Gucci Gucci Coo (3 page)

Chapter 3

When Ruby got back to Les Sprogs, there wasn’t a single customer in the shop. Even though the business was doing so well, she couldn’t stop herself worrying when there were no customers. Today, though, she was less concerned. First of all it was a Monday morning and Mondays were always slow. Second it was raining, and third, all the other shops in the street were empty.

Chanel was leaning against the counter, her head buried in one of the downmarket glossies she always liked to read. “Pisces,” she announced, noticing Ruby walking into the shop. She stabbed the horoscope page with a finger. “That’s me…hang on, this looks interesting: ‘Jupiter, planet of good fortune, is about to align with Venus, planet of romance. This could signal a windfall, not to mention a long awaited boost to your love life.’ Wow. You know what I reckon?”

“What?” Ruby said, taking a sip from the bottle of water she’d just picked up at Starbucks—to rid herself of all the caffeine she’d soaked up at the hospital. She placed a large cappuccino on the counter for Chanel.

Chanel acknowledged it with an “Ooh, cheers, I’ve been gagging for a coffee.” Then she straightened. “OK, I reckon this means somebody’s going to die and leave me enough money to pay for those collagen injections I’ve been wanting in my G-spot.”

Chanel had been with Les Sprogs since it opened. Officially, she was Ruby’s number two, but apart from the accounts, which were Ruby’s province, they pretty much worked as a team. They shared everything from serving customers and dealing with phone and e-mail orders to stocktaking and going out to fetch the coffee. At Christmas and during sale time they took on temporary staff to help out, but mostly they managed on their own.

Stella always used to get sniffy when she found Chanel reading magazines because she said it created a bad impression. Since Chanel was meticulous about only doing it when the shop was empty and since she worked her socks off the rest of the time, Ruby never minded. The truth was that Stella wasn’t overly keen on Chanel and had never wanted to take her on.

“Are you mad?” Stella had snapped at Ruby after Chanel’s interview—to which she had insisted on coming even though she had agreed to leave the hiring and firing to Ruby. “We can’t possibly have somebody like that working here.” The words
like that
had been put in italics.

It seemed that she had taken one look at Chanel’s bosomy size fourteen frame, encased in tight stone-washed denim, her brassy blonde highlights and her very, very visible panty line, and practically had an attack of the vapors.

“She looks like an Essex barmaid,” Stella went on. “And then there’s her accent. Her vowels are flatter than roadkill and her grasp of grammar is nonexistent. I simply refuse to employ somebody who can’t even decline the past participle of the verb ‘to be.’ Doesn’t she know that the second person singular is were, not woz?”

But Ruby had seen beyond the clothes and Chanel’s deficiency in the declension department. In Chanel Stubbs, she saw a chatty, warmhearted soul, who clearly adored children. She was thirty, had been a nanny for ten years before applying to Les Sprogs and came with outstanding references. When Ruby asked her why she had given it up, Chanel explained that she had just got married and that the long, unsociable hours meant she didn’t get much time with her husband.

As she listened to Chanel talking about her work as a nanny, a plan formed in Ruby’s mind. It occurred to her that Les Sprogs needed a unique selling point, something that made it different from all the other mother and baby shops in London. One way of achieving this, she thought, might be to make it somewhere that attracted not only women but their children, too. From the heartfelt way Chanel talked about the children she had looked after—she was in regular touch with all of them—Ruby thought it was fair to assume that little ones loved her as much as she loved them. Chanel, she decided, would be a huge hit with customers’ children.

Then fate stepped in to prove the point. Halfway through the interview—which was being conducted at the back of the shop—a friend of Stella’s turned up with her three-year-old. Stella insisted on breaking off for a few minutes to chat to her. What happened next was typical of Stella. She introduced her friend to Ruby, but not to Chanel. She also completely ignored the little girl. It was only when Blanche, Stella’s yapping pooch, jumped up at the child, scaring her and making her cry, that Stella was forced to acknowledge her.

“Oh, that’s just her way of showing she likes you,” Stella cooed, making no attempt to remove the dog, which was still pawing the child. It was the little girl’s agitated mother who scooped up the dog, handed her to Stella and suggested the animal might be in need of a walk. While Stella got affronted, but carried on smiling in an attempt not to show it, Chanel knelt down to the child’s height, shook her hand and said: “Hiya, I’m Chanel. What’s your name?”

The child turned and buried her head in her mother’s skirts, but Chanel persevered. “Wow, that’s a beautiful dolly you’ve got there. Isn’t she the one I’ve seen on the telly? Doesn’t her hair grow by magic?”

The little girl looked back at Chanel and rewarded her with a hesitant nod.

“Can you do the magic and make her hair grow?” Chanel asked her.

Another nod, but this time there was a smile as well.

“Do you think you could show me? I’d love to see it.”

A couple of minutes later the child, who finally revealed her name to be Freya, was sitting on Chanel’s lap chatting away with her as if she’d known her all her life. Ruby felt really guilty breaking them up to continue the interview.

Ruby was left in no doubt that Chanel would be perfect for Les Sprogs. Her references had said she was a hard worker and on top of that she had proven how well she got on with children.

Stella took some persuading, but after Ruby had worked on her gently but consistently for a week, she threw up her hands, said “OK, on your head be it,” and agreed to give Chanel a month’s trial. For her part, Ruby acknowledged that Chanel’s stonewashed jeans probably wouldn’t play well in Notting Hill and she agreed to introduce a staff uniform. Ruby had pale blue T-shirts made with the scarlet Les Sprogs logo across the front, which she and Chanel wore over smart black trousers.

Although she kept promising to be more hands-off as far as the business was concerned, Stella found it impossible. Much as Ruby had expected, she turned out to be an almost pathological control freak and insisted on being consulted at every turn. Irritating as Ruby found this, she was forced to admit that if she had invested as much money as Stella had invested in Les Sprogs, she might well have become a pathological control freak, too.

Long before the Chanel issue, though, they’d had another major difference of opinion. They hadn’t been able to agree about how the shop should be decorated. Ruby envisaged a modern minimalist feel with lots of primary colors and the walls covered in giant black-and-white photographs of pregnant women, babies and children playing. Stella wanted the Martha Stewart, weather-boarded house in Maine look: natural wood floors, painted dressers, squidgy check linen sofas, teddies and Beatrix Potter mice wearing aprons and wire-rimmed glasses dotted about the place.

As usual Ruby had fought for her vision, but without getting into a full-blown confrontation with Stella. On this issue, though, Ruby was finding it particularly hard, since she was convinced her approach was the right one.

It was her father, Phil, who finally convinced his daughter to pull back. He said shop design was essentially packaging and that he knew from his own experience how important it was to give the customer what she wanted, rather than force your own vision on her. Even though he agreed with Ruby that the image Stella had in mind was twee and dated, he could also see that it was cozy and reassuring. “It harks back to an era—albeit a nonexistent one—of happy, wholesome families gathered round the pine kitchen table eating Mom’s apple pie. It’s the Notting Hill Billies meets the Ingallses. You just watch how it pulls in the punters.” Of course he was right.

Ruby’s climb down over the shop design issue was immediately rewarded by Stella’s announcing her departure to New York. These days—because of all her business commitments over there—she visited Les Sprogs no more than once or twice a year. Finally she was leaving Ruby to run things alone.

Occasionally she would phone, but it was only to touch base. If Chanel happened to take a call from Stella, she was always her chatty self, but their conversation never lasted more than a few seconds. Ruby knew that it was Stella, as she would cut the conversation short since she merely tolerated Chanel. Even though Stella was now in no doubt about how popular Chanel was with the customers and their children, it wasn’t in her nature to back down and admit she may have been wrong about not wanting to take her on. Whenever she visited the shop, Stella greeted Chanel with the kind of distaste that Jerry Seinfeld reserved for Newman. Ruby assumed it was the same when they spoke on the phone.

In true Chanel style, she refused to let Stella get her down—particularly as she hardly ever saw her. Nor was she ever rude to her. She understood that if she were rude or started a row, it would have affected Ruby’s relationship with Stella. Then Ruby would have no choice but to let Chanel go.

So, with a good-natured smile and muttering something barely audible about it being “the icicle” on the phone, she would hand the receiver to Ruby. Then she would go and find some shelves to tidy.

“C’
MON
,” R
UBY SAID
, re Chanel’s proposal to have collagen injected into her G-spot. “You wouldn’t really have injections up there, would you?”

Chanel thought for a second. “Dunno. They said on this plastic surgery program that you have the most amazing orgasms afterward. Only problem is that if I went for it, Craig would go ballistic. He’d be worried sick about it all going wrong.”

Chanel’s husband, Craig, was a London plumber who made a fortune. He was a huge ex-navy, rugby-playing bear of a man with a heart every bit as big as Chanel’s. He would have lassoed the moon for her if he could. Collagen injections aside, whatever Chanel wanted, Chanel got. Not that she asked for much. She wasn’t the demanding type. Nevertheless, she only had to mention in passing that she’d seen a kitchen in Ikea that she liked and it was hers. Ditto bathrooms, lounge furniture and jewelry.

Chanel returned Craig’s love by refusing to take off the gold Chanel earrings he had given her on their wedding day. For her, the interlocking Cs stood for Chanel and Craig and were a symbol of their eternal love.

She also cooked him a “proper meat and two veg man meal” every night when she got home, ironed his boxers (not that he’d ever asked her to) and generally fussed and doted over him as if he were a helpless baby.

Chanel was no fool. She knew that in many ways Craig had become her surrogate child and she his, but neither of them could help treating the other the way they did. Until a baby came along, which, with the failure of one IVF attempt after another, seemed less and less likely, each remained the center of the other’s life.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Chanel often said. “I come from a family of six. Mum only had to look at me dad and she’d be knocked up. My sisters are the same. All breed like blinkin’ rabbits. Then there’s me: one miscarriage and that’s me lot.”

Ruby once asked her how she could bear to work in a mother and baby shop where she was constantly surrounded by children and pregnant women. Chanel had shrugged. “Dunno, suppose by rights I should want to run a mile,” she said. “But I love babies and kids and I’m buggered if I’m gonna run away and let my problems get the better of me. I just know me and Craig ’ave to plow on with the IVF and that one day it will be me standing the other side of this counter trying to decide which Moses basket to choose.” Chanel paused. “Bloody hell, I must sound like some obsessed nutter.” Ruby told her she didn’t sound at all like a nutter, just utterly determined.

Despite Chanel’s courage and bravado, there had been two or three occasions when Ruby had noticed her in the stockroom pressing a Babygro or tiny woolen cardigan to her cheek. Each time her eyes had been full of tears.

“S
O
,” C
HANEL SAID
now, “your checkup at the hospital go OK?”

Ruby let out a tiny sigh. “You may as well know. You’ll only hear it from Fi the next time she comes in.” She explained about Dr. Double Barrel and the stamp.

“You know,” Chanel said, apparently not in the least bit shocked by what she’d just heard, “I used to go out with this bloke who was really into sex toys. Only, because neither of us ’ad much money, we used to improvise. Instead of Chinese love balls I used to make do with an ’ard-boiled egg.”

Ruby looked at her, incredulous.

“Of course, you ’ad to keep the shell on,” Chanel went on. “If you’d peeled it, it would’ve disintegrated. Anyway, one day the egg got stuck and I ended up in the emergency room, so I know how you must’ve felt. It was the most embarrassing two hours of my life.”