Lovers and Liars Trilogy (96 page)

She arrived at her desk that morning, as usual, at eight. She had gone to bed the previous night at twelve, and had risen at six. Before she left home, there had been the usual domestic imbroglios—leaking pipe, no milk, cat sick. Attacking her in-tray, she tried to persuade herself that she was ready for this bout with McGuire, resolve and energy intact.

By nine she had approved that week’s fashion pages, lined up three future shoots, acted as unpaid analyst for her favorite photographer, Steve Markov—most of her photographers were neurotics, but Markov, whose latest boyfriend had just decamped to Barbados, was a maestro of temperament—and had finalized all the arrangements for the
Correspondent
’s coverage of the spring Paris couture collections, which would begin the following week.

At nine-thirty she retreated to her private office and shut the door on the shrilling telephones, the scurrying assistants. She drank her third black coffee of the morning, and began making lists—always a bad sign.

The lists grew. On the one headed
WORK
was a screed of numbers for models and assistants and accessorizers and fixers, all of whom, if soothed and bullied and cajoled and flattered in the right way, might ensure that she covered the spring collections efficiently, and without Markov threatening to slit his throat at ten-minute intervals. The other list, headed
URGENT
, made her spirits sink. It said things like
chicken?
and
toilet paper!
and
get petrol/call Gini/talk plumber/
wholemeal
bread/tell Tom return vid tapes.

It was now Friday; she was going away for the weekend. Neither her mother nor her son could be relied upon to remember to buy food, or to call plumbers when pipes leaked. How was she supposed to perfect her plans for McGuire when she was constantly distracted by trivia like this?

Straightening her back, and gazing icily at the view of leaden January sky from her window, Lindsay sat practicing
froideur
for a few minutes. The way to deal with the McGuires of this world, she had decided, was with an arctic and powerful disdain. She tried to recall the demeanor and techniques of the grandes dames who had still dominated the fashion world when she first began her own career, fifteen years before.

As a breed, these Vreelands were now almost extinct: vestiges of their chilly elegance, of their effortless tyranny, could be detected in certain of their descendants, but such qualities did not come naturally to Lindsay herself. As far as she could remember, of course, these women had been insulated from anything resembling real life. They presumably had bevies of drivers, maids, housekeepers, and cooks; their husbands had been nonexistent or invisible; none, as far as Lindsay could remember, had had children, and if they did, the children were exemplary and had long since left the nest.

I am fashion editor of a prestigious newspaper, Lindsay said to herself. I hold down a much-envied job, which is widely if erroneously perceived as glamorous—whatever that means. I am an independent working woman. I can be a grande dame anytime I feel like it. I am off to the Paris collections on Monday. Watch out, Rowland McGuire, because I also understand office politics, and I am about to grind you underfoot.

Lindsay looked down at the feet in question, on which she usually wore blessedly comfortable black canvas high-top sneakers. Today they were clad in sleek Manolo Blahnik black pumps with three-inch heels. The shoes, eye-stoppingly elegant and heart-stoppingly expensive, pinched her toes. Her son Tom called them her executive tart shoes.

Lindsay practiced another blood-freezing glance at the window, screwed up the lists, lobbed them hard at the waste-paper basket, and missed. The truth of it was, she was not cut out to be a grande dame. First, small and boyish-looking, she had the wrong physique. Second, there was no disregarding the facts of her life: she was a thirty-eight-year-old single parent who lived in a chaotic West London apartment with a mother who was born impossible and a seventeen-year-old son who was about, she hoped, to emerge from the hormone storm of adolescence: both mother and son trusted her implicitly to pay all the bills and solve every crisis in life.

Tom was fiendishly clever, but taciturn. For the past three years his normal mode of conversation had been a grunt. Since autumn, however, he had in rapid succession acquired a girlfriend, had the flu, and discovered Dostoevsky. The combination of love, literature, and the recent 102-degree fever had restored his voice. Lindsay was now harangued about ethics as she tried hastily to dust or cook. Louise, her mother, who drifted through life on a cloud of purposeful optimism, said this was a breakthrough; Lindsay was less certain.

“Tom’s emerging from the chrysalis, darling,” Louise had said the night before. “Now you’ll be able to cement your relationship. Lots of splendid wise motherly
talks
.”

“He can talk to his girlfriend,” Lindsay said through gritted teeth as she stirred canned spaghetti sauce very fast. “That’s her function. Boys Tom’s age don’t want to talk to their mothers.”

“Nonsense, darling,” Louise said airily, pouring herself some wine and lighting up a cigarette. “He doesn’t want to talk to the girlfriend. Her function is sex.”

Lindsay closed her eyes. The guilty voice at the back of her mind, always hyperactive, was now starting to jabber about contraceptives, AIDS statistics, and unwanted pregnancies, when she needed to concentrate on McGuire. She looked at her watch, swore, rose, applied some extremely red lipstick, and squirted herself with a super-powerful and unsubtle American scent. She stalked through to her outer office. There, Pixie, her assistant, who was looking forward to this moment, waited until precisely five past ten, then dialed McGuire’s office. She explained in tones of dulcet insolence that Ms. Drummond was in conference, and would be delayed: Lindsay stood over her, making faces, while she did this.

Pixie was nineteen and ambitious. Talented too; her intention was to be editing English
Vogue
by the time she was thirty, and to take New York by storm by the age of thirty-three. Pixie, a nouveau punk, could always be relied upon to dress originally. This morning she had a diamond in her nose; she was wearing bondage trousers, an African necklace, and a Gaultier top that appeared to be made of shrink-wrap. She had a strong Liverpudlian accent, and she was streetwise. Lindsay used to pretend she had hired her for this last quality; in reality, she had hired her because she liked her, and because Pixie reminded her of her own younger, blithely confident self. Pixie, who often made Lindsay feel old, giggled as she hung up.

“Poor McGuire,” she said. “He’s about to be gutted.”

“Good.”

“Why don’t you like him?” Pixie eyed her. “I think he’s gorgeous myself.”

“He’s a
man.
An interfering, arrogant man. Watch and learn, Pixie, all right?”

“He can interfere with me anytime. I wish he would.”

“Pixie. Pay attention. Do I look intimidating? How about the suit?”

“The suit’s totally brilliant. Really keen. You want to test me?”

“All right. I’ll give you a clue. It cost five months’ salary. It required a mortgage. A loan from the World Bank.”

“It’s a Cazarès, obviously.” Pixie frowned. “Give me a second. Last year? Spring? Autumn? Yeah—autumn, ’ninety-four. Not the ready-to-wear line…It’s saying ‘couture’ to me…”

“Let’s hope it says the same to McGuire.”

“—but it couldn’t be couture. Not unless you met a millionaire recently…”

“I wish.”

“So it’s the ready-to-wear, but top of the line. I’m looking at the buttons—
love
the buttons, and the cut of the jacket, on the bias, and the fabric. Cashmere?”

“And silk. What else?”

“The collar?” Pixie began to smile. “The way the collar sort of curves around the neck?”

“Good. Getting warm.”

“Got it. Autumn ’ninety-four. The Signature line. Kate Moss modeled it, in beige, not black. It came out number forty-two.”

“Forty-three. Very good, Pixie. So—am I late enough now? What d’you think?”

Pixie grinned, and consulted her watch.

“Twenty minutes. Give it another five maybe? I mean, if you’re going to be rude, be really rude, right?”

“Exactly.” Lindsay returned the grin.

She gave it ten.

“Have some coffee.” Rowland McGuire lifted his feet off his desk and rose to his full six feet five inches. Lindsay gave him a look of calculated ice, its effects slightly marred by the necessity of looking up.

“If you have time,” she said. “As you know—I’m running late.”

McGuire let this pass with only a brief glance at his watch. “Sit down,” he said over his shoulder. “Sorry about the mess. Just kick those books out of the way. Review copies. All junk.”

Lindsay glared at his broad-shouldered back. She saw that unlike every other man in the building, McGuire seemed capable of making coffee for himself. Another of his ruses, she decided—and one designed to impress. She was certain that had she not been there, a female secretary would have been summoned, one of the clutch of assistants, all new, who sat outside McGuire’s office and trembled at his approach.

Without comment she threaded her way to his desk. Her progress was impeded by stacks of papers, piles of books. In two months McGuire had transformed this department, and its efficiency. Pre-McGuire, the features department had been an amiable place, populated by talented young men who avoided strenuous activity and spent much of the day when not lunching with contacts congratulating themselves on the fact that they had avoided the demands of the newsroom where people were actually required to work. Since the advent of McGuire, these loafers had departed. They had been replaced, Lindsay had noted sourly, by a large number of attractive young women, all of whom were rumored to be ambitious, frighteningly bright—and in love with Rowland McGuire. That morning Lindsay had run the gauntlet of their assessing stares; she had been extremely glad to be wearing the Cazarès suit.

McGuire’s office was equally transformed. Formerly a place of humming modernistic display, all chrome and black wood, it now resembled a scholar’s bolthole circa 1906. McGuire’s state-of-the-art IBM computer was there, it was true, but it was virtually invisible; every surface in the room was piled with papers, magazines, and books. Sitting down by the desk, Lindsay squinted at the titles and was annoyed to see that the pile nearest her consisted of government white papers surmounted by a dog-eared, clearly much-consulted edition of Proust. In French.

She leaned forward and inspected the papers McGuire had been reading when she came in; she could see a large green file, a pile of faxes, and that morning’s edition of the
Times,
folded back at the crossword. McGuire, it was whispered, completed these crosswords in fifteen minutes flat; she now saw that the insufferable man filled in the answers in ink.

“You must be the only man in London,” she said, “who fills in the
Times
’s crossword in fountain pen. What happens if you make a mistake?”

“I don’t. Usually,” McGuire said, handing her a cup of coffee. “I’ve always found crosswords quite easy. Even the
Times.
It’s a quirk. A sort of knack.”

Lindsay gave him a sharp glance. His tone was modest enough. Two months before, when McGuire was first appointed, she might have been deceived by that tone: now she was not. Having given the impression that he was startlingly handsome, pleasant, and too good-natured to last long in this job, McGuire had started firing people. In between felling the dead wood, he had overruled Lindsay’s decisions twice in his first month. To do so once was forgivable. To do so twice was not. Lindsay had wasted no further time in arguments with McGuire, whom she realized she should have distrusted on sight. She went straight over his head, to the editor of the
Correspondent,
an old friend, Max Flanders.

In Max’s office, over a large whiskey at the end of the day, she had made a further discovery. McGuire, who had seemed so uninterested in power plays, had gotten there first.

“Look, Max,” she had said. “Who’s running the fashion department here? I thought it was me. It says it’s me on my contract. Now I discover it’s an Adonis with attitude. Do something, Max. I turn to you in desperation. Get this man off my back.”

“Strong words,” said Max, and lit a cigarette.

“Max, he knows nothing about fashion at all. Why in hell is he interfering? Since when did I have to answer to features? Is he empire-building, or what?”

“Certainly not. Rowland doesn’t operate that way. Though I have to admit, I sometimes think he’s being groomed for my job.”

Max, once a wild young man, and one whose ascent to editorial power had occurred at vertiginous speed, now cultivated a bland manner. He wore conservative three-piece suits, as befitted the editor of a powerful conservative newspaper. He had recently acquired spectacles Lindsay was certain he did not need. Max was thirty-six, masquerading as fifty-six, when on duty at least. He now suppressed a smile, adjusted the superfluous horn-rims, and gave Lindsay an owlish look.

“Max—am I getting through to you? This man pulled some Steve Markov pictures it took me three months to set up. This man didn’t like the model, didn’t like the pictures, didn’t like the clothes. The same man who did these things, Max, has never heard of Christian Lacroix. He admitted it, for God’s sake! I doubt he’s ever heard of Saint Laurent.”

“That’s what Rowland said? That he’d never heard of Lacroix?”

“He didn’t even blush.”

Max sighed. He lowered his eyes to his desk. “You don’t want to believe everything Rowland says, Lindsay. He likes teasing people. I expect he was sending you up.”

The remark did not improve Lindsay’s temper.

“He’s a clown,” she said. “A damned devious one too, I’m beginning to think.”

“Not exactly. Not really,” Max replied in a mild way. “He has a starred First from Balliol. Devious, on the other hand—well, he’s extremely determined, so there you could be right.”

“Fine. And his Oxford degree was in fashion, was it?”