Ambition (5 page)

‘You do what I want, and you get what you want.’ He snapped a breadstick neatly in two. ‘Or you break.’

He had his driver take her home. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t need to. He told her to report for work on time the next morning. And he told her to sleep on it.

She thought that it might be marginally less difficult sleeping on a bed of nails . . .

But things looked brighter the next day. At the editor’s desk she found a stuttering, sarcastic Australian called Bryan O’Brien, a Pope Communications corporate man
notorious as a first-rate caretaker editor but nothing more. He posed no threat and might even turn into an advantage; like most Australians he adored English girls and abhorred English men,
especially educated ones. Which meant that Fane, for one, was back where he belonged – eating expense-account humble pie.

And she was still deputy. People were respectful, if not friendly, again – when had they ever been? The thought of how her dear colleagues would dance on her desk if a new editor was
brought in over her head made her fists clench and the room swim. She felt she would do anything to save her face. Anything. Even sacrifice her soul.

‘Kathy, when Blondell gets here send her straight in, would you?’

Now Charles was gone and before Bryan was won over, her protégée would be her only ally in the office. A tall, slender bottle-blonde from Tiger Bay, Zero Blondell had marched into
Susan’s office slightly more than a year ago and announced that she was Miss Street’s temp. Barely looking at her, Susan had handed her a pile of routine letters to type. The girl had
thanked her politely and returned three-quarters of an hour later to lay a pile of foolscap paper on her desk. The letters were there, beautifully typed. But beneath them, also immaculate, was a
two-thousand-word rant, wanderfully written, on the sorry state of 1980s man. It was called ‘WHERE’S THE BEEF?’ and it was signed ‘Zero Blondell’.

‘That’s my new name. That’s who I want to be,’ the girl said simply when Susan called her in to explain herself. ‘I don’t think I look like a Pratt, do
you?’ Zero had been Myfanwy Pratt then. ‘No, don’t answer that. But as you can see, I type beautifully and I give great shorthand too. See, I was trained as a secretary and then
one day I thought, “Why should I fritter my young life away copying down these decrepit old men’s stupid thoughts all day when mine are so much better?” So I saved up and came
here six months ago. I’ve been temping, and I’ve tried slipping my own stuff in at various magazines before. But no one takes you seriously if you bleach your hair and walk with wiggle.
Until now.’ She smiled seductively at Susan, showing a mouthful of pale primrose teeth, some cracked and chipped for good measure. They were incongruous behind the high gloss of her
Schiaparelli hot pink pout. ‘Would you like me to be your secretary, Miss Street? I’ll sit on your lap. And take dic—’

‘No thank you, Miss Pratt,’ said Susan firmly. ‘I think your talents might be somewhat wasted making tea.’

‘Then can I be a writer?’ Zero Blondell literally wrung her hands, like a Dickens orphan. ‘Oh,
please
can I?’

‘Let me think.’ She thought, and decided in double-quick time that this strange young person could be just what the chief sales rep ordered to secure the elusive ABC1 young
professional audience every paper craved. They enjoyed a bit of controversy served up over Sunday brunch, and all the
Best
could boast by way of provocation was a middle-aged
enfant
terrible
whose vitriol had been watered down with gin over the years and who was usually too drunk to actually write the column. Instead assorted hacks rallied round with stray squibs about
the royal family and popular entertainers and why their bad behaviour was emblematic of a moral decline – and their star took more than fifty thousand pounds a year just for use of an old
photograph and a byline. Looking at Zero Blondell’s hot copy and eager face, this didn’t look much like a bargain any more. ‘Let me talk to the editor. Take your piece away with
you, and if you want to work in your lunch hour and cut it by six hundred words – well, I can’t make any promises.’

‘Oh, thank you, Miss Street! You angel! You saint!’ The beautiful girl leaned across the desk and squeezed her tight, leaving a faint but unmistakable odour of halitosis. Well, no
one was perfect.

It took all Susan’s powers of persuasion and promises of the capture of the mythical young and female readerships to get her a licence for Zero from Charles. At first he had been appalled
by Zero’s spite and spleen. Within a month he had realized that, unlike ninety per cent of the people employed in newspapers, she really could write. This presented its own set of problems.
Unlike the more mediocre hacks, she was fierce about the subediting of what she wrote; she once walked up to a dozing sub just back from the pub and a liquid lunch, slapped his face and hissed,
‘I refuse to believe that you could derive full job satisfaction anywhere outside of an abattoir in the rush hour.’ Tantrum followed tantrum until Susan stepped in and took the task
upon herself. Since then Zero had been sweetness and light. She could afford to be. At twenty-three, she was earning more than any other writer in the office and only slightly less than the
editors.

As if this wasn’t enough to distinguish her, she was flamboyantly and violently lesbian.

‘Why do you hate men so much?’ Susan had asked her as they lounged over martinis at the Groucho.

‘I was married to one.’ Zero laughed.

‘Fuck. Off. I make two-fifty a word, so that just cost you a fiver,’ she spat at a middle-aged reporter who tried to put his arm around her in a fit of drunken bonhomie one Christmas
Eve. She was civil only to Charles, Susan – and the secretaries. She made them coffee and tried to look up their skirts when they went up stepladders in search of research material.
‘Zero, back to your desk!’ Susan would scold if she caught her at either. ‘You are not being paid to make either tea or whoopee. You are being paid to write!’ Zero would
pout furiously, as she always did on being found out.

‘When in doubt, pout,’ she once told Susan was her philosophy of life.

For someone who didn’t like men, Susan thought as she waited for the girl to arrive, Zero could do a pretty good imitation of the very worst sort. What a bastard she could be. Susan had
seen literally groups of girls – three, four – sniffing and weeping in the street outside the
Best
’s main entrance while Zero sneaked in the back way in her veiled black
pillbox and trenchcoat. She pretended to be appalled by the sensation she created, but when she wasn’t working hard at it her genuine glee crept through. ‘Look at them, Susie!’
she would hiss, leaning out of Susan’s window and squinting at her fan club below as they chainsmoked, compared case histories and complained shrilly to each other. ‘Look at the
brunette! She’s Italian – what a beaut! I had her last week – no strings, no promises. Now she thinks we’re engaged or something, she’s threatening to get her brother
on to me! Dig the redhead! What a dog, but what a pair! Her father’s in the FO – she wants to move in with me! Me, the milkman’s daughter!’

‘Zero, have you always had this effect on women?’

‘Oh no, bach, only since I was seventeen. Right after I was married. It went awful from the start; I was a good chapel girl, knew nothing about the dirty deed. I couldn’t ever fancy
fucking the pig. I thought I was frigid, he told me enough times I was. He was a right slag, even after we were married. So, I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting-room one night waiting for
my monthly supply of instant thrombosis and I read in some magazine about how to improve your marriage. Well, mine could use the improving. And rule one was “Interest yourself in your
husband’s hobby”. And I realized that Dai’s hobbies were rugby and women. I’m not athletic, so women were all that was left. So I interested myself in them.’ Zero
sighed at the memory. ‘All those coffee mornings and girls’ nights out. There certainly wasn’t any lack of opportunity. You’d be amazed how easy it was, Susan bach. Men are
such bad fucks that a girl can get a girl as easy as
that
’ – she snapped her fingers – ‘when the lights are low and the Babycham is flowing. Well, within a year I
was the Lothario of the valleys. You bet I had to leave town! So I came here, to sin city. I had my typing, didn’t I, the working-class girl’s weapon. And I made a point of temping for
media women. So within weeks I learned about the Muffia, and I knew that was the world for me.’ She pouted. ‘But all those other media tarts just wanted my body, not my copy.
You’re the first editor to love me for my mind, not my behind.’

Zero maintained the existence of something called the Muffia, a loose affiliation of media lesbians who spent their lives laying, lunching and launching each other up the ladder of success.
Susan had never caught a whiff of it in all her ten years of journalism. But maybe she had been looking – or sniffing – in the wrong places.

‘Zero, why are you so mean to those girls?’ she had asked.

‘Oh, I don’t mean to be mean, bach. But girls are such pretty things, and there’s so many of them in this city. It’s a city full of pretty girls. You think you’re
having drinks with the cutest girl in the world, and then you look up into the waitress’s eyes and you could drown in them. You can’t help yourself leaving your card with the tip. I
always write on mine, “Heaven is seven numbers away.” ’

Susan made a retching noise.

‘No, it’s an old lie about girls being nicer to girls than men. They’re not, they’re just more fun. Going with girls, no Pill or pregnancy or losing your figure –
why, it’s just like being a teenager all your life! You should try it, babes, you really should.’

‘It sounds wonderful. There’s just one snag.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t fancy girls.’

Now the girl herself was walking through the door wearing one of her legion of black dresses, this one plain except for a striking tail proudly standing out behind. She carried the trade press,
which she threw on to Susan’s desk. ‘Hi, babes. Seen these?’

‘TOOTH OUT – POPE INFALLIBLE?’ they screamed. Susan shook her head. ‘God, the standard of journalism in this country.’ They laughed.

‘So what’s happening to you? Being kicked upstairs?’

‘Yes. Right into his bedroom.’

Zero made wide eyes. ‘No!’

‘Seriously. You wouldn’t believe what he wants me to do.’

‘I’d believe anything of men.’

‘He wants me to do six tasks for him. Just do what he wants six times.’

‘Isn’t that just like a man?’ Zero laughed. ‘It’s called being married. Only it doesn’t end after six times.’

‘Should I do it?’

‘What do you get?’

‘I think I get the editorship. Don’t tell anyone.’

‘Don’t tell anyone, but I think you should do it.’

‘Do you think I could?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ Zero’s face went very young and hard, as it never failed to do when talking about sex with men. Specifically, about Susan having sex with men.
‘You don’t love Matthew. Charles wasn’t the most appetizing morsel of man-meat I’ve seen in my young life. In fact he was a real dog. But you did
that.
’ She
pouted accusingly. ‘For
years
.’

‘I
liked
Charles.’

‘I fail to see exactly where or why your feelings have to be engaged. It’s business, not pleasure.’

‘YOU wouldn’t do it.’

‘Ah, but I’m not a career girl. I’m a congenital genius. If I
were
a career girl, and one of many after the same thing, I’d use anything I had to get it. I would
work on a Protean basis – I would recreate myself constantly. I’d be a bitch in the boardroom and a slave in the sack. I’d be what I had to be until I could be what I want.
We’re lucky: we’re women. We can recreate ourselves in a way men can’t because artifice doesn’t become second nature to them in childhood as it does to us.’

Susan looked at her suspiciously. ‘Did you swallow a thesaurus?’

Zero giggled. ‘No, I ate out a Kenyan girl, second-year PPE at Oxford. God, did we have some classy pillow talk.’

‘So what you’re saying, stop me if I’m wrong, is that I should behave like a whore?’

Zero shrugged elaborately. ‘You become a whore the minute you sleep with a man. I’m just asking you to be a pro.’

‘I think you’re horrible.’

‘Yeah, well, go and ask your girly boyfriend what you should do if you want the blushing broad angle.’

‘But he’s over
fifty
.’

‘All the better for you. How much can it take to keep him happy?’ Zero rifled through the ‘Strictly Confidential’ file. ‘God, is that all Pascoe’s getting? No
wonder he gives me the fish eye. You know the new metropolitan measure of how well you’re doing? You have to get your age in thousands. At
least.
Where’s the wife?’

‘In the Sunny von Bulow Clinic, I think. Upstate New York. Stop that, Zero. Rich alkie or something.’

‘Where’s the son?’

‘America. Big daddy has yet to persuade him to check out his new toy printing set.’

‘Didn’t he used to hang around with Caroline Malaise? The old man, I mean?’

‘God, yes. I’d forgotten. All those pictures of them in Dempster three years ago leaving Langan’s.’

‘Talk about Beauty and the Beast! Wasn’t she some sort of vague royal? – the blue-blooded bimbo they used to call her. Now
there
’s a career that spontaneously
combusted.’

‘Didn’t some French director say she was the new Catherine Deneuve?’

‘Do me a favour. They didn’t know what to do with the old one once she lost her milk teeth, But Caroline Malaise! Well – and now he wants you – little Susan Street from
Nowhere-on-Sea!’

He wanted her, she thought. He did. But not half as much as she wanted power.

‘Well’ – Zero rose, straightening her tail fastidiously – ‘It’s all up to you, I suppose. You’re the one who’s got to do the dirty deed. Deeds.
But I’ll tell you one thing for nothing.’ She paused with her hand on the handle. ‘There are forty-four ugly, stupid men in this office, give or take a messenger boy or two. Not
one of them isn’t bitter and doesn’t hate women and because of that not one of them hasn’t crystallized his fear and loathing of modern women in you. And right now every one of
them spends a good part of his waking hours wetting himself with glee because he’s got a ringside seat for the downfall of Susan Street. If you fail, you’re not just failing for
yourself. You’re in the inspiration game now, babes. I’d hate you to sleep with Pope, you know that. You must know I’m in love with you. But more than anything I’d hate to
see you fail.’ She closed the door quietly.