As soon as I got back to London, my life settled down into its usual pattern with almost spooky ease and after all the excitement and drama of the shows season, heightened further by my dangerous liaison, I was perfectly happy about that.
Ollie and I resumed our usual round of work, parties and work parties – some together and some apart. He couldn’t come with me if I was going along to keep Frannie company at the launch of a new eyebrow gel by one of Slap’s major competitors, so we would meet for dinner afterwards and I would tell him all about it. Every detail. He loved getting the inside scoop on his competitors like that.
But if it was a fashion launch he always came with me. They were perfect networking opportunities for him and he also really enjoyed them. Ollie was far enough on the outside of fashion to remain seriously impressed by it. I found his disingenuous enthusiasm very endearing and it stopped me from getting too jaded about it all. Some of my colleagues were so spoiled they would chuck their party goodie bags into the nearest bin, within full sight of the venue, if they thought the gifts weren’t lavish enough. Ollie always opened his with the excitement of a child with a Christmas stocking.
‘Ooh, look, Em,’ he would say, bringing out some garish tube of hair gel to add to the legions already stuffed into our bathroom cupboards. ‘More product! Excellent.’ He kept the carrier bags too. He still thought getting something free was the most terrific lark.
As well as tagging along on my calendar of events he also had a lot of work things of his own to go to, some of which I had to attend as the executive wife, but many – sales person of the month etc. – I was all too happy to miss. Between all this and occasional more normal social outings with non-work friends, we were only at home about two evenings a week. One of those was always Saturday. It was another of Ollie’s little quirks, but he simply refused to go out on a Saturday night. He wouldn’t even go to the cinema and if friends invited us over he would say we were busy.
It was some kind of atavistic hangover from the days when someone like Ollie would never have been ‘in town’ on a Saturday night and, indeed, if we weren’t having a Sunday salon the next day, we would go to the country, usually to his parents’ place in Hampshire.
Far from dreading the in-laws, I loved going to stay with Max and Caroline. Ursula was right, they were as straight and ‘uncreative’ as people could be – and that was exactly why I liked them. They weren’t dull in a narrow-minded suburban way, they were just very conventional for people of their kind, right down to the books of Social Stereotypes cartoons in the downstairs loo and the green wellies in the boot room. Like Ollie’s friends Jeremy and Sarah, the Fairbrothers were totally predictable, extremely right wing, but sincerely well meaning and generally great fun.
In all honesty I did find some of Max’s views a little hard to take and when certain subjects – asylum seekers, unemployment benefit, working mothers – came up, I had to exercise extreme self-control.
Despite this, they weren’t uncultured oafs; they loved opera and went to Glyndebourne every summer, but always to the more well-known productions. Similarly they would know what had won the Booker Prize – from Radio 4 or The Daily Telegraph – but they wouldn’t actually read it. Max only read historical biographies and Caroline loved Jilly Cooper, and so did I, which is one of the first things she and I found to bond over.
I was never quite sure what they made of me, but right from my first visit, as Ollie’s new ‘friend’, they made me very welcome. Caroline thought her parents had known my mother’s ‘people’, so that gave us a basis to start from.
I didn’t know how much Ollie had told them about my horror-show family background, but it was never mentioned, so I had a feeling he had warned them off. They knew my father was dead and that my mother was ‘unwell’, but beyond that they never probed and if family ever did come up, my brother’s military career always stood me in good stead in their milieu, plus I had gone to what they considered a ‘known’ school.
But despite all these unspoken codes of acceptability, the Fairbrothers weren’t snobs – Ollie was much worse than his parents in that regard – they just had certain parameters that constituted life as they knew it. Anything else didn’t really register.
I think they thought my job a little strange – Harpers or Tatler, they would have understood as a pre-marriage toy job – but they found Ollie’s choice of profession much odder. His three older brothers had all been brilliantly successful in the City, before graduating on to post-Square Mile hobby lives, two of them farming and one dealing in fine wine. It embarrassed Max slightly that his youngest son was ‘fooling around with bloody lipstick’, as I’d heard him say once in a cross moment, but Ollie always laughed it off, saying it was ‘just a business’ like any other.
In a similar vein I always played down my look when we went to see them and in all honesty, part of the pleasure of those visits was forty-eight hours in jeans and a big cashmere jumper. My only concession to my normal style was a pair of bright pink wellies, which they thought were hilarious.
The only slight cause of tension between the generations was Ollie’s and my lack of interest in reproduction, but that was mostly relieved by the constant supply of grandchildren from his brothers. There always seemed to be another one on the way, so the pressure was taken off us to an extent, although Caroline did occasionally make well-meaning references to breeding, as she popped a coq au vin into the Aga, or arranged the flowers I had brought her.
‘Tick tock, Emily darling,’ she’d say, tearing my exquisitely arranged Wild at Heart bouquet to pieces and stuffing it into an old earthenware bread crock with some huge pieces of garden foliage. ‘That’s all I’m saying. Little kittens – time passes – tick tock. There, perfect for the hall. Lovely. Thank you, Emily.’
*
Lazy weekends down there and busy weeks in London made up the life I was happy to retreat back into. But still, occasionally, when my brain was in neutral – squashed in a lift, sitting in a taxi, or when I heard certain pieces of music – Miles would pop into my head.
Mostly, I would push him right out again, but sometimes I would take the memory of him out of its box and enjoy it for a few moments, before putting him safely away again. Even at that remove the mere thought of him could make my insides liquefy, but I didn’t allow it to happen very often.
I did have one wobbly moment, though. We’d only been back in the office after the shows for a few days, when Frannie suddenly squealed at me from the art department, where she was looking at some shots with the art director, Tim.
‘Em!’ she cried. ‘Come and look at this.’
I ran over – ever eager to be distracted by a joke – and came to a halt in front of a computer screen covered in pictures of Miles doing his strut down the Dior catwalk. I felt a flush race over my entire body and was gripped by panic.
‘Isn’t that hilarious?’ said Frannie. ‘I never actually saw it at the time because I was backstage. I didn’t realize he’d done the full thing. He looks great actually – shame he wasn’t with us that night at the Costes, he’s got that model strut going on.’
I was relieved she was twittering away, as it gave me a chance to collect myself.
‘Yes, it was really funny,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level. ‘They are hilarious, those photographers. I sometimes think they keep us all sane at the shows, don’t you?’
I felt quite shaky from the adrenaline rush. Seeing a picture of Miles was way too real. Apart from anything, I had forgotten quite how sexy he was. I grabbed the art director’s mouse and clicked on a few shots, pretending to be looking at the other pics of the actual show, when all I really wanted to do was gaze at Miles in all his animal glory.
‘Gosh, that was a great collection,’ I said, to change the subject. ‘Look at this amazing cartoon print dress. Reckon that would make a great cover. What do you two think?’
Finally, I felt able to tear myself away and I relinquished the mouse back to Tim. He clicked it a few times, but it was clear he wasn’t interested in the cartoon dress.
‘Mmmm,’ he said. ‘Check that booty. This guy is seriously horny. Who did you say he was? Yummeeee. Your team or mine?’
I legged it back to my desk, before I gave myself away.
Apart from that scary moment, it was actually great to be back in the office, where I shared a little partitioned-off area with Frannie. Officially she was supposed to sit inside the glass office bit with her assistant and my desk was outside, with mine, but we’d swapped the phone numbers over so that Frannie and I were inside, and Janey and Gemma – our loyal right-hand gels – were outside.
We did work quite hard really, but there were also days spent playing with new beauty products, trying on clothes and dancing to the radio that we had on all the time.
‘I can’t believe I get paid to do this,’ said Frannie later that morning.
We were testing new face-masks that had been sent in to her – mine was bright pink mud from Arizona, hers was green algae from Brittany – while listening to Radio 2 (it was my turn to choose the station) and reading the latest American magazines which had just landed on our desks. I was reading Allure and Frannie was reading US Vogue. I had my feet up on my desk and my toenails were drying, a nice bright metallic blue.
‘This scenario just needs one more little element for me to achieve complete nirvana,’ said Frannie. ‘Bagels and very milky coffee. Janey!’
Eventually, after we’d washed the masks off and scoffed our snacks, which involved splitting a cream cheese and smoked salmon bagel so that Frannie had the bagel and the cream cheese and I had the smoked salmon, I did finally settle down to some proper work.
I seriously needed to get on with it – I only had half an hour to finish my trends list and story proposals for our all-important ‘New Season Meeting’ in Bee’s office. Frantically going through the notes of shoot ideas I had made in the back of my fashion shows sketchbook, I realized I would be lucky to finish in time.
This was pretty stupid because it was a crucial meeting. As well as our lists of what we felt were the key trends from the shows we had just seen, we each had to present a plan of the fashion stories (and beauty in Frannie’s case) that we wanted to shoot – which meant photograph, but we called it a ‘shoot’ – for the next six months of issues.
As well as the creative ideas, we had to include the more practical details of locations, photographers and models, and exactly how we would style the pictures, so there was quite a lot to it. And it was essential to make your ideas convincing enough to get Bee’s approval, because if she chucked them out it could really wreck your tanning plans.
Get it wrong and you’d be down at Camber Sands in the rain shooting the ‘Catwalk to High Street’ budget fashion pages with unknown models, when you’d planned on spending a couple of weeks styling ‘Edgy Beige’ in a tented safari camp in Kenya, with Karolina Kurkova and a vat of Sisley tanning products for company.
Needless to say, never-late-with-her-homework Frannie had finished her lists the first day we had got back from Paris, then she’d used the extra time to gather together visual imagery to support her ideas, which is why she had been looking at the Dior pictures with Mark that morning. She was even planning to wave around some scene-setting joss-sticks during her presentation, which I thought was taking it a bit far.
‘I’m going for the full sensurround experience,’ she’d told me. ‘I really want to do that Japan trip for my incense story.’
But apart from general procrastination and flightiness, I had another reason for doing my lists at the last minute. The previous season, when I had done them nice and promptly, Alice had sent her horrid assistant Natalie to get a copy of them and had brazenly pinched two of my best ideas – a direct lift – and passed them off as her own. As fashion director, she always presented her lists first, so it had left me seriously in the shit in the middle of the meeting having to come up with new ideas off the top of my head.
To make it worse, she didn’t seem remotely ashamed of what she’d done and I just hadn’t ever felt able to bring it up with her afterwards. She was my boss, after all, and maybe she thought my ideas were fair game. I hadn’t told anyone else about it either, not even Frannie. It was just one of many reasons I didn’t much like Miss Alee-chay Pettigrew.
It soon became clear that my instincts had been right about the risk of this daylight robbery being repeated because my loyal helper Gemma had caught Natalie – or Fatalie as I had been known to refer to her – snooping around my desk the day before. Then, just as I was starting to type up my finished proposal, she came in again.
‘Alice wants your list,’ she said, with her usual charm.
‘I’m just typing it up now,’ I said cautiously.
‘So when will it be finished?’ she demanded.
‘Just in time for the meeting, thank you, Natalie,’ I said, getting seriously pissed off.
‘Well, Alice says you have to give your list to me the day before the meeting in future, so she can have it in advance. This is very unprofessional.’
‘Oh, is it, Natalie?’ I said. ‘Well, tell Alice if she wants the list I will give it to her at the meeting. OK?’
She flounced out and Janey and Gemma both made faces at her back as she strutted off, which made Frannie and me roar with laughter.
‘What a cheeky bitch,’ I said, outraged. ‘How dare she call me unprofessional – even if she was quoting Alice.’
‘We have a word for girls like her in Scotland,’ said Frannie, popping a sugary bon-bon into her mouth. ‘Sleakit. I’ve met stoats I’d trust more than her.’
My lists were still belching out of the printer as everyone started to converge on Bee’s office for the big meeting. I half expected Alice to come and snatch them from me as she walked in, but she just strolled past, looking unusually relaxed – well, as relaxed as she could look in the overlarge black-framed swot glasses she wore when she wanted to be taken seriously.
It killed me how Alice always dressed the part. To complete her serious meeting look, she was wearing a severe black pantsuit and her hair was scraped back in a tight pony-tail. She was carrying a clipboard. An Hermès clipboard by the look of it, but still a clipboard.
By the appointed hour we were all seated round the meeting table in Bee’s large, bright pink office, but she was leaning out of the window smoking. Even the Queen Bee herself wasn’t allowed to light up in our offices, so she got round it by blowing her smoke out of the window like a schoolgirl and frantically chewing nicotine gum when that wasn’t possible. She had been known to chew the gum and smoke out of the window at the same time. Really it was a miracle she didn’t spontaneously combust.
‘OK, my little chickens,’ she said, tossing her cigarette butt down into the street below – I always gave the pavement beneath her office a wide berth when I left the building, for fear of such smouldering missiles – and joined us at the table.
‘This better be good,’ she said, folding her arms and leaning back in her chair. ‘I’m not in the mood for crap. Fire away, Alee-chay.’
Alice kicked off with her key trends and then we went round the table, each reading out our lists, while Bee’s assistant Nushka frantically made notes. This would become the ‘New Season Trends Master List’, which was the backbone of the magazine for the next six months and the basis for the catwalk picture supplements that Frannie put together each March and September. Crucial stuff.
After we’d been right round the table with that, it was clear we all agreed on the key directions, which made Bee very happy – she saw it as a sign we were a good tight team – and it put her in a more receptive mood for our shoot plans. Once again, Alice, as fashion director, went first. Her first word made me nearly fall off my chair.
‘Sarajevo,’ she said.
Sarajevo was the first word on my list too. My big idea was to photograph Iggy’s collection there, on models who came from all the different states that had made up the former Yugoslavia. There were masses of beautiful girls from those countries on the catwalks in Milan and Paris, which had given me the idea, combined with what Nelly had told me about Iggy’s amazing story.
I had also been going to suggest that we asked Iggy to come with us for the shoot, and to have one of our top writers interview him in his home town. I was really pleased with this as a package, because I thought Iggy’s story really needed to be told – but also because I knew Bee would love it.
It had all the elements that would appeal to the ‘intelligent, politically aware and passionately interested in international affairs’ Chic readers I had heard her describe on so many occasions. Usually to gormless beauty PRs who were terribly impressed and thought these were just the women who needed to know about their new lip glosses.
I just sat there with my mouth hanging open as I heard Alice spouting my exact idea. She must have stolen it from me, but it didn’t make any sense – I had only just typed my list out, so she couldn’t have cribbed it. Was it really possible that she had simply come up with the same idea as me – synchronicity and all that? But that seemed unlikely as I didn’t think she even knew Iggy’s story. Maybe she was psychic.
‘I think having the profile as well would add a deeper level of meaning to the pictures,’ Alice was droning on in her deepest, most monotonous ‘intellectual’ voice. ‘It would be pretty amazing to hear how Iggy feels about what happened in his country and how that relates back to his work.’
‘Yes,’ said Bee, beaming at her and actually clapping. ‘That is absolutely brilliant. Wonderful stuff, Alice. Although I must say I’ve always been pretty shaky on exactly what happened over there myself. Which side was Iggy on anyway? Is he a Muslim, an Albanian, a Croat, or what? And who were the baddies anyway? Can you enlighten me, Alice?’
I saw a look of naked terror flash across Alice’s face behind her Elvis Costello specs.
‘Er, I’m not sure,’ she said, her eyes flicking left and right like a terrified cat. ‘But I’m sure Iggy will be able to put us all in the picture.’
She definitely didn’t know his story, I realized. Very few people did and Nelly certainly wouldn’t have told the woman she referred to as Prune Face, so how could she possibly have come up with the idea on her own? Now I was really baffled.
‘Do you know, Emily?’ asked Bee, popping three pieces of nicotine gum into her mouth. ‘Has Nelly filled you in?’
‘Yes, she has actually,’ I said, looking straight at Alice, who just blinked back at me. She didn’t look remotely guilty, just nervous. I was absolutely bewildered.
‘And?’ said Bee, getting narky with me.
‘Er, it’s all really complicated, as you said. He’s a mixture. His mother is a Bosnian Muslim and his father is a Serb – not a Bosnian Serb, though, a Serb-Serb. He moved to Bosnia from Belgrade – which is in Serbia – to be with Iggy’s mum. And his grandfather was Russian actually, which is why he’s called Igor, which is not really a Serbian name.’
‘Fuck me,’ said Bee. ‘I didn’t know you worked for NATO, Emily. It is complicated, isn’t it? We’ll have to get a really serious writer on this, maybe that brainy bird who’s married to Martin Amis, whatsername? She’s been to Albania. Marvellous stuff anyway, Alice. Great to see you thinking about the features angle too. Now, what else do you have for me?’
The rest of Alice’s list was more her usual fare. For her big-name designer story, for which she got to choose her pick of the best outfits in the best collections, which always really annoyed the stink out of me, she was going to do ‘Asian Influences’.
This involved shooting a new Chinese model everyone was talking about, naked in a bare room, with the clothes being held up in the background by children of many colours. On black and white film. I mentally crossed my eyes. If I hadn’t been so furious I would already have been anticipating taking the piss out of it with Nelly.
For ‘Green’ she wanted to shoot on a racecourse – you know, ‘turf’ – with the models running alongside real racehorses, wearing papier mâché horses’ heads. Those were her big art ideas, then there was the usual list of shoots which involved her going to fabulously hot and glamorous locations and working on her tan.
Normally I would have kicked Frannie’s foot under the table when we got to the horses’ heads bit, but I was too upset about my Sarajevo idea to care, so I just tuned out and tried to think of another shoot idea quick, as I was now missing one and I was up next. Luckily for me my list already included several of the aspirational-but-accessible ideas that Bee loved, the ones that had got me the job at Chic in the first place, which would give me time to think of another idea.
When my turn came I started with the second idea on my list, enthusiastically explaining how I wanted to shoot vintage-style satin dresses in an old hotel I had heard about in Prague – all fabulous fading fabrics and old gilt furniture – on four models with long romantic wavy hair who were sisters in real life.
Then there was an upbeat stripes story to be shot on stripy deck-chairs in a studio – cute and cheap to do, so I knew that was a winner. For beachwear I suggested doing an incredibly glamorous bikini cover-up story in art deco Miami, with the girls getting out of pastel-coloured convertible cars driven by really gorgeous men with slicked-down hair, great tans and no shirts on. Very Cosmo 1975.
Then, desperate to replace Sarajevo, I dredged up that old fashion editor’s favourite – holiday packing – and made it up as I went along.
‘I thought we could do it as a kind of pictorial narrative,’ I heard myself saying, with no idea what was going to come out of my mouth next, while another part of my brain was madly trying to decide where I most wanted to go to shoot it. I was determined to salvage something from this disaster. Sun, or shopping? I was mentally asking myself as I spoke.
‘I thought we would base it around a capsule wardrobe of mix and match pieces, in the classic way,’ I continued. ‘But we’d shoot it in the luggage department of Macy’s…’
Bingo, New York, that was where I wanted to go. I could see Ursula and Paul could do the make-up. Bliss. Thank you, brain.
‘So,’ I continued, getting into my stride. ‘We’ll show her trying to pack her capsule wardrobe in several different suitcases and trying different bits of it on together as she packs. Then we’d see her getting into a yellow taxi with her luggage and then at the airport, checking in. Next she’ll be in her hotel room hanging the clothes up and then finally down at the bar having a drink in her evening look.’
I was on a roll. I continued, ‘And in each shot she would have changed just one piece of clothing, so through the story we will gradually show every piece of the capsule wardrobe, demonstrating how it all works together. Day to night and all that,’ I added, throwing in one of Bee’s favourite phrases for good measure.
I amazed myself. I had no idea where that came from – and I liked it. So did Bee. She was beaming at me between her madly chewing jaws.
‘Love it, Emily,’ she said. ‘Love it. Classic Chic stories all of them, especially the holiday wardrobe. You really get it – practical glamour, that’s what Chic is all about. Intelligent glamour.’
It was all very lovely, but I was so weirded out by the Sarajevo incident I couldn’t really relish her praise.
Everyone was on a bit of a high after the meeting, as none of us had stuffed up. With just a few tweaks here and there, Bee had been happy with all our ideas and we were all blissfully relieved it was over for another season, because if Bee didn’t like your suggestions, you really knew about it. Six months earlier one of the junior fashion editors had walked out of the office during the planning meeting and never come back, after getting roughed up by Bee over her lame suggestions.
Frannie, in particular, was ecstatic as her incense story had been a winner, which meant she was off to Kyoto – the place she had always most wanted to go. When we got back to our little room, she suggested we nicked off for the rest of the afternoon with Janey and Gemma and go to Sketch for tea, to celebrate.
I tried to dredge up some enthusiasm, but although I was delighted that – thanks to my quick thinking – I would now be going to New York and seeing Paul and Ursula twice in the next couple of months, the Sarajevo thing was really bugging me. In fact, that’s how I felt, like I’d been bugged. It was really unsettling.
Of course I did agree to go to Sketch, for Frannie’s sake and also because I fancied the idea of a stroll past the shops in Conduit Street afterwards.
We sat in the salon de thé and Frannie had three elaborate cakes – arguing that she would lose loads of weight eating all that raw fish in Japan, so it didn’t matter what she ate now – but I had to make a real effort to look like I was having a good time. Cake is not really my thing.
But I did my best to hide it because I didn’t want to dampen Frannie’s excitement – and because I didn’t want to tell her what was bothering me. It was just too humiliating. So I just sipped some Earl Grey and filed the Sarajevo incident away with all the other things I wasn’t thinking about, while Frannie and the girls stuffed themselves and chattered away.
Then I did what I always did when I wanted to put something out of my mind. I went shopping.