A Vintage Affair (10 page)

‘You drive a hard bargain,’ Miles muttered. ‘In that case, I’ll have the navy pair too.’ As I put them both in a bag I was aware that Miles was scrutinising me and I felt my face go warm. I was surprised to find myself wishing that he wasn’t married. ‘I enjoyed bidding against you the other day,’ I heard him say as I opened the till. ‘I don’t suppose you felt the same, though.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I replied pleasantly. ‘In fact, I was rather
furious. But as you were prepared to pay so much for the dress I assumed that you were trying to get it for your wife.’

Miles shook his head. ‘I don’t have one.’ Ah. So he lived with someone – or maybe he was an unmarried father or a divorced dad. ‘My wife died.’

‘Oh.’ My euphoria returned, to my shame. ‘I’m sorry.’

Miles shrugged. ‘It’s all right – in the sense that it happened ten years ago,’ he added quickly. ‘So I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it.’

‘Ten years?’ I echoed wonderingly. Here was a man who hadn’t married again in a whole
decade
? Let alone the week after his wife’s funeral, as so many widowers do. I felt my frostiness thaw.

‘At home it’s just Roxy and me. She’s just started at Bellingham College in Portland Place.’ I’d heard of it – an upmarket crammer. ‘Can I ask you something?’ Miles added.

I handed him his receipt. ‘Of course.’

‘I just wondered …’ He cast an anxious glance at Roxanne, but she was still chatting away, winding a white-blonde tendril around her finger as she did so. ‘I just wondered whether you’d … have dinner with me sometime …’

‘Oh …’

‘I’m sure you think I’m too old,’ he went on quickly. ‘But I’d love to see you again, Phoebe. In fact – can I confess something?’

‘What?’ I said, intrigued.

‘It isn’t
entirely
due to coincidence that I’m here. In fact, to be perfectly honest, coincidence has nothing to do with it.’

I stared at him. ‘But … how did you know where I was?’

‘Because as you were paying for the dress at Christie’s I heard you say “Village Vintage”. So I Googled you there and then, and up came your website.’ So
that’s
what he was looking at so intently on his BlackBerry as he sat next to me! ‘As I don’t live far away – in Camberwell – I thought I’d just drop in and say … “Hi”.’ So his honesty had triumphed over his cunning. I smiled to myself. ‘Now …’ He shrugged in a good-natured way. ‘You didn’t want to have lunch with me the other day – or even a coffee. You probably thought I was married.’

‘I did think that. Yes.’

‘But now that you know that I’m not, I wonder whether you might like to have dinner with me?’

‘I … don’t know.’ I felt my face flush.

Miles glanced at his daughter, still talking on her mobile. ‘You don’t have to say now. Here …’ He opened his wallet and took out his business card. I glanced at it.
Miles Archant LLB, Senior Partner
,
Archant, Brewer & Clark, Solicitors
. ‘Just let me know if you’re tempted.’

I suddenly realised that I
was
. Miles was very attractive, and he had this lovely husky voice – and he was a real grown-up, I reflected, unlike so many men of my own age. Like Dan, I suddenly found myself thinking, with his unruly hair and his ill-matching clothes, and his pencil sharpener and his …
shed
. Why would I want to go and see Dan’s
shed?
I looked at Miles. He was a man, not an overgrown boy. But on the other hand, I now reflected as reality took hold, he was a virtual
stranger and, yes, he was much older than me – forty-three or -four.

‘I’m forty-eight,’ he said. ‘Don’t look so shocked!’

‘Oh, sorry, I’m not, it’s just that … you don’t look that …’

‘Old?’ he finished wryly.

‘That’s not what I meant. It’s really nice of you to ask me, but to be honest I
am
pretty busy at the moment.’ I began rearranging the scarves. ‘And I have to focus on my business,’ I floundered on. Nearly
fifty
… ‘And the thing is – oh.’ The phone was ringing. ‘Excuse me.’ I picked up the handset, grateful for the interruption. ‘Village Vintage.’

‘Phoebe?’ My heart was suddenly pounding in my chest. ‘Please speak to me, Phoebe,’ said Guy. ‘I must speak to you,’ I heard him insist. ‘You’ve ignored all my letters and –’

‘That’s … right,’ I said quietly, struggling to control my emotions in front of Miles, who was now sitting on the sofa, gazing out at the Blackheath cloudscape. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

‘I need to
talk
to you,’ I heard Guy say. ‘I refuse to let things be left like this, and I’m not going to give up until I’ve got you to –’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you,’ I said with a calmness I did not feel. ‘But thank you for calling.’ I put down the phone without a scintilla of guilt. Guy knew what he’d done.

You know how Emma exaggerates, Phoebe
.

I switched the phone over to ‘answer’ mode. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Miles. ‘What were you saying?’

‘Well …’ He stood up. ‘I was just telling you that I’m
… forty-eight, and that, if you were prepared to overlook that handicap, I’d be delighted if you’d have dinner with me sometime. But it doesn’t sound as though you’d want to.’ He gave me an anxious smile.

‘Actually, Miles …I
would
.’

On Sunday afternoon I made my way over to Dad’s – or, more accurately, to Ruth’s. Although I’d met her – once – for about ten seconds – it would be the first time I’d set foot in her flat. I’d asked Dad if we could meet on neutral territory, but he said that because of Louis it would be easier if I could come and see him ‘at home’.

‘At home …’ I reflected wonderingly as I walked down Portobello. All my life ‘home’ had been the Edwardian villa in which I’d grown up and in which my mother, for the time being, still lives. The idea that ‘home’, for Dad, was now a smart duplex in Notting Hill with the hatchet-faced Ruth and their baby son was still impossible to grasp. Going there would make it all depressingly real.

Dad simply wasn’t a Notting Hill kind of person, I thought as I passed the fashionable boutiques of Westbourne Grove. What did L.K. Bennett or Ralph Lauren mean to my father? He belonged in friendly, old-fashioned Blackheath.

Ever since the separation, Dad’s had this slightly stunned expression on his face, as though he’s just been slapped by a stranger. That was how he looked now, as he opened the door of number 88 Lancaster Road.

‘Phoebe!’ Dad bent to hug me, but it was hard to do with Louis in his arms and the baby got squished between us and squawked. ‘It’s so lovely to see you.’ Dad ushered me inside. ‘Oh, would you mind taking your shoes off – it’s the rule here.’ No doubt one of many, I thought as I removed my sling-backs and tucked them under a chair. ‘I’ve missed you, Phoebe,’ Dad said as I followed him down the limestone-tiled hallway into the kitchen.

‘I’ve missed you too, Dad.’ I stroked Louis’ blond head as he sat in Dad’s arms at the brushed stainless-steel table. ‘
You’ve
changed, sweetie.’

Louis had morphed from a wrinkled, liver-coloured scrap of flesh into the sweet-faced infant who was waving his bendy little limbs at me like a baby octopus.

I glanced at all the gleaming metal surfaces. Ruth’s kitchen struck me as far too hygienic an environment for a man who’d spent most of his professional life grubbing around in the dirt. It didn’t even look like a kitchen – it resembled a morgue. I thought of the old scrubbed pine table at
real
home, and the stacks of Portmeirion ‘Botanical Garden’ crockery. What the hell was my dad doing
here?

I smiled at him. ‘Louis looks like you.’

‘Do you think so?’ said Dad happily.

I didn’t, but I didn’t want Louis to look like Ruth. I opened the Hamley’s bag I’d been carrying and handed Dad a big white bear with a blue ribbon round its neck.

‘
Thank
you.’ He jiggled the teddy in front of Louis. ‘Isn’t this lovely, baby? Oh look, Phoebe, he’s smiling at it.’

I stroked the baby’s plump little legs. ‘Don’t you think Louis should be wearing more than just a nappy, Dad?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said vaguely. ‘I was just changing him when you arrived. Now
where
did I put his clothes? Ah. Here we go.’ I watched, appalled, as Dad clamped a surprised-looking Louis to his chest with his left arm then somehow slotted his limbs into a stripy blue sleep-suit. Having done that, he then wrestled him into his stainless-steel high chair, getting two legs jammed down one hole so that Louis was stuck, rigid, in a bob-sleighing position. Dad then went to the gleaming American fridge and took out an assortment of small jars.

‘Let’s see …’ he said, unscrewing the first. ‘I’m getting him on to solids,’ he explained over his shoulder. ‘We’ll try this one, shall we, Louis?’ Louis opened his mouth wide, like a baby bird, and Dad began to spoon the contents of the jar into it. ‘
What
a good boy. Well
done
, my little boy.
Oh
…’ Louis had pebble-dashed Dad with beige mush.

‘I don’t think he likes it,’ I said as Dad wiped what I now knew to be organic chicken and lentil casserole off his glasses.

‘Sometimes he does.’ Dad grabbed a J-cloth and wiped Louis’ chin. ‘He’s in a funny mood today – probably because his mum’s away again. We’ll try this one now, shall we, Louis?’

‘Aren’t you supposed to heat it up, Dad?’

‘Oh, he doesn’t mind it straight from the fridge.’ Dad
opened the second jar. ‘Moroccan lamb with apricots and couscous – yum.’ Louis opened his tiny mouth again and Dad posted a few teaspoons into it. ‘Oh, he likes
this
,’ Dad said triumphantly. ‘Definitely.’

Suddenly Louis extruded his tongue, like a Maori, expelling the Moroccan lamb in an orange slick that now flowed down his front like lava.

‘You should have put a bib on him,’ I pointed out as Dad scraped the
ejecta
off Louis’ chest. ‘No, Dad. Don’t put it back in.’ On the table was a leaflet called ‘Weaning Success’.

‘I’m not much good at this,’ Dad said miserably. He scraped the rejected jar into the gleaming chrome bin. ‘It was so much easier when I could just give him a bottle.’

‘I’d help you, Dad, but I’m clueless myself – for obvious reasons. But why do
you
have to do so much childcare?’

‘Well… because Ruth’s away again,’ he said wearily. ‘She’s very busy at the moment, and the thing is, I
want
to do it. Firstly, there’s no point paying a nanny now that’ – Dad flinched – ‘I’m not working. Plus, when
you
were a baby I was away so much that I missed out on fatherhood.’

‘You
were
away a lot,’ I agreed. ‘All those field-trips and excavations. I always seemed to be waving goodbye to you,’ I added ruefully.

‘I know, darling,’ he sighed. ‘And I’m very sorry for it. So now, with this little chap’ – he stroked Louis’ head – ‘I feel I’ve been given the chance to be more of a hands-on father.’ Louis looked as though he’d prefer Dad to be hands off.

Suddenly the telephone rang. ‘Sorry, darling,’ Dad said. ‘That’ll be Radio Lincoln. I’m doing a telephone interview with them.’

‘Radio Lincoln?’

Dad shrugged. ‘It’s better than Radio Silence.’

As Dad did the interview, the phone clamped to his ear with his right hand while he posted more goo into Louis with his left, I reflected on his calamitous professional fall. Only a year ago Dad was still the widely respected Professor of Comparative Archaeology at Queen Mary’s College, London. Then came
The Big Dig
, and in the wake of the humiliating media coverage – the
Daily Mail
dubbed him ‘The Big Pig’ – Dad was asked to take early retirement with immediate effect. He’d had five years lopped off his career, had taken a big cut in his pension, and, despite six weeks of prime-time exposure on Sunday night, his burgeoning TV career had ground to a halt.

‘Well, when we ask what archaeology
is
,’ Dad said as he shovelled mango and lychee purée into Louis, ‘we might say that it’s the study of artefacts and habitation – the discovery of “lost” civilisations even, using the increasingly sophisticated means that we now have of interpreting past societies, the most important of which is of course carbon dating.
However
, when we say “civilisation” we should be aware that that is of course a modern definition imposed upon the past from a Western intellectual perspective …’ He grabbed a grubby muslin. ‘Sorry, should I take that again? You did say it’s prerecorded, didn’t you? Oh, I’m so sorry …’

On TV Dad had come across very well, largely because he’d had a scriptwriter to render his more erudite phrases
into homely ones. If it hadn’t been for the media fuss about Ruth’s pregnancy, perhaps he’d have got more presenting work, but all he’d been offered since the series ended was
Ready, Steady, Cook!
Ruth’s career, on the other hand, had flourished. She’d been promoted to executive producer and was producing a major profile of Colonel Gaddafi, for which she was even now flying to Tripoli.

Suddenly we heard the front door fly open.

‘Can you
believe
it?’ I heard Ruth yell. ‘Effing terrorists closing down Heathrow
again
! Except that it
wasn’t
terrorists, was it? No! Of
course
not’ – she sounded almost disappointed. ‘Just some loony trying to thumb a lift to Tenerife on the tarmac. Terminal Three’s been shut down – it took two hours for me and the crew to get out. I’m going to try and get us all on a flight tomorrow – Christ, what a mess you’ve made in here, darling. And
don’t
put carrier bags on the table’ – she removed the Hamley’s bag – ‘they carry bacteria, and
no
toys in here, please, it’s a kitchen not a playroom – and do
please
keep the cupboard doors shut as I can’t
stand
seeing them open like that – oh.’ She’d suddenly noticed me, sitting behind the door.

‘Hello, Ruth,’ I said calmly. ‘I’ve come to see my father.’ I looked at Dad. He was frantically tidying up. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Not in the least,’ she replied airily. ‘Make yourself at home.’ That would be hard here, I was tempted to say.

‘Phoebe brought Louis that lovely teddy bear,’ Dad said.

‘Thank you,’ said Ruth. ‘That’s very kind.’ She kissed
Louis on the head, ignoring his outstretched arms, then went upstairs. Louis threw back his head and started wailing.

‘Sorry, Phoebe.’ Dad gave me a baleful smile. ‘Could we make another date soon?’

The next morning, as I walked up to Village Vintage, I thought about Dad and about how he seemed to have stumbled into an affair with no idea of the turmoil that might follow. It was Mum’s belief that he’d never strayed before, despite the opportunities he must have had over the years with attractive archaeology students hanging on his every word as they’d huddled over the dust together, delightedly scraping up bits of the Phoenicians or the Mesopotamians or the Mayans or whoever it was. The ineptitude with which Dad had handled his relationship with Ruth suggested that he was hardly an experienced adulterer.

After he’d left home, Dad had written to me. In his letter he’d said that he still loved Mum, but that once Ruth was pregnant he’d felt he had to stay with her. Then he’d added that he was genuinely fond of Ruth and that I needed to understand that. I couldn’t understand it. I still can’t.

I could perfectly well see why Ruth would be attracted to my father, despite the twenty-four-year age gap. Dad was one of those tall, handsome, craggy-looking men who’d somehow grown into their faces, added to which he was intelligent, easy-going and kind. But what did he see in Ruth? She wasn’t soft or pretty like my mother had been. She was as hard as a plank – with about as much sensitivity. The trauma of seeing Dad move his
things out of the marital home had been made infinitely worse by the fact that a heavily pregnant Ruth was seen waiting for him, outside, in her car.

Mum and I had sat there that night, trying not to look at the yawning spaces on the shelves where Dad’s books and treasures had been. His most prized artefact, a small bronze of an Aztec woman giving birth – presented to him by the Mexican government – was no longer on the kitchen mantelpiece. Given the circumstances, Mum said she wouldn’t miss it.

‘If only it wasn’t for the
baby
,’ she’d wept. ‘I don’t want to be mean about a poor little baby that hasn’t even been born yet – but I can’t help wishing that this
particular
baby had never happened, because if it
hadn’t
then I could have forgiven and forgotten – instead of which I’m now going to be spending the rest of my life on my
own
!’

With a sinking heart I’d realised that I was going to be spending the rest of her life cheering her up.

I’d tried to persuade Dad not to leave Mum. I’d pointed out that at her age it wasn’t fair.

‘I feel awful about it,’ he’d said over the phone. ‘But I’ve got myself into this … situation, Phoebe, and I feel I have to do the right thing.’

‘Why is leaving your wife of thirty-eight years the right thing?’

‘Why is not being there for my child the right thing?’

‘You weren’t there for me, Dad.’

‘I know – and that has a bearing on my decision now.’ I heard him sigh. ‘Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent my whole life poring over the distant past, and now, with this baby, I’m being offered a piece of the
future
– at
my age, that’s cheering. Plus I do
want
to be with Ruth. I know that’s hard for you to hear, Phoebe, but it’s true. Your mother will get the house and half my pension. She has her job and her bridge circle and her friends.
I’d
like to stay friends with her,’ he’d added. ‘How can we
not
be friends after such a long marriage?’

‘How
can
we be, when he’s deserted me?’ Mum had wailed when I’d repeated this to her. I could perfectly well see her point …

I made my way up Tranquil Vale wishing that I could feel more tranquil myself. Annie wouldn’t be coming until mid-morning as she’d gone to an audition. As I unlocked the door I found myself guiltily hoping that she wouldn’t get the job, as it was for a two-month regional tour. I liked having Annie around. She was always punctual and smiling, she was great with the customers and she took initiative in rearranging the stock to keep everything looking fresh. She was an asset to Village Vintage.

I’d started the day with a sale, I realised happily as I read my e-mails. Cindi had messaged me from Beverly Hills to say that she definitely wanted the Balenciaga gown for one of her A-Listers to wear to the Emmys and that she’d phone me with payment at the end of the day.

At nine I turned the sign to ‘Open’ then I phoned Mrs Bell to ask her when I could come and collect the clothes I was buying.

‘Can you come this morning?’ she asked. ‘Say at eleven?’

‘Could we make it eleven thirty? My assistant will be here by then. I’ll bring my car.’

‘Very well, I’ll expect you then.’

Suddenly the doorbell jangled and a slim blonde woman in her mid thirties walked in. She spent a few moments looking through the rails with a slightly intense, distracted air.

‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ I asked after a minute.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m looking for something …
happy
. A happy dress.’

‘Right … and is that for day or evening?’

She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. It just has to be very bright and cheerful.’