Simply Divine (2 page)

A huge colour photograph of an extremely glamorous blonde girl sprang out at her. So pneumatic were her lips, so vast and plunging her cleavage, so huge and confident her smile and so contrastingly tiny her dress that one almost didn't notice the handsome but ineffectual-looking young man with her, who was gazing into the camera with vacant eyes. 'Bubbling Champagne!' proclaimed the headline. 'Society girl Champagne D'Vyne, snapped last night at the Met Bar with billionheir escort the Hon. Stretch von und zu Dosch,' said the caption.

'Oh, Christ,, it's that stupid Sloaney tart again,' exclaimed Nick, looking over and seizing on another target for his ire. He took a swig of tepid tea from his Houses of Parliament mug. 'She's absolutely bloody everywhere,' he snorted in disgust. 'And why's she got such a bloody stupid name?'

'Apparently she was conceived after her parents drank a bottle of champagne,' said Jane. She'd read it somewhere or other, and, having offered the information, felt acutely embarrassed as Nick razed her with a withering glare.

'The things you know,' he remarked in mock astonishment.

Jane flushed. It was true. Her ability to retain unfeasible amounts of trivia was ridiculous. Against her better judgement, she could remember all the words to 'Bohemian

Rhapsody', and recall every contestant in
The Wacky Races
but had forgotten her own telephone number on more than one occasion.

'It's a good thing her parents weren't into Newcastle Brown, then,' snorted Nick in his grating voice. 'Or Horlicks. Anyway, why's she so sodding famous?'

Jane looked at Champagne D'Vyne's lithe, athletic form, a riot of curves gloriously set off by her practically nonexistent clothing. She wore no bra. Her gravity-defying breasts seemed to be of that elastic variety that needed no support other than their own exuberance. 'I can't imagine,' she said, her light tone laced with sarcasm.

'Well, there must be some reason,' Nick insisted, Jane's irony utterly lost on him.

Jane stared. Could he really not see? Or perhaps it was because Champagne D'Vyne had a cleavage like the Grand Canyon that she, acutely conscious of her own rather more Cotswoldesque
embonpoint,
had no difficulty pinpointing the root of Champagne's attractions. 'She's famous for having huge tits,' she said finally. 'And for being fantastically posh. A lethal combination, wouldn't you say?'

'Well, you should know,' Nick sneered. 'That's your department, all that frothy, titsy, celebrity stuff. Great campaigning journalism, I must say.'

Jane flinched. Her career wasn't all it might be but did Nick
have
to be so nasty about it? Working on an upmarket glossy magazine might not be the socialist ideal but it was undoubtedly something a lot of people would kill for. The problem was, after six months at
Gorgeous,
Jane rather wanted to kill herself. Commissioning endless in-depth investigations into the contents of celebrity fridges and the dinner party games of the rich and famous was a soul-destroying business.

10

The sound of footsteps in the kitchen overhead derailed her train of thought. She wondered what the man upstairs was doing.

As she had passed him in the doorway last night, her all-quivering senses had caught a whiff of his aftershave — a delicious, clean, sharp scent the other end of the smell spectrum from the aspirational, peppery Jermyn Street potions Nick seemed so fond of.

By now, Nick had disappeared into the bedroom to get dressed. Jane could hear him rattling through the rail of expensive Egyptian cotton shirts that he had recently wheedled out of her for a birthday present, any one of which cost almost as much as her best office jacket. He emerged eventually, his bullet-hole smeared over with what looked suspiciously like her expensive new MAC spot cover.

'Good luck with celebrity underwear drawers,' Nick sniped as she went to kiss him goodbye at the front door. 'I wouldn't ring up Champagne D'Vyne about those,' he added. 'I can't imagine she has much use for knickers. She's obviously dropping them for every chinless wonder in town.'

Lucky old her, thought Jane as the door slammed in Nick's wake. She heard the click of his Church's shoes receding down the path as she headed towards the bathroom. Time to get ready for work. Make herself
Gorgeous.
There must be some hot water now.

Jane went into the bathroom and shot out again instantly. The air was filled with an ear-splitting shriek which she realised, after a few seconds, was her own. To accompany it, a series of crashing thuds from upstairs shook the flat above. But Jane hardly noticed. The last thing to register with any of her senses was the huge

11

spider crouched in the bottom of the bath. Vast^ malevolent and murderous-looking, with terrifying markings on its back, it had evidently marched in from the garden while they were reading the papers.

Still screaming, Jane bolted through the hall and out into the entrance passageway, leaving the door of the flat wide open. As she paused for breath, she heard it click shut behind her.

'Need any help?'

Head spinning with fear of the hideous beast in the tub and the dawning, dreadful awareness that she was locked out of the flat, Jane stared wildly up the stairwell to the next floor.
The man from upstairs was leaning over the banister. Grinning at her.
Grinning, it had to be said, more widely than the circumstances merited.

Jane gasped as she remembered she was wearing nothing but Nick's bathrobe. As she looked down at it, lolling off her shoulders and gaping open, she realised she wasn't even really wearing that. Mortified, she clutched the edges of towelling tightly to her and felt a warm tide of embarrassed crimson flood her face. How much had those knowing racing-green eyes managed to see of her? Had he spotted her spare tyre? The way her unsupported breasts scraped the floor? He must think her a loose woman in every sense of the word. Talk about the woman who put the common in Clapham.

'Well, aren't you going to tell me what's happened?' asked the man upstairs on the stairs, by now slowly descending the stairs. His faded burgundy bathrobe, stopping at his knees, revealed long, finely-muscled golden calves. 'I think it's the least you can do, personally,' he added, flashing her a smile so brilliant it could have been spotted from the moon. 'I was just in the shower myself,

12

and you gave me such a scare screeching like that that I lost my balance and fell over. Face down on the taps, as it happens,' he said, arriving on the ground floor and raking her with a rueful glance from beneath his thatch of damp, butter-coloured hair.

Despite herself, Jane sniggered. Falling face down on the taps was
too
ridiculous.

'Glad you find it funny,' remarked the man from upstairs, raising an eyebrow. 'I'll have a couple of shiners by the morning. Guaranteed.'

Contrite, Jane realised she wasn't giving him the best of incentives to assist her. 'I'm terribly sorry,' she stammered. 'Perhaps if you rub some steak on them?' She had a vague idea from somewhere that this helped.

'I'd rather eat it, frankly,' he replied. 'Anyway, what
were
you yowling about? What's the problem?'

'Well,' Jane muttered, suddenly feeling silly. 'There's, um, there's a rather large spider in my, um, bath.'

'Spiders won't hurt you,' said her neighbour breezily. 'It won't even move unless you make it. The whole point of a spider is being a spider. They don't go in for sightseeing or aerobics.'

'Well, this one's got a leotard on, actually,' flashed back Jane, remembering the nasty markings and determined to claw back some dignity out of the situation. She turned on her heel to re-enter the flat, only to encounter the closed door. 'Oh, and I'm locked out as well.' She banged her fist on the door in frustration.

'Hang on a minute.'

As if she had much choice, Jane thought, slumping against the door and watching the long legs lope back upstairs. She was hardly going to rush out and catch a bus dressed like this, was she? Not that it stopped some people.

13

Two minutes later, he had bounded down again, opened the latch with a credit card, entered the flat and flipped the spider out of the bathroom window. 'Thank you so much,' said Jane, stiff with embarrassment as well as cold. She had noticed by now that her legs were not only blue with the chill, but needed a shave. Her standards were beginning to slip after all.

'It's a pleasure. I'm Tom, by the way.' He flashed her another knee-trembler of a grin.

Tm Jane.'

'Yes,' he said. 'I know.'

'You
know?
Her heart swooped in a somersault. He knew her name. Jane surrendered herself to the thrilling thought that he must have more than a passing interest in her to bother finding out what she was called.

'Yes. There's a pile of bills with your name and address on them by the door.'

14

'I want
ideas.
Big ideas.
Huge
ideas. Circulation-rocketing, magazine-of-the-year-award-winning ideas.'

The editor of
Gorgeous
put the tips of his manicured fingers together, pursed his lips and glared at his staff. Jane shifted uncomfortably on the sofa between the art director and the fashion assistant, both of whom were gazing vacantly into space.

Josh flicked an invisible bit of dust off the lapel of his Prince of Wales check suit and stared through his monocle at his features department. In other words, Jane. There had been talk, when Jane started, of recruiting a crack ideas team to help her, but it had so far failed to materialise. Nor, Jane knew, was it now likely to.
Gorgeous
operated on the principle common to most publications, that keeping staff costs down was as important as keeping the circulation up. The standard belief that the overworked staff would feel elated by the enormous responsibility and positively revel in the lack of support also applied.

'What I particularly want,' Josh continued, 'is some really
brilliant,
original, ingenious, attention-grabbing
gimmick.
I'm
sick
of seeing
The Sunday Times
stealing a march on us with Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. She should be writing for
Gorgeous.
She's done wonders for their figures.'

15

No mean feat considering she had a chest flatter than an airport runway herself, thought Jane, who was no fan of the celebrated sybarite.

'And
Fabulous
is snapping at our heels,' continued the editor testily. It was true that
Gorgeous^
great rival, the society magazine
Fabulous,
was putting on readers at an alarming rate. 'We
cantlet
them overtake us in circulation.' He banged his fist dramatically on his desk. A collection of silver-framed photographs of Josh with Princess Diana, Josh with Karl Lagerfeld, Josh with John Galliano and Josh with Kate Moss fell over with a crash. 'What's
new?
he demanded, wiping Kate lovingly with his sleeve as he propped her up again.

His staff quaked. Everyone was terrified of Josh. Impeccably dressed and sharply good-looking, he had the reputation of being one of the most gifted and competitive editors in London. He was devoted to
Gorgeous
and expected everyone who worked there to be as obsessed with it as he was. He had, after all, taken it from a mumsy rag to a glittering social glossy in the four years he had been editor. No one could doubt his talents or his commitment. But his management skills were from the Darth Vader school.

'I see Champagne DVyne's all over the tabloids again,' ventured the chief sub. Her voice trailed off as she waited for Josh's reaction.