West End Girls

by Jenny Colgan

  Georges shook his head. “No, we do good food and . . .”

  He looked at Will, then Lizzie, who shot him a warning look, whereupon Georges changed his tone and said, “We do whatever is the best for the customer. Is that not right, my friend?”

  Will stared at him. “You’re Penny’s new boyf—”

  “Nothing,” said Lizzie. “That’s what you were about to say, wasn’t it? Nothing at all. Ha ha!”

  “I do not understand,” said Georges. “But here, this is my beautiful fiancée, Maria-Elena.”

  “You know,” said Maria-Elena to Will. “If you are to keep eating those English breakfasts you will get fat and die.”

  “Good,” said Will.

  “Shh, shh,” said Georges. “We will have none of this talk.”

  “Would you like an omelette?” said Lizzie. If she couldn’t make Georges love her, she could at least make him an omelette.

  “Yes, please,” said Georges, smiling at her.

  “No!” said Maria-Elena. “At least this man is thin. You are fat. Too fat. No more eggs before the wedding. You should be thin for a wedding.”

  “I cannot do that,” said Georges as Lizzie stood undecided over the frying pan. “I was a fat baby. Then I was a fat child. Then I was a tubby young man. Then I was a plump grown-up man. And now I am Georges! Thin and I are two things which will never be friends!”

  Maria-Elena’s brows knitted together and she muttered something in Portuguese.

  “And if we have children they shall be fat little babies and podgy children and plump teenagers . . .”

  Lizzie thought of having little plump babies with big dark eyes like Georges’s and bit her lip a tad wistfully.

  “No, we will not,” said Maria-Elena. “You.” She was talking to Lizzie, who was staring into space and not noticing. “You. I would like orange juice, and make a fruit salad.”

  Lizzie stared at her. Maria-Elena said something to Georges, and it wasn’t necessary to have a word of Portuguese to know that she’d just said something along the lines of, “Is your employee a retard?”

  Georges looked cross, then his face cleared as he remembered something.

  “Aha,” he said, pointing at Will. “For you, a man suffering a broken heart.”

  “I’m not suffering a broken heart,” said Will. “Oh, yes, I am. I forgot. Can I have that omelette?”

  “Of course,” said Lizzie. “You’ll have to be quick, though. I have to go and pick oranges or something.”

  Georges dashed out and returned in moments with a parcel covered in bubble wrap.

  “You’re going to try and cheer me up with bubble wrap?” said Will.

  “Ooh, I love bubble wrap,” said Lizzie.

  “No,” said Georges. “But I forgot it had arrived!” and he pulled apart the badly wrapped parcel to reveal Will’s painting.

  It was the avenue of trees, and the painting looked very delicate and beautiful in the brightly painted café.

  “I am going to put it up here,” said Georges. “So all my customers will see it and say, Georges, where did you get this fantastic painting as everybody knows you have the taste of a mountain goat. And I will say, you must NOT go to Sloan’s terrible art shop, you must call my friend Will, and everybody will call you and make you a milliadaire. What do you think?”

  Will merely shrugged his shoulders.

  “It looks terrible,” said Maria-Elena. “All the colors are wrong.”

  “It’s great,” said Lizzie. “Put it up here by the clock over the door. People always look at the clock.”

  “That is very true!” said Georges. “Here. And now, we must open the shop.”

  “What about the fruit salad?” said Maria-Elena.

  “Ah, my bride, I am so sorry, no fruit salad today.”

  “I’m making Georges a quick omelette aux fines herbes, though,” said Lizzie. She knew it was a little mean, but at the moment, she just didn’t care. “Are you sure you don’t want one?”

  “My dear,” said Sloan to Penny. He cleared his throat and tried again. He had somehow mysteriously woken up on the floor of the gallery again and, all things considered, had found it least painful if he didn’t try to move. “My dear, I sense you are sad. Or angry.”

  “How did you guess that?” said Penny, who was marching loudly over him when she needed to get anything out of the back.

  “Call it my feminine intuition,” said Sloan, who was trying to think of a polite way to tell her to stop stomping up and down like a baby elephant that wouldn’t involve her redoubling her efforts and getting louder.

  “How about making your old Auntie Sloan a bit of an eye-opener, eh?”

  “You really are a hopeless soak,” said Penny, who wasn’t exactly in the mood to do anything for anyone. “Don’t you think you should get help or something?”

  “I think,” said Sloan, propping himself up on his elbow with some difficulty in order to extract his cigarette holder from his smoking-jacket pocket, “help is for people who have difficult lives. Whereas my existence, a state, if you like, of near constant lunch, I find extremely pleasant. Now, if you look in the fridge I believe you will find some tomato juice, some Worcestershire sauce, one egg, and a bottle of Gray Goose vodka. I wish you to mix these ingredients in the order your heart tells you to.”

  Cigarette successfully lit, he returned to lying on the ground.

  “Say what you like about that Will fellow,” he said. Penny snorted loudly. “But at least you knew which way up to hang his paintings. Whereas with these . . .”

  He indicated the new oil paintings hanging on the gallery walls. They were vast abstract canvases, covered with mustard-colored geometric shapes spattered with blobs of gray and mushroom. In short, perfect for any office lobby in the developed world. Sloan was fully expecting to make a killing.

  “Ah, thank you,” he said, as Penny returned with his drink. “No straw . . . no . . . ?” He huffed himself into a sitting position. “Ah. Worcestershire sauce as the primary ingredient. Interesting concept. Now, what did you say the matter with you was again?”

  “My life is not going well,” said Penny.

  “Indeed?” said Sloan.

  “The only millionaire I know is getting married and the man I love is a penniless conniver who hates me. I need you to introduce me to some millionaires. Nice ones.”

  “Funny you should say that,” said Sloan. “Because I have just the job for you. We need to arrange a launch for the new pictures.”

  “Uh-huh?” said Penny.

  “The artist supposedly lives in the cloud forests of South America and never comes down to taint her life with civilization, although she may make a special exception for cut-price champagne. Personally I think that’s humbug and it’s two blokes in a lock-up garage in Edmonton. But that doesn’t matter now. Go through my Rolodex and invite everyone with a postcode starting W or SW, numbers up to eleven.”

  He fixed her with a slightly rheumy eye.

  “If you don’t find a pushover banking millionaire in that lot, Penelope, there is frankly no hope for you.”

  Penny smiled for the first time in three days.

  “Thanks, Sloan!”

  “Don’t thank me,” said Sloan. “You could get me a pillow, though.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Lizzie had meant to tell Penny she’d seen Will, but they still weren’t speaking. Fine, she could lump it then.

  Penny was in whirlwind mode in any case. For the first time in living memory, she was working incredibly hard, dashing around to put the opening together. She’d designed the invitations—“That’s original,” Sloan had said, looking at the red devil-shaped card, most unlike the plain Smythson stiffy he usually sent out—that said, Be a devil. Come see our most dangerous collection yet . . .

  “It’s not very dangerous,” said Sloan.

  “You have to know,” said Penny, “that the concept of buying art is very scary to most people. So I’m playing on their fear.”
r />   Sloan raised his eyebrows. “What’s scary about buying art? Oh, Christ,” he indicated a student walking past the window. “Would you look at the shoes on that? Great legs and shoes like a carthorse.”

  “Actually, that’s what’s scary,” said Penny. “People like you checking out your shoes.”

  Sloan pouted. “People are terribly oversensitive.”

  “So, I’m convincing all these business people to take a risk,” said Penny happily. “We’ve had loads of yeses already.”

  Sloan didn’t tell her that few people were as likely to travel a great distance for a free glass of champagne as people who were already rich; it was one of the ways they’d gotten rich in the first place.

  “Excellent work,” said Sloan. “Now, what about the artist?”

  “She’s coming in today,” said Penny. “To check the plassmong.”

  “The what?”

  “I don’t know. She said plassmong.”

  “Place-ment, my dear,” said Sloan, chucking her on the cheek. “You are so adorable.”

  “Stop that,” said Penny. “Just because I don’t know your stupid posh German or whatever it is.”

  “Quite right, too,” said Sloan, vowing to keep Penny and the artist as far apart as possible.

  Unfortunately, as with so many of Sloan’s vows, some old chums at the Reform Club and an excellent claret got in the way, and Penny was on her own, tweezing her eyebrows in the reflection of a particularly ugly steel sculpture that was supposed to represent womanhood but in fact represented something on the floor to bark your shins on, when the woman walked in.

  At first Penny smiled politely, assuming a customer had just entered, and one of their more eccentric Chelsea types at that.

  “Hello,” she said.

  The figure stood stock-still, framed in the doorway with the light behind her, and stared at Penny.

  “Oh,” said Penny jumping up. “Do you need some help getting up the step?”

  There came a loud imperious sniff from the doorway.

  “Sloan Williams-Forsythe, please!” boomed a voice loudly.

  “Er, he’s not here,” said Penny. “I’m sure he won’t be long, though.” She always said this, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t decide to wait for him. Most people, however, were aware of his lunching habits.

  “I am Tabitha Angelbrain Dawson,” said the woman, moving into the full arena of the shop. Without the light behind her, Penny took a closer look. She was a heavy woman, draped rather than dressed in shades of violet and purple, including heavy eye makeup and a mouth that was lipsticked so dark it looked like a place cherries went to die. Her hair was stiff, and a very peculiar aubergine color Penny couldn’t have described, which gave her some respect for her artistic abilities.

  “Hello!” said Penny. “You’re the artist! I’m organizing your party.”

  Slightly regretfully she remembered the last artist she’d met in here. Somehow she didn’t think this one would put up with quite as much cheek. Mind you, she wasn’t quite so desperate to get in this one’s knickers either.

  “I’ve just got you down as Ms. Dawson, though,” said Penny, looking at the sheet. “Sorry, I can change it.”

  “Tabitha Angelbrain Dawson is my full name,” said Tabitha Angelbrain Dawson. “Tabitha from my beloved daddy, God rest his soul, and Angelbrain came as a gift from heaven when no less than Sir Flinty Fortescue himself said, ‘Tabitha, dear, you have the brain of an angel.’”

  And the body of a brickie, thought Penny, but didn’t let it show on her face.

  “Dawson, well, what can one do?” Tabitha continued, looking slightly glum for a moment. “It sounds like I run a pottery shop in rural Yorkshire. Anyway, no matter. Let me take a look at le hanging.”

  She started pacing around the shop. In fact, she was loping, so deliberately Penny couldn’t help thinking she wanted it noticed.

  “You have a very graceful stride,” she said winningly. This party was very important, and it would be helpful to get Tabitha on her side, if at all possible, especially, as a general rule, she’d found fat women tended not to like her that much.

  “Thank you,” said Tabitha, straightening up and beaming. This had obviously been very much the correct thing to say. “My yoga teacher says that my spirit guide is almost certainly a big cat.”

  “Perhaps a panther,” said Penny.

  Tabitha nodded gravely, as if some huge secret had passed between them. “And all cats, you know, they find me irresistible.”

  Penny hoped that they hadn’t hung any of the pictures upside down, but Sloan hadn’t been in business for thirty years for nothing. Tabitha slowly completed her tour of the room, nodding occasionally in a cougar-like manner to show that she approved.

  She stood in the middle of the room, finally, and closed her eyes. Painfully slowly, she lifted both hands out to the side, raising her fingers up until her arms were fully outstretched, her purple robes fluttering behind her, like a priest.

  “I feel it!” she said. “I feel the vibrations! I feel for my art, for my creation, from the angels, from the mother spirit, I declare this . . . uh, this is the correct place and everything shall be good. And. Er. Let it be.”

  She kept her eyes closed for another twenty seconds or so and Penny squeezed hers shut too in sympathy, hoping nobody popped in and nicked the computer while she did so.

  “Fantastic,” said Tabitha Angelbrain finally, when she opened her eyes again. “I feel very strongly everything is going to go just fine. Got any tea?”

  “Absolutely,” said Penny. “But just normal tea, not chamomile or anything like that.”

  “Really? OK, then. Although I try not to pollute my body with caffeine. Ooh”—she had spied Penny’s secret stash of chocolate digestives—“are those digestives? Can I have one? Absolutely starved. Can you think of anywhere good for us to lunch?”

  “I’m not really allowed to take lunch,” said Penny. “We have a strict one-employee, one-lunch policy.”

  “Nonsense,” said Tabitha. “You just tell Sloan the artist ordered you. Plus, I have some very funny stories about my cats that I think you’ll absolutely love. You strike me as someone who’s very in touch with their inner spiritual core. Am I right?”

  Penny was firmly of the belief that people’s inner spiritual cores only ever made an appearance when they didn’t have to worry about paying the council tax, but considered it wise not to say so.

  “Well, there is this one place . . .” she said.

  Penny stopped just before the window of the café, as Tabitha paused to smell the cooking on the air in the manner of a tiger.

  Through the glass she could see Lizzie and Georges behind the counter. Lizzie was doling out food into containers which she was seasoning with parsley and tossing to Georges, who then, with a chat and a smile, handed them to hungry customers. They weren’t even looking at one another, but working entirely on instinct, Lizzie passing the salt or finding extra change; Georges handing her another tomato or reaching for the toaster without her having to ask him. They were a perfect ballet of complementary motion, and engrossing to watch.

  Tabitha looked ready to head in, but Penny couldn’t move. They looked so perfect, so absolutely right together. How could she not have noticed it before? Was she really that self-absorbed? OK, yes, so she was incredibly self-absorbed, what else was new? But she hadn’t really been trying to be cruel to Lizzie when she tried to seduce Georges. She really hadn’t appreciated how Lizzie felt about him.

  Now it seemed unbelievable that she could have missed it.

  At the side of the counter stood a dark-looking woman, scowling at the customers. It wasn’t hard to work out who that was.

  “My inner leonine element of femininity,” announced Tabitha, “is saying that it is experiencing a primal hunger for the misty plains. That means lunch,” she added hopefully.

  Swallowing quickly, Penny pushed open the door and marched in.

  Lizzie wasn’t in the
slightest bit happy to see Penny. In fact, she was furious.

  Here she is, thought Lizzie angrily, clop, clop, clop, on her little shoes, in to get the guy with the money. Make it even worse, the engaged guy with the money. Stupid cow. She ignored her, even when Georges looked up and smiled at the two women. Daft old Georges, she thought affectionately. You could probably kill his mother and he’d still want to give you a welcoming hug.

  “Two beautiful ladies!” said Georges happily, “who look in need of a tasty aubergine Parmigiana!”

  Tabitha bestowed on him a wide toothy smile.

  “I like a man who sees inner beauty,” she said. “And can cook.”

  Lizzie sniffed. She hadn’t noticed Georges’s amazing ability to discern inner beauty when she was chunky and looked like a frump.

  “Hi, Lizzie,” said Penny pointedly, but Lizzie just gave her a look.

  “What’s the matter?” Penny asked, just to be annoying.

  “Nothing,” said Lizzie.

  The woman who was obviously Georges’s fiancée let loose a torrent of another language, that equally obviously said, “Who are these women?”

  Georges looked a bit haunted.

  “Maria-Elena, this is Penny, Lizzie’s twin.”

  Maria-Elena’s eyebrows shot up so fast she might as well have had “I am a very rude lady” tattooed on her forehead.

  “Hello,” she said. “Georges, he has many female friends, yes? And you . . . ah, I see you dress in the ‘London’ style. Interesting.”

  This kind of talk didn’t phase Penny at all, who’d been the victim of many a ladies’ toilets backstab in her time. She stared Maria-Elena down until she took a step back.

  Penny looked at Georges again as he flipped his tongs to get the nice corner piece of the Parmigiana for them. There was a wide sweat stain under the arm of his slightly grubby chef’s whites, and sweat glistened on his low heavy brow. How on earth . . . I mean, obviously he looked a little better in his sharp suit, stepping out of a car someone else was driving, but you’d have to be really, really desperate . . .

  “Who are you?” said Georges in a friendly fashion to Tabitha.

  “I am Tabitha Angelbrain Dawson. I am . . . an artiste,” said Tabitha.