Charlie Glass's Slippers (9 page)

“Does he mention me?” Robyn asks, craning over my shoulder. “Or anything about the horse?”

So I’m telling you now: Thank you, Charlie. Thank you for giving
up your life to take care of me when nobody else would. Thank you for being the best daughter a man could ever have. Thank you for being better than me. Though how could you not be? After all, you’re your mother’s daughter, too.

I must have let out a noise, because Gaby says, “What?
What?
” But I carry on reading.

So, my shares in Elroy Glass are yours, Charlie, to do with as you wish. Sell them, keep them, it’s up to you. I only ask two more things, if you don’t mind, after twenty years of unreasonable demands: first, remember how much I loved the business. Along with your mother, that shoe shop was the love of my life. And second: whatever you do, make it something you want to do for a change. I’ve held you back long enough. Consider this a long overdue leg up. I love you, Charlie. Dad.

My head and eyes are swimming, almost so much that I can’t read the P.S. at the very bottom of the letter:

P.S. If I’m lucky enough to end up in the same place as her, I’ll give your very best love to your mother.

“It’s true,” I say, when I can speak at all. “He . . . wants me to have his share of the business.”

“No.” Gaby shakes her head. “It’s a mistake. He wasn’t lucid. He always told me the business was mine. Mine and Robyn’s.”

“Yes, I think that’s what he intended in a much earlier version of his will,” Oliver Winkleman says. “The version he drew up with Mr. Kellaway ten or fifteen years ago. But evidently he had a bit of a change of heart last October. Like I say, it’s not uncommon. People fall out, have family quarrels . . .”

Or, quite possibly, people just begin to get weary, as year after year drags by without their two eldest daughters offering an invitation to Christmas lunch, or popping around for a chat, or bringing over a takeaway to eat while watching
Strictly Come Dancing
, or calling to ask about the news from a worrying doctor’s appointment.

I mean,
I
used to get upset that Gaby and Robyn didn’t seem to give a shit about Dad and his illness. But I never thought Dad was upset. I never thought Gaby and Robyn could do a thing wrong, in his eyes.

“Okay, now I’m
really
confused,” Robyn is saying. “All I want to know is, which of us is getting this horse that was mentioned?”

Diana starts to laugh. It’s a rich, ringing laugh, so different from her usual careful tinkle, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s not laughing at what Robyn’s just said. She’s laughing at me.

“No. No, it’s just absurd! Elroy leaving
Charlotte
the business? What the hell is
she
supposed to do with it? She can’t even
wear
any of the shoes! I mean, are we supposed to rebrand Elroy Glass? Sell Birkenstock sandals to wear with fat-day tracksuits?”

Oliver is looking disconcerted. As well he might, with Diana apparently unraveling before his eyes. “Ah . . . anyway, you can sell the shares, Charlie, if you want to, which would certainly leave you with enough capital to buy a new flat and not have to worry about money, probably even for the rest of your life . . . or of course you can hang on to them and—”

“No, no, she’ll sell them! Of course she’ll sell them,” Diana snaps. “I’ll have the company lawyers draw up all the paperwork we need, we can get this mess sorted out in no time, and then we can all go back to normal.”

Normal.

Normal being fine for everyone here, of course.

Diana can go on running Elroy Glass and Gaby can go on Having It All, and Robyn can go on finding herself billionaire sugar daddies and having men fall at her feet like adoring Skittles whenever she so much as swooshes her hair in their direction.

But what will I go on doing? Fetching cups of tea for
people who have perfectly functional arms and legs of their own? Allowing Diana to insult my appearance, my intelligence, and the memory of my mother, without uttering a word to stop her? Is that what’s always going to be normal for me?

I take a very long, very deep breath and fix my gaze on Oliver.

“Hang on to them and what?” I ask him.

“Sorry?”

“You said I could hang on to the shares and . . . and what?”

“Well, that would be entirely up to you. You’d have the controlling interest in the company. You could either just sit back and be a silent partner, or I suppose you could start to take an active interest in the day-to-day running of the company . . .”

“Oh, honestly, Oliver, now you’re just being silly,” Gaby says. “Charlie doesn’t know the first thing about the business!”

“But I could learn.” I feel like I’m standing at the edge of an aircraft door, just about to leap out into the empty sky beneath me, without even checking to see if I have a parachute. “I mean, you know, Gaby, that I always wanted to work for the business when I grew up. Before I got sidetracked by taking care of Dad, and all that. You know that’s even why I started an Italian degree, so that maybe one day I could be useful dealing with the factories in Tuscany. And I know I’m inexperienced, but perhaps I could do something kind of behind-the-scenes . . . run the website, or . . . I don’t know, deal with customer complaints or something . . .”

Diana is laughing again. “Wait a minute, everyone! It’s just occurred to me
exactly
what Charlotte could do if she wants to come and work here. We’ve been having all kinds of problems with the contract cleaners lately—totally unreliable, floors not even getting hoovered—so why don’t we get Charlotte to come in and take care of the office cleaning?
After all, it’s in her blood! How about it, Charlotte, darling?” She turns to me, a genuinely pleasurable smile on her face; she’s really, really enjoying this. “You’d look ever so fetching in the overalls.”

Somewhere very deep inside me I feel something snap. No—snap is the wrong word. I feel something . . . release. Like a rip cord on the parachute I’ve never known I was wearing all along.

I give Diana a smile of my own. Because this is the most totally, purely joyful I’ve felt in twenty years. This is the happiest I’ve felt since before Mum died.

“Actually, Diana,” I say, “given that Dad saw fit to leave me the lion’s share of the company, I’m pretty sure he intended that I do something more with it than just the cleaning. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Diana doesn’t agree. Diana stares at me, just as silent as everyone else in the room.

A moment later, Gaby breaks the silence, getting to her feet in a brisk, businesslike manner.

“Oh, now, come on, Charlie. Mummy didn’t mean it. Of course you don’t have to do any bloody cleaning. But Daddy must have made some mistake—it’s perfectly obvious. He wasn’t thinking clearly during those last few months, that’s all.”

“Gaby,” I say, quietly, “that isn’t true. And anyway, even if it were, how would you know that? You were never there.”

“It’s true,” Robyn pipes up. “You
were
never there, Gaby. Daddy felt totally abandoned by you. He told me himself, every time I used to go and see him. Me and Charlie were the only ones who really cared about him, weren’t we, Cha-Cha?”

Gaby ignores her. “All right,” she says, “I could have seen more of Daddy these past couple of years, I grant you that. But the notion that he’d leave you the business, to exact some kind
of revenge on me . . . it’s just absurd. And you have to admit, Mummy has a point. I’m not being mean, but this isn’t the kind of place someone like you can come to work, behind the scenes or not. It’s . . . an image-obsessed business.”

“And I’ve got the wrong image, you mean.”

Diana lets out a whoop of laughter. “
Finally
, she says something sensible! Yes, Charlotte, you have the wrong image. You’re
fat
, my darling, in case you hadn’t realized. Your backside is the size of Cambridgeshire. And you have dreary hair, and cheap clothes, and the hands of a charwoman. And you want to come and work at a luxury shoe store? Looking like . . . Wait a minute, Charlotte. Where are you going?”

I’m heading for the door, is where I’m going.

En route, though, I cross the room to Oliver Winkleman and reach out to shake his hand. “Thank you ever so much, Oliver. Can I call you, if I have any more questions?”

“Ah, certainly. Anytime.”

I can hear three voices behind me as I walk out of the office. There’s Gaby, high-pitched and incoherent; there’s Robyn, still inquiring, petulantly, about her horse; and of course there’s Diana. She’s yelling after me: screaming, in fact, demanding that I come back this instant. But I’m not listening. I’m heading for the stairs.

And then I’ll be heading for my flat.

And then I’ll be heading somewhere else entirely.

I scrabble in my bag for my phone, pull it out, and dial Lucy’s number. She must be at work, because she doesn’t pick up, so when it goes to voicemail, I leave a message.

“Luce? Hi, it’s me. Look, can you call me when you get this? I need . . . I need your help on something. Do you think you’d still be able to fix up one of those boot camps you were telling me about? In Vietnam, or California, or anywhere else your boss wants someone to go? Because something has happened, Luce. Something . . . amazing. At least, something
that
could
be amazing, if I give it a chance. If I give
myself
a chance. So just . . . just call me as soon as you get this, okay?”

I slip the phone back into my bag and I keep striding, all the way past the designer shops, heading southbound down Bond Street.

PART TWO

chapter six

E
ver since I turned
at the pub near Lucy’s office, this group of men standing outside has been staring at me. No, it’s worse than that: intermittently staring at me, then retreating into their huddle to whisper and laugh together like a gang of teenage girls.

I can feel myself turning more and more violently red with each guffaw, and with each guffaw of laughter I glance down at my jeans again and wonder: what on earth was I thinking?

I’d just like it on record that this is all Natalie’s fault. Natalie was the head trainer at the California desert boot camp I’ve just returned from, and even though she basically tortured me morning, noon, and night for the last ten weeks, we ended up pretty friendly, too. It helped, I think, that I ended up a kind-of member of the staff, helping in the kitchens to cover the cost of my stay beyond the two weeks Lucy could arrange for me. Anyway, Natalie was the one who talked me into buying the jeans. Jeans that are, I should add, the first jeans I’ve worn in my entire adult life. Not an especially remarkable pair of jeans, I grant you—basic indigo denim things, with a mid-rise waistband and a slight boot-cut—but nevertheless, still a pair of jeans. And as everyone knows, as this gaggle of gossiping men apparently knows, as everyone on the entire planet apart from
Natalie knows, if you have a bum the size of Cambridgeshire, you shouldn’t be wearing jeans
at all
.

Because this was the remarkable thing about boot camp. Ten weeks slogging my guts out beneath the Californian sun, and I
still
have a big bum.

It’s all the more disheartening because—despite the fact that my flight from Los Angeles landed only this morning—I’ve really made a huge effort to look nice, seeing as it’s my first meeting with Lucy in almost three months. It wasn’t exactly fun, let me tell you, fighting my way home to Earl’s Court from Heathrow in the morning rush hour, just to spend a solid hour showering, changing, and doing full hair and makeup when all I really wanted to do was crawl under my lovely welcoming duvet and give in to my protesting body clock. But from the way these men keep laughing at me, clearly I still look like I’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards, across eight time zones, before having my makeup applied by Bozo the Clown and my hair done by Edward Scissorhands.

And—oh, God—one of them is breaking away from the group and heading my way. He’s tall, and probably about forty, and he’s wearing a sharp suit and an even sharper smile.

“Waiting for someone?” he asks as he reaches me.

“Mmm.” I turn away, slightly, to show that I’m not in a mood to be mocked. But this, I should have realized, is a mistake, because all it does is give the remaining blokes in the group a better view of my bum, and they all start whispering and sniggering again.

“Boyfriend, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Husband?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He adjusts his tie, then takes a gulp from his pint of lager. “So you’re . . . single, then?”

I curse Lucy for being late and leaving me stranded like
this, fair game for a smart-aleck businessman to take the piss out of me.

“Yes.” I can feel my face flaring. “Actually, I have quite a few phone calls to make, so . . .”

“Of course. Sorry I bothered you.”

And he’s gone, scuttling back to his group, who by now are all practically wetting themselves with laughter.

Just as I showily take my phone out of my bag, another of the men peels off from the group and comes my way. Actually, make that
swaggers
my way—he’s the one who’s been pretty much the ringleader in all the looking and whispering and guffawing. He’s smoothly handsome, an alpha male, and he knows it.

“Hey!” he greets me, in an upbeat fashion. “I’m Alex. Listen, I just had to come over to say how sorry I am about Tim.”

I blink at him. “Tim?”

“My mate over there. Sorry if he was bothering you. He’s a bit of a pest, unfortunately. Always going after the best-looking women and getting shot down.”

I’m soft enough to actually feel sorry for Tim, for a moment, until I focus on what this Alex guy has just said.

The
best-looking
women?

“We all told him,” Alex carries on, before I can process this any further, “he stood about as much chance of getting somewhere with you as England has of winning the World Cup. But he persisted, bless him.”

“Er—yes. Bless him.”

“Anyway, the least I can do to apologize for all this infantile behavior is buy you a drink.” He smiles at me, winningly. “And one for the friend who’s joining you, perhaps? If she’s even half as much of a stunner as you, Tim will be hitting on her, too, so I might as well buy her the drink in advance to make up for it.”

My ears popped quite badly as my plane came in over
Heathrow earlier, so it’s possible that I’m just not hearing this Alex guy properly.

Because it sounded very much as if he’s just called me a
stunner
.

And he didn’t
look
like he was joking when he said it.

“Glass of wine, maybe?” he’s continuing, his air of confidence starting to wobble, just slightly. “Or a vodka and tonic? I mean, help me out here . . . Sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Charlie.”

“Help me out here, Charlie! If I have to go back to my friends and say you wouldn’t even let me buy you a drink, they’ll take the piss out of me just like they were taking the piss out of Tim.”

“Oh . . . er . . . well, I guess maybe a glass of pinot grigio, or something . . .”

“One for you and one for your friend! Coming right up!”

There’s a noisy cheer from his friends as he spins around and heads into the pub itself, raising both arms in triumph as he goes.

Thank Christ, I suddenly see Lucy turning the corner towards me. I actually break into a brief jog to go and greet her.

“Jesus, Luce, I’ve never been so glad to see you in my life!” I throw my arms around her and hug her very tightly. “I’ve just had this weird experience with these blokes over there, and I’m thinking maybe it might be a good idea to move to a different pub . . . Oh, but we can’t now, of course, because he’s buying us drinks . . .”

“
Charlie?
”

Lucy’s expression is somewhere between that picture
The Scream
and Macaulay Culkin in the posters for
Home Alone
. Her mouth is wide open and she’s actually clapped both hands to the sides of her face.

“I . . . don’t believe it,” she adds, rather faintly. “You’ve
shrunk
.”

Shrunk
may be pushing it, but what I think Lucy is referring to is my weight loss. Which is approximately thirty pounds. Okay—thirty-two pounds precisely. Fat girls like me don’t do
approximate
weight loss. We know about every single pound of podge that we’ve painfully shed from our bodies.

Lucy prods me, disbelievingly—one finger jabbing my stomach, the other hand squeezing my upper arm.

“But . . . you never said you were going to try and lose . . .
How
much weight have you lost?”

“Um, a little more than thirty pounds?”

“
Thirty pounds?
Charlie! You said you wanted to shift a few pounds so that you could go and work at Elroy Glass without Diana being so horrible to you! You never said you were going to try and lose
thirty
pounds!”

“That’s because I didn’t intend to lose thirty pounds.”

Not that I’m going to claim that a thirty-two-pound weight loss just
happened
. I didn’t lose thirty-two pounds down the shower drain one morning, by happy accident. I lost thirty-two pounds through hunger. Stomach-churning, mind-altering, wake-in-the-middle-of-the-night-thinking-about-garlic-bread hunger. Oh, and I also lost it through Natalie’s five-mile sunrise runs. And her five-mile sunset hikes. And sit-ups. And lunges. Dear God, so many,
many
lunges. But I didn’t plan to lose thirty-two pounds when I first arrived in California. It’s just that, once the first six or seven pounds had gone, I began wondering about how it would feel if I could pull off that trick of wafting, sylph-like, back into London after all.

“And more to the point, what’s the deal with your hair?” Lucy croaks.

Ah, yes. My hair. The other thing Natalie talked me into.

Last weekend, I accompanied her on a drive into San Francisco, where she was going shopping for new jeans (which, thanks to Natalie’s persuasion, I ended up doing, too) and to have her hair cut and colored (which, thanks to
Natalie’s persuasion, I ended up doing, too). The woman in the salon trimmed my lank lengths into layers with—for the first time in my life—a long, side-swept fringe and said she was going to take me “five shades lighter” than my natural mouse. This didn’t sound like it was going to be anything too drastic. But—as it turns out—five shades lighter than my natural mouse is
blond
. A glowy, golden shade that the woman in the salon kept calling
honey blond
, and that looked great in the warm sunlight of Los Angeles but that I’m a tiny bit concerned, now that I’m back in gray London, actually looks more like the silky blond coat of Heidi, the Labrador Diana had put down when she realized I was getting attached to her.

“Do you hate it?” I ask Lucy, now. “Do I look like Heidi?”

“Heidi the girl at the top of the mountain?”

“Heidi the Labrador.”

Lucy snorts. “No, Charlie, you don’t look like Heidi the Labrador. Or Heidi the girl at the top of the mountain, for that matter. You look
incredible
. I mean, properly incredible. I hardly recognize you . . . Yes?” she suddenly asks, as Alex reappears from inside the pub, holding an extremely large glass of white wine in either hand. “Can I help you?”

“I was just buying a drink for you and your friend . . .”

“That’s nice, but I’m afraid we have to go now,” she says, linking an arm through mine and hauling me away from the pub, down the street towards Berkeley Square. “
Charlie!
” she hisses at me. “What the hell was that? You can’t just go accepting glasses of wine from strange men in pubs!”

I could point out that many of Lucy’s relationships, long-lasting or otherwise, started when she accepted glasses of wine from strange men in pubs, but all I say is, “I think he was just being friendly.”

“He was chatting you up!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. Men
don’t
go around trying to chat up skinny, tanned blondes. My mistake.”

“I’m not skinny . . .”

“No, actually, you’re right on that one.” Lucy stops, ostensibly to cross the road, but actually to give me a bit of a once-over. “You’re better than skinny. You’ve only gone and got yourself all bloody
toned
. I mean, my God, Charlie, your
bum
!”

“All right, all right, I know. My bum’s still massive.”

“Are you insane?”

“Well, it’s not small.”

“True.” Lucy contemplates my rear end, concentration etched on her face. “But who’d want a small bum when they could have one like that? All sticky-out, and firm, and bootylicious . . .”

“Luce, can we please,
please
stop talking about my bum?”

“But Charlie, you should be proud of it!
I’m
proud of it! I’m proud of
you
. I mean, you know I always thought you were pretty before, but this is a different league. You have cheekbones, Charlie.
Cheekbones!
”

“Let’s go in here,” I suggest, hastily, pulling Lucy towards the Starbucks we’re just passing, “and get ourselves a nice cup of coffee.”

“God,” she’s still saying, as we join the back of a short queue. “No wonder that guy was hitting on you at the pub. Ferdy is going to go absolutely
nuts
when he sees you. I still think he thought you were gorgeous before, but . . .”

“Ferdy?” I ask, sharply.

“Yes. Ferdy. You
are
going to give him a call, Charlie, now that you’re back, aren’t you?” Lucy fixes me with one of her stern looks. “You’ve done all this hard work to make yourself look amazing. It can’t just go to waste!”

“It isn’t going to waste! I didn’t do all this with Ferdy in mind. I didn’t do it with men in mind at all. I did it to get a life.”

“It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Men are a
part
of life, you know, Charlie.”

“Fine, but as far as my life goes, I don’t think Ferdy is going to be a major feature of it.”

“And you know that how?”

I don’t, right now, want to go into any details. Such as the fact that Ferdy didn’t email me once the entire time I was away. He didn’t reply to my email letting him know I was going away. Nor, indeed, did he reply to any of the three (okay, four) emails I sent after that. I’m sure he was busy with Chill and everything, but if he
really
liked me, the way Lucy seems determined to believe, he would have sent a couple of lines at some point, wouldn’t he? Surely he would have found a spare minute to do that?

“I just know,” I say, hoping to put an end to this conversation. “Anyway, I want to hear all about you! You didn’t email me nearly enough while I was away. How’s everything been going?” I order two coffees (a delicious, creamy latte for Lucy and a miserable, calorie-free Americano for me) and dig in my purse for some British change to pay with. “With work? With YoHoHo?”

“Work is fine. YoHoHo is
great
.” Her face lights up. “I had a huge order for a
Pirates of the Caribbean
theme party in Woking just this morning. Oh, and there’s another party customer in Croydon who’s trying to get me to source them a plank.”

“What on earth for?”

“For walking the plank, I assume. To be honest with you, I’m not sure why they can’t just go down to their local timber yard and get any old plank—actually, to be honest with you, I’m a little bit concerned about the whole walking-the-plank thing at all—but mine is not to reason why. Mine is . . . well, to sell them a plank, I suppose. That’s what Pal says.”