Simply Divine by Wendy Holden Page B

money as well.
    Oddly enough, Champagne never seemed to encounter any of her rivals. Jane had two theories as to why. Either they all avoided her or, as was far more likely, Champagne spent night after night with them in Brown's, Tramp and, the Met Bar but could recall absolutely nothing of it afterwards. Champagne's memory, Jane considered, made a goldfish look like Stephen Hawking.
    Not that this in any way held her back. No breakfast TV programme was complete without at least a reference to her; there was talk of her kicking off at Wembley, and rumours were beginning to circulate of a planned tribute in Madame Tussaud's. 'I hope that's true,' Jane said to Valentine. 1 might get more information for the column out of a waxwork.'
    'What we need,' said Josh, 'is the new sex.' The Monday features meeting had begun.
    'You're telling me,' simpered Valentine, examining his cuffs and pursing his lips in his best John Inman fashion.
    'You know what I mean,' Josh snapped. 'I'm talking about what's the latest hip thing. The new rock and roll,
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    the new black, the new brown, the new whatever. What's really, really hot just now?'
    'Well, this office for a start,' said Valentine huffily. 'The air conditioning is a joke.' He flapped a plump hand about in front of his perspiring face.
    Josh took no notice. 'Is being common the new smart?' he wondered aloud. 'Are men the new women? Is staying in the new going out?' He looked round the table. 'Where's Lulu? There must be something fashiony we could do. Are low heels the new stilettos? Is short the new long? Is underwear the new outerwear?'
    'Lulu's still in bed,' said Jane, who had received a telephone call from the absent fashion editor to this effect a few minutes before. 'Her alarm didn't go off.' She paused. 'So,' she asked tartly, 'is absence the new presence? Is staying in bed the new getting up?'
    'Poor Lulu needs her rest,' said Josh, leaping, as usual, to the fashion editor's defence. 'She needs to rest. She gets ill very easily, poor dear.'
    'You're telling me,' said Valentine. 'She's certainly the only person I've ever known claim they had bunions in their ears.'
    'Oh, shut up,' said Josh. 'Let's concentrate on the matter in hand. What's hot, what's hip. Is death the new life? Is being fat the new thin? Is,' his eyes widened as if knocked sideways by the brilliance of his own train of thought, 'rock and roll the new rock and roll?'
    As she entered the sandwich shop at lunchtime, trying to psych herself up to a mayonnaise-free, butter-free and most of all fun-free lettuce leaf roll, Jane spotted Valentine. He was muttering darkly in a corner with Ann, the deputy editor of Blissful Country Homes. A monthly celebration of Agas, applique screens and City bankers downshifting to
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    barn conversions in Bicester, Blissful, as it was known, was a stablemate in the same magazine company as Gorgeous.
    Meeting her gaze, Valentine rolled his eyes and beckoned Jane over. 'I've just been telling Ann about Josh. How he can be so rude to me, considering the strain I have been under, I can't imagine.'
    'Strain?' asked Jane, relieved that she wasn't the only one suffering at the moment. There was nothing like someone else's woes to take one's mind off one's own. She looked at Valentine's shining, agitated face. 'Why, what's the matter?'
    'It's Algy, my cairn terrier,' wailed Valentine. 'I went away last weekend and put him in a kennel where he got in with all the wrong dogs. He now refuses to come tq heel and poos all over the house. It's very upsetting.'
    'I know just how Valentine feels,' Ann said sternly to a nonplussed Jane. 'One of my tabbies isn't well at the moment. It's dreadful. I have to inject my poor pussy twice a day.'
    Never had a day been so designed to test Jane's patience to the full. She returned from the sandwich shop to find a letter from the BBC asking Champagne to go on Desert Island Discs and recommending she choose a mixture of contemporary and classical music. Jane