Sins

‘No, of course you mustn’t. I wouldn’t want you to.’

The approving smile Dan gave her was, after all, all the reward she needed.

‘It’s a very nice little piece, Ella, now that you’ve polished it up properly.’ The travel editor’s voice was patronising but Ella didn’t care. At least, she did, but she wasn’t going to let her disappointment over the way she had had to water down her carefully crafted article on Venice, to suit the travel editor’s demands that it be ‘more glamorous, darling–Vogue readers adore glamour; it’s positively essential to them’.

‘It will go in next month’s issue along with some of Oliver Charters’ photographs from the Comte de Livron’s Masquerade Ball.’

Dismissed from the travel editor’s office, Ella made her way back to the cubbyhole of an office she shared with some of the other editorial assistants. Getting her travel piece actually in print, and with her name as a byline, was a huge step forward and she mustn’t let herself dwell on her wish that the editor had not cut the two paragraphs lovingly detailing the work that went into making Venice’s gondolas, and the simple lives of these boatbuilders, their skill passed down the generations, contrasting them with their glamorous passengers, being ferried from one glittering occasion to another.

Ella’s heart was pounding, but she was used to that now. It was one of the side effects of the pills prescribed for her by the diet doctor, like the sudden compulsion to chatter, the feeling of restless energy that had her dashing everywhere, and, of course, not wanting to eat.

Which reminded her. As she sat down at her desk Ella reached into her handbag for her bottle of pills, putting them on her desk and then going to fill the office kettle to make herself a cup of tea.

Oliver hesitated outside the assistant editors’ office. He’d just left the fashion editor, who had been praising him for the photographs he had done for the Venice shoot, and that had made him reflect reluctantly on the part Ella had played in enabling him to get those shots.

He had been feeling guilty about Ella, and, in some inexplicable way, almost responsible for her. She was so ruddy naïve when it came to men, and he had had no right to kiss her the way he had done.

He pushed open the office door. The first thing he saw was the telltale bottle of diet pills, one pill placed ready on the desk itself–Ella’s desk. Oliver knew immediately what they were. All the models used them, and got hooked on them.

He strode across, picked up the bottle and turned to Ella, who stiffened in outrage, trapped in the corner by the kettle as he shook the bottle at her and demanded in angry disbelief, ‘Don’t tell me that you are stupid enough to be taking these?’

‘It’s none of your business what I do,’ Ella told him. He was still holding her precious bottle of pills and she desperately wanted him to put them down so that she could retrieve them.

‘Do you know what these are and what they do–apart from allowing idiotic girls to half starve themselves?’ Oliver challenged her. ‘They’re amphetamines,’ he continued without allowing her to answer him. ‘Speed, that’s what they’re called, because that is exactly what they do: speed you up. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, you talk twenty to the dozen, they speed up your heart and your life, and if you’re unlucky–and plenty are–they speed it up so much that it’s over almost before it’s begun and you die young–of a heart attack.’

‘You’re just making that up,’ Ella defended herself, not wanting to admit how much his outburst had shocked her, all the more so because she so clearly recognised the symptoms he had described.

‘No, I’m not. And dying of a heart attack is what you get if you’re lucky. This stuff sends some people mental, paranoid. I thought you were supposed to be intelligent,’ he told Ella with disgust as he flung the bottle into the waste-paper bin.

Immediately Ella rushed across to rescue her precious tablets but, realising what she was going to do, Oliver got there first, standing over the bin and then grabbing her to hold her off, his expression suddenly changing from impatience to grim anger.

Before Ella could stop him he had wrenched up her top to expose her pride and joy, her ribcage with all her ribs clearly on display. It was unfortunate that her breasts were still so large, but she was sure that she could get them smaller if she just kept on dieting.

Furious with Oliver, she tried to pull free of his hold, but he was manhandling her towards the mirror on the wall, holding her in front of his own body as he positioned her before the mirror so that her bare midriff was visible in the reflection.

‘Have you seen what you’re doing to yourself?’ he asked her savagely.

Of course she had, and she was proud of what she had achieved.

‘You look like a skeleton, like someone who has just come out of Belsen.’

It was an awful thing to say to her–comparing her with the poor people on whom atrocities had been committed in the German death camps, and Ella wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

Shaking with temper she threw back at him, ‘Well, at least I don’t look like an elephant, so if you and Laura want to find someone to make fun of and joke about behind their backs, it won’t be me any more, will it?’ She was literally shaking with anger, her face red and her eyes bright with emotion.

Oliver released her and stared at her in disbelief. ‘You’ve done this to yourself because some silly model made a bitchy remark about you?’

‘You agreed with her.’ Ella was beyond caring now about what she was revealing about herself.

‘What?’

‘You agreed with her when she said that I wouldn’t be able to diet. You laughed with her.’

Oliver was shaking his head. ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t care what you think you overheard, I can tell you that there is no way I would ever, ever have agreed that you needed to lose weight. Do you want to know why I know that?’ When Ella didn’t say anything, he continued bitingly, ‘I know it because I just happen to think that you have–had–the most gorgeous, sexy, lush, damnably lustable-after body in the entire Vogue setup. A proper woman’s body, with curves and soft flesh and fabulous tits, the kind of woman’s body that makes a grown man want to fall on his knees and thank God for making it. And now look what you’ve done to it.’

To o angry to wait for Ella’s response, Oliver strode out of the room banging the door behind him, leaving Ella shaking with a mixture of relief and shock.

It was half an hour since Oliver had left the office and Ella was still staring into space in disbelief, her tea now cold and her diet pills, she had to assume, in Oliver’s pocket.