"I'm sorry I don't have better news for you," Stella says, genuinely. "Certainly we've made strides in more than sixty years, but — well. I was a police constable in 1993. Half of my colleagues were middle-aged men who were still getting used to thinking of female officers as officers and not tea ladies."
If a senior officer had ever asked her to fetch his tea, she probably wouldn't have been able to keep herself from telling him to fetch it himself, and that would have been the end of her career, or near enough to it. Fortunately she'd never been subject to that particular indignity, but the level of sexism she'd still had to put up with then had been quite enough as it was. There's something about an attractive, confident woman that has always elicited particular emotions from men, that combination of fear and desire that, quite frankly, Stella hates. It turns all too easily into loathing, and into uglier feelings still.
"Caroline turned out all right, at least. My flatmate," she clarifies. "Last I heard she was married with three children. I suppose she must be happy." There's the tone in her voice of someone who can't imagine being happy in a long-term relationship, let alone marriage; she's trying to suppress it, but it still shows through. "I haven't spoken to her... in six years, I think. Not since I made chief inspector."
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If a senior officer had ever asked her to fetch his tea, she probably wouldn't have been able to keep herself from telling him to fetch it himself, and that would have been the end of her career, or near enough to it. Fortunately she'd never been subject to that particular indignity, but the level of sexism she'd still had to put up with then had been quite enough as it was. There's something about an attractive, confident woman that has always elicited particular emotions from men, that combination of fear and desire that, quite frankly, Stella hates. It turns all too easily into loathing, and into uglier feelings still.
"Caroline turned out all right, at least. My flatmate," she clarifies. "Last I heard she was married with three children. I suppose she must be happy." There's the tone in her voice of someone who can't imagine being happy in a long-term relationship, let alone marriage; she's trying to suppress it, but it still shows through. "I haven't spoken to her... in six years, I think. Not since I made chief inspector."