Charlie Glass's Slippers (28 page)

“We’re old friends.”

“I didn’t know that! Hey, if I’d known, mate, I’d have invited you to my party as a proper guest, not just as one of the catering staff.” Jay slips an arm, casually, around my shoulders. “You didn’t tell me you were friends with the ice-cream guy, Charlie!”

“I didn’t know he was going to be at the party,” I say, but I’m interrupted by Ferdy again.

“I think Charlie was pretty busy that night, anyway.” He’s looking directly at Jay, and (deliberately?) not looking at me. “Far too busy to come and hobnob with the catering staff.”

There’s something about the way he says
catering staff
that makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise slightly, the way that’s supposed to happen with wild animals when they scent danger. I’m pretty sure Jay has sensed it, too, because there’s a similar edge to his voice when he next speaks.

“Yeah, Charlie
was
a bit busy that night, actually.”

“So I hear.”

“We both were.”

“Imagine,” says Ferdy, “my surprise.”

There’s a bit of a silence. Jay and Ferdy stare at each other over the top of the Aston Martin’s still-open door. Jay is still smiling, though rather less pleasantly than before, and Ferdy is still wearing an expression that—I think—is meant to imply cold contempt. Trouble is, because his face is accustomed to looking gentle, thoughtful, and incredibly sweet, he looks less like he’s feeling coldly contemptuous and more like he’s staying very, very still in order to avoid being stung by a particularly nasty-looking wasp.

I’m annoyed with him and embarrassed for him in equal measure. What does he think he’s doing, getting all uppity with Jay like this? I’d assume it was something more than just some weird
Upstairs, Downstairs
chip-on-the-shoulder act—something to do with me, for example—if it weren’t for the fact that Ferdy has just made it very clear he doesn’t find me
remotely attractive. That actually, quite possibly, he finds me more than a little repulsive.

“Anyway!” I say, as brightly as possible, and hoping to put an end to this uncomfortable encounter. “Good seeing you, Ferdy!”

“Yes, of course, don’t let me keep you.” Ferdy nods at the car. “You obviously have places to get to.”

“What, in this old banger?” Jay laughs, and gives the top of the Aston Martin an affectionate thump. “Fan of Aston Martins, are you?”

“Not particularly.”

“Oh, mate. You’re seriously missing out! But then,” Jay shrugs, “I guess if you aren’t a car kind of a guy . . .”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t a car kind of a guy.” Ferdy is turning slightly pink. “I said I don’t particularly care for Aston Martins.”

“Well,” I say, getting that hair-prickling feeling again, and this time worse than before, “each to his own, obviously! How else would that explain all those people buying those horrible black Range Rovers, when there’s—”

“I’m more of a vintage Jaguar kind of a guy,” Ferdy interrupts me, still looking directly at Jay, “actually.”

Jay nods, approving and disdainful in equal measure. “Well, who
isn’t
a vintage Jaguar kind of a guy? I’ve got a beauty, as it happens . . . Well,” he adds with a grin, and dropping a kiss on the top of my head, “I guess you could say I have
two
beauties. And only one of them has a modified stroker crankshaft and red leather upholstery.”

I’d be thrilled to my cotton socks that Jay just called me a beauty if it weren’t for the fact that Ferdy has just shot him a look that suggests he’d quite like to push him under a passing vehicle. And that he wouldn’t care if that vehicle were an Aston Martin, a vintage Jaguar, or the number eleven bus. Clearly, Jay’s car talk is playing even more into that
Upstairs, Downstairs
sense of inferiority than I realized.

“It’s a sixty-seven E-type,” Jay is continuing, fixing his own gaze firmly on Ferdy. “Series one. Four-point-two-liter engine. All-synchromesh four-speed gearbox. Open headlights.”

Ferdy (who apparently has a lot more idea what all this mumbo-jumbo means than I do) actually looks interested for a split second, before covering it up with deliberately unimpressed blankness again.

“I have a nineteen fifty-nine XK one-fifty,” he says, “as it happens.”

I blink at him. “You have a
vintage Jaguar
?”

It’s the first time he’s looked back at me in this entire conversation. “Yes, Charlie. As a matter of fact, I do. I just don’t go around bragging about it.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“The Roadster, huh?” Jay nods. Unlike Ferdy, he’s actually allowing himself to look impressed. “Wow. That’s a nice car, mate.”

“Well, I like it.”

“I bet you do . . . Hey, you know what? You should join me and Charlie in Shropshire this weekend! Bring the Roadster!”

“Oh, no, I don’t think Ferdy will be able to do that,” I say, trying not to sound as horrified as I feel. “He’s got three ice-cream parlors to run, and it’s going to be a sunny weekend!”

“Exactly. A perfect weekend for tooling around the glorious Shropshire countryside in an XK one-fifty!
And
my E-type,” he adds, with another smile in Ferdy’s direction. “I’d let you have a good go behind the wheel, mate. If you think you can handle it, of course.”

“No, really, Jay, I think Ferdy’s far too busy to—”

“Yeah, that sounds good, actually,” Ferdy interrupts me to tell Jay. “Shropshire, you say?”

“Yes. My family has a place about five miles south of Ludlow.”

“But there won’t be room!” I’ve given up trying not to sound horrified. “Lucy’s already coming, with Pal, so—”

“There’s plenty of room. Anyway, my friend Ben and his wife were meant to be joining us but they’re busy with family this weekend, so they won’t be able to make it after all.” Jay’s hand strokes, gently, the nape of my neck. “Relax, Charlie. It’ll be fun.”

“I don’t think Ferdy’s girlfriend will think so,” I say, desperately trying to come up with a way that Ferdy can get out of the invitation. He can’t actually
want
to come, can he? Not when he so blatantly regards Jay as only a couple of rungs higher, on the scale of worthwhile human beings, than Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler. “I doubt she’ll be at all happy about Ferdy leaving her behind for a weekend, especially not when—”

“Oh, you’ve got a girlfriend?” Jay looks surprised. “Well, bring her along, too, mate. The more the merrier!”

I wish he’d stop saying that. Besides, if Honey comes, too, it’s going to be more like The More, the Scarier. The More, the More Psychopathically Paranoid and Prone to Unnerving Fits of Hysteria.

“Well, I’ll ask her,” Ferdy says. He’s looking a bit uncomfortable himself, for the first time in this whole uncomfortable conversation. “See if she fancies it.”

“I’m sure she will. And you’ll be wanting the address, won’t you? That’s what I came here to give Charlie, as a matter of fact.” Jay looks down at me. “For your friend Lucy.”

“I thought you were just going to text me that,” I say, before I can stop myself.

“True, but you know what?” He grins at me so sexily that—despite the fact that we’re very much not alone right now—I actually feel my heart skip a couple of beats. “I asked myself why on earth I’d send you a text when I could come down here and see you in person.”

Ferdy emits a noise that’s part cough, part sneeze. “So, can
I have the address, too, then? Unless you’d rather have an excuse to come back again tomorrow?”

Jay shifts his head to one side and regards Ferdy for a moment. “Oh, I don’t need an excuse, mate. Don’t worry about it.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“And I’m glad that you’re glad.”

Okay, this is just getting silly.

“Well,” I say, “maybe we’ll see you on Friday, Ferdy!”

“Any time after six-ish,” Jay says, holding out his iPhone so that Ferdy can see the address written on the notepad there. “Whenever you can get away from town. I have someone who cooks for me there, so I can guarantee you a decent dinner on arrival. And bring the Roadster, yeah? I’ve got a bit of land set aside for racing there. We can put it through its paces, see what it can do.”

“Sounds good.” Ferdy types the address into his own phone, then slips it back into his pocket. “Looking forward to it.”

Which is just great. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about this coming weekend—Pal; Honey; how to bluff my way through a tantric sex session—I now have to worry about Ferdy breaking his neck on Jay’s “bit of land set aside for racing,” just to prove that his vintage Jag is worthy of comparison with Jay’s vintage Jag. Just to prove that he can score points off a former Formula One driving champion. Just to prove that he’s not impressed by Jay’s wealth or status at all.

“Can I give you a lift home?” Jay is asking me now, as Ferdy turns and starts to walk the short distance back towards Chill. “Or even better, can I give you a lift to a pub or bar of some kind, where we can get a couple of drinks?”

“I’d love to,” I say, which is entirely true, “but I have loads of work to be getting on with.” (This isn’t entirely true. Even though I’d like nothing more than to spend an evening making notes on all the ideas Maggie, Leo, Suzy, and I discussed
earlier, I have loads of pre-weekend preparations to be getting on with. On this precise evening, if memory serves, that’ll be one loathsome run, a good half-billion lunges, roughly seventeen pints of detoxifying dandelion tea, and a couple of hours in the bathroom pummeling my thighs into submission with a body brush, a tub of Fat Girl Slim, and my brand-new Bliss spa “slimulator.”) “But I’ll take that lift home, if you’re still offering it.”

“Well, it’s a poor second best, but it’ll do.” Jay steers me around to the passenger door and opens it for me. “Nice guy,” he says, nodding in the direction of Chill as I start to get in. “Ferdy, is it?”

“Mm. He
is
nice.” I could—but don’t—add
usually
.

“I’ll have to keep my eye on him this weekend, though, I can tell.”

“Sorry?”

“Come on, Charlie!” He gives me another of those heart-skipping grins. “The poor bloke’s obviously nuts about you. Why else do you think I stood there like some kind of flash git, going on about my half-million-quid Jag? That’s me being jealous!”

“Of
Ferdy
?”

“Of the guy who couldn’t more obviously have the hots for you if he was walking the streets with a huge sign around his neck saying
I have the hots for Charlie Glass
.”

I stare at him. “He . . . has a girlfriend.”

“Ah,” Jay says, with a solemn nod. “Well, that settles it, then. People are never nuts about someone when they’re going out with someone else. That must be why nobody ever breaks up, and why the divorce rate in this country is so incredibly low . . .”

I laugh politely, but thinking of Honey has reminded me of something very, very important that I want to check out with Jay, right this very minute.

“Your place in Shropshire,” I ask, as casually as possible, “it does have locks on the bedroom doors, doesn’t it? Sturdy ones? That nobody can . . . er . . . pick? And creep into your room in the dead of night, for example?”

“Don’t worry.” Jay slides his hand across the gearstick and places it, gently and tantalizingly, on the lower and outer quadrant of my right thigh. “We’ll have plenty of privacy at the house this weekend, Charlie. No matter how many of your friends are staying there, too.”

Which is great, but isn’t quite what I wanted to know. Still, if I’m really lucky, maybe it will be a moot point. Maybe Honey will let Ferdy out of her sight for the weekend, and I won’t have to worry about being murdered in my bed—come to think of it, I realize with a lurching in my stomach,
Jay’s
bed—after all.

chapter eighteen

T
he drive to Oxley
Manor, a journey that Googlemaps assured me would take two hours and forty-eight minutes, is accomplished in a fraction over two hours. When you take into account the fact that there was Friday afternoon traffic heading out of town, you’ll probably begin to realize just how fast Jay was driving.

“Home sweet home,” he says, as—in the middle of the lush green countryside now—he spins his Jaguar through an open set of gates, up a graveled driveway, and towards a part-timbered, part-stone Elizabethan manor house that’s such a beautiful sight, in the late afternoon sunshine, it almost makes me want to weep.

Of course, there’s the little matter of the fact that I’m already pretty much weeping anyway. I finally succumbed, yesterday, to Galina’s insistence on dyeing my eyelashes (“You will not regret. Is better look for piggy eye than smudged mascara.”), and I can only assume I’m having some kind of allergic reaction to the dye she used. I woke up this morning with what looked like the beginnings of conjunctivitis in my left eye, by lunchtime the same thing was happening to my right, and mere moments before Jay came by the flat to pick me up, I had to do an emergency dash to Boots on Earl’s Court
Road to pick up eye drops and a cheapy pair of sunglasses to try and hide the swelling. I’m still having to surreptitiously dab watery tears off my cheeks every five minutes, though. As soon as I get a bit of privacy, I’m going to try to call Galina and see if there’s any remedy she can suggest that might improve the situation. I don’t think she’ll mind the out-of-hours call, especially since she and I have become rather touchingly close these past few days as Operation: Get Naked in Front of Jay has ramped up several gears. We’re certainly close enough (after Tuesday’s showgirl wax, Wednesday’s—truly agonizing, by the way—cellulite treatment plus eyebrow/mustache/sideburn maintenance, and yesterday’s all-over spray tan plus ill-fated eyelash dye) that she rather sweetly texted me, during the warp-speed motorway journey, to say
Enjoy country weekend ps don’t forget take tweezers and magnifying mirror. Also tea tree oil in case ingrown hair pustules. G xx

“Oh, Jay.” I gaze up at the manor. “It’s gorgeous.”

“Glad you like the look of it!” Braking the Jag to a stop, Jay switches off the ignition and undoes the seat belt that I begged him to put on somewhere between junctions four and five of the M40. “And just wait until you see the gardens around the back. There’s a pear-tree orchard, and a knot garden, and a diddy little lake that’s just big enough to swim in . . . Hey, if the weather stays like this, we can have a dip tomorrow. I hope you brought your bikini!”

My gut reaction—hollow, disbelieving laughter, followed by the question
don’t you know me at all?
—is fortunately overridden by a more measured response.

“Such a shame! I didn’t pack a swimsuit.”

“Oh, that’s easily remedied. I’m sure there’ll be a spare bikini lurking around the house somewhere.” Jay gets out of his side of the car and comes around to open my door for me. “Besides, finding a spare bikini is Plan B.”

“What’s Plan A?”

“Now, come on, Charlie.” He grins at me. “I’ll bet you’re a girl who wouldn’t say no to a spot of skinny-dipping.”

He’s right, in one sense. I’m
am
a girl who wouldn’t say no to a spot of skinny-dipping. I’m a girl who’d
scream and yell
no to a spot of skinny-dipping. I’m a girl who’d quite possibly turn to extreme violence as a way to avoid skinny-dipping.

“Well, that sounds wonderful, of course. But we can only hope the weather holds.” I gaze up into the (cloudless, azure-blue) sky and give a little bit of a shiver.

“And if it doesn’t, we’ll just have to find some other reason to take our clothes off this weekend, Charlie, won’t we?”

“We certainly will,” I reply, in a voice that—I happen to know—is croaky with nerves but that Jay evidently thinks is husky with lust. He moves closer still and places the lightest of kisses on my lips.

“Take these off,” he murmurs, reaching for my sunglasses, “so I can kiss you properly.”

“No, no, I’m perfectly okay!” I clamp my own hand onto the sunglasses and hold on for dear life.

Before he can attempt to take the glasses off again, I launch myself into a kiss of such passion that he seems rather taken aback. But once he’s stopped being surprised, he starts kissing me back with similar abandon. After a few seconds, he presses me back even harder against the side of the car, and I wrap my left leg around his right, and it’s all so completely marvelous that neither of us hears the gravel crunching beneath the wheels of an approaching car until it stops only a few feet away from our entwined bodies.

For a moment, I think it must be Ferdy, but then I realize that the car is a banged-up Ford Sierra taxi with
Ludlow Cabs
written on the side, not whatever fancy-schwancy Jaguar Ferdy is going to be arriving in. And that the doors are opening to let Lucy out of one side, and Pal out of the other.

“Hey, there! Did we come at a bad time?” Pal, dressed in
chinos, a shirt, and a jaunty-looking cravat that he must have borrowed from his neckerchief-wearing buddy, and looking more cheerful than I think I’ve ever seen him, heads towards us. He stretches a hand out to Jay, who’s pulling himself away from me with a lot less embarrassment than I have disentangling myself from him, and then kisses me heartily on both cheeks as if we’re long-lost buddies. “Splendid to see you, Charlie! And splendid to finally meet you, Jay! I’m Pal Kjaerstad. I think you know my sister-in-law, Marit?”

“Marit . . .? Oh, yeah, of course! She used to cook for my father and stepmother.”

“Well, yes, but I think she became very much a friend of the family, too, if you don’t mind my saying. In fact, I almost feel I know you already. Marit used to tell me all about your family, what delightful people you were . . .”

I can’t stick around to witness this display of sycophancy, and anyway I’ve just noticed that Lucy, charmingly abandoned by Pal, is struggling to get the bags out of the car and pay the taxi driver at the same time. I hurry over to her and grab the larger of her bags while she fishes in her handbag for a tenner.

“Interesting way to greet our arrival,” she whispers at me. “Full-on hanky-panky on the driveway . . .”

“There’s a lake,” I interrupt her, talking out of the side of my mouth like a Mafioso in a spoof mobster movie.

“Sorry?”

“A
lake
!”

“A lake. Right. And that’s a disaster because . . .?”

“I can’t let Jay see me in a bikini!”

“Er, you do realize that if everything goes to plan this weekend, he’ll be seeing you in a lot
less
than a bikini . . . Hey, Charlie, it’s okay! There’s no need to cry about it!”

She’s obviously just noticed the tears dribbling down my cheeks. This
bloody
allergic reaction.

“I’m not crying! It’s my eyelash dye!” I yank off the sun
glasses to show her the result of Galina’s ministrations. My heart sinks into my five-inch wedges when Lucy recoils in horror. “Oh, God. Is it that awful?”

“Well . . .”

“It is, isn’t it?
Shit
.”

“Look, it’ll probably calm down if you take an antihistamine. I might have some Zyrtec in my bag . . .”

She stops talking, suddenly. I shove my sunglasses back on, because I can tell from her expression that Jay is coming up behind me.

“You must be Lucy! Great to meet you.”

“And you must be Jay.” She beams up at him. “Charlie’s told me so much about you!”

“Only the good things, I hope.” Jay swoops in to give her a kiss on either cheek. “Why don’t you guys come on inside? I’ll show you to your bedroom and we can all get settled.”

“Why don’t
I
show Lucy to their bedroom?” I suggest. Because I’m mindful of the fact that the next step after Jay showing Pal and Lucy their bedroom is for him to take me to
our
bedroom, and that unless I’m very much mistaken, this will be my cue to start getting down to more of what Lucy has just called the hanky-panky. And until I can take these bloody sunglasses off, I’d really rather avoid any situation that might lead to either hanky or panky. “You can . . . er . . . show Pal your car!”

“Oh, now that would be splendid. Absolutely top-hole,” says Pal, who seems to have gotten himself thoroughly prepared for his Traditional English Weekend in the Country by reading volumes of P. G. Wodehouse and watching
Downton Abbey
.

Jay’s eyebrows knit closer together, quizzically. “How will you know your way to the right bedroom?” he asks me.

“Well . . . Oh, didn’t you say there’s a housekeeper? I’ll just ask her.”

“Hannah? Sure, if you dare.” He looks amused by the whole thing, as if he’s rather enjoying my sudden presumption that it’s okay for me to act like the lady of the manor. “She’s on her way out now, actually.”

He’s right: a middle-aged woman (who seems to have undergone similar preparations to Pal’s, and modeled her entire appearance on the Scottish housekeeper in
Downton
, right down to the gray cardigan and grim facial expression) is coming out of the house now and heading towards us with a purposeful air.

“Great! I’ll get Lucy settled, you boys can talk about . . . about gearboxes and horsepower, and we’ll all meet again when it’s time for dinner!”

I grab Lucy’s hand and pull her towards Hannah and the house before she can do anything to resist.

A few minutes later, Hannah has led us through a breathtaking, flagstone-floored great hall and up a flight of narrow stairs to the bedroom she’s allocated Lucy and Pal for the weekend. She’s keen to continue along the corridor and show me to my bedroom, too, but I’m just desperate to get rid of her so Lucy can give me the Zyrtec she may or may not have in her bag.

“That’s really kind,” I tell her, while Lucy ooohs and aaahs her way around the charming, wooden-beamed bedroom, “but I’ll find my way there a bit later!”

“How?” Hannah wants to know. “Have you been here before? Are you the one he brought here the weekend before Christmas, when I was off on holiday? The one he filled the bath with champagne for?”

“No . . .”

“Then are you the one who came here last summer? Kept sunbathing nude in the knot garden?”

“No! Absolutely not.”

“No. I didn’t think I recognized you. Mind you, it could
just be that you looked different with your clothes on.” Hannah casts an appraising eye over my sundress-clad body before clearly deciding that I can’t possibly have been the nude sunbather. “Fine, though,” she eventually sniffs, “if you want to find your bedroom yourself. I’ve put you in the one at the far end of the corridor. It’s Jay’s favorite when he brings a girl to stay. Super-king-sized four-poster bed. Decent soundproofing . . .”

“Terrific, Hannah, thank you!” I practically bundle her out of the room, no longer simply keen to have my Zyrtec moment alone with Lucy, but also desperate to put a stop to Hannah’s disapproving references to all the other floozies Jay has brought here for filthy weekends before me. “I’ll manage from here!”

“God, this
place
!” Lucy says, emerging from the en-suite bathroom as Hannah closes the bedroom door behind her. “You have to see the size of the shower, Charlie! Oh, and by the way, why didn’t you warn me just how ridiculously hot Jay is in real life?”

“Did I not?”

“No! I mean, bloody hell, Charlie. That body! That smile! Those eyes!”

Eyes. This reminds me. I whip off my sunglasses, take a deep breath, and risk a peek in the mirror on the wardrobe door.

Dear God!
My right eye, in particular, has puffed up to golf-ball-like proportions, and is the sickly pink of undercooked sausage, and my left eye, though less swollen, is unpleasantly shiny and oozing more of those tears than ever. It’s grotesque.
I’m
grotesque. And, as Hannah the housekeeper has just so helpfully reminded me, Jay isn’t accustomed to bedding grotesque women.

“Seriously, I’m sick with envy,” Lucy is saying, “that you get to have sex with that beautiful man tonight. You only have
to look at Jay to know he must know exactly what he’s doing in the bedroom department. I mean,
exactly
. I bet he’ll have all kinds of moves. I bet he’ll pick you up, and throw you down on the bed, and . . . er, Charlie? Are you all right?”

“No,” I croak. “I’m not. I can’t do this, Luce.”

“Can’t do what?”

“Any of it. Champagne baths. Nude sunbathing.” This is precisely how I felt that night up on the roof terrace at Jay’s party, only this time magnified by about a hundred. And this time, I’m not sure there’s any equivalent of a handy drainpipe to shimmy down.

“Okay, okay. Let’s just take a breath here.” Lucy takes my hand and pulls me towards the bathroom, where she sits me down on the loo seat while starting to rifle through her wash bag for the Zyrtec. “Now, I assume this is really about sex, right?”

I nod, unable to form words at the moment.

“And you’re having a bit of a freak-out? Because you’ve suddenly realized you don’t want to have sex with Jay after all?”

“No! I do want to! Of course I want to!”

“Oh, thank God.” Lucy is visibly relieved. “I thought you might have really cracked up there for a moment. Aha! Zyrtec!” She pulls a foil packet out of her wash bag, pops out a tablet, and hands it to me before turning to the basin to fill the tooth mug with a splash of water. Then she hands the mug to me and perches on the edge of the bathtub herself. It’s a gorgeous tub—one of those cast-iron, claw-foot ones—in keeping with the general theme of gorgeousness throughout the entire bathroom. It’s tastefully fitted out in swish white marble and glittering gray granite, with subtle daylight-effect lighting, and mirrors lining every single wall, except for a spot to the left of the shower where there’s another small door, perhaps leading to a separate dressing room. “Okay. The Zyrtec should
solve the problem with your eyes. Now, why don’t you tell me what the real problem is?”

“The problem is that I’m not a supermodel. Who may or may not have been the luscious specimen who was sunbathing nude here last summer. The problem is that I’m not Maggie O’Day. Or Sting’s backing dancer. Or a devotee of the tantra.”