Three weeks later, the emotional decompression chamber of the business-class compartment of a long-haul jumbo jet gave me the time and the space to look at my work situation with some detachment. In between reading my mother’s poems – which had become a bit of an inflight fetish – I considered my situation.
So far Surface was a total fuck-up and there was no going back to Chic now my least favourite person had my job. Bad. But looking on the good side – at least Rosie had given me complete freedom to shoot whatever clothes I wanted on this trip, which was quite a wild prospect. She had seemed quite surprised when I had asked her to come into my office so I could present the clothes for each of the three stories I was going to do, before I set off.
I’d arranged all the outfits on a clothes rail – which I’d had to go out and buy myself, because Rosie had said there wasn’t money in the budget for one – complete with their accessories, and a list detailing the designers, prices and UK stockists. In other words, just the way Bee had always insisted we did it at Chic.
Rosie had just looked perplexed and waved me away saying I was the stylist and she trusted me to do the styling. She didn’t even want to see what I was thinking of for the cover tries. I thought she was nuts and realized I missed the creative bounce around of such discussions. Bee had often made my shoots much better by restricting me a bit in what I wanted to use and making really helpful suggestions, but Rosie didn’t want to know.
‘You don’t get mixed up in the words, Emily, and I won’t interfere with the pictures,’ she had said patronizingly and completely missing the point.
That was exactly what an editor-in-chief was supposed to do – interfere, control, change, infuriate and generally spice up the crazy brew that made a fashion magazine great. As Bee used to say, magazines are not democracies, they’re dictatorships, with one vision steering them, and that’s the only way to make them work.
But as Rosie clearly had no concept of any of that, I decided I was just going to enjoy the freedom while I had it and if the magazine turned out to be as cruddy as her management skills, I’d just leave and go freelance until something better came along. At that moment, though, I was rather excited about the adventure I was embarking on. I was on my way to Sydney, for the first time, as the guest of Australian Fashion Week.
The week after the disastrous planning meeting Rosie had received an email inviting Surface to attend, with the flights and hotel paid for. I was amazed they’d even heard of us, but Rosie’s reputation as a writer was international and they’d written about us on WGSN – the best fashion news wire service – and they seemed keen for us to go. I jumped at the opportunity to tack some shoots in great locations on to the end of the free trip.
Ollie had been really excited about me going to Sydney and had asked me to do a serious recce of the city and how Slap sat in the market there. He was so geared up about it, rushing into his study and producing a file of cuttings he’d saved about groovy things in Australia, I thought for a moment that he might come with me.
And I had seriously mixed feelings about that. Normally I would have loved to share the excitement of visiting a new city – a new continent – with Ollie, but this was different. Miles lived in Sydney. If Ollie had come there with me, it would have been as weird as when Miles had been in London. Weirder.
Which was also why I hadn’t told Miles I was coming over. I knew how I had felt when he was in my home town, so I thought I should respect how he might feel about having me in his. I didn’t know anything about Miles’s private life outside our hotel-room bubble – and I didn’t want to. Not seeing him while I was there, seemed the cleanest way to handle it.
Of course the twenty-four-hour flight potentially gave me plenty of time to think about all that and the implications of it, but I just blocked it out with the free champagne, the movies and my mum’s book. It was funny how I could use her words to push away the things I didn’t want to think about, when normally I used anything available – to stop myself thinking about her. Somehow, though, reading her clipped, economical lines enabled me to allow her into my brain, without having really to confront the situation. It was the perfect balance.
I was so brain lagged by the flight when I arrived I could hardly take in anything about Sydney at first, but I was aware of a very big blue sky and a very short distance, compared to most cities I knew, between the airport and the hotel, which was in an old converted wharf sticking out into the famous harbour.
I had the most amazing view of the water from the little balcony off my room and I sat there feeling slightly dizzy and unable to take my eyes off the sparkling view, framed by wooded headlands and an atmospheric old naval depot to the right.
I started unpacking and then, despite everything I knew about conquering jet lag, I just had to lie down. I went straight to sleep until I was abruptly woken by the phone ringing next to my head.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,’ said a familiar voice. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were coming over.’
‘Miles?’ I said, faintly.
‘Who did you think it was?’
‘But how did you know I was here?’
He laughed. ‘I went in to the Fashion Week office just now to get my accreditation pass and there was one sitting there with your name on it. It wasn’t hard, Emily. But what is Surface magazine?’
I groaned. ‘Don’t ask. I’ve changed jobs.’
‘Well, you can tell me about it over lunch. I’m coming to get you.’
So there I was, just a couple of hours after landing in beautiful Australia, in the arms of a beautiful Australian. As welcomes go, I thought, as Miles lifted me up on to the balcony railing, gently biting my neck as he entered me with great tenderness, it would have been hard to beat.
*
‘So this is a panel van,’ I said to him, as I climbed into a hideous bronze-coloured thing, like an estate car, but with no side windows.
Miles grinned at me.
‘Yeah, ugly bugger, isn’t it?’
‘What’s the attraction?’
‘Room for your surfboards. And your woman… There’s room for two to sleep back there. As long as you don’t mind lying on top of each other.’ He grinned at me again and squeezed my knee, ‘I’ll take you on a little tourist tour, before we go to the restaurant,’ he said. ‘Show you my city. It’s better than yours.’
I have no idea where we went. He seemed to drive me all over the place, and the harbour and the ocean kept popping up around corners when I was least expecting them. We definitely went over the Sydney Harbour Bridge a couple of times and although I had seen it a million times in films and photos, I was blown away by the famous opera house view in real time.
My first impression was that I’d never been anywhere that made such an instant visual impact on you. The cities I knew and loved – London, Paris, New York – were more about aggregate impressions of lots of wonderful details and experiences, but Sydney just leaped out at you, the whole fabulous thing in one eyeful. It was like a city designed by John Galliano.
Ollie would have loved it, I couldn’t help thinking, as we drove along a pretty tree-lined street of interesting-looking boutiques, cafés and galleries, in what seemed just minutes after leaving an amazing white sand beach.
I already loved it. It was supposed to be autumn, but the sky was bright blue and it was warm enough for us to sit outside for lunch, on a chic restaurant terrace looking out over the sweep of Bondi Beach, complete with surfers. It was only as I leaned back in my seat with my eyes closed, enjoying the sun on my face after months of crushing European winter, that it really hit me. I was doing something normal – and public – with Miles.
My eyes snapped open again and there he was. Even more tanned, wearing his usual rather tight old T-shirt and ancient jeans, his brown feet in Birkenstocks, still gloriously male and looking at me, not grinning for once, but quite seriously. Then he smiled at me slowly, very different from his normal cheeky smirk, and reached out across the table to put his hand over mine. He squeezed it.
‘It’s good to see you in sunlight, Emily,’ he said.
It was all very gorgeous. The food was fabulous, we had a lovely bottle of wine and all around us were people who looked like the people I knew in London, but more relaxed. And that was the problem. I couldn’t relax.
Doing something so normal with Miles was making me feel incredibly tense. Coffee at the Fiera, even driving around sightseeing had been OK, but now I felt like we had stepped way over the boundaries I had set on our liaison, into something that was way too much like my real life.
I felt myself getting more and more inhibited as we sat there and it was all I could do to force down a mouthful of my grilled monkfish. I was relieved when it was time to leave. I was silent all the way back to the hotel and when I sneaked a glance at Miles he was looking fairly stony-faced too. He pulled up in front of the hotel and stopped the engine.
‘What’s up, Em?’ he said, simply.
‘Too real,’ I almost whispered.
I couldn’t speak more loudly or say more, because I was too frightened what might come out. The thing we have is too precious. You don’t know what it means to me. I can’t risk spoiling it. All of those things I couldn’t tell him, because I could hardly admit them to myself.
He stayed looking ahead. Was it hurt or disappointment I could see on that handsome face? I wasn’t sure, but after a moment, he turned to me, sighing loudly, and patted my knee.
‘I understand, Em,’ he said. ‘I went too far. I got a bit pushy there. I was just excited about showing you my city. Well, I won’t do it again. I’ll let you take charge. As always, Emily, you’re driving. You know my number. And you know where I will be for the next four days. Your call.’ He shrugged. ‘Or not.’
He totally got it, I thought, and I leaned over to kiss him on the cheek as I got out of the car.
I didn’t call Miles. I was having too much fun. Australian Fashion Week was a blast and I felt so freed from the pressures of Paris and Milan. I had no bossy editor-in-chief, or moody fashion director to worry about and – apart from Miles – nobody knew me, so I didn’t have any expectations to live up to. There were quite a few other people there from London, but they were all buyers and total strangers. It was so liberating.
I was also blissfully unaware of any front-row politics.
I’m sure the usual jockeying for status and position was going on, but I wasn’t part of it. And I didn’t have to worry about bloody advertisers either.
Adding to my relaxed state, at the beginning of the week they had given me a pass with all my seat placements on it and, apart from one or two shows each day away from the official venue, I basically had the same front-row seat for the entire time. That made life brilliantly simple and, on top of that, the shows didn’t run late, starting just about fifteen minutes, or so, after the stated time. I was so unprepared for that I nearly missed the first one.
The final treat was having a limo and driver to myself, laid on by the sponsors. It was such a treat after years of having to fit round other people’s moods and schedules, I felt quite giddy.
When I say I didn’t ring Miles, I didn’t ignore him – in fact I saw him every day. The shows were so small compared to the ones in Europe, I’d bump into him constantly, going in and out of them and just hanging around the venue. I just didn’t ring him, or see him, in our usual way.
It did feel a little strange, to be honest, to see him in public like that – and not to see him alone as well – and my heart did give a little leap every time he strayed casually into view, so on the second day I sent him a text saying that I hadn’t forgotten him, but I just needed some space.
He replied that it was cool – but that he did want to see me again before I left. In fact, he said, he insisted on it. That was fine with me and I just assumed that he understood that it was the same deal as London. And then, with my usual talent for keeping things separate in my head, I just got on with it.
To keep me distracted, as well as all the actual fashion shows, there seemed to be another whole schedule of parties to go to. The first few evenings I’d been too jet lagged to do anything beyond cocktail events and dinners, but by the last night I was seriously ready to get on down at designer Wayne Cooper’s after-show party.
I’d made what seemed like loads of new best friends at Bar Bazaar, the VIP delegates’ bar out at the main shows venue, so I didn’t feel shy to go on my own. Adding to my self-confidence, a make-up artist I’d met there had done my face and hair and I was wearing the emerald green Dolce & Gabbana toga dress I’d bought for the Chic Christmas party, with my highest gold Prada shoes.
Combined with a swift visit to a salon for a spray-on tan and a head full of compliments from people who’d only seen my dress before in internet shots of the Milan catwalk, I was feeling pretty happy about life.
It was quite late and I seemed to have been on the dance floor all night, shaking my thing with my new friends, when I felt someone come up behind me. Strong arms wrapped round me, lips nuzzled my neck and I breathed in the warm musky smell of hot man. I knew exactly who it was and I closed my eyes and breathed deeply as Miles nibbled my ear. Then he turned me round and kissed me – really kissed me – right there on the dance floor.
Maybe it was the Möet, maybe it was the scent of him, but as I kissed him back, one hand on the back of his head, pushing it into mine, as we swayed to the music, it did cross my mind that I was a married woman, kissing a man who was not my husband – in public. I didn’t care.
After that, Miles led me off the dance floor and into a corner of the nightclub where he sat down on a banquette and pulled me on to his lap.
‘Now where were we?’ he said, his cheekiest grin back in place, and he kissed me again. We sat there snogging like a pair of teenagers, right down to the hard-on I could feel straining against my thigh through his jeans. Drunk on champagne and pheromones, I surrendered entirely to him and it was lucky it was dark in that corner, because he had his hand inside my new Collette Dinnigan knickers and was quickly bringing me to a climax.
After that he just held me on his knee, my arms around his neck, as the pounding music washed over us. I don’t know how long we sat there like that, but I loved every minute of it. I was vaguely aware of other people passing by en route to the bar, but I didn’t care. I was wrapped up in a world no bigger than the piece of Miles’s shoulder my head was resting on.
‘Em,’ he said softly, after a while, maybe a few hundred years. ‘Let’s go.’
I felt slightly odd in his tatty old panel van in my Dolce dress, but not enough to snap out of my blissful state of euphoric well-being. We seemed to drive for a long time. I’d got used to the trip from the main venue back to my hotel in my chauffeured car and had started to recognize landmarks, but now I had no bearings.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked him eventually.
‘My place,’ said Miles, firmly.
I opened my mouth to speak, although I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I’d just assumed we’d be going back to the hotel. Miles and I always met in hotels.
‘I’m taking charge tonight, Emily,’ he said. ‘Just go with it. Trust me.’
And against all my better instincts, I did.
I woke up the next morning to sunlight streaming on to my face, the smell of coffee and music playing. Lifting my head from the pillow, I saw Miles walking around in a batik sarong. He was cutting up fruit and putting it into two bowls.
I looked round his place. It had seemed pretty amazing at night, with just a few candles lit, enough to illuminate a whole wall of books, and another two covered in artworks. The fourth wall was mainly window and at night it had just been black with a few lights twinkling, before he closed the blinds. In daylight I could see it looked straight out over water. It seemed to be the harbour, but not any part of it I had seen before.
His place was half a floor of an old warehouse building that had miraculously escaped the hands of developers, who would have turned it into about five separate rabbit hutches. It still had its original old worn floorboards and apart from the loo and a darkroom, it was completely open plan. Even the bath and glass shower cubicle were out in the middle of the space.
Miles saw I was awake and smiled broadly at me as he brought the bowls of fruit over to the bed. He climbed in beside me.
‘That’s yours,’ he said, handing me a groaning pile topped with yogurt, honey and nuts. ‘I’ve put extra honey and yogurt on it. You’re getting a bit thin. I like enough of you to get hold of, you know.’
And he kissed me on the end of my nose.
‘This is a great place, Miles,’ I said. ‘Where are we?’
‘Glebe. That’s the old industrial harbour out there. Great, isn’t it? I’m renting this place from a friend who’s living overseas. I was really lucky.’
‘I love this track,’ I said, as The Coral came on.
He turned and looked at me.
‘I love you,’ he said.
I just looked back at him.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to pretend any more. This may have started as a casual shows shag, but it has turned into something much more for me and I can’t lie about it any more.’
I opened my mouth to speak, but he put his fingers on my lips to stop me.
‘I know it’s against the rules we set ourselves,’ he said. ‘But it’s the truth. I’ve been wretched all week, Emily, watching you walk in and out of those fucking shows, the most amazing woman I’ve ever known, but out of bounds to me, like you were behind glass.’
I tried to speak, but he stopped me again. I decided to shut up and listen.
‘I know men are supposed to be sex beasts who can turn it on and off like a tap, but I can’t, Emily. Not with you. When we make love, it’s not just sex, it’s something much more and I know you know that. Like I told you in Paris, it has never been like this for me before with anyone and I’m not going to pretend any more whatever the fucking rules are’.
Finally it seemed I could speak.
‘Come here,’ I said.
I never did eat that fruit.