I didn’t eat the fruit and I didn’t stay another night in the hotel. I moved in with Miles for the rest of the trip, which I extended for another week even beyond the extra days I was already officially staying for the fashion shoots.
Rosie didn’t seem to care. I told her I was doing some additional shots and I’d be out and about on location, so just to call me on the mobile if she needed me. She never asked another question. Ollie didn’t seem that bothered either. He seemed more excited about the fact that Chic Interiors was shooting our ‘apartment’ the following day.
‘I hope you don’t mind not being in the pictures, Emily,’ he was saying. I was standing outside a café in a cool suburb called Surry Hills, making the calls, while Miles sat inside. ‘But Felicity thought it probably wasn’t a very good idea, as you have recently left the Chic stable.’
‘Neeeeigh,’ I said. ‘Gee up, neddy. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I’m just glad you got what you wanted out of her, Ollie. I hope it does wonderful things for the brand.’
If he noticed the slight edge in my voice, he didn’t react, but it was a conversation that made me feel a lot less guilty about what I was up to. If Ollie didn’t give a damn when I came home that was fine with me. I was having such a lovely time with Miles. It was so good just to surrender to how I felt about him, although I hadn’t gone quite as far as he had. I hadn’t told him I loved him, because I didn’t know if I did. But I loved being with him and for those all too brief days, I loved leading his kind of life, it was all so much more relaxed than what I was used to.
I did have to do the shoots for Surface, of course, and they went off really well, probably because I was so laid-back on them. I was using an Australian photographer who was starting to make a name for himself in New York and had come back to Sydney for Fashion Week, with a fantastic Brazilian model who happened to be his girlfriend.
Between the loved-up lot of us, it made for a very happy atmosphere on those shoots and a look in the model’s eyes that could never have been faked, as she stared down the lens at her lover.
I did tack one extra session on to the ones I had gone out there planning to do. It was an accessories still-life series in rich colour, that we shot on a deserted beach somewhere north of Sydney. The photographer was Miles.
At first he’d been really reluctant to show me his ‘real’ work, as opposed to the catwalk shots, but when he eventually did I was blown away. I knew he was an ‘art’ photographer and that his subjects were natural phenomena and formations he found on beaches, mainly to do with the shapes of waves and the effect of water on sand and pebbles, but I’d expected them to be classic – i.e. boring – ‘arty’ grainy black and white prints. Instead they were in the most amazing saturated colour, printed on superglossy paper and then worked into collages, some of it done by hand, other parts scanned in and manipulated on a computer. They were rich, sensuous and gorgeous, almost vibrating with life force.
Miles pinned them up on the walls of his loft and I just stood and drank them in. They had the same explosive sense of energy I had felt when I’d first seen Sydney Harbour in all its glory. Not dead-at-heart intellectual ‘art’ photos at all, they were alive and throbbing with energy.
‘Wow,’ was all I could say. ‘These are amazing, Miles. I love them.’
I looked at an extraordinary close-up of the curl of a wave fractured into a thousand tiny pieces and then back at Miles.
‘They’re like you,’ I said. ‘A force of nature.’
Something shifted inside me. I turned to him and took his hands in mine.
‘My dad was an artist, you know,’ I started.
‘And your mum is a really good poet,’ he replied.
I looked at him mystified.
‘I saw her book in your bag,’ he explained. ‘I read it while you were out the other day. I hope you don’t mind. I saw her picture on the back and had to have a look. She looks so like you. She’s beautiful. And I really liked the poems, especially the one about you – buddy.’
He took me in his arms and kissed me. I had been about to tell him my whole hideous family story, but instead I decided just to enjoy the moment and to leave that can of festering maggots unopened.
As the end of my stay drew nearer we both grew quiet. I knew he was feeling the same as me. It was almost unbearable to think of that special time ending, but I couldn’t just stay. And the funny thing was, that although Miles had thrown our rulebook out that night at the party, we were still observing two of them very strictly. We never talked about my life with Ollie and how I felt about him, and we never discussed any kind of future relationship between us beyond the here and now. We lived entirely in the moment.
Until the last night, that is, when Miles brought it all up in one go. I felt like a brick wall had just fallen on my head.
‘So, Emily,’ he said, leaning across the table towards me. I could tell by his tone of voice something was coming I didn’t want to hear. Particularly not then.
We were eating a dinner we’d cooked together. We’d gone to the fish market to get all the ingredients and it had been a wonderful day, chopping, grating, slicing and sauté-ing with the windows open, a bottle of dry Riesling on the go and everything from Outkast to Chopin blaring out of the stereo. Every now and then he’d taken me in his arms and we’d danced around the room.
Then, as we were eating our main course, he shattered it all with just a few dumb-ass questions.
‘So what’s next, Emily?’ he said. ‘You’re going home tomorrow, back to a job you hate and a husband you never talk about. Where does that leave me? Where does it leave us? When am I going to see you again? For a quick root in a hotel room in Milan in September? Is that going to be enough for you? Because I’ll tell you straight up, it’s not enough for me.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I sat there with my mouth open, feeling like a goldfish, but I couldn’t fill the air with babble just for the sake of it. It was too serious.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Well, let’s work it out. Starting with Mr Husband. I’ve seen him, you know. He looks like a complete arse. What’s with that make-up he wears?’
I put my fork down. I had to take a big gulp of wine to force down the piece of prawn I was chewing. It had turned to Play-Doh in my mouth.
‘It’s a work thing for him,’ I said, quietly.
Miles laughed.
‘Is he a clown?’
‘No,’ I said, tersely.
I felt weirdly offended on Ollie’s behalf. He did look ridiculous in that make-up, but it was just part of the whole career persona that defined him and if you knew him, it made sense somehow. And although I was the one who was gallivanting with another man, I had been with Ollie for so many years and I still loved him. Or something.
‘Please don’t be horrible about him, Miles,’ I said quietly. ‘I am married to him. He may seem like an arsehole to you, but he’s been very good to me.’
‘So good he hasn’t rung you once while you’ve been here?’ said Miles, clearly not ready to let it go.
It was true. Ollie was too caught up in that stupid shoot to call me, and when I thought about it, how did that sound? My husband hadn’t rung me while I was on the other side of the world, because he was having his house photographed. Great.
‘Do you really love him, Emily?’ said Miles, his brow all bunched up in an uncharacteristic frown. ‘Do you love being with him?’ He paused, then spoke again, more softly. ‘Do you love being with him, as much as you love being with me?’
My brain span just thinking about it all. Yes, but no, well, sort of. No, no, no. It didn’t look that good when you studied it, but on the other hand, what was I supposed to do? Leave Ollie and move to Sydney? It was too much. My mind suddenly tripped back to the first night with Miles in Milan, when he’d told me he’d been watching me for a year. I had felt stalked then and that suffocated feeling returned.
‘I don’t know,’ I said again. ‘I love being here with you, but I love my life in London. I’m not ready to give it up.’
‘Really? Does it really make you happy? Would a woman who was really happy be starving herself? Slim is one thing and you had a beautiful figure when I met you, but you’re fading away in front of me. You’re just bones now, Emily, and you’re thinner every time I see you. Is that a sign of a happy woman?’
Oh, not Miles as well now, I thought, telling me I was too thin. That made Ollie just about the only person who didn’t go on at me about that. He might not have rung me since I’d been in Sydney, but at least he understood I just wanted to look good in my clothes, which was part of my job after all.
On top of everything else, it was too much. I did the only thing I could do in the circs. I burst into hysterical tears and then, to my great shame, I had a big sulk. I just couldn’t cope with everything that Miles had thrown at me and I sulked for the rest of the night. I didn’t make love with him then, or the next morning and then it was too late, it was time to get the plane. Stupid, stupid girl.
Considering that those days in Sydney had probably been the happiest times of my life, my parting from Miles was horrendous. He saw me off, looking grey in the face and I just felt like I was made of stone.
I wanted to throw myself at him and beg his forgiveness and ask him to keep me there for ever, but I couldn’t. I could only go through the motions of checking in, buying magazines, kissing him on the cheek like some kind of acquaintance and pushing my trolley through that horrendous point of no return to passport control.
I turned round and looked at him just before there was a curve in the corridor and he would disappear from view. He was standing staring down at his boots, looking completely stricken. I hurried on before he looked up and I would have had to rush back to him.
I felt numb all the long flight home and the only thing that got me through it was watching terrible films and obsessively reading Paeanies. There was something about going over the same rhythmic words again and again that was amazingly comforting. It did make me have the odd unwelcome thought about my mother – and Toby – but mainly it made my brain switch into neutral, which is exactly where I wanted it to be.
When I finally got back, wrung out from the flight and the emotional spin cycle I’d been through, I found getting home was not the comfort it usually was for me. Normally just being in Westbourne Grove and sliding into my life there made me feel instantly grounded again, but this time I was like a dog turning round and round in my basket but not able to get comfortable. Ollie didn’t seem to notice, he was too wrapped up in the stupid shoot of our flat. He was so overexcited about it you would have thought it was something important.
At that stage the Chic Interiors art department had started to lay out the pictures and he was going into their offices all the time to help with the captions and stuff like that. Combined with his usual workload and the continuing saga of Slap for Chaps, which was now part of a major charity fund-raising event, I hardly seemed to see him. And it suited me. It took the pressure off having to pretend I was fine, when I was anything but.
It wasn’t until I’d been home for nearly two weeks that I realized he hadn’t even tried to make love to me since I’d got back, which was unusual. I was perfectly happy about it, because at that point I never wanted to have sex ever again, but it was still odd. We normally went through the motions whenever we’d been apart and this had been a longer separation than most. I reckoned Ollie must have been picking up on my low mood in some way and was giving me some space.
If things were tense at home, there wasn’t any relief to be found in the Surface office. The launch date was getting closer and closer, but Rosie was still in the same state of chaotic bravado. She’d written up her piece on Junya Watanabe and Steve was in the process of organizing a portrait of him, but apart from that the only material we had in was the pictures I’d shot in Sydney. At least they liked them – even grumpy Steve was impressed by Miles’s pictures.
Their enthusiastic reaction to his shots was just about the only nice thing that had happened since I had got home, until I received an email from him with no message, just a picture attachment. It was a photo of me, asleep and naked. Using his collage technique, he’d fanned my hair out around my shoulders, taken the flowers that had been in a vase on the bedside cabinet and scattered them in the air around me and chopped up the blue and white of the sheets, so I looked like some kind of twenty-first-century Venus rising from the waves. He’d called it ‘Bud’.
It was such a beautiful gesture I wanted to respond but I just couldn’t find the right words, so I went on the internet and trawled through those out-of-print book search sites, until eventually I found a copy of my mother’s anthology and had them send it straight to him.
Life went on like this for a few more weeks until something happened to shock me out of my self-obsession. Frannie rang me at Surface one afternoon and said she had some horrible news.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the baby, is there?’ I asked, immediately.
‘No, no, he or she is growing like a little champion – it’s Alice. She’s taken an overdose. She nearly died, Emily.’
‘Oh, fuck me,’ I said, feeling really shocked. ‘When did it happen?’
‘A couple of days ago, but we’ve only just heard. It seems Alice called her neighbour just in time, or she’d be dead. She’d taken masses of painkillers, but something made her change her mind, thank God. She’s been in intensive care, but she’s stable now, whatever that means.’
‘Oh, poor Alice,’ I said. My eyes filled with tears. For all my complicated feelings about her, I felt deeply sad that she’d felt bad enough to try and kill herself. No one deserved that. Plus it set off a lot of painful associations to do with my mother. Ouch.
‘So we were right about her being depressed,’ I said.
‘We bloody well were. The silly cow. Why didn’t she tell you, when you asked her that time in Milan?’
I just exhaled loudly. What a mess we stupid humanoids were, I thought. All scurrying along in our private pods of misery and not telling each other.
‘I think she couldn’t admit it to herself,’ I said, still not wanting to tell Frannie what had really passed between me and Alice that dark day in Milan, or any of the other baggage I was carrying in relation to Miss Alee-chay Pettigrew.
‘Which hospital is she in?’ I asked Frannie, thinking I might send some flowers. It seemed the least I could do.
‘She’s in St Mary’s and actually, that’s one of the reasons I’m ringing. Bee told me to – she’s been asking for you.’
‘Alice has? Me? That’s weird.’
‘That’s what I thought. I always thought she hated your guts, but that’s what Bee said, she wants you to go and see her. Will you? I know how you feel about hospitals, but Bee is pretty firm that you’ve got to go. Not that you work here any more, but…’
Frannie didn’t need to say any more. She knew all about my mum and how I felt about visiting her, and my blood phobia didn’t exactly predispose me towards medical institutions either, but in the circumstances – and if Bee wanted me to – I thought I’d better go.
I got a taxi straight over there and forced myself to get in the lift up to the ward where she was. Just the smell of the place was enough to bring me to the brink of running out again, but I didn’t. I just wanted to get it over with.
After a few wrong turns I finally found Alice in a room on her own. I peeped round the door before I went in and she looked tiny lying there, without any of her usual extravagant accessories, and so pale, just gazing fixedly into space.
‘Alice?’ I said quietly.
She turned her head and blinked when she saw me. Then she extended a hand. I went and sat next to her and took her hand in mine. Her eyes were full of tears.
‘How are you?’ I said quietly.
She just closed her eyes and shook her head.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said eventually, sighing deeply. ‘I had to see you.’
I squeezed her hand. This was seriously weird.
‘If there’s anything I can do…’ I started to say, but she just shook her head to stop me.
‘I just need you to listen to me,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said, nodding.
‘I owe you an apology,’ she said. ‘I did a terrible thing to you. I stole your ideas. I did it deliberately. I wanted to fuck you up. I wanted you to leave Chic.’ She paused a moment and then spoke in a whisper. ‘I was so jealous of you, Emily.’ She turned her big blue eyes to me, staring intensely into mine. I felt really uncomfortable.
‘You’ve got it all,’ she continued. ‘Everything I want. The looks, the husband, the money, the flat – all the security I so desperately need and you’ve got the brilliant ideas too. That’s what I couldn’t stand. You had all that and you were more truly creative than me too. I knew Bee liked you better than me as well, because you’ve got a sense of humour and I haven’t. It was so unfair, I couldn’t let you win. I couldn’t let you have everything. I had to hold on to my job, because it’s all I have. I don’t have any of that other stuff you have. And I never will.’
She looked wretched. If only she knew, I thought. I had all that and I was desperately unhappy too, because I was doing my best to fuck it up.
‘Don’t say that, Alice,’ I said. ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen. You could meet the right man any day. He might be your doctor here.’
It was pathetic, but it was the best I could do. She ignored me.
‘I need you to forgive me,’ she said.
‘Oh, forget all that,’ I said. ‘Of course I forgive you. It’s all in the past. But if you could just tell me one thing, Alice, it would really help me.’
‘Ask me,’ she said.
‘What I never understood was – how did you do it? How did you find out my ideas before the meetings?’
‘I got Natalie to do it,’ she said blankly.
‘But how did she get them, when I hadn’t even typed them out on my computer? I could never work that out.’
‘She looked in your shows notebooks,’ said Alice, simply. ‘It wasn’t hard.’
Well, at least that explained why I had found the little shit snooping round my office so much.
‘I never did like Natalie,’ I said.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Alice, quietly, her face looking momentarily even more stricken.
I didn’t say anything, I had a feeling she had more to tell me. She did.
‘She blackmailed me,’ said Alice, almost whispering. ‘She threatened to tell Bee what I’d been doing. But by then it was too late for me to stop. I was so terrified about being found out I couldn’t even think straight, let alone come up with any ideas, so I had to carry on stealing yours and she got more and more demanding. How do you think she got your job? She made me recommend her.’
Alice looked stricken. I patted her hand.
‘It’s OK, Alice,’ I said. ‘She’ll get found out for what she is. People who scheme and plot like that never really get ahead in the end. All that matters is that you get better. Your ideas will come back again.’
I wasn’t entirely sure I believed any of it, but I hoped it might comfort her. She seemed to make an effort to collect herself.
‘Anyway, Emily, thank you for listening. I am truly sorry. It was a terrible thing to do, but I was desperate. And you were so nice that time in Milan, when you asked if I was OK. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t take sympathy from you. You were the worst person to have asked me. Can you forgive me?’
‘Of course,’ I said, although it actually made it even more unbearable that Fatalie now had my job, but I wasn’t going to tell Alice that. She was suffering enough.
‘Don’t think about it any more,’ I said. ‘It’s all in the past. Just concentrate on yourself and getting better, and if you ever need someone to talk to, just call me. You’ve got my numbers.’
I think I meant it.
I left St Mary’s feeling stunned and rather tainted, I wanted to go home and have a hot shower to wash that hospital atmosphere off my skin. It made me shudder. But I also felt strangely relieved – at least I wasn’t nuts. I wasn’t paranoid and delusional, Alice and Natalie had been stalking me; which, with my family history, was quite a relief. I had seriously started to wonder.
But before I could even start to process any of this new information, I had a very unwelcome phone call. I had just turned my mobile on after leaving the hospital when it rang. I fished it out of my bag and saw Ursula’s number on the display.
‘Ursa Major!’ I cried, delighted to hear from her so unexpectedly.
‘Hey, kiddo,’ she said, getting straight to the point. ‘Spoken to your brother recently?’
‘Not since Christmas,’ I said, guardedly. I was still upset about that conversation with Toby, and with what had happened since at Chic, with Miles, and the ongoing catastrophe that was Surface, I’d just put it in a mental pending file.
Toby had called me a few times since then, but I hadn’t rung him back. I’d been too busy and with everything else that was going on I was not in the mood to be nagged about my mum as well. In fact Toby was seriously pissing me off. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t just leave me alone like he used to.
‘I think he called, but I haven’t got back to him yet,’ I said, trying to sound vague.
‘That’s what Toby said,’ said Ursula, quite tersely. ‘He said he’s called you at least ten times and you have never called him back and one time, you actually hung up on him. Your mother is asking for you, Emily. She really wants to see you. She’s a sick woman and she needs to see you. Toby rang me to ask me to intervene. He said he just couldn’t get through to you about it.’
‘I suppose you think I should go and see her as well,’ I said, the old anger and resistance rising inside me.
‘As I have always said,’ said my un-mother. ‘It’s up to you, kiddo, only you can decide, but it might do you more good than endlessly shopping and starving yourself.’
‘I don’t want to see her,’ I spat down the phone. ‘Why can’t you all leave me alone about it?’
And she just beat me in the race to hang up first.
I was furious with Ursula. Furious and hurt. She’d stepped over an invisible line in our relationship – the line between being my virtual parent and telling me what to do with regard to my real ‘mommie dearest’. And my anger with Toby was off the scale for involving her in it.
Great, I thought. First Ursula gets Paul on to me and now Toby has recruited Ursula to nag me as well. It was like some kind of international conspiracy to interfere with my life and to stir up shit that was much better left well alone. I felt betrayed by the lot of them. Between all the stuff that was going on in my life already and now what had happened with Alice, I was beginning to feel like an emotional squash ball. Just too many hard hits too close together.
I stomped along Praed Street fighting tears, until I saw a cab coming along. I hailed it and went straight to the Chloé boutique in Sloane Street and bought the high-waist linen pants I had been lusting after ever since I’d seen them in the spring/summer show.
Then I powerwalked down to the end of the King’s Road and the haven that was Manolo Blahnik, to pick up a couple of pairs of flat sandals, to get me through summer. After a pedicure at Bliss, to set them off to their finest advantage, I felt I had myself under control again. I needed it all anyway because I was going on another trip, as Rosie finally seemed to have realized we had a magazine to put out in just a few weeks and very little to go in it.
Tunisia in mid-July would not have been my first choice of location for shooting three autumn trends stories, but it was the cheapest option that would at least provide guaranteed light and some exotic backdrops. I already felt sorry for the model who would have to wear tweed suits in sub-Saharan summer temperatures, but needs must.
I had managed to scam the accommodation from the Tunisian tourist board and the Surface budget could just about stretch to five charter flights out there for me, Nivek and his assistant, a hairdresser and a make-up artist, but not for an assistant for me.
The thought of doing all the ironing in that heat made me feel quite queasy, but I was seriously looking forward to getting away and losing myself in work for a while. I felt quite cheerful as I assembled my packing wardrobe in neat piles on the bed, ready to leave the next day. This was what I was best at, I thought, as I stood back to admire what I had put together.
It had a white and navy linen theme with turquoise accents and flashes of burnt ochre in a bikini and a fine cotton shawl. I had a couple of caftans I’d had made once on a trip to Vietnam, which were perfect for keeping cool in Muslim countries, without offending the locals, plus my big squashy straw hat and my blackest sunglasses to keep the sun damage off my face. Orange Converse All Stars to fly in, my trusty Birkenstocks and the new Manolos, of course. I was such a pro.
As I was packing my inflight tote, I automatically reached inside my bedside cabinet for Paeanies, but after studying the cover for a moment I put it back. It had become a bit of a routine to read it on planes, but I decided not to take it this time, because it was starting to get a little dog-eared. I decided I would get hold of another copy for reading and save the inscribed one. It was too special to spoil.
Then, on an impulse, I took it through to the sitting room, where Ollie was watching TV. I hadn’t shown it to him before and it just seemed like the right time to do it. I hadn’t told him about her asking for me – I hadn’t told anyone – but this was my way of acknowledging her, without actually having to go and see her. Ollie made all the right noises and was suitably complimentary about my mother’s photograph and the poem she had written about me, so I left the book with him to look at.
When I went back into the sitting room later I saw he had left it lying on the sofa, so I picked it up and placed it on the kilim-covered ottoman that was our book display area. It looked very nice sitting between a copy of Derek Jarman’s Garden and a new book about Yves Saint Laurent. I didn’t think any more of it until I went to bed that night and found it sitting on my bedside table.
‘Did you bring this back through here?’ I said to Ollie, although it was obvious he had.
‘Yes, darling,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked him.
‘Well, it’s not something we should prominently dispaly, is it? I’ll probably have a Sunday salon while you’re away and we don’t want to prompt any questions about your mother, do we?’
I just stood there stunned, as he carried on getting ready for bed, like nothing had happened. A geyser of red-hot anger shot through me. How dare he insult her like that? I wanted to kill him. I wanted to run at him like a shrieking banshee and tear his limbs off. But Ollie and I never rowed.
Right from the start of our relationship we had always found a way of dissipating tension through a joke, or just by silently fuming for a while, until we got over it. We might have a few cross words, but we never had slanging matches. People like Ollie simply didn’t, and up until then I had been perfectly happy to avoid anything that reminded me of the heavy mortar fire that used to go on between my parents when they were drunk. Anger frightened me.
I stood there feeling gagged, shaking with fury, and starting to feel sick from the adrenaline rush, but still I couldn’t let it out. I wanted to scream and shout and claw him to death, but I just couldn’t. I felt the rage within me turn from fire into cold steel.
‘What?’ he said, finally noticing something was wrong. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘You cunt,’ I said slowly. ‘You self-satisfied, judgemental, superficial cunt.’
Before he could reply, I grabbed the book from my bedside table and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind me. By the look I saw on Ollie’s face as I turned, I knew those words had done the trick more effectively than any pyrotechnic display could have. Fuck him.