Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Looking back on it now the whole thing was absurd. I started the first book almost as a lark. Poppy, my mate at Klingfeld and Wish — (dear Poppy, I wonder what she’s selling now? Not books, at any rate, the world has moved on) — who’d put a lot of freelance editing my way over the years, inspired the whole thing by saying one day, as we drank acid wine in a sandwich bar, ‘It’s mad to be an editor. Wrecking your eyesight over other people’s messes when you could be in their shoes earning lots of lovely lolly. And be famous to boot.’

‘Are the authors I edit rich or famous?’ The books she gave me to edit were mainly obscure books about European subjects, Venetian glassware, Italian design. We had known each other at college, you see, where I read modern languages until I dropped out. She did business studies, and thought I was a highbrow. We rather lost touch during my Harrods period, but after Chris wangled me the little job being decorative in a Bond Street gallery I got in touch again, and she was duly impressed. I found editing easy, but very poorly paid.

‘The money’s in bestselling novels, darling. Ever since Sally Flanagan made millions out of Bodies. Now everyone says they’re going to write a bestseller… I’d do it myself, but I’m not a bit creative.’ There was a tacit assumption that I wasn’t either. To this day I remember the spasm of anger and joy that ran through my body. I am creative, I’ve always been creative. Besides, I’d read thousands of novels — I felt I was something of an expert in novels. I read them still. What else is there to do?

‘I could write one,’ I said. ‘About my mother’s family in Ireland. I could write you a lovely saga… with creamy-skinned heroines and demon lovers. Rags to riches, except they missed out on the riches.’

Poppy looked at me consideringly. ‘You’ve got the looks,’ she said. ‘For publicity, I mean. But it won’t do if they don’t get rich.’

‘OK they will. Then maybe I’ll get rich.’

I’m sure she didn’t take me seriously, and I had no idea if I could do it or not, but her disbelief, and Chris’s teasing — and I’m sure the kids must have joined in as well, they missed no opportunity of tormenting me — drove me on over the pages. I wrote Red Gold in just under six months. It was hard labour — my God it was hard. I take it back that I’ve never worked hard. My head ached, my back ached, my eyes were a torment…

Poppy said she liked it, and so did her superior, but they both suggested I rewrite it completely, and then they rewrote it all over again. When we had arrived at a final draft they flattered me grossly and took me out to lunch, not in a sandwich bar this time but in a sugar-pale interior with too many waiters. They didn’t pay me a huge advance, which would have been more flattering still. And then a giant stroke of luck intervened.

(I had so much luck, perhaps I used it all up. I suppose I must be happier now. But I’m not so sure that I’m lucky any more. I’ve spilled my drink. A refill, quick.)

Chris had been in television news for donkey’s years and most of his colleagues were amiable drunks. One of his oldest mates was Terry Fraser, a producer who drank rather more than the norm but who’d always shown me his charming side. His latest project was Hot Frox, a ‘young’ series on ready-to-wear fashion; I’d given him a contact, a friend of mine at Harrods — Angela and I once sold coats together in the lean years after I dropped out of college.

(The lean years, the desperate years when I sometimes sold rather more than coats. I was never quite a prostitute: too pretty, too arrogant, too ill-organised. But it was easy to meet rich men in Harrods, rich men who were eager to give me presents, and later, of course, it was hard to forget.)

When the presenter of Hot Frox got some horrible disease — shingles? syphilis? can’t remember — not long before shooting was due to begin, Terry came round to our house drunk as a lord. ‘Fucking stupid bitch, why does she have to get it now? Three months ago we could have replaced her, no problem, six months hence she could drop fucking dead!’

I too have my less charming side. Benjamin has found that out to his cost. I’ve grown more savage than I used to be, but I think I was savage enough with Terry. I told him what was wrong with his attitude, and graduated to what was wrong with his programme. He began to look at me very oddly, with a weird intensity I put down to drink.

Then he said, without answering any of my points, to Chris, who was listening anxiously, ‘Listen, could she do a camera test? Has she worked before? She could be the answer.’

After he went we laughed at him. We didn’t see ahead; we laughed at him. But I was interested too. I like new things, I get tired of routine, I like a change (Chris should have been warned; I like a change ).

Next morning Terry was late and bad-tempered, ready to pretend he had been joking. But the camera loved me. It was all very easy. Terry’s rudeness turned to an ecstasy of gratitude.

Success, success, I was a sweet success, the show and I were a terrific success. The media loved my face and hair and one journalist raved about my husky voice, so all the others copied him. RAW SEX ON FROX, screamed The Sun. I framed that cutting and stuck it in the loo. Suddenly I was a cult. I bought a Panama hat and enormous glasses so I could go to the shops in peace, but a Sun photographer spotted me, and after the front-page photograph young girls went out and bought Panama hats. The media acclaimed the ‘Alex look’. By the time my book was published I was seriously famous, and Chris’s children weren’t speaking to me.

Red Gold sold ten thousand in hardback and a quarter of a million in paperback, helped by the hinted libel in reviews that the lesbian affairs were my own — affairs I’d dreamed up at Poppy’s suggestion. The viewing figures for the programme doubled.

I loved it all; I lapped it up. It was glorious to make money on my own. We had always been comfortable on Chris’s salary, but now we were extremely comfortable, with the paperback advance stashed away in the bank.

But that was it, so far as I was concerned. It was an episode, over, not the start of something. When Terry asked me to do another batch of Frox I refused without a pang. All I had in mind was a holiday.

My agent soon disabused me. Three months after Red Gold was published, he rang me to tell me my publisher had offered a fabulous sum for a two-book contract. £100,000? £200,000? Whatever it was, I fell silent, amazed.

‘Alexandra? Are you OK?’

‘But I haven’t even thought about another book. What are they offering all that money for? ’

‘Your name,’ said my agent. ‘You’re bankable.’

‘Why? I’m not doing any more television.’

‘You’re not serious —’

‘— I am.’

‘Well they don’t know that. Take the money and run.’

I signed for one book, actually. No one was going to buy my future. Gold Cards was a blockbuster about prostitution, its ritzier, soft-focus end, as you would guess from the working title, Kept Women. The film rights were sold before the book was finished. But things didn’t go according to plan this time. I meant to write the book I had promised, but someone else seemed to take over my brain. A past self, a buried self. I began to write about lies and misery and pain and humiliation.

For a while after dropping out of college, in my early twenties, in the jungles of Knightsbridge, I had dropped out of the normal world. I was very young, I was very pretty. Fresh and round-faced in the photographs, my smile out-shining Harrods’ plate-glass though I functioned on pills and alcohol. My nights were night-clubs, discos, casinos and private suites at the big hotels where I faked orgasms for rich Arabs. The only bits I liked were the money and the dancing, but they didn’t make up for the aching mornings when my body and brain felt dirty grey, as if cigarettes had been stamped out all over me.