We weren’t really filming a makeover show for MTV, needless to say. I was using stealth means to get the shop-a-phobic Tristram into a new set of clothes that wouldn’t make him look like he’d covered himself in glue and cartwheeled round the back room of an Oxfam shop. His mother, Olympia, had tottered up the stairs to my office in a state of utter despair, having heard about Honey from a friend of hers whose son I’d cured of nail-biting. (Seventeen surprise phone calls a day soon shocked him out of it.)
‘Tristram simply refuses to buy new clothes. Refuses!’ she’d wailed. ‘He’s so self-conscious about his height, but also, I think, it’s because he has dreadfully shaped knees.’ She stopped herself. ‘Not that I’ve ever told him that. But he takes any comment about his appearance as a personal criticism, for some reason, and just slobs around in the same two T-shirts all the time. He won’t listen to a word I say. I mean, he’s got university interviews coming up and they’re going to think he’s some kind of drug addict!’
Looking at Tristram now, towering uncertainly over a display of boxer shorts as if he wasn’t quite sure what his gangling limbs might do next, the only drug he seemed to be on was some kind of growth hormone.
I’d calmed Mrs Hart-Mossop down as best I could with a plate of shortbread, and promised to smarten up Tristram to the point where his own father wouldn’t recognise him.
‘You’ll have a job,’ she’d said, forgetting herself sufficiently to start dunking her biscuit. ‘He simply refuses to spend money on clothes, even when it’s my money. Insists he’d rather have it in cash to spend on his computer.’
That made my heart sink. Computers and fashion weren’t easy bedfellows. Still, I’d had much worse cases in the past. Some of my clients, it turned out, had actual infestations.
‘Don’t you worry about a thing,’ I’d said with a beaming smile, offering Mrs Hart-Mossop a top-up of tea from the family silver teapot. ‘I pride myself on being a lateral thinker.’
‘You’ll have to be a bloody hypnotist,’ she’d said bitterly, and took a second biscuit.
And so here we were in Selfridges, pandering sneakily to Tristram’s obsession with reality TV and, in the process, introducing him to the world of linen.
Gabi really was filming too. Even though I’d asked her to pretend and keep the camera turned off. I could already imagine the hilarity that would ensue when she played it back at home to the amusement of Nelson, who never missed a chance to have a good laugh at my expense, particularly when it involved me having to fib. Given my family background, I am an incomprehensibly bad liar. Nelson has an annoying habit of shouting ‘Ding!’ whenever he spots me telling a porkie.
‘Turn it off!’ I hissed, while Tristram toyed curiously with cufflinks, as if he’d never seen them before.
Gabi shook her head and stepped out of my reach, just as Tristram turned back to me.
‘Are these, like, fabric nose-studs?’ he asked, holding up a cufflink to study it more closely.
‘No.’ I took it off him and replaced it in the huge bowl. ‘That’s advanced dressing. We’ll get to that later.’ I upped my encouraging smile. ‘So, Tristram, where would you like to start?’
His face went dark with reluctance. ‘The computer department.’
‘No!’ I laughed, rather grimly now I could see what an uphill battle this would be. ‘I mean, shall we start with a smart suit, or with casual wear?’
He looked at me like a giraffe peering down on a brush-wielding zoo keeper, then swung his gaze towards Gabi, who had stopped filming long enough to inspect a very lifelike dummy modelling tight jersey briefs.
‘Is that thing off?’ he demanded.
‘If you want it to be,’ I said soothingly. ‘Gabi? Could you give us a moment?’
With the camera off, Tristram sounded dejected, rather than sullen. ‘Look, can’t I just have the money? Nothing’s going to fit. Nothing ever does. Even when Mum pretends it looks OK, I just look like a big freak.’
‘No, you don’t,’ I said bracingly. ‘You just need the right clothes!’
‘I like the ones I’ve got.’ He flicked balefully at a row of ties, then stared at his shoes. ‘Poppy Bridewell, um . . . This . . . girl I met at a party said I looked artistic in T-shirts.’
There was a fine line between artistic and autistic. I wondered if it had been a loud party.
‘Is she your girlfriend?’
He shook his head, scattering dandruff on the cashmere jumpers. ‘Don’t have one. Never meet girls.’
‘Well, Tristram, just think how many girls will be watching this!’ I said conspiratorially. ‘And when they see you looking great in new clothes, clothes that really make the most of those lovely shoulders you have . . .’ I lifted my eyebrows. ‘I’m sure you’ll soon be fighting them off!’
I could hear Nelson ‘ding’ing in my head, but I crossed my fingers. Nothing enhanced a man’s confidence like knowing his shirt was working for him. He’d get more attention, one way or another.
‘You think?’ grunted Tristram, but his face looked more hopeful.
‘Just come with me,’ I said, and propelled him towards the changing rooms. I’d phoned ahead and asked the personal shopper to put aside some bits and pieces just to get us started. ‘You’re already very good with layers, Tristram,’ I said, nudging him into a cubicle with some buttery-soft cotton T-shirts and a cashmere jumper. ‘You just need to upgrade them a little. Now pop these on, and let’s see what they look like.’
Gabi reappeared, viewfinder to her eye, and Tristram shuffled compliantly behind the curtain.
‘It’s amazing what people’ll do if they think they’re going to be on telly, isn’t it?’ whispered Gabi, as if she herself wouldn’t do exactly the same thing. ‘I was in Brent Cross Shopping Centre at the weekend, just looking for sale bargains, you know, and this camera crew were there, and I . . . What?’
‘You said you’d cut up your credit cards.’
Gabi shuffled. ‘Yeah, well. You’ll never understand about me and my credit cards. They’re like you and your wig.’
‘Let’s drop the wig, shall we?’ I said breezily.
Gabi’s generous mouth twisted into a naughty grin. ‘You can’t Honey me, Mel,’ she said. ‘I work with women much posher and much arsier than you.’
Technically, Gabi and I didn’t have much in common – what with me being what she generically termed a ‘Chalet Girl Princess’ and her being the Queen of the North London Shopping Centres – but since my first day at the Dean & Daniels estate agency, where she’d ripped her skirt doing a very cruel impression of our office manager Carolyn mounting her Vespa, and I’d stitched it back up for her with the sewing kit I always kept in my bag, we’d been bosom buddies. The best friendships are like mobile phones, I think: you can’t explain exactly how they work, but you’re just relieved they do.
‘Shh!’ she said, before I could say anything, and pointed at the cubicle. ‘Clothes are appearing!’
I looked over to the cubicle and saw reject clothes being tossed petulantly over the curtain. Oh no. If Tristram thought he could just run through the lot in five minutes and pretend nothing fitted, he was sadly mistaken. I glanced about for the nice tailoring man to pop in and get his measurements for a decent suit. Tailoring made all the difference with these scruffy Sloane lads: once they were out of some awful inherited-from-Dad tweed Huntsman number and into something that fitted, they started to walk better, stand up straighter, preen themselves a little more.
Well, in most cases.
Tristram slunk out of the changing room with the T-shirt riding at half-mast, revealing some not-unattractive stomach, and the jumper concertina’d around his elbows. He looked like the Incredible Hulk mid-transformation, but still about ten times better than when he’d gone in. He even managed a shy smile for the imaginary massed audience of single girls waiting for him behind Gabi’s lens.
‘See?’ I said to the camera. ‘Fabulous! With shoulders like those you can carry off practica
lly anything. Now, try on these jackets!’ I pushed some jackets at him and made a mental note to find a sales assistant to ask discreetly if they had some in longer lengths.
‘Are you in for dinner tonight then?’ asked Gabi dreamily. ‘Nelson says he’s making something with fresh trout. He’s a really excellent cook, you know.’
I gave her a level look. I knew Nelson was an excellent cook. I’d known he was an excellent cook for the best part of the twenty-odd years I’d known him.
When I’d moved in to Nelson’s slightly shabby-chic flat behind Victoria Coach Station, five years ago, it had just been me and him, and we’d been very cosy, in that way that only old, old friends can be. Our fathers were at school together, and Nelson and I had grown up fighting over endless rounds of Monopoly, and squabbling over bunk beds. I’d rather got used to our unmarried, marital lifestyle – him bossing me about, criticising my parking but helping me with my accounts, while I generally added some female fragrance to his lifestyle. Nelson sailed a lot at weekends with his mate Roger. Now summer was coming on, the flat was beginning to smell like a marina, but without the champagne and suntan lotion.
However, since my sister Emery’s wedding at Christmas, Gabi had been sort of seeing Nelson, and much as I wanted both of them to be happy, I couldn’t help feeling what Jonathan would call conflicted. (He’s an American estate agent. He specialises in euphemisms.) Gabi was my best friend and Nelson – well, Nelson was like my brother. The first night Gabi stayed over without giving me time to make myself scarce I gobbled three Nytol and slept with my head wrapped in the duvet, just in case I heard something I shouldn’t.
Nelson made a point of leaning over the breakfast table the next morning, before Gabi got up, and intoning, ‘Nothing happened,’ at me as if I were some dreadful maiden aunt – which was ironic, since ‘maiden aunt’ is his own default behaviour setting – but unfortunately the Nytol had made me too groggy to yell at him, so I had to settle for a glare which he huffily interpreted as prurient interest.
So, yes. It was all getting rather awkward. I loved them both, wildly unsuited as they were, but the whole thing was just a little bit . . . Urgh.
Still, that was the beauty of being Honey, I thought, checking my list of must-buys for Tristram as a retrospective blush rose into my cheeks. At work Honey always knew what she was doing and wasn’t afraid of speaking her mind. And she wasn’t shy either. Not like Melissa.
‘So, are you in tonight or what?’ asked Gabi again, examining some silk briefs that I sincerely hoped she wasn’t planning to buy for Nelson.
‘Um, yes,’ I stammered. ‘Actually, no. No. I’ll, er . . .’
‘You think Nelson would wear these?’ she asked, holding up a pair of red silk pants.
‘Definitely not!’ I said, without thinking. ‘He’s always going on about how he hates that swinging free feeling and how he’s constantly thinking he’s about to catch himself on something . . .’
We stared at each other in mutual horror.
Fortunately, at that moment, there was a yelp and Tristram’s head reappeared round the curtain, looking both panicked and affronted. I snapped back into Honey mode without even thinking.
‘This chap’s just told me to take off my trousers!’ he howled.
‘He’s only measuring you for a suit, Tristram,’ I said briskly. ‘Nothing to worry about. Let the nice man get the measurements, and then all you have to do is choose a colour!’
The head disappeared.
‘Blimey,’ said Gabi, impressed. ‘I’ve never really seen you doing this Honey thing before. It’s quite scary, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
‘Are you wearing stockings?’ asked Gabi, casting a sideways glance at my skirt.
‘What?’ I shifted from foot to foot. I didn’t normally have anyone around when I was working, and I was beginning to wish I hadn’t asked Gabi to help me out. It was putting me off my stride. Or rather, I couldn’t get into my stride as Honey when she was there to remind me I was really Melissa.
‘Are you wearing stockings?’ Gabi did a suggestive shimmy, and I blanched. ‘Or did Jonathan knock that on the head too?’ she enquired. ‘I know he’s not happy about you carrying on with the agency, not now you’re meant to be a respectable estate agent’s girlfriend and all that.’
I looked suspiciously at the camcorder. Did that red light mean it was on or off? Things had also gone very still inside the cubicle, so I dropped my voice discreetly. ‘Jonathan’s fine about the agency, for your information. He just doesn’t want me to pretend to be anyone’s girlfriend any more. What I do with the rest of my time is my own business. If you must know, he’s very proud of me for being so entrepreneurial. End of topic.’
‘Oooooooh,’ said Gabi. ‘Touch-eeeee.’
‘Not in the least. I’m going to get Tristram into a suit,’ I announced, to change the subject. ‘It’s like getting a suit of armour. Gives you bulges in the right places and hides everything else.’
Gabi looked unconvinced. ‘You’d know best. And I wouldn’t want to argue with you, not in this sort of mood. Still, you know you could be getting all this a lot cheaper elsewhere? You ever thought about using me in an advisory capacity? I could be saving you a lot of money.’
‘It’s not the money his mother cares about,’ I said, my attention caught by the twitching of the cubicle curtain. Gabi’s shopping expertise went without saying. ‘It’s the fact that he’s going to be persuaded into wearing adult clothes.’
As I said this, Tristram stepped out of the changing room, in a black jacket and a really cool pair of dark jeans. He looked pretty good, if I said so myself.
‘Oh, wow!’ I swooned, clapping one hand to my bosom. ‘Tristram! Look at you! Don’t you look fabulous?’
The beginnings of a shy smile began to tug at the corners of his mouth, despite his best efforts to look cool and don’t-care-ish. The clothes made a difference, but what really finished it off was a touch of confidence.
I went over and put my arm around him so we were both facing Gabi’s camera. I hoped she had it on steadicam, because her shoulders were twitching with barely suppressed laughter.
I, on the other hand, was taking it very seriously, because Tristram obviously was. I felt him flinch, then, as I cuddled him tighter, he relaxed into me and even put a gangling arm round my shoulder.
‘So, how do you feel, Tristram?’ I cooed. ‘That jacket really brings out the blue in your eyes! You’ve got such lovely eyes, you know!’
‘Um, yeah, um, I . . . cool,’ he mumbled. That was about as articulate as most public schoolboys got, but from the way he was sufficiently emboldened to start some tentative groping, I chalked that up as a win and subtly removed his paw from my rear.
Tristram, Gabi and I had a very nice cup of tea downstairs in Selfridges, next to the computer department, before we sent him on his way, promising to let him know the moment we had a broadcast date. I thought I saw the salesgirl wink at him on the way out, and realised that enlisting similar encouragement might be a good confidence-boosting strategy to employ in the future.
‘You realise that Tristram had his nose practically down your cleavage at the end?’ said Gabi, peering at the flickering playback screen.
‘Did he?’ I blushed and poured myself some more tea.
‘Any closer and he’d have been talking to your navel. You want to see?’ she offered.
‘God, no!’ I shied away. I hated seeing myself in pictures. It never quite matched the vision I had in my head. The one in which I was played by Elizabeth Taylor, circa 1959.
‘You know, we should so send this tape into MTV,’ said Gabi, through a mouthful of raspberry cheesecake. ‘You could get your own programme. Mel’s Munters. Geek to Chic. You think?’
‘No, I don’t think.’ I looked on enviously. I only had to breathe near cheesecake and I put on about half a stone. ‘Shouldn’t you be saving yourself for supper?’
‘Not
a problem.’ She squished the last few crumbs down on the back of her fork and popped them in her mouth. ‘Got the fastest metabolism in London, me.’ A broad smile illuminated her face. ‘S’why I think me and Nelson are just fated to be together. Fast as he cooks it, I eat it!’
Funny. Gabi’s last boyfriend, Aaron, hadn’t had time to make a Pot Noodle, but he’d made money as fast as she could spend it – almost – and she’d nearly married him.
I pushed aside these unworthy thoughts. It was the end of a very long week, and frankly I was looking forward to spending the rest of the evening in a soap-opera-related trance, ideally with Nelson rubbing my feet. He was so good at foot rubs that I even forgave him the accompanying drone about learning the techniques while doing gap year charity work in Thailand.
Then I remembered that it was dinner for two and gooseberries for one at our house that evening, and the blissful image abruptly shattered. I supposed I could go round to Jonathan’s, but he had tennis coaching on Friday nights, and, in any case, we hadn’t quite reached the stage of our relationship where I was happy for him to see me dribbling onto a pillow as I fell asleep watching Coronation Street.
Oh, don’t be such a misery-guts, I told myself sternly. Pull yourself together!
I looked up at Gabi. She was a good friend, and I should be thrilled she’d found someone as decent as Nelson. ‘Thanks for giving up your day off to help me out,’ I said. ‘It was really sweet of you.’
‘No problemo.’ Gabi finished off the last of the tea. ‘’Sides, it’s not my day off. Carolyn thinks I’m having a root canal. She’s not expecting me in till Monday at the earliest.’
‘Gabi . . .’ I said reproachfully.
She cut me a cheeky look. ‘Oh, come on. Let someone else make the tea for a change! Anyway, it was an education. For me and for Tristram. I bet you ten quid he’ll be back for new jeans and another crack at your cleavage next week. Listen, what time’s supper tonight?’ Her dark eyes went all dreamy. ‘God, Nelson. There’s something about him that just makes me want to warm his slippers. He’s so big, and sensible. I feel like a heroine in an old-fashioned novel when I’m with him.’