More Than You Know (13 page)

“You must be the secretary,” he said, holding out a bony hand.

“Well,” she said, smiling at him sweetly, “I’ve come about the secretarial post, yes.”

“Ah. Yes. It’s very nice to meet you. I’m Jim Simmonds. Matt—Mr. Shaw’s partner.”

“Yes, I guessed as much. I was just saying to Mr. Shaw that you’d be asking a lot of me for the money.”

“Would we?”

“Miss Mullen has correctly pointed out,” said Matt rather wearily, “that she would sometimes have to work late. And through the lunch hour.”

“But you’d be prepared to do that?”

“Well, if I took the job on, I would. Yes. I can’t see the point otherwise. It’s a very important position, it seems to me. Exciting, though,” she said, with a recross of her black-stockinged legs and a dazzling smile at each of them in turn. “To be in at the beginning of something. Who knows, you might turn out to be millionaires one day.”

“We … plan to be, yes,” said Jimbo. He smiled back at her.

“Anyway … about the money. If you were to offer me the job, of course. I’ve got to eat. And pay for my season ticket, and so on. I really don’t know—”

Inspiration came to Matt.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t we pay for your season ticket; how about that? It’ll be a real benefit, like your luncheon vouchers; you won’t have to pay tax on it.”

A silence. Then she stood up and said, holding out a very pretty hand to each of them in turn, “Done.”

“Great. Well, I think we’ll all work very well together. I can see you’ve got the makings of a negotiator yourself, Miss Mullen.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, “but I’ll bear it in mind. Well, thank you. I can see it’ll be fun. And I really will work very hard. And stay late from time to time if necessary; I meant it. Oh—except on Thursdays.”

“What happens on Thursdays?” asked Jimbo.

“Miss Mullen plays netball,” said Matt.

“Ah. OK. Fine,” said Jimbo, with a grin. “So when Harry Hyams comes round, we’ll have to make sure it’s not Thursday.”

“I’ve heard of Harry Hyams. Famous property tycoon. Is he really a client?”

“Not yet,” said Matt.

Eliza was having lunch with Fiona Marks, a thin, nervy creature who talked at such a high speed that it was hard to understand her without one hundred per cent concentration. She was the fashion editor of
Charisma
, the new ultrachic glossy that was a talking point everywhere that autumn. Very feature-led, it was completely different from most women’s magazines. In its first three issues, it had run interviews with Betty Friedan and with Gloria Steinem, who talked, among other things, about her infamous stint as a bunny girl; there had been a very graphic account of the new “natural” childbirth, complete with show-it-all photographs; and an article on the death of marriage in twentieth-century life. And its “Twenty-four Hours in …” slot, photographic essays on life in such disparate places as a casualty department, an East End housing estate, and a luxury liner, both above and below stairs, was already being widely copied.

“Yes?” said Eliza nervously. Fiona’s voice had had a rather businesslike tone.

“Look … How settled do you feel at Woolfe’s? I mean, I know Lindy’s leaving and you must be a bit worried about it—”

“Oh, no,” said Eliza, carefully airy. “The person who’s taking over from her is marvellous. I’m really looking forward to working with her.”

“In that case, forget what I was just going to say to you.”

“What?” Eliza stopped in mid–company line. “What were you going to say to me?”

“Well, I was going to say I’m looking for an assistant—Lucy’s leaving to have a baby. Loads of people are going to be applying—half London, actually—but I’d like to know if you’d be interested.”

“Me!” said Eliza.

“Yes, you. Because I really think you’ve got a terrific eye, and that’s what I’m looking for above all else. But if you’re really happy where you are—”

“I’m not,” said Eliza, and heard her own voice as an odd, high squeak. “I’d love to apply for the job. Absolutely love it. Please. I mean thank you. Oh, gosh—golly.”

“OK. Great. It’s quite … tough there, you know. They really are determined to do something quite different, and the editor, Jack Beckham’s a proper, old-fashioned journalist, come up through the ranks; got the job because he worked on the
Sunday Times Magazine
launch
with Mark Boxer. He actually sees fashion as a necessary evil, to bring in the advertising; he’d prefer to stick to features about class and politics and sex, so every single idea we do has to be sold really hard. And they have to be proper ideas, not just the new hemline or whatever. But I fancy you could cope with all that. Anyway, let me have your CV—I still have to go through the motions of presenting you to the editor, so you do need to apply. And then he’ll give you a really tough interview, I warn you. But—”

“Oh, God, it’s so exciting,” said Eliza. “Thank you so much, Fiona; I couldn’t be more flattered or excited if you’d … well, I can’t think of anything. Crikey. It’s just amazing.”

She really must stop saying things like
crikey
; it made her sound as if she was back in the sixth at Heathfield.

She got an interview two weeks later. She rather liked Jack Beckham, terrifying as he was; he reminded her of Matt Shaw. He was dark and heavily built, with quite a strong London accent, and he looked completely out of place in the rather rarefied air of
Charisma
’s offices. Not that they were too much like those of most of the magazines she knew, full of pretty, posh girls in miniskirts chatting up models and effete photographers. The atmosphere here was much more serious, with a couple of very intellectual-looking men—one the assistant editor—and the features department, which was next to fashion and twice its size, was full of the sort of girls who had probably, Eliza thought, been to Oxford, clever-looking creatures with wild hair and arty clothes, with voices two octaves deeper than their twittering counterparts’. Their office, moreover, was full not of clothes rails and beauty products, but great piles of books and records and a couple of tape recorders, and the pictures on the walls were not of Jean Shrimpton and Pattie Boyd, but Kenneth Tynan and Norman Mailer.

Beckham’s office was full of smoke; he had a cigar smouldering in an ashtray on his desk and a cigarette in his mouth. He leaned back and studied her.

“So you’re Fiona’s great discovery. I hear you were a deb or some such rubbish.”

“I was,” said Eliza, “but that wasn’t my fault.”

“Well, I suppose not.” He smiled at her. He had liked that. “What makes you think you can do this job for us?”

“I don’t—yet. It was Fiona’s idea. But I’d love to try. I think
Charisma
is amazing.”

“And what’s the most amazing thing you’ve read in it?”

This was a test; she’d prepared for it.

“I think the piece about the down-and-outs. It was … well, it was great. So well written, and the photographs were—”

“Bollocks,” said Jack Beckham.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said bollocks. I bet you don’t have the slightest interest in down-and-outs.”

“I …” This was perfectly true; she smiled at him reluctantly.

“Tell me the truth: what really grabbed you?”

“OK, the piece about the cloakroom attendants at all the big hotels.”

“That’s more likely. Why?”

“Well, because I must have met lots of them. And never realised what extraordinary lives they lead. And the people they deal with on a daily basis.”

That was a pathetic answer; it made her sound like what she was: a spoilt, upper-class girl.

“Good. I like that. That’s what we try to do in all our features. Turn accepted ideas on their heads. Think you can convert that into fashion?”

“I … I don’t know. I mean … surely that’s Fiona’s job. She’s the editor. I’d just be her assistant.”

“Yes, yes, but we don’t want some crap yes-girl in that job. We want someone with balls. Understand what I mean?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“I interviewed Bernard Woolfe once. For the
Sunday Times
. Bit full of his own importance, I thought.”

“Well, in his world, he is very important,” said Eliza staunchly. She wasn’t going to be tricked into bad-mouthing her present boss.

“Tell me why you think so.”

“He’s done something amazing with that store. Especially the department I work in. It’s the first to have anything like that.”

“Well, maybe. Like him, do you? It’ll be very different working for me, you know.”

“I can see that.”

“You can?”

“Yes.”

God, she shouldn’t have said that. Now he was going to ask her in what way. But he didn’t. He laughed instead.

“You have a certain honesty, Miss Clark. I like that. Now, you’re not going to get married and have a baby like that wretched Lucy creature, are you?”

“Absolutely not!” said Eliza.

“You sound horrified. I thought that was what girls like you were trained to do.”

“I’m not like girls like me,” said Eliza coolly.

“I shall remember that. Hold you to it, even. Well, we’ll let you know. Lot of people want this job, you know.”

Eliza had to wait two weeks; Jack Beckham insisted on seeing every girl who had applied. But he told her he’d actually made his mind up when she first told him she wasn’t like the other girls like her.

“Now don’t let me down. And no marriage and no babies.”

“Of course not,” said Eliza.

“Eliza? Jeremy here.”

“Oh—Jeremy, hallo.”

“I wondered if you were free this Saturday?”

“Jeremy, I’m so sorry; I’m not. I’m going to go down to my parents’ for the weekend.”

“Never mind. Only a party. Plenty more ahead. Enjoy your weekend.”

“Thank you. And you.”

She put the phone down, looked at it thoughtfully. He did seem to be quite … keen.

They had been out together a few times now: he had taken her to Sybilla’s, the newest of the new clubs, and to the opening of the wonderful new National Theatre, with Peter O’Toole playing Hamlet—everything he did seemed to be so glamorous.

He was an absolutely perfect boyfriend. She really didn’t know
whether she was actually falling in love with him or even whether she was anywhere near being in love with him.

But she did like him a lot. There hadn’t been any suggestion of sex—yet. Just kissing, which he did really well. But then, he was just such a gentleman, he’d never dream of pushing it; he probably just thought they didn’t know each other well enough yet. Which maybe they didn’t.

He had a very big job at KDP; he was a group account director, a breed known at the agency as the Lords. “And a few of them actually are,” Jeremy said, grinning at her. “Lords, I mean.”

“Yes, I’d heard you’d got a few there. And that you recruit from … what was it, two universities, three schools, and four regiments. Is that true?”

“More or less. Yes. It’s a kind of neat copy line, isn’t it?”

He took his work very seriously; it was one of the things she most liked about him. It wasn’t just something he did to pass the time, like a lot of rich blokes. “I get a really huge buzz out of it—you know, getting the strategy for the ads right, working with the creative people, selling it to the clients. It’s incredibly satisfying. It’s like a battle. A lot of advertising terms are military, you know; it’s rather intriguing: things like strategy, campaign, operations room—yup, it is a battle. One I want—no,
need
—to win.”