Their voices divided pretty evenly between old-school RP, Mockney, elocution lesson, posh Aussie and Russian. This was more of an unreconstructed estuarine accent. What Creeping Jesus would charmingly call ‘common’. And Ed, for that matter.
‘Yes,’ I said, tentatively.
‘This is Janelle – I met you last night at Kiki’s party?’
Janelle? Janelle? I racked my brain. I had no idea.
‘She said you do clutter-clearing,’ continued Janelle, whoever she was. ‘Anyway, I love what you’ve done with her place and I want you to come and do mine.’
I was so surprised I didn’t say anything. Janelle did.
‘She told me you charge £500 a day – is that right?’
I think I squeaked. Kiki had been telling people I charged money for clutter-clearing? I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The cheek of that woman was unbelievable. On the other hand, a different part of my brain was reminding me, I didn’t make much more than that in a week at the gallery – and that was before tax.
‘Hello?’ said Janelle, starting to sound a lot less self-assured. ‘Are you still there? I mean, I can pay more…’
‘No, er, gosh, but…’
‘I know, I know, Kiki told me you are incredibly busy, but I’m desperate, so if I say £600 a day – cash – could I jump your queue?’
She really did sound desperate, and I didn’t know how I was going to tell her that Kiki was actually bonkers and I wasn’t really a professional ‘clutter-clearer’ at all, because I was starting to feel sorry for this Janelle person. Plus, the money was making my head spin.
‘Er, where do you live?’ I asked her, playing for time.
‘Hampstead,’ she said.
I took a couple of breaths before I said anything else, trying to process the situation but having difficulties. ‘I am very busy,’ I said to Janelle, slowly, trying to work out what I was going to say as I went along. ‘But perhaps I could do something at the weekend. Would that be possible for you?’
‘Can’t you come any sooner?’ said Janelle, now sounding quite pathetic. I had a strong suspicion I was going to need to have some tissues at the ready if I did meet up with her. The image of Kiki weeping over her Simpsons videos came into my head.
‘Well, I could come and do an assessment this evening, if you like,’ I suggested, amazed at how together I sounded.
And as I put the phone down, her address and phone numbers recorded in my diary, I realized that perhaps now I really was a professional clutter-clearer. How the hell did that happen? Oh, yes – Kiki. My meddlesome little friend. I’d have to sort her out quickly before she pulled any more of these stunts.
I reached for my mobile – I had learned the hard way not to make personal calls on the gallery phone – but before I could even look for her name it rang. It was Oliver, another big surprise, as I didn’t even know he had my number. I only ever saw him with Kiki.
‘Morning, bitch,’ he said, with his usual charm. ‘It’s Ol. Got your diary handy?’
‘Yes,’ I said, tentatively.
‘All right, which of these can you do at 8 p.m. at Kiki’s place?’
He reeled off some dates.
‘I can do most of them,’ I said cautiously. ‘But for what?’
‘I’m going to cut your tragic hair off,’ he said.
I was so surprised I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Hell-oo-oo…’ said Oliver. ‘Anybody there?’
‘I’m still here,’ I said, spluttering a bit. ‘But I’m in shock. What do you mean, cut my hair off? And what do you mean, tragic? How bloody rude! I like my hair, thank you very much… and so does Ed.’
‘I’m sure he does, I’ve heard about men like that…’ he laughed. ‘It is lovely hair, darling – for a twelve-year-old. But you, Amelia, are a beautiful, grown-up woman and you need a grown-up haircut. I’m sick of seeing you with it tied up in a pathetic ponytail, or hanging down like Joni fucking Mitchell’s on a bad-hair day.’
I went quiet again, trying to take it in. I couldn’t, so working according to the theory that if you can’t say something nice, say nothing, I continued with the silent treatment. He broke first.
‘I’m not going to labour this point, Amelia,’ he said, in a softer voice which he didn’t use very often. ‘But a lot of women would cut off a leg to have me cut off their hair, and I’m doing this because I like you and I want you to look as gorgeous as I know you can. I can’t bear to see potential wasted. Trust Ollie, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said, but not because I had any intention of actually letting him cut off my hair. I’d decided it was easier to appear to go along with him for the time being and then I could just keep cancelling arrangements until he and Kiki got bored and forgot about this latest crazy plan – because I had no doubt that she was involved in it as well.
Between this and telling everyone at the party I was a ‘clutter-clearer’, Madame Kiki really was getting seriously out of order, I realized, but I’d think about that later. Right now Oliver was talking again, in his more usual hectoring tones, so I tuned back in.
‘And Kiki’s taking you clothes shopping to say thank you for doing her place, so you’re a lucky bitch and you don’t want that shit hair to ruin it, do you? Good party, wasn’t it? I didn’t get home till five this morning…’
And after a short recap of exactly what he had got up to between leaving Kiki’s party and eventually going home – which was a lot more information than I really needed – we agreed on a date to meet at Kiki’s place and he rang off.
I sat back in my chair, my head reeling. I really did hope they would forget about my hair, as I was absolutely certain I didn’t want it cut off. I thought my hair – naturally straight and naturally blondish, properly blonde with help from my friends at the John Frieda salon, round the corner from the flat – was my best feature. So I wore it long because I was proud of it, but also because Ed really loved it.
I didn’t think he was some kind of weird, long-hair pervert, as Ollie had implied, but it was true that he did have a bit of a ‘thing’ about my hair; he had since we had first got together. He was always playing with it, winding it round his hand and then letting it fall down again, and he always liked me to wear it loose when we went out together, to show it off. And when we were in bed, for that matter.
But when I was left to my own devices, it did end up tied back in a ponytail most days, quite often with a red rubber band dropped by a postman which I had picked up off the pavement. Sometimes I just had to get it out of my face that minute.
I went into the loo at the back of the gallery and had a look in the mirror. Maybe a ponytail wasn’t the most sophisticated style for a woman my age, I thought. I took the band out and let my hair fall around my shoulders and down my back. It was exactly the same as it had been since I was a teenager, if not younger. I’d never really had any other style.
That was what my hair had been like when the sixteen-year-old me had kissed Joseph Renwick, I remembered with a slightly nauseous pang. That had been so weird, seeing him like that last night. Quite disturbing. I consciously put it out of my head and went back to looking at myself.
It had looked like this when I’d met Ed and that’s how I’d worn it for our wedding too – I certainly didn’t have one of those awful bridal up-dos. That was my hair and I really couldn’t imagine it any other way.
I knew it still attracted men’s glances as I walked down the street, but perhaps, I suddenly thought, I was in danger of turning into one of those tragic women who look like hot stuff from the back and then turn round to be a scary old disappointment.
I shuddered slightly and tried to catch myself out in the mirror, peeping over my shoulder through the open door of the loo to try and get the back view and then turning around properly. I was so engrossed, it took me a moment to realize Leo was watching me.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, in his most snide voice. ‘Auditioning for a hairspray advert? Or just admiring your crowning glory?
Lovely Amelia Bradlow and her famous long blonde hair…’
He came up beside me and tapped me on the top of the head with his rolled-up newspaper, which I could see was the Daily Sport. Typical.
‘Well, you may think you look like Anna Kournikova,’ he said, so close to my ear I could feel his hot wet breath on it, ‘but just remember Donatella Versace for the front view, OK? Now can you get out of there? I need to drop my load.’
‘Charmant! ’ I said, smiling brightly as I stepped aside to let him past. ‘Bien merder …’
‘And fuck you too,’ I distinctly heard him say, after he slammed the door in my face.
I stuck my middle finger up at it, slapping my bicep with the other hand. Not very ladylike, but a satisfying nicety I had picked up from my brother.
It was still only 10.45 but, after all that had happened, I decided I needed a breather. I was feeling increasingly jaded from the night before and I really didn’t want to be in the gallery when Leo opened that lavatory door again in about twenty minutes’ time.
I knew exactly what he’d do. He would go back upstairs, leaving it deliberately ajar, so I would have to go over to close it. He was so disgusting. I’d probably have to clean up in there with the lavatory brush too. I shuddered.
I grabbed my coat and bag and buzzed up to Christopher on the intercom. ‘I’m popping out to collect some envelopes from Smythson,’ I said, when he answered. ‘Leo is looking after the gallery.’ And I was out of the door in moments, before he could even reply.
I strolled idly down Bond Street, trying to see how my hair looked at a casual glance in the shop windows. I thought it looked rather good, swishing from side to side as I walked. Then, without really thinking where I was going, I crossed Piccadilly, walked along past the Ritz and then turned left into Green Park.
The moment I was inside those railings, I slowed down and breathed more deeply. I loved that park and felt a sense of ownership of it because I lived so near and ran round it so often. Hyde Park was actually closer to the flat, if you took the subway under Park Lane, but there was something about the quiet, contained space of Green Park which I particularly loved.
It was really starting to feel like spring now, and the trees were finally coming back to life. I wondered how my garden was doing down in Winchelsea. I hadn’t been there for a couple of weeks, so it was probably completely different from the last time I’d seen it. Mrs Hart’s garden – or Hermione, as I was learning to call her – next door definitely would be.
If I took on this clutter-clearing job from Janelle, whoever she was, I thought as I walked, we might not get down there that weekend either, and Ed would definitely not be happy. As he kept saying, what was the point of buying a cottage in the country if we didn’t bloody go to it?
And it had been me who’d wanted it so badly. I loved our flat in Mount Street, but it didn’t have a garden – not even a balcony – and I had been desperate for one. The park was lovely, but it wasn’t the same as having your own outdoor space.
I just wanted somewhere I could go outside with my coffee in the morning, I had told Ed repeatedly, until eventually he had caved in. I’d driven him mad over it, really.
We’d had to go the second-house route because there was no question of selling Mount Street and moving to somewhere in London that had a garden. Apart from the fact that Ed was very attached to the Mayfair flat as the only place that gave him an ongoing sense of home, we couldn’t sell it because it was bound up in some kind of family trust. They couldn’t chuck us out, he assured me, but it wasn’t legally ‘ours’.
Everything to do with Ed’s family and their money was tied up tightly with red legal ribbon as far as I could tell. Ed had told me years ago this was because his mother was a terrible spendthrift and, being much older, his father had wanted to protect her – and Ed – from destitution, in the event of his death.
As it turned out, he needn’t have worried about Ed, who was as brilliant with money as his father had been, but over the years I had come to see his point about Dervla. I’d had plenty of opportunity to watch her in action, as she still came over every summer for the Season, and stayed with us in what she very much still considered to be ‘her’ flat.
In all honesty, those annual visits were another reason I’d wanted the cottage so badly. I needed somewhere to escape to which I could really call my own. A lot of the furniture in the flat dated back to when Dervla had last decorated it in the seventies and I wasn’t allowed to change it. In that way and so many others, she was quite demanding.
At seventyish – not that she would ever reveal her age
– Dervla was still beautiful, in a fabulous-bone-structure way, and expected everyone to swoon at her feet and do everything for her. A lot of them did, which just encouraged her. She was also still intending to bag herself another trophy husband, and her endless pursuit of wizened old men she was convinced were loaded was absolutely exhausting to be around – especially as so many of them seemed to be under the impression that she was a wealthy widow who could bankroll them.
We still had a couple of months before she descended upon us that year and, now I was out in the fresh air and thinking straight again, I was cursing myself for agreeing to go and see Janelle that night. It had been one thing doing it for Kiki, but I didn’t want to get involved in the mess and filth of a total stranger and end up frittering away those precious pre-Dervla weekends on this ridiculous clutter-clearing nonsense.
But she had sounded so desperate, poor thing, I told myself, it would have been cruel to say no – although, if I were really honest, the prospect of earning £600 a day for something I found so easy was also pretty hard to resist.
It wasn’t like I went without – Ed paid all the bills and I had my own copies of his credit cards to use for everything else – but my salary from Mecklin’s was a joke, and it was exciting to have the prospect of some decent money that was really my own.
So, I reflected, sitting down on a bench and tilting my head back to enjoy the spring sunshine, perhaps it was worth missing a few weekends in Winchelsea for that.
Thinking about Janelle reminded me of the only possible explanation of how she had come to ring me – Kiki must have been handing out my work number with the bloody canapés the night before. Damn cheek!
It was odd she’d given them the gallery number, though. And what had Oliver said? Something about her taking me shopping? There was way too much Kiki puppeteering going on. I got my phone out.
‘Hi, Kiki,’ I said.
‘Hello, darling,’ she replied, her voice several tones lower than usual. ‘Wasn’t it a great party?’ She lowered her voice even more. ‘I’m still in bed.’
I had the clear impression she wasn’t alone there.
‘Oh, well, I won’t keep you then,’ I said. ‘It’s just someone called Janelle rang me today and I wondered how she got my number… Hmmm, Kiki?’
But before she could reply, I heard some kind of giggly scuffle going on, and then my phone went dead. I rang back on her home number and then again on the mobile but they both went straight to voicemail, so I left a message asking her to ring me and walked back to the gallery.
Creeping Jesus was standing behind my desk when I got back, with a face like a pickled walnut.
‘There you are!’ he practically shouted, before returning to his more usual, deadly measured tones. ‘I don’t employ you so I can stand behind this desk and answer the telephone, you know, Amelia.’ He stood and looked at me for a moment, his eyes narrowing to slits. ‘So where are the envelopes then?’ he said finally.
I was so surprised by his reaction – I’d only been out for half an hour or so – that I completely forgot my story about going to Smythson and just looked back at him blankly.
‘Aha,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘A little amnesia, I see. So where exactly have you been, Amelia, while I acted as your social secretary?’
‘But Leo was down here,’ I said, stupidly. It had seemed funny at the time,
going out while Leo was in the loo.
‘Leo was in the lavatory, as you well knew, and then he had to go out to a legitimate appointment. I’m still wondering where you’ve been.’
‘The envelopes weren’t ready,’ I mumbled, suddenly remembering my cover story.
‘No, they weren’t,’ said Christopher. ‘Because we didn’t have any ordered. I’ve just rung Smythson to check. So where were you really, Amelia? Coffee? A little shopping?’
I looked at him and wondered what it took to make someone so pathetic that they went to the trouble of checking up on some stupid little excuse, when they were always telling you how busy and important they were.
‘I went out to get some fresh air, Christopher,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a headache. I just needed to go outside.’
‘Well, I don’t pay you to go out for walks,’ he said, ‘so I will dock an hour from your wages this week. I don’t like liars, Amelia. Next time you have a headache on my time – take an aspirin.’
And with that, he turned and stomped back up the narrow wooden stairs to his office.
I went and sat down in my chair, feeling an initial numbness quickly begin to melt into absolute fury. On top of all the little indignities and bad temper I had suffered from Christopher over the years, not to mention the total absence of the promised promotions, this latest verbal assault seemed completely unacceptable.
I took a few deep breaths to try and recover myself, so I could think straight, then I happened to glance down at the desk and saw that a whole page of the telephone logbook was covered in Christopher’s spiky scrawl.
There were various names and numbers with my own name next to all of them, in larger and larger writing, down the page, as he had clearly become increasingly furious about taking messages for me.
As I stared, it gradually became apparent to me that while I’d been out – maybe it had been nearer an hour, I now realized – at least six people had phoned for me on the gallery number and, while I didn’t know any of them myself, I recognized all their names as friends of Kiki’s.
One of them was Rosalyn, the actress I’d met in Planet Kiki when she’d been telling everyone how they should hire me as a ‘clutter-clearer’. There was only one way Rosalyn could have got my number – and only one reason why she would be calling me.
How to Break Your Own Heart Page 9