The Finishing Touches (16 page)

Jamie pretended to look affronted. “It’s turning over enough to give me the occasional day off, helping out an old friend.”
He patted me on the arm and winked. An old-friend gesture. “You work out what your girls need to know about men, and I’ll fill them in. So to speak.”

“Thanks,” I said. I wanted to tell him that he could start with me, but I didn’t.

Before I strode consultant-ly
into the Academy on Wednesday morning, dressed in my Proper Job suit and yet another designer blouse that Liv hadn’t even taken the tag off, I did something I should have done right at the beginning of the week. I went to have breakfast with Nancy and Kathleen.

I knocked on the mews cottage door at ten past eight, and Nancy let me in, cooing, “Guess who’s here?” to Kathleen in the kitchen. Kathleen’s voice bellowed back, “If it’s that Harrison Ford again, tell him to bugger off.”

“No, it’s
Betsy
!” said Nancy, who had years of training in tuning out sarcasm. She ushered me through to the kitchen. “Come on in, we’ve just made you a little snack, to set you up for the day…”

To the untrained eye, it looked as if Kathleen had gone mad and catered for me
and
the England cricket team. There
was a vast dish of scrambled eggs on her hostess warmer, bacon sizzling alongside bulging Cumberland sausages, a massive pot of tea, and coffee and orange juice on the table.

“But I told you not to go to any bother,” I said weakly.

“This? Oh, I whipped up an extra egg,” Kathleen insisted from the stove, where she was frying bread. “What did I tell you? Breakfast like kings, dine like paupers—healthiest way. Winston Churchill swore by it.”

I was pretty sure Churchill had dined like a king from morning to bedtime snack, but it was hard to argue with the delicious smell of a full English.

“Tuck in, Betsy,” Nancy urged, pouring the tea. “You’re skin and bone since you moved up to Scotland. You need some feeding up.”

That was hardly true, but I began heaping a plate with golden scrambled eggs speckled with pepper and made with more butter than I’d normally use in a week. I tried to resist seconds, but I couldn’t.

After some general chat about what was going on next door (“I haven’t seen the police recently, Betsy—has that Russian girl sold her car?”), I nudged the conversation round to the other reason I’d called, apart from eating three days’ worth of calories on toast.

“Is my stuff still upstairs?” I asked Nancy. “I suddenly thought last night, I should have a look at my old notebooks.”

“Everything’s exactly as it was when you left it, petal,” she said fondly. “We didn’t move a thing.”

“Except to tidy up.” Kathleen gave me a much less starry-eyed look. “It was like a charity bazaar in there. After all Nancy taught you about a place for everything and—”

“Everything in its place. I
know
.” I protested as I put my knife and fork neatly together on the clean plate. “And I’m teaching Liv everything you taught me about running a tidy
house. She’s my model student—what Liv doesn’t know is exactly what the Academy needs to be teaching from now on.”

“Ooh, Betsy, that’s a job and a half,” said Kathleen.

“God bless her,” added Nancy.

“Well, that’s why I want my notebooks,” I said. Between ironing lessons and the notebooks, I reckoned that was the syllabus cracked. All I had to do was type it up into a semblance of professional jargon and get Miss Thorne to OK it.

“Can I tempt you to a tiny bit more bacon?” asked Kathleen, wafting the plate near mine.

“No,” I said, and I had to push myself away from the table as I said it, because my stomach was saying,
oh, go on, then.
“I’ll just pop upstairs, and then I need to get on. I’ve got stacks to do today…”

“I’ll make you some sandwiches,” Kathleen shouted after me as I headed for the stairs. “You can share them with that nice young bursar. I bet he’d not say no to an egg roll.”

I made my way carefully up the stairs, trying not to knock off any of the assorted framed samplers or baby photos, and opened the door to my tiny old bedroom.

It was, as Nancy had said, just as I’d left it, right down to the hair ribbons on the dressing table and the magazine pages of famous redheads that I’d used to paper the inside of the wardrobe: Fergie, Molly Ringwald, Rita Hayworth (bit of a long shot, that one). Feeling a bit like an intruder, I dropped to my knees and reached into the back, between the slithers of winter coats and long skirts, my hands groping for the shoe box I kept my treasures in.

My hands met something box-shaped but much bigger than I was expecting. I drew it out, and when I saw what it was I sat back on my heels with a thud.

An old Cooper’s Marmalade box.

My heart seemed to stop beating. This had to be
the
mar
malade box, the one Nancy had insisted had been thrown away for hygiene reasons every time I had asked where it was. They hadn’t thrown it away. They’d kept it.

My throat tightened as I lifted it, turning it in my hands so I wouldn’t miss a single scuff or crease. I’d never seen this before. Someone had put me in this and then walked away.

Now that I had it in my hands, my old daydreams sagged. What would a ballerina be doing with a gross dozen jars of marmalade? It wasn’t exactly something
normal
people had knocking around the house. Only the Academy took marmalade in quantities like that—they’d started taking Cooper’s as a tribute to me, Franny had said.

Suddenly, in adult hindsight, that sounded like Franny being nice. They’d probably
always
taken Cooper’s. Was that where the box had come from, the Academy kitchens? Surely that meant my mother
had
to be an Academy girl. The fact that she’d chosen a box with a royal crest sounded like the kind of thing Miss Thorne would recommend for the appropriate disposal of unwanted babies.

But she could just as easily have found the box round the back, where the bins were. Or got it from the hotel where she worked. There were plenty of hotels around Mayfair, plenty of chambermaids—and plenty of dubious ladies in paid-for flats…

I put it to one side and lifted out the box inside it—my own Chinese box of treasures.

In 1999 I’d slammed this box into the back of the wardrobe and sworn never to open it again. I hadn’t actually thrown it away—I didn’t have enough history to make grandiose gestures—but I’d hoarded everything that had the tiniest significance to me: gummed-up nail varnishes, notes that Liv and I had passed in class, plane tickets, goofy passport photos of us before our school trip to Boulogne, Valentine’s cards. I wanted
to inspect them all, but I made myself put them to one side until I’d found what I had come for.

At the bottom was the stack of lavender leather-bound notebooks, the ones handed out to the Academy girls each term. Franny had given me one as soon as I was old enough to write my own name, and after that I dutifully wrote down everything, even things I didn’t really understand. It made for some confused scrawls about “Tenshun Headakes” and “Marritul Relashuns,” but I kept the notebook with me in my pocket, even when Franny and I were out shopping or in the car. She always said something worth noting down.

I wrote down Kathleen’s and Nancy’s tips too, but they tended to be the “put eggshells on a wine stain” and “iron + brown paper removes candle wax” variety, and they went in the back of the book. Even my notebooks had a dual personality.

As I read through the spider diagrams illustrating the Secrets to the Perfect Party, I could hear Franny’s voice—calm but confident, because her parties were never less than perfect.

“Water and a slice of lemon looks like a gin and tonic if you can’t drink but don’t want to be a party pooper.”

“Send shy men out with the tastiest canapés so they’ll meet everyone without trying.”

“Wear white things near your face—the light’s more flattering.”

My writing grew up as I turned the pages, and I felt a sudden yearning for that time in my life when Franny’s tips had made grown-up life seem so gorgeous. You’d never think I was a waif and a stray, with the notes I had on stopping roses dropping their petals and how to get a tiara to stay on. All I really had to bother about, according to these notes at least, was whether I’d ever get a boyfriend who’d wear the right shoes with country attire.

A couple of photographs fell out of one book: me and Liv,
just after our final exams, in our shades—hers Kate Moss aviators and mine retro cat’s eyes above red lips, very Audrey Hepburn. It dawned on me just how much I’d changed when I’d gone up to Scotland. I’d been quite girlie in those days, more like an old-fashioned Phillimore Girl, with my bouncy curls and pretty sundress. And my eyebrows…I’d forgotten how into eyeliner pencils I had been at sixteen, but it hadn’t made my pale face seem more together.

I also seemed to have laughed a lot more. I turned the photo, but there was no date. I thought Jamie must have taken it. That was probably why I was smiling in that half-pouty, half-nervous manner.

I put the snap to one side to show Liv later and carried on reading the notes I’d made. It
was
going to be useful, I thought. I just had to adapt it. That tiara tip—it’d work for hairpieces now, or those tiny wedding hats. And men always needed telling which shoes to wear with what. My spirits started to lift as I read on through to the scrawls at the back—the good-bye notes from Academy graduates, bouncing out of there to go on to run ski companies or take jobs at Christie’s.

I’ll miss you SO MUCH, Betsy, PLEASE stay in touch, THERE’S A HOT TODDY WAITING FOR YOU IN VERBIERS!!! xoxoxox!
Charlotte Prior-Yardley had scribbled, along with several phone numbers (London/Bucks/Scotland/France). They were always
devastated
to leave, and
compleeeeetely
dying to meet up again “as soon as.” Charlotte’s sidekick, Tilly Tarrington, had rebelliously drawn hearts over all her
i
’s (one of Miss Vanderbilt’s pet hates) and written
See you at my wedding to Tom Cruise!
which even then I’d thought was hopeful.

Something about their unashamed sweetness made me melt inside. God knows where they were now, these girls, but the hot toddy would definitely still be on offer. There had been
reasons I’d wanted to go to the Academy. It hadn’t all been snobbery and—

My eye fell on the last signature as I turned the page, and my stomach contracted automatically at the superneat writing.

The best of luck to you in wherever life takes you next. Best wishes, Adele Yvonne Buchanan

Adele Buchanan. Blond, perfect, and so cool she could chill your gin and tonic at ten paces—unless you were a man, in which case she could melt the ice in your glass. Adele hadn’t offered anyone her phone number on Lady Phillimore Graduation Day. In fact, according to Kathleen, who told Nancy when she thought I was safely washing up, the only phone number she was interested in was Charlotte’s recently divorced father. He had a helicopter—Kathleen’s undertones were quite carrying—and she’d told someone she wanted a rich man, then a titled man, and then a rock star “before my tits go and I hit the cruise liner circuit.”

“Betsy! Oh, fiddlesticks!”

Nancy was standing at the door, a cup of tea in her hand and a worried expression on her round face.

“I thought you might like some tea…” she began unconvincingly, then put down the cup so she could wring her hands in dismay. “You’ve found the box! Oh, I
told
Kathleen not to put it in your wardrobe, but she was having one of her tidying fits; you know what she’s like.”

“Where’s it been until now?” I asked.

“Frances had it, at home, in her room. Wouldn’t throw it away. When she died, Lord Phillimore thought we might like it. I didn’t know what to do with it, but Kathleen put it in here, evidently.”

I couldn’t imagine Lord P transporting an old cardboard box down to London just for Kathleen. It was an unexpectedly gentle thing for a man like him to do.

“Why did you always tell me it had been thrown out?” I asked.

Nancy squeezed her stout frame past the bed and, with a series of painful clicks, sat down next to me so she could put her arm around me, just like she had when I was small. I let her, even though I towered over her.

“Look at it,” she said. “Tatty old thing. Would you want to know someone had left you in that?”

I shook my head.

“No, I shouldn’t think so. She should have put you in a Moses basket, precious gift that you were. I’ll never forget that morning. ‘Look what the milkman’s left,’ Kathleen says to me…But you don’t need to hear that again.” She stopped and looked embarrassed. “You need to be getting away. Keeping you back, gassing like this.”

“No,” I said, and squeezed her. “It’s been like old times, having breakfast here with you two.”

“Did you find what you wanted?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes.” I picked up the notebooks and put them in my red handbag. “I did. Thanks for hanging on to them.”

Kathleen pressed a Tupperware box of sandwiches into my hand as I left, and by nine I was in Mark’s office, trying to type up my ideas into a presentation.

I’d never given a presentation, or even listened to one, unless you counted the desperate sales pitch I endured every year from the man who made organic suede protector in Glasgow—Fiona had made me manager only so she could shunt the polite sales-pitch suffering onto me. Still, I made a list of BBC news-type phrases starting with “maximize demographic” and tried to shoehorn one per sentence.

Then I realized I was using far too much shoe jargon.

Paulette stomped up the stairs with the post at half past nine and nearly dropped the wrap of tulips she was carrying when she saw me at Mark’s desk.

“Jeez! What are you doing here?” she yelped. “I thought you were in the pheasant-plucking class.”

“Pheasant plucking?” Somehow I couldn’t imagine Venetia up to her false nails in a pheasant. Well, I could see Anastasia making short work of one, but Divinity and Clemmy would surely boycott it on animal rights grounds.

“Yeah, makes a right mess. They watch mainly because they can only afford one pheasant at a time. Plucking ridiculous.” Paulette grinned cheerfully. “The jokes are the best thing about that class.”

Eyebrow
plucking, though—not a bad idea. I jotted it down underneath the Modern Grooming section.

“Nope, I decided to skip it,” I said. “I already know all I need to about plucking pheasants. Which is absolutely nothing. Are those for me?”