The Finishing Touches

  “I don’t mind,” she insisted. “I’d mind more if you carried on pretending you didn’t. So long as you can still see what a knocker he can be and you don’t mind me whining about what a bossy sod he’s turned into. Go ahead and fancy him, please—you’d be the best thing to happen to him in years! In fact, I don’t even mind you getting together.” She paused. “So long as it doesn’t happen here. That would be too weird.”

  As if, I thought. “Liv, there’s no chance of that happening. OK, so I have a bit of a crush, but it’s not going to happen—it would be a disaster. For him as well as me. I need someone a bit calmer, more reliable, and he’s after an heiress, isn’t he?”

  “But this is the thing”—Liv looked tortured, as if it was killing her inside to admit it—“he’s offered to help me change my mortgage! And explained home insurance!”

  “Liv,” I said firmly. “It’s just shock, about Ken. It’ll pass. He’ll be caught red-handed with twin Tatlerettes by next week, don’t worry. I’m happy to wait for the right man—I’ve said it before.”

  She sighed and passed me a pair of diamanté chandelier earrings. “Why are you still single? You’d make some lucky sod a wonderful girlfriend. Can’t you start jogging in Green Park at lunchtime and bump into a banker?”

  “Actually, there is someone at work,” I said. “The bursar, Mark. It turns out he’s quite dry, and not bad-looking.”

  I ignored the fact that Mark was still a bit touchy about lights being turned off, and had told me to bring in extra cardigans for the end of the week when, according to his “home weather forecasting kit,” there’d be a nip in the air and no increase in the heating facilities upstairs. I liked a touch of grumpy charm, but I didn’t think Liv would get it.

  She didn’t. Her expression struggled between encouragement and horror. “You mean Mark the Sandwich Rationer? Have you been sniffing furniture polish again?”

  “So he’s got a lot to learn about first impressions,” I conceded. “But he’s taller than me, he’s not divorced, he rides a bike, he’s got a proper job, he isn’t fussy about his fingernails like some people who have man-icures…”

  “Leave Jamie out of this for a moment,” said Liv. “Look, that all sounds great from your famous checklist point of view, but, important question: is there a tingle? And I don’t mean from the static in his bicycle clips.”

  Tingles were important to Liv.

  “Yeees,” I said, trying to remember if it had been a tingle or just a chill. We’d definitely had a sneaky chuckle about Miss Thorne’s cats, and I’d felt a nice warm glow when Mark had complimented me on my lesson proposal. “I think there could be a tingle. He’s the kind of guy who needs a little defrosting, but you know, I prefer that to the type who hit you with the charm and flattering comments about your hair straightaway. It’s not very English.”

  “Quite Danish, in fact,” said Liv archly.

  “What’s not very English?”

  Liv and I turned to see Jamie strolling through the hall toward us, and I felt a definite tingle run simultaneously down from the top of my head and up from my toes to meet in the middle of my stomach where it rippled out in delicious mini tingles to all my extremities.

  “Did you let yourself in?” demanded Liv. “Where did you get those keys? Don’t I have any privacy anymore?”

  “Sorry, I’ve always had them, just in case you burned the house down making toast. Joan made me a set,” he said, not looking at her but staring directly at me, in my cocktail outfit on the coffee table. My knees felt hot all of a sudden. “Hello…Betsy? Is this the new table dancing course?”

  I knew there was a witty retort in my brain somewhere, but it disappeared like something sinking into quicksand at the way he winked at me.

  “Nurgh,” I said, pulling the dress back down over my knees and wondering if I could step down without falling headfirst into the sofa or crashing into the television.

  “You’re interrupting my first lesson,” said Liv crossly.

  “And what’s that?” Jamie settled himself on the sofa opposite and slung one long leg over his knee. He carried on beaming at me, and I tried to imagine if someone with eyes that outrageously suggestive could ever be sensible in a recognizable sense of the word.

  “I’m going to show the girls how to make three outfits out of one dress using only different tights and simple accessories!” announced Liv. “This is the evening-wear section.”

  “And very good it looks too,” said Jamie. “Ten out of ten. Can you make the skirt a bit shorter, though?”

  “Jamie!” Liv snapped.

  “Well, if you’ve got it…You should be teaching the girls to maximize their assets, Miss O’Hare. Or should I call you ma’am?”

  I felt too self-conscious to carry on standing on the table, but also too self-conscious to move in my current clumsy condition. I needed a distraction, so I could escape.

  “Oh, Liv!” I said, as if I’d just remembered. “I found something at Kathleen’s—Jamie, would you get my bag out of the kitchen for me?”

  “And bring us a drink at the same time?” added Liv.

  Jamie raised his eyebrow but got up anyway, with a sarcastic salute.

  Gratefully, I scrambled down off the coffee table and slipped on a stray scarf as I did, stumbling toward Barry the cat, who leaped backward behind the sofa. It could have been worse.

  “See?” said Liv, while I tried to disentangle the scarf from my heel. “You’re a mess. And he’s doing sensible fetching and carrying. You have a magical effect on each other.”

  “Shh,” I hissed, “he’s coming back.”

  Jamie returned with my handbag and a bottle of wine and some glasses, expertly hooked beneath his fingers. “So when do I get to do my lesson?” he asked, peeling off the foil.

  “Oh, here we go,” said Liv. “What lesson’s that going to be?”

  “Something very useful to the modern girl and related to my area of expertise.”

  Liv cast a despairing look in my direction. “I swear to you, Betsy, what was I saying earlier? I wasn’t making it up. I know it looks like I was…”

  I opened my notebook and found the old snap of me and Liv outside our GCSE exams. “See, I used to be able to accessorize. Have you ever seen so many bows?”

  Liv took it from me as if it were an antique. “Oh, Betsy, you look so pretty! Look at you—I’d forgotten…” Her voice trailed away, and she sounded quite choked for a moment.

  “Forgotten what? Liv, are you OK?”

  “Yeah, fine.” She smiled, and I could see her eyes had filled up. “We just look so young, and you look so pretty. With your hair nice and curly and those old-fashioned dresses you used to wear, you know, before you went all…” She stopped herself and looked rather guilty.

  “All what?” I asked her, but she fiddled with the belt she was holding.

  “Before you went off to university and started dressing like a grunge librarian,” Jamie finished for her. “What was it you said? Hair bands were for stupid girls who needed to have their brains held in? Here, let me see.”

  I looked at Liv. “Grunge librarian?” I mouthed. OK, so I’d dumped the prom dress and pearls look I’d had at school, but surely it hadn’t been that bad.

  Liv carried on fiddling with the belt as Jamie crossed the room and leaned between us to get a good look at the photo. My nose filled up with the smell of his cologne and warm skin.

  “Oh, that photo! I had a copy of that,” he said, chuckling. “You’d never know what a pain the pair of you were at the time. Windy day, was it? Ah, my sister the toy poodle.”

  Liv shoved him. “You were no better. You had spots and a bowl haircut. Anyway, what were you doing with a photograph of us?”

  “Just to make me look popular, why else?” Jamie nudged her back. “Two more girls on my wall—swelled the numbers, helped the reputation. Anyway, this leads me nicely onto what I wanted to talk to you about, Betsy. My lesson.”

  I glanced quickly at Liv.
“Um, right. You know, we do have a lot of party experts on the staff already, and I don’t want to make it all about socializing. And I know you’re very busy…”

  “Not too busy to help you out! And don’t worry, this is going to be very useful and practical.”

  “OK,” I said warily. I wasn’t sure that the girls would be listening to Jamie’s actual words so much as gazing at the vision in front of them. “What is it? A guide to New York? That would be helpful.”

  “No, how to look good in photographs,” he said with a ta-da flourish. “I’ve been giving it some thought, and I reckon it’s something everyone would love to know. As you can see”—he waggled the photo—“it’s not something that comes naturally, but who wouldn’t like some top tips? We can mock up a ‘Welcome to My Lovely Home!’ shoot in the ballroom, if you want. They can take turns to pose by the grand piano and practice looking modest.”

  Liv covered her face. “Oh, God, Jamie, don’t you listen to anything? Betsy’s trying to make this course look approachable, not some It Girl fantasy.”

  “No,” I said slowly, “that’s a genius idea. People never stop being photographed these days—weren’t you moaning just the other night about how someone put the New Year photos from Igor’s online and you look like—”

  “The Ghost of Christmas Pissed, yes, yes.” She scowled. “You don’t know fashion critiques until you’ve worked in a bar full of theatrical gentlemen.”

  “Well, then!” I smiled at Jamie, nervously at first, because he smiled back and the flash in his eyes put me off my stride. “Your driving license and your passport are just as important as a photo spread in Hello! And who better to coach the girls than the son of a top model and star of more party photographs than Sienna Miller?”

  “Exactly,” Jamie began, then stopped, his face abruptly sober. “No, don’t you mean the owner and CEO of Party Animals, the highly regarded and very exclusive events management company?”

  “That too,” I said.

  “I want them to take me seriously as a teacher, you know,” he said, and I got the feeling that he was including me and Liv in that.

  “Well, quite.” I must have sounded more brisk than I had meant, because he’d started loosening the top button of his shirt as he made himself comfortable in Liv’s huge white leather armchair. “I don’t want Miss Thorne thinking I’m just hitting up my friends and flatmates for replacement staff either. It’s not like I’m a qualified teacher.”

  “I’m sure you’re teaching them more than you think,” he replied with another warm smile.

  I opened my mouth to make some obvious retort about what he could teach them, fnar, fnar, but I couldn’t. My mind had gone annoyingly blank.

  He was looking at me differently, I thought. That wasn’t his normal, friendly expression. There was something almost challenging in it.

  Was that what Liv had meant? I wondered. Did he want me to take him more seriously?

  Or was he seeing me differently, in this clinging dress, with Liv’s expert smoky eyes and my hair all over the place instead of neatly smoothed back?

  A delicious tickle spread over the deep V of my little black dress. The bits that were covered in Liv’s dramatic jewelry, anyway.

  “Olivia,” he said, without taking his gray eyes off me, “will you tell Betsy to stop ironing her hair flat and wear it like that more often? It’s much more the Betsy I remember.”

  “Tell her yourself.” Liv held out her empty glass. “Are you going to pour that wine, or do we need to teach you some manners?”

  Jamie got up, but he must have seen me blush, because as he went to retrieve the bottle from the chiller, he winked at me.

  Thank God I wasn’t standing on anything, because I’d have fallen off it.

  Sixteen

  If you can’t remember your godchildren’s birthdays, give them gifts on your birthday instead.

  Between Liv’s How to Dress lesson and Jamie’s Image Management tutorial, the new timetable was starting to come together even more quickly than I’d hoped, mainly thanks to the endless lists I was making, even in my sleep.

  To be honest, it was leaping out of my notebooks, which were stuffed with surprisingly relevant advice. Most of Franny’s advice wasn’t etiquette but simple good manners—it was still important to be nice to shop assistants and not talk about your diet over dinner. I just had to tweak it for the world of emails and iPhones.

  I began to fall in love a little with the new Academy I was creating, as it came to life in my mind’s eye. Every time I opened the thick, creamy pages of my notebooks, I could hear Franny’s voice, wise and kind, and I felt some of her elegance returning to the way I did things: I made more effort to stand up straight and bought some postcards, ready for thank-you notes. But I was determined that my own life experience was going to be useful too, and I drew up lessons in two things I’d had to pick up the hard way: managing money and finding a job.

  Just because Clemmy and the rest had lots of money didn’t mean they shouldn’t know how to look after it. The trick, I decided, was to present financial savvy as being as cool as knowing how to mix a good drink.

  Mark—after some persuasion—agreed to teach a class in Credit Cards without Tears, to be followed by How to Live a Millionaire’s Life on a Credit Crunch Budget.

  We sat upstairs in his office on Friday at lunchtime, almost out of earshot of Mrs. Angell’s rumbustious Literary Appreciation class, eating sandwiches and agreeing with each other about how important it was for smart women to understand money.

  “Kathleen used to tell me that money was an umbrella. That it couldn’t stop a rainy day, but it kept your head dry,” I said, swinging on my chair. “And Franny used to say a clever girl kept enough cash secreted away for a one-way ticket to Rio. Not sure why Rio in particular.”

  “And you do?”

  “Of course I do,” I said proudly. “Rio and back. I always have done. I’ve worked every vacation since I was eighteen.”

  “Why? I can’t imagine the Phillimores kept you short.” Mark raised an eyebrow as he fished the tomato out of his sandwich and dropped it in the bin.

  I flushed. “They didn’t. I just liked…having my own money.”

  I’d actually had a very generous allowance, which I’d put away every month. I preferred spending the money I’d earned, and I supposed I had an irrational fear that one day, when my mother turned up to claim me, I might have to give it back.

  Now, though, I was starting to think their generosity made sense, if it was really Hector’s allowance they’d been giving me…

  “So, you were telling me about your flatmate,” said Mark, cutting into my thoughts. “The one whose life you’re overhauling? Do you make a habit of taking your work home with you?”

  “God, no, she doesn’t need my advice about shoes; she’s a shopaholic,” I started, then remembered he meant was I troubleshooting Liv’s personal life in my Proper Job capacity. “Oh, um, no.” I felt flustered as he looked at me oddly. “No, I just helped her…isolate her parameters. And identify areas of operational weakness.”

  Viz, I explained how to use the loo brush.

  The phone rang on his desk, but for once Mark didn’t grab it. Instead, he nodded at me encouragingly.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’d love to know how you’ve turned the housework into fun little seminars with magazine titles. Be a VIP of DIY, is it?”

  He was teasing, I think. Mark had such a dry sense of humor that it was hard to tell when he was being funny.

  We’d moved into non-Academy conversational waters. This was definitely a nonwork chat, and the phone was still ringing. He swung in his chair and looked at me over his glasses, and I was distinctly reminded of why I liked men in cashmere pullovers who made jokes about savings accounts. There was a comforting solidity about them.

  “Maybe you should answer that,” I said. “Could be your secretary.”

  “Or yours?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “I don’t think
so,” I replied with some confidence.

  He picked up the Bakelite phone but carried on looking amused—straight at me. “Mark Montgomery,” he began in his office tone, and then suddenly sat up in his chair. “What? Now? But it’s in my diary for the end of next week. No, I’m not raising my voice.”

  He caught my eye and pulled the pinchy, Persian-cat-licking-a-nettle face we’d mutually agreed was Miss Thorne.

  “Yes, she’s here. I’ll let her know. Absolutely, ten minutes.” And he put down the receiver. “I mentioned the termly meeting between me, Miss Thorne, and Lord Phillimore?”

  “Yes?” I said, hoping he was about to tell me it was canceled.

  “Well, we’re having it right now. Lord Phillimore finds himself in London and thinks it would be a good time to discuss your ideas.”

  The sandwich stuck in my throat, and I coughed. “But we can’t! We’ve barely started the new lessons! Miss Thorne will talk him out of it.”

  Mark had put away his lunch and was sorting through papers on his desk, obviously used to emergency meetings. “Don’t panic. It’s better this way—she can hardly complain that it’s not working if she hasn’t tried.”

  “But why’s he back so soon?” I wondered aloud. “He hates London.”

  “Maybe he wants to see you.” Mark handed me some papers. “There are some projections I did. Wave those at her, and I’ll back you up.”

  I hesitated. “Are you going to go in there with your real estate agency details for selling the house? You might at least tell me now.”

  Mark drummed his fingers on the desk for a long moment and said, “Not this time. I think it’s only fair to give you a decent shot at making something of this place. And anyway”—he looked up, and his face was more relaxed than mine—“I’m starting to be persuaded that it’s not such a bad business idea, after all.”

  I felt a cheeky grin spread across my face. “It’s a gentleman’s prerogative to have his mind changed,” I said, and swept out to the bathroom to smarten myself up.