hundred pounds. Instead she’s a diminutive blonde woman who can’t measure more than five feet, despite her skyscraper heels and carefully constructed beehive, which rises five inches from her scalp in a golden haystack.
‘It is so good to see you!’ Dressed head to toe in Chanel, she bustles into the gallery, her miniature Maltese dog scampering at her heels. Reaching up, she grabs my face firmly with her diamond-clad fingers and plants two brisk lipstick kisses on either cheek.
This is the way she greets me every morning. It’s a bit of a departure from the clipped ‘Hello’ that I grew used to from Rupert, my old boss in London, but then Rupert was Gordonstoun-educated and mates with Prince Charles. He used to walk around the gallery as if he still had the coat hanger in his suit jacket and wore one of those rings on his little finger with his ancestral coat of arms or something on it.
Whenever anyone came into the gallery who wore one, he would fiddle with it, like it was some secret code and they could communicate telepathically through their pinkie rings.
Magda is the antithesis of that old-school pinkie-ring mentality of the British class system. A rambunctious Jewish lady with a thick Israeli accent, despite having moved to New York thirty years ago, she’s not about subtleties, calling a serviette a napkin or saying, ‘What?’ instead of ‘Pardon’ (all lessons I learned from Rupert, who seemed to take it upon himself to play Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle).
Instead everything is about extremes and exaggeration. Why call a spade a spade when you can call it something completely different? And preferably outrageous. She talks in exclamation marks and is forever regaling me with one of her outlandish stories, be it about an amazing dessert (‘The apple pie was unbelievable!), her three ex-husbands (He was terrible I tell you, terrible!) or the time she was ">
Like strong cheese, or Russell Brand, you’re either going to love Magda or hate her.
Luckily for me, it’s the former.
‘Are you hungry? Did you have breakfast?’ Without waiting for an answer, she dives into her large Louis Vuitton tote. Out of it she pulls an enormous paper bag filled with what appears to be the entire contents of a bakery. ‘I bought bagels. Sesame, poppy seed, onion . . .’
‘Thanks, but I’m fine with coffee.’ I smile, reaching for the coffee-machine. ‘I’ve never actually been much of a breakfast person.’
Magda looks at me like I’ve just told her I’m an alien from outer space. ‘You don’t eat breakfast?’ Her eyes are wide with astonishment.
Saying that, Magda always has a certain astonished look about her. At first I just thought she was permanently surprised by things, but now I’ve figured out it’s due to her eyebrows, which sit much higher on her forehead than normal, a result, I suspect, of having had ‘work done’.
Which in the States is not in reference to a new loft conversion but to a series of nips and tucks performed by a man in a white coat at some fancy address on Fifth Avenue.
‘Well, no, not usually.’
Magda is shaking her head violently. ‘But this is terrible!’ she cries, pounding the countertop with her fist for emphasis. ‘Terrible!’
I swear you’d think she’d just found out her entire family had died at sea, not that her employee skipped breakfast.
‘No, honestly, it’s fine. I’m not that hungry,’ I try explaining, but Magda is having none of it.
‘You must eat. You must eat to survive,’ she insists dramatically.
I open my mouth to protest. Trust me, I eat. And I have the thighs to prove it. Remember that movie Alive, in which the survivors of a plane crash had to eat each other to survive? Well, those passengers could have lived for months on my thighs. Years, probably.
There’s no point trying to point this out to Magda, I realise, looking at my boss’s determined expression. I surrender and take a poppy-seed bagel.
Immediately her expression changes from tragic to comic, like one of those theatre masks.�€theatre m Sks. ‘It’s good, no?’ she chuckles, beaming with pleasure.
‘Mmm, yes, delicious.’ I nod in agreement.
‘I have cream cheese and lox.’
Lox, I’ve learned, means smoked salmon in New York.
‘No, thanks,’ I mutter through a mouthful of bagel.
‘You want it toasted?’
‘Mmph.’ I shake my head.
‘I have honey. You like it with honey?’
I’m still chewing.
‘Peanut butter? Pickles?’
I had no idea there were so many different ways you could eat a bagel, and I’m sure she would have kept suggesting them