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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Handbags and Gladrags

  Praise for Maggie Alderson’s Pants on Fire and Mad About the Boy:

  ‘A witty, smart debut’ Daily Mail

  ‘Alderson shows a gift for slicing through the daffy bravado of women’s mags’ real-life Pats ’n’ Edinas and makes a highly entertaining meal of one woman’s search for an Aussie fit for a Pom. Highly entertaining’

  Heat

  ‘A glitzy whirl of Tim Tams, tantrums and handsome love-interests’

  Marie Claire

  ‘It’s fun, funny, feather-light and once started, like a box of chocolate bikkies, can’t be put down until you’re full and it’s finished’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Witty, upbeat, modern romance’ Daily Express

  ‘A witty modern romance… much more than a Bridget Jones’s Diary’

  Australian Vogue

  ‘Wickedly funny and realistic… the perfect read for any girl who’s ever wondered if the grass might be greener on the other side of the world’

  OK!

  ‘A funny, light-hearted read’ Glamour

  ‘This sparky novel bowls along with great pace’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘Entertaining and upbeat’ She

  ‘Sassy stuff’ Daily Mirror

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Maggie Alderson has worked on nine magazines and three newspapers, and has been covering the international fashion shows for many years. Her first novel, Pants on Fire, was a UK bestseller and she was a co-editor of the charity anthology Big Night Out. Pants on Fire and her most recent novel, Mad About the Boy, are both published by Penguin.

  Handbags and Gladrags

  MAGGIE ALDERSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2004

  1

  Copyright © Maggie Alderson, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90508–2

  For Peggy

  Acknowledgements

  With particular love and thanks to Mark Connolly and Josephine Fairley for their friendship, humour and editorial advice.

  Heartfelt thanks also to:

  All at Penguin in the UK and Australia. Especially Mari Evans, Julie Gibbs, Louise Moore, Tom Weldon and Bob Sessions. Also to former Penguin, Harrie Evans. And the Curtis Brownies, Jonathan Lloyd and Fiona Inglis.

  To my treasured writer gal pals Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Karen Moline. To Barry Goodman for the Latin lessons. To everyone at Good Weekend for being such mates and to my wonderful editors there, first Fenella Souter and now Judith Whelan.

  Love and air kisses to all my shows buddies: Mark Connolly (again), Melissa Hoyer, Jane Roarty, Jane de Teliga, Joan Burstein, Albert Morris, Christian McCulloch, Laura Begley, Kirstie Clements, Nancy Pilcher, Alison Veness McGirty, Judith Cook, Jackie Frank, Marion Hume, and anyone I have left out. So many frocks, so many laughs. And thanks for all the limo rides.

  To all the PRs in London, Milan, Paris, New York, Sydney and Hong Kong who have given me fashion-show invitations over the years – particularly Jelena Music and Celina Ma – and to the Sydney Morning Herald for sending me to cover them.

  To the designers for continuing to inspire me, particularly Tom Ford, John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen, Phoebe Philo and Miuccia Prada. And to the ones I can really call friends: Jasper Conran and Collette Dinnigan.

  To James Hodgson for Kingsdown and Jane Scruton for Garden Cottage.

  To Popi Popovic for everything.

  And to all of the international fashion pack for the best people-watching on earth. Fashionisti vincit.

  1

  Miles McCrae wasn’t ever my boyfriend. We just had sex a lot. We had sex a lot in Milan and Paris, where we would gather with the rest of the international fashion pack, twice a year, to cover the catwalk shows of the big-name designers. I’d be in the third row with my hardback notebook and special pen, sketching the key outfits to shoot for Chic magazine, where I was a fashion editor. Miles would be crushed up with a horde of sweaty photographers taking the shots that would be flashed to news media around the world. And in each fashion city, we would fall into bed together and shag like animals.

  Apart from those few crazy weeks in spring and autumn we never saw each other and had no contact except for the occasional coded email, along the following lines.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Arriving Milan on Tuesday. Staying at the Principe. Please deliver film after Prada show.

  That’s film as in, ‘film’. As in ‘red-hot love rod’. Like I say, it wasn’t a relationship, it was just sex. Life-changingly good sex, it must be said. Sex that made the top of my head lift off and kept me smiling for forty-eight hours afterwards, but no more than that. Just sex.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like Miles. He was a sweetheart, as well as a love god from Planet Tharg – well, Sydney. He was cute, funny and kind. With an unusually large penis. A great guy for someone, for sure, but it was definitely just sex between us. Sometimes it’s much better to accept the limitations of a liaison right from the start. That’s what I told myself when I met him and I stuck to it. You’re much less likely to be disappointed that way. There were so many reasons why a full-blown relationship with Miles would never have worked, but the night we met none of them mattered.

  It was a wet and windy October day in Milan. I was wearing a sleeveless Balenciaga top, with ultra-tight leggings, a Rick Owens leather jacket and Sergio Rossi shoes with heels so high I felt like I had electric shocks shooting through the balls of my feet every time I took a step. Just normal working daywear for a fashionista at the shows. I’d been wearing it since nine that morning, when I’d had to leave our hotel – always the Principe, or the ‘Princh’ as we called it – with my Chic colleagues, to get to the Pucci show, which was being held in an old warehouse way out on the edge of town.

  Our limo had crawled painfully through the usual clogged Milan traffic, made much worse by the rain, with Chic’s editor-in-chief Bee Fortess-Smith (née Beverly Fortess, married to a Mr Smith) barking instructions down her mobile to her assistant, Anoushka, back in London. Most of them seemed to be concerning people she needed to have flowers sent to.

  ‘No, Nushka,’ she was yelling, quite a feat with a cigarette clamped between her teeth. ‘Scrap that. Send Miuccia Prada the willow tree and send a bo
x topiary to Mr Armani. What? Oh, just put the usual. “Bella, bella” – that’s “Bella, bello” to Mr Armani, remember – “Loved it all. Kisses, Bee.” Oh, and send Miuccia a separate letter in my writing – you know, with the brown ink – to thank her for the coat. Call me back when you’ve opened my post. And don’t forget to collect my dry-cleaning. And make me an appointment with Amanda Lacey for a facial when I get back. Oh and NUSHKA…’ she shouted down the phone, before the poor girl could hang up. ‘Call that bitch Domenica Stracciatella and tell her that if I don’t have a better seat for the Ferrucci show waiting for me at the hotel when we get back later, I will drop the Cameron Diaz cover and their stupid dress with it. But put it better than that, OK? Make it seem nice, that way you do. Thanks, darling.’

  I often thought Nushka’s diplomatic talents were a great loss to the United Nations.

  Sitting next to me in the back of the car – Bee always sat up front – was the magazine’s famous fashion director, Alice, which she preferred pronounced in the Italian manner, ‘Alee-chay’, Pettigrew. Which was pretty funny considering she came from Tunbridge Wells. Never the easiest of travelling companions, Alice (I always pronounced it the English way deliberately to annoy her), was stuffing stick after stick of sugarless gum into her mouth and silently seething. Bee had been sent the Prada coat she’d wanted as a present and worse still, she was wearing it. All Alice had received was a pea-green ostrich-skin handbag. She was gutted.

  Such palpable waves of negative energy were coming off her it was like sitting next to a human Chernobyl. My mouth was as dry as a bowl of pub peanuts, after several glasses of red wine too many the night before, but I knew there was no point in even asking Alice for a stick of her gum. I’d done that once, the first time I’d done the shows with the Chic team, three years before.

  ‘Get your own,’ she’d answered, grimacing like I’d asked to borrow her toothbrush. ‘I need this.’ She was right really. It was just about all she ever ate.

  On my other side, the left – not so good for looking at passing shops, which is why Alice always sat on the right – was the more cuddly shape of Frannie McAllister, the magazine’s beauty director and fashion news editor. As she liked to say, she was too clever to have just one job. I just called her the sanity editor. Frannie and I took it in turns to have the left-hand spot and the really crap seat in the middle. No way Madame Alee-chay was ever going to sit there.

  The seat sharing was just one of many little ways Frannie kept me sane on those crazy trips. They were so intense. The four of us were forced to be together fifteen hours a day for the best part of four weeks, twice a year, under constant pressure always to look good, pay attention and generally outclass our rivals on other magazines. You wouldn’t necessarily want to spend that much time with your best friends and as part of my job, I had to do it with one person I seriously detested and one I was seriously terrified of. In that scenario, Frannie was a true blessing – she was so unusually normal.

  She was, for example, just about the only member of the Chic staff who ate all the food groups, didn’t exercise every day and didn’t smoke. As a result she was an average kind of female shape – you know, a bit fat – and of even temper. She had long red wavy hair, perfect skin, a face as pretty as a daisy and a great sense of humour. And another little eccentricity in the fashion world – she always wore flat shoes. I adored her.

  I was just wondering how I was going to endure the rest of the car ride with the foghorn in front and the dark star to my right, when Frannie nudged me. She tipped her head in Alice’s direction, pulled a goofy face and winked. I smiled and winked back, then I put my head on her comforting shoulder and closed my eyes. I was just starting to drift off into a much-needed doze – we hadn’t got back from last night’s dinner with the Gucci PR until after midnight, and I’d been up at six thirty to do my yoga and hair – when I was brutally awoken by Bee’s voice booming out at its usual heavy metal decibels. She had bones as delicate as a bird and a voice like a freight train, that woman. I could never put them together in the same package, but there she was. Roseanne Barr in Gwyneth Paltrow’s body.

  ‘Luigi,’ she was braying. ‘How far are we from the venue? I recognized that factory we’ve just passed. Aren’t we getting close?’

  ‘Si, Signora Bee,’ said Luigi, our lovely, long-suffering driver. ‘We are two minutes.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Bee. ‘How embarrassing. I’m not going to be on time for bloody Pucci. They don’t even advertise. I’m only going for the cushions.’

  Oh, no, I thought, here we go, the Pucci grab-fest. They always put Pucci-print cushions on the seats at their show and the audience divided cleanly into those who grabbed as many of them as possible as they were leaving, and those of us who didn’t. If you were a non-cushion taker and hadn’t fixed yours in an iron grip just before the end of the show, you would feel it snatched from under your buttocks the minute you raised them a millimetre from your seat. I found the grabbiness of it quite repulsive, but the most surprising people would come out with armfuls of the things. Bee and Alice were big cushion snatchers. Frannie and I, categorically were not.

  ‘Turn off here and go round the block a few times will you, Luigi?’ said Bee, lighting yet another cigarette.

  I felt Frannie’s body slump next to me. She hated the limo. She called it the travelling torture chamber.

  ‘I knew I should have got the bloody tram out here,’ she whispered to me in her rich Dundee accent. ‘Now I’ll have to sit in her bloody smoke for another half-hour.’

  We had just turned down a side street away from the rest of the queue of chauffeur-driven cars we had been stuck in, when Bee suddenly turned round and looked at us through her huge dark glasses. Her blonde bob was so straight and perfect it looked as though it had been sprayed on to her head. Well, it had been in a way. Her hairdresser got to the hotel at seven every morning.

  ‘Are you all planning to go to the Ferrucci party tonight?’ she said.

  I felt Alice’s spine stiffen as she sat up straight. I glanced at her and saw her face was lit up by a radiant smile, as though Bee in her new-season Prada coat was like a vision of heaven for her.

  ‘Well…’ said Alice, in the same non-committal tones she used whenever a newspaper reporter asked her for a quote about what she thought of a show. ‘There were some lovely pieces…’ was the best the most hardened hackette would ever get out of Alice. In the same vein, she was clearly waiting to see what Bee wanted her to say before answering this question.

  ‘How about you two?’ said Bee.

  I shrugged and felt Frannie slump in her seat. Another party, more smoke.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I might go. I was going to see how tired I was after the show tonight. We’ve got another big day tomorrow and Marni’s at nine in the morning, all the way out here again.’

  Bee took a deep drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke right at us. Frannie let out a little groan.

  ‘Well, you’ve all got to go,’ said Bee. ‘Because I’m not. Going to plead migraine. Got to put that Stracciatella strumpet back in her box.’

  She was waving the seating plan that always came with the Ferrucci invitation. She hadn’t seen it until she’d opened her file of the day’s invitations, when we’d got into the car that morning. The howl that had gone up when she’d noticed her less than ideal placement would have been audible out at Lake Como.

  The ‘day files’, as we called them, were delivered to the hotel the night before by Chic International’s Milan office, which looked after all the Italian advertising clients, and getting the show invitations – with suitable placements – for all of Chic’s eight international editions. It was a job similar to juggling planes at Heathrow on a Saturday in August. I always tore my envelope open the minute I got it to see where my seats were, but Bee never bothered to look at her invites until the last minute. She just assumed she’d always have her rightful place – one of the best seats in the house.

  ‘Ho
w dare she put me close to runway entrance,’ she was still raving. ‘I’d only be able to see the back of the bloody clothes as they went past. What does she think Chic is? Some crummy little freebie magazine? It’s only the biggest-selling high-fashion and beauty lifestyle glossy in the British market. We have more AB women readers than any other comparable monthly magazine in the UK and a strong features base, alongside our world-class fashion pages.’

  Very gently, Frannie nudged me again. Bee’s sales spiel cracked us up. She had it down so pat we were convinced she muttered it in her sleep. Frannie did a great impersonation after a couple of drinks.

  ‘She knows I’m runway end or close to it,’ Bee was droning on. ‘So I’ll make her look really bad to the boss, by not turning up at his stupid party, but I need you all to be there to tell everyone how sick I am.’

  She chucked her cigarette end out of the window and I saw Luigi push in the car’s lighter on automatic pilot. He’d been Bee’s Milan driver for six years, he knew the score.

  ‘And do a number on that Giancarlo bloke,’ continued Bee, extracting another cigarette from the packet Luigi was proffering. ‘He’s the one Antonello’s listening to these days about the advertising, not that stupid little slut. Miss Stracciatella’s star is fading as fast as her hideous orange tan.’

  She was still turned round in her seat glaring at us, so we couldn’t even close our eyes and block her ranting out.

  ‘I’ll do the show, of course,’ she continued. ‘And I’ll come back out here in a few weeks and have lunch with Antonello myself to smooth things over, but you three can just keep things ticking over for me at the party. Tell them I’m just dying of migraine.’

  She chuckled and sucked deeply on her fresh fag.

  ‘Like I said, I’m definitely going to the party,’ said Alice, who had told me the night before she definitely wasn’t. ‘I’m going to wear that dress Antonello gave me last season. That’s why I brought it with me.’