The Finishing Touches (4 page)

I felt my cheeks go hot under her frank gaze. Seriously posh people could be incredibly direct, even with intensive finishing, it would seem. “Um, yes. I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t remember…”

“Well, how
would
you, darling? You were teeny enough to stash in an evening bag last time I saw you.” Her eyes creased up as she smiled. “I’m Nell, Nell Howard. Or Eleanor, as I was here. Are you still Betsy Phillimore, or have you racked up some double-barrels yet?”

“No,” I said, “I’m still Betsy Phillimore.”

“Ah, not a
true
Phillimore girl until you’ve bagged a few spouses,” she said with a sardonic flick of her black brows. “Miss Thorne must have had shares in the Great Trading Com
pany wedding list, the way she banged on about the importance of getting ourselves shacked up. Well, hello, Betsy.”

I juggled my teacup and biscuit while she expertly juggled her wineglass and side plate, and we shook hands.

“So, do tell,” she went on chattily, “did you ever track down your real ma and pa? Oh, sorry! Personal questions!” She slapped her own wrist and looked slightly, but not very, remorseful. “I’m not the most tactful conversationalist—used to get some dirty looks from Miss Vanderbilt. But if you don’t ask, and all that…”

“No, I never tried,” I admitted. “I was very happy. The Phillimores were all the family I needed, and Nancy and Kathleen looked after me—”

“Oh, I can imagine those two! Mother hens! But you never even looked?” Nell squinted at me as if I were standing in front of a bright light. She had the squinty tanned face of the habitual ski/sun/sand Sloane Square debutante, who’d happily take a few wrinkles in the name of snow, wine, and shrieks of hysterical laughter.

I shook my head. “I think it would have hurt too many feelings.”

That wasn’t the whole truth: I had to admit to a fair bit of suspicion about my father’s identity, at least, though I’d never have said.

Everything pointed to feckless Hector, Franny’s runaway black-sheep son, with the aristocratic good looks and the debt management problem. Why else would the Phillimores have taken me in and looked after me like their own if they weren’t secretly sure that he’d had a hand—at the very least—in my arrival? From what I’d managed to glean from Kathleen, he was irresponsible enough; had access to a veritable sweetshop of impressionable girls; and had skipped off to Argentina years
ago, which in Nancy’s book(s) was standard Guilty Cad Behavior. If there were any photos of Hector twiddling a mustache while posing next to a sports car, the evidence would be complete.

Sadly for my detective ambitions, there were no photos of Hector, because Franny had hidden them all, apart from the one by her bed—which, to my mind, explained why she doted on me the way she did. I was the last link with him. Nancy had looked after Hector as a baby and missed him too, so I couldn’t ask, but a couple of times I managed to enter into a dark hinting exchange with Kathleen. She insisted she didn’t know my father’s identity but that she could “feel it in her water that whoever it was wasn’t a million miles away from here. If you know what I mean.”

Nell didn’t need to know the complicated emotional reasoning behind all this, though.

“Besides,” I said as lightly as I could, “I didn’t mind not knowing. It meant I had nothing to live up to, or down to. I was just me!”

She tipped her head on one side, and her feather bounced. “Fair enough.”

“I did wonder whether it might be…” I hesitated, surprised at myself. “Whether my mother might have been at the Academy. Someone who knew what time Kathleen collected the milk in the morning? Did anyone else wonder that?”

“God, yes!” Nell nodded. “Quite possible. It was a bit of a scandaloso year—tons of really gorgeous girls who ended up as models, three-second roles in a Bond film, soap commercials, that sort of thing. And of course they went round town with the Bentley Boys. Gosh.” She fanned herself with an enthusiastic hand. “They were even more divine than the girls, to tell the truth. We’d be in some tedious dressmaking lesson,
and the horns would honk outside, and there they’d be—Rory, Simon, Hector…all floppy-haired and
disgraceful,
exactly the sort of silver-tongued charmers we were supposed to steer very clear of. Everyone would squeal. Apart from Miss Vanderbilt, obviously. But even she went a bit pink around the gills, old Vanders.”

“Bentley Boys?” I repeated.

Nell fixed me with a look. “Did Lady Frances keep you in a bunker all your life, darling? The Bentley Boys. As in, not safe in the backseat of. They were in all the gossip columns at the time, drinking, driving cars through champagne tents, furious fathers here, there, and everywhere. Then again, I suppose Hector Phillimore was the worst of the lot, which would explain why Lady Frances never mentioned it…” She looked more curiously at me. “Now, did
he
ever turn up? The bold Hector?”

I shook my head. Nell had an outrageously forthright manner, but I was too curious to be offended. I just wanted her to keep on talking. It was like a gossip sugar rush. “He’s still in Argentina, as far as I know. Didn’t even come back for the funeral.” I bit my lip. “It was very sudden, though—a brain tumor. By the time—” I gulped.

“I heard.” Nell sighed. “He always was a selfish sod, darling. Anyway, moving on—”

“So, you think my mother was one of these girls?” I asked, pointing at the photograph, my pulse hammering with the thrill of asking proper questions at last. “One of your friends?”

Nell barked with laughter. “
My
year? I don’t think so! Look at us!” She gestured at the photograph with her glass. The wine sloshed. “Bunch of heifers! The only film
we’d
end up in would be
Star Wars
! No, they were a year older. We all got mixed up, you know—some people did one term, some did three or four.”

But I was already searching for the 1980 photograph. “1979…1982…” I turned to Nell. “It’s not here.”

“Isn’t it?” Her cat’s eyes widened, and she put a finger on her chin. “Ooh! The plot thickens. I must say, they weren’t the most popular year. Not with the staff, anyway.” She winked.

“Elizabeth! And Eleanor Howard! What a nice surprise!”

I whisked round to find Miss Thorne, the new headmistress, right behind us.

No, not new headmistress, I corrected myself. She’d been running the place for four years, since Miss Vanderbilt retired. The trouble was, it was very hard to think of the Phillimore Academy without thinking first of Franny, then of Miss Vanderbilt. I imagined Miss Thorne was probably more aware of that than most.

Nell discreetly tipped back the remains of her wine, then looked in surprise at her glass. “Goodness! I’ve run dry! Miss Thorne, can I get you a cup of tea? You must be parched. Betsy? No? Excuse me for a moment, won’t you?”

And she slid off into the throng, leaving me with Miss Thorne, who I could tell was marking my outfit out of ten. I didn’t care: my brain was still whirling with Bentleys and cads in dinner jackets, and the possibility that I might have Bond girl blood running through my veins. Was that better or worse than impoverished ballerina? It certainly felt more real, all of a sudden.

I concentrated on standing up straight and saying the right thing to Miss Thorne. She had been the Nice Cop to the redoubtable Miss Vanderbilt’s Really Rather Disappointed Cop, and although Miss Thorne was generally much freer with her compliments, they tended to be the sort of compliments that exploded later, on closer examination.

“Elizabeth! You read very nicely, dear,” she said, offering a small hand crammed with diamonds, as I managed a nod.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I must say, I wouldn’t have recognized you! So chic!”

Miss Thorne stood back so she could get a proper professional view of me. I was at least five inches taller than her, despite her stout heels.

“Thank you,” I said. I tried hard to be chic. Now that I’d got past my anti-Academy grunge phase, I’d settled into a sort of Jackie O middle ground of simple neutral separates, which had the added advantage of not costing much and being easy to match first thing in the morning, and minimal makeup—just mascara and crimson lips, which I normally ended up doing on the bus. Just enough to make me look colored in.

“But where’s all that adorable curly hair?” Miss Thorne went on, taking in my blue shift and gold flats. “What was it the girls used to call you?” She affected not to remember, but I knew she knew. “The film, you know, with the ghastly dog and the dancing…”

“Annie,” I said reluctantly.

“Yes! Little Orphan Annie! How funny.”

The warmth drained out of my smile, though I didn’t let it drop. It wasn’t a nickname I liked, for a number of reasons, but I could hardly pretend I didn’t remember. It was largely because of that nickname that I’d spent two arm-wrecking months teaching myself to blow-dry my coppery frizz into submission. I could do a salon-perfect finish in under fifteen minutes now.

Miss Thorne went on, “So what are you up to now? Is there a lucky chap? Or are you still working?”

“I’m focusing on my career at the moment.” I smiled, so my voice would sound cheerful, though I didn’t feel it. “It keeps me very busy.” There was no way I was going to tell Miss Thorne that not only was I conducting a one-woman survey
into the very good reasons why the remaining single men of Edinburgh
were
still single, I was also using my famous math degree to work out sale discounts on diamanté sandals.

She carried on staring at me, which was the polite way of saying “and?” My mouth started moving on its own, under the force of her gaze. “I work in brand positioning and market analysis,” I stammered, crossing my fingers and thinking of the January sales plan I’d just drawn up for Fiona.

Miss Thorne’s bright eyes glittered, and she tilted her head to one side, watching my face. “How
marvelous
! Who are you working with? Is it one of those big companies I might have seen on the news?”

“I don’t think so…” I flushed even more. That’s the worst thing about having skin the color of milk: no fake tan, no sunbathing, and absolutely no blushing. “It’s a shoestring operation.”

I was saved from having to think up further shoe-related semi-fibs by a slender forty-something woman in a pink bouclé suit, who sailed up behind us and touched Miss Thorne on the arm. “Miss Thorne? Julia Palmer? From the Somerset Palmers? So sorry to hear about—”

“Piggy
Palmer
!” cried Miss Thorne, turning away from me as if I’d never been there. “Look at
you
, my dear!”

Piggy—who must have been piggy a
very
long time ago from the state of her toned calves—flinched, then gamely reengaged her warm smile.

I took the opportunity to slide away, scanning the room for any sign of Nell Howard, but she’d vanished into the sea of silk dresses and little Chanel jackets. My brain was buzzing with questions I desperately wanted to ask her. It might just be old gossip to Nell, but to me, it was the first direct connection to the flesh-and-blood woman who’d dumped me here.

Had there been one redheaded girl she might remember?

And what sort of things had gone on,
exactly
, with these reckless rich boys?

Had Hector Phillimore had a particular girlfriend?

Did she recognize my little bee necklace, the one I was wearing right now and never took off?

I nudged my way into the throng, conscious that my stomach was making most inelegant noises. I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch the previous day, which was highly irregular, since Getting A Good Breakfast was something Kathleen had drilled into me from an early age. “The bigger the day, the bigger the breakfast,” she’d insist, shoveling three different types of egg onto my plate. I’d skipped breakfast with her this morning for that very reason—I was far too tense to eat, much less deal with roaring indigestion.

Now, though, I was starting to feel decidedly peckish, and I headed toward the sandwiches. If I knew Franny, I thought, she’d have left specific instructions about the catering: no crusts, plenty of tiny cakes, and cloth napkins all round.

The postmemorial spread was laid on a long table beneath the first Lady Phillimore’s oil portrait, and I began helping myself to the cucumber sandwiches and scones. I was disappointed to see that the plates were already looking rather picked through, with telltale spaces between the parsley sprigs. Out of habit, born from Kathleen’s catering tips, I began shuffling the remaining egg-and-cress sandwiches together so that they’d look nicer, when suddenly the silver sandwich platter slid backward out of my reach and I heard an audible tut.

I looked up in surprise. A dark-haired man in a black suit and tie that seemed to be from a very, very minor public school, going by the clashing colors, was standing behind the table, holding the other end of the platter.

“Two,” he said, nodding at my plate. “Two sandwiches per person. And one scone half. Jam or cream?”

“
Excuse
me?” I said, in surprise.

“Two sandwiches,” he repeated. “You’ve got two there.” I didn’t recognize him. Apart from Lord Phillimore, he was the only man in the sea of estrogen and cashmere, which would have explained his nervous manner—but his brown eyes were darting back and forth as if something was just about to go wrong but he didn’t know where.

“Are the sandwiches
rationed
?” I said in a joking tone and tugged my end of the platter, which—I couldn’t believe it!—he refused to let go of. I tugged again, more meaningfully. “What if I don’t like egg and cress?”

“There are enough sandwiches to go round,” he said, “as long as people aren’t greedy. This is meant to be a quick buffet, not afternoon tea at the Ritz.”

I put my hand to my mouth in shock, and he took advantage of my confusion to seize control of the platter. Triumphantly, he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up his long nose with one finger. I made a determined grab for another sandwich, but he was too quick and moved the platter, just as a woman approached from my right; he made it look as if he wasn’t actually snatching the platter away from me but offering it to her.