Charlie Glass's Slippers (16 page)

“Neither did I. I mean, I didn’t know it was Yves Saint Laurent.” I reach out and touch the silk. It’s pale gray and hand-painted with a deep red cherry-blossom print. It has a low cowl neckline and full-length floaty sleeves that remind me of a medieval princess. “Mum used to wear it when they had fancy guests for dinner. I think Dad bought it for her in Paris.”

“Oh,
Charlie
! That’s so romantic.” She’s looking wistful again, though in a rather sweeter way than when she was talking about the racing driver/international supermodel orgy. “I wish I had a man who’d do things like that for me.”

“You have Pal!” I say, and promptly wish I hadn’t, because both of us know that Pal isn’t the type of man to buy vintage designer dresses, in Paris or anywhere. “Anyway, I can’t wear Mum’s dress, because it isn’t going to fit. Mum was slim.”

“
You’re
slim. And it’s bias-cut. It’ll look fantastic.”

I’m being drawn in, slowly but surely, by the power of the incredible Yves Saint Laurent. Even though it’s over two decades old—and come to think of it, it was probably vintage
when Dad bought it, so it might well be a good deal older than that—the silk has this shimmering, almost glowing effect, and the draping of the cowl neckline is so perfect it makes you want to weep.

Comparing it with the H&M dress is like trying to compare a vintage Aston Martin with a fresh-from-the-factory Nissan Micra.

And seeing as Jay is a man who must know a good car when he sees one, there’s probably more chance of him noticing me if I turn up at his party in an Aston Martin of a dress than if I turn up wearing the sartorial equivalent of a Nissan Micra.

“All right.” I take the dress from Lucy. “I’ll try it.”

She knows me well enough not to say anything when I scuttle into the bathroom, for privacy. I’m shy enough about stripping off at the best of times, and right now all I’m wearing under my dressing gown is the nude bra and thong set I bought yesterday afternoon. I close the bathroom door behind me, shrug off my dressing gown, hang it on the peg on the back of the door, and then oh-so-carefully step into Mum’s dress.

It’s a bit of a wriggle to get it up over my hips, but nothing like the struggle I thought it was going to be, and easy enough to slide the sleeves up over my shoulders. I don’t quite dare to take the dressing gown all the way off its peg, which would give me a clear view in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. But I push it to one side and take a quick, nervous glance.

Oh, my God
.

I look . . .

Could I actually go so far as to say
beautiful
?

The glowy gray silk is reflecting light up onto my face, the cowl neckline flatters my bust, my arms look astonishingly toned and slender through the peekaboo magic of the sheer sleeves. Most incredibly of all, the bias cut of the skirt is—as
Lucy predicted—clinging to my curves in all the right places. I scarcely dare look at the back view for too long, in case what I’m seeing turns out to be a trick of the light, but it looks like my bum is miraculously less shelf-like than normal.

I’m not being vain—at least, I’m not trying to be vain—and I’m certainly not trying to claim I look as beautiful as Mum did when she wore this dress. But after so long being completely invisible, it’s a heady, giddy rush to feel that I might not be invisible tonight after all.

I won’t be the belle of the ball, but I don’t think I’ll be the beast, either.

There’s a little knock on the door, and Lucy is sticking her head around.

“Can I see? Does it fit?”

“Yes . . . it definitely fits . . . but is it too dressy, do you think? Or too long? I mean, I’d already planned to give Mum’s crystal stilettos another go . . . I’ve been practicing walking in them for the last three days, and I’m confident that I’m no danger to any passing Sacher torte . . . well, as confident as I’ll ever be . . . Oh, my God, Lucy, are you
crying
?”

I don’t even know why I ask, because it’s pretty obvious that she’s crying. Tears are actually streaming down her cheeks.

“You look like a mermaid!” she howls.

“In a . . . bad way?”

“No! In a good way!”

“But Luce, you don’t usually cry when you think people look good.”

“I do! I cried when Kitty put on her wedding dress the morning she got married, didn’t I?”

I don’t point out that this was, really, just a continuation of the crying Lucy had been doing ever since her sister had announced her engagement six months previously. Because there’s something in the way she’s crying right now that re
minds me, exactly, of the way she was crying on Kitty’s wedding day.

“Lucy . . .” I grab the toilet roll and hand her a huge wodge of it. I’d put an arm around her, but I’m horribly conscious of what would happen to Mum’s glowy gray silk if it got tears and mascara on it. “Is everything okay? I mean, were you coming around tonight to talk about something?” I take a deep breath. “Like, I don’t know, things between you and Pal, maybe?”

“What? No! Why would I need to talk about that? Things are brilliant between me and Pal!”

“Okay, so maybe you wanted to talk about how . . . brilliantly things are going. Either way, if you want to talk, Luce, I won’t go to this silly party . . .”

“Are you crazy?” She blows her nose, loudly, on the toilet roll. “You’ll pick watching
Peter Andre: The Next Chapter
with me over partying with a billionaire?”

“He’s not a billionaire,” I say, immediately hating myself for sounding a bit like Robyn. “And yes, Lucy, of course I’d pick staying in with you over that.”

“Well, you’re not going to. You’re going to go to this party if I have to drag you there myself. You look ridiculously beautiful, Charlie—that’s all I was crying about.”

“It’s not me. It’s the dress.”

“Oh, Charlie. I think it’s a little bit you.” She reaches over and tucks a few strands of my hair behind my ear. “You know, if you weren’t so blond, you’d look exactly like your mum right now. I bet she wasn’t much older than you when she last wore this dress.”

Which is all I need, frankly, because now I can feel tears welling up at the back of my throat as well. Thank God there’s a distraction in the form of my mobile, which I can suddenly hear vibrating, with a text message, on my dressing table.

“That’s bound to be Robyn . . .” I gulp, darting out of the bathroom and back into the bedroom.

HURRY UP CHA-CHA FOR FUCKS SAKE AM HAVING A CRISIS I MEAN IT THIS IS SERIOUS

Which is my cue to finish getting ready as quickly as I can, so I can get out onto the street and find a taxi to take me to Robyn’s flat, in Westbourne Grove.

• • •

My legs and bum, worn out from the run and all the lunges, are howling at me in protest when I get to the fourth floor in Robyn’s building, where her flat is situated. It doesn’t help that I have to take the four flights of stairs i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y slowly and gingerly, to be sure of not treading on the hem of Mum’s dress.

When I finally reach the right floor, Robyn is already waiting for me, leaning out of her front door wearing nothing more than a black lace push-up bra, a titchy black thong that makes my own nude thong look like a pair of Bridget Jones’s Big Pants, an absolutely huge diamond-studded cuff, and a tearful, furious expression on her fully made-up face.

“Charlie? What the fuck has taken you so long?”

I can tell, immediately, that she’s in the throes of a full-fledged pre-party tantrum. I know these tantrums well, and I also remember that there are many possible reasons behind them. This could be a tantrum about her fringe looking wrong, or her arms looking fat, or her feet looking big. It could be a tantrum about her eyeliner looking “a bit too Cleopatra-ish” or it could be a tantrum about her pre-party champagne tasting “a bit too champagne-y.”

“I’m here now, Robyn,” I say, not quite able to bring myself to apologize for the fact that I’m all of three minutes later than I said I’d be. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“
Everything’s
wrong!”

“That can’t possibly be true.”

“I hate my shoes!” she wails at me now. “They’re too pointy and they hurt my
fucking
bunions.”

“Well, maybe you could wear a different pair?”

“But they’re the only ones that go with my dress!
And
I hate my dress! In fact, I hate
all
my dresses! I’ve got like literally nothing to wear! I mean
literally
! And I hate all my earrings and I hate all my necklaces! The only thing I own that I even
like
”—she holds up an arm, brandishing it violently in my face—“is this cuff. And I can’t wear it because it’s so obvious that Yevgeny gave it to me and I don’t want Jay to be reminded of Yevvie when he’s hitting on me. And because I think there’s a chance Yevvie might have had his jeweler put a tracking device in it somewhere, and I don’t want him turning up and causing a scene like he did at Eddie Methuen-Campbell’s engagement party.”

“Robyn, I’m absolutely sure you’ve got something lovely to wear.” I put a soothing arm around her shoulders and guide her back into her flat, which is huge, and split-level, and extremely white, from the thick, snow-colored carpet to the faint sprinkling of crystalline powder (oh
no
, Robyn) that I can see on the coffee table. “Let’s go to your bedroom and have a proper look.”

“I’m telling you!” she shrieks. “I don’t have anything lovely! I don’t even have anything halfway
decent
!”

“But you got a few things from Net-a-Porter, didn’t you?”

“Only a couple,” she says, as we go up the flat’s winding spiral staircase into her bedroom, which looks—I’m not exaggerating—pretty much the way I imagine the Net-a-Porter dispatch facility must look. There are black Net-a-Porter bags everywhere: small bags, medium-sized bags, large fold-over bags that are actually more like suit covers, and which I assume are used to package the most expensive designer dresses they deliver. The floor is practically ankle-deep in black Net-a-Porter tissue paper. And on every surface—the super-king-sized bed, the armchair, the dressing table—are flung brand-new dresses, in every shade of the rainbow.

“This is the one I was planning to wear,” Robyn says, grabbing an outrageously small piece of gold lamé, holding it up to herself for a moment, and then throwing it aside with even more disgust than Lucy showed chucking my H&M dress earlier. “See? It makes me look
disgusting
. Jay Broderick isn’t even going to notice me.”

“Robyn, you’re being ridiculous. You could turn up to the party in a bin liner and all the guys would still fancy you.”

“Jay wouldn’t.”

I swallow, hard. “Of course he would. Now, come on, let me help you choose something. What about this?” I pick up a short, sparkly dress in fire-engine red. “It’s Valentino, Robyn! You always look great in Valentino.”

“I do,” she says, modestly. “But not that one. Net-a-Porter sent the wrong fucking size. It looks like a sack on me. Which is like literally the worst thing that’s ever happened, because I pull every single time I wear Valentino, and I know Jay likes girls in red, because every time I saw him out with Cassia Connelly, she was wearing—”

“All right, then what about this?” I grasp at a heap of midnight-blue silk, which turns out to be a rather stunning baby-doll-style dress, with an Alexander McQueen label in the back. “This would be gorgeous on you!”

“I
suppose
 . . . Hang on, Charlie.” Robyn is suddenly reaching over to me, pulling at the lapels of my coat. “What’s that you’re wearing under there?”

“Oh, it’s just a dress.”

“I know that,” she snaps. “Let me
see
it.”

Suddenly shy, I unbutton the long winter coat I’m wearing (yes, I am a bit hot on this warm summer’s evening, but I decided I’d rather overheat than run the risk of sitting on something sticky in the taxi and ruining the dress forever) and open it so that Robyn can see.

Her jaw drops. “Is that . . .
vintage YSL
?”

“Yes!” I’m impressed. Though with the amount of time Robyn spends thinking about clothes, it would probably be amazing if she
didn’t
recognize an Yves Saint Laurent dress when she saw one. “It was my mother’s. Is it okay, do you think?”

“Well, take off that bloody awful coat and I’ll tell you!”

When I do (take off that bloody awful coat, that is), Robyn just looks at me, one hand placed on one jutting, bony hip.

“Hmmmmm,” she says, after a long moment of silence.

“Don’t you like it?” I feel panic rising in my gullet. After all, it’s all very well for me and Lucy to think I look nice. We’re not exactly cutting-edge fashionistas. Under more professional scrutiny, maybe the effect of Mum’s dress isn’t so miraculous as I thought.

“It’s not that I don’t
like
it . . . I mean, it was your mother’s, of course, so I don’t want to be rude, but I just . . . hmmmmm.”

“Robyn, please, stop saying
hmmm
and tell me what you think!”

“Well, I don’t want to be rude . . .”

“You’ve already said.”

“. . . but I think the print is way too loud. And you do realize that like literally nobody else at the party will be wearing full-length?”

“But Robyn, I don’t have anything else to wear!”

“Well,
that’s
nothing to worry about! Now that you’re all skinny, you can just borrow something from me.”

“I’m not as skinny as you!”

“True . . . Oh! Wait a minute, Charlie! Didn’t you tell me you were a size ten now?”

“Yes, but . . .”

She holds up a hand to stop me, using the other hand to delve into the pile of dresses on the bed and pull out the sparkly red Valentino one. “This is a size ten! They sent me the wrong one, remember?”

I stare at it, aghast. “Robyn, I can’t wear that.”

“Are you insane? Of course you can wear it! You’re not all fat and blobby any more, Cha-Cha!”

I choose to ignore the word
blobby
. I’m too focused on the dress, which—despite Robyn’s claim that it looked like a sack on her—still looks pretty small to me. It’s strapless and has a short, straight skirt that probably wouldn’t come down much farther than my mid-thigh region. It looks like the kind of thing Joan from
Mad Men
might wear if she was on the prowl for a hot, rich, single man to take her mind off her enduring passion for Roger Sterling. Actually, scratch that: it looks like the kind of thing Joan from
Mad Men
would wear if she lost her job as a super-secretary and had to make ends meet by street-walking instead.