New York Valentine (2 page)

‘Hello, hello, my darlings,’ Annie cooed, squatting down and opening her arms wide to hug them both. They were far too big and heavy now to be picked up for a cuddle together.

‘Mumma!’

First to reach her was Minette with her dark, soulful eyes and creamy cheeks. Micky wasn’t far behind, nappy bottom waggling busily. They buried sticky faces straight into Annie’s dressing gown but she didn’t mind one tiny bit, just stroked their silky heads devotedly.

‘Can you pour me a coffee, darlin’ … and maybe, just because you’re extra super nice, can you make me some toast?’

Lana let out a long sigh and dragged her slim, entirely black-clad body up from her chair.

‘Thanks, Lana, you’re a star,’ Annie said, as generously as she could, though really she’d have liked to seriously shake Lana or maybe even administer a little kick to her pointy, skinny-jeaned behind.

How many other teenage girls would
kill
, or at least donate vital organs, to be spending their gap year working in television? And did Lana thank her mother for arranging this amazing work placement? Did Lana look forward to her exciting day ahead at the studio? No. Lana was pretty much in a grump from morning till night and there didn’t seem to be a thing that Annie could do about it. So because complaining about the grumpiness hadn’t worked, Annie was currently trying to tune it out entirely and respond with relentless joy and positive vibes.

As she sat down to her coffee and toast, the babies, bored with cuddles, scuttled back to their play mat and the rolling balls, blocks and other drool-soaked objects of baby attraction.

Registering the time, Annie gulped her toast and swallowed the coffee with speed.

‘Oh good grief! I’ve got to get dressed – have my usual morning melodrama,’ she told Lana. ‘Can you hold the fort for me down here just a tiny bit longer, babes? Dinah will be here in twenty minutes.’

‘Oh Muuuuuuum!’ Grumph, humph, harrumph.

‘Thank you, sweetheart. You look great,’ she added, not just to try and cheer Lana up, but also because it was true.

Lana was rocking the funky film crew look. She was dressed practically enough for all the errands she’d be running and chores she’d be doing today. But the look came with dark eyeliner, a thick black fringe and just enough edge.

Annie had worried that maybe she was mollycoddling her daughter by arranging a job for her. But unlike her friends, who were planning trips abroad for work and travel, once Lana had left school with her impressive clutch of exam results, she’d been reluctant to make plans and didn’t seem to have any ideas about her future. So finally, Annie had made the move and arranged the under-paid TV job because she hated to see Lana sitting about at home, becoming more and more gloomy.

The fact that Lana could only work up the bare minimum of enthusiasm for her new job drove Annie slightly wild. But what could she do? Over the years, she had discovered that she could not nag, trick, encourage or even bribe Lana into enthusiasm.

‘OK, better get to my wardrobe. I’ll try not to take too long …’ Annie said, more to herself than to her daughter.

But this was the strange thing: everyone in her family now looked great, she thought. They all had their own individual-with-a-twist look and they worked it. Ed did groovy jeans, plus shirts and tweedy jackets. Owen was sporty labels with added bling. Lana did dark, skinny and moody. Even the babies had a look! Currently faded denim dungarees, Micky’s with a blue top, Minnie’s with pink.

But Annie, who’d been a personal shopper for years with one of London’s best known fashion stores, who’d dressed women from every corner of London with every conceivable fashion dilemma, who now presented her very own
How Not To Shop
fashion TV show …
Annie
was the one member of the family who was having a bit of an image crisis.

As Annie opened her wardrobe doors and looked at the collection of clothes inside, it hit her once again. There was so much in here. So many outfits. But, aside from a trusted handful which she’d worn so often that even the TV crew were starting to poke fun, there wasn’t anything she could wear because …

Annie looked down at herself. She was a
whole size
bigger than she used to be. An entire size. Possibly even, she had to admit to herself, two sizes; well, almost certainly one and a half. Even with
double
control pants (frankly a nightmare when you needed a wee), she could no longer fit into most of her wardrobe and there was no way, absolutely no way, she was buying new items in the dreaded new size – even though this was
exactly
what she would tell a client to do if they came to her for advice.

Buying new things in a bigger size would be giving up … it would be admitting defeat. She’d always been able to slim down and get back into her 12s and although she’d been dragging about the post-baby bulge for nearly a year now, she was not prepared to give up the battle yet.

Her hand went out to the stretchiest black dress she owned. OK, red leggings … the patent, peep-toed, very high red shoes … red lipstick … an amazing red and pearl necklace. These items would surely distract from the fact that she was wearing the black stretchy dress once again.

Another crimp on the shopping front was the promise she’d made to Ed about her mighty credit card debt.

Ever since she’d been old enough to own a credit card, Annie had been servicing, juggling, redistributing and rearranging her great big designer-label-caused debt. But now she’d managed to bring the figure down to just within reach of £5,000 – the lowest she could ever remember it being. She’d promised Ed she would clear it, and only then would she be allowed to buy new items from some carefully worked out budget that Ed was apparently going to draw up for her.

Just £5,000 to go. It was still a lot of money to owe, but her card debts had once been close to ten times that amount. So now she was on track and almost certain that she could beat her promise to have it cleared by Christmas.

She’d thought that paying off a debt would just be pure denial and pain and, yes, seeing so much of her generous TV pay disappear in lump sums to Messrs Visa and MasterCard was difficult. But on the upside, being able to open those sinister white envelopes without the feeling of impending panic attack was much more rewarding than she’d expected.

As soon as she’d bound herself up in the two pairs of control pants and a minimizing bra, her mobile began to ring. After a quick search of the untidy bedroom, she located it.

‘Annah!’ came the booming, gushing, heavily accented voice of one of Annie’s very best friends, Svetlana Wisneski.

Annie would probably have told anyone else in her life that she’d call them straight back as soon as she was dressed. But Svetlana, an extraordinarily glamorous former Miss Ukraine, who’d been married to not just one, but
several
of the wealthiest men in the world, was not a woman who waited for return phone calls.

So Annie sat down on the edge of her bed in the de-sexing beige pants and industrial bra and prepared to listen.

‘In New York … is a
disaster!’
Svetlana exclaimed dramatically.

‘Oh no! Has Elena’s boyfriend left her?’ Annie jumped to the conclusion, ‘What’s-his-name?’

‘Sye? No. No. This all lovely little romance for them. Tscha …’ Svetlana dismissed the thought, ‘no this is bizzzzzzneeeeez. Elena not coping. Not coping one little piece. Her new American business partner has left. Gone! Taken money, left debt with factory.
Disaster!’
she repeated. ‘We have orders for dresses but we have no money and no factory to make them!’

‘Oh no,’ Annie sympathized.

Elena was Svetlana’s lovely, determined and totally business-headed daughter. Although Svetlana had always sought fame and fortune by marrying the richest husbands available to womankind, Elena, a young twenty-something, was trying to turn herself into a business success story.

Svetlana and Elena’s backstory was a little more complicated than most mothers’ and daughters’.

In her early twenties, the beautiful Svetlana had had an affair with a married politician back home in the Ukraine. The affair had resulted in the unwanted baby Elena. When Svetlana decided to seek a husband, and her fortune, in the biggest, shiniest cities of Europe, Elena had been taken to the countryside to live with relatives. Svetlana had let many years slide by, hoping she wouldn’t have to face up to her daughter again.

But two years ago when a furiously determined Ukrainian beauty had turned up on Svetlana’s Mayfair doorstep, dressed in skimpy clothes and sporting a terrible hair-dye job, Svetlana had realized this was her past well and truly catching up with her.

Although at first they’d wanted to rip the blonde tresses from each other’s heads, it was still amazing to Annie how well things had settled down. Though, much to her mother’s distress, Elena didn’t seem remotely interested in rich husbands and mega-divorce settlements. In fact, she’d gone to business school, then earlier this year she’d persuaded her mother to found a dress label. Now Perfect Dress had small offices in London and New York and was about to launch a second, fledging collection.

‘What I do? What I do?’ Svetlana was asking in a voice that sounded unusually frantic.

‘Maybe you need to go over and see her,’ Annie suggested.

‘Ah no, is terrible timing. Just terrible. I’m too busy with Perfect Dress in London. So many orders – so many clients to talk to, visit, keep interested – and now possibility of no dresses! I can’t go. Harry is too busy to look after everything when I am away and the boys … I can’t leave my boys for so long. You know how Igor still worries me.’

Igor was Svetlana’s last and most significant ex-husband. He was the father of her two boys, who were currently (though a former Russian volleyball champion was working on this) the only heirs to Igor’s vast Russian gas fortune.

Although Svetlana was now married to Harry Roscoff, a QC, a divorce expert and one of London’s best legal minds, there had been Igor trouble before. Igor had once tried to sneak his sons out of the country and, although Harry had stopped the plan in its tracks, it had shaken Svetlana to the core.

She could hop to Paris or Milan at the drop of a hat for a business meeting or shopping weekend, but crossing the Atlantic and spending serious time away from her younger children just wasn’t an option.

‘Who do we know?’ Annie asked, thinking out loud: ‘who do we know who could go over and help? I take it Elena does
need
help? It’s not that she wants to sort this out on her own?’

‘Yes, of course! She need help!’ Svetlana insisted, ‘this biziniz partner take money. Un-paid the biggest sums and then exito! Elena in distressed. Big distressed. Not is knowing what’s to do.’

Annie had known Svetlana long enough to recognize that when her English got all tangled up she was really quite upset.

‘Who do we know who could help?’ Annie asked again. She was looking down at her body in disgust. Control pants and minimizer bras only worked when you were standing up. As soon as you sat down, not one, but two uncomfortable rolls of flab bulged out, squeezed downwards by the bra and upwards by the pants. She’d have to get an all-in-one – but then where did the flab go? It had to burst out somewhere. Would she have monster shoulders and padded hips?

‘We know
you!’
came the reply. ‘You are needs go New York.
You
, Annah. You need to help Elena.’ Taking a deep breath, Svetlana added, as calmly and as grammatically as she could: ‘I do not know one other person who could do this better.’

‘Huh?’

For a moment, Annie was speechless.

Then her thoughts began to gather. Of course it was lovely, wonderful to be asked. But Svetlana never seemed to understand, or maybe she never wanted to understand, that Annie had a life too. Annie had a TV career and a family and tiny children, and could not just drop everything to be at Svetlana’s beck and call.

‘I can’t go to New York …’ for so many reasons, Annie told herself, but the one she began with was: ‘I’m in the middle of filming.’

‘For how long?’ came the sharp question, ‘how many weeks this go on for?’

‘Another two months,’ Annie said, also a little sharply.

Did everyone think that she just swanned about in front of the camera for a day or two then banked an enormous cheque? It wasn’t like that at all. She slaved when she was filming. She slaved for long, long days and she travelled all over the country to incredibly non-glamorous destinations. Yes, she had long breaks, but they were precious – they were for catching up on all the family time she’d had to miss when she was filming.

‘Annah, please, you cannot just take break and go out to help Elena? You know fashion. You great business lady. Remember the fashion show in Paris?’

How could Annie forget?

‘We not have Perfect Dress without that show, Annah, and it was all because of you. Just for a few weeks … pleeeeeease?’ Annie didn’t think she’d ever heard Svetlana plead before.

‘New York, Annah. Think how exciting …’ Svetlana quickly moved into full-on persuasive charm mode. ‘She have apartment in wonderful area, just off Fifth Avenue. You can go and stay.’

‘No, Svetlana, I’m sorry,’ Annie said quickly, batting the images of skyscrapers, yellow cabs, avenues and cocktails right out of her mind, ‘I can’t go. I would love to go. You know I would do anything to help the two of you. But right now it isn’t an option. There’s a whole crew, a whole filming schedule. Plus, my family. I have babies! Everyone’s counting on me.’

Svetlana gave a strangled shriek of frustration before blurting out: ‘But Annah, what are we going to do?’

Melissa made-over:

Red V-necked knit tunic (Asda)
Pink frilled blouse (Mango)
Cropped jeans (Mango)
Purple funky Mary Janes (Camper)
Messenger bag (Kipling)
Total est. cost: £155

‘Haven’t a clue …’

Annie arrived at the studio by car. Not just any old car, the studio car, complete with driver wearing black leather gloves and a shiny peaked cap.

‘Thank you, darlin’. Exciting day ahead for you, is it?’ she asked him as she and Lana gathered their bags together and prepared to get out.