Charlie Glass's Slippers (4 page)

Lucy pulls a face. “I still don’t see why old bossy-pants and lipgloss-for-brains are getting left half of your dad’s shares each. Surely everything should get divided up evenly among the three of you.”

“I
am
getting an entire flat, Luce.”

“But that’s only worth a fraction of what his shares are worth!”

I don’t want to think about it too much, because I start to get all prickly and chokey about the unfairness of it all. Which is unfair of
me
, because unlike bossy-pants and lipgloss-for-brains—sorry, unlike Gaby and Robyn—I don’t actually have any moral right to Dad’s shares in the business. I’ve never worked for Elroy Glass, like they both have (well, like Gaby has; I’m still not sure exactly what it is that Robyn does for the company, apart from falling out of nightclubs wearing Elroy Glass shoes and getting her picture in the gossip magazines. Maybe you could call it advertising?), and anyway, Dad’s company was something he started up with Diana, Gaby and Robyn’s mother, long before he met
my
mother and fell in love with her.

“I’m just not sure I have any . . .”

“If you say
moral right
, I’m going to chuck this glass of wine over you.” Lucy is shooting me one of her fiercest looks. “What moral bloody rights do Gaby and Robyn have to a load of Elroy Glass shares landing in their laps? They’re both bloody loaded to the eyeballs as it is . . .”

“Diana’s got a lot of family money. That’s not their fault.”

“But what
is
their fault is that they’re a pair of the laziest, most overly entitled cows the world has ever known! I mean, remind me, Charlie—how many times did they come to visit each week, while your dad was ill?”

“Lucy . . .”

“Sorry—I’ll rephrase the question: how many times did they come to visit each
month
?”

I take a gulp (a Lucy-sized one, this time) from my wineglass and stay mutinously silent.

“Or should I make that, how many times did they come to visit each
year
?”

“Oh, now, that’s really unfair. They came more than once a year, Lucy! They came . . . loads more than that.”

“All right, then, how often did they offer to take your dad
to a hospital appointment, or offer to come and look after him one night so that you could go out for a change?”

“If this is about me missing your birthday party . . .”

“Five! You missed
five
of my birthday parties, Charlie, because you couldn’t leave your dad, and because neither of his other daughters fancied getting off their bony arses and pulling their nonexistent weight. And anyway, my birthday parties didn’t matter. I mean, yes, of course I wanted you there, but that’s really not the point. I just wanted you to have a night off once in a while, Charlie. I just wanted . . . Oh, I bet this’ll be Pal.” She breaks off, mid-berate, as her phone rings in her bag. “Hi, babe,” she answers it. “No, it’s number one-
one
-seven . . . Sorry, I thought I told you that . . . I’ll come up and meet you, okay?” She gets to her feet, knocks back the rest of her wine, and starts for the door that leads to the stairs. “Look, I don’t want to quarrel, Charlie. Let’s forget it. I just want you to enjoy yourself with Ferdy tonight.”

While Lucy goes upstairs to fetch Pal, I dart to the mirror above the telephone table in the hall and check that my up-do hasn’t started to become a down-do, and then I hurry to the range again to check on dinner. Stroganoff: still smelling good. Glazed carrots and potato gratin: both looking rich and delicious and keeping nicely toasty in the warming drawer of the ancient range cooker. Pecan pie: browning happily. I don’t know why I’m bothering to worry about the food part of this evening at all. If there’s one thing I can do, it’s cook. Flirting with Ferdy, sneakily finding out whether he’s at all interested in me or letting him know that I’m interested in him: these are the parts I’m bound to make a hash of. But dinner itself shouldn’t concern me.

“Then it was my mistake, babe,” Lucy is saying as she clatters down the stairs in her knee boots, leading Pal into the kitchen. “I must have told you number one-
two
-seven. I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah.” Pal starts taking off his puffer jacket and looking for somewhere to stow his gym bag. “You definitely said one-two-seven.”

“I know. Sorry.”

Seeing as Lucy’s been coming to this flat over a period of roughly twenty-five years, since we met on our first day in preschool, it’s highly improbable that she told Pal the wrong flat number. No, let’s be completely frank: it’s absolutely impossible. What’s much more likely is that Pal wasn’t listening when she told him the right flat number, and that Pal—in this, as in everything—is unable to believe he got something wrong. A fiction that Lucy is perpetuating by apologizing to him.

“Pal, hello! How are you?” I graft a smile onto my face and head over to give him a kiss on the cheek, which he returns with his customary enthusiasm (i.e. not a lot). “Let me put your bag over here. God—I’m so impressed that you’re dedicated enough to go to the gym on a Saturday night!”

“I’m training for the marathon. It’s not dedication, it’s just good sense.”

“Well, yes, but even so!”

“Even so—what?”

Ten seconds in, and Pal has already left me flummoxed. This is a pattern with me and Pal. Actually, it’s a pattern with Pal and pretty much everyone I’ve ever seen him talk to. You provide an opening pleasantry; Pal provides a chilly statement of fact; you come back with something foolish and meaningless but obviously well meant; Pal behaves as if you’ve just turned up to a convention of Oxford philosophy professors who have gathered to discuss the meaning of life and started burbling at them about your favorite sandwich fillings. He makes me feel like an idiot. He makes Lucy
act
like an idiot. All the while being, himself, the actual idiot.

Admittedly, Lucy’s form on the boyfriend front hasn’t been exactly stellar in the past—over the past three years, she’s been
in relationships with Aaron (druggy), Rob (shouty), and Nathan (secretly married, with a wife and a toddler back home in Watford)—but Pal represents a new low. Admittedly he has a good job; his own flat; tall, blond good looks; and the single-mindedness to train for the London Marathon. But despite all this, I hate him. Well, that may be unfair. I hate certain
things
about him. The way he treats everyone like an idiot, as I’ve already mentioned. The way he isn’t bothering to hide his superior smile now, as he surveys my slightly shabby kitchen. The dismissive way he treated the waiter when I met him and Lucy for brunch last weekend. The way he drones on about his job, as if it’s the most interesting subject in the world (I mean, he’s an accountant, not a war reporter or a Hollywood movie star), and about Norway, as if it’s the best country in the world (I’m quite sure the fjords
are
beautiful, and the social security system
is
peerless, but once you’ve heard about one fjord or tax break for working mothers, you’ve heard about them all).

But most of all, I hate the way he treats Lucy.

“Let me get you a drink,” she’s saying now, conveying him to a seat at the kitchen table and heading to the cupboard for a glass. “Charlie and I have been drinking white wine, but I’m sure she’s got some red, or a beer?”

“Lucy, you know I’m not drinking tonight. Does your friend have any coconut water?” Pal asks her, as though I’m not here.

“I don’t know. Charlie, you don’t happen to have any coconut water, do you?”

“Coconut
water
?” I blink at her. “Er—I might have a tin of coconut
milk
somewhere at the back of a cupboard, if that’s any use?”

“No, no, coconut water is different.” Lucy is looking a bit flustered. “It’s this thing Pal drinks when he’s been training, to replace all the electrolytes you lose when you sweat.”

“Oh. Then no, I’m afraid I don’t have any of that. I try to avoid situations where I’m sweating, myself!” I add with a smile to Pal, who doesn’t smile back. “But, um, isn’t Coke meant to be good for rehydration? I’ve got some Coke.”

Pal winces, as though I’ve just offered him a glass of bat’s blood spiked with industrial solvent. “Coke is full of sugar.”

“Diet Coke, then?”

He doesn’t dignify this with a reply. “Just some water, I suppose,” he says to Lucy. “Sparkling, if she’s got it.”

I’m sorely tempted to ask, Who’s
she
?—but then the doorbell rings again.

I gaze at Lucy, frozen in terror.

“That’ll be Ferdy!”

“Excellent! This is going to be a great night for you, Charlie.” Despite the disapproving presence of Pal, Lucy is, for a moment, her usual self.

“But I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. You know how rubbish I am at flirting . . .”

“Don’t flirt!” she says, in a tone of voice that suggests she’s only just managed to leave off adding
for the love of God, woman, no
. “Just be yourself, Charlie.”

“I was being myself yesterday,” I point out, “when I sat on a chocolate cake.”

“Well, just don’t be that part of yourself. Anyway, you’re wearing flats tonight. Look, he obviously likes you, Charlie, or he wouldn’t be coming to dinner at all. Isn’t that right, Pal?”

“What?”

“A guy doesn’t come to a girl’s house for dinner unless he likes her.”

“That depends.” Pal shrugs. “He might, if he didn’t have anywhere better to go.”

Upstairs, the doorbell rings again.

“I promise you, Charlie,” Lucy says, casting the briefest of
despairing glances in Pal’s direction, “Ferdy is coming to dinner because he likes you. He tried to ask you to lunch because he likes you. Let’s just accept, as a starting point, that he likes you. And see where the evening goes from there.”

Heart racing, hands clammy, I head up the stairs to answer the front door.

When I open it, Ferdy is standing on the doorstep.

He’s holding a large bouquet of multicolored gerberas and wearing a very broad, slightly nervous smile.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey!” I reply.

Then we both stand there, blinking at each other, until I realize that I’m supposed to be inviting him inside.

“Sorry, please come on in . . .”

I step back and hold the door open wider so that he can come through. The sleeve of his coat brushes my arm as he passes me. I shiver, ever so slightly, with the overwhelming desire to have more of him touch me.

“Yep, it’s freezing out there,” he says, obviously mistaking my shiver for one of cold, and turning to shut the door behind him. Then he holds the gerberas out towards me. “I think these poor things might be suffering from frostbite.”

“Oh, no, they look perfect!”

“Really? I didn’t know if you liked them. I thought they were nice in the flower shop. But out here they just look a bit like big, brightly colored daisies.”

“I love them.” I take the gerberas. “Precisely
because
they look a bit like big, brightly colored daisies.”

“Great.” His smile broadens even further, and the nervous edge comes off it. He starts to remove his coat and scarf, revealing jeans and a crisp white shirt beneath. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in something so smart—usually he’s wearing baggy khakis and a lumberjack shirt—and the white shirt
makes him look so very much like the Fantasy Ferdy of my overactive imagination that it’s all I can do not to fling the gerberas aside, leap across the hallway, and throw myself into his arms. “I did something right, then!”

“Oh, you do plenty right.”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing!” I grab his coat and scarf. “So, you should come downstairs and let me get you a drink! And meet my friend Lucy. And her boyfriend.”

“Oh, the Norwegian guy you’ve told me about? The impossible one?”

I nod, then start to lead him down the stairs. “But please, Ferdy,” I add in a whisper as we reach the bottom of the stairs, “don’t mention to him that I think he’s impossible.”

“Don’t worry, Charlie.” He grins, putting a hand on my arm. “It’ll be our secret.”

I know it’s only a hand on an arm. I know he’s not sweeping me into a passionate embrace, or leading me masterfully towards the bedroom. But I don’t think I’m imagining the little spark that just passed between us. And I certainly don’t think I’m imagining the slight softening around his eyes as he smiles down at me.

“Wine,” I say.

“Sorry?”

“Wine. Glass of. Let me get you.”

Having inexplicably turned, it seems, into Yoda, I dart into the kitchen, put the gerberas on the counter, and head for the fridge before I can say anything else stupid.

“Oh, you must be Ferdy!” Lucy says as he follows me into the kitchen. She heads towards him and extends a hand, while I shoot her a grateful look. “Lovely to meet you. I’m Lucy, Charlie’s best friend. And this is my boyfriend, Pal.”

“Great to meet you, too. I’ve heard loads about you!” Ferdy takes the glass of wine I’ve just handed him and clinks it to the
one I’m holding. “Cheers,” he says, with another of those very particular smiles at me.

“Cheers,” I say back, with a smile of my own. I’m surprised to notice that I suddenly feel a bit more relaxed. This all feels very comfortable, now that Ferdy is standing in the kitchen, and we’ve all got a glass of wine, and Lucy is looking so approving, and Pal . . . well, the less said about Pal, the better. But even his I’d-rather-be-anywhere-else glower can’t take the shine off this moment. I’m suddenly struck with a vision of how the evening is going to go: lots more wine and laughter around the table, Ferdy’s arm gradually creeping around the back of my chair, Lucy giving me a knowing look and withdrawing as soon as we’ve drunk the coffee, me and Ferdy left alone in the kitchen, me suggesting we break open one of Dad’s old brandies, Ferdy suggesting we take the brandy over to the banquette under the skylight . . .

“Something smells amazing,” Ferdy is saying now, turning to look at the oven with genuine interest. “I can’t believe I’ve never actually eaten a meal cooked by you, Charlie!”

“Oh, you’re in for a real treat,” Lucy says. “Charlie’s a fantastic cook. In fact . . .”