Читать книгу Chelsea Wives - Anna-Lou Weatherley - Страница 18

Sammie Grainger looked up from her desk.

‘Hey, Sammie, the boss wants a quick word when you’ve got a mo,’ her colleague, Lara Bradshaw poked her head around the door and raised an eyebrow. ‘You been missing deadlines again, or what?’

Sammie let out a heavy sigh.

‘I take it he’s in one of his good moods?’ she asked sarcastically, already knowing the answer. Her boss only had one mood that she knew of: surly.

Lara pulled her mouth to the side and widened her eyes.

‘And there was me thinking he might be wanting to congratulate me on the faaabulous Chelsea Wives piece,’ Sammie said theatrically, thumbing the pages of the magazine in front of her until she came to the colourful double page spread.

‘Hmm.’ Lara leaned over Sammie’s shoulder, glanced at the spread and murmured her congratulations. ‘Looks great,’ she said, picking it up and beginning to read the copy aloud.

‘“It’s harder than it looks, maintaining oneself to such a high standard”, says Calvary Rothschild, one-time Fashion Director on the now defunct Dernier Cri magazine, of her twice-weekly hair appointment at Jo Hansford.’ Lara mimicked a posh voice, flicking her short brown bobbed hair behind her.

‘Oh, the heart simply bleeds for you, darling,’ she scoffed, continuing. ‘“We spent a little over a million pounds on our wedding in Capri,” gushes Lady Belmont-Jones. “But it’s not about the money at the end of the day. I would’ve been just as happy with a little do in a local register office”.’ Lara clutched her chest in mock sincerity. ‘Yeah! Right! Course you would, love.’

Sammie laughed.

‘Must be nice,’ Lara sighed, throwing the magazine back down onto Sammie’s desk, ‘all that money.’

Sammie cocked her head and shrugged.

‘Yeah, but you know, they didn’t strike me as being, like, any happier than you or me.’

Lara let out a little whinny of disbelief.

‘You sure about that, Sammie?’ Lara wasn’t convinced. ‘I’m off now to interview Boris Johnson’s missus about the merits of being married to a mayor and riding bicycles around Shoreditch. Woo-hoo!’

Smiling, Sammie shook her head and watched as Lara flounced from the office. She was a great girl; fun and engaging. Not a bad little journalist either. Even if it had been a healthy dose of nepotism that had got her to where she was now. Thanks to her well-connected media mogul father, there had been no grass route slog for Lara Bradshaw; no mountain of rejection letters or three-year underpaid apprenticeship on some old rag with a readership of one for her. Not like it had been for Sammie Grainger. She’d had to chase her dream with all the fierceness and determination of a Rottweiler going after an intruder in a steak suit.

Sammie had always played down her lowly south London, council estate origins. A privileged background still gave you the professional advantage, even today. But it wasn’t just her provenance she was grappling with. Just lately Sammie had been faced with an altogether more intimate struggle: her sexuality.

‘My mum is so proud of me. I know it would break her heart. She wants the whole white wedding and kids stuff, you know. I want to let her have that dream a little longer before I take it away from her,’ Sammie said to her first and former girlfriend of her decision to stay in the closet. She’d not told anyone at work either, not that it would necessarily be a problem, this was the media after all, it was just that she didn’t want her sexual persuasion to become an issue, a potential stumbling block – and she certainly didn’t want to be lumbered with all the gay stories either. She had no desire to fly the flag for lesbians.

No, Sammie Grainger was determined that nothing was going to get in the way of her flourishing career. This job at ESL was a dream role and would afford her the perfect opportunity to make her name in the mainstream.

So far though, and much to her chagrin, the job wasn’t quite living up to expectation. To date, her repertoire had amounted to writing a ‘comedy’ piece on becoming an extra in a play at The Garrick and more recently, this sycophantic homage to brainless rich cows with more plastic in their Mulberry purses than brain cells in their heads. She doubted Jeremy Paxman was quaking in his boots.

Sammie looked at the glossy spread in front of her, the poised faces of the three well-heeled women staring back up at her, and ran her fingers through her black, choppy Victoria Beckham-esque crop. Her eye was continually drawn to one of the women in particular; Yasmin Belmont-Jones. Lady Belmont. She was very attractive in a WAG-ish kind of way. Not really her type though, if indeed she had one, but there was definitely something about her. Something vaguely familiar, she had felt it when they had met too, this odd feeling of déjà vu.

Sammie Grainger never forgot a face, her memory was almost photographic – and as such, this lack of placement was beginning to bother her. Googling Lady Belmont had turned up nothing of note either. Prior to her engagement and subsequent marriage to Lord Jeremy Belmont it was as if she had never existed.

Sammie looked out of her office window at the grey Kensington skyline and pondered, lost in her thoughts for a moment. Her sharp, journalistic nose instinctively told her there was a story behind Yasmin Belmont-Jones, a secret lurking behind that smiling, overly-made-up, oddly familiar face. Sammie was onto something and she knew it. The thought excited her, giving her a rush of adrenalin through her system as potent as a shot of amphetamine.

Her phone buzzed. It was her boss’s PA, Helena.

‘The big guy wants to see you, Sam,’ she said. ‘He’s in his office and he’s getting impatient.’

‘I’m walking through the door right now,’ Sammie said, standing, straightening out her smart black Reiss trousers and applying a slick of clear gloss.

Taking a marker pen from her desk organiser she drew a large black circle around Lady Yasmin Belmont-Jones’s face. The more she looked at her, the more she was convinced she had seen her somewhere before. But where?