Another Way

by Frankie McGowan

  Ellie looked quickly at his profile. Suddenly she felt panicky and she tugged urgently at his sleeve.

  ‘Jed, you don’t think…? I mean is this…?’

  He squeezed her hand. ‘Probably, ducky. It couldn’t go on. Chin up. Don’t panic about something that hasn’t happened — not yet anyway.’

  There wasn’t time for any more. Roland’s office was packed. The sales staff had come down from the next floor, the circulation manager was there with his staff and so too were the promotion manager and his bright, energetic young team who had done so much to make sure that Focus had the highest profile in town.

  A soft babble of voices filled the air. Across the room Ellie caught Rosie’s eye and lifted her eyebrows and shrugged. Pushing her way through the crowd, she edged towards the window embrasure and squeezed in beside her friend. Judith sat on the arm of a crowded sofa, long legs crossed, looking bored, examining her nails. Jed remained lounging against the door frame.

  ‘Hear the old man’s been closeted with Roland since dawn,’ whispered Rosie as Ellie sat down. ‘Must be heavy duty stuff.’

  Ellie nodded. She recalled seeing, James Baldwin, the lawyer, emerging from the lift with Marcus and a man whose face looked familiar but which she couldn’t quite place.

  There was a rustle and Ellie saw Roland making his way through the crowd, James with him. He didn’t waste any time.

  ‘I wanted you to hear it from me, before any announcements are made,’ he told them, standing behind his desk, his back to the panorama of roofs looking out over London.

  Roland spoke evenly, quietly. The room had never been more silent.

  ‘Belvedere Publishing has been sold...’

  His voice was drowned in a gasp from the entire room. Sold.

  Roland waited for silence once more before he continued.

  ‘This morning the proprietor signed contracts with the new owners, Goodman Coopers, and the effect is from now.’

  Bentley Goodman. That was the man she had seen with Marcus. It all fell into place.

  Roland had half raised a hand to halt the questions already flying at him.

  When? How? Who?

  ‘Please let me finish and then I will answer as best I can any queries. You all know we have been struggling; indeed, everyone has. Focus is only one magazine in the group, but it is, and I believe this, the best of them all. However, we cannot survive in a recession on reputation alone. While the good news is that Bentley Goodman, the new chairman, has guaranteed to keep the integrity and the title intact, the bad news is that it is going to mean changes.

  ‘The first change is that a new editor, Jerome Strachan, who many of you will know is currently associate editor of Profile, is with the new chairman signing a contract to take my place.’

  He shrugged wryly, taking in their shocked faces.

  ‘My own position is still a subject under discussion.’

  Rosie leaned sideways and whispered out of the corner of her mouth to Ellie:

  ‘Discussing how much the pay off will be, he means. Poor Roland.’

  Ellie nodded briefly as Roland went on.

  ‘The sad news is that there will be redundancies. Naturally we are anxious that as far as possible these will be voluntary and all contracts will be honoured.

  ‘I’ve never lied to you, and I won’t start now. We will, of course, have to make our own decisions about terminating some jobs if we don’t get sufficient numbers to make not just Focus but the entire group more efficient and cost effective.’

  The shocked faces of his staff gazed back at him. They had expected some cost cutting, some merging of resources. There had been no inkling that the changes would be on such a scale.

  Jerome Strachan. Ellie could hardly believe her ears. At thirty-three, he was generally regarded as a temperamental whizz kid but the stories from Profile of his peremptory manner, his arrogance and his blatant self-promotion were legion.

  Ellie stole a swift glance at Judith. She was staring ahead, utterly still. Poor Judith. He hadn’t even warned her. It was written all over her. What a bastard.

  *

  Jerome Strachan arrived the very next day and wasted no time in making changes. Tall, thin, with a shock of pale red hair, Jerome had overdosed on image. His suits came from Italian couture, his flat was a docklands penthouse, his friends were loud and just about famous, his language explicit.

  It was difficult to find anything good to say about him, but even his most fervent detractors had to admit he was talented. There was an edge to his ideas Ellie thought truly exciting, but she missed the measured confidence of Roland’s ability to exploit them. Where Roland had commanded grudging respect, it took only a matter of days for Jerome to alienate everyone with whom he came into contact.

  Within a week he had secured four voluntary redundancies and named the rest. Dixie had been asked, and had agreed, to stay on for the moment with this new young editor, out of a professional instinct that one didn’t just jump ship but equally because such high-powered secretarial jobs did not grow on trees. She had moved with Roland as he moved up the ladder. His success was hers and his slide from glory — the unthinkable — caught her in its wake. It wasn’t just Ellie who noticed that the good-hearted, motherly Dixie had taken to casting murderous glances at her new young boss which was nothing to what was said about him in hushed whispers throughout the building.

  The second casualty of his regime, however, was Judith.

  She emerged from her meeting with Jerome the day after his arrival and headed straight for the ladies’. It was there that Rosie found her throwing up, her mascara running in black streaks down her normally immaculately made-up face.

  ‘Honestly, El, I know she’s an opportunist, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,’ Rosie confided to Ellie much later, having ushered Judith quietly into her own office, shutting the door firmly until the other girl had stopped shaking. ‘I’ll give her her due, El, she refused to cry. She’s angry — well, murderous is a better description. I think she was planning a march on Bentley Goodman’s office when I left her. She said Jerome took just thirty seconds to tell her to clear her desk.’

  After Judith, whole departments were ripped apart. Loyal, hardworking employees were summarily dismissed and strangely, for a company looking for reduction in manpower, some new faces appeared. A condition of Jerome’s contract was the right to have some loyal lieutenants around him. He had managed to negotiate contracts for two of them who arrived within days and were brash, aggressive and openly derisory about the existing staff.

  Outrage at their appointments was not confined to muttered exchanges in the corridors and within an hour of the announcement, a deputation led by Brian Townley, the news editor, and Denton Browne, the talented young photographer headhunted only months before from Metro, converged on Jerome’s office.

  ‘These are not replacements,’ the new editor told them in a coldly furious voice when they asked him to justify his actions. ‘Those other jobs no longer exist. These are people with special skills to do a special job.’

  Anyone who knew Jerome could also have told them that his fury masked an innate terror of being challenged. Faced with these hotly indignant people he lashed back with the most wounding and undermining reasons that came to hand.

  ‘It’s obvious to me,’ he raged, ‘that if you had all been doing your jobs properly, I would not have had to appoint people from outside to pull this mess together.’

  Before the week was out, Ellie’s world changed out of all recognition.

  Her own interview with Jerome had been an uneasy duel, Ellie trying to get his measure, Jerome telling her what he expected of her. It didn’t sound any different to what she had been doing, but Jerome, with a thrusting and belligerent stance, simply relayed his instructions as though he were re-inventing her column.

  Ellie watched him as he circled her chair, pushing his fingers through his hair, taking calls, snapping instructions. He seemed unable to leave the subject of Theo
Stirling alone. In a list of forthcoming interviews of some of the best of the Good and the Great, only the possibility of getting Theo into the pages of Focus interested him.

  Ellie was shrewd enough to see through the hype and the bluster. Jerome Strachan needed that interview to blind everyone to the fact that Focus had acquired a new editor because of the new management’s desire for their own man to be in place, a grateful man at that, rather than the necessity to improve the tone of the magazine. For Focus remained the undisputed market leader. Those who worked for it, read it and invested in it hoped that Jerome Strachan wouldn’t ruin it.

  A major interview published soon after the departure of his rival — no matter that his predecessor had instigated it — was the clout he needed to silence the gossips who openly queried his abilities.

  ‘I’m not interested in deals with Roland,’ he snapped. ‘I’m interested in copy, good copy. Do a background piece, anything, but get him.’

  Ellie knew he was going down a disastrous path, but she was heading for one herself if she didn’t lead the way.

  Tomorrow I’ll call. Some pretence, anything.

  By the time she reached home, she was ready only to take the phone off the hook, sink into a bath, to thank God she hadn’t been one of the casualties of the new regime and to think seriously about moving on if it all got too bad. But even as she wallowed, eyes closed, in the soft, foamy, scented water she was uneasily aware that the options for such a choice were slim.

  Paul’s arrival half way through the evening was not entirely unexpected. After a week away in Europe, he was confident that she would be there, and simply turned up. Ellie, wrapped in her dressing-gown, her hair wound up in a white towelling turban, had just finished talking to her father.

  That weekend at Oliver’s had put her in a family mood and she missed her father’s company, which regular phone calls couldn’t replace. It was true he rarely asked about her problems, but they would go for long walks across the hills when she descended on him every couple of months, and he would be content to listen, enveloping her in an affectionate hug, dragging her off to a marvellous little pub he had discovered or amusing her with perfectly drawn descriptions of life in the Devonshire village that he and Alison had made their home.

  Visits by John Carter to his son’s home were rare; even rarer were the trips to London to see his daughter. But the trips he did make were memorable, childlike and, just as when they were children, bad moods were forbidden. A boat down the river, the Tower, followed by dinner at some lively bistro he had found, a lavish present left behind for her to open, and then he was gone in a whirl of kisses, extravagant promises to come more often; a vague, loving, amusing man, and Ellie suddenly longed for his company.

  Her father greeted her call with rapture.

  ‘Darling child, we want you here, don’t we, Allie?’ he called and in the background Ellie could hear her stepmother’s delighted agreement.

  ‘Okay,’ laughed Ellie. ‘You win. Tell me when.’

  ‘Ah, when. Yes, well, what about when we get back from Spain? Yes, after Spain. Give me a week or two to put everything in place and then come down.’

  Ellie tried not to be disappointed. It was too childish. Her father’s trip to Spain was not for another four weeks; two more after that would almost be September. The chances of her getting away would be reduced with the schedule she had lined up.

  ‘Lovely, Pa. Look forward to that. Lots of love to Alison, love you.’

  She had barely replaced the receiver when Paul arrived.

  Bruised from the unwanted imposition of Jerome Strachan, missing the comfortable familiarity of a life she had grown to love, and disappointed by her father’s reaction, Ellie did not resist when Paul took her in his arms, pressing kisses into her neck, trailing his mouth across her shoulders.

  There was a desperation, a fierceness to their lovemaking that had its roots in their separate needs: Ellie’s to blot out the hideousness of her day and Paul’s to reawaken in her a need for him which he knew was beginning to recede. Afterwards, even more unsettled, nothing had changed, although God knows what she thought would happen, she just desperately needed to be on her own. With Paul around even just thinking was not easy. She suggested that he go back to his own flat. He stared at her.

  ‘Why? I’ve only just got here.’

  ‘I’ve got an early start, and – and a headache. Honestly Paul,’ she tried to keep her tone light. ‘Look, I’ll get us a drink.’ She turned and walked into her kitchen. ‘Then I’ll shoo you away.’

  Paul followed her and as she pulled open the fridge door to extract a bottle of wine, she felt his arms slide around her waist, his forehead resting on the back of her head. ‘Nonsense.’ He nuzzled her neck. ‘Let’s have that in bed shall we?’

  Sighing, Ellie leaned back against him. She had known him for too long and too intimately to throw him out of her flat and her life but in that moment she knew her future was not with Paul. But equally — and how she longed for it to be otherwise — she had no idea what lay ahead of her.

  Years later she was heard to say that on reflection it was just as well she didn’t know.

  Chapter Ten

  All thoughts of getting even with Theo Stirling were abandoned as Ellie tried and failed to comprehend the enormity of what had happened to them all at work. Who else would suffer?

  Judith gone. Roland on leave pending a decision about his future. The entire office felt like a small country, harming no-one and suddenly invaded by these alien forces.

  Paul wasn’t on the list of those the editor wanted out because he was on a contract and useful because Jerome appeared to like travelling. But Brian Townley, the news editor, was plus two of the subs and Denton Browne.

  The names were not that surprising. Jerome was settling a few scores and ridding himself of people he had neither the experience nor the willingness to handle.

  ‘My sell-by date must have been stamped, confronting him like that,’ said a shaken Brian as they all grouped in a pub opposite the office when it was learned he was out.

  Poor Denton, thought Ellie. He had a mortgage staring him in the face, which he would never be able to manage now that his girlfriend was about to have a baby and had to give up work. It had been obvious he and Jerome were not going to hit it off.

  Denton’s work had drawn awards and admiration in equal measures, and his own exhibition of photographs had filled the Hamilton Gallery for the three days it was on display. Jerome had told him he wanted something with appeal, and to illustrate this, the new editor had sent a dozen tear sheets from previous issues of Profile so that Denton could get the general drift.

  Denton’s general drift had led to a confrontation that could be heard on the other side of the closed door and beyond, and he’d emerged from his first and last ferocious exchange of views with his new boss with no job, and the threat that his attitude amounted to dismissal.

  ‘He said he would be generous, and count my resignation as redundancy,’ Denton told an appalled Ellie and Jed. ‘But it’s got nothing to do with any of it. He just wants yes men around him. He’s frightened of talent, frightened of people he can’t control whom he thinks know more than he does. Pathetic.’

  They listened sympathetically and while usually they would have teased him about his arrogant view of his own talent, this time they knew it was what was going to help Denton survive and get back to work again.

  He left later that day.

  Briefly Ellie thought of Judith, the antithesis of everything she herself stood for, and felt a stab of pity for the girl who had gambled on career sex protecting her from the very situation she was now in. Jerome Strachan wanted nothing of the old regime to obstruct his way. Judith, so intimately acquainted with Roland, was a high risk but easy to dispose of.

  Ellie had been more of a problem. She knew that. She knew that Jerome knew that. Her interviews were the best in town, the competition to attract her attention was fierce. Jerome found her difficul
t to manipulate. Unlike Rosie, who shrugged sheepishly when she found Jerome’s current girlfriend, Sonya Lloyd, foisted on to her as a ‘consultant’.

  ‘She makes Lily Savage look like a class act,’ exploded Rosie, slinging her shoes off as Ellie poured them both a drink in her kitchen at the end of the first trying fortnight of Jerome’s tenure. ‘I can’t get any decent girls to model the clothes and the photographers are leaving in droves. No-one wants to know about the rubbish she’s dragging in.’

  She took a gulp of the wine Ellie offered her and rubbed a hand wearily across her eyes. Ellie stayed silent; she knew the conflict that Rosie was facing. Her son Tom came first. The chances of prising his school fees out of the feckless Rory Monteith Gore were marginally more hopeless than Ellie ridding her mind of Theo Stirling.

  Now that Rosie was divorced, sending her son to a weekly boarding school was her lifeline. No erratic help to worry about, just jealously guarded precious weekends that long working hours during the week meant she could keep totally free for her nine year-old son.

  Looking up, Rosie caught Ellie’s eye. For a moment she gazed steadily back at her and then with a defeated sigh, closed her eyes and rested her cheek on her folded arms across the kitchen table.

  Ellie reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘Everyone knows it isn’t you, Rosie,’ she said.

  Rosie lifted her head, a wry smile on her elfin face.

  ‘I haven’t any real option, Ellie. There just aren’t any jobs, everyone’s panicking because of the recession. I know it isn’t Sonya’s fault, Jerome has just told her she’s God’s gift — unfortunately I’m the recipient. I’ve just got to keep my head down and hope Jerome gets hit by a bus.’

  Ellie laughed. ‘It would have to be a triple decker, he’s got all the sensitivity of a navvy’s armpit. C’mon,’ she said, draining her glass and throwing Rosie’s jacket to her. ‘Let’s go berserk and have one course each at the Ivy.’

  Twenty minutes later, a cab dropped them at the fashionable restaurant where Jed had said he would meet them. Of all of them, he seemed to be faring better than most. Jerome’s love of gossip and the buzz he got from being at the centre of things made Jed invaluable to him. Moreover, Jed’s contact book was the best in London. Jerome hadn’t been in the editor’s chair long before it dawned on him that society hostesses liked nothing better than to boast Jed Bayley’s presence at one of their parties.