One Day in May

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘You’re exaggerating,’ I told her. ‘Daisy’s just at an age when she’s nervous of any boy.’

  I smiled an insincere goodbye at the blonde, who’d left without buying anything, and with a look that told me, before she banged the door shut, what she thought of saleswomen who sat on the phone whilst customers browsed, and wasted her time by having items already sold on display. Sold to me, some of them, if I couldn’t bear to part with them, or didn’t think they were going to a good enough home. Maggie despaired of me. Particularly when I told her I could have sold the lovely Chambéry table I’d found in Nantes, but the woman had wanted to cut the legs off and make it into a coffee table, so I’d hurriedly made up some story about ringing my partner to check its provenance, and been told, by a dialling tone, that actually it had already gone, been sold yesterday.

  Making up stories. Yes, I was good at that, I reflected as I got off the phone to Laura and went to shut the door, which had bounced open with the force of the slam. Had told quite a few in my time, and indeed, had told one just now to my sister, about not having given Hal a second thought. Not quite true. I’d wondered about him over the years – of course I had – and sometimes wondered if he’d thought about me. I knew he hadn’t married, and wondered how I’d feel when he did. Sometimes I even checked the paper for an announcement. So how did it feel, Hattie, hm? Now I knew? I tried to gauge my feelings honestly, straightening up and folding my arms as I faced the street. A twinge of regret for our youthful selves perhaps – laughing our way to lectures, going to parties together in his beaten-up Beetle – a sentimental glance back in an à la recherche du temps perdu kind of way, but no more than that. Definitely no more than that.

  I turned briskly and made my way back to the counter through the artfully arranged vignettes that made up the shop. A decoratively carved buffet table lined one wall, accessorized with a lamp, candlesticks, and a pile of antique books; a curvaceous console flanked another, between a pair of exotic blackamoors. Centre stage sat a beautiful, button-backed bergère, long, low and feather-stuffed, upon which, two hundred years ago, a grande dame would have settled, the seat wide enough to prevent her crinolines from creasing. That was what I loved about our pieces – I trailed my fingers along the bergère’s intricately carved frame – the past. The wondering who’d touched, sat on, glanced in the mirror of, swept by in their hoops, and yes, you could pick up something shinier and brighter in Heal’s, but did it have soul? Did it have a history? What secrets did that group of fauteuils hold, those small, upright gilt chairs, which would have lined the walls in some grand salon: what emotions had they been privy to, what glances seen traded, or tender moments heard whispered behind fans?

  I realigned a row of silver apostle spoons on a table on my way back and sat down at the counter: an old apothecary’s desk we’d found in Fayence, the town, incidentally with the blue church clock where Hal was getting married. I gazed through my treasures to the street. I had, in idler moments over the years, wondered if perhaps Hal hadn’t married because he’d never forgotten me. Idle, silly, vain moments, as it turned out, because now I knew. As Letty had said, he’d been playing the field, until he landed the biggest catch of all: a beautiful French girl to sweep up that idyllic aisle. I smiled. Reached for my glasses and opened the client book. But of course.

  A few minutes later, the door jangled open and Maggie burst in with the lattes.

  ‘Look who I found lurking in Luigi’s and trying to sneak away without coming to see us.’

  Christian followed her in, lumbering over the threshold in a vast tweed coat, puffing and blowing. I crossed the shop to embrace him.

  ‘How dare you!’

  ‘Is not a question of not coming to see you,’ he wheezed, ‘is more to do weeth not wanting to be the bearer of bad news – again!’

  Maggie and I exchanged guilty glances like a couple of fourth-formers. Christian, retired and arthritic now, did our books, Maggie and I both being numerically dyslexic, and he despaired of ever balancing us, let alone getting us to make a healthy profit.

  ‘It’s Hattie’s fault,’ said Maggie, striding to the counter and putting the coffees down. ‘Most of the stuff in here isn’t for sale because the prospective homes aren’t deemed deserving enough.’

  ‘And the things that are for sale,’ I countered, ‘Maggie puts exorbitant prices on, so they never sell anyway.’

  ‘Well, I’m not selling for peanuts like that Magpie shop on the corner. They’re practically giving it away.’

  ‘Girls, girls,’ wheezed Christian, coming to join us in a cosy circle behind the apothecary’s desk where we had a faded brocade sofa (not for sale) and a brace of Louis Quinze chairs (so highly priced they’d never sell) to sink into. He settled in one of them. ‘You got to be realistic. You running a shop here, not an orphanage, Hattie. Ees none of your business where your lovely Limoges plates end up. And, Maggie, you got to stop imagining you top end Mount Street or a museum curator!’

  ‘Some of the stuff here could grace Mount Street,’ muttered Maggie, but without much conviction because she knew he was right. We’d got too precious, lately. Weren’t commercial enough. And new shops had sprung up in the vicinity, undercutting us, selling similar pieces – not as good, Maggie would insist – for a fraction of the price, whilst we sat reading our horoscopes and sipping our lattes, letting the world slip by.

  ‘You’ve grown complacent,’ Christian told us, opening the books on the table. ‘Look. This two years ago, see?’

  Maggie and I peered from the safety of our body language: crossed arms and legs.

  ‘A whopping twenty per cent profit, yes?’

  We nodded, uncrossing a bit: this, the result of a wonderful coup with an Edouard Honore bowl I’d found in Montmartre that had sold for £10,000 at Christie’s, and a mirror of Maggie’s – very nearly a museum piece – worth a staggering £20,000. Both had made huge inroads into Maggie’s mortgage and Seffy’s school fees. But that had been two years ago. And they’d been one-offs. Last year we’d done quite well with the furniture – the contents of a château in the Loire had yielded some fine old pieces – and we’d turned in a ten per cent profit: still pretty good. This year, however, not a lot.

  ‘You rest on your laurels. Not good for reputation or business,’ Christian said sternly, and then, just as I was about to take a bite from the enormous muffin Maggie had bought me, added, ‘or figures.’

  I put it down guiltily. Christian might be vast himself but he had an uncompromising Frenchman’s view of spreading behinds.

  ‘We need to go to France more,’ Maggie said decisively. ‘We’ve got lazy.’

  ‘Or,’ Christian threw up his hands, ‘you just do commissions. Give up the shop.’

  This was where we’d recently made money, doing up people’s houses, so the shop had suffered a bit. To be honest, these days I thought of it as a nice place to go to chat to Maggie, to discuss said commissions, which of course was an extravagance. But the thought of closing it, of sitting at home like a couple of housewives playing at interior design, horrified us. This was our respectable working-girl front: we liked dressing up and marching into work in our clever, high-street-take-on-designer clothes. But rents had soared in Munster Road and we were paying through the nose to read Interiors wearing Boden.

  ‘It’s sheer laziness,’ Maggie said firmly again. ‘We used to go to France four times a year. We only went once last year.’

  ‘But we did well,’ I reminded her. ‘Only one lorryload, but we made more than we would have done with four lorryloads years ago. We’ve got better.’

  But I knew what she meant. The moment we were solvent, we lost our drive. Without the worry of wondering where the next cheque was coming from, or whether the shop would be a success, we relaxed, lost our edge; and a bit of me, at nearly forty, wanted to relax. Surely one didn’t have to battle through life for ever? Surely we were allowed a spot of complacency, a bit of middle-aged spread? But Maggie was already consulting a
diary.

  ‘Montauroux is on the fifteenth,’ she said, squinting and rooting in her bag for the reading glasses we both now needed: she perched them on her nose. ‘And Fréjus is on the twenty-third. We’ll go to both.’

  ‘Ah. Slight problem. I’ve just told Laura I’ll go and stay with her on the twenty-fourth. There’s a shoot at the Abbey.’

  Despite having just spent a very spoiling weekend there, the words ‘Shoot’ and ‘Abbey’, juxtaposed with my very privileged sister, were designed to send shock waves down Maggie’s spine.

  ‘That’s OK,’ she said evenly. ‘The fair’s on the Friday. If you drive through the night like we used to, you’ll be back in time for the slaughter on the Saturday.’ She sent me a flat stare over her spectacles: less best friend, more partner. I wriggled briefly, but the eyes had me pinned.

  ‘Right,’ I conceded weakly. ‘France it is.’

  Christian smiled, enjoying this little exchange. ‘I think she right, you know. You need the stimulation,’ he advised me.

  Maggie gave me a triumphant look and swivelled to the computer screen – as much as one can swivel in a Louis Quinze – to make the ferry reservations.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, Lucinda Carr rang,’ her back informed me as she waited for P&O to flash up their wares. ‘She wants one of us to look at her dining room. The Gustavian Grey has not turned out as planned, apparently.’

  ‘Well, why can’t you go?’ I yelped. Lucinda Carr was a terrifying Chelsea housewife: pencil thin and waspish, the wife of a wealthy investment banker. She scared the pants off me. The client from Hades in Hermès.

  ‘Because I’m doing this, and you know how hopeless you are on the computer.’

  There was no disputing this, but I realized she’d deliberately lined herself up a task so I could be dispatched.

  Grumbling I gathered my coat and bag. Christian was already pulling out a heaving drawer from the desk, spewing forth bills and paperwork, preparing to set to. I bent and pecked his cheek. He sent me a sympathetic smile.

  ‘She eat you for breakfast, no?’

  ‘Who, Lucinda Carr or Maggie?’ I said, glaring at my friend. ‘And anyway, what am I supposed to tell her?’

  ‘Tell her it’s fine,’ Maggie replied without taking her eyes off the screen. ‘She wants reassurance, that’s all. You know what she’s like. I told her you’d be there at eleven.’

  ‘Did you,’ I muttered as I slunk to the door. Childishly, I let it bang shut behind me.

  Once out on the street, however, standing a moment to breathe in the heady mixture of carbon monoxide, coffee, and delicious restaurant smells wafting on the cool air, I relaxed. If truth be told I needed a walk. And I loved to walk in London: loved sauntering past the bars and cafés in our street, greeting my friends – the Italians and Poles clearing morning coffee, laying their tables for lunch – seeing what the competition was up to. Munster Road fairly bristled with antiquarian activity – lighting shops, carpets, fabrics – and one or two French establishments too. In the main they were less formal than us, more pine-based and farmhousey, and despite our supposed rivalry, we were friends with all of them.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I called out to Penny, who ran Magpie on the corner. She was wheeling a distressed green wheelbarrow full of terracotta pots outside.

  ‘Slow,’ she groaned, setting it down with a bump. ‘And you?’

  ‘The same,’ I agreed.

  ‘Where are the tourists? she wailed.

  ‘In the King’s Road, paying silly prices,’ I called back. She gave me a despairing shrug then, with a wave, went back into her shop.

  I walked away from Fulham and its sprawling grids of redbrick terraced houses, and made my way towards the wider avenues of more gentrified Chelsea. It was quite a hike through Parson’s Green, along New King’s Road and on towards Stamford Bridge, but I enjoyed the exercise, and after a while, the houses grew taller and whiter, the pavements squeakier, the window boxes more luxurious, and the door knockers shinier.

  When I’d lived with Laura in Pimlico, I’d walked past similar houses on my way to work in Westminster. In an immature sort of way, I used to imagine living in one, and indeed, a whole other life could flow, pretty much uninterrupted, under my everyday existence. I’d peer into basement kitchens and within a twinkling be breakfasting in one myself, with my pinstriped husband and my little blond children, waving them off to school in their straw boaters and blazers. Even back in those days, as I swung my Topshop handbag and smacked the pavements with the flip-flops I’d swap later for heels, I was disinclined to be trapped at home, so I’d invent a part-time job for myself, a spot of charity work perhaps. Not tin-rattling in the cold, you understand, more arranging balls in the warm, with other well-dressed women with tiny ankles. Later I’d change into something sexy and expensive – Ungaro, maybe? Or was that a country? – issue instructions to my nanny, and hurry to my taxi, purring outside my perfect house, pausing only to breathe to the cabbie, ‘The House of Commons, please.’

  I rocked to a standstill in the street. Where was I? Oh. Yes. Standing outside another perfect house. Mrs Carr’s, in fact. I gave myself a moment, marvelling at the magnitude of my youthful gall. Then I took a deep breath and looked up. White, stuccoed and occupying four floors – a waste, I thought scathingly, since everyone knew these women lived in the basement – it was by anyone’s standards, a supremely elegant house. But these days, I wasn’t envious, only a little wistful. And not for the house, but for the way of life. Naturally I’d dreamed of having a more conventional family. Naturally I’d have liked a husband, a few children, a nice house, but life had decided otherwise. And occasionally, I had to quell the feeling it had treated me unfairly. I pulled myself together, but as I mounted the steps and pressed the bell, I was alarmed to find tears pricking my eyes. Would I be this person for ever? I wondered. This working girl, with her colour chart in her handbag, her boots that needed heeling, in her five-year-old coat, waiting for Mrs Carr, or someone similar, to open the door?

  She did, moments later, still dressed in a pink jacket and sunglasses, having clearly just returned from dropping her children at school. An expensive carrier bag swung from her hand.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. I’ve literally just walked in.’ She looked at me accusingly. ‘I had to pick my dress up from Bruce Oldfield, for the Aids ball tonight. Didn’t the other girl tell you eleven?’

  ‘The other girl did,’ I said smoothly. ‘And I’m sorry. You’re right, I am a few minutes early.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now. You’d better come in.’

  What – as opposed to waiting outside on the step while she took off her coat and had a cup of coffee?

  ‘Thanks,’ I murmured.

  ‘I’m just going to take my coat off and put the kettle on. Won’t be a minute.’

  I assumed I wasn’t to follow, and waited in her black-and-white tiled hall, watching as her pert little backside went downstairs to the basement kitchen. Her heels echoed in the vast empty house. On the Pembroke table beside me – nice enough, but not a great deal of age – were framed photographs of her family. A studio shot of two blonde teenage girls caught my eye, the ones that years ago, I’d have been breakfasting with in the basement kitchen. They were probably reading History of Art at Newcastle now, or on a gap year in Thailand, prior to Mummy finding them work at Sotheby’s. And what of Lucinda, I wondered, now they’d flown the nest? What was her life like now? Maggie insisted all her smart married friends had their work cut out keeping their successful husbands, and she didn’t mean feeding them. Said that these days, nipping to Harvey Nicks wasn’t a joy, but the deadly serious task of maintenance. Facials, hair, nails and clothes – it was all about keeping one’s man, whilst at work the younger women circled like sharks and desk-perched. Just as I had circled and desk-perched too, I realized, as I looked up with a jolt from the smiling teenage faces, to this woman, who had my life. She was clip-clopping back down the passage towards me, still slightly irritate
d, but plastering on a smile. She had the grace to apologize.

  ‘Sorry. You caught me on the hop, rather.’

  And I had the grace to accept it for what it was: an attempt from a woman, whose life no doubt looked immaculate, but wasn’t necessarily all it seemed, to remember her manners.

  ‘Trust me,’ Maggie would warn, ‘you wouldn’t want to be in their gilded cages, however cushy you think their lives are. They’re all on antidepressants.’

  ‘On the whole I’m very pleased,’ she was saying, leading me down the passage and through some double doors. Thank the Lord. ‘Your partner’s got a very good eye, and she’s caught just the theme I wanted. But the colour’s a disaster.’

  I followed her into the dining room which Maggie had indeed done well. I recognized the round, wrought-iron table we’d found in Grasse, originally a garden table from a château terrace, but working beautifully inside a London house. Around it were iron chairs, painstakingly sourced from a bistro in Paris and newly upholstered now in a modern grey check. On the wall opposite the open French windows, flung wide to dispel the smell of paint, hung a huge oil by Claude Vessan. The painting, along with the distressed corner cupboard for glasses and the walnut sideboard, were all pieces I’d personally found, but hadn’t seen in situ. I felt a surge of pleasure at seeing them so well appointed.

  ‘It’s looking good,’ I told her.

  ‘It is, but the walls simply aren’t working for me. This is not the Gustavian Grey I ordered.’

  I nodded. ‘Hi, Greg.’ This to a painter she’d failed to acknowledge, who was crouched by the skirting board in the far corner, applying the finishing touches.

  ‘Hattie.’ He turned, nodded.

  Lucinda’s mobile rang and she answered it.

  ‘No, I told you, two inches below the knee, not above. I can’t go to the opera looking like a call girl, can I?’

  She strode out through the French doors to continue her conversation on the terrace. Greg straightened up and showed me the tin.