She swept in, chestnut hair swinging like in a shampoo ad, and I could tell by her eyes, skittering from box to box, that she was itching to tidy up.
“Evie, don’t tell me anything, I want to guess why you SOS-ed me,” she said by way of greeting. “Has Max got the call from Antiques Roadshow? Has he finally schmoozed his way to fame?”
Alice threw one hand dramatically onto her hip and knocked over a Chinese vase with her sleeve.
“Oh, bollocks!” she squeaked, making a grab for it as the vase teetered, then fell off the shelf.
That was the saving grace to her otherwise majestic attitude. Like me, she was chronically clumsy, on account of being nearly six feet tall. Something to do with having longer legs and arms than normal and a center of gravity that seemed to shift with the tides. When we were children, our mother never let us go into the china department of any major department store without fastening our arms inside our duffle coats first.
I made a grab for the vase at the same time she did, and between us we managed to knock it onto a bedroom sofa Max had taken in as part exchange for a Tiffany lamp. It lay in the cushions, looking winded.
“Sorry,” breathed Alice.
“What’s going on?” yelled Max from the back room.
“Nothing!” I yelled back. “Alice was just thinking about buying a vase!”
“Tell her we don’t do mates’ rates in this shop!”
“Don’t mind him,” I said. “He has no mates.”
“I heard that!” bellowed Max.
“Can you lend me some money?” I whispered. “I went a bit overboard at the last sale, and Max is making me pay for everything myself. I know I can sell it. It’d just be a loan.”
“Again?” Alice looked pained. “It’s not that I mind lending you money, but—”
“Okay, then,” I said, trying a different tack. “Would you like to buy the sweetest little Steiff teddy bear? You could start a collection!”
“I thought you were starting a Steiff collection.” She eyed me beadily.
“I was. I’ll throw in the three I’ve already found,” I replied, mentally retrieving the tatty teds propping up my collection of first-edition Beatrix Potter books in my spare room: I’d been going for a ’30s nursery feel, but to be honest, I’d have been equally happy with a Victorian parlor look. “There, you see—you’ve already got four, and it’ll give Fraser something to buy you for Christmas instead of fishing rods and waterproof waders and all that outdoors stuff you’ve dumped in my garage.”
“No,” said Alice firmly. “I am totally anti-collections. As you well know.”
“You’ve already got a collection of unused huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’ gear,” I pointed out. “Can I sell you a stag’s head to complete the set?”
“I’d rather give you the cash.” She paused. “I’ll give you double if you don’t tell Fraser that fishing rod’s in your garage.”
“Done,” I said. “And I’ll give you the money back when I’ve eBayed my purchases for a massive profit.”
“I’ve heard that before too.” Alice reached into her gorgeous silver leather bag for her checkbook.
It was a shame Alice was so phobic about possessions, I thought, eyeing the collection of Art Deco cigarette cases in the cabinet behind her. She was the only person I knew who could actually use the cases for business cards, or mints, or—
“Stop it,” she said, looking up over her lashes. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m this close to calling Mum and telling her to Simplify your flat.” She held up her finger and thumb, then thought for a second and made the tiny space even tinier. “You know she’s itching to do it for a magazine?”
I shuddered.
Our mother, Caryl Nicholson—or Carol, as she’d been as recently as 2004—was something of a lifestyle guru in the leafier parts of south London, thanks to her business, Simplify with Caryl Nicholson, which basically dejunked houses so they sold faster. Mum’s spring cleaning had always started just after Christmas; she had to ration her housework so she didn’t run out of stuff to do by midweek. Woe betide Barbie if she got so much as badly cut hair; we didn’t have a dollies’ hospital so much as a sinister Gestapo-style toy abduction squad that spirited away any ailing toys, never to be seen again.
When Alice and I moved out, our father had offered Mum’s ruthless tactics to friends who had the real estate agents coming round, mainly so he could read the paper instead of having it yanked from his hands and ironed. Ten years and three hundred skips later, she ran her own “life laundry” business, and wore a lot of Joseph basics while charging rich ladies top whack to march around their executive residences, barking at them to get rid of anything that hadn’t moved in six months, up to and including husbands and heavy-shedding family pets.
Ironically, the property market collapsing had only made her more popular, and now she had a whole team working for her, including Alice, who was her central London manager. Both their houses looked like something from interiors magazines, even if—privately—I did think the extreme tidiness was a bit At Home with a Serial Killer.
“She won’t want to make over my flat,” I said confidently. “She doesn’t understand my need for ambience. She said my fifties-diner kitchen set made her want to cry.”
“I know,” said Alice.
“What do you mean, you know?”
Alice rolled her eyes. “I mean, she mentioned it. And told a journalist from Good Homes that you were her last remaining challenge. She has you in her sights, Evie. Consider this your advance warning. There.”
She handed me a check for five hundred pounds, and I felt an invisible flock of birds lift my careworn shoulders.
“Wow! Thanks, Alice, I was only going to ask you for a couple of hundred!” I blurted out. “Here, let me throw the teddy bear in!”
I pressed the bear into her hands, and she shrank away as if it might be a carrier of some rare disease, like untidiness.
Then she looked back at me without speaking, and her meticulously groomed eyebrows knitted a couple of millimeters closer together. “Evie,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, “there is something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
That’s when I knew the tip-off and the cash weren’t going to be interest-free.
“Coffee?” Max appeared, bearing an old pub tray with three unmatched porcelain cups, a battered hotel percolator, and a packet of HobNobs. “And would you like to explain, Evangeline, how you offered to make coffee, and I end up making it?”
I noticed he’d smoothed down his wild hair and was looking noticeably more dapper. I squinted. He’d added a red silk scarf. My red silk scarf.
Alice’s steely gaze skated around the shop until it alighted on the stag’s head. Suddenly she flashed a dazzling smile. “Max, this . . . big deer thing is just what I’ve been looking for, to give my boyfriend for Valentine’s Day!”
“It is?”
“Ooh, what a great idea!” I exclaimed. Fraser would appreciate the noble stag, even if Max didn’t. “You see? I knew it would be a perfect gift for the man who has everything! And Fraser can start a collection!”
“I’ve told Evie I want it,” she went on, shooting me a glare. “We just need to talk about a price.”
“Well, I had it marked down at three thou—” Max began, but I cut him off.
“It’s one of the items I was going to pay for myself,” I reminded him. “Out of my own money. So really she should be negotiating with me.”
Max looked foxed.
“I know Evie can’t do negotiations with an audience,” Alice went on. “Do you mind if I insist on discussing this with her outside the shop?” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, look, it’s nearly four already. By the time I bring Evie back, there won’t be much time left for you to close up. Tell you what, why don’t you just let her go now and then you can start in the morning with a nice big sale?”
“But . . . I . . .” Max spluttered.
“Brilliant, thanks so muc
h! Evie, is that your bag? And where’s your coat?”
Obediently, I picked up my bag (Alice’s last-year’s “patent hobo”) and my coat (Alice’s last-year’s “deconstructed cocoon”) and my hat (my own last-year’s Marks and Spencer beret), and let her march me from the wrong end of the King’s Road toward the much smarter end she frequented.
I was allowed to bask in the warm glow of having acted on my antiques instincts for about ten minutes, before the reason for Alice’s sudden generosity was laid before me like the wrong side of a bodged-up table.
Two
Alice took me to No. 11 Cadogan Gardens, a discreet hotel round the back of Peter Jones. It was a warrenlike townhouse with lots of discreet nooks and crannies; she and Mum liked to take clients there to tell them that their lifetime collections of Vogue magazines and paper boutique bags had been recycled. No one could hear you scream in No. 11.
“I’ve got some good news for you,” she said, pouring me a cup of tea from the tray that had appeared on the table in front of us within moments of us arriving. “It’s a favor.”
“For me, or for someone else?”
“For you and for someone else.” Alice broke a biscuit in half, nibbled it, and got out her phone. “Fraser’s mother’s neighbors—” She looked up. “Evie, stop looking at the cups.”
I put the saucer down guiltily. I couldn’t help it. Cups and saucers were one of my collections. Especially hotel ones, the older the better. I liked to imagine what sorts of people had drunk out of them—movie stars, duchesses, eloping couples—
“Are you concentrating?” she demanded. “Because this is complicated, and I’ve got to be somewhere at six.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Go on. Fraser’s mother’s . . . neighbors?”
“You know Fraser’s parents live on a farm in Berwickshire?” When I looked blank, she added, “You know—Berwickshire? The Scottish Borders? Very beautiful, heathery moors, grouse, dramatic North Sea cliffs, steeped in mindless Anglo-Scottish violence, et cetera, et cetera.”
I nodded. Alice had been invited up to stay with Fraser for New Year (or Hogmanay, as apparently no one called it). They’d been seeing each other for two years, so Mum and I had held our breath until about the third of January, waiting for Big News; but Alice had returned from Scotland with only a lot of salmon and a very bad cold—and a look on her face that made it clear there was nothing she wanted to discuss.
“If you’d told me about the heathery moors instead of the cobwebby loo, I might have remembered,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t see them, I was too busy not freezing to death. Anyway, Fraser’s family are old friends with the people who have the big house next door, the McAndrews. It’s a castle, really, called Kettlesheer,” she added in a terrible Scottish accent. “You’d love it—Sheila says it’s crammed with random junk. Some forefather was one of those Victorian collectors, shot everything he saw, then stuffed it in cases to gather dust for eternity. We drove past at New Year—it’s all turrets and bats’ nests. The problem is that the McAndrews need to raise some cash to fix the damp, or the roof, or something. Basically, they need an expert to advise them about what items to sell.”
“And you volunteered me?” My heart thumped in my chest; it sounded amazing. I’d always dreamed of getting into one of those big houses, opening the ancient cupboards, peering into the rusty suits of armor, maybe finding Maharajah’s diamond, wrapped in cloth and hidden for years in a trinket box. …
Something shifty in Alice’s expression stopped me as I was mentally waltzing down the ancestral portrait gallery.
“Is there a reason why they haven’t got in touch with one of the big auction houses?” I asked. “Bonhams and Christie’s both have branches in Edinburgh.”
“Ah,” said Alice. “Well, they need someone discreet. And very good,” she added, a split second too late. “Reading between the lines, they don’t want it getting round the sherry-and-shortbread circuit that they’re having to flog off the family jewels. And Max has a whole book of private clients who love random junk, doesn’t he?”
“If by junk you mean priceless antiquities—” I started.
“Evie,” said Alice, dropping her polite routine. “He buys random junk from skint aristos and sells it on to lottery winners who don’t know better.”
“Right,” I said instead, and ate the half-biscuit Alice had left.
“Besides which, Mum and I have been talking,” she said ominously.
Please, not the broadening horizons lecture again.
“I don’t want to give you a lecture,” said Alice in her most lecturing tone, “but this is a great chance for you to make some new contacts of your own. Broaden your horizons. Step out of your comfort zone.”
She spread her hands and smiled forcefully, like someone on QVC demonstrating a life-changing garden-sprinkler system. “Who knows who you might meet up there?”
I gave her a hard stare. “Please tell me this conversation isn’t going to end up at speed dating again. I do not need you and Mum to micromanage my life. I am not a sad old cat-gnawed hoarder.”
“Of course you’re not!” she protested. “But how long do you want to work for a man who has to send you to do his bidding at auctions because everyone else thinks he’s slimier than a weasel’s backside? You’re never going to be able to build your own client list while you’re running round after Max.”
I focused on the battered silver teapot—from one of the big hotels on Park Lane, maybe?—and tried to work out why half of me was swooning and the other half was feeling, well, mutinous.
I was a sucker for a turret, let alone a suit of armor. And I did want Max to take me more seriously. But I wanted to do it my way. Recently, Alice and Mum had started talking about me—while I was there, I might add—like some sort of renovation project, as if stripping bits of my life out and painting the rest a professional neutral might reveal a spacious, airy new Evie.
I was thirty, not sixty; I had a regular if unspectacular turnover of dates; and I’d made half my annual salary selling my finds on eBay last year. Most of it was “junk” that people like Mum and Alice had forced clients to chuck out. Sometimes I wondered how it was possible that I was biologically related to either of them; I’d even checked on the Internet to see if there were any of those “baby-swap nightmares” in the North Yorkshire area round the time of my birth.
“I’ve got the McAndrews’ details here,” Alice went on as if I’d already said yes. “Why don’t you give Duncan a call tonight and discuss it?”
“Duncan?” I said. “Are we on first-name terms already?”
She ignored the heavy sarcasm in my voice. Alice was good at ignoring sarcasm. And tears.
“Duncan and Ingrid. Very nice people. Actually, why don’t I call them for you? I’ll pretend to be your assistant. I can negotiate a decent day rate. I bet you’d do it simply for the chance to poke around their attics.” She started scribbling.
I decided, gloomily, that my mutiny boiled down to Alice—or rather, myself. Alice reminded me of what I could be like if I just organized myself a bit better. There was less than a year between us, and in the days when Mum dressed us in matching smocks, we were so alike that people often mistook us for fraternal twins. Yet these days, apart from sharing the same chestnut hair/lanky limb combo, we were totally different. She was better dressed than me, more sociable than me, just more in focus altogether. If she weren’t my sister, I’d probably hate her.
But she was my sister, I reminded myself. And no matter how bossy she came across, she did genuinely have my best interests at heart. My messy life bothered Alice a whole lot more than it bothered me.
“Do you fancy going for some supper?” I heard myself ask. “We could get an early-bird deal somewhere?”
She stopped writing. “Um, I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got to be somewhere at six.”
“Late appointment?”
“No, it’s . . .” She stopped and gazed up at me, her brown eyes fu
ll of dread. “You’re going to laugh.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. Think of the very last thing either of us would want to do on a Friday night.”
“Taxidermy?” I suggested. “Star Trek convention?”
“Worse. More mortifying.”
“Oh! You’re having that colonic Mum booked for your birthday present?”
Alice bit her lip, then silently opened her bag to show me the contents.
“You’re not serious,” I breathed, turning white at the same time her nose turned bright red. My whole soul crinkled at the edges in sympathy as our shared childhood humiliations flooded back. “Not . . . what I think it is?”
She nodded. “Yup.”
Our eyes met, and in an instant we were both standing in a freezing gym, two fed-up herons in a flock of pink-tighted cygnets.
“I am going to a dancing lesson,” she spat.
For me and Alice, dancing was on a par with normal people getting dressed up as a pantomime horse. Hilarious for everyone else, but mortifying, overheating, and potentially dangerous for those actually inside the horse suit.
Our tiny, matchy-matchy mother was horrified that she could have produced two gangling girls routinely referred to as Big Bird and King Kong even by their teachers. In her infinite wisdom, she decided that dancing would somehow neutralize our uncoordination, and so from the ages of about six and five respectively, Alice and I were launched on a program of enforced lessons. We stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs, making even the kids with “left” and “right” written on their mittens look like Liza Minnelli.
We begged—begged—Mum to let us pack it in, but with her steely ability to superimpose her own version of reality over everyone else’s, she managed to see miraculous improvement in us, and always clapped far too loud when we shambled on at recitals, clouting some unfortunate classmate or denting the scenery in passing. This went on for eight agonizing years and numerous dance styles, during which time I developed an allergic reaction to leotards and Alice was banned from all tap classes within ten miles of Harrogate.