Still not really feeling guilty, but more than a little confused, I had decided not to see him again. I was happy with that choice, but it was so strange to sit in every show and know he was out there somewhere in the semi-dark, possibly looking at me through his long lens. And there I was, all kitted out as Miss Perfectly Groomed Fashion Editor having the thoughts of a total slut muppet.
The other strange thing about the end of that week was not having Nelly sitting by me. I missed her so much. The shows were always our special time together because, although we talked on the phone a lot, we didn’t really see that much of each other back in London. It seemed crazy, but we were both always so manically busy with our jobs and, although we crossed over in the fashion scene and always made straight for each other at crowded launch parties, in our general social lives we moved in totally different circles. I was very much the Notting Hillbilly, while Nelly lived near Old Street and hung out with a much more edgy crowd.
Ollie and I might have been in the Tatler‘Cool Couples A-List’ – another cutting for his scrapbook – but I think Nelly found our lives a bit too straight for her taste. She used to call the highly desirable area where Ollie and I lived ‘suburbia’ and she was one of very few people who were immune to my husband’s generally irresistible charm. It was mutual. The two of them were like cats around each other, with their fur prickling up.
She did come over to one of our Sunday salons, but whenever I asked her again, she always found a reason why she couldn’t make it.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, darls,’ she’d said on one of my many attempts to get her along. ‘I’ll have to leave you and Little Lord Fauntleroy to it this time. I’ve got to help my mate Tom move house on Sunday, because he’s been kicked out of his squat. Give the A-list my love, won’t you?’
Neither of them would actually say it, because they wouldn’t have wanted to hurt my feelings, but Nelly thought Ollie was a pretentious posh git and he thought she was unbearably coarse and common. But whatever my husband thought of Nelly, I loved her and I really missed her hilarious running commentary at the shows. She did ring me a few times as the days went on in Milan, but she was flat out helping Iggy – or ‘my Igs’ as she was now calling him – with his show. And the really amazing thing was that far from losing her job, as I had feared she would, she was doing it all with her editor’s blessing.
With Nelly’s talent for broadcasting developments in her private life, Beaver – along with the rest of the fashion pack, which was frantically buzzing with the news – had found out almost immediately about Nelly’s new liaison. And far from being furious that her most talented stylist was missing the shows, pure’s editor was thrilled to have one of her staff as the ‘muse’ of fashion’s hottest rising star. Needless to say, Bee was as pissed off about it as Beaver was gloating.
‘Why didn’t one of you girls crack on to Igor bloody Vaseline-o-vich, or however you pronounce it, at that party?’ she asked us furiously.
We were having lunch in Cova, our favourite café, with its excellent range of very small, very expensive salads and fabulous proximity to Milan’s shopping epicentre. A Milan institution, right on the corner of Via Montenapoleone and Via Sant’ Andrea, it was bang in the heart of luxury boutique nirvana – the shopping Bermuda Triangle. It also had a waiter who was a dead ringer for George Clooney. We loved the place.
‘Perhaps because two of us are married and the other one was busy sucking up to Antonello Ferrucci and his staff on your orders?’ said Frannie with her usual frankness.
‘Humph,’ said Bee, necking the complimentary glass of Prosecco which had just been sent over by the management. ‘It’s so bloody annoying. I couldn’t believe it last night in Le Langhe. We walk in and there is Nelly Stelios sitting not only with Vaseline-o-vich but with Tom bloody Ford. At the same table. I nearly puked.’
Frannie shot me a look – this was the funny thing she had wanted to tell me the night before when she’d knocked on my bedroom door, while I was with Miles. She had told me about it that morning and we’d been in a state of hysteria ever since. Bee was obsessed with Tom Ford. That scenario was like a nightmare specially scripted to torture her. The only thing that could have been worse would have been Beaver sitting there with him too, but still she wouldn’t stop going on about it.
‘Christ,’ she was saying, chewing on a breadstick in her distraction, quite a feat considering she was smoking at the same time. ‘It must have been the worst night of Tom’s life.’
‘They looked like they were having a pretty good time to me,’ said Frannie. ‘He was cracking up most of the time. At Nelly.’
Bee ignored her and carried on raving, in between biting along the breadstick at high speed like a starving rat. ‘I bet they’re going to do some kind of insider reportage of the making of the show, with great backstage pics and an exclusive interview with bloody Igor. I’ve already been told we can’t have an interview with him. What kind of name is that for a designer anyway?’
She looked petulant for a moment and then another terrible thought struck her.
‘And they’ll probably have Tom in it now too,’ she wailed.
She was right on all counts. Nelly had told me all about it. She was directing the whole thing and the US, French, Italian, Russian, Australian and Japanese editions of pure had all optioned it. It was a massive story, at least twelve pages. I also happened to know that a documentary team from Channel 4 were filming the making of the feature too, for a one-hour show.
‘Mind you,’ said Bee, still off on one and waving at the George Clooney waiter for another glass of fizz. ‘It could all go horribly wrong. I still can’t believe there is a heterosexual fashion designer out there, even if he is some kind of Serbian thug. He’s probably just using her as a big bushy beard.’
She paused a moment and I saw her eyes start to twinkle.
‘Perhaps there’s a nice lezzo you could chat up, hey Alice? To get us a good story. Isn’t that new French designer Marie Millais meant to be a big licker on the quiet? You like her clothes, don’t you, Alice? Why don’t you go backstage after the show in Paris next week and chat her up?’
By the expression that crossed her face, I could tell Alice wasn’t sure if Bee was joking or not. She hadn’t seen the wink she’d tipped me and Frannie. Poor paranoid humourless Alice. She’d probably spend the rest of the day worrying if Bee really meant it, I thought, and planning what she should wear for a lipstick lesbian look.
‘I’ve got a Joan Armatrading CD I can lend you,’ said Frannie, brightly, kicking me gently under the table. ‘Get you in the mood.’
‘And you’ve already got your denim dungarees,’ I added.
‘And your Birkenstocks…’ said Bee, and the three of us collapsed into giggles.
Alice looked at us, bewildered, with a facial expression that reminded me of President Bush trying to grasp an abstract concept, until eventually, I could see the dawning realization that we were joking. Bee was wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. She whacked Alice on the upper arm, with the gung-ho spirit of the hockey captain she had been at school.
‘Oh, Alee-chay,’ she said. ‘You silly sausage. You are the most wonderful stylist, but you’ve got absolutely no sense of bloody humour. I don’t really expect you to change sides just to get me a good story. I was joking. You know? Funny ha ha? Now, here’s George Non Clooney. What are you going to eat, Alice?’ She flashed a mischievous look at me and Frannie. ‘May I suggest the prawn salad?’
And that just set us off again.
6
‘How’s your family?’ asked Paul, stirring sugar into his coffee.
We had finally managed to find time between shows and work meetings – real and fictional – to see each other and we were standing at the bar in our favourite old pasticceria, Marchesi, just off Corso Magenta, sipping nuclear-strength macchiatos.
‘Oh, you know,’ I replied. ‘Mad, bad and dead. How are yours?’
‘Much the same, thanks. Knocked up, knocked
out and knackered.’
‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Do give them my love, won’t you?’
‘Of course and do send your mum my best wishes, the next time you visit the loony bin.’
We clinked our coffee cups. It was just one of our ritual conversations. It may sound heartless and uncaring, but our game of twisted happy families was really a survival mechanism. In fact, it had been confessing to the equally gothic horrors of our childhoods which had launched our friendship from the merely hilarious into the seriously intense, way back when we had first met as students. As my photographer boyfriend had said, the day he moved out from our shared flat, Paul and I were closer than cling film and it was suffocating him.
The thing was, I hadn’t told anyone the truth about my family until I’d met Paul. I’d even got rather good at elaborate pretending games, to try and hide the horrible truth. It had been easy when I’d been sent to boarding school at age twelve. With no one around to contradict me, I could make up the kind of family I wished I’d had. So when I met Paul, who was completely open about his horrendous childhood – he’d almost made it into a party piece – it was the most incredible relief to tell him the truth about mine.
It’s a simple story really. Both my parents were highly strung artistic types – my dad was a painter, my mum a so-called poet. They both came from privileged backgrounds and had enough money in family trusts to allow themselves to indulge in their ‘art’, without any of the tempering reality checks of having to earn a living.
We lived in a big house in Sussex – Mum and Dad, me, and my younger brother, Toby – in a quite idyllic setting, and there were many happy days. But my mother’s mental state became increasingly fragile after a bout of post-natal depression, followed by a series of miscarriages. As my godmother, Ursula, once said to me, my parents were as irresponsible about contraception as they were about everything else.
Anyway, between getting pregnant and losing the babies, Mum supposedly wrote poetry, although as far as I could tell, she spent most of her time smoking dope, drinking and having very noisy nervous breakdowns – which were really just attempts to get my father’s attention. He was so totally absorbed in his painting. And his bong.
Then Dad died, so suddenly, and Mum really flipped out. I mean really. She was always drunk, or stoned, she never got dressed and rarely bought any food. When she did go out, she frequently left me – I was only ten – at home on my own to look after Toby, sometimes not even coming back overnight. I was too frightened to tell anyone in case ‘they’ took us away and put us in a home – those terrible childhood fears – and somehow I kept Toby and myself together enough to keep going to school. Why I thought that being taken into care would be any worse than living with a parent in the state she was in, I can’t imagine, but when you’re a child you just cling on to whatever you know as normal.
The final blow came when my mum attempted suicide. She threw herself in front of a train, but in her drunken state she even stuffed that up and was hardly even injured.
But that was when the social services did find out about how we were all living. Two children and a deranged, drunken woman in a filthy house. They took my mother into custody for reckless endangerment, and Toby and I went into care for one terrifying night before they contacted my father’s brother, Andrew, and he came and got us.
For a while it seemed they were going to prosecute my mother for putting the train at risk – and for child neglect – but after taking medical advice about her mental state the cases were dropped. But not before my mother was completely undone. She was already seriously unstable before any of it happened, but with my father’s death less than a year before, spending time on remand in prison and having her children taken away pushed her over the edge. In the end she was sectioned and after several more suicide attempts and a serious assault on a nurse, my mother has never been out of the mental hospital. She’s pretty much locked in.
My uncle did take me and Toby to see her a few times, but she seemed not to know us. She just sat there, picking at her skirt and rocking – and holding a baby doll. For two already severely traumatized children it was too much, and her doctors agreed it would be better if we didn’t see her for a while. Which for me, I’m afraid to say, became years. It was just easier not to go. Much easier.
So, like I said, it was a gothic horror of a childhood. But I was the lucky one in some ways, because I had my wonderful godmother, Ursula, to look out for me. When Mum was committed it was decided that Toby would continue living with our uncle, but he said he couldn’t take me as well. He had three kids of his own and it was too much. It was terrible to be separated from Toby, but really, I was saved a lot of aggro. Ex-Sandhurst, ex-Guards, Uncle Andrew was as manically straight and strict as my father had been bohemian. As a result, my brother grew up in a state of near martial law, but he seemed to like it. When he left school he went into the army and became some kind of superhuman SAS freak. We all have our own ways of coping with trauma.
I, meanwhile, was sent to boarding school, which I adored. It was all so normal and blissfully structured – hot food, clean clothes, lots of lovely rules, everything I had lacked at home – and then in my holidays I went to stay with Ursula, in New York, which was utter heaven.
Really, it was a miracle that my parents ever asked someone as sensible as her to be my godmother, although I suppose the fact that she was a diesel dyke who would have made Gertrude Stein look feminine, would have offset any boringly ‘bourgeois’ tendencies she might have had towards financial security and other – to them – tawdry facts of real life.
My father had known her since childhood. Their parents had become friends when her father was posted to London on some kind of secret squirrel mission during the war and after it was all over, my dad and his family had spent a lot of summers at Ursula’s parents’ place on Martha’s Vineyard. It was a seriously Preppie scene, but Dad and Ursula were united in rebellion and became very close friends. They once put hash into the brownies for a family beach picnic. Everyone had a great time without quite knowing why.
After graduating from Wellesley, Ursula went through a seriously hippy stage – she went to Woodstock and hung out with Janis Joplin, which always thrilled me – then she went into publishing, eventually becoming a very successful literary agent. She represented some of the giants of modern American literature, as well as some of the biggest-selling names in airport fiction, and was very wealthy in her own right on top of what she had inherited from her parents.
Even though she never came over to the UK – she had a morbid fear of flying – Ursula and my father stayed friends and it meant a lot to both of them when she agreed to be godmother to his first child. It was one of the few really smart decisions he ever made. I can still remember going over to Martha’s Vineyard the summer when I was four, just after my brother Toby had been born. I realize now that was when all my mother’s problems had begun, but at the time I was going through the classic displacement of the first child when a new baby comes along.
Ursula did her best to make me feel special and wanted. We went on expeditions together, just the two of us, combing the beach for shells and crabs, and then we’d sit on the beach eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups as she told me stories about her childhood and how naughty she’d been. On rainy days we baked cookies and on one very hot one, she showed me how to make real American lemonade and we set up a roadside stall to sell it. I still have a picture of myself sitting there.
Ursula never forgot my birthday or Christmas and often used to ring me up – all the way from New York – just for a chat, which was pretty special when I was eight. I think she knew life wasn’t that easy for any of us once Mum got ill, plus I was, she often told me, the daughter she would never have. She called me her ‘un-daughter’ and in many ways she was more of a mother to me than my own female biological parent ever was.
‘Have you seen Ursula recently?’ I asked Paul, as we sipped our dangerously potent coffees. One of the great
things for me about his move to New York, was that the two of them had become great friends.
‘I sure have,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ve got some books she sent over for you. And she asked me to give you this too.’ He took my face in his hands and planted a big kiss on my forehead. ‘Just there, that’s where she told me to put it.’
I smiled. Ursula always kissed me on the forehead. It was one of our things. She said it was my third eye.
‘Is she OK?’ I asked.
‘OK?’ said Paul. ‘She’s amazing. She’s fatter than ever, she’s richer than ever, her writers are all over the bestseller charts and she’s got an even-younger-and-more-gorgeous-than-ever girlfriend. She’s the Hugh Hefner of the isle of Lesbos, that woman.’
I laughed. Ursula’s ability to attract beautiful young women was legendary. She always had a glorious girl in tow – in total thrall to her intellect and charisma. She allowed them to worship her for a while but she always ended the relationships before they got bored with her.
‘And here are the books,’ he said, pulling them out of his capacious Bottega Veneta tote bag and handing them to me.
One was clearly a ‘treasure’ found during her obsessive trawling of second-hand book shops. Called Siren Songs it was a collection of poetry with quite a great Seventies illustration of a hippy chick on the dust jacket, which in my opinion was probably the best thing about it. I put it in my bag without looking inside. I hated poetry. The other book was a shiny new paperback, with the kind of text-heavy cover design that suggested it was some hideous self-help tripe. Thin Souls it was called. I read out the rest of the title.
‘“How high fashion creates low self-esteem…”. Oh, for God’s sake, where does she find these things?’ I groaned. ‘Why can’t she send me a nice fat art book, or some racy new novel? I love Ursula with all my heart, but for a literary agent, she has really terrible taste in books.
Oh well, I’ll tell her I loved them. Anyway, did I tell you about the amazing Azzedine Alaia jacket I’ve seen in Corso Como? God, I love that shop, I haven’t seen that jacket anywhere else. They’ve got this genius collection of vintage handbags too…’
Handbags and Gladrags Page 8
