FIVE

How can Hollywood people all be so flaky? How?

As soon as I got back to the UK, I looked up all my old contacts and sent off a stack of emails. But I haven’t got anything out of it: not a lunch, not a meeting, not a phone number. Every single one of my former customers who worked in film seems to have moved jobs or had a nervous breakdown or something. The only one left was Genna Douglas, who was a customer of mine at Barneys and had the hugest collection of backless dresses. But after getting no reply, I Googled her, and it turns out she left her job at Universal a year ago to start a beauty salon. She’s invented some treatment involving electric currents and honey and has been sued twice by disgruntled patients but is ‘actively seeking investors’. Hmm. Don’t think I’ll be pursuing that one.

I’m so disappointed. I thought I’d be swimming in contacts. I thought I’d be fixing up lunches at Spago and meetings with producers, and saying to Luke casually, ‘Oh, are you going to be on the Paramount lot this afternoon? I’ll see you there.’

Anyway. On the plus side, I still have Sage. A genuine, copper-bottomed, A-list contact. And I haven’t been sitting around doing nothing. I’ve started working on some looks for her, and I really feel I’m tuning into her personality. Her world.

‘So, look.’ I spread a pale-blue brocade coat out on the bed for Suze to see. ‘Isn’t this fab?’

Suze is my oldest friend in the world, and we’re lolling on her bed in Hampshire with gossip magazines, just like we used to in the old days when we shared a flat in Fulham. Except that in those days, it meant lolling on an old Indian bedspread covered in cigarette burns and smelling of joss sticks. Whereas today we’re lolling on a massive, ancient four-poster bed, with silk drapes and tapestry and wooden panelling that apparently Charles I carved his name in once. Or do I mean Charles II? Some Charles or other, anyway.

Suze is eye-wateringly posh. She lives in a stately home and ever since her grandfather-in-law died she’s called Lady Cleath-Stuart, which sounds quite terrifyingly grown-up to me. Lady Cleath-Stuart sounds like a ninety-year-old battle-axe swishing at people with a riding crop and barking, ‘What? What?’ Not that I would ever tell Suze this. Anyway, she’s pretty much the opposite of that. She’s tall and leggy with long blonde hair, which she’s now chewing in an absent kind of way.

‘Lovely!’ she says, fingering the coat. ‘Really gorgeous.’

‘It’s a great lightweight coat that Sage can just shrug on over jeans or whatever. It’ll really suit the LA climate. And then she can wear flats or those boots I showed you before …’

‘Amazing collar.’ She touches the grey frayed velvet.

‘I know,’ I say triumphantly. ‘I found it in this tiny boutique. The label’s new. It’s Danish. Now, look at this skirt.’