But I was on my own with this, and I had to do my best.
I spun round in my chair and stared out of the window at the bustling Soho streets below me.
‘I can do this,’ I said out loud. ‘I can bloody well do this.’
‘You can do anything you want,’ a voice said. A very familiar Australian accent that I’d not heard for more than five years. ‘You always have.’
I froze. Then slowly, I turned my chair round so I was facing into my office again.
‘Damo,’ I said. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
The huge figure of my ex-boyfriend filled the doorway. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, and he was wearing a grey beanie hat on his head. He looked absolutely knackered, very scruffy, and really, really hot. My heart started to beat a little bit faster.
‘What kind of a welcome is that?’ he said, laughter in his eyes. ‘I just came to wish you luck.’
‘All the way from Sydney?’
‘All the way from over there,’ he said, tipping his head in the direction of the team that produced the men’s mag Homme, and who shared our office.
What. The…
He laughed properly at my startled face.
‘Don’t read Homme much, huh?’ he said. ‘I’ve been working here for ages.’
‘Not full-time?’ I said. My voice was wobbly.
‘Nah,’ Damo said. ‘Bit of this, bit of that. You know how it is.’
I did. His lack of focus was one of the things that we’d clashed about when we were together. But now I was grateful that despite the bad luck that had brought him here on the biggest day of my life, his unwillingness to commit to anything was still intact. If he was only freelance, our paths wouldn’t have to cross.
‘But,’ Damo said. ‘I’m actually covering for the art editor for a while. She’s gone on maternity leave.’
Ah.
‘Got to run. Features meeting,’ he said, rolling his eyes and making me wonder how he’d cope with the day-to-day business of life on a magazine. ‘Catch up later?’
I nodded, dumbly, staring at the door as he shut it, then I put my head in my hands. What should have been the best day ever was turning into the worst. The magazine was in trouble, my new team were hostile – at least some of them were – and my ex-boyfriend (and not just any ex-boyfriend, THE ex-boyfriend) had turned up. What on earth was I going to do?
1966
‘Bye, Dad,’ I called as I shut the front door. There was no reply but I wasn’t surprised. I’d put a cup of tea next to his bed before I left and he’d barely stirred. Sleeping off last night’s whisky, I assumed. I guessed his assistant, Trev, would’ve already gone to the shop to open up. No doubt Dad would drag himself along when he finally fell out of bed.
I checked my watch. I was going to have to hurry to catch my train and I didn’t want to be late for work. Deftly, I picked up the hold-all I kept stowed in the bin shelter in our front garden and set off.
I made it to the station with seconds to spare – thank goodness – and immediately shut myself in the tiny toilet on board the train. My journey from Beckenham – the sleepy suburb of south-east London where I lived – to the centre of town where I worked, took exactly half an hour. Which gave me more than enough time to transform myself from the accounts assistant in an insurance company based just off Oxford Street that I pretended to be, into the junior writer on a magazine in Soho that I really was.
Things at home were… difficult. We’d been a happy family, once. At least, Mum worked hard to make sure me and my brother Dennis were happy. Dad just worked hard. He was a stickler for appearances and making sure we were all respectable. But he had a temper that he didn’t always keep under control.
And then Mum died. I was only thirteen when she got ill. Dennis was seventeen and doing his A-levels, and he went off to university not long after. So it was just Dad and me.
It was hard, without Mum. I missed her with a quiet intensity that never really went away. In the early days I’d unthinkingly set four places at the table and then have to put one set of cutlery back in the drawer, or shout hello when I came home from school, only to have my voice echo round the empty hall. I learned to cook and to clean and to sew because Dad was traditional. And he fell apart when Mum died, spending some days in silent grief and others in a furious rage, lashing out at the world – and me.
When the girls at school said their mums wouldn’t allow them to do something, I pretended my dad was strict too. Actually he didn’t really care what I did, as long as things looked okay on the surface. As the years without Mum went by, his periods of silence got worse, so did his drinking, and so did his temper. I learned to keep out of his way when he’d had a drink, never to talk back to him or disagree, and to have his dinner on the table when he wanted it. The one thing I’d dug my heels in about had been my job. He’d not been keen on me taking a job in town instead of working in the family newsagents, so I’d lied that working in accounts would be valuable experience that could help us expand the business and he’d eventually agreed.
‘Just until you and Bill are married,’ Dad had said, his lip curling with disdain. ‘London is no place for a married woman.’
I’d smiled and agreed, confident I’d never be foolish enough to marry anyone, let alone my devoted but dull boyfriend, Billy.
So I left home every day dressed neatly and wearing sensible shoes, with my hair pulled back into a ponytail. I arrived home looking the same.
But in between, I had a very different life.
Shut in the tiny loo, I unzipped my bag and took out a burgundy knitted dress, tights and boots. Wriggling in the small space, I pulled off the beige suit and blouse I was wearing and swapped it for the mini dress. I slipped on the tights and shoes, folded up my boring clothes and tucked them into my bag for later.
I pulled out my ponytail and brushed my straight dark hair and heavy fringe so it fell flat to my shoulders. If I got a slower train I sometimes backcombed it, but there was no time for that today.
I powdered my face quickly, then painted on a swoosh of liquid eyeliner. A slick of frosted-pink lipstick and I was finished. As the train pulled into Charing Cross, I slipped off my engagement ring and dropped it into my make-up bag. Done.
I breathed out in satisfaction. It wasn’t easy living my double life, but there was no doubt I was getting better at it. It made it even worse that I couldn’t see any way of it continuing much longer.
‘Morning Nancy,’ our receptionist, Gayle, shouted as I walked into the building. ‘Love the shoes.’
I grinned. Gayle and I were the only young women in the whole office. The rest of our team – the team that put together Home & Hearth magazine every month – were older women. They were all well turned-out and interested in fashion, but none of them were what I considered cutting edge. I hung up my coat and stowed my hold-all under my desk.
I was normally one of the first people in work, which I liked. I made myself a cup of coffee in the tiny kitchen and settled at my desk. Junior writer sounded thrilling, but there was a lot of filing and typing. I didn’t mind, though. I was learning so much that sometimes I felt like my head could explode.
Today I had a pile of recipes to type up. It was normally a dull, mindless task, but today’s were all based on locations our readers might have gone to on holiday so they were full of odd ingredients that I’d never tasted which meant