Gucci Gucci Coo

by Sue Margolis

  Chapter 3

  When Ruby got back to Les Sprogs, there wasn’t a single customer in the shop. Even though the business was doing so well, she couldn’t stop herself worrying when there were no customers. Today, though, she was less concerned. First of all it was a Monday morning and Mondays were always slow. Second it was raining, and third, all the other shops in the street were empty.

  Chanel was leaning against the counter, her head buried in one of the downmarket glossies she always liked to read. “Pisces,” she announced, noticing Ruby walking into the shop. She stabbed the horoscope page with a finger. “That’s me…hang on, this looks interesting: ‘Jupiter, planet of good fortune, is about to align with Venus, planet of romance. This could signal a windfall, not to mention a long awaited boost to your love life.’ Wow. You know what I reckon?”

  “What?” Ruby said, taking a sip from the bottle of water she’d just picked up at Starbucks—to rid herself of all the caffeine she’d soaked up at the hospital. She placed a large cappuccino on the counter for Chanel.

  Chanel acknowledged it with an “Ooh, cheers, I’ve been gagging for a coffee.” Then she straightened. “OK, I reckon this means somebody’s going to die and leave me enough money to pay for those collagen injections I’ve been wanting in my G-spot.”

  Chanel had been with Les Sprogs since it opened. Officially, she was Ruby’s number two, but apart from the accounts, which were Ruby’s province, they pretty much worked as a team. They shared everything from serving customers and dealing with phone and e-mail orders to stocktaking and going out to fetch the coffee. At Christmas and during sale time they took on temporary staff to help out, but mostly they managed on their own.

  Stella always used to get sniffy when she found Chanel reading magazines because she said it created a bad impression. Since Chanel was meticulous about only doing it when the shop was empty and since she worked her socks off the rest of the time, Ruby never minded. The truth was that Stella wasn’t overly keen on Chanel and had never wanted to take her on.

  “Are you mad?” Stella had snapped at Ruby after Chanel’s interview—to which she had insisted on coming even though she had agreed to leave the hiring and firing to Ruby. “We can’t possibly have somebody like that working here.” The words like that had been put in italics.

  It seemed that she had taken one look at Chanel’s bosomy size fourteen frame, encased in tight stonewashed denim, her brassy blonde highlights and her very, very visible panty line, and practically had an attack of the vapors.

  “She looks like an Essex barmaid,” Stella went on. “And then there’s her accent. Her vowels are flatter than roadkill and her grasp of grammar is nonexistent. I simply refuse to employ somebody who can’t even decline the past participle of the verb ‘to be.’ Doesn’t she know that the second person singular is were, not woz?”

  But Ruby had seen beyond the clothes and Chanel’s deficiency in the declension department. In Chanel Stubbs, she saw a chatty, warmhearted soul, who clearly adored children. She was thirty, had been a nanny for ten years before applying to Les Sprogs and came with outstanding references. When Ruby asked her why she had given it up, Chanel explained that she had just got married and that the long, unsociable hours meant she didn’t get much time with her husband.

  As she listened to Chanel talking about her work as a nanny, a plan formed in Ruby’s mind. It occurred to her that Les Sprogs needed a unique selling point, something that made it different from all the other mother and baby shops in London. One way of achieving this, she thought, might be to make it somewhere that attracted not only women but their children, too. From the heartfelt way Chanel talked about the children she had looked after—she was in regular touch with all of them—Ruby thought it was fair to assume that little ones loved her as much as she loved them. Chanel, she decided, would be a huge hit with customers’ children.

  Then fate stepped in to prove the point. Halfway through the interview—which was being conducted at the back of the shop—a friend of Stella’s turned up with her three-year-old. Stella insisted on breaking off for a few minutes to chat to her. What happened next was typical of Stella. She introduced her friend to Ruby, but not to Chanel. She also completely ignored the little girl. It was only when Blanche, Stella’s yapping pooch, jumped up at the child, scaring her and making her cry, that Stella was forced to acknowledge her.

  “Oh, that’s just her way of showing she likes you,” Stella cooed, making no attempt to remove the dog, which was still pawing the child. It was the little girl’s agitated mother who scooped up the dog, handed her to Stella and suggested the animal might be in need of a walk. While Stella got affronted, but carried on smiling in an attempt not to show it, Chanel knelt down to the child’s height, shook her hand and said: “Hiya, I’m Chanel. What’s your name?”

  The child turned and buried her head in her mother’s skirts, but Chanel persevered. “Wow, that’s a beautiful dolly you’ve got there. Isn’t she the one I’ve seen on the telly? Doesn’t her hair grow by magic?”

  The little girl looked back at Chanel and rewarded her with a hesitant nod.

  “Can you do the magic and make her hair grow?” Chanel asked her.

  Another nod, but this time there was a smile as well.

  “Do you think you could show me? I’d love to see it.”

  A couple of minutes later the child, who finally revealed her name to be Freya, was sitting on Chanel’s lap chatting away with her as if she’d known her all her life. Ruby felt really guilty breaking them up to continue the interview.

  Ruby was left in no doubt that Chanel would be perfect for Les Sprogs. Her references had said she was a hard worker and on top of that she had proven how well she got on with children.

  Stella took some persuading, but after Ruby had worked on her gently but consistently for a week, she threw up her hands, said “OK, on your head be it,” and agreed to give Chanel a month’s trial. For her part, Ruby acknowledged that Chanel’s stonewashed jeans probably wouldn’t play well in Notting Hill and she agreed to introduce a staff uniform. Ruby had pale blue Tshirts made with the scarlet Les Sprogs logo across the front, which she and Chanel wore over smart black trousers.

  Although she kept promising to be more hands-off as far as the business was concerned, Stella found it impossible. Much as Ruby had expected, she turned out to be an almost pathological control freak and insisted on being consulted at every turn. Irritating as Ruby found this, she was forced to admit that if she had invested as much money as Stella had invested in Les Sprogs, she might well have become a pathological control freak, too.

  Long before the Chanel issue, though, they’d had another major difference of opinion. They hadn’t been able to agree about how the shop should be decorated. Ruby envisaged a modern minimalist feel with lots of primary colors and the walls covered in giant black-and-white photographs of pregnant women, babies and children playing. Stella wanted the Martha Stewart, weather-boarded house in Maine look: natural wood floors, painted dressers, squidgy check linen sofas, teddies and Beatrix Potter mice wearing aprons and wire-rimmed glasses dotted about the place.

  As usual Ruby had fought for her vision, but without getting into a full-blown confrontation with Stella. On this issue, though, Ruby was finding it particularly hard, since she was convinced her approach was the right one.

  It was her father, Phil, who finally convinced his daughter to pull back. He said shop design was essentially packaging and that he knew from his own experience how important it was to give the customer what she wanted, rather than force your own vision on her. Even though he agreed with Ruby that the image Stella had in mind was twee and dated, he could also see that it was cozy and reassuring. “It harks back to an era—albeit a nonexistent one—of happy, wholesome families gathered round the pine kitchen table eating Mom’s apple pie. It’s the Notting Hill Billies meets the Ingallses. You just watch how it pulls in the punters.” Of course he was right.

  Ruby’s climb down over t
he shop design issue was immediately rewarded by Stella’s announcing her departure to New York. These days—because of all her business commitments over there—she visited Les Sprogs no more than once or twice a year. Finally she was leaving Ruby to run things alone.

  Occasionally she would phone, but it was only to touch base. If Chanel happened to take a call from Stella, she was always her chatty self, but their conversation never lasted more than a few seconds. Ruby knew that it was Stella, as she would cut the conversation short since she merely tolerated Chanel. Even though Stella was now in no doubt about how popular Chanel was with the customers and their children, it wasn’t in her nature to back down and admit she may have been wrong about not wanting to take her on. Whenever she visited the shop, Stella greeted Chanel with the kind of distaste that Jerry Seinfeld reserved for Newman. Ruby assumed it was the same when they spoke on the phone.

  In true Chanel style, she refused to let Stella get her down—particularly as she hardly ever saw her. Nor was she ever rude to her. She understood that if she were rude or started a row, it would have affected Ruby’s relationship with Stella. Then Ruby would have no choice but to let Chanel go.

  So, with a good-natured smile and muttering something barely audible about it being “the icicle” on the phone, she would hand the receiver to Ruby. Then she would go and find some shelves to tidy.

  “C’MON,” RUBY SAID, re Chanel’s proposal to have collagen injected into her G-spot. “You wouldn’t really have injections up there, would you?”

  Chanel thought for a second. “Dunno. They said on this plastic surgery program that you have the most amazing orgasms afterward. Only problem is that if I went for it, Craig would go ballistic. He’d be worried sick about it all going wrong.”

  Chanel’s husband, Craig, was a London plumber who made a fortune. He was a huge ex-navy, rugby-playing bear of a man with a heart every bit as big as Chanel’s. He would have lassoed the moon for her if he could. Collagen injections aside, whatever Chanel wanted, Chanel got. Not that she asked for much. She wasn’t the demanding type. Nevertheless, she only had to mention in passing that she’d seen a kitchen in Ikea that she liked and it was hers. Ditto bathrooms, lounge furniture and jewelry.

  Chanel returned Craig’s love by refusing to take off the gold Chanel earrings he had given her on their wedding day. For her, the interlocking Cs stood for Chanel and Craig and were a symbol of their eternal love.

  She also cooked him a “proper meat and two veg man meal” every night when she got home, ironed his boxers (not that he’d ever asked her to) and generally fussed and doted over him as if he were a helpless baby.

  Chanel was no fool. She knew that in many ways Craig had become her surrogate child and she his, but neither of them could help treating the other the way they did. Until a baby came along, which, with the failure of one IVF attempt after another, seemed less and less likely, each remained the center of the other’s life.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” Chanel often said. “I come from a family of six. Mum only had to look at me dad and she’d be knocked up. My sisters are the same. All breed like blinkin’ rabbits. Then there’s me: one miscarriage and that’s me lot.”

  Ruby once asked her how she could bear to work in a mother and baby shop where she was constantly surrounded by children and pregnant women. Chanel had shrugged. “Dunno, suppose by rights I should want to run a mile,” she said. “But I love babies and kids and I’m buggered if I’m gonna run away and let my problems get the better of me. I just know me and Craig ’ave to plow on with the IVF and that one day it will be me standing the other side of this counter trying to decide which Moses basket to choose.” Chanel paused. “Bloody hell, I must sound like some obsessed nutter.” Ruby told her she didn’t sound at all like a nutter, just utterly determined.

  Despite Chanel’s courage and bravado, there had been two or three occasions when Ruby had noticed her in the stockroom pressing a Babygro or tiny woolen cardigan to her cheek. Each time her eyes had been full of tears.

  “SO,” CHANEL SAID now, “your checkup at the hospital go OK?”

  Ruby let out a tiny sigh. “You may as well know. You’ll only hear it from Fi the next time she comes in.” She explained about Dr. Double Barrel and the stamp.

  “You know,” Chanel said, apparently not in the least bit shocked by what she’d just heard, “I used to go out with this bloke who was really into sex toys. Only, because neither of us ’ad much money, we used to improvise. Instead of Chinese love balls I used to make do with an ’ard-boiled egg.”

  Ruby looked at her, incredulous.

  “Of course, you ’ad to keep the shell on,” Chanel went on. “If you’d peeled it, it would’ve disintegrated. Anyway, one day the egg got stuck and I ended up in the emergency room, so I know how you must’ve felt. It was the most embarrassing two hours of my life.”

  “I can see that,” Ruby said, “but I bet you didn’t have the added humiliation of some gorgeous American doctor overhearing you on the phone telling your friend that you had a stamp lodged in your vagina.”

  “Omigod. How gorgeous?”

  “Very.”

  “What on earth did you say?”

  Ruby told her. Chanel burst out laughing, but was nevertheless hugely impressed by Ruby’s quick thinking.

  Chanel was still commiserating between giggles, when a couple of customers came in. They were typical trustafarian mummies: ski-slope cheekbones, expensive highlights, each with a little Gucci bag slung over one shoulder. Even though it was cold and raining they were both wearing sunglasses—albeit as hair bands. One of them had really taken the early September chill to heart and was wearing a three-quarter-length fake fur coat.

  “Blimey,” Chanel muttered to Ruby. “I wonder ’ow many Muppets ’ad to die for that.” Ruby shushed her, but it was as much as she could do to stop herself bursting out laughing. The other thing Ruby loved about Chanel was her irreverence.

  From their slightly awkward body language and the unfamiliar way they were chatting, Ruby got the impression the women didn’t know each other that well and that they had probably bumped into each other outside the shop.

  The woman in the coat was about six months pregnant and had a toddler in tow. The other was carrying her newborn in a leather and sheepskin Bill Amberg papoose. The papoose hinted to Ruby that the woman was a natural-childbirth-St.-Luke’s mother. The too-posh-to-push brigade never used papooses because they spoiled the look of their clothes. Instead they favored the Porsche buggy.

  The toddler, a little boy, was whining and demanding to be given the packet of potato chips his mother was holding.

  “Not until you say the magic word, Finn. What is it? Pl…Pl…”

  Finn turned down the corners of his mouth and folded his arms in defiance.

  “Come on. Say it. Say the magic word. Pl…”

  “Plain!” the child exclaimed, holding out a tiny chubby hand. Since he couldn’t have been more than three, it was clear to Ruby and Chanel that this had been said without a hint of sarcasm or cheek. His mother didn’t see it that way. Just as she was about to explode with fury, Chanel stepped in and suggested she take the child off to the play area. Introducing a play area with a miniature slide, climbing frame and pedal cars had been Chanel’s idea. It had also turned out to be a stroke of absolute genius. It was another reason mothers returned to Les Sprogs again and again.

  Coat woman was beginning to calm down. “Ooh, isn’t that exciting,” she cooed to her son. “Now then, off you go with the nice lady while I browse.” Finn took Chanel’s hand and the two of them trotted off. “Oh, by the way,” coat woman called out after Chanel, “Finn’s educational psychologist says he is gifted, so he might find the Play-Doh a bit beneath him.”

  Neither Ruby nor Chanel reacted. They were used to shallow, haughty women like the coat and their long-suffering trophy brats. It was at times like this that Ruby wished she had been able to fulfil her dream of opening a more mass-market baby shop with an
ethnic, Body Shop–style spin. She had even come up with a name for it: Baby Organic. She would often lie awake and let her imagination run away with her as she imagined herself pioneering the first global baby-wear chain, which sold affordable clothes—and maybe later on, even baby food—made entirely from organic products.

  The two women made a beeline for the Gucci baby wear. They oohed and aahed over the fabulously expensive outfits. Finally the coat selected a pair of blue suede baby slippers with a £100 price tag. As the pair carried on picking things up and putting them down, Ruby caught snippets of their conversation. At one point the coat patted her bump and informed papoose woman that she had booked herself in for a planned cesarean at the Portland.

  “Oh really?” papoose woman simpered, her tone giving more than a hint that she was about to claim the moral high ground in this conversation. “So you’re not going to do it naturally, then? Such a shame. I always think natural childbirth is better for the baby.” She looked down beatifically and stroked her baby’s head. “But of course your mind has to be centered and you have to be in a place where you see the labor as work rather than pain. Not everybody is capable of doing that. When I had Serendipity I went for seventeen hours without any drugs. But it was worth it for the whole water-birth experience. And then afterward we buried the placenta under a tree in the garden.”

  “That’s absolutely fine,” the coat came back, her languid smile no disguise for the venom she was clearly feeling, “if you don’t mind the aftereffects. Personally, I always worry about the structural damage caused by natural childbirth. Your husband may not mind finding your hallway a great deal roomier than it once was, but I know mine would be less than happy.” At this point the women exchanged taut, tension-charged smiles and went their separate ways. For the next ten or fifteen minutes each looked round the shop alone. In the end neither woman bought very much. Papoose woman bought a dream catcher and a pair of newborn Navaho moccasins. The coat bought Finn a £40 T-shirt with “I’m a genius” written across it.