by Carmen Reid
Total est. cost: £4,600
'Over £1,000? My word!'
'Mrs Valentine? Is that you?'
Annie opened her eyes very slowly. It was dark but she could make out in the glimmer of the orange street light that a man was bending over her.
She felt the most terrible throbbing and aching in her head. All over her forehead, down into her eyes and nose.
'Are you OK?' the man was asking, although it was pretty obvious that she was not. 'I'm Manzoor Khan from number ten,' he added.
Ah, Annie was able to register the flashy City banker from next door. He must have been coming home late from work.
But what the hell had happened to her? It had taken her some time to work out from the angle of the street light that she was lying on the ground. She put a hand up to her aching head and felt it very gingerly. The skin was grazed, burning and weirdly spongy.
'Do you think you can get up?' Manzoor asked.
Annie lifted her head and, with Manzoor's arm under her shoulders, managed to wobble up to her feet, feeling sick to her stomach.
'Did you fall?' he asked her.
'No . . . someone was running towards me and I think he must have hit me in the . . .' Annie began and that was when she realized what had happened. She'd been hit deliberately! She'd been mugged! Oh. No! NO! Despite her raging head, she looked down, scanned right across the pavement, but there was absolutely no sign of it . . .
'Someone's taken my bag!' she wailed. 'Someone's stolen my new handbag!'
'Oh dear,' Manzoor sympathized, 'that's very bad luck, but it might turn up. Muggers often take out the contents and throw the bag away round the corner, I could go and have a look around if you like. But I need to get you home first.'
'Throw the bag away?' Annie repeated in a dazed horror. 'Throw it away! That bag cost over a thousand pounds even with a staff discount.'
She was still too shocked even to feel upset yet.
'Over a thousand pounds? My word!' Even Mr Six-Figure-Salary sounded a little taken aback at this information.
With Annie leaning heavily on his shoulder because she felt so sick and dizzy, they walked the thirty metres or so to her front door.
Once Manzoor had rung the bell, Annie could hear Ed walking down the corridor then calling out to the closed door: 'And I suppose you've forgotten your keys, have you? Forgotten to put them into your totally overpriced handbag!'
But when he had opened the door and spent several shocked seconds taking in Annie and her battered head, his expression changed instantly from stormy to seriously concerned.
'Oh my God! Annie!'
The verdict of the two paramedics who turned up with the ambulance was that Annie should have a very quiet night at home and go to see her GP in the morning.
They put a cooling compress on her ballooning forehead, shone a torch into her eyes, decided that she wasn't concussed and warned her that going to hospital would mean spending the night in the waiting room instead of in the comfort of her own bed.
One of the two police officers who called at the house to take Annie's statement told her cheerily, 'That is going to swell right up, you're going to look like something from Dr Who.'
'He took my bag,' Annie wailed, 'and I only bought it today. It's Yves Saint Laurent!'
The woman police officer did at least look a bit sympathetic.
'My mobile with all my numbers!' Annie's losses were beginning to stack up, 'my wallet, my credit cards, my house keys!'
'You'll have to change your locks and cancel your cards,' one of the officers advised. 'You never know, he might try some of the doors in the street.'
Throughout the comings and goings of the evening, Ed made tea, held her hand, plumped the pillows up under her head, and looked distraught because he blamed himself for the whole thing. When she was finally in bed, propped up on pillows and loaded with painkillers, he pulled up a chair and sat beside her, holding her hand.
'I hope you're not here for the big make-up talk,' she told him with a little smile, 'because I need to sleep.'
'I know,' he told her, squeezing her hand. 'You could have been really badly hurt. You have been badly hurt . . . but it could have been . . .'
'Shhhh!' she told him off, 'I'm going to be fine. Don't go "if"ing and "but"ing about it,' but with a sigh, she admitted, 'I am going to look a fright in the morning.'
'Yeah, like . . .'
'Something out of Dr Who,' Annie finished his sentence, 'thanks. But what exactly?'
'I don't know, you'll have to ask Owen tomorrow. He slept through the whole thing.'
'Good.'
Ed pushed his unbuttoned shirtsleeves up and ran his fingers through tangled ringlets that looked even wilder than usual. 'I'm sorry we were arguing,' he said, casting his eyes down to the floor.
'I'm really sorry,' she told him quietly. 'I hate shouting and being shouted at.'
'I'm sorry,' he repeated, leaning over to run a finger gently down her arm. 'Let's not do that again.'
She looked over at him, then catching his eye, she smiled cheekily and said: 'So does that mean I can borrow the £30,000 then?'
Ed did not smile back and the hand on hers moved away.
'OK, we'll talk about this later,' she assured him; she was not in any state for another disagreement right now.
'Yes,' he agreed, 'it's just . . .' the hair shuffling was starting up again, so Annie knew he was agitated, 'I'm just thinking of you. I mean, your own business . . . can I just remind you: you hate the admin and the tax things and all paperwork in general. Annie, you love clothes and you love dressing people and you're great at it. Play to your strengths! Plus,' Ed's hands moved back to hers and he interlaced their fingers, 'we want to spend more time with you, not less!'
Annie felt the warm fingers squeeze tightly against hers. She understood, she really did. But she wanted to move on with Ed on her side, not holding her back.
'I don't want to talk about this now,' she told him, because that was the simplest thing, 'I have to go to sleep.'
When Annie woke the next morning, she looked at the ceiling in confusion for a few minutes before she remembered why her head felt just exactly as if it had been hit by a brick. The police officers had in fact found the brick and taken it away for analysis.
Because Ed was already awake and out of bed, she couldn't ask his opinion on how she looked, so she staggered over to the mirror at her dressing table. The face that looked back at her almost made her cry out with fright.
The skin on her forehead was pulled so tightly over the hard swelling underneath that it looked shiny. Even worse, it was deep dark purple and angry looking. The dressing seemed to have shrunk in comparison to the swelling the size of a large grapefruit that was now protruding from her head.
'Oh my God!' she was saying as Ed, wrapped in a towel, came into the room.
'Have you seen this?' she turned to face him, still not able to keep the astonishment out of her voice.
'Yes, I've seen it, you poor old thing.' He came over to her and put an arm carefully round her shoulder.
'It's all superficial,' he assured her. 'They said it would go down really quickly. So please get back into bed and rest.'
Annie turned her head slowly to look in the mirror again. 'So no plastic surgery on the NHS then?' she added, pretending to sound sad. 'Look, the swelling has made my frown lines disappear!'
'Oh well, there's an unexpected bonus,' Ed said just to join in with the joke for a moment, but then he couldn't help reminding her: 'You've been so lucky. He could have smashed your nose or taken out one of your eyes. He could have killed you if he'd hit you any harder. Annie . . .'
'Ed, stop it,' she reminded him and patted the arm around her shoulders. 'You're such a softie. I can't believe I've never been mugged before. You're not a real Londoner until you've been mugged. The only thing I'm really upset about is the bag.'
'The bag, the bag,' he said, then let out a breath. She wasn't sure if it was a sigh of sympathy or
exasperation.
'I can't go to work looking like this, can I?' She sounded almost annoyed.
'No,' he insisted, 'don't even think about it.'
'But I never don't go to work!' she reminded him, 'I don't think I've had a day off sick since . . .' she strained to remember, but couldn't. Streaming colds, blazing temperatures, twisted ankles, sore backs – all these conditions had been dragged into work with her before.
But even Annie had to accept that today she would have to take it easy. Plus, who would want to take wardrobe advice from someone out of Dr Who?
'I think Owen and Lana are on their way down,' Ed said at the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs. 'Do you think I should go out first and warn them: "your Mum's been abducted by aliens, but don't worry, we're getting her back slowly"? Do you want me to take the day off school,' he added, 'so I can look after you?'
'No, no!' she insisted, 'I'm going to be absolutely fine.'
'Oh Mum!' Owen said when he'd burst into the room and taken a shocked look at his mother, 'you look just like a human Dalek Sec.'
'That's it!' Ed had to agree.
By 9.58 a.m. Annie was bored rigid.
She'd had breakfast in bed. She'd tried to get back to sleep, she'd attempted reading a magazine, then the book on Ed's bedside table. But it was all boring her to death.
She just wanted to be well and back at work and out of this bedroom and doing something!
'For goodness sake, just take a day off will you?' Dinah insisted over the phone once she'd listened with horror to the full details of Annie's handbag saga.
'How's Bryan's secret party coming along?' Annie wanted to know.
'Definitely happening,' Dinah confided. 'I keep seeing the strangest notes and there are bizarre messages on the answering service. It is out of my hands. I'm just going to make sure that no matter where I am on that day, or what I'm doing, I am buffed, bronzed, gorgeous and wearing a beautiful dress. I mean, surprise parties, what a terrible idea!'
'Especially for women,' Annie had to agree. 'Men can turn up at anything looking like whatever, but for us it's so very different.'
'Agreed. Annie? Why can I hear tapping?' Dinah asked. 'Are you on your computer?'
'Oh, just having a little check on sales,' Annie admitted. 'I can't ignore eBay, not even for a day.'
What she didn't tell Dinah was that she had just emailed Mr Timi Woo with a substantial first order and she'd decided to cross all her fingers and take out the mortgage extension. It was going to work out. It really was. She believed in herself, even if no one else did.
'Annie, please go to bed,' Dinah pleaded. 'You should be resting.'
'I am in bed, but it's just so boring,' Annie told her. 'Ed and the kids have three days off school coming up,' she remembered. 'We never went away all summer and now I'd really like a long weekend somewhere. When's your next holiday?'
'Don't know,' Dinah replied; 'no plans in the pipeline.'
'We should do something together,' Annie said, 'especially as I'm probably not going back to work before then. I'll just be here, boring my face off.'
'I'll have a think about it,' Dinah promised her.
Once they'd said their goodbyes, Annie continued to fiddle about on the computer. What could she do? A little bit of online shopping? Nothing major – just some toiletries maybe? There were always good discount deals at her favourite online chemists. She knew that her bottles of shower gel and body lotion were about to run out, and she would hardly be able to go out to the shops looking like this.
With a few clicks of the mouse, Annie was logged on to one of her favourite cosmetic sites. Now she was looking at the offer of the week: an amazing deal on Sisley products. Sisley creams were very, very expensive. One hundred pounds a pot and upwards. They were also very, very good. Hollywood beauties apparently coated themselves head to toe in the really expensive anti-wrinkle face creams.
This really was a great offer: two tubes of face cream for the price of one, plus a pot of facial sun protector thrown in for free . . . direct from the manufacturer in Italy.
Annie made a snap decision to go for it. Fortunately, there was a credit card she kept in her desk which the mugger hadn't been able to steal from her.
Direct from Italy . . . that set her off on a fresh train of thought. She loved Italy. Home of the delicious leather shoe, birthplace of the beautiful handbag.
She had once spent four months in Tuscany working on a film set, back in her previous life as a wardrobe mistress. Although it had been some time since she'd used it, Annie considered her Italian surprisingly good. Out in Tuscany, some of the local set designers had taken her under their wing and made sure she'd had a daily dose of language learning. Annie had been taught all sorts of unusual and colourful expressions and made to repeat them over and over again until she was fluent.
She was confident that it would all come flooding back once she was over there again.
She'd been thinking about looking into an Italian summer holiday next year. Maybe with Dinah's little family in tow, maybe even Connor. They could all rent a big villa with a pool together.
So, why not do a little research now that she had the chance?
Soon, she was busy trawling through Italian villa rental websites. Tuscany, which she'd had in mind, seemed to be terrifyingly expensive: you couldn't rent a garden shed in midsummer without spending £2,000, so she started to look through some of the houses on offer in other regions.
Le Marche looked much more promising. Even better, it was near the coast. So there would be swimming and maybe even surfing, which might suit Owen and Lana more than touring round vineyards, olive groves and medieval churches.
She had a feeling that Ed would be big on medieval churches, though.
Clicking through the available accommodation, she glanced at a villa, another villa, an apartment, a beachside apartment, a villa with a pool . . . now that looked lovely. She opened up the photo of a big, whitewashed farmhouse with a red clay tiled roof. There was a wrought-iron balcony on the first floor which looked out towards the ocean, only a thirty-minute drive away. The house was described as 'within reach of Ancona and surrounding towns'.
Annie was supposed to be looking at dates for next summer. But she couldn't help noticing the flashing red 'late availability' sign.
The house was unbooked for the weekend that Ed and the children would be off and it was going for a song. The whole house and its lovely swimming pool. It was a steal. Really.
What a lovely, relaxing break they could all have, enjoying the late Italian summer sunshine. Her head injury could mend in peace and quiet. Ed could take a proper break away from school and evenings spent marking essays and all the out-of-hours music. He would be much less grouchy if he had a proper holiday. Maybe she'd be able to persuade Dinah, Bryan and Billie to come along and even Connor. He could tan up and drop a few pounds before his lunch with Sam Knight.
And if they divided the villa and the car hire between them, it would practically be cheaper than staying at home. And anyway, she was about to get £30,000 from the mortgage company, so surely she could treat everyone to a little break, especially after what she'd been through? She and Ed had never been away with the children. It would do them all so much good.
Annie pinged the owner an email straightaway, asking him to reserve the house.