Ignoring my stomach’s cries for a Hobnob, I settled down with one of Nelson’s peppermint teas and put my glasses on to read through Mrs McKinnon’s contract, Post-it notes and pencils at the ready in case of queries.
It was written in such vague terms that after ten minutes’ close study, all I could establish was that the agency was called the Charming Company and that it wasn’t based in the same place as Mrs McKinnon’s office. Still, I’d read through enough estate agents’ contracts not to be surprised by minor discrepancies like that.
What was more surprising was the list of particulars, starting off with a whole page just about dress. She obviously wasn’t employing only Old Cathalians – as if she had to tell girls like me to wear smart suits, matching underwear, no gold jewellery and to have my hair done nicely! I didn’t dress any other way.
Mrs McKinnon also suggested adopting a different name for professional use, ‘so that charm and fun can remain uppermost in your mind at all times’. I must admit this appealed to me, since I suddenly felt as if I could do with a spell off from being Melissa Romney-Jones.
‘Leave your mundane worries about council tax or dental appointments at home,’ she wrote, ‘and remember to take a fresh and appealing new personality out to be dined!’
The magical Cinderella effect was only a little spoiled when she stated baldly, ‘For reasons of legal and personal discretion, real names will not be used under any circumstances. Any employee found to be contravening this rule will be summarily discharged from the Charming Company.’
Mrs McKinnon covered appropriate conversation, topics to avoid, names not to drop, and so on at mind-boggling length. There was even a sub-list of where the loos were in all the smart restaurants.
I was curious to know how much all this charm cost, and when I flicked through to the clauses about fees and commission and so on, my eyes popped. No wonder Bobsy’s date could afford to throw champagne around. No wonder Bobsy herself was looking like she’d been overhauled by Gwyneth Paltrow’s stylists. God, I thought, I really wouldn’t have to do this for very long to get Daddy’s loan paid back.
I leaned back in my chair and thought about exactly what it would mean to get that debt – and Daddy – off my back. It would be wonderful. No more snide comments that only he and I understood; no more tugging my strings to make me feel about two feet tall. But the biggest, most satisfying irony of all would be that in order to pay back that money, I’d be getting paid for using exactly those ‘pointless finishing-school skills’ he took for granted in my mother, and said were only good for finding husbands for my sisters. Me – unmarriageable Melissa.
That made me smile.
Yes, I thought, with a delicious bubble of excitement starting to rise in my stomach. Yes, I could do this.
Plus, I reasoned, warming to the idea, there were literally heaps of beautiful cocktail dresses in my wardrobe that never saw the light of day; dresses I’d made myself to fit in all the right places, and then had to wear to all the wrong places. Though I’d never mark myself down as a beauty, Gabi insisted that I scrubbed up all right, and although I wasn’t the sort of girl to chat up complete strangers in a bar, I could certainly deal well with clients when I was in my PA role at work.
The bubble sank a little at the thought of being eyed up all night by a complete stranger, but I reminded myself that this would be a role too, a job. Nothing I hadn’t done before, in different circumstances. And, I don’t know, maybe I could help them in some way. Eating out alone is never much fun, even at the nicest restaurants.
I focused on the gratifying moment of triumph when I could hand over that cheque to Daddy, and pushed any doubts aside. Sometimes one just had to get on and do things.
The final page was taken up with Mrs McKinnon’s Mission Statement. It made for stirring reading. Some of it felt familiar – as though it might have been lifted from a school song.
When I got to the lines about ‘A smile is free and so is charm/A kindly ear is heartache’s balm’ I realised it was in fact our school song.
I was sitting there daydreaming about my new bill-free, high-gloss personality, and what I’d order from the Claridges sweet trolley, when the front door banged and Nelson’s briefcase hit the floor by the door.
‘Hi, honey, I’m home!’ he yelled from the hall. Just a joke, honestly. Apart from the ‘his and hers’ bathrobes, we weren’t really like an old sitcom couple.
‘Hi, honey!’ I yelled back while he hung up his coat. ‘Good day at work?’
‘No, rubbish. Dinner in the dog, is it?’
Oops. I hadn’t even thought about supper.
I looked down at the contract on the table in front of me and decided that Nelson didn’t need to know about it just yet. But, I mused privately, Honey was a very good name, as courtesan stage names went. Flirty and feminine, like a James Bond girl. Plus, I was used to Nelson calling me honey now and again, so I wouldn’t stare off into the distance wondering who Jennifer or Antonia was.
Hastily, I shoved the contract under the newspaper and distracted him with a couple of leading questions about his day at work, while I worked out what nutritious meal for two I could concoct from dry pasta, mustard and a tin of condensed milk.
5
I didn’t have much time to dwell on my meeting with Mrs McKinnon because the next day I had to go home to measure up Emery for her wedding dress.
I phoned beforehand to let everyone know I was coming, but when I arrived, bearing flowers and chocolates for all, Daddy had gone off to Norway with some of his hunting buddies for some kind of extreme fishing weekend, and Mummy had installed herself in a rigorous Yorkshire health club.
‘I’m joining her as soon as you’re done,’ Emery informed me, scoffing a truffle as I tried to get the tape measure around her tiny waist. ‘Poor thing’s worn to a frazzle – this month she’s had to organise three cocktail parties, file Daddy’s tax return with the accountant, hold a dinner for the council, and give a speech to the local WI about being in a photo-shoot for Country Life.’
I pursed my lips crossly. If my father had had to pay a professional to supply my mother’s various services, he wouldn’t have been able to afford her. Then again, at the back of my mind, I had a troubling feeling that he might once have been involved in some minor pay-roll scandal along exactly those lines.
‘And you’re going because . . . ?’ I asked, pushing the thought away.
‘Oh, I need to de-stress before I really start on the wedding plans.’
I failed to see how Emery could possibly need de-stressing. Emery was so vague that she once couldn’t accurately describe her own toothache to the dentist and so had two completely healthy molars removed. If anyone needed de-stressing it was me, and any other mug she was employing to arrange her nuptials.
‘I thought you were going to get a planner?’ I asked suspiciously.
Emery sighed. ‘I want to get one, but Daddy’s being impossible, as usual. Apparently three hundred people isn’t enough, but a wedding planner is a mad extravagance. Everyone else has one. Still,’ she added, with a little more steel in her voice, ‘I’m working on it . . .’
‘Mmm. So no messages, then?’ I asked hopefully. I was never going to get much in the way of moral guidance and/or support from either of my parents, but it would have been nice of them to be here to see me.
Emery paused and thought hard, her finger pressed on her lips to aid the process. ‘Oh, yes, Daddy said to tell you he hasn’t forgotten about Perry and the cash,’ she said, while I was measuring her back. ‘Whatever that means. He claims he’s on an economy drive before my wedding. Don’t know what he means by that either, but he did one of his ghastly just-out-of-the-coffin type laughs when he said it. Do you think I should go for something sort of more oysterish? You know, with puffy-ish . . . things?’
‘Stop waving your arms about, please,’ I said, and was glad that she couldn’t see my face, which had tightened anew at the mention of Daddy’s loan.
&n
bsp; The three best things about Emery were that she was so airy-fairy it wasn’t easy to fall into an argument with her, unlike the rest of the family; she had amazingly straight nutmeg-coloured hair, exactly like old paintings of the Virgin Mary; and she was quite kind, or at least too self-involved to be intentionally rude.
This didn’t mean she couldn’t deliver some real humdingers, though.
‘Are you going to be bringing a plus one to the wedding?’ she asked. ‘Only I need to know for my list.’
‘Why?’ I replied tetchily. ‘It’s ages off yet.’
‘Not really. Shall I put you down for a plus one, then if Orlando’s dumped you again, you can always bring Nelson instead?’
‘If it makes it easier for you,’ I seethed. ‘Anyway, you needn’t concern yourself with Orlando. Orlando and I are . . . not seeing each other any more.’
Emery sighed the wise sigh of the recently engaged. ‘Oh, Mel, you need to hurry up and find a man,’ she said, shaking her curtains of hair reprovingly. ‘Or there’ll only be divorced ones left.’
I ignored the fact that her own Prince Charming had two ex-wives to date and wasn’t yet forty. But I hadn’t met William, so didn’t feel it was fair to comment. The only facts I knew about him were that he was a partner in an American law firm in the City, he was a fiercely competitive sports enthusiast, he spent a good deal of time travelling, and that none of these gave him much time to spend with Emery, a situation which suited both rather well.
From the pictures I’d seen he was reasonably good-looking, in a glinty-eyed, jutty-jawed kind of way, and Emery seemed pretty keen on him, but that wouldn’t have been enough for me. There had to be some romance there.
‘If the choice is between spinsterdom or life imprisonment with a man like Daddy, I know which I’d rather choose,’ I said, measuring her neck rather more savagely than I intended.
Emery choked slightly. ‘But Melissa . . .’
‘I mean, who are you holding up as an example of marital bliss? Mummy, the unpaid housekeeper? Allegra, the largely ignored trophy wifelet?’
Allegra had been married to Lars, an Anglo-Swedish art dealer, who collected prehistoric arrowheads, for three years now. I didn’t know if art was all he dealt in, because he was very rich and operatically moody. Though that could just have been the Swede in him. Allegra spent much of her life floating around galleries and private views like Elvira Munster, and was as much admired (and twice as flinty) as Lars’s arrowheads.
‘Allegra is very happy with Lars,’ insisted Emery.
‘Only because he can’t spend more than forty days a year in England for tax reasons and she divides her time between a small mansion in Ham and a small palace outside Stockholm.’
‘That might be it,’ she agreed vaguely. ‘Still . . .’
‘Still . . .’ was Emery’s favoured conversational gambit. It conveyed agreement, mild disagreement and ‘let’s change the subject’ all in one syllable.
I don’t know why people make such a big deal about home comforts. My family home is one of the least comforting places I can think of.
Back in London, barely two days passed before I got a call from Mrs McKinnon. It came just after another ridiculous phone conversation with Emery about whether three hundred people could be sufficiently impressed with the release of one hundred doves on completion of her self-penned wedding vows. I regret to say that I had spoken my mind.
‘Hello?’ I said, all ready for Emery’s apology for putting down the phone while I was still explaining why chucking partially suffocated birds over the congregation might be less than festive.
‘Hello, Melissa,’ said Mrs McKinnon. ‘How are you fixed for tonight?’
I was tempted to remind her – jokily – of her instruction that a lady is never available at such short notice, but didn’t think it would be a good start to our professional relationship.
‘My diary is quite clear actually,’ I said, quite truthfully. There was only Nelson’s pub quiz on offer and I always felt such an idiot while he and his brainy mates were gaily scattering facts around like confetti.
‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘If you hie yourself along to the Savoy at half past six, you’ll meet the most charming man called Lord Armstrong-Siddeley who will be wearing a red silk hanky in his top pocket. He’s interested in point-to-points, vintage cars and clay-pigeon shooting, and he’d love to take you out for dinner.’
‘Is that his real name?’ I asked. ‘Good gracious – did his family design the motor car?’
‘My dear, didn’t you read the contract? We don’t do real names,’ she said, and there was a sliver of ice in her tone. ‘And no.’
I blushed. Clearly I had a lot to practise.
‘Wonderful!’ I tried not to sound crushed. ‘Clay-pigeon shooting, eh? That sounds wonderful!’
‘Call me at eleven, just so I know how it’s going and that you’re . . . safe,’ she said with more of that meaningful tone.
She needn’t have worried on that score: I’d already decided that this date would be finishing dead on eleven.
I spent the rest of the morning calming the butterflies in my stomach by finishing off Gabi’s T-shirt – she wanted something ‘ladylike’, so I was stitching seed pearls around the neckline to give the effect of piles and piles of tiny pearl necklaces. This was the third I’d made for her – if I didn’t know better I’d swear she was selling them on somewhere. My mind welcomed the repetition of embroidering the beads because it was racing with all sorts of questions.
First of all, what if Lord Armstrong-Siddeley was someone Daddy knew? What if he recognised me from somewhere? Of course, it was perfectly innocent, just a little dinner and chit-chat, but I’d hate to . . . well, I’d hate anyone to get the wrong idea – like I’d done with Bobsy and her Dinner Date. But then hadn’t I assumed they were father and daughter? And what could be more wholesome than that?
I’d been going over and over the whole situation, and although there was a part of me that shied away from the . . . well, post-date aspect of it, there was another part of me that thought the idea of being a modern-day geisha girl was eminently sensible. Mrs McKinnon wouldn’t be involved in anything seedy; she was always far too protective of ‘her girls’ to have put me in any sort of danger.
It was, I reasoned to myself, just like temping, wasn’t it – but on a social basis? Not everyone had the time or the inclination to deal with all the emotional stress that went with a relationship. I certainly didn’t want another relationship, for instance, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to go out and be entertained over a nice meal.
I snipped off a trailing thread with a certain satisfaction. That’s what I intended to tell Nelson. Eventually. I was going to give it a week or two to see if it worked out first, though. No sense in rocking the domestic boat for no good reason.
It wouldn’t be me they were having dinner with, anyway, I told myself: they’d be dining with Honey. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of inventing Honey; it relieved me from any personal responsibility and would probably mean I’d have more fun too. I just had to remind myself continually that Honey arrived when my dinner date walked into the restaurant and left immediately after coffee.
While I stitched on Gabi’s faux pearl necklaces, I ran through Honey’s background and personality, working out where she was meant to have gone to school and whether she had any brothers or sisters and how much sundry personal information we could safely share. I frowned. It could end up quite complicated. And then I had the most brilliant brainwave. If nothing else, it would remind me whether I was being Honey or Melissa.
The minute I finished the final strand, I got a bus into town and went to a tiny shop in Soho Granny once took me to when she was going through her Rita Hayworth redhead phase but didn’t want to ruin her lovely hair with henna.
A wig: the quickest, simplest way to be two people at once! And I’d always wanted to be blonde; Nelson frequently said I had a blonde personality
in a brunette’s body. Whatever that meant.
There were loads of wigs to choose from, and I tried on nearly all of them – curly red hair, angelic Titian waves, scary jet-black Cleopatra bob – but as soon as I saw my own eyes looking back at me through a heavy fringe of real caramel-blonde hair, I knew I’d found the right one. It was me, but at the same time, it very much was not.
To be honest, I looked so amazing that for a moment or two I could barely breathe: I looked like a gorgeous, film-star version of myself. My skin glowed, my lips seemed poutier and there was a new flirty twinkle in my eye. The shimmering strands around my face transformed my outfit; my plain camel V-neck and jeans suddenly looked kittenish instead of smart casual. The mere thought of what I’d look like with the stockings and suspenders I’d planned to wear as ultra-feminine Honey made me blush to my naturally stitched, real-hair roots.
I stood there for nearly ten minutes, just marvelling at this sex bomb in the mirror, turning this way and that, putting the hair up, then down again. The sales assistant looked on and smiled patiently. I supposed she had to go through this rigmarole every day. It was almost a relief to take the wig off and see sensible Melissa there again.
It cost me every single penny left in my Emergencies Only account, but you get what you pay for, don’t you? Miracles aren’t cheap.
Lord Armstrong-Siddeley could have been one of two or three men sitting in the American bar at the Savoy. They were all wearing red hankies in their top pockets, and, to my mind, looked as if they were waiting for someone.
I tried making eye contact with the first man, but he sank behind his newspaper, and the second one winked at me in quite a game manner, but appeared to be with his wife, so it couldn’t be him. There’s only so long a girl can stand at the entrance to a lounge, so I went up to the bar and ordered a gin fizz. I don’t normally drink much, but it was what Daddy ordered for us when we were all out: a Scotch for him and gin fizzes for the little ladies.