‘Please don’t be horrible about him, Miles,’ I said quietly. ‘I am married to him. He may seem like an arsehole to you, but he’s been very good to me.’
‘So good he hasn’t rung you once while you’ve been here?’ said Miles, clearly not ready to let it go.
It was true. Ollie was too caught up in that stupid shoot to call me, and when I thought about it, how did that sound? My husband hadn’t rung me while I was on the other side of the world, because he was having his house photographed. Great.
‘Do you really love him, Emily?’ said Miles, his brow all bunched up in an uncharacteristic frown. ‘Do you love being with him?’ He paused, then spoke again, more softly. ‘Do you love being with him, as much as you love being with me?’
My brain span just thinking about it all. Yes, but no, well, sort of. No, no, no. It didn’t look that good when you studied it, but on the other hand, what was I supposed to do? Leave Ollie and move to Sydney? It was too much. My mind suddenly tripped back to the first night with Miles in Milan, when he’d told me he’d been watching me for a year. I had felt stalked then and that suffocated feeling returned.
‘I don’t know,’ I said again. ‘I love being here with you, but I love my life in London. I’m not ready to give it up.’
‘Really? Does it really make you happy? Would a woman who was really happy be starving herself? Slim is one thing and you had a beautiful figure when I met you, but you’re fading away in front of me. You’re just bones now, Emily, and you’re thinner every time I see you. Is that a sign of a happy woman?’
Oh, not Miles as well now, I thought, telling me I was too thin. That made Ollie just about the only person who didn’t go on at me about that. He might not have rung me since I’d been in Sydney, but at least he understood I just wanted to look good in my clothes, which was part of my job after all.
On top of everything else, it was too much. I did the only thing I could do in the circs. I burst into hysterical tears and then, to my great shame, I had a big sulk. I just couldn’t cope with everything that Miles had thrown at me and I sulked for the rest of the night. I didn’t make love with him then, or the next morning and then it was too late, it was time to get the plane. Stupid, stupid girl.
Considering that those days in Sydney had probably been the happiest times of my life, my parting from Miles was horrendous. He saw me off, looking grey in the face and I just felt like I was made of stone.
I wanted to throw myself at him and beg his forgiveness and ask him to keep me there for ever, but I couldn’t. I could only go through the motions of checking in, buying magazines, kissing him on the cheek like some kind of acquaintance and pushing my trolley through that horrendous point of no return to passport control.
I turned round and looked at him just before there was a curve in the corridor and he would disappear from view. He was standing staring down at his boots, looking completely stricken. I hurried on before he looked up and I would have had to rush back to him.
I felt numb all the long flight home and the only thing that got me through it was watching terrible films and obsessively reading Paeanies. There was something about going over the same rhythmic words again and again that was amazingly comforting. It did make me have the odd unwelcome thought about my mother – and Toby – but mainly it made my brain switch into neutral, which is exactly where I wanted it to be.
When I finally got back, wrung out from the flight and the emotional spin cycle I’d been through, I found getting home was not the comfort it usually was for me. Normally just being in Westbourne Grove and sliding into my life there made me feel instantly grounded again, but this time I was like a dog turning round and round in my basket but not able to get comfortable. Ollie didn’t seem to notice, he was too wrapped up in the stupid shoot of our flat. He was so overexcited about it you would have thought it was something important.
At that stage the Chic Interiors art department had started to lay out the pictures and he was going into their offices all the time to help with the captions and stuff like that. Combined with his usual workload and the continuing saga of Slap for Chaps, which was now part of a major charity fund-raising event, I hardly seemed to see him. And it suited me. It took the pressure off having to pretend I was fine, when I was anything but.
It wasn’t until I’d been home for nearly two weeks that I realized he hadn’t even tried to make love to me since I’d got back, which was unusual. I was perfectly happy about it, because at that point I never wanted to have sex ever again, but it was still odd. We normally went through the motions whenever we’d been apart and this had been a longer separation than most. I reckoned Ollie must have been picking up on my low mood in some way and was giving me some space.
If things were tense at home, there wasn’t any relief to be found in the Surface office. The launch date was getting closer and closer, but Rosie was still in the same state of chaotic bravado. She’d written up her piece on Junya Watanabe and Steve was in the process of organizing a portrait of him, but apart from that the only material we had in was the pictures I’d shot in Sydney. At least they liked them – even grumpy Steve was impressed by Miles’s pictures.
Their enthusiastic reaction to his shots was just about the only nice thing that had happened since I had got home, until I received an email from him with no message, just a picture attachment. It was a photo of me, asleep and naked. Using his collage technique, he’d fanned my hair out around my shoulders, taken the flowers that had been in a vase on the bedside cabinet and scattered them in the air around me and chopped up the blue and white of the sheets, so I looked like some kind of twenty-first-century Venus rising from the waves. He’d called it ‘Bud’.
It was such a beautiful gesture I wanted to respond but I just couldn’t find the right words, so I went on the internet and trawled through those out-of-print book search sites, until eventually I found a copy of my mother’s anthology and had them send it straight to him.
Life went on like this for a few more weeks until something happened to shock me out of my self-obsession. Frannie rang me at Surface one afternoon and said she had some horrible news.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the baby, is there?’ I asked, immediately.
‘No, no, he or she is growing like a little champion – it’s Alice. She’s taken an overdose. She nearly died, Emily.’
‘Oh, fuck me,’ I said, feeling really shocked. ‘When did it happen?’
‘A couple of days ago, but we’ve only just heard. It seems Alice called her neighbour just in time, or she’d be dead. She’d taken masses of painkillers, but something made her change her mind, thank God. She’s been in intensive care, but she’s stable now, whatever that means.’
‘Oh, poor Alice,’ I said. My eyes filled with tears. For all my complicated feelings about her, I felt deeply sad that she’d felt bad enough to try and kill herself. No one deserved that. Plus it set off a lot of painful associations to do with my mother. Ouch.
‘So we were right about her being depressed,’ I said.
‘We bloody well were. The silly cow. Why didn’t she tell you, when you asked her that time in Milan?’
I just exhaled loudly. What a mess we stupid humanoids were, I thought. All scurrying along in our private pods of misery and not telling each other.
‘I think she couldn’t admit it to herself,’ I said, still not wanting to tell Frannie what had really passed between me and Alice that dark day in Milan, or any of the other baggage I was carrying in relation to Miss Alee-chay Pettigrew.
‘Which hospital is she in?’ I asked Frannie, thinking I might send some flowers. It seemed the least I could do.
‘She’s in St Mary’s and actually, that’s one of the reasons I’m ringing. Bee told me to – she’s been asking for you.’
‘Alice has? Me? That’s weird.’
‘That’s what I thought. I always thought she hated your guts, but that’s what Bee said, she wants you to go and see her. Will you? I know how you fee
l about hospitals, but Bee is pretty firm that you’ve got to go. Not that you work here any more, but…’
Frannie didn’t need to say any more. She knew all about my mum and how I felt about visiting her, and my blood phobia didn’t exactly predispose me towards medical institutions either, but in the circumstances – and if Bee wanted me to – I thought I’d better go.
I got a taxi straight over there and forced myself to get in the lift up to the ward where she was. Just the smell of the place was enough to bring me to the brink of running out again, but I didn’t. I just wanted to get it over with.
After a few wrong turns I finally found Alice in a room on her own. I peeped round the door before I went in and she looked tiny lying there, without any of her usual extravagant accessories, and so pale, just gazing fixedly into space.
‘Alice?’ I said quietly.
She turned her head and blinked when she saw me. Then she extended a hand. I went and sat next to her and took her hand in mine. Her eyes were full of tears.
‘How are you?’ I said quietly.
She just closed her eyes and shook her head.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said eventually, sighing deeply. ‘I had to see you.’
I squeezed her hand. This was seriously weird.
‘If there’s anything I can do…’ I started to say, but she just shook her head to stop me.
‘I just need you to listen to me,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said, nodding.
‘I owe you an apology,’ she said. ‘I did a terrible thing to you. I stole your ideas. I did it deliberately. I wanted to fuck you up. I wanted you to leave Chic.’ She paused a moment and then spoke in a whisper. ‘I was so jealous of you, Emily.’ She turned her big blue eyes to me, staring intensely into mine. I felt really uncomfortable.
‘You’ve got it all,’ she continued. ‘Everything I want. The looks, the husband, the money, the flat – all the security I so desperately need and you’ve got the brilliant ideas too. That’s what I couldn’t stand. You had all that and you were more truly creative than me too. I knew Bee liked you better than me as well, because you’ve got a sense of humour and I haven’t. It was so unfair, I couldn’t let you win. I couldn’t let you have everything. I had to hold on to my job, because it’s all I have. I don’t have any of that other stuff you have. And I never will.’
She looked wretched. If only she knew, I thought. I had all that and I was desperately unhappy too, because I was doing my best to fuck it up.
‘Don’t say that, Alice,’ I said. ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen. You could meet the right man any day. He might be your doctor here.’
It was pathetic, but it was the best I could do. She ignored me.
‘I need you to forgive me,’ she said.
‘Oh, forget all that,’ I said. ‘Of course I forgive you. It’s all in the past. But if you could just tell me one thing, Alice, it would really help me.’
‘Ask me,’ she said.
‘What I never understood was – how did you do it? How did you find out my ideas before the meetings?’
‘I got Natalie to do it,’ she said blankly.
‘But how did she get them, when I hadn’t even typed them out on my computer? I could never work that out.’
‘She looked in your shows notebooks,’ said Alice, simply. ‘It wasn’t hard.’
Well, at least that explained why I had found the little shit snooping round my office so much.
‘I never did like Natalie,’ I said.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Alice, quietly, her face looking momentarily even more stricken.
I didn’t say anything, I had a feeling she had more to tell me. She did.
‘She blackmailed me,’ said Alice, almost whispering. ‘She threatened to tell Bee what I’d been doing. But by then it was too late for me to stop. I was so terrified about being found out I couldn’t even think straight, let alone come up with any ideas, so I had to carry on stealing yours and she got more and more demanding. How do you think she got your job? She made me recommend her.’
Alice looked stricken. I patted her hand.
‘It’s OK, Alice,’ I said. ‘She’ll get found out for what she is. People who scheme and plot like that never really get ahead in the end. All that matters is that you get better. Your ideas will come back again.’
I wasn’t entirely sure I believed any of it, but I hoped it might comfort her. She seemed to make an effort to collect herself.
‘Anyway, Emily, thank you for listening. I am truly sorry. It was a terrible thing to do, but I was desperate. And you were so nice that time in Milan, when you asked if I was OK. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t take sympathy from you. You were the worst person to have asked me. Can you forgive me?’
‘Of course,’ I said, although it actually made it even more unbearable that Fatalie now had my job, but I wasn’t going to tell Alice that. She was suffering enough.
‘Don’t think about it any more,’ I said. ‘It’s all in the past. Just concentrate on yourself and getting better, and if you ever need someone to talk to, just call me. You’ve got my numbers.’
I think I meant it.
I left St Mary’s feeling stunned and rather tainted, I wanted to go home and have a hot shower to wash that hospital atmosphere off my skin. It made me shudder. But I also felt strangely relieved – at least I wasn’t nuts. I wasn’t paranoid and delusional, Alice and Natalie had been stalking me; which, with my family history, was quite a relief. I had seriously started to wonder.
But before I could even start to process any of this new information, I had a very unwelcome phone call. I had just turned my mobile on after leaving the hospital when it rang. I fished it out of my bag and saw Ursula’s number on the display.
‘Ursa Major!’ I cried, delighted to hear from her so unexpectedly.
‘Hey, kiddo,’ she said, getting straight to the point. ‘Spoken to your brother recently?’
‘Not since Christmas,’ I said, guardedly. I was still upset about that conversation with Toby, and with what had happened since at Chic, with Miles, and the ongoing catastrophe that was Surface, I’d just put it in a mental pending file.
Toby had called me a few times since then, but I hadn’t rung him back. I’d been too busy and with everything else that was going on I was not in the mood to be nagged about my mum as well. In fact Toby was seriously pissing me off. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t just leave me alone like he used to.
‘I think he called, but I haven’t got back to him yet,’ I said, trying to sound vague.
‘That’s what Toby said,’ said Ursula, quite tersely. ‘He said he’s called you at least ten times and you have never called him back and one time, you actually hung up on him. Your mother is asking for you, Emily. She really wants to see you. She’s a sick woman and she needs to see you. Toby rang me to ask me to intervene. He said he just couldn’t get through to you about it.’
‘I suppose you think I should go and see her as well,’ I said, the old anger and resistance rising inside me.
‘As I have always said,’ said my un-mother. ‘It’s up to you, kiddo, only you can decide, but it might do you more good than endlessly shopping and starving yourself.’
‘I don’t want to see her,’ I spat down the phone. ‘Why can’t you all leave me alone about it?’
And she just beat me in the race to hang up first.
I was furious with Ursula. Furious and hurt. She’d stepped over an invisible line in our relationship – the line between being my virtual parent and telling me what to do with regard to my real ‘mommie dearest’. And my anger with Toby was off the scale for involving her in it.
Great, I thought. First Ursula gets Paul on to me and now Toby has recruited Ursula to nag me as well. It was like some kind of international conspiracy to interfere with my life and to stir up shit that was much better left well alone. I felt betrayed by the lot of them. Between all the stuff that was going on in my
life already and now what had happened with Alice, I was beginning to feel like an emotional squash ball. Just too many hard hits too close together.
I stomped along Praed Street fighting tears, until I saw a cab coming along. I hailed it and went straight to the Chloé boutique in Sloane Street and bought the high-waist linen pants I had been lusting after ever since I’d seen them in the spring/summer show.
Then I powerwalked down to the end of the King’s Road and the haven that was Manolo Blahnik, to pick up a couple of pairs of flat sandals, to get me through summer. After a pedicure at Bliss, to set them off to their finest advantage, I felt I had myself under control again. I needed it all anyway because I was going on another trip, as Rosie finally seemed to have realized we had a magazine to put out in just a few weeks and very little to go in it.
Tunisia in mid-July would not have been my first choice of location for shooting three autumn trends stories, but it was the cheapest option that would at least provide guaranteed light and some exotic backdrops. I already felt sorry for the model who would have to wear tweed suits in sub-Saharan summer temperatures, but needs must.
I had managed to scam the accommodation from the Tunisian tourist board and the Surface budget could just about stretch to five charter flights out there for me, Nivek and his assistant, a hairdresser and a make-up artist, but not for an assistant for me.
The thought of doing all the ironing in that heat made me feel quite queasy, but I was seriously looking forward to getting away and losing myself in work for a while. I felt quite cheerful as I assembled my packing wardrobe in neat piles on the bed, ready to leave the next day. This was what I was best at, I thought, as I stood back to admire what I had put together.
It had a white and navy linen theme with turquoise accents and flashes of burnt ochre in a bikini and a fine cotton shawl. I had a couple of caftans I’d had made once on a trip to Vietnam, which were perfect for keeping cool in Muslim countries, without offending the locals, plus my big squashy straw hat and my blackest sunglasses to keep the sun damage off my face. Orange Converse All Stars to fly in, my trusty Birkenstocks and the new Manolos, of course. I was such a pro.
Handbags and Gladrags Page 31
