Face Value (5 page)

Bob and Julie Simpson had never heard of
Darling
magazine. Bob, whose paper manufacturing business often took him as far away as Plymouth to renew contracts with printers, had never been to New York. Julie had been once.

“It’s fantastic news, love,” she’d said. “You’ll love it there. All that shopping, and the policemen are ever so helpful if you get lost.” Bob scratched his crotch in agreement. Kate had sipped politely on the too strong tea and stared at her feet. She didn’t know how to behave, jubilant not being a look she had to do too often, her happiness suddenly overcome by an overwhelming sense of guilt. It was as if with every congratulatory remark another fear came rising to the fore. She’d never been to New York before, never been to America before. And beauty, what did she know about beauty? What
was
beauty?

“Excellent question, I know you’re the right girl for the job,” Alexis De Vere had said, when she’d called her one gray Maidstone afternoon to confirm the final arrangements. “Beauty is . . . something we’re all striving for, quite frankly, and I’m glad the philosophical nature of this most important department at
Darling
magazine hasn’t escaped you. I think it is an intrinsic part of the job, and a part that some beauty directors in the past have, I think, overlooked. . . . You have to give it to the readers, the philosophy thing, because they want, crave, and need to ask, to be asked, questions like that, in this shallow, superficial world of ours, Kate, don’t you think? And I think that beauty, what is beauty . . . well, it’s something we strive for, or something we are born with, or even, as I believe that great English wizard of words of yours once said, “something we have thrust upon us.”

“Shakespeare?” She had called him a “wizard of words.”

“Oh, you love the bard, too! I just know I’ve made the right decision. Kate, I’m so glad you’ll be joining us!”

“Something’s not right, is it?” her mother had asked over supper, a Marks and Spencer’s oven-ready vegetarian shepherd’s pie, organic, Kate’s favorite.

"What do you mean?”

“You should be happier, bragging about this. You’ve done really well. Poached by a New York magazine!”

Scrambled, more like, Kate thought to herself. Fried, possibly. She thought New York wasn’t one of the states where they still had the electric chair, but she couldn’t be sure. Even her mum knew more about beauty than she did, thanks to all those late-night plastic surgery shows she watched while waiting for Kate to return home, ready to make her a pile of Mother’s Pride toast with lashings of butter.

Lise had also picked up on her anxiety.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, the day before her departure. They had arranged good-bye drinks for her, down by the ballet school in the Old Palace, on a grassy bank overlooking the Medway. In the end what had sounded like a lavish affair, in Kate’s imagination at least, populated by throngs of grateful interviewees and kicked off with a rousing speech by Trisha Hillmory, whom she would by now be on lunching terms with, had turned out to be just Kate, Lise, and Steve, whom Lise had brought along in a vain, last-ditch attempt to ingratiate himself. Steve had graciously brought along a bottle of “bubbly,” as he called it, revealing a bottle of cheap bath foam as a humorous gesture toward Kate’s new future as beauty director.

“Oh, that’s really funny, Steve,” she’d said, her face not cracking, although in fairness to Steve’s abysmal sense of humor this could also be due to the remnants of last night’s face mask, an egg white concoction, renowned, or so said Yolanda, for its tightening abilities. (How was she supposed to know you were meant to rinse it off after fifteen minutes? Eggs didn’t come with instructions, did they?)

“Don’t worry, love, the real thing’s here,” said Steve, hastily, and from an Oddbins carrier he produced a bottle of Pomagne, which fizzed and trickled its way into the three paper cups Lise had thoughtfully pinched from Starbucks.

Steve’s bath foam was another omen. Beauty. She would be writing about lipsticks, makeup, hair products, bubble bath, all the things that Lise had probably been into since she was old enough to own her first Barbie doll. The stuff just didn’t interest her.

“But you know what,” Lise had helpfully pointed out, “with that kind of salary, you might start finding it very interesting indeed. Stop thinking about yourself as some kind of fraud.”

“She’s right, love,” said Steve. “You got the job! Got head-hunted. It happens all the time in the banking world.” Anyone would think he was a director at Merrill Lynch instead of the manager of the local NatWest. A cheating love-rat type of local bank manager.

But maybe they had a point. She had been appointed on merit, and frankly, didn’t she deserve it after all her hard slogging away at hospices and swimming pool openings and even interviews with Trisha Hill-bleeding-Mory? Why shouldn’t she have the job? She’d always known she was a good writer, with potential—one of her journalism teachers had told her at the Bright Futures Center for Opportunities. (She’d loved the plurality of “opportunity”—you could be a chef, a personal trainer, a journalist, or all three!) Alexis must be a genius of a woman to be able to spot that burning talent and ambition, to recognize her single person status as the huge career sacrifice that it was. She could do it, and she would do it.

In the end, by the time she had packed and repacked her bag three times, packing for a destination she knew nothing about, and a world within a world she both feared and dreaded, she was relieved to be going, relieved to be getting away from a life she had outgrown, outlived, that she had somehow given thirty-two years to without it seemingly giving much back to her.

new york

beauty note:

Model wears black wrap dress, Topshop. Every day for one week.
Hair:
Orange highlights by Maidstone College of Beauty Therapists.
Lips:
Cowshed Lippy Cow Lip Balms, free sample on Virgin Airlines Upper Class.
Fragrance:
Sarah Jessica Parker Covet, parting gift from Lise.

four

The fat lady in the dark blue uniform snarled at her, apparently welcoming her to America. In deference to the stringent US entry regulations, Kate was trying hard to look cool, important, and not guilty all at once. She put her hand up to her mouth in an attempt to mask the smile of sheer euphoria that kept attempting to push its way across her face. To look too excited would only draw attention to herself. What she really wanted was to be waved through quickly to baggage collection, where the tired ugliness of her fellow aliens was already being exacerbated by the harsh, sterile lighting, and get out there, see New York! Better say that again. New York!

For now, she had to be content with the all-American threat of danger that lurked palpably in the stale conditioned air. She volunteered a finger for the imprint machine, wiping it clean first with a tissue.

“Sorry,” Kate said to her new friend in Immigration. “Germs.”

The woman scowled. “You got a problem with the machine? ” she asked, threateningly. She flicked through Kate’s passport, menace running like static through her fingertips, her eyes squinting maliciously.

Kate felt herself redden, a future in Manhattan replaced by a stint in Guantánamo.

You learn big things about countries in small places, she mused as she eventually collected her baggage. Everything in America screamed success right from the get-go. Even the luggage trolley was a SmartCart.

After clearing Customs only to find there was no one there to meet her, she’d jumped in a cab. Lizbet had given her the address of a hotel somewhere in SoHo, which, according to her
Time Out
guidebook, was a glamorous destination, once an industrial zone, and earmarked for destruction in the 1960s. She was thrilled to be in a yellow cab. Ever since she’d seen Robert De Niro in
Taxi Driver
, she’d wondered what it would be like to hail one, sink into its low leather seats, and try to strike up a conversation through the scratched plastic screen with whichever driver she got. She was no closer to fulfilling that dream, as the cabbie was not conversant in the English language. No matter, she had other sources to draw on. Whereas Lise had been glued to
Sex and the City
when it had been on TV, Kate’s vision of New York had more of a literary bent to it.
Bonfire of the Vanities
;
Bright Lights, Big City
, she’d felt dizzy reading the books, and had moved from one to the other in frenzied succession. Now here she was, sundown, traversing one of the great bridges into Manhattan (unable to tell which one, and no driver to elucidate), and the reality was even more splendid. The lights of the bridge hung like diamond necklaces from pillar to pillar, all the better to highlight the city skyline as dusk fell. One by one, two by two, the city’s magical, tall buildings began to self-illuminate. The lights jumped up and down like an irregular heartbeat on a hospital monitor, always beating, never flatlining; the city that never slept and refused to die. The cab swerved into a more built-up area, and gradually, the buildings closed in on her, mighty and impenetrable with their facades of steel, cast iron, sheer plated glass, green glass; industrial fabrics that seemed fitting for a nation that stood by its industrial values so determinedly. She felt like shouting for joy, a rush of adrenaline surging through the core of her being. She felt the presence of a greater power, a silent knowledge that in spite of all his shortcomings, Man had built all this, fashioned it from some vision bigger than himself! Or herself. She was glad to be alive; glad to be here. How could she ever have considered not coming?

The SoHo Hotel was a collection of rooms with the fashion pack’s every desire in mind, or so the brochure rather grandly boasted. Lizbet had told her in Maidstone that her apartment wasn’t ready, so she would have to stay at this hotel for a while, if she wouldn’t mind, and to put anything she wanted on the bill. Nouvelle Maison Editions would settle all her expenses, naturally. Kate had gone straight for the minibar and, blissfully ignorant to the wages of sin that might befall her if she so much as looked at a carbohydrate, she began by devouring the numerous packets of salted potato snacks in upmarket packaging, all the while gazing at the view that dazzled from both sides, hers being a corner suite. The indomitable skyline in the distance, the hulking former warehouses across the street whose interiors now revealed homes, swish loft apartments, grandiose offices, were no doubt filled with beautiful people sipping on Cosmopolitans and listening to lounge music.

The hotel had promised to serve each and every whim of its discerning guests. From the pictorial evidence of the brochure, it seemed that whims were indeed served, providing that whim was a goldfish in a bowl, a French poodle for a fashion shoot, or organic grass-fed bison steak-frites. But they seemed to have difficulties when that whim was rather more ordinary—like passing on a message. Alexis De Vere would be picking Kate up in thirty minutes, said the bellboy at her door, just as the phone rang announcing that Alexis De Vere was in fact downstairs waiting for Kate. Now.

Kate would have preferred to crash on her king-size bed. She had never slept in a king-size bed before, although once, she’d gone round to Charlie Bell’s, the one boyfriend who’d ever wanted to marry her (age twenty-one, so it didn’t really count), when his parents were away. They’d been just about to christen Mr. and Mrs. Bell’s bed when Charlie had chickened out, worried that they’d crumple the sheets. Theirs weren’t soft Egyptian cotton sheets, inlaid with a paisley motif. Nor had they had a spray of white orchids on the pillow, or white chocolates in the shape of handbags and stiletto shoes in the place of Mrs. Bell’s dentures. A pair of creamy, soft slippers rested on a silken mat at the edge of the bed. She dipped her toes in them playfully, padding about in the bedroom before leaping out of her skin in fright:
Alexis De Vere was waiting downstairs, what was she doing?!

She looked at herself in the mirror. Her brand-new black Lycra-enriched wrap dress was crumpled and creased—a poppy bud unfurled before its time. She ran a brush through her hair, replaced the slippers with a pair of platform heels that Lise had assured her were very this season, and prepared to meet her editor.

Alexis De Vere stood slap bang in the middle of the lobby, shrouded in a soft white sheepskin gilet and nothing else bar a pair of tight white trousers and flat patent leather pumps with a buckle. The gilet had pom-pom rabbit tails hanging around the collar. Kate wasn’t sure if the pom-poms were made from real rabbit tails, but she suspected her fellow local
Green Issues
members might not approve. The pom-poms pommed dramatically as Alexis spun round to greet her.

“Darling! It’s my honor, my privilege to welcome you to America!” she said, loudly, not caring who saw or heard.

Kate looked Alexis squarely in the eye and gave what she hoped would come across as a full-of-confidence smile. "Thanks! I’m really pleased to be here.”

She could feel eyes burning into her from the chocolate leather sofas just off the lobby. Had she been Lise, say, she could have worked this situation to her advantage, scored some major brownie points with the staff on reception, who were by now standing to attention behind the front desk, staring, obviously impressed.

“Come,” Alexis purred. “I hope you don’t mind, but I have to attend an art opening tonight, and I thought you could come along? Fun, no!”

And then Kate saw it. Alexis had facial hair.

She took her by the arm, and Kate, unaccustomed to the giddy heights of never-worn-before platforms, lolloped after her, down three steps and into the welcoming open door of Alexis’s black Mercedes with the tinted windows. Great, she thought to herself, perhaps she’d give her a tour, point out some of the sights. She could think of nothing more exciting with which to indulge her eyes than yet more of what New York had to offer.

Alexis seemed to have small talk of a different nature on her mind. She wanted to get to know Kate a little better, she explained. She knew she was tired, but tomorrow she had such a busy schedule and she knew Kate would have one, too. Really they should have had some kind of handover period, but Diana, the previous beauty director, had left rather suddenly and when you go to another magazine, a rival at that, it’s just not healthy to hang around for too long, she explained.