It's Complicated (The Agency Book 2) Read online

  “Ethan didn’t do anything. It was my fault.” I take his hat from him, reach up and place it back on his head. It only took a moment for his bald patch to turn red and shiny with the cold. I swear, if it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t survive winter. “I have to go and see how Freja’s getting on.”

  I leave him to stare after me as I walk back over the moss-lined cobbles to join Freja, Jadine, Ruby, Tom and the French film crew. The snow is falling lightly, but thankfully the clouds don’t seem heavy or dark enough to bring a deluge. Freja managed to obtain a licence to shoot our TV ad in the heart of Montmartre, with a view of the Sacre Coeur basilica in the background. Decorative iron lampposts line the street, and narrow uneven buildings with wobbly ancient walls loom at either side. On the corner there’s a café with a fluttery burgundy awning. Some of the older houses have slate roofs with little round bohemian-style windows in them. My romantic heart imagines poets and artists living there. We could be standing within yards of Paris’s next Toulouse-Lautrec or Émile Zola. My skin goosebumps at the thought. Montmartre is my kind of place. Or it would be if it were summer.

  “How are we doing?” I ask Freja.

  “We’re good. The prop looks great.”

  I stare at the huge barricade set that the production team hired from a French studio. It was constructed using wooden beams, stepladders, wine barrels, wheels, sacks, chairs and the lid of a coffin, so it has to be forklifted back and forth to our location each day of the shoot. Georgie hoped our enormous prop was a remnant from the Les Misérables movie set, but we were told it was actually last seen in a music video for a Hungarian rock band.

  “Violet, I’ve already checked this over with Ruby and Tom, but I need you to . . .” Freja’s voice registers in my ears, enters my head then disappears. I’ve tried really hard to get up to speed on the technicalities of filming over the years, with no great success. The only words I can process are a jumble of “blah blah blahs” interspersed with directions, timescales and French street names. Literally nonsense. I’m not stupid by any means, but there’s something about film production that makes me want to saw my head off with a blunt breadknife. Her voice reappears. “What do you think?”

  “Oh . . . erm . . . whatever is easiest.” Shit. I need to concentrate. Actually, I need to pull a giant monster-sized rabbit out of a very small top hat. This is my first campaign as creative director, only half the team are on board with the concept and I’m starting to wish I’d taken a copywriting job somewhere else . . . anywhere else.

  “Which bit is easiest for what?” asks Freja, her freckled nose twitching in the icy cold air. She’s wearing a huge black padded jacket, a black scarf and a black knitted cap which contrasts beautifully with her long mane of shiny coppery hair. She looks warmer than I feel.

  “I . . . erm . . . don’t understand the question.”

  Freja looks between Ruby, Tom and Jadine, then she takes me by the arm and leads me to a quiet corner with a raised cobbled pavement and decorative iron railing. She glances back over to the team for a second and then stands in front of me, shielding me from their view. “You need to focus. You’re still not on your game,” she says plainly, her eyes scanning me. “What’s up?”

  No way am I telling her I opened my big stupid mouth and destroyed my relationship after she warned me not to. “Nothing, I’m just not very good with technical stuff. I don’t really understand film production terms and techniques.”

  She looks shocked. “Violet, we spent hours in meetings last week talking about the shots I wanted to set up. I offered options and you made decisions. Were you even listening?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t understand what you were talking about, so I just nodded my head and picked whatever option I thought you wanted me to pick.”

  “Oh my god.” Her hand shoots to her brow and she laughs. “What about my shooting schedule? Did you read it?”

  “I tried to . . . but it was written in more mumbo-jumbo. Ethan used to oversee all of our ad shoots. I concentrated on writing scripts and editing. Hey, but on the plus side, you know I have complete trust that you’ll make the right choices.”

  “You don’t have a choice if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Jesus. Please, sign yourself onto a filming basics course.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll check out some courses when we get back. I promise. Now, do you have everything you need?”

  “Everything apart from the weather.” Her eyes scan me again.

  “You’re looking at me funny.”

  “I am,” she says. “That’s because there’s something else.”

  “What?” I say with a huge dollop of guilt in my voice. Evidently I need to sign up for an acting basics course too.

  “You aren’t just off your game regarding filming. You’re off your game full stop. You didn’t say two words to anybody on the train over here and you avoided dinner last night. Why?”

  “It’s nothing,” I say as sincerely as I can, but I surrender as soon as I see the look on her face and those damned raised eyebrows of hers. “Ethan and I broke up.”

  “You told him?”

  I nod and bury my head into my scarf.

  “Damn it, I knew you would.” She shakes her head, and her eyes scold me. “I’m sorry, that’s not helpful. What on earth happened?”

  I glance over to the rest of the team before I speak. They all look busy, not that it matters as they can’t hear us. “It was awful. He was so angry with me. I’ve never seen him . . .” My voice shakes and I quickly shut down the memory before I start blubbing again. “Then, over the weekend, he wouldn’t answer my calls or reply to my texts.”

  “He’ll come around.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “True,” she says candidly. “But he’s a good guy who’s had his ego battered, that’s all. Now . . .” She takes hold of both my arms and bends her knees slightly so she can look directly at me. “Listen to me this time. Give him space. Don’t pressure him, or plead your case, or do that thing you do when you worry about everything bad that could – but won’t – happen. Just leave him to work things through by himself. If you chase him, you’ll piss him off.”

  “You knowing me this well is really quite creepy. I feel like you’ve been in my life for a decade as opposed to a week.”

  “Yes, and I told you when we first met that I liked you and we were going to be friends.” She smiles widely, then shivers as the wind rushes between us, carrying a flurry of snowflakes with it. “I’m a giver, remember? I get to know people quickly, get under their skin and find out how they operate. Then I give them amazing advice that they should follow.” She gives me a pointed look.

  I mentally kick my own arse. If I’d listened to Freja, none of this would have happened. I don’t even know why she wants to be my friend. Who’d want to hang around with someone who inflicts this much drama on themselves? I’ve always been a chaos-and-crap magnet, and there’s no sign of that changing any time soon.

  “Okay, you’re right. I need to pull myself together so we can get through the shoot.” My hands start to feel numb so I tuck them into my pockets. “And as hard as it is, I’ll give Ethan space.”

  “At this point you really don’t have a choice.” She links her arm through mine and leads me back to the group. “This is life. All you have to do is breathe and believe you’ll get through it. Everything will turn out the way it’s supposed to, you’ll see.”

  “What if I give him too much space? What if he doesn’t come back?”

  “Don’t overthink it, honey,” she says, practically through gritted teeth.

  I mentally kick myself again. “Fine. I will cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  “And I’ll be at your side, making sure you don’t blow up the bridge when you come to it.” I give her a look. “Come on, we both know it’s likely.”

  * * *

  We wrap up the morning’s shoot and head back to our hotel for a breakfast of fresh fruit, cured meat and croissants. A
ll eight of us are staying at the Lyric Hotel near the Louvre, which has gorgeous, modern furnishings matching the colourful artisan macarons sold in pretty pastel boxes in the hotel lobby. After breakfast, we head downstairs to a hired room of the hotel to select models for our ads. I’m the first to arrive.

  “Violet, can I have a quick word?” says Tamara Lockwood, our client account manager and Ethan’s feisty ex-girlfriend from their days at UCL. Tamara is petite with dark hair cut into a choppy asymmetric bob. She has what I would call “tight” facial features: high cheekbones, a small pointed nose and a thin, wide mouth. She’s tough, smart and beautiful. I was insanely worried about her working at Tribe, but thankfully, my hysterically uncontrollable jealousy was quashed last week when I learned she was engaged to a very good-looking, and very rich, stock market trader.

  “Sure, what’s up?” I say with apprehension, catching a worried glint in her eyes. We leave the room as the others start to enter, retreating to a quiet corner of the corridor decorated with a floor-length painting of a ballet dancer.

  “It’s really hard for me to tell you this,” she says. My stomach tightens. Not again.

  “Tamara, whatever it is, please just tell me. I’m tired of people approaching me as if I’m a fire-breathing dragon about to incinerate them.”

  “It’s not that,” she says. I believe her. Tamara has never been afraid to say precisely what she thinks, which is why her relationship with Ethan amounted to years of incessant fighting interspersed with a few random happy moments. “I’ve been thinking about the ad, and talking to the client. Unfortunately Ms Oaks is having second thoughts about the ‘Vive la Révolution’ idea. She’s worried it’ll come across as too violent.”

  “What? She can’t change her mind now.”

  “She’s the client, so she can,” Tamara says. I feel a surge of irritation at her directness. I’ve never worked with an account manager who appreciated the amount of blood, sweat and tears that goes into creating successful ads, but it’s much worse when it’s your first major campaign as a creative director and your life is completely out of control.

  “You agreed the ad and you were responsible for presenting the idea to the client, Tamara. It’s no good coming to me in the middle of a shoot saying you’re having second thoughts. If you had doubts, the time to tell me would have been a week ago. Do you know how much work we’ve put into this? All the creative teams have slogged their guts out on this campaign. Georgie and Max have already produced preliminary artwork, and Freja has spent a huge chunk of the client’s budget on the barricade set, as well as film location licences. Then there’s travel and accommodation for us all. No, it’s too late to backtrack.”

  “Violet.” There’s a frosty bite to Tamara’s tone. “I supported your idea last week because I trusted you’d find a way to make it fit the client’s brief. Belle Oaks is a luxury brand built on traditional craftsmanship. It’s not revolutionary. Nevertheless, your voiceover copy has strength and intelligence, so I was happy to go along with it. But, after seeing the set this morning, it seems you’re letting Georgie and Max run this in the wrong direction. It doesn’t look good and I don’t think it will work.”

  “Max is your friend,” I say, wondering how she could be so disloyal to him.

  Her olive eyes narrow. “Don’t think for one minute that I wouldn’t say this to Max’s face, or to Georgie’s.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you would.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks indignantly.

  I think back to the many complaints I’ve heard about her from Ethan and Max over the years. “It means you’ve always put yourself first, Tamara. You’re not a team player.”

  Her facial features tighten. All except her nostrils, which I’ve just noticed are too big for her face. In a kind of rodent way. “This is work, Violet. It’s professional, not personal. I put my clients first, because that’s my job. “

  “And it’s my job to support my team and their work.” This feels more than just a run-of-the-mill client-versus-creative spat now. I feel like she’s in attack mode.

  She shakes her head. “No, Violet. It’s your job to create adverts that fit the brief I give you. If you’re prioritising personal loyalties ahead of that, then maybe you’re not ready to be creative director.”

  Her knife-sharp words cut straight through to my insecurities. “The ad will fit the brief. I have faith in my people.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Violet, but they’re not all your people.”

  “I know that, but they’re all in the creative department.”

  “That may be so, but you’re not united on this. Tom Vance has spoken to me. He said you completely dismissed his and Ruby’s idea in favour of something a member of the art department dreamed up. I’ve looked at Tom’s work and I think it would have worked better.”

  I know violence is wrong, but if I find out Tom has gone over my head again, I’m going to punch him in the throat. And as for Tamara? Well, let’s just say I hope her new stockbroker fiancé never leaves the cap off the toothpaste, because she’ll rip him to shreds.

  I force a smile. “Thank you, Tamara, but I’m confident my team will deliver work that fits all the requirements of the brief. If you want to change the brief, then I’ll need it in writing.”

  Her lips purse. “If that’s how you want to proceed.”

  “It is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have models to audition.”

  16

  I’VE BEEN DREADING THIS MOMENT all week. To say I’m bricking it would be an understatement. As we arrive at Belle Oaks’s Paris boutique on the Rue Saint-Honoré I feel like I need to book a couple of hours on the loo.

  The pre-production film work and still photography for Belle Oaks’s advertising campaign has taken almost four days to complete, and it’s a wonder the team is in one piece. Tamara Lockwood has barely spoken to me since our disagreement on Monday. Georgie has had spats with Tom, Jadine, Max and Pascal, the French cameraman who accidentally trod on her foot. It snowed again on Monday afternoon, rained on Tuesday, and there was so much wind yesterday that our tricolour flew off the pole and got tangled up in a lamppost. The model fell off the barricade twice and got a splinter in her arse. Then, worst of all, I am now one thousand per cent convinced neither print nor TV ad fits our brief.

  It was quarter to three yesterday afternoon when the real panic set in. Or rather when the panic galloped in, pulling chariots ridden by the merry hordes of hell. But then, if I’m being honest, I’ve had the same sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since I made the decision to run with Georgie’s “Vive la Révolution” concept. I’m sure Ethan would have pulled the ad the second he knew it had gone awry, but “ideas” were always his domain, not mine. I’m a brilliant copywriter but a hopeless leader – a fraud. Someone who only got her job because she’s sleeping with her boss.

  I follow everyone up to a meeting room above the boutique. Coffee has been prepared, as well as a mouth-watering selection of cakes and pastries. Well, they would be mouth-watering if I didn’t feel ready to puke up my insides. My teammates load up their plates with food, but I make do with a glass of iced water.

  When Belle Oaks and her French assistant, Amélie, enter the room, my nausea reaches full throttle. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was suffering from stress. I may need an actual chill pill. I take a huge gulp of water and consider booking a doctor’s appointment when I get home.

  Ruby and Tom are seated to my left, then in a semicircle to my right sit Freja, Jadine, Max, Georgie, Tamara, Amélie, and finally Belle. I glance at Max, who is gazing moonily at Belle’s pretty ingénue. This further sets my nerves on edge. If he was sitting closer to me I’d nip him. I summon telepathic superpowers I don’t have and will him to stop staring at her. He persists until she finally meets his gaze. Then he gives her a weird smile and she mouths, “Drop dead”. Oh god, please let him take the hint.

  After a few minutes of small talk, Belle Oaks, who’s a small wo
man of around fifty, with rich auburn hair and bright green eyes, asks me to begin the presentation. Her harsh gravelly voice doesn’t fit at all with her elegant indigo suit – probably Dior or Chanel – with two oversized crystal brooches on each lapel and coordinated choker necklace. Her accent isn’t as posh as Georgie’s, but it is effortlessly commanding.

  I let Tom, aka designated-man-who-knows-about-scart-leads, connect my laptop to the screen in the meeting room. I wish death on the monitor, or my laptop, but after a moment the screen flickers and up pops Tribe’s logo. It’s now or never. Time to get roasted.

  “Just click when you’re ready,” says Tom, pushing the laptop towards me.

  I take a very deep breath and click the play arrow. “It will be better with music and a voiceover, of course,” I say to the room before the video begins. We all watch silently as the mostly soundless ad plays out. The ordeal lasts precisely one minute and fifty-eight point three-five seconds.

  “I don’t get it,” says Belle. All of my internal organs pass out, but I should have expected Belle to reach the exact same conclusion as the rest of us. “What does this . . . this . . . homage to the Reign of Terror have to do with my high-end luxury leather handbags?” Her voice is so loud that it makes blood rush to my ears. She speaks to the room, but then she turns and addresses Tamara. “I told you our USPs were excellence of design, sumptuousness of Italian leather, and the brand’s roots in both English and French craftsmanship. I see none of that in this monstrosity!”

  Tamara’s lips thin to a tense line and I instantly feel like shit. There’s no love lost between Tamara and me, but this isn’t her fault. She tried to tell me. “We wanted to instil a sense of the modern.”

  Belle picks up her nude handbag and slams it down on the table in front of her. “My designs were inspired by La Belle Époque of the late nineteenth century and, if I’m not mistaken, the French Revolution was a hundred years before that.”