Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [48]
Relief soothed the sting of Lisa’s innuendo. In the short time Ashling had been working at Colleen, constant anxiety about her lack of ideas had gnawed at her. Then Ted suggested that she think about what she’d like from a magazine and suddenly avenues opened up. Anything to do with tarot, reiki, feng shui, affirmations, angels, white witches and spells piqued her interest.
Jack’s door opened again and everyone flung themselves protectively on their cigarettes.
‘Lisa?’ Jack called. ‘Can I have a word?’
‘Certainly.’ Elegantly she got up from her desk, wondering what he wanted to talk to her about. Could it be that he was going to ask her out?
When he instructed her to shut the door her excitement mounted. And instantly disappeared when he said apologetically, ‘There’s no easy way of saying this.’
He paused, his handsome face shuttered by discomfort.
Lisa said coolly, ‘Go on.’
‘We’re not making the advertising,’ he said, baldly. ‘Nobody’s biting. We’re only up to –’ He checked the memo on his desk, ‘– twelve per cent of what we’d projected.’
Lisa twitched with fear. This had never happened before. Though they’d always negotiated off ratecard, designers and cosmetic companies had been falling over themselves to take out full-page ads when she’d been editor of Femme. And as everyone in magazines knows, the income generated from selling ads is far in excess of that garnered from cover-price sales. At least it should be. If companies can’t be persuaded that a particular publication is the right vehicle in which to advertise their product, it goes under. Panic swept up Lisa in a prickly wave. How would she ever live down the failure of a stillborn magazine?
‘It’s early days,’ she tried.
Reluctantly he had to shake his head. It wasn’t, they both knew that. Before Colleens editorial staff had arrived, Margie had been doing pre-production work for over a month: interested advertisers had had plenty of time to bite. Lisa burned with humiliation. She wanted this man to respect and desire her and instead he was bound to think she was a failure.
‘But don’t they know… ?’ she couldn’t stop herself from blurting.
‘Know what?’
She tried to reformulate and couldn’t. ‘Know that I’m the editor?’
‘Your name carries a lot of weight,’ Jack said, tactfully, and when she saw how unpleasant he too was finding this, it soothed the sting. ‘But new marketplace, new audience, no track record…’
‘I thought you said that Margie was a Rottweiler. That she could persuade God to place an ad.’ When in doubt, blame someone else. A motto that had served Lisa well thus far in her career.
Margie’s great at getting ads from Irish companies,’ Jack explained. ‘But the London office is handling the international cosmetic and fashion houses.
‘Where are we at?’ he asked. ‘What kind of definite features have we? We need to throw a couple of bones to the London office, for them to show the potential ad-placers.’
Lisa’s face was a white mask as she searched around in her head. Definite features! She’d been in this fucking job less than two weeks, thrown in at the deep end, in a strange country. She’d been knocking herself out trying to get a handle on things, and already they wanted to know definite features!
‘Just a rough idea,’ Jack said, with heartbreaking gentleness. ‘Sorry to do this to you.’
‘Why don’t we all go to the boardroom for a progress meeting?’ Lisa suggested, an unresponsive wobbliness about her knees. And to think that everyone thought editing a magazine was glamorous. It was the most terrifying, sleepless-night-inducing job, with no certainty, no respite. Just trying to make the figures every month. And as soon as you’d strained and sweated yourself to the limit to do so, you had to turn around and start all over again. All you were was a glorified salesman. In an attempt at dynamism she swept from Jack’s office, but her leg muscles were pulpy and she had a sheen of perspiration above her lip. ‘Boardroom, everyone, now!’
All the people who didn’t work on Colleen sniggered, delighted that they weren’t being