The Finishing Touches

  I had to do it quickly too. According to the large calendar Paulette had put on my desk, I had about ten working days to arrange the whole bash. I could rely on Kathleen to handle the food, and Mark to sort out wine or something, but everything else would have to come from me—otherwise Miss Thorne would make it look like her awful brochure, and there’d be glove etiquette going on in the foyer.

  I started drafting a letter, but after ten minutes I realized I couldn’t concentrate without more coffee and headed downstairs to get some refreshments. The noise in the Lady Hamilton Room stopped me in my tracks.

  Mrs. Angell was supposed to be teaching Miss Thorne’s traditional syllabus, but unless it was Making Yourself Heard at Ascot, I had no idea what it could be. The yelling was audible outside the room. I put my head around the door in case Mrs. Angell had thrown in the towel and left them to fend for themselves with a copy of Debrett’s.

  “Ah, Betsy!” said Mrs. Angell, her glazed eyes latching on to me gratefully. “You can settle an argument for us. Is it, or is it not, appropriate for a first date to take place in the most expensive restaurant you can find these days?”

  “No!” I said, shocked. “Of course not! Who ever said that?”

  “Adele,” said Venetia at once. “She says it’s important to assess your date’s commitment to the future of your relationship.”

  “That’s rubbish,” I said. “It makes you look as if you’re putting a price on your company. Besides, you should always offer to split the bill, just so he can say no, but what if he says yes? What then?”

  Venetia’s expression conveyed that this was beyond her sphere of experience.

  “Vhy vould you do that?” asked Anastasia.

  “Because…” I looked round the class at Mrs. Angell for help, but her frizz suggested she’d spent much of the lesson either clawing at her face or raking through her hair.

  “Well,” I said, “you should offer, he’ll say, ‘no, really,’ and that’s that. But sometimes, if the date isn’t going well and you have no intention of seeing him again, offering to pay half is a better way of making that clear than ignoring his calls for the next month. It’s a polite way of saying, ‘I had a nice evening as friends but let’s not do this again.’”

  “What if it’s a crap date and you feel like he owes you?” asked Clemmy.

  “Only you can decide how much you’re worth in oysters,” I said.

  “You must have been on some terrible dates,” said Divinity sympathetically.

  “Oh, God, everyone goes on some stinkers, don’t they—” I started to say, then stopped myself. They didn’t need to know about my rogue’s gallery of first dates. “Why are you discussing this?” I asked. “Is it part of the lesson?”

  “Divinity has a date,” said Clemmy. “We’re helping her organize it.”

  Mrs. Angell’s eyes bulged in appeal. “We were talking about how to announce one’s engagement. Divinity suggested Heat magazine.”

  “So you’ve gone back to basics with some Date Management discussion! That’s a great idea!” I said, reaching for my notebook. “So, who’s your date with, Divinity?”

  Divinity’s face was glowing. “Don’t ask,” she said. “I don’t want to jinx it!”

  “Matthew Hartley,” said Venetia, sounding bored. “He has no money, stupid long hair, and a junk heap of a car, and he bailed out on her the last two times. I’d go for sushi, Div—you can eat on your own then, and you won’t look stood up.”

  Divinity spun in her chair. “Shut your head. He couldn’t come. He’s an artist; he had a deadline.”

  “Had no cash, more like,” replied Venetia scornfully.

  “Then you should suggest somewhere he can afford,” I said, ignoring her and making for the blackboard. I found a pen and wrote: “Location.” “The more informal the better. Which do you want, after all—great conversation, or lobster?”

  “Lobster,” said Venetia and Anastasia at the same time as Clemmy and Divinity said “Conversation.”

  “Where should I go?” Divinity’s pen was poised and she had a familiar, paranoid expression on her face. “Name names!”

  It was a while since I’d eaten out in London, and my mind went blank. All I could remember was La Poule au Pot in Chelsea, where Jamie had taken me once when I was down visiting Liv and she’d been called away by an urgent fiancé. It had been all those things: cozy tables, delicious food, free-flowing wine, although I hadn’t really noticed at the time, thanks to the outrageous gossip he was telling me. If I ever had a date with Jamie, it was definitely where I’d want to be taken.

  “La Poule au Pot is…” My voice went funny, and the girls stared. “Very good. Or Le Boudin Blanc round the corner from us here? Bistro food, quite romantic, easy to get home from if it’s gone badly, or easy to go for a stroll if it’s gone well…”

  That had been another one. When I thought about it, I could remember pretty much every restaurant Jamie had taken me to—he knew all the nicest places and insisted on paying because it was “good research for Party Animals.” Our dinners did linger in the memory, despite not complying with my usual rules for successful dates. I usually had at least one glass of wine too many, stayed until the poor waiters were sweeping under our table, and ended up falling a tiny bit more in love with him.

  They weren’t dates, I reminded myself. That was the whole point.

  “You’ve gone very red,” Anastasia observed. “Are you having a hot flash?”

  “Anastasia!” gasped Mrs. Angell. “Medical symptoms! And how old do you think Betsy is, anyway?”

  “She’s bright red,” Anastasia repeated. “Look at her.”

  “Dates in restaurants are a nightmare,” groaned Clemmy, ignoring my confusion. “I always worry about how much to tip, and then if he doesn’t tip enough, I get embarrassed and feel like I should add something, but I never know how much that should be.”

  “Tipping is a good litmus test, though,” I agreed. “Tight wallet, tight heart, as they say.”

  Mrs. Angell seemed relieved the lesson had got back onto safer ground. “Tipping! Yes, good! Fifteen percent. And a pound for the coat girls. What other tricky moments can we encounter when we’re dining out, and how might we rise above them? Have you had a tricky moment?”

  “Oh, my God, yes!” agreed Divinity. “What should you choose so you don’t look like a pig? I always worry about that. Is it, like, still really bad to have the bread?”

  “No,” I said. Where did they learn this stuff? “Always eat exactly what you like. My friend Jamie says that nothing puts a man off more than a girl who orders mineral water and a green salad and then won’t add dressing. And he’s dated more girls than you’ve had hot dinners.”

  Looking at them, maybe that wasn’t the best choice of expression.

  “Anyway,” I hurried on, “who wants to look like a high-maintenance control freak on a first date?”

  “That’s not what Miss Buchanan says,” said Venetia. “She says men find control an aphrodisiac.”

  She rolled out aphrodisiac with dramatic relish.

  “Adele says we should regard a first dinner date just like other girls might approach a job interview,” said Venetia. “The right clothes, the right questions, the right background reading.” She curved one corner of her lovely mouth into a superior smile. “The trick is to make them think they’re doing the interviewing.”

  “And the metaphorical position you’d be applying for?” I demanded.

  “Any position they’d like to offer,” muttered Clemmy.

  “Wife,” said Venetia, surprised I was asking. “If you want to marry well, you have to apply yourself. It’s no use imagining that the right man will just fall into your lap.” She cast a sympathetic look over at Divinity. “Unless they’re the type to fall off the career ladder for you.”

  “You’re here to learn more than just how to be a wife,” I pointed out. “You’re here to learn how to be yourself. The best version of yourself you can be.”
/>
  “Of course you’re here to learn more than just how to be a wife,” said Mrs. Angell hurriedly. “Adele would tell you that herself. She has many other accomplishments that—”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” said Venetia quite confidently. “She says marriage is like a merger. You have to get your assets in order and be prepared to negotiate hard if you want to secure a decent pension.”

  I’d heard enough. It was bad enough knowing Adele was peddling her own brand of matrimonial carpetbagging while I was trying to suggest there might be more to a girl’s horizons, but the merest thought that Lord P was the next in line for her acquisitions board was just too much.

  “It depends what you want from your dinner, then, doesn’t it?” I said, quite vehemently. “Do you want an evening out, getting to know someone and enjoying yourself, or do you want to sit through an expensive power struggle for three hours?”

  Venetia didn’t even bother to reply.

  Divinity put her hand up. “What am I supposed to wear? Should I wear high heels? I’m always falling off them after I’ve got a few on board, but my legs are dead stumpy otherwise.”

  I turned back to the board and wrote Outfit? Might as well make a lesson of it, I thought.

  “Liv,” I asked when I got in that evening. “What are you supposed to wear on a first date?”

  Liv was in the kitchen, watching Judge Judy on the breakfast bar TV while she ironed some crisp white sheets. Her face was wreathed with steam and the blissed-out expression she used to save for her Pilates class. I’d taught her how to use the iron, mainly by calculating the Fashion Math incurred by not sending everything to the laundrette, and now she was ironing everything in sight. I suspected I’d replaced one addiction with another, but at least it was keeping her out of Topshop.

  “Depends where you’re going, but you can’t go wrong with a black dress and boots,” she said. “Stuff some accessories in your bag and dress up or down when you get there.” She held up a perfectly flat T-shirt and gazed lovingly at it. “You know I’d forgotten I’d got this? Ironing is just so cool! It’s amazing what I’ve been finding in my laundry basket—it’s like free shopping.”

  “How much have you ironed?” I stared at the pile. “That can’t all be yours, surely.”

  “Oh, Jamie dropped a bag of his round, in exchange for some wine,” said Liv beatifically. “He wanted me to do it for a bottle, but I beat him up to a case. He said Dad would be proud.”

  I put my handbag down on the table and removed my shoes so I could massage the balls of my aching feet. “I could have done with you today. I just can’t talk clothes like you do, not in front of that lot.”

  “Oh, you can,” said Liv kindly. “You’ve got your own style. It’s…classic.”

  “You mean boring.”

  “No, I mean classic.” She started on one of Jamie’s handmade shirts—black, with purple paisley inside the collar and cuffs. “Not everyone needs to be a slave to fashion. You have a classic separates look. Pared down, simple. You use your hair as your accessory, which is…elegant.”

  I suspected she meant boring, but didn’t rise to it. I stopped massaging my feet and moved on to massaging my temples, elbows on the table, eyes closed, as the smell of the fresh ironing calmed me down. It reminded me of growing up next to Nancy’s never-decreasing stack of tablecloths and girls’ shirts.

  “You know you said you’d help me teach a lesson?” I asked.

  “Mmm.” The iron hissed.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  There was another hissing noise that might have been Liv, not the iron.

  “How about that black dress?” I suggested. “Take one black dress and change it round. From work to party to nightclub—that’s really useful.”

  “Isn’t it more from party to nightclub to party to your mum’s affair flat in Knightsbridge with that lot?”

  “Well, yeah. But it’s for the Open Day more than anything,” I explained. “I need to have something useful to show people when they come to look round.”

  “I suppose I could,” she said dubiously. “But I’d have to practice. How about next week?”

  “Practice is fine.” I hauled myself up to a sitting position. “No time like the present. I’ll make a pot of tea and you can use me as your dummy.”

  Liv shot a burst of steam at me. “Betsy, there’s only one dummy round here, and it’s not you, believe me.”

  One pot of tea later, I was standing on the coffee table in the sitting room in one of Liv’s nineteen “definitive” LBDs, surrounded by a sea of scarves, shoes, jewelry, hats, and fake-furry bits and pieces.

  She’d picked a stretchy knee-length dress from Banana Republic with a deep V-neck and three-quarter sleeves, and for my office look she had added a cardigan, a shiny belt, and my patent Fiona Flemings, and twisted my hair up into a neat half bun, ignoring my pleas that it was about to frizz.

  “Stop faffing about your bloody hair,” she’d said. “It looks fine.”

  I’d made her take a photo, so we could create a workbook, and now we’d moved on to the “bar for a quick one after work” version.

  I had to admit, I was secretly enjoying it. Liv had a real knack for pulling out my best features and blurring the rest. My reflection was looking gratifyingly unlike me—taller, curvier, much sexier, and accessorized like the sort of woman who bought cruise collections.

  “I just think of a sentence in my head that I want the outfit to say, and go for it. This is saying, I have a great figure but I don’t need to prove anything with it,” she explained, pushing the sleeves up a little and wiggling the dress just above my knee. “I don’t know why you don’t make more of your figure, Betsy. You should have men falling at your feet, with knees like that.”

  “I work in a shoe shop,” I reminded her. “The only men I meet who appreciate a good ankle tend to be ordering the larger sizes, if you know what I mean.”

  “That’s no excuse.” She hovered between two long strands of beads. “You’ve got to invite romance into your life, instead of expecting it to appear from nowhere. You’ve got to look, and sometimes it’s there under your nose.”

  I thought this was pretty rich coming from a woman who worked in a veritable supermarket of available, well-connected, fashionable types, most of whom were already fairly uninhibited thanks to Igor’s bohemian attitude to closing time.

  “It’s not like I don’t have dates—” I began.

  “Oh yeah, you’re great at dates,” she said. “You’re almost as good as Jamie when it comes to dates. Must be that finishing school training of yours.”

  “Sorry, Liv!” I pretended to clean out my ear with a finger. “It’s just that I thought you said Mr. Lover Man and I were on the same sort of level there.”

  Liv put her hands on her hips, still holding a chain belt and a bolero. “Actually, you know what? I take that back. I think Jamie might have moved ahead of you on that. I think he’s having some kind of midlife crisis. You know, he came into Igor’s this lunchtime and asked if I wanted to spend an evening this week sorting out some bills?”

  “And?”

  “And he got his diary out, and apart from work, there were no dates in there at all.”

  “Blimey.” My mouth fell open. “Not even on Friday?”

  Liv shook her head. “He had a fancy dress party to check in on at ten, and then a personal trainer session first thing Saturday. And he told me he’s thinking of buying a house with a garden. For a dog! I’m starting to think he actually means it about settling down. He won’t tell me if there was someone in New York, but he’s been really cagey about why he’s back.” She unclipped my hair and rearranged it over my shoulders, doing something to it with her fingers that separated the curls into thicker waves. “But I think there must be someone. Last time he was single for this long he had that funny rash on his—”

  “I don’t want to know,” I said hastily. There were very good reasons for Jamie’s playboy reputation.

  ?
??Mind you, that was five years ago,” said Liv. “Things change. People change.”

  “No, they don’t,” I said. “That’s just something marriage counselors say, to drum up business.”

  “But they do. When they have shocks, like Dad disappearing. Would you like Jamie more…if he got a bit more responsible?” Liv asked casually. She wasn’t very good at casual.

  “Isn’t that like asking me if I’d like him more if he got a bit more Danish?”

  “No.” She swatted me. “Be serious, will you? I think you two would really balance each other out—if he stopped acting like he’s God’s gift, and you stopped thinking there’s only one man in the world who’s perfect for you, and that everyone else will mess you around and leave you up the duff.”

  “I do not think that!”

  “Oh, come on, Betsy, you do. Some people, not me obviously, might think that the only reason you’re so fussy about Mr. Ideal is just so you’ll never have to find him, and he won’t let you down.” Liv fixed me with the sort of firm stare only a very, very best friend could. “But what if Jamie turned out to be sensible underneath it all? What if he got a briefcase, and stopped wearing shiny suits?”

  “I think you’ve gone mad,” I said, feeling my face go hot. “In that case, he’d stop being Jamie. Jamie is irresponsible, and outrageous. It’s what makes him so horribly sexy and absolutely wrong for anyone with a brain in her head and—”

  Liv’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Oh, really?”

  I realized what I’d just said and hurried to correct myself. “I’m not saying I find him horribly sexy; I’m just speaking as an impartial observer of—”

  “Do me a favor!” She waved the bolero at me. “I saw you over dinner the other night—you couldn’t keep your eyes off each other! You go red when he talks to you, and I’ve never seen you do that for any other bloke. And the other night? You drank my wine twice and dropped nuts all over yourself when he laughed at your stupid jokes. Of course you fancy him. I’d have to be blind not to notice.”

  I looked down at my feet. Was it that obvious? Oh, dear. I wondered if Jamie had noticed too. I wondered if Liv had any thoughts on how he felt about me, and immediately felt mortified. How old were we? Fifteen?