So along with themselves, Oscar and Tamasin, Lillian half on admin and half on labeling, Crispin half on deliveries and pick-ups and half on pot filling, they were managing to keep up with the orders. They were even set up for the summer term, when three mums from St. Boniface’s would be starting. Now that had been an interesting conversation. Izzie, skulking in the playground at pickup time, had been surprised as they had approached her. She knew them by sight, of course, but had never had more than a nodding acquaintance with them.
“You’re Charlie’s mum, en’t you?” said the one in the middle, with her hair cut into a mullet and the most visible piercings.
“Yeees.” Were they going to complain about that awful rhyme Charlie had been chanting—that one that started: My friend Billy . . . ?
There was a pause. The one on Izzie’s left with the growing-out perm tied into a tight ponytail chipped in. “My Jade’s on the same table as your Jess.”
The third of these three graces was short and fat. “I got Sam ’n’ Adam in wi’ Charlie. We was wonderin’ if you and that friend of yours needed any work doin’—casual like. You got that place out on Blackcote, en’t yer?”
Now how did they know that? The answer was not long coming. “My sister’s ex-boyfriend’s mate was doin’ the plumbin’ and he saw you goin’ there. So we knew you was goin’ big, with that face cream stuff. We’ve been workin’ down the plant nursery, potting up and loading the orders, only they said we had to work durin’ the ’olidays. Seeing as you’ve got kids an’ all, we was thinkin’ you’d understand ’bout that. We could start soon as they go back.”
Izzie recovered her composure. Things were desperate and this could be ideal, but how would Maddy react? She’d have to run it past her. “Why don’t you come over and see us at the barn, tomorrow maybe, when the kids are at school, and we’ll try to work something out?”
So the Easter holidays were far easier than Izzie and Maddy had dared to hope. With Colette back, Maddy’s kids and therefore Maddy were well and happy. She’d even got to grips with the computer, sending e-mails with the best of them, and she’d overcome her reservations about employing the school mums, Angie, Donna, and Karen (perhaps it was the association of those last two names that swung it).
It was sad, as term resumed, to say good-bye to Oscar and Tamasin. Tamasin, despite Izzie’s fears, had proved herself invaluable within an hour of starting work. She had caught on so quickly to what was needed that, by the end of her time with them, she’d often completed tasks even before Maddy or Izzie had thought about asking her to do them. Her new natural look suited her much better than the Goth too, although she’d cut her hair ludicrously short herself, to avoid the two-tone effect as she grew the dye out. “We’ll carry on at weekends though, won’t we, Oz? And at half term too, if you want us.”
With the three graces, Karen, Angie, and Donna, taking over, the atmosphere changed radically and Izzie heard some jokes that shocked even her, but productivity increased. The new workers’ disrespectful attitude to the product also endeared them. “Load o’ bloody crap, all this though, ennit? Soap and water my mum always used, an’ ’er skin were smashing. And best part of thirty quid? They want their ’eads lookin’ at.” This was the judgment of the triumvirate, endlessly mulled over, along with a fairly limited range of other topics including sex, kids, the lottery, and a bloke called Shane. But in spite of their feelings on the product, the three were clearly used to hard work and, grimly cheerful, they operated as a well-oiled if rather noisy unit, with Radio One playing loudly all day.
Having regular staff also allowed Izzie and Maddy to get on with strategic planning. Maddy had already been working on one of Luce’s other recipes. A moisturizer, called Crème Rosée du Soir. “It’s evening dew cream,” she translated. “I think it sounds rather romantic. It’s got the weed extract and rose petals infused in oil—we’d have to get some stonking rose essential oil and, maybe, almond oil and wax—if we haven’t made all the bees in the country homeless, that is!”
Lunchtimes were also rather different. Without the tabbouleh, pan bagna, or chili bean wraps, sent in by Janet and shared generally—once Tamasin had got over her embarrassment at her mother’s pebble-dashed offerings—they had now relapsed into sarnies, crisps, loads of diet cola purchased from the lunchtime van, and Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers by the score.
But Pru had been livid. Immaculately groomed as always on one of her rare visits north, and in stark contrast to the gear she’d insisted they should wear, she had counted off the list of dos and don’ts on her French-manicured fingers. “No ciggies, no booze apart from French wine, French mineral water, no takeaways, no ready meals, no sliced bread, no processed food, no supermarket for preference. I was wondering about going veggie, but I think if we stick to . . . oh I don’t know . . . guinea fowl, capons, and mutton, you can go on eating meat.”
“What, no sausages?” Izzie squeaked, imagining the mutiny she’d be faced with at home.
“Saucisson de Toulouse, of course—but nothing less recherché. Unless you can find a little place that does homemade organic, of course.”
The list went on and on. Fluoride-free toothpaste, hemp towels, strictly nothing in black, no Lycra, and emphatically no eyebrow plucking or waxing . . . “What?” Maddy and Izzie had rejected that one simultaneously.
“Pru, you can’t.” Maddy was outraged. “You remember what my eyebrows were like at school. It’s just not sensible.”
Izzie was aghast. “You haven’t seen my legs without attention. I have this pelt—it keeps me warm in winter—but it has to come off, or I’ll stifle in the heat once summer comes.”
Maddy gazed at Izzie with new respect. “You mean you go all winter without waxing your legs? How revolting! Go on—show us.”
Izzie managed to hold her patchwork skirt down round her ankles, despite Maddy’s tugging. “But what about our families? You can’t expect the kids to change their lifestyle to fit in with our new image. And as for Marcus . . .”
Pru steepled her fingertips together and leaned toward them. “Girls, if I’ve got this right—and believe me, I’m never wrong—it’s not just going to be your families doing all this. It’s going to be a good forty percent of ABC1s in the twenty-five to thirty-nine bracket, with spin-off going much, much further. In fact, if one’s kids aren’t eating mulberry bread with wild mushroom pâté, they’re going to be complaining that everyone laughs at them in school.”
She also briefed them on what to expect from Elements. “They are big hitters, I warn you, and they have an extremely well-defined image, so they’ll have put in lots of work on this presentation.”
Izzie rubbed her hands together. “I was thinking, we want to make a really professional impression, so do you think we should scrap all the cambric and go for really natty little suits?”
Pru was indignant. “Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? You are the brand. You have to carry this through with conviction or it won’t work. Natty suits is what they wear—you and Maddy stick to the plan.”
It was harder explaining Pru’s policy document and the need to stay “on message” to Marcus. He shook his head in exasperation. “Look, I understand that you’re working very hard and long hours and everything, and it’s great to have some money coming in . . . although I think you ought to have a better fix on just how much you’re making . . . but you just haven’t considered my feelings in all this. Does it really matter what I do? You’re the main story here.”
“I’m not really enjoying all of this either. There are days I could murder a packet of prawn cocktail crisps.” Izzie crossed her fingers under the table. “But surely it’s not too much to ask? You can drink lager at home, if you like. Just don’t do it in the pub.” She moved closer, put her arms round his unyielding body. “We need to be a bit careful that we maintain an image. We can’t afford to be caught out. And think of what we stand to gain. I need you on board, Marcus.”
He stood stiffly, fr
owning and distant. “Do you? I wonder sometimes.”
Between the meeting with Pru and the planned meeting with Elements, the May issue of Country Lifestyle magazine came out. Izzie arrived at the barn with her copy, hot off the press—well, off the shelves of the Ringford newsagent anyway. She and Maddy had agreed not to peep until they were together—it felt a bit like opening A level results.
“Ready?” They eyed each other anxiously, then, opening the magazine boldly, they both gasped. The photographs were nothing less than amazing, with a dramatic quality that had nothing to do with the weather on the day of the shoot.
“How did he manage to make those clothes look sexy?” Maddy examined the pictures more closely. “You look like Cathy waiting for Heathcliff. I can’t imagine what lens he must have used to give you a cleavage like that—telephoto perhaps?”
“Well, look at you—you’re positively Demelza-ish in that one. And what are you doing to that carrot?”
Maddy had flipped to the next page. “Look at the kids! Who says the camera never lies? They were being little sods that day, but he’s made them look angelic—all rosy cheeks and pearly teeth.”
The copy was even better, gushing on about “the idyllic environment” and “a secure homestead which manages to keep the excesses of the twenty-first century at bay.” “Both women work hard,” it effused, “to provide for their families on their own terms; in a context where glass ceilings and boardroom wrangles are irrelevant.”
Izzie clutched her head. “Oh no. What’s Marcus going to say when he reads that?”
Marcus didn’t say anything. In fact, he barely glanced at the feature when she showed it to him enthusiastically. As predicted, the coverage resulted in another prodigious surge in sales. There was now a kind of momentum building up, with articles appearing quite regularly and little mentions here and there. One R&B diva claimed that she had been using nothing but Paysage Enchanté for years, and had been a fan long before anyone else had caught on. Maddy and Izzie both chuckled at this one.
Buoyed up by this excitement, they marched confidently a few weeks later into the achingly trendy Spitalfields offices of Elements, although they felt decidedly out of their element in their swirling skirts and frilled shirts. “Just as well we didn’t go for the natty suit option,” Izzie hissed as they swept upward in the steel and glass lift. “They seem to be cloning those types here. We might have got lost and never found each other again.”
“God, they’re scary. I’ve never seen so many people like this before in one place. If they’re creatives, why do they all dress the same?”
“Relax.” Izzie held up a reassuring hand. “These are my people. Remember, I used to live in North London.”
Waiting to greet them in the conference room—yin-yang balanced no doubt, for the most positive energy—were a range of identikit designer types. Black suits, white T-shirts, clunky shoes, and neo-brutalist haircuts—and those were just the women! The only splashes of color came from the hair—dyed an alarming range of very non-natural colors. Finbar, a postmodern Irishman who seemed to be their leader, got them off to a flying start.
“We’re very excited to be working with Paysage Enchanté.” Izzie tried to avoid Maddy’s eye. It did sound funny in a Belfast accent. “We feel that the brand truly enhances our current range-set, introducing an excitement-facing urban-rural dialecticism that we think will upscale selling outcomes of both identities in a kind of counterbalancing way.” What? “By comingling, as opposed to intermingling, PE with our other more future-here brands, we think we’ll create an incrementalized dynamic, producing an almost”—he did air quotes and both women shuddered visibly—“ironic tension between the old and the new—with the deliverable of course being”—he smiled around at his colleagues, who were all nodding in agreement—“exponentialized client take-up across the board!”
Maddy looked around in confusion. Izzie was frowning. “Hold it right there, Finbar. Can we just ‘unpack’ that?” Izzie air-quoted and Maddy turned her splutter of laughter into a coughing fit. “If I’m interpreting correctly your vision of our brand identity, you see it as validating your current image in a Rousseauesque rural juxtaposition that springs entirely from the contemporary—in other words, externally.”
The clones were gripped.
“I couldn’t agree less,” Izzie went on. “PE’s integrity is entirely autoreferential.” They were eating out of her hand now. Some of them were even taking notes. “We propose a dedicated PE zone in each of your outlets, spatially contiguous with, yet distinct from, your base range area. A kind of syncretic concatenation with all the imagery that implies. I’m thinking green, gray-green with cobalt éclats. Sepia, concealed lighting to create a wash and tonally matched to Provence at two thirty on an afternoon in early June.”
Finbar’s mouth was hanging open and he nodded fast. “I’m with you! I’m totally there. I can smell the garrigue.”
“I knew you’d get it, Finbar.” Izzie smiled at him warmly, and they went on to finalize details with figures, she realized in horror, that would mean more than doubling their output. If only she could double the number of hours in a day. When she mentioned the proposed new rose moisturizer, Finbar almost wet his knickers with excitement and wittered on about “creating a synergistic lifestyle experience.”
“I can smell something, but it ain’t garrigue,” muttered Maddy as they passed round Pantone swatches for the point of sale. “I didn’t know you spoke fluent bullshit.”
On the way out, the drones and clones were deferring to Izzie as though she were the queen ant, and she took the adulation in her stride. She was particularly pleased with herself for having requested about three hundred pounds’ worth of their existing cosmetic ranges, to help her with the concept, naturally. Finbar hugged them both like old friends.
“It’s wonderful to work with clients who have such a clear vision. Ciao, ciao!” he gushed as he closed the taxi door, then waved until they were out of sight.
“Phew—I’m glad I was able to put a stop to that.” Izzie sighed with relief. “What a bloody nerve—they wanted to put our stuff next to their existing products as a sort of contrast, old and new. But I reckon our stuff is so different in every way, and is giving out such a different message about lifestyle, that it has to stand alone.”
“You were fab, girl. Did you make all that up on the hoof or had you been thinking about it before?”
“I suppose I was thinking how the pots could be presented. They would have looked terrible on those glass shelves with the shiny pots—all country mouse and town mouse. But when that awful Finbar started I just saw red. He probably assumed we’d be country bumpkins. What a patronizing gobshite!”
Maddy started to chuckle. “Well, you must admit, Madame Cholet, we do look a bit like yokels.”
Izzie looked down at her unshaven legs and pin-tucked blouse, and giggled. “Yeah, but sexy as hell!”
Really irritated now by the time André, Ringford’s most sought-after hairdresser, was taking, Maddy made it plain she was ready to go, paid the bill (£35—compared to London charges, a snip at the price!), and left as smartly as she could.
She’d promised to meet Jean Luc in town when she was done. He’d arrived late last night, had been in bed before she’d got back from Blackcote Farm at about one in the morning, and he’d still been asleep when she’d left for her nine o’clock hair appointment.
“I’m shorn,” she said when he picked up his mobile after several rings. “Where are you?”
Five minutes later she tracked him down in Costa’s. The Saturday papers were spread all over the table, except for a small space opposite him where he had placed her steaming cupful, and his head was bent over them intently. He had always loved the weekend broadsheets; it was about the only compliment he ever gave the British. She crept up behind him before he could see her and whispered “boo!” in his ear. Starting with shock, he twirled round and gabbled in rapid French. “Merde, don’t do that to me. My he
art’s already racing from the amount of coffee I’ve . . . Good God, Maddy, you look fantastic.” He stood up and enveloped her in his arms. He smelled wonderful and felt so warm and strong, and for a few moments she let him hold her as he buried his nose in her hair, not unaware of the interested looks they were receiving from the other people in the café.
“You smell of coconuts.”
“Must be André’s secret shampoo. What do you think of the cut?” She sat down in the chair opposite and twisted her head around exaggeratedly like a hairspray model.
“You look like you did when we were fifteen—all that fake blond gone at last.” His eyes were sparkling, and Maddy went quite pink under his scrutiny. “I like you better this way.”
“Well”—she took a gulp of the strong, hot coffee—“not bad for the provinces. Did you have a good sleep? I hope Colette was hospitable and you didn’t flirt too outrageously with her.”
“She’s a lovely girl but a bit young even for me! You must have got in late.” He offered her a cigarette.
“I’d kill for one, but I’m down to two a day and even those I have to have surreptitiously upstairs in my bathroom. I can’t afford to have anyone see me with a fag in my mouth. This coffee is subversive enough.” She fiddled with the handle of her cup. “I have to say it’s bloody hard, and most of the time I feel like I could kill someone. I’m going to be the first psychopathic hippie ever.”
He put his hand over hers. “You sound pretty fed up with it all, ma chère.”
“No.” The warmth of his hand felt good. She’d missed the feeling of a man touching her even if it was just Jean Luc. “Just tired and generally crabby and nicotine deprived. Izzie says if she’d known how horrible I was in real life, she’d never have bothered with me!”
“How is she?” he said on cue.
She filled him in on Izzie’s bravura performance at Elements. “She just rose to the occasion, and by the end we were dictating what we wanted from them.”
“I can’t imagine that of her.” He stubbed out his cigarette and knocked back the last drops of his coffee. “She is usually so gentle and sweet. What’s that great expression?” he said in English. “Wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”
Goodbye, Jimmy Choo Page 21
