Page 10 of Friend of the Family

‘What about the spare set?’ said David.

She puffed out her cheeks and glanced at the clock above the kitchen door. ‘They were the spare set.’

‘I’m sure they’ll turn up. In the meantime, get Geoff to take you.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll get the Tube,’ he said, and Amy blew him a kiss across the room.

‘I love your bag,’ said Josie, eyeing Amy’s clutch when they were in the hall. ‘Claudia’s got one just like it.’

Amy smiled. It was one of the perks of the job: in the run-up to Christmas, fashion PRs would shower editors with gifts, and handbags were the most prized.

‘You’re right,’ she said, opening the front door. ‘I was lucky enough to get given two of the same.’

‘So you gave it to Claudia,’ Josie said, her eyes wide.

Amy made a mental note to see if she could rustle up something nice for Josie. Today she was wearing a plain white shirt and navy skirt, the sort of thing they sold in supermarkets as ‘back-to-work fashion’: it should have looked bland, but Josie was slim and pretty enough to pull it off. It was that old Marilyn Monroe thing about looking good in a potato sack; some people, annoyingly, just had it. Amy remembered that Karen had had a little of that too. She wasn’t the most striking beauty in the world, but she just had the ‘X factor’: somehow clothes, however ordinary, fitted her better and colours flattered her more.

Geoff, David’s driver, was sitting in the car and leapt out when he saw Amy and Josie come down the steps.

‘So he’s a driver, not a taxi,’ said Josie, lowering her voice as they approached him.

‘David has a driver. I don’t. But as we have to go to Berkshire today and I have lost my car keys, David has made the noble sacrifice of letting Geoff take us.’

‘Wow,’ said Josie, clearly impressed.

‘We’re heading for Cliveden in Taplow. Geoff, you have the address?’

Geoff snaked around the back streets of Ladbroke Grove until they hit the Westway heading out of town. At least most of the traffic was moving the other way. Today was the shoot for next month’s cover, and Amy was dreading it, including as it did the many variables of a white-hot actress, a diva photographer and being on location rather than in a studio.

‘So why is the shoot happening out here?’ asked Josie when they were on the A4.

Amy was glad to have a little time in the car with Josie. This was the third day of her internship, and Amy had been so busy with meetings, she had barely seen her. She had heard good things about her from the staff, however: she was bright, friendly and eager to help, which was a relief. Given the ‘switch-off’ pact with David for Provence, Amy had to make sure everything for the next two issues of the magazine was perfect and iron-clad, which meant she didn’t have the time to supervise Josie.

‘Number one, because Cliveden is beautiful. Number two, because it’s not far from Heathrow and Miranda, the cover star, and the photographer both have flights straight afterwards. It’s taken six months to make this shoot happen and it’s a tight squeeze now that it is.’

‘This is so glamorous,’ said Josie with a grin.

‘I warn you, it’s a lot of hanging around.’

‘So why are you going? Are you doing the interview?’

Amy laughed. She’d loved interviewing celebrities at the start of her career, because their lives were so different from her own. But she’d quickly realised that although she was a good writer, she wasn’t a great one, so had moved into editing copy rather than generating it in order to move up the ladder.

‘I always try to pop in to the cover shoot. The cover is everything. A great one can add fifty thousand to our sales. A bad one and we can lose twenty per cent.’

‘This is a million times better than I thought it was going to be.’

‘Really? You should have been an intern twenty years ago. I opened a lot of envelopes, but there was so much fun too.’

‘Are you trying to put me off?’

‘I’m saying it’s harder,’ replied Amy. ‘Smaller staff, tighter budgets. But it’s still the best job in the world.’

‘I know. I’ve seen the beauty cupboard.’

Amy smiled back. ‘I could happily live in the beauty cupboard. One day I think I might just move a bed and a camping stove in there.’