Summer Daydreams (27 page)
The next day, I meet Tod for breakfast in the tiny courtyard garden of the hotel. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, the smell of fresh croissants wafts out from the kitchen and I feel like shite.
Tod stands when he sees me. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Heavy night?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not really.’
That’s the strange thing. I had two glasses of wine with dinner, then I had a glass of champagne with Yves and barely started one more after he left. I’m not exactly a big drinker, but does that constitute a heavy night? Does it warrant me feeling so truly terrible? I actually feel like I’ve been drugged. My head is banging and my mouth is as dry as dust. Then the thought goes through my fuggy brain – what if I have been drugged?
Should I voice my suspicions to Tod? What if Yves had slipped something in my drink? It isn’t entirely beyond the realms of possibility, I think. It happens. At least, I’ve read about it happening to other people. Or am I just being ridiculously paranoid?
I have to ask myself what exactly was I doing letting someone I hardly know into my room at all. It also freaks me out to think that Yves might have helped himself to my designs. Not once, but twice. Though, perhaps, I should count my blessings that I gave him short shrift and that was all he was able to help himself to.
God, I feel so stupid.
Tod pulls out my chair for me and, gingerly, I sit down.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘No.’ I decide that honesty is the best policy. ‘I’m not that great.’ I might even want to be sick. Instead, I put my head in my hands and Tod pours me a glass of water. I gulp it down gratefully. ‘Yves came to my room last night. Late. He brought champagne.’
Tod’s face tells me that he doesn’t like the way this is going. I can’t say that I blame him.
‘I don’t know if it was drugged,’ I confess. ‘I certainly feel more awful than I should do after a few glasses of plonk.’
‘Drugged?’ Tod’s face blanches. ‘He didn’t… ?’
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘When it became clear he wasn’t there primarily to talk about work, I told him to leave. He did.’
‘Thank heavens for that.’
‘Exactly.’ I let out a shuddering breath. ‘But I think he took some of my designs with him.’
Tod’s face darkens.
‘I don’t think it’s the first time. ‘
‘Oh, Nell.’
Taking a deep breath, I plough on. Tod might as well know everything. ‘When he came to see me in Hitchin a few months ago, I’m pretty sure that he took some of my new sketches with him then.’ I can’t believe what a fool I’ve been. But I never expected anyone to do something like that? Why should I? ‘I never suspected him at all at the time,’ I admit. ‘I just thought I’d misplaced them. Or Petal had binned them. Or something.’
‘I think your nature may be too trusting for the cut and thrust of business.’
‘I’m beginning to see that.’
‘I asked around about him last night, Nell, but no one seemed to know who he was.’
I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. ‘I feel such a fool.’
Tod tuts. ‘I should never have left you alone with him. This is my fault.’
‘It’s mine,’ I counter. ‘I should have made sure I checked him out more thoroughly.’ And hadn’t simply agreed to everything because I was blinded by his flattery. Stupid, stupid me.
The waitress brings us fresh coffee, so strong and black that it will either kill me or cure me. She also puts down a basket of croissants and a dish of creamy butter. My stomach rolls.
‘Eat,’ Tod instructs. ‘We have a busy day ahead of us.’
I can hardly bear the thought of it. I want to go home. I want to run back to Olly and Petal. I want to be with people who love me and don’t want to do bad things to me.
‘We are going to track that man down,’ Tod informs me as he tucks in. ‘Whoever he is.’
‘We are?’
He whips out his programme like it’s a weapon of mass destruction and, while I force myself to nibble at a croissant, he trawls through the listings.
‘Right,’ he announces eventually. ‘I’ve got some shows marked down where he might be. Up for this, Nell?’
‘Yes.’
Tod fixes me with a gaze. ‘I don’t want to find him only for you to go all nice on me.’
‘No,’ I agree. ‘I can do not nice.’
‘Excellent. Then let’s go and get the bastard.’ Couldn’t have put it better myself.
I see the Louvre from another taxi window, and then Tod and I go to three different shows back-to-back on the hunt for
Monsieur
Yves Slippery Simoneaux. We see some nice stuff, but not the elusive trickster/agent. The last show of the morning is for a new accessories designer, Marie Monique, and Tod reckons that this might well be a good place for Yves to rock up. I sincerely hope so.
This venue looks like a disused factory and is called
Espace Blanc
. Inside, it’s all industrial with concrete floors and exposed pipework. A central, galvanised steel staircase comes down from a gallery to join a runway that’s flanked by rows of chairs. It’s sparsely populated, at the moment, but filling up fast. Tod and I take the last remaining seats in the front row at the head of the runway. Despite the soothing music, a prickle of apprehension runs through me.
Sensing my discomfort, Tod says, ‘OK?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. I just feel a bit funny.’
‘Not sick?’
‘No.’ Something like a sixth sense. Yves will be here. I know it. I can feel it in my bones, in my water, in the hairs on the back of my neck.
Scanning the rows though, I can’t see him anywhere.
Five minutes later and the music racks up several notches, announcing the start of the show. The chill-out sound of Groove Armada’s mellow song ‘At the River’ fills the room. The models high-step down the staircase, a precarious move in canvas sandals with towering wedge heels. They’re dressed only in white skimpy bikinis and floppy hats and wear brightly coloured beach bags in different styles slung across their bodies to sit low on their hips.
‘Nice,’ Tod whispers to me.
I can’t argue with that. But I’m distracted and can’t help but keep looking round in search of the elusive Mr Simoneaux.
The mood changes and a drum and bass version of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ pumps out. The models wear red playsuits and black stilettos. The handbags are glittering silver box shapes with red satin hearts attached. Cute.
The music changes tempo again and it’s M People singing ‘Itchycoo Park’. This time the models are dressed all in white with cropped T-shirts, pedal pushers and ballet flats. As they hit the runway in front of us, my heart stops, my limbs freeze and my eyes pop. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Or maybe I can.
The handbags that the models are wearing are as familiar as the freckles on my child’s face. These are my handbags. The ones that I had sketched out when I was in my shop in Hitchin. The ones with the pop art inspired, psychedelic designs. The ones that Yves Simoneaux had lifted, just as I suspected.
Tod turns to me instantly. I nod. ‘They’re mine.’
‘You don’t need to tell me. I’d recognise them anywhere,’ he says.
I knew that it was bad. But I had no idea quite how bad.
‘That slimy French bastard has stolen your designs.’
He has. My God, he has. I don’t know what I thought he was going to do with them, but I hadn’t, in my worst nightmare, thought that he would do this.
Tod and I sit there mesmerised as my nicked handbag designs are paraded before our eyes. The applause is louder than for any other part of the collection and that’s with two people not clapping at all.
‘What can I do?’ I whisper to Tod.
‘This is a nightmare,’ he hisses back. ‘We can try to make a legal case against him, but it will be long and lengthy.’
Not to mention expensive, I suspect.
‘How can you prove the designs were yours, Nell, if you don’t have any record of them?’
Bloody hell. All I had was my original sketches. Yves knew exactly what he was doing, the sleazebag. He knew I was green and keen. It must have been like taking candy from a baby.
‘But they’re mine,’ I say, sounding exactly like Petal would.
‘They’re mine.’ The people are going crazy for them and they’re mine.
‘Don’t worry,’ Tod says, looking worried. ‘We’ll think of something.’
But we stay pinned in our seats, immobile and watch the models strut with goggle eyes.
The show finishes and still Tod and I don’t move. At the end of the last catwalk run, as is customary, the models escort the designer to the front for them to take their bow from the audience. From the gallery above us, Marie Monique appears and I’d recognise her anywhere too. It’s the woman in white who was at the gallery show yesterday – with Yves Simoneaux.
She’s dressed all in white again today. A bodycon dress teamed with killer heels. Her hair is in a long, black plait. The woman who is passing off my handbags as her own designs struts up to just beside us. She’s wearing one over her shoulder, dangling it in my face. She looks serene, sophisticated, a woman used to adulation. A battery of cameras flash. Striking a pose like a seasoned model, she takes her applause, basking in the praise and the cornucopia of cameras capture the moment.
My anger is boiling away inside me. A red rage is rising that I didn’t know I was capable of. Marie Monique turns and smiles. She holds out her hands and from the side of the stage, at the back of the audience, Yves Simoneaux steps up onto the runway and takes her into his arms. They kiss each other warmly. The applause doubles. The cameras flash again.
Looks like they are rather well acquainted and are, more than likely, in this together.
‘We’ll grab him as soon as they’re off that runway,’ Tod says through gritted teeth. ‘Though goodness only knows what we can do. I’ve a good mind to knock that slimy bastard to the floor.’
Something inside me cracks. Where there was rage there is now a cool calm. I’m out of my seat and on to the runway before I know what I’m doing.
‘These are my handbags,’ I say in a very loud, clear voice.
‘They’re my designs. And you’ve stolen them.’
The cameras flash. There’s a collective gasp from the audience. Marie’s face blackens instantly. ‘Go away,’ she spits. ‘Go away. I do not know who you are.’
‘Maybe not,’ I say. ‘But he does.’
Yves has the grace to look panic-stricken.
‘Nell,’ he says in a placating tone. ‘There is a mistake. We can sort this out.’
A reporter pushes a microphone close to us and more cameras move in.
‘They’re my bags,’ I repeat more firmly and I hear it reverberate round the busy hall. I don’t sound unhinged or hysterical. I simply sound like a woman who knows she’s been wronged. ‘You both know that they are.’
Marie pushes me. She pushes me in the chest. ‘Get out of here,’ she says. ‘Get out of my show.’
She goes to turn away, to dismiss me as irrelevant, and the red mist descends on me once more.
I grab the bag on her shoulder and she pushes me again. As I snatch it from her, she swings round and tries to claw my face, spitting insults in French. She punches me in the eye, which hurts like hell, but still I hang on. Then, while she is screaming obscenities, I take aim and thwack her one back with my rescued handbag. It hits her with a resounding thud. A volley of camera flashes follow the action.
‘This is my handbag,’ I say again. ‘I’m Nell McNamara and this is
my
handbag.’
Marie, not looking so serene or sophisticated now, makes a lunge for me, but I sidestep her and somehow grab her long, luxurious plait. It takes me back to the playground when I swing her round by it and, I have to say, it feels great. She topples off her stilettos and falls to the floor. Yves swoops in to help her. Marie lies cowering beneath him.
‘You’ll stop making those handbags right now,’ I say, wagging my finger in her face. ‘And you, you swindling bastard, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.’ Said with the bravado of a woman who doesn’t actually have a lawyer or the wherewithal to pay for one.
Then Tod is beside me leading me off the runway. Marie, still on floor, is swamped by reporters.
‘Whoa!’ Tod says as we move away from the commotion on stage.
‘That wasn’t “too nice”, was it?’
Tod laughs. ‘That wasn’t nice at all. Let’s hope she doesn’t sue you for assault and battery with a handbag.’
‘Let her try.’
Now all the cameras are focused on me. I’m breathing heavily, but I feel powerful, victorious. The journalists swarm towards me.
‘It’s my bag,’ I say to no one in particular and I see a dozen pens scribble it down. ‘Marie Monique has stolen my designs.’ Just in case anyone didn’t catch that.
‘Your name?’ someone shouts. ‘What is your name?’
‘Nell McNamara,’ I reply.
Tod leads me outside. ‘You’ll be all over the trade papers,’ he says.
‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ I remind him. I can only hope that I’m right.