She giggled and looked a bit sheepish, no doubt remembering what else she did that night. That made two of us.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I nodded enthusiastically. ‘I do remember. He’s really nice. That was hilarious what he did at Dior. Really helped to pass the time.’
‘But what the fuck’s he doing in here?’ said Nelly, who hated unexplained mysteries almost as much as Frannie did. ‘He and Seamus stay in a total doss-house, they certainly don’t stay here.’
‘He was probably delivering some pictures – a disc or something,’ I said, suddenly inspired.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Frannie. ‘That’ll be it. He works for loads of different magazines, that’ll be it.’
‘Yeah,’ said Nelly. ‘But I saw him go up in the lift and you need a key card to make it work here, don’t you?’
‘Weird,’ I said, shrugging, and turned round quickly to Paul to change the subject, which worked, luckily.
He and his friends were hilarious together, but once I knew Miles was upstairs I lost all interest in the chatter and frivolity in that bar – even when we realized the couple sitting in the corner were Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser.
‘Didn’t know they did the shows,’ said Paul, which made us all roar. ‘Wonder what Harold thought of Helmut?’
I sneaked a look at my watch. It was after midnight already. I’d had enough, I wanted to be upstairs with that gorgeous man, who was probably already naked in my bed, but how could I suddenly leave without them all twigging something was going on? I tried not to think about it, but I just couldn’t sit still.
‘What’s up with you?’ said Paul eventually, pushing me in the ribs, so I nearly fell off the corner of the chair we were sharing. ‘Have you got ants in your pants? You’re twitching like a voodoo zombie.’
‘Oh, it’s just sitting on uncomfortable seats all day,’ I lied. I did have ants in my pants, large ones, which looked very like Miles. ‘It’s made my muscles all tight. I think I need to go and have a hot bath and lie down.’
Lie down on top of Miles.
‘Well, I’m sorry if we’re boring you,’ he said, half acting snitty, half meaning it.
I was saved by Bee, who started yawning and said that she was off to bed, she was catching an early train home so she could go straight into the office. I used her exit to commence mine, which involved a lot of kissing and hugging of Nelly, Iggy and Paul, even though I kept telling them I would be seeing them all soon – Nelly and Iggy when they came over to London to move her stuff, and Paul on my trip to New York with Ollie.
When I finally did escape, it took all my self-control not to run to the lift and my heart sank slightly when Frannie appeared at my side, just as I got to it.
‘I’m going up too,’ she said. ‘I’m knackered.’
I was even less thrilled when she started to say something about borrowing the latest edition of US Chic, which I had in my room. I had to think fast.
‘Oh no!’ I said, clamping my hand over my mouth. ‘There’s something I forgot to tell Nelly. I’d better go back.’
Frannie gave me one of her clever-clogs looks – as if to say, what could be so important I couldn’t call her, or text her, in the morning? – but I just disappeared back round the corner to the bar as quickly as I could. I was planning just to wait by the wall for a minute until the lift had gone, but then Paul saw me as he was leaving.
‘I thought you’d gone to bed,’ he said.
‘Well, I had, but then I thought I’d forgotten something, but I just realized I hadn’t,’ I said, lamely.
‘Oh fine, Emily,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That all makes perfect sense.’ He came over and put his hands on my shoulders. He rubbed his nose against mine. Eskimo kisses, another of our jokes. ‘You are such a weirdo at times,’ he said. ‘But I still love you. See you in Sin City.’ He kissed me, smack on the lips, and left.
At last, I was free. Bugger the lift, I thought, and ran up the stairs – it was only three flights – and along the corridor to my room. By the time I got the door open I was literally panting.
Miles was lying sprawled on the bed, naked in a tangle of sheets – and fast asleep. He looked so peaceful and almost angelic, despite two days’ beard growth, with his wiry hair sticking up around his head on the pillow. I couldn’t bear to wake him.
I cleaned my teeth, drank two bottles of mineral water from the mini bar – I’d had a lot of champagne, I now realized – and sorted out the mess of handbags and shoes on the floor, ready to pack quickly in the morning. I was hoping he would wake up, but he didn’t, so eventually I just took my clothes off and slid into bed beside him.
We’d never actually slept together, I realized, as in actual sleeping, except for about an hour in the early morning of our first night and I wondered how it would be. It was one thing having rampant nookie with another man, but to sleep quietly with one, well that seemed weird.
I almost felt like retreating to the sofa, but as I settled on the bed and turned over, I felt Miles’s arm come round me and he pulled me towards him, curling his body round mine, all apparently in his sleep. Almost immediately, I fell asleep myself and neither of us stirred until the next morning, when my alarm split the peace. That was a very strange wake-up call. I don’t know which of us was more disorientated, but almost immediately Miles’s frown of confusion turned into a big smile.
‘I can’t believe I slept through it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Was I great?’
‘You were great at sleeping,’ I said.
And the funny thing was, I had been too, and on the whole I was not the greatest sleeper. I often woke up in the middle of the night, next to Ollie, who was a master sleeper, and I would lie there for hours, worrying.
Worrying about my credit-card bills and whether I should change my job and whether I was getting fat and whether Ollie would always love me and was my brother really OK and should I see more of him and should I go and see my mother in that terrible place or did it just stir it all up for her?
And quite often, in the darkest hours, I would shed a tear for my dad, remembering our happy times together in his studio. It was as though all the demons I kept at bay during the day could get through my defences at night.
‘I’m really sorry, Emily,’ said Miles, rubbing his head with both his hands. ‘What an idiot I am. I’m afraid I had a few too many with the boys last night and I just crashed out. Actually, I’m glad you didn’t see me awake, I was pissed. I was a mess.’
‘So was I,’ I said. ‘I think we probably both needed a good sleep.’
‘And now we need a good…’ he said, rolling over on to his front and reaching out for me.
‘Shower,’ I said, slapping his bum, that beautiful bum of his, which reminded me. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Nelly saw you here last night. It was a pretty close call.’
‘Oh shit, it was her then,’ he said. ‘I thought I saw her, so I jumped into the lift to escape.’
‘Lucky you did,’ I said. ‘We were all in the bar and she would have dragged you in there, if she could have. I think I would have died.’
Then, at last, we got on and did what we had been supposed to do all along and then we said goodbye, me heading for Eurostar, London and my cosy little life with Ollie, Miles back to Sydney and whatever that held for him. We stood at the door and Miles took both my hands in his.
‘Bye, Emily,’ he said, playing with my fingers. ‘It’s been great. It’s been quite a “season”, as I believe you fashion babes call it.’
I smiled shyly at him. He got that mischievous look.
‘Are you doing New York?’ he said, with a mock serious expression.
I laughed.
‘Probably,’ I said.
‘So, maybe see you in February – well, I definitely will see you, through my long and throbbing lens – but it’s up to you, if you want to see me back, or not. You’ve got my number.’
And with one last peck on the cheek, he was gone.
11
As soon as I got back to London, my life settled down into its usual pattern with almost spooky ease and after all the excitement and drama of the shows season, heightened further by my dangerous liaison, I was perfectly happy about that.
Ollie and I resumed our usual round of work, parties and work parties – some together and some apart. He couldn’t come with me if I was going along to keep Frannie company at the launch of a new eyebrow gel by one of Slap’s major competitors, so we would meet for dinner afterwards and I would tell him all about it. Every detail. He loved getting the inside scoop on his competitors like that.
But if it was a fashion launch he always came with me. They were perfect networking opportunities for him and he also really enjoyed them. Ollie was far enough on the outside of fashion to remain seriously impressed by it. I found his disingenuous enthusiasm very endearing and it stopped me from getting too jaded about it all. Some of my colleagues were so spoiled they would chuck their party goodie bags into the nearest bin, within full sight of the venue, if they thought the gifts weren’t lavish enough. Ollie always opened his with the excitement of a child with a Christmas stocking.
‘Ooh, look, Em,’ he would say, bringing out some garish tube of hair gel to add to the legions already stuffed into our bathroom cupboards. ‘More product! Excellent.’ He kept the carrier bags too. He still thought getting something free was the most terrific lark.
As well as tagging along on my calendar of events he also had a lot of work things of his own to go to, some of which I had to attend as the executive wife, but many – sales person of the month etc. – I was all too happy to miss. Between all this and occasional more normal social outings with non-work friends, we were only at home about two evenings a week. One of those was always Saturday. It was another of Ollie’s little quirks, but he simply refused to go out on a Saturday night. He wouldn’t even go to the cinema and if friends invited us over he would say we were busy.
It was some kind of atavistic hangover from the days when someone like Ollie would never have been ‘in town’ on a Saturday night and, indeed, if we weren’t having a Sunday salon the next day, we would go to the country, usually to his parents’ place in Hampshire.
Far from dreading the in-laws, I loved going to stay with Max and Caroline. Ursula was right, they were as straight and ‘uncreative’ as people could be – and that was exactly why I liked them. They weren’t dull in a narrow-minded suburban way, they were just very conventional for people of their kind, right down to the books of Social Stereotypes cartoons in the downstairs loo and the green wellies in the boot room. Like Ollie’s friends Jeremy and Sarah, the Fairbrothers were totally predictable, extremely right wing, but sincerely well meaning and generally great fun.
In all honesty I did find some of Max’s views a little hard to take and when certain subjects – asylum seekers, unemployment benefit, working mothers – came up, I had to exercise extreme self-control.
Despite this, they weren’t uncultured oafs; they loved opera and went to Glyndebourne every summer, but always to the more well-known productions. Similarly they would know what had won the Booker Prize – from Radio 4 or The Daily Telegraph – but they wouldn’t actually read it. Max only read historical biographies and Caroline loved Jilly Cooper, and so did I, which is one of the first things she and I found to bond over.
I was never quite sure what they made of me, but right from my first visit, as Ollie’s new ‘friend’, they made me very welcome. Caroline thought her parents had known my mother’s ‘people’, so that gave us a basis to start from.
I didn’t know how much Ollie had told them about my horror-show family background, but it was never mentioned, so I had a feeling he had warned them off. They knew my father was dead and that my mother was ‘unwell’, but beyond that they never probed and if family ever did come up, my brother’s military career always stood me in good stead in their milieu, plus I had gone to what they considered a ‘known’ school.
But despite all these unspoken codes of acceptability, the Fairbrothers weren’t snobs – Ollie was much worse than his parents in that regard – they just had certain parameters that constituted life as they knew it. Anything else didn’t really register.
I think they thought my job a little strange – Harpers or Tatler, they would have understood as a pre-marriage toy job – but they found Ollie’s choice of profession much odder. His three older brothers had all been brilliantly successful in the City, before graduating on to post-Square Mile hobby lives, two of them farming and one dealing in fine wine. It embarrassed Max slightly that his youngest son was ‘fooling around with bloody lipstick’, as I’d heard him say once in a cross moment, but Ollie always laughed it off, saying it was ‘just a business’ like any other.
In a similar vein I always played down my look when we went to see them and in all honesty, part of the pleasure of those visits was forty-eight hours in jeans and a big cashmere jumper. My only concession to my normal style was a pair of bright pink wellies, which they thought were hilarious.
The only slight cause of tension between the generations was Ollie’s and my lack of interest in reproduction, but that was mostly relieved by the constant supply of grandchildren from his brothers. There always seemed to be another one on the way, so the pressure was taken off us to an extent, although Caroline did occasionally make well-meaning references to breeding, as she popped a coq au vin into the Aga, or arranged the flowers I had brought her.
‘Tick tock, Emily darling,’ she’d say, tearing my exquisitely arranged Wild at Heart bouquet to pieces and stuffing it into an old earthenware bread crock with some huge pieces of garden foliage. ‘That’s all I’m saying. Little kittens – time passes – tick tock. There, perfect for the hall. Lovely. Thank you, Emily.’
*
Lazy weekends down there and busy weeks in London made up the life I was happy to retreat back into. But still, occasionally, when my brain was in neutral – squashed in a lift, sitting in a taxi, or when I heard certain pieces of music – Miles would pop into my head.
Mostly, I would push him right out again, but sometimes I would take the memory of him out of its box and enjoy it for a few moments, before putting him safely away again. Even at that remove the mere thought of him could make my insides liquefy, but I didn’t allow it to happen very often.
I did have one wobbly moment, though. We’d only been back in the office after the shows for a few days, when Frannie suddenly squealed at me from the art department, where she was looking at some shots with the art director, Tim.
‘Em!’ she cried. ‘Come and look at this.’
I ran over – ever eager to be distracted by a joke – and came to a halt in front of a computer screen covered in pictures of Miles doing his strut down the Dior catwalk. I felt a flush race over my entire body and was gripped by panic.
‘Isn’t that hilarious?’ said Frannie. ‘I never actually saw it at the time because I was backstage. I didn’t realize he’d done the full thing. He looks great actually – shame he wasn’t with us that night at the Costes, he’s got that model strut going on.’
I was relieved she was twittering away, as it gave me a chance to collect myself.
‘Yes, it was really funny,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level. ‘They are hilarious, those photographers. I sometimes think they keep us all sane at the shows, don’t you?’
I felt quite shaky from the adrenaline rush. Seeing a picture of Miles was way too real. Apart from anything, I had forgotten quite how sexy he was. I grabbed the art director’s mouse and clicked on a few shots, pretending to be looking at the other pics of the actual show, when all I really wanted to do was gaze at Miles in all his animal glory.
‘Gosh, that was a great collection,’ I said, to change the subject. ‘Look at this amazing cartoon print dress. Reckon that would make a great cover. What do you two think?’
Finally, I felt able to tear myself away and I relinquished the mouse back to Tim. He clicked it a few times, but it wa
s clear he wasn’t interested in the cartoon dress.
‘Mmmm,’ he said. ‘Check that booty. This guy is seriously horny. Who did you say he was? Yummeeee. Your team or mine?’
I legged it back to my desk, before I gave myself away.
Apart from that scary moment, it was actually great to be back in the office, where I shared a little partitioned-off area with Frannie. Officially she was supposed to sit inside the glass office bit with her assistant and my desk was outside, with mine, but we’d swapped the phone numbers over so that Frannie and I were inside, and Janey and Gemma – our loyal right-hand gels – were outside.
We did work quite hard really, but there were also days spent playing with new beauty products, trying on clothes and dancing to the radio that we had on all the time.
‘I can’t believe I get paid to do this,’ said Frannie later that morning.
We were testing new face-masks that had been sent in to her – mine was bright pink mud from Arizona, hers was green algae from Brittany – while listening to Radio 2 (it was my turn to choose the station) and reading the latest American magazines which had just landed on our desks. I was reading Allure and Frannie was reading US Vogue. I had my feet up on my desk and my toenails were drying, a nice bright metallic blue.
‘This scenario just needs one more little element for me to achieve complete nirvana,’ said Frannie. ‘Bagels and very milky coffee. Janey!’
Eventually, after we’d washed the masks off and scoffed our snacks, which involved splitting a cream cheese and smoked salmon bagel so that Frannie had the bagel and the cream cheese and I had the smoked salmon, I did finally settle down to some proper work.
I seriously needed to get on with it – I only had half an hour to finish my trends list and story proposals for our all-important ‘New Season Meeting’ in Bee’s office. Frantically going through the notes of shoot ideas I had made in the back of my fashion shows sketchbook, I realized I would be lucky to finish in time.
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