Do you prefer rich men?

I really don’t care about money. Love is the most important thing to me. If Dai hadn’t a penny in the world I’d still adore him.

Jane snorted so loudly that a couple of elderly duchesses on the next sofa almost dropped their glasses of sherry. They glared over their bifocals at her in fury.

Are wedding bells in the air?

Marriage is certainly on the cards.

You bet, thought Jane. Dai’s credit cards.

Would you have a traditional wedding?

Yes. With my darling little pet poodle Gucci as Best Dog, of course.

Extract 12

When Jane returned to the lounge, a woman with a helmet of black hair, a slash of red lipstick and spike heels was occupying a minuscule area of one of the sofas. Jane had seen enough pictures of the Fabulous editor to know who it was. The woman was talking urgently into a mobile phone. Or was she? As Jane approached, she realised there was a mirror glued to the inside of the mouthpiece flap. Victoria Cavendish was evidently checking her lipstick the executive way.

‘Hi,’ said Victoria, holding out a cool hand clanking with rings. ‘Two champagne cocktails, please,’ she added, waving imperiously at a passing waiter. Jane felt relieved. At first glance, Victoria had looked dangerously like the skinny, self-denying sort whose idea of a racy drink was Badoit and Evian in the same glass.

Although probably in her mid-forties, Victoria had the figure and, perhaps less advisably, the clothes of someone half her age. That someone, however, was not Jane. Victoria’s sharp suede jacket and matching miniskirt were far snappier and more costly than anything she had in her own wardrobe. Round Victoria’s neck was a soft brown shawl, which Jane recognised as one of the wildly expensive kind which were, as far as she could remember, made from the beard hairs of rare Tibetan goats. Victoria’s, of course, was probably made from the facial hair of the Dalai Lama himself.

Jane crouched on the edge of the seat, crossing her legs to minimise the spread of her flanks and wishing she had remembered to clean her shoes. Come to that, she wished she had had her hair cut, lost a stone and spent a day in Bond Street in the company of a personal shopper and an Amex card.

‘Well, as you know, I need a deputy,’ said Victoria, lighting a menthol cigarette with a lipstick-shaped lighter. She crossed her bird-like black legs, the razor sharp heels just missing her bony ankles. Jane shivered. There was more than a touch of the Rosa Klebb about all this.

‘You’re very highly recommended,’ said Victoria. ‘Appar­ently you handle contributors very well and I particularly need someone I can trust with a very high-profile new writer we have coming on board.’ A thrill ran through Jane. A famous writer. How wonderful.

‘Who is it?’ she asked.

‘Can’t tell you, I’m afraid, until you’re all signed up,’ said Victoria, taking another swig from her champagne glass. ‘But someone who will hopefully send our circulation into the stratosphere.’

Martin Amis? wondered Jane. Iris Murdoch? She thrilled at the thought of day-to-day contact with a proper author. ‘Sounds wonderful,’ she said, reaching for her own glass, then realising it was empty. As was the dish of nuts. Jane realised she had shovelled in the lot in her excitement.

‘So I take it you’re interested,’ said Victoria, clicking her metallic blue-tipped fingers for the bill.

Jane nodded. ‘Yes please.’

‘Good. I’ll bang you a contract over tomorrow.’ Victoria levered herself upright. ‘Must run now,’ she said, which struck Jane as no less than fighting talk, given her footwear. ‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow.’ She shimmered away across the carpet in a cloud of the sort of delicious perfume Jane instinctively knew one didn’t buy in Boots.

Jane wandered slowly out of the hotel and along the darkening street back towards the Tube station. The 2CV, which had not worked for several days now, lay languishing by the Clapham roadside waiting to be put out of its misery. It probably would not live to see another MOT. The potholes of Mullions had seen to that.

It was flattering though odd, Jane thought, as she wandered absently down the stairs into Green Park Tube, to be suddenly so much in demand. Odd, too, that Victoria Cavendish should be eager to sign her up without so much as asking for her opinion of Fabulous, let alone without a CV, references and especially without the reams of sparkling features ideas invariably demanded on these occasions and never referred to thereafter. Especially as Victoria, if rumour was to be believed, had her own special methods of selection.

Candidates for employment were, so it was said, generally invited to lunch with her so she could observe their table manners and satisfy herself that they didn’t cut their salad with a knife or belong to what she designated the HKLP (Holds Knife Like Pen) brigade. Victoria, reportedly also used these occasions to ensure that any of her would-be co-workers were not prone to the verbal social faux pas that would condemn them without trial into what she called the PLT (Pardon, Lounge, Toilet) category. Jane could believe it all. Victoria, as was well known, was completely unrepentant about both her magazine and the social aspirations it enshrined. ‘Snob­bery,’ she was often quoted as saying, ‘is merely an acute awareness of the niceties of social distinction.’

Even candidates who scraped through Victoria’s restaur­ant tests were far from home and dry. They still risked one of the editor’s celebrated spot checks in which she had a member of staff call the would-be employee’s parents’ home (the number, with address, was demanded on the Fabulous application form) to make sure that the person answering had a suitably patrician tone of voice. By these combined methods any social chameleons of humble origin were prevented from getting their plebeian feet under Fabulous desks. Some, it was said, were filtered out right at the beginning of the process simply by Victoria’s casting an eye over the parental address. If it was a number rather than a name, the letters were filed straight in the bin, a process which had always struck Jane as somewhat unre­liable, ruling out as it did any members of the Prime Minister’s family, for starters.

Yes, it was certainly strange that none of the usual hurdles had been placed before her, thought Jane now, crossing the dirty platform to her Northern Line connection at Stockwell. Especially as she was not at all sure she could have jumped over any of them. The word ‘toilet’ had certainly passed her lips from time to time, and she had yet to see anyone, herself included, eat a Caesar salad without resorting to a blade of some sort. And, although thinner than she used to be, she was certainly not racehorse skinny.

There was, however, one highly plausible explanation for Victoria’s keenness to get her on board, one quite detached from all the flattery about her superior editing skills. Josh. All being fair in love and circulation wars, it was entirely within the rules of the game for Victoria and her rival to poach as many members of each other’s staff as possible. Bagging as key a person as the Gorgeous features editor was certainly a feather in the Fabulous editor’s cap, and would be even if Jane’s parents had lived at 13 Railway Cuttings and she ate her salad in the lounge with a saw held like a Biro.

Extract 13

She returned to her desk, just in time to answer the telephone which had been ringing for ages, ignored, as usual, by Tish who was otherwise occupied flicking through the latest Vogue. Jane’s heart sank as the familiar honk blasted through the receiver. After the exchange she had just had with Victoria, Champagne choosing now to call – collect, naturally – from New York was like a blow upon a bruise.

‘Four bangs,’ squawked Champagne. ‘I’ve managed four bangs so far!’

‘What?’ It sounded positively modest by Champagne’s usual standards. So why was she boasting about it?

‘Four crashes because people were staring at my under­wear ads when they were driving!’ Champagne boomed. ‘One fatal.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Jane. ‘How awful.’

‘No, it’s brilliant. Proves the ads are really working. Superbra are thrilled!’

‘I’m delighted for you,’ said Jane. ‘Is that everything?’

‘Yah, think so,’ said Champagne. Then, ‘Oh, no, hang on, there is something else. I’ve packed in Wayne.’

Why aren’t I surprised? thought Jane.

‘Just too much of an oik, really,’ declared Champagne, even though Jane hadn’t asked. ‘Hasn't a clue. His idea of a seven-course meal is a six-pack and a hamburger. Thinks Pacific Rim is something sailors get. The last straw was when we were in a restaurant and he pronounced claret claray. So embarrassing.’

‘Quite,’ said Jane, not sure how else to respond.

‘But I’ve met some scrummy men in New York,’ Champagne continued. ‘The sweetest English politician at the Donna Karan show last night. Bloody nice guy.’

Jane had seen the coverage of Champagne at this part­icular fashion bash in the tabloids that morning. Coverage, however, had hardly been the word. Champagne’s clinging silver dress had made her cleavage look like the San Andreas Fault.

‘Yah, he was really interesting,’ Champagne gushed. ‘We talked for hours about politics.’

‘Really?’ said Jane faintly. Surely, as far as Champagne was concerned, Lenin was the guy who wrote songs with Paul McCartney. Her idea of a social model was probably Stella Tennant and dialectical materialism meant wearing a velvet Voyage cardigan with a leather Versace miniskirt. Champagne’s concept of social security, Jane felt sure, was ten million a year, a country house in Wiltshire, flats in Paris and New York and a Gulfstream V.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16