“Calm down,” I said. “We can work this out. It’s just a case of adding things up.” I automatically arranged the various bills into priority order. “You know roughly how much you need to cover utilities and the mortgage and stuff?”
Silence. I looked up to see Liv chewing her lip and looking ashamed.
“Liv?” I prompted. “How much is the monthly mortgage?”
“I don’t know!” she squeaked. “Erin worked everything out on her spreadsheet and I paid my half. Come on, she was good at it!” Liv helped herself to another organic triple chocolate cookie—we’d cracked open the emergency chocolate supplies. “I’m sorry, Betsy. I feel so stupid. I didn’t ask you down here to sort out my life.” Pause. She gave me an appealing blue-eyed peek through the lashes. “Unless you could…”
I forced myself to be firm with her, for her own sake. “Olivia, you’ve got to do this,” I said. “It’s not your fault you haven’t done this before, but soonest started, soonest over, as Nancy says. You’ve got to open these letters. All of them. I’ll help you, I promise.”
She stared into her cup of tea. “I suppose you’re right.” Then she put the whole cookie into her mouth, as if she didn’t know when she’d get the next deli special.
I decided not to push it. I didn’t want her bolting for Spain too. So I made a proper pot of tea this time, and to make her feel like she wasn’t the only one in over her head, I told her about my roller-coaster day, starting with Miss Thorne informing me that I had a parlormaid name and finishing with Kathleen and Nancy’s impending eviction, with a bit of Mark the bursar’s sell-sell-sell spiel in between.
“And when Nancy looked at me like one of those abandoned old pets you see at Battersea Dogs Home and said, ‘I suppose the new owners might need someone to vacuum the stairs…’” I spread my hands wide and blinked, half-laughing, half-crying, at Liv. Tears were coursing down our faces. “What could I say?”
“Nothing, it’s too horrible.” She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “Poor Nancy and Kathleen. What are you going to do?”
I sighed and shook the last cookie out of the packet. “Well, that’s the thing. What is there to save now? It’s pretty hard to argue with Tightwad Mark when he says we should just tell Lord P to sell up and get out. I mean, obviously I don’t want to do that, what with Kathleen and Nancy, and me losing the chance to track down Nell Howard, but I just don’t remember it being so…” I struggled to find words to sum up how weirdly let down I felt by the ramshackle, dated mess I’d found.
“So what?” prompted Liv. “So big? So posh?”
“No, so irrelevant!” I burst out. “I mean, I’m sure Franny used to teach girls to do more than just host dinner parties and eat cheese nicely!” I dug the brochure out of my bag and slid it across the table. Liv’s eyes widened when she saw the photograph of the girl in white gloves shaking hands with a vicar, under the heading “Making the Right Connections.” “It’s all teaspoons and addressing envelopes and what to say to divorced earls. Meaningless stuff about…butlers! Who in their right mind cares about etiquette anymore?”
“Betsy, people do! You can’t move for etiquette guides in WHSmith!” Liv flipped through the pages, frowning. “You only say that because you already know it. Everyone else is like, this is a minefield! I mean, weddings.” She pulled a “mad” face. “That’s one social nightmare after another. Remember when I nearly got married to Charlie Palmerston and you helped me work out what to do with the divorced bits of the family so no one was offended—I hadn’t got a clue, but I knew they did.” Her face darkened. “And if you hadn’t given me that wake-up call about his mummy complex…well, that was even more helpful. Believe me, if there’s an accepted formula when it comes to breaking off an engagement, people want to know.”
“Maybe that’s what they should be teaching the girls,” I suggested drily. “Arranging a wedding, and then getting out of one, if necessary.”
“Well, who else is going to tell you?” Liv nodded, ignoring the fact that I was joking. “Mothers aren’t what they used to be when it comes to advice like that. I mean, look at us. Rina bunked off before I even had a boyfriend to ask her about. Didn’t Franny give you that big Things You Should Know talk, remember, when we were in the fourth form? What to do about Wandering Hand Taxi Man? And Lend Me a Tenner Boy? You had it all in that notebook.”
I knew exactly what she meant—the notebook and the advice. All the Phillimore girls had lilac leather books that they were supposed to jot down the lessons in, and I’d always had them at school. They made me feel extremely sophisticated, even if I was just scribbling down addresses. Franny’s “things you should know” advice had been delivered over a series of girls-only teas at the Ritz, the summer I was fifteen, and I’d felt deliciously grown-up as we sat there, sipping tea, while Franny reeled off all the different men who’d apparently be queueing up to take me out for dinner—their good points, bad points, and “things to watch out for.”
“’Course I remember that,” I said. “Shoes are still the first thing I look at on a date.”
“Where are those notebooks?” asked Liv. “God, the hours we spent, going over and over them…They were like Cosmo, but better. More ladylike. You should publish them—you’d make a fortune.”
“They’re in my old wardrobe at Kathleen’s. I haven’t seen them since…since I went to university.” I blinked away the memory of shoving them in and slamming the door shut in a fit of humiliation at the thought of not being allowed to compile official ones. “But I don’t think they’re teaching anything like that now. It’s all snobbery and fish forks.”
Liv pointed at the brochure. “But it says here there’s a course on putting clothes together—isn’t that useful?”
“There is, but it’s all ‘tell your dressmaker’ yadda yadda yadda. Girls need to know about sales shopping, and how to buy a perfect little black dress, not hats!” It made me cross, the brochure’s assumption that normal women had the time or the money to have half the “little social worries” the Academy would fix. “Now, if they were going to teach you how to do a salon-perfect blow dry at home…How much money could a girl save if she knew how to do her own nails, for instance?” I gave Liv’s glossy merlot manicure a pointed look, in light of her own personal credit crunch. “How much money are you spending a month on your nails, for a start?”
“I don’t want to think,” she said—then, under my gaze, conceded, “A lot. I mean, I used to.”
“Well, think how much money you could save if you could do it yourself. It’s Budget Day, Olivia O’Hare.” I wagged my finger at her with a pretend stern expression. “You don’t have to dry-clean jeans, you know, they go in the wash. I can’t believe the stuff no one’s told you over the years. And how to set up your direct debits so they don’t crash your bank account…”
My finger-wagging slowed down as the faint shape of an idea began to take form in my mind. The Academy used to teach girls skills for marriage; why couldn’t it now teach them skills for independent life? Could DIY be the new interior decoration? Could professional blow-drying be the new flower arranging?
“Steady on, Betsy!” Liv gasped, but I wasn’t hearing anything. There was no point trying to re-create the Academy’s former glories—we had to reinvent the finishing school for the twenty-first century! Even Mark Montgomery had to agree that had potential and postfeminist credibility. I reached for the notebook in my handbag and started to scribble.
“Basic household stuff—I wish I knew more about that. I spent a fortune on calling out plumbers last year, and I never know if decorators are ripping me off. Do you know where your stop valve is?”
“I didn’t know I had one,” said Liv faintly.
“And mortgages.” I looked up. “I’m assuming your dad didn’t explain the difference between fixed rate and adjustable rate?”
Liv shook her head.
“And wouldn’t you love to know, without having to have some mouth-breather from the ba
nk tell you?”
She nodded obediently, then asked, “Um, why?”
“Because…” I searched around for a better reason than “because”; it had never occurred to me, growing up with no dad to fix my faucets or set up my internet access, that anyone wouldn’t want to know. “Because…then no one can patronize you! Or take advantage!”
“Right,” said Liv, unconvinced.
I was on a roll. “This is what the Academy needs to offer! Short courses in making a woman’s life as stylish as possible. What’s more stylish than knowing you’re in control of your destiny? It doesn’t have to be for rich girls—it’s for anyone who wants to feel more in charge of their lives!” I tapped my silver fountain pen against my lips, then pointed it at Liv. “What else makes you feel inadequate because you don’t know how to do it?”
“Parking,” she said at once. “How to reverse park in one go so those evil taxi drivers don’t honk and put you off. God, I hate that. Why don’t they realize it makes me hit things?”
I wrote down “London driving.” If you could drive in London, you could drive anywhere. “Exactly! And something about wine—I always wish I knew more about wine. Um…What else do you really wish someone had told you when you were eighteen?”
“That the bars of London are paved with divorced men? And some who aren’t quite divorced but tragically saddled with wives who just don’t understand them?”
“That is a great idea.”
“And stepchildren,” she added. “There’s something no one tells you about in Brides magazine.”
“Great. And alimony?”
“Yes, alimony. And pre-nups. What about breaking off engagements? Someone should teach that. And turning down proposals.”
“Oh, they do that,” I said. “They work on the principle that once you’re a Phillimore girl, you’re turning titled suitors down left, right, and center. What they don’t tell you is how to decide whom to marry.” Another light bulb lit up in my head. “Does your friend Beattie still work for Mishcon de Reya? Would she come in and talk about pre-nups?”
“If the new Director of Studies at the Phillimore Academy asked her, how could she say no?” asked Liv only half-jokingly.
“But I’m not going to be in charge of this, I’m just…” I began, and ground to a halt. Was I in charge now? Would Miss Thorne take me seriously? A math degree and an armory of vinegar-related household hints only went so far, especially with no money to spend on new staff.
Liv spotted my wobbling confidence and leaped in, as she always did. “It’s a really great idea, Betsy,” she said, reaching over the table to grab my hand before I could start chewing my nails. “I can’t believe they haven’t thought of it before! It’s a brilliant idea.”
I pulled a face. “But will they listen to me, though? I’ve only been there one day, and Miss Thorne’s already reminding everyone that I didn’t go there and have no idea what a finishing school’s meant to be. Mark Montgomery seems to think I’m some kind of bimbo, and he’s virtually got the estate agents measuring it up already. Only Miss McGregor seems remotely friendly.”
“Be reasonable,” said Liv. “You’ve only been there ten minutes! Once they’ve sussed you’re not there to put them out of a job, I’m sure they’ll warm up.”
“Mm,” I said. “Not sure Miss Thorne’s ever going to warm up to me. Not even if I started a fire in her office.”
“What about the girls? You haven’t said much about them.”
I realized I hadn’t. “Well, they’re all right, I suppose. I don’t think they care what they’re being taught. I think most of them are there because it’s handy for the shopping more than anything else.”
“Well,” said Liv, throwing up her hands as if her point were proved. “How much more interested are they going to be when you go in there and tell them there’s new lessons about beating the sales and dumping a love rat?”
I thought of Anastasia. She probably had her own methods for dealing with love rats. None of the girls needed to economize on manicures, but in the few hours I’d been there, I’d noticed that Divinity, for one, seemed eager—paranoid, even—about doing the “right” thing. And Clemmy struck me as being insecure rather than genuinely angry. Maybe they would get something out of real-life lessons.
“I suppose so,” I said slowly. “I just think the Academy needs to appeal to more people, not just the usual superwealthy crowd. But I guess everyone needs to spot a good man and a classic coat.”
“Exactly! What have you got to lose?” said Liv. “If it keeps the place open for another few months, it gives you more time to do some hunting around for potential parents. If it closes tomorrow, that’s it. The files are shut.” She slapped her hands together dramatically. “You’ll be reduced to going on one of those daytime DNA shows if you really want to track her down.”
My stomach plunged. I’d had that selfish thought niggling at the back of my mind the whole day but hadn’t liked to acknowledge it. It was true, though. If Mark had his way, the house would be on the market in a matter of days, and I’d only have myself to blame for not looking earlier.
“You know, you’re the only person insensitive enough to put it like that,” I said with a crooked smile.
“Yes, but I’m the only person who knows how much you want to find her. Deep down, when you’re not worried about hurting anyone’s feelings. It’s about time, Betsy. You’ve done so much on your own, and you’ve been the best daughter the Phillimores could have had, but you’ve got to move on with your life.”
“By going backward?”
“No, by finding out for sure, so you can make some decisions about who you are instead of worrying that, deep down, you’re not good enough!”
“Is this about those application forms again?” I said.
Liv shoved back her chair, got up, and gave me a tight hug in a gangling rush of long arms and blond hair. She smelled of fresh white flowers, as she had for years. We’d picked our signature fragrances at thirteen, on Franny’s recommendation: hers was Pleasures, mine was Chanel No. 5.
“I know you can do it,” she said, squeezing me. “You just have to work out what you think I ought to know, what Franny told you, and what you’ve learned. Listen, if you can teach me to be half as capable as you, I’ll be fine. And I’d pay to learn that.”
“Liv, that’s really sweet,” I said, but already my brain was whirring with possibilities.
Nine
Don’t save your best underwear for special occasions—wearing it may create one!
The Practical Reinvention of Olivia O’Hare began the next morning, with a proper breakfast of the sort Kathleen would approve.
I had to nip out myself to the local supermarket to get the actual food, but by eight the porridge was on the stove, the toast was in the toaster, and I was head-deep in the fridge, wiping down the sticky marks, when Liv came stumbling blearily into the kitchen in her dressing gown. This was one she’d nicked from the Ritz in Paris.
“Breakfast?” she said, yawning. Even yawning, Liv didn’t have a double chin, the lucky mare. She looked pretty much the same when she’d just woken up as she did in full going-out mode. “I just have coffee in the mornings, generally.”
“The Book of Kathleen says an empty stomach is a false economy,” I said. “What you need is a bowl of porridge first thing—it wakes up your brain for work and stops you from grazing all morning. And then blowing a fortune on nibbly things for lunch.”
“God, yeah. Igor might as well give my paycheck to Fresh and Wild.” Liv sighed. “There’s one opposite the bar—I must have spent half my take-home pay on organic salad.”
“Yes, well, that’s the first thing we’re going to tackle,” I said. “Your take-home pay and where it’s going.”
“Ha ha ha,” said Liv. “Before nine o’clock? You’re funny!” She looked at me. “You’re not joking, are you?”
“No,” I said. “Sorry.”
“I’ll put some coffee on,” she said, sh
uffling toward her shiny espresso machine—one of the happier relics of an abandoned engagement that had reached the gift-list stage.
“Now, are those all your bills on the table?” I asked, stirring the porridge. “Or just the most recent ones?”
I heard the sound of a cup being dropped in panic. “I don’t know!”
“Well, that’s this morning’s job,” I said, carrying on stirring calmly. “Find them, and file them. Even the ones you’ve hidden in the biscuit jar.”
Liv made a strangled noise. “How do you know about those?”
“First place I looked. Are you working at Igor’s today?”
“No, I don’t have a shift until tomorrow afternoon.”
“But you’ve asked for some more shifts, to cover Erin’s share of the bills?”
“Er, no. Ooh! Can I have some porridge now?” she asked hopefully.
“Have you got a calculator?” I said firmly. “We need to work out whether more shifts are going to cut it, or whether you might need to rethink the whole part-time bar girl, part-time art photographer thing.”
“Really?” Her hand inched closer to the magazine that had arrived in the morning’s post. Liv had subscriptions to everything with perfume ads in it.
“It’ll take five minutes to do, compared with days dreading doing it,” I said bossily, then realized to my horror that I sounded just like Kathleen. “It’s not as bad as you think,” I added in a consoling voice, turning back to the porridge. “You’ll have some rent from me coming in for the next fortnight—no,” I added, as she tried to protest. “Fair’s fair. I insist.”
Behind me, Liv sighed. “That’s really kind of you. But we can save on some supper tonight—Jamie’s going to take us out. He was just going to take me for a pizza round the corner, but then I told him you were here, and he upgraded us to a steak in Chelsea. Must be trying to impress you, eh? Either that or he’s checking it out for some work reason.”