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extravagant cool, with the glitz of music, fashion and entertainment increasingly drawn there as if by the force of a giant pink and ice-blue magnet.”
    There. She would rephrase it and start with a bit of color. The phone rang. It was Melissa, the PR girl, “just asking” how she was getting on with the article and checking that she was coming to Pierre Ferramo’s “little gathering.” Olivia tried to type with one hand, the phone tucked under her chin, desperately waiting for a gap between sentences which never came. No sooner had she got rid of Melissa than the phone rang again. This time it was the commissioning editor from Elan, in a leisurely mood, wanting to talk more about the OceansApart: the angle, the length, the style, people who might be good for interviews. It was nearly five o’clock. It was hopeless, hopeless. Why the fuck had she got herself into this mess? She was doomed—doomed to write articles beginning: “Suddenly there are more hats everywhere!” She would never be allowed out of the office again.

Chapter 6
     
    p. 31 B ack in London, in the Sunday Times office, Barry Wilkinson was pacing in front of the big old-fashioned clock, cursing Olivia.
    He watched, furious, as the second hand clicked towards eleven o’clock, poised to pick up the phone.
    “Okay, the silly cow’s flunked. We’re going to have to run the standby.”
    Barry’s deputy burst into the room brandishing a printout. “She’s filed it!”
    “And?” said Barry, witheringly.
    “It’s great,” said the deputy.
    “Humph,” said Barry.
     
    Meanwhile, Olivia too had been glancing furiously at the clock as she tried to get ready in a negative amount of time. Why did people in America do everything so bloody early? Lunch at noon. Dinner at seven. It was like being back in 1960s Worksop except that she was headed for a party hosted by either a perfumier slash producer or a terrorist, depending whether she was mad or not.
    She was ready within minutes. Eight years earlier, as part of the Rachel-to-Olivia metamorphosis, she had made one supreme effort to change herself from plump to thin, to arm herself with a great body as a useful tool in life. What had startled her was how p. 32 differently the world had treated her old plump self and her new thin self. It was then that she realized she could manipulate reactions. If you wanted to create a stir and have everyone notice you, that wasn’t so hard. You just wore something very small and attention-seeking, like a wannabe movie star does at a premiere. If you wanted no one even to realize you were there: ill-fitting jeans with hankies in the pockets, flat shoes and a baggy sweatshirt, no makeup, glasses, and hair all over the place. She became, in her instinctive way, a master of disguise. Dressing was all about uniforms and codes. People didn’t look much beyond that outside Worksop, until you got to know them, if you ever got that far.
     
    Tonight, she decided, she needed a look which was attractive, but not so tarty as to offend any possible Muslim sensibility (tricky), and shoes which enabled one to walk or at least stand still without getting blisters. She had packed her rich, attention-seeking uniform (designer slippy things, enough posh jewelry to carry off some flashier fakes) and also her usual equipment: pepper-spray pen, spyglass, hatpin (an old fail-safe of her mother’s to counter would-be assailants) and survival tin, of course.
    After a very small number of attempts, she arrived at a simple pale slip dress and a Pucci wrap to cover her shoulders. She thought about covering her head as well, then realized she was getting carried away. She gave her reflection a rousing, almost cheerleader-like smile, and called downstairs for a cab. At the last moment, she stuffed the hatpin, pepper spray and survival tin into the Louis Vuitton clutch along with her miniature address book, just in case.
    She flicked on CNN before she left to see if anything exciting had