"How to lose a man in ten days," said Bronte Keane.
"Sorry?"
"That's the piece. Four thousand words, first person, funny, and I want it filed a week on Sunday." Bronte did not look up from her screen. "You pick a man. Any man. You go out with him, and for ten days you do every single thing that women are told not to do — the whole catalogue, the clinginess, the mother, the pet names, all of it — and you write down what happens."
Immy Shaw stood in the doorway of an office on the fourth floor of a building in Farringdon and tried to work out whether she had been fired.
"Why?"
"Because it's June and traffic's down eleven per cent and I have got a features budget the size of a sandwich," said Bronte. "And because you have written twenty-two months of Immy Tries It and the only one that ever did a number was the one where you did a week of cold water swimming and cried in a lake."
"That's not — "
"It got four hundred thousand," said Bronte. "Four hundred thousand, Imogen. Do you know what your ballet one got?"
"I don't want to know what my ballet one got."
"Nine thousand," said Bronte Keane, "and six of those were your mother."
There were, Immy worked out on the stairs, three things happening in that conversation and she had only heard one of them.
The first was the commission.
The second was that there was a list. Everybody knew there was a list; there had been a list since March, and it had eleven names on it in a building of ninety, and Immy Shaw had been at Frame for four years and had produced twenty-two months of a column that got nine thousand views on a good week.
And the third thing was that Bronte Keane, who was the least sentimental woman in London W1, had given her a piece with a guaranteed number on it.
Which meant Bronte was trying to keep her.
She got as far as the second floor and then went back up.
"Bronte."
"Mm."
"If I do this."
"Yes."
"Can I do the other one afterwards?" Immy stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame. "The one I've pitched you four times. Four thousand words on my dad's pub and what happened to it and what happens to all of them, and I know you think it's a Guardian piece and I know you think nobody wants six pages about a pub in Leytonstone — "
"Immy."
"— but I've been writing it for two years and I can't finish it and I think the reason I can't finish it is that nobody's ever said yes."
Bronte Keane took her glasses off.
"Do the ten days," she said. "Do it properly, and be funny, and get me my four hundred thousand. And then come back in here and ask me about the pub, and I will give you an honest answer, which may still be no."
"That's not a yes."
"No," said Bronte. "It's the first time I've said ask me again, and if you had any idea how rarely I say that you'd be running down those stairs."
Two rules, she said, as Immy left.
"One. No names, no faces, nothing identifying. He does not find out, he does not get hurt, and if you cannot do it that way you do not do it at all."
"And two?"
"Do not fall for him," said Bronte Keane. "I mean it. I've watched four people try a version of this in twenty years and two of them got married and both of those marriages were a catastrophe."