by Ilana Fox
‘Madeline would never do that to me.’
‘Oh, you’re so wrong. Madeline and I have grown rather close recently – well, we do have a lot in common – and she is perfectly prepared to go to any number of magazines or newspapers so that the whole world knows the truth about you. She’d prefer to break the news to your father in person, considering how decent he was to her when you were married, but other than that she’d be happy to go to the press. She needs the money, you see. Madeline and I both agree that it’s time she gets what she’s owed. And while we’re sorting out what she rightly deserves, I need some hush money too.’
Joshua looked at Mia blankly. Ordinarily he thrived on negotiations, but Mia had him backed so far into a corner that he was willing to give her whatever she wanted to shut her up. If he lost his reputation, he thought, he would lose everything – his position within the company, the respect of the industry and his pride. ‘What do you want?’ he said emotionlessly.
Mia sat down on her sofa and crossed her legs. Her silver dress rose slightly up her tanned thighs, and even though she looked like a model, she spoke like a confident business-woman who knew she’d won a bloody battle. ‘Ten million pounds each. Call it severance pay, and neither Madeline or I will ever go to the press with our story.’
Joshua stared at Mia, and his mouth dropped open. ‘I don’t have a spare twenty million sitting around. And if I don’t have it, you can’t have it.’
Mia laughed. ‘You may not have it, Joshua, but your publishing company does,’ she said, while smiling lazily. ‘I asked Debbie to get the latest finance figures from Edward Sampson-Brown, and it seems Garnet Publishing is doing rather well. Ten million pounds each is small change to the company, and the figure is – at the very least – what we’re worth. After all,’ she said, ‘what price would you put on your reputation?’
Joshua didn’t speak for a minute as he assessed the situation. It would be worth spending £20 million just to get Joanne Hill and his stupid ex-wife out of his life, he thought. Just so long as they never darkened his door again.
‘You will both sign a statement saying you will never speak about any of the things mentioned tonight,’ Joshua said, menacingly. ‘Because if a word of this gets out, you will not only be liable to give me back every single penny, but I will sue you so hard for breach of contract that you will have to beg your surgeon to take back your breasts in order to raise the money you’ll owe me.’
Mia grinned. She didn’t have a problem with his terms at all. ‘Get the contracts to us within twelve hours and you have a deal,’ she said, glancing at her clock. It was nearly one in the morning, and twelve hours was plenty of time for Joshua to call his lawyers to an emergency meeting. ‘If you don’t, I won’t be held responsible if Madeline happens to phone up her cousin in tears. Do you remember her cousin, Joshua? The one who writes for The Times?’
Joshua shot Mia the most malicious glare she had ever received, and without saying a word he swept out of the penthouse and on to the rain-sodden streets of London’s South Bank. As soon as he left, Mia slumped on her sofa, and it wasn’t until she noticed the pink diamond ring glittering on her living-room floor that she realised she’d won: she’d taken on Joshua Garnet and beaten him. All the nervous energy that had built up soon drained from her body, and Mia felt only calm, soothing relief that quickly gave way to pure, ecstatic exhilaration. Even though she knew she could phone Amelia, Gable, Lucy or Madeline to fill them in on what had happened, Mia realised there was only one person in the world that she really wanted to celebrate with, and that was William.
Chapter Twenty-One
May 2008
A year later Jo was composing an email on her computer when Madeline walked into her office. Jo looked at the older woman carefully, and realised, sharply, that her business partner was beaming at her – something she’d never done when she’d worked at Garnet Publishing. When Madeline smiled, Jo thought, her whole face relaxed, and despite being in her forties, Madeline looked ten years younger than she really was. Motherhood suited her, Jo realised with a jolt, and she recalled how Madeline and her new partner, Dan, had summoned her to the hospital to meet Alfie Turner when he was only three hours old. Madeline had gazed down at her son with such tenderness that Jo had felt a pang of regret about how badly she’d treated Madeline in the past.
‘Lucy phoned, and she says that Joshua has just called a crisis meeting,’ Madeline said happily, as she sat down on a cow-print chair in Jo’s large glass-fronted office. Framed covers of Cerise – their first women’s glossy magazine – hung on the hot-pink walls, and in pride of place on Jo’s desk was a photograph taken on a recent trip to Thailand. In the photo Lucy and Amelia were hugging each other, and Jo was being carried, piggyback style, by Gable. She was beaming directly at the camera. Jo knew that without the support of her friends she would never have been able to get through the intense weeks of media coverage about her surgery and deception, so she had treated them all to a luxurious few weeks on a remote Thai island.
Jo leant back in her indigo leather chair and laughed. Her natural brown hair fanned out on her shoulders, and even though she’d put on half a stone and wasn’t wearing any make-up, she still looked as beautiful as she had done when she was pretending to be Gable’s little sister. ‘So he’s finally realised that Cerise is going to shut him down,’ she commented, and Madeline nodded as she smoothed out a wrinkle in her white Prada suit. In it she looked more like Bianca Jagger than ever.
‘Lucy says that the staff have been whispering about Gloss folding and people being made redundant,’ Madeline added. ‘However, Lucy’s certain she’ll be offered a position on one of the other Garnet magazines. Apparently Joshua is still so sucked in by Lucy’s simpering routine that he told her he “values her editorship skills”. Really, he hasn’t a clue that she’s actually employed by us to ruin Gloss from the inside.’
‘Good,’ Jo said with satisfaction. ‘But until Gloss goes under, Lucy is going to have to keep on pretending – we’ve worked too hard for anything to go wrong now.’
When Jo – or Mia, as she’d been known at the time – had decided to launch her own magazine to rival Gloss, the first person she’d phoned was Madeline. Over a lunch of chicken Caesar salad and mineral water at Soho House, Madeline had agreed to partner up with Jo and form Platinum Publishing, a consumer magazine publishing company that would specialise in high-end magazines as well as web properties that complimented their brands. They funded the company with the hush money they had received from Joshua Garnet, and within a fortnight they’d rented a large office in Soho and employed a receptionist, a research team, an art director and an advertising sales team. For six months both Jo and Madeline worked fourteen-hour days and planned every aspect of their first launch. Cerise magazine, they had decided, was going to be aimed at women who were sick of being dictated to by shiny women’s magazines like Gloss and Cosmopolitan, and even though the ideology behind Cerise defied convention, Jo knew that the magazine would be an instant success.
When Jo was growing up, she had always wanted to tell magazine readers which clothes from the catwalk would be the season’s hottest trends. Now, however, the internet had changed all that, and even though magazines could still dictate, their messages were falling on deaf ears because women preferred the instant accessibility of the internet to magazines that were out of date because they only came out monthly. Jo’s research team discovered that women now visited and created websites that helped them carve out and define their individuality, and in doing so they stopped buying the magazines that said, rather sinisterly, that if they didn’t wear tulip skirts or Sienna Miller-style leggings they were committing fashion death. Jo saw that Cerise would never work if they preached to women in the same way that Gloss did, and instead she focused on the pick-and-mix ethos of the blogs she was reading; the online diaries where women could publish what they really liked, rather than pretending to rate the same fashion and trends that magazines told them to bu
y.
Jo watched the internet intently during those six months of planning. For so many years she had viewed magazines as her knowledgeable older sisters, and when Jo had been at school, magazines were her best friends – they were what she turned to when she was feeling insecure and believed she didn’t know any of the answers to life. Even though the magazines couldn’t help her lose weight or make friends, Jo drew comfort from knowing the best way to apply liquid eyeliner, or who the hottest new Brazilian model was. What Jo didn’t realise was that the magazine makers weren’t trying to make Jo feel better about herself, but were in fact hoping they would make her feel worse by subliminally saying, ‘You don’t know this, but we do, so therefore you need us because you’re as worthless as you think you are.’ Now she was older, Jo believed that women’s magazines sold unhappiness and insecurity, and what she wanted to do with Cerise was sell happiness instead. Jo didn’t want people to feel dissatisfied with their lives when they were reading Cerise, and she hoped they would feel normal for not fitting into a magazine-produced stereotype of who they had to be, what they had to buy and say, and – most importantly – what they had to look like.
As Jo had planned the launch of the magazine and accompanying website, she’d realised that not only was she breaking down the messages that all other women’s magazines were sending out, but she was also destroying the media-produced stereotype of what a beautiful girl should look like. With hindsight, Jo now realised that she too had subscribed to the magazine ideal of beauty, and that it was magazines she had turned to when she was planning her cosmetic surgery. Rather than just envying the pretty girls in the magazines like so many other readers had, Jo had taken it to an extreme and bought herself that near-unobtainable beauty so she could have a career in the media. Jo felt ashamed as she realised how shallow she had been, and she set about trying to transform herself back into a version of the girl she had been before she had surgery.
The first step was to rid herself of her golden hair and to become a brunette again. When the hairdresser at Charles Worthington had removed the towel from around her head, Jo’s eyes had filled with tears on seeing her newly dyed hair. With shiny mahogany hair, Jo looked like the slimmer, prettier version of the lumpy girl she could remember being as a teenager, and as she admired herself a quiet rage formed within her, spurring her on to make sure that Cerise was the best women’s magazine in the UK. Jo knew she couldn’t blame Gloss entirely for the media-construct of women – where all girls were supposed to be beautiful, slender and highly sexualised – but she did know that her magazine would never be held responsible for making any girl who was slightly plump or plain feel bad about themselves again. But as well as making her readers feel more secure about who they really were, she also wanted to entertain them and make them laugh, and she formulated Cerise to be everything she had ever wanted in a magazine herself. When Jo and Madeline looked at their first dummy copy before sending it to the printers they both agreed that they had never seen anything like it. They both thought it was the best magazine in the world.
The first issue launched as a package of showbiz gossip, paparazzi photographs that showed what celebrities really looked like without airbrushing, and real-life stories that all women could identify with. Instead of employing a fashion director who was a slave to what men wanted women to look like, Jo employed a team of girls who were so hungry to be part of the industry that they had previously set up edgy fashion websites that reported on the trends on the street. In Cerise, each fashion journalist described real-life fashion that they saw in London, New York and Milan, and on top of that the magazine invited readers to email in high-resolution photographs of themselves in their favourite outfits. The mix of real fashion combined with straight-talking reportage of the catwalk shows was a hit with women who didn’t have the money to copy what the fashion houses were churning out, and Jo and Madeline toasted their success. They had combined citizen journalism with celebrity glamour, and the readers were lapping it up. So much so that Lucy, who was now editing Gloss, reported a forty per cent drop in the Garnet title’s circulation soon after they had launched. Jo remembered their conversation exactly.
‘Joshua is beside himself,’ Lucy had said quietly down the phone, after she’d spotted Joshua throwing a copy of Cerise magazine at Debbie in a rage. ‘He’s asked me to think of ideas for Gloss that will get our circulation rising again. What do you think I should do?’
Jo had laughed. ‘Put a stick-thin blonde on the cover and make sure that your fashion pieces are even more commanding than usual,’ Jo had said. ‘Oh, and find a Hollywood anorexic and write an editorial saying now women aren’t sexy if they’re not as thin as her.’
Lucy hadn’t spoken for a moment. ‘I get what you’re saying, but isn’t that a little irresponsible?’ she’d asked. ‘I mean, Gloss still has some readers, and I’d hate to think of them starving themselves because we’ve declared size zero the coolest body shape for the year.’
Jo’s smile had frozen. She had been so intent on destroying Gloss that she hadn’t thought about their readers. ‘You’re right,’ she’d said seriously. ‘Why don’t you take the most extreme outfits you can find from the catwalk and tell your readers that they won’t look sexy unless they copy them completely? You know, full-blown Gautier sailor costumes for the office, and Betty Jackson gothic ball-gowns for nights out on the pull. Rather than looking fashionable your readers will just look silly instead. And hopefully they won’t resort to throwing up to lose a drastic amount of weight.’
Lucy had chuckled down the phone. ‘You got it,’ she’d said, and the next issue of Gloss followed Jo’s advice perfectly. Circulation dropped even more, and as a result Joshua closed Cycling Monthly and spent their budget on redesigning and marketing Gloss. When he did so, circulation fell further, and it was then that Jo had realised that it was only a matter of time before Gloss went out of business.
*
‘Joshua has to be shutting Gloss down, he’s run out of options,’ Madeline said, as she crossed her legs and leant back in her chair. Her white Dior sandals, crusted with crystals, sparkled in the sunlight that beamed into the office. ‘I’ve thought about what else he can do to salvage Gloss’s brand, but really, nothing can be done. It’s dead, and he knows it.’
Jo smirked, and as she did Madeline was struck by how fresh-faced Jo was, despite working to deadline the night before. Her simple navy blue Chloé wrap-dress showed off her size-twelve curves, and the diamond solitaire necklace that hung from her neck nestled on top of her lightly tanned cleavage. Despite everything Jo had gone through in the last year she still looked stunning, and as she thought about Gloss shutting down her cheeks flushed excitedly. ‘I bet it hurts for him to realise it, too. Not only have we put one of Joshua’s most successful magazines out of business, we have also done it with his money. That’s got to be painful.’
Madeline smiled. ‘He deserves it.’ She sighed and looked out of the window that overlooked Soho Square. Outside people were enjoying the early summer sunshine on the grass, and Madeline itched to be at home with her baby. The sooner Gloss folded, the sooner they could employ Lucy to run Cerise, meaning that she could take the maternity leave she desperately craved. Madeline tried to stop thinking about her son and work, and changed the subject. ‘Now, while we’re waiting, tell me what you thought about Jake. He certainly liked you – he’s already sent me an email asking if you’d appreciate a phone call.’
Jo recalled the weekend before, when she had attended one of Madeline’s dinner parties. Although the food had been excellent – Madeline had asked her local Thai to deliver as she didn’t have time to cook – Jo had been set up with Jake Pritchard, an investment banker who kept Porsches and visited New York for long weekends. The moment Jo had seen him she’d admired his choppy light-brown hair, his impressive broad shoulders, and the way his eyes twinkled when he gave her an easy, relaxed smile, but there was something about Jake that just didn’t feel right. There was no spark.
‘Jake was lovely,’ Jo began slowly, hoping she wouldn’t hurt Madeline’s feelings, ‘but …’
Madeline raised her eyebrows. Jake was one of many men she had set Jo up with, and yet again, he didn’t fit the bill despite being one of London’s most eligible bachelors and clearly having a thing for Jo.
‘But he’s not right for you,’ Madeline concluded with an exasperated sigh. ‘You do know you’re going to have to get over this mythical William fellow at some point, don’t you?’ she asked gently, and at the mention of William’s name she saw Jo flinch.
‘There’s nothing to get over,’ Jo said lightly, forcing a smile. ‘William Denning and I were never “together”, and to be honest …’ Jo trailed off when she saw that Lucy had appeared in the doorway to her office, and in a flash all thoughts of William disappeared. Lucy stared at Jo and Madeline with a grave expression, and for a moment neither partners of Platinum Publishing felt as though they could breathe. Lucy clearly had news, but it didn’t look good.
‘Well?’ Madeline whispered, as Lucy looked down at the floor. Jo looked from one woman to the other, and before she could stop herself she felt her heart sink. Gloss hadn’t folded, she thought. Somehow Joshua had weaseled out of the inevitable yet again and had managed to keep it going. Just as Jo felt disappointment run through her body she saw a tiny flicker of laughter appear at the corners of Lucy’s mouth, and in that moment she knew they had done it.