Christmas at Claridge's (3 page)

Clem’s jaw dropped open.

‘One hundred – and thirty – five – thousand,’ Tom repeated. ‘It’s plated in rose gold and has real fucking
diamonds
studded in it! It was never
designed to be used! I left it in the flat in order to protect it over the holidays because our insurers won’t cover it in the studio without . . . without a bloody security guard. And
you’re telling me you brought it to a mosh-pit party because it was
raining!’

‘I panicked. Josh was chatting up another girl.’

Tom’s usually benevolent gaze drifted from her to the husk of a man leaning on her, so far gone he couldn’t even focus, much less keep up with the conversation.

‘And was it worth it?’ His contempt was withering, though whether it was reserved for her or Josh wasn’t clear.

Clem shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry, Tom. I didn’t know it was that mu . . . I’ll make it up to you. I promise.’

‘How, exactly?’

She shrank back from the disdain in his voice. They both knew there was no rescue remedy to this, her latest, disaster.

‘We’re supposed to unveil it at the Expo in Berlin next week. It’s the lead exhibit. There are companies coming from China just to see it. ‘

‘I’ll work without pay,’ she offered desperately.

‘That’ll simply mean I have to pay your rent and food for you, too.’ His hand reached out for Clover’s and she grasped it keenly, her thumb rubbing reassuringly –
proprietorially – over the back of his hand. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what it is with you, Clem. You’ve got it all going for you, and yet for some reason, everything
you touch turns to shit. I’m up to here with you acting like a spoilt child and never thinking about anyone but yourself. When are you going to get your act together and just grow
up?’

‘Tom, I . . .’ she faltered, but he thrust his half-drunk beer roughly into her hand and stormed off, pulling Clover behind him like a kite.

Clem bit her lip, tears stinging her eyes as she watched him stride over to the hall, pushing people out of the way and unhooking the priceless bike from the wall sconces. Beside her, Josh fell
over his own feet and landed face first on a Moroccan pouffe. Clem looked down at him in despair before remembering the enigmatic stranger, the Swimmer. But, like her brother and the prospect of
ringing in a happy new year, he was long gone.

The rain had fallen even harder on the way home. Not that Clem remembered this. Finishing off the bottle of Grey Goose had been so effective at staunching the hurt of
Tom’s contempt, it was almost as if their fight hadn’t happened at all. Rather, it was the sodden leather jacket – untreated, as it turned out – bleeding tannin into the
pale maple floor that showed just how wild the weather had become. That, or she’d had a bath in it, which frankly couldn’t be discounted as an option either. She’d done worse in
her time.

She groaned as the room moved around her prostrate form on the sofa, her hands automatically stroking the curly tufts of the sheepskin sofa that soothed her like a teddy bear. The silk envelope
had fallen to the floor, its precious contents still pristine, thankfully, and she knew she had to hide it again before Tom came back. It had been reckless to—

Tom. She swivelled one mascara-clotted eye around, looking for him. Usually he woke her nose-first, cooking up one of his famous fried-egg sandwiches, which always settled her stomach and
enabled her to move to a vertical position. But the flat was quiet and still, yesterday’s dirty dishes were where she’d left them on the worktop and the eggs were keeping their healing
properties a secret in the fridge.

It was too early for him to come back from Clover’s, she reasoned. It was still dark outside. She should go back to sleep and try to slumber through the worst of this. But water. She
needed water.

Shambles, watching from her perch in Tom’s room, squawked loudly at the sight of Clem’s jerky, hesitant movements. ‘Sexanddrugsandrocknrollsexanddrugsandrocknroll.’

Clem nodded feebly in acknowledgement and slowly sat up, smoothing a hand through her matted hair and seeing, with damped horror, Tom’s flattened Akubra hat, which she’d used as a
pillow.

‘Oh, Shambles,’ she mumbled, trying to punch it back into shape. ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’

‘Where’s
the remote?’ the parrot squawked.

‘Mmmgh.’

Grabbing a handful of seeds from the bowl on the small round kitchen table, she opened the door to Shambles’ cage and scattered them in. She left the door open so that Shambles could come
out to stretch her wings, and staggered over to the sink.

The sound of keys in the door made her turn apprehensively, but the first glimpse of giant blue Ikea bags told her it was Stella following after, not Tom. She was over so often, she had honorary
housemate status with her own set of keys.

‘Hey!’ Stella panted, throwing the bags ahead of her like a ball at skittles, and stopping short at the sight of Clem standing dazed and confused in just last night’s jumper
and knickers. At least she was wearing knickers. ‘Oh dear. You look
baaaad.’

‘I
feeeeel
bad,’ Clem groaned, sagging against the worktop. ‘Thank God you’re here. You can do that egg thing that makes me feel better.’

‘What, eggnog?’

Clem retched. ‘God no. That always makes me throw up.’

‘Oh, Tom’s hangover special, you mean?’

‘That’s the one,’ Clem sighed, giving up the fight against gravity and collapsing onto a kitchen chair. ‘How come you’re up so bright and early anyway?’ Clem
moaned, her head in her hands, as Stella crossed the room and got busy in the kitchen. She was wearing an outfit only an official designer could get away with – a vintage kimono coat over
silk pyjama bottoms and a metre-long scarf – and looked dispiritingly healthy, even though she had drunk Clem and most of Tom’s rugby club under the table. Quite where she put the
alcohol in her 5-foot-2-inch frame, no one knew.

‘It’s hardly early, babes. It’s almost five.’

‘In the afternoon?’

Stella grinned at her, delighted. ‘It was a great party, wasn’t it?’ Stella always gauged the success of her parties by the severity of Clem’s hangovers and the number of
bodies unconscious in her flat the morning after. ‘There were seven still sleeping it off at mine this morning. Last one only just left, although he had rather more reason to stay than the
others.’ She winked joyously as she cracked the eggs, accounting for the flush in her cheeks and the brightness in her green eyes.

‘Well at least one of us got lucky.’ Clem frowned. ‘What . . . what happened with Josh?’

‘He passed out at ten and slept in the bath. I got Tom’s mates to move him out of the way for me. He was hogging the sofa. Gone by the time I surfaced this morning, though.
He’s no doubt cycling up Snowdon as we speak.’ She pulled a sympathetic face. ‘Hate to say it, but I did tell you not to trust a man who doesn’t drink.’

The eggs hissed as they splashed into the hot oil.

‘From now on I shall stick to married men and public school boys with recreational drug habits. At least you know where you are with them.’

Shambles flew out of the cage and swooped above Stella in the kitchen, enjoying the hot thermal current coming off the frying pan, before settling on the windowsill. Clem watched despondently,
distracted. Five o’clock? Tom would definitely be back by now ordinarily. This was no mere spat.

‘What’s wrong with me, Stell? Why do I always mess things up? I’m a one-woman disaster zone.’

‘No you’re not. You’re just one of life’s energy force fields. You attract everything to you and sometimes things just spin a little bit out of control, that’s
all,’ Stella murmured, her hands moving quickly so that in a few moments more, she placed a steaming, oozing toasted sandwich in front of her beleaguered friend. ‘Now get that down you.
I need your body.’

Clem sighed appreciatively and tucked in. Stella always knew how to rally her. A shoot-from-the-hip Finchley girl, she’d been raised by her father after her mother died when she was four,
and she had a bustling, maternal nature that soothed Clem and brought her down from her more outrageous antics. Their friendship had been instantaneous and intense since the day they’d met at
St Martin’s College, where Stella was studying Fashion Design and Clem was doing the Fashion Journalism and Marketing course. Clem had been hired as a model by one of the more pretentious
design students, Taylor Dart, who had put on a still-life fashion installation in a mechanics’ workshop. Stella had been helping Taylor with the fittings as he had all the technical
dressmaking ability of a goat, and she and Clem had bonded for life over the armless dress he had reserved for her.

Unlike Taylor, Stella had an unerring instinct for what women wanted to wear – and more importantly how they wanted to feel – and her graduation show had been one of the standout
presentations that year, with editors and buyers keeping close tabs on her as she apprenticed with Topshop and then the Burberry Brit division. But Stella had quickly grown restless with giving her
best ideas to others so they could profit from them, and when Clem mentioned in passing that her florist friend Katy had told her a stall on Portobello was coming up, the deal had been done. It
might not be the glossy shop front she dreamed of on Westbourne Grove, but at least everything had her name on the label, and as one of the most famous markets in the world, it was a fashion
mecca.

Stella wandered over to the capacious bags she had bundled in with, and pulled out various bolts of fabric. She was genuinely gifted and her stall in the market was always thronging at the
weekends. Clem had worked on the stall for her for a while, but after the third successive theft, in which half of Stella’s collection was lifted while Clem either flirted with the guys in
the betting shop or slept behind the changing-room curtain, they had agreed it was better if she simply donated her body to fashion and left it at that.

Clem stood up and took off her jumper, standing in the middle of her flat in just her knickers, as Stella began to wind a length of dusky pink butterfly-print silk-chiffon around her lean
frame.

‘Ooh, I like that,’ Clem murmured, looking down as Stella moved nimbly round her, pleating, tucking and folding. ‘What are you going to make with it?’

‘Not sure yet. Let’s see,’ Stella mumbled with pins clenched between her teeth, lifting up Clem’s arms.

Clem looked out and into the flats opposite. Old Mrs Crouch, who’d lived in Portbello all her life, so for well over seventy years, was picking some basil from her window box. Clem gave
her a wave. The old lady was used to seeing Clem half-dressed and didn’t bat an eyelid at the goings-on over the road.

‘Do you think we should have some resolutions this year?’ Clem asked as Stella pinned a dart and the fabric moulded beneath her bust.

‘What for? Our lives are perfect the way they are.’

‘Mmm.’

Stella rotated her ninety degrees so that she was looking at the wall and the series of framed black and white photos Clem had taken of her and Tom during the phase when she’d fancied
being a photographer. She studied her brother’s floppy brown hair, which always fell over his left eye, and the slight gap between his teeth, which gave him the endearing, scampish look girls
fells for time and again. Not that he ever noticed. He had been with Clover for five years now and was as loyal as a puppy. The only reason he hadn’t proposed to Clover yet, Clem knew, was
because he worried about her and wanted to see her more settled first.

‘I’m just wondering whether I need to make some changes. Tom’s really pissed off this time. I messed up big style.’

‘He’ll have forgiven you already, you know he will. He hasn’t got a resentful bone in his body, that one.’

‘He says I have to grow up.’

‘But you are grown up,’ Stella pouted prettily, as though the slight was as directed at her as at Clem. ‘You live in this great flat—’

‘With him – which he bought off Mum and Dad. Paying him rent is like giving back my pocket money.’

‘You have a cracking job.’

‘At his company.’

Stella pulled back from her position on the floor and looked up at her, as though she was trying to be difficult.

‘See what I mean? I can’t cook. You and Tom make everything or else I get a take-out.’

‘Or go without,’ Stella reproved, knowing that Clem’s lack of interest in food was one of the reasons for her spectacular figure.

‘And I can’t drive. I get buses and cabs everywhere.’

‘Yeah, but what d’you need to drive for in London? Parking’s a nightmare and we both know your car would be permanently clamped. Or you’d forget where you left
it.’

‘But what if I want to go into the countryside?’

Stella shot her such a pained look that for a moment Clem wondered whether she’d accidentally swallowed a pin.

‘Yeah OK, so not that. But you know, I might want to go to . . . Clapham, one day.’

‘You never go south of Hyde Park, east of Ladbroke Grove, west of Westbourne Grove or North of North Ken. This is your patch. Why go anywhere else?’

Clem sighed. ‘I just think I should have some resolutions this year. For Tom’s sake. Be a better sister, flatmate, employee, person.’

‘Like what then?’

‘I dunno.’ Clem stared across into Mrs Crouch’s cluttered flat, where the lampshades were draped with fringed scarves and her china figurine collection adorned every surface.
‘I could promise to clean the flat once a week.’ Her eyes scanned the stacked up dirty dishes, the fashion and gossip magazines thrown like scatter cushions across the sofa, the leather
jacket still weeping quietly in the middle of the floor, her clothes overflowing from her bedroom . . .

‘Well, get a cleaner at least,’ Stella grimaced. ‘No need to go overboard.’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ Clem agreed gratefully. ‘I’ll hire a cleaner. And I’ll learn to cook.’

Stella arched one finely plucked eyebrow.

Clem held up her index finger. ‘One thing. I’ll learn to cook one thing really well.’ An idea came to her. ‘Like lasagne. That’s Tom’s favourite, and besides,
I’m fed up of people talking about béchamel like it’s a private club.’