‘It’s worth it,’ I said. ‘For all the great stuff I get to do as well.’ I giggled. ‘And for the Prada discount.’
‘You’re a hopeless case,’ said Miles, punching me lightly on the arm and smiling indulgently.
We sat there chatting a bit more and I gradually calmed down. I even managed to keep it together when various people came over to say hello to each of us. When we were alone again, Miles got us two more coffees and as he was walking back to the table with them, I noticed he was looking at me with a more serious expression on his face.
‘Are you OK, Emily?’ he said when he sat down.
‘What do you mean?’ I said. I hoped he wasn’t going to tell me to eat more.
‘Well, we’ve seen quite a bit of each other this week and I do also sneak the odd look at you through my long lens, and I’ve noticed you looking a bit low. You usually strut around the shows like such a haughty little princess, and this week you seem a bit, I dunno, flat.’
‘I am,’ I said, and then I told him what had happened with Alice, the whole story, which I hadn’t told anyone else.
Miles listened carefully, made a few perceptive and supportive comments and generally made me feel much better about it all. It didn’t really matter what he said – although his suggestion that people were always going to be jealous of someone as beautiful as me, was delicious, of course – it was just such a relief to have told someone. Someone who wasn’t in any way involved in it, or affected by it. Apart from Ursula, I didn’t have anyone else like that in my life, I reflected.
Eventually it was time for us to leave, Miles had to get away to mark out his space at the Versace venue and I had to do three more advertiser shows before that. We strolled out of the café doors together and I was just about to turn left towards the escalators and the exit, when Miles grabbed my arm and pulled me towards the staircase.
‘Go up,’ he hissed at me. ‘I’ll follow.’
He knelt down and pretended to sort out something in his camera bag and I did what I was told and went up the stairs. I stopped when I got to the next landing, not sure what to do. It was dusty and deserted up there, and it seemed a million miles away from the frantic main spaces of the Fiera.
A couple of minutes later Miles joined me, his filthiest grin splitting his face. He took my hand and led me up the next flight of stairs, to another landing, where there were a few old plastic stacking chairs lying about in piles and it looked even more abandoned. To one side there was a recess with a door in it and Miles led me to it, pushing me gently against the wall.
As his mouth joined mine I flipped straight into the zone where nothing existed but me and him and flesh against flesh. I was panting so hard, I felt like I might vomit. My stomach was churning with desire for him.
I had my hand down his pants and I was grinding myself against him while we kissed and then moving more out of instinct than conscious thought, I tried to move one leg up over his hip, but my tights and skirt made any further developments impossible. Miles pulled away from me and started laughing.
‘Bloody tights,’ he said. ‘Bloody winter clothes. Bloody Europe. If we were in Australia, I’d have had you by now. No wonder they’re into all those pervy stockings and suspenders over here.’
I smiled back at him, it was funny. Then he put his mouth against mine and kissed me again, very tenderly, without closing his eyes. When he pulled away again, he put his hands up around my face.
‘But that’s OK, isn’t it, Emily?’ he said, his eyes gazing searchingly into mine. ‘Because it’s not just about the fucking, is it?’
I stood there gazing back at him. That was a question I really didn’t want to answer. Not even to myself.
I couldn’t believe it, but Alice carried her cold face right on over into Paris, where it was even easier for her to ignore me, as we didn’t go round in such a tight little family Chic unit there anyway.
Even having Luigi arrive from Milan to drive us again, with the associated hilarity of following strange limos around Paris and Bee’s happiness about having her champion cigarette lighter on hand, didn’t do much to lift the mood between us. I felt self-conscious about everything I said and did in front of Bee and Alice, in case it added to her conviction that I was out to stitch her up.
In the end, I was acting so weirdly, it was my moodiness that Bee ended up being concerned about, not Alice’s. The two of us were walking through freezing fog over to the tent in the Tuileries to see Lanvin when she asked me about it.
‘Is something wrong with you?’ she asked, with her usual bluntness, her high heels crunching harshly on the frozen sandy path.
‘No,’ I snapped, much too quickly. ‘Why?’
Bee looked at me with narrowed eyes. Our breath hung in the air between us.
‘You seem unusually quiet, Emily. I’m used to you and Frannie chattering away in the back of the car like a couple of entertaining schoolgirls, but now you seem to have hit surly adolescence. That display you put on at Huw Efans was bad enough, but now you’ve got the sulks and I’ll tell you straight, it’s a fucking bore. I know it must be humiliating having your husband parading around like Lily Savage in a Savile Row suit, but has something actually happened?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I’m just a bit tired.’
She sighed impatiently.
‘We’re all tired at the shows, Emily. Dealing with it is part of the job and I’ve already got Alice’s moods to endure, without you pulling the prima donna act as well, so snap out of it.’
Then she slapped me quite hard on the upper arm with her bright green kid leather gloves and stalked off into the fog.
In every regard it was turning out to be one of my less fun Paris seasons. I didn’t see so much of Nelly there as I had in Milan because she was pretty much Paris fashion royalty now, in the front row at most shows and caught up with lggy’s working scene every evening.
He wasn’t showing that season – he was going to debut for Albert Alibert in the October – but she was so wrapped up in him and making their new life together in Paris, she just didn’t have the same time for her old London mates. Not in any snobby way, just the practical facts. We did have dinner once and a couple of drinks and coffees, but there wasn’t the same feeling of being in a gang.
I still had Frannie, of course, but she didn’t seem interested in going out at all. She wasn’t drinking or having late dinners, because she was on some kind of super-strict de-tox diet she was researching for her big annual ‘Bikini Beauty’ story for the June issue. It was boring even by my standards of food consumption, but there was nothing I could do to shift her from it.
The final disappointment was no Paul. For the first time in years he wasn’t doing Paris, because he’d been offered a car commercial at such a ridiculous fee his agent had threatened to sack him if he turned it down. It had all happened at the last moment and he’d rung me from the shoot in Rio to tell me.
‘Repeat after me,’ he had said down the phone, when I’d groaned with disappointment at the news. ‘Beach. House. Fire. Island. The. Pines. OK? Have you got that?’
There were just two things – or, rather, two people – that made Paris bearable that March. One was Miles, who came over to the Meurice late, several nights that week – I’d given him a key again – but the other was more of a surprise to me. It was the writer, Rosie Stanton.
I’d seen her a few times at Christmas parties and launches, since she’d come to the Sunday salon and when I bumped into her at Junya Watanabe on the first morning of the Paris shows, she suggested we ‘catch up’ for dinner, as she put it. I’d been a little vague at the time, not wanting to commit myself until I’d seen what other invitations were coming in. But by the Friday, when there were no exciting dinners of any kind on offer, I was more than happy to accept her invitation to go out after Alexander McQueen.
We went to Brasserie Lipp, where she seriously impressed me by getting us a table, not only downstairs – most foreigners were instantly ushered up the
spiral staircase to Social Siberia – but in the front section where only the chosen few were ever seated, and strictly locals. We were actually next to Sonia Rykiel, who ate there practically every night.
It was Rosie’s perfect French and intellectual appearance – i.e. hopelessly ungroomed and badly dressed – that had swung it, I realized. My French was OK, a result of that six months in Paris as a child and the expensive education that Ursula had given me, and it was good enough to tell that hers was pretty much native.
‘I read French and economics at Cambridge,’ she told me, when I remarked on it, raising her glass of burgundy to chink my kir royale. ‘And I lived here for several years. That’s how I got into fashion writing actually. I was living over here as a correspondent for The Sunday Courier, mainly covering French politics, but one day they got me to interview a young designer who couldn’t speak any English, because their fashion editor at the time couldn’t speak any French, and when she left I got the gig.’
At least that explained her dress sense, I thought, taking in the details of that evening’s outfit, which was as apparently random as usual. This one featured some kind of terrifying long-line crocheted cardigan in ecru string, over a black polo neck and a flowery summer skirt, with heavy black knee boots.
When Alice mixed heavy boots with floaty dresses it was some kind of a poetic statement, but on Rosie it just looked like a horrible accident. She had flaking pale pink metallic varnish on bitten fingernails, and her hair was in its customary un-style, centre parted and limply hanging. It wasn’t helped by the black macramé beret – string was clearly a theme for her that season – that she’d just taken off.
Despite our lack of taste convergence and her rather intense conversational style, I enjoyed Rosie’s company. As I had found at the Sunday salon, she stretched me in the brain department. Talking to her about shows made me think about them quite analytically rather than just going on about how ‘divine’ something was, like I did with everyone else. Which really meant how great I thought it would look on me.
Not that I got to say much. ‘Talking’ to Rosie one-on-one was rather more about listening than speaking, I had discovered, but at least she was worth paying attention to. Over the course of the dinner she gave me quite a detailed lecture comparing and contrasting Jean Paul Gaultier and Alexander McQueen, both of whose shows we had seen that day.
‘Gaultier is essentially inspired by retro aesthetics,’ Rosie was saying, fixing my gaze intently over her gigot of lamb. ‘But he is interested in how he can make them relate to current mores. McQueen, on the other hand, takes contemporary concerns and imposes them on to historical styling. The interesting thing is that although he goes back much further for inspiration, in the current context – with its universal sense of apocalyptic inevitability – he is the more modern designer.’
It was quite amazing really, I thought, how she could eat, talk, think and drink simultaneously without choking herself.
‘In the Eighties,’ she continued, stuffing in a large piece of bread, ‘before the current vintage boom, when most designers were interested in designing for a putative twenty-first-century utopia, or an ironic mis-topian take on that, Gaultier seemed paradoxically more innovative than his contemporaries.’
She paused to smile at me, rather smugly, while I chewed and nodded.
‘But now that we are beyond that rather metaphysical sense of millennial uncertainty,’ she continued, ‘replaced with an actual environment of chaotic change and apocalyptic insecurity, the more distant past becomes more relevant as a reference point, than recent decades. Fundamentally, McQueen’s is an aesthetic of anxiety, which I think is very interesting.’
I thought I pretty much got the gist of what she was saying and I was rather impressed. Impressed with her and impressed with myself for understanding and even enjoying such a conversation.
Then she started droning on about Rei Kawakubo, who was not my favourite designer, mainly because I never got an invitation to Comme des bloody Garcçons, and my mind was floating off into autopilot, wondering whether I should text Miles to see whether he was up for a postprandial parlez-vous, when Rosie said something that made me snap back to attention.
‘Are you happy at Chic?’ she asked, apparently out of nowhere, although I realized that she had just been talking about how she was enjoying working for magazines after ten years on newspapers.
I was really surprised.
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the great fashion magazines of the world and Bee is a wonderful editor. I love working for her.’
‘And you’re senior fashion editor, is that right?’
I nodded.
‘How would you like to be a fashion director?’ said Rosie.
‘On Chic?’ I asked, suddenly getting concerned that Rosie might be on a secret mission from Alice.
‘No,’ she said, slowly stirring her coffee. ‘On Surface.’
‘What’s Surface?’ I asked, with intense relief.
‘It’s a new magazine of which I have just been made editor-in-chief,’ said Rosie. ‘I’ve been given carte blanche to choose my staff and I would like you to be fashion director.’
‘Gosh,’ I said, almost spluttering with surprise. ‘That’s very kind of you, Rosie. I’m really flattered. Crikey, you sprang that on me. What kind of magazine is it going to be?’
‘It’s going to be a glossy fashion magazine, like Chic, or Vogue, or Bazaar, but with less fluff and more analysis. A fashion magazine for women who think.’
She smiled at me. One of her front teeth was quite grey.
‘There won’t be any relationship rubbish in it,’ she continued. ‘Or horoscopes, or beauty coverage. Our reader isn’t interested in mascara. But there will be more fashion shoots than in most glossies, interspersed with essays on trends and in-depth profiles of the more interesting designers by important writers. I interviewed Junya this morning, for the first issue.’ She flashed her rather smug smile again. ‘Imagine The Economist, but as a fashion magazine.’
I was still trying to imagine a woman who wasn’t interested in mascara but who would be interested in looking at loads of fashion pictures. It sounded a bit potty to me, but it’s always nice to be offered a job, so I didn’t say no immediately. Then something struck me.
‘If you aren’t going to have beauty coverage,’ I said, ‘how are you going to get the advertising revenue to finance the magazine? Most fashion magazines are mainly bankrolled by the beauty industry, not fashion, as you know.’
‘We believe that if the fashion and writing are good enough to attract the right readership – and they will be – the beauty houses will feel they can’t afford not to be in Surface, but we won’t be at their beck and call for editorial coverage. In fact they’ll come begging to us.’
‘Well, that would be nice,’ I said with all sincerity. ‘They torture Bee and Frannie.’ I laughed ironically. ‘My husband is one of the worst.’
She smiled again, as if to say – I rest my case.
‘So are you interested?’ she said. ‘Does “fashion director” appeal as a title?’
‘Well, of course it does, but to leave Chic would be a huge step. I would really have to give it some very serious thought and I’d need to know a lot more about – er – Surface, first. Like, where did you get the name from, for example? And who’s publishing it?’
‘When we get back to London, I’ll show you the dummy,’ she said, glossing over my questions. ‘I’m sure you’ll love it. The first issue isn’t coming out until September, so you’ve got a bit of time to make up your mind.’
I promised to think about it, although I didn’t think I was remotely interested at that point. But then again, I thought, on my way back to the Meurice in a cab – ‘Emily Pointer, Fashion Director’.
It did have a certain ring to it.
20
I handed in my notice at Chic less than two weeks later, straight after the new season ideas meeting.
Up until
that moment I had only been thinking vaguely about the job at Surface. I’d seen the dummy and had been impressed by the art direction, the number of fashion pages and the salary Rosie had offered me, plus, of course, the fashion director title appealed more and more. But I still didn’t think I wanted to leave Chic for an untried start-up mag.
The only thing that made me start to give it more serious consideration was Ollie’s reaction. He’d clapped with delight when I’d told him about Rosie’s offer. We were having a post-Paris dinner at Locanda Locatelli and he’d immediately ordered champagne to celebrate.
‘But that’s perfect, Emily, darling,’ he’d said. ‘A highly sophisticated, internationally focused product, with a respected editor, nicely niche and intellectually edgy, but not way-out streety, and the right job title for you at last. You’d be mad not to take it.’
‘Are you sure, Ollie?’ I said. ‘We don’t even know who the bloody publisher is. It could be some seriously dodgy porn baron, or an arms dealer. I’m on a good gig at Chic, I know Bee likes me and I haven’t been there that long, so it’s not like I’m stagnating. I’m really not sure, but you seem to be absolutely convinced.’
‘One hundred per cent, sweetheart. You know I wouldn’t encourage you to leave Chic on a whim. I’m convinced this is the right move for you.’
I took more notice of Ollie’s opinions on these things than anyone, but I still hadn’t decided to do it – until I sat in that new season meeting and heard Alice reel off every single story on my ideas list one after the other. The Sarajevo thing last time had been a shock, but this was like being in the ‘X Files’. Especially as I had typed up my list and printed it out at home to be double, triple sure she couldn’t get hold of it, but somehow she had.
The ideas Alice suggested weren’t exactly the same on every detail of photographers and locations – although even some of those were identical – but the basic story concepts all were. I just stared at her in disbelief.
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