by Wendy Holden
Laura sat down on the vampish sofa. ‘I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here,’ she began, reasonably.
Clemency stopped swinging and leant forward. She gave a sickly sweet smile. ‘What does it look like, darling? I’ve got your job!’
Laura swallowed. For a second, the room tilted. Then the feeling of shock, of defeat, of her worst fears being realised, became a great, galvanising fury. She clenched her fists.
She forced it down, however. There was no point screaming at Clemency. The person behind this move was Bev Sweet. The real question was – why? Clemency was a terrible editor. She could backstab and scheme her way to the job, but once there, she was useless.
‘You,’ Clemency added, with a vicious satisfaction, ‘are now my deputy.’
Laura sat back on the red lips. So that was it. Still, at least she hadn’t been sacked.
It wasn’t great, all the same. Clemency would get the glory, the glamour and the deference. But Laura, as deputy – i.e., dogsbody – would do all the work.
On the other hand, this at least meant that she was no longer responsible for the Scottish issue. Which, given how she now felt about the place, was just as well. Her effort at smiling at Clemency was more successful this time. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘you’ve got a lot on your plate. You’re going to have to make the Scottish issue work.’
Clemency stared at her. ‘What Scottish issue?’
‘The 75 per cent advertising one.’ Laura tried to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. ‘The one I just went to Scotland for.’
‘Canned.’ Clemency waved a gold-fingernail-tipped hand. ‘It’s not happening. Bev realised it was a hide into nothing, that the ads would never come through.’ She gave Laura a mean red grin. ‘So all your time’s been wasted. Such a shame!’
Laura had never expected to hear Clemency Makepeace saying anything she wanted to hear. She tried to keep the spike of joy out of her voice. ‘So what’s the theme of the new issue, then?’
Clemency tossed her rippling auburn hair. ‘Bev,’ she said.
‘Bev?’ Laura repeated. ‘You mean – Bev Sweet?’ She was confused. How on earth could the magazine be about her?
It was possible that there was something defensive about the way Clemency now folded her arms. ‘Bev’s just had her birthday party, so obviously we’ll be putting it in the party pages.’
Laura relaxed slightly. It wasn’t unreasonable or unusual for the CEO to have a photograph in the social section. Christopher Stone had had one or two over the years. If that was all, fair enough.
‘We’re giving it twelve pages, the whole section,’ Clemency went on, toying with an auburn strand.
‘Twelve pages!’
‘Absolutely.’ A pair of narrowed green eyes skewered Laura’s. ‘And Bev’s currently buying a holiday home in Marbella from a completely fascinating firm of high-end international estate agents. They’ll make a riveting article and coincidentally they’re very interested in taking a few pages of ads.’ She swished her red hair about and gave a feline smile. ‘Oh, and she’s a member of a prestigious Belgravia gym. They’re also quite keen to advertise.’
Laura’s mouth had dropped open. She could see what was going on now. Her precious magazine was to become a vehicle for the positioning of Bev Sweet as a high society figure and the monetisation of her lifestyle. How Clemency had got the job was no longer a mystery.
‘What about the cover?’ Laura broke in. Bev Sweet certainly couldn’t be on that. Aspirational, money-grubbing and power-crazed she might be, but she was no Cindy Crawford. The magazine’s front, at least, must maintain some sort of standard.
Clemency smiled sweetly. ‘Bev’s daughter Lilibet’s going to be our cover girl. She’s an up-and-coming actress.’
‘Is she?’ Laura had never heard of Lilibet Sweet.
‘Well, she will be once she’s been on our cover. She’s taking acting lessons at the moment.’
‘What does she look like?’ If it was anything like her mother, this was a non-starter.
Clemency’s eyes widened in mock amazement. ‘I’m surprised at you, Laura. We’re living in a Time’s Up world where shallow and rigid ideas about appearance have to be challenged.’
Lilibet was hideous, in other words.
‘We’re running a big interview with her.’ Clemency paused and favoured her with a dazzling smile. ‘Which you, Laura Lake, will be writing.’
*
At lunchtime, Laura went for a fast walk to let off steam. A strong wind was whirling the leaves about the garden square opposite the building. They mirrored Laura’s angrily whirling thoughts.
Society under Clemency was a joke, although not a very funny one. The magazine, which Laura had made great efforts to position into a scoop-grabbing leader in its field, full of thought-provoking features and interesting people, had gone violently into reverse.
The idea of the Scottish issue had been bad enough, but even worse was a Bev Sweet special whose every page sought to aggrandise the British Magazine Company’s unspeakable CEO. It made Laura long for the days when Raisy and Daisy, the fashion editors, would burst into meetings declaring it was all about emergency blanket metallics or extra-extra neon. And for Tatty, the luxury editor, to explain that thank-you presents for presents were a thing now.
She felt guilty about Sandy too. The Glenravish article would now never appear, and Sandy would never be able to sell the place and escape.
Laura was surprised, therefore, to turn from the garden square through a little courtyard where an expensive restaurant had tables outside, and hear a familiar sound.
‘Hwah hwah hwah!’
Laura screeched to a halt so suddenly that her Chelsea boot heels struck sparks off the pavement.
The woman had her back to her, but there was no doubt about it. While, for once, a pie-crust collar was not in evidence, an electric-blue dress was, its shoulder pads extending into the middle of next week. Her hair was just as unmistakeable; who else, after all, sported stiff blonde wings on which an entire can of Extreme Hold had been discharged? Most tellingly of all, her lunching partner was a thumping red-faced pinstriped Hooray who seemed to have come straight from the eighties without touching the sides. His earsplitting ‘yah yah yah’ echoed round the courtyard.
Laura hurried to her side. ‘Sandy!’
‘Cripes!’ Sandy it was, right down to the blue mascara, the nuclear explosions of blusher and the heart-attack lipstick. From the front, her dress was even more of a vintage classic than it seemed from behind. It referenced the darkest days of Princess Diana’s wardrobe, accessorised with vast black circular plastic buttons and completed with black patent flats topped off with electric-blue bows. ‘Haven’t seen you since you went off stalking with Struan. He said that you suddenly decided to go back to London. And who can blame you, hwah hwah hwah.’
Laura registered the official explanation for her non-return to Glenravish. Possibly anyone bar the capital-fixated Sandy might have smelt a rat, but the lady laird, desperate to reach the fleshpots herself, obviously thought it perfectly normal.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Enjoying myself, hwah hwah hwah.’ Sandy dug a fork into a great pile of spaghetti exploding from the centre of a crustacean. ‘Haven’t had Lobster Thatcher since the good old days! Luigi rustled it up just for me.’
‘Can’t see the point of lobster,’ boomed her red-faced companion. ‘Can’t think of anything worse than poking and prying into all those leg thingies and getting one mouthful for ten minutes’ work.’ He stuck his fork into a large sausage and prised it out of a mountain of mash.
‘Hwah hwah hwah,’ honked Sandy. She gestured with a lobster claw. ‘Have you met Rupert? Rupert, this is Laura. She’s an absolutely brilliant magazine editor.’
‘I say, is she really?’ Rupert’s pale, exophthalmic eyes were rolling in his head as he looked Laura appreciatively up and down. Laura felt much as she imagined a cow at market must feel, but als
o rather guilty. Her brilliance as a magazine editor, should it exist at all, was not now going to do Sandy any favours.
‘Yes, she was going to write a piece about Glenravish. Glass of poo, darling?’ Sandy waved a bottle of champagne at Laura.
She watched Sandy slosh the foaming liquid in the glass and felt more embarrassed than ever about not being able to deliver the promised article.
But possibly they were evens, because shouldn’t Sandy feel embarrassed about sending her out with a homicidal stalker?
‘Well, she won’t need to do that now, will she?’ brayed Rupert. ‘Not now you’ve flogged the crumbling old pile.’
Laura, sipping her champagne, found it suddenly going up her nose. ‘What? You’ve sold Glenravish?’ She stared in amazement at Sandy, who nodded violently, but not violently enough to dislodge her hairsprayed wings.
‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ Sandy raised a champagne glass into the air. ‘I’m back in London! I’m free!’
Chapter Twenty-seven
It was a week later, and the evening Edgar’s whistling choir was to perform. Laura had decided to go along. She had nothing better to do, needed a distraction after a day on the ever more ghastly Bev Sweet issue and, besides, it would be free.
By way of an apology for the recent disturbance Edgar had shoved a couple of tickets through her door. She had been touched and distressed in equal measure; he clearly thought Harry was still around. It was probably just as well he wasn’t, though, Laura decided, having examined the tickets more closely. The Shoreditch Whistling Choir were appearing with the Garbage Orchestra Collective. The venue was a multi-storey car park scheduled for demolition. The Last Night of the Proms this definitely was not.
Laura’s first thought was to ask Lulu to come. The two of them had not been in touch since Lulu rescued her in her helicopter. But Lulu had been elusive recently; Laura was not entirely sure she was even back in London. Laura had been shocked to hear, during the return in the helicopter, that Lulu had had an almost equally traumatic experience of Scotland. Perhaps she had gone on one of her recuperative New York shopping trips.
Laura, meanwhile, had been battling to keep, if not her job, then a job. This had been one humiliation after another, the worst being the interview with Lilibet Sweet. How it would make a cover piece was anyone’s guess, but Laura had done her best.
She half-thought of asking Sandy to come to the concert. She was, after all, permanently in residence in the capital now, renting in the same Earl’s Court building in which Princess Diana had, pre-marriage, once flat-shared with three friends. Laura wondered if sausage-eating George had had the courage to break the terrible twenty-odd-year-old news and decided that he probably hadn’t.
Sandy, however, had proved irritatingly secretive about the identity of the purchaser of Glenravish. She had insisted it was more than her life was worth and Laura didn’t relish the prospect of a further evening trying to winkle it out. Sandy, at any rate, would be completely baffled by the idea of a whistling choir, let alone a garbage orchestra collective. Who wouldn’t?
She decided to go on her own. Solitude, anyway, suited her current mournful state of mind.
‘It’s taters, Laura, where’s yer weasel?’ yelled Ben from the inside of Gorblimey Trousers, and Laura doubled back. He was quite right, the evening was cold and she would need a coat.
The multi-storey car park resounded with the hubbub of a fashionable crowd. Laura threaded her way through men with curated beards and women whose floaty dresses were teamed with eighteen-hole lace-up boots. She had hoped to see Edgar, but there was no sign of him, nor of anyone who might be a garbage collective orchestra.
They were clearly somewhere, however, as at the appointed time all the beards, dresses and boots started disappearing from the main mustering area down some stairs. Following them, Laura entered a large concrete room full of heating ducts and pulled-out wires. There was no natural light at all. Builders’ lamps shone on a wall against which a number of people in hazmat suits stood with their backs turned. Piled around them were cardboard boxes and oil drums. It looked to Laura as if something had gone very wrong in the council’s recycling department.
‘Novichok?’ someone behind Laura muttered. A ripple of uncertainty spread through the crowd packed into the small space.
Laura, however, felt almost at home. The darkness, the bleakness, the edgy urban vibe, took her right back to the start of her career in journalism, when she had been in Paris, so skint she had accepted a job sitting on a mattress in a morgue, surrounded by rubbish. The mattress – and the rubbish, for that matter – had been a cutting-edge installation called Call This Art? by a British contemporary artist called Amy Bender. There had been compensations: it had led to her job at Society, and she had met Caspar. At the time he had been an out-of-work actor, not the Hollywood superstar he was now. Or had been, until his recent fall from grace. Laura was just starting to wonder how he was – he was so hopeless, or maybe too famous, about keeping in touch – when something jerked her abruptly from her thoughts.
‘Is what going on?’ A familiar voice now rang round the basement, putting into words what everyone was feeling. Laura felt a great smile split her face in the dark.
‘Lulu!’ she called into the crowd, just at the moment the hazmat suits turned round, did jazz hands and launched into a whistled version of Michael Jackson’s ‘You Wanna Be Startin’ Something?’ Edgar was at the end, a little out of time, Laura noticed.
The ones not whistling had seized the boxes and oil drums and begun banging wildly away at them with drumsticks. The noise was deafening, much too loud to talk. It was like some extreme mutual therapy session. Perhaps it was. But what was definitely the case was that conversation would have to wait until the interval.
After what seemed years of violent crashing and tuneless screeching, a pause came in the proceedings. Laura, who had squeezed and slid her way back to the entrance so as to be first out, practically ran back up to the ground floor of the car park. Here, night had fallen. The building-site arc lights shone powerfully down on trestle tables ranged with Peckecco, the local Peckham-produced sparkling wine in plastic cups. Grabbing a couple – her nerves were shot to pieces – Laura looked eagerly round for Lulu.
She was easy to spot, and not just because of her pile of blonde hair and rhinestone-studded trousers teamed with a bolero of shaggy white fur. In silver wellies overprinted with the Chanel double ‘C’, she was standing at the back of the drinks queue, lip pushed crossly out beneath the ever-present huge sunglasses.
Laura smiled. Lulu hated queuing, especially for something not champagne. As she hurried towards her friend, waving her spare plastic cup, she felt comforted to see a huge Hollywood-white smile split Lulu’s deeply tanned face. It had been a long time since someone was this pleased to see her.
‘Laura! Thank God you here, hmm?’ Lulu grabbed the wine and knocked it back in one.
‘How come you are?’
‘Is South’n Fried. Whistling garbage bug thing.’
‘Big thing,’ corrected Laura, though some of the garbage collective had certainly looked less than pristine. One, with matted grey dreadlocks to his knees, had been scratching himself throughout. ‘You mean it’s attracting attention?’ She looked about. There were certainly a lot of people here.
‘Is right. Music producers and big arse men here tonight, hmm?’
A & R, Lulu guessed. Artists and repertoire. Talent spotters from big record companies, in other words. It made sense for South’n Fried to see and be seen here. He stood some distance away, the centre of an admiring crowd. Sporting a white fur coat over a suit printed with Marvel characters, he looked quite his old over-styled self. She could see the rubies in his teeth gleaming even from here.
Laura guessed that this meant that the Land of the Purple Haze had now finally been ruled out. But the demanding Nadine Salmon’s loss was the Shoreditch Whistling Choir and Garbage Collective Orchestra’s gain: presumably they would be pe
rforming on the new album. Edgar would be thrilled. He was a big South’n Fried fan, and Laura had heard the rapper pounding through her ceiling in the early hours long before she had ever met him.
‘You must be glad to see the back of Scotland,’ she remarked.
Lulu nodded happily. ‘Back to Scotland tonight, yes. In helicopter.’
Laura’s jaw dropped open.
‘We have new plan. Nadine Salmon going to love it.’
Laura frowned. She couldn’t see the famously brusque Scottish First Minister getting behind a whistling choir. Especially not one from Shoreditch. ‘You’re surely not still trying to get South’n Fried into Land of the Purple Haze?’
The blonde hair nodded. ‘Of course! Is big festival! Big relaunch. So we have bought big estate!’
For a single, hopeful second Laura wondered if she was talking about a car. A big car, with a rear door. Suitable for loading music gear into. The British called those estates, after all.
But then again…
Laura swallowed the rest of her Peckecco. Lulu couldn’t surely mean what every nerve in her body was now telling her she did mean. ‘A… Scottish estate?’ She could not be serious. Not even Lulu, who bought houses like other people bought handbags.
Lulu had dived at the trestle tables and grabbed another two cups from right under the beards of the queue. Stern facial hair was being turned in her direction, but these bounced off Lulu’s sunglasses like water off a duck’s back. ‘Nadine Salmon,’ she said, after a triumphant slurp, ‘can’t say South’n not Scottish enough. Not when he big lard, hmm?’
Laura was too horrified to correct her. A terrible suspicion had seized her. ‘Not McBang’s estate?’ Had Lulu bought it after all, even though it wasn’t his to sell?