Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  Was I being deliberately manipulative? Yes, I most definitely was. Like I say, Ham had taught me everything about men, how their minds work, how to control them and how to keep them interested. And I knew that if I had sex with Jay now, however much he liked me, I would never see him again.

  Although I didn’t yet understand how he could get instantly into any night club on the Riviera, why he carried wads of cash in his pockets, or why Laura Birchwood thought she knew who he was and was struck dumb by it, I had figured out that Jay was a serious Alpha Male and Ham had told me exactly how to play them.

  Make them wait.

  ‘He was a Junior Alpha Male,’ Ham had told me, years before, when I’d had my heart broken while I was at university, by a handsome lothario who had loved me and left me in a particularly callous way.

  ‘What you have to understand, darling,’ he had explained, ‘is that these are men who can have anything they want. They can buy or demand whatever they want, when they want it, so you have to hold something back from them. Make them wait for it, and they’ll be your slaves. Look at me – I still fall for it every time.’

  So, calling on all my strength of will, I climbed into the spa with Jay, still wearing my silk knickers, and while we had a wonderful time, kissing and stroking, I never touched him where he most wanted me to, much as I longed to, and I didn’t let him inside my pants either. That he would have to wait for.

  After a while, when I knew I couldn’t hold out much longer, I knew it was time to go. I pulled my head away from his and held his cheeks in my hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jay,’ I said. ‘I’d love to stay here with you all day, but I have to go. God knows what I’ve already missed at the launch, I’m sure it was all rubbish, but I am here to work and I’ve got to go and do it. I’m really sorry.’

  He opened his mouth like a goldfish. He really couldn’t speak he was so surprised.

  I kissed him one last time on the lips and climbed out of the tub. I saw him shake his head quickly, as if he was trying to make sense of it.

  ‘I want to see you again,’ he said, his voice croaky with frustration.

  I nodded. ‘Well, I’m not going until tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘I might have to leave today,’ he said, raking his wet hair back with his fingers and rubbing his face. ‘Jericho might come after me again.’

  I laughed. ‘You better run for it then.’

  ‘Where can I find you?’ he said.

  ‘I’m at the Journal,’ I said blithely. ‘The number’s in the directory.’

  It was textbook stuff. Ham would have been proud of me.

  I dropped my dress over my head, zipped it up with one hand and then – in what I knew was a master stroke – I wriggled out of my wet knickers and left them there on the deck. Then I picked up my shoes, blew him a kiss and left quickly, before I changed my mind.

  I knew I had to do it that way. If I wanted to see more of him later, he had to have less of me now. Was I as calculating as all the gold-diggers I would later witness pursuing him around the world? Yes, I was.

  But the difference was that I was doing it because I really liked him.

  3

  After a record-breaking quick change in my hotel room, I’d arrived with wet hair and probably a red face, halfway through the morning’s second slide presentation.

  I groaned inwardly, as I saw that Jericho’s personal diamond cutter was going step by step through the process of selecting the stones. A topic I had only sat through about five thousand times before at jewellery launches.

  And I don’t even like bloody diamonds. Too many associations with terrible African civil wars, forced child miners, and environmental devastation – all in pursuit of sparkly bits of carbon.

  The whole diamond trade made me sick, actually, but it was my job to be there and to write about it and, by the time I’d got down to the conference room that morning after leaving Jay, I had been very late.

  Tara Ryman, the PR, had given me a mystified ‘what’s going on?’ look, when I’d crept in at the back, mouthing apologies to her. Mind you, I thought, as I scrabbled to find my notebook in my handbag, she could hardly come the moral high ground with me; she’d lied shamelessly when she’d promised there would be no darkened rooms and slide shows at the launch – and when she’d told me I had the story as a UK newspaper exclusive.

  I could have used that as a counter-attack defence for my lateness, but she was the London representative for a lot of important luxury brands, as well as Jericho’s ghastly trinkets, so I had to tread a bit carefully. Plus, I really liked Tara, and didn’t want to piss her off totally with my poor showing at the launch. Not that Laura Birchwood didn’t try to make maximum capital out of it.

  ‘Wasn’t that Jay Fisher I saw you arriving with in the hotel lobby late this morning?’ she said in full and deliberate earshot of Tara, during a coffee break on the hotel terrace, before the next brain-numbing presentation. ‘Looked like you’d been out all night.’

  I saw Tara’s head swivel slightly to listen better. I just smiled wearily at Laura and shrugged.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘So what?’

  ‘How do you know him?’ she asked me, her eyes like a cunning little rat.

  ‘How do you know him?’ I said and walked over to Amy, who I could see was shaking with laughter.

  ‘So do you know him?’ she said, punching me on the arm. ‘Carnally, I mean.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I like him, though.’

  ‘I bet you do,’ said Amy, although I didn’t yet understand what she was getting at. I was still at the stage when I thought Jay was just a good-looking guy, with a certain savoir faire beyond the ordinary.

  Looking back, it is hard now to see how I remained dumb about his true identity for so long, but the name Fisher is just not that unusual. It’s not like Rockefeller, or Getty, or Onassis, or Rothschild, or Sultan of Brunei, or any of those names that instantly spell huge money. It’s just a general sort of name that lots of people have.

  If I’d met somebody called Jay Turner, or Jay Gates, I wouldn’t have instantly presumed he was closely related to CNN, or Microsoft, so I just didn’t twig that someone called Fisher was necessarily part of the legendary American banking family with the equally famous art collection.

  And I suppose I just didn’t pay enough attention to the gossip columns and trash mags either, or I would have had an idea who he was, as quickly as loathsome Laura had – i.e. the extremely eligible and cute bachelor and major heir to the family fortune, who had been linked to so many beautiful women.

  Speculation about his future wife was not quite as hot as it was for, say, Prince William, or Albert of Monaco, but he was somewhere up there, as I later discovered.

  The fact was, even though I was a fluff correspondent and had to keep abreast of fashion and celebrity red-carpet gowns and stuff like that, the first part of the paper I turned to every morning was still foreign news. That was what really fascinated me.

  When I was alone in a hotel room, it was CNN I turned on, not E!, let alone Fashion TV. As I’d told Jay, that was why I had become a journalist in the first place – hard news, world events – and even if I had ended up writing about haute couture, rather than coups d’état, my interest in current affairs hadn’t waned.

  And in all honesty, I actively avoided reading things like celebrity magazines, as they were too much of a reminder that I had strayed so far from my original career intentions.

  I would mug up enthusiastically on interviews with the CEO of Louis Vuitton in the Financial Times, or analysis of trends in the luxury market in The Economist, but articles about film stars’ facelifts in the trash weeklies, and even the tabloid gossip columns, were more than I could bear.

  But it was a while yet before the full wisdom of journalists reading broadly around their subject, as I had been encouraged to do since my earliest days as a graduate trainee on the paper, would really come home to me.

  As I stood chatting to Amy, on that
sunny Riviera terrace, a warm buzz still between my legs from the long ride on the Vespa the night before – and what came after – I was still blissfully unaware of the shark-infested waters I was swimming into.

  ‘I’m sorry we abandoned you last night, Amy,’ I said. ‘Jay just wanted to escape from “Jerry”… She wants his bones badly.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ said Amy. ‘Don’t worry about it. I was fine. I found your note, pulled Spotter off the dance floor and made him come back in the limo with me. Had to beat him around the head a bit and remind him I’m a happily married mother of two, but it was a good night, wasn’t it? Wonder if Jerry will recognize us at the press conference this afternoon?’

  She didn’t appear to, when she was introduced to us later, after keeping us waiting a full two hours before making her entrance.

  When she finally showed up, it was hard to see what had taken so long. Her hair was pulled back into a simple chignon and she was wearing a black cocktail dress of Audrey Hepburn simplicity, the better to show off her hideously flashy jewellery – which was even worse than we had braced ourselves for. It was amazing really, how she had managed to make things that were so expensive look so cheap.

  While she clearly didn’t recognize me and Amy, she certainly paid us more attention than she had the night before, when we had been just irritating detritus around Jay.

  Now in her full professional megastar mode – and with us in the role of temporarily useful journalists – she treated us to the ultra-wide, blinding smile we knew so well from music videos and movie posters, and even a modicum of eye contact.

  But while she started off happily enough, as a woman from the US edition of Glow magazine asked her some astonishingly inane and sycophantic questions about the ‘philosophy of the range’ and ‘her deep personal connection with the gemstones’, I could see her mood start to darken.

  She sighed her way through the rest of our questions, which were clearly not craven enough for her, getting visibly more restive – unless the queries were brazenly flattering.

  Then, when I asked her – reasonably enough, I thought – if she was aware of ‘the startling similarity between her diamond heart pendants and the famous heart design by Elsa Peretti for Tiffany…’, she finally blew.

  She glared at me like some kind of terrifying gorgon and then, after slamming her water glass down on the table with a mighty crash, so that the contents spilled all over the microphone and everyone within range, she turned and hissed something at her personal publicist, before standing up, kicking her chair over and stalking out of the room.

  I had never heard a door slammed so hard. Then she reopened it – glared directly at me – and slammed it again, so the room shook.

  Amy and I turned and gaped at each other, bug-eyed. In all our years of diva press conferences, we’d never seen anything like it: true prima donna-ish behaviour, with an added frisson of violence.

  There was a moment of stunned silence and then it was Amy who started the laughter – and to my great relief, everyone joined in. Even Tara.

  ‘Oh, you’ve done it now, Stella,’ she said, coming over and punching me playfully on the shoulder. ‘She’s probably gone up to get her Christian Louboutins. You do make me laugh, though. Always the one with the tricky questions. Why do you do it to yourself?’

  ‘I work for the Journal,’ I said, with complete sincerity. ‘It’s my job to ask the tricky questions. And her stupid pendants are identical to the Elsa Peretti ones – they’re a complete rip-off. Someone had to tell her. They’ll probably sue her.’

  ‘Do you know what, Stella?’ said Tara, lowering her voice confidentially. ‘I’ve been trying to tell her exactly that since the start of this bloody awful project – so thank you. Maybe she’ll listen now.’

  After that, the whole launch fell to bits. I was up in my hotel room emailing my news story back to the office for the next day’s paper – a story which was much more interesting than it would have been, thanks to Miss Jericho’s outburst – when Tara called.

  The formal dinner planned for that evening had been cancelled, she told me, and we were all being shipped home right away.

  Suited me. When I’d got back to my room after the press conference, I’d found a note under the door from Jay, saying he’d had to leave and promising to contact me in London. Result.

  *

  The next morning I was back at my desk at the Journal, my news story in the paper on the desk beside me – page two, an excellent position for a fluff report – working on ideas for a longer feature about Jericho’s burgeoning fashion empire, on orders from the features editor, and bracing myself not to answer my phone.

  Normally it wasn’t an issue. I never answered it, because I’d never have got any writing done if I had. It rang all day long, with people trying to persuade me to put their products on my pages, so I just ignored it and checked the messages twice daily.

  Everyone I wanted to speak to had my mobile number, or my email address – everyone, that is, apart from Jay. So every call that came through that morning on my office phone was potentially him and I had to steel myself not to grab the receiver every time it rang, and to limit checking my messages to once every hour.

  By twelve noon I’d checked them three times and there was nothing yet. Between that and having to think more about Jericho and her hideous jewellery, I was feeling a bit edgy – and the twenty-four hours at the Cap Mimosa were starting to seem like a dream.

  I was almost tempted to email Amy to ask her if it had all really happened. Had I really met someone called Jay Fisher?

  I was just about to go to the kitchen to make yet another cup of tea to try and clear my head when I saw a very large bunch of flowers coming towards me. Behind them was the mahogany-haired head of my least favourite colleague, the features editor, Jeanette Foster.

  ‘I found these in the delivery dock,’ she was saying, plonking the huge bouquet of beautiful pink roses rudely on my desk.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, my heart sinking. Jeanette took a dim view of Journal writers being sent flowers – or any other gifts – and as I got plenty of both, it was a source of friction between us. One of many.

  I hoped if I didn’t say anything else she’d go away and I wouldn’t have to tell her who they were from, but she didn’t. She just stood there, glaring at me.

  ‘Well, who’s this bribe from then?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to look?’

  I opened the card, but deliberately didn’t read what it said. I knew I couldn’t trust my face not to reveal anything if, maybe, possibly, they weren’t from a PR.

  ‘Oh, they’re from that young milliner I did the piece about last week,’ I lied, putting the card back into the envelope and throwing it into the bin. ‘How sweet of her. It was the first bit of editorial she’d ever had.’

  My heart was pounding, as a result of what I’d really just read on that card, but I wasn’t going to share the secrets of my private life with Jeanette Foster. I stood up and reached for the flowers.

  ‘I’ll get Moira to send them to the women’s refuge,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ said Jeanette. ‘But before you go, I want to talk to you about this bigger Jericho piece. Have you come up with an idea yet?’

  Jeanette was always telling us how she liked her writers to generate our own ideas, because it ‘kept us active’. But I knew it was really because she was simply too arse-lazy and boring to come up with any ideas of her own. She was a great one for taking credit where it was not due.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I thought we could broaden it out into a look at the whole concept of celebrity brands. You know, Kylie’s undies, Liz Hurley’s bikinis, Madonna’s children’s books, Ρ Diddy’s fashion ranges, Victoria Beckham’s jeans and the like…’

  Jeanette was smiling her anaconda smile. It was a good idea, she should have been smiling.

  ‘George Forman’s health grills…’ I added, for my own amusement.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jeanette. ‘I like tha
t. Good photo possibilities, too. That’s good for the layout, lighten the page…’

  She got a look in her eye that I knew was advance satisfaction at the prospect of presenting the idea as her own. And from that I surmised she was responding to an order from the editor-in-chief, to have more of the ‘quality fluff’, as he called what I did – hence my office nickname – to lighten that week’s papers, which were looking a bit ‘bum heavy’.

  Those were just a couple of characteristic phrases from our editor, Duncan McDonagh – or Doughnut, as we all called him for obvious reasons, although not to his face. Doughnut was a classic Glaswegian short-arse with an equally short temper, a huge personality, a massive ego and a seriously oversized intellect. You didn’t mess with him.

  A lot of people on the paper hated Doughnut, or were – like Jeanette – just plain terrified of him, but I understood men like him. I suppose they seemed normal to me. My beloved Ham was no slouch in the monster ego area himself.

  And if you worked hard and were passionate about your area, Doughnut would treat you with respect. More than once I had come back to my desk to find a bottle of champagne on it and a note saying he’d liked something I’d written. Probably one of the reasons Jeanette liked to give me a hard time.

  ‘OΚ, I’ll leave you to get on with it then,’ she said, walking off with her usual lack of charm, then pausing to bark back at me over her shoulder. ‘I want it by Monday.’

  I waited a full minute to be sure she had really gone, before I pulled the little white card that had come with the flowers – Moyses Stevens, nice – back out of the bin.

  ‘Call me… Soon,’ it read, followed by a mobile number and one kiss. No name, just the kiss, but I knew exactly who it was from.

  I pondered for a moment how I felt about the presumption of him not putting his name and decided I liked it. It was thrillingly cocky. Then I considered the significance of the one kiss, as opposed to, say, three, or three hundred, and came to the same conclusion. He was clearly a very confident guy. I liked that.