Charlie Glass's Slippers (33 page)

“After you.”

“Thanks,” I say, just as icily, before adding, in a low voice, “Lucy hasn’t texted or called you, has she, to say why she packed up and left?”

“Goodness, what a marvelous spread!” Diana’s voice suddenly cuts in, before Pal can reply. She’s settling herself down on one of the sofas by the bay window, casting an eye over the coffee table in front of her, which is laden down with plates of Hannah’s home baking and a large and rather beautiful traditional silver tea urn, complete with little gas flame to keep our tea nice and hot. “Scones, sandwiches, cakes, tarts . . . Well, that’s Charlie sorted, what about the rest of us?”

As her laughter peals out, I know that the damage-wreaking has begun.

I abandon Pal and head, swiftly, for the sofas myself.

“I mean, I’m sure you’ve noticed Charlie’s appetite by now, Jay,” Diana is saying, as I reach them. “Hearty, to say the least!”

“Exactly.” Jay pulls me down onto the seat beside him and gives me a smacker of a kiss. “It’s one of the things I love most about her. Especially after all these years of going out with girls who threw a wobbly at the mere sight of a biscuit!”

“Ah, well, you certainly won’t catch Charlie throwing a wobbly at the sight of a biscuit,” Diana says, manfully attempting another attack on my greed. It’s the updated, publicly acceptable version of her grabbing my wrist on its way to the potato dish and telling me I mustn’t get fat as well as being plain and boring. “Oh, yes, do come and join us, boys,” she adds, as Pal (who clearly isn’t sure, yet, whether Diana is Someone to Be Cultivated or not) and Ferdy (who’s looking as if he might make a break for the train station himself at any moment) head our way and sit down in the free spaces—Pal on the other side of Jay, and Ferdy, poor soul, next to Diana. “I’ll be mother, shall I?”

“That’d make a nice change,” I mutter, under my breath, as Diana starts to fill cups from the silver urn.

“It’s just so wonderful to be back at Oxley again,” she’s continuing, simultaneously managing to hand out cups of tea and gaze, wistfully, out the window. “The gardens are looking absolutely glorious, Jay. Reminds me of all those wonderful barbecues your father used to host out there.”

“He didn’t do that many barbecues.” Jay helps himself to a couple of dainty sandwiches. “One or two, is all I remember.”

“Oh, no, there were more than that! And pool parties, too . . . In fact, I have a distinct memory of Robyn, age nineteen or twenty, sitting in this very garden in one of her itsy-bitsy bikinis . . .” She pauses, for a moment, to make sure everyone at the tea table is envisaging the glorious equation of Robyn + itsy-bitsy bikini; even Pal, who’s never met her (though I’m quite sure he’s the one doing most of the envisaging). “You used to get into the most spectacular water fights with her, Jay, don’t you remember?”

“I think that was only the once. At my twenty-fifth birthday pool party, if I recall.” Jay pops two whole sandwiches into his mouth with one hand, and reaches for my hand with the other.

I can see Diana’s eyes flare wide with fury. She’s come out swinging, that’s for sure, but—so far, at least—none of her punches has even landed, let alone proved to be the knockout blow she’s obviously hoping for.

“Well,” she says, after a moment, “I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. The two of you, both so bronzed and beautiful, chasing each other around the pool . . . I hope you young people have managed a dip since you got here?” she adds, gazing pleasantly around at all of us. “Charlie? I’m sure you hardly needed an excuse to pop on an itsy-bitsy bikini of your own!”

“Not yet. But we’re hoping the weather brightens up this evening, aren’t we, Charlie?” Jay says.

“Absolutely,” I say, crossing my fingers behind my back. “Fingers crossed.”

“Gosh, then you’d better steer clear of the clotted cream, Charlie,” Diana warns, reaching across the table to physically remove the plate of scones, complete with little ceramic pots of jam and cream, from my reach, as if I were about to stuff my cheeks with the lot of them, like a hamster on the run from an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. “We don’t want you busting out of your bikini!”

“Oh, I think I’d cope,” says Jay, giving my hand a little squeeze.

I could kiss him, I really could. Diana’s snide insults just seem to slide off him, like water off a duck’s back. This may just be because he’s so supremely at ease with himself, and the entire world around him, that he can’t quite envisage the idea that anyone would make nasty comments about someone the way Diana is doing. Or it may be—could it be?—because he just isn’t understanding the nature of the barbs. After all, he’s got no idea I used to be fat. So unless Diana starts to refer, less opaquely, to my former size (which is surely quite difficult to do, unless she plans to start opening conversations with
Back in the good old days, when Charlie was a heifer . . .
), Jay is going to remain immune to her comments about me.

“Well, we all know
you’d
cope, Jay!” Diana gives one of her little peals of laughter. “It’s these other chaps I’m worried about! I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of meeting either of you,” she says, to Ferdy and Pal. “Are you friends of Jay’s?”

“Pal’s going out with Charlie’s best friend,” Jay informs her, hastily (you can’t blame him for being hasty, really, when trying to distance himself from Pal). “Lucy. You must know her, Diana?”

“Oh, yes, Lucy. Lovely girl. I’ve always been very fond of her,” says Diana, who refused to let Lucy through her front door for the best part of ten years, and who banned me from attending Lucy’s sixteenth birthday party in order for me to stay home and clean all the indoor paintwork instead.

“And Ferdy . . . well, he’s an old friend of Charlie’s,” Jay says, leveling his usual challenging gaze across the table at Ferdy, who has just put a jam tart into his mouth and so isn’t able to answer. “Aren’t you, mate?”

“Well, how nice!” Diana bestows one of her smiles onto Ferdy. “Do you know Charlie from school? University? I can’t imagine she had too long to make friends at university, though,” she adds, with the briefest of glances in Jay’s direction, “seeing as she dropped out after barely a term!”

“I don’t know her through university,” Ferdy says, filling the awkward silence that might otherwise have followed Diana’s casual trashing of my academic reputation. “My dad is . . . an old friend of hers. And Elroy’s.”

“Is your father a doctor? Some kind of physical therapist? A carer of some kind? Oh, what am I saying?” She smiles across the tea table at me. “Of course he isn’t a carer! Elroy didn’t need a carer, did he, Charlie? Not when you were there full-time to do the job.”

This time, there really is an awkward silence.

Because from the look on Jay’s face, I can see that one of Diana’s punches—finally—has found its target.

“You were your dad’s carer?” There’s a slight frown lodging itself between his eyebrows. “You never told me that, Charlie.”

Look—I know I should be proud of what I did for Dad all those years. I know there’s no shame—far from it—in being a carer to a sick person, especially when that person is your father. And I
am
proud. I really, really am.

But obviously I haven’t yet gotten around to mentioning any of this to Jay. And for someone like him, whose everyday existence is so glittering, so glamorous, so filled with parties and champagne and racing cars and Olympic-standard sex marathons . . . well, I just don’t know how he’ll feel about me if he knows that all I was, up until three months ago, was an invalid’s girl Friday.

“Oh, yes, and she was marvelous at it!” There’s an odd glitter in Diana’s eyes. “So selfless! It’s no wonder my late ex-husband was so keen to compensate her for all her hard work.”

Just for a moment, the conversation I had with Olly about Dad’s will flashes into my head. There’s something about the way Diana says the word
compensate
. It comes from the very back of her throat, as if it’s so offensive to her that she can barely bring herself to voice it.

“But then, she’s as domesticated as they come, is our Charlie!” Diana is continuing. “All those dreary years, doing nothing but cooking and cleaning and spoon-feeding and bum-wiping . . . Well, domesticity was in her genes, of course. She’d obviously inherited a talent for menial tasks from her mother . . .”

I shoot her a look that must be so unintentionally venomous that she actually stops talking for a moment.

“I can only hope,” I hear myself say, “that you have someone to take care of you, Diana. If you’re ever struck down with a debilitating disease, that is.”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll manage. I have two extremely loving daughters, after all.”

I’m about to add that her
extremely loving daughters
weren’t extremely loving—in fact, barely qualified as daughters—when their father was stricken with illness, so that I wouldn’t go counting her chickens if I were her, when Jay interrupts.

“God, but that must have been so awful for you, Charlie.” His frown is deepening. “I mean, wasn’t there someone you could have hired to do all that for you?”

“He was my dad.”

“Sure, but . . .” He takes his hand off mine and passes it over his face for a moment. He’s wearing, quite suddenly, that little-boy-lost expression again, the one he had when he was talking about his mother. “Taking care of an invalid . . . I just can’t believe you did something so hard-core.”

Diana’s smile is widening. She’s sensed the blood in the water and, like all good beasts of prey, is moving in for the kill.

“Oh, well, a lot of things have changed about Charlie since her father died. Honestly, sometimes I hardly even recognize her!”

I don’t know what this latest game is, exactly, seeing as all her previous attempts to make mention of my former fatness have fallen on deaf ears.

“In fact, that reminds me! I was having a little clear-out of some old magazines at the Vicarage, Charlie, and you’ll never believe what I found . . .” Diana is leaning down to rifle inside the Longchamp bag at her feet. “Now, where did I put it?”

“Put what?” I ask.

“Well, it was in the
Tatler
, two or three months ago. A picture of you and your sisters at your father’s memorial! Oh, yes! Here it is!”

She reaches her hand out of her bag, clasping within it a half-sheet of torn-out magazine, on which is that photo of me, Gaby, and Robyn at Dad’s memorial party.

That bad photo. That unflattering photo. That photo in which I am shiny and frizz-haired after hours of waitress duty, and—more to the point—flabby and frumpy in my too-tight wrap dress, clutching a tray of lemon drizzle cakes as if I’m about to scarf the lot.

Christ only knows how it ever ended up in an issue of
Tatler
magazine. A photo-desk error, perhaps, or a picture editor with a sadistic sense of humor.

But how it happened doesn’t matter. How it happened doesn’t change the fact that Diana is wielding it, now, the way a medieval king might wield a battle-ax, ready to deal the last, lethal blow to his sworn enemy.

I can’t let Jay see this photo. If he sees this photo, he’ll never look at me in the same way again.

And not only that, but isn’t there a good chance he’ll recognize me as the girl who dislocated his shoulder?

The world seems to go into slow motion. I watch Diana’s hand extending with the magazine cutout, and Jay’s hand extending to take it. I get halfway out of my chair, wondering if there’s any way I can intercept it, wondering what I can possibly do with it even if I
do
intercept it . . .

Then Ferdy’s hand reaches forward, too. I think, because it’s holding his teacup, that he’s only reaching forward to refill himself from the silver urn.

And maybe that’s all he’s actually intending to do.

What actually happens, though, is that somehow—I don’t see how—his teacup collides with Diana’s hand, knocking the photo out of it. As the photograph falls towards the tea table, his left hand comes out to catch it. But Ferdy is obviously feeling more than usually clumsy today, because instead of simply catching it and handing it over to Jay, he fumbles it for a moment.

Fumbles it, in fact, right into the gas ring at the bottom of the silver urn.

“God, I’m so sorry,” Ferdy says. “What an idiot. I’m really sorry about this!”

He’s so busy apologizing that it doesn’t seem to occur to him to pull the picture back out of the flame. It’s already alight at one corner and burning up fast.

“Blow it out!” Diana gasps, grabbing at Ferdy’s hand, which—in his confusion?—he’s still using to hold the magazine cutout firmly in the flame. “Blow it out, for fuck’s sake!”

“Yes, sorry, of course.”

And he does blow it out, now, but it’s too late. There’s only the smallest scrap of photograph left—the bottom right-hand corner, where, I suspect, all you can see is the edge of Robyn’s black minidress, and a hint of the slender thigh it was exposing.

All evidence of Fat Charlie has been safely burnt away.

“Oh, dear. Again, I’m really sorry.” Ferdy turns to Diana. “I don’t suppose you happen to have a copy, by any chance?”

She shoots him a look that could ignite a fire pretty much all on its own. “No,” she spits. “Not unless I track down another copy of a three-month-old
Tatler
.”

“Ah. Then that really is a shame.” He shakes his head in a sorrowful fashion, then reaches for the plate of jam tarts beside the tea urn and proffers it, politely, to Diana. “Tart?” he asks.

Diana doesn’t want a tart. In fact, now that she’s been thoroughly thwarted in her attempts to inflict damage, she doesn’t seem to want very much of anything anymore. As soon as she’s finished the dregs of her tea, and chewed her way, furiously, through the remains of her smoked salmon sandwich, she announces that she’d better be getting home.

“Charlie?” She smiles at me, in a frozen fashion, as she gets to her feet. “Will you see me out to my car?”

I open my mouth to say no, when quite suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t need to say no. I can say yes. After all, do I really need to be so scared of being alone with Diana? All her attempts to humiliate me just now have come to nothing, and if there were ever an occasion when I could lord it over her, for once, instead of the other way around, it’s this one. I’m here at Oxley Manor with Jay, for Christ’s sake. I’m not a scared little fat girl anymore.