Charlie Glass's Slippers (41 page)

“I didn’t say I was planning on forgiving her. I’m just saying that could have been the way it happened.”

Although I have to admit that Diana has always relished the long game and the apocalyptic follow-through. And it seems quite obvious now that the only reason Diana was suddenly so enthusiastic about me setting up Glass Slippers
was because she was cooking up a plan to destroy the place.
She did assure me that
I’d regret what I’d done, after all. It’s not so very far removed from possibility that she did the same thing with Mum. When it comes to anything that confronts her with Dad’s disinterest, I’m not sure there are any depths to which Diana wouldn’t stoop.

“Honestly,” I go on, “in some ways I almost feel sorry for her, more than anything. She’s been so eaten up with bitterness all these years, and all because of a man who wasn’t interested in her.”

“Your dad, you mean?” Ferdy takes the chopping board with my beef chunks on and scrapes them into the softened onions. “Well, she needn’t have taken it so personally. Dad’s always said that the only person your father was ever really interested in was himself. Oh, shit,” he adds, realizing that he might have just been rather too open and honest with me. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay. You’re right. Your dad is right.”

Somehow it doesn’t feel quite as treacherous to let myself admit this anymore. If my time with Jay taught me anything, it’s that it’s not reasonable to make perfection a condition for love. Loving someone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to admit that the person is selfish and narcissistic. And being able to admit that someone is selfish and narcissistic doesn’t mean you can’t love that person just the same.

Maybe without all the hero worship, that’s all.

“Dad was . . . Well, he was a pretty rotten father, really. To all three of us. It’s why I want us to make Elroy Glass a proper success again. It was the good part of Dad. It’d be nice to have that to hang onto.”

“So you’re going to carry on working for the company?” Ferdy asks. “Despite the fact that I urgently need you to return to your honorary, unpaid, thankless job as my head of Research and Development?”

“Sorry, yes. But I’d really like to carry on my honorary,
unpaid, thankless job in a part-time capacity. If that would be okay?”

Ferdy turns, suddenly, to open the fridge-freezer and starts rooting around for something. “It’s always okay, Charlie, to spend a bit of time with you,” he says, in a rather muffled voice, and sending out little puffs of warm breath into the icy air that comes out of the freezer.

The fact that it sounds as if he still thinks I’m a nice person reminds me of something I desperately need to clear up with him. Before I can stop myself, I’m suddenly blurting, “I didn’t kiss Pal, you know.”

“Sorry?”

“Pal. I know what Honey saw. Or rather, I know what Honey
thought
she saw. But I wasn’t kissing Pal. He was kissing me. And I was hitting him with a damp flannel.”

Ferdy stops rooting in the freezer for a moment and glances over his shoulder to look at me. “Damp flannel?”

“It was the only thing I had to hand. But I’ve explained it all to Lucy now, and she—”

“It’s okay, Charlie. You don’t have to explain anything to me. The more I thought about it, the more I knew Honey had to have gotten something wrong. And she wasn’t exactly your biggest fan. Especially after you tried to kill her with your driving.”

“Ferdy, I honestly didn’t try to kill her!”

“I’m kidding! Anyway”—he turns, quite suddenly, back to the freezer—“Honey wasn’t your biggest fan long before that. Seeing as she had this obsession with . . . well, with the ridiculous idea that you were wildly in love with me.”

His words hang in the air for a moment, while I try to work out the best way to reply to them.

Before I’ve done this, however, I hear myself say, “Ridiculous?”

“Exactly!” Ferdy laughs. It’s slightly too loud a laugh, and
with an extra ring from the fact that he’s directed it into the freezer. “Honey always admitted the reason she could never maintain a long-term relationship was because she got paranoid about that kind of stuff. But I don’t think even
she
has ever been that paranoid before. I mean, thinking you were chasing after me, when you’re going out with a guy like Jay Broderick! Rich, good-looking, successful, charming . . .”

“Sounds like
you
might want to go out with Jay Broderick!” I say, lightly.

“Very funny.”

“He’s all yours,” I add, “if you want him. You’ll have to compete with his brand-new girlfriend, of course. And most of the other women in Britain. But seeing as I’m not with him anymore, there’s at least one less girl to stand in your way.”

Ferdy stops rooting around in the freezer. His back is still turned.

“You’re not with Jay anymore?”

“No.”

He still isn’t looking at me. “I’m . . . sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. It was fun while it lasted.” If you take the definition of
fun
, that is, to be
exhilarating at times, nerve-racking at others, and ultimately just plain exhausting
.
“And at least I got a vintage MG out of it . . . Okay, now
I’m
kidding,” I add, hastily, as Ferdy finally turns to look at me, his eyebrows raised in mild shock. “I’m giving the car back, obviously. Though knowing Jay, he won’t accept it.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Seeing as I still think he gave it to you partly to make me jealous—which it did, by the way—he might feel it’s served its purpose and be happy for you to return it. Scratchy Umbrella?”

“
Sorry?
”

“Scratchy Umbrella?” He holds up the carton of ice cream that he’s been rooting for. Sure enough, the words
Scratchy Umbrella
are written on it in large black letters. “It’s a new ice
cream I’m trialing. I mean, it’s another new version of stracciatella, obviously, but I always liked the way you got the name wrong, so when I was—”

“No, I didn’t mean . . .” Touched (and delighted) though I am that he’s been creating an ice cream based on a silly mistake that I make with the name, this isn’t what I was trying to get him to repeat. “You just said that . . . that Jay giving me the car made you jealous.”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean that you were jealous because you liked the car?”

“No.”

“Do you mean that you were jealous because . . . you liked me?”

He puts the ice-cream container down on the worktop, opens a nearby drawer for a scoop, opens a nearby cupboard for some bowls, and opens another drawer for some spoons.

Then he says, “I
like
you so, so much, Charlie, that I keep accidentally putting crushed walnuts in the raspberry sorbet.”

This is so far and away the nicest thing I’ve ever had anyone say to me that I don’t even care that I can’t make any sense of it.

“What I mean,” he continues, turning slightly pink, “is that I’m currently working on a banana-and-walnut ice cream and on a raspberry sorbet, and because all I can do is think about you all the time, I keep muddling up the two different batches. And I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten raspberry sorbet with crushed walnuts in it, but it’s really not a terribly pleasant experience. Which is ironic, because it’s a really, really pleasant experience thinking about you. In a weird, tortured kind of a way, that is.”

Okay, that last sentence was a bit less nice.

“Thinking about me is weird and tortured?”

“Well, obviously. I mean, that’s why Honey was so crazy.
Because I know you’re not interested in me, Charlie. You didn’t reply to any of the emails I sent you while you were away, and you only wrote one brusque line letting me know you were going. And then when you came back, you were—”

“Hang on.
What
emails you sent me?”

“The emails. Stupid stuff, really, just wittering on about ice cream.”

“I didn’t get a single email about ice cream. I didn’t get a single email about
anything
. Are you sure you were sending them to the right address?”

“To the email address you sent me that one line from. You told me it was a new Gmail address you were going to be using while you were in America. CharlieG1985, or something. I assumed that was the year you were born.”

“I was born in 1983.” (But does Ferdy
really
think I’m almost twenty-seven instead of almost twenty-nine? Take that, Galina!) “And I didn’t set up an AOL account, Ferdy, much less email you from one.”

“But then who . . .” He stops. “Oh, God,” he groans. “Honey was born in 1985.”

“Ah.”

“And Honey had access to my email, because when she was helping me refurbish the new store, she was always using my iPad for one reason or another.”

“And you think she must have seen the email I sent telling you I was going away, deleted it, and then set up CharlieG1985 at AOL to send you a fake email from? So that I wouldn’t get any emails you sent me?”

Ferdy is looking more embarrassed than I’ve ever seen him. “I did tell you she wasn’t a fan of yours.”

“You didn’t tell me she was plain psychotic!” Though obviously, I’d worked that one out for myself a while ago. “Jesus, Ferdy, what were you doing, going out with a girl like that?”

“I don’t know . . . She was just so bloody
persistent
, and
every time I ever tried to slow things down, she’d suddenly have some crisis she was terribly upset about . . . and anyway, you’d buggered off to America, Charlie, without so much as a by-your-leave, as far as I knew.”

“But you never said anything
before
I went to America.”

Ferdy shoots me an incredulous look. “What, you mean I didn’t turn up on the doorstep with three dozen red roses and sweep you off to the bedroom when you were frazzled to the end of your tether with the stress of caring for your dying father? Anyway, I did try to ask you to lunch that day of your dad’s memorial, but you seemed keen to keep it as a friends-only thing instead. Inviting me to dinner with Lucy and Pal, and all that.”

“I’d just sat on a Sacher torte,” I say, helplessly. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“And then when you came back from America, I was just really pissed off with you for ignoring me for four months. And then you were going on about queues of men, and strings of suitors . . . and anyway, you looked so
different
.” He uses the ice-cream scoop now, to gesture vaguely at me, from head to toe. “Blond, and tanned, and gorgeous . . .”

“You thought I was gorgeous? I thought you found me repulsive!”

“Charlie, why on earth would I have found you repulsive? I’m not
blind
! I was just a bit intimidated, because you never used to look like that. And if I’m being completely honest . . . well, I kind of missed the way you looked before. I really liked it.”

“You fancied
Fat Charlie
?”

“I never knew any Fat Charlie. All I knew was Pretty Charlie. Sexy Charlie. Charlie-with-the-beautiful-smile.”

Right now, I’m Charlie-with-the-goldfish-mouth-and-the-startled-eyebrows.

“Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I
don’t
like the new hair,
and the great clothes, and the jaw-droppingly awesome body.” Ferdy stops talking for a moment, swallows rather hard, and then carries on again. “But I’d like it a lot more if you seemed happy. If I didn’t worry that you’re too busy fretting about the way you look to have any fun. If you’d just sit with me at the table and have a taste of my new Scratchy Umbrella ice cream and tell me what you think about it.”

The smile that I know is spreading across my face right now is so huge and bright that I can actually feel it lighting me up from the inside. As if I’m bathed in natural sunshine today, instead of standing under one of those energy-saving light bulbs.

“Trouble is,” I hear myself say, “that if you really did like the”—what did he call it?—“jaw-droppingly awesome body, you’re going to have to stop tempting me with offers of ice cream.”

“Hmmm. That’s quite the dilemma. Do you think there’s any way we could find some kind of happy medium? A little less of the jaw-dropping awesomeness, but a soupçon more of the ice cream?” He looks mortified all of a sudden, his own smile vanishing from his face. “Oh, God, Charlie, not that I’m telling you what you should be doing with your body! That’s totally up to you! I mean, you’re not standing here telling me what I should be doing with
my
body . . .”

“True. But actually,” I say, taking a deep breath, “there are one or two things I could think of. That you could do with your body, that is.”

“Hey, I know. I know I’m no Jay Broderick. I know I’m not Mr. Six-Pack Adonis. There are a million ways I can’t compete with him, and that’s just one of them.”

Which just proves, once and for all, that I should never,
ever
try being flirtatious. Here I was just trying to hint that Ferdy should take a big step towards me, take my hands in his, and kiss me, and somehow I’ve got him thinking I’m expecting
him to hit the gym and whittle away his hint-of-a-paunch before I’ll so much as deign to look at him.

“Ohhh . . .
I
get it,” he says, clearly reading the expression on my face. “You weren’t saying I’m not Mr. Six-Pack Adonis.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were saying you fancy me.”

“I was. I am. I mean, I do.”

And
that’s
when he takes a big step towards me, takes my hands in his, and kisses me.

Well, okay, he only takes my right hand. Because he’s still holding the ice-cream scoop in his left.

But the kiss is none the worse for that. The kiss, in fact, is perfect.

Perfect despite the fact that he’s holding an ice-cream scoop, and that we’re surrounded by a distinct aroma of singeing onion, and that his hair is still leaking dust, and that I’m still in the clothes I wore to dinner last night, which anyway are looking a little bit tight on me thanks to the fact that I seem to be inexorably creeping from an exhausting size ten to—hopefully—a more manageable twelve, and that I haven’t had the chance to do my hair or put on any makeup or tweeze my eyebrows . . .