New York Valentine Read online

  Lana had shut down the in-flight entertainment and was now looking out of her window with unmistakable delight. When Annie peered over Lana’s shoulder to get a glimpse of the view, she too felt a jolt of excitement. Below was a bright blue sea and a long blond strip of coastline.

  ‘Wow! Could that be New England?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Maybe. Doesn’t it look beautiful? There are islands … maybe it’s the Hamptons. Maybe we’re almost there.’

  Annie took a glug from her bottle of water and tried to run calming hands over her hair. But it was no use: static from the blanket, from the fuzzy velour seats, from the very atmosphere of the plane was making her hair crazy. She poured a little mineral water into her hands, then smoothed wet fingers over her short blonde bob.

  ‘Better?’ she asked Lana.

  But Lana didn’t even turn; her eyes were glued to the window. She pointed with her finger and her mouth dropped open in awe.

  ‘That’s it,’ she whispered, ‘the skyline. Ohmigod! We’re here. Look, Mum. LOOK!’

  Lana moved her shoulder back so that Annie could see out of the little glass oval. There was a tiny, postcard-perfect view of a jagged square centimetre of Manhattan skyline. Now Annie had to gasp too.

  ‘Oh look! Look at that!’

  ‘The buildings are so big. The island is so small. Oh this is amazing.’

  The plane wheeled around in the sky and suddenly they were looking at blue ocean, tiny toy ships and—

  ‘There! It’s the Statue of Liberty! So small!’

  ‘But it must be so big! Compared to that ship …’

  ‘We are nuts.’

  ‘This is soooooo brilliant.’

  ‘I can’t believe we’ve done it!’

  ‘I can’t believe we’re really going to New York!’

  ‘We’re going to New York, we’re going to New York!’

  ‘I still can’t believe it.’

  ‘This is the best trip I’ve ever, ever been on,’ Lana announced, grin right across her face.

  ‘Babes, we’ve not even landed yet. We might still crash … or land up in some flea-pit with cockroaches … or get mugged – murdered, even.’

  ‘Mum, this is the best ever trip. The best ever idea. Thank you!’

  To Annie’s amazement, her sulky, grumpy, slouchy, grouchy teenager was suddenly throwing her arms around her.

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  ‘It’s OK. I would never have been brave enough to come on my own, babes. Thank you for forcing me onto the plane,’ Annie admitted.

  As they hugged, Annie dared to stroke her girl’s hair, just as she’d done when she was little. A prickle of tearfulness welled up in her eyes and nose.

  ‘We’re going to have a ball, babes. A totally wonderful ball.’

  All the horror of queuing for two entire hours in the cramped, windowless space of JFK’s arrival hall evaporated when Annie and Lana got into their bright yellow New York cab and began the journey into Manhattan.

  When the Brooklyn Bridge and then the skyscraper skyline came into view, they began to shriek at each other in a fever pitch of excitement.

  ‘There’s the Empire State!’

  ‘No that’s the Empire State!’

  ‘Look at that!’

  ‘Look over there!’

  ‘This bridge is amazing!’

  ‘Everything’s amazing. Look at the size of the buildings.’

  ‘Look how many cabs. How much traffic.’

  ‘We have to shut up. The driver is laughing at us. He thinks we’ve come in from a farm or something.’

  The driver did begin to laugh at this. ‘Where yo from?’ he asked, pushing back a sweaty baseball cap.

  ‘London,’ Annie admitted.

  ‘No skyscrapers in London?!’

  ‘Not like this. Not all jammed together like this,’ Lana told him.

  It was hot. They hadn’t been prepared for the wave of heat shimmering off the tarmac as they’d climbed down the aeroplane steps. And now, inside the taxi, the black plastic seats were sticky with heat and humidity. Annie had brought choice items from her autumn wardrobe; she wasn’t prepared for the knockout heat of high summer.

  ‘Is it always like this in September?’ Annie asked the driver.

  ‘No ma’am, for September this is hahht,’ he replied.

  ‘Hahht,’ Annie repeated, enjoying the accent. She couldn’t stop looking out of the cab window at the looming Manhattan skyline, hazy in the early afternoon heat.

  This was heaven.

  She’d only been to New York once before for a magical long weekend with Ed and she’d forgotten how brilliant it was: the excitement, the hustle, the crazy feeling of everything at once being brand new because she’d never been before and yet so strangely familiar because she’d seen it all so often on the screen.

  ‘Wow … wow … double wow …’ Lana repeated in a reverential whisper.

  ‘Here and loving, loving, loving it! Thank you. Could not be here without you.’ Annie texted Ed.

  Once they were over the bridge, the cab joined the traffic swirling through the Lower East Side towards the address in lower midtown which Svetlana had given them.

  ‘So where are we going?’ Lana asked, eyes still fixed to the window: they were passing a play park and it was so different from London because the kids were all in baggy vest tops bouncing and chasing a basketball. By the side of the road, a man with a bucket was washing down an enormous shiny brown car with a white roof which looked like it had driven straight out of an Elvis movie.

  ‘We’re heading for East 16th Street between Fifth and Sixth,’ Annie replied. ‘Doesn’t mean much to me … but that’s what it says. Building 1157, apartment 121. You know Svetlana, it vill be simply vonderrrrrful.’

  ‘Yeah but don’t forget, this is Elena’s end of the business.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  Lana had a point. While Svetlana was a woman used to luxury, a woman who could not in fact see the point of life without luxury, her daughter Elena was very different.

  Elena was thrifty, ambitious and tough. She had been brought up by relatives in the Ukraine on the £50 a month or so which Svetlana, busy scaling the London super-rich scene, had billed as ‘manicure’ and used to fund the upbringing of the daughter she hadn’t wanted then, but was so very fond of now.

  Despite their very different styles, the business had been working well. Until their New York partner had messed things up and bailed out with lots of their money, obviously.

  The cab was on a wide, four-laned avenue now, the traffic jumpy, snarled and impatient and the driver blaring his horn and yelling at everything ahead.

  Annie couldn’t help gaping at the shops. Huge glass window fronts, making chain stores like Gap look as glossy and important as major department stores.

  ‘You do like Elena, don’t you?’ Annie asked her daughter all of a sudden. ‘I mean, she’s a bit different from how she was when she stayed with us. Do you remember?’

  Both of them laughed at the memory of Elena on their doorstep in high heels and micro-mini with bad blonde hair dye and dodgy male friends. The very picture of Eastern European chic.

  ‘She’s better dressed for starters,’ Lana pointed out.

  ‘Oh yes, very smart, very businesslike. And she’s so good at her job, so efficient. I can’t really believe she let a partner mess her up like this.’

  ‘I bet she’s glad you’re turning up to help her out.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ Annie admitted, ‘I’ve been bored out of my nut sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring.’

  ‘This is yo street,’ the cab driver announced, then, turning a sharp right at a huge window display of the most gorgeous handbags Annie thought she’d ever seen, he drove into a narrower one-way street with a mixture of tall apartment blocks and smaller old brownstone houses on both sides.

  ‘Nice neighbo’hood,’ the driver commented.

  Lana and Annie scanned the street for the right number: 1123 … 1
141 …

  ‘Isn’t that what’s-her-name?’ Annie said, pointing to a girl who was standing at the door of one of the brownstone houses, searching in her bag … maybe for a set of keys.

  ‘Who?’ Lana asked.

  ‘That girl, the English one, she writes for Vanity Fair … Emily … ? Emily Wilmington. I’m sure that’s her. In DVF, carrying a very nice bag,’ Annie added approvingly. ‘We’re staying on the same street as Emily Wilmington! Amelia and Ginger will never, ever believe me.’

  ‘Get a photo!’ Lana suggested.

  But too late: the girl had opened her front door and slipped inside.

  ‘There it is!’ Lana exclaimed and pointed to a high, ten- or twelve-storey building, of red brick. Rows and rows of bells were lined up beside the double glass front doors.

  Once they were out of the taxi and standing on the pavement, Annie and Lana couldn’t help exchanging glances … both feeling a heady rush of excitement and astonishment.

  ‘We made it!’ Annie told Lana. ‘We’re here. We’re standing in East 16th Street, midtown, between Fifth and Sixth!’

  ‘We came up Sixth,’ Lana said, ‘so that—’ she pointed a short distance ahead to the junction on the other end of the street – ‘that must be Fifth Avenue. Right there.’

  Annie smiled: ‘This is sooo cool. C’mon, find bell, let’s get in, let’s see Elena, let’s dump luggage and let’s get out again!’

  Lana found the right number and pressed the buzzer. Several moments later, a fuzzy ‘hello’ came out of the intercom and the front door clicked open.

  Inside, the lobby was dark and cool, lined with locked letterboxes and four elevators with shiny golden doors.

  ‘Tenth floor,’ Annie instructed Lana, looking at her scribbled instructions.

  The lift brought them out into a nondescript corridor lined with brown doors and hideous wall lights. Checking numbers, they walked left, then turned down another long corridor. At number 121 they stopped and Annie knocked at the door.

  Several moments later and Elena was standing in front of them. But she looked nothing like the Elena they remembered.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Annie asked straight away.

  Elena’s long blonde hair was hanging lank and limp round a pale, exhausted face. There wasn’t a trace of make-up to hide the circles under her eyes and she was wrapped up in a short silky dressing gown. Even though it was lunchtime in NYC, Elena obviously hadn’t made it out of her pyjamas yet.

  ‘No, not OK,’ the deep, accented voice replied gloomily, ‘and I asked my mother to tell you not to come.’

  Chapter Seven

  Elena miserable:

  Floral silk dressing gown (Victoria’s Secret)

  Worn white T-shirt (borrowed from Sye)

  Chipped pedicure in Fire Engine Red

  (Thai Blossom nail boutique)

  iPhone (Apple)

  Total est. cost: $600

  ‘End of business. End of story.’

  ‘But we’re here to help you!’ Annie exclaimed, putting her bright smile of greeting back in place and trying not to feel too winded by Elena’s less than enthusiastic welcome.

  ‘Huh,’ came the unwilling response.

  ‘But your mother thought I could be lots of help, darlin’,’ Annie insisted, ‘and Svetlana thought it would be useful for Lana to come and help us all out too. Free workers – that’s got to be a good thing.’

  Elena couldn’t have registered Lana at first, because now she brightened slightly, peered over Annie’s shoulder and said, ‘Lana, I not know you here. Please come in.’

  For a moment, Annie wasn’t sure if this meant she had to stay outside.

  But Elena repeated: ‘Come in,’ and she did seem to mean both of them.

  She opened the door wide and stood back to let them into the tiny corridor. This opened out onto a bright room with a white-tiled floor which contained a kitchenette, a fold-down sofa, a TV, a tiny café table scattered with papers, and all in a space about two metres square. Now that all three of them, plus Annie and Lana’s bags were in the room, it felt claustrophobically small.

  ‘There is only one very small bedroom,’ Elena explained, ‘You will have to stay here.’

  Lana gave a little gasp of surprise while Annie dismissed the idea as bonkers, quickly trying to work out if she could afford to move them into a hotel. But four whole weeks? That would just be totally beyond the budget. Impossible. Almost as impossible as trying to live in a tiny kitchen, on a fold-down sofa … with Lana!

  Annie was conscious that she needed a long, cool, thirst-quenching drink. A long bladder-relieving pee might also have been a nice idea, not to mention a comfortable seat and a degree of pampering. But, nevertheless, she turned to Elena and tried to concentrate on the poor girl’s woes.

  ‘You look very upset. Has it been a terrible time?’ she asked soothingly.

  Elena sank her long-limbed, lanky frame down onto the corner of the squashy sofa which Annie had been eyeing up for herself and threw her head dramatically into her hands.

  Lana and Annie pulled up the two spindly café table chairs and prepared to listen.

  It was a fraught story.

  The partner had disappeared, taking with her a sizeable chunk of company money and leaving unpaid debts, including at the factory which had made the last run of dresses. Elena had no intention of pursuing the ex-partner through the courts because: ‘this America – lawyers and doctors are the most expensive people. Once you get involved you can never stop paying.’

  There were many orders to fulfil: a whole range of high end shops had placed requests for the next collection of Autumn/Winter dresses. The shops were expecting those dresses within weeks but there was no money to buy material, or to have the dresses made up. The factory in Hong Kong was not going to make a single dress for Elena until she had paid her bill for the last order.

  ‘I don’t know how to get out of this,’ Elena confessed. ‘I think I will have to tell everyone who has ordered dresses that we can’t deliver. But then we will be finished. End of business. End of story.’

  She glanced up as she said this and Annie could see that she was close to tears.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Elena added in a shaky voice.

  There were so many questions Annie would have liked to ask, so many possible suggestions, solutions, areas to explore. But just then Elena’s phone bleeped. As she picked it up and checked the screen an unexpected smile flashed across her face.

  ‘Sye is at the door. He’s coming up,’ she beamed, looking up at them.

  Ah. Sye. Of course.

  Annie remembered now.

  Sye was a very handsome, utterly charming photographer, based in New York, who’d met Elena at the first Perfect Dress fashion show in Paris, back in the spring. Sye, with his dreamy eyes and hippie cool hair, was very possibly the reason 22-year-old Elena had been so keen to quit London and her mother’s comfortable Mayfair mansion in order to open up the New York Perfect Dress ‘office’.

  Yes, having a New York ‘office’ sounded very impressive, but the New York Perfect Dress office was in fact, Annie suspected, the little spindly-legged coffee table she was now sitting at.

  ‘How is Sye?’ Annie asked.

  It was amazing how Elena’s face had brightened.

  ‘He’s good,’ she replied, ‘he’s very good. He always makes me feel better about everything.’

  ‘OK, so, when you’re ready, we will talk about the business. You’ll tell me all about the problems and we’ll think hard about what we can do to solve them. I promise you, I’ve had all kinds of financial ups and down in the past and I want to do everything I can for you.’

  With a shy smile, Elena replied: ‘I know. You are a very good person. Think of the fashion show. It would never have happened without you and I would never meet Sye and sell the first dresses. I’m sorry I not very kind when you arrive. Sorry,’ she smiled apologetically first at Annie, and then Lana.

  ‘Fogeddaboudi
t,’ Annie said, trying out her new ‘transatlantic’ twang. Lana nodded in agreement.

  There was a tap on the door and Elena jumped up to answer, running her fingers through her hair as she did so. She disappeared behind the small partition wall which screened the living room from the door.

  Annie and Lana smiled at each other as they heard the exchange of ‘Hey baby’s and the long, smoochy kiss that followed. Then Sye came into the room, Elena draped around his waist and shoulder.

  ‘Hey there,’ he said with a big grin.

  ‘Hi,’ Annie and Lana replied.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ Annie told him, ‘you look well.’

  ‘You too … Just off the plane? You must be exhausted.’

  ‘No! Too excited. Too much to see. Too much to do,’ she told him.

  ‘I know – this city is the best,’ he said with a grin.

  Sye was as scruffily handsome as Annie remembered, dirty blond curls, heavy stubble, tanned face, strong tanned arms emerging from his rolled up shirtsleeves. Broad shoulders crisscrossed by at least two camera straps.

  Annie wouldn’t have thought at first glance that Sye was the man for Elena – and certainly Svetlana could not stand the thought of her daughter hooked up with such an ordinary mortal, when she wanted Elena married off to a multimillionaire ‘at least’ – but it was obvious Elena and Sye were devoted to each other.

  Maybe Sye’s easy charm and relaxed friendliness were the perfect foil for Elena’s intense ambition and nerviness.

  The pair sat down on the sofa and after several moments of watching them trying and failing to keep their hands off each other, Annie realized that she and Lana needed to be out of the way.

  ‘Are you as hungry as me?’ she asked Lana.

  ‘Definitely.’ Lana looked away with something of a blush as the hand around Elena’s waist slid down to her buttock and squeezed.

  Elena moved one leg over Sye’s and the two sat entangled together, jiggling, finding it almost impossible to concentrate on anything else but each other.

  ‘I think we’ll go out, Elena,’ Annie announced. ‘Get some food, walk around the neighbourhood … step out onto Fifth Avenue for the first time.’