AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  He thought no more about it, nothing at all; put it out of his head, gave himself up to pleasure.

  That weekend, for the first time, he went to the Moat House and met Chloe. He thought she was lovely: with her dark red hair and hurt-looking brown eyes, and her quiet, pretty manners. She clearly didn’t feel particularly friendly towards him; she sat in near silence through lunch, and was about to disappear up to her room when he asked her if she would take him for a walk.

  ‘I’ve eaten far too much, and I need to digest. As my old gran used to say. And I know your mother wants to ride, and I’m terrified of horses, and – well, would you walk with me, Miss Hunterton?’

  Nothing could have endeared him more to Chloe than the information he was terrified of horses.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, of course.’

  Chloe realized with something near to irritation, merging with relief, that she was enjoying her walk. Joe’s shaggy, smiling friendliness, his contentment to be quiet, soothed her hostility. She did not feel embarrassed by the silence, or even obliged to chatter mindlessly in order to fill the vacuum. They wandered out of the garden and up the lane and then out into a field; it was cold, and Joe pulled his rather shabby, threadbare-looking jacket round him.

  ‘I should get one of those,’ he said, nodding at her Barbour. ‘This is no good in a wind.’

  ‘We could have lent you one,’ she said.

  ‘Next time, maybe.’

  She found she quite liked the idea of next time.

  ‘This is a beautiful place,’ he said, looking across the gentle seesaw of land that passes for hills in Suffolk. ‘I don’t usually like the country, it frightens me. But this is so gentle, somehow.’

  Chloe looked at him curiously. ‘What do you mean it frightens you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m a townie. I like to be able to disappear if I feel like it. To be anonymous. You’re awfully visible in the country.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Chloe. She wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but she liked the way he kept revealing his insecurities. Most adults pretended they could cope with anything. Except maybe Jack Bamforth. She felt a bit the same with Joe, she realized, as she did with Jack Bamforth. Comfortable, confident. She smiled at him. ‘Well, I like it here. Perhaps I don’t have any need to disappear.’

  ‘Perhaps. That was a wonderful lunch. Your mother tells me you’re her live-in cook.’

  ‘Well, in the holidays. I do love it. We did have a cook, but she got old, and it’s hard to find young ones.’

  ‘Well, you’re the best young cook I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Thank you. I want to do a cooking course, but Mummy won’t let me.’

  ‘Whyever not?’

  ‘She says it’s silly. She says I should go to university. Did you go to university?’

  ‘I did not. Too busy supporting a couple of wives. And getting on with what I really wanted to do.’

  ‘A couple of wives?’

  ‘Well, not at the same time.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He smiled. ‘Sorry. Your mother obviously hasn’t told you much about me.’

  ‘No. She doesn’t tell me much about anything.’

  ‘Well,’ said Joe, ‘I always tell everybody a great deal about everything. It gets very boring for them, but I enjoy it. I was married at seventeen, and then again at twenty. So I’m a man of the world, you see.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Oh, undoubtedly me. I was very immature.’

  ‘I suppose most people are at seventeen,’ said Chloe and sighed.

  ‘No, not at all. You seem rather mature to me. But I wasn’t. Anyway, I’m not married at the moment.’

  ‘Are you thinking of marrying Mummy?’

  She surprised herself by the directness of her question; but she felt so hurt, so rawly angry still at her father’s death, she had to know, had to find out where he stood in her new, difficult world.

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ he said carefully. ‘She’s just a good friend. I’ve been trying to help her through this awful time. That’s all. I’m very fond of her though,’ he added. ‘She’s a very special person.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She’s one of the bravest people I’ve ever known.’

  ‘My father was very brave,’ said Chloe, slightly hostile.

  ‘Yes, I know. Very very brave. I wish I’d known him.’ He looked at her carefully. ‘You were very close, you two, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, we were. I miss him terribly,’ she said and burst into tears.

  Joe stood still and looked at her, at her grief and loneliness and loyalty and felt his own eyes beginning to fill. He wiped them with the back of his hand and cleared his throat. This was no time for self-indulgence.

  ‘Tell me about your dad,’ he said, taking her hand, passing her his own rather grubby handkerchief. ‘Tell me about you and him.’

  Chloe told him. She told him about how her father had always loved her best, always taken her side against her brothers; how he had always had time for her, how he had watched her endlessly swimming in galas, appreciated the meals she had cooked, told her she was pretty, pretended not to notice when she knocked things over: ‘I’m terribly clumsy,’ she said, and ‘Me too,’ said Joe; how she had felt happy and safe with him; how she no longer seemed to have anyone at all she could call her own.

  ‘He just loved me I suppose,’ she said, sniffing and smiling shakily at Joe. ‘Mummy doesn’t, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I think she does,’ he said carefully. ‘She seems to love you to me.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. Not properly. She finds me clumsy and cowardly and irritating. She always has. I try so hard, or I used to, to please her. I’ve given up a bit lately.’

  Joe’s eyes began to prick again. He sniffed, reached out for the very damp handkerchief and smiled at her, slightly embarrassed. ‘When you get to know me a bit better, which I hope you will, you’ll find I cry rather easily. Bit awkward for a man. But I can’t help it. Anyway, I’m also clumsy and cowardly and irritating, and it doesn’t seem to stop your mother liking me. I don’t think those kind of things matter. I’m sure she loves you very much. You seem a lot more lovable to me than those brothers of yours,’ he added.

  ‘They’re awful,’ said Chloe simply. ‘I hate them.’

  ‘I think I might too. Anyway, all I was going to say was that I hope I can be your friend. But I don’t want you feeling you’ve got to like me, and accept me, because you don’t have to do anything of the sort. You can hate me if you want to. I mean I hope you won’t, but I can see why you could. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Chloe. She smiled at him. ‘I don’t think I’ll hate you.’

  ‘Well, that’s a promising start. But if you feel it coming on, just let me know and I’ll get the hell out of it for a while.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘I will.’

  Chloe began to feel better from that moment. Over the next few months Joe visited more frequently: sometimes he even stayed the night. He slept in the guest room and she had never seen him and Caroline doing anything more intimate than kissing briefly as he arrived and left; nevertheless, her instincts told her that they were very close, and if she had not liked Joe so much, found him so gentle, so easy, so thoughtful, she would have found it very difficult to handle. He did a lot for her, and her fragile confidence; he talked to her, canvassed her opinion on everything, even showed her articles he was writing. He told her she was pretty, and that she was clever and talented; perhaps the most important thing he did was persuade Caroline that she should be allowed to go to Winkfield. When Caroline told her she had arranged an interview there, Chloe looked at her and said quietly, ‘Joe talked you into this, didn’t he?’

  ‘In a way,’ said Caroline carefully. ‘Let’s say he made me understan
d how badly you wanted to do it. I still don’t quite understand, but you certainly seem to have a flair for it. And if you really don’t want to go to university –’

  ‘I really don’t,’ said Chloe.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ said Caroline. She sounded genuinely baffled.

  ‘Well, for now, cook. Directors’ lunches, that sort of thing. But what I really want to do is get married and have babies.’

  ‘Chloe! How very old fashioned,’ said Caroline with a small laugh.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chloe, aware that her voice was very cool. ‘Yes, well, that’s the way I am.’

  ‘I got it! I got the job.’

  ‘Fleur, that is wonderful! I’m so pleased for you.’ Margie Anderson’s plain face was awed as she looked at her friend. ‘How much are they going to pay you?’

  ‘Loads.’

  ‘How much is loads?’

  ‘Fifty bucks a week.’

  ‘Wow!’

  Fleur had been saying for a while that she wanted to work in advertising, ever since a careers talk at secretarial school, but what had clinched it for her was seeing a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie the year before; Doris Day had been working at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, and Rock Hudson had been one of the clients, and although Fleur could see the real thing might be just a little different, she had watched Doris Day coming out of the agency and walking down Madison and she had known that was the kind of glamorous lifestyle she wanted. Glamour was in Fleur’s bones; she craved it, and she would roam Fifth Avenue and peer into the Plaza and the Pierre and explore Bonwits and Tiffany’s, studying the particular form of glamour to be found there; she would read voraciously about glamorous people and what they did and where they went and what they wore, people like Jacqueline Kennedy and her sister Lee Radziwill, and Baby Jane Holzer and Maria Callas and Truman Capote, so that she did most assuredly know glamour when she saw it. And she saw it in the advertising profession. ‘I walked in there,’ she said to her best friend of the time, Margie Anderson, ‘and there were all these gorgeous people who looked like they were having a good time. It just blew me away.’

  Advertising is really just a branch of show business. All the elements are there: the shows, the stars, the critics, the audience. As an industry, it is not noted for its quiet, retiring introverts. The great figures in advertising are showmen: fiercely professional, highly polished, well rehearsed. There are exceptions to this rule: Tom Wolsey, of Lennen Newell Wolsey in London was one, Kenneth Roman of Ogilvy’s in New York was arguably another. But on the whole, the born-to-advertise man is only truly happy performing. The audience does not have to be appreciative; rather the reverse. Nothing will give the true advertising person more pleasure than winning round a combative peer group on the creative floor, a cynical account director, a critical difficult client, or a hostile sales force to the view that the campaign he has just presented to them is the best, indeed the only one worthy of their consideration. Agency people get up every morning with a clear mission in life: to create better advertisements than the next man – or woman – and they dress, eat, drink, and talk with that mission in mind. It is a religious fervour; and nothing, not love, not sex, not the maternal instinct can be allowed to interfere with it, stunt its growth, halt its footsteps. And in the sixties, when life was so infinitely showy, when style was God, the industry moved into a new era of brilliance, originality and self-obsession.

  Silk diMaggio, a medium-sized agency (for which read billings of sixty million dollars), possessed all three qualities to an excessive degree. Nigel Silk was old money, charming, deceptively languid, blond – ‘by Harvard out of Brooks Brothers’ as some wag had once labelled him – who provided the agency with its business acumen, and Mick diMaggio was no money at all, eighth child of an Italian immigrant who ran a deli off Broadway. Mick (so another wag had said) talked like Italian ice-cream spiked with bourbon; he wrote fluid, beautiful, witty copy that haunted the public consciousness. He was one of the first examples of the big breakaway in advertising from the WASP culture – Gerry della Femina was perhaps its most famous example – spearheading an invasion of rougher, tougher, brasher people, seeing, saying and doing things in an entirely different way. Silk diMaggio had got their big break when the entrepreneur tycoon Julian Morell had given them his New York store Circe to launch, and subsequently his cosmetic range Juliana; now their client list incorporated Pinski’s Diners, upon whom Mick had bestowed immortality by tagging them with the line ‘Meals not food’, R-S-T-shirts (‘the only T you could take to the opera’), Bechstein’s Beds (‘every night a masterpiece’), a slice of Oldsmobile, and Chapman’s Chocolate Peanuts (‘try the willpower test’).

  Silk diMaggio were clever, confident and highly visible (‘People want to work here so badly they crawl on their hands and knees through this door,’ said Poppy Blake, administrative PA to the creative department, to Fleur, as she showed her round on the first morning of her job as junior secretary in the creative department). They won at least three major creative awards every year, and Silk and diMaggio were both paper millionaires several times over. The agency was actually on Madison, about halfway between Brooks Brothers and Condé Nast; it occupied the second and third floors of a new building. It had a reception that was all white and chrome, with walls peppered with awards certificates and huge examples of the agency’s work; it had a creative department that was one huge, buzzing, hyped-up workshop where the junior art directors and copywriters sat around a vast drawing-board and drew and wrote and shouted and threw paper aeroplanes and made up silly jokey campaigns and gossiped and got excited and bad-tempered and rejoiced and worried and produced very often superb work; and it had side rooms off it where the copy heads and senior art directors did much the same in a very slightly quieter, more ordered style. Mick diMaggio’s office was on a gallery, approached by a spiral staircase in the very centre of the creative floor; he could be seen there (and he could see all his staff from it) from very early in the morning until very late at night. His office furniture consisted of a large drawing-board, a high swivel stool, a fridge and a stereo, on which he played classical music all day long. His mood could be gauged by the style: opera heralded triumph and excitement, orchestral music meant intense cerebral activity, reedy esoteric sounds indicated depression or even despair. The rare occasions when Mozart was actually replaced by Puccini or even Wagner were heady: they meant a problem had been cracked, a copyline created, a new campaign born. On really good days when the volume level was turned up high, he would appear on his spiral staircase, his broad swarthy face beaming, a champagne bottle clasped in one brown hairy hand and several glasses slung upon the fingers of the other.

  ‘Gather round,’ he would cry, ‘we have it here. Listen, listen and look,’ and they would stand there, the young ones, sipping the champagne, looking at his roughs, reading the honeyed, funny, charming, totally relevant words and learning what advertising was all about. The senior art directors and copywriters didn’t join in this adulation; they thought it was self-indulgent and unnecessary, and would pretend they weren’t noticing all the hubbub and shouting and even the popping of the corks, but sooner or later they would get drawn out. Mick would put his head round first this door and then that, beckoning, saying, ‘Come along, come along, join in the fun, we have something to celebrate here I think,’ and in the end they would all come out and there would be a brief, noisy party while everyone told him how wonderful he was and then they would all go back to work. Mick would go and find Nigel Silk, who worked on the floor above in a great Japanese-style room with a black door and black blinds and a white-tiled floor, and endeavour to sell the new campaign to him.

  Nigel was not easy to sell work to; like all the best advertising account men he was totally unimpressed by creative work for its own sake; there had to be a rationale, a totally straightforward, commercial reason for saying what was being said. It was no use, he said, an ad
being funny, or clever, or charming, or beautiful if it wasn’t going to persuade the public to put money down on the counter and ask for the product by name. He and Mick had some terrible fights, and Mick would threaten to resign and go and work for Doyle Dane or Ogilvy’s or Wells Rich Greene, who were all constantly making him offers, and Nigel would say fine, off you go, I’ll help you clear out your desk, but Mick never went and Nigel nearly always won.

  Seeing which of Mick’s campaigns got through Nigel’s black door and were released to the clients for their delectation and hopefully their approval probably taught the rest of the agency more about advertising than anything else.

  Fleur felt as if she had died and gone straight to heaven in her first few weeks at Silk diMaggio; she was in a state of total enchantment from the moment she walked through the door in the morning until she had to be dragged out of it at night. She sensed an instinct in herself about advertising: she could see how it worked and why; she felt serene in what she was doing, and she felt at home. She had a sense of being absolutely in the right place, that she had been born to do what she was doing. She woke up in the morning and felt a thrill of pure pleasure going through her at the prospect of what lay ahead; it seemed to her better than anything, better than going to the movies, going to parties, shopping, gossiping. Indeed as she said to Margie quite frequently, working at Silk diMaggio was exactly like going to the movies and a party and shopping and gossiping, all rolled into one, it was that heady, that much fun. She had been lucky to get the job, and she knew she was lucky, coming as she was from a year’s temping in tedious jobs in downtown New York and with no more qualifications to her name than graduating from Brooklyn High School and completing a secretarial course in an admittedly excellent college and with the highest marks in the class; but she also knew that the creative department in general, and Poppy Blake in particular, had seen off six secretaries in as many months, and that she was earning every cent of the fifty dollars a week they paid her. In fact, she told herself firmly, as she set out from what was now her Aunt Kate’s house in Sheepshead Bay, a little over an hour before she needed to on her first morning, they were lucky to get her.