Sophie Weston - The Accidental Mistress

There was a moment’s complete silence. Then Jemima groaned and heaved the pillow aside. She sat up.

‘Okay. It’s not a nightmare,’ she said, resigned. ‘You’re here and you won’t go away until I do what you want. What do you want?’

Izzy brought a list out of her pocket and handed it to her.

Jemima stared at it, then looked up at her in disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Starting,’ said Izzy, preparing to leave, ‘with Pepper’s make-up. She’ll be ready for you in about ten minutes.’

‘Oh.’ Jemima sagged back among the remaining pillows. ‘All right.’ Her voice began to slur again. ‘I’ll be out in ten minutes.’

‘Sure you will,’ said Izzy sweetly. And took the duvet with her.

She ignored the roar of outrage that followed her into the corridor. And sure enough, heavy-eyed and spitting, Jemima was in the kitchen with full make-up kit and a hugely magnifying mirror inside five minutes. She spurned the eggy bread with dignity, but she swallowed two cups of coffee and then peered at herself in the mirror.

‘Eye bags,’ she said, like a surgeon giving a diagnosis. She snapped her fingers. ‘Ice.’

Izzy got a bag of ice cubes from the freezer and watched, fascinated, as Jemima applied them to her puffy eyes.

‘Old model-girl trick,’ she said between her teeth. ‘Being the face of Belinda has taught me a lot of those.’

She did not sound as if it was a lesson she was entirely happy about. Izzy was whipping eggs for Pepper’s breakfast, but at that she looked up sharply. Jemima had not only stopped listening, she realised with a pang, she had stopped confiding, too.

‘Everything okay, Jay Jay?’

‘Just great. I live in five-star hotels and when I wake up in the morning I don’t know which continent I’m in.’

Izzy’s eyebrows rose. ‘Is that good or bad?’

‘It’s a living,’ said Jemima without expression.

Izzy was beginning to get worried. When Jemima had been selected by cosmetics house Belinda to be the face of their new campaign, all the papers had said this put her in the superstar league. It was the height of every model’s ambition, they’d said. But this did not sound like a woman enjoying well-deserved success. This sounded like a woman with problems.

But now was not the time to talk about it.

‘Let’s go for a pizza this evening, when the razzmatazz is all over,’ Izzy said.

Jemima gave a harsh laugh. ‘Who has time for pizza? I go straight from the presentation to the airport.’

‘You mean you won’t even be coming back here to pick up a bag?’ Izzy was shocked.

Jemima shook her head.

Izzy was filled with compunction. ‘I’m sorry I took the duvet off you this morning.’

‘If you hadn’t, I’d have slept for a week,’ said Jemima. ‘You don’t want to know how mad my life is.’

But before she could say any more Pepper emerged in a bathrobe. She had another sheaf of printed tables in her hand.

‘Jemima, Izzy—what do you think? I could just run through…’

More pressing concerns took over.

‘No statistics,’ they yelled in unison.

‘You,’ said the woman from the PR agency, ‘are a genius. I didn’t think it could be done.’ She had spiky, lurid green hair and a clipboard and she was terrifyingly professional.

Izzy was on a roll. She was good at crisis management, and this morning she was getting plenty of opportunity. Now she stopped tacking a piece of chintz across a nook full of wires and looked up. She tucked a stray lock of red hair back under her gypsy headscarf. ‘What?’

‘Getting the Beast of Belinda here before ten o’clock in the morning. She looks like a dream, all right. But that woman bites.’

Izzy was affronted. ‘I’m sorry?’

But the clipboard had already zipped to the other side of the big glass-walled reception room.

The in-house cameraman stopped adjusting his focus on the small stage and looked down at Izzy. ‘Molly means thank you for keeping Jemima sweet. She hasn’t actually sunk her teeth into anyone yet.’

Izzy blinked. ‘Beast of Belinda?’ she echoed.

He pulled a wry face. ‘Jemima Dare. Face of Belinda Cosmetics. Newest of the supermodels. And doesn’t she know it!’

And my sister, thought Izzy. Probably not a good moment to mention it, though. Normally she would go to war with her sister’s enemies at the drop of a hat. But twelve minutes before they opened the door on the launch of Out of the Attic was bad timing by anyone’s standards.

She flicked the chintz into expert folds and stapled it in place. ‘You know Jemima Dare?’ she said with deceptive mildness.

‘I’ve worked with her.’

‘Phew, yes,’ said the cameraman’s assistant, with feeling. ‘Serious pain in the ass, that one.’

Izzy held onto her temper with an effort. ‘How interesting,’ she said between her teeth.

She hammered an errant nail into place with force, flicked a dustsheet over the whole construction and stood up.

‘Done?’ said the woman with the clipboard, zipping back as if she were on rollerblades. ‘Can we let the punters in yet?’

Izzy cast a narrow-eyed look round the big reception room. It did not look like the launch of anything. It looked as if it was in the throes of refurbishment. Pots of paint stood around, amid step ladders and mysterious outcrops of furniture under dust sheets. The pictures on the walls were draped in sheeting and the big central chandelier was at the end of the room, leaning drunkenly against a trestle table. The carpet had gone. The London fashion crowd were in for a shock.

‘Yup. Ready to rock.’

The green-haired woman grinned. ‘I was right. Genius. Culp and Christopher would be a happy agency if all our clients were practical like you.’

‘Practical is what I do,’ agreed Izzy.

‘Sure is.’ The woman consulted her clipboard. ‘I’ve got the girls in position to hand out the goody bags. So we’ll open up the moment you give me the sign.’

She powered over to the big doors to the conference hall.

Izzy nodded and checked that her earpiece was in place. Then she pressed the connect button and spoke into her collar mike. ‘Testing. Testing. The partygoers are at the gates. Are we ready? Speak to me, people…Tony? Geoff?’

They were there. She ran through the roll call of her other helpers one by one. All in place, raring to go. Then at last she came to her cousin Pepper.

She was not worried about her décor, or the timing of her effects, but she was worried about Pepper. Should you be that nervous before the launch of a ground-breaking new business?

‘Pepper? How’s it going?’

There was an audible gulp. ‘Fine,’ quavered Pepper.

Izzy turned to face the wall, so that there was no chance of a passer by hearing her. She switched to one-to-one transmission and said into her mike, very softly, ‘Come on Big Shot. Entrepreneurs don’t panic. You can do this thing.’

There was a slightly watery chuckle. ‘You got evidence of that?’

‘You blagged the money men. After that, how hard can a bunch of journalists be?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘What’s more,’ interrupted Izzy ruthlessly, ‘you convinced me and you convinced Jemima. She knows all about clothes and I hate the things. So there you are. Every sector covered.’

This time the chuckle was a lot more robust. ‘So it is. Thanks, Izzy.’

‘My pleasure.’ She switched back to broadcast. ‘Okay, everyone. Showtime!’

She gave the thumbs-up to the woman with the clipboard. The tall doors were flung back. The waiting audience clattered in—and stopped dead at the decorators’ disarray.

Izzy could have danced with glee. Great! This was a launch they wouldn’t forget.