Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘Do you think he’s handsome?’ I said, acting surprised.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he said. ‘He looks like something out of Brideshead Revisited. So did you snog him?’

  ‘Ned!’ I said, pushing his legs off the chair.

  ‘Yοu did then?’ he said, roaring with laughter.

  ‘No, I did not,’ I said. ‘That is so embarrassing. How could you even say that?’

  ‘Well, he must have had a go,’ Ned said. ‘I mean, I know Englishmen are pathetic with women, that’s why I do so well over here, but crammed into a confined space with you like that, nice and cosy, a long hot day at the pool behind you, surely he tried to slip you the tongue?’

  I sighed loudly.

  ‘No, he did not,’ I said, feeling really pissed off with Ned and simultaneously furious with myself for letting him get to me. In more ways than one. ‘Alex is my stepbrother, so it would hardly be appropriate and anyway, we’re friends, so it would be really yucky.’

  ‘That’s not the way it looks to me,’ said Ned, bringing his arms down slowly and standing up. He walked towards me and bent down so his head was close to mine.

  ‘From where I’m standing,’ he said, right into my ear, in his lazy seductive voice, so close I could feel his breath against my skin, ‘it looks like he’s madly in love with you.’

  After dropping that bomb on to my head, Ned blithely disappeared inside and as soon as I heard his bedroom door close, I went in too.

  I lay in my bed in the dark thinking about the day. On the surface it had been just another perfect summer Saturday down at Willow Barn, but actually so much had gone on for me underneath the surface.

  The terrible remorse about my conversation with Jay. The revelation of Ned’s love-god body and the uncomfortable – well, too comfortable, actually – feelings it had sparked in me. And in Venezia. Making it up with Jay. Tabitha’s tears. The closeness I had felt to Alex in the tree house. Ned’s inappropriate comments about him.

  A wave of irritation swept over me, as I remembered what Ned had said. It was bad enough feeling that Ham was trying to set us up, and now I almost wondered if he hadn’t recruited Ned to help him with his cause. It was just the sort of manipulative game they would both enjoy.

  I analysed all my interactions with Alex that day. OK, he had been a bit competitive with Ned in the pool, but that was just normal boy behaviour. And, really, any man would have felt a bit threatened by Ned’s body.

  He’d been a bit soppy when I’d told Tabitha the story about us sleeping in the tree house, but that was just sentimental childhood memory shit. None of it added up to unrequited love.

  Looking back further, there had been The Incident, of course, but that was just boy behaviour too. All men are driven by their hormones – Ham had drilled that into me since childhood. It was a classic example of his dandelion theory.

  ‘Put a man in a situation where he feels he has the slightest chance with a woman and he will always give it a go,’ was what he had repeatedly told me. ‘It’s not our fault, it’s just nature. It is our biological imperative to spread our seed as widely as possible. Really, we are no different from dandelions.’

  So that was all it had been that embarrassing night with Alex – just nature, making him have a go. And if my body had betrayed me by reacting, that was just biology too.

  And I could apply Ham’s theory equally well to Ned’s flirtatious behaviour by the pool and my own hormonal reaction to that. It was perfectly normal, according to the laws of nature, for a virile man and a woman of childbearing age to experience a sexual frisson during an encounter when neither of them is really wearing any clothes.

  Dandelions, the lot of us. Just fluffy, little weeds.

  18

  That Monday morning Jay sent me a huge bunch of flowers – lots of different kinds, but all shades of blue. They were utterly gorgeous and so was the card that came with them.

  ‘This is the colour I am without you…’ it said, followed by so many kisses I couldn’t even count them. I wondered how he had dictated that to the girl in the florist’s.

  I kissed the card back and put it carefully into my wallet. He’d stopped even putting his initial on them, to be on the safe side, but I still wasn’t taking any risks.

  He couldn’t have timed those flowers better. For one thing I was extremely relieved that we had got our relationship – if that was what it was, the concept was still so new to me – back on track, if not a little closer, as it would dispel any confusing feelings I might have had about Ned after the incidents of the weekend.

  As relatively secure as I now felt with Jay, I knew I could put Ned – and his killer body – firmly back into his rumpled work suit and his role as my respected colleague and office mate, with any more complicated stirrings completely forgotten.

  The other reason Jay’s flowers were a welcome boost that morning, was something I’d just seen in the Post’s weekly media section, which was the most widely read one in the industry.

  It was a really snide little snippet about the new section – and the first mention of it anywhere, because it hadn’t been officially announced yet. I had read it about twenty times, still hardly able to believe how horrible it was about me.

  Once again under the cosh from management to cut costs, Journal editor-in-chief Duncan – Big Spender – McDonagh has stooped to conquer. His idea is don’t spend less – earn more, no matter the cost to the paper’s integrity.

  So in a move that has surprised the paper’s more serious journalists, he has appointed the paper’s lissom ‘luxury correspondent’ Stella Fain to edit a weekly mini glossy magazine for the paper, with his eye on pinching some of Vogues advertising revenue.

  Daughter of six-times-married peer Lord Montecourt of Cliffe, the It girl journalist has recently been linked to billionaire playboy Jay Fisher and is great mates with such luxury-brand luminaries as Rebecca Rosen – the London PR for Cartier.

  So with the paper’s apparent desperation for cash, no doubt the gushing editorial will flow as freely as the Bollie at the swanky functions and freebie five-star trips Ms Fain so regularly enjoys.

  Sad times, indeed, for a paper that used to be better known for its groundbreaking investigations than its PR puffs.

  I was just reading it one more time, to be sure I hadn’t imagined how foul it was, when Peter and Ned appeared in the door together. I took one look at their concerned faces and burst into tears.

  They both moved to comfort me and even in my distress, I was relieved that Peter got there first, flourishing the starched handkerchief he always had in his pocket. I wasn’t quite ready for a hug from Ned yet, not so soon after seeing what his bare chest looked like.

  ‘Oh, you poor mite,’ Peter was saying. ‘That was a very nasty little piece. Actionable, actually. I just came in to tell you that I’ve seen Duncan and he says not to worry – we’ll get the bastards.’

  Ned was reading it again and shaking his head in fury.

  ‘What a bunch of fuckers,’ he was saying. ‘This is so wrong.’

  ‘But the thing is,’ I said, blinking back the deluge of tears which was trying to flood out. ‘I do go on free trips and I do drink bloody Bollie at launch parties and Becca is a luxury-brand PR and she is my friend, I can’t deny any of that. The only thing I can say in my defence is that it really doesn’t affect what I write. But that’s just my word and as I do write positive things about some of the brands – the ones I really do think are great – I am compromised.’

  Peter looked thoughtful, then he took the media section from Ned’s hands and threw it into my bin.

  ‘There, that’s where that is going at the end of today. You’ve worked on papers long enough to know that things like this, while unpleasant at the time, blow over very quickly. Hamster cages and all that. It’s a very upsetting experience when you’re the brunt of it, but in the long term, it’s just a blip, so try not to worry about it. Just carry on doing your work as brilliantly and ethically as you alw
ays have and you will be fine. Success is the sweetest revenge, I have always found.’

  He patted my head, consolingly – he wasn’t the most physical of people – and turned to leave my office, when something occurred to me.

  ‘Peter,’ I said. ‘Before you go, one last thing – do you think Jeanette could have had a hand in this?’

  ‘Almost certainly,’ said Peter, looking rather pleased about it. ‘And I’m hoping she did, because it might be just the thing finally to get her fired.’

  I felt a little comforted by Peter’s comments, but after he left, and Ned had gone off to the canteen to get me a comforting bun, I sat gormlessly at my desk for a moment, wondering what to do. Get back to work, I finally told myself, like Peter said, that was the only thing for it.

  I clicked on to the Internet and checked out a few new luxury shopping sites I’d heard about, but I couldn’t concentrate. I stared into space for a little while and then my glance rested on Jay’s beautiful blue flowers and I had another idea – I logged on to Google and typed in his name.

  As the screen immediately filled, I wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner. There were pages and pages about him. Most of them were articles – and pictures, which made my heart turn over – in trashy magazines, but there were quite a few New York Times and Wall Street Journal stories as well, and even some Amazon links to books about the Fisher family and their fortune. I clicked on one of those.

  Fishers of Fortune, it was called, with the subhead: ‘How the Fisher family took control of the American banking system’.

  I scrolled down and read the longer description of the book.

  Leading Washington Post reporter, Jerry Mulhew, analyses the rise and rise of one of America’s richest dynasties, from its origins as a small-town savings and loan started by two brothers, to an international banking empire.

  The book examines the extraordinary financial brilliance of five generations of one family and also looks into the legend of the Fisher family curse, which has arisen from the untimely deaths of at least one son in every generation since the bank began.

  I knew Jay’s older brother, Bob, had died when he was twenty-three, but I’d had no idea about a family curse, that was really horrible. For a moment my hand hesitated with the cursor poised on the ‘Buy It With One Click’ box.

  If I bought that book, I could find out all about Jay’s family in one fell swoop. It was really tempting, but instead I closed the page and then Google. I didn’t want to get to know him in that artificial way. I would wait and put it together through what he told me, as I would have to do with any other man.

  Ned came back with the coffee and we spent the rest of the morning with the designer who had been assigned to us, going through the articles we were planning to use for the first two weeks of the new supplement.

  Work was the perfect distraction, just as Peter had said it would be, and as I went through it all I began to feel really excited about the section again. Once it came out and people saw how cool – and unbiased – it was, spiteful little reports like that one would be forgotten.

  I also had the chance to ask Ned about his killer body. Somehow I felt talking about it openly would put an end to any further sexually-charged moments between us.

  ‘So tell me, Ned,’ I said, as we started to wrap up for lunch. ‘How did you get that body of yours? I had no idea you were a man mountain beneath that terrible suit.’

  He grinned at me and flexed one bicep like a cartoon muscleman.

  ‘I used to play water polo for Australia,’ he said.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Very impressive. Did you have to give it up when you moved here?’

  ‘Pretty much. I could have moved to Italy to play professionally there, but I just wanted to be a journalist, so here I am.’

  ‘Do you still train?’

  He nodded. ‘Five times a week. Why do you think my hair’s such a mess?’

  At twelve thirty I left my office for my own preferred form of training – my Iyengar yoga class. I had just pushed the button in the lift, and the doors were closing, when someone barged in. It was Jeanette.

  ‘Not a very positive piece in the Post today, Stella,’ she said, with her crocodile smile. ‘Rather personal, wasn’t it?’

  I felt like planting a smart punch on her liver-y lips, as I was pretty much convinced that she was behind it, considering her track record of planting unpleasant stories about me in the press, but I forced myself to stay cool.

  ‘That’s just newspapers, isn’t it?’ I said, shrugging. ‘You’re always going to get your share of nastiness when you’re ahead, aren’t you?’

  I don’t know how she took that, because I spent the rest of the ride looking resolutely at the lift door and was very glad when we got to the ground floor and I could speed off. She was really starting to give me the creeps.

  The afternoon got off to a brighter start, when the post boy, Martin, turned up at my office door carrying a large package with a gold balloon attached to it. The balloon had the words Top Me!’ printed all over it.

  ‘Can I do it?’ asked Martin shyly.

  I handed him my letter knife and he gleefully stabbed it, until it burst and a small key fell out on to the floor. Meanwhile, I had opened the package, to find an old-fashioned jewellery box, which I unlocked with the key.

  Inside was an invitation to a fragrance launch – but not just any fragrance launch. It was from the classic French house of Huguenot for their new scent, Précieuse, and their launches were legendary, more like fabulous balls than corporate events. This one was black tie, which was always a good start.

  I’d received a diary note about it a couple of weeks before, so I’d known it was coming, but there was one problem. The invitation said: ‘Stella Fain and Guest’. Who could I take?

  I’d asked Ned, but he’d already accepted an invitation to a major mobile phone launch the same night. Tim would have loved it, but he was back in Iraq, and I realized that with all that had been going on, I had rather lost touch with the various other men I had used before in a human handbag capacity.

  I got on the phone to a couple of them, but to no avail. One had acquired a proper girlfriend who, he said, would not appreciate him going out with another woman, even just as friends, while the other one was clearly pissed off not to have heard from me for so long and told me, in very icy tones, that he was busy that night – and the rest of his life.

  I put the phone down on him and pulled a face at it.

  If only Jay had been around, I thought. I could just imagine how heavenly he would look in a dinner jacket. But even if he had been in town – and even if Ham had not made me promise not to see him – our presence at such a public event would only have unleashed the hounds of paparazzi hell on us again.

  Nothing was simple about that relationship, I thought sadly, except how much I liked being with him.

  I was just wondering whether to ask Peter to come with me, when inspiration struck. I rang Alex at work and invited him. He sounded really surprised – and really pleased – and said he would be delighted to come with me. It was a relief that something seemed to have worked out neatly.

  The day of the launch, I had my hair done in the morning and got changed in the office. I was wearing a taupe chiffon Alberta Ferretti dress I’d picked up in the Harvey Nichols sale, with the baroque pearl and diamond earrings Ham had given me for my eighteenth birthday and a pair of gold Manolo skyscraper heels. It was hard to see myself properly in the awful light in the office loos, but I thought I looked OK. I always felt good in gold shoes.

  As I headed for the lift, I heard a loud wolf whistle. I looked in the direction it had come from and saw Ned, standing by the photocopier, grinning at me.

  ‘Nice dress, Stella,’ he said, looking me over, shamelessly, from head to toe, just as he had done that day at the pool.

  Even from a distance, I could see he had that wicked look in his eyes; the one that rendered the newspaper’s librarians into blushing ninnies. I
wasn’t going to let him do the same to me. There were strict limits to our professional relationship, as far as I was concerned.

  ‘Nice suit, Ned,’ I replied. ‘Oh no, silly me – it’s the same one you always wear. Anyway, have fun at your phone launch.’

  ‘Have fun with your stepbrother,’ said Ned.

  Bastard, I thought. He always got the last word in.

  I’d arranged to pick Alex up from his office building in the City, which was on the way back into the West End from the Journal He was waiting outside when I got there and before he noticed the taxi pulling up, I had a moment to reflect on how good he looked in his dinner jacket.

  I realized I hadn’t seen him in one since my twenty-first birthday party and he still wore it well. Remarkably well, actually. Women pouring out of the office entrance were turning back for another glance at him.

  His face broke into a broad smile when he saw me – that uncomplicated smile that used to make my stomach do cartwheels when I was a teenager. Now it gave me a simpler warm feeling; of familial affection, nothing more, whatever Ned said.

  ‘Hey, Stella,’ said Alex, getting into the cab. ‘You look absolutely gorgeous.’

  He kissed me warmly on both cheeks.

  ‘You look pretty 007 fabulous yourself, Alex,’ I said.

  ‘I do enjoy getting into this rig-up, actually,’ he said. ‘Girls love it. I got changed far earlier than I needed to, so I could pose round the office a bit.’

  He grinned at me again.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s this jolly all about? Something about scent, did you say?’

  I explained that Huguenot was one of the classic French fragrance houses, with a long noble tradition, like Guerlain, and that they only launched a new perfume about once every five years, so it was always a big deal and the parties were extravagant production numbers.