For the first year after starting my own business, I spent a lot of time peering into a tin shaped like a red telephone box that sat on my kitchen shelf. Inside it was the money – in cash – that the four of us had to get through the week.
You return directly to ‘Go’ when you start up your own business. I was no exception. Gone were the big salary and perks. So, too, were the designer discount cards, restaurant lunches, the structure, the status and the nice office.
Instead I sat at a desk, loaned to me by the media agency PHD in return for project advice, which was opposite the lift. Everyone who got out of it thought I was the receptionist.
Failure, as they say, was not an option. The whole Portas family would be living in a box if the agency didn’t work, because Graham had left his teaching job to join me, looking after its finances and administration.
When I set up the business in 1997 my vision was to help other brands and retailers do what I’d done at Harvey Nichols: engage with consumers in many different ways. That could be done via anything from an advertising campaign to a product launch, a marketing strategy or brand creation.
I’d saved to fund us through the first year of business because I knew I wouldn’t take a salary. I’d also negotiated a three-days-a-week consultancy for Harvey Nichols to give me a reduced but steady income and was lucky to sign my first client before I’d even left my job.
When the managing director of Clarks shoes heard I’d resigned, he sent his marketing director to see me at Harvey Nichols. They signed with my agency when it wasn’t even up and running. I’ll always be grateful for the faith Clarks showed in me then and for the next eighteen years as my client.
So I had money to live off in the bank – as long as I tightly controlled business and personal expenditure – and free office space. A creative business like mine doesn’t need a lot of investment at the beginning, in terms of product or infrastructure, so those were costs I didn’t have to cover initially. I quickly acquired more clients, thanks to a good reputation and word spreading that I was out on my own. Within six months, I’d taken on four staff.
Setting up a business with two young children is tough. Really tough. Not just in terms of the time it takes, but the mental and emotional energy you must pour into it. This took its toll on Graham and me. Five years after starting the agency, we couldn’t make our marriage work and decided to divorce.
The separation of a family is never without a lot of pain and change. The thought of building a new life for yourself without your partner is pretty terrifying. But mostly you’re worried about what it might do to your kids.
Graham and I knew that divorce could get incredibly messy. So, way before Gwyneth and Chris consciously uncoupled, we determined to keep things as amicable as possible to ease the path for Mylo and Verity. We couldn’t get caught up in our own stuff in a way that would damage them.
Key to that was making them feel as if they didn’t have to ‘pick’ a side and ensuring they saw a lot of us both. We split our time with them straight down the middle. Graham stayed in our family home, I took on another mortgage to buy a new place, and Mylo and Verity spent alternate nights at each house. We bought two of everything so they didn’t have to drag bags between the houses, and they saw Graham or me every morning or evening depending on where they were that day.
We did this for two years and I’d work like mad when they were with Graham to free me up when they returned to me. When Mylo started secondary school, we moved into a more traditional pattern of one night a week and alternate weekends with Graham. But I think that initial period really helped root in them the idea that they weren’t losing either of us.
I will always be proud that Graham and I divorced as amicably as we did and concentrated on our kids. We did okay, I think.
But the following year, someone came into my life who would reshape it for ever, a person who forced me to rethink almost everything I thought I knew: a woman named Melanie. I met her at a working dinner and fell in love with her almost instantly. It really was as simple as that. It wasn’t something I had anticipated or looked for. I certainly hadn’t spent my marriage secretly pining after the woman in the nail bar or wishing I could take Linda Evangelista for a cocktail. But I fell in love with a person who happened to be a woman, and meeting Melanie thrillingly derailed so much of the structure that I had set up in my life – and where I believed I was going.
You don’t go from being married to a man to being in a relationship with a woman – with two children to consider – without quite a lot of sleepless nights. It was a huge adjustment not only to how I lived my life but the person I’d thought I was.
Graham was the only one I told at first: I quickly knew that Melanie and I had a future together so at some point Mylo and Verity would be aware of that – and part of it.
We decided not to spell it out to the kids for now. Melanie lived around the corner from me and at first we saw each other when the children were with Graham. Then, gradually, she started to visit when the children were with me and bit by bit came more often, until they started to ask where she was when she wasn’t with us.
So far, so good, until the day Mylo, Verity, Melanie and my very Christian au pair were sitting at the kitchen table while I cooked.
‘How do you spell lesbian?’ Verity suddenly squeaked, as she sat writing a card to a friend.
The blood drained from my face. How did a seven-year-old even know that word? I certainly hadn’t mentioned it. And what was the bloody au pair thinking?
Mylo, nine, looked up. ‘Verity is a lesbian now,’ he said, with a heavy sigh. ‘And she’s told Daddy.’
I set my face to neutral. Was I giving off lesbian pheromones? Graham was going to wonder what on earth Melanie and I had been up to.
For once in my life, I was lost for words.
While I spelled out the word (which felt like it took about thirty-seven minutes), the au pair sat looking confused and appalled in equal measure and I slammed plates of pasta on the table hoping to divert attention.
But after we’d eaten, I picked up the card, curious to see what on earth Verity was up to. ‘Dear Leah,’ she’d written. ‘I will so miss you when I go to my new school. You are like a beautiful sunflower and you make me happy. I love you. Verity.’
Then she’d added something at the end.
‘PS Lesbian.’
I started to cry. I didn’t know where she’d heard the word but Verity thought lesbian meant loving a girl.
And in a way, of course, it did.
In that moment, I knew my relationship with Melanie was as simple as Verity had made it. Melanie made me happy. It was time to have my own ‘PS lesbian’ moment.
It was then that I started to become more open about the change in my personal life. It didn’t happen overnight but gradually my family, friends and, over time, Mylo and Verity understood that Melanie was Mamma’s girlfriend.
For what it’s worth, no one really batted an eyelid. Particularly the kids. Melanie pretty much seamlessly became a part of our family because children are way less bothered about the boxes we put ourselves into than we adults are. She played with the kids, talked to them and was interested in them. That was all that mattered. They had Mamma, Daddy and now Melanie. Later, Elisabeth would also join our family when Graham remarried. One of my happiest memories is of turning up to Mylo’s carol concert with him proudly flanked by his ‘four parents’.
All I’d say is this: there were challenges, but falling in love with Melanie forced me to take a risk that changed me very fundamentally. I’d lived according to the rules and now I was beyond them. The codes I’d adhered to had been thrown up in the air.
I didn’t know it right then but that change in my personal life would in time be the foundation of changing the way I worked too.
And that, for me, was perhaps an even greater risk because work was the one thing I’d always clung to for safety and security. But my relationship with Melanie proved to me that I could cope with huge change – and flourish – and it was a vital lesson for the future.
For now, though, all that was to come and the change in my personal life still had to be negotiated professionally. Mostly, my relationship with Melanie went without comment. But while fashion might be more liberal than other professions it’s also a small world and I knew people were talking.
At one meeting, a chief executive I knew well gave me a wry smile and alluded to it lewdly.
Another low was sitting next to a well-known tycoon at a charity dinner. Just before I went on stage to give a speech, he turned to me and said, ‘Tell me, Mary: how do two women ****?’
Classy.
Remember those layers of distance from alpha culture that I talked about earlier? My new relationship had added another and the power dynamic had shifted.
It was perhaps the first time I realized just how powerful straight male/female dynamics can be at work: the jokes, the subtle flirtations. Now that I was a gay woman, some of the most powerful men in my working world didn’t seem to know what to do with me. And the only thing some could come up with was really offensive jokes.
(PS You don’t need to fall in love with a woman to create change in your own life. Any which way it happens for you is good.)