The Plus One

by Sophia Money-Coutts

  ‘Morning, Legs.’

  She sighed. ‘Well, I don’t know how thees ees going to work. Chanel have sent a few things but they are sample sizes and—’ she looked at the coffee in my hand (a full-fat latte) ‘—you’re a fourteen?’

  ‘More like a twelve.’

  She sighed again. ‘Eet’s going to be difficult. But I will ’ave a go.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘So you need something for a dinner on Saturday night, oui?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ She glanced at my hips. ‘OK. Take thees and try them on.’ She handed me several clothes hangers and removed the latte from my hands.

  ‘OK, I’ll just nip to the bathroom and try them on.’

  ‘Non, do it in here. Faster, then I can see what you look like. Just go behind there.’ She pushed me behind another rail sagging with clothes.

  I peeled off my jeans and shirt in a self-conscious fashion, my back to Legs.

  ‘Polly!’ she suddenly said in horror. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What?’ I asked, looking over my shoulder, embarrassed. ‘You told me to get dressed in here.’

  ‘Non. I mean your bra! Your pants! You can’t wear thees things. Honestly, it ees some kind of joke, non?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Polly, I have seen sexier underwear on my grandmother. I am going to ring up my friend at Rigby & Peller and you will go there at lunchtime.’

  ‘And spend a million pounds on a bit of lace that’s going to itch and scratch and quite possibly ride so far up my bottom it causes me serious internal injuries? No thanks.’

  ‘No, no, not a million pounds. She will give you a discount. You cannot wear thees peasant underwear, Polly. Now, how is that dress?’

  I had wriggled into a short black woollen dress, with a leather trim and a zip right up the back. ‘I can’t quite get the zip done up.’

  ‘Come here.’

  I shuffled in front of her.

  ‘Breathe in.’

  ‘I am breathing in. Can you just watch…’

  Legs, with the tenderness of a Nazi prison guard, wrenched the zip up, catching a little bit of my neck flesh at the top.

  She stood back and scrutinized me. ‘Eet will work. When you ’ave a better bra.’

  ‘Hello, I’m Polly,’ I said to a middle-aged lady wearing a vibrant shade of pink lipstick behind the counter of Rigby & Peller that lunchtime. ‘I think Allegra might have called? From Posh! magazine?’

  ‘Oh, Polly, hello! Yes, it’s all sorted. I’m Carol. Now, what I want you to do is wander around and have a look at what you think might work. And then I’ll measure you and we’ll go from there.’

  I nodded and looked around her. Maroon bras, peach-coloured bras, black bras. All vast. Legs said it was once the Queen’s lingerie maker. But was Her Majesty really that enormous? I supposed she needed something comfortable for all that travelling, for all those boring factory openings she has to go to. To stop her back from hurting. Then I thought to myself, what are you even doing thinking about the Queen’s breasts? I spied a white corseted bodice, which did up with little eye hooks at the front, and reached out and touched it.

  ‘Are you after anything special?’ said Carol from the till.

  ‘Er, I think just a couple of new bras and some matching knickers,’ I said, still looking at the corset. ‘This is probably a bit full-on for me.’

  ‘Tell you what, darling, why don’t you find a changing room and I’ll bring a few pieces through? What colours are we thinking?’

  ‘Oh. Black really. Maybe white. Except white always seems to go…’

  ‘A bit yellow in the gusset?’ said Carol, lowering her voice in a conspiratorial fashion.

  ‘I was going to say grey.’

  ‘That too,’ she said, unhooking one of the changing room curtains. ‘Right, in you pop. What size are you? I reckon…’ She stood back and eyeballed my chest. ‘A 36C.’

  ‘A 34C, mostly. But it sort of seems to depend.’

  ‘You don’t want any bulges in the back though, darling. Hang on, I’ll be two minutes.’

  Carol reappeared shortly afterwards with an armful of lace. Peach lace, yellow lace, baby blue lace, orange lace, black lace and a sort of hideous maroon lace, the colour of varicose veins. I tried on so many bras I thought I might have whiplash, but by the end we narrowed it down to a new black bra, a new baby blue bra and matching ‘panties’ as Carol insisted on calling them. Plus the corset. I’d tried it on at Carol’s suggestion, despite my misgivings that it would make me look like something that was auditioning for Sea World, and – actually – it felt pretty freaking amazing. Hot, even, which was never an adjective I’d considered using about myself. It nipped in at the waist and gave me the heaving chest of an Austen heroine. Less performing orca, more Beyoncé.

  ‘So,’ said Carol at the till, having folded everything up in tissue paper with the reverence of a bishop. ‘Altogether that comes to… two hundred and forty-one pounds please.’

  ‘Oh, Carol, sorry, Allegra said something about a discount?’ I cringed at having to ask but I couldn’t spend the GDP of Belgium on doilies for my nipples.

  ‘Yes, I’ve added it, duck. Forty per cent is the press discount. I hope that’s all right?’

  ‘’Course,’ I said, beaming back and rummaging in my wallet for my credit card. ‘Just wanted to check. And thank you.’

  The underwear would have to become a family heirloom. I would pass them down to my daughters. If they’d gone yellow in the gusset it was too bad.

  Jasper picked me up outside the flat on Saturday afternoon.

  ‘Quick, go, go, go, otherwise we’ll be stuck with her for years,’ I said, closing the door to his Range Rover as Barbara peered out from the shop door. I immediately worried about how to sit so my thighs didn’t splay all over his smart leather seats and look fat.

  ‘I’ve been in already to buy some cigarettes,’ said Jasper, waving back at Barbara. ‘She told me that you were a Capricorn so I had to look out for your mood swings.’

  ‘Oh, I wish she wouldn’t! She’s a danger to the public.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, starting the car. ‘All ready?’

  ‘Yup,’ I said. ‘First weekend away.’

  ‘First?’

  ‘I mean. No. Not first necessarily. I don’t mean there will be more.’ I blushed. ‘I just mean we’re going away. Together. For the first time.’

  Jasper burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t be mean,’ I said.

  ‘You are the easiest person in Britain to tease, Polly Spencer. Right, come on, let’s get going so we arrive there before midnight.’

  Little Swinbrook was one of those villages that a visiting American would describe as ‘quaint’. There was a lake with a few ducks waddling beside it, neatly clipped grass verges and a thatched pub called The Duck & Doorknob.

  ‘That’s the Earl and Countess of Stow-on-the-Wold’s place,’ said Jasper, pointing out a big wooden gate to the left of the car. ‘Swinbrook Hall’, said a sign on it. I sat up and tried to peer beyond it, but the driveway was annoyingly discreet, with big box hedges planted either side of the gate.

  ‘And I think this is Khaled,’ he said, slowing down and pulling on to a gravel drive a hundred yards down on the other side of the road. This was a metal gate, which slowly started opening in front of us, revealing another thick metal gate behind it. ‘Takes his security quite seriously then,’ said Jasper, pulling forward until we were sandwiched between the two gates. He opened his window and leant out towards a keypad on the wall.

  ‘Hello, Jasper Milton here.’

  There was an inaudible reply from the keypad and the sudden whirr as the gate behind us started closing again. Then a clunk when it finally closed, before the gate in front started sliding sideways.

  ‘Open Sesame,’ said Jasper.

  ‘What happens if he wants to pop to the village for some milk? It wou
ld take days.’

  ‘He probably has someone else who worries about the milk,’ replied Jasper, driving slowly down a tarmac drive with neatly fenced fields either side of it.

  And then the house came into view. It was enormous. Like Buckingham Palace, with steps leading up to the main entrance, stone pillars either side, and a big sweep of gravel in front of it. But Jasper carried on along the tarmac road, past a clump of rhododendrons.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, looking behind me at the house.

  ‘Back entrance. You never go to the front. He said to come to the courtyard behind the house.’

  ‘So why do they even have a front door?’

  ‘To look pretty. And for events. Parties. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I went to the front when I came to Castle Montgomery.’

  ‘I know. I was watching you from my bedroom, laughing as you tiptoed across the grass.’

  ‘You weren’t?’

  ‘’Course I was. I was thrilled, actually. I was expecting some sort of middle-aged frump and then I saw you and…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I was intrigued.’

  ‘Intrigued because you saw me sneaking across your lawn like a burglar?’

  ‘Exactly. There was something endearing about it.’ He stopped the car and leant across, putting his hand underneath my chin and pulling my face in to kiss me. ‘Right, come on. Let’s go in.’

  He jumped out and opened the boot, then swung his bag over his shoulder and picked up mine. I checked my face in the rear-view mirror and got out just as the back door swung open.

  It was a man dressed in black tailcoat and grey pinstripe trousers. ‘Hello, sir. I’m Edmund. Can I take your bags?’

  ‘Very kind, thank you.’

  I walked up the stone steps behind Jasper. ‘Hi,’ I said, waving awkwardly at the butler. Do you shake hands with butlers? I wasn’t sure. Butlers had not loomed large in my life until a couple of months ago and now I knew two. Two butlers! Presumably I’d need someone to put toothpaste on my toothbrush soon.

  ‘Hello, madam. Let me take you to your room.’

  Edmund silently led us through the house. Gold chandeliers, gold mirrors, gold side tables, gold chairs and golden banisters on the stairs. It was like walking through the house of a deranged French king. He then stopped in front of a door on the first floor. ‘The Marquess of Milton and Miss Polly Spencer,’ said a small handwritten card on it.

  ‘Here you go, sir,’ said Edmund, gliding in and putting our bags down by a window that looked out from the front of the house and down the drive and the line of trees.

  ‘Very kind, Edmund, thank you. And where’s Sheikh Khaled?’

  ‘He’s at the stables, sir. He said to make yourselves comfortable and come down for drinks at seven.’

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘And can I get you anything now?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to a whisky if there’s one going?’ said Jasper. ‘Pols, do you want a drink?’

  I was inspecting the bathroom. A gold bath. Even a gold bidet and a gold loo seat. Could I put a photo of the gold loo on Instagram or would I get in trouble?

  ‘Polly?’

  ‘Mmm?’ I stuck my head out from the bathroom.

  ‘Do you want a drink now? We’ve got an hour or so before drinks downstairs, so I’m having a whisky.’

  ‘Oh, well in that case, erm, a vodka and tonic would be great, if possible?’

  ‘Of course, madam.’ Edmund inclined his head a few millimetres again and walked out.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Jasper, loosening his tie and taking it off, along with his jacket and throwing them over the sofa at the end of the bed. A gold four-poster with approximately fifteen pillows on it. ‘An hour to kill,’ he said, looking up at me and smiling. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Won’t Jeeves be back any second with our drinks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I might just jump in the shower and wash my hair first.’

  I stripped off in the bathroom and spent the obligatory few minutes when tackling a new shower, trying to work out which way was cold, which way was hot, and got in. Big bottles of Guerlain shampoo and conditioner. I wondered if I could take them home with me. Probably not. I lifted up an armpit to check the stubble situation.

  And then suddenly the shower door opened and before I could turn around, Jasper’s arm had snaked around my stomach and he was pressing into me from behind.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, worrying instantly that mascara had run down my face and I looked like some sort of sad goth.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, lifting my wet hair and kissing my shoulder.

  I always worry about having sex in the shower. You’re generally standing up, right? Unless you’re in one of those showers for old people where there’s a ledge. If there isn’t a ledge, it’s physically awkward.

  Take face-to-face sex in the shower, for example. I have never been one of those doll-sized girls who men can pick up with one arm and hold up against the shower tiles. Never going to happen. He’d put his back out.

  So instead, a man had to approach me as if doing a limbo dance, bending his knees a little so his hips were lower than mine. And then I’d have to crane one leg in the air, possibly pressing my foot up against the opposite shower wall for support, or perhaps he’s holding the other foot up. It all gets a bit Strictly Come Dancing.

  Alternatively, I would be in front facing the shower wall and he would be behind me. As Jasper was now. ‘Put your hands against the wall,’ he said. So, I leant forward, put my hands on the marble and wondered what the cellulite on the backs of my thighs looked like. But I didn’t have long to worry about that, because Jasper reached forward and pinched my right nipple hard. Hard.

  ‘Aaaah,’ I said, a noise I was hedging my bets with a bit. I didn’t want to suggest that I wasn’t into this because that felt uptight. Unsexy. So, my noise could also mean ‘How lovely, please do it harder.’ Even though Jasper was being quite rough. The noise was also meant to suggest ‘Would you mind pinching less hard?’

  He reached for the shower head, unhooked it and turned it towards me, positioning it so the water was basically shooting straight into my vagina. I wasn’t totally into that, either, but I made a more encouraging ‘Aaah’ sound, and Jasper thrust himself into me.

  ‘That… feels… sensational,’ he said in my ear, before kissing my shoulder again.

  ‘Does it? Aaaah.’ He’d moved the shower head closer to me, so the jets of water were now really quite sharp on my clitoris. Lucy Hastings had always talked about getting herself off on the showers at school, but I never really understood how because the water pressure was so pathetic. The only thing I ever got from a school shower was a verruca.

  ‘Aaaah,’ I said again, putting my hand over Jasper’s on the shower head and moving it away a fraction.

  Jasper pushed harder into me. Again and again, but quite slowly, holding the shower head with one hand and gripping my hip with the other. It did feel better than the school showers after a while. Much better. So good that I forgot about the cellulite on the backs of my thighs and after a few minutes I came, with louder, more urgent ‘aaaahs’, followed by Jasper, seconds later.

  ‘Christ,’ he said afterwards, still inside me, putting one of his hands over mine on the shower wall. We stood for a few moments, heavy breathing, the water from the shower head shooting out around our feet. ‘Come on,’ he said, when I was getting cold. ‘Let’s have that drink.’ He opened the shower door and stepped on to the bathmat.

  ‘Two seconds,’ I said, not wanting to bend over and pick up the shower head while he was standing there watching my bottom. ‘I’ve just got to condition my hair.’

  The drawing room was full when Jasper and I arrived downstairs for drinks. I felt self-conscious walking in. I’d put the corset on underneath the Chanel dress and I was worried it was cutting off circulation to my head. How did those poor old Victorians do it? No wonder they were always fai
nting all over the place and calling for smelling salts.

  ‘Aaah, Jasper!’ said a man I recognized as the Sheikh, hurrying towards us. He smothered Jasper in a hug.

  ‘Great to see you again, Khaled,’ said Jasper, slapping him on the back. ‘And this is my girlfriend, Polly.’

  The Sheikh released Jasper, stepped back and looked at me. ‘How do you do, Polly,’ he said, holding his hand out. It was soft, like shaking hands with a koala. And he was shorter than I expected, with neatly clipped, dark hair slicked into a side parting and a moustache that perched on his upper lip like a slug.

  ‘I’m very well, thank you. And thank you for having us.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. Now, what would you like to drink? I am afraid I won’t allow alcohol here. So you can have pomegranate juice or a mineral water, if you like?’

  He looked enquiringly at me.

  ‘Oh. Um. Pomegranate juice would be delicious, thank you.’

  He burst out laughing and clapped one of his freakishly soft hands over his moustache. ‘I am just making a little joke with you, Polly. What nonsense is this, no alcohol? Of course there is alcohol. Now you would like a glass of champagne, yes?’

  I smiled and breathed out, as much as I could in the corset. ‘Yes. Perfect.’

  ‘Jasper?’ asked the Sheikh.

  ‘Champagne would be excellent, Khaled, thank you.’

  The Sheikh raised his hand in the air and clicked his fingers: ‘Two glasses of champagne please.’ In the corner, underneath a life-size oil painting of the Sheikh in military uniform, a waiter in white tie leapt as if electrocuted sharply in the buttocks, poured two glasses and carried them over on a gold tray.

  ‘Yes, yes, thank you, thank you, thank you,’ said the Sheikh, batting the waiter away again with his hand. ‘Now you must meet the other guests.’ He turned around to a sofa behind him, where a blonde woman was sitting, legs tucked underneath her, beside a red-faced man in a tweed jacket. A small, yellow-coloured dog was sleeping between them.