Emma didn’t reply at first. Her large green eyes strayed to a young couple walking hand in hand on the other side of the street. ‘It’s okay,’ she said after a moment. ‘After all … I hadn’t known him that long, as you pointed out – although he didn’t discourage me from thinking …’ Her eyes suddenly filled. ‘And those roses he brought me. I thought …’ She pressed a paper napkin to her eyes. It had ‘Amici’s’ printed on it. ‘Well,’ she croaked. ‘It doesn’t look as though I’ll be going to Tosca with him after all. Maybe you could take him, Phoebe. He said he was looking forward to it …’
I sighed with frustration. ‘Look, Em, I’m going to say no. If it’s going to make you miserable, then I’m not interested.’
‘No,’ Emma murmured after a moment. She shook her head. ‘You should go – if you like him, which I assume you do, otherwise we’d hardly be having this conversation. Anyway …’ She picked up her bag. ‘I’d better be off. I’ve got a bonnet to be getting on with – for Princess Eugenie, no less.’ She gave me a cheery wave. ‘I’ll speak to you soon.’
But she didn’t return my calls for six weeks …
‘I wish you’d ring Guy,’ I heard Mum say. ‘I think you meant a lot to him. In fact, Phoebe, there’s something I need to tell you …’
I looked at her. ‘What?’
‘Well … Guy phoned me last week.’ I felt a falling sensation, as though I were sliding down a steep incline. ‘He said he’d like to see you, just to talk to you – now don’t shake your head, darling. He feels you’ve been “unfair” – that was the word he used, though he wouldn’t say why. But I suspect you have been unfair, darling – unfair and, quite frankly, idiotic.’ Mum took a comb out of her bag. ‘It’s not as though it’s easy, finding a nice man. I think you’re lucky that he still holds a candle for you after the way you threw him over.’
‘I want nothing to do with him,’ I insisted. ‘I just don’t … feel the same about him.’ Guy knew why.
Mum ran the comb through her wavy blonde hair. ‘I just hope you won’t come to regret it. And I hope you won’t also come to regret leaving Sotheby’s. I still think it’s a shame. You had prestige there, and stability – the excitement of conducting auctions.’
‘The stress of it, you mean.’
‘You had the company of your colleagues,’ she added, ignoring me.
‘And now I’ll have the company of my customers – and of my part-time assistant, when I can find myself one.’ This was something I needed to pursue – there was a fashion auction coming up at Christie’s that I wanted to go to.
‘You had a regular income,’ Mum went on, swapping her comb for a powder compact. ‘And now here you are, opening this … shop.’ She managed to make the word sound like ‘bordello’. ‘What if it doesn’t work out? You’ve borrowed a small fortune, darling …’
‘Thanks for reminding me.’
She dabbed powder on her nose. ‘And it’s going to be such hard work.’
‘Hard work will suit me just fine,’ I said evenly. Because then I’d have less time to think.
‘Anyway, I’ve said my piece,’ she concluded unctuously. She snapped shut her compact and returned it to her bag.
‘And how’s work going?’
Mum grimaced. ‘Not well. There’ve been problems with that huge house on Ladbroke Grove – John’s going insane, which makes it hard for me.’ Mum works as PA to a successful architect, John Cranfield, a job she’s been doing for twenty-two years. ‘It’s not easy,’ she said, ‘but then I’m very lucky to have a job at my age.’ She peered at herself in the mirror. ‘Just look at my face,’ she moaned.
‘It’s a lovely face, Mum.’
She sighed. ‘More furrows than Gordon Ramsay in a fury. None of those new creams seem to have made the slightest difference.’
I thought of Mum’s dressing table. It used to have a single bottle of Oil of Olay on it – now it resembles the unguents counter of a department store with its tubes of Retin A and Vitamin C, its pots of Derma Genesis and Moisture Boost, its pseudo-scientific capsules of slow-release Ceramides and Hyaluronic Acid with Cellular-Nurturing, Epoxy-Restoring this, that and the other.
‘Just dreams in a jar, Mum.’
She prodded her cheeks. ‘Perhaps a little Botox might help … I’ve been toying with the idea.’ She stretched up her brow with the index and middle fingers of her left hand. ‘Sod’s law, it would go wrong and I’d end up with my eyelids round my nostrils. But I do so loathe all these lines.’
‘Then learn to love them. It’s normal to have lines when you’re fifty-nine.’
Mum flinched, as though I’d slapped her. ‘Don’t. I’m dreading getting the bus pass. Why can’t they give us a “taxi pass” when we hit sixty? Then I wouldn’t mind so much.’
‘Anyway, lines don’t make beautiful women less beautiful,’ I went on as I put a stack of Village Vintage carriers behind the till. ‘Just more interesting.’
‘Not to your father.’ I didn’t reply. ‘Mind you, I thought he liked old ruins,’ Mum added dryly. ‘He is an archaeologist, after all. But now here he is with a girl barely older than you are. It’s grotesque,’ she muttered bitterly.
‘It was certainly surprising.’
Mum brushed an imaginary speck off her skirt. ‘You didn’t invite him tonight? Did you?’ In her hazel eyes I saw a heart-rending combination of panic and hope.
‘No I didn’t,’ I replied softly. Not least because she might have come. I wouldn’t have put it past Ruth. Or rather Ruthless.
‘Thirty-six,’ Mum said bitterly, as though it was the ‘six’ that offended her.
‘She must be thirty-eight now,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes – and he’s sixty-two! I wish he’d never done that wretched TV series,’ she wailed.
I took a forest green Hermès Kelly out of its dust bag and put it in a glass display case. ‘You couldn’t have known what would happen, Mum.’
‘And to think I persuaded him – at her behest!’ She picked up a glass of champagne and her wedding ring, which she continues to wear in defiance of my father’s desertion, gleamed in a beam of sunlight. ‘I thought it would help his career,’ she went on miserably. She sipped her fizz. ‘I thought that it would lift his profile and that he’d make more money which would come in handy in our retirement. Then off he goes to film The Big Dig – but the main thing he seems to have been digging’ – Mum grimaced – ‘was her.’ She sipped her champagne again. ‘It was just … ghastly.’
I had to agree. It was one thing for my father to have his first affair in thirty-eight years of marriage; it was quite another for my mother to find out about it in the diary section of the Daily Express. I shuddered as I remembered reading the caption beneath the photo of my father, looking uncharacteristically shifty, with Ruth, outside her Notting Hill flat:
TELLY PROF DUMPS WIFE AMIDST BABY RUMOURS.
‘Do you see much of him, darling?’ I heard Mum ask with forced casualness. ‘Of course, I can’t stop you,’ she went on. ‘And