She stopped and looked at him.
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah. On the table in the living room.’
‘Oh, God, I didn’t realise. I didn’t see it. Sorry.’
‘Apology accepted,’ he said, so loftily that she immediately wanted to snap at him again.
But she refrained and, once in the lift, offered him a compliment on the portrait instead.
‘You weren’t working from a photograph?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘From here.’ He put a hand on his heart and all her residual irritation faded clean away.
It didn’t return until, washed and brushed up, they were in the cab heading for Alfonso’s Shoreditch consultancy office.
‘So this is like a clothes shop?’ said Jason. ‘Where we’re going?’
‘No,’ said Jenna. ‘Alfonso is a stylist. He doesn’t sell clothes. He suggests looks for you.’
‘What’s the point of that? Why not cut out the middleman and just go shopping? If we must,’ he added in a sulky undertone.
‘Jason,’ said Jenna, slipping without realising it into a professional lecturing tone, ‘all successful people in the public eye need styling. The days when you could get away with wearing what you thought looked good on you are gone. With so many magazines and papers selling copies on the back of pictures of celebrities who made bad style choices, you can’t afford to get caught out like that any more. Believe me, if you put a fashion foot wrong, it will be all the way around the world before you can blink. That’s the frightening reality of modern celebrity.’
‘Yeah, but it’s shit, though. Just because something’s shit doesn’t mean you have to go along with it.’
Jenna couldn’t even begin to formulate an answer to this, not least because, somewhere near the core of her consciousness, she had a nagging feeling that he could be right.
Instead, she chose to bluster. ‘Trust me, Jason. This is what I do. I know what I’m talking about. Think about the pop music you grew up with. Which acts broke through the quickest? Was it the most talented? Was it the ones with the best songs? No. It was the ones with the strongest style. The Spice Girls, Take That, Britney and all those others. The public love their stars to be instantly recognisable, to be unique and yet also easy to copy. Madonna pulled that trick off brilliantly. So did Michael Jackson.’
‘What about Susan Boyle? What about Johnny Rotten?’
‘Johnny Rotten was styled to within an inch of his life,’ she said, on surer ground now. ‘Believe you me. But that’s an interesting thought. We go left field, do something nobody’s expecting. I’ll discuss it with Alfonso.’
‘You’d better not make me look like a tosser. I won’t be made to look like a tosser.’
‘Why would I want that?’ Jenna snuggled her head into his shoulder. ‘I still have to fancy you, don’t I?’
‘I should bl
oody well hope so. And don’t forget. There’ll be payback for this later.’
Somehow she didn’t think threats of payback were meant to make her feel quite so hot and bothered, but this one did.
She was still tingling mildly when the taxi disgorged them and they mounted the narrow stairs to Alfonso’s office in a converted warehouse.
The floor on which he held his premises was an open-plan space filled with small business units. In one, a group of women cut cloth and worked at sewing machines; in the next, a younger mixed group sat on a circular sofa huddled over iPads. Inspirational posters and strangely-clad tailors’ dummies were rushed past until Jenna located the unit she needed to get to.
‘Alfonso,’ she called, and a short, dark man in an outsize pinstripe shirt and neon yellow skinny jeans burst out from behind a screen, arms spread wide.
‘Oh my God, you are real,’ he cried, tackling her into a hug. ‘I thought someone had cloned your voice pattern or something when you made the appointment before. I didn’t dare to hope.’
He stood back, laughing all over a good-natured, pointy-bearded face.
‘Still a goddess,’ he said.
‘Still a bullshitter,’ she grinned back. ‘But fantastic to see you, all the same. I’ve watched your progress from behind my desk in LA. You’ve got some of the hottest clients in town. Congratulations on the Girl Crush gig.’