I turned to look at Toby’s face as Max said grace. His head was down with his eyes closed and I realized he was starting to look more and more like my father as he got older, with one marked difference: Dad had always been ghostly pale from spending all his time in his studio and Toby’s face had the ruddy tinge of skin constantly exposed to harsh weather. Pushing himself to physical extremes seemed to be Toby’s way of coping with all the things he didn’t want to think about.
As a result of his formative years with our Uncle Andrew and his subsequent superstraight education, Toby fitted perfectly into Fairbrother-land in his chunky cords and checked Viyella shirts. You’d never have guessed he was the son of a wayward artist and his unhinged poet wife, or even that we were related. I watched him pulling a cracker with one of Ollie’s sisters-in-law, a toothy blonde in a bright pink Boden cardie and pearls, who was squawking with excitement at the fun of it. Two hearty Sloanes in perfect harmony.
Toby and I were like some kind of sociological experiment, I thought. I was eleven when I went to live with Ursula, he was seven when he moved in with Uncle Andrew and his family, yet we both seemed completely defined by those years. He was leaving on Boxing Day to go to Andrew’s – he had a strong sense of duty to the people who had given him shelter – and before he left he asked me to go for a walk with him.
Even though I hadn’t seen much of him over the years, I was still very fond of Tobes. He may have gone off on a completely different tangent to me, but we did have those crucial seven years together. We’d hardly seen any of our parents’ relatives when we were little, so he and Ursula were just about the only people left I had any shared childhood memories with.
We met in the boot room and set out across the fields behind the house. They were still crisp with the hard frost glittering in the midday sun and the trees on the horizon were outlined starkly against the pure white sky.
I breathed in deeply, filling my lungs with the cool clean air which seemed uniquely English somehow. I could see the steeple of the village church in the distance and smoke rising from the chimneys of cottages nestling in the folds of the landscape. I’d missed those ageless English days when I’d lived in New York.
We walked along chatting lightly about how nice the Fairbrothers were and Toby’s plans for life after the army. Max had taken him off for a man-to-man chat about the City after breakfast that morning and he said he was giving it serious thought.
The conversation gradually petered out and as I saw Toby’s shoulders rise towards his ears inside his Barbour, I knew he had something to say to me; something he was having trouble getting out. I remembered him doing that thing with his shoulders when he was tiny and had been told off. I trudged along for a while admiring the effect of my pink boots against the white frost, but in the end I couldn’t stand it any longer. I stopped and turned towards him, putting my hand on his waxy sleeve.
‘What is it, Tobes?’ I said. ‘I can see you’ve got something on your mind. Tell me.’
He looked relieved, as he turned to look at me, but still constricted by whatever it was he needed to say. He sighed deeply and then took a breath, like someone about to jump off a high board.
‘It’s Mum,’ he finally got out in a strangled voice.
‘What about Mum?’ I said, trying not to let an edge come into my voice, but it did anyway. I couldn’t control my reaction to her any more than Toby could be at ease with his emotions.
‘She’s asking for you,’ he said.
I laughed. I don’t know why, it’s just what happened.
‘Em,’ said Toby pleadingly.
Now it was my turn to sigh deeply. I didn’t want to have this conversation any more than he did.
‘What do you mean she’s asking for me? And how do you know?’
‘I go to see her,’ said Toby in a tiny little voice.
I was stunned. I had no idea. I did a quick sum in my head. I hadn’t seen her for nearly ten years. The last time I’d gone she hadn’t seemed to know me and had kept telling me to get out, so I had. Gladly.
‘When do you go to see her?’ I said. I realized I was shaking. I wasn’t cold. It was some kind of shock. I never talked about my mother and I didn’t want to now. Not even to Toby.
‘I go every month,’ said Toby, looking down. ‘The, er, hospital is not far from where I’m based. I went once just to see how she was and she seemed much better. She recognized me. So I’ve carried on going.’
He looked up at me. His face was even redder than usual. He looked like he could cry.
‘The loony bin, you mean,’ I spat out. I had no intention of continuing that conversation and I strode off up the hill to get away from it. I heard Toby call after me, but I didn’t turn back.
I just kept walking until the white frost underfoot and the white sky overhead merged together through the tears in my eyes and wiped my brain clean like one of those Etch A Sketch pads.
And I didn’t go back to the house until after he’d left.
17
Christmas melted into New Year, which Ollie and I celebrated in high style in Paris with Iggy and Nelly, at the house-warming for their new apartment, a wonderful sprawling place in the Palais Royal.
It was quite a party, with a lot of the men – including Iggy and Ollie – fully made up. There was a great turnout, with Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano both making appearances and, as Peter Potter – who had been invited by the cunning Ms Stelios – wrote in his column, it established Iggy and Nelly as the new ‘It’ couple of the fashion world.
Then it seemed like I’d hardly got over that hangover and there I was again, picking up my dry-cleaning ready to pack for the shows. It was mid-February and the whole crazy fashion circus was about to take off once more, starting in New York.
It was just going to be me and Alice in New York – Bee felt she couldn’t spare the time this season – but we had a brief to keep UK Chic visible there, especially at Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and all the other American designers with big fragrance advertising budgets.
I was sitting at my desk in London pondering whether to cancel the booking that had been made for me to stay at The Mercer with Alice, so I could spend more time with Ursula while I was there, when it struck me. If I stayed at Ursula’s, I wouldn’t be able to sneak around with Miles. Even though she knew all about it, I couldn’t imagine seeing him outside the anonymity of a hotel room – and I certainly couldn’t countenance having rampant sex in my childhood bedroom, with the teddies, and my parents, looking on.
By that point, with all the Christmas and New Year jollies – and sales – to distract me, plus some quality time with Ollie, I really had almost stopped thinking about Miles, so I was quite surprised by how vividly that fully formed thought popped into my head. The next thing I knew The Mercer’s address was going into the press accreditation form that Gemma had just put on my desk.
I skipped my yoga class that lunchtime, staying in the office when all the other girls went off, which was very unusual, but I wanted some time alone, with no risk of anyone casually looking over my shoulder. I had a private email to write.
Twenty minutes later I had written about fifty different versions and still wasn’t happy with it. I understood enough about the lack of internet security to be very circumspect with what I wrote, but I was still agonizing over getting the tone right. So far the best I had come up with was this:
To:[email protected]
From:[email protected]
Re: Are you doing New York?
Arrive NYC February 6. Staying at The Mercer. Look forward to seeing your work.
I still wasn’t sure about it. I felt it needed to be a little less assumptive that I would be seeing him, but then something happened that made me hit send with an instant reflex. Natalie suddenly appeared in the office. I don’t know which of us was more surprised to see the other. She clearly hadn’t expected anyone to be in there.
‘Hello, Natalie,’ I said, trying to recover f
rom the slightly sick feeling that I had sent an email I wasn’t entirely happy with. ‘Can I help you with something?’ I asked pointedly, hoping to make her feel as uncomfortable as possible.
Her eyes darted around the room making her look particularly ‘sleakit’, as Frannie called it, as she tried to come up with a good reason why she had come into our office, at a time when we were all usually out. I saw her eyes rest for a second on the form on my desk.
‘Alice needs your accreditation form,’ she said, far too quickly.
‘Oh, does she?’ I said, picking it up. ‘Well, here it is, Natalie. You can take it to her. I’m sure she will be racing back from that lunch I saw her leaving for half an hour ago, just to look at this form. How lucky you got it for her just in time.’
My sarcasm was not lost on her and she snatched the form from my hand and stalked out. As I watched her big round bottom wobble away I couldn’t remember when I had disliked somebody quite so much.
The next morning I got in early to check my emails – the way Natalie was creeping around I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was hacking into our computers as well – and there was a reply from Miles in my Inbox.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: Re: Are you doing New York?
Can deliver shots to hotel as required at the end of each day. Will await instructions.
I was beaming as I deleted it and then emptied my Deleted Items file and re-started my computer.
The New York shows were as dull as I remembered them and the weather as terrible, but the shopping and the nightlife I squeezed in around them were stellar – plus I got to see Paul most days and fitted in a few visits to Ursula.
Apart from a really grim moment when three of my credit cards were refused one after another in Sigerson Morrison and another when I ended up trudging miles through filthy melting New York snow in my pristine Prada boots – one of the pairs I’d put aside back in October – I had a great time.
I didn’t have to see much of Alice for one thing. She had a lot of contacts of her own in New York, so apart from sharing the limo, which I didn’t even use all the time – hence the boot nightmare – we went our own ways.
And then of course there was Miles.
I saw him first at the Marc by Marc Jacobs show. It was about the fourth one I’d been to and while I had tried not to rubberneck too obviously in the direction of the photographers’ pit at each of them, I’d had a fairly good look and hadn’t been able to see him. It was quietly driving me nuts.
But I resisted the temptation to send him a text saying ‘R U HERE???’ because while I was almost desperate to see him, there was part of me that also wanted to string out the exquisite agony of the anticipation – and another, smaller, part that knew it might be better in the long term if I didn’t see him at all.
But then, suddenly, as I walked up the stone steps into the venue, he was at my side. He didn’t say anything, just appeared next to me. It was his battered old boots I noticed first and when I jerked my head up, there was that familiar face – much browner than before, especially against the winter-pale faces all around – with that big squinty grin beaming down at me.
He was wearing a navy wool beanie pulled right down on his head which made his white teeth look whiter and his green eyes look greener. In some kind of reflex action I gripped my Birkin bag to my stomach, just to have something to hold on to so I didn’t fall over.
He said nothing and neither did I – I couldn’t – he just held my gaze for one extended moment, as snow fell gently around us, then he touched my arm with the lightest of pressure and strode off to shoulder his way into the venue. As I watched his broad back disappear into the crowd I realized I had come to a complete standstill, with rivers of people streaming past me on either side.
I sat on the exquisitely uncomfortable metal bleachers – promoted to the second row on Alice’s invitation, as she was in Bee’s front-row spot – all squashed up with my coat, hat, gloves, pashmina, handbag, specs and notebook, and feeling vaguely unreal.
It was so weird to know Miles was in there somewhere, probably thinking about me – possibly looking at me – but I didn’t know where. The particularly long wait before the show began gave me a chance to sneak plenty of looks down to the photographers’ pit and after a while there was one long lens that did seem to be trained on me.
I was fairly certain it was Miles, so I stuck my tongue out in its direction and coquettishly licked my lips. The woman sitting next to me gave me a very funny look, but I didn’t care. A couple of seconds later, my phone beeped. I looked in my Inbox and there was Miles’s number with a message to check my emails later.
I tapped out my reply: ‘2 nite? 11?’
And back came the answer: ‘U bet.’
The rest of the day passed in a blur, during which I picked up some new underwear at the fabulous Prada store in SoHo – paying cash to avoid card problems – before I went back to The Mercer to drop off my shopping and change.
I felt really mucky after a day rattling around in Manhattan in the snow and slush and wanted to look my best at Donna Karan, where I was sitting next to Alice in the front row, as a result of the ongoing confusion over who was actually there from UK Chic. It was fine by me.
I ran a bath, but before I got in it, I checked my emails. There were a few from Gemma keeping me up to date with travel arrangements for Milan and Paris, some jokes from Frannie, and Ollie had emailed to say he was going away for a special work conference in Bath for a few days and would be ‘phone off’ for most of it.
Then there was one from Nelly telling me she was going to be in Milan – yippee! – the usual spam offering me a larger penis and a cheap loan, and then finally the one I wanted. It was a picture of me at the Marc by Marc Jacobs show with my tongue poking out.
The reunion with Miles was everything I had fantasized it would be, on the few occasions I had allowed myself the luxury of thinking about it. Four months had passed since I’d last seen him and I was all too aware that, give or take the odd phone call, I could have built the whole thing up into something it wasn’t.
But from the moment I opened my hotel-room door to him I knew I hadn’t. He was still wearing the woolly hat and he had augmented his usual jeans and motocross jacket with a big chunky polo-neck jumper. His cheeks were pink from the cold and he was grinning at me so cheekily, my stomach did a spontaneous backflip. I just stood there in the doorway gawping up at him. There was something about Miles that was so quintessentially male, it just did me in.
An image of Ollie at Nelly’s party, painted and powdered like a Regency fop, complete with beauty spot, flashed across my brain. I deleted it instantly as Miles thrust his tongue into my mouth.
After we’d got to know each other again, as it were, and I had come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be wearing those particular pieces of overpriced chiffon underwear again – they were in shreds on the floor – we just lay there, looking at each other.
‘G’day,’ he said, tipping an imaginary hat at me.
‘How do you do?’ I replied.
‘You tell me,’ he said.
‘You do good,’ I said poking him in his rock-hard stomach. ‘You’re looking seriously fit, Miles,’ I said. ‘You’re even more toned and tanned than usual. Quite the Calvin Klein model. You’d give that Travis a run for his money right now.’
‘Summer,’ he said, with a contented smile. ‘Since I last saw you, I haven’t done much except surf and lie around. There’s only so much of this fashion bullshit world I can take – I don’t know how you stand it – then I just have to go and sit on a beach for a while to get my head straight. I took a few photos, of course… on the beach.’ He laughed. ‘And I travelled around a bit in my van. Spent Christmas way up north. It was bloody hot and wet, but still beautiful. What did you do?’
Even as he said it, I saw his face constrict and I felt mine do the same, as my whole body involuntarily stiffene
d.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me. In fact, please erase that question from the records, OK? Let’s stick in the here and now, shall we?’
I nodded dumbly.
‘And right here and right now, I’d like to do this…’ said Miles and I sank back into blissful oblivion.
I saw him twice more after that, late one night and then for a delicious rendezvous over lunchtime on the last day. Straight after he left, I raced uptown to meet Ursula for tea at The Pierre.
She was waiting for me in her usual spot in the Rotunda room – it was her favourite venue for meetings with writers – and when I walked in she burst out laughing.
‘What?’ I said, looking down to see if my skirt was tucked into my knickers or something. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘Oh, Em,’ she said. ‘You might as well take out a billboard in Times Square – look at you!’
‘What?’ I said more tentatively, as I had an idea where this was heading.
‘He’s in town is he?’ said Ursula.
I grinned at her sheepishly and nodded. She nodded back.
‘Just left him, have you?’ she continued.
I sighed indulgently, as I sank into my seat.
‘Oh, you,’ I said, kicking her foot with mine. ‘How do you always know?’
‘Because being able to judge people by the tiniest little signals is a big part of what I do. A twitch of a mouth can net me another fifty grand if I read it right. Plus, of course, I’ve been around for about a million years. Here, have some tea and I’ll order you a sandwich. You must be ravenous.’
And for once, I was.
Another funny thing happened at that tea. Ursula gave me a book of poetry. There was nothing unusual about that, she was always trying to get me to read stuff I had no interest in, but this one was different. It was by my mother.
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