by Pippa Wright
‘No, Roars, not unless, like, it’s a disaster movie. Like, Shampoo: The Reckoning. How did you feel when you looked in the mirror?’ She cocked her head to one side in an I-am-listening-attentively gesture.
I had a creeping suspicion that Ticky, for all that she seemed to be trying to help me at the moment, might have somehow engineered my disastrous hairstyle to create more drama for her vicarious enjoyment. Not that I am suggesting she told her hairdresser to make me look stupid, but that arranging a visit to the salon was probably done more in her interests than in mine, even if she wasn’t aware of it. Subconsciously it suited her to keep me in a state of victimhood so that she could continue to be the supportive confidante. After all, as long as I was lurching from one emotional disaster to another, her entertainment was guaranteed.
‘I hope you didn’t pay him,’ she said, rubbing my arm reassuringly.
‘Of course I bloody paid him!’ I said. ‘I even tipped him! I didn’t want to make a scene.’
Ticky stared at me in amazement. I knew she wouldn’t understand. She and her friends were the kind of people who could remain entirely oblivious to the dark looks and resentful mutterings of a pub full of locals as they loudly brayed their way through a Sunday lunch in a tiny village. They believed the world enjoyed listening to their loudly expressed opinions; they had been fed giant helpings of self-confidence along with their boarding-school suppers (never dinners, only common people ate dinners). They had a sense of entitlement so strong that it never occurred to them that not everyone was as delighted with them as they were with themselves.
‘Roars,’ she said gently. ‘It’s, like, not making a scene to say you hate what someone’s done to your hair. It’s just an exchange of money for service, and if that service is crappy you’re totally allowed to say so?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I agreed, to get her off my back. I knew she would have preferred me to have had a screaming row with her hairdresser just so that she had something outrageous to discuss with him the next time she visited for her highlights. My silent seething was not nearly dramatic enough for her purposes. But this was my life, and I was not living it for her enjoyment, I thought bitterly. Although, to be honest, nor did I seem to be especially living it for my own enjoyment these days; more struggling through each day in turn.
I visited the ladies’ far too often that day. I wasn’t sure what I expected to have happened to my hair each time; it’s not as if it would have magically grown back while I sat at my desk answering emails, but I kept returning to the mirror as if it might have improved since the last time I checked. I was turning my head from side to side in yet another despairing analysis when I heard Amanda’s strident tones mixed with Martha’s equally loud ones in the harsh blend of voices to which everyone in the office was horribly accustomed. And it was heading towards the ladies’. Panicked, I threw myself into a cubicle, locked the door and tucked my feet up on to the loo seat, hoping they would think it was out of order rather than occupied.
I heard the door swing open and two pairs of heels click on to the tiled floor. You could tell which ones were Amanda’s – they had the tight plink of spiky, expensive, spindly heels, the impractical kind that suggested (accurately) that their wearer spent more time in taxis than on foot. Martha’s were stouter, more clompy, but louder. I had long suspected that she received them as a kickback from the advertisers at the back of the magazine; they looked suspiciously like the truly hideous ‘Comfort? Yes! And style, too!’ numbers offered by Weldon’s of Ludlow. And it would be just like Martha to aim so tragically low in her appropriation of magazine perks.
‘First a dating column, and now an agony aunt?’ Martha hissed. I don’t know why she thought lowering her voice would make any difference now the whole office knew she and Amanda had retreated to the ladies’.
‘Martha, I appreciate you are, even after three long years, uncomfortable with the new direction the magazine is taking,’ said Amanda wearily, ‘but fighting me over every change is simply wasting your time as well as mine.’
‘I’m not fighting against you, Amanda, I’m fighting for our loyal readers,’ Martha snapped. ‘Forty thousand readers can’t be wrong.’
‘Forty thousand readers six years ago, Martha,’ said Amanda, with a voice of steely politeness. ‘Only twenty-two thousand by the time I took over.’
‘Twenty-two thousand very happy and satisfied readers,’ Martha said. ‘And you are betraying them all with your silly women’s magazine ideas.’
Martha, although she did not have the shell of posh that shielded one from all doubt, had a blind spot all of her own. How did she not see that losing nearly twenty thousand readers in the space of three years was a bit of a problem? Of course there was always the possibility that the ageing readership had simply gone to the big country house in the sky instead of abandoning the magazine for more racy reading, but even so, no other company would have allowed Martha to stay on in any capacity whatsoever. The Bettertons, being a family firm, had only kept her on out of guilt and the knowledge that, after so long at Country House, she was effectively unemployable anywhere else.
‘Thirty-five thousand readers according to last month’s fgures,’ said Amanda. ‘So I must be doing something right.’
‘Barely a day goes by that I don’t get a letter from a reader complaining about the new changes! Only today I had one asking what had happened to the Janet’s Country Ramblings column,’ protested Martha.
‘Our Letters page is full of people who like the new changes,’ answered Amanda smoothly.
‘Letters that you’ve got Ticky Lytton-Finch to write!’
I stifled a gasp from my loo seat. Of course I knew that Ticky wrote half the letters that we published – if you saw the genuine postbag you would see why. I mean, who in their right mind would bother writing to a magazine to say, ‘I was most impressed with your new layouts. Keep up the good work’? No one does – they only write to complain when they don’t like something, or when they mistake us for the National Trust magazine and send fierce missives deploring the poor standard of cucumber sandwiches sold in the Knole Tea Rooms. But I thought we had kept this fact from Martha, who would never have allowed such a thing when she was Acting-Editor.
‘Ticky merely steps into the breach when our correspondence hasn’t quite delivered what we need,’ said Amanda. ‘Much as the Betterton family appointed me when you had failed to deliver what they needed.’
I smothered another gasp – although I thought Martha’s one-woman campaign to bring down Amanda was not only pointless but totally misguided, that was one hell of a smack-down. Martha evidently thought so too, because she was stunned into silence.
‘Martha. I am as uncertain as you about Rory’s dating column. That is why it’s been relegated to the website. But I put you in charge of finding an agony aunt for the magazine because I thought you might enjoy the challenge.’
I winced in my cubicle. I knew Amanda had doubts about my column, but it was still hard to hear her say so.
‘An agony aunt! Next you’ll be asking me to find an astrologer! It’s entirely inappropriate,’ snapped Martha.
‘I can always appoint someone else to do it,’ threatened Amanda. ‘And any other part of your job that you think “inappropriate”.’
I winced again; for Martha this time. As much as she was a complete nightmare, I couldn’t help but sympathize with her, nearing retirement age in her comfortable and not at all stylish Weldon’s of Ludlow shoes, having her entire world turned upside-down by this glossy fortysomething in her Louboutins. Of course Amanda was right, of course Martha had to be made to see it, but it was still painful to hear her be beaten down like this.
‘Fine,’ said Martha. ‘I’ll find you an agony aunt.’
‘Good,’ said Amanda. ‘And don’t bother asking Honor Blackman – she’s already said no.’
Her spiky heels clipped out of the bathroom and in a reflex action I found myself checking my watch – six minutes. Far of
f Amanda’s personal best, but an effective Martha-crushing nonetheless.
Martha’s heavy shoes stomped over towards the sinks and I heard a low sigh, then a series of sniffs. I sat very still for a full five minutes until she left the room.
Back in our office, Ticky was counting out a handful of coins on her desk, and I knew she must have won the latest bet. She guiltily scooped the money off her desk as I came into the room.
‘Oh, Roars, it’s just you, thank God,’ she said. ‘Six minutes on the nose. Well done me, eh?’
‘Yeah, well done you,’ I said.
I wondered if I was losing my taste for the office games that had once helped to pass the time. Sniggering outside the bathroom door in the knowledge that Martha – who had once had such power over all of us – was getting a pasting was totally different from hearing her being humiliated in person. Country House was far more than just a job to her; she visited properties at the weekends, she stayed late in the office, she felt each Amanda-sanctioned change as a stab in the heart. She was too close to retirement to find a job elsewhere, but too far from it to be able to look forward to her imminent escape. She was stuck, like a trapped animal, snapping and biting at everyone who approached her. I had the uncomfortable feeling that my sudden sympathy for Martha’s situation was not unrelated to the recent unravelling of my personal life. It would have made me a better person to have felt simple empathy for a fellow human being, but I couldn’t deny that my pity was tempered by a hefty dose of fear that, if I didn’t sort my own life out, Martha’s unhappy present might become my future.
11
‘Hello, ladies,’ drawled Lysander Honeywell, throwing himself into the chintz armchair that sat in the far corner of our office. It was clear that his usual clipped courtesy had been loosened by a certain amount of alcohol.
‘Christ, Lysander,’ shrieked Ticky, pulling him up from the seat, ‘can’t you look before you land your drunken arse down? You’ve sat on Mummy’s new fascinator that I just picked up from Fenwick’s. She’ll kill me.’
Ticky reached behind Lysander for a Fenwick’s bag and pulled out a sad-looking jumble of wires and feathers hanging limply from a tiny circle of fabric. I have never got the whole fascinator thing – is it a hat? Is it a hairclip? – but I think that is because I am not of a class that considers the highest possible praise for an item of clothing to be ‘fun’. As in ‘Gosh, Jocasta, yellow tights! What fun!’ Instead of, ‘Gosh, Jocasta, yellow tights! You have never looked more ridiculously like a garden bird.’ But fascinators were indisputably ‘fun’; even the most formidable dowager, corseted in stern upholstery, let society know that she was a spirited slip of a gel underneath it all just by wearing one on her steely locks. No posh country wedding was complete unless the congregation fairly bristled with them.
‘Yikes, awfully sorry, Victoria,’ said Lysander, blushing, or perhaps it was just a boozy flush. ‘If your ma complains, tell her I’ll buy her a new one. Throw in lunch, too. Haven’t seen her for ages.’ He slumped back down in the seat while Ticky huffed and sighed as she tried to restore the fascinator back to its maximum fun setting.
‘Bloody ruined,’ she muttered under her breath.
‘Nice lunch?’ I asked him. His pale-pink shirt was unbuttoned a bit too low, which almost certainly meant he’d had lunch with a pretty young book publicist. He was of the Simon Cowell generation which confidently believed the sight of an expanse of manly chest inspired as much lust in women as an exposed female cleavage did in men. The bared chest was an incongruous look for a book editor who, I always thought, would surely have come across better literary heroes to emulate than the Mills & Boon cover model. Still, I guessed it worked for him in a way; although he never got anywhere with the publicists, who were all half his age, he rarely seemed to be short of a lady companion.
‘Lovely young gel from the Pendragon Press,’ he said, settling back into his chair as if he planned to spend the whole afternoon there. Which he probably did. After a long lunch, Lysander rarely returned to his own desk, preferring to while away the rest of the day in idle gossip and office-hopping.
‘Where’d you go?’ I asked, less out of interest than to prompt the monologue that I knew was already prepared.
Lysander lay back, his hands folded across his stomach, legs outstretched. His eyes were half closed in fond reminiscence already.
‘Just a small place I know, run by an old chum of mine . . .’
I prepared for the clang of a name being dropped.
‘Jeremy Wells? L’Ecluse?’
‘Oooh,’ I said politely, as I knew was expected of me. I had been to L’Ecluse for a drink before, but it was a little out of my lunchtime price range, and Lysander’s. Pendragon must have been picking up the bill. I wondered how soon I could turn my attention back to the computer screen without being noticed.
‘I began with the soup of Jerusalem artichokes and bacon, while Leticia had . . .’ Lysander rambled on, going through every dish in immense detail and giving an account of his conversation which, if true, must have bored poor Leticia to tears as it was mostly designed to make her aware of his great importance and his close personal friendships with her bosses and authors.
I let him declaim from the depths of the chintzy chair while I quietly got on with my work. Even though it was he who had got her the job at Country Life, Ticky had no patience with Lysander; having known him since childhood she had suffered his monologues for too long already. But I didn’t especially mind having him drone on in the background. He was just a rather lonely man who needed an audience and, since he didn’t particularly mind if the audience was an attentive one, it felt a bit like having the radio on: you could tune in if it got interesting, and straight back out again when it tailed off.
He had been going for a good ten minutes when Ticky, with her usual want of tact, spoke loudly over him.
‘Roars, these unsuitable men. I’m just trying to think if I can set you up with anyone to kick you off. Do you have, like, an age range you want to stick to or just keep it wide open?’
I rolled my eyes in the direction of Lysander, who was looking a little put out at the interruption.
‘Lysander, can you just, like, put a cork in it for five minutes while I get on with some actual work over here? Yah, Rory, age range. What do you say?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, having not really given it any thought before. ‘Er, probably around my age?’
‘Oh no,’ said Lysander, leaning forward in his chair and clutching at the corner of my desk. ‘Oh but my dear, you would be ruling out so many interesting men. Men of an older generation have so much to teach younger women.’ He pressed a hand to his exposed chest and Ticky stuck two fingers down her throat.
‘You may laugh, Victoria Lytton-Finch,’ said Lysander with great authority, ‘but an older man knows how to spoil a woman, how to treat her like a woman. And, my dear Rory, if you don’t mind my saying, you look like you could do with a bit of spoiling right now.’
My hand crept to my hair; I knew I looked terrible. He smiled at me with a surprising sweetness. But surely he wasn’t suggesting . . . ?
‘Lysander, you dirty old perv, there is, like, no way Roars is going out on a date with you,’ said Ticky, completely disgusted. ‘She’s young enough to be your daughter.’
Lysander sniffed and sat up very straight. ‘Victoria,’ he said, ‘I will thank you not to speak to me in this manner. I am not a dirty old perv, as you so revoltingly put it, nor am I proposing anything untoward with Aurora.’
I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I mean, there was nominally unsuitable and then there was please-tell-me-you-are-joking-how-would-I-ever-live-this-down unsuitable.
‘I am merely suggesting,’ said Lysander, turning his back on Ticky to face me fully, ‘that by ruling out the older gentlemen, you may be ruling out some perfectly pleasant evenings.’
‘Well in that case, you can’t rule out the young ones either, Roars,’ said Ticky. ‘Like, you’
re going to have to be an equal opportunities dater? And do admit a hot young boy is quite a lot more appealing than one of Lysander’s wrinkled old cronies.’
‘Er, right,’ I said, feeling that actually neither of them was as appealing as someone my own age, someone with a decent job and a home and a shared history. Someone who was the youngest board director at Fairfax Accounting. Someone with a new girlfriend, I reminded myself.
Ticky decided that I should be seeking unsuitable men within an age range of twenty to seventy, which we all finally agreed was quite wide enough to encompass all kinds of unsuitability. Satisfied with her afternoon’s work, she decided to pop out of the office to spend her sweepstake winnings on chocolate. Lysander stayed behind, unusually silent in his floral armchair.
‘Aurora,’ he said, finally. ‘I wouldn’t normally suggest such a thing, but you are specifically looking for unsuitable men for your column, aren’t you?’
‘I am,’ I said hesitantly.
‘Only my cousin Ethelred—’
‘Ethelred?’
‘We all have unusual names in our family, Aurora,’ sniffed Lysander. ‘I would have thought you would sympathize.’
‘Sorry, do carry on,’ I said.
‘My cousin Ethelred is visiting London from the Highlands this week. Charming fellow, never married. Red-haired, just like you. I’m supposed to be meeting him for dinner at Wilton’s tomorrow night, but something has come up – a situation with a lady, if you understand my meaning.’
Oh God, I really hoped Lysander didn’t think that, just because I let him run his mouth off in our office, I was offering myself as some sort of confidante for his dirty dalliances.
‘Umm, right?’ I said.
‘So why don’tIring Ethelred and suggest he has dinner with you instead? I can promise he’ll be delighted – the old duffer barely sees a woman for weeks on end up on his ruddy estate, let alone a pretty girl of your age. And he’s rich as Croesus so you don’t need to worry about paying.’