The Personal Shopper (Annie Valentine) Read online

  This was a gloomy basement prison, inhabited by three, probably more New Zealand travellers who clearly had better things to do than keep house. Every available surface was covered with their clobber: wet towels, unemptied ashtrays, clothes and empty beer cans. In the sitting room, five curry takeaway boxes were sitting like pre-schoolers in an expectant semicircle round the TV.

  ‘I don’t think they’ve been watching House Doctor,’ Dinah whispered to her.

  ‘Their landlord must be insane trying to sell it while they’re still all here.’

  ‘As you can see,’ the estate agent continued, ‘the lounge could benefit from a little freshening up, but there’s a lot of potential.’

  Ha! Yes, with some effort, the room could be transformed from a filthy, north-facing gloomy dungeon with a view of a wall, to a clean, nicely painted north-facing gloomy dungeon with a view of a wall. On the plus side, the little kitchen faced south, was almost sunny on a good day and even had a minuscule strip of lawn outside it. But the deciding factor was the bedrooms: two little cubicles carved from one room with the ruthless use of plasterboard.

  Each had a small double bed buried beneath a tumble of more clothes, towels and stuff. The rooms smelled of damp, sweaty clothes and cheesy trainers.

  ‘It could look just so completely different all white, Annie,’ said Dinah in her usual, touchingly positive way.

  The estate agent was nodding agreement.

  Were they joking?

  In the kitchen, one of the tenants was making a fried egg sandwich, standing bravely beneath a flapping polystyrene tile that was threatening to throw itself off the ceiling at any moment.

  ‘What do you think of the flat?’ Dinah asked him.

  ‘Great!’ came his brief reply. ‘Obviously we don’t want anyone to buy it right now!’

  Annie caught herself staring at his bare bronzed pecs a moment too long. She couldn’t think when she’d last been so close to tanned nipples. This really was a small kitchen.

  ‘Shall we go and take a look outside then?’ Dinah asked.

  ‘Oh . . . yeah.’ Annie tore her eyes from the pecs.

  Out in the tiny garden, surrounded by tall walls on every side, Dinah’s three-year-old daughter Billie skipped in a circle, oblivious to the disappointingly poor quality of the real estate around her. Her straight shoulder-length hair, the same light brown as Mummy’s, bounced on her shoulders and she sang something under her breath.

  She came to a stop before her beloved Aunty Annie (the adoration was mutual), made an attempt at crossing her chubby arms and asked, ‘You can still be a fisher lady if you’re a princess, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, definitely.’ Annie didn’t know what a fisher lady was, but she wasn’t capable of denying this soft round face, bright eyes and perfect pink mouth anything at all. No-one else was either, which was probably something of a problem for Billie’s long-term development, but no need to worry about that yet.

  ‘Well, I’m going to be a princess fisher lady when I grow up, then.’

  ‘What does a princess fisher lady do, babes?’ Annie bent down to make sure she didn’t miss a thing.

  ‘Well . . .’ Billie began, putting her hands on her hips and leaning forward in a theatrically conspiratorial kind of way, probably copied directly from her nursery school teacher, ‘it’s a princess, so she wears a pink dress and eats pink cakes all the time, but she also fishes, you know, with a fishing rod.’

  ‘And that’s what you’re going to be when you grow up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perfect. Now, I think we should go to my house and eat croissants. How does that sound?’

  ‘Yesssss!’ Billie began to skip in her circle again.

  ‘So, ask me where I got my coat?’ Dinah challenged Annie on the walk back to her flat.

  ‘That’s no use!’ Annie laughed. ‘Now I know you got it in Cancer Research or the PDSA. What did you pay?’ she followed up immediately.

  ‘Oxfam, thirty pounds,’ came Dinah’s completely honest reply.

  ‘Could have got it for you for less,’ Annie told her, but this wasn’t true today, it was just a knee-jerk reaction, something she always liked to say to Dinah when they were talking about shopping.

  ‘Could not!’ Dinah retorted huffily.

  Annie and her sister Dinah – three years younger – had always understood each other almost perfectly. They weren’t alike. They appreciated each other’s differences and clicked. Always had done, ever since Annie had worked out how to scramble – carefully, without stamping on the baby’s head – into Dinah’s cot in the morning to make her giggle.

  Although Dinah spent far less on clothes than Annie, she still maintained a lively, edgy style all her own and never shied away from a fashion challenge: tank top and Bermudas? Mini kilt and woolly tights? Sweater dress and kinky boots? Bubble coat? Dinah was game.

  There was still an element of competitive dressing between them, left over from the days when they stole tops from each other’s wardrobes, fought to wear the same skirt to the same party, and cried when new dresses got ruined.

  ‘How’s Bryan?’ Annie asked next, aware that she’d been with Dinah for almost an hour and not enquired once after her brother-in-law. But then it was a badly kept secret between the sisters that although Annie was crazy about Billie and couldn’t imagine life without weekly get-togethers with Dinah, she wasn’t quite so smitten with Bryan.

  ‘He’s fine.’ Dinah sprang open one of her glittery green clips, readjusted it in her perky bob and smiled. ‘Still waiting to hear about that project, over in Hammersmith.’

  ‘Nothing else in the pipeline?’

  ‘Oh loads, he’s pitching for work all the time, but you know how competitive it is.’

  One of life’s true romantics, Dinah, in Annie’s opinion. She was dreamy and sweet and softly pretty: pale skin, rosy cheeks, dark brown hair. After an unexpectedly druggie youth and many disastrous relationships, she’d finally found Bryan. A ‘soul mate’ (supposedly) just as kind and gentle as she was. Bryan was an architect, who only ever seemed to secure work on the smallest of projects like rearranging kitchen units, and as Dinah was an occasional children’s book illustrator, they lived in a tiny flat, not far from Annie’s, but still a million miles from Highgate, in a state they liked to describe as ‘impoverished bliss’. It drove Annie slightly wild. She was always nagging them to be more proactive and ambitious . . . not that it made the slightest difference.

  Annie would ask things like: ‘But don’t you want to do up the kitchen at some point?’

  Dinah, oiling some ancient French casserole dish she’d bought at Brick Lane market for 20p, would answer, ‘Oh, but at least this is a real wooden cupboard’ (squeeeeeeak, cue cupboard door falling off hinge). ‘Those MDF things get worn out so quickly. And this has character, I love to cook in here.’ The fact that her kitchen was no bigger than most people’s fridges didn’t put her off either.

  Or, ‘Have you thought about where you’re going to send Billie to school?’ Annie, ever practical, would ask.

  ‘Oh, her nursery’s so lovely and most of her friends there are going to the local primary, so we’ll probably send her there and . . . you know . . . see how it goes . . .’ came Dinah’s rose-tinted-spectacle reply.

  ‘But you can’t! That primary school came bottom of the entire league table!’

  ‘Did it?’ Genuine surprise, followed by, ‘But apparently they’ve got a lovely new head.’

  Annie, preoccupied with earning enough money for her family, couldn’t help suggesting moneymaking schemes for Dinah and Bryan: ‘If Dinah had a job just three days a week even . . .’ ‘If you put together a website, Bryan, showcased your best ideas . . .’ ‘Dinah, have you tried contacting other publishers?’ ‘Have you tried advertising in property magazines, Bryan?’

  But she suspected Dinah and Bryan quite liked things the way they were: they liked not having to work too hard, they liked being at home with each other and their p
recious little girl.

  For Billie, however, Annie had great hopes. Billie was aiming high with her plans to become a princess, and she was already displaying the ferocious negotiating skills of a Washington lawyer.

  ‘Just four more mouthfuls, darling,’ Dinah would beg.

  Billie would shake her head.

  ‘Well, let’s say three then, so long as they’re big ones?’

  Vigorous shake of head, lips glued together.

  ‘Two?’

  ‘NO!!’ would come the roar.

  ‘Just one tiny-winy little bit more then? Just for Mummy?’

  ‘N-O spells NO!’

  Billie had a shiny pink moneybox in which Annie encouraged her to store all the pound coins she slipped her. It wasn’t going to be enough to pay for St Vincent’s, though.

  ‘Aunty Annie,’ Billie piped up now, ‘is it true that Lana and Owen’s daddy lives on a hill with other ladies?’

  Startled by this question, Annie turned to look at Dinah for some guidance on how to reply.

  Dinah just shrugged her shoulders and looked as if she was trying not to laugh.

  ‘Well, er . . .’ Annie began, but to her relief, Billie had already moved on.

  ‘Mummy?’ she asked next. ‘You know the pink fish we eat . . . is that a real fish? The same as the ones you catch? Do we eat real fish?’

  ‘I’m leaving that answer to you,’ Annie smiled, suddenly recalling Owen’s devoutly vegetarian phase, aged four.

  Back at Annie’s flat, there was an overwhelming smell of nail polish. Lana and her friends Greta and Suzie were giving each other lavish, diamanté-studded manicures and trying to eat toast at the same time with the wet talons.

  Annie made the girls and Billie sit down at the kitchen table where she spread butter and jam and cut toast into manageable pieces for the manicurists, while Dinah went in search of Owen, who was in his room reading and hiding from the teen excitement in the kitchen.

  Annie’s children had managed to jumble up their parents’ looks and features so thoroughly that they looked very like both their mother and father, but completely unlike each other.

  Lana had Roddy’s thick, straight black hair, blue eyes and pale skin, as well as Annie’s fine mouth, nose and long limbs. Owen had Roddy’s face but coloured with Annie’s brown eyes, rumpled mousy hair and a tawnier skin. Although he might one day fill out to be muscular and sturdy like his dad, at the moment Owen was a lanky, slouchy, skinny boy.

  ‘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?�
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  ‘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.