Charlie Glass's Slippers (7 page)

“Yeah.” Hamish is short and pink and shiny, rather like a pig fashioned from a balloon by a clown at a children’s party. He looks pleased to see Jay, shaking his hand and slapping his
back as he gets into the elevator, and completely ignores me as I follow. “Fucking hell, Jay, it’s been ages. In fact, we need a proper catch-up. I was just talking to your father about a couple of matters regarding the trust, and . . .”

“Okay, then, why not come and have a coffee with me now?” Jay suggests, pressing the button to close the elevator doors. “This lady here is interviewing for Marit’s job, and she’s about to cook me breakfast.”

“Marit?” Hamish’s eyes goggle. “The hot Swede?”

“I think she was Norwegian, actually, mate.”

“Swedish, Norwegian . . . who cares? She was hot. And she’s
leaving
?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then, you need to replace her with someone equally hot! Not . . .”

“Hamish!” Jay snaps.

I feel my face flood with color.

“Hey, are you all right?”

Jay Broderick is looking at me with mild concern, probably because I’ve just turned the color of boiled beetroot.

“I’m fine!” I say. “Just . . . er . . . not a fan of elevators, that’s all. A bit claustrophobic,” I add, hoping this is explanation enough for my bright red cheeks.

“Yeah, I said it was slow . . . mind you, it should have opened by now.” Jay reaches behind me to press the door-open button. “That should do it.”

The elevator doors do, indeed, open.

But then they stop opening, abruptly, when they’re only halfway apart.

This might not be such a big deal if we’d actually reached the basement floor. But we haven’t. We have, however, left behind the ground floor. And where we are right now is trapped, with half-open elevator doors, somewhere between the two.

All three of us stare out at the large expanse of brick wall ahead.

“Shit,” says Jay. “This isn’t good.”

He reaches behind me, again, and presses the LG button. We go nowhere. So he presses the G button. For a thrilling half-second we jolt upward. And then we stop again. A foot-wide gap has appeared at the top of the elevator.

Annabel’s face appears, sideways, in this gap.

“Oh, my God, guys! Are you all right? Okay, hang on,” she adds, before any of us can reply. “Let me just press the button outside the doors.” She disappears again, so that all we can see are her legs.

“Well, I don’t know about you, Jay, but I’m quite happy staying here for a bit longer, with a view like that.” Hamish takes a step forward. “You know, if we get the angle right, we might even be able to see up her skirt . . .”

“Jesus Christ, Hamish.” Jay pushes him backwards. “Annabel? Are you pressing the button?”

“Yes . . . and you’re still stuck.” Annabel’s head appears again. “God, Jay, I’m so sorry about this. We’ve been having problems for a while, but it’s never got stuck with anyone in it before. But, look, I’ve already called the maintenance man this morning . . .”

“He won’t get here till noon,” I hear myself say.

Annabel shoots me a look of dislike. “And he won’t get here till noon, that’s right. But it’s almost ten forty-five now, so . . .”

“Annabel, sweetheart, we can’t wait that long. Charlene’s claustrophobic. Are you okay there, Charlene?”

It takes me a moment to realize that he’s talking about me.

“Oh, honestly, I’m fine! And it’s Charlotte, by the way.”

“What’s Charlotte?”

“My . . . um . . . name?”

There’s a bit of a silence.

“OKAY, CHARLENE, YOU JUST TRY TO STAY CALM,” Jay says, very loudly and clearly, and in exactly the tone of voice you’d use if you thought someone was losing it so badly that she’s just forgotten her own name. “I’VE GOT THIS UNDER CONTROL.”

He steps forward, takes a speculative hold of the shelf of marble flooring, and places both hands on the horizontal surface just above his head. After a quick, “Mind out of the way, Annabel!” he hauls himself upward.

Well, if I wasn’t feeling hot and bothered a moment ago, I certainly am now. I mean,
Jesus
, I can actually see his back muscles rippling under his shirt. They ripple some more as he twists his body sideways, squeezes through the narrow gap, and pulls his legs up behind him.

A moment later his head appears in the foot-wide gap.

“Easy!” he says, with a grin.

Well, yes, it probably
was
easy, for a man with upper-body strength like that.

“COME ON, THEN, SWEETHEART.” Jay reaches his arm farther into the elevator and snaps his fingers, a thrillingly masterful gesture. “GIVE ME YOUR HAND.”

Even if I could ignore the thrilling masterfulness (and I can’t), how can I possibly turn him down? He’s telling me to hold hands with him! His intention is to keep me calm, presumably, until the maintenance man gets here. I mean, I’m not such an idiot as to think he wants to hold hands
romantically
or anything. But if I get to hold hands with the sexiest man I’ve ever met, I’m not going to quibble about his motivation.

I take a step towards him and reach up. His grip is firm and his hands are pleasantly cool to the touch, and I’m looking right up into his inky eyes, and for a moment it’s all just as wonderful as I thought it was going to be.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Ready?” I echo.

“Count of three?”

“Count of . . . Sorry?”

“On the count of three,” he explains, patiently, “you jump and I’ll pull. Okay?”

No, no, no, no, no!
This is
not
okay!

He actually thinks
he can pull me up?

“You know, I think I’ll just wait for the maintenance man, if it’s all the same to you. I mean, it’s perfectly comfortable in here—quite cozy, in fact—and . . .”

But Jay—still under the impression that he’s listening to the ramblings of a lunatic in the throes of a panic attack—ignores me.

“Hamish, for crying out loud,” he says. “Help me out here. Give her a leg up, can’t you?”

“You have to be kidding me.” Hamish hasn’t bothered to lower his voice, perhaps because he, like Jay, thinks I’ve gone into some kind of semi-catatonic state, or (more likely) just because he’s one of those men who thinks fat girls are better off ignored. “A leg up? Who do you think I am, the Incredible Hulk?”

“Hamish, that’s not funny.”

“It’s a
bit
funny. Do you seriously think you can winch her out of here? And even if you could, how’s she going to fit through that gap? I mean,” he adds, with a snigger, “we all know you’re an expert at getting something huge into a tight space! But I think in this case you might have finally met your match.”

“Oh, just shut the fuck up, Hamish. You can be a real dick, you know that?”

And then, if I weren’t mortified enough by what Hamish has just said, Jay gives the hand he’s holding a well-meaning squeeze.

“Okay, darling, looks like it’s just you and me, then. So like I said, on the count of three . . .”

“I’m perfectly fine here!”

“One . . . two . . .”

“Honestly, I’d much rather—”

“. . . three . . .
hup
!”

I have no choice. On
hup
, he pulls and I jump.

Which is when there’s a sudden, extremely nasty popping sound.

It’s come from his shoulder.

Jay gives a sharp gasp of pain. Then he lets go of my hand as though it’s scalding hot, rolls sideways, and disappears behind the elevator doors.

But on the bright side (I seriously need to find a bright side here), the elevator has suddenly taken it upon itself to stir back to life. It suddenly judders upward by about three feet, not all the way back to the ground floor but certainly far enough up that I can easily scramble out of the half-open doors.

Jay has propped himself up against the nearby staircase, with Annabel leaning over him (leaning, I can’t help noticing, with quite a lot of her bounteous cleavage spilling out from those undone top buttons).

“Do you need me to call a doctor?” she’s gasping. “An ambulance?”

“No, I’m okay—honestly, it’s an old injury. I just need to pop it back in . . .”

Which he does, with an even more ghastly sound than it made when it popped out.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumble. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“
Fucking
hell
, mate!” Clambering out of the elevator himself, Hamish looks, if anything, even more pale and sweaty than Jay does. “I
told
you it was a bad idea to try hauling around a heifer like that!”

If you could dislocate your sense of self-worth, if your self-esteem could make a nasty popping sound, the way Jay’s shoulder has just done, you’d just have heard another of
those ghastly noises coming from me. Not that I’m trying to underestimate the pain Jay must be feeling at the moment, but I can’t help wondering if the agony of humiliation I’m feeling would give a dislocated shoulder a run for its money.

“It wasn’t her fault,” Jay says (though he doesn’t, I notice, actually dispute Hamish’s claim that I’m a heifer). “This shoulder’s never been the same since I dislocated it on the Suzuka Circuit.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I croak. “Anything at all?”

But Annabel and Hamish are too busy fussing over Jay to pay me any attention.

I’ll be honest: for once in my life, I’m very glad that nobody seems to notice me.

I don’t care, anymore, about getting the cooking job. All I want is to get away from this place and never come back.

“Again, I’m really, really sorry,” I mumble, as I sidle towards the front door.

I may be, as Hamish so considerately put it, a heifer; I may weigh enough to dislocate a man’s shoulder when he tries to lift me. But the supremely ironic thing is that all of this somehow combines to make me pretty much invisible. So invisible, in fact, that I can slip away from the scene of my crime without anyone even noticing.

The bigger you are, it seems, the less anybody sees you at all.

chapter five

I
make the mistake
of
arriving before either Gaby or Robyn for the will reading on Thursday. Gaby, according to her assistant, is on her way back to the office from a meeting with a fashion stylist at the Dorchester, and Robyn is . . . well, just on her way. It’s not quite two o’clock in the afternoon yet, so she probably only got out of bed about an hour ago. Honestly, if she makes it anytime before three, we should probably all be grateful.

But the reason that my early arrival is a huge mistake is that, without Gaby or Robyn, without even Oliver Winkleman the solicitor, I’m alone with my stepmother, on her turf.

That’s right. The Ice Queen. She Who Must Not Be Named. The High Priestess of Mordor herself.

Diana.

She’s looking at me now, from behind the colossal oak desk in her office. It’s two floors above the shop floor, with large windows facing out over Bond Street below, and it’s decorated in Diana’s usual style, which is to say that everything is oversized, extremely expensive, incredibly ornate, and entirely without charm. I’ve often felt as though Diana picks out furniture that’s big and solid and overblown almost as if to emphasize her iron will over all objects, inanimate or other
wise. Her desk in this office is Gotham-esque, the chesterfields at her house are mammoth, and the swirly Venetian mirrors she likes to hang on every available bit of wall are roughly the size of the ones you see in stately homes and National Trust houses, but still Diana dominates her space. And, should there be any doubt, she also dominates everyone else in it.

Of course, she’s an extremely striking woman. She was a successful society model before she met Dad in the early seventies, and those looks are still in evidence today: high cheekbones that are always, but
always,
emphasized by an ash-blond chignon, and an angular frame that she sets off to dramatic effect in sharp tailoring and bold jewelry that would drown a smaller, softer woman. Today, for example, she’s wearing head-to-toe navy (wide trousers and a kind of Japanese-style wrap shirt in extremely stiff cotton) accessorized with onyx earrings the size of quail’s eggs and a heavy beaten-gold choker around her neck. Usually she’d be nudging six feet with the assistance of her customary four-inch heels, but today—thanks to her recent bunion surgery—she’s slumming it in a mere kitten heel, the closest Diana will ever get to a flat shoe. Her handbag, within reach by the side of her desk, is her usual black quilted Chanel 2.55.

Although I did my best to put together my very smartest outfit for today’s will reading, I felt shabby and creased the moment I walked in here. And that’s without Diana even having pointed out that I look shabby and creased. Which she will, I guarantee you. For Diana, where I’m concerned, cruel and mocking jibes are always within easy reach.

“So! Charlotte!” she says, with one of the smiles that Lucy calls
a Diana special
. (It’s anorexically thin, arctically cold, and never comes within a thousand miles of reaching her eyes.) “How are you? I haven’t seen you since Elroy’s funeral.”

She says this as though, under normal circumstances, we see each other once every couple of weeks. We don’t. Dad’s
funeral was, in fact, the first time I’d seen her in about four years. And I’d happily have gone another four years without a further meeting, let me tell you.

“I’m fine. How are you? How’s Michael?”

Michael is Diana’s fourth husband. The fact that there have been four people in the world who were prepared to marry Diana is a source of total mystery to me. But then, there were people who were prepared to marry Stalin, weren’t there? There are people who are prepared to marry convicted serial killers. There really is no accounting for taste.

“Oh, he’s fine. You know, you really must come and stay with us one weekend in the country, Charlotte, when Gaby and the children are down, too.” This remark has been perfectly timed to coincide with the arrival of her assistant, bearing a tray of tea things and a plate of madeleines. Which is entirely consistent with Diana’s age-old MO: delightful in public, diabolical in private. This, I finally worked out a few years ago, explained all those times she would lavish praise and attention on me when Dad came to visit, only to launch character assassinations—usually with renewed vigor—the moment the front door had closed behind him. “It would do you good,” she adds, as the assistant sets down the tray and leaves, shutting the door behind her, “to get out of London for a weekend. Away from that grim little flat!”

I clear my throat. “It’s not grim.”

“Oh, darling, it’s totally grim!” Another anorexic smile, accompanied by a little flurry of laughter. “Admittedly I haven’t seen the place for donkey’s years, but if it was grim back then, I can’t believe it’s a palace now! Right on that corner where the buses thunder down Earl’s Court Road, wasn’t it? I’m sure you can practically reach out of your bedroom window and touch a passing number seventy-four. Oh—though it was a basement flat, wasn’t it, if I remember correctly? So you probably can’t reach out of any window at all!”

“It’s ground floor and lower ground.”

“Really, Charlotte, there’s no need to be so defensive.”

“I’m not being defensive, I was just—”

“It makes you sound terribly bitter. Though God only knows what you’ve got to feel bitter about.”

“But I was only—”

“And nobody likes a bitter woman, Charlotte. Men especially. Oh, that reminds me—did Robyn tell me you’d started dating someone?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe it was Gaby, then. I’m sure one of the girls mentioned it. I’d love to hear all about him!”

“There . . . is no him.”

“So you’re
not
dating someone?”

“No.”

“Oh, dear. Poor old Charlotte. Still, never mind. I mean, you’re only twenty-seven, aren’t you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Ah. Well, even so. Plenty of time to track down some nice man who might be interested! I hear dating websites are very good, these days, for girls who find it hard to attract a man in the usual way. I mean, I don’t even think you have to exchange photographs or anything until you’ve spent a bit of time emailing back and forth. And I suppose you could even get a friend to help you write the emails, if you were worried you were going to sound dull or a bit thick or something.”

I imagine you’re probably wondering why I don’t grab the tea tray and fling it, madeleines and all, into Diana’s smiling face. Or pick up her Chanel 2.55 and beat her insensible with it. Or open the window and shove her out so she splats, shocking the Bond Street shoppers, on the pavement below.

Why I just sit here and say nothing to defend myself at all.

Lucy’s explanation for what looks like my total and utter wimpishness is that the moment I step into Diana’s orbit, I
immediately regress to my childhood years in that big, cold house in Fulham where I grew up. I don’t want to get all Dickensian about it, but it wasn’t the happiest childhood. I’m sure there are some women who would be capable of being kindness itself to the small daughter of the tragically killed woman who was the catalyst for their husband leaving them . . . but Diana wasn’t one of them. Diana was the kind of woman who preferred to bully, torment, and kill with a thousand tiny cuts. The kind of woman who’d arbitrarily refuse to let me eat at the dinner table because she’d suddenly take exception to “seeing such an ugly face.” The kind of woman who’d decide that I should be the one to get up every morning at six to walk Gaby and Robyn’s Labrador—lovely golden-haired Heidi, my one source of comfort in that house—and then who’d suddenly announce, when I came home from school one day, that Heidi had become ill, been taken to the vet’s, and put down. The kind of woman who wouldn’t let me come down on Christmas morning to open presents with Gaby and Robyn by the tree, because that was a tradition reserved “for family.”

Lucy’s probably right, but I think it’s a bit more specific than that. Because the real trouble with Diana is that she’s what is best described as an emotional terrorist. Sure, she’s vicious and bloodthirsty, but what really unsettles you is that she has her occasional moments when she seems (almost) reasonable, and when for a foolish few minutes, you dare to believe that she might not be planning to destroy you after all. I mean, when DI Wright and the social worker first took me to stay with her and my sisters, right after Mum died, Diana was sort of nice to me for a while. I can’t claim she was exactly warm and loving—I was the daughter of the husband-stealing housekeeper, for heaven’s sake—but for the first few months, she was welcoming enough. She certainly wasn’t verbally abusing me at the dinner table, or banning me from
attending family Christmas. All that stuff came gradually. I’d been there three or four months when the first barbed comments about my unwanted, unasked-for presence began, and it was a full six months before open hostility broke out at mealtimes. And I can pinpoint the very first time Diana subjected me to one of her apocalyptic, week-long rages: the first New Year’s Eve I spent living there, when I was accused of spending longer than my allotted time on the phone to Dad, who was calling from a bar in Casablanca. It was true, I probably did spend more than the two or three minutes both Gaby and Robyn had on the phone with him, but that was partly because neither of them seemed all that interested in long conversations, and partly because as soon as I came on the phone, Dad’s voice cracked and he began to sob, meaning that I could hardly just hang up and head back to watch the fireworks on TV. Whatever the case, I don’t think I deserved Diana’s reaction, which was to drag me up to my room and systematically smash, rip, or stamp on every single item from the small pile of Christmas presents I’d been given the week before (reserving special viciousness for the set of Moroccan leather-bound notebooks Dad had sent me), followed by her refusing to speak a single, solitary word to me—actually to even acknowledge my presence—until school began again a week later. Oh, and demanding that Gaby and Robyn do the same.

If I’m in the mood for torturing myself (which I’m usually not) I can remember, as clear as day, sitting at Diana’s kitchen table one breakfast time that week with tears rolling down my cheeks as I begged one of them to respond to my request to pass me the Rice Krispies, too frozen with misery to reach across the table and take the cereal box myself.

That New Year’s rage was such a horrible shock, and—for a nine-year-old—so very much out of the blue, that I’m honestly not sure I ever got over it. And though Diana was much
more cruel to me on many, many occasions after that, not to mention pretty consistently so for the next ten years, I don’t think I ever forgot how very suddenly and how violently her mood could turn on a pinhead. I quickly learned that my best defense was not only not to do anything that might inadvertently annoy Diana, but to behave as if I weren’t there at all.

Which is why I stay quiet. Why I try not to let on that anything has upset me. It’s self-preservation, pure and simple. Live with Diana for a decade, and you’d get pretty good at it, too.

“Oh, Gaby, darling,” Diana suddenly says, as the door opens and Gaby strides into the room. “How was the meeting with Poppy?”

“Waste of time. She’s been cozying up to Tamara Mellon again.” Gaby shrugs off her trench coat and hangs it on the burnished brass coat stand next to the office door. “All her clients are going to be in Jimmy Choos at the BAFTAs. I couldn’t even get her to promise us Helen fucking Mirren. Oh, hi, Charlie. Yeah, I’d love a cup of tea, thanks,” Gaby says, even though I haven’t offered her one. “Oh, and you never told me whether or not Oliver Winkleman came around to you at the weekend, to make the inventory like I asked him.”

“Yes, he came around. I had people over for a supper party, but—”

“You know, I’m still fuming with Elroy that he stopped using Alan Kellaway at the last gasp and took up with this Winkleman instead,” Diana interrupts. “I mean, I don’t even
know
this Winkleman. He sounds about twelve years old on the phone. And honestly, I don’t know why we have to go through this whole rigmarole with Elroy’s will. We all know what the damn thing says. You and Robyn get his shares in the business, Charlotte gets the flat. Actually”—she turns to me, with a smile so thin it’s in danger of dying from starvation—
“I’m not at all sure that it was worth you coming along today, Charlotte. Any queries that the girls or I have are going to be about Elroy’s business interests, and nothing to do with his leaving the flat to you.”

“Mummy, don’t be absurd.” Gaby doesn’t look at Diana as she says this. “Of course Charlie has to be here for Daddy’s will reading.”

“But Gaby, it’s a
family
affair.”

“Mummy . . .” It would be going too far to say there’s a warning tone in Gaby’s voice, because even she, fearsome as she is with pretty much everyone else on the planet, is far from her usual steely self when it comes to dealing with her mother. And it’s not even a reproachful tone, because nobody reproaches Diana. But it is a tone of sorts. “Charlie is . . .” She pauses, pressing her lips together, perhaps before the word
family
can escape out of them. “Well, she’s entitled to be here.”

“Oh, she’s entitled all right!” Diana’s smile is hardening, her eyes are becoming just a little too bright, and the atmosphere is changing from unwelcoming to downright hostile. This is the thing about Diana’s tempers: they are so lightning fast that—even after years of practice—you never see them coming. “Just like her mother was when she felt entitled enough to steal my husband!”

“Mummy, don’t,” Gaby says, in a low voice.

“Well, that’s the only reason she’s here today at all, isn’t it? Swiping an entire flat from under our noses, a flat that Elroy had to buy only because he wanted to shack up with her mother? That money would be yours and Robyn’s otherwise, Gaby! Do you still want to defend her, do you still want to be her very best buddy, when she’s doing you out of part of your inheritance?”

“Mummy . . .”

Gaby is wearing a look of discomfort on her face. It’s the same look she used to wear when, on the occasions Diana deemed me to have too ugly a face to eat dinner with them, she would sneak up to my room with a plate of cookies and chips, hissing at me crossly to “Hurry up and close the door! And this never happened, right?” before scurrying away again so that Diana wouldn’t know that one of her own daughters had defied her.