‘So you gave it to Claudia,’ Josie said, her eyes wide.
Amy made a mental note to see if she could rustle up something nice for Josie. Today she was wearing a plain white shirt and navy skirt, the sort of thing they sold in supermarkets as ‘back-to-work fashion’: it should have looked bland, but Josie was slim and pretty enough to pull it off. It was that old Marilyn Monroe thing about looking good in a potato sack; some people, annoyingly, just had it. Amy remembered that Karen had had a little of that too. She wasn’t the most striking beauty in the world, but she just had the ‘X factor’: somehow clothes, however ordinary, fitted her better and colours flattered her more.
Geoff, David’s driver, was sitting in the car and leapt out when he saw Amy and Josie come down the steps.
‘So he’s a driver, not a taxi,’ said Josie, lowering her voice as they approached him.
‘David has a driver. I don’t. But as we have to go to Berkshire today and I have lost my car keys, David has made the noble sacrifice of letting Geoff take us.’
‘Wow,’ said Josie, clearly impressed.
‘We’re heading for Cliveden in Taplow. Geoff, you have the address?’
Geoff snaked around the back streets of Ladbroke Grove until they hit the Westway heading out of town. At least most of the traffic was moving the other way. Today was the shoot for next month’s cover, and Amy was dreading it, including as it did the many variables of a white-hot actress, a diva photographer and being on location rather than in a studio.
‘So why is the shoot happening out here?’ asked Josie when they were on the A4.
Amy was glad to have a little time in the car with Josie. This was the third day of her internship, and Amy had been so busy with meetings, she had barely seen her. She had heard good things about her from the staff, however: she was bright, friendly and eager to help, which was a relief. Given the ‘switch-off’ pact with David for Provence, Amy had to make sure everything for the next two issues of the magazine was perfect and iron-clad, which meant she didn’t have the time to supervise Josie.
‘Number one, because Cliveden is beautiful. Number two, because it’s not far from Heathrow and Miranda, the cover star, and the photographer both have flights straight afterwards. It’s taken six months to make this shoot happen and it’s a tight squeeze now that it is.’
‘This is so glamorous,’ said Josie with a grin.
‘I warn you, it’s a lot of hanging around.’
‘So why are you going? Are you doing the interview?’
Amy laughed. She’d loved interviewing celebrities at the start of her career, because their lives were so different from her own. But she’d quickly realised that although she was a good writer, she wasn’t a great one, so had moved into editing copy rather than generating it in order to move up the ladder.
‘I always try to pop in to the cover shoot. The cover is everything. A great one can add fifty thousand to our sales. A bad one and we can lose twenty per cent.’
‘This is a million times better than I thought it was going to be.’
‘Really? You should have been an intern twenty years ago. I opened a lot of envelopes, but there was so much fun too.’
‘Are you trying to put me off?’
‘I’m saying it’s harder,’ replied Amy. ‘Smaller staff, tighter budgets. But it’s still the best job in the world.’
‘I know. I’ve seen the beauty cupboard.’
Amy smiled back. ‘I could happily live in the beauty cupboard. One day I think I might just move a bed and a camping stove in there.’
‘No you wouldn’t. Your house is lush.’
‘I suppose it is.’
It made her stop and think. Her life seemed normal to her now. She was always careful to make sure Tilly understood the value of money. To realise how lucky she was. She encouraged her daughter to give coins to every busker they enjoyed hearing play at Portobello Market, and to collect pennies from the back of the sofa, as she herself had done as a child, to save up in a jar. But there were so many other things that they took for granted – the private school education, the fancy holidays, the cars, and the ability to go to Pret after ballet class and spend twenty pounds on hot chocolate and cake without even blinking.
Until Josie came. Seeing her past up close made her remember that her life wasn’t normal. It reminded her of where she came from. Over the past few days, the sound of Josie’s Bristolian vowels and casual slang had occasionally made Amy bristle, because she knew it still lurked in her own lexicon. Her smart Home Counties accent almost never slipped these days; people who met her for the first time assumed from her polish and confidence that she had been educated at the finest schools and colleges. But this week, when she had been talking to Josie, she had found herself remembering who she used to be.
‘So what are you going to do after this week? Back to Bristol or Brighton?’
Josie wrinkled her nose. ‘Landlord’s flogged our house to someone else. He hiked the rent up anyway, so I couldn’t afford it. So I’m going back home.’
‘Your mum will be pleased.’
‘I guess. She always says that she’s glad my dad has gone, but I’m not sure she means it. She gets lonely.’
Amy nodded, wondering if Karen had had a partner since Lee. Their lives had become so distant from one another, she was ashamed she didn’t know.
‘Did you ever meet him?’ Josie asked.
‘Who?’
‘My dad.’
‘A couple of times. But we didn’t really know each other.’
‘She deserved better,’ said Josie. ‘We both did.’
‘Do you still see him?’
Josie shook her head. ‘Don’t want to. He beat her up. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ Amy said, feeling sad and angry. She couldn’t tell the young woman that she’d never liked the cocky mechanic. Yes, he was handsome, even charming. But she had always felt uneasy at the way Karen either gushed about him or sidestepped his name. Amy knew she should have done more to warn her friend.
‘Did you always want to leave?’ said Josie after a minute.
‘Leave where?’
‘Westmead.’
‘I guess. But not because I was unhappy. I just wanted to see what else was out there. I applied to a bunch of colleges randomly. Got into Oxford Brookes and that was what really changed my outlook on the world.’
‘Is that where you met David?’
‘Yes, but it was really my friend Pog who changed everything. I worked with him behind the bar in a student pub in Oxford. He was frightfully posh – so posh it was almost as if he was from another planet. But we got on really well, and when I used to tell him what I dreamed of doing – going to Paris, moving to London, falling in love with someone rich and handsome – he told me to go for it. I wasn’t convinced at first. I thought it was easy for him to say with his trust fund and his connections, but he used to reply, “Why not you?”’
‘Why not me?’ repeated Josie as if to herself.
‘Your mum doesn’t doubt you can do it,’ said Amy with a maternal smile. ‘And neither do I.’
Cliveden was a photographer’s dream, with fountains, pathways and a stunning honey-coloured facade.
‘I don’t like the look of those clouds,’ said Amy, peering out of the window. She knew that they had some shots planned for outdoors.
Josie craned her long neck and pulled a face. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to reschedule?’
Amy sighed. ‘I’d love to, but we’re lucky to get Miranda at all. Plus we don’t have the time. This issue has to go to the printer’s in three days and we have nothing else to put on the cover.’
Janice Evans, the magazine’s fashion director, met them in the reception. She was tall, blonde and Welsh, and refreshingly no-nonsense for someone in the notoriously flouncy fashion world.
‘Are they here?’ said Amy, following her through the house towards the stable block.
‘Got here half an hour ago. Miranda’s in hair and make-up already. Liz Stewart is in there doing the interview.’
Amy felt her shoulders fall. It was good news that the talent was here on time, but she was never convinced that interviewees distracted by stylists and publicists made for the best copy.
‘Her manager insisted. Apparently they’ve got to be out of here by lunchtime.’
Miranda’s American manager, Karrie, was sipping at a cup of coffee impatiently, frowning with every sip as if it were toxic.
‘I hope this isn’t going to take long,’ she snapped, putting her drink down on the windowsill. ‘Miranda’s just bouncing back from tonsillitis.’
Amy had her platitudes at the ready. She was used to dealing with celebrity entourages, who tended, as a breed, to be sullen and negative, perpetually whining about their client being on the verge of succumbing to Asian flu or whatever jet-setting disease was in the news that week.
‘It helps that we have a really strong idea. When the concept is good, we can usually nail it quickly,’ she said.
‘About that,’ said Karrie. ‘I was just talking to your art director, and she told me about the bubble bath . . .’
‘That’s right,’ said Amy. ‘The image we had in mind for the cover is Miranda in a big bath full of bubbles. It will be fun, glamorous. Very Rolling Stone meets Vanity Fair.’
‘Miranda is a serious actress,’ said Karrie pointedly. ‘Persuasion is out in November and there’s Oscars talk already. We can’t let anyone be distracted by photographs that are not on brand.’
Amy didn’t like to point out that until twelve months ago, Miranda Pilley was best known for an ABC sitcom.
‘Elise von Keist is one of the best photographers in the world,’ she said. ‘Almost every set of pictures she takes becomes iconic. Miranda’s publicist seemed very keen on the idea when we signed off on it two weeks ago.’
‘We do want to make this work,’ said Karrie, her threat not even thinly veiled. ‘But a bath. Bubbles. You’re going to have to rethink.’
‘Shit,’ muttered Amy after she’d gone. She was aware that Josie was standing awkwardly behind her. ‘Can you go and find some coffee, and then Janice, can you show Josie the clothes we’ve brought along to the shoot.’ It wasn’t the most exciting job she could give her, but she was sure Josie wanted to feel useful.
‘Nice girl,’ said Janice, watching Josie trot towards reception. ‘I had her in the fashion cupboard yesterday, sending shoes back to the PRs. No one likes doing returns, but she did it all in half the time my assistants usually take, and she didn’t bother me once. If she needed an address, she just picked up the phone.’
‘She’s keen, I’ll say that much,’ said Amy, still thinking about what they were going to put on the cover.
Liz Stewart, the journalist commissioned to write the cover interview, emerged from the dressing room.
‘That was quick,’ frowned Amy.
‘I was shooed away.’
‘How was it?’ she asked hopefully. Liz was one of the best celebrity interviewers in the business and had once won a writer-of-the-year award on the back of a ten-minute interview she’d done with Catherine Zeta-Jones in a bathroom in New York. If anyone could get good copy from a twenty-minute tête-à-tête, she could.
‘About as responsive as a week-old corpse,’ Liz said tartly. ‘Apparently she’s ill.’
‘So we’ve been told. Did you get anything?’
‘I tried. She was difficult. Every time I veered onto the personal stuff, they just shut me down.’
‘Isn’t she dating Leif Tappen?’ said Janice with interest. Tappen was still one of the bad boys of Hollywood, even though he was in his fifties.
‘She won’t sit in a bubble bath for a cover shoot. She isn’t going to admit to dating Hollywood’s baddest bad boy,’ replied Amy.
‘I heard he was on heroin.’
‘In the nineties. But all is forgiven when your movies have made three billion dollars at the box office. Liz, I need something, anything for a cover line.’
‘It will be a great piece,’ said Liz, returning to her usual bluster. Somehow Amy didn’t believe her.
Liz left and Janice went to show Josie the dressing room. The art director, Gemma, emerged from one of the suites looking frazzled.
‘Will you remind me in my next life never to have any dealings with celebrities?’
‘Did it always used to be this hard?’ said Amy, sipping her coffee.
‘I bet Mode don’t have to put up with this shit.’ Gemma smiled.
The two women looked at each other and laughed. It was true. Certain magazines could still call the shots. Vanity Fair had legendary power. Vogue and Mode still seemed to be able to get the ungettable.
‘You’ve heard about Ros Kimber?’ said Gemma.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s leaving.’
‘You’re kidding!’
Gemma shook her head. ‘My friend at Mode just texted me. Apparently there will be an announcement this afternoon.’
‘God,’ whispered Amy. This was big news, huge. Ros Kimber was the editor of British Mode, Genesis Media’s flagship title and fashion magazine powerhouse. Ros was a formidable woman, grey-haired and elegant, and although she was now in her mid-fifties, after two decades in the role she’d never shown any sign of slowing down.
‘Is it a case of her jumping, or was she pushed?’ asked Amy.
‘Jumped, I should think. Mode’s still packed with ads, so she’s been making money. My guess is someone’s made her an offer she can’t refuse, probably one of the big houses in France.’
Amy nodded. The truth was, it didn’t really matter what Ros Kimber’s plans for the future were; all anyone was thinking right now was who was going to step into her shoes.
‘You’ve got to be a front-runner,’ said Gemma, knowing exactly what her boss was thinking.
Amy looked straight ahead of her. ‘I’m not sure it’s the right move,’ she said, almost automatically. Like politicians who bashfully denied they’d ever entertained ambitions to be prime minister hours before announcing their candidacy, glossy magazine editors always claimed they were uninterested in vacant positions. There was a certain truth to it: there were so few editors in the women’s market, it was a high-risk strategy to apply for another job. It was fine if you were successful, but what if you weren’t? Your current employers would believe – correctly – that you were dissatisfied, and even worse, that you were planning on jumping ship armed with valuable insider information about budgets, staffing and profit-and-loss. On the other hand, not applying for such a dream role looked callow and unambitious.
‘Of course it’s the right move,’ said Gemma. ‘What, you like shooting in England waiting for the rain to come? If we were shooting for Mode, we’d be in Namibia or Sri Lanka with a two hundred K budget. And note I said “we” there. I would of course expect you to take me with you.’
Amy gave a throaty laugh. ‘Of course I’ll take you,’ she said. But Gemma was right: at Mode, she’d have power. There would be no feet-dragging or tantrums from the likes of Miranda and Karrie.
For a moment, Amy allowed herself to dream. She wouldn’t just be sitting on the front row for the collections; she would be given an exclusive preview. Designers would be desperate to know her verdict, like some Roman emperor giving a thumbs-up or -down denoting whether people around the world would wear blue or green, leather or silk next season. Collections might even be hastily changed according to her suggestions.
She would have access to the very best photographers, celebrities and writers, prize-winners and literary heroes. The editor of Mode. She felt dizzy even thinking about it.
The industry gossip distracted her from the fact tha
t Miranda was taking ages in hair and make-up. Despite gentle prodding, it was gone noon by the time she emerged.
‘Let’s look at the clothes,’ said Janice, waving her into an adjoining suite.
Amy watched Miranda listlessly slide the gowns along the rail. ‘Is this all you have? They’re a bit too sexy. I mean, don’t you have any Purfoy or Taormina? Something beautiful like that?’
Amy tapped a finger against her lips, as if she were considering it. Purfoy and Taormina were the hottest new boutique labels. They barely produced a dozen pieces a year, most of them so cutting-edge they wouldn’t look out of place in an art installation.
‘Is everything okay here?’ said Elise, standing at the door, hands on hips.
‘Karrie and Miranda think the clothes are too sexy.’
‘But sexy is good,’ said Elise with a little shrug.
‘There’s nothing suitable here.’ Miranda was pouting.
Elise shrugged again. ‘Well, I have to leave for Dusseldorf at two o’clock.’
This was why Amy hated coming on shoots. They were hotbeds of ego and jostling for power and position. She smiled thinly and made her excuses, asking Janice to follow her.
‘Tell me you can get something biked over here within the next hour,’ she said.
Janice blanched. ‘We’re in Berkshire. It will take a couple of hours at least.’
‘Does Cliveden have a shop?’ suggested Josie, who was hovering nearby.
‘Actually, I’ve got some things in the car,’ said Janice. ‘I’m doing a freelance shoot tonight.’
‘Great. Let’s see them,’ Amy said.
‘Do you need another coffee?’ asked Josie.
‘Thanks. And make sure Miranda and Karrie have got everything they want. In fact, let’s have an early lunch break so we can sort this and start shooting.’
Janice disappeared, returning a few minutes later with five billowing gowns. All were beautiful and intricately tailored, but they lacked the Verve sass.
‘It’s modest fashion,’ she explained, running her hand down the lace arm of a long yellow dress. ‘The shoot tonight is for a magazine based in the Middle East.’
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