LITMIR.BIZ

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ready for partner. Not quite the same line of bullshit you have been feeding me for the past two months, is it?’

      ‘Now come on,’ he said, putting out his arms towards her, ‘that’s not what I said.’

      ‘Oh really?’ she challenged. ‘He seemed very clear about it.’

      ‘He’s obviously taken what I said the wrong way …’

      The snake, thought Emma, walking off in disgust. Mark chased her, grabbing her arm.

      ‘Davies thinks you brought in the Frost Industries as well. Apparently you told him so. Or did he take that the wrong way as well?’

      ‘Come on Em, let’s talk about this. I thought we were going to have supper.’

      ‘You betrayed me, Mark,’ she said her voice thick with emotion. She was desperate not to cry but she could feel the tears welling up and stinging the backs of her eyes.

      Mark turned away then faced her.

      He looked as if he was about to keep denying it but finally he simply shrugged his shoulders.

      ‘OK. You’re right. I happen to think you’re not ready to be a partner,’ said Mark flatly. ‘You are a good business strategist, but you’re too soft. You don’t even have the balls to fire that dim secretary of yours. You’re an academic, not a corporate player. You’re too nice to make tough decisions. You’re just not ready to play with the big boys.’

      ‘And Pete Wise is ready? Jack Johnson is ready? Does being on your softball team make you ready for partnership? I’m good, Mark,’ she pleaded. ‘You know it.’

      ‘You do well at Harvard and you think the world owes you a favour,’ he laughed scornfully.

      ‘I trusted you to tell the truth,’ she said quietly. ‘I trusted you to tell people like Daniel Davies that I was the best. But no, you surround yourself with yes-men, idiots who will make you look good.’

      ‘Fucking you could have cost me my job and this is all the thanks I get,’ he said sneeringly Droplets of rains began to fall. They were like slaps on the cheek.

      ‘Fucking me,’ she repeated quietly. ‘Is that what it was to you?’

      Mark glared at her, then waved a dismissive hand in the air.

      ‘Ah, you needy women are all the fucking same: Davies is right, you probably do want to run off and have a baby.’

      She looked at him. The man she had whispered ‘I love you’ to, the man she had admired and trusted, had withered to a sycophant and a liar, a man who lived off other people’s hard work and talent. She knew she was better than him, but there was little doubt he had played the game better than her. The likes of Daniel Davies would never know how much she put into the company, how much profit was directly down to her efforts and talent because operators like Mark Eisner took the glory for himself.

      Waves were beginning to whip up in the harbour and rain was beginning to fall more heavily. Lights on the skyscrapers behind her sent a muddled saffron glow into the shallow puddles. She was angry, confused, but she was sure about one thing.

      ‘I don’t ever want to see you again,’ she said as evenly as she could.

      ‘Emma, don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, the tone of his voice softening. ‘We have to work together.’

      ‘Do we?’

      She thought of Winterfold, that crazy jumble of antiques and bric-a-brac, she thought of the lazy village and its single red telephone box, all of it a million miles away from this corporate jungle. Saul had trusted her to take over his entire company. Saul had faith in her. And suddenly so did Emma.

      Suddenly she had a clear sense of purpose, a sense of belonging.

      ‘Happy birthday, Em,’ said Mark, hunching his back against the rain.

      She didn’t turn round. She just kept on walking.

5

      Briarton Court, one of England’s top boarding schools for girls, had phenomenal resources at its disposal. Its one hundred acres of grounds housed an embarrassment of riches: indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a lacrosse pitch, running track and tennis and petanque courts. In the classroom, Briarton’s pupils – who included the children of politicians, tycoons, ambassadors, billionaires, minor European royalty and good old-fashioned English aristocrats – had the opportunity to study everything from Calculus to Mandarin, not to mention the wide range of extracurricula activities. Apart from the annual ski trip to Klosters, the most popular after-school activity by far was Briarton’s monthly careers evenings which pulled in guest speakers to give the Oxford Union a run for their money.

      That evening’s guest speaker looked around the packed lecture theatre and took a sip of water. Cassandra Grand had been tempted to turn down the invitation to speak as it was slap bang in the middle of London Fashion Week, but when she had heard that in the last two years alone the speakers had included two cabinet ministers, a Nobel prize winner, Richard Branson and an Oscar-winning actress, Cassandra had found time in her diary.

      She was glad she had; forty-five glorious, uninterrupted minutes talking about her glamorous life as a glossy magazine editor and – the girls hung on every word of this – how she had got there. Cassandra would reveal how she had left a similar school to this one eighteen years ago with the sole ambition of wanting to work for an upmarket fashion magazine. How her six months as an intern at US Rive almost killed her: lugging suitcases full of clothes to fashion shoots, unpacking them and ironing them, getting shouted at by the photographer, the art director and the models, running here and there to fetch coffee, batteries or pick up dry-cleaning, then repacking the suitcases, lugging them back to the office late at night before neatly folding the clothes back into padded envelopes for return to the fashion houses. She would tell them how she got her big break when she met Carla Miller, one of the hottest fashion names of the early Nineties, back in London. Carla styled shoots, catwalk shows and advertising campaigns for the likes of Calvin Klein and Versace and it was she who gave Cassandra a job as her assistant. She would tell them how Carla grew so confident in Cassandra’s abilities that she would recommend Cassandra for small jobs that she was too busy, or simply too important to undertake. And she would describe how another chance meeting with Alliance Chairman Isaac Grey landed her a job as fashion editor on US Rive where she rose through the ranks to become their deputy editor and eventually seconded to salvage the UK edition as their editor-in-chief. Cassandra had loved talking about herself and reliving her apparently charmed life, leaving out the ruthlessness, the back-stabbing and political chicanery that was really at the heart of her success.

      She was, however, unprepared for the onslaught of questions from her eager audience, hands darting into the air like fireflies.

      ‘How much money do you earn?’ asked a blonde in the front row.

      ‘What famous people have you met?’ asked a Chinese girl further back.

      ‘Do you get free clothes?’

      ‘Do you have to be thin?’

      Cassandra looked out onto the sea of eager faces wondering how many of them would make it. The fashion cupboards of glossy magazines, of course, were full of pretty young things like these who wanted to play with clothes all day long, killing time until a rich banker husband came to sweep them off their feet and out to the country.

      ‘What do you need to get to the very top, other than a fabulous fashion eye?’ asked a beautiful blonde girl. Now she looked more promising. Her blouse looked vintage YSL and she had that indefinable X factor. Stylish, confident, focussed. Cassandra smiled at her.

      ‘Having a fashion eye certainly helps, but it’s not essential. People who reach the very top know how to pick the best team, how to get the most out of other people’s talent. What the editor-in-chief

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