Late Night Shopping: (34 page)

'I need to go through my wardrobe,' Paige told her, 'pack away all the summer things, get the winter clothes out.'

'Mmm,' Annie agreed, 'me too. I love doing that! Folding away all the bikinis and summer dresses, getting out the woollies and the scarves and gloves. Planning all my new outfits! Thinking about the lovely new things I
need
to buy!'

She was going to do that tonight, she decided. If there was no sign of Ed, no word from Ed, she was going to leave him to it. Instead, she would soothe herself with a long, deep delve into all the darkest corners of her wardrobe.

'I love this bag,' Paige declared, holding out the green lizard print clutch, 'it's so elegant and different.'

Annie wanted to do a little victory dance: Paige likes something that isn't beige!! Instead she said, 'I have a lovely little velvet scarf, gold and olive – would you like to try it on with the suit?' If Paige liked the scarf, maybe they could even consider green shoes . . . Don't rush it, Annie reminded herself.

'I thought things weren't supposed to match, you know . . .
accessories
,' Paige said the word as if it was foreign to her.

'I know,' Annie replied, 'they
weren't
supposed to match. Nothing was supposed to be too matchy-matchy, but now we've come full circle. Now everything's supposed to match. What goes around comes around. Personally,' Annie went on, 'I like two matching items, it looks so nicely pulled together, but I think the third needs to be a bit different: a pattern incorporating the colour of the other two but mixing it with something else, you know, something a little offbeat.'

'It's so complicated!' Paige declared.

'No,' Annie insisted. 'Just buy what you like, take baby steps. I love the bag with the bracelet, that's not hard. Try that out. If you want to add the scarf, great; if not, forget it.'

'Scarves scare me,' Paige confided.

'I know, I know,' Annie had heard this before, 'I have clients who can do heart surgery but they're frightened of knotting a scarf.'

'I'm worried I'm going to look . . .' Paige began.

'
Matronly?
' Annie whispered the word and Paige nodded in fear. 'Trust me,' Annie said, 'we won't even tie the thing, we'll just place it under your jacket, do up the buttons and let it get on with its job quietly. There will be no knotting, no tying and certainly no hint of a . . .
brooch
.'

Annie could hear the trill of her mobile from her office. Secure in the knowledge that Paige was happy and definitely about to buy quite a few things, she asked if it would be OK to take the call.

As she picked up the phone, she checked the screen. The number was unfamiliar and it certainly wasn't one of Ed's.

'Ahnnie!!! How are you?'

Annie was delighted to hear the booming tones of Mr B coming to her all the way from Italy.

'Your bags are with the courier,' he told her. 'Did you speak with Harrods?'

The completely true answer to this was, to be precise, 'No'. But because Annie was sure that she would speak to Harrods and that Harrods would at least want to see her, she didn't think it was so far-fetched to answer, 'Yes! They're going to see me next week.'

'Fantastico!'

Nic's new look:

Black, lime and cream tunic (Dorothy Perkins maternity)
Black pencil skirt with elasticated tummy gusset
(Formes maternity)
Black boots (Hobbs)
Lime bag (Hobbs)
Total est. cost: £380

'I can't believe I'm going to go through the whole turning
into a hippopotamus thing again.'

As Annie smoothed down Owen's hair and kissed him goodnight, he quietly asked the question he'd been meaning to ask all evening.

'Mum, is Ed coming back?'

'Oh babes, I hope so,' Annie told him. 'Would you like him to come back?'

Although the bedroom was dark, Annie could see that Owen was nodding.

'So, what's happened?' Owen asked next.

'We've had an argument . . . that's all, really.'

'Well can't you just make up? I have arguments with Lana all the time.'

'I know, but we're grown-ups . . . we're much more . . .'

'Stubborn?' Owen offered when Annie struggled for a word.

'Maybe,' she agreed with a little laugh. 'Did you see Ed in school today?' was her next question.

'I saw him and he waved at me and smiled, but we didn't have a lesson with him, so I never got to talk to him. I walked home with Lana, like you told me. I like that you're going to come home early now that Ed isn't here.'

'Oh, well . . .'

Arranging several days of temporary cover so that she could leave work at 6.30 and come home to look after her children hadn't exactly been easy and she didn't know how long she could keep it up. A week at the most. Then there was the lost commission to consider. Surely she and Ed would have made up by the end of the week? This couldn't go on for much longer, could it?

'Don't worry about us, OK?' she told Owen. 'Sleep tight and I'm sure it's all going to look different in the morning.'

'G'night,' Owen yawned and gave her a sweet little kiss on the cheek.

Closing the door on Owen's room, Annie considered knocking on Lana's but then decided she would leave it for a bit. Their suppertime conversation hadn't exactly gone brilliantly. Annie hadn't meant to bring up Andrei or ask anything upsetting at all. But somehow she'd asked about school and Lana had mentioned Greta and before either of them could stop themselves they were talking about Andrei and whether or not it was true about Daisy, and Annie soon heard herself declaring, 'If it is true, don't even bother making up with him. I definitely don't want to see him again, even if you do. He's not welcome here. Anyone who hurts your feelings totally hurts mine.'

Which resulted, as she could have predicted, in Lana shouting, 'I don't want to talk to you about this!' storming out and heading for her room, declaring that she had 'tons of homework' to do.

'I'm sorry, Lana,' Annie called to her daughter on the other side of the closed door.

For a moment she heard the frantic keyboard-bashing stop, but then it started up again, so Annie decided it would be best to try again later. Right now, she would stick with her plan to go downstairs to the main bedroom, where she would fling open the doors of her wardrobes, haul everything out and get busy in there.

Half an hour later, great armfuls of clothes were heaped all over the double bed, a huge tangle of colours and fabrics, styles and labels, impulse buys and 'investments', cheap thrills and expensive flings. There were a lot of dresses, because Annie hated suits, was 'so over' jeans and didn't seem to suit any of this year's trouser styles. Anyway, dresses were her thing right now. They could be smart. They could be casual. They could be warm as well as cool. And buying a dress meant you didn't have to worry about choosing a skirt and three different tops to go with it.

So she began to look through the dress mountain critically. Anything with bell-shaped angel sleeves was going straight to eBay. She'd decided after three – no . . . five – dresses that it was a loser look on anyone over fifteen. Plus the sleeves dangled, they got into the washingup bowl, they scooped up ketchup from the corner of your plate; even more alarmingly they got singed on the gas when you removed the pasta from the hob.

Much, much better was the balloon sleeve, preferably three-quarter length with a narrow cuff holding the fabric in check. Now that was elegant, especially if the top of the sleeve was tight and it ballooned from just above the elbow. Yes, all of those dresses were staying. Along with the Michael Kors shirt dress and the Chloé shirt dress . . . but no, no, the zebra print D&G, that was off. It was so tight and so short. What was she thinking?

She held the dress up and remembered exactly what she'd been thinking. She'd bought this at a whopping great discount to wear at home . . . just for Ed.

She tossed it quickly into the 'sell' pile.

The bedroom phone burst into life. It was an old-fashioned one, black with a dial. It had been Ed's mother's, one of the many, many things already in the house that Annie had had to make room for during the renovation of the place. There was no telling what the number was. She let it ring three, four times – then snatched it up, breathing in tightly.

'Hello, it's Annie.'

'Annie! It's me,' she heard her mother's voice at the other end of the line. 'I've just been speaking to Aunty Hilda,' Fern continued. 'What's going on?'

'Oh . . . hello, Mum,' Annie began, sitting down on the edge of the bed, 'did you have a good holiday? I didn't know you were back yet.'

'Just got in. Lovely,' but she didn't want to be sidetracked.

'What is all this? Hilda says she came back early with Ed because you're carrying on with some Italian . . .'

'What!' Annie broke in. 'Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick! She's an old lunatic that woman, she really is.'

'No,' Fern insisted. 'She says she and Ed saw you with this man and that's why he came home with her on Sunday.'

'WHAT!' Annie exclaimed. 'Oh, this is just stupid. The man sells
handbags
. I'm going to buy some
handbags
from him to sell on. Ed knows all about it. Ed's in a total huff about it . . .' Annie added. 'It has nothing to do with me
"carrying on"
with anyone.'

'Well Annie, she seems to think that she definitely saw you and this other man,
together
,' Fern emphasized the word.

'Vicious old bats like Hilda see what they want to see,' Annie snapped.

'There's no need to be rude. Have you and Ed sorted all this out then?'

The easy thing to do would be to tell her mother yes. She didn't want Fern's interference right now, she didn't want Fern's opinion or advice. All of a sudden, Annie understood exactly how Lana must be feeling.

'We're having a bit of a row . . .' Annie began carefully. 'I'm sure it's going to blow over. I'm sure we're going to sort it out . . . but at the moment, he's gone to his sister's—'

'Oh Annie!' Fern was horrified. 'For goodness sake! What is this all about?'

So then Annie had to tell her about the Italian bags and the Chinese shoes and the taxman's £10,000 bill and the mortgage extension . . . and her plans to turn it all around.

'I just don't know,' was Fern's verdict when she'd listened to it all. 'If Ed doesn't think it's such a good idea—'

'But what does Ed know?' Annie burst in. 'He's a schoolteacher. What he knows about fashion or selling things I could fit on the back of a stamp in very big letters.'

'Yes, but he's your partner,' Fern insisted, 'you have to work these things out together.'

'Oh and you'd know all about that, of course,' Annie blurted out. Fern had ditched Annie's feckless, reckless and generally unreliable father so early on that Annie had only the vaguest memories of him.

'There's no need for that,' Fern told her briskly.

'Mum, you're a very strong, very independent person,' Annie reminded her, 'you brought us up all by yourself, you worked so hard and sent us to a great school. I can't believe you're telling me to shelve my ambitions because of what Ed thinks!'

'Annie,' Fern began quietly, 'I never found anyone else. Maybe I would have done things differently if I had. Maybe the way I did things wasn't the best, how do I know? All I can tell you is that Ed makes you happy. I know that. I can see that. You need to think very, very carefully before you throw that away.'