Charlie Glass's Slippers (27 page)

I dart to the computer and click on the X to close the pop-up, mid-grimace.

“A friend was just asking me about . . . about tantric sex . . .” I avoid Maggie’s eye, even though she’s grinning in an understanding sort of way. “And you know what the Internet is like, when you’re searching for something . . . all kinds of dodgy things pop up out of nowhere.”

“Dodgy things popping up out of nowhere?” She gives me a big, lascivious wink. “Sounds all right to me! And you know, if there’s anything you want to know about tantric sex, you only have to ask. I used to do it sometimes with an old boyfriend. He used to go out with a girl who’d been a backing dancer on tour with Sting, and obviously Sting knows a thing or two about tantric sex . . .”

“So I gather.” The ghastly grimacing couple on my computer screen are refusing to go away, popping up again like a virus—oh,
God
, I’ve given my computer a virus, haven’t I?—every time I click on the X in the corner of their box to get rid of them. “I really am so sorry about all this,” I mumble, feeling just about ready to die of embarrassment. Not only have I failed to provide so much as a dribble of coffee or a crumb of croissant, but now I’m lowering the tone of the meeting before it’s even begun. “I know it must all look very unprofessional.”

“Hey, that’s perfectly okay, Charlie. I have a sky-high sex drive, too. Honestly, if you could see the kind of things I watch on
my
laptop . . .”

“Anyway! The shoot seemed to go okay yesterday!” I sing out, before Maggie can fill me in on precisely what it is she watches on her laptop when nobody is looking. “I hope Heather was happy with the pictures she got.”

“Oh, yeah, she called this morning to tell me it all went really well. Actually, she mentioned that a freelance friend of hers
might want to do something similar for one of the Sunday supplements . . . Hey,” she suddenly says. “Isn’t that your sister?”

I think she’s talking about Gaby, and her surprise involvement in the shoot yesterday. “Yes, look, I didn’t ask Gaby to show up, or anything, she just—”

“Out there, I mean.” She gestures towards the street with her Evian bottle. “Not Gaby. The other one. The snotty gold-digging one who’s always coked to her eyeballs whenever I see her at parties?”

I’m too surprised to even, as usual, defend Robyn—it has to be Robyn that Maggie is talking about—from accusations like the one she’s just made. Because she’s right: Robyn is indeed outside on the street. Men in white vans hang out of their windows and bus drivers leer from their cabs, while Robyn, strutting at speed towards us in spray-on jeans, a cropped vest, and heels even higher than Maggie’s sex drive, rudely sticks a middle finger up at them.

A moment later, she’s stalked through the door and slammed it behind her. She flings a Net-a-Porter carrier bag to the floor and points a furious finger in my direction.

“You’re shagging Jay Broderick, you absolute bitch!”

I bid a final farewell to the dregs of my professionalism. I’m not sure I could look any more unprofessional now, to be perfectly honest.

“Robyn!” I put down my treacherous computer and hurry over to her. “Do you think we could have this conversation another time, please?”

“Ha! So you don’t deny it? You
are
shagging him!”

“Yes! Yes, I
do
deny it. And
no
, I’m not . . . shagging him,” I say, completely truthfully.

Robyn emits a derisive snort. “Bollocks. Lulu called me just now to say that she’d been talking to Poppy Gregory, who’s going out with Caspar Blake-Ashby.”

I blink at her, none the wiser about who any of these
people are, or how they fit into the issue of me and Jay. Shagging or otherwise.

“Well,
obviously
Caspar works with Ben Mortimer! Jay’s best friend! And Ben told Caspar that Jay called him this morning to invite him to bloody Shropshire for the weekend! With
you
! How could you
do
this to me?”

“You know, that’s pretty much the question I asked myself when I saw the size-six label in the back of that Valentino dress you lent me.”

“What? Oh,
that
.” Robyn tosses her head, contemptuously. “That was just a little joke, Charlie. Anyway.” She seems keen to change the subject. “Do you want to know the really sad thing, Charlie? Until Lulu called this morning, I was only planning to come here to bring you back your Yves Saint Laurent dress.” She indicates the Net-a-Porter bag on the floor. “
Despite
the fact you still haven’t returned my Valentino. But
that’s
the kind of sister I am.”

Which reminds me—I do pretty urgently need to take the Valentino to the expensive invisible-menders to have the seam fixed. But still, Robyn’s attitude takes the cake.

“Sorry—you’re expecting undying gratitude for bringing me back something I actually own? Something I wanted to wear on Friday night?”

“Well, my Valentino worked out pretty well for you in the end, didn’t it? Wiggling your giant boobs under Jay’s nose all night!”

“Look, Robyn, I really would prefer to talk about this another time . . .”

“Oh, Maggie won’t care!” Robyn glowers in Maggie’s direction. “When it comes to Jay Broderick, she’s just as much of a slut as you are.”

I turn around, startled, to glance at Maggie. She shoots me an eye-roll before saying, dangerously sweetly, to Robyn, “And lovely as ever to see you, too, Robyn, darling. Hey, how are
things going with that very nice Ukrainian boyfriend of yours? The one who’s the very nice Ukrainian boyfriend of lots of other women, too?”

“
Ugh
,” is Robyn’s only reply to this, though whether it’s directed at Maggie, at Yevgeny, or at the memory of Yevgeny’s other girlfriends, it’s hard to tell. “Well, I hope you feel
good
about yourself,” she spits, turning back to me, “betraying your
own sister
like this. Especially when I’m due to have
life-threatening surgery
any day now.”

“My God, what’s wrong?”

“My bloody bunions, is what’s wrong!”

I have to talk fast, to cover Maggie’s snort. “I’m sure you’ll be absolutely fine.”

“I hope I
die
on the operating table! That’ll show you.”

“Robyn, don’t say that . . .”

“And I hope you have a
horrible time
in Shropshire this weekend. And I hope you get all fat again before you go . . . no, I hope you get
even fatter
!”

With this, her curse on me, she turns and stalks back out of the door, sticking up her middle finger at a bus driver who hasn’t even had the temerity to leer at her yet.

“Well!” says Maggie, as the door slams behind her. “Isn’t she just a bottle of sunshine?”

Oh.

Maggie.

I compose my face as carefully as I can before turning back to look at her again.

“And yes,” she says, before I can bring myself to ask the question. “Robyn’s right. About one thing, anyway. I used to go out with Jay Broderick.”

Of
course
she did. She’s chic, and glamorous, and incredibly pretty, and she was a VIP guest at his birthday party. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before.

“And yes,” she adds, with yet another of her cheeky winks,
“he was the one I tried the tantric sex with. Just in case you were wondering!”

I hadn’t been wondering. But now, naturally, it’s all I can think about.

“Hey, don’t look so worried! It was like five years ago! And it was only for a couple of months. Our boy Jay can’t stay interested in anyone for very much longer than that!”

Suddenly, I feel this morning’s vanilla Müller Lite rising up my gullet, eager to make a reappearance.

“Are you all right, Charlie?” Maggie asks, staring at me with concern. “Do you need to sit down or something?”

“No,” I croak. “I’m okay.”

“Well, I’m not surprised you’re feeling a bit rubbish, after that stupid cow yelling at you like that.” She comes over to me and holds out her water bottle. “God, Charlie, did she
really
lend you a Valentino dress that was two sizes too small?”

“Mm. It split.”

Now Maggie looks really cross. “That’s just a waste of a good Valentino.”

I force myself to laugh—even though I think she might have been deadly serious—and take another sip of water.

“Anyway, I’m here to work, not to grill you about your love life.” She pats me, nicely, on the shoulder. “Come on. Leo and Suzy will be here any minute. Let’s go upstairs before they get here so I can get a proper look at all these shoes Leo has been orgasmically emailing me about. And you can show me which ones you let Heather use in the shoot yesterday.”

As I start leading her up the stairs to the stockroom, she suddenly stops me with a hand on my shoulder for the second time.

“Charlie—you weren’t upset by what I said just now, were you? About Jay Broderick? And the two-month thing?”

“What? No!” I can hear in my own voice how defensive I sound. “Not at all, Maggie!”

“Okay. But your sister was right, wasn’t she? You
are
going out with him?”

“I don’t know.” This, at least, is honest. “We’ve had a dinner date . . . and I am going away with him for the weekend.”

“To his place in the country?” She nods, looking impressed. “You’re already higher in the pecking order than I ever was! He never offered to take me there. I think it’s only for special people.”

This cheers me up slightly—as I think, bless her, it was meant to.

“Well, you’ll have a great time,” she adds. “Jay’s the master of a good time.” She nudges me, nodding down at the laptop that’s still tucked under one arm. “And it looks like you’re planning to show him a pretty good time, too, Little Miss Tantra!”

Which I don’t think was ever officially one of the
Mr. Men
or
Little Miss
books. Though obviously I haven’t spent long enough, yet, trawling Amazon to be absolutely sure.

I carry on up the stairs, hoping that a good hour or so with Maggie going through Dad’s shoes will block out the increasingly uncomfortable vision in my head: a vision of Jay, somewhere in the recent past, having hour after hour of athletic, virtuoso sex with one of Sting’s most lithe and bendy backing dancers.

• • •

Despite the absence of catering, the meeting was a success. Among the four of us, we’ve definitively decided on six different styles for Leo and Suzy to work up, for me to then present to the directors’ AGM—one of those metallic disco sandals Leo is always getting slightly moist-eyed about, a cute patent sling-back, an elegant suede pump, and then three separate styles in bright red: a sexy stiletto, a demure Mary Jane, and an absurdly glamorous platform sandal with a whip-thin ankle
strap. Maggie has gone off in raptures of excitement, Leo and Suzy have scurried away to make more progress on the actual sketches, and I’m just locking up the store at five o’clock, ready to head home for a fun-packed evening of loathsome running and squats and lunges, when I hear my name being called from a little way along the street.

“Charlie! Hey!”

It’s Ferdy. He’s coming out of Chill and heading my way, a rather grim expression on his face.

I hold up my hands, automatically. “Look, I’m sorry, but I really, really didn’t mean to make Honey cry . . .”

“Charlie, I’m coming to apologize to you.” He looks grimmer than ever. “For Honey’s . . . little moment this morning. Jesse told me about it. I gathered that it was about . . . well, that it was something to do with me.” He’s looking rather flustered. “Look, I know what Honey can get like when she gets a bit paranoid about stuff. And I’m just sorry that you had to deal with it.”

“That’s okay.” I put the keys into my bag and zip it up. “Is she all right now?”

“She’s fine,” he says, in a voice that suggests quite the opposite. In fact, he looks far from fine himself: pouchy-eyed and more drawn than usual, his tufty hair even more in need of a comb. “Just a touch of the green-eyed monster, that’s all.”

“About . . .” I swallow, and start again, trying to sound casual. “About you and me?”

“About you.” Ferdy shoves his hands into his pockets. “You know. The way you look, and everything.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Hey, I didn’t say it made any sense!”

Ouch
.

I stare at him, hurt beyond measure. “Is there something
wrong
with the way I look?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you said—”

“I didn’t
mean
that.” He jiggles his hand in his pocket, looking exasperated. “I only meant . . . Oh, here we go,” he mutters, as right out of nowhere—as you’d expect, the speed it’s traveling at—Jay’s dark blue Aston Martin
vrooms
up to the curb beside us. “Here comes lover-boy!”

I would deny that Jay is anything of the sort (I’m sure that, technically speaking, you probably have to have had sex with someone before he can be called your lover-boy), but I’m seized with a burning desire to let Ferdy know that there are
some
men out there who find me attractive, even if he doesn’t. Some
extremely desirable
men, as it happens.

“Well, it was nice catching up with you, Ferdy.”

His eyebrows rise, just for a moment. “Are you trying to get rid
of me?”

“No! I just—”

“Don’t worry. I don’t want to cramp your style any more than you want me . . . cramping it.” He turns to walk back to Chill, but he has to pass right by the Aston Martin to do so, and he’s blocked for a moment as the driver’s door opens and Jay gets out of it.

“Hi!” Jay says to him. His brow furrows. “Wait—don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Yeah, I do . . . you’re the ice-cream guy!”

“Yes. I’m the ice-cream guy.”

“That’s right. I thought I recognized you.” Jay takes a step in my direction. “Hey, there,” he says, leaning down to plant a kiss on my lips, before turning back to Ferdy, with a smile. “So, you two know each other?”

“Nearby premises,” I offer by way of explanation, just as Ferdy replies at the same time.