‘Done. Sold. Put me down for two,’ he said. ‘One for my mother, and another for my godmother.’
‘Excellent,’ I said, putting two ticks by his name.
‘How’s the lovely Gabi?’ he asked in his new man-of-the-world voice.
‘She’s fine,’ I said, thrown by his interest. ‘Why? Have you changed your mind about having a girlfriend?’
‘Good God, no, I haven’t, but I think Nelson might have.’
‘I don’t think so!’ I retorted automatically.
‘Don’t you?’ he said. I reminded myself that Roger was a terrible old woman for gossip, accurate or otherwise. ‘Oh, maybe I’ve got it wrong,’ he went on airily. ‘But that’s Nelson all over, isn’t it? He’s got a bit of a Sir Galahad fixation when it comes to helpless women, hasn’t he?’
I stared at the receiver. There was no polite answer to that. Especially coming from a man who now prided himself on offering women advice about their highlights.
‘I hear you’re escorting Miles Glover to a party tonight?’ he went on, oblivious to my shocked silence. ‘Be nice to him, he’s not very good at these social dos. See if you can have a word with him about his BO too, will you?’
Really, I had created a monster, and no mistake.
Miles Glover, old friend of Roger Trumpet, was waiting for me in the coffee shop opposite the bar in which his office party was taking place. I would have known him for a friend of Roger’s, if only from the prematurely middle-aged haircut and the nervous way he was shredding a paper napkin, as if he was waiting to be stoned to death, rather than drink a few glasses of warm white wine in a private room.
I wasn’t really in the mood for someone else’s office party, but a job was a job, and since I was scaling down Jonathan’s appointments, I really needed to do more of these. So I pulled all my confidence and positive thoughts up into my chest, straining the buttons of my new Loden-green wool suit, and went over to Miles’s table.
‘Hello,’ I said, slipping into the chair opposite. ‘Is it Miles? I’m Honey. How do you do?’
‘Hello.’ He gave me a quick look, then cast his eyes back down to the table where there were four empty espresso cups lined up in front of him.
‘Not looking forward to tonight?’ I asked sympathetically.
Miles shook his head.
‘Never mind, it’ll soon be over,’ I said. ‘If it gets very bad, I can pretend I have a terrible headache, and insist that you have to take me home. Then you’ll look like a perfect gentleman, I’ll look like the prima donna and you won’t have to stay for the speeches.’
That cracked a tiny smile out of him.
‘Is there anything I need to know before we go in?’ I asked. We’d covered the basics in our phone conversation earlier: it was an old-fashioned law firm, they were always on at him to bring a partner along, Miles hated Christmas parties and had always feigned last-minute ski trips but this year he was going for a promotion and had to be there.
‘That they’re a nosey bunch of bastards?’ he suggested, bitterly. ‘And don’t drink the wine, it’ll be poisonous.’
‘OK,’ I said brightly. This was going to be a long three hours. ‘That sounds like most office parties I’ve been to.’
Miles made an enigmatic snorting noise, knocked back the dregs of his last espresso and off we went.
As Christmas bashes went, I actually didn’t think it was a bad one but Miles clearly wasn’t the sort of chap to wander round a party on his own, scattering chit-chat and jollity in his wake. He spent most of the first hour glued to my side, while I made increasingly desperate conversation about Roger and Roger’s cousins. But I did notice that heads were turning our way, and every so often someone would pop up and linger next to us, until I said hello, and he grudgingly introduced them to me.
Then they went away again, rejoined their circle of mates and began gossiping furiously.
Most of my dates were just shy, but there was something else about Miles. He was shy and cross and seriously hard work. He was also knocking back the free wine like nobody’s business.
My feet were hurting and my back was aching and I was dying to look at my watch, but I knew I couldn’t. I hadn’t had a date this tough since that horrible lunch for Mrs McKinnon in the Lanesborough. Being with Jonathan had obviously ruined me for normal men – even with his unpredictable silences, I hadn’t realised until tonight how very easy it had been. And if I ended our arrangement, it would all be like this from now on . . .
I shook myself.
‘So, Miles!’ I said cheerfully. ‘Who’s that big chap who keeps staring over at us? Should I go and say hello?’
Miles, who had no compunction whatsoever about checking his watch, snapped to attention at that point. ‘Don’t look at him. Don’t!’
‘Why?’
Miles let out a gusty sigh. ‘He’s . . . just someone I know from school. Called Ben. He joined the firm a few months back and all he’s done ever since is spread . . . nasty rumours about me.’ He downed the rest of his wine and took another glass from the passing tray.
‘Oh dear,’ I said, casting a brilliant smile at this Ben bloke, who blinked rapidly, then winked at me. ‘What sort of rumours?’
‘Don’t want to talk about them.’
‘Really? That bad? Surely not,’ I said, soothingly. ‘Oh look, he’s coming over.’
‘Shit,’ said Miles.
‘Would you like to put your arm around me?’ I suggested.
Miles looked at me, and his face was frankly scared. So I put my arm around him.
‘Hello, Miles, my old mucker,’ bellowed Ben, and I knew at once what sort of man he was: head boy, captain of the first fifteen, everyone’s mate apart from the ones whose lives he made a misery. ‘And hello there to you, darling. Who are you?’
‘I’m Honey,’ I said, extending my hand politely. I didn’t flinch under Ben’s firm grip and I withdrew my hand the second he held it too long.
He cocked his eyebrow. ‘Didn’t know Miles had a sister?’
‘I’m Miles’s . . . friend,’ I said. ‘Not his sister.’
‘Well, well, well!’ Ben laughed. ‘Wonders will never cease. Never had you down as a ladies’ man, Miles!’
I could feel Miles flinch. ‘Why ever not?’ I asked.
‘Well, you know . . .’ Ben did a rugby-club guffaw and now I flinched on Miles’s behalf.
‘No,’ I said coldly, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Between you and me, Honey . . .’ said Ben, leaning so close I could smell the wine and cigarettes on his breath. Not nice. ‘Between you and me, we had old Miles down as a shirtlifter. Didn’t we?’ he added, giving Miles a hefty slap on the back. ‘Bit of an uphill gardener!’
I looked at Miles in horror: misery was written all over his face and his slumping shoulders told me everything I needed to know.
‘How rude.’ I pulled my shoulders back and tried hard to keep the anger out of my voice, while flashing Ben a look of pure disgust. ‘Do you have a girlfriend yourself?’
‘Abso-bloody-lutely.’ Ben preened himself. ‘Fighting them off with a shitty stick.’
‘Really?’ I said, sympathetically. ‘Well, if you say so. Maybe there really is someone for everyone. Would you excuse us? Miles wants me to say hello to his secretary. I wish I could say it was lovely to meet you, er, Bill. But I can’t.’
I gave Miles a gentle shove and made it look as if he were leading me away instead of the other way round. As we passed a door, I pushed him through it into the deserted buffet area, and he wilted onto a nearby chair.
‘What was all that about?’ I demanded. ‘You know bullying in the workplace is illegal these days? You can take him to a tribunal for behaving like that! What a revolting piece of pondlife!’
Terrible shoes too, I noticed, but didn’t add this, as it didn’t really seem to sit well with my moral outrage.
Miles shrugged hopelessly and looked round for a drink. He was distinctly the worse for wear, and we’d
been there only fifty minutes. For a solicitor, he was very weedy. I wondered what he was like in meetings. Not exactly value for money. ‘They’re all the same,’ he moaned. ‘What’s the point?’
‘There’s a big point!’ I snorted. ‘If you’re not gay, it’s a disgusting way of bullying you, and if you are gay, then . . . then it’s sexual harassment!’
I paused, unsure whether I might have overstepped the mark. No mention had been made about Miles’s sexuality, and I hadn’t asked. But bigots like Ben made me so angry, and there was something about Miles that needed a good shake. ‘Miles?’ I said, nudging him. ‘You’re at work for a long time. If that creep’s ruining your life, then you need to deal with it.’
Miles looked up at me with weariness in his eyes. ‘And what if I don’t know? What then?’
I knew he wasn’t talking about Ben the bully then. I sat down on the chair beside him, tucking my skirt around my knees. ‘Life’s very short,’ I said. ‘You can’t spend it pretending to be someone you’re not.’
Given my own dilemma, I realised the irony of this as soon as I said it and was thankful that Nelson wasn’t there to ram it home.
‘Roger said you were perfectly happy to cover for him at his party,’ Miles whined on defensively. ‘You didn’t give him a lecture.’
‘Roger’s different.’ I helped myself to a lone sausage roll. It tasted of lard. ‘I’ve known Roger for years and he’s very comfortable with his sexuality.’ I was about to add, ‘What there is of it,’ but didn’t. ‘Roger isn’t particularly interested in girls or boys – he just wanted to get his mum off his case,’ I went on. ‘That’s the only reason I was happy to do it. I don’t think you’re so sure, and, you know, it’s not really very healthy to sweep it under the carpet.’
‘You’re saying you wouldn’t act as an escort to a gay man?’ he countered crossly. ‘Isn’t that discrimination?’
‘I have acted as an escort to a gay man,’ I said, thinking about a rather enjoyable evening of Scottish dancing a few months back. ‘But the man I was escorting was completely relaxed about being gay, had a charming boyfriend, but he just didn’t want to bring him to a cricket club event with a bunch of men he didn’t know that well yet. I didn’t say I was his girlfriend, just a friend.’ I gave Miles a pointed stare. ‘I think it’s always easier to let other people draw their own conclusions than to start off with a lie.’
He let out a long sigh. ‘I could leave.’
‘You could. Or you could deal with the problem. It’s your life, Miles. Do what you want with it. Just don’t end up doing what other people want. You can only mask things for so long.’
What was I masking, I wondered. Why was I so determined to run away from Jonathan, from confronting my father, from saying no to people? Why was it so much easier, so much more rewarding to be Honey, and not Melissa?
We sat there in silence, listening to the party rumble on behind the closed door.
22
‘Jeremy, put that down,’ I said, looking up from the shopping list. ‘You can’t afford it. Step away from the display.’
Jeremy Wilde, reformed surf dude, obediently replaced the jar of Crème de la Mer he’d been fiddling with. We were in the beauty and make-up hall of Liberty, on the finishing straight of our Christmas shopping speed slalom. He was carrying the bags containing the gifts I would giftwrap overnight, then annotate with Post-it notes, all ready for his personal touch. I, meanwhile, was sipping calmly from a bottle of water, and beginning to understand why my mother treated her Peter Jones card like some women treated Valium.
Shopping for other people, with other people’s money, was a surprisingly fulfilling career sideline, especially in the season of free mulled-wine snifters, mini-mince pies and the all-pervasive atmosphere of impulse buying. Thanks to the Little Lady, secretaries all over London would now be unwrapping something more exciting than three Roger et Gallet soaps on their last day in the office. And thanks to Honey’s own personal research efforts in the field of boned and laced undergarments, some wives would be discovering some saucy undies they’d actually want to wear.
‘Who’s next, Jeremy?’ I asked.
‘Dad’s girlfriend,’ he mumbled, then squinted up naughtily from under his shaggy fringe. ‘Katinka. She’s hot. Hyuk, hyuk. Mum hates her. Used to be our au pair – till she ran off with Dad.’
‘Hmm. Nothing too sexy, then,’ I said warningly, noticing Jeremy’s eyes glazing. ‘How about . . . cellulite cream?’
With three weeks to go before Christmas (and by the same reckoning, two weeks before Emery’s wedding), I was inhaling more ‘festive ambience’ than one of Santa’s little helpers. Sadly, my own spirits were less than festive.
Yesterday Daddy had left two messages on my mobile and one on our home answering machine, wanting ‘to see you and your chequebook’. After those came a couple of messages from Emery, about her self-penned wedding vows and the possibility of hiring a small boy to carry her rings, since William’s ex-wife was oddly reluctant to let her borrow their four-year-old Valentino, then a call from Gabi, looking for Nelson to help her view another flat, with only a passing hello to me.
None of these prospective conversations filled me with much joy and I was waiting for something positive to happen, in order to work up the necessary oomph to deal with the return calls.
‘Hyuk, cellulite cream, excellent. Should I offer to apply it for her?’ asked Jeremy, sneakily. ‘She didn’t have any last time I looked.’
‘Scrap that. Pedicure socks,’ I said. ‘Girls love them. Big treat.’
My work phone rang in my bag and despite all the lecturing I’d given myself, my heart thudded in case it was Jonathan.
The number was withheld.
He could be calling from a foreign switchboard . . .
‘Hello!’ I said cheerfully, imagining a Starbucks Eggnog Latte, all steaming and festive and spicy. And American. ‘This is Honey!’
‘Oh, Honey,’ whined a familiar voice. ‘It’s Bryan. I need some help with my Christmas shopping. What can I get my mother? She likes Lilliput Lane houses and baking.’
I suppose I should have been flattered that Bryan refused to give up, but it was getting quite wearing and I wasn’t very good at being mean to men who clearly needed more help than I could offer. Since threats and crossness had only inflamed him – and I didn’t have time to deal with him here – I decided to try another tack. I just couldn’t be mean. I wanted to, but there was some kind of valve in my head that stopped me.
‘All right, Bryan, but this will be very expensive since you’ve left it to the last minute,’ I warned. ‘Fax over a list of all the people you need to give presents to, with their ages and rough price guides and I’ll get my assistant to look at it.’ Half an hour on the phone to Gabi should sort him out. ‘Now I have to go – there’s another call waiting.’
I did have another call waiting, as it happened: also, enticingly, from a number-withheld switchboard.
‘Hello?’ I said breathily.
‘Hello, Honey, this is your accountant speaking.’
‘Nelson,’ I said, letting the breath rush out of me, ‘why are you calling me on my work phone?’
‘Because you’re at work? And because I’ve done your accounts. We need to go through them. Would you like to take me out for a sandwich? You may hear something to your advantage.’
My attention was drawn back to the display. Jeremy was slowly poking his fingers in and out of a large open pot of home waxing gunk while the assistant glowered at him.
‘Stop it!’ I hissed. ‘Yes, Nelson, that would be fine.’
‘OK, meet me at that nice café opposite my office at about one.’
I looked over at Jeremy. He had abandoned the wax and was inspecting a heated eyelash curler with curiosity and fear in his eyes.
‘Put it down,’ I mouthed, and he did.
‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ asked Nelson, tearing into an almond croissant.
&nbs
p; The café was warm, cinnamon-scented and playing Christmas songs, but I still felt unseasonably tetchy.
‘The good news,’ I said. ‘Unless the bad news is so bad you think I’ll need a lot of good news to recover from it.’
Nelson did a pretend double take. ‘What has got into you?’ he said. ‘You’ve been like an old biddy all week! Get with the seasonal programme!’
‘Sorry.’ I pulled a face. ‘It must be this wedding. It’s turning me spinster-ish.’
Nelson snorted something unintelligible. But it was true: I was turning into a right old trout. Jeremy’s dad’s girlfriend’s pedicure socks floated accusingly into my mind’s eye. That had been mean of me.
‘Well, the good news is that you are running a remarkably profitable little business,’ he said, pushing a page of accounts over the table.
I stared at the columns in front of me with a mixture of delight and astonishment. Then I looked up at Nelson. ‘Seriously? This is my profit?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘No, you plank. Not unless you’re selling drugs on the side. That’s turnover. This is your profit.’
He pointed to another column. It was still a surprising amount of money, more than I’d expected, even with my manic saving.
‘Really?’ I said, my face breaking into a smile. ‘Wow!’
‘Yup,’ he said. ‘You can stop cutting those “How to Pinch Pennies in Your Office” features out of the Sunday papers.’
I blushed and ran my eyes over the columns again. Wow.
Nelson raised his cappuccino cup to me and winked.
‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I want to be the first to admit that I was wrong. You are a shrewd businesswoman after all, and I demand my share of the profits for giving you the idea in the first place.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, beaming so broadly I thought my face was going to split in two.
‘So does this mean we get a much better Christmas?’ he asked.
‘Definitely!’ I enthused, my mind returning immediately to Liberty, this time with my own shopping list, instead of Jeremy Wilde’s. ‘Santa might just bring you those slippers you’ve been hinting about, after all! And I’m going to treat myself to a really fabuloso pedicure somewhere, and get some new undies, and replace that knife of yours I broke, and . . .’