Christmas at Claridge's (6 page)

‘I’ll help you,’ Simon said, getting up and holding the door open for her. Clem watched him, bored.

Tom had taken his call into the conference room – in reality, a tiny box room with a skylight and a plug socket for a laptop – and Clem sat in the office, alone and silent until her
eyes found an anomalous shape resting on the wall behind Tom’s desk. It was shrouded with a white sheet, but she knew what it was.

Getting up, she pulled off the cover and gasped to see – in the harsh light of day – exactly how wounded and diminished the bike was. Contrary to her daydreams of owning a bike like
this, she saw clearly now that this was not a bike that could ever have been chained to a lamppost outside the pub; this bike was for people who wanted to cruise round their vast country estates
when the Bentley was too big and the Ducati too fast. And she had trashed it at a party.

One hundred and thirty five thousand pounds? Once maybe, but not like this and not in this condition. They’d struggle to sell it at a car boot sale now, and Clem felt a wave of nausea grip
her as she took in the full scale of the damage. The caramel and baby pink woven leather handle grips had come loose and untucked in several places where cigarette burns had caused the leather to
fray and pull apart; the diamond-studded leather casings on the top and upright tubes looked like they had been tie-dyed with red wine; and the rare, peachy hide they’d used for the saddles
– the foreskin of a blue whale was it? Or was that just the punchline of a joke she’d heard in the pub? – had been defaced with an obscene cartoon in red biro. Only the gold bell
inset with a pink diamond and surrounded by hundreds of yellow pave diamonds shaped into petals had escaped unscathed – probably because the revellers had assumed it was fake. She opened up
the leather panier, which had been whip-stitched by elves (or by hand, same difference) and opened out, tailgate-style, to reveal a Fortnum’s-stocked picnic – only someone had popped
the bottle of Tattinger and the tin of foie gras was missing altogether, a crushed packet of Marlboro Lights having been popped in its place.

Covering the bike again, she turned away, depressed, and her headache getting worse – the two ailments possibly weren’t unrelated – and stepped towards the window to stare down
into the street below. The Christmas lights were still strung up between the lampposts, criss-crossing the street, but they looked sad rather than festive now and Clem hoped the council would take
them down quickly, along with the Christmas trees lying upended outside every house or flat, littering the pavements and making it difficult for residents with hangovers to get to work. She just
wanted Christmas and New Year to hurry up and be forgotten for another eleven months, so that life could go back to just drifting along again, without this overbearing need to mark time.

Below her she saw the flashing hazard lights of the white delivery truck as Simon signed for the shipment, saying something that made Pixie laugh, and Clem grudgingly admired her shoes –
shiny raspberry-pink ballet flats with the bow fashioned to look like Minnie Mouse ears.

She watched as elderly residents came out early to do their shopping with tartan trolleys, dogs being walked on short leads by owners holding small black bags; office workers standing by
doorways smoking, a cup of coffee in hand. It wasn’t the glitzy, razzmatazz image people conjured when they thought of Notting Hill and the famous Portobello Road market. It was greyer,
damper, messier than that, and still in the kind of morose hibernation that comes from three days of solid rain. It only really looked the way the tourists imagined in the summer, when the
pastel-painted houses baked like cookies in the sun and the faded shop awnings were rolled out to throw shadows on the ground, when the pub gardens overflowed with revellers and geraniums, when men
– old and young alike – wore panamas and shorts, and girls cycled the streets on rattling boneshakers wearing vintage petticoats.

She watched as an elderly Jamaican man bought a hand of green bananas from Bob Ashley, the grocer – her father’s most trusted fig supplier; a troop of teenage girls, not back at
school for another week and all identically dressed in a junior version of her own outfit – bleached skinny jeans, swing jumpers and studded ankle boots – slunk past on their way to
Trudie’s café, where the coffee still only cost a pound and you got a bourbon biscuit for free. She smiled as she saw Katy her florist friend, put together a beautiful spray of
ranunculus roses and pussy willow, tying a blowsy hemp bow expertly around the stems as she chatted and laughed with relaxed familiarity to the customer, a well-dressed lady with white hair and a
tweed coat and gloves. An orange-clad street sweeper was making slow progress down the road, pushing his cart in front of him and clearing chip wrappers and blue-striped polythene bags with his
long-handled grabber, meaning he never had to so much as bend his knees – which was just as well since he was sixty-four and had been sweeping Portobello for forty-seven years. His name was
Bert, and Clem had known him her entire life.

She pressed her hand to the glass as the old, familiar ache seeped through her. This was her home, her manor. She belonged here; she was a true local, born and bred in the tall, gracious villa
her parents still lived in, two streets away on Elgin Crescent; she and Tom had been educated at La Scuola Italiana a Londra in Holland Park Avenue half a mile away – her parents were big
believers in raising children to be bilingual, although Clem was becoming more and more convinced that her father just wanted them as interpreters on his long and involved annual gastronomy tours
through Italy. In fact, the two years she’d managed at St Martin’s in Covent Garden – it was supposed to have been three – were the longest she’d ever been away.

Even now she was all grown up – supposedly – she lived and worked in buildings only 500 yards from each other. If Clem pressed her face to the window and looked to the right, she
could see her flat above the hardware store, opposite the Punky Fish clothes shop. She loved it here, she belonged here. And yet . . .

She wandered back to her desk, her eyes coming to rest upon the bag still sitting there, like a silent accusation. She stared at it for several long moments, knowing it was a bribe not a gift,
before hurriedly lobbing it out of sight under her desk as the others came back into the room.

Simon and Pixie were still laughing. Tom . . . Tom looked like death. He seemed to have greyed just in the time he’d been on the phone.

‘Tom, what is it? What’s happened?’ Clem asked urgently, unable to keep the alarm out of her voice.

Simon and Pixie fell silent, and Tom looked up at them all with bloodshot eyes.

‘Tom?’ Clem’s voice wavered to see her brother look so broken, and she pushed her glasses onto the top of her head to get a better look at him.

Silence cloaked them all, and only the intermittent ping of incoming emails and a truck reversing in the road provided any soundtrack.

‘That was Perignard.’ His voice had flatlined. ‘They’re pulling the project.’

Clem’s hands flew to her mouth and Simon had to steady himself by grabbing the nearest desk.

‘But we’re going into production in twelve days,’ Simon said, almost laughing at the preposterousness of Tom’s words.

‘Not any more we’re not,’ Tom said, shaking his head.

‘But we’ve been working exclusively on this for the past year,’ Simon argued, his Celtic colour beginning to rise. ‘We’ve ploughed everything into getting the new
machines manufactured. We’ve got a contract.’

‘They would argue that we’re in breach of that contract.’

‘How?’ Simon asked, growing redder in the face. ‘Everything’s ordered and being shipped as we speak. We’re bang on schedule and cost. I don’t
understand.’

Tom drew his lips into a thin line, his eyes unable to meet Clem’s, and she saw the tic quiver in his cheek. It was because of her, she realized. What she’d done.

‘Could someone please tell me what’s going on?’ Simon demanded into the vacuum.

Without saying a word, Clem crossed the room and pulled the sheet off the bike. Simon almost howled as he caught sight of it. ‘It’s my fault,’ she said quietly, meeting all
their eyes.

‘What did you do?’ Pixie whispered, walking over practically in a trance.

‘I fucked up.’
As usual,
she didn’t need to add.

An appalled silence followed.

‘You all know that this was the showpiece for the new Dover Street store,’ Tom said quietly.

‘It’s the window display; Perignard’s had state-of-the-art glass fitted especially so that anything short of a tank couldn’t get past,’ Pixie said proudly her
eavesdropping having paid off. ‘With all the passing traffic, it’s an invaluable branding opportunity for us.’

‘Was,’ Tom corrected quietly.

‘No, no, hang on!’ Simon interjected agitatedly, his quick mind racing. ‘This doesn’t just affect Perignard. What about Berlin? We were going to unveil it to the trade in
Berlin next week! It’s supposed to showcase the new technologies we’ve invested in. How can we do that now when the bike’s . . .?’ Words failed him as he looked at it,
visibly paling as he took in the scale of destruction.

‘It’s clearly unusable in this condition,’ Tom said quietly. ‘Or, to quote Perignard, “not fit for purpose”. And they’re right.’

‘But surely we can repair it before next week?’ Pixie squeaked, looking at the bent spokes on the front wheel, where someone had squeezed in some bottles of Stoli, as though it was
an obscure bottle rack.

Simon gave her a withering stare. ‘The bike is vintage, so everything on it is made to bespoke dimensions. We’ve had it plated in
rose gold.
And if I told you that I was
practically standing over the calf at birth, that would still be making light of the lengths I went to, to source the slink saddle leather.’

‘Oh.’

They all stared at the trashed bike despondently.

‘Do they want the diamonds back?’ Pixie asked.

‘Obviously,’ Simon snapped.

Clem could see Tom stretching his lips thin, trying to keep control of his emotions.

‘Can’t we just, y’know, regroup and get everything ready for Berlin
next
year?’ Pixie suggested, relentlessly optimistic.

Tom inhaled deeply and slowly. ‘For one thing, our competitors will have caught up with us by then. At the moment we have the patent on the technology, but it’s already an arms race
and I know for a fact that Hermès is maybe only two months behind us. This is our USP, and we banked on it being our springboard into the next tier, offering a deluxe product that no one
else could bring to the table. It was what made us stand out for the Bugatti contract.’

Clem’s head snapped up. She hadn’t heard anything about Bugatti before now.

‘Bugatti? What? Like the cars?’ Pixie chirruped.

‘Exactly like that,’ Simon muttered sarcastically.

‘I didn’t know there was a contract with them up for grabs,’ she said to Tom.

‘It was highly confidential. Si and I had to sign nondisclosure agreements; we couldn’t tell even you,’ Tom replied, looking at her feet. ‘But with Russia, China and the
Middle East as their biggest markets now, offering a diamond-studded interior is exactly the edge they’re looking for.’

Clem thought she was going to be sick.

‘And now there’s nothing to show them,’ Simon mumbled, folding his arms across his body and dropping his chin to his chest. ‘Any reputation we had for professionalism
will be scuppered once this gets out. There’s no way we can get something else done for Berlin in the timeframe and . . . Fuck! We can hardly come clean about why we’re not showing the
bike. We’re just going to have to say the technology’s not finessed yet and hope to God that Perignard keeps quiet.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Clem said quietly. ‘I really, really, really am.’

Her words were directed at them all, but her eyes were on Tom. No one would look at her.

‘Simon, let’s go into the meeting room,’ he said, ignoring her again. ‘We need to review where we are on invoices and new business.’

‘Sure thing,’ Simon said, grabbing his iPad and coffee from his desk, and shooting Clem a look that for once wasn’t suffused with repressed yearning.

Clem’s heart beat double-time as she watched them walk off together, Simon’s hand slapping Tom’s shoulder in commiseration, their voices already low in consultation.
She
was always the one who made Tom smile when things were bad; now he could barely look at her, and when they did talk, it was practically with a snarl.

Pixie, realizing she was alone with Clem, widened her eyes excitedly, clearly about to suggest a sympathy cupcake at the Hummingbird, but one look at Clem’s expression and she scooted
quickly back to her desk.

Clem stood stock still, resisting the urge to barge in to the meeting and demand to be allowed to help. This was her doing! She ought to be given the chance to fix it! That was what she wanted
to say, but deep down, she knew a low profile was all Tom wanted from her at the moment.

He had built the company from nothing, but in eight years it had come to be seen as the successor to prestigious British leather houses like Connolly and Bill Amberg. Tom wasn’t happy
stopping there, though. He was going after the big guns – Hermès, Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton – he wanted
his
leathers wrapping the luxury world. He’d been just
one bike away from taking that first step, and he’d done all that with the £10,000 their parents had given each of them when they’d graduated – or in Clem’s case,
dropped out. Like the prodigal son, he’d used it as seed money to buy twenty hides, a specialist sewing machine and a six-month lease on this office.

He had asked her at the time if she wanted to join forces – what they could do with a £20,000 start-up would bring forward his five-year plan by at least three years – but
after the disaster of failing her second-year exams (although turning up would have helped, she admitted afterwards) Clem had been adamant that what she needed was to ‘get away’ and see
the world and had promptly bought a one-way business-class ticket to Bali and sat on the beach for eight months, until she ran out of money and had to ask their father to sub the flight home.