Little Lady, Big Apple

  He tutted, as if I were attempting some audacious street robbery, then said, ‘I might be able to arrange something. But get yourself back here. And make sure you’re wearing something smart.’

  ‘I always look smart,’ I objected.

  Daddy made another derisive noise, then added, as an afterthought, ‘Oh, and fetch something nice back from Duty Free for your mother. It’s our anniversary at the weekend. Fifty quid, preferably under, and don’t try to smuggle anything back through the wrong channel. We’ve only just got your sister away from the rozzers.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good news!’ I said, relieved. ‘And Lars?’

  ‘I can’t talk about this now,’ he said abruptly. ‘I will see you on Friday.’

  And he hung up.

  When I explained this turn of events to Jonathan, he took it with his customary sangfroid. In his line of business, jetting hither and thither wasn’t such a big deal. He was also inspecting the latest missive from his bathroom designers, so I only had about forty per cent of his attention anyway.

  ‘Have you checked he’s booked your ticket?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘The lovely Claudia emailed the details. Business-class return.’

  ‘Hey. That’s nice of the old man.’

  ‘I very much doubt he’ll be paying for it,’ I said heavily. I’d got my mother a huge bag of multicoloured wools and fancy needles from a shop I’d found on Sullivan Street; I doubted very much that I’d get the money back for that either, but at least Mummy wouldn’t be unwrapping another silk negligee in the wrong size. With someone else’s monogram on the breast.

  ‘I’m just sorry I can’t be coming with you.’ Jonathan gave me a rueful grimace. ‘Would have been quite fun to test out those new business-class beds BA does. Still, I’ll get some of this out of the way, so when you get back, I can give you my full attention.’

  That made me feel slightly better.

  Thanks to the luxurious seat on the plane and the lavish toiletries bag supplied therein, not to mention the use of the business-class spa on arrival, I caught a taxi to Victoria feeling positively refreshed. I just had time to fit in a quick visit before the afternoon meeting with Daddy – and, actually, when you put it like that, I felt like I almost deserved my business-class luggage tag.

  I felt a rush of affection for London as I walked down the street, noticing all the things I’d missed without realising: parking meters, discarded copies of Metro, Pret a Manger. Maybe a touch of trepidation too, though, in case I ran into a queue of disgruntled clients hammering on the door and demanding their money back. Still, I reminded myself nervously, I shouldn’t be too mean to Gabi and Allegra. There was a lot to pick up, and they’d probably been trying their best.

  I waved at the beauty therapists in the discreet salon on the ground and first floors, and checked my bag for the presents I’d brought from Bloomingdales. I hoped Gabi was in before Allegra, not just because her present was significantly nicer, but because I could at least get a reasonably accurate version of the previous fortnight’s events. If I encountered Allegra first, it would take at least half an hour of intense chat about herself before she’d even consider getting round to what she’d been up to at work.

  In the event, I needn’t have worried because when I reached the second floor I found the agency door locked, a stack of post on the table outside, and no sign of either of them.

  Frowning, I checked my watch. Ten past ten. Where were they? I could hear the telephone ringing, and I let myself in as fast as I could get the key in the lock.

  Once inside, I nearly dropped my post in shock and had to steady myself against the leather couch.

  For a start, the leather couch wasn’t where I’d left it. It was on the other side of the room, where the desk had been. The desk was up against the opposite wall and looked as if a small but savage land battle had been fought on it recently. All my lovely pictures had been taken down and there were shopping bags and discarded coffee cups everywhere. Worst of all, the dressmaker’s dummy was wearing some kind of rugby kit.

  My knees felt like buckling, but the phone was still ringing, so I pulled myself together and answered it.

  ‘The Little Lady Agency. How can I help you?’ I said smoothly, running my eyes around the office. Thank God I’d come back!

  ‘This is Thomasina Kendall,’ said a clipped voice. ‘Can I speak to whoever organised my son’s christening present on behalf of Patrick Gough?’

  Patrick Gough? The name didn’t ring any bells. It must have been something the girls had sorted out while I was away.

  Oh, God.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I apologised, searching around for the absent desk diary, ‘but I think one of my assistants was looking after that for Patrick, and they’re not in the office at the moment. Was there a problem? Is there something I can deal with for you?’

  ‘No,’ said Thomasina Kendall. ‘I need to speak to whomever it was directly.’

  I fervently hoped it had been something simple, like Gabi leaving the price tag on a silver rattle, rather than Allegra giving a newborn baby a replica Aztec sacrificial knife.

  I opened the drawer, saw a pair of boxer shorts draped over everything from the desk top, and closed it again. Then I closed my eyes too, for good measure.

  ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Kendall. If you give me a contact number I’ll ask her to call you the instant she comes in.’

  ‘If you could.’ She rattled off a series of numbers on which she could be contacted throughout the day. Whatever it was she needed to talk to them about, clearly it couldn’t wait.

  I put down the phone, feeling ill. A band around my forehead, coaxed into existence by incipient jet-lag and the sight of traffic wardens in a ticketing frenzy around Ebury Street, tightened.

  Calm down, I told myself, trying to find three positive aspects of the gloomy situation facing me. Three positive things and the rest wouldn’t look half so bad.

  One, the phone hadn’t been cut off.

  Two, they’d clearly been doing something.

  And, three, I could always tidy up. Everything would look a hundred times better after thirty minutes’ intensive tidying up.

  I opened my eyes, sank back into my familiar carved oak office chair and surveyed the confusion: no biscuits in the glass barrel, five dying bunches of flowers on the shelves, magazines ditched everywhere, and, bafflingly, one small red stiletto discarded on top of the filing cabinet. There was a lingering smell in the air that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. It smelled like . . . gunpowder.

  In twelve days, Gabi and Allegra had turned my office into a fifth-form common room. And that was only the mess I could see. A shudder ran through my blood.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. I yanked open my desk drawer and rummaged around until I found the photograph of me and Jonathan, absent from its pride of place by the phone, then placed it firmly on the desk. Then, as my momentum picked up, I pushed back my chair, grabbed the nearest three magazines and dumped them in the bin, followed by all the paper coffee cups, plastic bags and discarded bits of clothing. Breathing deeply, I hung the pictures back on the wall – I could already hear Allegra snotting about having to look at such low-level art – and started to retidy the book shelves with cross, jerky movements.

  And, honestly, I hate tidying up. I really wasn’t tidying it out of a neat freak inability to endure a badly stacked pile of books (as Nelson would have confirmed, had he been there) but until the office was back to the way I’d left it, I felt unsettled. As if I’d been burgled.

  Just as I was tottering unsteadily about the place with the Dyson, like one of those unhinged sitcom housewives hoovering in high heels at 3 a.m., the door opened and Gabi rushed in, with two big Hamleys bags balancing her small frame. She wasn’t, as I’d carefully hinted in my instruction file, wearing a skirt and pretty heels, but her jeans, a black cotton shirt, and a pair of gold trainers.

  ‘Oh, my God, you’re back!’ she gasped. Then she rearranged her face into a
n unconvincingly confident smile, and exclaimed, ‘Oh, my God! You’re back!’

  I turned off the vacuum cleaner. We both watched as a red casino chip whirled and then sank back into the grey dust of the transparent chamber. Somewhere in my head, I registered that it was for five hundred pounds.

  ‘When did you fly in?’ asked Gabi quickly. ‘You must be really jet-lagged. Can I make you a coffee? I’ve got some more biscuits in here somewhere . . . Not telling tales, but I’ve been here and out again already this morning, because I had to collect a present that Allegra was supposed to have sorted out yesterday, before she felt tired and had to go to Calmia to have her chakras rebalanced. Oh, I see you’ve . . . Er . . .’ She trailed off and looked at me, Dyson in hand. ‘Sorry,’ she said contritely. ‘I was planning to do the cleaning today. Honest.’

  I took a deep breath. Much better to know the whole story than to guess half. Why was I thinking that so much these days?

  ‘Just tell me,’ I said, ‘without any exaggeration or explanation, what’s been going on while I’ve been away?’

  ‘With what?’ Gabi hedged.

  ‘Well, you could start with why the desk is on the other side of the room? Why there’s a shoe on the filing cabinet? Why there are sixteen messages on the answering machine? What you’ve done to Thomasina Kendall’s son? Why no one was here when . . .’ I stopped, hearing my voice rising with each question, and pressed my lips together, breathing into my stomach to calm myself down. It wasn’t like me to be so shouty, either. Tidying up and shouting. Blimey, I was turning into an office manager.

  I let out all the pent-up breath in a big sigh, and felt marginally better. But not much. ‘Maybe I will have that cup of coffee.’

  ‘God, Mel,’ said Gabi, turning on the coffee machine, ‘you’ve only been in New York two weeks and already you’re barking orders at me like Jonathan. Take a chill pill. Sit down, will you? Have you had a good time?’

  ‘I’ve had a fantastic time,’ I said, but I wasn’t going to be sidetracked just yet. Not with my desk drawers full of men’s underwear. ‘Come on, give me the bad news. Before Allegra gets in.’

  Gabi tossed her head dismissively. ‘Chuh. In that case, we’ve got time for a minute-by-minute account of the past twelve days for both of us. And I thought I had a bad attitude to time-keeping. It’s her fault the place is in this mess.’

  ‘Really?’ I gave Gabi my best ‘now, is that the whole truth?’ look.

  ‘It is!’ she insisted. ‘The police were here yesterday! She claimed she was too traumatised to tidy up after they’d searched it, and—’

  I held up my hand, as my heart sank into my stomach-flattening pants. ‘Stop there. Slowly, please. The police were here?’

  Gabi nodded. ‘They’ve done searching her place, and your mum’s place, and they still haven’t found whatever it is they’re looking for, so when they found out Allegra was here, suddenly we had the boys in blue knocking on the door. They fingerprinted everything, even your dressmaking dummy.’ She sniffed. ‘You can still smell it, can’t you?’

  I sank my head onto my forearms on the desk.

  Police! In my office.

  No. I couldn’t think of three positive things to say about that.

  In fact, I couldn’t think of one.

  A grim thought occurred to me and I sat bolt upright. ‘God in heaven. Tell me they didn’t—’

  ‘Nope, they didn’t find anything here, either,’ added Gabi cheerfully. ‘But they had a good laugh watching your home movies of Tristram Hart-Mossop leching at you in Selfridges. And I got some very interesting gossip about one of them who knows the protection officers at Downing Street. Apparently, Cherie likes to—’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I yelped. ‘Just tell me some nice encouraging things, until I get my composure back.’

  ‘OK,’ said Gabi, heaping ground coffee into the filter. She took a look at me, and added an extra scoop. ‘I’ve spoken to some awfully worried young posh blokes, who are all having hernias because you’re in New York.’ She put her head on one side curiously. ‘What is it you do to these people? Some of them sound desperate. You can tell me, Allegra’s not here.’

  ‘Nothing, really,’ I said, feeling mollified. ‘I just . . . Well, it’s not all just shopping, you know. It’s the talking, and, er, listening.’

  Gabi looked baffled. ‘But half of them never say anything.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all about giving them a bosom to cry on. I mean, a shoulder. To cry on.’

  ‘Well, that might be closer to the truth than you know,’ said Gabi, and turned the coffee machine on. ‘Your bosom could bring a grown man to tears.’

  ‘And what exactly do you mean by that?’ I demanded.

  ‘Oh . . . Never mind. If you look on the desk, there’s a list of messages. Do you mind having your coffee black? We’re out of milk.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ I moved the invoice files and the post file to one side. So I could see Gabi better over the desk, I also moved the large cardboard box that had been dumped there.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, peering in. ‘Is it those breath fresheners I sent over? I thought we could slip some in with each invoice. Then no one can take it personally.’

  ‘Ah, no, they’re in the store room. You don’t need to see that,’ said Gabi quickly, bouncing off the sofa as if propelled by an ejector seat. ‘That’s just . . . just a nothing.’

  She swooped to take the box away, but I swooped it in the opposite direction first and held the box away from her.

  ‘Is it for Nelson?’ I asked teasingly. ‘Are you sending him special rations?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But listen, Mel, it’s not important. Look! Here are some letters from your editor at that magazine, for your column.’ She waved them at me, as if to get me to let go of the box to take them. ‘Some very juicy ones here, one from a chap who’s got a thing about kilts.’

  But my curiosity was piqued. ‘So what’s in here then?’ I asked, reaching inside. My hand made contact with a whole load of soft things. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve taken up knitting socks for Nelson?’ I asked, pulling one out.

  When I saw what it was, I nearly hurled it straight back in. ‘Argh!’

  Gabi sighed.

  ‘What in the name of all that’s holy is this?’ I shook it at her then peered more closely. It seemed to be a knitted toy dog, except it had six legs and one ear much longer than the other, and was knitted from a strange green mohair which gave it a fuzzy halo. There was also a tumour on its back, bulging obscenely, but not quite as obscenely as its red tongue, which lolled out at some length. The whole thing looked radioactive.

  ‘Is it a dog?’ I asked incredulously. ‘A camel? An . . . anteater? I mean, what?’

  I dropped it onto the desk with a shudder and looked at Gabi for some explanation.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again and shrugged.

  Silently, I reached into the box, and pulled out a cat, created in a luminous rainbow stripe, sporting a tail that was three times as long as its body and massive ears that bent in different directions. For some reason, there were three of them. It also had terrifying human-shaped eyes sewn onto its head in green wool, complete with Clockwork Orange eyelashes and staring pupils.

  I put it next to the dog. They made a fearsome couple. In fact, just looking at them brought back vague stirrings of childhood nightmares.

  I giggled nervously. ‘Gabi, did my mother send these?’

  She nodded. ‘There are lots.’

  I peered into the box and vaguely made out a tangle of legs, heads, tails and torsos, all in different colours. It was the lucky dip from hell. A child could end up with lifelong issues if they woke up with something like that next to them on the pillow.

  ‘Mummy must have been very busy,’ I said, trying to think of a positive observation to make.

  ‘She’s knitting away her stress,’ explained Gabi. ‘I had a very interesting chat with her on the phone. Apparently, there’s bee
n a bit of bother with—’

  ‘Gabi,’ I said firmly, ‘one catastrophe at a time.’

  She rolled her eyes in a manner that Nelson would hardly have recognised. ‘Look, it hasn’t been a total disaster while you’ve been swanning round New York,’ she snapped. ‘If you look in the invoice file, you’ll see that it hasn’t all been police raids and shopping. Some of us have been doing some work.’

  I bit my tongue and opened the box file. ‘I know,’ I apologised. I had no right to yell at Gabi. Coping with Allegra was a full-time job for her, let alone doing anything else. Just because Allegra’s entanglements with the police had started to swish airily over my head didn’t mean Gabi had had time to get used to the constant drama. ‘I’m sorry. I know you’ve been working hard and I do appreciate it.’

  ‘We have. Well, I have.’ Gabi poured me some coffee and brought it over to the desk. I noticed, as she put the cup and saucer down, she surreptitiously moved the box of mutant toys to somewhere out of my eye-line.

  ‘Oh, come here and give me a hug,’ I said, pushing my chair back and going over to embrace her. ‘I’ve really missed you.’

  ‘I’ve missed you too,’ she said, hugging me back, and I was relieved. It was horrible being cross with Gabi – I wasn’t cut out for ball-breaking, and, to be honest, I was quite glad about that.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘what’s in the Hamleys bags?’ I peered but couldn’t see inside. ‘I love Hamleys. I could spend all day in there!’

  Gabi looked shifty, and at that moment the door swung open and Allegra shimmered in. When she saw me, a ghost of a double-take flitted across her face, then vanished behind her usual expression of barely concealed impatience.

  ‘Hello, Melissa,’ she said. ‘Ah, splendid, you’ve made coffee, Gabi. Black, three sugars, please.’

  ‘I made coffee for Melissa,’ said Gabi through gritted teeth.

  ‘Biscuits?’ Allegra held out her hand towards Gabi expectantly.

  ‘Allegra, this isn’t a café!’ I protested. ‘And Gabi isn’t here to furnish you with elevenses.’ I took a deliberate look at my watch. ‘As it now is.’