‘I gave her a minus ten for appearance,’ she informed Jodie, who was sinking into the chair, grateful for its support; her legs were feeling distinctly weak. ‘And no one recovers from a minus ten.’
There hadn’t been one girl in that waiting room who could conceivably have been described as a minus ten – not, at least, by Jodie. Heart in her mouth, she stared at Victoria, who had swivelled her chair and was crossing her legs, tapping on the notepad with her pen. It was true, what Jodie had heard: the back of Victoria’s chair was bolt upright to ensure perfect posture, beige leather made to her own specifications. Her blonde hair was swept back perfectly, literally not a single hair out of place, the side parting over her ear as straight as if it had been executed with a ruler. The collar of her 3.1 Phillip Lim shirt was flicked up, emphasising Victoria’s long, slender white neck, heavily twisted-around by strands of huge black pearls, gleaming purplish against the pale background. Victoria’s desk was a shiny sheet of glass, uncluttered by anything but a silver Apple Mac, the notepad, the pen, and a silver-rimmed glass of bubbly water in which a slice of lime floated. Through the clear glass, Jodie could see Victoria’s waist, impossibly small, and her legs, most of which were on display in her tiny beige mini-skirt.
‘So,’ Victoria said, snapping Jodie out of the trance into which she had fallen while taking in the exquisite perfection of Victoria’s appearance. ‘Am I to assume this was deliberate?’
She flicked the pen up and down in the air, indicating Jodie’s hastily-assembled outfit. Jodie opened her mouth to give one answer, made a series of lighting-fast calculations, and told the truth instead.
‘I came in for the interview,’ she said, ‘and everyone was dressed exactly the same.’
Victoria’s blonde brows drew together. ‘Including you?’
Jodie nodded. ‘And they were all doing it better than me. So I ran out and got some new stuff as fast as I could.’
‘And your hair?’ Victoria asked. ‘Because frankly, it’s a dog’s dinner. It actually gets worse the more I look at it. Minus two.’ She made another note.
Jodie hadn’t had time to get her hair restyled. All she’d been able to do was to pull it out of the chignon she’d spent so much time on that morning, brush it out and leave it loose. She was growing out the layers, and it looked shaggy, she knew; but she’d given it a quick spray with styling lotion in Boots just now, and at least it was smooth.
She reached a hand up to it, embarrassed, as Victoria said, ‘So, tell me about this outfit that you cobbled together.’
At least she hasn’t deducted points for my outfit yet, Jodie thought frantically. It was hard to breathe: Victoria’s narrow grey eyes were fixed on her face, noticing, Jodie was sure, every spot and blemish that she’d done her best to cover up that morning.
‘Well, the T-shirt’s from Benetton,’ Jodie started nervously. ‘I know it’s not trendy, but they’re really good quality and the cut is timeless. I picked navy because that suits me better than white, and it’s a classic colour. And long sleeves, because I wanted to keep the bangles and I really like them piled up over a sleeve. It looks sort of medieval, which is coming back in. I think it’ll be huge next year.’
She lifted one arm to show off the effect; the hem of the sleeve was pulled down to the base of her thumb. Victoria nodded.
‘Plus four,’ she said. ‘Go on.’
Emboldened, Jodie continued, ‘The jeans are Karen Millen. She cuts really well for my shape and they’re classics too—’
‘Minus two for describing them as classics,’ Victoria snapped. ‘The grey will date fast and there’s too much branding. I can see the name on those hem zips from here. I loathe visible branding. But,’ she paused, ‘they do work with those cheap shoes of yours. The length is right, and they fit you well. Plus two. We’ll call it even.’
Jodie gulped.
‘My hair was in a chignon,’ she said feebly. ‘But I pulled it down and brushed it out. I thought anything was better than looking like all those other girls. And to be honest, it looked better on most of them than it did on me.’
Victoria huffed: it took Jodie long painful seconds to realise that this was a laugh.
‘Yes, you won’t do well copying my style.’ Victoria set down her pen, recrossed her slim legs under the glass table, and swung the one on top as if to show off her beige crocodile-skin Prada shoe. ‘You’re not thin enough, frankly. You don’t have the bone structure to pull your hair back fully. And there’s too much pink in your skin for you to wear white.’
She looked down complacently at her legs, tanned to a delicate gold. Though naturally pale, Victoria was known to have weekly spray-tanning sessions in order to achieve her perfect, even colour.
‘Remind me where you’re working now?’ Victoria asked.
She huffed another little laugh when Jodie muttered, ‘Wow magazine.’ Jodie felt ashamed even mentioning something so lowbrow in front of Victoria Glossop. ‘It’s a weekly. I don’t have much of a budget, but I’ve done some good layouts. I can show you . . .’
She leaned down to pick up her portfolio, which she’d placed by the side of her chair when she sat down, sensing that it would be a huge no-no to put it on Victoria’s immaculate desk. Even now she hesitated, not wanting to set it on the smooth sheet of glass in front of her unless she was specifically invited to do so.
‘Don’t bother,’ Victoria said, waving it away with an imperious gesture. ‘It’ll all be cheap, cheap, cheap.’ She shivered. ‘I despise cheap. You know this job isn’t an editorial one? You’d be working as my assistant. As far as status goes, you’re below the junior shoe editor and the handbag girl whose name I can never remember. You’re at my beck and call. I’ll put you through hell. I assume you know all this already – I’m well aware of my reputation.’
She smiled, briefly flashing even white teeth, each one polished to an opalescent gleam. Somehow, Victoria’s smile was even more frightening than her words; it was anticipatory, looking forward to the appalling treatment to which she would be subjecting her next assistant.
‘So tell me why you want this hellish job,’ she continued.
Jodie leaned forward eagerly, her eyes bright, only to be stopped by Victoria holding up a hand to stop her. Her huge grey diamond engagement ring blazed on the fourth finger, precisely the colour of her eyes. Jodie, who had read up everything that had ever been written on Victoria, knew that although it had been bought by her husband, Victoria had seen it in a Sotheby’s auction catalogue in a sale of jewels owned by the Bavarian royal family: she had had her assistant send it on to her then boyfriend with a note that this would be the only ring Victoria would consider accepting when he proposed – as she assumed he was bound to do. He had instantly fallen into line, as everyone seemed to do around Victoria. Once duly presented with it, she had promptly had it reset more fashionably than the Bavarian royal family’s jeweller could achieve, and insisted that Alexander McQueen, who had designed her wedding dress, match the exact shade of grey for the embroidery on the bodice.
‘I don’t want to hear that this is the opportunity of a lifetime,’ Victoria said briskly, ticking off no-go areas on her fingers. ‘Or that you’ll work harder than anyone else I’ve ever employed, or that I’m your idol and you’d do anything to sit at my feet and learn from me. Or any variations on those themes. Surprise me. Tell me something that no one else has today. And make it quick,’ she added. ‘I’ve wasted far too much time on these interviews already.’
Jodie forced herself to sit back in her chair, to try to look as cool as the woman sitting opposite her, who held the key to her future in her manicured hands.
‘I just completely restyled myself in less than an hour,’ she said. ‘And I bought your receptionist a coffee to make sure I got to see you last. If I can think that quickly on my feet, I can do anything you need me to do, and faster than anyone’s ever done it before.’
Victoria stared down her nose at Jodie, tapping the toe of her shoe again
st her silky-smooth golden calf.
‘Plus ten. Fine. You start in three weeks,’ she said. ‘Davinia goes off to run the fashion cupboard in a month, and she’ll have to spend a whole week training you up first. But there are two conditions. First, go out now, buy some decent shoes and throw out those ghastly ones. I can practically smell the cheap leather from here, and it’s making me nauseous. Second, lose seven pounds, minimum. No one who works for Style is more than a size ten, and you’re clearly at least a twelve. If you step over the threshold in a month’s time and haven’t lost the weight, I’ll spin you on your heels and send you packing. Are we clear?’
‘As crystal,’ Jodie said valiantly.
No shepherd’s pie for me, she thought. Mum’ll be so disappointed, but she’ll have to understand. The diet starts now – I’ll live on Ryvita, apples and zero fat cottage cheese. I can do this, she told herself determinedly. It’s totally worth it.
Victoria was flapping her hands at Jodie as if she were shooing geese, the grey diamond flashing; it was the signal for Jodie to jump out of her chair, grab her bag and make for the door.
‘Oh, one last thing,’ Victoria said, head turned towards her computer monitor. ‘Your name. That’s a minus ten. I can’t possibly have an assistant called Jodie.’
Utter panic spiked through Jodie’s veins, a surge of adrenalin so sharp she flinched from the shock. She froze as if she were playing a game of Musical Statues, portfolio under one arm, the bag dangling from her other hand the only thing that moved as Victoria continued:
‘We’ll have to call you something else. Believe me, I’m doing you a favour. Hmm . . .’ she glanced down at her skirt ‘. . . I’m loving Chanel at the moment. Coco! There you go. From now on, you’re Coco. Don’t bother to thank me. Tell Davinia on your way out.’
Mouth open, fingers sweaty on the handle of her bag, Jodie staggered out of Victoria’s office. Skinny Jeans, aka Davinia, was sitting at the desk that would be Jodie’s in a month’s time.
She looked up at Jodie and drawled, ‘Do tell me you got the bloody job, won’t you? She’ll be even more of a bitch if I have to line up six more girls for her to rip to pieces.’
Jodie nodded, wordless with shock.
‘Oh, thank God,’ Davinia sighed in relief.
‘Only now I’m called Coco,’ Jodie managed to get out.
Davinia didn’t even blink at the news. Looking at her – slim, confident and off to the dizzy heights of the fashion cupboard – Jodie wondered whether Davinia, a year or so ago, had also been a size 12 girl with a bad haircut, called Nadine or Cheryl or Kimberley, with a much less posh accent than she had now . . .
‘Well, good luck, Coco,’ Davinia said dryly to her replacement. ‘You’re going to need it.’
Victoria
Victoria Glossop had never spared a thought for other people’s sensibilities. Not her parents’, not her three brothers’, not a single person with whom she had ever come into contact. Feelings were messy and unpredictable, a swamp in which you waded around, not knowing what you’d step on next or what would wind itself around your legs and try to pull you down into the fetid depths. Victoria had always had her own feelings very firmly under control, the more vulnerable and sensitive ones shoved down so far that she would have had great difficulty accessing them. Not that she had any wish to do so. Even when she got angry, threw a tantrum, rampaged around the office shouting at her terrified staff, she knew exactly what she was doing, was able to measure the precise level of fear and trembling she wanted to induce in her victims.
An indifference to other people’s feelings was one of the principal reasons Victoria had been so successful. The other was her world-class ability to charm and flirt with powerful men, honed by years of practice on her father and brothers. A brilliant lawyer who had climbed the career ladder smoothly from QC to judge, Victoria’s father was the incarnation of an authoritarian paterfamilias who bullied his sweet fluffball of a wife and ruled his sons with a rod of iron. He had never realised how much he wanted a daughter until Victoria was born, the last child and by far the most indulged one. From the moment she could walk and talk, Victoria’s sharp little brain had identified her father as the one with all the power. She had quickly been able to wrap him round her little finger. Judge Glossop had chosen a pretty, feminine woman to marry; if Victoria had been a different kind of girl, she might have considered it very unfair of her father to pick an adorably ditsy, scatty wife and then spend the marriage criticising her for precisely the qualities for which he had proposed to her in the first place.
But Victoria had always been on her father’s side. The side with the money, the control, the intelligence. Having worked out how to manipulate her father, she used the same techniques on her brothers: charming, beautiful Victoria, always dressed, by her mother, in the kind of pretty clothes that her father considered appropriate, cut a swathe through her entire family from an early age. Her mother was dazzled by her, openly admiring Victoria’s ability to do what poor downtrodden Mrs Glossop couldn’t – get exactly what she wanted from the judge.
Victoria could easily have been a politician or a lawyer, if her father hadn’t emphasised how important he considered femininity in a woman – and if she hadn’t hugely enjoyed the process of choosing clothes, dressing up and then twirling in her new finery in front of her besotted father. The only items in poor Mrs Glossop’s household budget which her controlling husband never questioned were the huge sums spent on Victoria’s outfits. Her brothers, all competing constantly to please their father, were now, respectively, a QC, a decorated naval officer, and something in MI5 that he wasn’t allowed to talk about, but the child Judge Glossop boasted about constantly, the one whose photograph had pride of place on his desk, was Victoria, editor-in-chief of Style, a fashion icon in her own right.
Still, despite Victoria’s meteoric rise to success, all she had achieved in her thirty-four years of life, she had one more crucial goal to achieve. And – she checked her slender gold watch bangle, a Vacheron Constantin antique which had cost her husband nearly ten thousand pounds as her birthday present last year – it was almost time for the dinner appointment which might bring the ultimate prize within her grasp.
Victoria’s heart pounded with excitement. This meeting had been a long time coming. She’d schemed and planned and manoeuvred for years to get here, worked every single contact she had, charmed her way inexorably towards the ultimate goal: the crucial conversation she was going to have over dinner with Jacob Dupleix, head of the Dupleix media empire, the man whose name was on the building, who made the ultimate decisions about who edited his flagship magazines. Jacob’s range of investments was enviably extensive. He had been an early adopter of the internet, and his tentacles stretched far and wide throughout the media. But no matter how much money Jacob coined from all the pies in which he had fingers, his real love was print. His magazines were his babies, his editors carefully chosen for their artistic skill and business sense, but also for their ability to incarnate the magazines they represented.
Thin, elegant, hyper-chic Victoria was the living, breathing embodiment of UK Style; however, this coveted, prestigious job, was, to her, simply a stepping-stone to the definitive job in fashion. The peak of the pinnacle. The biggest prize of all.
Picking up her Bottega Veneta bag, Victoria pushed her chair back and stood up from the desk. She looked around her office with a critical eye, at its polished teak floor, silk rugs and custom-made cherrywood bookcases housing back issues of Style, and her own huge collection of photography and fashion tomes. She strode towards the door in her high-heeled United Nude pumps, designed by the famous architect Rem Koolhaas – white leather ballet-style shoes set at a stratospheric angle to the blocky black heel. They were very hard to wear, very hard to build an outfit around, which was precisely why Victoria had chosen them. Thousands of women would try to copy her by buying the Block Pump Hi and fail abysmally to look as good in them as Victoria did.
By the
time she had opened the door, Coco was already on her feet and moving towards her boss with a loop of wide brown sticky tape already wrapped around her hands, as if she were winding wool. Victoria opened her arms as if she were being crucified. She stood there motionless, the huge white handbag dangling from one wrist, as Coco meticulously went over her with the tape, lifting every single tiny piece of lint from Victoria’s clothing. Coco unwound the tape, dropped it into the wastebasket, produced a lint roller and repeated the process, now including Victoria’s wide suede belt, which she had avoided with the tape, the delicate surface of the suede being too fragile to be touched by anything sticky.
‘Your car’s waiting, Victoria,’ Coco said as she finished the linting. This was a procedure she executed at least four times a day – when Victoria came into work, before and after her lunch, and when she left for the evening. Plus, of course, after Victoria had been looking at angora or cashmere samples, or whenever she capriciously deemed it necessary. ‘It’ll be pulled up outside when you leave the building. The Fiji water in the car is chilled to twelve degrees this time. I’ve instructed the driver to take it out of the fridge three minutes before he picks you up.’
Victoria merely nodded, but that was more than enough praise for Coco, who continued, ‘Your table at the Wolseley is waiting and Mr Dupleix’s assistant has confirmed he’s on his way there. He’s due to arrive at least five minutes before you.’
Victoria refused to enter a restaurant unless she was sure that at least one of the people meeting her was already present. She had been known, on being informed by a greeter that she was the first member of her party to arrive, to turn on her heel and return to her car, making the driver circle round the block until her assistant had rung to assure her that the person she was meeting had checked in at the restaurant in question.
‘And when I leave?’ Victoria asked, holding out her hand imperiously for her shaved-mink jacket, silver-blue, soft and luxurious. ‘Last time—’
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