The Little Lady Agency

by Hester Browne

  God! The rent!

  The overdue rent. And the small matter of the phone bill. My salary barely covered bills at the best of times.

  I tried to smile bravely. ‘Well, that will help. I know it’s none of my business but does this mean . . .’ I cast about for a tactful way to put it. ‘Um, are Charles and Hughy . . . ?’

  ‘Charles and Hughy?’ Quentin looked surprised, but shook his head. ‘No, they’ll be heading up the flagship with me.’

  Good. Well, I was pleased about that, at least.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Quentin, ‘that’s it.’ And he looked a bit sad.

  Gabi took the news very badly. If I didn’t know she was a tough nut, I’d have sworn she was crying for real.

  ‘Don’t leave me here with Carolyn!’ she pleaded. ‘It’ll be like working the night shift with Dracula. In a blood donor unit.’

  ‘I won’t be leaving you here, you idiot,’ I said. ‘You’ll all be shipping out to Knightsbridge.’

  ‘Oh God,’ moaned Gabi and sank her head onto her folded arms.

  ‘Think of the shopping, Gabi!’

  ‘I am,’ she groaned from underneath her sleeves.

  Quentin’s office door opened and everyone froze until he barked, ‘Jeremy? A word? ASAP?’

  The door closed. Jeremy walked over in a silence so extreme I could hear his Gucci loafers squeaking.

  ‘Sooo, skirt too tight then?’ simpered Carolyn in passing. Her face looked so innocent that I couldn’t help wondering if she’d been listening in.

  ‘Nothing wrong with my skirt,’ I said, lifting up my chin so I could look her in the eye that didn’t squint. ‘In fact Quentin thinks I brighten up the place no end.’

  ‘Brightened,’ Carolyn corrected me smugly, then looked cross with herself.

  ‘I don’t know what we’ll do without Melissa,’ wailed Gabi. ‘Apart from the small matter of the office grinding to a halt, she’s the only one who knows how to work the coffee machine without getting it full of grit. Quentin must have gone insane. Why has he sacked you?’

  You can’t tell Gabi anything and expect it to stay secret. Hughy had got into loads of trouble that way, with Gabi answering my phone and telling clients what other people were offering. I, on the other hand, prided myself on being the very soul of discretion.

  ‘I’ve been made redundant,’ I reminded her, putting on a brave face. ‘These things happen, don’t they? No sense in getting bitter about it. New challenges and all that.’

  As Gabi sank her head back into her hands, I struggled to think up three positives about the situation.

  More time for dress-making at home – the pocket money sideline that had saved my bacon with the rent more than once already.

  No more fighting Carolyn’s inept filing.

  Um, sometimes things go wrong for a reason?

  For once, none of them made me feel much better.

  There really aren’t that many rewards for being nice, not in real life. I suddenly wished I could throw an all-out hysterical bitch fit – God knows I’d seen enough at home – but I just couldn’t. For a start, I didn’t know what you were meant to do once you ran out of bitchy hysteria. Rush away? Vanish in a puff of smoke?

  ‘Well, I’m sure Daddy will bail you out,’ said Carolyn nastily. ‘Slip you a couple of thousand for a skiing holiday to get over it.’

  ‘No, he will not,’ I retorted.

  I didn’t need to pretend to be dignified here, because it was true. My father had always made a huge deal about how my sisters and I wouldn’t get a penny until we’re fifty. He reckoned that if anyone wanted to marry us for our money, they’d have to stick around for at least twenty-five years to get it.

  His actual words were, ‘If they want to get into my daughters’ pants, they can bloody well pay for it up front.’ Not nice, is he? I think thirty years in Parliament does that to you.

  I used to think it was because he wanted us to earn our own money and be independent, or at least marry for love, but the older I got, the more I realised that Daddy liked to make sure his was the only name on the chequebook. Maybe there was a tax break in it too somewhere. Maybe there wasn’t actually any money. Cash flow was ever a mysterious force in our family. There was never enough for Mummy to buy new clothes, for instance, but always enough to restock the wine cellar.

  Anyway, unlike my confetti-happy sisters and my poor subjugated mother, I vowed at an early age that I’d never be a household slave to any man, especially my father, so I made a point of always earning my own money, what little there was of it. Apart from which, Daddy and I didn’t see eye-to-eye about, well, previous loans.

  ‘I don’t get a penny from my parents,’ I insisted.

  ‘Daddy not paying your bills?’ said Carolyn with great surprise. ‘Do me a favour.’

  Gabi looked shocked too. Her boyfriend, Aaron, was a maths whizz who did something complicated with spread-betting in the City; he earned a small fortune, but had no time to spend it, so Gabi’s main purpose in life was getting her hands on his cash and redistributing it amongst deserving shops, salons and spas. She was the Robin Hood of Bluewater, basically. ‘How else can you afford to work here on this salary?’ she demanded. ‘It doesn’t even cover my credit cards!’

  I looked from Gabi’s sagging jaw to Carolyn’s spiteful moon-face and the red-faced agents in the background, all making panicky calls to their girlfriends, and felt rather affronted. I was no blonde Daddy’s girl. I wasn’t even a blonde, for heaven’s sake.

  ‘I pay my own way,’ I said. ‘I have done since I left college. This and my, um, side projects cover the bills, thank you very much.’

  Carolyn hooked up her eyebrows in a very inelegant enquiry. ‘Side projects?’

  I wasn’t going to mention my dress-making to Carolyn. It was the big office joke that I was a 1950s throwback already, what with my girls’ school education and my pearl earrings. In fact, I made gorgeous T-shirts, embellishing baby-soft cotton shirts with tiny beads and sequins. I only did them for friends, but even so it was quite a lucrative hobby, given that I mainly did it to keep my hands busy and out of the biscuit tin while watching television.

  But Carolyn wasn’t interested in that, and I wasn’t going to tell her.

  ‘Yes, side projects,’ I said and shut my lips tight. My head was beginning to throb with tension and hurt.

  ‘How fascinating,’ she said, sounding bored. ‘Now, come into my office so we can talk about your P45. Why don’t you take your outstanding holiday now, and have the rest of the week off?’

  There are many marks of a true lady, but I believe that one of them is to walk with her head held high into the office of redundancy, while her world falls apart around her. Which I did. For the third time in eighteen months.

  2

  Thank God for Nelson Barber, the flatmate from heaven.

  And I did thank God for him, every time I passed a delicatessen and saw how much stuffed olives would cost if I had to buy them ready-made instead of enjoying their hand-wrought brothers in the comfort of my own house.

  Nelson and I have known each other for years and years. His father was at school with mine, only his dad’s a perfect gentleman with a passion for British naval history – hence Nelson and his brother, Woolfe. Nelson’s three best points are: he’s a fantastic cook; he makes me laugh when I’m feeling sorry for myself; he has a very kind heart beneath his grumpy exterior, and he appreciates good manners. OK, four good points. To be honest, I can’t stop at four – he has loads.

  In fact, it’s easier to do Nelson’s only three bad points: he frequently acts like an off-duty High Court judge; he has very thick brown hair which clogs up the shower; and he derives disproportionate pleasure from taking the mickey out of my occasional faux pas.

  But I can forgive all that because he understands me perfectly and knows when to keep quiet and offer comfort food.

  Hence the first thing Nelson said when I walked
through the door, looking and feeling completely shattered, was, ‘I’ve just tried this new recipe for chocolate orange cake – can I twist your arm and make you taste it?’

  I was forced to admit to myself that that was what you want at the end of a day like today; not rampant sex, or stacks of red roses leaning up against your front door. Not that either had ever been on offer to me.

  ‘Just a tiny, tiny slice,’ I said. Then, when I saw the somewhat literal angle his knife was making, ‘Er, maybe not that tiny, darling.’

  Nelson handed me the wedge of cake and a fork to shovel it in with, and didn’t even ask me what had made my hair so flat and my eye make-up so smeary. But I knew he knew something was badly wrong because he didn’t mention the rent, even though it was now over a fortnight late.

  When I’d devoured the first slice of cake (divine), and Nelson had cut me another giant wedge without me even having to ask, I bit the bullet and filled him in.

  ‘I’ve been made redundant,’ I mumbled through a mouthful of ganache. Sharing the news with Nelson took a tiny sting out of it, but not very much.

  ‘Why? And from when? And,’ he added, ever the pragmatist, ‘with how much severance pay?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t care about that,’ I said, sinking onto the sofa and surreptitiously easing the strain on my skirt zip at the same time. ‘I mean, it wasn’t ideal, but I liked working there, and I hate interviews. I’m just not very good at selling myself. I know how good I am at my job – I just can’t sit there boasting about my typing speeds.’

  Nelson climbed over the back of the sofa and settled himself at the end opposite me. His best jeans were covered in flour and he was wearing socks, but I let it go. ‘Do you want me to talk about the legality of them firing you like this?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Well, how are you for cash?’

  ‘I have a little,’ I said.

  ‘Enough for half a phone bill?’

  The mere thought made me flinch. ‘Is that bigger than half an electricity bill?’

  ‘Try a quarter of the electricity bill.’

  I bit my lip. ‘Oh God, I hate owing money. It’s just so . . . humiliating.’

  ‘Don’t bite my head off, but why not call your dad?’ suggested Nelson. ‘Ask his advice. He owes you that much. And if he can’t find you a job, he should at least lend you some money until you sort yourself out.’

  I noticed Nelson said ‘lend’, not ‘send’. He knew my father too well.

  ‘No. That’s not going to happen,’ I said, slightly evasively. I still hadn’t exactly come clean with Nelson about why Daddy was even less likely than normal to bail me out this time. Nelson had a very low opinion of my boyfriends in general and confessing all about the Perry Hamilton incident – and its financial ramifications – would just have put the tin lid on it.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so proud, Melissa.’

  ‘It’s not pride. It’s . . .’ I wasn’t sure it wasn’t pride, actually. ‘It’s dignity,’ I said instead.

  ‘It’s stupidity, that’s what it is.’ Nelson looked unusually ticked off. ‘He should support you, and he doesn’t. No one in that family supports you. He’s throwing money at Emery, the most foolish girl I’ve ever met, just because she’s getting married to a serial womaniser, and if anyone needs a bit of help it’s you, since you’re all on your own and that creep Orlando’s never going to—’

  ‘Nelson!’ I exclaimed, before I had to hear him say what was inevitably coming next. ‘No!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry . . .’ He held his hands up in front of his face. ‘I didn’t mean it to come out like that, honestly.’

  But all the tears that I’d managed to bottle up while I was at work were rushing up my throat now, hot and choking. I felt so miserable. And to my surprise, I realised I was rather angry too. I could feel my face burning red. It was too mean of Nelson to bring up the marriage thing. Emery, my sister, was two years younger than me, and getting married at the end of the year, albeit to a man whom I’d never actually met, while I remained an on-off spinster who couldn’t even afford a cat to grow wrinkled with. It wasn’t that I lacked a romantic soul, either. Maybe I was too romantic.

  Nelson looked guilty and stretched out a comforting hand towards my knee. He patted it awkwardly. ‘Oh God, listen, what do I know? Maybe he’ll come back from this . . . “break”, or whatever you’ve called it, and decide that you’re meant to be together after all, and . . . Oh, sorry. I’ll just shut up, shall I?’

  The well-meaning kindness in his voice set me off afresh. I had thought Orlando was The One. I honestly still thought he might be. But then I’d thought Perry was The One too. And Toby and Jacques before him. But I hadn’t loved any of them the way I loved Orlando. I truly believed that he was the one I’d been saving myself for. And that made his desertion even harder to bear, since he’d galloped off into the sunset ‘to think about what he wanted from life’ with my dignity, my heart and, well, other prized gifts. Nelson, needless to say, claimed he knew Orlando was a reptile straight away.

  But I didn’t. That’s what comes of getting most of your romantic education from paperback books, and a mother who insists that True Love Conquers All despite being married to an out-and-out cad.

  That was why I was still secretly hoping he might come back and prove me right, and Nelson wrong.

  ‘Oh, bloody, bloody hell!’ I screeched, and marched into my bedroom. There was only one thing that could calm me down now. I needed to wreck something, really break something up, so it could be me inflicting the damage instead of it happening to me.

  I yanked open my sewing basket and pulled out a T-shirt I’d been stitching for a friend of Emery’s: rainbow rows of tiny sequins and pearls.

  I barely even registered how long it had taken me to get that far, or how much she was willing to pay for it, or how many beads there were, nestling on the peachy-soft cotton.

  ‘Oh, Mel, don’t!’ Nelson’s voice drifted through from the sitting room. But I had what Mummy calls the red mist on me, and the T-shirt got it, with both blades of my embroidery scissors.

  Nelson came in, in time to see me slashing away in a fury, beads and sequins and threads and tears flying around and sticking to my face.

  ‘Sweetheart, calm down,’ he muttered and slapped a hand over his eye where a stray sequin had ricocheted off my flying blades.

  ‘I am so fed up of being disposed of!’ I snarled. ‘I am so fed up of being taken for granted!’

  Then I sank down onto the bed and groaned, because T-shirts took me ages, and this one had been a real corker.

  ‘Bang goes a hundred quid,’ said Nelson, gently picking a sequin off my damp forehead. ‘Quite literally, as it turns out.’

  I stared at the explosion of spangly particles around my room. That was the phone bill money.

  And then the bloody phone rang in the hall, like I needed reminding.

  Nelson answered it.

  I was still staring at the debris, wondering if I could persuade Nelson to find me a job temping at his office, when he walked in with the cordless phone. I knew who was on the other end from one glance at his face, which had tightened and turned a funny shade of grey.

  He offered the phone to me without speaking.

  ‘Hello, Daddy!’ I said in a derangedly cheerful voice. I couldn’t help it. I was trained from an early age that it’s polite for ladies to answer telephones as if the National Lottery were calling to offer one the jackpot.

  ‘How’s my little girl?’ he demanded.

  ‘Fine, thank you!’

  Nelson looked astounded and tapped his forehead aggressively.

  I glowered back. Like I was going to tell my father I’d just been sacked.

  ‘You haven’t called home for a while and your mother was wondering if you’d got yourself into trouble, so I said I’d ring up and find out.’

  That was the automatic expectation, by the way. I was their only offspring with a functioning brain and a working knowle
dge of PAYE, and yet I was the one who was meant to be permanently teetering on the brink of disaster.

  Nelson was now miming something very complex, so I turned my back on him while I worked out what my best ploy was.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I lied unconvincingly. ‘But, do you know, Nelson was telling me that I’m coming up to the last moment to put some money in my pension and—’

  ‘Let me stop you there, little lady!’ My father has no qualms about interrupting. It’s not an attractive trait. ‘I hope you’re not about to ask me for some money?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Because we know what happened last time I lent you some money, don’t we?’

  I shuffled over to the window so Nelson couldn’t hear what I was saying. A heavy feeling was expanding in the pit of my stomach, like someone was inflating a balloon in there.

  ‘I do know. And I’ve told you that I’ll pay you back, every penny.’

  ‘Where is he these days, that Perry character?’

  I bit my tongue and tried to remain ladylike. ‘He’s set up a chalet rental agency in Switzerland. Just as he said he would.’ I didn’t know where, that was all. Or what his new mobile number was, now that the other one no longer worked.

  ‘Skiing away on my assets, I daresay.’ My father had the effrontery to guffaw like a horse, then he stopped abruptly. ‘It’s only because you gave him the money that I can’t prosecute that bastard Perry Hamilton for theft, you realise, Melissa? Ten thousand pounds!’ he roared.

  As if he’d ever let me forget.

  ‘I know that,’ I replied heavily. ‘But it was an excellent investment opportunity and I have complete faith that it’s all a misunderstanding. He’ll be on the phone to sort it out any day now.’

  He cackled again and I made a very undignified face into the receiver. ‘My dear girl, how many times have I told you that only men make business deals in bed!’