It was now Friday; she was going away for the weekend. Neither her mother nor her son could be relied upon to remember to buy food, or to call plumbers when pipes leaked. How was she supposed to perfect her plans for McGuire when she was constantly distracted by trivia like this?

Straightening her back, and gazing icily at the view of leaden January sky from her window, Lindsay sat practicing froideur for a few minutes. The way to deal with the McGuires of this world, she had decided, was with an arctic and powerful disdain. She tried to recall the demeanor and techniques of the grandes dames who had still dominated the fashion world when she first began her own career, fifteen years before.

As a breed, these Vreelands were now almost extinct: vestiges of their chilly elegance, of their effortless tyranny, could be detected in certain of their descendants, but such qualities did not come naturally to Lindsay herself. As far as she could remember, of course, these women had been insulated from anything resembling real life. They presumably had bevies of drivers, maids, housekeepers, and cooks; their husbands had been nonexistent or invisible; none, as far as Lindsay could remember, had had children, and if they did, the children were exemplary and had long since left the nest.

I am fashion editor of a prestigious newspaper, Lindsay said to herself. I hold down a much-envied job, which is widely if erroneously perceived as glamorous—whatever that means. I am an independent working woman. I can be a grande dame anytime I feel like it. I am off to the Paris collections on Monday. Watch out, Rowland McGuire, because I also understand office politics, and I am about to grind you underfoot.

Lindsay looked down at the feet in question, on which she usually wore blessedly comfortable black canvas high-top sneakers. Today they were clad in sleek Manolo Blahnik black pumps with three-inch heels. The shoes, eye-stoppingly elegant and heart-stoppingly expensive, pinched her toes. Her son Tom called them her executive tart shoes.

Lindsay practiced another blood-freezing glance at the window, screwed up the lists, lobbed them hard at the waste-paper basket, and missed. The truth of it was, she was not cut out to be a grande dame. First, small and boyish-looking, she had the wrong physique. Second, there was no disregarding the facts of her life: she was a thirty-eight-year-old single parent who lived in a chaotic West London apartment with a mother who was born impossible and a seventeen-year-old son who was about, she hoped, to emerge from the hormone storm of adolescence: both mother and son trusted her implicitly to pay all the bills and solve every crisis in life.

Tom was fiendishly clever, but taciturn. For the past three years his normal mode of conversation had been a grunt. Since autumn, however, he had in rapid succession acquired a girlfriend, had the flu, and discovered Dostoevsky. The combination of love, literature, and the recent 102-degree fever had restored his voice. Lindsay was now harangued about ethics as she tried hastily to dust or cook. Louise, her mother, who drifted through life on a cloud of purposeful optimism, said this was a breakthrough; Lindsay was less certain.