Wonder Women (44 page)

Holly paused for a second. Now that she thought about it, the very last thing she wanted was to be alone with her thoughts. She had the rest of her life to think about what a romantic disaster she was. ‘Thank you,' she said as graciously as she could manage. ‘That would be lovely.'

And so it transpired that at around the time she had expected to be licking the sweat off Fraser's naked body for the second or third time, she was watching Trevor Howard touch Celia Johnson on the shoulder while she nibbled on the last crumbs of Mr Benton's lighter-than-air pastry. Life, she concluded, is always full of surprises.

It was the Easter bonnet that did it. Jo was racing around the house, trying to coordinate a halfway decent outfit. She only had about twenty minutes before she had to race to the Tube station so she could meet Richard at nine at King's Cross to catch a train to Leeds to meet a potential supplier. She would have been up earlier and been better organised, but Imi had woken seven or eight times in the night, feverish and niggly. Jo wasn't sure if she was ill or just teething, but whatever was bothering her little girl, only Mummy would do. In the end, Jo had slept fitfully for a few hours, sitting up in bed with Imi on her chest. She was fuzzy-headed and clumsy this morning. Everything she wanted to wear seemed to be crumpled in the laundry basket. She would have had a go at Lee for not keeping up with the laundry, but she knew he'd had as hard a time during the day with Imogene as she'd had through the night. At 8.05, she was standing in the utility room in her bra and tights and dressing gown, ironing a dress that she hoped very much would (a) still fit her, and (b) be warm enough for Leeds. She glanced up through the door into the kitchen, where Lee was giving
the kids their breakfast, and saw that Zach was weeping silently into his porridge. Lee hadn't noticed; he was too busy trying to coax a little food into Imi. Jo unplugged the iron and went through to sit next to Zach. ‘What's wrong, sweetie?' she said, putting her arm around his shoulders.

‘Go 'way,' he mumbled.

‘Zach! Don't be rude to your mum,' Lee chipped in from the other side of the table.

‘Come on, Zachy, why are you crying? Let Mum help,' Jo said, giving him a squeeze. She stole a glance at the clock. She was still in her underwear, not wearing any make-up and she knew she looked grey and rumpled from the interrupted night. If Zach was also getting ill, his timing couldn't be worse. ‘Zachy? What's wrong, love?'

‘You forgot to make my Easter bunnet,' he shouted.

‘Your what?'

‘My bunnet. It's the Easter parade at school today and we all have to have a bunnet and you promised we'd make one together and then you didn't make it and now I haven't got a bunnet and everyone will laugh at me.'

‘Oh …' said Lee, realising. ‘Easter
bonnet
.'

And with a start, Jo remembered. About a week before, she'd been sitting at her desk trying desperately to catch up on emails, and Zach had come to stand beside her and told her all about the parade at school and how he needed the best ‘bunnet' because Joshua's mother always made the best ones and Joshua was a smelly poo. She'd stopped what she was doing, and laughed. ‘We'll make it together, Zach, this weekend. Promise. And it'll be the bestest bunnet in town.'

‘Should we ask Dad to help?' Zach asked.

‘No, let's do it just the two of us,' she had said, giving him a cuddle. ‘It'll be a special mum-and-Zach project.'

But in the mad rush of the weekend, with grocery shopping and catching up on housework, taking the kids to three different birthday parties and creating a PowerPoint presentation for the Leeds meeting, the ‘bunnet' had slipped her mind totally.

‘Oh, Zachy …' she said, looking helplessly at Lee. ‘I'm so sorry, but Mum has to leave to catch a train in ten minutes …' Zach started to cry really hard now, and her heart ached. Lee shrugged, then he raised his eyebrows and Jo knew he had had an idea. He rushed upstairs, and within a few minutes was back with Zach's plastic fireman's helmet, a roll of small white price tag stickers, Imi's little toy bunny and some small Easter eggs that Jo had stashed in their bedroom ready for Easter morning. He opened the drawer they used for craft materials and got some Sellotape and a sheet of green paper.

‘How about we turn this helmet into a hill, with the Easter bunny on top, and some eggs at the bottom? We can make bunny paw prints with these stickers, and grass with the green paper? What do you say, big guy?'

Jo mouthed, ‘Thank you,' to Lee. He had saved her bacon again.

‘No,' said Zach stubbornly. ‘Mummy do it.'

‘Honey, I can't …'

‘Mummy,' said Zach, and he looked her squarely in the eyes. ‘You promised.'

Jo stared at him for a moment, sighed and took out her mobile. Richard's phone went straight to voicemail. He must
already be on the Tube. Thank God. ‘Richard? It's Jo. I'm so sorry, but I've been unavoidably delayed. Catch the nine a.m. train and I'll be on the next one. I'm sorry, but it's a domestic emergency and I have to sort it out.'

‘I'll finish ironing your dress,' said Lee.

‘Right, Zach,' said Jo, picking up the green paper and a pair of scissors. ‘Shall we put some lovely green grass all the way around the bottom of our hill?'

The finished ‘bunnet' was a bit wonky, and held together by Sellotape, string and luck, and it was unlikely to last five minutes beyond the parade, but Zach went off to nursery happy. Lee dropped Jo at the Tube station, saving her ten minutes, and the train came mercifully quickly. She made it to King's Cross by 8.55, and caught up with Richard as he headed for the platform.

‘I just heard your message,' he said. ‘I thought I'd have to manage the presentation on my own.'

The presentation. A work of art that she'd spent hours on over the weekend, currently sitting on her home PC. She had meant to save it on to a memory stick or email it to herself, but in the midst of the Easter-bunnet crisis, had completely forgotten.

‘Excuse me,' she said to Richard, ‘I just have to ring Lee about something. I'll see you in a moment.'

He boarded the train and went looking for their seats, and she stood by the door desperately hoping she'd catch Lee at home before he and Imi went to their playgroup. He answered the home phone on the third ring and she sighed with relief.

‘Love, I desperately need your help. I forgot to save my
presentation to my laptop and I'm about to climb on a train to Leeds. Can you email it to me now?'

‘Of course,' said Lee, and she talked him through where to find the file on her computer.

She got on the train and found Richard sitting in first class. He had got them each a coffee.

‘Can I have a look at the presentation en route?' he asked.

‘Of course!' Jo said brightly. ‘I just need to make a few tiny final adjustments.'

To her relief, Richard settled down to read the
Financial Times
on his iPad. She booted up her laptop. Try as she might, she couldn't connect to the Wi-Fi, so she spent a hair-raising few minutes trying to remember how to use her mobile phone as a modem. It seemed to work in principle, but kept dropping the connection. It took her twenty minutes to get into her email and download the presentation. Then PowerPoint kept crashing. She could feel sweat blooming under her arms. She'd have to pop into the chemist at Leeds station and buy some deodorant.

Finally, she was able to load the presentation and spin her laptop around to show Richard. ‘There,' she said, as calmly as she could manage. It was 9.30 a.m. Between the Easter-bonnet crisis, the sick baby who she'd actually forgotten to kiss goodbye, the neglected husband, the nearly absent presentation and her less than perfect outfit now sporting fetching sweat stains, it had been a disaster of a morning. A real swan day, where if she appeared to be gliding along serenely, it was only because she was paddling like a lunatic beneath the surface.

They were going to Leeds to meet a woman called Kimberley Lytton, a clothing wholesaler who imported a vast array of children's fashion from the Far East. Jo and Richard had agreed that the first and most obvious step in growing the business was to start stocking clothes for little girls as well as boys. Jo was adamant that the brief would be the same: hard-wearing and reasonably priced play clothes. Their buyer, Gary, had a long-term working relationship with Kimberley, and Jo and Richard had come up to meet her, see her operation and talk about a potential link-up and prices and quantities. Jo had desperately wanted Holly to come on the trip, but her mother was just too ill for her to be out of town. She had taken copious notes from Holly on what to look for in terms of quality, and she had a list of questions to ask about sustainability and working conditions in the garment factories, which were core values of the business and very important to her and to Holly.

Every now and then in your life, you will meet someone who, for no real reason, just rubs you up the wrong way, and the feeling might well be mutual. Maybe you're having a bad day, maybe they are. Maybe it's some kind of profound hormonal thing, or perhaps it's related to a historic but long-forgotten clash between your ancestors and theirs. Whatever causes it, it can be really very bad, and there is nothing you can do to change the way you or the other person feels. This was what Jo kept telling herself, as she sat across the boardroom table from Kimberley Lytton.

It had started badly, when Kimberley met them at the station. She had brought her car so she could drive them back to her premises, and she put Richard in the front beside
her and Jo in the back. She chatted exclusively to Richard all the way to the business park where she had her warehouse and offices, and Jo had to sit in the middle of the back seat and lean forward uncomfortably to try to hear what was being said. Rationally, she knew that only one of them could sit in the front, but it annoyed her that Kimberley had automatically assumed it should be the man. If she had done her homework, she should know that Jo was the company founder and still the majority shareholder.

When they got to the business park, Kimberley ushered them upstairs to her boardroom. She had pulled out all the stops, and there was a delicious selection of pastries and sandwiches laid out, as well as coffee, tea and juices. Along the long wall of the boardroom, she had set up a clothing rack, with hundreds of sample garments.

‘You're certainly well prepared,' said Richard.

‘Thank you!' Kimberley giggled.

Jo caught herself mentally sneering. Firstly, in her opinion, women in their forties shouldn't giggle, and secondly, in her correspondence with Kimberley, she had specifically said that she wanted to present their current and future vision for Jungletown before viewing samples. Now she felt that whatever she said in her presentation, Kimberley had made up her mind about what they needed.

She stopped herself before the sneer registered as a facial expression and she tried very hard to smile and be pleasant. Don't make judgements too soon, she told herself. Kimberley was probably a perfectly pleasant woman, and she was obviously very successful. She was trying to make a good impression, that was all. She was just keen. Jo was very
hungry, but she was damned if she was going to eat a croissant and then do her presentation with a flake of pastry adhering to her lapel, or worse, her face. She poured herself a sparkling water and sipped it, while the IT technician linked her laptop to the projector and handed her a remote mouse to change the slides. As she waited, she glanced over the selection of clothes. There was only one word for them. Pink. Unrelentingly pink. Every last T-shirt, skirt and dress was in a shade from strawberry milkshake to brightest cerise. She was sure she had spoken to Gary about the colour brief. Yes, Jungletown would now have a separate section with clothes for girls, but she had wanted the colours to reflect the colours they used in the shop: bright primary colours, vibrant jungle shades of green, orange and purple. She knew they would have to stock some items in pink, but she had been hoping to offer as wide a selection for girls as she did for boys. Well, maybe she would be able to get that across in the presentation. She hoped Kimberley would be paying attention and taking notes.

Jo loved to present. She knew she was good at it: three years of drama school had made her at ease in front of an audience, and she had a witty, lively style that won people over. She was well prepared for this: no one knew the business better than she did, and she had filled the presentation with enticing images of the interior of the shop, as well as Lee's artist's impressions of future, bigger stores. For the first time that day, she relaxed, and enjoyed herself. She could see Richard nodding and smiling, so she knew she had come across well, and when she finished, Kimberley's team gave her a quick round of applause.

‘Questions?' she said brightly.

One of Kimberley's assistants put his hand up. ‘The artist's impressions are great, but what will the girls' section look like?'

‘The girls' section?' said Jo, a little confused. ‘It'll look like the rest of the shop, continuing the jungle and tropical-island theme. Our current store is small, but in future stores, there'll be girls' clothes along one wall, boys' along the other.'

‘Would you not consider having a castle theme? Or maybe a fairy grotto?' said Kimberley sweetly. ‘That's very big, you know. Every little girl wants to be a princess.'

‘Not in our shop, they don't.' Jo smiled. ‘Every little girl that has come through our doors has loved the play area, and has wanted to be a pirate, or a ladybird, or a toucan.'

Kimberley sat back in her chair and gave a little half-smile to her assistant, which to Jo, who was already feeling sensitive, looked condescending. ‘We've looked at the market,' Jo said, rather louder than she had intended to, ‘and there is no one doing exactly what we are doing.'