The Finishing Touches (10 page)

Mark raised a hand and interrupted me. He seemed more
weary than cross. “Betsy, I appreciate what you’re saying, but if you’re trying to tell me that there’s a market for finishing schools in this day and age, you’re talking to the wrong man.” He folded his arms over his chest and tipped his head to one side. “Shall we put our cards on the table here? I think it’s
terrible. Insulting.
Encouraging girls to think there’s nothing more to life than folding napkins and making themselves pretty—for God’s sake! What next? Spinet lessons?”

“I’m not saying things have to stay exactly as they are—” I began, but he hadn’t finished.

“I’ve tried to suggest updated courses, like house buying or managing their not inconsiderable allowances, for instance, but Miss Thorne insists that it’s not what they’re here to learn.”

“And what are they here for?” I asked. “I wish someone would tell me.”

“To turn into the ideal wee wifey? But what would I know? I mean, I’m just a man.” He lifted his palms, and I got the feeling we were actually agreeing, not arguing at all. “That’s what we should be looking for in a girl—napkin folding. Not smart budgeting, or funny conversation.” Mark stopped, self-consciously, as if he’d said too much. “Anyway, I don’t know if it’s worth it anyway—not a single one of those girls downstairs has the first idea what goes on in the real world,” he went on, pushing a hand into his dark hair and making it stick up even further. “Forgive me if I’m being tactless here, but I’m amazed at just how bloody normal you are. I was expecting Management Barbie, but you’re the first Academy graduate I’ve met who makes any sense at all.”

“I didn’t
go
!” I nearly yelled, almost missing the backhanded compliment. “You must be the only person here who doesn’t know that!”

“Oh.” He looked surprised. “I assumed…”

Maybe I had overreacted, but he’d touched a raw nerve.
“What? You assumed I’d just waltz in here and start telling you what to do? No!” I snapped. “I’ve got real business experience, and more than that, I want to do everything I can to keep this place open, because I promised Lord Phillimore that I would try. I’m not here to catch you out, or take over; I’m just here to help him. If I can’t think of anything,
then
we can discuss selling the house. But not until I’ve tried.”

Up to that moment I hadn’t realized how strongly I wanted to do that, and I realized I was pounding the desk for emphasis. Mark was looking at me rather differently. He sat back in his office chair and folded his arms, waiting to see what I would say next.

It occurred to me that experienced management consultants probably didn’t pound the desk in meetings. Not so soon, anyway.

“Have you got a brochure there?” I asked, trying to modulate my voice. “I think I should have a look at how the Academy’s marketing itself. And last year’s accounts too.”

I watched him as he opened and closed drawers, pushing up the sleeves of his gray cashmere sweater as he muttered to himself about filing. There was a different atmosphere in the room now—as if we’d edged tentatively into each other’s confidence. He’d been a bit too honest with me; I’d been a bit too honest with him. But it felt all right, as if we might actually be on the same wavelength.

At least this was one man who wouldn’t be put off by my geeky math degree, I thought, noticing the frayed collar of his checked shirt. Mark didn’t seem like a man who bothered too much with clothes. That sweater, though—it looked like a Christmas present from a girlfriend…

“Here.” I jolted back to attention as he passed a glossy brochure over the desk, along with a clear plastic file of neatly typed figures. “Don’t read it while you’re drinking coffee.”

Now that he wasn’t looking cross, Mark really wasn’t bad-looking, in a bookish way. The glasses were cute, and I admired the way he was more concerned about Lord P than about upsetting Miss Thorne, whom he clearly didn’t have much time for. We had that in common too. He just seemed quite…exasperated about things.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because you might find yourself spitting it all over the place.” The corner of his sardonic mouth lifted. It was a boyish smile. “I understand that’s terrible table manners.”

Mark had been right to warn me about the coffee. I read the brochure over lunch, in the Pret A Manger round the corner, and I nearly scalded my tongue on my cappuccino with shock.

The brochure was unbelievably awful. I stopped being surprised at the paltry four students enrolled, because frankly I was amazed they’d even got
four
. It was expensively printed, on glossy paper, with no vulgar mention of prices, but the text was weird and dated, as if it hadn’t been changed since Franny’s day. Since
before
then, even. Under Miss Thorne’s new management, the Academy seemed to have gone backward into the England that existed only in period dramas where everyone talked in
tebbly, tebbly clipped eccents
and had impassioned clinches next to steam locomotives.

No manners are more prized than those of the English lady
, someone (Miss Thorne, presumably) had written, beneath a photograph of a girl in three strands of pearls trying to choose between hats—one like a loo-roll cover with frills and a larger one that looked more like a flattened cabbage—while Miss Thorne lurked instructively in the background. I thought they were hats, anyway.
The Phillimore Academy prides itself on tak
ing the girl and handing back a lady who can comport herself with style and grace in the highest echelons of society.

I wasn’t sure how that related to the awkward photographs of more pearled-up girls sharing some hilarious joke over a porcelain tea service while Miss Thorne looked on with approval and a very smooth brow. They were all sitting with their knees super-glued together in a Las Vegas hotel version of the Palace of Versailles. Or possibly teatime at Madame Tussauds.

We will endeavour to equip our students with every charm necessary for a challenging and socially inspiring life,
it went on, underneath a picture of a model pretending to read
Madame Bovary,
as if she’d never actually held a book before, while another model pretended to talk on an old telephone that wasn’t connected to anything. I didn’t know whom she was talking to. Wallis Simpson?

The courses, when they were finally listed, were infuriatingly vague. “Everything a lady might need to know”? In 1980, maybe, if she lived in a Bavarian castle surrounded only by bishops, with nothing to do all day but arrange après-ski parties and make needlepoint cushions. Formal dinner settings, engaging household staff, “chalet cuisine”…There was some vague reference to “life presentation” and “letter writing,” but otherwise it was as if email, female emancipation, and budget air travel hadn’t been invented.

I’d solved math equations made up solely of numbers and Greek squiggles, but I couldn’t make head or tail of the Academy’s prospectus. What
was
protocol? What did personal ethics
mean
? Why did Miss Thorne think that hovering in the back of each shot like an etiquette policeman was anything but sinister?

I sat back in my chair and stared in dismay at the brochure propped up against my sandwich. To think I’d spent the best part of my adult life feeling swizzed that I hadn’t been allowed
to take lessons in how to drink a cup of tea. At least, I thought that was what the assembled etiquette-bots were doing in the illustration.

Had it always been like this? I wondered glumly. The fascinating secrets I remembered Franny dishing out like sweets, things that made me long to be grown-up enough to test them out…was it really just this? I wouldn’t have wanted
this
.

I tossed my empty cup and sandwich box into the bin and walked back down Piccadilly. The sun had gone in, but I hardly noticed.

I couldn’t even sneak back up to the bursar’s office to go through the files, because Miss Thorne grabbed me as I came in and insisted that I attend her own personal class: Conversation.

Conversation wasn’t really the point, it seemed—well, not as I knew it. Miss Thorne’s tactic was to teach the girls how to stop any conversation dead in its tracks if it started to veer off the appropriate lines. So I sat, listening to her block any comments about gossip, celebs, illness, politics, television, and tattoos—on which the girls were surprisingly entertaining—and counting down the minutes until I could drop in on Kathleen and Nancy for some moral support and a dose of reality.

At four o’clock on the dot the girls bailed out as if the place were on fire. I was in dire need of a cup of tea, possibly fortified with a shot of whiskey. I didn’t drink whiskey, but there was something about Miss Thorne’s uptight conversation class that made me want it. Just for the sake of being unladylike.

I made my way through the neglected garden toward the mews cottage, which was, in contrast, neatly kept, with the
brass knocker gleaming out of the dusk on the front door. Before I’d even lifted it, the door had swung open and there was Nancy, welcoming me in as if I’d just crossed the Arctic, which in a way it felt like I had.

She rushed me inside and settled me in the chair by the big old kitchen stove while Kathleen piled up my plate in the manner of someone constructing a dry stone wall of sponge cake.

“So, how did it go?” Kathleen asked when I’d downed my tea and held out my cup for a refill.

I hesitated, trying to think of something positive to balance out the negatives, but she caught me. “Be honest, Betsy,” she said sternly. “Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

“It’s…in need of a spring clean,” I said.

“What’s to be done?” asked Nancy. “Do they need some new teachers? I know Maureen’s been there for years. And Miss Thorne did make a lot of them redundant last year. There’s only her and Edwina Angell left.” She smiled. “I expect you can think of some clever things to do. You’ll make one of your lists, I expect.”

I looked at them—the kindest, sweetest, most honest old ladies—and struggled. They’d been here nearly all their lives and adored everything Franny had stood for—kindness, manners, decency. How could I tell them things were so bad that I almost agreed with the bursar about closing the Academy down, when they expected me to be able to put it right?

But they’d also brought me up to be honest, so I made myself meet their expectant gazes.

“I don’t know what to do,” I confessed. “It’s going to be very hard to persuade new students to come here, unless a lot of things change. No one really wants to learn how to meet the Royal Family anymore. The bursar thinks we might have to advise Lord Phillimore to sell.”

“Sell?” gasped Nancy, and her china cup rattled on its saucer.

“Now, Nan, we knew that was in the cards.” Kathleen gave me a stout look.

“Well, what if he does sell?” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “It just means you’ll get some squillionaire offshore businessman next door—they’ll only be there twenty days a year!”

At that, Kathleen’s face took on a worried shadow, and Nancy pressed her lips together. The lines deepened around their eyes, and I was painfully reminded of just how old the two of them were getting. I wanted to hug them both to me, just like they’d once crushed me to their mighty bosoms, but my bosom was nowhere near so comforting.

“What?” I asked, and for once neither of them corrected me.

“Well, it’s not just the house that’d go on the market, is it?” said Kathleen. “There’s not many properties round here come with their own three-car garage and staff quarters. He’d put the lot up for sale. The mews too. We’re tenants, you see, Betsy. Always have been. Part of our retirement package, this.”

My mouth dropped open, and I could have slapped myself for being so slow. It had never even
occurred
to me that selling the Academy would make Kathleen and Nancy homeless.

“But—but surely Lord P would find somewhere for you in the country,” I stammered. “At Bellingham Manor—there must be some room…”

Kathleen folded her arms. “Live in the country? At our age? I don’t think so, dear. Dreadful place. Smelly. And dark. Not like London.”

“No, we don’t want to be moving out of London, not now. I suppose the new owners might want some staff,” said Nancy, her brave smile wobbling. “I hear you can get vacuum cleaners that go up stairs these days, save my old back. And Kathleen’s still a dab hand—”

“No!” I said, pushing back my chair. “That’s not going to happen! Do you think Franny would allow anyone to throw
you out of your own home?” I demanded. “She’d be furious!” I blinked, because I was very near crying now, and I knew Nancy was too, and I didn’t want to set her off.

“The Phillimore Academy is
not
going to close, and it’s
not
going to be sold,” I said, and grabbed my notebook. Doing something always made me feel better. “There must be something we can do. I’ve got the brochure, and it’s mad. Flower arranging, dinner parties, dealing with staff…as if we’re still in the nineteen-fifties. Aren’t there
any
teachers under fifty?”

Nancy and Kathleen exchanged looks.

“Well, there’s always Adele,” said Nancy.

“Who’s Adele?” I asked. I hated the name Adele. I couldn’t hear it without thinking of the only Academy girl I’d ever really disliked. But then, no one had liked Adele Buchanan, and she hadn’t cared. She wasn’t what you’d call a girl’s girl, even at eighteen. Her nose had been like a spring onion at the beginning of the year, and then she “went skiing” and came back with a teeny button nose and new teeth.

“Adele Buchanan,” said Kathleen, as she got up to put the kettle on. “Do you remember her? Bottle blond, never bothered with the regulation skirt. Or regulation knickers, come to that. She’s very thick with Miss Thorne—flounces in now and again to ‘mentor’ the girls. Whatever that means.”

“Really?” I couldn’t imagine Adele teaching. “Isn’t she married and running some huge estate somewhere? That was what she said she was going to do. She wanted a helicopter pad before she was twenty-three, I remember her saying.”