A Perfect Heritage (5 page)

Chapter 4

This was so awful. She was going to have to chuck it in. It was getting worse every day. It wasn’t just the job, and never feeling she was getting anywhere, it was what it was doing to her and her professional reputation. You couldn’t afford to be associated with failure. She wished she’d never taken it in the first place – but it had sounded so enticing.

‘I know we don’t seem the most exciting outfit in the business,’ Lawrence Ford, the marketing manager, had said, ‘that’s why we want you. To make us exciting. We’ve got a lot of plans, going to make big waves – with your help. And if you do it, well, Ms Harding,’ he looked at her rather intensely, ‘the sky will be your limit.’

Hmm. Pretty dark sky, Susie was thinking. She really should have known better. She hadn’t even liked him very much, he was so smarmy, but he had also been talking, in some ways, a language she appreciated. Like offering her twenty-five per cent more than her current salary. Like health insurance, very generous expenses, company credit card. The Lot, in fact.

And lovely as it had been, working for Brandon’s, the newest, wildest, colour cosmetic kid on the block, with people fighting to get near the counters at their space in Selfridges at lunchtime, she felt she had been there, done that, and was ready for a challenge. Her reputation was sky-high, she was the default PR girl all the journalists called when they wanted anything, from a story to the latest product. She had spent a couple of days studying Farrell’s, googled its range and company history (plenty of PR opportunities there, and old Lady Farrell sounded amazing) and decided she’d go for it. She could see where it had gone wrong; and she had lots of ideas of how it could be put right. Lawrence Ford had assured her he would welcome any such input so it had all sounded good.

She talked to Henk about it; Henk was her new boyfriend, a so far unsuccessful photographer. He’d urged her to go for it.

‘It’s more money, babe, and you’ll be more your own boss.’

A small voice told her the appeal of that for him was that she’d be able to carry on paying for everything, and use him professionally, but she crushed it. And the biggest attraction was the challenge. She’d called Lawrence Ford and told him that.

Well, it
had
been a challenge. She had worked all hours, called in favours, thought laterally, created stories – all to absolutely no avail. An email or call from Susie Harding to the beauty editors and bloggers slowly, but obviously, became something to avoid. Make-up artists declined the invitation to stock their palettes with the full range, and the bait of a personal interview, so irresistible when it had been with Kris Brandon, carried no weight at all if it was to be with one of the Farrells – except of course Lady Farrell: everyone still wanted her. And she flatly refused to consider anything of the sort unless she was allowed to vet every word of the copy. As if!

And when she did manage the impossible and got The Cream listed on
A Model Recommends
, one of the top ten blogs, for God’s sake, as ‘absolutely yummy’, they didn’t even thank her. In fact, the old bat came in and complained that all she had managed was ‘a blog’.

‘It’s
Vogue
we want here, Susie,
Vogue
and
Tatler
; I would like you to try to remember that.’

She closed her computer with a sigh, pulled on her coat, dropped her mobile into her bag and set off for the lift, her high heels (Louboutin, but honestly, these days who cared? She might as well wear sandals!) clacking across the wooden floor. She was meeting Henk at Soho House in half an hour; he’d approve; he’d been telling her she was wasting her time ever since she’d finished her first week at Farrell’s. Not that he knew anything about it; he just missed being able to hang around while she entertained her mates in the press. He was getting rather worryingly stroppy about it. He was very possessive and getting more so. Which might have been all right if he was offering anything in return, but he wasn’t. Sometimes, Susie thought, just sometimes, it would be nice to have a proper relationship that was supportive and ongoing, not just for laughs and sex. It had eluded her so far.

And at least she had someone. Someone cool and sexy. That was what mattered: being on your own didn’t do your image any good, quite apart from its otherwise obvious drawback.

Anyway, she had to get away from Farrell’s. She was getting depressed, and nobody could do publicity if they were depressed. It was a job that demanded absolute, upbeat self-confidence.

‘Patrick, hello. Jonjo here. How are you, you old sod? Hope you enjoyed the skiing you cancelled me for! Anyway, I might have a proposition for you and I wondered if you’d got a minute in the next couple of days and we could meet, have a chat?’

‘Of course. Love to.’ And how did it feel, Patrick wondered, not to have a minute: to be properly busy and, even more, to be overstretched, stressed, exhausted, desperate for a break – all the things he was unable to imagine, as he made his calm, thoughtful, pleasant progress from client to client, meeting to meeting, lunch to lunch. It was what Bianca knew very well and although most of the time he was thankful not to operate like that, there were times when he envied her. For they could seem long, those calm, thoughtful, pleasant days and he knew very well that his presence in them was far from imperative.

‘Great! Well, how about a drink, Thursday, L’Anima, just off Broadgate West. Six-ish suit you?’

‘Bit early,’ said Patrick in a desperate bid to sound busy. ‘Six thirty’d be better.’

‘Six thirty it is. How’s Bianca?’

‘Oh, fine. Probably about to start a new very, very high-powered job. As opposed to just a very high-powered one.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’ said Jonjo, laughing. ‘She’s amazing. But we all know that. See you Thursday.’

Patrick wondered what proposition Jonjo could possibly have for him. Jonjo Bartlett, coolest of the City boys, sharp, funny, clever, who made and lost and always made again millions at the drop of a computer key, Jonjo whose job as a City trader was almost incomprehensible to Patrick, with its vocabulary of options and income rate swaps and futures, whose friends were all sharp, funny and clever too, working-class boys made very, very good for the most part; Jonjo who lived in immense style in an apartment in Canary Wharf, spent a fortune on clothes and cars and an endless succession of flashily gorgeous girls, and professed on the occasions he visited Patrick at home to be jealous of him. He’d been married once and divorced two years later and since then claimed to have been looking for the next wife. As, along with being sex on legs personified with a perfect face and flawless figure, she would be required to have the patience and tolerance of Mrs Job, this seemed to Patrick a somewhat fruitless quest.

Unlike most of his colleagues, Jonjo came from old money, had gone to public school with Patrick, and a close, if odd, friendship had formed.

At the end of his time at Charterhouse, while all his contemporaries went off to university, Jonjo, tired of the academic, went straight into a job in the City and within two years was making large waves. At least once a year he and Patrick met for dinner and Jonjo plied Patrick with vintage Bollinger and, more recently, sushi, and towards the end of the evening, told him, his voice slurring increasingly, what a lucky chap he was and how he would give his new Ferrari to be in his shoes. And Patrick, who knew very well Jonjo would last for roughly a week in his shoes, would nod sympathetically and pat at first his hand, then his shoulder and finally Jonjo’s head, slumped over his arms on the table, and tell him he was sure all would be well one day.

But it would be good to see him, Patrick thought; he’d had such a filthy time recently, what with work being increasingly unrewarding and that nightmare of a skiing holiday, with the children all crying, actually crying, when they were told their mother wasn’t coming, and then trying to look after them when they were in Verbier, as they veered between feeling the lack of their mother rather acutely and running a bit wild and showing off their independence as a result.

He had never been so glad to get home from a holiday in his life.

‘Hello! I do hope you don’t mind me just dropping in like this. Lady Farrell said I could come in and talk to you, Miss Hamilton.’

Florence Hamilton smiled politely at her visitor, over the counter of the Berkeley Arcade shop.

‘How very nice.’

Florence’s voice lacked enthusiasm. There was no doubt in her mind that Bianca would want to close The Shop.

Bianca beamed. ‘What a showcase this is for the House of Farrell. I think it’s enchanting. And you’ve run it since – what? 1953?’

‘Yes,’ said Florence. ‘Lady Farrell – Mrs Farrell then, of course – took me on in the March and we opened in May, just in time to get all the tourists who’d come to London for the coronation. They just flocked down the arcade, and the American ladies in particular loved it. It was a
very
exciting time.’

‘It must have been,’ said Bianca. She looked more interested than people usually were over such reminiscences. She picked up a sample jar of The Cream that was lying on the counter. ‘May I?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Florence.

Bianca opened the box, smiling like a child unwrapping a Christmas present, and rubbed a little of the cream into her wrist. ‘I love this stuff.’

‘You must take a jar for yourself.’

‘Well, that’s kind, but of course I have some already. I bought it, wanted to experience the product that made Farrell’s famous.’

‘And?’ said Florence.

‘Well, as I said, I love it And of course I look at least ten years younger than I did.’ She smiled. ‘I do love those boxes too. Now – body lotions and so on – where are they? Oh, yes, I see. And eye make up and so on are . . . ?’

‘Here, under the glass counter,’ said Florence.

‘Oh how clever. This is just a lovely old-fashioned shop, isn’t it? I imagine the trade here is a bit seasonal – more in the summer and so on?’

‘Of course. But it’s never very quiet,’ said Florence firmly. ‘Now, can I offer you a cup of tea? I have a small sitting room upstairs – I call it my parlour. Of course I work up there,’ she added hastily, lest Bianca might think it was a piece of self-indulgence. ‘It’s where I do all the paperwork, the sales figures and so on.’

‘I’d love that,’ said Bianca, ‘how kind. And you can tell me more about your long, long time here. It’s such a wonderful story that I’m surprised it hasn’t been featured in all the magazines. I mean, this is the heart of the brand, it seems to me.’

‘Oh, Miss Harding – the PR, you know? She was pressing me to do exactly that. But Lady Farrell didn’t consider it appropriate.’

‘Why not? It seems very appropriate to me!’

‘Well – we have never really courted that sort of publicity at the House of Farrell. What she was talking about sounded much too . . . personal. In the old days,
Vogue
and
Tatler
would do photographs here, have a model leaning on to the counter, applying one of the new lipsticks, that sort of thing. Which was wonderful. But Miss Harding wanted this to focus on me and my story here. Lady Farrell didn’t approve of it at all.’

‘Oh really?’ said Bianca.

‘Or my talking about past famous customers and clients. Well, many of them are still alive and we have always prided ourselves on our discretion.’

‘I see,’ said Bianca. ‘Which magazines did she want to approach with this idea?’

‘Well, the newer ones. Which I do rather admire.
Glamour
I enjoy, and
Red
. That’s intelligent, as well as glossy. And even more recently, one of these blogs. Which I believe are very important now, almost as much as the magazines.’

‘That’s absolutely true,’ said Bianca, impressed by Florence’s appreciation of the modern media.

‘But Lady Farrell was very opposed to the idea. She feels Miss Harding is not quite our style.’

‘And how do you feel about her? Purely professionally, of course?’

‘Well, I think she’s rather fun,’ said Florence, ‘but of course Lady Farrell understands the brand and what it needs far better than I.’

Her expression was carefully innocent, Bianca thought. Interesting.

‘Well, look, let’s go up to your parlour and have that cup of tea and we can chat some more. About your work here, and how you see the House of Farrell, all that sort of thing.’

After Bianca had gone, Florence sat down rather heavily and thought about the small kingdom where she had spent so much of her life. A tiny, shabby place it had been the first time she saw it, transformed by Athina Farrell’s vision – ‘I want it to be like a little jewel box, filled with treasure.’

It had been the first exclusive outlet for Farrell’s, the shop on the ground floor, with its curvy window and paned glass door with its brass handle and knocker, its old-fashioned glass showcases and gleaming mahogany counter, the salon on the first floor where women – only one a time, so utterly exclusive it was and wonderfully private – could have their faces cleansed and massaged and then anointed with The Cream, and then on the top floor, the parlour, with its pretty small desk where she did the accounts each day – by hand, of course, in a perfectly kept ledger – a small chaise longue where she read the glossy magazines, not as a self-indulgence but to acquaint herself with what mattered in the world of fashion and beauty, and the tiny kitchen to the side of it, where she could make tea, sometimes just for herself, sometimes for important visitors, as she had for Bianca today: always in fine china cups, sugar lumps in a matching bowl complete with silver tongs, and silver spoons with which to stir the tea. And of course, biscuits from Fortnum’s just along the road.

It was home to Florence just as much as her small house in Pimlico, bought with a legacy from her father; it had been the setting against which she had lived out her life, the professional life that had replaced the personal one for the most part denied to her. Her young husband had been killed almost at the end of the war in a wonderfully successful Allied attack called Operation Varsity, which was agonising enough in itself, but had been made even more so by the way military historians had since questioned its necessity, meaning that perhaps Duncan had died for nothing. She had failed to find anyone else, had never really wished to. Once she recovered from her grief she had decided a single life suited her. Being a wife and mother seemed to her restrictive and exhausting while she was free to pursue her career, to travel where and when she wished, and to spend such money as she had entirely on herself. And indeed to conduct her entire life as she chose. Many people told her these days that she had been born considerably ahead of her time.