Charlie Glass's Slippers (5 page)

She breaks off suddenly, as the doorbell rings again.

This is odd, as I’m certainly not expecting anyone else.

“Hang on, I’ll just see who it is and get rid of them,” I say, putting my wineglass down on the table as I head back up the stairs towards the front door.

A small, extraordinarily pretty blond girl is standing outside. And she’s crying.

At least, I think she’s crying. There are no actual tears, and no sign of red or puffy eyes, but her shoulders are shuddering and her lips are trembling.

“I’m so sorry!” Her voice is tiny and breathy. “But is Ferdy here?”

“Ferdy?”

“Yes, I was just with him two minutes ago. I was carrying on to get the tube and he was coming to this block of flats for dinner with somebody called Charlie.”

“I’m Charlie.”

“Well, is he here?” She gulps.

“Er, yes . . .”

“Then could you get him for me?” she asks, her lips trembling so fast they become an actual blur. “Please?”

“Right. I mean, sure.” I take a couple of steps backwards, lean down the stairs, and call out, “Um, Ferdy? Could you pop upstairs for a second, do you think?”

He appears in the stairwell, glass of wine still in hand, and starts coming up.

“Everything okay up here?” he starts to ask, just as the blond girl rushes past me towards him, throwing herself into his arms in exactly the way I was fantasizing about doing only a few minutes ago.

“He’s dead, Ferdy!” she sobs into his chest. “My mum just called, and he’s dead!”

I stare at Ferdy, who’s patting the girl’s hair and making rather uncomfortable there-there noises.

“Jesus, Ferdy . . . what’s happened? Is there anything I can do?”

“Don’t worry.” He passes his wineglass towards me, obviously worried about spilling it. “It’s just her cat.”

“
Just
my cat?” The blond girl gazes up at him. “Ferdy, I’ve been telling you for ages how much I love Mittens, and how poorly he’s been!”

“Yes, I know, but I was just reassuring Charlie that it wasn’t a person who’d died or anything.”

“Mittens was a person to me!”

“Sure, but . . .” Ferdy stops patting her hair and shoots me an embarrassed look.
Sorry
, he mouths, before continuing, “Charlie, this is Honey, by the way.”

Oh . . . wasn’t Honey the name of the interior designer Ferdy mentioned to me yesterday? The one who thought there were too many chocolate chips in the scratchy umbrella ice cream?

“I’m so sorry about this,” Honey says, dabbing her eyes and turning to me. Now that I’m getting a chance to look at her properly, I’ve never seen anyone so fluffy bunnyish in my life. Her hair is the color of . . . actually, of honey, her eyes are big and pale blue, and she’s wearing the cutest little skater skirt beneath an oversized parka with a fake-fur-trimmed hood. “We had a late meeting at the store to discuss paint samples, and I was terribly upset because my mum had just called to say Mittens had taken a turn for the worse . . . and Ferdy was
so sweet
about it that when she called back just now to say Mittens had gone, the only thing I could think to do was come and find Ferdy where I’d left him.” She gulps. “And I know you were supposed to be having a lovely dinner, and now I’ve turned up and ruined it all!”

“No, no, you haven’t ruined it all!” I say, patting her on the arm. (Obviously she has, a bit, but I can’t exactly tell her that, can I, with her beloved cat just dead and all that?) “You shouldn’t be alone at times like these.”

“Oh!” She shoots me an adorable, rather watery smile. “Well, if you
do
have room for one more!”

“Honey,” Ferdy says, rather sharply, “I don’t think Charlie meant . . .”

“It’s fine, honestly.” Because what else am I supposed to do: throw this fluffy bunny of a girl back out onto the street, still crying about the demise of Mittens? Besides, she’s pretty much invited herself now. It’s too embarrassing to tell her to go away. No matter how much her presence is going to obliterate my cozy vision of midnight brandy on the banquette . . . “There’s plenty of food to go around. Besides, the more the merrier, right?”

“That’s
so nice
of you, Charlie! I should have known you’d be nice, seeing as you’re a friend of Ferdy’s!” Honey takes off her parka, hangs it on the peg by the front door, and then starts to trip daintily down the stairs in the direction I point her.

“Charlie, you really don’t have to do this,” Ferdy says in a low voice, as he follows me down after Honey.

“Don’t be silly. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

“Yeah, but
people
, Charlie. Not cats.”

But there isn’t time for him to say any more, because we’ve reached the kitchen and now there’s a lot of general greeting and merriment going on. I’m a little bit surprised, I admit, that someone who was in tears about her poor cat only three minutes ago is now managing to introduce herself to Pal and Lucy with such enthusiasm. But probably I’m being mean-spirited, and Honey is just a bit of a trooper. After all, Lucy has gone on and on to me about how strange she finds it that I don’t seem to have cried yet about Dad dying. And I of all people should know that some of us just prefer to keep our grief under shiny, happy wraps, in case it seeps out and overwhelms us.

And anyway, I can’t deny that adding an extra person is already making everything seem a bit more buzzy and party-like, a bit more like the atmosphere at Mum and Dad’s dinner parties of yore. Pal has certainly perked up, for example, ever since Honey materialized. He got up from the kitchen table and is chatting to her in the most animated way I’ve ever seen from him, only breaking off to ask Lucy if she could get him a beer.

“I thought he wasn’t drinking tonight,” I hiss at her, as she passes me by at the cooker on her way back from depositing cold beers with Pal and Ferdy. She’s shoved a glass of white wine into Honey’s tiny hand and is now generously refilling her own wineglass.

“Well, he’s obviously changed his mind,” she hisses back. “Anyway, who the hell
is
she?”

“Interior designing new premises. Dead cat,” I mutter, which—and this is one of the many benefits of two and a half decades of friendship—Lucy understands without me needing to add any more info.

“Well, I don’t like the way she’s flirting with Pal.” Lucy seems oblivious to the fact that, from where I’m standing at least, Pal is doing sterling work of flirting right back. He’s roundly ignoring Ferdy, who’s still looking about as comfortable as a turkey the week before Christmas, and telling Honey all about his (profound and long-standing, apparently) interest in interior design. She knocks back a good half of the wine in her glass. “She’s incredibly annoying.”

“She’s incredibly pretty.”

“Charlie, you think everyone’s incredibly pretty.”

“I do when they look like a girl from a shampoo advert.”

“Exactly. Annoying. You’re a million times more attractive. And she’s got her sights set on Ferdy, by the way. I can tell.”

“But you just said she was flirting with Pal!”

“Doesn’t mean she’s not after Ferdy. She’s obviously one of Those.”

Those
is Lucy’s term for what other people might call a man’s woman: what Lucy herself, with great scorn, once described more fully as a “gosh-you’re-such-a-big-strong-man-and-so-clever-too-whereas-I’m-so-weak-and-silly-I-can’t-even-take-my-own-clothes-off-would-you-do-it-for-me? kind of woman.” Lucy’s younger sister Kitty is one of Those (evidently quite a lot of it is in the name, if Kitty and Honey are anything to go by) and has wound Lucy up to the breaking point over the years by entrancing and delighting all the men in Lucy’s life, from her crushes to her actual boyfriends, until eventually tripping daintily up the aisle with a rich and handsome businessman at the tender age of twenty-two. Pretty Kitty is now a mother of one angelic girl, with another on the way, and living
in rambling Edwardian splendor with the rich and handsome businessman in Surrey.

I only mention all this because there’s just a chance that Lucy is looking at Honey and seeing Kitty instead.

“Why else would she have come chasing after him to cry about her dead cat?” Lucy asks. “I bet he’s told her all about you, and she’s all jealous . . .”

“Luce, for God’s sake, can we ditch the wild conspiracy theories?” I crouch down to pull the pecan pie out of the oven, hoping the blast of heat might account for my cheeks turning pink. “Can you just get everyone sitting down at the table?”

“Oooh, yes, and I’ll sit next to Ferdy and talk you up!”

“Lucy . . .”

“Don’t worry, Charlie. I’m on the case.”

And she is, as she manages to organize things so that it’s herself and Ferdy opposite Honey and Pal, with a seat for me in between Ferdy and Pal at the head of the table. Ferdy shoots me a quick smile as I put the beef Stroganoff down.

“It looks as good as it smells, Charlie.”

“Thanks.” I raise a smile in return. Trouble is, I’m wishing it were still ten minutes ago, that Honey had never arrived, and that Ferdy was still giving me those special, could-be-something-between-us smiles instead of the rather nervous, excessively polite one he’s giving me now. “It’s my mum’s recipe.”

“Awww, that’s so
nice
!” Honey—proving Lucy wrong—is clearly just as adorably perky in conversation with other women as she is with men. In fact, now that I come to think of it, she seems to end every single sentence she utters with an exclamation mark. “I love using my mum’s recipes, but then all that happens is that Mum wants me to cook for her instead of the other way around! I hope your mum still cooks it for you, Charlie, sometimes?”

“I’m sure she
would
,” I say, “if she could.”

“Too busy?”

“Too, um, dead.”

Which, as conversation killers go, is up there with the best of them. It even beats any conversation killer that Pal might have to offer.

Oh, and it’s why, by the way, I don’t like to talk too much about the reason I was sent to live with my stepmother and stepsisters when I was eight. Mum’s sudden death and Dad’s ensuing nervous breakdown (and his initial year-long disappearing act to Morocco, followed by his many subsequent global wanderings, ostensibly to provide inspiration for his shoe collections, but—I always believed—really just another way for him to escape memories of Mum) aren’t things I care to dwell on, particularly. Not when they transformed my life from a normal, cozy, eight-year-old existence into something straight off the pages of a Charles Dickens novel.

“Oh, my
God
!” Honey gasps, clapping a hand to her mouth. “I’m so
sorry
!”

“It’s okay,” Pal tells her, reaching over to pat her on the other hand. “It was a long time ago. Like, twenty years or something. Isn’t that right, Lucy?”

Lucy shoots him the dirtiest look I’ve ever seen. “It
was
twenty years ago, but that doesn’t make it okay.”

“But really, Honey, it’s fine that you asked about her,” I say hastily, sitting down in my seat in the hope that this might bring an end to this line of discussion.

“This is one of the things that I always think is so amazing about Charlie,” Lucy says, meaningfully, to Ferdy. “The fact that she’s so
kind
, and
generous-spirited
.”

“Er—yes,” says Ferdy. “She’s . . . very kind.”

“But Ferdy told me your dad just died, too,” Honey says, her blue eyes gazing at me sorrowfully. I’m concerned that this talk of death is going to tip her into tears about Mittens the cat again, but so far she’s staying strong. “How did your mum’s death even
happen
?”

“She was in an accident,” Ferdy tells her, in the kind of voice you use when you want to impart information swiftly and minimally, and bring an end to the conversation. He shoots me an embarrassed look.

“What kind of accident?”

“Hit-and-run,” I say, because I want to spare Ferdy the awkwardness of not knowing whether he’s allowed to reveal this or not. (It’s a subject he’s incredibly sensitive about, partly because he’s just a really nice guy, but partly, too, because his dad, Martin—or DI Wright as I knew him back then—was the first senior officer at the scene of Mum’s accident. And, poor man, the one who had to tell me and Dad that she hadn’t survived it, when we arrived at the hospital. He took the whole thing quite to heart, as evidenced by the fact that he stayed in touch with me over the years: with formal visits while I lived at Diana’s, and then with casual drop-ins for tea and a chat, with increasing frequency after he retired, while I was taking care of Dad. That’s why I think of DI Wright as an old family friend. It may be a pretty tragic way to have made somebody’s acquaintance, but I’m no less fond of him for that.) “Anyway!” I add, super-brightly, because I don’t want my longed-for dinner party to descend into utter misery and mawkishness. “Who’s for the first portion?”

“This is another thing that’s so incredible about Charlie, don’t you think?” I hear Lucy saying to Ferdy. “How cheerful she is about awful things like what happened to her mum. How brave she always was about it, even though she was only eight. Her mum was just on her way to collect her from my house when this car just . . .”

“Let me take your plate, Lucy!” I interrupt. Because I know she’s trying to talk me up, but I suspect all she’s actually doing is making Ferdy feel sorry for me. And I may not know much about men, but I suspect that
cheerfulness
and
bravery
, while fabulous attributes for a character in an Enid Blyton novel,
aren’t exactly high on most men’s lists of qualities they look for in people they fancy. I mean, if that’s all Ferdy wanted in a companion, he might just as well get himself a plucky Labrador. “Small portion or a big one?”

“Small portion,” Pal answers for Lucy, before she can speak. “Don’t forget, babe, we’re eating at my brother’s tomorrow lunchtime. My sister-in-law’s an incredible cook,” he adds, to Honey. “Just incredible.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure Charlie’s an incredible cook, too,” Ferdy says, with a pleasant smile in Pal’s direction.

“My sister-in-law cooks
professionally
.” Pal’s nose, as ever, is put out of joint by someone daring to imply he’s said something inaccurate. “As a matter of fact, for the past two years, she’s been a full-time cook for an
extremely
wealthy family in Holland Park. She does all their dinner parties and all their big events. She even goes away with them sometimes when they go to one of their other properties. They wanted to take her to New York with them for a month, but unfortunately she and my brother are moving home to Oslo in a few weeks’ time, so she’s had to give them notice.”