Maya walks through the glass double doors and rushes to her desk. Since Cressida became site editor, she has had to ‘have words’ with people about their timekeeping. Not Maya yet, but Maya feels it’s coming. Even though Maya often works through lunch and never leaves before 6.30 p.m., if she arrives a minute later than 9.30 a.m. she sees Cressida look at the clock on the top right-hand corner of her screen and is often met with a snide comment.
Maya couldn’t even commit to teaching night school at the Hazelworth Collective College this term because of Cressida’s office ethos, and she really misses the characters, the jokes, the Italian still life on the wall. When Maya is still at her desk on a Tuesday evening, she often wonders who might have been in her class this year; whether the new conversational Spanish teacher has made a friend like Velma.
Sam looks up. He’s on the phone but nods hello as he talks in hushed tones in a now-quiet office. Cressida’s diktat for the stereo to be turned off lives on.
‘How can you be creative with tinny noise in the background? It’s not even good music,’ she said with a curl of a full lip, and Maya wondered what type of music Cressida would listen to anyway.
Maya suggested the team could listen through their computer headphones if they wanted to work to music. Cressida banned that too.
‘I’m the editor. I need to be heard at all times.’
Maya throws her bag under her desk and slides into her seat. The 8.21 pulled into the station at 8.33, giving Maya twelve minutes when she could have walked up the platform to seek out James Miller but didn’t. She waited, halfway down the platform as she has anyway lately, but definitely will do from now on, near where people emerge from running the rattling gauntlet of the underpass. She stood reading her notes from the first of the spring/summer presentations after last month’s New York, London, Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks. She didn’t even look up when James Miller walked past, so lost was she in roomy denim, one-shoulder dresses and Obi belts.
As she disembarked at the terminal, Maya didn’t look around for that familiar, reassuring back of the head that she loved to see walking with purpose ahead of her. She hotfooted it up Euston Road, across the busy intersection, past the Planetarium and left down Baker Street. One minute late.
Cressida, sitting at the best desk in the office, the desk next to the huge window that Emma gave up for her, darts her eyes to the top right-hand corner of her monitor. Maya knows she is checking the time.
9.31. Bite me.
Maya wishes Cressida hadn’t made her so petty.
She slips her fluffy pink cocoon coat onto the back of her chair. Maya doesn’t love the coat any more, she knows it’s time to retire it since it’s been hanging on the back of a lot of chairs at FASH HQ, but Maya is proud to have coined the term ‘cocoon coat’ the summer before last. The shape ended up everywhere, and no one knew what to call it until Maya had named it the Cocoon at FASH. Below the knee and wide around the middle like a big fluffy cuddle, it was obvious to Maya.
Sam finishes his phone call, and Maya swings her chair around to see him, tap, click, restarting at his desk.
‘Sam,’ Maya whispers. ‘You going to Emma’s lunch today?’
Sam swings around and Maya notices a hole on the shoulder of his Metallica T-shirt.
He nods but doesn’t speak.
‘I’ve got a card for everyone to sign. And some vouchers towards a pram. Oh and some macarons from a tower I made yesterday…’ Which reminds Maya to find a photo of it to show Sam, so she starts to scroll through her phone. ‘Look, I made this!’
‘Very nice,’ Sam says flatly, giving Maya’s phone a cursory glance.
Maya withdraws with sloping shoulders.
‘Conference!’ barks Cressida. And seven pairs of hesitant feet stand and shuffle listlessly into the meeting room, notebooks and laptops in hand.
‘I’ll just nip to the loo,’ says Emma, taking her enormous low bump through the double doors and across the canteen for what will be the first of many times today.
‘Right, quickly before she comes back, does anyone who hasn’t yet put in for Emma’s collection want to?’ asks Maya, looking around the room but deliberately not at Cressida.
‘Oh I haven’t signed the card yet,’ says Alex, looking down the table for it through horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘May I?’
Maya hands it over and Alex gets the giggles.
‘Oh Chloe, that’s brilliant!’ he says, looking at the sixteen Photoshopped images of Emma’s head on pregnant celebs’ bodies.
Cressida makes no attempt to even look at the card, let alone sign it.
So mean.
Maya knows Cressida is the only person who didn’t tuck a five or ten-pound note into the collection envelope, and as Emma’s line manager, she ought to have given the most.
She gave you her all, she gave you her desk!
‘Right, we don’t have to wait for Emma’s little social media update and she doesn’t need to hear about FASHmas as she’s buggering off anyway, so I’ll get us started.’ Cressida rubs statuesque hands together. ‘Just a quick FASHmas update before we talk about today’s celeb pics. But I’m taking over because it means so much to Lucy and the exec team, and I’ve had some brilliant ideas for this year. I’m presenting them to Lucy at 3 p.m.’ She turns to Olivia. ‘I want you working on it solidly until then, so Holly, you’ll need to do pictures after conference.’
Olivia frowns. ‘You’re putting me back on FASHmas? You took me off it on Friday.’
‘Well I’m sorry but I didn’t take that art degree over the weekend, I need a picture editor.’
Olivia tugs on her jumper and breathes a heavy sigh. ‘Well I’m going to Emma’s leaving lunch, but I can work on it until 1 p.m.’
‘Nope, not going to happen I’m afraid. I need you to source new images for the mood board. I can get lunch in, if eating is that important to you, but I’m sure you of all people can hold on until 3 p.m.’
Olivia is dumbstruck. Papers stop shuffling. Alex stops writing in the card and looks up.
‘Me of all people?’
The door clicks open, Emma walks in and Alex tucks the card back under the envelope it was hidden in.
‘Me of all people?’ says Olivia matter-of-factly. ‘You mean because I’m so fat I can rely on my reserves to get me through to 3 p.m., Cressida? Or because I could do with skipping a meal? What did you mean, Cressida?’
Cressida blushes, she’s not used to being challenged. ‘Just a joke, Olivia. Deal with it!’ she says defensively, dismissively.
Emma looks at Maya to gauge what just happened. Maya shakes her head softly.
‘That is so not on, on so many levels, Cressida,’ says Olivia, pointing a glossy royal blue talon towards their boss. ‘I will work on the mood board, as I have been for the past few weeks with Maya. But at 1 p.m. I’ll go to lunch. Not because I’m greedy, but because I want to be sisterly and to wish Emma well and see her off in style.’
Emma blushes. She doesn’t want to get involved. In fact she just wants to get out of the office ASAP and go on maternity leave. Maya feels a roar rising from the pit of her stomach, inflamed by injustice, gaining momentum thanks to Olivia’s rebellion, but still stifled by the oppressive regime.
Olivia pushes her laptop towards Holly. ‘Can you take the lead on the pictures today, Hols, I can’t stomach that,’ she says, nodding towards Cressida with sass as she stands.
‘Oh, if you’re going to be so sensitive don’t worry about it, Olivia. I’m sure I can find a much more enthusiastic and talented freelance picture editor for FASHmas,’ snaps Cressida. ‘You’re obviously burnt out.’
The door slams.
Cressida’s face shows the awkward cocktail of embarrassment and defiance. ‘Someone’s feeling sensitive today!’ she says, widening her eyes. ‘Pictures please, Holly, before we waste any more time.’
Maya looks across the table at Alex and Emma doodling in their notebooks and opens her laptop. Under the guise of working double time through the morning meeting, she opens her personal mail and emails Tom.
Hi Tom,
Lovely to see you yesterday, thanks for coming. So excited about your wedding!
About your contact at the Standard… if she’s interested then I’m game. It’s a total joke here.
Mx
Maya presses send and feels discomfort in the pit of her stomach. She doesn’t know what she’s more disgusted by: what Cressida said or the fact she herself sat back and said nothing.
*
James stands on the steps of Mayfair Library and looks through his lens. He sees old sweethearts, people who have been in love and lost love a long time ago and fallen back in love again. He sees proud adult children, throwing pastel-coloured paper, cut in to the shapes of hearts and horseshoes and four-leaf clovers, swirling and dancing in the wind. James feels heartened. He wonders how many happy couples have walked down these steps. He is proud to capture this particular couple doing it.
Earlier, when James was standing in a window of their mews home, taking pictures of the happy couple getting ready, he asked the groom how old he was when he had fallen in love with his bride the first time around.
Startled, a man with thinning hair and a bushy black and white stripy beard stopped tying his tie and looked at James, who dropped his lens for a second.
‘How did you know we were sweethearts?’
‘I saw it through the lens.’
The man turned back to admire himself in the mirror – ox-like shoulders, thick neck, tiny wise eyes behind rimless spectacles – and finished tying the tie on his Armani suit.
‘You’ve seen her. Can you imagine what a knockout she was back then? She came from Germany on a school exchange, fifty-one years ago. I never should have let her go back.’
James smiled and raised his lens again, taking a side profile of a man who didn’t look like he had many regrets.
‘But it turned out good. Our families have come together beautifully. You’ll meet our grandkids later.’ Eyes like currants turned back to look at James. ‘She was worth waiting for, son,’ he said with a wry smile.
On the steps after the ceremony, James lowers his lens and bends his knees to capture small children with ruddy cheeks in pretty coats. A little girl asks Oma to pick her up. A woman with sleek silver hair, artfully coiffed back to a point at the base of a long tanned neck, picks up her granddaughter. Her new husband nestles in and the little girl snuggles into his badger beard. A shake of his head tickles the little girl and a belly laugh tumbles down the grandeur of South Audley Street on the tail of a wind.