Handbags and Gladrags

by Maggie Alderson

  There were two dance floors with DJs in rotation, an ambient room to chill out in and another area done out like a casino, with roulette and baccarat tables. You exchanged your invitation for a pile of plastic chips and if you won, you could cash them in for special Ferrucci ‘dollars’ – complete with his Botoxed face – which you would be able to spend the next day at his boutique in Via della Spiga.

  And, of course, there were masses of beautiful people to perve on. All the models from the show seemed to be there, along with all their male counterparts from Ferrucci’s famously erotic advertising campaigns, mingling with faces I recognized from the front three rows of the shows, and plenty of Eurotrash party padding.

  While Frannie and I had been cruising around and sorting out our Alice strategy, Nelly had been busy getting things ‘sorted’, as she called it. She’d managed to commandeer a circular booth that she announced was our ‘party central’ and waiters were arriving with bottles of champagne, trays of glasses and pyramids of chocolate-dipped strawberries.

  ‘Let the games begin!’ she yelled into my ear, and they did.

  What a wild and crazy whirl that night was. I just remember people, loads and loads of people, coming over and chatting and kissing and laughing, laughing, laughing.

  Every now and then, I would team up with Paul and we’d do ‘a once around the room’, which was a quick tour of the venue to check out what was going on and who was there to bitch about and squeal with and lust after, and what they were wearing, before heading back to our HQ. I waved at Alice in the VIP area as we went past and I don’t know which of us was happier about our relative locations in relation to that velvet rope.

  And then, of course, there was the dancing. I remember Paul first grabbing me when our favourite Missy Elliott track came on and after that I didn’t leave the dance floor for what seemed like hours. I grooved with him for ages and then with Nelly and Frannie and Seamus and whoever was there. It didn’t matter, I was just dancing with life really. And it’s amazing the power champagne has to make you forget how much your feet hurt. Then ‘Starry Eyed Surprise’ came on and the DJ had it on some kind of repeat and a whole group of us were dancing together, with our arms round each other’s shoulders.

  And that’s when I did notice Miles. He was on one side of me in our dancing circle, with his arm round my shoulder. He was wearing an old rock-tour T-shirt with the sleeves cut off – trust me to have total recall of the styling details – and I remember noticing the big, brown, muscly biceps coming out of it. In a kind of drunken dance daze I looked along the arm until I got to the face and then somehow he had both his arms around my neck and everyone else in the room just disappeared.

  We danced together for ages and if all my other friends were still there I didn’t notice them. All I could see and feel and smell was him. Yet, I think if I’d never seen Miles again after that night I don’t think I would have been able to pick him out in a line-up. I wasn’t aware of him as an individual, he was a kind of universal male presence and nothing else existed.

  We danced apart, we danced in a clinch, he held me close and he whirled me round and once he stopped me dead in the middle of it all and just gazed into my eyes. I remember it clearly; my stomach did a backflip.

  I came out of my trance when Nelly suddenly lurched back on to my radar, dancing with some guy I vaguely remembered had been at the Four Seasons with us and who, I eventually realized through my champagne haze, was Iggy Veselinovic. Then Nelly and I were dancing together, the way you just are on a night like that, and I don’t know what happened to the guys.

  Suddenly I badly needed to pee and Nelly and I headed off to the loo together, giggling and talking total nonsense, with her insisting that Iggy was straight, which I found very hard to believe.

  ‘A straight male fashion designer?’ I said. ‘He could join a circus. In the freak show section.’

  ‘I’m telling you, babe,’ insisted Nelly. ‘He’s got my ovaries twitching and Nelly’s gonads are never wrong. The man is straight and he wants to shag me.’

  The ladies’ loo was as tricked up as the rest of the party. It was done out like an old-fashioned powder room with skirted dressing tables and stools, and all the Ferrucci make-up and fragrances laid out for us to use. We had great fun squirting each other with the ones we hated the most and trying on sparkly purple lipstick.

  After a while I was getting bored of hearing about Iggy and the ghastly perfume was starting to make us both feel sick, so we headed back to party central, where most of our gang seemed to have re-grouped. And then it just seemed to be time to go. Paul told me Frannie had already left and that he had to be up early to prepare for a show, so he dashed off and the rest of us drifted down the stairs towards the exit.

  Then Nelly heard yet another of her favourite tracks starting up and grabbed Iggy to go back for one more dance and a couple of people had to wait at the cloakroom for their coats and someone else disappeared back in for a pee and suddenly it was just me and Miles standing on the street hailing a cab, which we both got into.

  I said, ‘Hotel Principe, per favore,’ and Miles said nothing. He just put those strong brown arms around me again and kissed me, very slowly, taking me right back into that zone where nothing existed but him and me melded together on some kind of lateral plane.

  And in that state, when we pulled up at the hotel, it seemed perfectly natural for him to throw a twenty-euro note at the cab driver and take my hand as we walked into the hotel, picked up my key and went up to my room.

  Where we shagged like rabbits till dawn.

  3

  I don’t want to go on about the sex in detail, because it would just sound yuck and it was so, well, beautiful really. Suffice to say that, just like the saying goes, Miles took me to places that I had never been before (cloud-cuckoo-land?) and between, er, events, he was really nice to talk to as well. He was cuddly too. And although he was clearly some kind of Olympic-class sexual athlete, he seemed to enjoy the general closeness as much as the actual rogering.

  We spent a lot of the night just lying there on the super-king-size bed looking into each other’s eyes and breathing, drinking each other in with that sense of primeval wonder that only sex with someone new can inspire.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m here with you,’ he said.

  ‘Neither can I,’ I replied, with all sincerity.

  ‘I thought you were getting it on with that black guy at first. Gee, he’s a good-looking bloke. Come to think of it,’ he laughed, ‘why aren’t you with him?’

  ‘Paul? Well, he is a total babe, but he’s my best mate and when it comes to his private life, he makes Liberace look butch. He’s what you might call a very active homosexual, but I don’t see much of him these days, hence the smooching.’

  ‘I’m glad about that,’ said Miles, pulling me closer and nuzzling my ear. ‘I had my eye on you and I was very disappointed when I saw you cuddling up with him.’

  ‘When did you have your eye on me?’ I asked, stupid girl, loving the flattery.

  ‘You really want to know?’

  I nodded.

  ‘For just over a year so far…’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, equally mystified and thrilled.

  ‘Well, you know I do runway pictures, right?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Well, it gets really boring stuck there waiting for shows to start squashed in with hundreds of other foul-breathed stinking photographers, most of whom I wouldn’t want to sit next to on a bus…’ He paused. ‘Do you know they keep us waiting for over three days a season, when you add it up?’

  ‘Yes, I did actually. Anyway, go on.’

  Go on to the bit about me.

  ‘Well,’ he said, pulling me closer. ‘It gets really boring and really stinky in the snake-pit so we have a game we play to pass the time: we look at all you girls through our long lenses and decide who we’d most like to root.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Root – you know,
er, “shag”? It’s an Australian word.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ I said. ‘Gisele, surely. Or maybe Karolina?’

  ‘No, not the models,’ he said, apparently genuine. ‘None of us want to root the models. When you look at them all day, they just become objects, sexless objects. I mean the real girls, that’s who we look at. The audience. Last season I picked you. And I picked you this season too.’

  I was too surprised to speak.

  ‘I think you’re gorgeous.’

  He kissed me a bit, to prove his point.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued. ‘So Seamus told me he knew the girl who usually sits next to you – Nelly – because she works for pure and he invited me along tonight and I came because I thought you might be there too. So when I walked into the Four Seasons and saw you I felt like I’d won the lottery. Until you sat on your mate’s knee, but…’

  ‘You stalked me,’ I said, interrupting, feeling a bit weird about it suddenly.

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘And now I’m going to stalk you again.’

  And he did, and then I didn’t mind so much.

  But despite all that lovely flattering stuff and the preter-naturally great sex, like I said, I knew I wasn’t falling in love with him. There were just so many reasons why it was never going to work between me and Miles and I knew that right from the start.

  For one thing, there was the location problem – he lived in Sydney and I lived in Westbourne Grove, and I had comforted enough girlfriends heartbroken over holiday romances, to know that long-distance love just does not work.

  Then there was his career as a struggling art photographer. He’d told me that he actually hated fashion and he only did the shows to make enough money not to have to work the rest of the time, so he could concentrate on his art. And his surfing. Which might be fine in Sydney, but it’s not fine in W11. And I knew myself too well to fall into that trap. Handsome starving artists were all very well, but I was a fashion princess with expensive tastes.

  Then there was the small matter of my husband.

  And there you have it. I was married. All along. To somebody else. Happily married too. That’s why this thing with Miles was so nuts. I wasn’t remotely interested in having an extra-marital love affair, or even extra-marital sex, it had never even crossed my mind. I had plenty of sex and cuddles already, yet here I was, doing the thing that unhappily married women do.

  So it didn’t make any sense – and there was another really weird thing going on too. I didn’t feel remotely guilty about it. Not even when I woke up from a brief sleep – the only sleep we’d had all night – when my alarm went off at six thirty.

  I just looked over at Miles and wondered if we had time for another quick one before I had to get up to do my yoga and hair. We did, as it turned out, and actually it was rather a slow one, before I really did have to get up and salute the sun and my blow-drier, and he had to get back to the flea-pit hotel room he shared with Seamus, to pick up his camera equipment and head out to claim his position at the Marni show.

  I lay in bed and watched him dress. His body was almost as good as Paul’s, I decided, in a golden-brown version, as opposed to Paul’s smooth shiny black, and with a little more hair on the chest and down his stomach. In just the right places really. In his old faded jeans and that chopped-up T-shirt, his thick reddish-brown hair standing on end, a heavy growth of stubble on his chin, he looked totally gorgeous. Not handsome in a classic way, but fundamentally male somehow.

  He stood at the end of the bed looking at me steadily as he did up his belt. We spoke simultaneously.

  ‘I wish…’

  We broke off, laughing. We’d clearly both been going to say the same thing: I wish you/I wish I didn’t have to go yet.

  ‘The problem with you and me,’ said Miles, throwing himself down on the bed again and burying his face in my neck, ‘is that we’re too bloody responsible. We should just fuck the lot of them and stay here all day.’

  He nibbled my earlobe and my back was arching before I’d even realized it.

  ‘But you’d better stop that,’ he said. ‘I’m under serious instructions from my boss at the picture agency to get good pictures of the Marni show. I went out to the venue yesterday and marked out my spot and everything.’

  ‘Well, you’d better stop doing that then.’

  He was brushing his hand lightly backwards and forwards over my nipples, which were clearly enjoying it. I moaned, involuntarily.

  ‘I’m going to have to see you again,’ he said.

  I nodded. He made to get up, but I grabbed his hand. I had to tell him. I had to tell him I was married before he told Seamus about us and Seamus told Nelly and Nelly told Frannie and, ugh – it was too horrible to think about. Everybody on Chic and everybody on pure – in fact, the entire British fashion magazine world – knew my husband.

  ‘Miles,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to tell you something…’

  He grinned at me.

  ‘I already know you’re married,’ he said, and put his head down to suck my right nipple. ‘And I don’t give a shit,’ he added with his mouth full.

  *

  By 8.45 a.m. I was yoga-d, showered, blow-dried and dressed – in an Alexander McQueen suit my husband had recently bought me, with a very tight skirt and a very waisted jacket, to be worn only with very high heels – and back in the limo on the way out to the Marni show.

  For once, I didn’t mind the crawling claustrophobic car ride through the grey buildings, in the fug of Bee’s fag smoke. I felt so good I was practically singing. Alice was unbelievably cheerful too, full of the party and what a fabulous time she’d had with Antonello – in the VIP area, as she kept stressing – and how George Clooney had kissed her hand.

  Bee was particularly thrilled about the part when Antonello appeared to be ignoring Beaver in favour of talking to Alice and how left out and put out she had looked. She kept making Alice repeat it with all the details, like a child wanting to hear the same story over and over again. Bee was also going on about how marvellous she felt after an early night. And I was, quite simply, spunk drunk from my time with Miles. The only one of us who was quiet was Frannie.

  ‘Hey, Franster,’ I said, not even minding that I was sitting in the middle of the back seat once again, this time in a tight skirt that was riding up my thighs. I could see Luigi was having a private perve fest in the rear-view mirror and I didn’t even care.

  ‘Frannie,’ I said again when she didn’t answer, leaning in towards her. ‘Are you OK?’

  She turned her face to me. She looked terrible.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I feel like absolute shite. I’ve never been so hungover in my life. Aren’t you? You were putting it away like a Glaswegian last night.’

  I considered her question. I felt fine. I felt fantastic.

  ‘Er, I did yoga this morning,’ I said, slightly too quickly. ‘I think it must have helped clear the toxins from my liver.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Frannie. ‘The thought of liver. Fried liver with onion. Shut up about food, or I’ll boke out the car window.’

  Then a hand appeared out of nowhere proffering a packet of sugar-free gum. It was Alice. Smiling. It really was an extraordinary morning.

  We finally arrived at the venue, an old factory even more decrepit than the average set-up, just late enough to keep Bee happy. As they always did, the Marni people were compensating for the early start by providing coffee, orange juice and pastries and the crowd was falling on it. Two-and-a-half weeks into the season, people were starting to look seriously tired.

  I saw Frannie – who was normally Miss Organic Food Purity – hoover up three espressos and two almond mini-croissants. She must have been taken bad, I thought. I just headed for my seat. I’d had my grated apple back at the hotel and this show was always my favourite for audience gawping, because while the wooden benches we had to sit on were torture on the lower back, the space was full of natural morning light and you could see everybody really clearly.

&nbs
p; I’d been sitting there for about fifteen minutes happily looking around and making notes in the back of my notebook about the cool stuff other people were wearing – and which I therefore had to go out and buy as soon as possible – when I suddenly had that feeling that somebody was looking at me. You know that almost prehistoric instinct we have when we are being watched? I put on my glasses – the ones I need to see the clothes properly – and looked over towards the bank of photographers. It was the usual wall of huge long lenses, but one of them was pointing straight at me. As I stared back at it the shutter suddenly closed and opened like a winking eye. Then Miles’s head popped up from behind it, grinning.

  I snatched my glasses off and felt myself go hot with a blush which started at my feet and went all the way up to the top of my head, with quite a few stops in between. I was extremely relieved when almost the next moment the music started and the show began.

  But it wasn’t until I had sketched about three of the fabulous outfits that I realized there was something missing. Beaver was in her usual position in the front next to Bee, but Nelly wasn’t sitting next to me. And Nelly loved Marni.

  I didn’t see Nelly all morning. She wasn’t at any of the shows. I tried her mobile several times and it went straight to voicemail. I even rang her hotel – the pure girls always stayed at the Palace, five stars, but not nearly as nice as the Princh – to see if she had stayed in bed. They told me Signora Stelios was out.

  It didn’t make any sense. If she’d been sent home to London for bad behaviour – which was a distinct possibility – I knew she would have rung me to bitch about it. Likewise if Beaver had her doing some kind of secret last-minute shoot and she was out frantically sourcing the clothes. Our respective editors would have been horrified if they’d known how little professional discretion existed between us.