More Than You Know

by Penny Vincenzi

  “Oh, God, it’s so exciting,” said Eliza. “Thank you so much, Fiona; I couldn’t be more flattered or excited if you’d … well, I can’t think of anything. Crikey. It’s just amazing.”

  She really must stop saying things like crikey; it made her sound as if she was back in the sixth at Heathfield.

  She got an interview two weeks later. She rather liked Jack Beckham, terrifying as he was; he reminded her of Matt Shaw. He was dark and heavily built, with quite a strong London accent, and he looked completely out of place in the rather rarefied air of Charisma’s offices. Not that they were too much like those of most of the magazines she knew, full of pretty, posh girls in miniskirts chatting up models and effete photographers. The atmosphere here was much more serious, with a couple of very intellectual-looking men—one the assistant editor—and the features department, which was next to fashion and twice its size, was full of the sort of girls who had probably, Eliza thought, been to Oxford, clever-looking creatures with wild hair and arty clothes, with voices two octaves deeper than their twittering counterparts’. Their office, moreover, was full not of clothes rails and beauty products, but great piles of books and records and a couple of tape recorders, and the pictures on the walls were not of Jean Shrimpton and Pattie Boyd, but Kenneth Tynan and Norman Mailer.

  Beckham’s office was full of smoke; he had a cigar smouldering in an ashtray on his desk and a cigarette in his mouth. He leaned back and studied her.

  “So you’re Fiona’s great discovery. I hear you were a deb or some such rubbish.”

  “I was,” said Eliza, “but that wasn’t my fault.”

  “Well, I suppose not.” He smiled at her. He had liked that. “What makes you think you can do this job for us?”

  “I don’t—yet. It was Fiona’s idea. But I’d love to try. I think Charisma is amazing.”

  “And what’s the most amazing thing you’ve read in it?”

  This was a test; she’d prepared for it.

  “I think the piece about the down-and-outs. It was … well, it was great. So well written, and the photographs were—”

  “Bollocks,” said Jack Beckham.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said bollocks. I bet you don’t have the slightest interest in down-and-outs.”

  “I …” This was perfectly true; she smiled at him reluctantly.

  “Tell me the truth: what really grabbed you?”

  “OK, the piece about the cloakroom attendants at all the big hotels.”

  “That’s more likely. Why?”

  “Well, because I must have met lots of them. And never realised what extraordinary lives they lead. And the people they deal with on a daily basis.”

  That was a pathetic answer; it made her sound like what she was: a spoilt, upper-class girl.

  “Good. I like that. That’s what we try to do in all our features. Turn accepted ideas on their heads. Think you can convert that into fashion?”

  “I … I don’t know. I mean … surely that’s Fiona’s job. She’s the editor. I’d just be her assistant.”

  “Yes, yes, but we don’t want some crap yes-girl in that job. We want someone with balls. Understand what I mean?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “I interviewed Bernard Woolfe once. For the Sunday Times. Bit full of his own importance, I thought.”

  “Well, in his world, he is very important,” said Eliza staunchly. She wasn’t going to be tricked into bad-mouthing her present boss.

  “Tell me why you think so.”

  “He’s done something amazing with that store. Especially the department I work in. It’s the first to have anything like that.”

  “Well, maybe. Like him, do you? It’ll be very different working for me, you know.”

  “I can see that.”

  “You can?”

  “Yes.”

  God, she shouldn’t have said that. Now he was going to ask her in what way. But he didn’t. He laughed instead.

  “You have a certain honesty, Miss Clark. I like that. Now, you’re not going to get married and have a baby like that wretched Lucy creature, are you?”

  “Absolutely not!” said Eliza.

  “You sound horrified. I thought that was what girls like you were trained to do.”

  “I’m not like girls like me,” said Eliza coolly.

  “I shall remember that. Hold you to it, even. Well, we’ll let you know. Lot of people want this job, you know.”

  Eliza had to wait two weeks; Jack Beckham insisted on seeing every girl who had applied. But he told her he’d actually made his mind up when she first told him she wasn’t like the other girls like her.

  “Now don’t let me down. And no marriage and no babies.”

  “Of course not,” said Eliza.

  “Eliza? Jeremy here.”

  “Oh—Jeremy, hallo.”

  “I wondered if you were free this Saturday?”

  “Jeremy, I’m so sorry; I’m not. I’m going to go down to my parents’ for the weekend.”

  “Never mind. Only a party. Plenty more ahead. Enjoy your weekend.”

  “Thank you. And you.”

  She put the phone down, looked at it thoughtfully. He did seem to be quite … keen.

  They had been out together a few times now: he had taken her to Sybilla’s, the newest of the new clubs, and to the opening of the wonderful new National Theatre, with Peter O’Toole playing Hamlet—everything he did seemed to be so glamorous.

  He was an absolutely perfect boyfriend. She really didn’t know whether she was actually falling in love with him or even whether she was anywhere near being in love with him.

  But she did like him a lot. There hadn’t been any suggestion of sex—yet. Just kissing, which he did really well. But then, he was just such a gentleman, he’d never dream of pushing it; he probably just thought they didn’t know each other well enough yet. Which maybe they didn’t.

  He had a very big job at KDP; he was a group account director, a breed known at the agency as the Lords. “And a few of them actually are,” Jeremy said, grinning at her. “Lords, I mean.”

  “Yes, I’d heard you’d got a few there. And that you recruit from … what was it, two universities, three schools, and four regiments. Is that true?”

  “More or less. Yes. It’s a kind of neat copy line, isn’t it?”

  He took his work very seriously; it was one of the things she most liked about him. It wasn’t just something he did to pass the time, like a lot of rich blokes. “I get a really huge buzz out of it—you know, getting the strategy for the ads right, working with the creative people, selling it to the clients. It’s incredibly satisfying. It’s like a battle. A lot of advertising terms are military, you know; it’s rather intriguing: things like strategy, campaign, operations room—yup, it is a battle. One I want—no, need—to win.”

  She liked that too.

  He earned a great deal of money and he had a seemingly limitless expense account; his office was very grand and indeed like no office Eliza had ever seen. The agency was housed in a row of what had been three rather splendid buildings in Carlos Place, just off Grosvenor Square; the chairman was a legendary American advertising guru called Carl Webster. “Well, Americans invented advertising,” Jeremy said when she expressed surprise.

  Lunches, when clients would be entertained in the dining room on the top floor of the agency, with its huge oval table and view across to the square, would often run from midday until six, when a switch would be made to cocktails and plans for the evening.

  They were unashamedly snobbish; even the secretaries at KPD were very well-bred. “They all disappear and we have to get temps for Ascot week, you know,” said Jeremy. “And one of the typing tests includes spelling champagne correctly, and Bollinger, of course. Then we know they’re suitable.”

  Only the creative people, recruited from the art schools, were from the other ranks, as Jeremy called them; boys from secondary moderns, quick, sharp, and irreverent, with total
ly original ideas on design, and openly, if jokily, contemptuous of their social superiors.

  The other thing that was absorbing Eliza, even more than her romance with Jeremy, was her new job. She absolutely adored it. As well as running around as general dogsbody at sessions and in the office, she was consulted endlessly by Fiona, and in the most flattering way, about ideas, plans, sessions—and what on earth they could do when they went to the Paris collections.

  “Jack’s agreed we’ve got to cover the collections, but he says he simply will not have any crap about fabrics; he wants a proper idea. I can’t think of anything. Can you?”

  Eliza said she’d try.

  Sarah enjoyed the weekend—most of it, anyway. It was wonderful to see Charles, and it had been lovely to see Eliza; they had had the most marvellous walk together on the Saturday afternoon, Eliza chattering all the way. She was so excited about her new job, which did sound wonderful. And she had been out with Jeremy Northcott several times, it seemed.

  “But don’t look at me like that, Mummy. I do like him and he likes me; we get on together very well, but that’s all.”

  Sarah tried not to think beyond that, but it was difficult.

  They all had a very jolly supper on Saturday night, and played Scrabble afterwards; Charles explained to Juliet that it was a family tradition.

  “It’s Scrabble or the cinema, and there’s nothing on.”

  Juliet protested that she was hopeless at Scrabble, and after about half an hour, when she was doing really badly, she started to sulk and said she’d like to go to bed, she was terribly tired.

  “I don’t want to appear rude,” she said, “but I’ve had a terribly busy week, and I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

  Sarah said of course she didn’t appear rude. “Just have an early night, my dear. Charles, what about some cocoa for Juliet—”

  “Cocoa would be lovely. Charles, darling, would you mind?”

  They started discussing the wedding plans next day, immediately after breakfast.

  Juliet made notes in a pink spiral-bound exercise book into which she had already stuck photographs torn out of magazines of wedding dresses, bouquets, even honeymoon locations.

  It was all perfectly natural, of course, Sarah thought, that she should be so excited, but she couldn’t help feeling rather sorry for Charles, who was clearly dying to get outside and to spend some time alone with his father. Juliet wouldn’t allow that; she said she wanted him very fully involved.

  No doubt about who would be boss in that marriage …

  After they had all gone, Sarah went for a walk and then came back and sat in the kitchen, next to the Aga—it being the only really warm place in the house—and tried to concentrate on the Sunday Times. It was difficult; she really couldn’t get worked up about the successors to the ailing prime minister, Harold Macmillan. It seemed very unimportant.

  She was delighted—of course—that Juliet and Charles wanted to have their wedding at Summercourt, but it did seem to fly in the face of the natural order of things. She quite liked Juliet—but she just wasn’t quite what she would have expected Charles to have chosen. She had hoped for … well, someone a bit better than Juliet. She was simply—Oh, stop beating about the bush, Sarah thought—she was simply not quite their class. She was rather dreading meeting her parents; she could see they would have very little in common …

  Like millions of other people, Eliza knew exactly what she was doing when she heard that President Kennedy had been shot. She was in bed for the first time with Jeremy Northcott. For the rest of her life she was unable to think of one event—with its attendant shock and sense of unreality—without the other.

  They were in her flat, trying to decide what film to see that evening. It was a toss-up between a rerun of La Dolce Vita at the Curzon, which she wanted to see, and Lord of the Flies, which he did.

  Eliza was very happy. Very happy indeed. She didn’t think about what might happen in the future; she was just enjoying the present.

  The weekend looked good. She and Jeremy were going to a party on Saturday; Charles and Juliet were going down to Summercourt with the Judds; Sarah had wanted her to go, but she couldn’t face it.

  “Do you want a cup of coffee while we argue about the film?” she said now, and: “Do you know, I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “Had one too many G and Ts at lunchtime. Mind if I put the radio on?”

  He was a news junkie, always “catching the news,” as he put it. Eliza smiled at him, then turned her attention to finding the coffeepot; as she did so, she heard a newsreader’s voice: “… has been shot as he rode in his motorcade through the streets of Texas. It is not yet known how serious his condition is.”

  When she heard the words “Mrs. Kennedy is at the hospital” she sat down abruptly and listened, stunned with a shock that felt personal, as the ghastly story was told. And when finally Jeremy said, “Dear God in heaven,” she went into his arms, surprised at her need for comfort.

  They sat on the sofa in the drawing room, drinking the coffee and listening to the endless reports, repeating over and over again, “John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the president of the United States, is dead”—first the English voices, shocked and stunned, then the American ones, even more so, reactions from the crowds, first in Texas and then in New York, disbelieving, grief-stricken. They turned on the television, saw the photographs that would become iconic, of the Kennedys arriving in Texas, both untouchably glamorous, both smiling, waving, she in her Chanel suit and pillbox hat, he with his thick hair lifted by the wind. “It’s almost unbearable,” Eliza said. “Look at them; they were safe then, just an hour or so before. Oh I’m talking nonsense; sorry, Jeremy.”

  “No, no, it’s not nonsense. I understand; I feel the same. It’s like some awful nightmare that we should wake up from. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really feel too much like going to the pictures now. What would you say to a nice quiet meal somewhere?”

  “I’d say, ‘Hallo, nice quiet meal,’ ” she said, and grinned at him. It was a familiar joke of theirs.

  “OK. San Lorenzo?”

  “Yes, lovely,” she said.

  San Lorenzo was surprisingly full. People obviously wanted to be with other people. There was talk of nothing else: who had heard, what they’d heard, how dreadful it was, how appalling for Jackie, who might have done it—it was the Mafia, it was the Cubans, it was the Russians.

  Finally they had had enough. “Let’s go,” Jeremy said suddenly. “Your place or mine?”

  “Yours,” said Eliza. “There’ll be at least two giggling girls at mine.”

  “Possibly not giggling tonight.”

  “You want to bet?”

  Jeremy’s flat in Sloane Street was rather amazing. It was quite old-fashioned, admittedly, a mass of gilt mirrors and rather grand furniture and a very out-of-date kitchen, but it was luxurious beyond belief, room after room, high ceilings and tall windows overlooking private gardens. Her first thought when she went there (and her second and third, if she was honest) was how extremely rich he must be. Jeremy had inherited a very large amount of money from his banker grandfather, and when his father died, he would get an incredible house in Norfolk, pretty well a stately home with vast acreage, a flat in the South of France, and several millions more.

  “Right,” Jeremy said as they walked in, “you go and sit down. I’ll get us a drink.”

  He had been totally silent as he drove to Sloane Street; she wondered whether she had upset him in some way; it was so unlike him.

  Eliza went into the snuggery—the drawing room seemed rather overwhelming for the occasion—and waited for him rather nervously. He walked in finally with a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

  “Goodness,” she said, “is it really a champagne moment?”

  “It could be,” he said, and sat down beside her. “What would you say to champagne in bed?”

  Silence, while the shock of it thudded into her head; and then, “I’d say, ‘Hallo, champagne in bed,’
” she said, and laughed, and he laughed too, and he kissed her, and she stood up and reached for his hand and they went into the bedroom, his sumptuously grand bedroom, and sat in bed drinking the champagne and not saying very much more really and … well, then …

  It was, well, it was very nice. Yes. Very nice indeed. And definitely better than anything she’d known yet. Which wasn’t much, of course. Just one other chap after the first. Another drunken country-house occasion. She’d felt terribly depressed after that one, cheap and tarty, and also beginning to think maybe it was her. Being frigid or something. Her friends all claimed to like it, to find it wonderful, even. Maddy said she had what she described as gorgeous sex with her boyfriend, Esmond, who was a hatter and very pale and thin, and if Eliza hadn’t been told otherwise, she would have thought he was queer.

  Anyway, sex with Jeremy was honestly not gorgeous. But it was very, very pleasurable—of course it was—and thank God, she thought, she’d found that wonderful lady gynaecologist who’d put her on the wonderful pill. She just kept waiting for the wonderful, fireworky stuff to happen—and it never did. And that really was a bit of a shock: that sophisticated, experienced, man-about-town Jeremy Northcott should not be able to do better for her than that.

  She pretended a bit—she had to, really—and the worst thing of all, she felt, was that he seemed to believe her.

  Matt never forgot November twenty-second either. It was the day he took delivery, as the salesman put it, of his new car. His first car. His own car.

  He picked it up first thing in the morning: a racing-green Triumph Herald, with wire wheels and go-faster stripes, and a twin exhaust that roared most satisfyingly every time he put his foot down.

  Driving it into work, he felt completely different: smoother, more confident, no longer an inexperienced boy, but a successful young man going to work, carving his way through the traffic rather than waiting to cross the road, warm and comfortable, not standing at the bus stop in the rain.