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ultramarine crested with crimson and gold where the burnished sun blazed on the wave tops and sent them crashing into the gloomy troughs deepening to a dark malevolent indigo .
    He hung on the final word, deepening his voice in comic pomposity even as he raised his eyebrows. INN -digo, he boomed.
    Of course you know why I didn’t notice the sea? It was because I spent two weeks with my head&mdash ; Well, where my husband’s head was is between me and him.
    We both giggled helplessly and rolled around on the bed and Charlie, dear Charlie, was conceived.
    I pushed open 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 on to Commercial Street, the paintwork 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 conies 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 through mine as we took the stairs together. The editorial floor was right at the top of the building. We were halfway up before I realised 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 AM start for my junior staff, bless them, and none of them was 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 Ghloe and sipping green tea. On the other hand, they wouldn’t still be there at midnight scrawling CECI N’EST PAS PRET-A-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 Star bucks cups.
    We talked about the issue we were closing. The ad sales people had done unusually well that month -perhaps the spiralling cost of street drugs had forced them to spend more time in the office—and we realised 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 2,4 with the sound down. They were running a segment on the war. Smoke was rising above one of the countries