Sophia Money-Coutts - The Plus One

Wobbling along Notting Hill Gate, I locked my bike beside the Posh! office, then dipped into Pret to order: one white Americano, one egg and bacon breakfast baguette and one berry muffin. According to Pret’s nutritional page (bookmarked on my work computer), this came to 950 calories, but as I hadn’t actually eaten anything with Joe the night before I decided the calories could get stuffed too.

‘Morning, Enid,’ I said over my computer screen, putting the Pret bag on my desk. Enid was the PA to Peregrine Monmouth, the editor for Posh! magazine, and a woman as wide as she was tall. She was loved in the office on the basis that she put through everyone’s expenses and approved holidays.

‘Polly, my angel! Happy Birthday!’ She waddled around the desk and enveloped me in a hug. ‘And Happy New Year,’ she said, crushing my face to her gigantic bosom. Her breath smelled of coffee.

‘Happy New Year,’ I mumbled into Enid’s cardigan, before pulling back and standing up straight again, putting a hand to my forehead as it throbbed. I needed some painkillers.

‘Did you have a nice break?’ she asked.

‘Mmm,’ I replied vaguely, leaning to turn on my computer. What was my password again?

‘Were you with your mum then?’ Enid returned to her desk and started rustling in a bag beside it.

‘Mmmm.’ It was some variation of my mum’s dog name and a number. Bertie123 ? It didn’t work. Shit. I’d have to call that woman in IT whose name I could never remember.

‘And did you get any nice presents?’

Bertie19 . That was it. Bingo.

Emails started spilling into my inbox and disappearing off the screen. I watched as the counter spiralled up to 632. They were mostly press releases about diets, I observed, scrolling through them. Sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, fat-free. Something new designed by a Californian doctor called the ‘Raisin Diet’, on which you were only allowed to eat thirty raisins a day.

‘Sorry, Enid,’ I said, shaking my head and reaching for my baguette. ‘I’m concentrating. Any nice presents? You know, some books from Mum. How was your Christmas?’

‘Lovely, thanks. Just me and Dave and the kids at home. And Dave’s mum, who’s losing her marbles a bit, but we managed. I overdid it on the Baileys though so I’m on a new diet I read about.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘It’s called the Raisin Diet, it’s supposed to be ever so good. You eat ten raisins for breakfast, ten raisins for lunch and ten raisins for supper and they say you can lose a stone in a week.’

I watched over my computer screen as Enid counted out raisins from a little Tupperware box.

‘Morning, all, Happy New Year and all that nonsense. Meeting in my office in fifteen minutes please,’ boomed Peregrine’s voice, as he swept through the door in a navy overcoat and trilby.

Peregrine was a 55-year-old social climber who launched Posh! in the Nineties in an attempt to mix with the sort of people he thought should be his friends. Dukes, earls, lords, the odd Ukrainian oligarch. He applied the same principal to his wives. First, an Italian jewellery heiress. Second, the daughter of a Venezuelan oil baron. He was currently married to a French stick insect who was, as Peregrine told anyone he ever met, a distant relation to the Monaco Royals.

‘Where is everyone?’ he said, reappearing from his office, coat and hat now removed.

I looked around at the empty desks. ‘Not sure. It’s just me and Enid so far.’

‘Well, I want a meeting with you and Lala as soon as she’s in. I’ve got a major story we need to get going with.’

‘Sure. What is it?’

‘Top secret. Just us three in the meeting. Need-to-know basis,’ he said, glancing at Enid. ‘You all right?’ he added.

Enid was poking the inside of her mouth with a finger. ‘Just got a bit of raisin stuck,’ she replied.

Peregrine grimaced, then looked back at me. ‘Right. Well. Will you let me know as soon as Lala is in?’

I nodded.

‘Got it,’ said Enid, waving a finger.

An hour later, Lala, the magazine’s party editor, and I were sitting in Peregrine’s office. I’d drunk my coffee and eaten both the baguette and the muffin but still felt perilously close to death.

‘So, there’s yet another Royal baby on the way,’ said Peregrine, ‘the Countess of Hartlepool told me at lunch yesterday. They have the same gynaecologist, apparently.’

‘Due when?’ I asked.

‘July,’ he said. ‘So I want us to get cracking with a quick piece which we can squeeze into the next issue.’

I wondered if I’d live as far as July given how I felt today. Some birthday this was. ‘What about something on the Royal playmates?’ I said.

Peregrine nodded while scratching his belly, which rolled over his waistband and rested on the tops of his legs. ‘Yes. That sort of thing. The Fotheringham-Montagues are having their second too, I think.’

‘And my friend Octavia de Flamingo is having her first baby,’ said Lala, chewing on her pen. ‘They’ve already reserved a place at Eton in case it’s a boy.’

‘Well, we need at least ten others so can you both ask around and find more posh babies,’ said Peregrine. ‘I want it on my desk first thing on Friday, Polly. And can you get the pictures of them all too.’

‘Of the parents?’ I checked.

‘No, no, no!’ he roared. ‘Of the babies! I want all the women’s scan pictures. The sort of thing that no one else will have seen. You know, real, insidery stuff.’

I sighed as I walked back to my desk. Posh! was now so insidery it was going to print pictures of the aristocracy’s wombs.

My Tuesday evenings were traditionally spent having supper with my mum in her Battersea flat and tonight, as a birthday treat, I was doing exactly the same thing.

It was a chaotic and mummified flat. Mum had lived there for nearly twenty years, ever since Dad died and we’d moved to London from Surrey. She worked in a curtain shop nearby because her boss allowed her to bring her 9-year-old Jack Russell to the shop so long as he stayed behind the counter and didn’t wee on any of the damask that lay around the place in giant rolls. Bertie largely obliged, only cocking his leg discreetly on the very darkest rolls he could find if Mum got distracted by talking to a customer for too long.

It was the curtain shop that had landed me a job at Posh! . Peregrine’s second wife – the Venezuelan one – had come in to discuss pelmets for their new house in Chelsea while I was in there talking to Mum one Saturday. And even though Alejandra had all the charm and warmth of a South American despot, I plucked up the courage to mention that I wanted to be a journalist. So, because I was desperate and Peregrine was miserly, he offered me the job as his assistant a few months later. I started by replying to his party invitations and buying his coffees, but after a year or so I’d started writing small pieces for the magazine. Nothing serious. Short articles I mostly made up about the latest trend in fancy dress or the most fashionable canapé to serve at a drinks party. But I worked my way up from there until Peregrine let me write a few longer pieces and interviews with various mad members of the British aristocracy. It wasn’t the dream role. I was hardly Kate Adie reporting from the Gaza Strip in a flak jacket. But it was a writing job, and, even though back when I started I didn’t know anything about the upper classes (I thought a viscount was a type of biscuit), it seemed a good start.