Maya and the rest of the editorial team snake back through reception and up the stairs with a little less vim than their descent, as they head to their two islands of desks.
‘Well that sucks,’ says picture editor Olivia flatly, as she slumps into her window seat in the chair next to Maya’s. Olivia is as loud as she is big and her wild orange corkscrew-curled hair is like a sunburst of sunshine and warmth whatever the weather.
Social media manager Emma sits facing Olivia on the other side of the desk next to the window. Blue, Flower Fairy eyes sparkle in the sunshine and jump out against darkest brown shoulder-length hair. She is Maya’s oldest friend at FASH and is online day and night, responding to tweets, searching for what’s trending, advising the team on what the customers are rating and hating, and is too lovely to work in fashion. She sits next to Lucy, who is opposite Maya, making up the fourth terminal, so she can keep Lucy up to date on breaking fashion news. When Lucy’s at her desk that is. She’s been so busy lately. For months, she’s needed a new site editor to support her and take a load of work off her hands while she moves into her more strategic role.
On the bank of desks behind Lucy and Emma sit the other four members of the FASH editorial team. Senior writer Alex and his junior Liz. Between them they translate the looks into shareable, clickable and – most importantly – shoppable articles, so that the FASH visitor will see exactly why she must have the new must-have bomber. And then buy it. Liz is a meek and mousey girl with an encyclopaedic knowledge of every item of clothing every major fashion house ever sent down the runway. Liz is so nice, even Lucy feels guilty asking her to get her a bread-free sandwich from the deli café over the road at lunchtime. Alex is a carefully coiffed, softly spoken fashion powerhouse. His experience in fashion writing is vast and he has tried every trend going since he was clumsily clipping Grolsch beer bottles to his shoes in the eighties.
Opposite Liz and Alex giggle Chloe and Holly, the youngest and most fun members of the team. If you want to know who snogged who at the summer party, Chloe and Holly will tell you. All those fancy graphics flashing on the home page? They’re designed by Chloe, and Holly is a picture researcher, who, when she’s not scrolling through Instagram or braiding her long dip-dyed hair, is focused on the shots from the hundreds taken in the FASH studio every day.
So, these are Maya’s eight-hour friends, but she is also their confidante. Most of the team at some point have asked Maya for ‘a quick word in the canteen’ and usually it’s about a family dilemma, boyfriend issue or party outfit advice. All of them, apart from Lucy evidently, wish Maya had got the site editor job rather than the willowy woman they were just presented with downstairs.
*
Maya sits at her computer in the big open-plan office. Refresh refresh refresh. Not a single email from anyone who could be Train Man. Maya ponders Cressida Blaise-Snellman but doesn’t glance up at her as she takes to her new desk opposite, filling Lucy’s empty magazine box files with her copies of Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Maya knows that Cressida recognises her; they crossed over at Walk In Wardrobe for a year before Lucy poached Maya. But as Cressida introduces herself to the editorial team, she pretends she doesn’t.
‘Gather round my desk everyone!’ she beckons. Chloe and Holly walk over while Liz, Alex and Emma swing their chairs around. Maya and Olivia stand at their desks. ‘Super excited to be here obvs,’ she says in a cut-glass Chelsea accent. ‘I will learn your names in due course, promise. But let’s just say that I’m better with faces than names,’ she says, holding up a Models 1 directory and filing it alongside her magazines.
There are only seven of us to remember.
Perhaps Cressida doesn’t remember Maya, perhaps Maya is that insignificant. Train Man has barely noticed her in almost a year of sitting almost opposite him, every single morning. Maybe Cressida is embarrassed. She is now working with someone who might remember how she bullied an intern so badly that one lunchtime the intern left her desk and didn’t come back. When Cressida finally got through to her mobile and demanded she come back from lunch, the intern pretended she’d been run over by a bus and couldn’t return. Ever. Maya saw the intern in a pub in Soho the next night, not a single bone broken nor a limb in plaster. Sheepishly the intern confessed she had to get away from Cressida. Maya didn’t tell Cressida about it at the time, she didn’t want to embarrass her, but the whole team suspected that Cressida had pushed a young and once enthusiastic intern to make up such a drastic lie.
‘I will of course arrange one-to-ones with each of you, my BF owns a chi-chi bar on Marylebone High Street, so we can do them there.’ A pause for effect. ‘For now, back to work, chop chop.’
Olivia sits back down in her chair and sends Maya and Emma an email.
Did she just say ‘chop chop’?!
Before Emma has a chance to read Olivia’s message, Cressida asks her if she would kindly switch desks so she can have Emma’s window seat.
‘Cressie is just a nightmare if she doesn’t have optimum daylight,’ she says in the third person.
Maya tries to get lost in ‘Varsity Chic’, a new trend from the autumn/winter lookbook that is all about collegiate jackets, PE socks and prep-school stripes, and it’s all a bit nauseatingly reminiscent of Cressida’s style. Refresh refresh refresh. She can’t concentrate. Cressida Blaise-Snellman’s arrival is making Maya’s freckles wilt. But more upsettingly, Train Man is making Maya’s heart crumple. It is gone 11 a.m. and she hasn’t heard anything.