The Finishing Touches (33 page)

“Why didn’t you say?”

“Oh, stop blushing, it’s fine. I didn’t know what you’d told La Thorne, or Phillimore. And it seemed like a small price to pay for having a reasonable human being around the place for
support. Anyway, it’s been fun. For the first time in
years
, I’m glad my dad made me promise to take over his bloody volunteer work.”

Our eyes met, and I honestly felt a small frisson run over my skin. Whatever transformation Liv had done to Mark had extended far beyond his clothes.

“Would you stay?” I asked. “I mean, part-time? I don’t know how much money there’ll be for new teachers, to begin with, so I’d need to keep you and Liv and Jamie on as…Mark? Mark, are you listening to me?”

He wasn’t listening, and his face had gone funny. I turned to see what he was staring at.

Liv was standing in the doorway in a minidress that fell into her “restaurant dress” category. Without the benefit of a tablecloth, it’d cause her serious sitting-down issues, but on the all-important way to the table, it made her legs look a mile long. Her blond hair was loose around her shoulders, her makeup was invisible, and she looked as if she’d just thrown her outfit together despite having been upstairs throwing everything else around for hours, probably.

“Hi!” she said breathily. “Ooh, tea, fantastic!”

Mark rushed to pour her a mug and managed to slop milk all over his new jeans. “Oh, bollocks,” he said, trying to mop the spillage with my Visa bill.

“Get some warm water, from the loo—under the stairs on your left,” I said quickly.

With a shame-faced grimace at Liv, Mark rushed out, backward.

“Doesn’t he look great?” said Liv fondly. “It only took me three hours to get him out of cords and into denim. I’m very proud.”

“He looks gorgeous,” I admitted. “You’ve really brought out the man in the accountant.”

Liv turned back to me, and her face sparkled with more than just highlighter. “I know! And I take it all back—you’ve been right all these years. I just didn’t realize how attractive a man like that can be. He’s going to help me buy a cheap car, he says.”

“But you don’t drive—” I began, then started again. Just to be clear. “You and Mark. Is this…a date?”

Liv looked coy. “I don’t know. But he’s lovely, isn’t he?”

“But he’s a man with good-quality socks and a sensible job!” I hissed in an undertone. “You said he was exactly the sort of man to steer clear of? In favor of fun? And excitement?”

“The sort of man
you
should steer clear of,” Liv corrected me. “Me, on the other hand, I
need
someone who cares more about socks than, I don’t know, minibreaks. As soon as I met Mark, I realized that he’s the kind of guy I’ve been waiting for all these years.” Her eyes had gone starry. “He didn’t even try to chat me up! He was wearing those awful trousers, and I just knew here was a man who wasn’t married to anyone else.”

“OK,” I said slowly, surprised at how disappointed I felt. “OK, but I thought I might—”

The loo flushed in the downstairs bathroom. Mark was on his way back. Liv grabbed my arm and pointed her finger at me fiercely.

“No!” she gabbled, desperate to get everything in before Mark came back. “Get it together with Jamie! I insist! I’m fed up with you two faffing around, dropping stuff and generally acting like a pair of morons when you’re together, because I saw him yesterday, and he does it too. He
wants
to settle down. With you! Call him tonight, have dinner, sort it out, do what you have to do, or else…or else…”

“Or else what?” I demanded.

“Or else,
I’ll
tell him you fancy him,” she said.

We stared at each other in horror as her words sank in.

Liv put her hands on each side of her face. “You’ve turned me into a thirteen-year-old,” she said. “Please, just get on with it.”

Mark and Liv went out on what I now realized was their first date, and I settled myself on the sofa with Barry the cat and Liv’s entire selection of cheesy DVDs, but I couldn’t get past the first ten minutes of anything.

I should have been feeling on top of the world, and in some ways I did, but little things kept niggling away at me.

Adele, for a start. She couldn’t seriously be making a move on Lord P, could she? Could she end up my stepmother, technically?

And Jamie. Just thinking about him working with Adele made my scalp crawl with invisible lice of mortification. And Mark! I didn’t begrudge Liv a good, sensible man, but it wasn’t like I was inundated with candidates myself right now.

And Nell. What was she playing at? I’d seen her hovering around the Open Day, but then she’d disappeared before the end. Again.

I thought about my airy flat in Edinburgh, and my old life that suddenly seemed very uncomplicated by comparison. Dull, but uncomplicated. I knew where I was with shoes. If I stayed in London and opened the new Academy with all the fanfare it deserved, it wouldn’t be long before someone discovered that I was no etiquette expert. And what if it was my real mother who decided to turn up and expose me? She was out there somewhere, just waiting to turn up and honk at me like Emma-Jane and her farmyard animal impressions.

I opened a bottle of wine and got one of the lilac notebooks out of my bag. I held it in my hand, feeling the satisfying
weight of the leather binding and the gleaming gold edgings to the paper, then opened it at random.

It was halfway through two lessons, and my writing struggled to keep up with Franny’s enthusiastic advice, offered while she drifted round the class, clicking her fingers as she thought of new points to make.

I could hear her now.

“A Good Chap (GC) will say nothing when you’re wrong, but will make a real song and dance when you’re right. A GC probably won’t comment on your clothes, but he’ll always let you know when you’ve made him proud to take you out. Don’t worry if he forgets flowers—only international GCs and husbands are trained in that respect, and it can be a little creepy and make you wonder what he’s hiding—just make sure he remembers to do the little things, like offering to help when there’s nothing in it for him, and making you tea in the morning, and not criticizing your parking. These are things you can’t train, they’re inherent; so when you find one, treasure him.”

“Thank-you letters. Always write your thank-yous the same day and on good paper or amusing postcards. Keep a stock in your desk for that reason. Don’t use free ones from hotels; it’s showing off…”

That I could do. Thank-you cards.

I poured myself a large glass of wine and got my correspondence cards out of my bag. I had a lot of people to thank, and at least I knew how to do that, even if I’d thoroughly cocked things up on the GC front.

“‘
Dear Miss McGregor. Thank you so much for all your halp.’
No, help. ‘
The right fork can bring so much small happiness to…
’ I can’t read this, it’s all smudgy…”

I opened one bleary eye. I was on the sofa, I noted, not in bed. And my head was throbbing.

Liv was standing over me, reading aloud from the thank-you notes I’d started the previous night. “‘
Dear Clementine. Thank you so much for all your halp
.’ Again. Halp. Tsk. ‘
Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not a strong, individual young woman because…
’ Oh dear, anyone would think you’d been drinking when you wrote these.”

“I had,” I croaked, “one or two glasses.”

“One or two buckets. But still writing thank-you notes! There’s manners for you. ‘
Dear Miss Thorne, I’d like to thank you so much for all your help, but I can’t because you didn’t give me any, you stuck-up old…’
Oooh, good job that smudged.”

“Stop it,” I said, dragging myself to a sitting position.

“‘Dear Liv,’”
she read.
“‘Thank you so much for letting me share your flat and boss you around. You are the best friend a girl could want. Please tell Jamie that…’”
She stopped. “Oh. No, I won’t tell him that. You should tell him that yourself.”

I slumped back onto the sofa and waited for Liv’s horrified intake of breath as she got to the end of the card.

It took longer than I’d thought—my writing
was
hard to make out.

“What do you mean, you’re probably going back to Edinburgh! Why are you leaving?” demanded Liv. “You’ve just inherited the business of your dreams—you’re going to be the first manners millionairess in London. Come on! You’re making the family fortunes over again!”

“I’m not family. Hector’s not my dad,” I said. “Nancy told me yesterday. He had mumps that rendered him technically no danger to innocent young ladies.”

“Oh.” Liv pulled a
fancy that
face. “Bet that was an interesting conversation. So? You’re still Lord P’s family—he adopted
you, for God’s sake! What more do you want? And you’ve still got an amazing business to run.”

“I
can’t
,” I said. “It feels wrong. Yesterday I thought, wow, this is my destiny! I can do this because I’ve inherited Franny’s social genes! But now…” I looked round the kitchen for the glass of water and Nurofen that I always left out to force down before sleeping. Typical. I had forgotten to take it for the first time since Freshers’ Week. No wonder my head was banging.

“Now you’re going to run away to Edinburgh?” said Liv sarcastically. “Because running away is the one genetic certainty you have? Give me a break.”

“No,” I started, but she carried on boggling at me. “You’ve got very tough of late,” I informed her.

“I can’t think why. I’ve only had some first-class life coach moving in with me and kicking me up the arse and generally helping me get my act together.” Liv thrust the glass of water at me. “You’re not going anywhere, not just like that. Drink this, put the coffee machine on, and I’ll go and get the papers. You’ll feel tons better with some caffeine and a proper breakfast inside you—isn’t that what you’re always telling me?”

“I need to rewrite those thank-you notes anyway,” I conceded.

Liv’s face brightened. “Great. Now, get in the shower, and I’ll be right back.”

I did feel a bit better with clean hair, and significantly better with coffee flowing through my veins. Liv crashed back in while I was still in her dressing gown, making myself a second cup.

“I blew the budget and went to Paul for proper French croissants,” she informed me, breezing past with several bags. “Don’t even think about arguing. Mark says that you can’t put a price on feeling good. And I’ve got a selection of papers—serious, scandalous, and the one that pretends to be serious but that’s just full of prurient gossip about celebrities and rich people cavorting around town.”

She threw the papers down in a fan shape on the table. “You can have the pick. So long as you read the horoscopes out loud.”

I managed a smile and grabbed a croissant as I pulled the nearest paper toward me.

Silence fell in the kitchen as we scarfed flaky pastry and slurped away at coffees, now that no one was there to inspect our table manners.

“Would you believe Jennifer Lopez has lost weight?” I observed, turning the pages of my tabloid. “And Gwyneth Paltrow has put it on.”

“Baby, or comfort eating due to secret agony?” said Liv, without looking up.

“They don’t know. It looks like a bad dress to me.” I bit into my croissant and turned the page.

SCANDAL. SEX. SOCIALITES. WHEN GOOD GIRLS GO VERY VERY BAD.

She looked familiar, I thought, inspecting the blonde in question as I reached for my coffee. In fact, she looked a lot like…

Venetia.

ILLICIT LIAISONS. DRUNKEN ANTICS. SEX. THE FINISHING SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL?

My eye scanned the page up and down, unable to take all the words in at once.

The main photograph was the one of Venetifa from the feature earlier in the week, but Adele had been replaced with a blurry long-lens paparazzi picture of a man I assumed was Luka the fiancé with the Ferrari. He wasn’t quite the smoldering Adonis she’d made out either. From what I could see, he was about as round as he was high, and Venetia would be condemned to ballet flats for her entire married life—however long that was, according to Adele’s “starter marriage” prescription.

On the other side of the double-page spread was a group shot that I hadn’t seen before but had still seemed oddly familiar. I looked closer and realized it was the missing “Class of 1980,” but with little “Where Are They Now?” boxes springing from each of the girls, and photos of floppy-haired, posh
heartthrobs alongside. I didn’t know any of the men, but they looked like characters from
Brideshead Revisited,
with names I vaguely recognized—Rory McAlmont, Lord Inverisle, Simon Fitzgerald, Bingo Palmer, the Honorable Hector Phillimore.

My insides turned to liquid as my eye caught something in the corner of the page.

Me.
There was a photograph of
me,
aged about five, sitting in the garden on Lady Phillimore Day, laughing up into Franny’s face as she tugged my long plaits and looked radiant with happiness.

It was captioned,
Elizabeth “Betsy” Phillimore, adopted daughter of Lord and Lady Phillimore, owners of the notorious Phillimore Academy.

My mouth went dry. Where did I fit into this? I forced myself to read the words, though they were dancing and blurring.

You’re a billionaire businessman,
the article started.
You’ve got friends in high places, and your fingers in many pies. The only thing you don’t have is class. So where do you turn? To the last bastion of establishment—the English finishing school, where respectability and social acceptance can be bought, albeit at a price.

Political donor and Serbian entrepreneur Luka Jankovic this week announced his engagement to society party girl Venetia Hargreaves, a student at the notorious Phillimore Academy in Halfmoon Street London—and finally ended his campaign for a British passport. Leggy, polo-loving Venetia appeared in this paper earlier in the week, extolling the virtues of the “new-look” finishing school that teaches its students not only the art of eating in the smartest restaurants and dressing for success, but also, it seems, making adept marriages of convenience. New-look? Or just the same as the marriage market that London’s smartest heiresses were trained for a hundred years ago?

That wasn’t what the dressing-for-success classes were about, I thought wildly. And the eating in restaurants thing—
that was about handling your chopsticks in a sushi bar, not freeloading with rich businessmen, as the paper was suggesting!

I started to feel physically sick. What did they mean…the
notorious
Phillimore Academy?

It’s not the first time Phillimore girls have helped out a billionaire in need. Twenty years ago, behind the £2,000-a-term closed doors, aristocrats and playboys treated the Academy as their own private dating agency, wining and dining the privileged young women sent to learn the ins and outs of the upper classes. Rich wild girls like Coralie Hendricks (pictured left) and Sophie Townend (pictured right, as a Bond girl) cavorted in private hotel orgies and caused mayhem at high-society balls, but when their moneyed indulgences tipped over from youthful exuberance into scandal, the establishment was swift to close ranks and hide the resulting human wreckage.

“There is nothing in the paper this weekend,” moaned Liv. “Pass me the magazine section, will you? Betsy? Betsy! What’s up?”

My eyes were glued to the page.
Several outrages were hushed up by the well-connected owners, including aspiring racing driver Rory McAlmont’s fatal late-night Aston Martin crash on Chelsea Bridge, which killed him and his passenger, heroin addict Antonia Greene. Whispers also persisted about a newborn baby abandoned at the Academy, possibly the illegitimate child of a former student. Lord and Lady Phillimore adopted a daughter around this time (Elizabeth, now twenty-seven), though they denied any knowledge of her origins at the time and made strenuous efforts to keep the matter out of the papers.

I felt as if I were floating a foot outside my body. They were talking about
me
. Me, in the paper. Next to a heroin addict and a dead-boy racer who might or might not be my parents. No, I thought, the blood draining from my face as I put two and two together. No…

Elizabeth Phillimore, or Betsy, as she’s now known, has taken over the mantle of the Academy, reinventing it for a new generation of party girls. Speaking to Imogen Twist this week, she joked about the importance of parties in a girl’s life and revealed her vision for today’s aspiring social climber: “There’s something about being able to carry off a pair of heels that makes men take you very seriously.”

“That wasn’t what I meant!” I gasped in agony.

“Betsy, give me the paper, I want to read the morbid scandal pages in the middle,” said Liv. “Ooh, let me distract you with a croissant.” She dangled a pastry in front of my nose, but I was barely aware of it.

Whoever had written this gloating feature had done my detective work for me. Why had I bothered being discreet when I could have just gone straight to Imogen and her muckraking mates? I thought bitterly.

Here they all were. Coralie Hendricks:
three times married, currently divorcing film producer Mark Sheen
. Sophie Townend:
ex-Bond girl, beat coke addiction to become Green Party activist
. Simon Fitzgerald:
died in skiing accident in 1987.
Bingo Palmer:
jailed for his part in an insurance scam involving his father’s zoo
. Hector Phillimore:
fled criminal charges by disappearing in 1980.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the words were imprinted in white on the inside of my eyelids.
Scandal. Addict. Criminal. Betsy.

The newspaper fell from my limp fingers.

Franny and Lord P must have known what a collection of wasters were hanging around. They must have known all along that I was the result of some seedy shag at a messy party. The unwanted accident of two stupid, selfish rich kids with plenty of perfect manners and nothing decent underneath, and they’d taken me in to make sure no nasty whispers got out.

“Oh, thanks,” said Liv. “Finally!” She grabbed the paper off me and stuffed the croissant in her mouth. I heard her choking on it.

“Oh, my God!” she cried. “Have you seen this…Oh, no. Oh, Betsy!”

I wasn’t listening. Her voice sounded a long, long way away.

Liv went through several stages of fury, horror, indignation, and finally fury again in the time it took me to stop feeling numb.

“You should sue!” she kept saying, marching up and down the kitchen, growling and throwing her hair around. “This is defamation of character! It’s outrageous! You’ve been totally misrepresented. I’m going to ring Dad’s barrister and get right onto it.”

She stopped, hands on hips. “Betsy, please say something. You’re seriously worrying me.”

I didn’t know what to think first. There was just too much.

“Say something,” she pleaded. “Don’t make me throw water over you.”

“Where’s my phone?” I asked.

Liv crumpled in relief. “I don’t know. I’ll look.” She moved stuff up and down on the counter, then grabbed something. “Here! Oh, it’s out of battery. I’ll plug it in, shall I?” As she did, I heard it bleep. “Oh, my God, Betsy, you’ve got like twenty messages! Shall I play them?”

“No!” I said, and sank my head onto my hands. “They’ll be people ringing to feel sorry for me. Or cancel their deposits. Or just have a good laugh.”

Liv wrapped her arms round me and hugged me hard. “No one’s going to be doing that! And if they do, I’m going to…
I’m going to…” She buried her head in my hair. “I’m not going to let them in.”

There was the sound of a key in the lock, and we both froze.

“Hello?” called Jamie’s voice. He didn’t sound his usual flippant self. “Betsy? Liv?”

We exchanged panicked glances.

“I can pretend you’re not here if you…” Liv began with a worried frown, but I shook my head.

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Jamie might know what to do.”

We didn’t even bother to joke about his scandalous experience. It didn’t seem funny anymore.

“Betsy, are you OK?” Jamie burst through the kitchen door without any preamble. He looked as if he’d just got back from the gym—he was unshaven, his hair was damp, and he was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a hooded top under an old sweater. I’d never seen him looking so rough, but I’d never been so pleased to see him.

“I’ve just seen the paper. I don’t know what to say. I’m disgusted. Imogen rang; she says she’s been trying to get hold of you since last night—apparently the news desk have been trailing that bloke of Venetia’s for months, trying to pin something on him, and this was the best chance they’ve had. He’s an arms dealer, been making huge donations to the Labour party.”

“And that’s meant to make her feel better how, exactly?” demanded Liv.

Jamie shrugged and looked mortified. “It’s not. It’s just that they’ve twisted what they could about the Academy to make him look as bad as possible. I bet they’ve been sitting on that other stuff for years, waiting until the injunction ran out or something.” He turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “You know what the press are like. It’ll be nowhere near as bad as that—one of them was probably in rehab for about
a month, and someone else once got a bit tipsy at a party. It’s only gossip, Betsy; it’ll be forgotten by the morning.”

“No, it won’t,” I said dully. “Not here, anyway. How can I forget
that?
” I gestured at the newspaper, lying accusingly over our breakfast things.

Liv and Jamie exchanged glares over my head, and I could tell they were dueling eyebrows.

“Don’t,” I said, unable to tear my eyes away from the photograph of Venetia, who’d set all this in motion, the vacuous bimbo. “Don’t have a row now. Please.”

Liv’s house phone rang on the wall, and we all jumped.

“I’ll get it,” said Jamie, and picked up. “Hello? No. No, I think you’ve got the wrong number.” His voice sounded harsh. “Yes, if you ring back in an hour you’ll
still
have the wrong number. Good-bye.” He replaced the receiver and grabbed my coat and hat from the chair where I’d left them the previous night.

“Come on,” he said, pulling the hat over my head. “We’re going out.”

Jamie steered me out of the house and toward his car, which he’d parked so quickly that two of the wheels were on the curb.

He opened the door for me—a nice touch, I thought in some dim part of my brain—then went round the other side and got in, bracing himself against the steering wheel.

“So! Where do you want to go?” He turned to me and cocked an eyebrow. He was trying to act normally, but I couldn’t.

“I don’t know. Anywhere. Somewhere that won’t be full of people reading that paper…” I shuddered.

“All right,” he said. “I know just the place.”

We set off, and I slumped in my seat as he drove through
the Sunday morning streets of Clapham. Well-dressed couples with their babies in strollers, going about their business, heading to the pub for a roast, safe in their worlds, knowing who they were, where they came from.

And me in the car, feeling soiled.

I didn’t know where Jamie was going, but he was taking the scenic route round all the London landmarks I hadn’t had time to revisit in the mad few weeks I’d been back. We headed over the green common full of dog walkers and crossed the river into Westminster, past Big Ben and the sugarcraft carving of the Houses of Parliament, up toward Fleet Street where the offices were empty and the streets were deserted apart from cleaners and a few tourists making the hike to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

As I watched the old black-and-white buildings turn into the glass skyscrapers of the City, Jamie kept up a soothing barrage of chat, about a new bar he’d been to here or an interesting shop there, until I felt the numbness begin to ebb away. We were deep in the oldest part of town now, yet in the middle of the highest tech area, and the Sunday silence was strange but lovely. It felt like we were the only people there.

“Where are we going?” I asked as he turned away from the city streets and into a jumble of pavement stalls and Bangladeshi curry houses. Brick Lane.

“We’re getting more breakfast. Isn’t that one of your rules?” He made a sudden signal and parked neatly in a tiny space outside a sari shop. “Stay there. I’ll be right back.”

I sat back in my seat and waited. There were more people around now, and the queue from the bagel bakery Jamie had headed into stretched out into the street. Some folks were carrying flowers from the nearby Columbia Road market; others were obviously on their way back from a night out, shivering
in tiny skirts and leather jackets. There were lots of cabbies. None of them peered into the car and pointed at me.

Jamie returned surprisingly quickly with a large brown bag and almost dragged me out of the car. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, handing me a plastic cup of very hot coffee.

We set off down Brick Lane, weaving though fashion students and locals browsing the flea market. Jamie obviously knew where he was going, though I didn’t, not being an East London girl, and before long we’d got off the main street and were standing outside a huge white church, built like a wedding cake and looming above us.

“Don’t panic, this isn’t an elopement,” he said with a wink, and herded me into the gardens, where we sat down on a bench and he dispensed breakfast: smoked salmon bagels and cheesecake.

“Right, I guarantee no one here will give a toss about Petronella Hotsy-Totsy or whatever those girls were called,” he said. “You’re safe.”