‘Don’t let me down, Grace,’ Vaughn said softly, as she stood there and waited for the inevitable ‘shape up or ship out’ pep talk she was certain was coming. But it seemed that was all she was getting.
‘I’ll try not to,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’ll really try not to.’
‘You do well tonight and I’ll buy you a present. What would you like? Jewellery? Maybe a tiara if you’re going to wear your hair up more often?’
Grace had always wanted a tiara, ever since she’d seen Breakfast At Tiffany’s at the tender age of eleven and decided that she was going to be Holly Golightly when she grew up. But when she’d actually read the Truman Capote novella much later on and realised that Holly was a prostitute, her fictional heroine had lost a lot of her allure. And now, when she was coasting a tsunami of stress and standing here in a dress paid for by a man with whom she had sex on a regular basis even though she didn’t like him very much, it was all too close to home.
‘You don’t have to buy me presents,’ she burst out, and knew she sounded like an absolute ingrate, but the mention of tiaras had hit a nerve. ‘You’re paying me to organise this and that’s enough. The allowances are enough.’
Vaughn’s eyebrows had shot up, but now he’d schooled his features into the slightly sneery, but otherwise impassive expression that always made Grace nervous. More nervous.
‘You’re in a very strange mood this evening, Grace. I hope you snap out of it before our guests arrive,’ he said lightly, turning away. ‘Where are you serving pre-dinner drinks? In the drawing room?’
Then he strode out, leaving Grace with no option but to follow him.
It wasn’t a perfect evening. Grace constantly had to leave the table with a murmured, ‘Would you excuse me?’ to run interference between two of the waiters who’d had a lover’s tiff five minutes before the first guests had arrived. Or to listen to the latest thrilling instalment of the chafing-dish saga. Then she’d sit down again to find that the conversation at her end of the table had ground to the grinding-est of halts because Lola and Nadja, the eighteen-year-old almost-supermodel girlfriend of a Russian oligarch had absolutely nothing in common.
Luckily, Nadja had taken one look at Grace’s Chanel dress and decided that both it and Grace met with her approval. She’d tucked her arm into Grace’s as they walked into the dining room and confided, ‘I’m so glad you’re not old. These dinners, they’re so boring. You smoke, da? Good, then we go out for fags in between courses.’
Grace had nodded shyly because Nadja had replaced Lily as the most beautiful person she’d ever met in real life. Most models in the flesh were tall, skinny and nothing much to look at until the camera lens did something magical with their angles, but Nadja was so gorgeous that she seemed to suck all the light and colour from the room. She was the only thing you wanted to look at. From the way she tossed back her toffee-coloured hair and smiled with a feline grace, she knew it. But she was more than her beauty; she was also a straight-talking, take-no-shit-and-no-prisoners girl who’d been discovered by a scout when she was bunking off school to beg on the Moscow Underground.
‘Alex, you sell any more stories about me to the gossip men, I have you offed,’ she’d hissed when Alex had taken his place opposite her at the table. Within seconds they were quite happily swapping scurrilous stories about people they’d met at other dinner-parties. Meanwhile, Vaughn was sitting at the other end of the table looking like a drawerful of daggers because Lola and Noah were a no-show.
They’d finally turned up half an hour late, claiming they’d got lost on the way to Vaughn’s house, which to be fair was set far back from a narrow twisty road that snaked around Hampstead Heath. Noah walked in with a cocky swagger and a shit-eating grin, which accessorised perfectly with his paint-splattered jeans and a T-shirt with Fuck Art, Let’s Dance emblazoned on it. Lola, on the other hand, looked as if she’d come straight from a Punk Rock Aerobics class because she was in running shorts, metallic leggings, vile pink trainers and a deconstructed vest. She was also sallow and sour, but Grace could tell that if she’d been able to crack a smile, she might have looked a little like a young Bianca Jagger. But it was academic because Lola looked like she hadn’t smiled since 2001.
Grace got the whole ‘eat the rich’ shtick, she really did, but she’d wanted to smack them as they stood there in the doorway. Noah had eyed everyone up with a disdainful stare while Lola had scowled, but her grandmother always said that good manners was making people feel comfortable no matter what the circumstances. What her grandmother had meant was when guests turned up for dinner without even a box of Milk Tray or a bottle of Liebfraumilch, but it was the same thing.
Vaughn slowly got up, brows beetled in irritation, but Grace had beaten him to it, leaping to her feet and exclaiming, ‘Did you get turned around on the way out of the tube? It sounds like you should get out at Hampstead but actually Belsize Park is nearer. Let me get you a drink and introduce you to everybody.’
She’d been so jolly hockey sticks that she’d actually grabbed Lola’s hand to escort her to the table and felt the other girl’s fingers trembling. Immediately, Grace guessed that Lola was putting a brave face on sheer terror - that she was regretting the statement outfit and wishing she’d never come. Grace knew exactly how she felt. And if she’d never met Vaughn and had found herself suddenly catapulted into this dining room, straight from the fashion cupboard, she’d have covered up her nerves by giving it some serious attitude too.
It turned out that Noah knew Alex (who seemed to be one of those annoying people who knew everyone), Nadja had taken advantage of the diversion to go out for a cigarette, and Grace decided that her energy was best spent getting Lola to withdraw the stick she had lodged in her rear end.
Grace longed to keep refilling her own glass until the sharp pang of nerves was replaced by numbness, but she didn’t dare. Not when keeping the conversation going had been like wading through treacle in gumboots.
At one stage, Grace had heard herself ask manically, ‘So, who else is angsting about their carbon footprint?’
But the puddings had been received with rapturous little ooohs of delight and the gift bags had been a monster hit. By this stage Noah had lost the sneer and could only smile in dopy stupefaction at the tubes of paint. ‘How did you know?’ he asked Grace.
‘I Facebook stalked you,’ Grace revealed, and he looked even more stunned.
‘Didn’t know girls like you used Facebook,’ he grinned.
‘Are you kidding?’ Grace spluttered. ‘And what do you mean, “girls like me”?’
‘Posh girls.’ Noah waved his hand to encompass the poshness that was Grace. ‘Thought you’d be too busy getting your nails done to check Facebook.’
Grace had wanted to tell them that the elaborate hair-do and the designer frock were just window dressing. Really, she was like them, but with better manners and much, much better dress sense. That she ate peanut butter straight out of the jar and could find her way through Shoreditch blindfolded, but tonight she was playing a part and she guessed her performance had verged on flawless. But if Vaughn wanted her to suck up to edgy Shoreditch artists then maybe Chanel dresses and elaborate updos weren’t helping.
‘We have three mutual friends,’ she informed Noah smugly. ‘You know Laetitia? We worked on a vintage clothing stall in Spitalfields together.’
‘I know Laetitia,’ Lola offered, but she looked at Grace suspiciously. ‘What were you doing working on a vintage clothing stall?’
Grace made an executive decision then to stop channelling her grandmother and be more like herself. ‘Mostly we spat in the owner’s tea because she was a heinous bitch. Like, she’d make me sew fake Biba labels into this Chelsea Girl dead stock she used to get really cheap.’
‘Laetitia told me about her,’ Lola said, nodding her head slowly as if maybe there was slightly more to Grace than met the eye. Not much more though and Grace wasn’t sure why, but it hurt a little that Noah and Grace thought she was slumming it in Spita
lfields and on Facebook, when actually it was much more her scene than catered dinner-parties in Hampstead.
Now, though, as Sergei and Nadja (still cooing about the Cavalli shoes) finally left, Grace could feel herself wilting, head hanging heavy under the weight of all the expectation and hair products.
Vaughn walked back into the big open space that Grace would never consider a living room, where they’d taken coffee and dessert, to find her slowly and methodically taking apart her chignon.
He didn’t say anything, but watched Grace run her fingers through her hair to try to smooth down the lacquered hanks. Then she leaned over to the side table to pick up a half-full brandy snifter that Sergei had left and knocked it back.
‘For God’s sake, Grace, that’s disgusting,’ Vaughn snapped. ‘If you want a drink, I’m sure we can find an empty glass.’
All the stresses and strains of the last week were still there with a side order of anti-climax that Grace hadn’t expected. She blinked teary eyes as one of the servers came in with a laden plate, which Vaughn told her to put on the table next to Grace.
‘You barely touched your dinner,’ he chided, once the woman had closed the door behind her. ‘I think you had maybe one scallop.’
Keeping the ball of conversation firmly in the air had completely destroyed Grace’s appetite, though she’d been too aggravated to choke down anything that wasn’t a banana over the last few days. In fact, she was seriously considering pitching her patented Banana Diet to the health editor. ‘I was too nervous to eat,’ she explained, rubbing a hand over her empty stomach, which didn’t feel quite as squidgy as usual. ‘You know what I mean?’
From the envious look on Vaughn’s face, he was a comfort eater from way back. ‘You should eat something,’ he insisted. ‘And there was no need to worry. You handled everything beautifully. I was so proud of you.’
She did? He was? Grace wondered if there was an apocalypse just around the corner, because Vaughn’s affirmative statement had contained absolutely no traces of sarcasm. ‘That’s cool,’ she decided, staring at the plate. ‘That you’re pleased, I mean. I thought it was all going to go horribly pear-shaped just before they served pudding. Lola, Noah’s girlfriend . . . God, she was hard work.’
‘She could have made more of an effort,’ Vaughn agreed, coming to sit on the end of the futuristic chaise longue on which Grace was perched.
‘Tell me about it,’ Grace nodded, surreptitiously easing off her right shoe, which was a good half-size too small. During an awkward lapse in the chatter, Grace had mentioned that she’d been at St Martin’s at the same time that Noah and Lola had been at the Slade. Lola had narrowed her pale blue eyes. ‘Did you know that girl who bailed on her final degree show at the last minute?’ she’d asked. ‘My cousin’s at Glasgow School of Art and even she heard about it.’
Grace had felt her heart do a painful fandango, but she’d forced herself to muster a bland smile. ‘Not anyone I know,’ she’d lied. ‘I think that was just an urban myth.’
Lola had refused to let it drop. In fact, it had been the first time she’d really relaxed. ‘No! It’s true! One of my friends was studying fine art at St Martin’s and it was all anyone talked about for weeks.
They were doing renovations in one of the studios and apparently she dumped all her outfits in a skip and walked out.’
It hadn’t been a skip. It had actually been a common or garden bin in the corner of the sewing room, but Grace had just stared at Lola, aware that her face was going redder and redder. Surprisingly, it was Alex who’d come to her rescue, though it was more a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.
‘So, Gracie, I’m dying to know how you and Vaughn met,’ he said with a sly smile, and maybe her greatest triumph of the night had been the way she’d managed to recover and spin that first fateful meeting into a wry little anecdote that made everyone, even Lola, laugh.
Now she pulled a face at the memory of Lola. ‘I felt sorry for her,’ she admitted, as Vaughn tilted his head and looked surprised. ‘She was really nervous and it just made her aggressive. You know, like fight or flight. She couldn’t run away so she went on the attack. She was OK by the end. She even said she was going to friend me on Facebook.’
Vaughn was dipping his finger into the pot au chocolat that Grace would have quite liked to eat herself. ‘And what about her boyfriend? What did you make of him?’
‘Noah? He’s not as working class as he pretends to be,’ Grace mused, finally kicking off her other shoe so she could curl her legs under her. ‘Like, he and Alex went to the same public school so I don’t know why he got all up in my grill because he thought I was one of the landed gentry. I mean, he’s called Noah, for goodness’ sake,’ she summed up scathingly. ‘And he totally took a moment to appreciate the expensive brandy.’
‘So you think he was impressed?’ Vaughn was now stealing little forkfuls of lemon pudding, and closing his eyes blissfully every time he sneaked a piece into his mouth.
‘I think he was impressed, but maybe they were out of their comfort zone. Just a little bit.’
‘But that was the whole point of having dinner here; it was more intimate.’ Vaughn frowned. ‘Usually I just book a table in a restaurant, it’s a lot less bother.’
And he’d said that he was easing her in gently? Grace decided that it wasn’t worth seething about. There’d been that line in the contract about other duties: as required and Vaughn was entitled to ask her to do anything he saw fit, considering the amount he was paying her. Besides, he was being nice to her for once so she also decided that there was no point in telling him that she’d been in airports that were more intimate than his home. ‘I guess Hampstead is a long way from Dalston,’ was all she said. ‘Like, in this metaphorical way ’cause it’s only a few miles as the crow flies.’ This relaxed debrief and watching Vaughn have multiple foodgasms wasn’t helping to make Grace any more lucid. Her brain had packed up shop for the night.
But he just gave her another lazy smile. ‘Duly noted. This pudding is rather good. Do you want to try some?’
He waved the fork temptingly in front of Grace’s mouth and part of her job was to put things in there when he told her to so she obediently opened up to let Vaughn feed her a huge piece of surprisingly sugary sponge.
‘Too sweet,’ she complained, squinching up her face as she chewed, then took a huge gulp of champagne to wash it down. ‘I can feel my back molars protesting.’
There was something sticky clinging to her lip and before Grace could discreetly dab it away with her napkin, Vaughn was cupping her chin so he could rub his thumb slowly at the offending glob of sauce. ‘That’s better,’ he said, stroking the pooch of Grace’s lower lip and smiling when she flushed.
‘So how did things go at your end of the table?’ Grace asked, in a voice that sounded as if she smoked at least forty Gauloises a day.
His hand hadn’t left her face, but was trailing a path along her neck, where her pulse was thundering away like she was a prime candidate for a pulmonary embolism. ‘Boring,’ he confided. ‘We had to talk about Third World debt but I think I managed to offload a painting I hate for a lot more than I originally paid for it.’ Then his fingers moved down and curved around the swell of Grace’s breast and they were both surprised when she relaxed into his touch.
‘That’s cool,’ Grace whispered, and it was even more surprising that she was closing the gap between them so she could get to his smiling mouth but Vaughn was leaning towards her like he was totally down with that.
Grace kissed him slowly because she wanted to savour the lemon-tart taste of him. Vaughn’s lips clung to her and she could feel the faint scrape of his stubble against her cheek. When Grace shifted restlessly, hips circling against him, he was hard. Sometimes it seemed like his dick was the only part of him that never played games. And sometimes it seemed as if she spent all her time veering from not liking him to liking him a lot.
Vaughn was still stroking her breast, rubbing
his thumb against the spot where Grace’s nipple was peaked and aching. ‘There are three people standing outside the door waiting to clear up,’ he remarked conversationally. ‘Shall we go upstairs, because I’d like to get you out of this pretty dress as soon as possible.’
The parquet felt rough under her bare feet as Grace stood up and stretched languidly, aware that Vaughn’s eyes were resting on her body as it undulated under the black dress. Just the way he was looking at her, like everything she did tonight was perfection wrapped up in a big bow, was making Grace itch inside her own skin.
Apparently, approval really turned her on. Who knew?
And when Vaughn stood up and took her hand, Grace let him pull her bonelessly behind him as he opened the door and startled the servers who were lounging against a Corbusier table that cost more than their combined annual earnings.
The small blonde Polish girl flicked a glance at Grace, at her perfectly polished toenails, understated dress that still managed to shriek its net worth and Vaughn clutching her arm in a death grip, before turning away with a knowing smile, while he murmured platitudes about their silver-service skills. For the second time that evening, Grace marvelled that simply looking the part made up for what really lay underneath.