The Finishing Touches (28 page)

I laughed. “No! No, I’m just…”

Our eyes locked for a moment or two, and I almost told him the truth: that I was too scared of it going wrong.

Jamie tipped his head inquiringly.

“It’s the scene where she pretends to do Irish dancing!” roared Liv from the sitting room. “Come and see the pretend Irish people!”

“What were you going to say there?” he said softly. “Go on.”

I let his gray eyes search my face, but I couldn’t admit it. I almost preferred this tingling flirtation, imagining what it could be like, to actually being there and it maybe going wrong or falling short of my years of imagining. At least this way there would always be a dinner on offer.

He’d be going back to Manhattan soon. I was going back to Edinburgh. It would fizzle out. He’d move on; I…wouldn’t.

“Betsy?” he said, and pretended to check his watch. “My other dinner dates are stacking up like planes at Heathrow—are you coming out or not?”

He was joking, I think, but it made me decide.

“I have to get back to the ship,” I apologized.

“Another night?” he said casually. “You’re here for a while now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, let’s do it another night.”

We smiled nervously at each other.

“Betsy!” yelled Liv. “I know you’re both talking about me, but I need you on this sofa
now
!”

Jamie raised a finger. “I’ll hold you to that,” he said. “The dinner, not the sofa.”

“OK,” I said, and felt a shiver run across my skin.

Friday’s field trip was supposed
to be the National Gallery, but instead we went to Selfridges with Miss O’Hare, personal style teacher, to investigate “classic but creative interview outfits.” I had to explain to Divinity that these were outfits for attending job interviews, as opposed to interviews you might conduct before acquiring a new swimming pool or nose.

“It’s always best to shop with someone who doesn’t know you,” I explained as we marshaled them outside Halfmoon Street like ducklings in their big coats and shades. “They don’t have the same hang-ups as you do, and they’ll make you try new things.”

“Absolutely,” said Liv, nodding. She’d dressed the part in a fashionable jumble of big necklaces and layers that I wouldn’t know where to start assembling. “Now remember, we’re looking for classic pieces—that perfect black skirt we talked about
and the Versatile White Shirt—but with twists. So, you’ve all got to find a handbag that sums you up, just so they know you’re not a robot, OK? Prize for the best shoes under fifty quid.”

I’d thought styling the girls would be a logical extension of Liv’s online shopping fix, with the bonus of actually drilling some useful fashion advice into them. Liv and Ken’s credit card had been on first-name terms with all the best in-store shoppers in London, and we were soon ensconced in the biggest personal shopping suite while Liv marched round the store, pulling various Jackie O suits and crisp pinafores off the rails and steering the girls away from glitz and toward investment tailoring. We then had to try on our finds while Liv stood on a chair and critiqued us, starting with me.

She didn’t hold back.

“Now do you see what I mean about how pretty Miss Cooper looks when she colors herself in?” Liv said when I pulled back the curtain in the clothes she’d picked out for my own “creative interview” Open Day outfit: viz, a silky Miu Miu skirt printed with huge blue cornflowers teamed with a bracelet-sleeved cardigan. “See how the blue makes her hair shine and her eyes pop?”

“What do you mean, pop?” I demanded. “Like a fish?”

Liv ignored me. “And see how we’ve emphasized her waist, with the patent-leather belt? Clemmy, put Anastasia’s belt over that jacket of yours—a thinner belt’s more flattering…There! You see? Gorgeous!”

“Your waist’s really tiny,” said Clemmy with a covetous sigh. “Lucky you.”

Liv had charmed Clemmy out of her usual grays and blacks, and now the transformed Clementine was sitting on a footstool in a tomato-red dress that made her skin adorably creamy. Liv had twisted her dark hair up in a neat chignon to
demonstrate necklines, and the result was a Clemmy-on-her-way-to-Ascot, not Glastonbury. She was sitting with her knees and ankles together, and Miss McGregor wasn’t even in sight.

“Write this down,” said Liv. “Thin belts for thick waists, thick belts for thin ones. Betsy, stop looking for problems in that mirror—you look great.”

“You don’t think this blue clashes with my hair?” I asked doubtfully. Black might have been boring, but at least it wasn’t competing with the riot of color that was my red hair and green eyes. My notebooks had always said
three colors maximum per outfit, and red hair counts as one.

“No,” said Liv.

I twisted round. “You don’t think the belt just makes my bum look bigger?”

“No,” said Liv. “Shut up.”

I had to admit it, Liv knew what suited me better than I did. I would never have bought such a strikingly printed skirt—I mean, it didn’t go with a thing I owned—but she somehow produced the pointy-toed shoes and then fiddled with my hair until it was a whole outfit, and I looked so amazingly fresh and bright in the mirror that I hardly recognized myself. I wasn’t blending in, or looking discreet. I was me, but at the same time not.

I tried to pinpoint what it was that was so weird, then it struck me: I looked like I used to imagine I would when as a little girl I daydreamed about being twenty-something. Elegant, grown up, with shoes that meant business.

“Buy it,” urged Liv. “Buy it and wear it for the Open Day. Go on, you need a new outfit.”

I started to protest that I didn’t need any new clothes, but something stopped me.

I wanted to
be
this person—bright and colorful and confident.

Maybe it was the gorgeous swish of the skirt. Maybe it was the growing camaraderie between me and the girls and the sense that maybe I could pull the Academy through into the twenty-first century after all. Maybe it was the something bubbling between me and Jamie.

Whatever it was, I felt better about myself than I had in years and years.

I did a little half-turn and smiled. The Betsy in the mirror twinkled back.

“Go on,” urged Clemmy. “You have to.”

I bought the lot. On my credit card.

The fruits of our efforts with Imogen came on Tuesday afternoon, in perfect time for the Open Day on Saturday.

We were in the middle of a role-playing class about Worst Case Scenario: Very Public Disasters, when there was a knock on the door, and Mark put his head around the door of the Lady Hamilton Room.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I’ve got something for you.” He waved a copy of the evening paper at me.

“Ah-ha!” I said as butterflies fluttered up into my stomach. “Shall we take a break, girls?”

“No!” said Clemmy. She glared at Mark. “Mr. Montgomery can help.”

“Help with what?” he asked pleasantly.

“What you would do if you’d got to the church and decided that you didn’t want to marry your fiancé after all.” She paused. “We wanted it to be because the groom was sleeping with a bridesmaid and two of the ushers, but Betsy made us stick with ‘because he’s not Mr. Right.’”

Mark took an unsteady step backward. “Sorry, I hoped it was going to be something about tax relief.”

“Well?” demanded Divinity. “What’s the best thing to do?”

“Whatever Betsy said. Which is…?” He looked at me with hilarious desperation, but I was eagerly eyeing the newspaper in his hand.

“I said it’s never too late to call off a wedding if you realize you can’t go through with it and will be ruining his life as well as yours, but it’s better to pretend that you’ve had some kind of massive allergic reaction to your bouquet and/or fake a kidnapping on the way to the church.”

“Isn’t that a bit melodramatic?” Mark asked, surprised. “Shouldn’t you just be honest about it?”

“Well, normally, I’d say honesty is best,” I admitted. “But weddings are different. People talk about jiltings for the rest of your
life.
You should create some kind of drama to distract people’s attention from the fact that you’re standing up your fiancé. And then get your bridesmaid to redirect everyone to the reception to tuck into the food and drink while you go off on the honeymoon and return, ‘unkidnapped,’ a few months later.”

“You seem to have given this some thought,” he said with a dry smile. “Do all women have this planned out?”

“All women worry about being jilted,” said Venetia unexpectedly. “It’s good to have a Plan B.”

I hadn’t had Venetia down as a wedding worrier. Personally, I’d sometimes dreamed about marrying Jamie, only to get to the altar to find another woman standing in my place, or my mother turning up and revealing herself in mortifying fashion. It would be complex enough just working out where to sit everyone when there were only four people on the bride’s side and technically no family at all.

“Is that the evening paper?” I asked.

“What would a man do?” the girls demanded. “What would you do?”

“I would try to speak with my fiancée and get the ushers to clear the church,” Mark said solidly. “In instances like this, guests don’t want to poke their noses into other people’s distress.”

“You’ve never been to a celebrity wedding,” observed Divinity.

“And vot about the reception?” Anastasia tapped the table. I think she was still playing the part of the outraged mother-in-law, as per the role-play earlier. “It is all paid for!”

“I’d send the food to a homeless shelter and the flowers to a hospital,” said Mark.

“But vhy?” she wailed, pulling at her hair. “How could you treat my daughter so badly? My husband knows people…you vill never vork in Hempstead again…”

“Ana,” I said hurriedly, as Mark edged toward the door, still holding the paper. “That’s enough. Mark, can I see the paper?”

“Your daughter was shagging an usher too,” said Divinity, wagging her finger. “
And
she’s maxed out my son’s credit cards with her online bingo habit!”

“He drrrove her to the bingo!” snarled Anastasia.

Mark regarded me nervously from the door. “Um, should I come back later?”

I held my hand out for the paper. “No,” I said encouragingly, “you’re being a great help! Now, what was the…?”

“What are you meant to do as a guest?” Venetia buttonholed him with a direct look. “If you think something’s going on backstage, as it were?”

“Get your camera phone out,” said Clemmy. “And get it onto YouTube.”

“No!” I said. “Just…” I wasn’t sure what you
were
meant to do, actually. “Mark?”

He shook his head. “Offer to arrange a game of charades to pass the time?”

“Is that our interview?” yelled Divinity, and she had the newspaper off him faster than you could say “pre-nup,” her fingers flipping through the pages to the center.

“Did they use the picture of me in my car?” demanded Anastasia. “Or Clemmy pushing the pram?”

“No, she said she had some beautiful photographs of you in the ballroom with…”

We all fell silent as I reached the page in question. Under the headline
PRACTICALLY PERFECT
was an enormous color photograph of Adele and Venetia, sitting on the grand piano in the old ballroom, looking “like sisters” with their long blond hair, ankles glued together, and spectacles perched on their noses.

“But they don’t even
wear
glasses,” snorted Clemmy. “She’s wearing Miss Thorne’s!”

“Oh, look, we are in it,” offered Anastasia, pointing at a tiny picture of her, Clemmy, and Divinity posing in the mews on her Porsche.

My eyes were skimming through the copy with mounting disbelief. After a brief mention of visiting us in our car-parking class and chatting with “two cheerfully normal graduates of the new-look Phillimore Academy,” Clemmy and Divinity, Imogen’s feature was hijacked by an interview with Miss Adele Buchanan and her protégée, Venetia Hargreaves, in which Adele outlined her own take on the female graces, which seemed to consist of exfoliation, depilation, prenuptial agreements, and breath mints.

I couldn’t tell whether the article was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Venetia, I discovered, “makes any party feel like a premiere” and “hides a razor-sharp mind behind her razor-sharp cheekbones.” She also enjoyed “playing the stock markets and polo.” Adele, meanwhile, had been “the most fun hostess in London since she arrived in town in the late ’80s” and was now “passing on her little black book of social secrets to a new
generation of girls.” “It’s the least I can do!” she was quoted as cooing.

“Oh, look,” said Clemmy, pointing. “You’re in it too.”

I’d missed it, being dazed by Adele’s shiny legs, but there
was
a small but quite flattering photograph of me, taken during our procession round the house in our heels. I was kicking away at the front of the shoe conga, and my hair was coming down from the neat bun Liv had put it in, but at least I looked like I was enjoying myself.

“The fresh direction is the brainchild of twenty-seven-year-old Betsy Cooper,” Anastasia read aloud, “who is pretty nimble on her stilettos and also pretty nimble when it comes to advising on tactful ways to bail out of dates and where to stick your savings. If anyone could teach me how to park with panache or rustle up a dinner to win any man’s heart, it would be the polished, unpretentious Betsy, and I’ll be seeing her at the weekend, to sign up for a course in making the most of myself. Because if I don’t sign myself up, my mother certainly will.”

“Ker-ching,” said Divinity, looking at Mark. “Gotta be pleased with that, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Although obviously I’m crushed that she didn’t mention the parking instructor by name.”

“She said you were a racing driver, not an accountant,” Divinity pointed out. “That’s pretty flattering.”

“And come on,” said Clemmy. “She didn’t mention Mr. O’Hare either, and she used to go out with him.”

“That’ll be why she didn’t mention him!” I laughed, although I felt a twinge of disappointment. Why had he said she was just a friend? I’d started to think more of Jamie than that.

Just goes to show, I thought crossly. Leopards don’t change their spots. They just cover them up.

“You’re very photogenic, though,” said Divinity generously. “You look like you’re having a whale of a time.”

I stared at the small photograph of myself. I wished my hair had been neater and that I’d maybe worn more lipstick, but it wasn’t a bad photo. Being Liv’s portrait practice must have paid off. But would it be enough for my mother to recognize me? Might she be sitting on the tube this evening, or on a bus, reading the feature and thinking, yes, I’ll go along on Saturday and…

And what? Say hello? My insides flipped over.

“Anyway, you’re pleased?” said Mark. “Looking good?”

I looked up and saw him hovering, his eyebrows lifted hopefully.

Given that he’d virtually had real estate agents measuring the place up only a few weeks ago, I reckoned that was quite a turnaround.

“Yes,” I said. “I reckon it should draw the crowds, if only to meet the fabulous Venetia. You’ve done really well,” I said, turning to the girls. “Well done on being such a wonderful ad.”

I realized that the girls had drawn back from the table and were staring at Venetia in a hostile manner, and I wondered if they knew something they weren’t telling me about her.

I remembered when I was younger I’d overheard Kathleen saying something about how some girls were born with silver spoons in their mouths and others came to the Academy to have theirs silver plated, which hadn’t made much sense to me at the time. I think they’d been talking about Adele, whose father had made his pile in soil diggers but who pretended her parents lived abroad, not in Preston. I wondered if Venetia was like that. She was certainly determined to get on Adele’s matrimonial social springboard.