It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (21 page)

As far as Barri was concerned, I was learning, The Brand was gospel. He held dear to his heart a weighty document (if something which only existed on the company
intranet could be said to be weighty – its megapixels were legion, anyway) called the Brand Guidelines, which set out in minute detail what fonts, colours and words were to be used in all company communications. The English language took rather a battering – Barri had apparently declared a unilateral war on the humble comma, and the word ‘that’ was never to be used. Even the geography of London came under fire in the Brand Guidelines – the street on which the store was located could only be referred to as ‘Bond, W1S’. I’d been forced to read the entire tome from cover to cover during my first week, and with every page I’d felt a fresh surge of annoyance at its triviality.

Isla finished speaking, then Piper briefly summed up what she’d been up to the previous week – mostly writing blogs pretending to be fashion models – and then it was my turn.

But Barri said, “That’s it for this morning, ladies and gent. Get out there and make the magic happen!” And everyone got up to shuffle back to their desks, limp with relief and exhaustion, although it was only nine in the morning. “Oh, Ellie. A moment, please.” And Barri – I’m not making this up – stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, ran a finger theatrically across his throat, and allowed his head to drop dramatically backward. So, I was in for assassination.

Part of me just felt wearied by his histrionics, and conscious of how poor a manager he was to be treating people this way. But mostly, I’m afraid to say, I felt small and scared. Vindictive and petty as I was beginning to realise Barri was, he was my boss and ultimately I needed the job, and everyone wants their employer to think well of them. So I sat back down and pulled my shorthand notebook back towards me, despising myself for the tremor in my hands, smiled brightly and said, “Yes, Barri?”

“What,” he hissed, “is this?” And he produced from his powder blue leather
Smythson document holder a copy of the previous day’s
Sunday Mirror
colour supplement. I realised with a slight sinking feeling that I’d been so busy shagging Peter, then eating pizza in bed with him before dashing home to get a load of washing on and snatch a few hours’ sleep, that I’d neglected my usual perusal of the Sunday papers. Barri flipped the magazine open, and there was a six-page spread based on the press release I’d sent out the previous week, all about globalism and ethics in fashion. It looked great – Nadine, the junior fashion assistant who I’d got hold of on the phone and befriended after we’d realised she was going out with James, the guy on their news desk who I used to chat to when I was at YEESH, had really pulled out the stops.

“Wow,” I said to Barri. “That’s quite a lot of coverage.”

“Ellie,” he spat, “It’s coverage. In. The.
Sunday
.
Mirror
. Have you not read the Brand Guidelines?”

I felt sick. “Of course I have. There’s nothing in them about the
Mirror
, is there?”

Barri smiled a nasty smile. “No,” he said, “there isn’t. There’s also nothing in them about how we don’t get graffiti taggers to spray our brand on railway arches, nor have tramps model our clothes when they’re dossing in Trafalgar Square, nor employ feral cats to piss our signature scent on walls.” All of these struck me as rather innovative ideas with quite a lot of potential, actually, except maybe the one about the cats, which while inspired would be tricky to bring to fruition. But clearly Barri thought otherwise. “I thought I had spelled out in our Brand Guidelines that Black & White is upmarket, Ellie. Was that not clear to you?”

“Of course it was,” I said. “But isn’t this great publicity? It’s worth about fifty grand, in terms of the space.”

Barri leaned towards me, so I got a sickening waft of his aftershave, and could see the careful powdering-in of the gaps in his eyebrows. “We’re upmarket, Ellie. Up-
fucking-market. That means
Vogue
, or
Tatler
, or
Harpers
, or
Elle
at a push. We associate our brand with high-end titles and high-end titles only. Now what I want you to do is stop smearing our image all over the gutter press, only send out releases that have been signed off by me personally, and only send them to approved contacts in approved media – I’ll get Torquil to compile a spreadsheet and talk you through it. Now go back to your desk and start making calls to our approved journalists asking them if they are free to attend our polo event in May. You’ll report in to Daisy on that one. Clear?”

If Ruth or Duncan had asked me to do something so ridiculously counterproductive, I’d have looked at them and gone, “What?” and we’d have argued the toss until either they came round to my point of view or I understood the method in their madness. But I wasn’t sure it would work that way with Barri. To buy myself some time, I carefully wrote on my notebook, “
Vogue
,
Tatler
,
Harpers
” then, in brackets, “(
Elle
).” Then, “Polo.”

Then I said, in what I hoped was a calm and reasonable tone, “But, Barri, I really feel that…”

“No, Ellie.” He held his tiny, manicured hand up in front of my face. “Remember this. The Brand is sacred. We cannot allow our individual egos to interfere with The Brand. And another point. There’s a very wise thing I often find myself telling my girlies when they first come on board and do something a little bit off-message, and I feel you might benefit from bearing it in mind.”

He had a sickly sweet smile on his face. I bit back my rage and tried to look attentive, and picked up my pen.

“Ellie,” he said, “hear this: there is no ‘I’ in ‘Team’.”

I looked down at my notebook, and carefully wrote, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘Team’.” I looked up at him, smiled nicely and said, “Thanks, Barri, I’ll remember that.” And, slowly
and clearly underneath, I wrote, “But there is a ‘U’ in ‘Cunt’.” Then I got up, taking the plate of pastries with me, and went to the kitchen and ate the lot, then was sick and cried in the ladies’.

When I’d finished crying and splashed cold water on my face (why does one bother doing this? It makes no difference at all, except that instead of looking puffy-eyed and blotchy, you look puffy-eyed and blotchy with wet hair), I went back to my desk, attracting various sympathetic and curious looks from my colleagues. When Piper saw me she discreetly slipped a pack of witch hazel eye pads over to me, and then made me a cup of tea, bless her, which of course made me cry again.

I sat hiding behind my monitor, waiting for the lump in my throat to subside and my eyes to stop burning. I was smarting with hurt and injustice, and when Peter sent me a direct message on Facebook at lunchtime asking how my day was going, I couldn’t resist pouring out the whole story to him.

“He sounds like a total dick!” Peter typed, loyally.

“He is,” I said, beginning to feel a bit better, the way you do when you’ve offloaded on someone who you feel is well and truly on your side.

“Want me to send the boys round?” said Peter.

“No,” I said. “Barri v gay, would love that.”

“I see,” said Peter. There was a pause, then he said, “Want me to hack into his Grindr profile and edit his personal info to say he is short and fat?”

I giggled in spite of myself. “Good idea,” I typed, “Except he is actually short and fat.”

“Okay,” Peter replied, “in that case we need a better plan. How about…” there
was a pause, then I saw him start typing again. “I take you out for cocktails and dinner tonight to cheer you up? Will you feel a bit better after that?”

I thought how lovely he was, and wished I wasn’t having increasingly grave misgivings about our relationship – if you could even call it that after two shags (three if you counted round two on Sunday). “It’s working already,” I typed.

I spent the rest of the day on the phone to Daisy’s press contact lists, trying to persuade them that what they really wanted to be doing on a Saturday in May was not enjoying time with their families, mowing the lawn, spending the day in bed with their partners, catching up on work, going to Tesco, or any of the billion other things that normal people do with their weekends, but attending Barri’s ‘star-studded’ polo day, and then writing about it. Needless to say, a lot of them said, “Let me get back to you,” and I knew they never would, and I’d have to chase them and chase them and they would end up automatically ignoring my calls and deleting my emails, which would make my job a lot harder when I was trying to get in touch about a story they might actually want to use.

So by the time five thirty came, I had well and truly had enough, and I shut down my computer and picked up my bag and walked out, even though there were only three names on the list left to call and I could easily have got through them before I left. I went to Selfridges, where I found a gorgeous black lace top to go with the grey pencil skirt I’d worn to work (even with my staff discount, I wasn’t going to give Black & White and by extension Barri a penny of my hard-earned salary that day), and impulse-bought a cute little T-shirt with a bee on it for Pers and a new Dior nail polish for Rose. Then I put on some red lipstick and went to meet Peter at the Connaught.

Within minutes of walking into the bar, I could feel my shitty day fading into the background. The room was so glamorous and fabulous, I felt pretty fabulous myself in my
new top and flattering skirt and shiny lipstick, and Peter let me bitch about my horrible day and made me laugh and bought me a proper grown-up martini with an olive in it. I sipped my drink and looked at his tanned skin and smiley eyes and long legs and all the rest, and tried to feel lucky to be going out with him. But no matter how hard I pushed the part of me that was saying, “If only it were Oliver here, not Peter,” deep down inside myself, I couldn’t stop hearing it.

I know a lot of men who subscribe to the ‘treat them mean, keep them keen’ school of thought, and believe that every compliment you give a girl should be sort of countered with a dismissive comment; who’ll check out other women in the room on the basis that it’s going to make you more anxious to please them; who’ll try not to let on that they like you lest you fail to like them back enough and bruise their poor, sorry egos. Peter, bless him, wasn’t like that. All through that evening, he told me again and again how beautiful I looked, he laughed at my jokes, he reassured me that everything at work would work out fine, and even if it didn’t, it didn’t matter because someone as brilliant as I was would find another job just like that, recession or no recession. He bought us another cocktail and dinner in a posh bistro that had loads of vegetarian options on the menu, and by the time we’d finished and he’d insisted on paying the bill and found a taxi with impressive speed and skill, I was feeling so grateful for his niceness, and of course a bit pissed, so I asked him to come back to the flat.

After I’d fumbled my keys out of my bag and opened the front door, Peter lifted me up in his arms and carried me up the stairs to the flat. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished that someone would do that to me, but to be totally honest when Peter did it I realised that, although romantic, it is rather over-rated. My head bashed against the ceiling light bulb, he almost tripped over my handbag, and I was worried that he was going to put his back out.
So it was a bit of a relief when we got inside and collapsed on the sofa. Peter cupped his hands over my breasts in my new black lace top. “God, you’re sexy,” he breathed, and I closed my eyes and kissed him again.

“You, too,” I lied.

We pulled off our clothes, and I was lying back against the sofa cushions, Peter kissing the inside of my thighs, moving his mouth gradually upwards, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. “Shit!” I pushed him away. “Quick, into my bedroom. Rose is home.” We grabbed our clothes off the floor – or most of them, anyway; I found my bra draped over the telly the next day, God only knows how it got there – and legged it into the bedroom, slamming the door behind us just as I heard Rose’s key in the lock, and her and Oliver’s voices as they entered the flat. I heard Rose say, just as she had the first night I met Oliver, “Whisky, Ollie?” but this time he said no thanks, he was rather tired and would just as soon go straight to bed.

Peter and I were lying on my duvet, giggling at the ridiculousness of the situation. “Come here,” he whispered. “I’m not going to be put off my stroke just because your little sister’s home. I might even like the idea.”

I pushed him gently away. It was no good, I realised – I couldn’t have sex with him, especially not with Rose and Oliver in the next room. It made me feel all knotted up and a bit guilty, as if I was cheating on Oliver by sleeping with Peter, and somehow deceiving Peter too. The idea made me curl in on myself, away from Peter, and I turned over and drew my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around my knees.

“I can’t,” I whispered to Peter.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” he said, and I said, “Shhh,” but neither of us laughed.

“I just can’t,” I said softly, “not while Rose and Oliver are next door.”

“But you must have done before.” Peter looked baffled and annoyed.

Well, of course I’d had sex any number of times with Rose asleep – or awake, I have no idea and don’t really care – in her bedroom. But I couldn’t say that to Peter, so I just said again, “Pete, I can’t. I’m sorry. Next time we’ll go back to yours and…”

But Peter was already getting up off the bed and pulling his clothes on. “I think I’ll go back to mine now, actually,” he said, rather huffily, “And please don’t call me Pete,” and of course I said, “Go, then, Pete,” and that was it – our evening together was well and truly spoiled. I got under the duvet and lay there, numb and silent, while Peter finished putting his clothes on and checked his pockets for keys, mobile and so on.

Then he said, “I’ll ring you,” and walked out.

I turned off the light and lay in the darkness with my eyes closed. It took me a little while to realise that I was straining to hear any sounds coming from the rest of the flat. I thought I could hear the murmur of voices but I wasn’t sure. Then, very clearly, came the sound of Rose’s bedroom door opening and closing, and then the front door slamming again, considerably harder than it had done when Peter had left.