Flawless (4 page)

“What do you think, Boxie?” she asked, flinching at the violence of the rain-cum-sleet as it pounded the empty pavement. “Shall we make a break for freedom?”

The dog thumped his tail enthusiastically on the floor, his stock response whenever he heard his name mentioned, and returned to the serious business of mauling his mistress’s discarded Ugg boot. Scarlett, who knew full well that he would have thumped his tail just as hard if she’d said, “Come on, Boxford, what about a nice trip to the vivisectionist?” decided she would take this as a yes and switched the Open sign in the doorway to Closed.

Gosh, she was tired. Pulling down the blinds, her back and shoulders ached like an old woman’s. It was an effort to lift the heavy trays of jewelry, all her own designs, out from the glass display cases and into the safe at the back of the shop. She really must try to make it to yoga at The Life Centre this week, for her mental health as much as her poor muscles. Heaven knew she’d have precious little time to channel her inner calm once she got home to Scotland for Christmas.

At almost six foot, with long, molasses-brown hair and a perfect, willowy figure, Scarlett Drummond Murray had originally come to London to work as a model, one of the first “aristo girls,” as they were known—Jasmine Guinness, Honor Fraser, Stella Tennant—to be snapped up by a big London agency. But despite her striking beauty—porcelain-pale skin, lightly freckled across the bridge of the nose, wide-set amber eyes, cheekbones so sharply prominent you could have served sushi on them—she wasn’t a natural model. Having grown up in a family that set little store by looks, especially hers (her father’s pet name for her growing up was “Giraffe”), Scarlett had never developed the confidence to go with her ethereal good looks and was clumsy when she moved. She was also hopelessly dreamy and found it impossible to concentrate on shoots, which often involved standing in front of a camera for hours on end with nothing to do but keep turning one’s head this way or that. Inevitably her mind would wander to more interesting things—the latest Oxfam report on famine in Congo, her girlfriends’ love-life problems, whether
or not she’d remembered to leave fresh water in Boxford’s bowl before she’d left the apartment that morning—and take her eye off the ball just at the crucial moment, to the frustration of the photographer and crew. Catwalk work was even worse. Scarlett was forever missing cues because she was too busy backstage trying to comfort the makeup girl whose boyfriend had just announced he was gay, or missing flights to important shows because she somehow managed to get her days muddled up.

It was a relief to her agency as much as to her when she finally decided to quit modeling and go into business for herself, as a jewelry designer. With no formal design training, never mind business experience, even her friends privately thought her latest career change offered little prospect of success. But Scarlett had proved them all wrong. With the modest nest egg she’d saved from modeling, she put down a deposit on the tiny premises in Westbourne Grove just before the area exploded as a property hot spot and watched it triple in value in the space of five years. During this period, as well as learning on the job and from the veritable library of self-help books she’d picked up from Waterstone’s—
Small Business for Dummies, Make Jewelry Design Work for You, Be Your Own Book Keeper
—she had diligently attended night classes at the London Business School. Armed with her newly acquired business acumen and a natural flair for design and eye for beauty that no course in the world could have taught her, she launched Bijoux with a small party the day after her twenty-second birthday. By the end of the first year she had established suppliers and a steadily growing customer base, with a good smattering of repeat business. Eighteen months in, she was turning a consistent profit, and it wasn’t long before her store became synonymous with all that was hip and vibrant about Notting Hill, a bastion of boho, young London style.

Now, at twenty-seven, Scarlett was a reluctant regular on the pages of
Tatler
and
Harper’s Bazaar UK
, and rarely did a month go by without one of her pieces being featured in
Vogue
or
In
Style
. Now that they no longer had to deal with her flakiness professionally, her old colleagues from her modeling days were more than happy to support Scarlett as a designer, and she often found model friends and photographers willing to work for her for knock-down rates, or even sometimes for free. Once she started her Trade Fair campaign, raising awareness about corruption in the jewelry industry and the widespread use of “blood” diamonds—diamonds originating from war zones, usually in Africa, and smuggled onto the market illegally—the goodwill toward both her and Bijoux had snowballed still further. These days, Trade Fair was almost on par with PETA, the antifur animal rights group, as the London fashion crowd’s cause of choice.

Picking up a diamond-and-emerald brooch in the shape of an apple with a single bite taken out of it—she’d christened the piece “Eve’s Temptation”—Scarlett lovingly ran a finger over the shimmering stones. To her, each of her creations was like a child, unique and beautiful in its own way. She poured so much love and care into her work that she still found it hard to sell a much-loved piece to a buyer who seemed unworthy of it—a spoiled housewife or a rich man buying thoughtlessly for a girlfriend who’d be more impressed by the Bijoux box than the work of art inside it.

The polished diamond beneath her fingertip felt cold and smooth. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine what it had felt like to the hands, almost certainly black and impoverished, that had first plucked it from the earth, ending its fifty or perhaps even a hundred million years of subterranean existence. Very different, that was for sure. It would have felt warm. Rough. To all outward appearances, worthless. The long journey each stone made before becoming part of a brooch or ring somewhere on the other side of the earth had always seemed impossibly romantic to Scarlett. She knew she represented the safe, sanitized, wealthy end of the diamond food chain, but she still felt a close emotional connection to everyone who had helped each stone along the different
legs of its journey—the miners, drivers, cutters, polishers, and appraisers—before it arrived at her workshop.

Her overdeveloped social conscience, already an irritating thorn in the side of the diamond cartels and multinational retail chains, was part nature, part nurture. Always a sensitive and loving little girl, she grew up in a uniquely sheltered and privileged world in her family’s ancestral, stately home in Scotland, Drumfernly Castle. Had it not been for the many long childhood summers spent in South Africa, at her Aunt Agnes’s game reserve near Franchoek, she might never have seen a black face until the day she left St. Clement’s Girls’ Boarding School in Inverness to make her own way in London. As it was, by the time she began modeling she had long since developed a passionate interest in African affairs and the injustices of globalization. Never, ever would she forget her first trip to Cape Town, driving past the corrugated iron shacks of the shanty towns, where thousands of AIDS-stricken people sweltered in the hundred-degree heat, while less than two miles away their white neighbors lounged by swimming pools, plainly visible from the shacks, congratulating themselves on how cheaply they’d bought their property and wondering aloud where else in the world could you enjoy a full lobster supper with a decent bottle of Pinot Grigio for the equivalent of five US dollars.

Loading the last of the jewelry trays into the safe, she closed and locked it with a satisfying
cl-clunk
and reached up to the hook by the door for Boxford’s leash.

“Come on, you big lug,” she said, ruffling his tangled fur and clipping the lead onto his collar while simultaneously removing her tattered left Ugg boot from his slobbery jaw and slipping it onto her foot. “We’d better get a move on if you want to eat.”

Outside, the rain was even colder than it looked. Stepping into it from the warm cocoon of the shop felt like getting out of a sauna into one of the showers at St. Clement’s, so freezing it made you gasp for breath. Dressed for the cold but not the wet—the
sky had been as crisp and blue as a butterfly’s wing when she’d set out for work this morning—it wasn’t long before Scarlett was soaked to the bone. Her Ugg boots squelched audibly with each step, and icy water ran off the sleeves and back of her sodden suede coat like hundreds of miniature mountain streams, joining forces with the torrents running in the gutters as she crossed Portobello Road.

“You need an umbrella, love!” shouted the fish ’n’ chips man from across the road. “Wanna borrow mine?”

“Thanks,” Scarlett yelled back. There was very little traffic, but the noise of the rain was deafening. “But I think it’s a bit late for that now. We’re almost home anyway.”

Cheered by this exchange, she stepped up her pace, dragging poor Boxford from puddle to puddle on their way to the local organic supermarket. Even on a horrid, gray day like today, Scarlett adored Notting Hill. The friendliness, the sense of community, the quirky, boutiquey shops of Portobello competing for space and custom with super chichi stores like Matches and Anya Hindmarch. In the eight years since she’d moved here, she’d seen the area go from genuinely bohemian, a home to artists and artisans from all walks of life, to its current status of “Belgravia of the North,” a stomping ground for hedge-fund millionaires and their tacky Russian wives, with their furs and Bentleys and round-the-clock nannies for their baby-Dior-clad offspring.

But she could never bring herself to join the new breed of Notting Hill–haters. Yes, there was a lot of new money coming in, an inevitable result of the crazy property hike. But there was still a mix of rich and poor, alternative and mainstream, arty and financial, that couldn’t be found anywhere else in London. Ten-million-dollar mansions still stood cheek to cheek with public housing, and the Woolworths on Kensington Park Road did every bit as brisk a business as the Paul Smith on the corner. People
talked
to each other here, on the street, in shops and cafés. There was a palpable sense of belonging, so much so that as a
single girl Scarlett never felt uneasy walking home alone late at night, as she would have elsewhere in the city.

Fresh & Wild was closing up as she arrived, but Will, the manager, took pity on her bedraggled state and let her in anyway. “As long as you’re quick,” he added, holding Boxford’s leash for her while she darted inside, slipping through the empty aisles, all beautifully hung with holly and mistletoe for Christmas. “The football starts in an hour, and I’m not missing kickoff for anyone.”

Five minutes later, armed with some smoked tofu, leeks, expensive organic chocolate, and a quarter of a pound of lean minced beef for Boxie—a terrible extravagance, especially at these prices, but he’d been such a patient boy today she decided he deserved it—she was off again, head down against the wind, walking back toward Ladbroke Grove and the beckoning warmth and comfort of her apartment.

Having ploughed almost all of her savings into the business, Scarlett’s two-bedroom conversion in a dilapidated Victorian villa was at the distinctly cheap and cheerful end of the market. But with her flair for color and innate sense of style, she’d transformed it into a haven of warmth and homeliness, her refuge from the cut and thrust of the jewelry business and from life in general. A passionate hater of minimalism, in jewelry as well as interior decor, she’d crammed the flat with colorful treasures from her travels. African masks and brightly woven textiles from Mexico and Bolivia were thrown together with a carefully selected handful of inherited antiques: an inlaid mahogany-and-walnut desk of her grandmother’s, Victorian and over-the-top ornate; a library full of ancient atlases and bound maps that she loved chiefly for their dusty, leathery smell; and in the so-called master bedroom, her pride and joy, a Jacobean four-poster hung with vintage lace-and-linen curtains, so big that she couldn’t fit so much as a bedside table next to it and had to climb out the foot of the bed every morning.

As soon as she’d squeezed through the door, dumping her shopping bags unceremoniously on the hall floor, she ran to fetch two towels from the bathroom, one for Boxford and another for herself. It was a further five minutes before either one of them was dry enough to progress through to the living room, Scarlett having shed her boots, coat, sweater, socks, and sodden jeans and wearing nothing but a red tank top, matching bra, and pair of M&S white cotton underwear. Happily, the flat was already toasty warm. Having grown up in a draughty castle in Scotland, central heating was one of the few ecologically unsound luxuries in which Scarlett indulged to the full, and she didn’t hesitate to turn on the gas fire full blast so that Boxford could settle down comfortably in front of it on his favorite tatty armchair.

“Bloody bills. Honestly, don’t they know it’s Christmas?” she grumbled, going back into the hall and scooping up a huge pile of brown envelopes along with a smattering of white ones—Christmas cards, probably—and carrying them into the kitchen along with the groceries. Flicking the radio on to Classic FM for the carols and lighting a Diptyque Myrrh candle, the ultimate smell of Christmas, she set about warming Boxford’s mince and chopping leeks for herself, intermittently opening post as she went.

Making the cardinal sin of opening the white envelopes first, she was punished when the first one turned out not to be a Christmas card but a letter from her mother, Caroline.

Looking forward to seeing you, darling
, it began, unconvincingly.
I’m writing to remind you to pick up my food order from Harrods before you drive up, and all the decorations from Peter Jones. You can help me with those when you get here. Pa’s been complaining that the parlor looks awfully drab.

Scarlett felt the first stirrings of annoyance prickle across her skin. “Help you, my arse,” she mumbled crossly. “I’ll be doing the whole darned thing, just like every other year.” And why on earth couldn’t her mother get the Harrods Hamper delivered
like everybody else? Last year the stench of the stilton sweating on the backseat for fourteen hours had made the drive almost unbearable, and she kept having to reach into the back to prize Boxford away from the apple-and-clove-spiced sausages. Not to mention the fact that a trip into Harrods tomorrow on the busiest weekend of the year, followed by a second detour to her brother Cameron’s house in Chelsea, would mean they wouldn’t be able to set off until close to lunchtime, slap-bang in the middle of the worst of the holiday exodus traffic. Next year she was
definitely
taking a plane home for the holidays, carbon footprint or no carbon footprint. She’d rather plant a rainforest with her bare hands than go through that nightmare drive one more time.