Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you like her?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I love her music, especially that album. My mum used to play it all the time when I was a kid. She actually used to live near her one time, in LA, before I was born.’

  I sat up in the bath.

  ‘So did my dad,’ I said. ‘Topanga Canyon?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jay.

  ‘Gosh, how weird is that? My dad loves her music too, he got me into it. He plays it all the time.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Jay. ‘This is no good at all, too much spooky synchronicity, nought degrees of separation and all that. I’m going to have to come over there real soon.’

  We talked until my bathwater went cold and I had to keep topping it up. I still didn’t quite understand what it was about him yet, but we just had so much to say to each other. Not only soppy lovey-dovey stuff – although there was some of that going on too – but interesting things.

  Jay had his own angle on everything, but not in a monologue-y way. He never lectured, but he made me think. He stretched me and made me feel brighter than I felt with anyone else.

  The physical side of things with him had been sublime, but that was much easier to find than this kind of ‘brain fuck’ that we had going on. That was his name for it and described it perfectly. I was as turned on by his brain, as I was by his body.

  After he rang off, I was in such a swoon I sank down into the water beneath my bubbles.

  *

  Jay rang and emailed me every day from then on, usually more than once, but he still hadn’t been able to get back over to London. He was a bit vague about the reasons, something to do with family commitments, as far as I could gather, but while I was longing to see him, I had plenty going on at work to keep my mind off him.

  Doughnut had extended our deadline for getting the dummy of the new section together, which was a relief, because there was a lot more to it than I had realized.

  Peter was a great help, but it was still daunting creating an entirely new framework for a section that had never existed before – and the ghastly Jeanette was doing her best to undermine me at every turn.

  With my new status as a section editor, I now attended the weekly Monday meeting of all the section editors on the paper, so we could all discuss what we were planning to run over the next week, to make sure there weren’t any overlaps.

  Although my section wasn’t happening yet, Peter had said it was important for me to start going to the Monday meetings to get to know the other section editors and how they worked. Very quickly, though, the meetings became a major forum for Jeanette trying to make me look – and feel – I wasn’t up to the job.

  It was quite subtle the way she did it, just the odd little reference to how experienced everyone else there was at editing, and using technical terms about production that I didn’t understand. Then she’d ask me some direct question about how I was planning to do something on ‘The Good Life’, which I couldn’t possibly answer and I’d feel all tongue-tied and stupid.

  I started to dread those meetings – especially as they were chaired by the managing editor, Martin Ryan, who I had never liked, and who had, I was quite sure, an equally low opinion of me.

  He was great friends with Jeanette for one thing – he’d been at university with her husband and they were still very tight. But apart from that there was something really cold about Martin that made me wary. He didn’t say much, but you could see him taking everything in, like a big lizard. It was much more scary to me than Doughnut’s hot temper.

  ‘He’s a useful grunt,’ was the best Peter had ever said about him. ‘That’s the only reason Duncan has him around the place, I’m certain of it. He does the actual sackings, for example. Duncan may have a terrible temper, but he’s a decent man at heart, and he doesn’t really enjoy sacking people, whatever anyone thinks. But Martin does. He relishes the power trip.’

  I also discovered Jeanette was mounting a campaign against me with key writers on the paper. I got my first inkling of that when I took the fashion editor, Natalie, out to lunch one day, to talk about how she could contribute to the new section.

  Natalie and I didn’t have the easiest of relationships. She’d only been on the paper a few months and when she’d arrived, from a rather recherché fashion magazine, she’d been extremely arrogant for someone with no newspaper experience.

  She really seemed to think she was doing us all a favour by being there and that filing copy by deadlines and checking facts and spellings were beneath her as a creative being. As a result, the subs really hated her, which was never a good position for anyone on a paper.

  I had tried to be friendly when she’d first started, but she seemed to have a problem accepting that it was totally within my remit to write about Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, and all the other luxury brands she felt were her exclusive territory, just because they happened to make clothes.

  She had been particularly furious the time I had been invited to Milan instead of her, to do an exclusive interview with Miuccia Prada.

  Making matters worse between us, the person who had come to her aid, when it seemed she might sink under the consistent lack of cooperation from some very pissed-off subs, was Jeanette.

  Natalie was a seriously groovy girl and I felt at heart she didn’t really relate to creepy Jeanette and her sack-like ‘art’ clothing and feature jewellery, any more than I did, but she clearly owed her one.

  She certainly made it immediately apparent that she wasn’t at all interested in cooperating with me on the new section.

  ‘I really don’t know what your section has to do with me, Stella,’ she’d huffed, when I’d asked her to have lunch with me. ‘You’re the one who has always been at pains to remind me that fashion and luxury are quite separate.’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Can we at least talk about it?’ I persevered.

  She reluctantly agreed to meet me in the café on the ground floor of the building, but then kept me waiting for over ten minutes after the agreed time.

  While I was sitting there waiting, Jeanette came through the door and was clearly making for a table where two of the most highly respected feature writers on the paper were already sitting, when she saw me.

  A succession of expressions crossed her smug face. Irritation, concern and cunning, one after the other. Then she snapped her fingers as though she had just remembered something, turned on her heel and walked out again.

  I glanced over to the feature writers, who were looking at Jeanette’s receding back with extremely puzzled expressions. Shortly afterwards one of them answered his mobile phone and then they both got up and left.

  Was I being paranoid, I wondered, or was that very strange? And was it really all a result of Jeanette spotting me? It seemed far-fetched, but I just couldn’t see any other reason for what I had just witnessed.

  Before I had any more time to ponder on it, Natalie arrived, not even apologizing for her lateness, and sat down opposite me with her arms folded. I decided just to be honest.

  ‘Listen, Natalie,’ I said. ‘I know you don’t like me because you think I write about stuff which is your brief and you probably don’t want to cooperate with me on the new section, in case you accidentally make me look good, but I just want to ask you to think about it a bit more carefully before you reject it.’

  She had the grace to look surprised, at least. She started to protest that she’d never said she didn’t like me, but I just waved her away.

  ‘That’s all irrelevant, Natalie. I honestly don’t care if you like me or not. This is work, not fun time, so just let me finish,’ I said. ‘This new section I am editing is Doughnut’s baby. It’s all his idea and he has a lot invested in it professionally. It’s really going out on a limb for him, to do something in his paper which is expressly designed to bring in advertising revenue and he really wants it to work.

  ‘If it does work – and I’m going to make sure it does, with or without your help – everyone
involved with it will get a large boost in Doughnut’s estimation. So just have a think about that, before you tell me you’re not interested, OK?’

  She looked quite puzzled.

  ‘Got any questions?’ I asked, in a milder tone.

  ‘Was it really Doughnut’s idea?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He wants the revenue to finance the Jerusalem bureau, and he came up with this idea in cahoots with the advertising bods. They’ve even got in some hotshot from Condé Nast to help woo the luxury clients. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, looking distinctly shifty. ‘I had lunch with Jeanette the other day and she told me that the section was your idea – to expand your empire, as she put it – and that you had got Doughnut to agree to it, by flirting with him outrageously, and because he knows your dad.’

  I just sat and stared at her, I was so amazed. She looked a bit more uncomfortable for a moment, and then continued.

  ‘And she also said that it wouldn’t last more than a few months and it would be the laughing stock of London and anyone who was involved with it would look really lame.’

  I sat there stunned for another couple of seconds and then I burst out laughing.

  ‘Are you serious?’ I said. ‘That is hilarious. My God, she’s even more desperate than I thought she was. Doughnut does know my dad, but they’re not big buddies; they both know a lot of people and they go to the same parties. Jeanette’s just pissed off about this, because they’ve taken her Friday section away from her and her little empire has shrunk by one fifth.’

  Natalie’s eyebrows were nearly at her hairline.

  ‘Would she really make all that stuff up?’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s up to you to decide,’ I said. ‘You can only believe one of us, but if you want to check my version of the story, you could ask Ned, or Peter Wallington – or Doughnut actually. I didn’t ask for a section to edit, they gave it to me, out of the blue. It’s about luxury, which is what I write about, so it was a no-brainer to get me to do it really, wasn’t it? Of course I’m excited, but it’s a hell of a lot of work, and I’m a bit freaked out by it, if you really want to know.’

  Natalie looked quite shattered.

  ‘I’m sorry, Stella,’ she said, eventually. ‘I’ve been really unfair to you, but Jeanette has just always made me feel like you were someone to be seriously wary of and I’ve had such a hard time since I came to this paper, I just didn’t want to risk getting close to you in case you stitched me up – as Jeanette said you would at every opportunity.’

  ‘Well, I’m flattered she thinks I’m so deadly,’ I said. ‘But really, Natalie, I’m just a newspaper reporter trying to do my job, I’ve never hankered after anyone else’s, not yours and not Jeanette’s. I’m too busy doing my own as well as I can.’

  ‘Well,’ said Natalie, looking quite punch-drunk. ‘I’m on board with “The Good Life”, if you still want me.’

  I smiled and put my hand out to shake hers. I reckoned from then on we would get on just fine.

  *

  Once I was back in my office and had a bit more time to reflect on what Natalie had told me about Jeanette, I stopped finding it quite so funny. It was treacherous – slanderous – what she’d done. And that wasn’t the end of it. I’d been right about what I’d seen in the café.

  Later that afternoon, Tim called me on my mobile, from his side of the office where he was re-installed, back from Iraq.

  ‘Cabbage crates over the briny,’ he said. ‘Red eagles fly tonight.’

  It was his way of saying: meet me at the fire escape as soon as possible. I knew the score.

  ‘Ten four, rubber duck,’ I said and went straight out to meet him.

  By the time I got there he was already inside the ‘conference room’ as we called the fire stairs. That stairwell was the only place in the Journal’s open-plan office where you could have a private conversation.

  Even the few offices with doors were hopeless, because they all had glass walls looking straight on to the news floor. Some people ascribed Rita’s amazing powers of gossip gathering to lip-reading through those glass partitions.

  ‘Hello, sweetie,’ said Tim, who was sitting on a concrete step, with an unlit cigarette between his lips. ‘I have some intelligence for you. Not nice. Jeanette is fully trying to stitch you up. Greg Turnbull has just told me she took him and Roger Fullman out for coffee and told them you’d only got this new section because of your father’s friendship with Doughnut – plus his immature penchant for slender brunettes with good legs.’

  I laughed, bitterly. Greg and Roger were the writers I’d seen in the café earlier when Jeanette had done her strange about-turn.

  ‘Well, funnily enough, I did have an inkling about this,’ I said. ‘Go on, tell me the rest.’

  ‘She also said that writers of their reputation would be mad to write for the section because you were only doing it so that you could arse-lick all the luxury brands who take you on all those glamorous overseas trips and send you all the free gifts and bouquets.’

  I groaned. I was no longer finding Jeanette’s machinations amusing. It was all getting to be a huge drag.

  ‘Surely, they don’t believe Doughnut would let that happen on his paper?’

  ‘Well, I’m just telling you what Greg said. Of course, I told Greg I believed that you were entirely ethically scrupulous, but I think maybe you need to talk to him and Roger yourself.’

  ‘Thanks, Tim,’ I said and told him about my own meeting with Natalie.

  Tim made appropriately disgusted noises, then we sat in silence for a moment. He pretended to take a draw on his unlit ciggie and extravagantly blew out the imaginary smoke. Then he looked at me sideways. It was an expression I knew well.

  ‘How do you like working with Ned?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘He’s a great guy.’

  ‘So I hear,’ said Tim, archly. ‘I wouldn’t mind being bent over a computer console with him myself. You’ve been shut up in that office together very cosily, I must say, and Rita tells me you’ve been going out to loads of events with him too. So, are you shagging him then?’

  ‘Tim!’ I said outraged. ‘We work together. You know I’m not into that office-affair bollocks and he’s not my type anyway.’

  ‘Maybe he should be…’ said Tim, and he got up to start the descent down the thirty-one flights of stairs to the ground floor, which was the only way out of our conference room once you’d closed the one-way fire door.

  I left Tim happily puffing outside the building and went back up to my desk – via the lift – feeling quite sick about what was going on. It just amazed me that someone who seemed to do as little work as Jeanette, could find so much energy to put into trying to destroy someone else’s career. If only she channelled that vigour into her actual job, she wouldn’t have lost the Friday section in the first place.

  One thing happened to cheer me up that afternoon, though – another beautiful bouquet arrived from Moyses Stevens. A huge spray of glorious garden roses and a card which said ‘For my untainted English rose, J. xxxxx’.

  Five kisses. Excellent.

  I was a bit surprised, though, the next day, when another bunch arrived. So I rang the florist to tell them they must have made a mistake, because I’d received a bouquet from them the day before from the same person. The girl on the phone said she’d check the order book. She came back on the line after a few minutes.

  ‘That was from Mr Fisher, right?’ she asked me and I confirmed it.

  ‘No, that is correct,’ she continued. ‘He ordered pink roses yesterday and mixed roses today. There should have been a different message today too, did you get that?’

  I told her I had. I could remember it quite clearly.

  ‘Soon…’ it had said. ‘J. xxxxxxxxxx’.

  The next day, I got another bouquet. White roses, mixed with white lilac, and another lovely card. And the next day another. Mixed lilac. My office was so full of flowe
rs, I had run out of places to put them and the smell was overpowering – and my colleagues were starting to make comments.

  ‘It’s like the Chelsea Flower Show in there,’ said Peter, as he passed my office on the Friday morning.

  Rita, as usual, was more to the point.

  ‘Bloody hell, Stella,’ she said, leaning forwards to sniff the lilac and clearly trying to see if there were any cards lying around she could sneak a crafty look at. ‘Who’s sending you all these amazing flowers? Have you got another billionaire boyfriend?’

  I thought quickly.

  ‘Oh no, Rita,’ I said. ‘It’s just the new section. All the luxury brands have heard about it, and they’re all trying to crawl up my arse.’

  ‘Oooh,’ she said. ‘Well, when you get a free set of Vuitton luggage, chuck a little one my way will you?’

  It got me off the hook regarding Jay, but that little lie quickly caused other problems. Tim sent me an email.

  ‘Nice flowers, Stella,’ it said. ‘I’ve just heard Jeanette tell Greg they’re all from luxury PRs – just the start of the freebies you will be creaming off via the section. Thought you should know.’

  When that day’s delivery arrived – a glorious purple wisteria in full bloom, in a large terracotta pot – I knew I had to do something.

  I took all the bouquets to the editorial assistant and asked her to have them sent to the nearest hospital. I got Tim’s friend in the delivery bay to send the wisteria to Ham’s address.

  That night when Jay called, I knew I would have to bring it up with him. Every other night that week I’d thanked him for the beautiful flowers and it was going to be hard to ask him not to send any more without seeming really churlish. Luckily, he brought it up first.

  ‘Did you get your tree?’ was the first thing he asked me.

  ‘Yes, thank you, it’s so beautiful.’

  ‘Do you know why I sent that? Because when I first saw you, you were sitting beneath a cloud of that purple in the pool bar at the Cap Mimosa. A flower among the flowers.’