Ollie was frowning slightly, as he flicked his signature forelock out of his eyes. He had his mouth open and was investigating his back teeth with his tongue. He looked momentarily rather less than attractive.
‘But what could he possibly see in her?’ he said. ‘It said in the paper that he’s got one hand missing, he’s got a hook. Sounds grotesque. Is he fat and ugly too?’
‘Ollie!’ I said, pissed off. ‘Don’t be so horrible. Nelly may not be your cup of tequila, but a lot of men find her really attractive, you know. Not all men like skinny girls. She’s what they call a “real woman” and I’ve seen men follow her down the street.’
‘Maybe she’d dropped something,’ he said. He wasn’t smiling.
‘Look, Ollie,’ I said, leaning in to the table and spitting the words at him. ‘I know you don’t like Nelly – in fact, she doesn’t like you either, so you’ve got that in common. But I really like both of you and let me tell you something. Igor Veselinovic is about to become one of the hottest names in world fashion. He’ll be up there with Alexander McQueen and John Galliano very shortly and you and I are both really lucky to have a close connection to him right from the start.’
That shut him up. I leaned back in my seat and continued.
‘So, you have a choice – you can carry on with this stupid snobbery about Nelly, just because her parents have a chip shop, or you can cash in on her new status. And I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed sitting front row at the Rucca show and I love Nelly dearly and I’m going to make the most of it. So there.’
Ollie was now carefully picking spinach out of his teeth with his little fingernail.
‘And will you stop that goddam picking!’ I said.
It was a habit of his that drove me nuts. Even though I knew it was inspired by his fear of contaminating his dazzling porcelain-veneered smile with green foliage, which was a valid concern, I found the public picking completely repulsive. He was still at it.
‘If you want to pick your teeth,’ I continued, slightly surprised by how cross I felt. ‘Go to the bloody toilet and do it, and keep your gob shut till you get there.’
I said ‘toilet’ deliberately, as it was one of Ollie’s most hated ‘suburban’ words. ‘Lounge’ was another that was good for getting at him, and ‘settee’. They made his skin crawl. He wasn’t keen on glass clinking either, or a myriad other little signals that someone was not quite his tribe. He stopped mid-pick and looked at me in amazement – then, to my great relief, he threw back his head and roared with laughter.
‘I’m sorry, Em,’ he said, taking my hand again. ‘It’s my terrible prep-school table manners. We were like little savages at my school and I do sometimes forget myself.’
He motioned at a hovering waiter to refill my glass.
‘Oh, you do make me laugh sometimes,’ he said, wiping tears from his bright blue eyes. ‘OK, you’re quite right, I must put my silly dislike of Nelly behind me. It’s just that I didn’t think she was a suitable friend for you and I didn’t want you to be tainted by association. And toilet to you too,’ he added, raising his glass and not clinking it.
‘Well, look how wrong you were there Mr Snob Guts,’ I said. I paused and looked at him sitting there with all the gloss and confidence his expensive education had endowed him with.
‘You know,’ I continued, not particularly liking him in that moment. ‘It’s not necessary to have gone to a major public school to get ahead in the fashion business, Ollie. I think you need to let go of that idea. It’s not like merchant banking.’
I could see he wasn’t listening, though. He had a look in his eye that I associated with serious brand strategy.
‘I could do with a trip to Milan,’ he said eventually. ‘Bit of a cool hunt through the city, see how the brand sits there. It’s hard to find the right retail outlets in Italy, because apart from a few unexciting department stores the cosmetics marketplace there is limited to independent perfumeries, so it’s very hard to control your brand’s environments. I think it might be time to move into stand-alone Slap boutiques there. So shall we go for a long weekend soon? Catch up with our dear friend Nelly and her new beau Iggy? You can take me to all those marvellous restaurants you’re always telling me about. On expenses, of course.’
I shook my head at him, but I couldn’t help smiling.
‘You are such an operator, Ollie Fairbrother,’ I said. ‘Teeth picking, or no teeth picking. I’d love to go to Milan with you – once Paris is over, of course – and only if we can stay at the Four Seasons.’
‘Deal,’ said Ollie.
‘But hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘I thought we were going cool hunting in New York, so you can try and pressure Paul into signing his life away to Slap?’
‘We’ll do both,’ he said, raising his glass again.
‘Cheers,’ I said, raising mine and clinking it loudly with his. ‘Toilet.’
Although I only had three more days at home before going to Paris early on Tuesday morning, Ollie insisted on going ahead with our Sunday salon as normal. I was quite disappointed, as I thought we could have spent the day together, maybe checking out the new exhibition at the Whitechapel and exploring Brick Lane and Hoxton and having lunch at one of the new restaurants there, so he could show me what he was so excited about.
I did go to that part of town quite a lot to various photographic studios in old warehouses and to see young designers, most of whom seemed to be based in E1 these days, but if Ollie was seriously considering uprooting us from our W11 haven I wanted to have a closer look. It was going to have to be pretty special to get me out of Ledbury Road.
But he seemed strangely unenthusiastic when I suggested it, saying he’d gone off the idea of moving – the property market was still too uncertain, it could go up or down, or so he’d read. So instead we spent Saturday shopping for food and flowers and cooking for the next day’s lunch. I was always glad to get back into my kitchen, as I found cooking truly relaxing. I could get completely absorbed in chopping and stirring, with my brain in a pleasant state of neutral. I was really glad that Ollie had no aspirations to be a Jamie Oliver himself, as it was my thing and I liked to shine in it.
For that Sunday, I’d pulled a recipe for a Tunisian chicken dish out of an old copy of French ELLE and, with the help of a French/English dictionary, I’d worked out what was involved. We went up to the Moroccan spice shop on Golborne Road to buy the more obscure north African ingredients, which was just the sort of expedition Ollie adored, and as well as the spices we had actually gone for, we came out laden with gold and white filigree tea glasses, a brass teapot with an outrageous spout and two couscous steamers. He was such a consumer, my husband. Suited me.
In between the shopping, and stopping to chat to people we bumped into, Ollie worked his mobile, drumming up suitable types to come to our salon. He had a few people in place already, he said, but he liked the serendipitous effect of leaving it to the last minute, surrendering the final guest list to fate. This calculated risk mostly paid off, and we’d end up with a mix of people you never would have put together on purpose, yet who would strangely seem to click; the whole being greater than the sum of the human parts and all that. Only once had it led to a very intimate meal for six people – two of whom were rival model agents who loathed each other. That had been rather too interesting.
For this one, Ollie said he had already ‘locked down’ five guests, but he wanted about four more for ‘the mix’. I had to find two and he had to find two – but he wouldn’t tell me who he had already. Ollie loved to turn everything into a game – a competitive game. I sometimes wondered if he had actually left school, but it was harmless and made him happy, so I went along with him.
Although I knew creating an unpredictable mix was all part of the game for Ollie, I was still quite surprised to hear him call Nivek Thims – a name I couldn’t miss – who seemed to accept delightedly, judging by the high-pitched squeaks coming out of Ollie’s mobile.
‘What
on earth did you invite him for?’ I asked, as we headed into Tom’s Deli for a coffee fuel-up, our shopping complete. ‘He’s such a shameless user.’
‘Partly because I want to torture him with how close you are to Nelly,’ said Ollie, grinning. ‘But mainly because I have a gut feeling about him. I’ve heard his work is really good and I think he will become a big-name photographer, so we might as well get him on side.’
For my two guests, my first choice was Paul, who was spending a couple of days in London before heading over to Paris, but after dialling his mobile and getting his voicemail message, I decided against pursuing it. I knew I would have enjoyed the event a lot more with Paul there, but I had my reasons not to ask him this time. For one, I didn’t want to jeopardize my trip to New York by giving Ollie a chance to talk to him about signing up with Slap. Secondly, he’d been there the night I’d met Miles and just for the time being it all felt a little too close.
Instead, I invited an up-and-coming fashion PR I rather liked, who was getting a reputation for representing interesting young London designers and who went by the single name of Isolde. Then, after about three knock-backs and five message banks – one of Ollie’s rules was that we weren’t allowed to leave messages, we had to get a live acceptance – I got quite desperate and roped in Peter Potter, the poison-penned fashion editor for The Daily Reporter, a mid-market tabloid.
A little too far to the bitchy side of bitchy queen for my taste, Peter would never have been a first choice, but he always had brilliant goss, which would delight the other guests, whether it had any foundation in truth or not. Plus he was quite well known through his TV appearances, just the sort of media fame which Ollie found so impressive.
It wasn’t until I put the phone down on that call – he was clearly delighted to be asked and already knew all about our last-minute guest lists – that I remembered he’d been at the Ferrucci party that night with us all too. I went cold all over and desperately hoped I wasn’t part of his current Milan ‘hot scoop’ repertoire.
*
As a result of Ollie’s unconventional way of assembling the guest list, part of the fun of the Sunday salons for the two of us was seeing who turned up.
First to arrive on this occasion was Felicity Aldous, the editor-in-chief of Chic Interiors, the sister magazine of Chic. I was quite amazed to see her walk in – a full ten minutes before the invited time – because I really couldn’t stand her and Ollie knew it.
It was typical of her to arrive early like that. God, that annoyed me. Why couldn’t she just have walked around the block a few times like any normal person? You had to arrive at least five minutes after the appointed hour, preferably fifteen, everyone knew that. I wasn’t even properly dressed when she marched in, I was still hopping around on one shoe, and it just added to my already less than warm feelings towards her.
Whenever I saw Felicity I was overwhelmed simultaneously by her pretension and her flying saliva. The spit spray you could dodge, but the carrying on about bollocks could kill you, to quote Frannie. A couple of times a year at work we would have what Felicity called ‘essential cross-cultural briefings’ – and Bee called after-work piss-ups – when the staff of the two magazines got together with a few bottles of wine and some chips ’n’ dips, so we could tell them what was going on in fashion and they could fill us in on the latest developments in scatter cushions.
I just couldn’t take it that seriously. Don’t get me wrong, I love homewares as much as the next compulsive shopper and no one as over-concerned with their wardrobe as me could help but be equally obsessed with poncing up their living space, but those Chic Interiors girls went way overboard. I mean, I can be really silly about a handbag, but I do have a sense of humour about it at heart. You have to, or fashion will eat you alive.
But not Felicity. She really believed it all. She could come over all spitty and excited about a washing-up-liquid bottle, reducing me and Frannie to hopeless church giggles at those briefings, until we succumbed to lobotomized boredom.
She was a quite a snappy dresser, though. I was prepared to give Felicity that – if you like those over-intellectual kind of designers – and she was really thin, so she wore her clothes well, which was a good thing, seeing how plain her face was. With her big eyes, prominent teeth and bony features, Frannie had once said she looked like a constipated chihuahua in novelty specs. They really were the most stupid glasses – I think she wore them to put architects at ease – and combined with that ultra-severe Joan of Arc hairdo, it was quite a striking look. She clearly styled herself a jolie laide. Jolly well never gets laid, Paul had said when he’d met her, but he was wrong about that.
The amazing thing was, Felicity never seemed to be without a boyfriend. Good-looking ones too, with jobs and everything. Mainly architects, it has to be said, but in London’s desperate dating meat market, they were prime cuts, no doubt about it. She had the kind of look I totally didn’t get – I could never understand girls who didn’t simply want to look as glamorous as possible – but there seemed to be a lot of men who liked women who looked about as warm and feminine as a John Pawson kitchen.
But Ollie seemed pleased to see her and I was even more pleased to notice on the placement – he always did one on the sly, filling in the guests as they arrived – that he had cleverly put her next to him, with me at the other end of the table. Well out of range of the oral fountain. Hurrah.
Isolde arrived next and she and Felicity seemed happy to have the chance to get to know each other. Mind you, it would be a rare PR who didn’t seize the chance to cosy up to a magazine editor, although I did notice Isolde take a few steps back as Felicity talked at her in increasingly excited tones about a new tap designer she had discovered.
While they were happily schmoozing each other, I cornered Ollie in the bathroom, where he was giving his perfect hair just one more little touch up. He was quite vain about his hair, was Ollie.
‘What the hell did you invite the human lawn-sprinkler for?’ I whispered at him.
‘What are you talking about?’ he said.
‘Spitty Felicity – why did you ask her? You know I can’t stand her.’
‘Felicity?’ said Ollie, frowning. ‘I think she’s really interesting – and we’ve decided to advertise in her mag. I think homewares is a very important growth area and those magazines are about to become as crucial for niche cosmetics marketing as fashion mags, if not more so. It’s the ideal way to reach the more sophisticated end of the lifestyle consumer, so I wanted to cement our relationship with her, OK?’
‘Whatever,’ I said, sighing. I should have known there was an angle on it. ‘But you may want to wear breathing apparatus while you do the cementing.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The spitting, Ollie. It could drown you.’
He just looked at me blankly.
‘I honestly don’t know what you are going on about,’ he said shrugging, and turned back to admiring himself in the mirror, from several angles. ‘And please be nice to her, Em. I want her to put this place in the magazine.’
He chucked me on the cheek and left the bathroom, grinning to himself.
The next bunch of people arrived in a clump, starting with Ollie’s old school friend, Jeremy Trouton and his wife, Sarah.
Jeremy was your classic public-school banker wanker, and I actually rather adored him. He was so straightforwardly straight he was almost eccentric and after the twisted creative weirdos we hung out with most of the time, he was a relief. He was funny too, in a totally unreconstructed sexist, classist, Tory-voter, Spectator-reader way. He reminded me of my uncle, but with a sense of humour.
Sarah I found slightly harder work, sweet though she was, as it was hard to get her to talk about anything apart from ‘our two boys’. In all fairness, they were really nice kids and in school hols, if they weren’t all ‘in the country’, they came along to our Sunday salons too.
Aged eight and ten, I always had a lot of fun with them, s
o that was a good basis for Sarah and I to get on, even though her house was decorated entirely from the OKA catalogue and she dressed in head-to-toe Boden. She was always telling me how ‘clever’ I was with clothes before telling me how very little she had paid for what she was wearing.
‘It’s marvellous, you know, Emily,’ she was saying to me on this occasion, after I had duly admired her purple needlecord skirt. ‘If you order within two weeks of receiving your catalogue you get a further ten per cent off. I buy all the boys’ weekend clothes from them. Amazing value.’
Arriving at the same time was another couple, rather different in their interests. Polly and Ossian were ‘artists’, classic Notting Hill trustafarians, complete with whiteman dreadlocks and quite the filthiest house I had ever been in, although full of the most gorgeous bits of ethnic tat and beaten-up pieces of priceless furniture from their various family piles. They never seemed to do much ‘arting’, did Poll and Oss, in fact their artistic lives consisted mainly of going to the openings of their myriad artist friends’ exhibitions. But they had an insatiable appetite for social events, were good fun and I was always pleased to see them.
I loved their upbeat manner – everything was ‘amazing’ or ‘marvellous’ – and I always particularly enjoyed watching them interact with Sarah and Jeremy, because they were really just different sides of the same Sloaney coin. In fact, the four of them knew loads of people in common and got on really well. I used to have this fantasy about dressing them in each other’s clothes and seeing if I could tell the difference.
Arriving just after them came Ollie’s bore of the week. He always had to have one – someone who was directly useful for his work and who also made the whole event fully claimable on expenses. They were a varied bunch. It might be a rally-driving enthusiast from the media-buying agency he used, whom he was grooming to screw even lower advertising page rates out of magazine advertising sales people – Ollie could never have done something so uncouth himself, as it might have damaged his precious relationship with ‘editorial’.
Handbags and Gladrags Page 11