“We should celebrate it,” says Melissa, head of Features, from the editor’s almost-cleared office. She’s wearing a wine-colored silk dress. On Ellie, this would have looked like her grandmother’s nightie; on Melissa it looks like what it is—defiantly high fashion.
“The move?” Ellie is glancing at her mobile phone, set to silent, beside her. Around her, the other feature writers are silent, notepads on knees.
“Yes. I was talking to one of the librarians the other evening. He says there are lots of old files that haven’t been looked at in years. I want something on the women’s pages from fifty years ago. How attitudes have changed, fashions, women’s preoccupations. Case studies, side by side, then and now.” Melissa opens a file and pulls out several photocopied A3 sheets. She speaks with the easy confidence of someone accustomed to being listened to. “For instance, from our problem pages: ‘What on earth can I do to get my wife to dress more smartly and to make herself more attractive? My income is £1,500 a year, and I am beginning to make my way in a sales organization. I am very often getting invitations from customers, but in recent weeks I have had to dodge them because my wife, frankly, looks a mess.’ ”
There is a low chuckle around the room.
“ ‘I have tried to put it to her in a gentle way, and she says that she doesn’t care about fashions or jewelry or makeup. Frankly she doesn’t look like the wife of a successful man, which is what I want her to be.’ ”
John had once told Ellie that, after the children, his wife had lost interest in her appearance. He had changed the subject almost as soon as he had introduced it, and never referred to it again, as if he felt what he had said was even more of a betrayal than sleeping with another woman. Ellie had resented that hint of gentlemanly loyalty even while a bit of her admired him for it.
But it had stuck in her imagination. She had pictured his wife: slatternly in a stained nightdress, clutching a baby and haranguing him for some supposed deficit.
She wanted to tell him she would never be like that with him.
“One could put the questions to a modern advice columnist.” Rupert, the Saturday editor, leans forward to peer at the other photocopied pages.
“I’m not sure you’d need to. Listen to the response: ‘It may never have occurred to your wife that she is meant to be part of your shop window. She may, insofar as she thinks about these things at all, tell herself that she’s married, secure, happy, so why should she bother?’”
“Ah,” says Rupert. “‘The deep, deep peace of the double bed.’”
“‘I have seen this happen remarkably quickly to girls who fall in love just as much as to women who potter about in the cozy wrap of an old marriage. One moment they’re smart as new paint, battling heroically with their waistlines, seams straight, anxiously dabbed with perfume. Some man says, “I love you,” and the next moment that shining girl is, as near as makes no difference, a slattern. A happy slattern.’ ”
The room fills briefly with polite, appreciative laughter.
“What’s your choice, girls? Battle heroically with your waistline, or become a happy slattern?”
“I think I saw a film of that name not long ago,” says Rupert. His smile fades when he realizes the laughter has died.
“There’s a lot we can do with this stuff.” Melissa gestures toward the folder. “Ellie, can you dig around a bit this afternoon? See what else you might find. We’re looking at forty, fifty years ago. A hundred will be too alienating. The editor’s keen for us to highlight the move in a way that will bring readers along with us.”
“You want me to go through the archive?”
“Is that a problem?”
Not if you like sitting in dark cellars full of mildewing paper policed by dysfunctional men with Stalinist mindsets, who apparently haven’t seen daylight for thirty years. “Not at all,” she says brightly. “I’m sure I’ll find something.”
“Get a couple of interns to help you, if you like. I’ve heard there’s a couple lurking in the fashion cupboard.”
Ellie doesn’t register the malevolent satisfaction crossing her editor’s features at the thought of sending the latest batch of Anna Wintour wannabes deep into the bowels of the newspaper. She’s busy thinking, Bugger. No mobile reception underground.
“By the way, Ellie, where were you this morning?”
“What?”
“This morning. I wanted you to rewrite that piece about children and bereavement. Yes? Nobody seemed to know where you were.”
“I was out doing an interview.”
“Who with?”
A body-language expert, Ellie thinks, would have identified correctly that Melissa’s blank smile was more of a snarl.
“Lawyer. Whistleblower. I was hoping to work something up on sexism in chambers.” It’s out almost before she knows what she’s saying.
“Sexism in the City. Hardly sounds groundbreaking. Make sure you’re at your desk at the right time tomorrow. Speculative interviews on your own time. Yes?”
“Right.”
“Good. I want a double-page spread for the first Compass Quay edition. Something along the lines of plus ça change.” She is scribbling in her leather-backed notebook. “Preoccupations, ads, problems . . . Bring me a few pages later this afternoon, and we’ll see what you’ve got.”
“Will do.” Ellie’s smile is the brightest and most workmanlike in the whole room as she follows the others out of the office.
Spent today in modern-day equivalent of purgatory, she types, pausing to take a sip of her wine. Newspaper archive office. You want to be grateful you only make stuff up.
He has messaged her from his hotmail account. He calls himself Penpusher; a joke between the two of them. She curls her feet under her on the chair and waits, willing the machine to signal his response.
You’re a cultural heathen. I love archives, the screen responds. Remind me to take you to the British Newspaper Library for our next hot date.
The only human librarian has given me a great wedge of loose papers. Not the most exciting bedtime reading.
Afraid this sounds sarcastic, she follows it with a smiley face, then curses as she remembers he once wrote an essay for the Literary Review on how the smiley face represented all that was wrong with modern communication.
That was an ironic smiley face, she adds, and stuffs her fist into her mouth.