The Forgotten Girl (22 page)

‘There they are,' I said, trying not to stare at Mick Jagger's long, long legs and tight trousers. ‘Oh I'm desperately envious of Suze and completely terrified for her at the same time.'

George laughed.

‘Can you see Suze?' he asked, looking round. ‘I can't.'

I squinted through the people and smoke but I couldn't see her either.

‘Maybe she's not here yet,' I said. ‘Let's have a wander round.'

We weaved our way through the crowds, sipping our drinks, and I began to feel more like I belonged there. I saw a few people I knew. George saw even more people he knew – honestly, that man knew just about everyone in London – and I drank in the atmosphere.

‘This is where I wanted to be,' I murmured to myself. ‘This is what it was all for.'

I stood, leaning against the wall, half-listening to George talking to a singer from another band that I hadn't heard of, and half-looking for Suze who still hadn't appeared. Mostly, though, I was watching how the beautiful people acted. How they stood. How they talked. How they danced. I was going to be like them one day.

By the table where the Stones sat, a tall willowy girl stood up. She was wearing the miniest skirt I'd ever seen, and her jet-black hair reached almost to her hemline. She bent down and whispered something in Keith Richards's ear and he gave her a cheeky smile. Then – to my absolute horror – she stood up and pointed at me.

‘Who's she?' I hissed to George as she came towards me.

‘That's Gloria Brown,' he said. ‘She's the Stones' publicity person. She sorted out the interview for Suze, I think. Through that girl Suze knows at the studio. It must be time for Suze to do her thing.'

‘But Suze isn't here,' I said, panicking. ‘What should I tell her?'

‘Hi,' said Gloria. ‘Suze Williams, right? And George Mann? The guys are ready for you now.'

‘Just go with it,' George said under his breath. ‘We can't miss this chance. Everyone mixes you and Suze up anyway.'

I gripped my hands together to stop them shaking and gave Gloria what I hoped was a winning, sophisticated smile.

‘Lovely to meet you,' I said. ‘Lead the way.'

And I walked across the dancefloor to interview the Rolling Stones.

Chapter 35

2016

I had two choices, I thought as I travelled home on the train – Damo lived in Hackney, I discovered when I left his place, which was fortunately quite easy for me to get home from. I thanked my lucky stars he hadn't moved somewhere further away.

I slumped in a seat and went through my options as the train rumbled towards south London.

My first option was to fall apart. Things had gone wrong. Really wrong. Like Madison said, I'd broken Damo's heart for the sake of my career. And I'd thrown away all the work Jen and I had done on The Hive and trampled all over her feelings too, and that had really come back to bite me on the bum. In fact, that career I was so keen on? That hadn't exactly worked out as I'd planned either. Option one was tempting. I really, really wanted to crawl under my duvet and stay there all weekend. And then run away from Mode, from Damo, from Jen – go back to Oz perhaps, or try New York...

And yet, there was option two. And that was to make it work. To rebuild my relationship with Damo and maybe Jen too if that wasn't past saving. To relaunch Mode and make it a huge success. To launch The Hive, which I was certain would be a massive hit. To finally prove to my bloody mother that my job was worthwhile. That I could do something important, even if it wasn't economics or law.

That option sounded a lot less fun, and much, much harder. But it also sounded more like me. I was Fearne Summers. I worked hard and I got results.

‘Yeah!' I said.

‘What's that, love?' said the man sitting next to me.

‘I don't give up,' I told him as the train pulled into Crystal Palace.

‘Good for you,' he said.

I worked all weekend. First, I texted Damo to say thanks for putting me up, then I turned my phone off so I wouldn't get distracted. I cleaned my flat from top to bottom. I made green juice and even managed to drink some of it before pouring it away and going for Diet Coke instead. And I stayed up late and put together a proper plan for relaunching Mode with a twenty-first century version of the first ever issue.

I wrestled with my budget, working out what we absolutely had to spend money on and what we could do in-house. I planned what was going on which page and pulled together all my notes on the features that I'd made at Suze's house. She had given me some brilliant ideas and made me look at some things in a different way. We'd have to commission some writers and I hoped Vanessa would pull it out of the bag. We had a budget for one big name, or a couple of cheaper writers, and then it would be in-house all the way but I'd let her sort that out. I thought the whole team would enjoy pulling together all the articles. And I knew Damo would make them all look amazing, with or without glitzy photoshoots.

Once I'd done that, I got out my diary and pencilled in a meeting with Vanessa and Lizzie to discuss Vanessa's ideas for selling the mag in different places. And I drafted a press release about the relaunch. Should we have a party, I wondered? In fact, could we have lots of parties in shopping centres across the country to really take the magazine to our readers? We'd just need DJs and some goodie bags. It needn't be too expensive.

I scribbled notes and ideas furiously, determined to make Mode's relaunch as good as it possibly could be.

Could we have a big celeb-filled party if we got a sponsor? Would there be time to arrange it? If we got the right guests we could get lots of coverage.

And while I was thinking about celebs, I emailed Amy Lavender's agent and asked if she'd be our cover star. Her story was all about rebirth – from failed soap star to national treasure – and she was bloody gorgeous, too. It was one area where I was going to divert from the original Mode but it was definitely the right idea.

Finally, on Sunday evening, I ordered a Chinese takeaway, poured myself a glass of wine, resisted the pull of Netflix, and sat down to look at The Hive. I had an idea that we could somehow combine the work we'd already done with all the effort we were putting in at Mode. But that wasn't really my motivation. I kept thinking about Suze and her friend Nancy, who'd died. The way she talked about working with her friend and how they'd really helped each other, had reminded me of how I used to work with Jen. I missed that and I missed her. I felt like I had to at least try to put it right. Perhaps showing her I was still serious about The Hive would go some way to doing that.

I worked late, slept well, and headed to the office bright and early on Monday morning, raring to go.

When everyone arrived, I called them into a meeting ready to explain what I wanted to do.

When Emily found the old issues, she'd told me that the entire first issue of Mode was on the company server. So on Saturday I'd rung our printers and sweet-talked them into producing enough duplicate copies for the team. They'd been waiting for me on my desk when I arrived and now I handed them out to everyone. I was gratified to see the first glimmers of interest in the team as they started to flick through them.

‘I met Suze Williams on Friday,' I said, glossing over the bit where she threw me out of her cottage. ‘She had some amazing ideas and together we came up with what I think is a great way of relaunching Mode with a bang.'

I took a breath.

‘We're going to recreate the first ever issue to coincide with the magazine's fiftieth anniversary,' I said.

There was silence. The team all stared blankly at me.

‘So we're just going to copy this?' said Vanessa, her lip curled up. I gave her a sharp look – I was making inroads with her, of course, but she still had a tendency to be negative. But she carried on regardless. ‘It doesn't seem all that innovative.'

I thought for a minute.

‘Think of it as looking back to move forward,' I said. ‘We're going to be inspired by the features in this issue, but we're really just using them as a starting point and updating them for women now.'

I stood up and opened the magazine at the feature about illegal abortions – the one that had given me the idea in the first place.

‘For example,' I said. ‘This was written before abortion was legal and it's fairly shocking. Have a read.'

There was silence while everyone scanned the article. Riley tutted loudly.

‘Terrible, what people went through,' she said. ‘And it's relatively recently.'

‘But abortion's legal now,' Vanessa pointed out. ‘We're not going to get a feature on some backstreet Vera Drake.'

I nodded.

‘So we need a different take on it,' I said.

Vanessa chewed her lip.

‘It's still illegal in Northern Ireland,' she said slowly.

I grinned.

‘Exactly,' I said, thrilled we were thinking along the same lines.

‘I've got a friend from uni who had to come to England. It was pretty traumatic for her.'

‘I've heard of people buying abortion medicine on the internet,' Emily added. ‘I think women have been arrested.'

‘So that's how we'd write that feature,' I said. ‘We need to look at each article in turn and think about how we'd approach them now. Like this one here, on why the writer – Nancy Harrison – doesn't want to be a mother. We could get someone to write a twenty-first century take on that.'

Vanessa was – finally – nodding.

‘So same basic ideas, but given our own twist,' she said. ‘We can't do the whole mag like that though.'

‘We can't?' I said. I'd sort of hoped we could.

She shook her head.

‘No,' she said. ‘We'd need to explain what we're doing – maybe in the ed's letter – and then we'd probably need some other features about the differences between then and now too.'

Emily jumped in.

‘What about my interview with Suze Williams?' she said. ‘My day-in-the-life thing – comparing then and now?'

I made a face.

‘Leave that one with me,' I said. ‘We might need to come up with something else.'

Damo had been very quiet the whole time, listening carefully and drumming his fingers on his thigh. Now he grinned.

‘You're on to something here, Fearne,' he said. ‘We can have a lot of fun with this.'

He pulled the first issue towards him.

‘There's not a lot of colour inside,' he pointed out. ‘So obviously we'd do that differently. But I'm thinking we could drop in a pic of the original feature on each page so people know what they're comparing.'

‘And we could put the whole first issue online,' Emily suggested. I flashed her a smile – that was a great idea.

We threw around more suggestions, and Emily wrote them all up on the huge whiteboard at one end of the room. I felt really positive for the first time since I'd started at Mode and I was pleased that finally the team were all working together. I just hoped it was going to work.

When I eventually got to my desk I trawled through my emails from the weekend – ninety percent were rubbish but one caught my eye. It was from Suze. My heart thumped as I clicked to open it.

‘I'm sorry if I over-reacted,' she wrote. ‘I enjoyed meeting you but I don't want to be involved in the magazine and I can't do the interview. If I can help over the phone, please don't hesitate to give me a call. I would like to help you relaunch Mode, which has a special place in my heart. But please don't use my name anywhere in the issue.'

I stared at the email for a while. I was pleased Suze was willing to help because the ideas she'd had on Friday were so brilliant that I couldn't imagine doing it without her now. But her reluctance to be officially involved and the way she'd shut down any suggestion of it, had intrigued me.

‘Maybe she just gets upset when she talks about her friend,' Vanessa suggested later when I filled her in.

‘That's what Damo said. But I get the impression it's more than that,' I said. ‘She was so adamant. Almost nervous.'

‘It's a long time since she worked in magazines, perhaps she's lost her confidence.'

I nodded slowly and pulled at my ponytail.

‘Yeaaah,' I said.

‘But you don't think so?'

‘She virtually threw me out of her house,' I said. ‘She wasn't shy, or worried about being out of touch. She was determined that no one would find out she was involved in the magazine.'

‘But she writes novels,' Vanessa pointed out.

‘Under a pseudonym.'

‘Maybe she did something bad,' Vanessa said, leaning forward. She was eating porridge, which may have been a really late breakfast or an early lunch, and she dropped a lump on my desk then wiped it up hurriedly when she saw my face. ‘Maybe she did something so terrible, she had to leave Mode and go and hide away in the countryside.'

‘That could be it, you know,' I said. ‘That's exactly how she acted – like she was feeling guilty about something.'

‘Maybe she murdered her friend,' Vanessa said.

‘I have some sympathy for her in that case,' I deadpanned and Vanessa laughed. I was pleased we were joking together again.

‘Seriously, though, it might have something to do with Nancy Harrison,' I said, thinking back to how Suze had acted when I was in her house. ‘She was funny about her.'

‘So Google her,' Vanessa said, sucking on her spoon. ‘Google Nancy Harrison and find out how she died and what happened. Find out if Suze was ever a suspect.'

‘I don't have time to investigate a silly mystery from fifty years ago,' I said. ‘I've got a magazine to save.'

‘But you're going to do it anyway, right?'

‘Hell, yes.'

Chapter 36