The Personal Shopper (7 page)

‘Ask him to come through, will you?’ Annie had said to Dinah. ‘At least for a croissant.’

Owen eventually sloped in, blushed deepest pink at the sight of Lana’s two teen invaders and picked a chair as far away from them as he could.

Greta and Suzie, being two of Lana’s closest friends, knew not to speak to Owen or even look in his direction, which was easy enough as he was far too young to be of any interest.

After a while, he would usually calm down and chip into conversations with a few words of his own, but direct questions from non-family members were too stressful. When Annie brought his croissant over on a plate, she didn’t say anything to cajole
him into talking, but just massaged his slight shoulders for a few minutes, hoping to help him relax.

Sunday mornings were a
problem in the Valentine household. There had once been lavish Sunday brunches with the most astonishing, homemade, thick and fluffy pancakes.

To Annie, it didn’t seem
so long ago that brunch had never
 
begun before 9.30 a.m. because she and Roddy had always insisted on a Sunday morning lie-in after Saturday’s weekly ‘date night’ when a rota of three babysitters took charge of Lana and Owen while their parents went out. Didn’t matter where they went out, the
 
important thing was being out and having time together: for dinner somewhere smart if they were feeling flush, to see friends or to the cinema, or even for fish and chips on a park bench if they were skint, Roddy whispering in her ear: ‘Can we go home yet? I want to do filthy things with you.’

Back at home, the ideal end to the evening was to lock the bedroom door and get close in the way only people who’ve been happily together for a long time can: ‘I know just what you want and I’m so going to make you wait . . . and then wait . . . and wait some more . . . before I finally give it to you.’

Roddy had never liked life to be boring and he certainly didn’t like love to be boring, so an evening in with him came with premeditation . . . with blindfolds or honey or ice cubes, maybe silky scarves, music and always surprises.

She had loved him, through and through and inside out, every completely thoroughly explored square inch
 
of him. From his soft white shoulders, to his solid buttocks to his quirky toes. No part of him had been untouched by her, unloved by her or out of bounds for her. They had once been completely and totally intimate.

‘We’ll always have each other,’ he’d told her so many times.

The liar.

The rule for the children on Sunday mornings had once been ‘Do Not Disturb’ until 9 a.m. at the very earliest.

Sunday brunch had once meant happy, sleepy parents in pyjamas and Roddy making pancakes with banana and maple syrup, or blueberries, or bacon and syrup, or even, not so successfully, Smarties
and liquorice
.

The kitchen on Sundays had once been full of burning butter smoke and sizzling fat, coffee fumes and the noise of Roddy’s carefully selected seasonal tunes played loud, to sing along to. In winter, this meant crooning with Dean Martin about his marshmallow world; for summer, they’d learned all the words to things like the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini song. When it was hot the pancakes had come with chilled strawberries and even vanilla ice-cream.

For some time
after Roddy had gone, Annie had tried to keep the Sunday morning pancake tradition going on her own. But she couldn’t get it right. She burnt the butter and the pancakes came out black on the outside, raw in the middle. Or the batter went runny and they came out like crêpes. In desperation, she’d even tried pancake mixes, but the results were too sweet or too stodgy and provoked just as many tears as the bad home-cooked ones.

But then, when Dinah came round and made them wonderful pancakes, taking Roddy’s big blackened cast
 
iron frying pan down from the shelf, washing and re-
greasing it carefully, Annie and her children understood that even perfect pancakes wouldn’t work.

What was missing was all too obviously Roddy and his huge, sunny presence in their lives.

So Sundays were now a careful exercise in avoidance. There was a different routine going. Lana usually invited friends round, Owen and Annie often went out for a long, early morning walk, although more recently Annie had spent Sunday mornings viewing flats.

Today, Annie had brought back the new Sunday morning delicacy: butter croissants from the deli. She put them into the oven to warm, filling the room with a toasty comforting smell. There was lovely cherry jam and Lana’s music on the stereo, pots of tea and the busy chatter of seven people in the kitchen. This way, Annie, Lana and Owen were able to not think about pancakes and ‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow’.

Once the meal was over, Annie lured Dinah to the sitting room with the words: ‘Follow me, I’ve got something very interesting to show you.’

The south-facing, windows-on-two-sides, third-floor sitting room was an Annie makeover triumph. She’d scraped, sanded and sealed the floorboards herself, she’d reclaimed the tiled fireplace inch by inch from the paint and plaster slapped over it. Now the room was a delicate shade of lemon-green with fresh yellow blinds (sale), luxurious green and lemon curtains (secondhand), a slouchy biscuit-coloured sofa (small ads) and all
 
the little touches – antique mirror, sheepskin rugs, beautifully framed photographs – which ensured her flats always sold for a bomb.

Dinah snuggled, feet up, on the sofa and patted for Annie to sit down beside her.

‘I have a new plan,’ Annie told her, taking a seat.

‘You always have a plan, Annie. Does this one involve going round another dodgy flat at nine thirty on a Sunday morning?’

‘No, no, no,’ Annie assured her. ‘Although I’ll have to find something else to move to. No, this plan is about giving up the Lonely Hearts columns.’

‘Oh thank God!’ was Dinah’s reaction. ‘I don’t know how you’ve managed to keep putting yourself through all those blind dates. I know you tried very hard, Annie, but I didn’t think it was ever going to work.’

Last summer, Annie had decided that the best cure for the aching loneliness her absent husband had left in her life was maybe not to pretend that everything was fine and she had been coping just perfectly on her own, but to find someone new.

She’d approached the project as she’d approach a shopping quest: she’d looked in all the places she could think of where available men were on offer and she’d tried out many, many different styles. Unfortunately finding a replacement partner was turning out to be much more difficult than finding a new pair of shoes.

Although she had spent almost every single Friday night for the past eight months on a date, Annie had to admit she was not making much progress.

She had been out with twenty-two men. She’d kept count. Eighteen of those men had been complete losers of the tragicomic variety: badly divorced, depressed, dumped, dysfunctional or defective – truly the very end-of-sale rail in the romance department.

Three had been a little more promising. Well . . . they’d been worth a second, even once a third date for closer inspection, but nothing had come of them. And then there had been the One Night Wonder.

Oscar, the man in a crumpled linen suit, incredibly good looking for the dating circuit, funny, attentive, utterly convincing and so persuasive that she had taken advantage of the children being away for the night and invited him home.

There was no hanging around waiting for Oscar to make a move, oh no. No sooner had she brought him in through the front door than he’d caught her wrist, spun her round and pulled her in close saying, ‘We have to kiss, right now. It can’t wait,’ in a voice not unlike to Cary Grant’s.

He was a fabulous kisser: moist, deliberate, practised, delicious and a great fit. He knew perfectly well she hadn’t been this close to a man for too long and he was there to meet that need, no doubt about it.

His tongue moving against hers had felt breathtaking; she’d opened her mouth wider, twisted her tongue against his and wanted to eat him up, right there in the hallway.

Of course they’d gone to bed together. She’d expected to feel nervous, but instead found herself running up
 
the stairs, not stopping to turn on the lights, and throwing herself on top of him.

Kissing her busily, he’d felt for the gap between her top and skirt, put cool fingers against the bare skin of her
 
back, then moved them slowly to her stomach.

But still talking to her, joking, charming her all the way. ‘
Hello, I think I love you, what’s your name again?
’ he’d sung in a giggly whisper against her ear, running a finger teasingly round the rim of her belly button. Then two fingers had begun to walk from her knee upwards, taking the hem of her skirt with them.

‘No, no,’ she’d giggled back, pushing his hand away.

So the fingers had moved back to her belly button, circling round, playfully persuading.

When he kissed her, whenever their lips had brushed together, she’d felt an electrically charged tingle.

‘You so want to. You do,’ he’d told her, moving his hand slowly up her leg again, taking big wolfish bites and licks at her mouth and neck.

He’d smelled spicy, sweaty, grassy and delicious. She’d been unable to recall wanting anyone more, was ravenously hungry . . . starving.

‘Nah ah, no,’ she’d protested, but she’d been laughing and pushing closer, had begun to unbuckle and investigate him, both of them totally focused on each other.

His fingertips had moved . . .
just there, yesss
. . . softly, insistently against her as his tongue licked down her neck and his leg wrapped in behind hers.

It had got much more heated, deliciously desperate .
 
.
 
. frantically moving, probing fingers and mouths until they were naked and moving, sweating, gasping together, Annie determined to have him, make up for all the time she’d lost, cram in every sensation she’d been so deprived of.

Finally they’d fallen asleep in the not so small hours, they’d kept each other awake so long. He’d held her,
 
whispered to her, been unbelievably tender and she had so, so fallen for him. But in the cool light of the morning, he’d already seemed detached
– had to hurry off – left a number which when three days later she finally ventured to call turned out to be
wrong
!

‘I’m emotionally scarred and vulnerable!’ she’d shouted at the receiver once she’d hung up. ‘It’s against the rules to treat me like this! You total wanker!’

Her best friend, Connor, had christened Oscar the One Night Wonder and tried to make a joke of him ever afterwards, to ease Annie’s pain as quickly as possible. Now, whenever she thought back to that little episode, she tried to remember just the very good bits (not so hard) and hey, Oscar had broken the ice, hadn’t he? He’d been the first person she’d ever slept with since her husband. Not that he deserved the honour.

Annie was now as expert at reading the Lonely Hearts as she was at the property ads.

‘Successful businessman’ meant ‘runs corner shop’, ‘discreet fun’ was always ‘adultery’, ‘tall’ equalled ‘giant’, for ‘bubbly’ read ‘on horse-strength antidepressants’.

‘You’re going to meet your next Mr Right one of these days, you’re going to bump smack bang into him when you’re not even looking,’ Dinah soothed her. ‘You’ve just got to give yourself time to let it happen.’

Annie gave her a sympathetic look. Her sister was touchingly sweet and naïve in so many ways. Did she really think something this important could be left to chance? To fate? That she should rely on Mr Perfecto waltzing into The Store one day, setting eyes on her and declaring that she was the one?

In Annie’s experience, men were nothing like that. Even when they were madly in love with you, they rarely did anything about it. They had to be seduced, cajoled, reassured: in short, hunted down.

Even securing Roddy, hardly one of life’s shy and retiring types, had been hard work. Nineteen-year-old Annie, wildly in love, convinced this was the man for whom she was destined, had had to keep a constant track of his nightlife via a friend to make sure she turned
 
up at all the right places,
accidentally
, looking as
 
sensational as possible for the early nineties when everything came from Gap, was black or grey or plaid,
 
and the highest heels were kitten. (See the first series of
Friends
for details and try to imagine: the hair-straightener hadn’t even been invented!) But the plaid miniskirts had worked and finally she had landed the prize. And there’s nothing, nothing in the world as wonderful as the one you’ve longed for, dreamed of, ached over, suddenly turning all his dazzling attention on you. Full beam.