O’Hara. He’s an actor too, as it happens.’ Though actually, this makes me feel a tiny bit better about my disastrous encounter with Dillon: I mean, sure, he’s good-looking and talented and all that, but he’s no Gregory Peck, is he?
‘Well, I’ve never heard of him,’ Audrey declares. ‘And he can’t be so very wonderful if he broke up with you to go out with your sister instead!’
I snort so loudly at the ludicrousness of this that more of that damp snot billows out of my nose.
‘God, no! That’s not what happened. I only met Dillon this morning. And, anyway, Dillon would never give a second glance to a girl like me, even if he didn’t have a thing for pneumatic blondes. Like my curvier, blonder, prettier little sister.’
‘Darling, that’s a ridiculous thing to say. You’re extremely pretty!’ She doesn’t, I can’t help but notice, comment on the curvy and blonde thing. ‘Now, if you’d just stop hiding yourself away underneath that hat …’
I take off my sunhat.
Audrey Hepburn stares at my hair.
‘Well, that’s perfectly easily solved!’ she says, after a long moment’s silence. She springs to her feet and – with the hand that’s not clasping the cigarette-holder – grabs the kitchen scissors from the kitchen worktop. ‘I’m jolly good with hair. I used to cut all my friends’ hair in London after the war, when we were too poor to go to the hairdressers!’ She puts her head on one side, still smoking, and considers me for a moment. ‘You know, a fringe would look marvellous on you.’
I have my doubts about this, because although it’s been roughly two decades since I last had a fringe, the memories (and the photographic evidence) are still with me. And it didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, look marvellous. It made me look like an oversized hobbit. On a Bad Hair Day.
‘Oh, yes …’ Audrey Hepburn is saying, happily, as she takes one of the huge loose covers off the arm of the Chesterfield and starts to tuck it in around my neck. ‘A fringe will be impossibly chic! Not to mention the way it will bring out your cheekbones.’
Memories of oversized hobbit-dom are fading, to be replaced with a vision of that moment in Roman Holiday where Audrey Hepburn has all her hair lopped off by the barber, rocketing from gauche schoolgirl to international beauty in the time it takes to fade out and fade back in again. Not that I’m suggesting I possess the other advantages Audrey has (elfin features, incredible bone structure), but if she really thinks a fringe would make me chic …
… not to mention that Getting a Makeover was one of the things I always used to do in my Audrey Hepburn dream-world. Admittedly that was in the serene surroundings of an old-fashioned beauty parlour, and not in a cramped flat surrounded by boxes. But still …
‘Could you really make me look chic?’ I ask, wistfully. ‘And a bit … well, a little bit like you?’
‘Oh, Libby!’ She rests her cigarette holder on the kitchen worktop, and leans towards me in a cloud of L’Interdit. Then she takes a huge hank of my hair in one still-gloved hand, and starts to slice through it with the scissors. ‘I’m nothing so terribly special.’
I stare up at her. ‘You are joking. Right?’
‘Not at all.’ Her scissors are working quickly, confidently. ‘I mean, think about it, darling: put any of us in a fabulous dress like this one, throw in some Tiffany diamonds to wear, and we’d all look breathtaking.’
‘Hmm. It helps, of course, if you really are breathtaking.’
It’s her turn to let out a snort, though obviously she manages to do so in an elegant and Gallic sort of way (i.e. without damp snot frothing out of her nostrils).
‘Breathtaking is as breathtaking does, Libby Lomax. Here you are getting all hung up on not being blonde or curvy enough … I mean, just look at me!’
I do. I do look at her. And she’s every bit as flawless as she’s looked in every movie and photograph I’ve ever seen of her.
‘When I started out in Hollywood, all anybody wanted was the pneumatic blondes. Jayne Mansfield, Doris Day, poor darling Marilyn … I couldn’t possibly compete with them! So do you know what I did?’
‘Er – carried on looking exactly like you do now, got a starring role in a major movie opposite Gregory Peck, won an Oscar and got every girl on the planet wearing Capri pants and ballet flats for the next fifty years to try to look like you?’
She stops snipping for a moment to give me a rather sharp look.
‘I played to my strengths.’
‘Which is all very well, when you’ve got strengths …’
‘Everybody has strengths,’ she says, gently. ‘Even you. Especially you. And it would do you no end of good, Libby Lomax, if you started to believe it. Now hush, and let me concentrate on this fringe.’
I do what I’m told, and hush, while she moves the scissors round to the front of my head and starts to snip, daintily, with the tip of her tongue resting in concentration on her lower lip.
She’s probably right, if I really think about it. That it would do me good if I played to my strengths a bit more. If I stopped comparing myself to the sort of blonde bombshells that attract men like Dillon O’Hara and made the most of myself, instead of grunging about the place in jeans and a grey hoodie. If I stopped trailing in the wake of my little sister and did something – well – that I actually want to do, instead of doing something badly that I couldn’t give two hoots about …
‘Done!’ she suddenly sings out, and then steps back to admire her handiwork.
Her face falls a moment later.
‘Oh.’
This is not the tone of someone admiring their handiwork.
‘What do you mean, oh?’
‘Nothing! It looks …’
‘Chic?’
There’s another long moment of worrying silence.
She picks up her cigarette holder from the counter and takes a hasty, rather anxious draw.
Then she says, ‘Perhaps if we found you a slightly larger hat …’
‘Oh, God.’
I grab my bag, root about for the little foundation compact I know is in there, flip it open and gaze at my reflection in the little mirror.
It’s not good.
At all.
The compact mirror may be small, but it’s big enough for me to see the extent of the disaster zone. The fringe makes my forehead look like a tombstone. It highlights the length of my nose. It does not bring out my cheekbones; if anything, in fact, my face is more pancake-like than ever before. And it’s not even as if the fringe is the only problem: the rest of my hair has been horribly mangled, too; cut in an uneven crop that makes me look like a startled toilet brush.
‘I
