The Forgotten Girl

Chapter 6

2016

I felt funny when I got home that evening. A bit low, a bit lost, and – I had to admit – a bit lonely.

I wanted to eat a nice dinner, drink some wine and tell someone about my day. But what I actually did was change into my pyjamas, make tea and eat chocolate. By myself. I lived alone in a once shabby flat, in a once shabby corner of south-east London. Every time I got off the train to go home, I noticed a new juice bar or artisan bakery and thanked my lucky stars I’d got in when I did. I’d never be able to afford my flat now – shabby or otherwise.

I had two bedrooms – one was tiny but I used it as a walk-in wardrobe – a cosy lounge and a very small kitchen, and normally I loved living alone. Today, though, I felt like the flat was just too big.

‘Maybe I should get a cat,’ I wondered out loud. Then I thought about the many, many houseplants I’d killed over the years and decided that was a very bad idea.

I flopped on the sofa in my jimjams and scrolled through endless Netflix options, without choosing anything to watch.

I thought about ringing my mum to tell her I’d started my new job.

‘Darling, well done!’ I imagined her saying. ‘I’m so proud of you and I know how hard you’ve worked.’

What were the chances of her saying that? Slim to nil. She’d listen in silence, making sure I was well aware that she wasn’t remotely interested in what she considered the frivolous and superficial world of women’s magazines. Then she’d tell me about some lecture she’d been asked to give somewhere prestigious – she was an economics don at a college at Oxford University and was always jetting off round the world to be a guest speaker at various conferences. She’d probably throw in some fawning about my future sister-in-law, Isabelle, who was one of Mum’s former PhD students – she’d met my brother Rick at a department summer party that I’d not been invited to. Isabelle was going some way to making up for the terrible disappointment my career choices had brought my mother and she talked about her a lot. She might even do the thing where she’d tell me about a friend’s son or daughter who’d just been made partner at a law firm, or published some ground-breaking scientific research, or started their own charity. She’d fill me in on all the details, then with self-pity dripping from every word, she’d say: ‘I always thought you’d end up doing something like that, but you went a different way…’

No. Mum was not the person I needed to speak to right now. And ringing Jen wasn’t a good idea either. She was ignoring my calls for a reason and I wanted to give her time to calm down.

Maybe I couldn’t settle because I needed to get down some ideas for the magazine? I turned on my laptop and opened a new document, but after staring at the blank screen for half an hour, I admitted defeat. Instead, I padded through to the kitchen, made another cup of tea, and grabbed the rest of my family-sized bar of chocolate out of the fridge. Then, even though it was only eight p.m., I went to bed and snuggled up under the duvet. I spent the rest of the evening looking at old photos of my time in Australia – my time with Damian – on my laptop.

What can I say? Every girl needs a hobby.

I’d always regretted the way Damo and I had split up – it had been pretty brutal – but I’d never regretted moving on because I knew I’d had good reasons at the time. But now I’d seen him I was struggling to remember what those reasons were.

I scrolled through the pictures until my eyes were burning. Damo and me climbing Sydney Harbour Bridge, trekking in the bush, messing around at the pool on the roof of our apartment block… It was like watching a montage from a rubbish romcom.

I woke up at five a.m., with a crick in my neck and my head resting on my laptop. I’d dribbled on the screen, which was frozen on a photo of Damo sitting on the edge of a bright blue pool, wearing nothing but denim shorts and a smile. I shut the laptop with a snap and, groaning, I dragged myself out of bed.

‘Back to work,’ I told myself firmly as I pulled on my gym gear. ‘No distractions. No complications, just work.’

One spin class, one shower and two flat whites later and I was raring to go. I gathered the team in my office, ready to start brainstorming ideas to transform Mode and send its sales soaring.

At least, I was ready. The rest of the team looked at their feet and didn’t speak.

‘So we’re looking for someone to put on the next cover,’ I said. ‘I know Vanessa mentioned Sarah Sanderson but I’m really after someone zingy and exciting and a bit younger than Dawn Robin – lovely though she is.’

I’d read Vanessa’s interview with the soap star yesterday and it was fine. Great, in fact. It just wasn’t very Mode. Passionate as Dawn was about home baking, I couldn’t see sassy, twenty-something professionals queuing up to find out what she used to make her scones rise.

I beamed at Vanessa.

‘It was a great chat,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘Any ideas about who we should do next?’

Vanessa leafed through her notebook painfully slowly. It was obvious to me she’d not prepared for the meeting at all.

‘I met that MP, last month, at a book launch,’ she said finally.

‘MP?’ I tried very hard not to roll my eyes.

‘That young one,’ she said, still turning pages. ‘The one who no one expected to win, except she did and now she’s an MP even though she’s only just graduated.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, feeling a bit excited. ‘Joanna Fuller?’

‘That’s it,’ Vanessa said. ‘What about her?’

‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘We’d need to shoot her though – make her look more Mode. And MPs are a nightmare to get time with. We might need to do the shoot and the interview whenever we can and sit on it.’

Vanessa nodded.

‘So what about next issue,’ I said. ‘Any ideas? We need to be quick, because we’re late planning this one.’

Not content with taking half the team with her to her new job, Sophie had apparently stopped planning future issues as soon as she’d handed in her notice, leaving me with barely anything in the bag and very tight deadlines.

No one seemed to share my sense of urgency.

Vanessa shrugged. She really was infuriating. I looked at my own notes.

‘What about Amy Lavender?’ I said. ‘She’s everywhere right now and her agent owes me a favour, which is lucky because our budgets are very small. If we can shoot her and interview her on the same day, we’ll have time to use it next issue. I’ll sort it out.’

‘Great idea,’ said Milly. ‘I love her. She’s hilarious.’

Vanessa looked furious.

‘Fine,’ she said, even though it was clearly anything but.

‘What else?’

‘We’ve got the Jurassic diet plan,’ Vanessa said. ‘It’s the new paleo. Basically you only eat kale and chia seeds, mushed together in a kind of primordial ooze.’

I brightened up. This was more like it.

‘Get someone to do it,’ I said. ‘And write a diary. And find a nutritionist to sing about how fabulous it is, and another one who’ll trash it completely.’

Vanessa sighed, but she didn’t complain. She wrote something on her pad that seemed to be a lot more detailed than what I’d just said. I wondered if she was writing rude things about me. I used to do that when I was an intern and editors were dismissive of me – though I really thought someone of Vanessa’s age and experience should have been past that by now.

I moved on.

‘Fashion?’ I said.

The fashion editor was a woman called Riley who I had worked with briefly years ago. I’d been so grateful to see a familiar face when I’d realised who she was yesterday, that I’d almost hugged her. Thankfully I’d stopped myself just in time.

Now she leaned back in her chair, stretching out her long brown legs – which were bare even though it was January – and smiled at me.

‘I’ve got a dresses shoot that’s in the bag,’ she said. ‘But if we’re doing Amy Lavender, we could hang on to the dresses for next issue and perhaps we could get her to do something instead?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ridiculously pleased that finally someone was using their initiative.

‘She wears lots of vintage stuff, right?’ Riley went on thoughtfully. ‘How about I take her for a trawl round some of the shops near here. We can do a feature on how to wear vintage clothes, ask Amy for her tips, and get her to model what we find.’

I loved that idea. I told her so.

‘We could do a whole vintage issue,’ said Milly, looking excited. ‘Theme the whole magazine.’

‘We could use Vanessa’s feature on Dawn Robin,’ I said wryly. Everyone laughed – except Vanessa. Oops.

‘Seriously, though,’ I said. ‘Theming the issues is a great idea. We could definitely do that. It might give us a bit of an edge – make us different.’

And help us survive, I thought.

A tiny voice spoke from the corner of my office.

I looked round. Our work experience girl, a quiet student whose name I had absolutely no chance of remembering, was there, hunched over a notebook and blushing furiously.

‘Pardon?’ I said.

She blushed even more and cleared her throat.

‘I was just saying, it’s Mode’s fiftieth anniversary,’ she said. ‘In September. So if you wanted to do a vintage theme, that would be a good time to do it.’

I stared at her. She looked down at her notebook.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Emily,’ she said.

‘Emily, you are a genius.’

She beamed at me.

‘Let’s do it,’ I said. ‘Let’s theme every issue. This one could be…’

I thought for a moment. Everyone looked at me expectantly.

‘…back to basics,’ I said. ‘Inspired by Vanessa’s Jurassic diet.’

A ghost of a smile crossed Vanessa’s face. Just a ghost, mind you.

‘I’ll do black and white fashion with Amy, then,’ Riley said. ‘Maybe some denim? And do the vintage stuff too, and hang on to it for a couple of months.’

I nodded.

Slowly, painfully, but finally, everyone started to come up with ideas of themes, of features, of fashion shoots, cover stars – the works. The beauty editor, who was aptly named Pritti, wowed me with her knowledge of different make-up looks that could fit with every theme someone shouted out. Vanessa didn’t offer many ideas, but even she didn’t seem quite as hostile as she had done.

Eventually we had a plan for the back-to-basics issue, and the beginning of a plan for future issues, too. I knew this was going to be hard work. Harder than hard work. But maybe, just maybe, we were going to pull it off.

Chapter 7

I can’t lie, those first few days on Mode were a slog. I started work early and stayed late, going over page proofs, rewriting features to make them fit within our back-to-basics theme, making endless lists – and avoiding Lizzie.

I’d expected to see Damo around but actually I’d not crossed paths with him since that first day. Once, I’d been staring out of my office window and seen him crossing the road outside, and I’d heard his laugh a few times echoing down the open-plan office from Homme, but I’d not actually spoken to him. I couldn’t decide if I was pleased or disappointed about that.

Desperate to get everyone involved in the process of revitalising Mode, I got a big white board put up in the office and urged everyone to write ideas on it.

‘Anything goes,’ I trilled, putting some pens on the shelf next to it. ‘The crazier, the better. Features ideas, cover ideas, events, sponsorship plans – absolutely anything.’

But now, a whole week after it had been put up, the board was still mostly bare. Riley had written up some ideas for future fashion shoots, but I wasn’t sure ‘SOMETHING FUNNY’ was really what Mode readers were after. I did, however, love the idea for a monthly ‘unlikely style crush’. How to recreate outfits worn by cartoon characters, people from books, old ladies… Riley had scrawled on the board.

I picked up a pen and wrote ‘I love this!’ next to her idea, then I stared at the rest of the bare board in despair.

‘Come on,’ I said, under my breath, even though it was barely eight a.m. and I was alone in the office. ‘I can’t do this by myself.’

I’d come in early to wrestle with the budgets for the next few issues, which wasn’t a fun way to start the day. The rest of the office filled up gradually, and by ten a.m. everyone was there. I left my office door open all the time but no one popped their heads round to say hello. I was still very much an outsider.

I sent my budget outline to Lizzie, hoping she’d agree with how I’d moved the money around, and then I sat quietly for a minute, trying to pluck up the courage to go and speak to my team. I didn’t want to – how ridiculous was that?

I picked up my phone to call Jen, then put it down again. She probably wouldn’t answer anyway, and – I thought with uncharacteristic insecurity – I couldn’t say I blamed her.

A knock on my office doorframe made me look up. It was Emily, the intern, wobbling under the weight of a pile of magazines.

‘I’ve been using these for my uni research project,’ she said. ‘Thought they might be useful.’

She lurched over to my desk and dropped the pile in front of me.

‘They’re the first issues of Mode,’ she said. ‘They’re amazing.’

I looked at the issue on the top. It was from the late 1960s and had Twiggy on the cover. I felt a shiver of excitement.

‘Where did you get these?’ I asked Emily.

She grinned at me.

‘There’s a guy called Kevin, works in the library in the basement,’ she said.

‘There’s a library?’ I was impressed with her knowledge.

‘It’s not massive, but it’s brilliant,’ she said. ‘Anyway, Kevin’s got a daughter about my age, I gave him some advice about something, and bob’s your uncle – he bent the rules and let me take the magazines away.’

I was impressed. I studied Emily carefully. She had strawberry blonde hair that was twisted back and up on her head, Adele-style, and she was wearing capri pants and a fitted fifties-look blouse. She looked great and absolutely nothing like the interns I was used to, who were like one great identical mass of oversized tote bags and false eyelashes.

She looked back at me for a moment then lowered her eyes shyly.

‘Just thought they might be helpful,’ she said.

‘They’re not just helpful,’ I said, picking up the Twiggy issue. ‘They’re life-saving.’

She grinned again.

‘How long are you here for, Emily?’ I asked.

‘One more month,’ she said.

I made a note on my to-do list to speak to HR about taking her on full-time, and to re-do the budget I’d just sent to Lizzie to pay for her, then smiled at her.

‘There are some photos in there,’ she said, gesturing to the magazines. ‘I found them inside one of the issues.’

She leafed through the pile and pulled out an A4-size black and white glossy print.

‘It’s the team who worked on the very first issue,’ she said.

I looked at the photo. There were about ten people in the shot, their arms linked. At the centre, holding a magazine, was an older woman – about fifty-ish – stylish in a boxy Chanel suit. It was mostly women and they all looked incredible. I breathed out.

‘Those clothes,’ I said.

‘I know,’ Emily said. She came round my desk and leaned over my shoulder.

‘That’s the first editor,’ she said, pointing to the older woman.

I nodded.

‘Margi Matthews,’ I said. I’d read about her, of course. She’d come from the States and had been a real trailblazer.

‘And that is Suze Williams,’ Emily pointed to a young woman at one end of the picture. She had dark hair in a crop just like Twiggy’s, and she was wearing a very short, black pinafore dress over a white long-sleeved t-shirt and white tights.

‘No way,’ I said. Margi was the founding editor of the magazine, but it was Suze who’d made it what it was now. She’d been editor in the late seventies and had taken Mode from its cautious beginnings as a fashion mag, to one of the most controversial and sassy women’s mags in the business.

‘She started out as editorial assistant,’ Emily said. ‘She worked on the very first issue, and eventually took over.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, staring at the pic. ‘Can you take some of these, go through them and make some notes about features that catch your eye?’ I said, a germ of an idea taking root in my mind. ‘I’ll take the other half.’

‘Of course,’ Emily said, looking like I’d given her a present. ‘I’d love to.’

She took a bundle of mags from the top of the pile and headed out of my office.

I sat back in my chair, pleased with her initiative, and started leafing through the issues. They made me really sad. It was such a brilliant magazine and if Lizzie had her way it would be the end. I loved digital and how you could react to things happening immediately online, but in my opinion there was nothing better than treating yourself to a glossy magazine and curling up on the sofa to read it. Grace was a great magazine, I liked it a lot, but it didn’t have the history that Mode had. It had changed its image so many times over the years that its early days as Home & Hearth were completely forgotten now – except to magazine geeks like me.

I read for well over an hour, jotting down ideas. Magazines had really changed, that was for sure, but what surprised me about those early editions was just how blunt and honest they were. There was loads of sex in them, hard-hitting features on things like abortion and racism, there was humour, advice, and a real feeling of being in this together. We could learn a lot from these issues, I thought.

I picked up the photograph of the first Mode team again and stared at it. There were only about ten people in the picture. They all had their arms linked and they were laughing. Margi Matthews, in the middle, was holding a round glass of champagne and the man to her left, who was wearing Mad Men style glasses, was gripping the bottle. There was so much energy and enthusiasm oozing out of the photo I could almost feel it.

I tapped the photo against my chin, thinking. The difference between the team in this picture and the team I was looking at – the nervous, quiet, worried team I had – was astonishing. Somehow I had to get that enthusiasm into my team if we were going to have any chance of beating Grace’s brilliant sales. I couldn’t rely on Vanessa to come up with exciting ideas, that was clear. I needed a right-hand woman. Someone I could work with. Someone who knew me inside out. In short, I needed Jen.

She and I had worked together on and off for years. We’d met when we were both interns on magazines in the same company. Our careers had followed similar paths and we’d ended up as deputy editor – me – and features director – her – on Happy magazine. We’d loved working so closely together. I was in awe of Jen’s creativity and her knack of knowing exactly what the magazine needed each issue, while I knew I was better at managing a team and getting the job done.

We’d worked so well together in fact that we’d hatched a plan. We’d started plotting to launch our own online magazine, which we’d planned to call The Hive. We’d approached writers, spoken to designers, I’d even had some tentative meetings about getting finance in place. The feedback was enthusiastic, there was a real buzz about it and things were moving. And then Lizzie had called me to chat about this job. I’d not mentioned it to Jen at first, thinking it would come to nothing. But somehow I’d gone for one interview, then another, then presented to the board… and suddenly I was the new editor of Mode. I had to tell Jen – and more importantly we had to put all our plans for The Hive on hold.

Not surprisingly, Jen was furious. She’d put a lot of work into The Hive.

‘Carry on,’ I’d said, as we sat in our favourite bar the day I told her. ‘Carry on without me.’

She’d shaken her head, her bleached blonde hair brushing her shoulders.

‘You know that wouldn’t work,’ she’d said. ‘It’s called The Hive for a reason. It’s not a solo venture.’

‘I’ll help,’ I said desperately. ‘At evenings and weekends. I’ll do whatever you need me to do.’

Jen stared into her glass.

‘You won’t,’ she said. She didn’t sound angry, she just sounded disappointed and really tired. ‘You’ll do whatever you want to do. That’s what you always do.’

She fished a ten-pound note out of her purse and shoved it at me.

‘For the drink,’ she muttered. Then she picked up her bag and left.

I’d not seen her since then. I was put on gardening leave as soon as I handed in my notice, so I’d not gone back to Happy. Jen hadn’t replied to my emails and she cancelled all my calls. I knew she was acting as editor while the bosses at Happy found someone new to fill my role and I hoped she was doing well. She’d make a great editor and I knew she’d been bored to tears before – it was one of the reasons she’d been so keen to launch The Hive.

Although, I thought now, tapping my nails on the front cover of the first ever Mode, it might be good if she was bored.

Without stopping to think, I scrolled through my phone to her number and hit call. It rang a couple of times, then went straight to voicemail as I’d thought it would.

‘Jen, it’s me,’ I said. ‘Sweetheart, I’m sorry about everything. I’ve got lots to say to you but for now, let me just say this…’

I paused.

‘Do you want a job?’

I ended the call and sat back. As I’d hoped, my phone rang almost straight away.