style="font-size:15px;"> I take a business card out of my wallet, which depicts me standing against a wall of flowers in a Sixties minidress. ‘Look!’ I say. ‘That dress is Pucci. You had one like that, didn’t you?’
She knows I’m trying to get around her and she doesn’t reply.
Some vague desperation for that old connection makes me persevere. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it? Marilyn Munro was buried in Pucci, you know.’
‘I’m assuming not in this specific dress.’
Ha ha, she’s hilarious, my mother.
She reads the business card slowly, at arm’s-length, too proud for reading glasses. ‘Fern Banks Vintage.’ She hands it back to me and sighs, summing up my enterprise with her own brand of snobbery. ‘In other words, you’re selling people’s cast-offs.’
That hurts.
I reply lightly, forcing a smile. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘And you hope to make a living this way?’ my father asks.
‘Yes, I do. I never pay over the odds. I look for styles and buy diffusion lines, nothing too out there, just clothes for women to look good in.’
‘As opposed to?’
‘Look …’ I’m talking too fast and too defensively, I know, but I want them to understand that this is something I can make a go of. ‘This is something I’m actually good at. And I’m building a decent client list.’ I’m stretching the truth a bit here, obviously. But it’s early days.
A deep weariness has come over them.
See? I think bitterly. Dressing people up in a department store doesn’t seem such a bad job now, does it?
My mother expresses her disapproval by emanating a dense and disappointed silence.
I play with a button on the Barcelona footstool. The silence is just starting to get uncomfortable, when: ‘How’s Mick?’ my father asks casually, breaking it.
That didn’t take long, did it? ‘He’s fine! He sends his love.’ I say that to annoy them. It’s not the kind of thing that Mick would do, send his love to my parents. They’ve only met once, briefly, on my birthday, and he wasn’t what they wanted for me. What he thought of them, he didn’t say. He never gives them a second thought.
They digest my comment for a moment.
‘Your mother and I have been talking about the flat,’ my father says, crossing one leg over the other.
‘Oh, really?’ I feel nervous, as if I’m no longer on solid ground, and I stare at his feet. For a moment I think that what I’m seeing is his pale bare ankle, but no, he’s wearing beige socks.
‘The reason we’re keeping it in our name, apart from the issue of capital gains tax, is because we feel it’s financially safer. For you, you understand,’ he adds.
‘How so?’
He and my mother exchange a look.
‘Have you thought,’ my mother says, ‘that Mick might simply be out for what he can get?’
This is a brand-new put-down out of a whole array of criticisms. I mean, Mick couldn’t possibly like me for my company, my looks and the fact the sex is good, could he? No. He’s after my flat. Correction: their flat. I take another mouthful of my drink. My eyes water. It hits the back of my nose like mustard powder. It’s more like a punishment than a cocktail.
‘He’s got his own house,’ I point out. ‘In Harpenden.’
That shakes them.
‘Actually his own?’ my father asks dubiously.
‘Yes. Actually his own.’ I’ve got a decent imagination, but even I couldn’t invent a house in Harpenden.
My mother gives me the look she uses when she suspects me of lying. I think of getting up to show her photographs of it on my phone, but I change my mind and sink back down again because honestly, it’s not worth the effort.
I crunch on my celery stick and look at her face with those new, strange eyes and wonder what my father thinks about it. The work she’s had done ages her. Only people afraid of losing their looks have that kind of extreme appearance, the kind that makes them look stretched and plumped and filled and tightened. When you see a face like that you immediately put them in the category of the middle-aged. When I was a personal stylist I saw the same shiny foreheads and immobile mouths on a daily basis. It rarely made women look young. It made them look as if the humanity had been taken out of them.
My parents are leaning towards each other on the red sofa, still recovering from the Harpenden house revelation, forcing them to come up with some new reason for protecting me from Mick or protecting the flat from me. Time to change the subject.
‘I saw an interesting woman today. You’d have liked her,’ I say to my mother. ‘She was wearing Chanel.’
‘You sold her Chanel?’ My mother brightens, visibly impressed. ‘Is she anyone we’d know?’
She’s got the wrong end of the stick, but I don’t want to ruin it, so I smile brightly. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say. Client confidentiality. Can I refresh your glass?’
Vodka, tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, celery salt, fresh celery. Glasses refreshed, I sit down again on the red footstool and the hit of my drink is so strong that for a moment I have the horrible feeling I’m going to topple off it.
‘Is she a television personality?’ my mother persists eagerly, hankering after the days when she, too, was a name and hung out with the stars.
I smile enigmatically, not wanting to ruin it for her.
‘I can guess who it is,’ she says smugly, mollified by her own imagination.
The doorbell rings. In my semi-drunk state it doesn’t sound like the doorbell. It sounds like an alarm, harsh and urgent and motivating, and the three of us are galvanised out of our alcohol-numbed torpor into action, struggling to our feet in uncomprehending panic.
‘Who is it?’ my mother asks, keeping her voice low as if we’re in hiding.
I open the door and it’s my upstairs neighbour, Lucy. She comes in full of drunken merriment. ‘Hey! I saw your light on and I—’ She suddenly notices my parents. ‘Oh, hello!’
I can guess what my mother is thinking behind her frozen face. She hates people who drop in unexpectedly. She thinks it’s the height of rudeness.
‘Bloody Mary?’ I ask Lucy.
‘Ooh, yes. Is this a party?’
Lucy’s got curly blonde hair and the kind of cheerful superficiality that actors are good at during those times when they’re not talking about a new role. They take acting seriously, but they treat life with a very light touch, which is a welcome relief if you belong to my family. Lucy’s wearing a black unstructured
