The Accidental Mistress

by Sophie Weston

  Maybe one day I’ll tell them, she thought. Pepper and Jemima—even Adam.

  But the thought of handsome Adam Sadler made her shake her head. No, it was impossible to tell him. Adam was a banker. He thought the most dangerous thing that could happen was the US economy going into recession. Whereas Izzy knew that danger came at you in combat gear with crazy eyes and—

  She swallowed. It all seemed so far away from London and her busy life these days. Sometimes it even felt as if it had happened to someone else—a story she’d read in one of the Sunday magazines. Or as if she had split into two people on that bus on the jungle track. One Izzy had come home and flung herself into the family enterprise and was doing just fine.

  Only the other Izzy was still lost. And Adam Sadler, with his Lotus and his Rolex and his membership of a ferociously expensive City gym, was not the man to help her find herself. Even if she wanted him to.

  Well, she’d better stay lost today, thought Izzy, revving up for the final push. Today there were more important things to think about. Today was going to take a lot of handling. Today was serious.

  And there were definitely problems on the horizon. Last night Pepper had been showing signs of climbing the walls. And Jemima was jet-lagged out of her brains. But somehow or other they had to pull it all together for the launch. Because today was crunch time.

  Izzy flung back her head, the loose red hair flying. ‘And the crunch is what I do,’ she said firmly. ‘Crisis a speciality. The others can freak all they want. I’ll bring home the bacon.’

  And she lengthened her stride, put her head down, and went through the pain barrier.

  When she got back to the apartment Pepper was sitting huddled over the kitchen table surrounded by three cups of barely touched coffee and clutching a sheet of paper covered with sticky notes. She looked up when Izzy came in. But she did not really see her, thought Izzy. Her cousin’s eyes were wild.

  ‘“A whole new experience”,’ she was muttering. “‘A whole new experience”. Hello, Izzy. “A whole new shopping experience”.’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Izzy, taking the sheet of paper away from her. ‘We went through all this last night.’

  Until two in the morning, actually. The woman could hardly have slept at all.

  Pepper’s smile was perfunctory. ‘But I had this idea in bed…’

  ‘Sleep would have been better,’ said Izzy. She took the coffee cups away, too, and threw their congealing contents down the sink.

  ‘No. Listen. The statistics—’

  Izzy looked round from the sink in disbelief. ‘You aren’t going to hit a bunch of fashion journalists with statistics?’

  ‘They’re significant,’ said Pepper earnestly.

  Izzy shook her head. ‘You’re on a caffeine burn,’ she said kindly. ‘Cogs not engaging. Statistics are strictly for back-up stuff in the press pack. You have to keep your speech short and intriguing.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’m going to make you some toast,’ announced Izzy. ‘And eggs. With warm milk. Or hot chocolate. Or champagne. You will have something to eat and drink that isn’t caffeine. And you will please stop gibbering. Out of the Attic is a fantastic idea and this launch is going to be awesome. Right?’

  Pepper gave her a better smile this time. ‘You’re very good to me, Izzy. I’m glad I’ve got a cousin like you.’

  Izzy grinned at her. ‘Likewise, oh retail genius. Now, go and have your shower while I rout Jemima out of her pit.’

  Jemima had swirled the duvet round her like a Swiss roll and was about as welcoming as a grizzly disturbed in its winter quarters.

  ‘Go ‘way.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You’re a nightmare. Push off, Nightmare.’

  Ruthlessly Izzy flung open the curtains. Golden sun blazed in. Jemima screamed and pulled the pillow over her face.

  ‘I hate you,’ she said, muffled but passionate. She was clearly a lot more awake than she wanted to be.

  ‘Sure you do,’ said Izzy with a grin. ‘Get up.’

  ‘I only just got to sleep.’

  ‘Tough. You have work to do.’

  Jemima let out a wail. ‘Tell me something new.’

  ‘And a cousin to support.’

  There was a pause. Then the pillow was pushed aside a fraction. One eye and a lot of tousled hair appeared.

  ‘Izzy?’ said Jemima, as she’d used to do when Izzy woke her on school days.

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Izzy cheerfully. She added cunningly, ‘If you get up now, I’ll do eggy bread for breakfast.’

  There was a moment’s complete silence. Then Jemima groaned and heaved the pillow aside. She sat up.

  ‘Okay. It’s not a nightmare,’ she said, resigned. ‘You’re here and you won’t go away until I do what you want. What do you want?’

  Izzy brought a list out of her pocket and handed it to her.

  Jemima stared at it, then looked up at her in disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Starting,’ said Izzy, preparing to leave, ‘with Pepper’s make-up. She’ll be ready for you in about ten minutes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jemima sagged back among the remaining pillows. ‘All right.’ Her voice began to slur again. ‘I’ll be out in ten minutes.’

  ‘Sure you will,’ said Izzy sweetly. And took the duvet with her.

  She ignored the roar of outrage that followed her into the corridor. And sure enough, heavy-eyed and spitting, Jemima was in the kitchen with full make-up kit and a hugely magnifying mirror inside five minutes. She spurned the eggy bread with dignity, but she swallowed two cups of coffee and then peered at herself in the mirror.

  ‘Eye bags,’ she said, like a surgeon giving a diagnosis. She snapped her fingers. ‘Ice.’

  Izzy got a bag of ice cubes from the freezer and watched, fascinated, as Jemima applied them to her puffy eyes.

  ‘Old model-girl trick,’ she said between her teeth. ‘Being the face of Belinda has taught me a lot of those.’

  She did not sound as if it was a lesson she was entirely happy about. Izzy was whipping eggs for Pepper’s breakfast, but at that she looked up sharply. Jemima had not only stopped listening, she realised with a pang, she had stopped confiding, too.

  ‘Everything okay, Jay Jay?’

  ‘Just great. I live in five-star hotels and when I wake up in the morning I don’t know which continent I’m in.’

  Izzy’s eyebrows rose. ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘It’s a living,’ said Jemima without expression.

  Izzy was beginning to get worried. When Jemima had been selected by cosmetics house Belinda to be the face of their new campaign, all the papers had said this put her in the superstar league. It was the height of every model’s ambition, they’d said. But this did not sound like a woman enjoying well-deserved success. This sounded like a woman with problems.

  But now was not the time to talk about it.

  ‘Let’s go for a pizza this evening, when the razzmatazz is all over,’ Izzy said.

  Jemima gave a harsh laugh. ‘Who has time for pizza? I go straight from the presentation to the airport.’

  ‘You mean you won’t even be coming back here to pick up a bag?’ Izzy was shocked.

  Jemima shook her head.

  Izzy was filled with compunction. ‘I’m sorry I took the duvet off you this morning.’

  ‘If you hadn’t, I’d have slept for a week,’ said Jemima. ‘You don’t want to know how mad my life is.’

  But before she could say any more Pepper emerged in a bathrobe. She had another sheaf of printed tables in her hand.

  ‘Jemima, Izzy—what do you think? I could just run through…’

  More pressing concerns took over.

  ‘No statistics,’ they yelled in unison.

  ‘You,’ said the woman from the PR agency, ‘are a genius. I didn’t think it could be done.’ She had spiky, lurid green hair and a clipboard and she was terrifyingly professional.

  Izzy was on a r
oll. She was good at crisis management, and this morning she was getting plenty of opportunity. Now she stopped tacking a piece of chintz across a nook full of wires and looked up. She tucked a stray lock of red hair back under her gypsy headscarf. ‘What?’

  ‘Getting the Beast of Belinda here before ten o’clock in the morning. She looks like a dream, all right. But that woman bites.’

  Izzy was affronted. ‘I’m sorry?’

  But the clipboard had already zipped to the other side of the big glass-walled reception room.

  The in-house cameraman stopped adjusting his focus on the small stage and looked down at Izzy. ‘Molly means thank you for keeping Jemima sweet. She hasn’t actually sunk her teeth into anyone yet.’

  Izzy blinked. ‘Beast of Belinda?’ she echoed.

  He pulled a wry face. ‘Jemima Dare. Face of Belinda Cosmetics. Newest of the supermodels. And doesn’t she know it!’

  And my sister, thought Izzy. Probably not a good moment to mention it, though. Normally she would go to war with her sister’s enemies at the drop of a hat. But twelve minutes before they opened the door on the launch of Out of the Attic was bad timing by anyone’s standards.

  She flicked the chintz into expert folds and stapled it in place. ‘You know Jemima Dare?’ she said with deceptive mildness.

  ‘I’ve worked with her.’

  ‘Phew, yes,’ said the cameraman’s assistant, with feeling. ‘Serious pain in the ass, that one.’

  Izzy held onto her temper with an effort. ‘How interesting,’ she said between her teeth.

  She hammered an errant nail into place with force, flicked a dustsheet over the whole construction and stood up.

  ‘Done?’ said the woman with the clipboard, zipping back as if she were on rollerblades. ‘Can we let the punters in yet?’

  Izzy cast a narrow-eyed look round the big reception room. It did not look like the launch of anything. It looked as if it was in the throes of refurbishment. Pots of paint stood around, amid step ladders and mysterious outcrops of furniture under dust sheets. The pictures on the walls were draped in sheeting and the big central chandelier was at the end of the room, leaning drunkenly against a trestle table. The carpet had gone. The London fashion crowd were in for a shock.

  ‘Yup. Ready to rock.’

  The green-haired woman grinned. ‘I was right. Genius. Culp and Christopher would be a happy agency if all our clients were practical like you.’

  ‘Practical is what I do,’ agreed Izzy.

  ‘Sure is.’ The woman consulted her clipboard. ‘I’ve got the girls in position to hand out the goody bags. So we’ll open up the moment you give me the sign.’

  She powered over to the big doors to the conference hall.

  Izzy nodded and checked that her earpiece was in place. Then she pressed the connect button and spoke into her collar mike. ‘Testing. Testing. The partygoers are at the gates. Are we ready? Speak to me, people…Tony? Geoff?’

  They were there. She ran through the roll call of her other helpers one by one. All in place, raring to go. Then at last she came to her cousin Pepper.

  She was not worried about her décor, or the timing of her effects, but she was worried about Pepper. Should you be that nervous before the launch of a ground-breaking new business?

  ‘Pepper? How’s it going?’

  There was an audible gulp. ‘Fine,’ quavered Pepper.

  Izzy turned to face the wall, so that there was no chance of a passer by hearing her. She switched to one-to-one transmission and said into her mike, very softly, ‘Come on Big Shot. Entrepreneurs don’t panic. You can do this thing.’

  There was a slightly watery chuckle. ‘You got evidence of that?’

  ‘You blagged the money men. After that, how hard can a bunch of journalists be?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘What’s more,’ interrupted Izzy ruthlessly, ‘you convinced me and you convinced Jemima. She knows all about clothes and I hate the things. So there you are. Every sector covered.’

  This time the chuckle was a lot more robust. ‘So it is. Thanks, Izzy.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ She switched back to broadcast. ‘Okay, everyone. Showtime!’

  She gave the thumbs-up to the woman with the clipboard. The tall doors were flung back. The waiting audience clattered in—and stopped dead at the decorators’ disarray.

  Izzy could have danced with glee. Great! This was a launch they wouldn’t forget.

  She said into the mike, ‘Geoff, city sounds please.’

  At once a tape full of combustion engines and sirens and voices filled the room. The audience, London sophisticates to a woman, were even more intrigued. They began to move round the room, looking at the shrouded shapes questioningly.

  ‘Right,’ said Izzy. ‘Got them. Pepper, you’re on. Tony, start the light show now.’

  The harsh lighting began to dim and a patch of rosy warmth appeared on the shambolic stage. It was empty. It should not have been empty.

  Izzy’s heart sank. She must not let it show, though. ‘Pepper?’ she prompted into her mike, sounding as casual as she could manage.

  And a blessed, blessed voice said in her ear, ‘We’re here, Izzy. We’re just going on.’

  It was Jemima. It should not have been Jemima. Jemima should have followed Pepper onto the stage for dramatic effect.

  Technically, she was only there to model a couple of outfits and mingle with the guests. ‘I’ll do the robot in the gear,’ she had said, right from the start. ‘But I haven’t got time to learn a script.’ Yet here she was, stepping into the breach, just as Izzy would have done in her place.

  Huh! Beast of Belinda indeed, thought Izzy, bursting with pride. This was no pain in the ass. This was a fully paid-up member of the Girls Stick Together Club.

  She said into the mike, ‘Go for it, Jay Jay.’

  Jemima walked out onto the platform like a queen. Well, a queen taking a day off to paint the nursery, maybe, thought Izzy ruefully. As they had planned in various transatlantic e-mails, Jemima was wearing paint-stained dungarees. There were flecks of paint and ink over her hands and forearms. And her legendary hair was caught up in a tangly ponytail. The audience stopped chattering to their neighbours and frankly stared.

  ‘Life,’ said Jemima, standing close to the sound system and reading Izzy’s script from the palm of her hand without anyone noticing, ‘is a mess. Too fast. Too dirty. Too many disappointments.’ She paused.

  ‘Not,’ said a soft husky voice, out of sight, ‘always.’

  From behind an edifice covered in dustsheets, a large, beautiful woman came out into the middle of the stage. She had a mass of gleaming red hair, she was dressed in a silk coat of peacock colours, and she was smiling. Pepper had come a long way since the sisters had taken her bathrobe and statistics away from her this morning.

  It looked as if she had got over her momentary panic, too. Thank you, Jay Jay. But still Izzy crossed her fingers, just in case.

  The audience gasped. This was not what they were expecting at all. This was no model. This was Pepper Calhoun herself. Entrepreneur, innovator and, just possibly, retail genius.

  The light changed again, turned gold. The whole room was bathed in the soft glow of a summer evening. Birds cheeped. Insects buzzed. A stream chattered faintly in the distance. Ripples of light like water began to flicker across the shrouded shapes. Even the nosiest journalist dropped the corner of the dustsheet in simple awe.

  ‘Hi, there,’ said Pepper, in her soft American accent.

  To Izzy’s relief she was as cool and friendly as if she had opened the door to a bunch of friends. Just as Izzy had coached her for a week. She sounded as if she did not have a nerve in her body and had never even heard of retail statistics.

  ‘Good to see you,’ she went on. ‘Glad you can be here with us today.’

  So she was right back on Izzy’s carefully crafted script. Cautiously, Izzy uncrossed her fingers. Looking good, she thought. Looking more than good.

&nbs
p; Pepper smiled sleepily around the room. She seemed to catch the eye of every single person of that select group there.

  That was Izzy’s idea, too. They had practised it in the flat, over and over again, until Pepper had been reeling and Izzy had been gloomily certain it would never work. Now she held her breath.

  Jemima stretched her arms out in front of her, as if she were easing her shoulders after a hard painting session. Only Izzy noticed that she was turning her hand so she could read from the back of it.

  ‘Couldn’t get the show on in time, eh, Pepper?’ she said as lightly as if she had only just thought of it. ‘What went wrong?’

  The glittering green and blue figure on the stage beside her smiled.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘you just have to trust your imagination.’

  That was the signal.

  ‘Geoff, Tony, ladies…’ murmured Izzy into her mike, more for herself than her well rehearsed team.

  ‘Let your fancy fly,’ said Pepper, laughing.

  And the lights went out, right on cue.

  There was a rush of cool air. Thank God they’d mastered the air-conditioning in time, thought Izzy. Half an hour ago she would not have put money on it.

  The tape changed to strange, unearthly music. The darkened ceiling suddenly gleamed with a million stars. There was a concerted gasp from the audience.

  Yes! thought Izzy. She let herself breathe again.

  There was another gasp as the dustsheets rose like flock of huge birds before flopping to the floor like paper. Silent-footed, the junior helpers folded and rolled the sheets, getting them rapidly out of sight. Izzy waved them away. But they had rehearsed this. They didn’t need any more direction. They had all identified their nearest exit. Now they melted through the various doors while the audience was still staring entranced at the starscape.

  Izzy was the last to go. She held the door to the kitchen open the tiniest crack so she could see the effect of her production. She was not disappointed. When the lights came up, there was a long indrawn breath of wonder from a hundred throats.

  The reception room had magically turned into a big attic, full of sunlight. Wooden trunks of clothes stood invitingly open. Comfortable shabby chairs were set beside old fashioned clothes horses from which every colour of garment hung. There were cushions and books and pot-pourri, and the friendly smell of coffee and fresh bread. The guests looked around, enchanted, as if they could not believe their eyes.