Authors: Rebecca Chance
He’s given me a hugely powerful position, and
in return, he’s had his little dominant moment, made the point
that he has the ultimate power.
Well, that’s fine with me. I’ve always been happy to play Jacob’s
games; I’ve always come out of them exactly where I wanted to be
.
Victoria heaved a long sigh of release. She was finally free to
relish her dinner. For a moment, her fork toyed with the
chopped anchovies, tempted to mix them into the tartare, but
then she pushed them aside, her self-control as acute as ever;
she loved anchovies, but the high salt content would cause her
to retain water.
‘So who are you seeing now, Jacob?’ she asked, deftly directing the sexual tension that lingered at the table into safe waters.
‘Jools,’ Jacob said, and Victoria nodded at the name. Jools
Gosling was the latest hot British model, a runway sensation
with her high-stepping walk, boyishly-cropped hair and flatchested, long-waisted figure. ‘Lovely girl. She’s on a shoot in
Morocco for a few days.’
‘Aww, what a shame, Jacob,’ Victoria teased. ‘I bet you still
want it every night, don’t you?’
‘Hey, take me to Annabel’s after dinner and I’ll pick up a
slim young thing,’ Jacob said easily. ‘One of your upper-class
girls. I like ’em, you know that. Some Camilla or Vanessa or
Florence. See, I even know all the names. It’s not like Jools and
I are exclusive.’
‘You know, Jacob, you should get married,’ Victoria
observed.‘To a nice Camilla or Vanessa or Florence. It’s about
time, don’t you think? When the models you’re dating are less
than half your age . . . Jools is barely twenty.’
Jacob’s thick eyebrows shot up. ‘Marriage? Honey, I did that
once, in a galaxy far, far away, a loooong time ago,’ he said,
drawing out the vowel for comic effect. ‘And that was enough.
I’ve learned my lesson. Besides,’ he added, reaching out to lay
a hand on hers, ‘I like my serious women really smart. You
know that. Your English aristocrats, they’re not so bright. No
hips, big brain: that’s my ideal woman.’
‘Well, I’ll happily come with you into Annabel’s,’ Victoria
said, finishing her steak tartare with satisfaction. ‘And you can
pick up some skinny Sloane, spin her on her axis, and show her
the time of her life.’
Dinner at the Wolseley, a celebration toast in full view of all
the tables that count, and then off to Annabel’s, Victoria
thought, anticipating the visit to London’s most exclusive
nightclub, its membership list packed with hereditary titles,
where Lady Gaga, no less, had played a private set just last
year.
And we’ll have another celebration toast there. Jacob told me
not to breathe a word about my new job, but I won’t need to.
London gossip will do it for me
.
Jennifer Lane Davis is going to feel a cold wind blowing over
the Atlantic and down her neck very, very soon. Better start packing up your desk now, Jennifer
.
In her mind, Victoria blew her rival a little goodbye kiss.
Bye bye, Jen. Don’t let the door of the editor’s office hit you on
the way out
.
Coco’s voice tailed off as she realised that her boss had
already hung up on her. Victoria saw no point in staying on the
line after she’d conveyed what she needed to. Coco set the
phone back on the bar table.
‘All okay?’ her sister Tiff asked, slurring her words a little,
her eyes bright with alcohol. ‘Whasshe want now?’
‘To make sure her driver’s waiting outside the restaurant for
her and Jacob Dupleix,’ Coco said, a thrill running through her
at merely saying his name; he’d been in the building today but
hadn’t come into
Style
, which had been a huge disappointment. Ambitious as ever, Coco had been dying to impress the
head of the company with her efficiency and organisational
skills. ‘They’re going on to Annabel’s. That’s a really posh club
in Berkeley Square,’ she added for her sister’s benefit.
‘So d’you need to stay up all night and sort out her sodding
car to take her home ’cos she’s too bloody lazy to do it herself?’
Tiff persisted.
‘No, that’s the great thing about Annabel’s,’ Coco said with
a sigh of relief. ‘The doorman takes care of that. And parking in
Berkeley Square at ten-thirty in the evening is a lot easier than
Piccadilly or St James’s at dinnertime – the driver can wait
close by till she’s ready to go.’
‘Poor bastard,’ Tiff muttered.
‘Oh, he’s paid well, don’t worry,’ Coco said, rolling her eyes.
‘I should know, I process all the bills. Besides, she won’t be that
late. Victoria never is. She’ll make a big entrance, have a VLT
and a mineral water, be sure everyone important sees her with
Jacob, and then go.’
‘She sounds like a total fucking nightmare,’ Tiff said, throwing herself back in her seat and crossing her legs sloppily, nearly
flashing her knickers.
‘She’s the best editor I’ll ever work with,’ Coco said with
utter seriousness. ‘It’s like a crash course in magazine editing.
I’m learning so much.’
She took a small sip of her own VLT. Before Victoria, Coco
had drunk margaritas, cosmos, daiquiris; sweet, girlie drinks.
Now, after months of studying and committing to memory
every detail of Victoria’s behaviour, she wouldn’t have dreamed
of it. Victoria’s horror at a model’s confession that she had
been knocking back mango daiquiris the night before a shoot
had been legendary. Victoria had stormed up and down the
photographer’s studio, moving faster in her Gina heels than
most people did in trainers, screaming that she could see the
sugar and alcohol bloat on the girl’s body, that the girl was an
idiot – had no one told her how many calories there were in
fruit and rum, and sugar? She, Victoria, was ringing the model’s
booker immediately to rip her to pieces for not keeping her
girls under stricter control.
The model had burst into hysterics, the booker had apologised profusely and sent Victoria a bouquet so big that Coco
had staggered under its weight when it arrived, the shoot had
been re-booked at considerable expense, and the model had
turned up with forty-eight hours of clean living under her belt.
Coco had taken some of the Polaroids from the first, aborted
shoot and the one that had gone ahead, to compare: Victoria,
she realised, had been entirely correct. The model’s jawline,
cheeks, hips were all more distinct, more photogenic in the
second set; in the first, there was a minimal puffiness on her
face that had entirely disappeared by the time of the rescheduled shoot.
Other staffers on
Style
had rolled their eyes and complained
about their editor’s insane perfectionism. Coco had not.
‘So d’you like it here?’ asked Emily, the assistant beauty
editor, returning from her cigarette break on the outside
terrace. Coming to the bar high up in the Oxo Tower, on the
south bank of the Thames, had been her idea. Night had fallen,
and the light spilling from the high glass Embankment interchange made a breathtaking spectacle, especially if you had
grabbed a window table and were sitting in front of the sheer
cantilevered glass sheets that offered uninterrupted views of
one of London’s most beautiful panoramas. The Oxo bar was
a destination in itself, a place to see and be seen, and its sweep
of white bar, its pale chairs and black tables, were a deliberately neutral backdrop against which the pretty, shiny clientele
could peacock.
‘I always say it’s better to sit on this side of the river, so you
can look at the other,’ Emily drawled, sliding her cigarette
packet into her baguette bag.‘It’s so much prettier. That’s the
one downer about going to the Savoy – you have to look at the
South Bank Centre – all that ghastly 1960s concrete.’
She eased herself down carefully into the leather bucket
chair next to Tiff – carefully, because her skinny jeans were
tight enough to cut off her circulation. Like many of the aristocratic girls at
Style
, Emily had the smooth pale skin of a
delicately-painted wax doll, and a long tangle of blonde hair
with which she fiddled incessantly, tossing it from shoulder to
shoulder. Her jaw was too square, her lips too thin; without the
cascading mane of hair, she would not have been considered a
beauty, and she knew it. All the
Style
girls were acutely aware
of their physical strengths and weaknesses.
But Emily was not a typical posh girl in other respects.
Unlike most of the other Jacquettas and Savannahs and Katies,
who could smell a girl from the lower classes at fifty paces,
Emily had been nice to Coco from the moment Coco had
started work. Emily had stopped to chat every time she passed
Coco’s desk, dropped off samples from the beauty desk’s
extensive collection, even passed on an appointment for a
facial that she couldn’t make herself. Coco was aware that
there was some self-interest in Emily’s friendship, a hope that
Coco would put in a good word for her with the boss, but
Coco had been so grateful to have someone actually hang out
at her desk and chat to her as if she were a fellow human that
she didn’t care.
Besides, Coco thought cynically, we’re all out for ourselves
in fashion. It’s totally cut-throat. So what if Emily thinks
there’ll be an advantage in befriending me? She’s got me some
really great Estée Lauder face cream that would have cost a
hundred pounds if I’d had to pay for it. And that Dermalogica
facial at Comptons in Covent Garden made my skin glow for
days afterwards.
Coco had never had a proper, Eastern European-style facial
before: as well as a massage, gentle peel and moisturising, it
included steaming her face and then squeezing out sebum
from blocked pores, most of which seemed to be on and
around her nose. It had been excruciating, but utterly worth it,
leaving her skin delicately pink and exquisitely smooth. Now,
like many of London’s beauty and fashion editors, she went
religiously to Compton’s every month, and got her blowdries
and hair colour there too.
Emily’s always given really good advice about where to go,
Coco thought. She’s taken me out to a lot of amazing launch
parties – and she’s come out with me and my sister tonight,
which can’t be much fun for her.
Tiff had come into London from Luton for the evening,
making it clear that she wanted a grand tour of her younger
sister’s new life now that Coco had snagged her dream job.
Not only that, Tiff had been tasked by their worried mother to
check out what Coco was getting up to in the evenings, and
meet at least one person she worked with. Ever since Coco
had started at
Style
, she’d been absolutely exhausted. She
didn’t go out at the weekends any more, conserving all her
energy for the brutal weekday grind. She was expected to be
at work by eight-thirty and rarely left the office before seven;
even then, an imperious Victoria might call out of hours with
an idea she had had for the next day’s work, needing Coco to
make a note of it, demand a last-minute restaurant booking, or
tell Coco to organise a car, or ring a photographer in New York,
LA, Rio di Janeiro – quite indifferent to the fact that Coco
might have to stay up late or get up before dawn to compensate for the time difference.
And of course, for all this hard work, she was paid practically nothing – certainly not enough to afford to leave home
and live closer to work. She was lucky even to be paid at all –
the way the job market was at the moment, Victoria could
have got an unpaid intern as her assistant if she hadn’t been so
picky about who she wanted in the position.
‘Yeah, it’s okay here, I s’pose,’ Tiff answered Emily, shrugging and reaching for her Singapore Sling.
Coco was embarrassed by her sister’s dismissive tone. She
knew it was because Tiff was overwhelmed by both the chicness of the Oxo bar and the confidence that Emily projected,
the gift of an expensive upbringing in the Home Counties and
an equally expensive private education.
‘It’s
so
much nicer here since Harvey Nicks took it over and
did a revamp,’ Emily said, reaching for her white-wine spritzer.
‘It was a bit of a hole before, frankly. Do you remember, Coco?’
‘Oh, um, yeah, of course,’ Coco said quickly, though this
was the first time she’d ever been to the Oxo bar.
‘Crappy service and dodgy drinks,’ Emily said. ‘I honestly
thought they watered them down!’ She laughed, a bell-like peal,
tossing her hair back. ‘But now it’s
so
much nicer. And of course,
I know Raffy—’ she waved at one of the handsome young Sloane
boys behind the bar – ‘so he’s taking good care of us.’
‘Coco!’ Tiff echoed, shaking her head. ‘I still can’t get my
head round it. Mum did her nut when she found out you’d
changed your name, Jodie.’
‘You changed your
name
?’ Emily said, eyes widening.
Coco wanted the floor to open up and swallow her. She’d
assumed that Davinia had told everyone at
Style
that Victoria
had made her change her name – it was a tasty piece of gossip,
and she couldn’t expect Davinia to keep her secret. The
Style
girls might have giggled behind her back, but no one had been
nasty enough to taunt her with it directly. Now the humiliation was direct and immediate, and made even worse by the
fact that she knew how very posh Emily was.
‘I didn’t actually change it myself,’ Coco said, unable to
meet Emily’s eyes. ‘It was Victoria. She didn’t think “Jodie” was
– well, fashion-magazine enough.’
‘Bloody snob, if you ask me,’ Tiff said bluntly. ‘Do you know
what Mum said when she heard? She said Gran’s aunt was a
housemaid – you know, like in the TV series, cleaning out fires
and everything. And when she got hired, the lady she was
working for asked her name – which was Mary – and said she
couldn’t be called Mary, ’cos she had a friend called Mary and
it would be too confusing. She told Gran’s aunt that she’d have
to change her name to Jane. She said that was a better name
for a housemaid anyway.’
Emily’s forehead squinched up in tiny lines. ‘It’s not
quite
the same though, is it?’ She said, sounding distressed. ‘I mean,
really, Victoria’s
helping
Coco.’
Tiff snorted inelegantly.
But then, nothing about Tiff was elegant
, Coco thought disloyally, seeing her sister with a fresh eye. She felt awful and guilty,
judging her sister like this. It was very wrong to look down on
your family, to reject where you came from just because you’d
found a lifestyle you thought was better. The Raeburns were
an enviably close family; Coco and Tiff still lived at home with
their mum, a kindergarten teacher, and their dad, a baggage
supervisor at Luton airport. Their brother Craig worked at the
airport too, and though he had moved out with his fiancée,
they lived only four streets away from the Raeburn family
home. The children had wanted for nothing growing up, and
their parents, apart from the normal squabbles, were a happy
couple. It had been an enviably safe and secure upbringing,
and Coco knew how lucky she was.
I’m the only one born with the ambitious gene
, she thought
ruefully.
The only one who wanted to get out of Luton and head
for the big city
. None of the others understood her drive and
restlessness. Craig and Tiff would be in Luton all their lives,
Craig at the airport, Tiff at Boots as a sales assistant. She was
supposed to be saving, too, for a deposit on a flat, but most of
her spare cash was spent on going out and having a good time;
her indulgent parents didn’t seem to mind.
‘I don’t see how it’s helping her,’ Tiff snapped. ‘Changing
her name, working her like a fricking slave all day and all night.’
She realised that the skirt of her bright red jersey dress had
risen up again, and pulled it down.
Top Shop, Coco thought, looking at Tiff’s outfit. Not even
that cheap, but not well-made. That jersey fabric’s so thin it’s
almost see-through, and that elastic belt’s digging into her.
‘And she’s starving herself,’ Tiff went on, looking at her
younger sister. ‘Mum’s going mental about you not eating
dinner with us any more. Not even the Sunday roast. She says
you’re living on bird food.’
‘I’m a size ten now, Tiff,’ Coco protested. ‘That’s not starving myself.’
Tiff rolled her eyes. The Raeburns weren’t a skinny family,
and both Tiff and her mother were built along substantial
lines. The weight suited them, and Tiff was never short of
admirers; she had a personality as big as her generous curves.
‘Mum cares about you,’ Tiff said firmly. ‘We all do. She just
doesn’t want to see you all stressed out and bony.’ She glanced
at Emily’s exiguous frame. ‘No offence,’ she added, looking
down complacently at her own plump legs.
‘Oh, not at all! Do you come up to London a lot, Tiff?’
Emily asked politely.
Coco was hugely relieved at the change of subject. Emily
has really good manners, she observed. Victoria wasn’t the
only one Coco was learning from; Emily’s upper-middle-class,
head-prefect, well-bred social etiquette was something she
wanted to emulate. Tiffany was a typical Raeburn; they were
all blunt to a fault, never beat around the bush. That might be
how Victoria Glossop operated, but Coco was at the bottom
of the pile, not the top, and she couldn’t afford to be as curt as
her boss. I need to be able to talk like Emily, Coco thought. Be
diplomatic and tactful and handle people like she does.
‘I should come up more,’ Tiff answered, finishing her
Singapore Sling with gusto and letting out a small burp. ‘Keep
an eye on this one. Sometimes she doesn’t get home till well
late. I wouldn’t mind if you were out pulling, Jodie –