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the street door and stepped up into the lobby of the magazine. The
black Italian marble floor was the only grace note that had survived our
tenancy of the offices. The rest of the lobby was pure us. Boxes of sample
frocks from wannabe fashion houses were stacked up along one wall. Some intern
had triaged them with a chunky blue marker: YES KEEP FOR SHOOT, or OH I THINK
NOT, or the triumphantly absolutist THIS IS NOT FASHION. A dead Japanese
juniper tree stood in a cracked gold Otagiri vase. Three glittering Christmas
baubles still hung from it. The walls were done up in fuchsia and fairy lights,
and even in the dim sunshine from the tinted windows that gave onto Commercial
Street, the paint-work looked marked and tatty. I cultivated this unkempt look. Nixie wasn’t supposed to be like the other women’s
magazines. Let them keep their spotless lobbies and their smug Eames chairs. When
it comes right down to editorial choices, I would rather have a bright staff
and a dim lobby.
    Clarissa,
my features editor, came through the doors just after me. We kissed once,
twice, three times—we’d been friends since school—and she hooked her arm around
mine as we took the stairs together. The editorial floor was right at the top
of the building. We were halfway up before I realized what was wrong with
Clarissa.
    “Clarissa,
you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes.”
    She
smirked.
    “So
would you be, if you’d met yesterday’s man.”
    “Oh Clarissa. What am I going to do with you?”
    “Pay
rise, strong coffee, paracetamol.”
    She
beamed as she ticked off the points on her fingers. I reminded myself that
Clarissa did not have some of the wonderful things I had in my life, such as my
beautiful son Batman, and that she was therefore almost certainly less
fulfilled than I was.
    It
was a 10:30 A.M. start for my junior staff, bless them, and none of them were
in yet. Up on the editorial floor, the cleaners were still in. They were
hoovering, and dusting desktops, and turning upside down all the framed photos
of my staff’s awful boyfriends, to prove they’d dusted under them. This was the
grin-and-bear-it part of editing Nixie. At Vogue or Marie Claire, one’s
editorial staff would be at their desks by eight, dressed in Chloé and sipping
green tea. On the other hand, they wouldn’t still be there at midnight
scrawling CECI N’EST PAS PRÊT-À-PORTER on a sample box they were returning to a
venerable Paris fashion house.
    Clarissa
sat on the corner of my desk and I sat behind it, and we looked out over the
open plan at the gang of black faces spiriting away yesterday’s fabric swatches
and Starbucks cups.
    We
talked about the issue we were closing. The ad-sales people had done unusually
well that month—perhaps the spiraling cost of street drugs had forced them to
spend more time in the office—and we realized we had more editorial material
than space. I had a “Real Life” feature I really thought should go in—a profile
of a woman who was trying to get out of Baghdad—and Clarissa had a piece on a
new kind of orgasm you could apparently only get with the boss. We talked about
which of them we would run with. I was only half concentrating. I texted Andrew, to see how he was doing.
    The
flatscreen at our end of the floor was showing BBC News 24 with the sound down.
They were running a segment on the war. Smoke was rising above one of the
countries involved. Don’t ask me which—I’d lost track by that stage. The war
was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and
they’d grown up together. At first both of them were a huge shock and demanded
constant attention but as each year went by, they became more autonomous and
one could start to take one’s eye off them for extended periods. Sometimes a
particular event would cause me momentarily to look at one or the other of
them—my son, or the war—with my full attention, and at times like these I would
always think, Gosh, haven’t you