Handbags and Gladrags

by Maggie Alderson

  One moment he was working on a commission for the lobby of a major new bank building, the next he was dead on the floor. He’d had a massive brain haemorrhage, or something – while I watched. My life was never the same after that and it was still almost too painful to think about.

  Even without these details, Ollie seemed to pick up that we had moved to a new level of closeness, above and beyond the sexual dimension that had just come into the relationship. He was holding my hand as we drove along and as we approached the turn-off for Shepherd’s Bush he pulled it up to his lips.

  ‘Don’t go home tonight,’ he said simply. ‘I don’t want to be apart from you. Come and stay with me at Ledbury Road.’

  He turned and looked at me for a moment. I smiled back at him, squinting at him through my hair which was blowing all over my face. I nodded. I didn’t want to go home to the hard-to-let council flat I shared with Paul in a Hackney tower block. I wanted to stay with Ollie.

  ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he said, as we swung off the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout into Holland Park Road. ‘Come and live with me at Ledbury Road.’

  So I did.

  4

  Life in Westbourne Grove was bliss. It wasn’t just the contrast between my former unsavoury dwelling and a gorgeous ‘apartment’ – as Ollie always called it – in one of the chicest parts of town, it was heavenly to be settled with a man I adored.

  Right from that first night Ollie and I just clicked together as a couple. I remember we walked over to 192 for dinner and held hands across the table the whole time. And it wasn’t just any table either, it was one of the best ones, right by the window, where everyone could see you, as they walked past on the warm May evening – and they did. In our claustrophobic little world, we might as well have taken out a full-page ad in the Evening Standard to announce our relationship.

  Within months we were an established ‘it’ couple around town, a new level of prestige that was enhanced even more when I got the job at Chic. It was up there with British Vogue as one of the most respected fashion magazines in the world and Ollie was hugely proud of me. I was pretty thrilled too.

  I’d first met Bee when Ollie had invited her over to one of our regular Sunday afternoon gatherings at the flat. Those ‘Sunday salons’ – Ollie’s term, he had a catchy name for everything – had become a bit of a ‘thing’ that we did. The idea was to mix up interesting people we’d met around town with old friends and anyone who might be useful for promoting Ollie’s make-up, at a relaxed – yet fantastically stylish – meal. Which Ollie could then claim on expenses.

  They were a bit pretentious, really, but it wasn’t just a cynical marketing exercise. I loved to cook and Ollie adored entertaining. His parents were renowned hosts at their place in Hampshire and having people over really brought out the best in him. He could be a bit twitchy and nervous when we were out – usually in case there was somewhere more fashionable we should have been, or a better table in the restaurant we were at – but in his own home he was completely relaxed and great company.

  He’d designed the whole layout of his flat – sorry, ‘apartment’ – entirely around the entertaining area, sacrificing the third bedroom to create a large open space which stretched from the front of the building to the back, where there were folding doors on to a large deck. Divided up into what Ollie called ‘moments’, through clever arrangements of sofas, chairs and tables, it was ideal for people to gather in constantly shifting groups, with us all ending up together around the large dining table. That space had a great dynamic, as Ollie used to say. He loved words like that. I used to tease him about it.

  The day I met Bee, it was early autumn and although it was still warm enough to have the doors on to the deck folded back, there was just the hint of a chill in the air. I had filled the place with dark red shaggy dahlias from Wild at Heart, edged the deck with Moroccan lanterns and lit my favourite Agraria incense sticks, which I always brought back from New York. And, of course, I can still remember what we were wearing.

  Ollie had on a midnight-blue velvet Seventies dinner jacket I’d found for him in Portobello market, which looked great over a collarless white shirt and jeans. On his feet he had dark red Moroccan slippers embroidered with silver flowers, and no socks. Apart from to the office, Ollie never wore socks, just as I never wore tights. I’ve no idea what that was all about, it was just one of our things. I was wearing velvet too – a hip-length, kurta-style top in deep red with mirror embroidery around the neck, over my favourite Yanuk hipster jeans, with a fabulous brass-studded belt slung low and a pair of jewelled velvet Manolo mules on my feet.

  I wish I could say it was a happy accident that we were both wearing that velvet/ethnic combo, but it wasn’t. Nothing Ollie and I did was left to chance and we had such fun contriving our stylish lives. We did laugh at ourselves as we posed together in front of the floor-to-ceiling wall of mirror in our walk-in closet, but at another level we believed our own bullshit too.

  ‘You look gorgeous, Em,’ said Ollie, watching himself give me a big hug in the mirror. I breathed in a big waft of Acqua di Parma from his neck. ‘You always look gorgeous. You are gorgeous. You are my beautiful, beautiful gorgeous girl and you make me so happy.’

  He was just giving me a big snog when the buzzer went. It was Paul, arriving first as he always did. He was pathologically punctual.

  ‘Oh, get you two,’ he said as he walked in, checking out our looks. ‘Mr and Mrs Chic Ethnic Accents.’

  He handed me a large box of my favourite chocolate-covered ginger.

  ‘Here’s some chocolates for you not to eat, Emily. You two look like Pinky and Perky in those outfits. Or Siegfried and Roy.’ He laughed to himself. Paul always laughed heartily at his own jokes. It was very infectious.

  ‘When’s the Hello! photographer turning up then?’ he said, sniffing my artfully ‘unarranged’ flower arrangement. ‘Ollie Fairbrother and Emily Pointer entertaining their fascinating and wittily accessorized friends at their lovely west London home.’

  We laughed, but it was a bit like that. Journalists from the Evening Standard were always quoting us in articles about the lifestyles of groovy people around town and Ollie had whooped with satisfaction when we finally made it into a picture on the ES social pages, at an opening at some ultra-hip new art gallery in Columbia Road.

  Slap make-up MD Oliver Fairbrother and stylist Emily Pointer with artist Jeremiah Hock at the opening of his installation, ‘Snake Oil’, at the Rrrrrrs Gallery.

  I’d torn the picture out and put it on the fridge with moustaches drawn on our faces, but Ollie had carefully cut the page out from another copy of the magazine and put it in one of the A3 scrapbooks he kept in his study.

  There were eleven of us at the ‘Sunday salon’ the time I met Bee – Ollie thought odd numbers had a much better ‘synergy’ than neat little groups – and the crowd was the usual pick ’n’ mix of ages, occupations, nationalities and sexualities, all united by a certain ‘brightness’.

  Bee and her banker husband, George, were the next to arrive after Paul. I already knew her face from boutique openings and fashion shows, but we’d never actually met. She knew Ollie pretty well, though, from the mutual arse-licking symbiosis that exists between magazine editors and make-up brands’ managing directors. For Bee and Ollie any social contact was a fiesta of mutual backscratching – essential job-preserving advertising revenue for her, priceless bonus-enhancing editorial recommendations for him – although at least with Slap it was a great product, so it wasn’t quite so venal as it could have been.

  There were ranks of sales people behind the scenes on both sides who did the actual money deals – the mucky part of the business – completely separate from editorial, but Bee was the crucial bridge between the two. And she worked that position as shamelessly as a lap dancer.

  As she walked in that afternoon I saw her eyes swivel around the room like a CCTV camera, taking in the whole scenario. From where her gaze momentarily rested – the
dahlias, the perfectly placed pieces of mid-century furniture, the ethnic accents, the French lamps, the feature piles of art books, the incense, the collection of vintage black and white fashion photographs in clusters on the walls, the artless heaps of Sunday papers – I could tell she wasn’t missing a detail.

  That ability to size up and assess – places, people, photos, fashion collections – in an instant, was one of the qualities that made Bee so good at her job. It was almost like a sixth sense with her. Her seventh was her decisiveness.

  ‘So, Emily,’ she said, as I brought out the autumn fruits jelly that I’d made for pudding. I saw her clock how good it looked, the jewel-like fruits suspended in stripes of coloured jelly in the glass bowl. ‘You’re a stylist on Gorgeous, aren’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Which shoots did you do in the current issue?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I said. I knew there was a copy of it by my right foot, where all our magazines were thrown into a large Kenyan basket, because I’d put it there earlier, just in case of this scenario. And that particular issue happened to contain the best work I’d ever done.

  ‘I did this dress story,’ I said to Bee, flipping open the magazine and trying to sound casual. ‘The idea is – “don’t stop wearing dresses, just because summer’s over, it’s a great way to dress for winter too” – a great working wardrobe option we often forget.’

  Bee was wearing a dress, did I mention that? A classic Diane von Furstenberg print wrap number. My dress pictures – which included a number of von Furstenberg items – were gorgeous and just the kind of thing I knew that all editors love, but rarely get out of their fashion editors, who always want to do ‘art’ pictures. I’d taken them in locations around Deauville. Two models, beautiful natural light, streetscapes, a strong narrative feel, with a slight poignancy – and really beautiful wearable clothes. I saw Bee’s eyes flicking over the pages like a stockbroker studying a Reuters screen. The market was clearly on the way up.

  ‘I did this little thing, as well,’ I said casually, knowing it was another sure-fire editor pleaser. ‘Just a good-ideas-type story, showing how you can mix six different chain-store pieces, for under sixty pounds each, with one pair of Chloé pants – more like three hundred pounds – and have an entire new wardrobe.’

  By the time we were on to the herb tea and Turkish delight, she was offering me a job. I accepted on the spot – to be a fashion editor on Chic was the styling equivalent of my first big Hollywood role. As Ollie was lighting a Cuban cigar for her, she announced the news to the table. His face, behind a thick pall of expensive smoke, was priceless – a struggle between desperately wanting to air punch and yelp with joy, and knowing it wouldn’t be cool to do so.

  I can’t think of any announcement that would have made Ollie happier than my promotion to the ranks of the serious high-fashion glossies, and when we were in bed that night after all our guests had gone he had made love to me with exquisite tenderness.

  ‘I’m so proud of you,’ he said. ‘You’re my dream woman. You make me so happy. I adore you.’

  It was good stuff. I just lay there smiling back at him. I’m a total sucker for flattery. Then he suddenly jumped up on the bed. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing, but then he dropped back down on one knee – stark bollock naked – and took my hand in his.

  ‘Emily Pointer,’ he said, gazing into my eyes. ‘Marry me – please.’

  So I did. And that’s what I was putting at risk for a quick bunk-up in Milan with a scruffy Australian photographer. All that.

  What was I on?

  Whatever was going on with me, it was clear that weird day in Milan – the morning after my night before with Miles – that something was up with Nelly too.

  She finally appeared late that afternoon at the Moschino show. In fact, she was already in her seat when I walked in and she was sitting there with her eyes and her mouth closed, an extraordinary event. She didn’t even stir when I arrived, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before. All of these were firsts.

  ‘Er, Nelly?’ I said, sitting down next to her.

  She didn’t reply, but her right hand came out and grasped my leg.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said. This was getting spooky. Her only reply was a long loud sigh. Then she finally turned her head, which was still lolling back on her shoulders and half opened her eyes. Then she let out a kind of death rattle groan. I laughed, it was the only possible response.

  ‘Oh, Ems,’ she said, slowly shaking her head. ‘This is no laughing matter.’

  ‘Well, what the fuck is it?’ I said, starting to get really impatient.

  Nelly licked her glossy red lips. What a drama queen.

  ‘Iggy,’ she whispered.

  ‘Iggy?’ I snapped back.

  She nodded furiously and gestured with her eyes towards Beaver who was in her usual position in front of us. I lowered my voice.

  ‘What about Iggy? Is he dead?’

  She shook her head violently. Then she grabbed my notebook – my special hardback shows notebook, which I can only get at one shop in New York – and opening it right in the middle, she scrawled something right across the page. In splodgy blue biro. She handed it back to me.

  ‘LUUUUURVE!!!!’ it said in huge letters. Then she grabbed the book back and added some more. ‘Nelly gonads neva wrong.’

  I finally got the full story on a tram back to our hotels, which were right next to each other.

  There was a break before the next show and we had both told our editors – separately, of course – that we had to go off and see some new models we were thinking of using. We’d taken the tram, a total novelty for me, as it was where we were least likely to see anyone we knew.

  ‘Well, you were right about him being straight then,’ I said.

  Nelly just nodded. I had never known her so quiet. Normally when she had a new lover I had to listen to every grisly detail – size of penis, number of rogerings, cunnilingus rating – in full technicolour and sensurround.

  ‘He’s amazing, Em,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Such an amazing person.’

  I waited for more information, but all she would tell me was that they had gone back into the party for that last dance and then they’d come out and walked the streets of Milan talking until they got to his apartment in the Brera, where they’d carried on talking until dawn, when they’d finally ripped each other’s clothes off.

  The last bit sounded rather familiar, but I said nothing.

  ‘I’m going back to the hotel to pack,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m leaving the hotel and moving in with him. That’s what he wants me to do. I’m going to help him style his show.’

  ‘But what about Beaver?’

  ‘What about Beaver?’

  ‘Doesn’t she expect you to stay in the hotel with her? How can you help him with his show and do all the other shows at the same time?’

  ‘Beaver can do what she likes. Iggy wants me to help and I’m going to. No more shows for Nelly. I only came to Moschino to find you. I wanted to tell you myself.’

  ‘Have you got a temperature?’ I asked, laying my hand on her forehead.

  She laughed, that filthy chuckle, which was a much more familiar Nelly reaction to anything.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a serious fever, but not up there, darling.’

  She stood up to get off the tram – I’d decided to stay on and go into town for a little more shopping – and she leant down to give me big smacking kisses on both cheeks. I grabbed her arm before she could get away.

  ‘One thing, Nelly,’ I said. ‘Do I have to keep this a secret?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Nelly, flinging her arms in the air. ‘I just wanted you to hear it from me first. Tell the world!’

  And then she did a twirl, which the men on the tram must have enjoyed, because her circular skirt flew right up and she wasn’t wearing any pants.
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br />   When I got back to the hotel – two new Helmut Lang tops later – I ignored the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on Frannie’s door and knocked on it loudly. I wanted to make sure she was all right. And I wanted to tell her Nelly’s amazing news.

  ‘Can’t you bloody read?’ I heard her shout from inside. ‘Do not bloody disturb, per fa-bloody-vore.’

  ‘Frannie, it’s me,’ I said. ‘I want to know how you are.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I heard her muttering as she came to the door. She opened it without looking at me and then got back into bed, turned her back on me and pulled the covers over her head.

  ‘That bad?’ I said, from the door. ‘Do you want a doctor?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want my mum.’

  And she burst into tears. I ran over to the bed and put my arm round her.

  ‘Franster,’ I said. ‘Whatever’s wrong? Tell me. I’ll be your pretend mum. Are you feeling really sick, or is it something else?’

  She just cried louder. I sat on the bed beside her, stroking her hair with my hand. I had never seen Frannie, my beloved sanity editor, in this kind of state before.

  ‘Whatever is it?’ I said. ‘You’ve got to tell me. You can’t suffer like this.’

  Finally she lifted up her face. Her eyes were sore and red.

  ‘I’ve done something terrible, Emily,’ she said.

  ‘It can’t be that bad,’ I said. ‘Murder? Fraud? You’ve bought some more shoes?’

  She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her bathrobe.

  ‘I kissed that bloody Seamus,’ she said.

  I didn’t know how to react. I felt my face twitch into an involuntary smile. This was getting ridiculous.

  ‘It’s not bloody funny, Emily,’ she said, pushing me off the bed. ‘I’m a married woman. I love my husband. I’d never do anything to hurt him and now I’ve kissed some Irish bloke I don’t even know.’

  ‘Did you – er – just kiss him?’ I asked tentatively.

  She looked shocked. ‘Well, I didn’t shag him,’ she said vehemently. ‘If that’s what you mean, but I think kissing’s bad enough. I’d be shattered if I caught Andy kissing someone else. I don’t know what came over me.’