by Jemma Harvey
I was silent. I wasn’t certain I wanted to find chocolate nauseating. Without serotonin, what was there between me and suicide every month?
Besides, I knew she was talking bullshit.
‘Eat little and often,’ Georgie continued sententiously. ‘Lots of fish and veg. And if I were you, I’d avoid all that low-calorie crap. You know: Diet Coke and Slimmachoc and stuff. Artificial sweetener tastes disgusting and anyway, I think it gives you cancer.’
‘Everything gives you cancer,’ I said. I didn’t tell her I’d been on the low-calorie crap for years – on top of the high-calorie crap, of course.
In fact, I decided the best thing to do was to eat once a day, usually in the evening, and feel full. That gave me something to look forward to. Besides, the French only eat one main meal, or so I understand, and Paris is full of svelte, slender women in tiny Chanel suits, so they must be doing something right. I stopped buying tortilla chips and other lazy food and cooked properly: broccoli or cauliflower or courgettes, and portions of fish or steak or chicken (skin on: I like the skin). I bought polyunsaturated margarine, though I rarely ate it: it just made me feel good to have it in the fridge. And I wound up with the low-calorie drinking chocolate by way of dessert, despite the health risks. Georgie said I was doing it all wrong, but Lin said what did it matter as long as it was working, and, to my amazement, it did seem to work. Perhaps the real secret of dieting is to know you can lose weight. Deep in my subconscious I’d never really believed I could be any thinner. I’d been fat since I was fourteen, and the concept of a slimmer me had always seemed to belong to one of those other universes founded on fairytales – the one with the Tyrannosaurus Rex, for instance, or the one with Helen Aucham’s corpse dressed as a nun. I was never going to be skinny, but the day came when I pulled my shirt tight around my body and found that I had a waist.
‘I’ve got a waist!’ I cried, at work the next morning. ‘Look! I really have!’
‘You’re wasting away,’ Laurence Buckle punned, predictably. He was partial to puns. Rumour had it he was secretly writing a chick lit-style novel for gay men which would out-pun Wendy Holden and even Jilly Cooper. It was variously said to be titled Sore!, Bad Her Day, and Captain Corelli’s Mannikin.
‘You’re doing great,’ said Georgie. ‘A few more pounds, and we can go Shopping.’ I could hear the capital S.
Meanwhile, she had launched her campaign to find herself a millionaire.
‘You must have had lots of opportunities,’ I said. ‘The media is full of millionaires.’
‘Wrong kind,’ Georgie responded. ‘They all have ex-wives and ex-children and Xpensive cocaine habits. And very often entourages and groupies as well. I don’t want a glamorous celebrity millionaire: there’s too much competition for those. I want a fat, boring millionaire from the City with stocks and shares and dividends and kickbacks and golden handshakes. I want the kind of millionaire who gives you diamonds and is too busy flying off somewhere on business to have sex. I want a millionaire with a heart condition.’
‘We don’t meet that kind,’ Lin pointed out.
‘I know,’ said Georgie. ‘So I’m going to advertise.’
‘For a millionaire?’ Lin demanded. I just stared.
‘Uh-huh. In the personal columns. In The Times and the Telegraph, I think, not the tabloids. Possibly the Guardian: there are lots of rich guys in New Labour. I don’t know if the FT has a personal column, or The Economist.’
‘What will you say?’ I inquired.
‘I’m working on it.’
Two days after the triumphant flaunting of my waistline, it was Georgie’s turn to be gleeful. ‘Eureka!’ she announced by e-mail, unable to wait for lunchtime to bridge the gap between Publicity and Editorial. ‘What do you think of this? “Penniless beauty – history of impoverished ne’er-do-wells – seeks philanthropic millionaire with cardiac condition who would like to die happy.” I’m going to set up a special e-mail address for respondents, using the name of a famous gold-digger or celebrity courtesan. Mme de Pompadour? De Montespan? Ninon de Lenclos? Why is everyone I can think of French?’
‘What about that blonde model who married the old boy of eighty-nine?’ I e-mailed back. ‘Can’t remember her name, but she’s not French.’
‘I can’t remember it either, so no good,’ Georgie responded. ‘Besides, too vulgar. I want to epitomise the poor girl/rich guy scenario in a classy way. What was the name of Cophetua’s beggar maid?’
In the end it was Lin who came up with the answer. ‘How about Cinderella?’ she proposed, in the lunch hour. ‘That says it all, doesn’t it?’
So Georgie became Cinderella X, contacted the newspapers, and placed her ad. We all waited with slightly queasy anticipation for the results.
A few days before the ad appeared Georgie and I went on our shopping expedition. My diet had slackened off a bit but I was determined to maintain my newfound waistline and Georgie, looking me over with an experienced eye, declared: ‘Fourteen. Maybe twelve in some things,’ and decided I was ready to go for a change of image. ‘We’ll start with underwear,’ she said, ‘and work outwards. You’re obviously wearing the wrong bra. What size do you think you take?’
‘38DD?’ I hazarded. Bras on me always rode up at the back and bunched into lumps at the front, but M&S hardly ever had a bigger cup size, except in something that looked like a straitjacket. As for the posh lingerie shops, with wispy bits of lace in the window clearly designed for women with wispy bosoms, they terrified me.
Georgie heaved a sigh. ‘Rigby and Peller, here we come.’
I’d heard of Rigby and Peller, of course. I knew this was the Shangri-La among lingerie shops, as far above Marks and Spencer as Everest is above Highgate Hill. I’d heard women speak of it in accents varying from reverential to merely ecstatic – the way a Moslem speaks of Mecca or a cricketer of Lords. This was the place where the modern Cinderella took her pumpkins, where every transformation scene really began. I expected it to be grand and overpowering, but it wasn’t. A friendly assistant weighed and measured the offending objects and announced that I was a mere 34EE, or possibly F, depending on the make, and bras appeared which cupped and lifted and decorated me, elevating my bust to undreamed-of heights. (I tried not to look at the price tags, and succeeded far too well.) For the first time in my life I had a Figure, instead of just a body. It was a heady sensation. I bought pale pink lace and ivory lace and black lace with little mauve flowers, all with matching briefs, and my credit card stoically withstood the shock.
‘Much more of this,’ I said, ‘and I’m going to need a millionaire too.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Georgie. ‘We’ve only just started.’
In the sixties, women thought it was liberating to burn their bras. The bra, they claimed, feminised and thus diminished them, pandering to male erotic whim, emphasising their harem status. Well, whoever came up with that garbage must have been as flat as a board. In fact, the two advances in the twentieth century that actually encouraged female emancipation were effective contraception and effective underwear. With the Pill, we no longer had to be pregnant all the time. With the bra, we could come out of the corset and enjoy real physical freedom. The bra is lightweight, comfortable (when it fits), easy to wear, and enables someone like me to run for a bus without blacking my own eye. How many female athletes would have broken Olympic records if their tits had been bouncing around all the time? The right bra can transform your frontage from that look of a cow with too many udders to a streamlined superbust poised for action, breasts jutting like guided missiles. Looking at my reflection, I began to feel almost like a sex goddess, or at least a nymph with big ideas.
I hoped I had earned a coffee break, but Georgie was just warming up. ‘Harrods,’ she said. ‘Then Harvey Nicks. Come on.’
‘Georgie!’ I screamed. ‘They’re too expensive! I don’t go to places like that!’
‘I do.’
In the end, we went to Harrods, but I baulked at Harvey N
icks. After that we headed east for lesser dives like Next, Principles, Wallis. I saw myself tapered by tapering skirts, heightened by short jackets. Nothing loose or baggy, Georgie decreed. ‘The object is to take you out of the burkha and turn you into twenty-first-century woman.’
‘I can’t change my entire wardrobe,’ I protested at last. ‘I feel like a tatty drawing room in the hands of Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen. I want the fireplace left where it was or I’ll be completely disorientated. Besides, I’m exhausted.’
‘Okay, I suppose we could take a break,’ Georgie conceded grudgingly. ‘But after this, if I see you in one more case of baggy black I’ll prosecute. Anyway, we still haven’t done the hair.’
It had become the hair now, not my hair, please note. I had begun to suspect that as far as Georgie was concerned I’d ceased to be Emma Jane Cook and turned into something between a publicity exercise and a work of art – a drawing room to be rearranged, a Galatæa to be chiselled into shape. She was definitely getting carried away, my credit card was going to need absence-of-retail therapy, and although I had a reserve for emergencies (quite a lot, since I was no longer subsidising Nigel) I had never been accustomed to the Big Spend. I’d been brought up to be sensible about money, with an allowance from an early age and emphasis on responsibility. In addition, buying clothes when you’re seriously overweight has far fewer charms than when the clothes start to look good on you. (Financially speaking, dieting is a potential disaster.) It was fatally easy to see how Georgie had run up her debts and I didn’t intend to join her.
‘I don’t want anything done to my hair,’ I said.
‘Just a trim,’ she almost pleaded. ‘I’ve booked you in with Paolo next week. He’ll know what products are best for you.’
Paolo was the genius who had evolved the blonde streaks, the tousling, that air of having been dragged through a hedge backwards at enormous cost which so suited Georgie. An appointment with him for someone who wasn’t a regular was supposed to be as sought-after as tickets for the Cup Final. I wavered. Was this a man who knew how to de-frizz?
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Just a trim.’
So my new image didn’t burst on people all at once: it happened in stages, and at first I thought no one had noticed. Lin said immediately: ‘You look terrific,’ but then, she was so nice she always would. Then it was Cal, telling me in classic male fashion: ‘I don’t know what you’ve done to yourself, Cookie, but you’re looking really great lately.’ And Alistair: ‘Lost a lot of weight, haven’t you?’ (I hadn’t actually lost all that much.) ‘Shaping up for action? Good girl.’ Laurence Buckle, whose gayness was of the discreet, low-camp variety, was more perceptive. ‘I gather Georgie’s taken you in hand. Long overdue. You’re so pretty, Cookie: it’s time you learned to show it. Ravishing eyebrows.’ I swung between elation and self-doubt. I wasn’t yet the modern Venus, but I was making progress. And it wouldn’t really be appropriate to go around being a sex goddess in a publishing company. It would be caviar to a pizza house – too exotic, too erotic, in mildly bad taste. But in my secret heart I dared to dream of stunning Nigel, of him crawling back to me, begging for the chance to unsay his cruel words, grovelling while I spurned him with contumely (whatever that is), until, in my weakest moments, I forgave him. I knew Georgie would condemn that part of the dream, but I couldn’t help it. The emptiness in my flat, in my life, still ached for him, and the memory of the good times seared my soul. That’s the hardest part, remembering happiness, that’s the part you can’t let go.
You must be bored with my going on about Nigel. You thought I’d had enough of him, didn’t you? New clothes, new leaf, new fixations. But the worst aspect of pain, is that the sufferer never gets bored.
I went to see Paolo, an Eastender of Italian extraction with a down-to-earth manner who advised me never to blow-dry – ‘We want big hair, love, but not Struwwelpeter’ – and trimmed my hair with reassuring moderation. (I was privately terrified of being razed to the scalp.) Later, back at the office, I wandered into Publicity for coffee and approval.
‘Looks brilliant,’ said Georgie. ‘See? The wish business is a cinch. I’ve had over fifty answers to my ad already. Cinderella X is going to the ball.’
‘Lucky you,’ sighed Lin. ‘I haven’t met a man for three months.’ Work colleagues and traffic wardens didn’t count.
‘Get on the Internet,’ Georgie said. ‘That’s the future of dating, take my word. Safe, anonymous, no commitment. Forget the singles bar. This way, you can find out in advance if he tells sick jokes, or is a rabid fan of Alan Titchmarsh. Then you can dump him on the compost heap before he’s had a chance to take root at your side.’
‘What about halitosis or a spotty back?’ I said.
‘The system’s good; I didn’t say it was loserproof. Anyhow, you wouldn’t see a spotty back in a singles bar. Unless it was on the beach.’
‘I couldn’t do an ad like Georgie,’ Lin said. ‘I’d never be able to think of anything witty enough. Besides . . . well, I just couldn’t.’
‘Have you told Cal yet?’ I inquired of Georgie.
‘No.’ She was unusually curt. ‘It’s none of his business. He’s married. I’ll tell him when there’s a nine-carat diamond on my finger and I’m going up the aisle on the arm of a wheelchair.’ She turned to Lin. ‘Join a dating agency. You just type in your requirements and you get pages and pages of possibles. With photographs.’
‘Bank details?’ I asked. ‘Back details? Spot checks?’
Georgie threw me a look that was intended to wither. ‘Give it a try,’ she said. ‘What harm can it do?’
That, as it turned out, was the million-dollar question.
‘I suppose I could,’ Lin said. ‘At least I don’t need a babysitter to go online.’
Back at my desk, I took a phone call from Todd Jarman. I didn’t want to, but it sneaked up on me: there was no variation in the ring tone to give me any warning. One day, they will come up with a telephone system that gives helpful advice before you answer: Do not take this call – salesperson; Anonymous caller – switch on Heavy Breathing tape; Very Bad Vibes – answer carefully. I’d been waiting for the Jarman bombshell to drop ever since our meeting, expecting a rocket from Alistair if not the sack, bracing myself to argue that I had taken the flak for major changes he had initiated (never mind all the minor ones). But curiously, nothing had happened. Whatever Jarman felt about me, he hadn’t passed it on to my boss. (Maybe he was sorry for me? Poor thing. What a lump . . . The thought made me cringe.) Hearing his voice with the customary sinking of the stomach and stiffening of the sinews, I realised that his restraint owed nothing to acceptance or indifference, let alone pity. He was evidently determined to fight it out between the two of us. His words crackled with suppressed . . . well, suppressed something. Probably rage. He had found space for an extra body. Probably mine. Perhaps, since I was so good at his job, I would like to suggest a motive for the crime?
‘Someone who Knew Too Much?’ I volunteered flippantly. ‘That’s always a reliable old chestnut.’
Thanks. Were there any other clichés I would like him to insert?
Unable to resist, I said sweetly that I thought there were plenty of great clichés there already.
There was a short silence. Then: ‘Of course there are,’ Todd said. ‘I put them in ’specially for readers like you. It’s called dumbing down.’
It occurred to me that somehow we had crossed the borderline from overt hostility to mere banter. To my surprise, it was almost fun.
‘The mass market, you know,’ I said airily. ‘D’you want the Man Booker or the Top Ten?’
‘Both,’ Jarman responded instantly. ‘What writer doesn’t? By the way, I’ve dealt with most of your lesser alterations: they’re now back in their original form. Would you like to waste more space and time going over them again or shall we just clash over the big issues?’
I winced, but maintained my bravado. ‘I’m game,’ I said. ‘Pistols at dawn?’
/>
‘A little later in the day would suit me – if suiting me is important to you.’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But you’re one of our top writers, so I have to be polite.’
‘Fuck you, Miz Cook.’
Oddly, I ended the call with my stomach back in place and feeling strangely buoyant. Give Jarman his due, he hadn’t pulled rank by complaining about me to Alistair – and as he’s a bestseller, that would have done my career a power of no good – and no matter how sarcastic or insulting he might be, at least we quarrelled on an equal footing. It really was . . . almost fun.
During the afternoon I found myself speculating about how to practise my newfound sex-goddessness, and whether I too should go the Internet route. But it seemed an awful waste of a new haircut. Instead, I rang up one of those friends whom I like very much but don’t see enough (this applies to almost any friend you don’t work with) and we arranged a night out on the town. We met in a trendy Notting Hill bar, where she was gratifyingly stunned by my new look and insisted on a serious round of pubs and clubs to show it off. Amazingly, although admirers didn’t exactly swoon and fall at my feet, I found myself resisting the advances of several men who could, in a bad light, be rated as attractive – even if one of them later proved to be gay. I hadn’t been so sought-after since I was eleven years old and won a giant Easter Egg full of chocolate buttons at a children’s raffle. I went home after three, subdued the urge to snack, and tumbled into sleep without pausing to dream of Nigel, or even Hugh Jackman.
Chapter 4