The Finishing Touches

by Browne, Hester

  “Betsy!” Nancy spotted me and waved. “Have you heard about Liv’s new fiancé?”

  “There’s a ring,” said Kathleen meaningfully.

  Liv looked shifty and tucked a long strand of blond hair behind one ear. “I accepted it as a friendship ring. I told him I’m having a break from serious relationships right now.”

  “Weren’t you engaged to that last fellow?” asked Kathleen. “That chap with the fancy car that blew up?”

  “It didn’t blow up; I just didn’t—” Liv’s blond hair fell over her face. “I didn’t put the right petrol in it. Or I forgot to, or something. Anyway, no, that’s off.”

  “But you kept the ring?” Nancy inquired anxiously. “Or was it his grandmother’s again?”

  “Or his current wife’s?” I couldn’t help it. I’d had to disentangle her from the would-be bigamist myself, and it hadn’t been pretty, pretending to be my best friend’s psychiatric nurse.

  “Er, let’s not talk about me,” said Liv. “What we really want to know is what happened in the library. Let’s go back to Kathleen’s and you can give us the goss.”

  “I should really say my thank-yous to Miss Thorne…” I said, looking round for the principal or any of the teachers, but they were nowhere in sight. Someone had cleared the room with top-drawer-hostess efficiency. I couldn’t even see Mark Montgomery, let alone Nell Howard and her Pucci print dress.

  I felt suddenly bereft, as if I’d come very close to learning something important but now it was slipping away from me and I had no idea how to get it back.

  “Come on, we’re dying to know,” Liv added, tugging my arm. “You were in there ages. Was there a will, with conditions? Have you been set tasks before you can claim your massive inheritance?”

  “And what sort of tests do you think Franny would have had in mind?” I inquired. “Running an etiquette assault course around Knightsbridge? Arranging the dinner tables at a fourth marriage?”

  “Catering a reception using only one white loaf and a jar of peanut butter?” Liv pulled a face. “Can you have a word with those caterers, by the way? I went to get some food for Kathleen and Nancy and that grumpy bloke acted like I’d just tried to shoplift the silver. I only took two sandwiches!”

  “You were lucky you got two,” I said. “He’s got a measuring jug for the wine. Seriously. I found it next to the tea urn.”

  “Hello, Mark,” said Kathleen meaningfully, over my left shoulder.

  I spun round, embarrassed. Mark Montgomery was standing there with four ten-pound notes in his hand.

  “Here,” he said, “from petty cash. Forty quid.”

  I thought of what Lord P had told me about the echoing Academy coffers and blushed. I wondered if by “petty cash” he meant his own wallet. “No, honestly, it’s fine—”

  “Please, take it,” said Mark, thrusting it at me. “I’ve just been trying to get it through to Miss Thorne that balancing the books does not mean walking round the ballroom with Chambers bloody English bloody dictionary on your head. Paulette got a receipt.”

  I wondered what had happened to make Mark so cross. Any faint traces of good humor that had emerged over the sandwich making had now vanished, and even his garish tie seemed to be quivering with barely suppressed irritation. He looked less like a wholesome Scotts Oats advertisement and more like he was about to take my head off with a caber. Whatever conversation he’d just had with Miss Thorne had made his mouth go very thin, but not, I noted, in an entirely unattractive way.

  “OK,” I said slowly, and pocketed the notes.

  “You’re not going to count them?” Mark glowered at me, and I realized that some of his irritation seemed to be directed at me. I took an involuntary step back, nearly knocking over a flower arrangement. “I wouldn’t want you to find any problems in the audit,” he said, and nodded politely to Kathleen and Nancy before turning on his heel and marching off.

  “Ooh,” said Liv. “You don’t normally see flouncing like that in a suit. No wonder he’s got vents in his jacket—plenty of room for the stick up his—”

  “Liv!” said Kathleen. “Manners!”

  “Sorry,” she said, looking about as far from sorry as it was possible to be.

  “You can tell you’re not a Phillimore lady,” said Kathleen.

  I tried not to catch Liv’s eye. Or Nancy’s.

  Liv and I went back to Kathleen and Nancy’s for a cup of tea. Every time I tried to quiz them on the state of the Academy, though, they went very evasive and dragged the conversation back to how much I was eating, whether I’d met a nice young man, whether any of Liv’s nice young men would do for me, and so on. It was very frustrating, and I didn’t really understand it; they’d both been retired for nearly twenty years, and although Nancy was generous to the point of lunacy when it came to giving the benefit of the doubt, Kathleen usually had no trouble speaking her mind.

  “I’m just glad poor Frances retired when she did” was all Kathleen would say, and then, promising I’d be back soon, Liv and I left.

  I didn’t see enough of Liv, being up in Edinburgh, so staying with her in Clapham was treat enough, even without the enormous Chinese banquet she insisted on ordering for us on our way back from one of the four restaurants she had on speed dial. Liv never let anyone pay for anything, unless she was on a date, but with her allowance she could afford to. Since Rina and Ken’s divorce, Ken had devoted much of his time to making sure his princess wanted for nothing. Consequently she had more spending money than Paris Hilton, mostly in used notes held together with an elastic band.

  “I should warn you, the place is a bit of a mess,” she said as we approached her house, down one of the pretty terrace streets near the Common.

  “A mess? Don’t be ridiculous,” I scoffed, already mentally sinking into one of her deep cream sofas. “You’ve got the only flatmate in London who’s in some kind of competition with your cleaner.”

  “What, Erin? No! Didn’t I tell you? She’s not here anymore—she got a promotion—some law firm in Chicago headhunted her.” Liv made the sort of bunny ears with her fingers that Erin liked to make, usually when referring to their quote-unquote “housekeeping schedule” or “shared cleaning responsibilities.” “Packed up her shredder and moved out about three weeks ago.” She fumbled in her bag for her keys, looked cross, pulled out a fancy gold lipstick, looked pleased, then looked cross again, then dumped the bag on the step while she scrabbled with both hands.

  “You never said! Did she give you notice?”

  “Well, I reckoned you had more important things to be worrying about than my flatmate leaving. Bloody hell! Where do keys go?”

  “You know, you should clip your keys to the inner pocket zip,” I pointed out. “Then no one can steal them, and you always know where to look.”

  “Yeah, yeah, send it to Good Housekeeping,” said Liv, still searching. “Aha!” She waved the bunch at me. They were on the huge diamond-ring key ring I’d given her on the basis that her magpie eye would be drawn automatically to a giant solitaire. “And,” she added, letting us in, “can you believe this for timing? Erin bailed on me the same week Joan handed her notice in too. Retired!”

  “Joan retired? How are you managing?” I said, now genuinely concerned. Erin’s mania for bills and schedules had just about contained Liv’s domestic oblivion, but saintly Joan was the only thing preventing full-on chemical warfare breaking out in the fridge. She’d cleaned for the O’Hare family for years and was the sort of Heritage cleaning lady even Kathleen would approve of.

  “I’m not managing,” said Liv. “I never thought she’d retire. She said she wanted to go on hoovering someone’s stair runner to the end. Die on the job, mop in hand.”

  “Although there was always the risk that you might finish her off, with your mess,” I added, following her into the kitchen.

  A faint whiff of unemptied bin cut through the scent of the white lilies on the counter. It was a gorgeous kitchen, all reclaimed retro units and stee
l work surfaces, with a bold, square window looking out onto a tiny patch of green garden. Ken’s crack squad of Polish builders had knocked it off in a fortnight between conversion jobs and had transformed the grubby seventies back room into the kind of space you could do fashion shoots in. Just as well, since now Erin had gone, there’d be no cooking going on.

  “Well…she was eighty, you know? And then Dad’s gone to Spain…” Liv went on, opening and shutting drawers in search of a corkscrew.

  This really was getting surreal now. Ken? Spain? With his freckly skin and innate suspicion of foreign water? I balanced myself against the huge table and kicked off my crippling new shoes. I’d forgotten to soften the heels with Vaseline. “I thought he hated abroad.”

  “Yeah,” said Liv. “I thought that too. But you know what he’s like…Maybe he’s found some villas going cheap. Oh, sorry, the oven’s not working,” she added, seeing me putting plates in to warm up before the takeout arrived.

  I turned it on at the wall switch, where Erin had probably turned it off for safety reasons. “When’s he back?”

  Liv stared at the oven as if I’d performed some magic trick on it, then shrugged and opened the wine. “Dunno. He just said, ‘off to the sun for a few weeks, princess,’ then handed me the usual roll of fifties.” She did an eerily accurate Ken O’Hare wink, then smiled, untroubled. “Told me not to get into any trouble, or get engaged to anyone he didn’t know. Tsk! As if!”

  I frowned, my imagination already running amok. Liv was Ken’s princess, and Ken usually left his princess with very detailed instructions about his whereabouts, in case she needed Emergency Dad Assistance. “But I thought he’d just been away for Christmas? Did he leave a number?”

  “He’s got his mobile! Honestly, Betsy, you’re such a drama queen. You should know us better by now: ‘Don’ arsk,’ that’s the O’Hare family motto.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again. Apart from the stream of suitors and the handbag collection, that was the main difference between me and Liv. I was constantly wondering whether I was doing the right thing, or imagining what could go wrong next, whereas Liv never did. She had faith in things sorting themselves out, or at least someone leaping in to sort them for her.

  Then again, I reasoned, if I had men falling over themselves sending me trees with necklaces on them, I probably wouldn’t waste time worrying about stuff either.

  Liv saw my brow furrow, and she did what she always did when she saw me worrying—she rolled her huge eyes goofily and changed the subject. It made her look like a duck with killer cheekbones. “God, what am I like? I should know how to turn the oven on, shouldn’t I!” she said. “Do you have any idea where Erin left the manuals for the…kitchen stuff?”

  “You don’t need manuals, Liv,” I said. “There are pictures on the appliances. You just need to get some practice.”

  “Is that something they teach at that Academy, then? Ovens and whatnot?” She poured us each a big glass of Chablis. “Maybe I should go there for a bit. Get myself some stirfry skills now that Erin’s packed up her work and left me to the mercy of Takeout Alley. Will you let me in, now that you’re in charge?”

  “It’s all canapés, really,” I said, trying to remember what exactly they had taught in the cookery classes. I’d learned my proper cooking from Kathleen, downstairs. It involved a lot of potatoes and had been my savior during many a budget-strapped week at uni. “Meringue swans and hard-boiled eggs in aspic…Nothing you’d really want to eat. I mean, I don’t know what they do now.” I took a sip of wine. “Besides, I’m not going to be in charge. I’m just going to…look round. And…advise.”

  “You’ll have to be a bit more executive than that,” Liv retorted. “Didn’t you tell Kathleen and Nancy you were going in there to hit them with your shiny consultancy stick?”

  “Well…yes.” I cringed and took another, bigger sip of wine. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Look, you could just tell him the truth,” said Liv gently. “Come on, Betsy, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and you don’t even lie on your car insurance.”

  “No!” I said at once, spluttering wine everywhere. “No, I can’t. It’s gone on too long. I mean, it’s bad enough that Franny died thinking I was some hotshot business guru instead of a shop assistant—”

  “Now that’s just stupid!” Liv flapped her hands. “You’re not just a shop assistant, you’re the manager! And you know what Franny was like about shoes—she’d have loved what you’ve done with that shop. I never knew a woman with better shoes than Franny. Didn’t she always say that the right heels were the first step in the best outfits?”

  My mouth twisted into a sad smile. “Yes. And that you could tell a lady from the state of her shoes. And that good shoes turned high street into Bond Street. She taught me to run for a bus in high heels, you know.” I sighed. “Poor Franny. I hope she had no idea how bad things were at the Academy after she left.”

  “But you can fix that!” Liv’s eyes were full of the sort of puppyish trust and enthusiasm that made law partners run to Tiffany’s with their checkbooks flapping in the breeze. “You can make it up to her by doing the job she thought you were doing, on the Academy! Go in there, and…I don’t know…make them tackle their filing, like you did with Fiona and her accounts.”

  “Oh, Liv, that was different! It was a tiny shop, not a finishing school. I didn’t even go to…” I started, but Liv wasn’t having any of it.

  “They obviously don’t have a clue, so what does it matter if you don’t either?” Liv tried to look motivational. “You don’t know what you can do till you try—that’s what you’re always telling me.”

  Well, actually, that was what Kathleen was always telling me.

  “And…” Liv rapped the table with her finger, then pointed at me to indicate that she’d had an idea. “You know you’re always going on about how you can’t start your own consultancy when you’ve got no experience? Well, look—you’ve done Fiona’s shop, and if you do this too, you’ve got references, right? I bet Dad’ll let you overhaul his office if you want, and there’s three! There’s your business plan! This time next year, you could actually be doing the job everyone reckons you are, and you’ll never have to come clean!” She paused. “It’s a fairly elaborate way of getting out of telling a lie, I’ll give you that, but you’re such a rubbish liar, anyway…”

  A slow excitement began to burn in my stomach. It was so ridiculous, it was almost reasonable.

  Liv saw she had me on the ropes and went in for the killer blow. “I mean, have you applied for any proper jobs recently?”

  I squirmed. Every couple of months I told myself it was about time I kicked my life into gear and had a furious week where I applied for “proper jobs”—accountancy, legal retraining, even the tax office. But when I actually had the pen in hand and the application form in front of me, I froze. I’d spent my whole life spinning wild possibilities about who I might be, and now it came down to boxes. It felt so final. Was I letting down some ballerina blood inside me? Was I really an actuary at heart?

  “But I can’t decide what I want to do,” I whined, then shook myself. Liv was hardly one to talk about career drift. Neither of us had exactly set the world on fire so far, although in Liv’s case, Ken’s regular bundles of fifties kept her pretty toasty. “Have you?”

  “No,” said Liv with absolute serenity. “I’m happy with my two days behind the bar at Igor’s. It gives me time to pursue my dreams of becoming a top photographer. Or possibly a poet slash muse.”

  “As well as time to be Eurostarred to Paris at the drop of a hat,” I pointed out.

  “That too.” She shook her long bangs out of her angelic face. “We’re not talking about me, though. This is one of those chances of a lifetime! I mean, I think Lord P’s got a bloody nerve asking you to go back there, when he wouldn’t let you in to begin with, but if the place is going down the toilet, what harm can it do for you to go and look round? You keep telling
me you don’t want to be handing pop socks to women with bunions this time next year—isn’t this a great chance to get out of that?”

  The doorbell rang before I could answer, and Liv swung her legs off the table. “Think about it while I get the takeout,” she said.

  I reached into my bag for my purse. “Liv, here’s my half, at least—” I started, but she waved my money away.

  “My treat,” she said.

  Liv padded down the hall, and I heard the door open and the sound of distant flirting as I pulled open drawers in search of forks and spoons. I wasn’t really listening, though—I was quailing at the prospect of marching back into the Academy, in less than a week’s time, and telling Miss Thorne where she was going wrong.

  In the drama of Nell Howard’s revelations, and the weird half-dream of seeing inside my childhood memories, and the warm glow of helping out the Phillimores, I’d sort of forgotten I’d be expected to do something. Lord P had a huge amount at risk, not just financially, and then there were the employees. And the students who were there! More to the point, I’d have to deliver the bad news myself—once I’d worked out what it was. I mean, how was I meant to know why they weren’t making any money? I didn’t even know what the Academy did these days.

  And it didn’t look as though Mark the Bursar was going to be much help, if he thought it was all a useless waste of time.

  I chewed my lip.

  On the other hand, it was my last chance to get back in there and do some detective work…

  The front door banged, and Liv reappeared with three bursting bags of Chinese food.

  “You know what? I think I’ve overordered again,” she said, dumping them on the granite counter. “I never know how much rice is enough…”

  My silence must have unnerved her. She stopped unpacking the cartons and looked me in the eye with a remorseful expression.