Midland

by James Flint

  In the beginning Emily tried to battle this on principle. Shouldn’t editorial take precedence over advertising? Wasn’t the fierce independence of the editorial voice absolutely fundamental to the very ethos of their magazine? But as the months wore on and the circulation figures rolled in she began to realise that this was not the case; editorial independence was in simple fact a luxury that could only be afforded by a profitable balance sheet, because without that there would be no magazine.

  Plus, of course, since she’d started, the NASDAQ – along with all around it – had done nothing but plummet from the heady heights it had briefly attained in March. The bang that kicked off the year 2000 had turned out to have come from the bursting of the dotcom balloon, and with billions daily melting off the value of media companies that had paid too much for Internet properties that now appeared worthless, it didn’t seem a great time to go biting the hand that was feeding you if you were one of the lucky few getting fed.

  But Emily was too busy to worry much about any of that. Her remit included pretty much any text that didn’t fall into the big bins of beauty, health or fashion, and each month she had to find the copy for a large opening section with a page apiece on something cool and current in pop culture, theatre, books, TV, film, art, music, sport, design, cars, restaurants, consumer trends and celebrity style; the ‘Hot or Not’ snapshot of what the Hudson hive mind considered to be either coming in or going out; a short section on something science-y (but not too science-y); a short section on money and investment meant to be aspirational rather than actually helpful for anyone doing any real financial planning; a short section about the website à la mode along with a round-up of the latest gadgets; a short section on the environment (‘Help save the polar bear by re-using your plastic bags!’); and, most important of all, a couple of big anchor profiles per issue of arty stars of some description – designers, actors, writers, chefs, singers, comedians, whatever. It was quite a list.

  Most of this material was supposed to come more or less unbidden from the constellation of contributing writers and associate editors, but the reality was that after the flurry of enthusiasm that accompanied Hudson’s first few issues it rarely did, and Emily found herself having to chase and chase hard for ideas and contacts, let alone copy, which almost never came in on time, however firmly promised. When it did arrive it invariably required a great deal of editing and fact-checking to pull it into shape, and then as often as not would be spiked more or less on a whim by Bronwyn during an editorial meeting or scorned by Katharine at a sales review. That’s if it even got that far, as it was generally sent back long before then by the humourless Miranda Walton, who saw herself as an indispensable filter and gatekeeper and was in the habit of validating this belief by returning Emily’s copy on reflex, annotated with schoolmarmish comments and requests for new angles, side panels, and changes in emphasis that were as often as not reversed by Bronwyn to something approaching Emily’s originals once a draft had been deemed worthy to be placed on the editor’s desk. ‘Placed’ being the correct term, as Bronwyn had a horror of computers and wouldn’t consider anything for sign-off in the magazine by looking at it on a screen, a tic that could only be serviced by having Hudson’s office printers chunking out pages round the clock and running a bill for toner cartridges that stretched into four figures every month.

  Before she really knew it, therefore, and certainly without ever having an opportunity to stop and think about it, the demands of servicing the magazine’s monthly cycle had completely annexed Emily’s life. Any notion of working the forty-hour week specified in her contract went out of the window on day one and then might as well have emigrated for all the hope there was of ever seeing it again. When Emily wasn’t in the office she was on her way to it, or coming back from it, or doing something related to it. She didn’t even have the time to dislike her bedsit any longer, as she was barely ever in it – it had become a place to sleep and change her clothes. She even washed more at work than she did at ‘home’ – there were showers in Hudson’s building and they were hotter and far more powerful than the pathetic electric-panel affair in her house, which never maintained a consistent temperature long enough for her to rinse the conditioner from her hair without getting alternately scalded and frozen in the process.

  She was supposed to have five weeks’ holiday a year, but the pressures of her deadlines were such that she only managed to take three of them if she was lucky. She was supposed to have weekends off as well, but an extraordinary number of these also went west, either because she was in the office, was catching up on work at home, was frantically attending to the various pieces of bureaucratic admin generated by the turning cogs of modern life, or was just sleeping to try and restore some of her much-depleted energy.

  After nearly three years of this, two of them punctuated by repeated management assurances that the situation was temporary and would improve, Emily woke up one Monday morning with a feverish cold, muscular aches that made her wonder if she’d got early-onset rheumatoid arthritis, and the absolute conviction that she was being exploited. For the first time since she’d started at Hudson she called in sick, staggered to the doctor’s to get a note to prove it, then took the train to Warwickshire to her parents’ house to recuperate, emailing Miranda only to tell her that she wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week and that they should call Marie-Louise in for cover.

  When she did return, bolstered by her mother’s cooking and assurances that she was far too thin and clearly working far too hard, she sent a memo to Bronwyn and Miranda – cc-ing Heather Monk – making what to her seemed like a very clear-cut case, given that she was personally responsible for more than a third of the magazine’s written editorial, for her to be authorised to hire a full-time assistant in order – she was careful to argue – to offset any future risk of her absence through accident or illness.

  Her gamble was that the experience of relying on Marie-Louise to get through press week would have proved so horrific that the editorial team would acquiesce to her demands just to ensure that they never had to ask the hare-brained Features Associate to act in such a capacity again. And so it proved. Marie-Louise had been almost no help at all, and the extra workload had fallen squarely on the shoulders of Miranda Walton – who, whatever else Emily thought of her, was at least capable of handling it. She was also capable of reminding Emily of this fact for months afterwards, which she did, and of hinting heavily that she suspected Emily of cynically engineering the entire situation in order to create a crisis that she could subsequently manipulate to her advantage – an interpretation of events that Emily sometimes thought, in retrospect, might actually contain an element of truth. But Miranda was also capable of seeing that the risk to the production process of having Emily solely responsible for so much content was real and had to be addressed.

  Emily didn’t get her way immediately, of course. There was a meeting to discuss possible solutions to the problem, all of which involved, in the first instance, trying to give her extra rights to call on the time and resources of existing staff. But having got this far she wasn’t going to be derailed as easily as that, and so she firmly pointed out all the reasons that this would not work – not the least of which was that it would get the backs up of people across the magazine, most of whom were quite as stressed as she was. The next tactic was to try and fob her off with an intern, but Emily had seen that one coming too and had a response lined up: that it was actually illegal not to pay someone if they had set tasks and responsibilities and did real work, even if this law was regularly flouted across the creative industries.

  Finally a compromise was reached. Although hiring anyone new was apparently completely out of the question with the HR budget maxed out for the rest of the financial year (Emily did consider suggesting that if Bronwyn learned to edit onscreen they pay an extra salary with the money saved on toner), there was a person who was becoming available following the termination of a project on one of Hudson’s sister magazines. Sh
e was a trained journalist, very capable, and already had a contract. It would help Heather out if Emily would take her on, and obviously it would help Emily as well.

  So all of a sudden Emily had an assistant. Her name was Laetitia Scott and she was twenty-eight, so a couple of years younger than her new boss, though she looked older and styled herself older as well. While Emily tended to favour a smart pair of jeans, a blouse and a jacket, Laetitia sported power outfits from good labels that hinted at family money or an eye for bargains in factory outlets or on eBay. She was also painfully thin even by the magazine’s standards, her frame so frail that it vibrated slightly when she spoke with conviction or tested it with a laugh. And unlike Emily she smoked, was one of the crew that regularly needed to step across to the little park in the square in front of Hudson’s building and flutter nervously around the little cigarette bin that the council had clamped to the railings. She was also a vegetarian, so she and Emily had that in common, even if she hardly seemed to touch her food. And she was clearly smart, with a capacious memory and a quick mind, and that counted for a lot.

  Unfortunately, as Emily was soon to discover, she was also precious, ambitious, completely self-centred and utterly ruthless, perhaps pathologically so. As a package she reminded Emily just a little bit of Caitlin, which was not a flattering comparison given the way things would turn out.

  Naturally Emily didn’t tell Caitlin any of that. Instead she put the bag of rubbish in the dustbin, replaced its lid, said: ‘Not much, really. I’m sort of between things right now,’ and went back inside the house.

  —————

  Hands easy on the wheel, Alex zigzagged through the chicane of the driveway and pulled up in front of the garage. As the cooling engine ticked quietly to itself he retrieved a black leather holdall from the Porsche’s minuscule boot, hooked it over his shoulder like a cricketer hefting a kitbag, and strode towards the back door, feet crunching on the gravel.

  He was in the kitchen fussing over the dogs when Emily appeared.

  ‘Hey Al.’

  ‘Hey Em.’

  ‘Journey all right?’

  ‘Yeah, not so bad. You good?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Bearing up I think. She got a bit teary today, but I think it was a one-off.’

  ‘Oh right. What brought that on?’

  ‘Bit of a strange one. After the funeral, Caitlin showed up.’

  Alex stopped petting the dogs and looked up. ‘She came here?’

  ‘She certainly did. She’s here now.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. And she could be around for a day or two. Jamie’s come back, and apparently there’s been some sort of family row over the will. She wanted to keep out of it.’

  ‘Crikey. Well, can’t say I blame her. I’m going to get a beer. Want one?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m off to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘’Night.’

  ‘’Night.’

  Pondering the mystery of Caitlin’s arrival, Alex disappeared through the door that let onto what the family called the back kitchen corridor. It connected to a large room called the freezer room, a half-forgotten game pantry that was too dark and too cold and too damp to ever get used for much of anything, and a third room lined with old teak cupboards. This was the ‘brown cupboard room’, and an investigation of its eponymous storage spaces would reveal a dozen tennis rackets of varying antiquity; some bats of varying purpose; a few mildew-stiff canvas bags rattling with calcified cricket pads and shrunken leather balls; several balled-up rugby shirts rich with moths and spiders; three dilapidated and nearly-valuable boxes of Monopoly, Cluedo and Trivial Pursuit, and an occasional shuttlecock, lurking amongst the clutter like the cocoon of a giant bug.

  Alex bypassed this treasury of memories and headed for the freezer room, where a supermarket crate of lager lay on the cool quarry tiles. He snagged a can and returned with it to the kitchen, where he cracked it open and upended it into a smoky yellow tankard. Then he sat down at the breakfast table and kicked off his shoes, a schoolboy habit that he’d never grown out of: inside the house – any house – he preferred to be in his socks, even though it meant he wore them out in a matter of weeks. Flexing his arches and enjoying the sensation of evaporating sweat, he glanced through the copy of the Birmingham Post that was lying nearby. Then his father wandered in.

  ‘Oh, hello Alex. You’re here are you? How was the drive?’

  ‘Fine thanks. I thought you’d be asleep! How’re things here?’

  ‘Oh you know. Can’t complain.’

  ‘How’s Mum?’

  ‘Bearing up I think. She’s upstairs in bed, but I believe she’s still awake if you want to stick your head in and say hello.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll do that. How about Caitlin? Em said she’s staying.’

  Miles brightened a little. ‘Yes, she is. I didn’t expect that, I have to say. She was here for dinner. So long since I’ve seen her. Nice girl, but a little self-absorbed. Though you’d expect that, at such a time. She didn’t touch her meal.’

  ‘Emily said there was some issue with the will?’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’

  ‘But you’ve heard tell.’

  Miles produced a thin smile and began tidying away odd items left over from dinner: the cheeseboard, a stack of dirty plates, his son’s empty beer can.

  ‘It seems Tony has been playing silly buggers with all concerned,’ he said. ‘But why let death change the habit of a lifetime?’ Was this a reference to the deceased’s brief marriage to Margaret? Alex wasn’t sure.

  ‘Yes, quite.’

  ‘Talking of which, young Mr Blake has returned.’

  ‘Emily told me. She said he and Sheila weren’t seeing eye-to-eye.’

  ‘Apparently not. Though I’m not sure Jamie ever saw eye-to-eye with anyone about anything.’

  ‘I always got on him with him okay.’

  ‘Ah, yes – the Mia connection.’ His wife, Alex felt, was another person of whom his father had never quite approved.

  ‘That’s right. Though I was thinking back to when we were teenagers. I didn’t actually see him the time we went to his place in Brazil.’

  Miles frowned with the effort of remembering. ‘He wasn’t at your wedding, was he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No – well, it would probably have upset your mother.’

  This was true enough.

  ‘I’d better go up and see her before it gets any later.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll follow you. Nice to have you home, anyway, Alex. In spite of the circumstances.’

  ‘Thanks Dad. Nice to see you too.’

  Tankard in hand, Alex wandered through the silent house, pausing in the hallway for a minute to absorb its presence before slowly climbing the main staircase and padding along the landing towards the short wide flight of carpeted steps that led up to Emily’s bedroom and the box room – home, when he’d last lived here, not to boxes, but to the family computer. At the foot of these steps Alex turned right, stepping down through an archway into a small anteroom, off which led two doors. One belonged to his parents’ dressing room, the other to their bedroom.

  He knocked lightly on the latter.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Alex? Is that you dear?’

  Alex pushed the door open and walked lightly into the room. A bedside lamp threw a damp glow against the walls, and before he saw his mother his eyes fell on a silver-framed portrait that had stood on the cherry veneer of the table in front of the window opposite for as long as he could remember.

  It was a photograph of Margaret at twenty-six, dressed in sandals and a pale blue dress with a square smock neck, leaning against the kind of low weed-choked wall that generally bordered some picturesque stretch of estuary. One foot forward, the other bent and back, her neck slightly craned, she was smiling – toothily, benignly – at his father, the photographer. Miles had taken the picture the weekend he
’d proposed, and it held an important place in the Wold family mythology because Margaret had already been pregnant with Alex at the time. This fact sat contrary to the couple’s otherwise rather staid reputation and lent them a hint of Sixties rebellion they’d always rather revelled in. But it told another story too: that of Margaret’s fear, in the wake of Tony’s fruitful affair with Janice Blake, that she might be infertile, and as always when confronted with the photograph Alex faced the troubling thought that his prim mother would almost certainly never have allowed herself such sexual liberties if she’d hadn’t been stalked by that particular spectre – and that he therefore owed his own existence, in a very real way, to the libidinal urges of one Mr Anthony Nolan, Esquire.

  ‘Hi Mum.’

  Margaret lowered her copy of House and Garden and peered at her son over the tops of her reading glasses.

  ‘Hello dear. I thought I heard your car. Did you have a good journey?’

  ‘Yes. Clear all the way.’

  ‘How’s everything in London? How’s Mia? And Rufus?’

  ‘They’re fine, just fine. We went to see the whale.’

  ‘Oh!’ Margaret perked up at once. ‘I was going to ask if you did. I heard all about it on the news, poor thing. Wasn’t it sad?’

  But Alex had got over his brief obsession with the whale, and despite having brought it up he didn’t think that right now the topic was worth pursuing. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at his mother.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Not too upset?’

  ‘Over Tony? No, dear. I mean, yes, obviously, it’s an awful shame. But anything else … it was all such a long time ago. I really didn’t come into contact with him very much. The last few years your father saw more of him than I ever did.’

  ‘Well as long as you’re okay.’

  ‘Yes, yes. It’s Caitlin we should be worried about, I think.’

  ‘It was nice of you to let her stay.’

  ‘Well it seemed the least we could do,’ Margaret said, folding her glasses into their case. ‘Though I have to say it was a little unexpected. I would have thought she’d want to be with her own family at a time like this. But it seems that Jamie’s come back and there’s some huge upset over changes to the will.’