by Sharon Owens
‘I said I needed a new car for work,’ Emily grimaced, ‘and some new furniture for my flat.’
She’d have loved a nicer car and a beautiful sleigh bed, but there was no point in thinking of those things now.
‘Well, I just hope your poor father was grateful,’ Arabella sniffed. She was disgusted with the male of the species these days. ‘Imagine asking your only child to bail you out of your poker debts. The rascal! I wouldn’t have done it, if I were in your shoes.’
‘He was so grateful, though, really he was. He wept like a baby when we turned up on the doorstep; he was that glad to see us. Dylan went to the guy’s house with Dad to hand over the money. He told him this was a one-off thing, and we would not be covering for Dad again. Wasn’t that very masterful of him?’
‘I suppose so,’ Arabella admitted.
‘Meanwhile, I gave the house a thorough clean. I filled two black bags with rubbish and got through two bottles of bleach. We had battered sausages from the local chip shop for tea. Then the three of us went to visit Mum in the loony bin.’
‘Sounds like a dream weekend,’ Arabella said dryly. ‘Thugs, bin bags, bleach, battered sausages and a loony bin.’
‘And I mean that in a nice way,’ Emily added. ‘Loony bin sounds less scary than saying my mother is receiving acute psychiatric care.’
‘Poor woman, I hope I never end up in a place like that. It’s a very thin line, isn’t it? When David’s new love had those twin girls, it was touch-and-go for my sanity, I can tell you.’
‘Ah yes, Venice and Paris,’ Emily said.
‘What awful names.’
‘Well …’ Emily grimaced.
It was only then that Emily noticed Arabella hadn’t been smoking for a few days. She wondered if Arabella had finally decided to kick the habit. She decided not to ask, just in case she triggered a craving in Arabella.
‘How is your mum?’ Arabella asked.
‘Oh, I felt really sorry for her this time,’ Emily said sadly. ‘I thought she was looking terribly old. And she was as white as a sheet. Dylan was a complete honey, as usual. He bought her a box of chocolates and six magazines, and chatted away to her as if she were just in there having a sprained ankle looked at. I still can’t get over how pale she was.’
‘Yes, well … Booze and cigarettes can do that to a person, my darling, and that’s why I’ve given up both of them.’
‘Have you really, Arabella?’
‘Yes, I have. Last night I threw out my entire stash of cigarettes, all the wine in the house, and all the ready meals, biscuits and crisps. Everything went into the wheelie bin at midnight and then I went to M&S first thing this morning and stocked up on porridge, apples and salad. I’m going to be healthy, Emily. I should have done it years ago.’
‘Well, good for you, Arabella. I’m very impressed.’
‘Yes, I’m having porridge for breakfast, tuna salad for lunch, and chicken with a baked potato for dinner. All tea will be decaf, and my only snack will be a rice cake with a teaspoon of honey on it.’
‘Steady on, woman; you’ll be fading away on us,’ Emily smiled.
‘Oh, I could do with dropping a few pounds. Now, let’s crack on, shall we? What have you got lined up for my perusal today? I feel really empowered, Emily; I sent the last of David’s stuff to his old office yesterday and I didn’t even cry. They can send it on to him. Needless to say, I haven’t been told his new address in Italy.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Yes, this is the first day of the rest of my life,’ Arabella laughed. ‘I really feel as if things can only get better now.’
Just then, three men in dark suits and cheap shoes came into the office and asked for Arabella; Jane pointed them in the right direction. Arabella and Emily barely had time to look up from their desks before one of the men told Arabella he was a detective. He wanted Arabella to come with them for questioning; something to do with a house fire a little while ago, he said in a very discreet whisper. It was a good thing nobody in the office could lip-read.
‘Listen, I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Arabella said at once. ‘Please leave this office at once. I really have a lot of work to do.’
‘It’s not an invitation,’ she was told.
‘Am I being arrested?’ Arabella said calmly.
‘Yes, you are,’ the man said quietly. ‘We’ve found new CCTV evidence. So I can arrest you here in full view of your colleagues. Or you can come down to the station, and we’ll arrest you a bit more discreetly.’
‘There must be some mistake,’ Emily said, aghast.
‘The wig was clever, Mrs Harrington, but we’ve just found footage of you taking it off on a nearby street. Your ex-husband, David Harrington, has identified you via email. If it’s any consolation, he was most reluctant to give us your name; most reluctant indeed. But there’s a lot of money at stake here. The house that was burned down has to be completely rebuilt – and if we don’t get a conviction then your ex-husband might have to stump up for the bill. The owner says he isn’t going to let the matter drop until somebody pays for the rebuilding. His insurance company are keen to make sure it isn’t them.’
‘Arabella, tell them it isn’t true,’ Emily beseeched her. ‘A house was set on fire? You didn’t do it. You didn’t do it, surely?’
But Arabella just pursed her lips and switched off her computer.
‘Oh no,’ Emily gasped.
‘Right, then, I suppose we’d better get this over with,’ Arabella said. ‘Emily, will you please phone my solicitor? The number is in my address book. And tell him where they have taken me. Oh, and you are in charge until I get back. Consider yourself the acting editor again.’
Arabella stood up slowly and gracefully, and slipped on her belted trench coat. She put her mobile phone into her glossy red handbag and draped it across her arm as if she were the Queen going to inspect the troops. Jane Maxwell’s bottom jaw was scraping the carpet as Arabella left the office with her head held high, flanked by three detectives. The rest of the staff were utterly shocked, and one or two of them were even teary-eyed.
Emily’s hands were shaking as she dialled the solicitor’s number. After she’d given him a panicky explanation of what had just happened, she heard him sigh long and loud at the other end of the line.
‘I’ll go there right now,’ he said.
‘Will I come with you?’ Emily said.
‘If you like,’ the solicitor said. ‘But it could be a long night. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’
13. Showdown in Suburbia
It was early November and Emily was having a quiet Saturday to herself. Her mother was out of hospital and recuperating at home. Her father had sworn off the gambling for a while, still pretty ruffled over his run-in with the darker side of illegal poker. Arabella had admitted to a charge of arson, pleading diminished responsibility. She wasn’t being held on remand, but she had been told not to leave the country. David wasn’t pressing charges, because he didn’t want his move to Italy to be disrupted in any way. He was currently staying with Mary and the twins at an unnamed location in Rome while his new house was being completed. The owner of the fabulous glass house that had been reduced to a smoking shell had had a mild heart attack and was threatening to sue both David and Arabella for stress, and for the cost of rebuilding. The insurers said they wouldn’t be paying out any time soon, given the circumstances.
Dylan had gone to France with a couple of his best friends to see a rugby match. He’d be back again soon, though, and was going to come straight round to see Emily.
And so Emily had an entire day to herself – a lovely, empty Saturday with nothing to do but idle round the shops for a while in the morning. Perhaps she’d go home in the afternoon and paint her nails, lie in the bath, have a takeaway for dinner and maybe watch a DVD on her portable telly. She was looking forward to spending a day just being on her own. And she had also promised herself she was not going to waste it dwelling on past even
ts and future possibilities. So far she’d bought a bar of handmade soap that smelt of vanilla, a cute necklace made of chunky plastic strawberries, a packet of M&S chocolate biscuits, a pink mug, a skinny belt and a packet of Fairtrade coffee. Now she was dithering over whether to buy a new suede brush for her boots or a couple of glossy magazines. She hovered by the magazine stand in Tesco, trying to make up her mind. Daisy Churchill was on the cover of no fewer than nine of that week’s offerings. Nine magazine covers! Apparently, she’d given up on her bid to break into the interior design sector and was instead garnering column inches by dating a high-profile TV producer from the United States. Emily gazed at the pictures of Daisy’s surgically enhanced pout, and wondered if the model ever looked in the mirror, had a fleeting moment of self-awareness and asked herself what the heck she was doing.
‘Hey you, what the heck do you think you’re doing? I want a word with you,’ said someone standing behind Emily.
And suddenly a very sharp object was digging into Emily’s back. It felt like a fingernail. It was a fingernail. Emily spun round and gazed into the spidery eyelashes of Daisy Churchill herself. And the woman was even thinner and more orange in real life than she looked in her glamour pictures. Emily couldn’t help glancing downwards at Daisy’s most famous assets. And yes, there they were, all hoisted up in a balcony bra and looking like a couple of ostrich eggs about to hatch. They even had the hairline cracks, which Emily supposed must be stretch marks. She looked incredibly angry too.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ve met before,’ Emily stuttered.
‘We haven’t met before, but I know who you are. I’ve seen your picture in Stylish Living. And let me tell you that nobody turns down Daisy Churchill.’
‘I’m terribly sorry, but this isn’t the time or the place,’ Emily began, her face ablaze with embarrassment.
‘How dare you turn me down – how dare you! You think you’re better than everybody else? Who the hell are you, anyway?’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m in a dreadful hurry,’ Emily gasped. ‘Excuse me, please.’
Emily began to walk briskly away from Daisy and the small crowd of shoppers who’d paused to enjoy the sideshow, but a group of housewives chatting near the escalator had blocked her path.
‘Don’t you dare walk away from me, you snob!’ Daisy shouted.
‘Excuse me, please,’ Emily said again, slithering past the shoppers and stepping on to the escalator.
But Daisy Churchill wasn’t that easy to evade. She abandoned her trolley (full of expensive champagne, fillet steak and imported strawberries, Emily noted – not exactly working-class foods) and followed Emily, shouting all the way down to the ground floor. Emily thought the escalator she was standing on was surely the slowest escalator in the whole wide world.
‘Come on, come on, hurry up, hurry up,’ she urged it.
She couldn’t walk any faster, as her path was being blocked by a very large lady with not one, but two, overflowing shopping baskets.
‘That’s right, go on … and try to walk away from me, you nasty little snob! Toffee-nosed, stuck-up, butter-wouldn’t-melt, snobby-knickers little cow,’ Daisy roared again.
‘Let’s play cliché bingo,’ Emily said under her breath.
She took a slouchy grey bobble hat out of her shoulder bag and deftly pulled it on. Then she lowered her gaze and pretended she had no idea who Daisy was shouting at. Some teenage girls saw Daisy and began to take pictures of her on their mobile phones. And Daisy, in spite of her white-hot rage at being snubbed by Stylish Living, took the time to pout her lips for the cameras. She blew air kisses and leaned over the edge of the escalator suggestively.
‘That’s right, girls,’ Daisy cooed. ‘It’s me, Daisy Churchill. And I’m not too stuck up to do my own shopping in Tesco. Not like that one over there – that’s Emily Reilly, right there, in the stupid grey hat. And according to her I’m not good enough to be in a posh magazine.’
Emily pulled her hat off again and stuffed it in her pocket. She thought she was going to faint, she was that mortified. The teenagers looked at Emily and giggled. They took some pictures of her as well. Mercifully the world’s slowest escalator finally delivered Emily safely to the entrance porch, and she belted for the sanctity of her car. But Daisy wasn’t going to leave it there.
‘This isn’t the end of it,’ she shouted as Emily hopped into her car and locked the door firmly behind her.
‘You’re on loads and loads of magazine covers this week,’ Emily forced herself to shout back. ‘Why can’t you just leave us alone? We’re just a harmless little magazine, minding our own business.’
‘I spent all day working hard for that shoot. And time is money, in case you didn’t know.’
‘You call that work?’ Emily was beyond furious now. ‘People in this country are cleaning toilets for five quid an hour. That’s hard work in my book. Where on earth did you get your sense of entitlement from? You don’t deserve to be a millionaire, Daisy Churchill. And what’s more, you’re a terrible example to young girls everywhere. They can’t all make a living blowing kisses to a camera. You’re a disgrace to the sisterhood.’
‘Bitch,’ Daisy shouted.
And she threw her umbrella at Emily’s car for good measure. The umbrella got tangled up in Emily’s windscreen wipers and one of them broke off with a loud twang.
‘Takes one to know one,’ Emily cried, remembering the most popular retort from her Belfast childhood.
‘Don’t you mess with Daisy Churchill,’ Daisy roared.
‘Don’t you mess with my magazine,’ Emily shouted back.
Emily reversed out of the car park and drove home, shaking with righteous anger.
Her lovely day off was ruined.
The following week, the pictures of Emily and Daisy having a ding-dong in Tesco were published in Closer magazine.
But thankfully Emily’s face was almost hidden behind a sign advertising fifty per cent off Daz pomegranate-scented washing powder, so it wasn’t the disaster it might have been. And the name of her magazine hadn’t been mentioned either.
Probably they didn’t want to give another publication a free plug, Emily thought to herself.
She decided to carry a pair of dark glasses around with her in future, just in case she ever ran into Daisy Churchill again.
14. A Surprise Visit
Emily was sitting at Arabella’s desk, doing her best to avoid the resentful glances from Jane Maxwell and one or two others. It seemed that Emily’s temporary promotion to the position of editor had really ticked off some of the staff, especially the ones who were older than Emily, or had been at the magazine longer than she had. There was talk of Emily being made deputy editor when Arabella came back to work. Even good old Petra Dunwoody seemed a little miffed; Emily thought Petra was rather overdoing the politeness in recent days. And no doubt Jane was doing her best to spread dissent within the camp, Emily thought dryly. Well, they were getting no extra information from her regarding Arabella’s sudden absence. The official line was that Arabella was taking some time off to remodel her home; and the infamous arrest had been an unfortunate mistake. Nobody believed it for a second – but they still hadn’t discovered David’s infidelity, the twins or the house fire.
It was such a shame it had come to this, Emily thought sadly. She wished she could tell everyone the truth about Arabella getting divorced – but, of course, she could not. For any sign of weakness in an editor would be seized upon in the cut-throat world of magazine publishing. And Arabella might be tipped over the edge now, if her own story were to be emblazoned across one of the minor gossip rags.
Emily sent her boss a text every day to let her know that things were going okay. Arabella was having some privately funded therapy for her anger and rejection issues, and was also waiting to find out if she was going to stand trial for arson. In the meantime, she was resting (and crying a lot) at home and had told Emily she was to go ahead and do whatever she wanted at the magazine.
‘I’ve given enough of my life to Stylish Living,’ she’d said, the last time she’d spoken to Emily on the phone. ‘Right now I need to put my own well-being first.’
And so Emily was putting together a major feature on de-cluttering. It was going to be a very glossy booklet for the January issue; a timely thing to do considering recent events all round. But this wasn’t just the usual advice about putting cooking ingredients in a wooden trough to make wiping the larder shelves easier, or storing rolled-up bathroom towels in pretty wicker baskets. No, this was a radical feature on total de-cluttering – stripping rooms right back to the bare walls and starting all over again. This was nothing short of a lament on the modern disease of hoarding – a disease that particularly affected women, since they were the ones lumbered with the ‘gathering’ gene.
Emily had chosen a palette of soft greys and whites for her big idea, and she was busy sourcing coffee tables with built-in storage. She had photographed her own wardrobe for the cover, spending hours lighting it just so. She wanted women everywhere to share her new-found de-cluttering confidence. She wanted women everywhere to give their old things away, to say no to buying new clothes every weekend, or even every season. She wanted women everywhere to address their emotional needs, instead of just pottering up and down the High Street looking at clothes and trinkets, and feeling bored and unfulfilled and inadequate.
She was almost beginning to relax into the task when there was a phone call from the reception desk down in the foyer to say two people were asking for her.
‘I wasn’t expecting anyone today. What company are they from, please?’ Emily asked absent-mindedly.
She picked up a photograph of a vintage-style peg bag, and placed it beside her other selections for the laundry room section. Then she put it aside again; she would have no floral peg bags in this feature. She’d have traditional wooden pegs in a thick glass jar – something that would never date and would never need to be replaced.
‘They’re not from a commercial company, Miss Reilly. This is a personal visit.’