Charlie Glass's Slippers (20 page)

I pull the blazer around myself, suddenly wanting to hide my prize-melon breasts. “He’s not a playboy.”

“Says the girl with the smudged lipstick and the bedhead hair,” he says. He says it lightly, and with a teasing smile on his face, so I’m not sure exactly how to respond, but fortunately he carries on. “Anyway, I imagine you’re going to need my help getting out of here.”

“Only if it’s not too much trouble. I mean, I know you have your Chill stall to run and everything.”

“Oh, that’s okay. My assistant Jesse is helping me. Anyway, your friend Jay’s pals don’t seem all that big on ice cream, if you can believe it. Or gourmet hot dogs, or organic kebabs. But the guys on the sushi stall are doing an absolutely roaring trade.” Before I know what he’s about to do, Ferdy has hopped onto the balustrade, swung his legs over, and dropped down the six more feet or so to the ground. He lifts his arms up and indicates that I should climb over, too. “Come on. I’ll catch you.”

“I’m too heavy . . .”

“You’re not too heavy.”

“I am. I’m twice the weight of Honey.”

“What’s Honey got to do with anything?” He sounds cranky now. “Come on, Charlie. Any minute now, your Jay is
going to be out here with sniffer dogs and the FBI, tracking down the only woman on the entire planet who’d shimmy down a thirty-foot drainpipe to get away from him.”

Even though I’m not at all sure that Jay is going to be too bothered about trying to find me (I mean, I sent him for water and then ran off; my rudeness knows no bounds), I don’t want to risk it. So I do as Ferdy suggests and clamber over the balustrade. Then I slip down to the ground below as carefully as I can, ensuring that he absolutely doesn’t need to catch me.

“All right, then.” He sounds a bit stiff as he makes a start for the front of the house. “Let’s go and find you a cab.”

Again, I don’t argue, because I’d rather run the gauntlet of Annabel on the front gate with Ferdy than without him. But as it turns out, there’s no need to run any Annabel gauntlet, because she’s no longer on the front gate. It’s just the two security guards, who remain blank-faced and impassive when Ferdy asks if we can go past them onto the street, where—in well-organized fashion—there’s already a line of black cabs waiting.

“Do you have enough money to get home?” Ferdy asks, approaching the first cab in the line and opening the door for me.

I dislodge my clutch bag from beneath my arm—it’s a tiny bit sweaty now, from my armpit—and peer inside to check that I’ve still got a twenty in there. “Yes. Plenty.”

“Good. Anyway, I really should get back to the stall. Jesse might be struggling to contain the crowds. There might be two whole people waiting for ice cream now. Maybe even three.”

“Sorry, of course. Will it be okay if I hang onto your blazer, though? Just until I get home.”

“Sure. I mean, it’s not even mine. You can return it to Jay Broderick, when you’re done with it, if you want.”

I don’t say that I won’t be seeing Jay ever again, to return a cheap staff blazer to him or otherwise. There’s something else
that’s suddenly on my mind, and I don’t want to wait until I get home to check it out.

“Actually, Ferdy, could you just do one more thing for me? Could you just look down the back of the blazer and see if you can see the label in the back of my dress? And tell me what it says?”

He looks puzzled, and not all that keen, but he does what I ask. “Valentino,” he says, after a moment.

“No, sorry—I mean, could you tell me what
size
the label says?”

“Oh . . .”

I can feel his breath, very lightly, on the back of my neck, and I can feel the gentle brush of his fingertips as he lifts my hair out of the way to get a better look at the label.

“It says size six.”

“
Six?
”

“Yes. Six.” He lets my hair fall back again and steps away, swiftly. “I gather from Honey that a size six is a good thing.”

What’s Honey got to do with anything?
I almost ask. But I don’t, because I’m still trying to digest what Ferdy has just read on the dress label.

Size
six
?

Robyn did say they’d sent her a size that was too big . . .

But then, anything over a size four would have been too big for Robyn. And she didn’t say anything about it being (allegedly) a size ten until she was trying to talk me into wearing it.

The question is, did she deliberately talk me into wearing a dress that she knew was two sizes too small simply because she wanted to wear the Yves Saint Laurent dress? Or was she trying to make me look silly, too?

I shiver, suddenly, although the night is still warm.

“Charlie, I really need to go . . .”

“Sure. Thanks again, Ferdy. Thanks so much.” I pull the cab door shut and ask the driver to head for Earl’s Court.

When I glance back over my shoulder, a moment after moving off, Ferdy has already disappeared through the gates.

I’m halfway home before I realize that my feet are bare. That my shoes—Mum’s beautiful, crystal-embellished shoes—are somewhere at the bottom of a drainpipe in the Broderick family garden.

chapter thirteen

W
hen I wake up,
the morning after Jay’s party, the very first thing I remember about the night before is that I did a runner from the most attractive man I’ve ever met, just as things were starting to get really interesting.

The second thing I remember is that I lost Mum’s shoes when I was shimmying down that drainpipe.

The third thing I remember is the touch of Ferdy’s fingertips when he lifted my hair up from my shoulders to check the label in the back of my dress.

And then, just when I’m wondering how Ferdy has popped into my mind (I mean, up against the thrill of kissing Jay Broderick, you wouldn’t think there’d be room in my head for Ferdy at all), I remember a fourth thing.

Maggie O’Day, the stylist who mistook me for a model. And that conversation I had with her, about Mum’s (now lost) shoes.

I think about this conversation while I haul myself out of bed to go for my loathsome Embankment run, and I think about it while I’m eating my breakfast (three meager eggcup-fuls of sugar-free muesli and a blob of no-fat yogurt; I have to atone for those delicious goat’s cheese tartlets somehow).

I’m also thinking that the reason I went on this ghastly
health kick in the first place was for my career, not so that I could waste my time canoodling with men like Jay Broderick. I’m thinking that if I’m going to so spectacularly mess up things with men like Jay Broderick, the least I can do is focus on that career. On Elroy Glass. On what Dad wanted for me. On worthwhile, meaningful,
positive
ventures that don’t come to a nasty end with me halfway down a drainpipe, inadvertently mooning half of West London.

So I put Stage One of my plan into action: call Olly Winkleman’s number and, when he answers, besiege the poor guy with a barrage of property-ownership questions he surely couldn’t have anticipated when he picked up his phone at ten o’clock on a sunny Saturday morning. He’s as obliging as ever, though, hmm-ing and haa-ing in his thoughtful way at every question I ask, and then suggesting we meet later on in the day when he’s had the chance to pop into the office and dig deeper into the boxed files of Dad’s paperwork he keeps there. We agree to meet at the King’s Road store at three, which gives me plenty of time to execute Stage Two: going onto the Internet to track down Maggie O’Day.

It takes a few minutes to ascertain that she has a Twitter account, and quite a few minutes more to set up my own Twitter account so that I can tweet her. Then, after a tense half-hour wait, Maggie O’Day is actually calling my mobile, after which we chat, for a good long bit, while (look at me, multitasking!) I also use the time to get the day’s quota of lunges under my belt.

Then, as soon as I’m finished on the phone, I’m out of the flat and heading to the store, even though it’s a good couple of hours until I’m actually due to meet Olly. Stage Three is too exciting to wait for, even for just a couple of hours. And I’m so wrapped up in Stage Three, in fact, that I don’t hear Olly coming into the store and up the stairs to the stockroom until his head appears in the doorway, and he says, cheerfully, “Knock, knock.”

“Olly!” I scramble up from where I’ve been squatting in the middle of the stacked crates—crates that I’ve now opened up and begun to carefully divest of their contents. I would go over and give him a hug, but I’m suddenly aware that I haven’t showered or changed since this morning’s loathsome run, and that now my rapidly staling sweat is sealed in by the fine layer of dust that’s been gradually raining down on me ever since I started going through the crates. “Thanks so much for coming!”

“It’s no problem at all. Glad I can help.”

“Well, at least let me buy you a coffee.” I brush the worst of the dust from my arms and reach for my bag, which is now buried beneath half a dozen pairs of slightly dubious hand-painted clogs, one of Dad’s less successful design experiments. “There’s a café over the road.”

“Actually, I passed a rather nice-looking ice-cream parlor just a couple of doors along—”

“No!” The last thing I want, after last night’s drainpipe debacle, is to run into Ferdy. But I think I’ve startled Olly, so I add, “I don’t think they’ve opened yet.”

“It looked pretty open. Lots of people queuing.”

“Oh, well, in that case, we’d definitely be better off avoiding it. Nothing worse than queuing for ages for ice cream.” I make a start for the stairs, before Olly can—quite reasonably—come up with roughly a half-billion things that are worse than queuing for ice cream. “Anyway, I could really do with some caffeine!”

“But I think the ice-cream parlor also does coffee . . .” Olly gives up trying to persuade me to join the line at the lovely-looking, retro ice-cream parlor, and after I lock up the store, follows me happily enough across the road to the dodgy, fly-blown café instead.

I insist on buying the coffees (black for me; a creamy cappuccino and a delicious Kit Kat for lucky old Olly) while he grabs a table as close to the open doors as possible.

As soon as I sit down at the slightly sticky Formica table, I remember that I owe him another round of apologizing for the housewarming party/Scandinavian Accountants’ Conference I subjected him to last weekend.

“But Charlie, I didn’t have that bad a time!” he assures me, midway through my apology. “Honestly! I learnt a lot about the differences between Swedish and Norwegian—who’s to say that won’t come in handy, somewhere down the line?—and it never hurts to know more of the ins and outs of pension funding.”

I suspect that it
could
hurt, actually, but he’s being so polite that I don’t want to disagree with him.

“Well, thanks again, Olly, for coming with me. I was the only friend of Lucy’s there, so it’s a good thing you helped me stick it out. For her sake, that is, not for Pal’s.”

“Yes. Pal. I must admit, I found him . . . hard work. Still, maybe it’s just a language barrier. He seemed ever so keen to tell me that he farts lots.”

“It’s
fartleks
, I think. Something to do with interval training.”

“Ohhhhhh. That does make more sense. He kept telling me he was doing it in the gym, and I kept wondering why they hadn’t asked him to revoke his membership. For the sake of all the other gym-goers, if nothing else.”

This makes me laugh so hard that coffee comes shooting out of my nostrils, and Olly has to go and get a napkin for me to mop it up.

“Anyway,” he goes on, tactfully changing the subject while I dab the Formica and try not to die of embarrassment, “it was a perfectly nice evening. Good to see your friend Lucy again. Oh, and that other chap. Fergie, is it?”

“Ferdy.”

“Ah. I think I may have called him by the wrong name.” Olly looks mournful. “That might have been why he wasn’t all that friendly to me.”

“He wasn’t?” I realize that I’ve jumped on this with far too much interest, so I ask again, more casually, “I mean,
wasn’t
he very friendly?”

“Well, maybe I just imagined it. After all, he was perfectly affable when I met him the first time, at your dinner party. No reason why he wouldn’t have been equally affable when I saw him this time.” Not realizing the significance of what he’s just said, Olly has started rooting around in his briefcase for the paperwork we’re actually here to discuss. “So! We should discuss what you called me about this morning. Selling your dad’s old shoes . . .”

“Well, it’ll be a bit more than just that,” I say, hastily, wanting to disabuse Olly of the notion that what I’m actually planning to do is flog a load of old shoes at Sunday-morning regional swap meets or something. “What I really want to do is use Dad’s old shoes—his
vintage
shoes—as part of the Glass Slippers project.” I sit forward in my chair, buzzing with enthusiasm again, exactly the way I was when I discussed this with Maggie O’Day earlier. “After all, Glass Slippers is meant to be a range that brings back the glory days of Elroy Glass, and it occurred to me last night: why not focus on the vintage aspect of it all?”

“And vintage is a good thing, yes? I mean, it’s not like the jumble sales my mother runs for the church fundraising committee?”

“Vintage is a very good thing indeed. Which is why I’m thinking that Glass Slippers should be a vintage-inspired line. And what better way to launch a vintage-inspired line than to start off by selling much-coveted,
actual
vintage Elroy Glass shoes—shoes that don’t hurt so much you want to die, shoes that don’t give everyone bunions—in the original Elroy Glass store?” I take a slurp of watery coffee, then break off a tiny bit from one of Olly’s fingers of Kit Kat, just to take the taste away. “I’ve been discussing it with a fashion stylist, and she’s going
to help me pick out the best ones to put on sale. Assuming I
can
put them on sale, that is . . .”

“Which is where I come in.” Olly nods. “Well, I’ve managed to check out the deeds to the store, and you’re in luck. On that front, at least. The contents of the store belong to the company.”

This doesn’t, in fact, sound like I’m in luck at all.

“To the company? But not to me?”

“Yes.”

“So . . . I
can’t
sell them?”

“No, no, it doesn’t mean that at all! It simply means that you’ll need permission from your fellow directors before you do sell them. But as the profits will be going back into the company, I can’t imagine any of the directors will have a problem with that . . .” He stops, suddenly. “Ah. Though I’d forgotten that, of course, Diana
is
one of the directors . . .”

I stare at him in dismay. (Dismay doubled by the fact that, I’ve just realized, I’ve somehow eaten an entire finger of Kit Kat, and not just the little piece I intended.) “She’s never going to give me permission!”

“Oh, I’m sure she would. After all, selling the shoes would be a direct revenue stream into—what seems like, frankly—a struggling company.”

“Olly, I promise you, I could come up with an idea that would net Diana a cool million pounds in personal profit every year from now until Doomsday, and she’d still reject it out of hand if she thought the idea was important to me. If it was something I might actually enjoy doing.”

He thinks about this in his usual careful, considered manner for a moment before apparently deciding he can’t really deny it.

“Well, there’s still no need to despair, Charlie. Diana is only one of six directors. Her vote carries no more weight than anyone else’s.”

“Maybe not, but Gaby will just do whatever her mother tells her to do, and as for Alan Kellaway . . . sorry to be rude about your boss, Olly, but he was shagging Diana when I was younger, and if he’s not
still
shagging her, I’ll eat my hat.”

“
Really?
” Olly, respectable solicitor that he is, clearly isn’t immune to a spot of gossip. “You know, that does make an awful lot of sense,” he muses, “now that I think about it. Although it does make me wonder . . .”

“Wonder what?
Please
don’t wonder about the actual carnal details, Olly. I’m still traumatized by the faintest memory of them.”

“No, I’m just thinking that it would make a lot of sense regarding your dad’s will. Alan Kellaway having a thing with Diana, I mean. When I first met with your dad to make the amendments to the will, he was having the hardest time remembering all the exact details of the original version of it.”

“Well, his memory was pretty awful by that stage.”

“Maybe. But he swore blind that he’d never wanted
all
his shares to be split solely between your sisters. And now that I know that his original solicitor—who drew up the will in the first place—was having a thing with your sisters’ mother . . . hmmm.” He pulls a face. “It’s a bit iffy, is all I’m saying.”

This
is
a bit iffy. I mean, is Olly really saying that he thinks Diana and Alan might have cooked up the original will between them? They could have gotten Dad to sign anything in those years after Mum died, when his head was so buried in his work . . .

But no. Even Diana wouldn’t have done something like that. Something
illegal
.

Would she?

“Anyway!” Olly seems to think it better to put this subject to rest for now. “I’m sure you’ll have no problem getting permission to sell the shoes from Terry Pinkerton or James the First. And James the Second seemed rather taken with
you, if I recall, so I can’t believe that will pose any sort of a problem.”

“But it’ll be three against three.” I squirm, uncomfortably, in my seat. “Which means I’ll have to take the casting vote.”

“And . . .?”

I can hardly believe he’s asking this. “
And
,” I say, heavily, as I help myself to another finger of Kit Kat (look, it’s medicinal now, okay?), “that’ll just be one more opportunity for Diana to conclude that I’m defying her. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Olly, but my stepmother isn’t big on people defying her.” I don’t add, because I don’t want to unduly alarm him, that I’ve long held the suspicion that there’s a mass grave, somewhere near Diana’s farmhouse in Shropshire, filled with the bodies of people who’ve defied her.

“Really, Charlie, this isn’t at all insurmountable. What we need to do is . . .” He breaks off, because something on the other side of the street has, apparently, just caught his eye. “Oh,” he says, wistfully and with a touch of envy in his voice. “Nice
car
.”

On the other side of the road—right outside Dad’s store, in fact—a sleek, dark blue sports car has just pulled up. The driver’s door opens, and Jay starts to climb out of it.

“Oh, my God!” I duck, just in case he turns his head and sees me through the café window.

“Are you okay?” Olly asks, with concern.

“Yes, it’s just . . . someone I know.”

“The chap with the Aston Martin?”

“No, don’t look!” I yelp, ducking even farther, and throwing down what’s left of my second finger of Kit Kat. “He’s only looking for me because he’s annoyed with me.”

“Are you sure?” Ignoring my express orders, Olly is peering out through the window. “It looks like . . . hang on,” he whispers, which is probably strictly unnecessary unless, to add to all his many other impressive physical attributes, Jay has
supersonic hearing, too. “He’s carrying something . . . it looks like a shoe box, actually.”