Chapter Eight
This time not only was Tess given a double-page spread in The Sunday Sentinel, but her piece was trailed on the front cover along with her picture.
There she was nestled next to Gordon Ramsay and above the Prime Minister. The photo shoot had gone a lot better this time too. They’d booked a photo studio, a stylist and … a male model!
It was absolutely no hardship to snuggle up with a smouldering Heathcliff looky-likey and Tess had been allowed to wear something of her own choosing, a flattering midi dress in a dark green Swiss dot cotton.
To think that Tess hadn’t even been sure if she was going to pitch the article. Not to Sarah, the features editor. Not after what Claire had said about Sarah complaining that Tess had all but stalked her.
But the morning after one of the strangest evenings of her life, she’d been sitting in The Sentinel canteen with her work bestie, Jay, to thoroughly debrief about her date.
After a good night’s sleep, Tess was traumatised no more.
Confused, yes. Amused, yes. But what was one more catastrophically bad date in the general scheme of things?
‘It’s not just real-life men I repel. I also repel the fictional ones,’ she’d told Jay wryly.
She’d met Jay on her very first day at The Sentinel group.
It was his first day too, as a lowly fashion assistant.
They’d done their orientation together and had instantly bonded over salad and chips in the Sentinel canteen.
Now Jay had his own fiefdom. He was style editor (men) and also one of the very few IRL men who weren’t repelled by Tess.
A very handsome IRL man, whose Scandinavian and Filipino heritage had provided him with hair as dark and as glossy as a crow’s wing, an olive complexion and startling blue eyes.
Quite an arresting combination, which he paired with an impish personality, which was in evidence now as he let his mouth hang open, his eyes fixed on Tess.
He hadn’t even taken one spoonful of his chia bowl, so rapt was his attention.
‘Could you touch him? Was he corporeal?’
‘Yes, and I could certainly smell him,’ Tess remembered with a little shudder.
Jay grinned and fanned his hand in front of his face. ‘Not wearing Tom Ford aftershave then?’
‘Only if Tom Ford has created an aftershave called I’ve Never Had a Shower in My Life.’
Yes, Heathcliff had smelled pungent, but when Tess had got home, still mildly traumatised at that point, she’d pulled Gabe’s handkerchief out of her pocket.
Some impulse that she couldn’t control had made her hold it up to her nose and the scent of clean laundry, a forest-y, woodsy, it’s-just-rained trace of an expensive aftershave and a faint whiff of that old book smell had made her inhale deeply. It was quite the heady mix of aromas.
‘Do you really think it was magic? The whole thing sounds properly bizarre,’ Jay said in disbelief and Tess had shrugged. Then she’d felt a tap on her shoulder and had swivelled round to see Sarah standing there.
‘I couldn’t help but overhear, Tess,’ she’d said with a bright smile like she’d never bitched about Tess with her line manager. ‘You know we all loved the last piece you wrote. Could you write me 800 words for Monday morning?’
Write another piece for the woman who’d talked shit about Tess with her line manager? Tess nodded eagerly. ‘I’d love to!’
‘Great. We actually have a studio booked for some feature shoots next Tuesday afternoon. I’ll send Claire an email and explain things.
’ Sarah allowed herself an eye roll. She was younger than Tess but gave the impression that she’d never known even a moment of self-doubt. ‘She’s a bit of a dragon, isn’t she?’
Tess could only smile noncommittally and now, ten days later, there she was, taking up all of pages fourteen and fifteen.
Usually, Tess waited until she was in the office on a Monday morning to leaf through to the back of the paper and read the advertorials she’d written.
But she’d woken up to find a copy of The Sunday Sentinel waiting for her on the kitchen counter and a note from her favourite hyphenate, Saskia, Tess’s flatmate-landlady-friend.
Saskia always got up early on a Sunday when she wasn’t travelling for work.
GREAT piece! So proud of you. Will be back from Pilates just after eleven and starving. Let’s go out for brunch and a mooch. S x
Tess had barely kept in touch with any of her friends pre-university. Not that she’d had that many. She and Saskia had gone to the same secondary school, but Saskia had run with a high-achieving, highly glamorous set of girls, while Tess had hung out on the edges of the arty, rebellious set.
After school, they’d only been social media acquaintances until Saskia had broken up with her fiancé a couple of weeks after Tess had found herself both dumped and soon-to-be homeless on the cusp of her thirtieth birthday.
When they’d bumped into each other quite by chance in the middle of Oxford Street, Tess was swollen-faced from crying while Saskia had been coldly furious. But misery, she did love company.
After a quick drink which had turned into a couple of bottles, Saskia had offered Tess her spare room. She’d already kicked her former fiancé out of her flat so he ‘can fucking find himself a new home office and some other poor fucking idiot to cheat on’.
Tess hadn’t imagined that she’d stay very long.
Just long enough to get back on her feet.
She’d always been a little bit frightened of Saskia and she was also a little bit frightened of Saskia’s Scandi-inspired interior, which had very little to do with IKEA and a lot to do with a subtle, minimalist aesthetic and neutral colours.
Saskia was a lawyer who worked fourteen-hour days, still found time to exercise regularly and often had to fly to far-flung places like Singapore and Brazil for a couple of days to negotiate company mergers.
Then she’d fly back on the red-eye to be at her desk by eight the next day.
If nothing else, Saskia needed a flatmate to take in all the parcels that came for her.
Tess could always tell when Saskia was going through a particularly stressful period at work as she dealt with that stress by online shopping.
Yet here Tess was three years later, still happily installed in Saskia’s spare room, the one space in the Swiss Cottage flat, which no longer had a subtle, minimalist aesthetic.
Swiss Cottage was an oddly transient area of London.
Although it had a library, a cinema and a swimming pool, it wasn’t really a destination.
Very few people wanted to actually hang out in Swiss Cottage, but the entrance to their apartment block and the entrance to the tube were literally ten metres apart and it was a short commute to Waterloo for Tess and a slightly longer journey for Saskia to Canary Wharf.
The best thing to be said about Swiss Cottage was the short walk up a grand avenue of huge, imposing Victorian houses to reach Hampstead or a stroll in the opposite direction to Primrose Hill, which was where Tess and Saskia now headed for brunch.
Taking The Sunday Sentinel with them, because Saskia insisted that she had to read the piece again.
‘Honestly, Tess, you’re not going to have to withdraw any more book boyfriends when the hot men of London get a load of you in that photo,’ Saskia said as she dug enthusiastically into her Shakshuka. ‘Your breasts are insane.’
‘I don’t think the hot men of London read The Sunday Sentinel,’ Tess said as she forced herself to slow down and not inhale her Full Breakfast Everything Bagel. ‘But, you know, I do feel a bit like Keira Knightley in Love Actually.’
Saskia shook her head, her glossy brown hair falling just so even though she’d not long taken an exercise class.
Like her flat, she too had a subtle minimal aesthetic.
She was a big fan of no make-up make-up, not that her almost perfectly symmetrical features needed much adornment.
Especially when she was still making the most of her healthy glow. ‘No! Don’t go there.’
‘I have to go there; it’s the law,’ Tess insisted, holding up the paper so she and her 2D twin were face to face. Then she smiled sappily. Some might even say simperingly. ‘I actually look quite pretty.’
‘You know, you always look pretty,’ Saskia said gravely. Her forthright nature didn’t just manifest itself in being very bossy, she also used it to big up her friends. Tess in particular. ‘I wish you realised that.’
‘Look, I’m realistic.’ Tess shrugged. ‘I scrub up all right, and in this photo I’m wearing more make-up than I ever thought possible. Even more than Wilde when she’s doing one of her Get Ready with Me TikToks.’
‘Oh, Tess, no!’ Saskia sounded genuinely dismayed, and with good reason.
Tess hadn’t meant to mention Wilde. Just as she’d promised Jay earlier that morning via WhatsApp that she wouldn’t read the comments when her piece hit The Sunday Sentinel website, she frequently promised Saskia that she wouldn’t look at Wilde’s TikTok.
Or her Instagram. Definitely not her Facebook.
Yet every time, usually not even twenty-four hours after vowing she wouldn’t, Tess was back to her habitual hate-watching.
Not even hate-watching. But transfixed by the woman who’d stolen her life as she filmed her GRWMs and her What I Ate In A Days and her fit checks and her Sunday Resets …
Of course, Wilde hadn’t really stolen Tess’s life.
She hadn’t even stolen Tess’s man. Because the man in question had left Tess of his own volition.
Wilde had only come into the picture a good six months after Sean, Tess’s boyfriend of ten years, had announced, out of the blue, that it turned out he didn’t love her after all.