirting and, in our case, memories of the brief times we did a little more than flirting. Cathy was very attractive: she had shoulder-length light brown hair, deep blue eyes and a sensual - and naughty - mouth. She had a slim figure and particularly attractive legs which, I had been disappointed to note earlier, where clothed in a business trouser suit. She was born and brought up in the East End of London, left school at sixteen and made a great deal of her life. I admired her determination to do well. Although my life had taken a different course, and I had been to university, my father worked on a factory assembly line, my mother in a newspaper chain, so our origins weren't that different.