Charlie Glass's Slippers (12 page)

“I can tell you the answer to that right away!” Gaby is looking indignant. “Too bloody much, that’s what it would cost!”

“But I thought we’d be able to keep production costs down by using some very new designers,” I say, “and obviously you’ve already got all the contracts with the factories for manufacture. And the old store is just sitting empty . . .”

“Because we haven’t leased the place to anyone else right now. The moment we do, it goes back to bringing in a grand a week!” Gaby insists.

“Sure, but a grand a week isn’t going to keep the business afloat, if sales really are that bad.”

“I’ve already said”—Gaby slams her hand down on the table—“sales aren’t bad!”

There’s a bit of a silence.

A silence during which I suddenly notice that Diana is staring at me. She’s wearing the kind of expression I imagine Marie Antoinette was wearing when a bunch of grubby revolutionaries stormed into her palace, packed her off to the Bastille, and then started helping themselves to the best bits of the furniture.

“Well!” she says, after a moment. “It all sounds very noble to me! Now—am I right, Charlotte—you seem to be suggesting that we turn ourselves into some kind of . . . charity, dedicated to providing cut-price shoes for penniless unfortunates?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Should we rename ourselves, do you think?” Diana is in full flight. “Stilettos for the Starving? Peep-toes for Paupers?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Diana. I don’t believe that’s what the girl’s suggesting at all.” Terry Pinkerton is getting to his feet, popping his half-moon glasses in the top pocket of his pinstriped jacket. He turns to me. “Look, why don’t you put
together that business plan, like James suggested? Get something a bit more concrete on paper? I’m sure we’d all like another look at your proposal when you’ve taken it further.”

“Yes, of course I can do that . . .”

He nods. “Good. Then I think we can leave today’s meeting there. We can discuss all this—and the Moscow issue—at the AGM in a few weeks. I think a proper meeting will be far more valuable than a last-minute one,” he adds, with a meaningful look at Diana. “Don’t you?”

Diana nods, mute with fury, as Terry Pinkerton and the two Jameses start, with much relief, to pack up their things and leave the boardroom. There’s a bit of general parting chitter-chatter, among the men at least, and James the Second leans across the table to shove a folded piece of paper in my direction. When I open it, I see that it’s a mobile phone number, with the words
Drink sometime?
scrawled above it. I shoot him what I think is a polite (but Lucy would no doubt say is an overly encouraging) smile before he leaves, James the First behind him.

As the door closes behind them, Diana turns her face upon me. With the main part of her audience gone, she isn’t looking so much like Marie Antoinette facing down the revolutionaries as Marie Antoinette a moment after the
swish-thwack
of the guillotine.

“Thirty. Five. Years,” she says. Her voice is deathly cold. It perfectly matches her expression. “Thirty-five years I’ve run this business. The day-to-day grind, while your father farted about drawing pretty pictures in his studio, and taking off on exotic foreign trips to schmooze clients, or get
inspiration
.” She spits the word. “And now I’m being lectured to in my very own boardroom?”

“Diana, I wasn’t lecturing you.” I swallow. “I’m sorry if that’s what you thought I was doing. But all that’s happened is that I’ve come up with an idea, and I thought it was worth a mention.”

“Worth a mention in front of all the other directors? Before you’d even had the courtesy to bring it to me first?”

“I tried to bring it to you,” I say. My desire for fairness trumps my usual fear of disagreeing with her. “I was bringing it to you for our meeting at four fifteen today. I wasn’t to know you’d scheduled a directors’ meeting for exactly the same time.”

“Look.” Alan Kellaway is getting to his feet. I’d almost forgotten he was here, but now he’s heading for Diana as if he’s keen to hustle her out of the boardroom before she launches herself at me and starts scratching my eyes out. “Why don’t we just call it a day for the time being? Like Terry said, we can discuss it all again at the AGM. In the meantime, Charlotte”—he bestows upon me a rather condescending, if not actually unpleasant, smile—“you can be getting on with fleshing out this little idea of yours.”

“Fine,” Diana spits. “Let’s go down to my office, Alan. That is, if it hasn’t already been razed to the ground by Charlotte’s zealous campaigners for freedom, equality, and cheap ankle boots.”

“I’ll see you back at the office, Oliver,” Alan Kellaway says over his shoulder to Oliver Winkleman, before the door closes behind them.

Gaby, who has been studiously gathering up her papers and her iPad, turns to me the moment they’ve gone.

“Bloody hell, Charlie. Thanks for giving me fair fucking warning!”

“But, Gaby . . .”

“You said it was just a
thing
. You didn’t say it was a suggestion to revolutionize the entire fucking
brand
. Which, as the brand’s bloody PR director, you might think I’m entitled to a bit of a heads-up about.”

“I’m really sorry, Gaby. I really didn’t know Diana was going to . . . well, ambush me like that.”

“And whatever Terry said,” she goes on, as if I haven’t
spoken at all, “this Glass Slippers idea of yours isn’t going to work.”

“Is it a bad idea?”

“I didn’t say that. I said it isn’t going to work.”

“But maybe if we just—”

“Don’t”—she eyeballs me, looking uncannily like Diana for a moment—“tell me how to do my job, Charlie.”

“I’m not, Gaby. I’m really not. I just want to give this a shot.”

“Yes, well, you can give it all the shots you like—you can pepper it with machine-gun fire for all I care—but I’m not giving it so much as a bloody minute of my own time. I have an overbooked schedule already, you know, Charlie. I have a husband, and two children, and three stepchildren, and a nanny who wants to go back to Romania, and overdue bunion surgery that I can’t find room for in my planner.”

Good grief: Gaby has bunions, too? Is this something she’s inherited from Diana, or is it simply an inevitable by-product of squeezing your feet into the kind of eye-watering shoes I saw downstairs?

More to the point, is it a product of squeezing your feet into
Elroy Glass
shoes? I mean, my Internet research has led me to discover that people seem to think our manufacturing standards have been slipping these past few years . . . but are they actually responsible for the development of painful and unsightly foot deformities?

“But look, you’re the chief bloody shareholder, lest we forget,” Gaby continues. “I’m not going to try and stop you. Just don’t come and badger any of my staff. Everyone’s far too busy already.”

“I wasn’t going to. I’m going to take the lead on this myself, Gaby. Well, apart from the designing, obviously . . .”

“Well, before you ask, no, there
isn’t
anyone on the design side with the time to knock up some sketches for you. Mum
my’s just sacked one of the freelancers we were using, and there aren’t many other freelancers left who’ll work for her.”

“Right.” I can’t help the little pang of worry that, actually, things at Elroy Glass are worse than I thought. “If you wouldn’t mind, though, Gaby, there is just one small favor I wanted to ask you . . .”

“
Here
we go . . .” She rolls her eyes.

“Can I have the keys for the King’s Road store?”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that’s fine. I can have my nanny drop them round to you if you like.”

Before I can thank her, she marches from the boardroom. The door bangs shut behind her.

“Well!” says Oliver. “That went brilliantly, I thought.”

He’s got such a lovely twinkle in his eye that I want to throw myself at him for a long, relieved cuddle.

“Oliver . . .”

“Olly.”

“Olly.” I take a step towards him. “Thank you so much for helping me out!”

“It was nothing.” He’s buckling up his briefcase. “Somebody had to make it clear you were coming into the meeting entirely unprepared. And the way your stepmother is obfuscating all my attempts to get her to give you all the up-to-date company accounts . . . well, it’s nothing short of a disgrace!”

“Well, I’m really grateful, Olly, for everything you’re trying to do on my behalf.”

“Your father would have wanted it.” He gives me a shy smile. “And you know, you really did rather well just now. Honestly, Terry Pinkerton did seem genuinely impressed by your suggestion. For what it’s worth, I think Glass Slippers sounds like a terrific idea.”

“Thanks, Olly!” I open the door for him and we start down the stairs. “I can’t say how pleased I was to see you when I got
here!”

“Well, I was pleased to see you. You’re looking really . . . really brilliant.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

“Well, it’s true.” In typical lawyer fashion, he seems to feel the need to back up his statement with a solid wall of indisputable facts. “Your hair is different. Your clothes are different. You seem to have lost a good two or three stone . . . not that you needed to or anything!” he adds, obviously panicking when he realizes how that just sounded. “I only mean . . . well, you look nice,” he says, rather dismally, as we reach the bottom of the stairs. “That’s all.”

“Thank you.” I can feel myself getting flustered. Which is crazy, because I don’t even fancy Olly, for Christ’s sake.

Though I probably should, come to think of it.

I mean, I should probably
try
to.

Maybe it’s just because I’m on a bit of a high, relieved that Diana’s horrible ambush went a little way in my favor (and did I really ask her to fetch me a cup of coffee?), but I’m suddenly thinking that Lucy might be right about men being an important part of life. Maybe I should be trying to make some kind of progress on this front.

“Olly, would you like to come with me to a party tomorrow night?” I hear myself say, all of a sudden. “I mean, if you’re not busy already, that is. Though it might not even be that much of a party, come to think of it. There are going to be quite a lot of serious Scandinavians there . . .”

“That sounds great.”

“Really?” I blink at him. “What, even with the serious Scandinavians?”

“Oh, I’ve never let a serious Scandinavian put me off doing anything. Besides, this is a party thrown by your friend Lucy, yes? The one I met at your flat? The one with the Norwegian boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she seemed lovely.” Is it my imagination, or is Olly turning ever so slightly pink in the cheeks? “I’d love to come, Charlie.”

We swap mobile numbers, agree to text to make meeting-up plans tomorrow, and then part outside the store to walk our separate ways, Olly towards his office on Brook Street and me towards the tube at Green Park.

chapter nine

A
dmittedly I’ve not been
on many actual dates before, so I’m not exactly an expert. But if this is what dating is, then it’s great. I should have been doing more of it a long time ago.

I met Olly at Wapping station a little after seven, and we quickly repaired to a nearby wine bar where we found an outside table overlooking the river, drank glasses of nicely chilled rosé, and had a really lovely chat.

The only thing, I think, that would make it a really,
really
perfect date is if I actually started to fancy Olly, just a little.

It’s stupid of me, because he is, I’m realizing, really quite good-looking, especially now that he’s out of his work suit-and-tie combo. So while he’s been chatting away I’ve been looking at different bits of him and trying to get myself all giddy and excited about the prospect of them touching different bits of me. You know, the way I can’t seem to help doing whenever I see Ferdy, or I couldn’t help doing that time I met Jay “sex-on-legs” Broderick. I stared at Olly’s arms and tried to crank up a sweeping-me-onto-a-horse fantasy, and when that failed I stared at his mouth and tried to spin a kissing-every-inch-of-me fantasy, and when that failed, too (and when I think I started to make him a bit uncomfortable with all the staring), I gave up and just concentrated on listening
to his stories about his sweet, funny-sounding family instead.

Anyway, we’ve finished our drinks and left the wine bar, and we’ve just gotten to Pal’s building—which, I suppose, is now Lucy’s building, too. I press the buzzer for apartment 918.

“You’ll really like Lucy,” I tell Olly, while we wait for her to answer. “She’s the nicest person I know.”

“Well, she seemed terrific, when I met her briefly at your place.”

“Oh, she is. She’s really terrific. She’s funny, and sweet, and . . .”

“Hello?” comes Lucy’s voice over the intercom. There’s some background noise: music and people talking. “Charlie, is that you?”

It must be one of those video-entry systems. I wave at the intercom. “Yep, it’s me!”

“Well, who the hell is that with you?”

“It’s Olly.”

“Olly?”

“You met him that time you came around for supper. Dad’s solicitor? Remember?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Charlie! He’s not your
date
, is he?”

I’m slightly regretting the fact that I’ve just been describing Lucy as funny and sweet and the nicest person I know.

“Er . . . well, you didn’t say I shouldn’t bring anyone . . .”

“That’s because it never occurred to me you
would
bring someone!”

“If it would make things easier,” Olly says, rather nervously, from behind me, “I’m perfectly happy just to make my way home.”

There’s a brief silence from the intercom, while I wait for Lucy to laugh and say he mustn’t be ridiculous and to buzz us on up.

“Well, actually,” she says, after a moment, “if you haven’t come from too far away or anything . . .”

“Lucy!”

“All right, all right.” There’s a buzz and the door clicks open. “You’d better both come up.”

I spend the entire lift journey apologizing for Lucy’s odd behavior, while Olly spends the entire lift journey insisting that I mustn’t worry about it. When we reach the ninth floor and get out of the lift, Lucy is already waiting for us.

At least, I think it’s Lucy. I have to blink a couple of times to be absolutely certain, because I was expecting her to be wearing some version of her usual party outfit: something sparkly, perhaps, and rather small. Certainly not something a primary school teacher might wear for her first-ever parents’ evening, which is what she appears to be wearing right now: a below-the-knee navy-blue dress, prettily accessorized with a puff-sleeve cotton bolero and nude ballet pumps.

“Sorry if that sounded rude, just now,” she says to Olly.

“That’s okay, I really didn’t—”

“Yes, look, I need to have a quick word with Charlie,” she interrupts him, starting to usher us both towards an open door just along the corridor, which I assume is Pal’s flat. “So can you go and find someone to chat to for a bit? Everyone’s perfectly friendly. I mean, quite a lot of them will be speaking Norwegian, which I know can be a bit off-putting at first, but if you butt into a conversation, they’ll all be very happy to switch back into English instead.”

“Lucy, I’m not just going to abandon Olly to a room full of strange people!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie, only
some
of them are strange.” Lucy shuts the door behind us. She grabs a full wineglass from a tray that’s sitting on a console table in the tiny hallway, shoves the glass into Olly’s hand, and shoves
him
in the direction of one of the two doorways that lead off the hall. “Even the Norwegian ones are mostly normal, when you actually get talking to them.”

“I meant
strangers
. I wasn’t implying your guests were a bunch of weirdoes.”

“Well, he’ll be fine either way. Won’t you, Olly?” Lucy doesn’t wait for an answer before giving him another little jab towards the party. Then she grabs my hand and pulls me through the other doorway, which opens into the kitchen. “Charlie!” she hisses at me, as soon as we’re alone and the kitchen door is closed behind us. “What on earth are you playing at?”

I stare at her. “What on earth are
you
playing at?”

“Bringing a date! You never said you were bringing a date!”

“He’s not a date. He’s just a . . . new friend.”

“Bollocks.” She waves a hand, taking in my outfit. I’m wearing the new pencil skirt from H&M, teamed with a black sequined top (also from my H&M haul) and black knee-high boots with a safe, two-inch heel (well, I figure I’ve got to start somewhere on the high-heels front) that arrived in my second wave from H&M first thing this morning. “You’re dressed up all sexy for him.”

“Well, forgive me for trying to look nice for a party! Unlike . . .” I stop myself before I say anything about her own parent–teacher evening outfit. “Look, I don’t even fancy Olly, as it happens,” I say, but lowering my voice, just in case he’s not found anyone to talk to, and is shyly hovering in the hallway outside with his wineglass pressed up to the door or something. “He really is just a friend. And he isn’t even going to be that anymore, if you keep trying to get rid of him!”

“I’m not trying to get rid of him. I’m trying to clear a path.”

“Clear a path to what?”

“To you!”

Okay, now I’m totally lost. The wine I drank at the wine bar is making me foggy in the head, and the super-bright kitchen spotlights aren’t helping, either. In fact, the kitchen itself is freaking me out. And it would freak you out, too, if you’d ever
seen any of the kitchens in the various flats that Lucy has lived in before now. Not being the world’s most enthusiastic cook, she tends to use her kitchens for general storage: books piled up on the counter, makeup strewn across the table, shoe boxes (I’m not making this up) stacked up in the oven. But here, in Pal’s flat, the galley kitchen is pristine. Even though Lucy has only just moved in, there’s not so much as a packing box anywhere on the spotless granite surfaces. Not only that, but there is evidence that the oven is being used for actual
cooking
, rather than the storing of footwear: there’s a light on inside and warming-bready smells coming from within.

“Oh, shit, my blinis!” Lucy suddenly gasps, grabbing a nearby tea towel and yanking the oven door open. “Do you think they’re all right, Charlie? Not overcooking?”

I peer at the blinis. For a moment, I’m hit with a sudden craving—not just for the blinis themselves, which are exactly the type of food I can never, never eat again, but more importantly for the act of making them. I used to make great blinis: proper, full-sized buckwheat ones, whipped up to Dad’s aunt Esther’s original Russian recipe, then layered with thick-cut smoked salmon and dollops of luscious, lemon-spiked sour cream. I’m going to miss cooking that way. I already miss cooking that way, now that I actually think about it. Although I helped out in the kitchen at boot camp, that wasn’t so much cooking as shredding raw vegetables. And since I’ve been back, the most exciting thing I’ve done in the kitchen is whip up some wilted watercress in the blender and turn it into something you’d have to be generous to call “soup.”

“They’re not overcooking at all. Actually, they could use a few more minutes,” I tell her, manfully preventing myself from actually salivating over the blinis or anything. “God, Luce, did you actually make them yourself ? Not just open up a packet, I mean?”

“Yes, but they were perfectly easy. Well, by the sixth trial
run, they were perfectly easy. They’re Pal’s mother’s recipe,” she adds, looking a little bit pleased, as she bangs the oven door shut again, “which was really nice of her to let him give to me, don’t you think? I’m going to write her a thank-you card
in Norwegian
. Is that a nice idea, do you think? I’ve been thinking it’s probably time to start learning a few words of Norwegian anyway . . .”

“I think that would be very nice, Luce—the card, that is.” I don’t comment, in the spirit of being Entirely Positive, on her plan to start learning Norwegian. “But can we get back to what we were just saying? About you clearing a path for something?”

“Not something. Some
one
. I just can’t bear the thought that you’re going around the place looking like a million dollars but still being too shy to
do
anything about it.”

“Do anything about what?”

“About you and Ferdy.”

“Lucy, there
isn’t
any me and Ferdy.”

“Well, not right now. But that could all change. If—say—you were to run into him at a party. Or something.”

“That’s hardly likely. We don’t go to the same parties. I’m not friends with anyone he’s friends with.”

“Well, maybe Ferdy just happened to remember that I worked for The Bespoke Planet, and maybe a few weeks ago he started to plan a surprise fortieth wedding anniversary cruise for his parents, and maybe he gave me a call, and maybe I’ve been sorting out that cruise for him, and maybe when he came into the office the other day I asked if he wanted to come to my house-warming party tonight . . .”

“Lucy, stop saying
maybe
. Did all those things happen, or didn’t they?”

“Yes. They did.”

“So . . . Ferdy is coming here tonight?”

“Yes! Now you see why I don’t want this Olly person clut
tering up the place! Unless . . .” She grabs my arm, her eyes suddenly shining. “You know, maybe it’s a
good
thing you brought Olly along with you. Maybe it’ll make Ferdy a little bit jealous! Maybe he needs to realize there are other men going after you. Come to think of it, maybe I should go and introduce you to a few of Pal’s friends for you to start flirting with, before Ferdy gets here. Well, okay, not
flirting
—in fact, Charlie, you have to absolutely promise me you won’t attempt to flirt with anyone at all, not even Ferdy. Just be yourself, and . . .”

I cut her off before she can insult my flirting skills any further. “I can’t believe you’ve gone behind my back like this!”

“But it had to be behind your back. Otherwise you’d only have chickened out of coming.”

“I wouldn’t have chickened out.” (Not true: I probably would have chickened out.) “I just think it’s going to be horribly awkward, that’s all. I mean, he obviously doesn’t have any interest in me, even as a friend, or he’d have kept in contact while I was away.”

“Well, that simply proves that the two of you are just as hopeless as each other,” Lucy decides, optimistic as ever. “We all know he already liked you . . .”

“
You
know that, Luce. I’m not sure anybody else does.”

“Come on, Charlie. Would he really have given you all that help when your dad was ill if he didn’t like you?”

“He’s a good person.”

She ignores this. “It’s so obvious just how much you like him . . .”

“It’s not obvious.”

She ignores this, too. “And when he sees how incredible you look now, he’s not going to be able to keep his hands off you! All I’m doing is facilitating the inevitable.”

Lucy seems so sure that I’m actually starting to wonder if she might be right. If there really
is
a chance that Pal’s pristine,
rather chilly flat could be the unlikely scene of my misty-moor fantasy; that any moment now, the kitchen door will fly open and in will come Ferdy, looking tall, broad, and appealing; that his jaw will drop open and his eyes will light up; that he’ll stride across the granite floor tiles and sweep me up into his arms . . .

I get the surprise of my life when, all of a sudden, the kitchen door
does
fly open.

But sadly it’s not Ferdy standing in the kitchen doorway. It’s Pal.

“Lucy, I thought we agreed you’d have the first round of hot canapés ready at quarter to nine . . . Oh, hel
lo
,” he suddenly says, his mouth upending itself into a smile when he sees there’s someone else in the kitchen with her. “You must be one of Lucy’s friends! I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Pal!” Lucy gives a nervous laugh. “This is Charlie!”

“Oh, you have two friends called Charlie?”

“No, I have one friend called Charlie.”

“No. You obviously have two friends called Charlie. The fat one, and this one.”

“I
am
the fat one,” I tell him, crisply, before turning back to Lucy. “Luce, actually, I think you might need to get those blinis out now . . .”

“Shit!” She grabs her oven glove again and pulls the oven door open. The blinis within are just starting to brown, marginally too much, around the edges. “Are they salvageable?”

“More than salvageable. A little bit of crunch makes them even tastier, in fact. Look, why don’t I help you get them topped with smoked salmon and sour cream?”

“No! You have to go out and start, you know,
enjoying the party
. Before other people get here.” She shoots me a meaningful look. “Actually, there
are
one or two people I’m sure Pal would like to introduce you to. Why don’t you go and take Charlie to meet Stefan, babe?”