Swept off Her Feet (2 page)

“My God,” he said, his voice cracking with grief. “Are you trying to break me? Is Tessa paying you to destroy my credit rating as well as my credibility?”

Too late. He’d obviously reached the photo frames, my Achilles’ heel.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said in a small voice.

He thrust the list at me. “Evie, Evie, Evie, not wedding photographs
again
.” Max clapped a hand to his head. “Do I even have to look at them? What freaks have you snapped up this time?”

Damn,
I thought. Max would choose this one afternoon to roll back in after lunch. The one afternoon Lots Road Auctions decided to deliver late. He never noticed half my purchases normally; I was an expert at buying, staging, and reselling before he even noticed the shop looked different.

“They’re good old frames!” I argued. “And if they’re already filled with wedding photos, it’ll give people looking for wedding presents the
buying feeling
!”

“
Hello?!
These freaks would put anyone off getting hitched!” Max reached into the box and shoved the top frame under my nose with such urgency that his leather jacket squeaked. “Four eyes and not one of them looking in the same direction!”

If I was being honest, the frames weren’t that special, but I felt so sorry for someone’s great-grandparents, dressed up in their finest and looking so happy, being sneered at and passed over. Chucked onto the unsold pile. What was twenty quid a go?

Plus hammer tax.

Plus VAT.

I swallowed, and wished Alice would hurry up. I had a bad feeling about where this was going.

Max regarded me with a mixture of frustration and despair. “I’m beginning to think I should start going to auctions myself.”

“Yeah, right,” I scoffed, before I could bite my tongue.

Max hadn’t been to an auction within fifty miles of the shop in five years, on account of his chaise-longue-lizard reputation going before him, and the prices rising accordingly as all the dealers in the room abandoned their bickering and clubbed together in order to see off Max Shacks, the Housewife’s Choice. That was the whole point of having an assistant to do his bidding. Literally.

“It’s all perfectly salable.” I swiped the list of out his hands before he got to the moth-eaten sampler that had made me go all Jane Austen. “If I wanted it, someone else will.”

“That’s the trouble, though, isn’t it? You’ve got more of my stock in your flat than I have in here.” He paused in his ranting and asked curiously, “Speaking of which, did you ever manage to get that knackered Chinese silk dressing screen up your stairs?”

“Yes,” I said, lifting my chin. “It’s giving my boudoir a very Edwardian ambience.”

Max snorted. “You are still living in that sixties block of flats round the back of Fulham Palace football ground, aren’t you?”

“It’s not where you are, it’s . . . what you have around you. It makes me
feel
Edwardian.”

He sighed and looked down at the list. “Evie, this really isn’t the week to be filling the shop with tat because you feel sorry for it. I’ve got the accountant coming in—we’re living in hard times. . . .”

I’d heard this one before as well, and was easily distracted by the doorbell jangling. The deliveryman had returned. He was backing in under the weight of my final mercy buy, and when he turned round, giving me a full view of what I’d bought, I blanched.

“I know, I know. Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll make you some coffee?” I gabbled, hustling Max toward the tiny office in the back.

Too late. Hearing the bell jingle, Max turned round and staggered back against an Arts and Crafts bookcase in shock.

“Where’d you want this, mate?” the deliveryman asked, weaving slightly beneath the weight of a massive oak-mounted stag’s head. The stag had seen better days. One glass eye was drooping, as if he’d had a dram too many, and both antlers bore traces of tinsel from some recent Christmas party at the auction house.

Max turned to me and widened his eyes until I could see the whites around the bloodshot bits. “Why?” he demanded.

“It looked so noble!” I pleaded. “It just screams
stately home
! I’ll find a buyer for it, Max, I promise.”

“Who?” We’d reached monosyllables. Not a good sign. Max generally loved the sound of his own voice.

“Um . . .” I racked my brains. “Um, animal lovers? People with hats?”

The deliveryman swayed, but wisely stayed silent.

Max sank onto a mahogany dining chair and put his head in his hands. Then he removed it, and demanded, “How much?”

“Um, I think it’s a good price for—”

“How
much
, Evie?”

“Two hundred pounds,” I said in a very small voice.

“Nnnggghhh.”
Max shoved his hands into his hair and gripped tightly. Along with his suggestive mouth and cavalier way with priceless heirlooms, his hair was one of his redeeming features, being thick and black and tinged with gray, in a sort of rakish Shakespearean-actor fashion. In idle moments,
I sometimes pictured him in a doublet and ruff, complaining about the price of lampreys.

Sadly, the hair and the mouth did not make up for the foul temper, the inability to work a credit-card machine, or the biting sarcasm that he liked to think was Wildean but usually made him come across more like a petulant geography teacher. He also habitually wore a long leather coat—the trademark he hoped would eventually get him a gig as a TV antiques expert.

“You are paying for that out of your own money,” he informed me, emphasizing each word with a stab of his finger.

“Fine,” I said, a bit too brightly. “Why don’t you take it out of my—”

“No.” This time his voice was very distinct. “No, you’re already down to a hundred and ten quid for the month, thanks to that filthy Edwardian wedding dress that even Miss Havisham would have used for dust rags. I want the money in cash, in my account, by the end of the month.”

“But it’s
February
, it’s a short month! And I’ve still got Christmas to pay for,” I protested as the deliveryman inched his way backward out of the cluttered shop. He gestured toward the stag and made
I’m not taking that back
gestures.

I ignored him.

“Keep them, sell them, I don’t care,” Max went on. “But I want the money. For the freak-show photos, the deformed teddy, the moth-eaten stag, everything. Now, not over time. It hurts me to do this, Evie,” he added, less convincingly, “but it’s a lesson in business. You are here to learn, are you not? Or am I running some kind of flea market?” He paused, then frowned, distracted. “What’s that?”

A long streak of something red had appeared at the window and was peering inside.

“Sweet Jesus! Has that postbox moved?” Max demanded. “I have
got
to stop drinking with Crispin at lunch—”

“No,” I said, getting up to let Alice in. “It’s my sister. And don’t be rude about that coat—it’s her style statement for this winter.”

“Alice? I’ll go and make some coffee,” said Max and slunk off.

Alice was one of the few people I knew who could carry off a bright-red maxi coat. She was very tall and always gave the impression she was wearing a cape, even when she wasn’t. She was, by profession, an “interiors consultant,” and her swishy efficiency extended from her cowed clients to her enviable wardrobe: Alice spent a fortune on one dramatic item per season and wore it everywhere, referring to it constantly in the fashion singular. Once everyone had fallen under the spell of her “key piece,” she “retired” it (i.e., passed it on to me) and moved on to the next.

Max had once tried to argue that his leather coat was a key piece, but as Alice pointed out, rather brutally, it was more of a meanness issue than a style one. He’d had it so long that on a pay-per-wear basis, it now owed him money. Alice didn’t show her clothes any loyalty, whereas it would take pliers to get that thing off his back.

She swept in, chestnut hair swinging like in a shampoo ad, and I could tell by her eyes, skittering from box to box, that she was itching to tidy up.

“Evie, don’t tell me anything, I want to guess why you SOS-ed me,” she said by way of greeting. “Has Max got the call from
Antiques Roadshow
? Has he
finally
schmoozed his way to fame?”

Alice threw one hand dramatically onto her hip and knocked over a Chinese vase with her sleeve.

“Oh, bollocks!” she squeaked, making a grab for it as the vase teetered, then fell off the shelf.

That was the saving grace to her otherwise majestic attitude. Like me, she was chronically clumsy, on account of being nearly six feet tall. Something to do with having longer legs and arms than normal and a center of gravity that seemed to shift with the tides. When we were children, our mother never let us go into the china department of any major department store without fastening our arms inside our duffle coats first.

I made a grab for the vase at the same time she did, and between us we managed to knock it onto a bedroom sofa Max had taken in as part exchange for a Tiffany lamp. It lay in the cushions, looking winded.

“Sorry,” breathed Alice.

“What’s going on?” yelled Max from the back room.

“Nothing!” I yelled back. “Alice was just thinking about buying a vase!”

“Tell her we don’t do mates’ rates in this shop!”

“Don’t mind him,” I said. “He has no mates.”

“I heard that!” bellowed Max.

“Can you lend me some money?” I whispered. “I went a bit overboard at the last sale, and Max is making me pay for everything myself. I know I can sell it. It’d just be a loan.”

“Again?” Alice looked pained. “It’s not that I mind lending you money, but—”

“Okay, then,” I said, trying a different tack. “Would you like to buy the sweetest little Steiff teddy bear? You could start a collection!”

“I thought
you
were starting a Steiff collection.” She eyed me beadily.

“I was. I’ll throw in the three I’ve already found,” I replied, mentally retrieving the tatty teds propping up my collection of first-edition Beatrix Potter books in my spare room: I’d been going for a ’30s nursery feel, but to be honest, I’d have been equally happy with a Victorian parlor look. “There, you see—you’ve already got four, and it’ll give Fraser something to buy you for Christmas instead of fishing rods and waterproof waders and all that outdoors stuff you’ve dumped in my garage.”

“No,” said Alice firmly. “I am totally anti-collections. As you well know.”

“You’ve already got a collection of unused huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’ gear,” I pointed out. “Can I sell you a stag’s head to complete the set?”

“I’d rather give you the cash.” She paused. “I’ll give you double if you don’t tell Fraser that fishing rod’s in your garage.”

“Done,” I said. “And I’ll give you the money back when I’ve eBayed my purchases for a massive profit.”

“I’ve heard that before too.” Alice reached into her gorgeous silver leather bag for her checkbook.

It was a shame Alice was so phobic about possessions, I thought, eyeing the collection of Art Deco cigarette cases in the cabinet behind her. She was the only person I knew who could actually use the cases for business cards, or mints, or—

“Stop it,” she said, looking up over her lashes. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m this close to calling Mum and telling her to Simplify your flat.” She held up her finger and thumb, then thought for a second and made the tiny space even tinier. “You know she’s itching to do it for a magazine?”

I shuddered.

Our mother, Caryl Nicholson—or Carol, as she’d been
as recently as 2004—was something of a lifestyle guru in the leafier parts of south London, thanks to her business, Simplify with Caryl Nicholson, which basically dejunked houses so they sold faster. Mum’s spring cleaning had always started just after Christmas; she had to ration her housework so she didn’t run out of stuff to do by midweek. Woe betide Barbie if she got so much as badly cut hair; we didn’t have a dollies’ hospital so much as a sinister Gestapo-style toy abduction squad that spirited away any ailing toys, never to be seen again.

When Alice and I moved out, our father had offered Mum’s ruthless tactics to friends who had the real estate agents coming round, mainly so he could read the paper instead of having it yanked from his hands and ironed. Ten years and three hundred skips later, she ran her own “life laundry” business, and wore a lot of Joseph basics while charging rich ladies top whack to march around their executive residences, barking at them to get rid of anything that hadn’t moved in six months, up to and including husbands and heavy-shedding family pets.

Ironically, the property market collapsing had only made her more popular, and now she had a whole team working for her, including Alice, who was her central London manager. Both their houses looked like something from interiors magazines, even if—privately—I did think the extreme tidiness was a bit At Home with a Serial Killer.

“She won’t want to make over my flat,” I said confidently. “She doesn’t understand my need for ambience. She said my fifties-diner kitchen set made her want to cry.”

“I know,” said Alice.

“What do you mean, you know?”

Alice rolled her eyes. “I mean, she mentioned it. And told a journalist from
Good Homes
that you were her last remaining
challenge. She has you in her sights, Evie. Consider this your advance warning. There.”

She handed me a check for five hundred pounds, and I felt an invisible flock of birds lift my careworn shoulders.

“Wow! Thanks, Alice, I was only going to ask you for a couple of hundred!” I blurted out. “Here, let me throw the teddy bear in!”

I pressed the bear into her hands, and she shrank away as if it might be a carrier of some rare disease, like untidiness.

Then she looked back at me without speaking, and her meticulously groomed eyebrows knitted a couple of millimeters closer together. “Evie,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, “there is something
else
I wanted to talk to you about.”

That’s when I knew the tip-off and the cash weren’t going to be interest-free.

“Coffee?” Max appeared, bearing an old pub tray with three unmatched porcelain cups, a battered hotel percolator, and a packet of HobNobs. “And would you like to explain, Evangeline, how you offered to make coffee, and I end up making it?”