I’d meant to be delightful when Caspian left, sending him across the ocean with the sweetness of my kisses lingering on his lips, but unfortunately our parting took place at 4 a.m. And so I was mainly half asleep, mumbly, and pathetic. I think I got my message across, though, especially when I wrapped my arms around his leg and wouldn’t let go.
“I’ll be back next Saturday,” he said, trying to sound exasperated and actually just laughing. “Please let go. I don’t want to be late.”
“No. I’m keeping you.”
“Arden.”
I whimpered tragically. “Promise you’ll come and see me straight away? As soon as you land?”
“It’s Eleanor’s birthday. Have you forgotten?”
Oh shit. Where had August gone? “Only technically.”
“How about”—he peeled my hand gently off his knee and gave it a squeeze—“I pick you up and we go together?”
That startled me almost awake. “You want to take me to…um…a family thing?”
“Why not? You were invited.”
“I know, but it seems serious, doesn’t it?”
“If you’re uncomfortable, I can meet you there.”
“No!” Oops. Capslock! Ardy Strikes Back. It was too late to sound nonchalant now, but I tried. “It’s cool.”
He smiled, and bent down to kiss my nose. “Then it’s a date.”
The sheer sweetness of those words left me floating through Sunday in a happy haze. On Monday, though, work happened to me. I honestly hadn’t expected Poppy to say yes, since all we’d discussed was the interview. But she did—as long as I was still involved. And from then on everything became a flurry of agents and publicists and contracts and ahhh. It took most of the week, untold emails and even a couple of conference calls, all of which felt way above my pay grade. Especially because I didn’t have a pay grade.
But, somehow, by Thursday, it had all come together. And, with the end in sight, an email plinked into my inbox that was only to me. It was from Mara Fairfax, the editor of Milieu, and it said: “Do come along to the office. This afternoon. 2?” Nine words and the world’s most unconvincing question mark—as impenetrable as a text from someone you fancied when you weren’t quite sure if they fancied you back. Was this a casual visit? A job interview? Did they just want to look at me like I was a monkey at the zoo?
Still, at least I didn’t have long to fret about it. A little before two, I’d navigated a receptionist and was ascending to the appropriate floor of a moderately ugly, portico-fronted office block off Hanover Square. A woman, a leggy brunette in pearls and ballet flats, was waiting for me at the far end of a long, white corridor, where the words MILIEU, EST 1702, was picked out in gigantic, shiny letters on the wall.
“You’re Arden, aren’t you?” she said, stepping forward. “I’m Tabitha. Tabitha England-Plume and, yes, I’m a real person and that’s my real name. You can look me up if you like. I’m in the Bible.”
I shook her hand dazedly. “Were you begat?”
“The other Bible. Debrett’s.”
“Oh. The thing is, I haven’t actually…”
“Don’t worry, Mara’ll give you a copy. It’s all terribly silly really.”
She led me under the Milieu sign and into the office itself. I was braced for the full Devil Wears Prada but, actually, it was kind of banal. Plainly decorated, with computers tucked into cubicles, it could have been the admin block for almost anything. The Wernham Hogg Paper Company. Maybe half of the workstations were occupied. All of them frighteningly tidy.
“Mara’s nuts about clutter-free working,” said Tabitha. “This way.”
I hurried after her down another corridor, this one lined by framed Milieu covers. Things gradually got shinier—through their glass walls, I caught glimpses of fancy meeting spaces and rooms so full of clothing racks you could barely have wriggled inside.
Mara’s own office, when we finally got there, was large, but not swaggeringly so. It was clean and bright, austerely decorated with a few black and white prints, and what I took to be a personal photograph of a laughing girl and a horse. There was room for a sofa and glass-topped desk, and a large table, currently strewn with photographs, which was where the action seemed to be happening.
A woman, who I thought was Mara Fairfax, was leaning over the images, studying them with a focus bordered on ferocity. Her colleague, probably the photographer, had her hips braced against the edge of the table, one foot—in a perfectly polished Oxford—swinging idly. She was pretty much the picture of glamorous nonchalance, in high-waisted pinstriped trousers held up by braces over a low-cut white shirt, but then she reached out to Mara and tucked a strand of her honey-brown hair gently behind her ear. Which Mara herself hardly seemed to notice.
“Well,” she said, “I think any of these three could be a cover. Or maybe just these two. I like her face in this one—there’s a softness there, almost a whimsy, which isn’t a side of her we usually see. But this one, the shape of her body”—her hand traced a curve—“it’s pure Kate.”
The photographer tapped the second. “This is it, I think.”
“Let’s try it.” Mara straightened up. And then, with a wave of her hand, “Come in, you two. Have a seat.”
“Um. Hello.” I perched on the edge of one of the chairs in front of Mara’s desk.
“I’m Mara Fairfax. And I’m sure you’ll have heard of George, here.”
Was this a test? There was really only one notable George in the British magazine photography. I’d seen what I’d assumed to be his name credited on so many fashion and editorial shoots. Time Out. Skin Two. Vogue. Milieu. “George…Chase? You’re George Chase?”
“It’s so convenient when one’s reputation precedes one.” She reached into the pocket of her trousers and pulled out a card case. Flicking it open, she extricated a business card and held it out to me between two agile, knotty-knuckled fingers.
It was matte black, faintly textured under my thumb, a barely visible circular pattern that suggested the shape of a lens. All it said was GEORGIA CHASE: LIBERTINE, ROUÉ, PHOTOGRAPHER. And then a website.
“Anyway,” said Mara, effortlessly reclaiming my attention, “thank you for coming in, Arden. You’ve sent us some quite interesting pieces.”
“I have? Gosh. Thank you.”
Mara Fairfax wasn’t what I’d expected. But then my expectations had probably been thrown off by too much Meryl Streep. She was about five years older than George, maybe more, not exactly beautiful, but classically English: all strong bones and clear skin, and the sturdy athleticism of having spent most of your life on horseback. “Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?”
I glanced from Mara to George and back again, still not entirely sure what was happening. After a dithery couple of moments, I decided to risk a direct approach. I mean, what was the worst that could happen—apart from excruciating personal embarrassment, that is. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why am I here?”
“I’m deciding whether I like you.”
“And what happens if you do?”
“Then I offer you a job.”
I successfully managed not to fall off my chair. Go me. “At Milieu? OMG. I mean…uh…holy shi—that would be a dream come true. But I should tell you, I…I just got my degree results and I sort of…I got a 2.2.”
There was a silence. I waited to be escorted from the building.
Tabitha laughed. “I got a third.”
“And Mara here,” said George, grinning, “was sent down.”
She shrugged. “If I hadn’t been, I would never have met you.”
“Oh please God no.” That was Tabitha. “No more stories about New York in the eighties. It was a golden age. You once threw up on Andy Warhol. We get it.”
“Alas, poor Tabs. The most exciting thing you’ve ever vomited over are your Jimmy Choos.” George climbed lazily to her feet. “But, in any case, I should leave you all to your chat.” She began gathering up her photographs, pausing only to glance my way. “I do hope we meet again, poppet.”
And, with that, she sauntered out.
Leaving me genuinely unable to figure out whether I was relieved or not. She seemed kind of into me, which probably meant she was my ally in whatever was happening here. But, at the same time, she had legs for miles and a fantastic rack and she kept smirking at me distractingly.
So I guess I was overall grateful for her absence.
Especially because, so help me God, I was not fucking this up. It was the opportunity of a lifetime and I wanted it so badly it was making my throat tight and my mouth dry. My brain, of course, was a flurry of uncertainties. It wanted to tell me I wasn’t good enough. That I didn’t deserve this. That I’d only end up disappointing everyone.
But I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t.
I’d earned this chance. Worked for it. Milieu and me were made for each other. And I was going to land this job.
Because, let’s face it, I was likeable as fuck.
* * *
Fifty minutes later, I emerged flayed, dazed, giddy, and job-having.
Junior Assistant Editor. I was a junior assistant editor.
Truthfully, I was still a bit shaky on what that actually involved. But, whatever it was, it was a real thing and I was going to be paid for it. Not, y’know, much. But I’d never been paid for anything before. Unless you counted that time Caspian had established a scholarship in my name after I’d given him a blow job.
I lurched past one of the Pitts and into Hanover Square. Slumped onto a bench, amid the swirling green, and messaged everyone I knew with shaking fingers. Caspian first, of course. And he was the first to get back to me, signing his congratulations off with an x, which was incredibly effusive for him, squeaking in before my family, who sang to me as follows: We knew you could do it / Just call it a hunch / Ardy’s delicious & nutritious / For dinner, breakfast, and lunch. Rabbie and Hazel wrote music for adverts, and pined after the days of the unironic jingle, so most of my accomplishments were celebrated via cheesy earworm.
Tucking my feet onto the edge of the bench, I hugged my knees and watched the shadows of the trees dancing over the grass. I was half expecting to jolt awake and find myself back at Oxford, in my single bed, under my crappy duvet, on the morning of my first exam. Having desperation-dreamed this whole absurd fable: being with Caspian, meeting Ellery, not completely fucking up my finals, landing a job at Milieu.
Except no. This was my life. This was really my life.
I bounced up, flung wide my arms, and wheeled in circles, accompanied by a few startled pigeons. Well. I figured I deserved my very own Disney princess moment. Even if I did look slightly bonkers.
From there, I headed home, where I found Ellery and a bottle of scary-expensive congratulatory champagne Caspian had contrived to send me that she’d mostly drunk. Her pink tulle skirt and leather jacket combination made her look like Tinkerbell gone bad.
“Came to be all yay and shit,” she explained.
I twitched the champagne from her hand and took a swig. The bubbles rushed up my nose and down my chin and left me sneezing. Gosh, I was just the coolest. “It seems like you’ve started the party without me.”
“Haven’t you heard?” She gave me her flattest stare. “I am the party.”
Laughing, I went to shed my coat and shoes. When I came back, she was standing by the fridge and tearing the foil away from another bottle of champagne with her teeth.
As ever, I was mildly qualmish about taking advantage of Caspian’s largesse or whatever. But technically Ellery was the one taking advantage. And I really did have something to celebrate.
Pulling herself onto the edge of one the gleaming marble counters, she popped the cork with upper-class ease. Foam surged upward, splashing onto the floor and running down her hand. I would have been squeaking and flailing for a cloth, but she only laughed and licked the champagne from her arm, spilling even more as the gesture tilted the bottle downward.
Mustering some of her insouciance, I skirted the puddles of champagne and hopped onto the counter next to her.
She nudged my knee with hers and passed me the bottle. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks.” I swigged—didn’t choke myself this time—and kicked her gently back.
“Is this…what you want to do? With your life or whatever?”
“Yes. I mean, ideally at some point in a less tea-making, better-paying capacity. But this is a super exciting start.”
“Cool.”
We passed the bottle back and forth for a while. Ellery, though, seemed restless, her heels catching against the cabinets below.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She shrugged. And, then, after an uncomfortably long pause, “Just thinking about shit. I was quite busy dying for a while. And then I had to not die. Now I guess I have to do something else.”
“Well. Is there anything you like?”
“I liked dying. I was into that.” Her mouth curled into a rare smile. “Good at it too.”
I reached out and ran my thumb across the bumpy, wrong-way scar on her wrist. “I’d say you were mediocre at best.”
And she threw back her head and laughed the rough, throaty laugh that reminded me so much of Caspian. Not so much the sound of it, but the way it tore itself free, like a butterfly from a cocoon. It made me want to hug the shit out of both of them.
“So how about,” I said instead, “we back-burner suicide for the time being?”
She rolled her eyes. “If you insist.”
“Is there anything else you enjoy?”
“Coke?”
“Seems to me you’d make a very successful investment banker.”
“Nahh.” She took another swallow of champagne. “My dick’s too big.”
Now it was my turn to giggle. “Speaking from experience?”
“City types are always the same. Fat bonus, tiny prick. Lawyers are even worse.”
“I’ve only slept with proto-lawyers.” My mind produced a hasty, semi-pornographic montage of everyone I’d bonked at university who I vaguely remembered as having been studying law. “They seemed fine.”
“Maybe they shrivel away over time or something.”
“Consumed from within by their own pedantry.”
“Yeah.” Ellery lifted the bottle in a toast of disdain. “Pompous wankers.”
Her contempt, which usually hummed along at a certain comfortable baseline, had spiked noticeably. “You really don’t like lawyers, huh?”
“Probably Caspian just hires the biggest twats he can find. I dunno.”
“Okay. So”—I made a valiant effort to redirect the conversation—“putting aside Class A narcotics—”
“Cocaine isn’t a narcotic. That’s a pharmacologically erroneous legal classification.”
“Thanks, Walter White.”
“I told you lawyers were bullshit.”
I wrestled my face into its most patient expression. “Is there anything else that makes you feel even a little bit like you don’t want to die?”
She huffed out a long, aggrieved sigh. And then mumbled something.
“What?”
“Music. Music’s okay.”
“What about that, then? I mean, there’s university or…like…music school.”
Shit. I was out of my depth and it earned me a scowl. “No. I hate music like that.”
“Like what?”
“In a cage.” She gulped down the last of the champagne, jumped off the counter, and pulled open the fridge. Glanced over at me and grinned, feral and bright with the light shining on her face. “Another?”
My memories of the rest of evening got all bubbly. Ellery lay under the table and talked about Bartók a lot—about exile and the preservation of Hungarian folk songs. And I pitched articles to her, my ideas flowing as bounteously as the booze, though significantly poorer in quality. At some point we might have done the full Titanic pose on the balcony—with me shouting that I was king of the world to the slumbering city below. And we’d hooked my phone up to the sound system and danced and danced and danced until the stars blurred and Ellery looked almost happy.