Or, even more eye-crossingly dull, would be someone involved with ‘distribution’ and his hideous wife, although generally they were more likely to be invited to some kind of frou-frou corporate tent at Henley, or a Genesis concert. I always had to go along and do my corporate wife bit at those events, but I didn’t mind because I generally got a new outfit and a John Frieda blow-dry out of it. Fine by me.
Other crucial contacts in Ollie’s business world included his retail clients, and this week we were welcoming a high-level executive from a chain of provincial department stores which desperately wanted to stock Slap. Her name was Carol. Although he hadn’t told her yet, I knew Ollie had already decided to go with them, but by dazzling her with his glamorous friends and lifestyle, he was clearly intending to impress her into giving him a ridiculously large acreage of floorspace at lower rent than any of his competitors, in the prime position opposite the main door, with free advertising space in the store’s cardholder magazine thrown in.
There were a lot of plates to spin in Ollie’s job – far more than most people realized – and he never dropped one of them. I really was proud of him.
Carol arrived at the same time as Peter Potter, which already had her seriously impressed, as he was a big name in Middle England. Not only did he have his byline picture smiling out of his page in The Daily Reporter every week, he was actually better known for his regular appearances on ‘Wakey Wakey’, a hugely popular sofa-based women’s morning ‘magazine’ show. It was seriously mainstream stuff, but – much as it killed us magazine chicks to admit it – it was probably the single most influential platform for flogging fashion and beauty products in the entire country.
From the moment he arrived that day Peter was even more brightly ‘on’ than usual, with his excitement at having been ‘ringside’ when Nelly and Iggy had got together, as he put it. And if he had noticed what I had been up to the same night, it clearly paled next to the big story. Everyone at that table knew all about Iggy and Nelly – apart from Jeremy, of course, who thought all fashion designers, except possibly Johnnie Boden, were ghastly poofs. Even Sarah had read about it in the Daily Mail, an innocent reference that caused a momentary scowl to cross Peter’s face.
‘Yes,’ he’d snapped at her. ‘They picked up the story from my page and just managed to squeeze it into their last edition, with all the other boring shit their boring readers enjoy.’
But apart from that momentary irritation he was positively pregnant with the scoop of it all and clearly longing to regale the company with the details.
Peter Potter was a small man – in every regard, according to Paul, who’d been there once, as he had to so many other places he later regretted – and he was puffed up with glory at having first-hand intelligence about such a big story. He was generally quite happy to run with sixth-, seventh-, or even no-hand information in his fashion gossip column, so this was a big thing for him.
And it was great for me too, as I could sit back, happily out of the spotlight, as he regaled the table with his memories of the night that Iggy and Nelly got it on.
‘Well,’ he was saying, as we sat down to eat – he had the natural sense of timing to keep his big story until he had everyone’s attention. ‘I had always assumed Iggy was a big woofter, like every other fashion designer in the world.’
Jeremy nodded in sage agreement.
‘And, of course, there are all those well-known people who went to Saint Martins with him…’
Peter lowered his voice to a more conspiratorial level. The entire table leant in to hear him. Gotcha! he would have been thinking.
‘There are several people – household names– who claim to have had more intimate contact with Mr Veselinovic than those three Serbian kisses, which are becoming such a signature of his. Nevertheless, it was quite obvious to me from the start that he was seriously turned on by my Miss Nelly…’
‘Oh, I never thought Ig was gay,’ Nivek interrupted, with the self-importance of someone who was very close to the person being discussed. ‘I was at the Four Seasons with him that night it all happened – before any of you came in.’
Pause for sickly smile at Peter. Registered. Continue.
‘You can see by the way he reacts to models,’ continued Nivek. ‘At castings for major international ad campaigns…’ – pause for effect – ‘… his interest is definitely more than just academic. His reactions are more, well, genital than cerebral.’
Nice work, Nivek, I thought. Good interrupting and I liked the use of ‘campaigns’ in the plural. ‘Major’ and ‘international’ were nice touches too. Especially for someone who hadn’t actually been booked for the job yet. It quite cancelled out Peter’s use of ‘my Miss Nelly’.
I glanced over at Ollie, who was watching the exchange with the concentration of a spectator at Wimbledon Centre Court. Nivek was in the Tim Henman role. He might win, but he probably wouldn’t.
‘Anyway,’ said Peter, brushing invisible crumbs off the table in a gesture that suggested that it was what he would like to have done with Nivek’s contribution. If not his actual head. ‘As I was saying, despite all the well-founded…’ – killer look at Nivek – ‘… rumours, it was obvious to me that Iggy fancied the pants off my little Nelly from the moment I saw them together.
‘It’s funny,’ he continued, looking smugger with every word. ‘Because I know they had met before – Nelly had told me all about discovering this incredibly talented young Serbian designer months ago – but it just hadn’t clicked between them until that night. I think it must have been meeting away from a work context for the first time that made the difference. And, of course, having been so close to Nell, for so very long, I could tell immediately she had the hots for him too. And when my Nelly wants a man, Nelly gets him.’
‘Nelly’s gonads never wrong,’ I heard myself saying. It was quite unconscious. The words just popped out. Every head at the table swivelled round to me, gripped. ‘Gonads’ had even attracted Jeremy’s interest. Carol’s mouth was hanging open.
‘What?’ said Peter, Nivek and Ollie in unison.
‘Er, nothing,’ I said, thinking fuck, fuck, fuck. ‘I was just mumbling.’
‘Nelly’s gonads never wrong?’ said Peter, who was highly skilled at hearing and remembering things people didn’t want him to hear or remember. ‘Is that what she said to you?’
I just laughed. ‘Oh no, I’m just being silly, just a joke. Silly girl stuff, take no notice. Now, who would like some more couscous?’
I got up quickly and went over to the kitchen area. Peter Potter was next to me in a moment.
‘Is that what Nelly said to you?’ he said, his hand on my arm, quite tightly. ‘Nelly’s gonads never wrong?’
‘What?’ I said, trying to play the dumb blonde. ‘Do you want some couscous, Peter?’
I smiled brightly at him, trying to channel Margot from ‘The Good Life’, who I always found such a comfort in tricky social situations, but he just narrowed his eyes back at me.
‘OK, princess,’ he said, nodding his small shaved head. ‘I hear you. And I also hear that your gonads were working hard that night too. It was quite hot and heavy on that dance floor, wasn’t it, Emily? Nearly as hot as the photographers’ pit.’
He spat the words out. I could feel the blood draining from my intestines, when he spoke again.
‘Very charming that Seamus. Irish eyes and all that…’
He looked so pleased with himself and I just felt like shouting with laughter. He’d seen me dancing with Seamus. I did dance with Seamus that night. Closely. Provocatively. It meant nothing.
‘Oh yes,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘That Seamus is such a sexy little guy. I love those Irish boys. I’m always teasing Ollie about it. Aren’t I, darling?’ I said, walking back to the table, leaning round my husband and kissing his cheek, as I put the couscous steamer down on the table.
‘I was just telling Peter, how sexy I find Irishmen. You know all about my secret love for Terry Wogan, d
on’t you, Ollie?’
I flashed Peter my brightest Margot smile and he looked furious as Ollie laughed along.
‘Yeah,’ he said, patting my bottom. ‘Can you believe it? Emily is addicted to Radio 2. She listens to Wogan every morning. She loves the old fart.’
‘Wogan,’ said Jeremy with great enthusiasm. ‘Top man, Wogan. Bloody funny. Eurovision. Hilarious. Very dry, old Wogan. Good man.’
Up you, Peter Rotter, I thought, you smarmy little creep.
After that I was relieved to find that the conversation had moved on quite naturally from Nelly and Iggy, as the rest of the table didn’t have quite the insatiable appetite for the fashion gossip that was Peter’s lifeblood. He wasn’t too upset, though, because he managed to regain the spotlight fairly quickly with supposedly ‘gospel’ bits of filthy information about Hollywood stars and their alleged sexual perversions.
I found all that stuff about as interesting as rally-driving stories, it was so clearly rubbish, but if it kept Rotter – as I had now decided to call him – off my back, I was happy to look fascinated and tell him how amazingly clever and in the loop he was.
If the mixture of people was right, sometimes those Sunday lunches took off in a way that was quite magical, with really dazzlingly witty exchanges and stimulating arguments, sometimes turning into a full-on party. This was not one of those weeks.
I was sitting next to Sarah, which rather limited my conversational prospects and it didn’t take her long to get round to her favourite topic – after her own children – which was asking when Ollie and I were going to ‘start a family’.
‘Are you trying yet, Emily?’ she always asked me with great delicacy, which made me want to bark with laughter.
It didn’t matter how many times I had explained to her that we had made a completely conscious decision not to have children, as neither of us wanted them, she was still convinced we were just putting it off.
‘There really isn’t a “right” time, you know, Emily,’ she was saying, with her customary originality. ‘But then that means there isn’t a “wrong” time either. Really, they will change your life so much, you will just wonder why you ever waited. And, you do know that it gets much harder to conceive after thirty, don’t you? I really can’t remember life before we had the boys now…’ she continued and then she was off, droning on about schools and common entrance and all the other subjects that helped to convince me that I really didn’t ever want to be a parent.
I tried to divert her by coaxing Polly and Ossie into the conversation, but they were uncharacteristically subdued, after what they admitted had been a big weekend, even by their standards. So I wasn’t particularly surprised when the conversation turned to that most excruciating of all subjects – property prices. Needless to say it was one of Felicity’s areas of special interest and I nearly lost it when she came out with her first gambit.
‘Of course I’ve been in the Spitalfields market since the early Eighties,’ she sang out, spraying all around her.
Oh, how I longed for Frannie to share the joke with. Where else would Spitty Felicity live but Spitalfields?
‘Of course, from my vast Huguenot house on Fournier Street, I have watched the gentrification of Clerkenwell with horror, Hoxton with amusement and Brick Lane with a certain trepidation,’ continued Spitty, smiling at us smugly over her novelty specs, which looked like missing parts from a passing Sputnik.
‘But my house – for which I paid a little over sixty thousand in eighty-four, is now worth well over a million – and I have used the equity to buy several other properties in the quartier. It’s such a fascinating part of town and the young creatives who are now moving in are nothing more than the latest wave of refugees to populate it. I see myself as their patron.’
And that was it, they were all off with their property stories. It was as bad as drug stories, or drinking stories, or even hearing about someone else’s trip to the dentist, because no one was really listening to anyone else, they just wanted to broadcast their own smug good fortune. I could have machine gunned them all to death.
I’d heard Sarah on the subject of the Fulham property boom about a million times before – ‘I knew when Blooming Marvellous opened up we’d made it as a neighbourhood…’ – so I knew I’d have to sit through a percentage-on-percentage analysis of that, but I was surprised when Jeremy chipped in. I’d thought he was too much of a gentleman to talk about money.
Even dreamy Polly and Ossie got in on it. It was like a brain-wasting disease that had infected the entire British middle class. A form of BSE caught from drooling over estate agents’ windows and the property sections of local papers. The only ones who didn’t join in were me and Ollie. He might have been a hard-nosed business man at work and a bit of a poseur in every other respect, but he thought it was the absolute end to talk about money in a social context. And at that moment, I really loved my husband.
8
On the train to Paris on the Tuesday morning Frannie and I were nearly senseless with laughter. Peter Potter had pissed me off royally at the Sunday salon, but boy had he got his own back at Nivek Thims for stealing his thunder with the Nelly story. Frannie had bought The Daily Reporter that morning along with all her other beloved tabloids – the papers of the people, she called them – and we were in stitches over what the Rotter had written.
It’s quite amazing, the lengths to which some people in this business are prepared to go, to make themselves seem more interesting than they really are. Turns out ‘rising’ not-so-young photographer Nivek Thims was actually born with a slightly less fascinating name. How does Kevin Smith look on your passport, Nivek? Or perhaps you need a mirror to read it?
‘Kevin – Nivek…’ I had tea coming down my nose, I was laughing so hard. ‘But, hang on a minute,’ I said, scribbling the letters on the edge of Frannie’s paper. ‘Look – Thims isn’t even Smith backwards. It should be Htims; he’s fiddled with it to make it work. God, what a self-conscious wanker.’
‘Who cares,’ said Frannie, handing me a piece of paper. ‘Check this out.’
She’d drawn mock-ups of our Chic business cards with the following names on them: Senior Fashion Editor – Ylime Retniop. Beauty Director and Fashion News Editor – Einnarf Retsillacm.
It just set us off some more.
‘I don’t think Retsillacm really works,’ said Frannie. ‘But I’m quite taken with Einnarf. Sounds more Celtic than Frannie, almost Tolkien-esque. I could be a minor elfin queen, Cate Blanchett’s little sister, but Ylime Retniop, now that’s a winner. It’s brilliant. You sound like a Tibetan lama, but sexy. I’m going to call you Y-lime from now on.
‘Hey, Alee-chay,’ she called over to Alice, who was sitting opposite, with her eyes closed. ‘Have you met Y-lime?’
Alice, as usual, was oblivious to the joke. She really couldn’t see anything wrong with Kevin calling himself Nivek – ‘I think it’s quite creative,’ she had said in all seriousness, when we’d shown it to her, in the deep, whispery monotone voice she thought sounded intelligent. Once she’d closed her eyes again, Frannie had sketched out Alice’s new business card and Ecila Wergittep set us off all over again.
‘Cilla!’ said Frannie, wheezing with laughter. ‘We can call her Cilla.’
Bee was tapping away at her laptop across the aisle, frowning hard, so we couldn’t share the joy of Eeb Ssetrof-Htims with her – or Thims, as we made it, in Nivek’s style – but it kept me and Frannie amused all the way to Gare du Nord. We really were fantastically immature at times.
A driver was there to pick us up, waiting right on the platform, as per orders, but it wasn’t our usual Paris chap. Bee – or Eeb as we were now calling her – looked at him with great suspicion which was very soon borne out. He couldn’t even find his way to the car park where he’d put the limo. And he couldn’t speak English. The poor man had unwittingly tapped right into one of Bee’s tenderest Achilles heels – because our brilliant, sophisticated editor-in-chief couldn’t speak a wo
rd of French.
‘Oh, for GOD’s sake,’ she was practically shouting, the third time he had us patrolling back along the station concourse with all our luggage. ‘What use is this idiot going to be? Frannie, you speak Frog, tell him I am going to stand outside this station – smoking – until he comes to pick me up.’
Frannie duly told him and in the end we all went and stood there waiting until he eventually emerged in the car. It got worse. Getting from Gare du Nord to the Hôtel Meurice, on Rue de Rivoli – one of the city’s more well-known thoroughfares – he got hopelessly lost. He didn’t even know it was one way and tried to turn left into it from Rue de Castiglione.
Bee was going into orbit.
‘What use is he going to be to us? How is he going to find his way to an abandoned bloody asbestos works on the Périphérique if he can’t even find the Tuileries gardens? We might as well have Luigi here. At least he speaks bloody English.’
‘But Luigi’s not from Paris,’ said Frannie, going into top-of-the-class mode, a condition often brought on by exercising her text-book perfect, but hopelessly un-idiomatic command of French.
‘No, he’s not,’ said Bee. ‘But I’ll bet you dinner at Caviar Kaspia that this fuckwit isn’t either. Go on – ask him, Miss Bilingual Dundee Nineteen Ninety-six.’
‘Excusez-moi, Monsieur,’ said Frannie in a perfect Dundee accent. ‘A quelle ville est-ce que vous habitez habituellement?’
‘Marseilles,’ came the smiling reply, causing Bee to smack the dashboard in triumph.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘I’m calling Luigi, I’m going to get him to come and drive us. At least if we get lost with him, he’ll be charming about it and I can abuse him in a language he will understand.’
It was shaping up to be an interesting Paris season.
It got a lot more interesting that very afternoon when I was waiting – sweating – inside the vast plastic tent in the Tuileries gardens that was the venue for the Dior show. I’d accidentally got there on time simply because our hotel was just across the road from the park, and I knew I was in for a very long wait. I’d milled around for a bit outside in the afternoon sun, watching everyone come in, which was always like another catwalk show in itself, until my shoes seriously started to remind me that they had four-inch heels attached to them.
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