“Or so we think—she might have been the village bike.”
“Don’t interrupt. I’m in full flow! A real earth mother, who knew what a woman’s role should be, who raised her family in a natural environment, and you are the glowing, healthy proof that her genetic line was strong and true.”
Maddy looked at her in silence. “But come on, this back-to-the-earth thing is nothing new. People have been ramming natural health and beauty products down our throats for years. You can’t move for anchovy and horseradish skin toners and mango and chopped liver foot creams, you said so yourself.”
“Ah, but this is different. All that is within the framework of the modern age. It’s all chrome and clean and clonelike. We are all buying into the same image, whether it’s what we put on our bodies or how we decorate our homes. You’ve come up with something fresh.”
“Can we eat now?”
Pru laughed. “I’m sorry. Got on my high horse a bit, didn’t I?”
The waiter glided over and put down the salad for Pru and risotto with wild mushrooms for Maddy. A real treat. She loved the stuff but never had the time to make it for herself.
“So diatribe over,” said Pru through a mouthful. “Tell me, how was sunny France?”
“Interesting. I think something went on between Izzie and Jean Luc.” Maddy fiddled with her napkin to distract her from the craving for a cigarette. “She seems fairly enrapt by him. You know Jean Luc from the old days. He’s criminally flirtatious and likes nothing more than a bit of encouragement, so much of the time I felt like a spare part. I’m not sure but I think they may have slept together.”
“Bloody hell.” Pru’s eyes widened. “She’s going to have to be very careful the press don’t get hold of that. I have to admit I’m quite surprised. She seems very innocent. What’s her husband like?” She took another sip of her wine. “Is he in the art world?”
“Well, he’s not one of my faves actually. We just didn’t hit it off right from the start. I suppose he had me down as some kind of airhead Sloane with a big house and more money than sense. And now I’ve committed the ultimate sin of going into business with his wife and we’re making a success of it. The better we do, the less he seems to like it. Male pride I guess, especially as he was once in a big London advertising agency, but he was made redundant and isn’t really working at the moment.”
“Who did he work for?” Pru stuck her fork into the salad put in front of her.
Maddy took a mouthful of the delicious risotto and let the flavors spread over her tongue. “Oh don’t ask me,” she mumbled, “something something McCormack, I think.”
“Stock. What’s his first name?”
“Marcus.”
Pru paused for a moment. “Wait a minute. I know about Marcus Stock. Yes, I certainly know about him. And he wasn’t made redundant.”
Maddy stopped, a forkful midway to her mouth. “What?”
“No. It was quite a scandal at the time. Let me think. They were pitching for a big account—British Airways or someone like that—and Stock had been head-hunted by a competing agency. Anyway, as I recall, he committed the cardinal sin and tipped them off about what Mitchell Baines McCormack planned to pitch. He was rumbled and given the heave-ho. It was all over Campaign.” She paused. “Did Izzie tell you he was made redundant?”
Maddy put down her fork, suddenly feeling sick. “No. Not as such. I think she said there was an agency takeover and that, as he’d had a pretty lean period creatively, he lost his job.”
“I’ll say he’s had a lean period. He used to be good, one of the best, but I don’t think there’s an agency in London that would have hired him at the time. No wonder they skedaddled to the provinces. Could explain why he’s not keen on your high profile in the press at the moment. They’d have a field day with that one.”
Maddy leaned back in her chair, disconcerted. Had Izzie known this all along? Was her story just to cover up and save Marcus’s dignity? She couldn’t quite believe that Izzie would have told her a lie—or at least been economical with the truth—but then she’d told her all about Marcus’s job at their first lunch together. She was bound to be cautious with someone she hardly knew.
She worried about Pru’s revelation all the way back on the train. If Izzie hadn’t given her the full story then, why hadn’t she been truthful since? God, Maddy had opened up enough about herself and her life and, gazing out of the window, she felt hurt. Didn’t Izzie trust her enough?
But then there was always the chance that Izzie didn’t know the real story. Marcus was such an arrogant man, and Izzie would have been unlikely to have read the trade press like Campaign, not when she worked in children’s book publishing, which wasn’t exactly cutting-edge. No, she thought, I wouldn’t put it past him to hush up the whole thing and just whisk Izzie out of London on the pretext that they couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Izzie was so wonderfully naïve, and so devoted to him, she’d have done whatever he wanted. But then hadn’t she, Maddy, done exactly the same when Simon suggested—okay, arranged—for them to move out of London, and she had been just as guilty of not really questioning very deeply his work setup. She’d just assumed. How dangerous assumptions can be. Armed with the information, and not quite sure what to do with it, she decided to think about it for a while and simply observe.
“So how are you feeling?” she asked Izzie when she called her later that evening. “Recovered from the trip?”
“Yes, yes fine. Piles of laundry to do and the house in chaos, but it’s nice to be home.” Either Marcus was listening or Izzie was being strangely offhand with her. “It’s been crazy today though. Elements have been on the phone almost constantly wanting to chivvy up the next order. Lillian was at the dentist and Karen got the phone before I could get to it, so God knows what they thought, but I managed a schmooze which you would have been proud of.”
“Learned at the knee of the expert schmoozer!”
“Naturally.” Izzie laughed, and sounded back to normal. “How was Pru?”
“Quite philosophical. She wants to take us beyond hippie, and make us more of a statement against the mediocrity and image obsession of today.” She tried to précis, not quite so eloquently, Pru’s spiel, but Izzie seemed to get the message.
“I can see what she means, but isn’t that a bit of a tall order? We’re only a couple of—”
“Housewives!” they said simultaneously. “That’s exactly what I said.” Maddy put her feet up on the table and lit her first cigarette of the day. “But she seems to think we have hit a nerve, and that we must exploit it. I was thinking. Let’s see if Peter can come up and we could have a meeting with him and Geoff about financing the new product launch. We could get on with sourcing the ingredients tomorrow, and then you can call Jean Luc and give him the centpertuis order.” She waited, expecting Izzie’s coy giggle. There was a pause.
“No, you ring him, Maddy. Would you mind?”
Confused, Maddy didn’t mention him again, or Marcus and the sacking, but the rest of the week was too mad anyway. The team worked flat out, with intermittent complaints from Crispin that at this rate he’d forget how to mix cement, he hadn’t done it for so long, and the next order was ready for dispatch to Elements on time and in one piece.
Maddy’s ear went pink she spent so long on the phone to suppliers and to labs about accreditation for the samples of the moisturizer, and when she wasn’t doing that, she was poring over Luce’s book, and vats of more trial recipes with Izzie. There was barely time to mention anything, so preoccupied were they with proportions, temperatures, and fragrances, and Lillian had to remind them not to miss a meeting with the Web site design team—an hour’s meeting about Flash plug-ins and HTML that might as well have been in Serbo-Croat.
“Is it just me”—Maddy sighed, flopping into a chair with mental exhaustion, “or is the rest of the world talking bollocks?”
“Well, how about this for plain speaking?” said Lillian, smiling enigmatically as she repla
ced the phone. “That was the alternative therapies buyer at Harrods. She wants to arrange a meeting.”
Lying on Will’s bed a week later, curtains drawn against the evening sunshine, and listening to him read hesitantly about Biff, Chip, and the Magic Key, Maddy felt as though she too had held a magic key and been transported by mistake into a new and strange world. Over the last incredible weeks she had been in negotiations with one of the biggest cosmetics outlets in the country, had been bamboozled by techno-whizes, had been approached by the most famous department store in the world, all because of a weed recipe Izzie and she had cobbled together in her kitchen. Yes, the money was thrilling, and they had both gleefully signed a fat check to pay back Peter. The fees were secure, bills could be paid, and she had new car brochures—eco friendly, of course—sitting on the side in the kitchen just waiting for her to pick the color for the trim.
But frankly it scared her. It wasn’t so much the pots of healing balm per se, although they’d started to dominate her days and most of her dreams at night. It was what they had come to represent.
Here she was curled up with her little son, the same Mummy he had always known, and yet she was having to be someone else at the same time, acting out a role that was uncomfortable and farcical. What was she playing at, having Colette drive thirty miles to buy chicken nuggets and pizza for the children—there was only so much wholemeal pasta they could stomach—in case someone spotted her in the local supermarket? Only two days ago she had found herself with a copy of Tatler in her hand in WHSmith in Ringford, but had had to stuff it back on the shelf as if it was something smutty when Fiona Price had lolloped around the corner.
“Hey, Mum, you’re hurting me,” complained Will, and she realized she was holding him too tightly as if he, like the rest of her previous life, would suddenly evaporate. This time last year they had still been in London, and she’d never even heard of Ringford. Life had been simple, mapped out by an unchallenging routine of lunches and dinner parties, interspersed with copious bouts of shopping. Now here she was, a single mother, at the vanguard of a new sociological trend with implications she couldn’t begin to grasp. What on earth would Simon have said about it all? Something funny and sensible and grounding, no doubt.
The sense of being on a bolting horse only worsened a couple of days later when Peter and Geoff arrived at the barn. “It seems to me,” launched Geoff without preamble “and I don’t know anything about cosmetics, that you should exploit this success story right now and launch further products. Create a range and a stronger brand image.”
“We’re onto it,” said Izzie, “and we think we’ve got the recipe right for a moisturizer and a cleanser. We just need the accreditation, but I’ve a bit of a boyfriend at the labs and he’ll make sure it’s tested as soon as possible.” She picked up some notes from the desk. “And now that we are ordering broadly similar ingredients but in substantially larger quantities, we’re pretty sure we can get huge discounts on our orders.”
Geoff whipped out a pad, and they all settled down to number crunch. “You certainly have the capacity here,” he said, solemn and businesslike, “to cope with the extra production, but you will need to get in more staff.” He lowered his voice. “Your current . . . er . . . workforce is working well, but you are going to need to treble it.” He handed each of them a spreadsheet, and Maddy could just about work out from the sea of figures what their outlay would have to be. Next to it, he had calculated the potential income from extending the range and had estimated the profit once costs were deducted. She had to look twice, convinced he had put the decimal point in the wrong place.
“Are you sure this is right?”
“Obviously it’s a bit of a stab in the dark, but to the nearest grand I think I’m not far off.”
Izzie and Maddy looked at each other in silence.
“Time to buy back that piano, I think.” Izzie smiled, delight in her eyes.
“I think you might be able to run to the whole orchestra!”
Chapter 14
As July settled in, it started to get cocky, chasing away the rain clouds to start off with, then all clouds, even the wispy, high-up ones that look like cherubs. There was day after day of uninterrupted azure, with barely a breath of wind. So where, thought Izzie, does all this dew come from? The bottoms of her drawstring hemp trousers were soaked on the short walk across the lawn to the car each morning. Of course, the grass was far too long, but Marcus had been assiduous in not doing anything beyond taking care of the children for the last few weeks. He took them to school and picked them up in his new car, a very efficient people mover with a name that sounded like a 1950s cinema chain, and wearing his fancy new duds—mostly linen, thank goodness, so the image remained intact.
He didn’t seem to feel awkward with her providing the money for the new treats he was obviously enjoying. Or if he did, he hid it pretty well. It was so hard to imagine what he was feeling anymore. He gave no clues. At first, Izzie had wondered if he would feel she was trying to buy her way back into his favor, by releasing some money for these and the other things they had needed for so long—like a new downstairs loo and new carpet in the children’s rooms. But he seemed remarkably sanguine about the whole thing. In a way she’d been dreading him striking an attitude, going all proud on her, but when he didn’t she felt peeved—and this troubled her. He didn’t even comment when her piano turned up again—yet she’d probably have hated it if he had—just started to pile his discarded newspapers on it, as he had done before.
It hadn’t been the first thing she bought after France. No, her guilt had been too overwhelming for that, and she’d started with the telephoto lenses he needed. Only once they were safely locked up in his darkroom could she think about what she really wanted. She’d been torn about going to the piano warehouse, in case it wasn’t there anymore. Finally, with a pocketful of readies and her heart in her mouth, she’d driven over there. At first, she didn’t see it, and angry disappointment tightened her throat. She’d been about to leave, too upset to even ask about it, when the funny little man who’d come to value it suddenly popped up. He’d stared at her, blinking rapidly for a moment or so, then hurried to the office without saying a word. A moment later, he’d reappeared and bobbed up in front of her so suddenly, she’d yelped.
“Mrs. Stock, isn’t it? Were you, er, looking for something special?”
“I was just looking, you know . . . wondering if—”
“Your piano, the Bechstein. A fine instrument. The finest we’ve had here in a long time. It’s not here . . .”
Her shoulders slumped. “Oh . . . that’s what I was afraid of. Well, I suppose—”
“No, Mrs. Stock. I moved it out of here. Actually . . .” He stopped and fumbled for words. “I moved it into the house. The temperature out here—it gets very warm in the afternoons. I’ve . . . I’ve been playing it myself actually.” He laughed sadly and shrugged his shoulders. “I knew you’d be back for it, so I thought it had better be kept out of the way. I didn’t want any children”—he shuddered—“with sticky fingers trying it out. We can arrange for it to be brought back to you later this week.”
Izzie was overwhelmed and laughter bubbled in her throat. “You were hiding it, weren’t you? Trying to stop anyone else seeing it. I don’t believe it! I was so afraid it would have gone. Thank you so much!”
He accepted her thanks with embarrassed pleasure, but had the grace to be shamefaced when she saw the price he had been hoping to sell it for—almost twice what he’d given her. Still—she was so pleased that she gladly split the difference, then added on some more. “Consider it payment for board and lodging,” she called as she drove away, waving through the open window. And she hummed along tunelessly with Radio 3 all the way home.
But there wasn’t much time to play it. An unsolicited plug from a flavor-of-the-month actress on Parkinson resulted in another surge of sales and an invitation to appear on Breakfast TV. What an ordeal that had been! The Paysage Enchanté
philosophy had been raked over on the comfy sofas, but considering their nerves, they both thought they’d handled it pretty well.
They can’t have done too badly because the requests for the balm increased even further. Izzie’s feet barely touched the ground, and it was only a phone call from her mother asking her what she wanted that reminded her that her birthday was looming. Marcus sure as hell hadn’t mentioned it. If anything, he was on the defensive. “But you never said!” he ranted a few days later. “I’m not a mind reader! I just assumed you’d want to have a quiet time with us. I mean, you’re hardly ever here are you?”
“I don’t want a big fuss. I just thought you might have booked something. Dinner out, flowers and a babysitter, something like that. And I did hope I wouldn’t have to buy my own cake this year. Come on, Marcus. It is a special birthday.”
She wearily began to clear the breakfast table. It looked like the piano would have to be her present to herself.
“What do you mean you’re not doing anything?”
Izzie looked up from the desk. “Well, I made the stupid mistake I suppose of leaving it up to him to organize something. Silly me!”
“It’s your fortieth birthday, for heaven’s sake, even reaching those heady heights is worth celebrating, though of course I wouldn’t know.”
“No.” Izzie smiled wanly. “You’re just a mere babe.” She rubbed her hands wearily over her eyes, and went back to the spreadsheet in front of her. “If we get Karen and Angie to do the early morning shift, then Donna to start at three, we should be able to keep the line running for about sixteen hours. Keep that up for a week and we’ll have managed two weeks’ production in—”
“No, I’m sorry, I’m not going to let this drop, Izzie. It’s your birthday, and you’ve worked bloody hard over the last seven months. I love a party and we’re going to celebrate.” She thought for a moment. “It’s Friday, isn’t it? Right, book a babysitter or persuade that Marcus of yours. You’re coming over to my house.”
Goodbye, Jimmy Choo Page 25