I liked to think that Moff had hired me for my sparkling prose, my witty repartee, and a writing style that sang from the page—all of which the boss had indeed come to appreciate in her fashion editor—but I knew in my heart that I’d got the job for transforming that cupboard from a yard sale into a lending library.
I had taken a deep breath to steady myself, then cleared the floor of its glamorous debris, lining up the smaller items on shelves initialed according to which editor had requested them and when they’d arrived, and the clothing on hangers ordered by their designer names and the season’s trends. Every so often a single shoe or earring would rise like flotsam and jetsam to the top of the pile, and I’d set it aside in the hope of making it once again part of a pair.
I uncovered things that the team had long since assumed were lost and had been charged the full price for by the labels’ furious PRs—a fur coat that went straight to Moff’s corner office, which she had worn on a semiregular basis every winter since; a diamond hairslide that Trina, the beauty editor, had clipped in on her wedding day; a bias-cut silk sheath dress that Laura, the then–fashion editor, packed for the shows every season, with a theatrical wink directed at me but done for the rest of the office’s benefit.
“Many thanks, Miss Jones! Fashion’s most fabulous cleaning lady!” she’d trill.
That had stung a bit. My beginnings admittedly were more ordinary than those of the rest of the women in the office, many of whom came less from family homes than from dynastic seats, but I’d hardly grown up on the breadline. Still, my country accent and the fact I’d caught Moff’s eye for clearing up after them was too delightful a Cinderella narrative not to stick.
I blushed and shrugged: Among my finds was a crumpled gabardine trench coat of the sort I liked to imagine Jackie O throwing on over a black sweater and cigarette pants, something for which I would have had to save for several years to buy from the label, and that would have caused me severe angst had I ever had to part with quite so much money for it in a shop.
It was mine, they told me, for the amazing job I’d done for them—little expecting that, ten years on, I’d still be in the office. Still wearing that trench occasionally, in fact, only now more senior than all of them.
* * *
I STILL HADN’T HEARD from Winnie by the time the first interview was scheduled to start. I found I couldn’t put the tragedy from my mind without another vision of the little cotton hats I’d bought for Jack, the ridiculously small socks we’d both been laughing at on Sunday, the plastic bath propped up beside the sink, floating into my head.
I could hardly believe I hadn’t cried yet—thanks to the pregnant hormonal fug I existed in, I’d found myself welling up regularly at TV ads for donkey sanctuaries and life insurance in recent weeks. Instead I felt my friend’s grief as a dull physical ache, in my throat, my heart, my shaking hands, and my stomach, where all fluttering had given way to a sadness as still and as heavy as a boulder. Perhaps there is an unhappiness beyond tears that is just pain.
I couldn’t tell Moff: I wouldn’t know how to say it and she wouldn’t know how to hear it. It’d sound like something out of a schmaltzy TV program. That’s the only place you hear about children dying. Children die every day and we just pretend it doesn’t happen. I didn’t want to risk bursting into tears in front of my boss: Moff wasn’t good with emotions. She’d be shocked and standoffish, and then she would almost certainly send me home. The last thing I wanted was to be alone today.
So I hung my coat up behind my desk and smoothed the oversized shirt I had on underneath with a pair of indigo jeans. Not in maternity-wear yet! I rummaged in my stiff leather handbag (pregnancy notes, prenatal vitamins, water bottle, makeup bag) for the black leather pochette that contained my phone, security pass, and notebook, and headed into the glass-walled meeting room next door to Moff’s office.
The two women who had applied to cover my job knew me already. They recognized me from my byline photo, an unflatteringly cropped headshot that I loathed and that accompanied most of my articles, right next to my name along the top. They knew me from my seat at the shows, where elaborately calligraphed cards are placed on cushions or at intentionally narrow-hipped intervals on white benches to signify whose bottom goes where. While attendees scan for their own names along the length of the catwalk, they take in the rest as they go, either to drop ambitiously into conversation later on or so they can take merciless aim at that person’s perceived failings in the privacy of their own clique.
I had told Moff I had a vague idea of who the two newcomers were, too. In truth, I knew exactly. I had put the same effort into researching my potential replacements as I would into finding my baby’s carer once I was ready to come back. This job might not have been performing backflips in my stomach, but it was just as much a part of me. Full-on, often stressful, sometimes infuriating, but fun and fast-paced: I loved it. Only the most capable pair of hands would do.
A woman capable of following Moff’s orders, and equally capable of fucking off again in a year’s time.
The first, whom I knew from the society pages, was married to a tinned-food company heir worth millions. I saw Moff’s interest pique at the sheer wealth this woman exuded, at her perfect hair caught back in a ponytail that hung down over one shoulder, her glowing skin and buffed nude nails, the pterodactyl-wing elbows that come from consuming just enough calories to function. Her doll-like frame was clad in perfectly fitting black trousers, a simple turtleneck, and a pair of loafers that almost every editor was on the waiting list for.
My blood ran cold at the prospect of this woman’s occupying my desk; I had always been uncomfortable around people this rich and this polished. I knew I was being touchy and insecure (Winnie always upbraided me for it, wagging a finger and tutting: “Not attractive!”) but this woman was everything I wasn’t, and if she ended up doing my job, Moff might realize how much its original incumbent was lacking in. The confidence that comes with a certain type of education, the presence that gloss and beauty can bestow, the easy chitchat born of an innate knowledge that other people will want to listen. Absolutely not.
While Moff tittered at the woman’s anecdotes and inquired about other horsey people they had in common, I worked out my strategy. I suspected that someone who didn’t strictly need the money the role came with was likely to flinch at the devotion that Moff required of all her staffers. I threw her a few examples of late nights in the office to finish the pages ahead of print deadlines, of writing breaking news on my phone in the street in the rain, of filing a story within minutes to make sure Haute’s was the very first online.
The woman’s deep-set dark eyes widened on either side of her aristocratic nose. Too easy! She’d politely retract her interest by email on her way home in a cab.
“And so now we have…” Moff looked at the next résumé, once the first interviewee had swished from the meeting room and the second taken a seat on the other side of the red Perspex table. “Margot?”
“Oh no,” a warm voice corrected her as its owner slid her arms from the sleeves of a well-cut dark blazer. “It says that on my résumé, but I’ve never been a Margot—too formal and fusty for me.” The woman beamed, all telephone-box red lips and tumbling dark curls.
“I’m Maggie.”
2
MAGGIE BEECHER
She almost died when she realized what she’d said. Formal! Fusty! Only about the woman’s actual name—the name her eyes had danced over for years every time she read an issue of Haute, and the name on the masthead inside that hers might well have replaced. She guessed it wouldn’t now. Christ, Maggie, what an idiot move.
She was always being told, usually by men on building sites or in pubs, that she had a big mouth—with bright red lipstick on, it was one of her best features—but it had never felt big enough to get both feet in it at the same time. Until now. What could she say? She was terrible when s
he was nervous.
And she was really nervous about this interview. These jobs don’t come up very often—why would they? It’s a pretty plush deal, being fashion editor of a glossy magazine.
You sit there writing about nice things, while the people who make the nice things send them to you, so you can see exactly how nice they are. You travel a lot—to fashion week, sure, but also to interview beautiful, glamorous people in beautiful, exotic locations, and sometimes simply because a brand who wants to get on your good side has enough money to take you there.
Let’s just say it was a job she could definitely see herself doing, at least for a year or so until Margot Jones wanted it back. Maggie would be more than happy to keep Margot’s seat warm for her.
To the fashion editor’s credit, she was nice about it. As Maggie was trying to disguise the full-body cringe her mistake had triggered, Margot smiled and threw her a lifeline.
“Maggie, hi! I never knew you were a Margot, there’s always more of us than I realize. How are you?”
What Maggie was tempted to say, by way of an apology, was that the woman opposite her was a total Margot, every inch an M-a-r-g-o-t, in the way she was so, so not. She had never lived up to her elegant name: she was short and busty, a bit crass, and prone to excruciating social gaffes.
The other Margot was tall and willowy—tidy—with long, straight blond hair and very clear, pale skin. She looked immaculate, as always, even though she was probably feeling ropy as fuck underneath it all. How pregnant was she anyway? She couldn’t be that far along. Maggie was more bloated than she was, especially when she’d got her arms stuck in the sleeves of the blazer she’d borrowed from her flatmate, Cath.
But Maggie didn’t say any of that. She said: “Yeah, I’m good, thanks.”
Maggie saw the lights go out behind Emily Moffatt’s eyes at that point—before, they’d been twinkling merrily at her mistake and Margot’s potential irritation—and cursed her usual curse for not being sparkier or more interesting. But Margot seemed to have faith in her.
They’d first met years ago, on the sort of press trip that brands didn’t tend to do that often anymore: expensive, excessive, and thoroughly unnecessary. Some niche vodka company whisked a bunch of journos off to Iceland for three days, put them up in a razzy hotel, chauffeured them to the hot springs in a fleet of black Mercedes, laid on a helicopter tour of the geysers, and wined and dined them all in edgy Reykjavík restaurants. Maggie had wangled a spot by promising to write about it for the food and drink column in the local paper; Margot was there because she was fashion editor at Haute, and that’s the sort of person who needs to know about your niche vodka if you want it to become less niche, in certain circles at least.
It was an odd group. Maggie’s heart had sunk slightly when they’d all met up at the gate before the flight and the majority were middle-aged men who covered the consumer beat for the big newspapers. Middle-aged men and this incredibly glamorous blond woman in a black leather biker jacket, gray jeans, and ankle boots who looked as dismayed with her fellow travelers as Maggie was. They might have been thrown together by circumstance, but they bonded after that. The men used the trip to behave like bachelors and drink as though they were childless; the two women entertained themselves by watching them at it.
“Makes me almost glad to be terminally single,” Maggie said to Margot on the first night as they sat with their backs to the subway-tiled wall in a cocktail bar that styled itself as a sort of hipster laboratory and served drinks in conical flasks and test tubes. Endearingly European not to realize that there was nothing remotely cool about that concept.
“I’d rather be on my own forever than married to him,” she continued as one of the group chased a pixieish Icelandic woman across a dance floor pulsating with people half his age.
Perhaps that was a bit strong, but Maggie was feeling bitter at the time. Her last serious relationship had been nearly six years ago, and she was a couple of months off her thirtieth birthday. She’d gone on some dates since then, had a couple of few-month things, but still nothing long-term. The difference now was that she was finally okay with being by herself. She quite enjoyed it most of the time.
“Safer to have a baby hatched in one of these,” Margot had replied, waving the half-empty test tube that she was drinking from. The green liquid sloshed inside.
They laughed then and traded stories about their worst dates: the nose-picker, the drunk, the slightly threatening one (Margot), the one with the full-length leather coat (Maggie).
Maggie got the impression—and she often got it from women her age in a couple—that Margot was trying to convince Maggie that she would always be single at heart. Lots of them believed that deep down they were this happy-go-lucky girl who lived in a crap flat full of shoes and had just accidentally met the one guy who wasn’t a shit. Otherwise they’d have been in Maggie’s shoes. In her crap flat. It was an attempt at solidarity, she supposed, which, when it comes from somebody more successful than you, is just another version of pity, isn’t it?
They had fun together on the trip. They’d meet for breakfast at the hotel and sit together on all the outings. It was like the friendships you develop at Brownie camp or during Freshers Week: functional but intense, warm but temporary. When she got back, Maggie bought herself approximations of all the outfits she’d seen Margot in, only from significantly cheaper shops where the clothes came in plastic bags rather than paper ones. It sounded a bit creepy when she put it like that, but it was Margot’s job to persuade everyone else to dress like her, after all. Maggie supposed she might have been a bit embarrassed if the other woman had found out.
She’d seen Margot a few times since then, at launch parties and the occasional dinner thrown by a new label or a fancy stationery brand—or at a distance from her back-row perch at the shows—and they always chatted. When Margot had texted to say she was pregnant and asked whether Maggie would be up for covering her job, she couldn’t believe her luck. It wasn’t a dead cert that she’d get it, she knew that much, but having Margot’s seal of approval had to count in her favor.
As a freelancer, she was never quite stone broke, but it was either feast or famine when it came to commissions, and there was all too often a bit of a lull between them. A salaried job appealed to Maggie: She could relax a bit, maybe make a start on the savings account she’d been lying to her parents about, or the pension she assured them she had opened. And at a magazine like Haute—she would have said it was the icing on the cake, but from what she’d seen that morning, Maggie was fairly sure nobody in that office touched the stuff, iced or otherwise.
She had to say, once they’d got over that initial hitch, the interview seemed to go quite well. Maggie was no fashion editor, but she was a journalist through and through: She knew a good story when she saw one, she knew where to look for them, and she was a master in the art of turning a mere thing into a Thing.
Maggie had always been fascinated by what turned a matter of taste into a trend. She’d discovered, early on, that most people just wanted to know about the stuff that somebody else thinks is worth being interested in.
Her enthusiasm seemed to get Emily Moffatt back on her side reasonably quickly, too—once the editor in chief realized she wasn’t just a nervous amateur. Emily Moffatt. Maggie had to keep using her full name because she was Emily Moffatt. In magazines, there was nobody more impressive or more high-powered. She got a lot of criticism beyond the fashion world—she was a bitch, a tyrant, a bit of a caricature—but everyone Maggie knew who’d worked with her agreed she was a pro. Even the ones who’d shared an office with her for years still spoke of Emily Moffatt in hushed tones.
And there she was, just like her photo from the papers, sitting opposite Maggie, interviewing Maggie. That artfully blow-dried, raven-black do—the sort that looks like it might lift off like Lego hair; a gray Prince of Wales–check trouser suit so sharply tailored yo
u could dice carrots with it; and a face so subtly, so impeccably worked on you’d have had to cut her open and count the rings to find out her age. Interviewing Maggie!
She had felt, rather than seen, the editor looking at her when she entered the room. Emily Moffatt had appraised Maggie from head to toe in one expressionless rake of the eyes, starting with her hair (she’d had it blow-dried professionally that morning, knowing precisely that her frizzy curls wouldn’t play ball on such an important occasion) and finishing with the embroidered velvet slippers she’d panic-bought the night before (she remembered Margot’s wearing something similar when they’d last bumped into each other).
Somewhere in between, Emily Moffatt took in Maggie’s borrowed blazer (a far better cut and fabric than anything she could afford); her “perfect white tee,” as fashion editors called it (as far as she could tell, the perfection stemmed from its costing almost a hundred quid); her black trousers (reliable, smart); and her vital statistics. It felt like that, anyway. Maggie almost wondered whether her prospective boss would tell her she was in the wrong-size bra, like those fitters in posh shops who know whether you’re a 34C or D from sight alone.
She’d never reveal how long it had taken her to choose this outfit, but she’d missed the deadline on another article because of it. What do you wear to an interview with somebody who decided six months ago what you should be wearing right now?
From the moment she’d started mixing with them—albeit from a distance—Maggie had always been surprised by how fashion editors dressed in real life. They might have been telling you on those shiny pages that the seventies would be big next season, or that it was all about polka-dot everything, but they were more likely to be in jeans and a sweater, or a white cotton shirt, when you spotted them in the wild. Granted, they’d be the It-jeans du jour and the sweater would always be one million percent cashmere, but a few larger-than-life types aside, these women were rarely the peacocks you’d expect them to be.
The New Girl Page 2