The Perfect Present

by Karen Swan

  ‘Don’t let Alex freak you out. He’s just a teenager, really.’

  ‘It’s fine. I can handle him.’

  Cat nodded, twirling her spoon round her bowl distractedly. ‘So, I’ve been thinking and I wanted to run an idea past you.’ She took a nervous breath. ‘How would you feel about me throwing a cocktail party for you when we get back? You know, to showcase your designs. I’ve got so many friends who I know would just love your stuff, and I’d love to help if I could.’

  ‘But you haven’t even seen my work yet.’

  Cat shrugged. ‘I know, but Orlando and Rob have been raving about it, and, I mean, if they’re excited . . .’ She put a hand on Laura’s forearm. ‘Oh, tell me you’ll let me. It could be your official launch. We’d have such a scream.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Laura replied. ‘I’m so flattered.’

  ‘Say yes.’

  ‘. . . Yes. Please.’

  Kitty came back with her fresh custard, her face falling as she saw Cat settled in her seat. ‘What are you two plotting?’ she asked, sitting cross-legged in the snow instead.

  ‘Laura’s domination of the London accessories scene. I’m going to throw a party for her when we get home and invite all my best and dearest and richest friends,’ Cat replied, eyes gleaming. ‘By Easter we’ll have made Laura the hottest jewellery designer in London.’ Her opal eyes opened wider suddenly. ‘Oh, Rob!’

  Rob, who was sitting on the parked skidoos with David and Orlando, looked over.

  ‘Don’t you know Bertie Thingamabob?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, he’s on the BFC. You met at that Asprey’s dinner last summer.’

  ‘Bertie Penryn?’

  ‘That’s the one!’

  ‘I’ve met him once, Cat.’

  ‘Yes, but couldn’t you make an introduction for Laura? To get her into the tents at London Fashion Week.’ She looked back at Laura, grasping her hand eagerly in hers. ‘That’s where you need to be if you want to get the international buyers.’

  Laura looked over at Rob, her eyes hopeful.

  He shrugged petulantly.

  ‘He can,’ Cat assured her. ‘He will. I have my methods of persuasion,’ she winked.

  Laura beamed as Cat gave a squeal of excitement and Kitty started drilling her feet in the snow like a drum roll.

  ‘New dress, new dress, new dress,’ Kitty chanted.

  ‘God, the tents . . . That’s, like, the centre of my universe. I’m just so overwhelmed,’ Laura murmured, shaking her head. Wait till she told Fee!

  ‘We’ll make you a star, baby,’ Cat laughed. ‘We’ll organize the party for you as soon as we get back – it’s vital we catch everybody before Christmas, because straight after they shoot off to the Caribbean. And I’ll ask my friend Jinny to come too – she’s the jewellery editor at Harper’s. And we must ask . . . ooh, what’s her name, the new diarist at Tatler?’ Cat asked Kitty, clicking her fingers as she tried to remember. Kitty looked at her blankly. ‘Araminta Pitt! She’ll take one look at all the women clamouring for your stuff and that’s it. You’re in!’

  Laura shook her head in amazement. A society launch party in London? An introduction with the British Fashion Council? The FT feature had been a lucky break that had inadvertently come through Fee’s well-intentioned meddling, but this was another league altogether. Cat was finding ways to position her with the fashion elite and bring her face-to-face with a cash-rich, sophisticated clientele. The ripple effect from those women alone would probably span three continents.

  She’d need a logo and proper packaging. A website and a studio that wasn’t in the middle of a creek. She should be in London, and . . .

  She stopped herself. No! What was she doing? Laura felt the familiar ambition begin to throb inside her. This was everything she had told Jack and Fee she didn’t want – she’d told them she wanted to keep everything small, local, bespoke – but already she could feel her brain beginning to engage, the ambition that she struggled to subdue leaking out.

  Let Cat host the party. It was just a party. Nothing else had to change.

  The light was fading by the time they got back, and energy with it. Everyone was shattered, Laura most of all, but she couldn’t hightail it up to her room to rest. She might have been welcomed with open arms into the fold and played with the rest of them, but her brief was still different from theirs. They had been invited as friends; she had been invited to work. Orlando hadn’t been so far from the truth after all when he’d likened her to an undercover reporter. Somehow she had to get an interview in with Alex without Cat noticing. Tomorrow he’d be driving back to Milan and she would be flying home, and it was Cat’s birthday in twelve days’ time.

  ‘Laura,’ Cat said as they pulled their boots off in the porch. ‘Would you mind flinging the black lace dress back in my room tonight? Sasha’s going to take it in with the rest of the dry-cleaning tomorrow.’

  ‘Of course. And I’ll pay to have it cleaned, naturally.’

  Cat smiled kindly and simply shook her head. Laura felt instantly foolish.

  She padded down to her bedroom and immediately started running a bath before flinging herself backwards on to the bed like a felled tree. She felt fatigue tiptoe up her body, leadening her muscles, slowing her breathing down, the radiant heat of being indoors again beginning to sedate her.

  Her phone rang quietly on the bedside table and she knew it would be Jack, but she was too tired to pick it up, even though she knew she should speak to him. She needed just a little more time to regroup before she reconnected with him and her real world. She felt so far away from him right now – not just geographically, but within herself, and she knew he would hear it in her voice instantly. She could do without the questions and puzzled pauses. She wanted to be left alone.

  She closed her eyes, listening to the water running in the background. Everyone was chilling in their rooms for an hour or so before reconvening for a film and pizza downstairs at seven. But Alex – she must fit him in somehow. Bath, interview, film? It worked for her, but what was he doing? Swimming? Sleeping? Making up with Isabella again?

  With a weary sigh, she pushed herself up off the bed and retrieved the dress from her wardrobe. Cat was just skipping towards the lift in a thin, white cotton bathrobe as she stepped into the hall.

  ‘Oh, Cat! I’ve got the dress,’ she called after her.

  Cat turned back to find Laura holding it up. ‘Thanks, Laura. You’re a star! Just throw it on my bed, will you? I’m going down for a facial.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Laura heard the lift doors trill open as she stepped into the Leopard suite and took in that marvellous carpet again. It really was a thing of beauty and testament to Cat’s exquisite taste that it didn’t come across as remotely tacky, but as high end and sumptuous.

  She walked quickly across the room, turning the neck of the hanger round so that it would hook on to the wardrobe door, when the bathroom door next to her opened suddenly.

  Rob, towelling his hair dry and with only a towel over his hips, stood stock still at the sight of Laura – and not his wife – in his bedroom.

  Laura gaped back at the sight of him. ‘Oh God! I’m so sorry. Cat asked for this dress back for the dry-cleaning and I . . . She told me to put it on the bed, but I thought I’d better hang it up because it’s so expensive . . . I assumed no one else was in here. I would have knocked otherwise. I’m so sorry.’ She was gabbling.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said tersely.

  ‘What?’ she asked, taken aback, as he strode past, resuming his towel-drying.

  ‘Stop being sorry. All I ever hear you saying is fucking “sorry”.’

  Laura stared at him, stunned, as he walked over to the balcony doors, the muscles in his back clearly delineated as he towelled his head vigorously. Silently she ran over the carpet, catching Rob’s eye in the mirror as she left.

  ‘Shit. Laura, wait! I—’

  The door clicked behind her a
nd she ran into her room, shocked, angry tears streaming down her cheeks. She leaned back against the door, wondering why Rob was being so persistently aggressive to her. He’d been in a cold fury all afternoon, ever since she’d sided with Cat about not skidooing. Was that really such a crime? She had just jumped out of a helicopter with him. That more than sang for her supper.

  ‘Laura?’

  She blinked her eyes open in fright. Alex was leaning against her bathroom door, watching her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘What are you doing in here?’

  A knock on the door behind her made her jump again, and she moved away from it. Rob came in, flustered and urgent.

  ‘Laura, look . . .’ His voice died away as he saw Alex in the bathroom. ‘What’s he doing in here?’ he demanded, just as he clocked her wet cheeks.

  ‘I could ask you the same thing, mate,’ Alex remarked.

  Rob looked down at himself, half dressed.

  Laura looked back at Alex and he held his hands up in a gesture of appeasement. ‘I came to see whether you wanted to interview me for the necklace,’ he shrugged. ‘We’re running out of time. I knocked, no one answered, I could hear water running, so I came in. And it’s just as well I did – the bath was about to run over.’

  Laura rolled her eyes heavenwards, annoyed with herself. Water damage on the top floor of the chalet? That would have been just precious.

  ‘Thanks. I forgot. I just went to return Cat’s dress, and . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

  Alex looked questioningly at Rob. Everyone was accounting for their movements. What was he doing here?

  But Rob had settled into another stony silence, and Laura saw again how very little the two men actually liked each other.

  ‘The film’s at seven,’ Rob muttered, turning to go.

  ‘We knew that, didn’t we?’ Alex asked her before looking back at Rob. ‘We knew that. Why are you really here?’ he smiled. It was so clear what he was doing – tarring Rob with his brush. He had kissed Laura, so therefore Rob must be chasing after her too.

  Rob threw him an icy glare and slammed the door behind him.

  Laura and Alex stood in awkward silence for a moment. ‘Shall we do this now, then?’ Laura asked curtly, wiping her cheeks dry with the back of her hand and walking over to the bureau, where her notebook and pens were. ‘I’m tired and I’m sure you must be too. I’d really like to have a rest before this evening.’

  Alex watched her cross the room, taking in her fresh anger. ‘I also wanted to apologize about this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I was bang out of order.’

  ‘Yes. You were.’

  ‘Do you hate me?’

  ‘I don’t have any feeling about you,’ she snapped, thumbing through her book to the next new page.

  Alex looked like he’d been slapped. Telling him she hated him would have been far preferable to utter indifference, she guessed.

  She sat down in the chair, hoping he believed her, and dug her toes into the carpet like an axe into ice. ‘Do you want to sit down?’

  He looked around. The pretty chair was too small to accommodate his shoulders. ‘On the bed?’ he asked, looking at her.

  ‘Of course,’ she shrugged with a casualness she didn’t feel.

  He sank on to the edge of the bed, his knees wide apart and his arms draped loosely on them. ‘So.’ He fiddled with the gold signet ring on his left hand.

  Laura inhaled deeply, trying to focus on the job in hand. She looked down at her notebook, knowing the answers to the questions weren’t in there, but she didn’t want to meet his eyes. ‘Tell me about you and Cat,’ she said quietly, more gently, as she pushed her finger over the silky-smooth paper. ‘Rob said you were her first love.’

  ‘I’ll bet he did.’ He shrugged as he took in her quizzical expression. ‘What? It keeps me nicely boxed up, doesn’t it? I’m just the first love but Cat’s the love of his life. I got the Once-Upon-a-Time, but he’s got the Happy-Ever-After.’

  Jesus. If he was going to be this chippy all the way through . . . ’How did you and Cat meet?’ she asked wearily.

  Alex’s expression changed at the memory. ‘At sixth-form college. I can even remember the day I first saw her. She walked into the economics class wearing white jeans and a red and white striped jumper. The sun was shining behind her at the door, making her hair all, like, bright. Like a halo.’

  ‘Was she an angel?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he murmured. ‘Top three in the class. I only passed because of her. There was nowhere else to sit except next to me, and so that was that. I could hardly talk to her for the first term, and it was another term after that before I could look her in the eye. She was so beautiful.’

  This was better. ‘So what changed? How did you get her to fall in love with you?’

  ‘By making her an offer she couldn’t refuse. I bought tickets for Take That at Wembley. Had to sell my bike to do it, but it was worth it – an early lesson in speculating to accumulate,’ he chuckled. ‘Everyone was so jealous. Her friends because they wanted to see Mark Owen. Mine because they’d have sold their mothers to be with her. After that, we were inseparable. The chemistry between us was insane.’

  ‘What’s your best memory of her?’

  ‘Easy.’ He smiled so that his eyes shone. ‘Skinny-dipping at midnight on the summer solstice, the night after our last exam. God, she looked breathtaking,’ he murmured, his eyes moving as though they were even now skimming over her figure, the image burnt on to his retinas. ‘It was her idea.’

  ‘Oh.’ There it was again – that wildness. ‘Was it just the two of you?’

  ‘Thank God,’ he nodded. ‘It was a memorable night for other reasons too.’

  ‘You mean . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ He watched her, the way her eyes slid away from his, the way she pressed the nail of her index finger against her thumb. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me about it?’

  ‘No. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘You don’t think that something as seminal as Cat losing her virginity to her first love is relevant to this project? I’d have said it was a central story in her life.’

  Laura bit her lip, her eyes still on the carpet. ‘Fine. But leave out the gory details.’

  Alex grinned. ‘Well, like I said, it was the day of our final exam. Everyone had been messing about afterwards at the Rec on their bikes and boards. Someone had brought along a boom box and we were all lying about on the grass, smoking and drinking beers. Kitty and Joe were there too, snogging each other’s faces off.’ He chuckled. ‘It was just one of those days when everything felt right, y’know? It was hot, there was a glorious sunset, the entire summer was stretching out before us . . . Cat was wearing a little pink dress, like a tennis dress, with no sleeves and one of those flippy pleated skirts . . . such great legs,’ he murmured. ‘Anyway, we were there for hours, just singing and watching the sun go down, when suddenly one of the lads – Tom Anderson, I think it was – pitched up with some bags of flour, and before we knew it, everyone was having a massive flour fight. It got in our eyes, our mouths, our hair, up our noses. And our clothes were covered. We looked like ghosts by the end of it.’

  Laura smiled at the vision of their teenage antics.

  ‘It got really bad when someone started chucking the beer around too, though. That’s when everything got lumpy and sticky. Cat said there was no way she could go home looking like that, that her mother would kill her. I told her to come back to mine for a shower, but she just . . . she just gave me this smile. I’d never seen her smile like that before. Sometimes, I’ve almost thought she planned the whole thing somehow.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, she took my hand and said we should go down to the mill pond at Tipper’s Brook.’ He looked straight at her. ‘I swear to God that was the most terrifying moment of my life, that one. Because I knew then what was going to happen.’

  ‘Was it your first time too?’

  ‘No. But it might as well have been. It changed us b
oth. She was the first girl who had ever meant anything to me.’

  ‘What made you split up?’ she asked.

  ‘We never really did. It was just a series of longer and longer breaks. The first one was when we went to university, and, looking back, my biggest mistake. I had a place at Manchester too, but I didn’t want to seem like I was trailing there after her, so I went to Durham. She, uh . . . went off the rails a bit.’

  ‘You mean she cheated on you?’

  Alex looked directly at her. ‘Sam was a bad influence.’ He forced a smile. ‘But fun. I’ve forgiven her since, clearly.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, once I knew the score, I made a point of playing around too. There was no point moping after her a hundred and thirty miles away, knowing she was off with . . . well, God knows who. But back home in the holidays we just couldn’t stay away from each other. We ended up coming to a sort of unofficial agreement that we’d see who we wanted in term time and get back together at home.’

  ‘And you were happy with that?’

  ‘I had to be,’ he shrugged. ‘In theory it was the ideal scenario. My mates couldn’t believe it – whichever girl I wanted at Durham, and Cat back at home?’ He looked up at her from under his thick lashes. ‘It never really felt as good as it sounded.’

  ‘What happened when she moved to London?’

  ‘Pretty much the same. I hung out at her and Sam’s flat a lot, but we were fighting more. She wanted her freedom. I represented home to her, and home was everything she wanted to escape. She didn’t want to even think about it.’

  ‘What? Even Kitty?’

  ‘Yes. Even her.’

  ‘But why did she want to escape from home?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Her parents had had a bitter divorce. It really screwed with her head,’ he said. ‘Anyway, things got steadily worse between us – a real “couldn’t live with each other, without each other” scenario. It messed us both up.’

  ‘So what was the final nail in the coffin?’

  ‘Rob. He literally met her and married her within months. It was one of our “off” times and the first I even knew of him was when the invitation dropped on to the mat.’ He jumped up off the bed and began pacing, the tone of his muscles sharp beneath his skin.