Charlie Glass's Slippers (2 page)

“Oh, but Gaby and I never think of her as a
half
sister—do we, Charlie, darling? At least,
I
don’t.” Robyn grabs a pistachio macaroon from a plate that’s being whisked past by the frantic Becca, and makes all the ooohing and aaahing noises she always makes when confronted with food, to divert everyone’s attention from the fact that she’s not actually eating any. “Surely you know, Eloise, that my daddy was an absolutely
awful womanizer? Mistresses in every port, illegitimate offspring everywhere?”

“That’s not exactly true!” I say, as Eloise’s green eyes widen to match her open mouth. “In fact, that’s not true at all. There’s only Gaby and Robyn and me! And Dad was only married twice—to their mother and then to mine.”

“Oh, yes, I do recall something about that now.” Eloise-from-
Grazia
looks rather embarrassed. “Didn’t he . . . er . . . run off with the Irish cleaner, or something, while he was still married to Diana Forbes-Wilkinson?”

“Yes! The Irish cleaner was Charlie’s mother!”

Before I can add any mitigating information to Robyn’s pronouncement, we’re interrupted by the
Tatler
photographer whom Gaby, in an impressive coup, has persuaded to cover the event. He asks us to pose for a picture; then, after a swift glance at the picture in his digital camera, asks me if I’d mind stepping to one side, “so I can just get the other two on their own instead.”

Evidently I’m not
Tatler
material.

“My mother was the housekeeper,” I tell Eloise, as soon as the photographer has wandered off to take more shots of
thin
people. I’m determined to give Mum her due, and to make one other very important fact clear. “And they ended up happily married, by the way, and having me. Besides, Dad didn’t just
run off
with her. It was . . . complicated.”

Complicated, I could point out, by the fact that Dad and Diana’s marriage was over in all but name long before Mum even came on the scene. They were really only staying together, at that point, because they were partners in the shoe business—Dad the design genius, Diana the hard-nosed businesswoman—and the husband-wife brand was a great selling point. But I don’t like to say anything flippant about her parents’ marriage in front of Robyn.

“And it
was
the swinging seventies, Eloise,” Robyn inter
jects, evidently having no qualms about being flippant about her parents’ marriage herself. “I mean, Mummy was already cheating on Daddy with most of the neighbors before he took revenge and shagged the housekeeper. God,
sorry
, Cha-Cha.” She slings a bony arm around my shoulders. “You
know
I don’t mean anything horrible about your mum. Especially not today, when the three of us should all just be thinking about poor Daddy.”

For the first time today—in fact, almost for the first time since Dad died, three weeks ago last Wednesday—I feel a stab of something painful, somewhere deep down inside. So I gather it up as quickly as I can, pop it into a mental box marked
To Deal with Later
, and carry on as if Robyn hasn’t spoken.

“Anyway, Robyn, I came over here to tell you that somebody really wants to talk to you . . . er . . . over there.” I gesture, vaguely, towards the swirling vortex of blondes that are filling the room. “That blond woman in . . . um . . . the black dress.”

“
Fuck
, that’s Jessica from
Vogue
. Sorry, El, darling, but I have to go and talk to her, or she’ll just get uppity and refuse to take my calls from now on.”

Robyn is already hightailing it across the store, leaving me and Eloise-from-
Grazia
stuck with each other.

“Well, Robyn seems quite . . . high on life this afternoon,” she says, as soon as Robyn’s out of earshot.

“Oh, you know Robyn. Always high on something!” Which wasn’t what I meant to say at all. Gaby is going to
kill
me. “High in a . . . a metaphorical sense, I mean!”

“And you’re the third Glass sister,” Eloise continues. She’s gazing at me with curiosity in her beautiful green eyes. This may not be much, I grant you, but it’s more interest than anyone else has shown me this afternoon. “The cleaner’s daughter. Wow—your family is complicated.”

“Housekeeper. And what family
isn’t
?”

“So do you work for Elroy Glass, too?”

“God, no. I mean, I don’t work for Elroy Glass the company. I’ve been looking after Elroy Glass himself for the last nine years! Dad, that is,” I add, in case she hasn’t understood me.

“Looking after him? As your
job
?”

“Um, yes. Absolutely,” I add, hoping to make this fact sound better than she’s just made it sound. I smile at her. “Motor neuron is a pretty life-altering illness, you know. Dad needed someone to help him do everything, from eating and washing to . . .” I stop myself, before I start to regale a total stranger with the pretty depressing details about the day-to-day indignities of living with a debilitating neurological condition. “Anyway, yes, in answer to your question. Looking after Dad is . . . sorry,
was
 . . . my full-time job.”

“Wow. That must have been hard.” But Eloise-from-
Grazia
is distracted already, as a skinny blonde waves at her from across the room, mouthing,
Come and say hi, sweetie!
“Oh, sorry . . . I really need to go and get round to a few more people. But it was nice talking to you, er . . .”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie.” She hoists her bag up farther into the crook of her arm, turning away as she does so. “And my condolences, of course, about your father.”

It’s the first time anyone has said this to me at Dad’s memorial.

I fight back the prickly feeling that’s crept up, quite suddenly, in my throat, and go and busy myself with another tray of teacups.

chapter two

I
suppose I should
be
more upset by Eloise-from-
Grazia
forgetting my name and then swanning off to talk to someone more interesting. But it’s hardly worth getting offended. I mean, fashion people aren’t going to waste their time chewing the fat with someone who’s so obviously not one of them.

I’m not one of them, in fact, in more ways than you’d think. Mostly because I’m the combined size of at least
three
of them. And I’m not Putting Myself Down when I say that, by the way (Putting Myself Down being another one of Lucy’s pet peeves). I’m just stating an out-and-out fact. The average size of the women in this room has to be . . . a four. Well, if it’s a four, then my ratio is accurate. At least in the bum department, seeing as my (roughly) planet-sized rear end is the reason I had to buy my new dress in a size sixteen rather than the fourteen, which fitted okay everywhere else. It’s a wrap dress, specially ordered from the euphemistically titled “plus” section of H&M online, so at least I’ve managed to fasten the tie-belt a bit tighter around my waist, and hopefully not
look
as though I’m (partially, at least) a size sixteen. I felt pretty good in it, especially teaming it with these shoes. They’re peep-toed four-inch heels, and they’re made from soft, silver leather that’s covered with tiny, glittering crystals—impossible to walk
in but magical to look at. Anyway, what with the new dress, the vintage shoes, and careful makeup to emphasize my eyes and bring out my cheekbones (which I’m still determined to believe are lurking there somewhere), I was congratulating myself on scrubbing up well, until I got to the church earlier and realized that everyone else was kitted out in Armani Privé and new-season Stella McCartney.

Talking of Armani, Privé or otherwise, Gaby has caught my eye from across the room. She’s mouthing
Sacher torte!!!
at me as if she’s a drowning woman and the only thing that will save her is a life raft made from traditional Viennese chocolate cake.

Fine—Sacher torte it is. I stop faffing with teacups and set off for the staircase at the back of the store to go up to the first-floor storeroom, where I’ve stashed the rest of my baked delights.

It’s yet more tortuous progress, because the stairs are shallow and uneven. This isn’t exactly news to me, but navigating these stairs in spindly heels is an entirely different ball game from running up and down them in sensible buckled Mary Janes, the way I used to when I was a child. This, Dad’s original flagship shoe store, was my and Lucy’s favorite Saturday-morning hangout when we were six and seven. Down on the shop floor, where the scary-eyebrowed fashionistas are now fiendishly networking, there was a thrilling air of decadence, with loud music, popping champagne corks, and a revolving door of perfumed and glamorous customers, who all seemed to be half in love with Dad. But up in the stockrooms above, things were even more thrilling, at least for a couple of six-year-olds. In the first-floor stockrooms, you could play endless hours of “shoe shop” with the pairs of shoes you secretly took down from the shelves; or, up in Dad’s airy, light-filled studio on the second floor, you could pull a couple of chairs up to one of the many windows and spend whole afternoons
“spying” over the backyards of the neighboring stores, which would occasionally—grippingly—feature the canoodling couple from behind the counter at the café next door, or some of the staff from the nearby health food shop gathering to smoke weird-smelling homemade cigarettes out in the back.

There was even one—only one—glorious Saturday morning here with Gaby and Robyn. I barely ever got to see my half sisters until I went to live with them when I was eight, so an unexpected opportunity to hang out with them would have been exciting enough even if it hadn’t been here at the store. Admittedly, things weren’t absolutely perfect—Dad let each of us pick out a pair of shoes to play dress-up with, and we all inadvertently picked red pairs, which made Gaby go into a mood because she thought we’d copied her, and made Robyn cry because she wanted both of us to wear boring black ones—but it’s a happy memory for me nonetheless. Though when I tried to mention it to Gaby earlier today, in an attempt to create a glow of rosy nostalgia for the old place, she simply stared blankly at me and claimed it had never happened.

Of course, this place hasn’t housed an Elroy Glass store, much less a flagship one, ever since my stepmother, Diana, finally got her way four or five years ago and moved operations to a swanky new site on Bond Street instead. She is the CEO, after all—a position she’s occupied ever since she married Dad thirty-five years ago—and Dad had been so ill that he’d stopped even the pretense that he was still designing many months previously, so I suppose it was her prerogative. The old store has been let out to a succession of businesses ever since—most recently an antiquarian book dealership—but seeing as it’s not really at the plum end of King’s Road anymore (really, it’s more like the prune end of King’s Road), it’s never exactly regained its old atmosphere. In fact, after Gaby’s swift and merciless makeover downstairs, to get the place suitable for today’s party, it’s more lacking in atmosphere than
ever before. Which makes the quiet, almost padded calm of the unchanged upper floors feel melancholy in comparison.

Dad’s old studio has been taken over by these big crates, filled with old pairs of his shoes, that at some point have been moved up here from the more convenient first-floor stockroom by one of the intrepid but unsuccessful shopkeepers who have leased the place over the last few years. I’ve used one of the crates to conveniently store my cakes on—the two remaining lemon drizzle cakes and the rich, glossy Sacher torte that Gaby has sent me to fetch—but there’s another crate free, luckily, for me to perch on and rest my protesting feet.

“Oi! Charlie!”

The voice takes me by surprise. Though the windows up here are grubbier than they used to be in Dad’s day, there are still enough of them that I can easily look out over the back of the store. Two buildings along, and almost at a right angle to the back of this building—the site of the old health food store, actually, where the dodgy cigarettes were smoked—a man is waving at me from out of an open second-floor sash window.

It’s Ferdy Wright, the love of my life.

Well, okay:
secret crush
is probably a more accurate description. You can’t call someone the love of your life unless that person is actually in love with you, too—can you? And Ferdy Wright isn’t in love with me. We’re just friends—and fairly new friends, at that. His dad, Martin, has been a kind of friend of the family for the best part of two decades, but I’d never met his son until Martin broke his ankle skiing two winters ago and I bumped into Ferdy during hospital visiting hours when I was dropping by with an Ian Rankin novel and a box of praline seashells for his dad. We got to chatting by the coffee vending machine and our friendship just kind of blossomed out of that.

I get up from my crate, manhandle one of my own sash windows open, and lean out to greet him.

“Ferdy! What are you doing there?”

“Plumbing in the staff toilet!” he calls back. “But don’t get me wrong, Charlie. My life’s not all glitz and glamour. The rest of my day has been spent with the health and safety people from the council, discussing how to block off access points for a variety of delightful rodents!”

I should explain: the reason Ferdy is two buildings along at all is because that’s where he’s setting up a new branch of his ice-cream parlor business. It’s called Chill, and he already has two branches—one in Soho and one just off Marylebone High Street. They’re really gorgeous: proper old-fashioned Italian ice-cream parlors with retro fifties décor in appropriately ice-creamy shades of strawberry and pistachio, but with modern touches like slouchy leather sofas and free Wi-Fi. And more gorgeous still are the ice creams themselves, all homemade and delicious, from traditional Italian flavors like dark chocolate tartufo and zabaglione to Ferdy’s trad-with-a-twist confections like blackberry ripple and lemon-meringue crunch.

And more gorgeous
still
, of course, is the owner himself. Even at this distance, today, I can make out his wide, open grin and the cheery gleam in his pebble-colored eyes. His hair is messy and tufty and a kind of dusty brown (dusty because that’s its natural shade, I mean, not dusty because he doesn’t bother to wash it; in fact, I’ve surreptitiously inhaled his hair on several occasions, and I’m thrilled to report that it smells very freshly washed indeed, with sparkling notes of citrus and peppermint). As for his build, he’s not what you’d call
perfectly
in shape (actually, he has a distinct hint of ice-cream-induced tummy), but he’s tall and broad and strong-looking, which is incredibly handy for this silly fantasy I sometimes have. I won’t give you all the embarrassing details, but there’s this part where Fantasy Ferdy sweeps Fantasy Me into his arms and lifts me up onto his Fantasy Horse. And there’s a rain-lashed moor in there, too, the bleak landscape of which Fantasy Me
has been wandering for some unspecified reason, looking artfully disheveled in a ragged bodice and a threadbare cloak, until Fantasy Ferdy rides out of the mist and does his whole lifting-me-onto-his-horse thing.

“I was thinking about you this morning, actually,” Real-life Ferdy calls out now, from his window.

“You were?”

“Yes. I’m trying out a new mint stracciatella ice-cream recipe and I really need to get your opinion on it. There’s an issue with the amount of chocolate chips. Honey—she’s the interior designer for the new store—tasted it yesterday and she thinks there are too many chocolate chips. And I think there are too few. So I thought to myself, who else is there who can give me proper advice about all-important chocolate quantities but my head of R and D? That’s you, by the way, Charlie. It’s an unpaid position, I should warn you, but one of great influence and honor. I expect,” he adds, pushing up his sash window so that he can position himself more comfortably, sitting on the inside ledge rather than leaning out of it, “you’ll be getting calls from top headhunters quite soon, trying to poach you to go and work for rival ice-cream makers, people who promise six-figure salaries and exciting foreign travel. But don’t forget that I was the one who discovered you, Charlie Glass. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you unlimited ice cream, that’s all I’ll say.”

He’s joking. Well, he’s joking about the rival ice-cream companies. And it’s an exaggeration that he’s calling me his head of research and development, because obviously I’m nothing of the sort. But then, this is kind of the basis on which our friendship has blossomed since we first met. I think he was only being kind at first, because we’d discussed my dream of working with food one day, but he started bringing around samples of his ice cream for me to taste and comment on. The first few times we tried them together, but after that he
really seemed to start taking me seriously. He started bringing around so many that we couldn’t taste them all at once, so I became more methodical about it, blind-tasting the different varieties after he’d left and writing up proper tasting notes to email him. I can’t help feeling that he was a bit taken aback the first time I emailed an entire page of (single-spaced) notes on his bitter-chocolate sorbet, but honestly, ever since, he seems to really value my opinion. For example, when I emailed to let him know that his blackberry ripple was
good and sharp, but might benefit from some crunch
, he wrote back within five minutes to ask
do you mean biscuity kind of crunch or honeycomb-y kind of crunch? And should I try similar ripple thing with rhubarb?

“I’d love to try your . . .” I won’t attempt to say the word; I’ve never been able to properly pronounce what I call scratchy umbrella ice cream. “. . . new mint ice cream, Ferdy. Whenever you want.”

“There’s no rush. You’re busy. Anyway, what are you doing there?” he carries on, gesturing at my window. “I thought you said you never went to your dad’s old store.”

“I don’t. Not usually. It was Dad’s memorial service this afternoon.”

“Oh, Charlie.” The limitations of holding a conversation across fifty feet of space are becoming clear. Ferdy looks stricken, but he’s still having to shout. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. You should have said! You know I’d have come, if you’d mentioned it.”

“Don’t worry, you weren’t invited! I mean,” I add, hastily, when I see him look a bit put out, “
nobody
was invited. Nobody normal, that is.” I’m just going to have to hope that none of Gaby’s illustrious guests have stuck their heads out the back window downstairs for a smoke. “It’s fashion people,” I clarify, “and really, it’s more of a business thing than a . . . Dad thing. My sister’s the one in charge.”

“The bossy sister, or the loopy one?”

Now I
really
hope nobody’s stuck her head out of the back window for a smoke.

“Gaby,” I say, wishing I hadn’t told Ferdy quite so much about my family. “But I guess she does need to do the client-schmoozing stuff. She
is
the head of PR, after all.”

“Oh, right. Still, I wish you’d told me about today, Charlie. I’d have come and taken you for lunch.”

He would?

Like, as in lunch . . . out?

I know this sounds weird, given that we’re friends and everything, but Ferdy and I have never been
out,
together
,
anywhere at all. Partly, that’s because until around three months ago, Ferdy had a very pretty girlfriend called Davina, but also with Dad so ill these past few months, I couldn’t even go down the road to Tesco without getting Lucy to come in and sit with him for twenty minutes. This, though, was the thing that transformed me and Ferdy from friend-
ly
to proper friends, because when he found out that I was so housebound he immediately volunteered, without taking no for an answer, to come and sit with Dad whenever Lucy wasn’t available and I needed to get something important done out of the house. Thanks to Ferdy, these past months, I’ve been able to get the shopping done, go to urgent dentist’s appointments, and—once or twice—just have an hour or so walking by the river to clear my head.