Goodbye, Jimmy Choo

by Annie Sanders

  The three of them chatted and laughed over lunch, Jean Luc embarrassing Maddy with stories about their youth and her ghastly first boyfriends, egged on by Izzie.

  “Oh, he was rough.” Jean Luc shook his head in disbelief. “Not a nice boy at all. Giselle went crazy. Motorbike and those tattoos on his arms ’ere and ’ere.”

  “Speaking of arms”—Izzie suddenly remembered the burn—“how’s yours now, Maddy?” she asked, pulling back Maddy’s sleeve.

  “Oh that. I’d forgotten all about it.” They both peered closely at her barely marked skin and their eyes met in amazement. “Well, look at that! Seems the old bird was right about this stuff after all.”

  It took days to get the smell out of the house. Maddy had opened all the windows in the kitchen until the children and the poinsettia on the windowsill had started to complain of frostbite.

  It had been an anticlimax when Jean Luc left and, with only a few weeks of term remaining, the looming horror of Christmas was beginning to worry Maddy seriously. Without Simon it all seemed so pointless, and it took everything she had just to drag herself out of bed in the morning. And then there was the cost! Florence, whose unspoken grief had manifested itself in the need again for a nappy at night, had her heart set on some ghastly plastic pony she’d seen advertised on ITV. Will’s wish list was a second-mortgage number. Game Boy Advance, CD-ROMs, Action Man, go-kart. She knew they were out of the question this year, but out of a passionate desire to make up for all they had lost, Maddy wondered whether he’d settle for a homemade version—perhaps Crispin could knock something up in the sheds?

  Stephen Chester from Chester Goodwin, the big auctioneers in Oxford, had been so obsequious when he’d toured the house that it was all she could do not to punch him. Good public school etiquette, which oozed from every pore of his tweed-clad body, forbade him from making any enquiries as to why Madam wished to raise the cash. He had simply gushed suitably about the house, and then became intimidatingly businesslike when it came to the sticky subject of valuation. He peered closely at the massive gilt mirror—the one she’d bought for the overmantel in London and which now took pride of place in the hall—and tapped his cheek with his pen, then jotted down a brief description on his pad. He tried, and almost succeeded, to cover up his excitement at the walnut tallboy in the spare room, and ran his hand lovingly over the long oak dining room table and large Carver chairs.

  Maddy had followed him round, trying to act nonchalant, as he peered, considered, and wrote down notes. “It’s only furniture,” she kept reminding herself. It can always be replaced, but as she spread out the contents of her jewelry box onto the kitchen table, she almost lost control.

  Watching his chubby hands picking up and putting down her rings, necklaces, and earrings, she felt as if she had been violated. “Some interesting pieces here, Mrs. Hoare,” he said oleaginously, “though of course a successful sale entirely depends on how interested the collectors are.” He looked closely then carefully discarded several pieces, and she felt a mixture of relief and outrage that they weren’t good enough for consideration. “This is especially pretty.” He had picked up an oval diamond brooch that Mémé had given her for her eighteenth birthday and was holding it very close to his eye. “Yes, very interesting. There is a growing market for this style of art deco jewelry. I think this could easily sell,” and he made another note on his pad.

  The letter with his list of suggested reserve prices had arrived a couple of days later, and for another two days she had picked it up and peered at it, then put it down in disgust. The final figure, if she put all the pieces he had suggested into auction, would just about cover the outstanding invoices for the work already done on the house, except Crispin’s bill, but only if she included Mémé’s brooch with the lots. Trying to sound as cool and detached as she could, she rang to confirm her agreement.

  She put down the phone and surveyed the kitchen. The sale might raise enough, but it wouldn’t come close to leaving them enough to live on. It was no good. She’d have to get a job.

  Izzie was incredulous. “A temping agency? Maddy, when was the last time you even went into an office? They have computers these days you know, all the typewriters are condemned to museums. What are you going to offer them?”

  “Well, people must still drink tea.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “But can I ask you a big favor? I’m going to try that agency in Ringford—WorkWorld or something—could you possibly have Pasco for a couple of hours tomorrow morning? He’d love to play at your house and you know how much he loves you.”

  “Okay, you don’t have to lay it on. I’ve got to finish this bloody Web site stuff, but he can always sort out my CDs while I’m doing it. How is he at ironing?”

  “You’re a doll. I’ll bring him over about nine thirty.”

  Maddy was serious. She felt happier leaving Pasco with Izzie than anyone else. She knew he’d be happy, safe, and looked after, so next morning, putting on her black Jean Muir “funeral” suit—she assumed that was the sort of thing efficient secretaries wore—and using a belt to hold up the now much-too-big trousers, she dropped the children at school and set off for Izzie’s.

  The narrow driveway was taken up with a skip, now full to the brim with sick-looking timbers. The house was swathed in scaffolding, and two men were crawling over the roof. The damage was clearly worse than Izzie had let on, and Maddy wondered just how much it must be costing them to put right. Izzie just seemed to muddle along without complaint, but this must have put a hell of a dent in their budget. Marcus got to the door first, and she tried to smile warmly.

  “You look smart,” he opened with, rather coolly. “Swanning off to lunch somewhere posh?”

  Not a very good start. She really couldn’t put her finger on it, but on the few times she had met him now, his charm seemed rather phony, and when Izzie wasn’t around, he was verging on hostile. Had she done something to offend him? “Izzie very sweetly said she’d look after Pasco, while I go into town for a meeting.” That sounded important and professional. “He’s terribly good and I won’t be long.”

  His reply was cut short by Izzie bolting down the stairs. “Hi, little mate,” she said, as Pasco put his arms out to her. “Are you coming to play with me this morning? Fancy a biscuit? Let’s go and find you one.” She looked at Maddy, as Marcus went back into the kitchen, and said quietly, “Remember, they are called word processors, and you are familiar with Windows XP.”

  “Is that a new type of Jag?”

  “Ha-ha. Just say it, and if they’ve something for you, I’ll give you a crash course on my computer.”

  “Crash it will be,” laughed Maddy. She gave Pasco and Izzie a hug and promised she’d be back as quickly as possible.

  No, thought Maddy as she tried to find a parking space, Marcus really is touchy. Whenever he was around, Izzie seemed to lose her spark, glancing at him nervously as if not quite trusting him to behave. She certainly hadn’t been like that with Jean Luc. The old rogue had brought out the best in her like he did with everyone. His charm was hard to resist. For a silly moment she fantasized about Izzie and him getting it together. Jean Luc deserved some happiness. But she couldn’t imagine it really. Besides, there was no way on earth Jean Luc would move over here. Not for anyone would he tolerate British supermarket shopping. Daft idea.

  “So,” repeated the rather brisk woman at WorkWorld, “you haven’t been employed since 1994.” She pursed her lips. That plum-colored top is so wrong for her, thought Maddy, and that hair! It looks like it was cut at the garden center.

  “I take it you are familiar with Microsoft Office and PowerPoint?”

  “You just plug the machine in at the wall, don’t you?” The woman looked sceptical. “I’m very efficient, and I’m a quick learner . . .” Maddy finished weakly. Nothing she seemed to have said so far had impressed, and she could feel this interview was running away without her.

  The woman halfheartedly scrolled down the compute
r screen in front of her. “Well, Mrs. Hoare, I’m not sure we have anything to match your . . . skills just at the moment, but we will keep you on our books and I’ll be in touch if anything comes up. I take it you can start work at a moment’s notice?”

  Maddy thought about Pasco at home all day, Florence at Little Goslings, and the school pickup at three thirty. “Oh yes, not a problem.”

  “Lovely. Well, thank you for coming to see us, and I’ll be in touch.”

  Don’t hold your breath, thought Maddy as she got back to the car. Pulling out of Ringford, her mood hit rock bottom. What the hell was she going to do? Who was she kidding that she could earn money? The only thing she could do was spend it. Stuck behind a tractor, the journey back to Izzie’s was a slow one. She’d left London so she could get out of traffic and third gear, but things didn’t seem to be any better here. If only she could turn back the clock, to before that day in May when Simon had said he wanted to move out. Had she followed her gut instinct and said no, he’d still be alive, they’d still have their lovely house, and she wouldn’t be acting out this humiliating charade in her little black suit.

  As she turned into Hoxley, she spotted a home-painted sign by a gate advertising local honey with a bright orange bee painted with childish ineptitude. An idea popped into Maddy’s head and she pulled in. Half an hour later, her small inquiry about buying wax had led to a lecture on honey production and a full-scale tour of Mr. Norman Jacks’s hives—luckily the bees were asleep because she hadn’t fancied putting on one of those beekeeper’s hoods. In her smart suit, she’d have looked like something from a Vivienne Westwood collection. She’d also found out about a Christmas Fayre—an annual event at Ledfinch Manor, a huge pile Maddy had remembered passing a couple of times, and quite the highlight of the local Christmas calendar according to Mr. Jacks, who muttered something about “load of nonsense.”

  Izzie handled the delicious slabs of wax with awe. “Brilliant—let’s see if you can get a stall at this jamboree and sell some of Luce’s recipes, but let’s hope the wax improves the smell, or when people open the jars, they’ll run a mile.”

  “One thing that struck me while I was looking at Mr. Jacks’s little production line—are there restrictions on producing something people are going to put on their skin? We don’t want the great and good of the county spending Christmas in hospital with second-degree burns.”

  “To the Internet, my girl,” directed Izzie, leading her through the cottage. “The source of all information that’s useful and plenty that isn’t.”

  “Can we look at some naughty sites, too?” Maddy giggled conspiratorially.

  “Type in ‘skin’ on a search engine, and God knows what we’ll find. Jess was looking up about ponies the other day, typed in ‘riding’ and . . . well . . . you wouldn’t have believed what came up.”

  Izzie led her through the sitting room.

  “Hey, something’s missing,” said Maddy, pausing to look around the room. “Where’s the piano?”

  “It’s on the roof.”

  Maddy looked at her for a moment, not quite understanding. Then the penny dropped. “God, you didn’t have to sell it, did you?” Maddy was incredulous. “Not that beautiful thing?”

  “Darling, I had no choice. It was that or going on the game, and I didn’t think Marcus would make much of a pimp.” Izzie tried to laugh, but Maddy could see the depth of her distress. Her own furniture hadn’t meant anything like as much—but with the loss of the brooch, she could relate to the terrible sacrifice Izzie had made. Maddy hadn’t realized money was that tight for her and Marcus too.

  Izzie briskly led her through to the study, as if she couldn’t bear to look at the empty space left by the piano, and somehow they found her desk in among piles of newspapers, old magazines, books which had overflowed from shelves and were piled precariously on the floor, and large sheets of book page proofs.

  “God, Izzie, how the hell do you work in this state?”

  “A tidy desk is the sign of a sick mind. Now what do you need to know? Trading standards, I suppose.” As she went online and started typing in key words, it suddenly struck Maddy that Izzie kept saying “you” whenever they talked about Luce’s recipes.

  Maddy squeezed onto the chair beside Izzie. “Hey, Mrs. Stock. You’re not leaving me to do this project on my own, are you?”

  “Well, she was your relation, wasn’t she? And the stuff is coming from your cousin, so it’s really—”

  “Wait right there a moment,” said Maddy, putting her hands on Izzie’s to stop her typing any more. “I’m not doing this harebrained project without you. If you aren’t going to do it with me, then we can forget it right now.”

  Izzie looked uncertainly into Maddy’s eyes, then a broad smile spread across her face. “I’m with you, girlfriend. Give me five!”

  Everything moved incredibly slowly for the next few weeks. Izzie’s stoicism over losing the piano made Maddy determined to be brave as she watched the walnut tallboy, dining table and Carver chairs, a commode, an oil painting (that she’d never actually liked), and her beloved gilt mirror being wrapped in blankets and placed carefully in the back of the van. Rather pathetically she wrapped the brooch in bubble wrap, and the driver put it carefully in his pocket. “Should get a bit for this lot, love,” he said, slamming the back of the van shut. “But you won’t miss it in a place this size, I expect.” Maddy could have kicked him.

  Frantically seeking displacement activity, she phoned Gail Thwaite-Mickleton, the Fayre organizer, and managed to sweet-talk her into giving them a stall—someone had apparently had to drop out—and gave her some flannel about the quality of their product and how it would fit in with the woman’s high standards. “This isn’t some two-bit event, my dear,” Gail T.-M. had brayed. “We only want products of the very best quality.”

  The only problem was they really had no product yet to sell—high quality or not. Izzie’s investigations had revealed the rigorous regulations that went with cosmetic production, and Maddy had used her best sultry tones with a nice-sounding man at the trading standards office in Oxford to help her find laboratories that tested cosmetic products for them. It helped that Luce’s recipes were about as natural as they come. To make life simpler, they had settled for now on producing just Luce’s “baume panacé”—healing balm—which contained nothing but centpertuis, beeswax, olive oil, and lavender, something Izzie had finally sourced from a rather twee dried-flower emporium in Cheltenham. It was worth the inflated price—the lavender sweetened the awful smell, though only slightly—but Izzie was incensed at the amount she had been charged for it. “This is daylight robbery—in summer my garden’s awash with it!” All of the other recipes they had tried so far had been disasters. The healing balm might smell awful, but at least it didn’t look like half-rotted lawn clippings.

  Now all they could do was wait until they got the results. Meanwhile, they had the packaging to think about. Maddy didn’t imagine for one minute that the type of women who came to these fayres would settle for creams in the selection of old marmalade and jam jars Izzie had found in the cupboard under her sink.

  “No, they’ll never fall for that,” said Maddy, as they both looked despondently at a washed-out jar of Bonne Maman apricot jam that sat in the middle of Maddy’s kitchen table. They were feeling panicky. Only days to go until the Fayre: a large pan full of green healing balm which closely resembled pig swill; no jars, and no accreditation to sell it anyway.

  “Have you any old Clarins jars we could use?” suggested Izzie hopefully.

  “Good God, woman. Clarins? I wish. I’m reduced to lard these days.”

  Izzie suddenly sat up. “I’ve got it. What about those sweet little Kilner jars that Jean Luc brought with the pâté in?”

  Maddy smacked the table in excitement. “You’re a genius. They’re in the cupboard over there.”

  There were only five of them, but they looked unusual and rustic enough that they just might do. They scraped out th
e contents, spreading some of it on crackers and eating as much as they could—this was good stuff and a tragedy to waste—until they both felt thoroughly sick. The rest went into the apricot jam jar, which Izzie put in her bag for Marcus’s supper.

  Once the jars were clean and the old labels soaked off in hot water, they looked even better. Now all they needed were labels. Maddy dug out a roll of white stickers she used to mark the children’s snack boxes, and they both sat at the table again.

  “Now what?” said Maddy. “I can’t do anything; my drawing is retarded.”

  Izzie picked up one of the children’s crayons from the table and started to doodle on a piece of paper. “Well, first we need a name. Is there a sort of ancient French name we could use? Tante Luce or something?”

  “Sounds a bit like an apple pie brand you’d find in the freezer compartment at Tesco’s. It needs to be countrified. ‘Old Slurry’?”

  “Oh, that’ll get them excited! Eve Lom had better look out!” Izzie laughed. “Get serious, Maddy. You’re the frog.”

  “Okay. Pays, paysanne? Country something. Luce’s recipes are almost like spells, aren’t they?”

  “What? Like country magic?” said Izzie half-wittedly.

  “No, more like magical country.”

  “Like Narnia or in the Wizard of Oz.”

  “Yeah right. I’ll be Dorothy. Oh the hours I spent watching that film. I can date my shoe obsession back to those ruby slippers. You can be Toto. You’ve got the hair for it. Right.” Maddy scribbled some words on the paper in front of her. “Magique, sortilège, secret . . . er . . . enchantement du pays?”

  “Too clumsy.”

  “Enchanté. I know, what about Paysage Enchanté. It means sort of magical country . . . ?”

  Izzie started to write out the letters, copying the thin, florid, distinctively Gallic script from Luce’s notebook. Beneath she doodled and half sketched out a long, veined leaf of centpertuis. It looked very plain and uninspiring on its own. Then, flicking through Luce’s book on the table, she picked out a dried stalk of lavender, straw colored now but still perfect in shape, and sketched it on the paper.