The Personal Shopper (24 page)

He nodded with understanding.

Owen waved at Gray from the doorway then fled back to his room. Annie left it at that. She was trying to enjoy Gray’s many compliments about her home rather than worry too much about how her children were going to react to him and vice versa.

‘Shall we go into the kitchen and have some coffee?’ she asked.

‘Yes, definitely . . .’ Gray got up from the sofa arm he’d perched on. Annie was still thinking she’d like to push him back onto the cushions and rumple him quite a lot, but the presence of children made that impossible.

At the kitchen table, Lana was chewing at the skin round her nails and texting frantically.

‘Everything OK?’ Annie wondered.

‘Yeah, fine, everything’s fine,’ she answered, not breaking eye contact with the screen.

‘Does Seth
still rule?’ Annie couldn’t help herself.

But she shouldn’t have, she just got a black look and deepest scowl in reply: ‘At least he doesn’t use hair dye and fake tan,’ Lana snapped.

‘Hopefully it won’t
kill
you to be nice,’ Annie whispered at her, just bef
ore Gray came
in
to
earshot.

‘D’uhhh,’ came the great grudging sigh. Annie decided to stay calm. Lana was a confused 14 and the prospect of a real, live man in her mother’s life, rather than a faceless date, was bound to be unsettling.

Once the kettle was on for the coffee, Annie felt an unusual desire to play domestic goddess. She brought out a tablecloth then shooed Lana and her things out of the way so she could put it on the table. She set out cups, saucers, cake plates and shook almond biscuits out of the packet.

The milk went into a little blue jug, brown sugar into a matching bowl. She warmed the rarely used cafetière before adding the ground coffee she’d unearthed at the back of a cupboard.

Then, using the typical parental combination of threats and bribes, she made Owen and Lana sit up at the table properly to meet Gray.

‘I hear you’re both at St Vincent’s?’ was Gray’s ice-breaker, once he was settled into his chair. But the question didn’t go down so well.

Lana scowled, rolled her eyes and came out wit
h: ‘
I absolutely hate it.’

‘No you don’t,’ Annie said with her nicest smile. ‘Tell Gray about the fund-raising website. They’re hoping to make ten thousand pounds for charity by the end of the summer.’

Lana pulled a face, but then her phone bleeped with a reply text and she pounced on it, snatching it up, eyes lighting.

Gray and Annie watched as Owen picked up four biscuits and crammed them all into his mouth, forcing his lips to part as he crunched down on them.

‘Of course we won’t be at St Vincent’s for long,’ Lana fired out, taking Annie completely by surprise. ‘Mum’s totally broke and we’ll either have to sell the flat or leave school.’

‘Or both,’ Owen added for emphasis, spraying crumbs across the tablecloth. Despite her embarrassment, for a moment Annie managed to feel proud that Owen had actually spoken two words despite the presence of a stranger. Just a few months ago, this would never have happened.

‘Er . . . well,’ she smiled at Gray and twisted the coffee cup round in her hands. Maybe last night hadn’t been such great timing for the earnest little conversation she’d had with the children about the hole in the family finances. ‘It’s hardly as bad as that.’

‘But you said—’ Lana began.

‘I may have to free up a little equity,’ she breezed, seeing what she read as concern in Gray’s face, ‘but St Vincent’s is a great school. They’re both going to be there for many years to come.’

She shot a look at Lana, who slumped melodramatically over her phone. The phone Annie would right at this moment like to rip from her daughter’s hands and toss out of the window.

Then the landline began to ring and to Annie’s surprise, Owen stood up and ran out of the room to answer it.

He picked up, said, ‘Hello,’ in a very calm-sounding voice and then carried on something resembling a normal conversation.

This was very unusual.

‘Oh yeah . . . hi . . . aha . . . that’s really cool,’ she overheard.

Then came: ‘Hmmm . . . Wednesday? This Wednesday? Muuum!’ came the shout.

‘Yes?’ she answered.

‘Are we doing anything on Wednesday evening?’

Annie flicked mentally through the following week’s
 
family schedule: Sunday karate, Tuesday Billie babysit, Thursday swimming lessons. Wednesday? Was anything planned for Wednesday? Annie glanced at Gray, in case he wanted to jump in with a suggestion: helicopter trip to Paris for rooftop dinner, perhaps? No. He wasn’t saying anything.

‘No,’ she said finally, ‘I don’t think we’re doing anything – but why? Who?’

Owen didn’t answer her, he was back on the phone: ‘Wednesday’s fine. Great . . . So about seven p.m.?’

This was positively chatty, startling for Annie.

‘OK cool. Yup. See ya tomorrow, sir. OK.’

‘Who was that?’ Annie asked as soon as Owen came back into the kitchen, although the ‘sir’ at the end of the call had been a good clue.

‘Ed,’ Owen replied.

‘Mr Leon?’

‘Yeah.’ There was a pause and Annie thought the presence of Gray was going to silence Owen once again, but instead she watched as he took a breath or two to
 
calm himself, as he’d been taught to do but rarely remembered, then he continued, stumbling over the odd word: ‘There’s this singer, Rufus Wainwright, and he’s doing an . . . an . . . acoustic thing at the National Theatre. Ed said he’d look into getting tickets for us. It’s going to be cool!’

‘All of us?’ Annie wondered.

‘You, me, Lana.’

‘Oh no,’ came the groan from Lana.

Rufus Wainwright wasn’t registering on Annie’s radar. She looked at Lana, to see if she could spot any signs of recognition there.

‘He’s gay, took crystal meth . . . folk-type god,’ was Lana’s helpful biog, delivered in tones of deepest uninterest.

‘Don’t you want to go?’ Annie asked.

‘Oh yeah . . . well, Ed the Shed is
so not cool, but Rufus is awesome
!’

Annie worried for about the tenth time that day if her children were watching too much American TV.

Gray’s contribution to this new turn in the conversation was to ask what crystal meth was, which earned him the kind of scowls and shrugs Lana usually reserved for
total losers
such as children’s T
V presenters, people in anoraks
, members of the Conservative Party or the Royal Family.

This caused Gray to loo
k at his watch (very flashy
Tag Heuer) and announce his imminent departure. Annie suspected he still wasn’t over the ‘Mum’s totally broke’ comment and she would have to do something to remedy the situation or she wasn’t going to see him again for dust.

As he got up, she ushered him through into the sitting room, saying she wanted to show him something.

‘Take a look at that building over there.’ She pointed it
 
out from her window. ‘Now that is really worth investing in.’ Her tone was cosy and confidential now: ‘Lovely part of town, great views, good school catchment, right on the tube. It will rent like a dream. I happen to know that the developer is right on the verge of going down the tubes. He desperately needs money coming in to finish the project off. I’m absolutely certain that he’d take a very low bid on a two-bedroom flat, so long as you were willing to pay a big deposit up front, before the place was even finished. I would be investing in that right now . . . except, as my children have so helpfully explained,’ she tried to make light of it, ‘I’m not exactly so flexibly . . . liquid at the moment.’

‘Great tip.’ To her relief, Gray was purring again. ‘I’ll look into it,’ he added. ‘And by the way, what are you doing next weekend?’

Yes!

‘Well, let me see . . . There’s the shopping trip to buy gags for Lana and Owen . . . but otherwise . . .’

Chapter Sixteen

Ed dressing for the occasion:

Yellow polo shirt (drawer)

Red polo shirt (drawer)

Green tweed jacket (can’t remember)

Baggy khakis (Army and Navy stores)

Heavy boots (same)

Est. cost: £45

‘Music always gives me an appetite!’

‘There you are!’ were Ed’s opening words as Annie, Lana and Owen arrived wet and slightly bedraggled at the doors to the concert hall.

They were twenty minutes late and now there was barely time to say hello because the performance was just about to begin.

‘Sorry, Ed,’ Annie began. ‘It’s taken us ages . . . We got totally lost out there.’

This wasn’t untrue, there had been some confusion about directions, but she decided she’d bypass an explanation about the enormous Lana row which had really held them up.

Just your standard mother–teenage daughter ‘you’re not going out like that’ argument, which had of course escalated to great, hurtful, all-encompassing insults being tossed around at random.

Lana: ‘You’re such a cow! I hate you!’

Annie: ‘You’re just a spoiled brat, I’m not buying you anything, ever again! This time I mean it!’ And so on.

Owen had quietly put on his shoes and anorak, then he’d gone to stand by the door, headphones in, iPod cranked up, foot tapping to the rhythm, as he’d waited for the storm to finally blow over.

The sight of him had taken the wind out of Annie’s sails.

‘Right, Lana, that’s it, I’m done,’ she’d announced in the coolest voice she could summon: ‘Just put on the sparkly boob tube, skinny jeans and platform boots if you want. I’m not saying another word about it. Just make sure . . .’ See? She was already saying another word about it, but she couldn’t resist: ‘Make sure you’ve got something waterproof on top because it’s definitely going to rain.’

There. Words her own father could have been saying to her twenty years ago. He’d barely been around enough for her to remember many of his words of supposed wisdom, but she could definitely recall the
 
nagging: ‘Put something warm over that or you’ll freeze.’

But then wasn’t this the most totally irritating thing about parenthood? Just as you came to appreciate how caring and sensible some of your parents’ advice had been, that’s when your very own little teenage spawn was throwing it all back in your face, exactly as you’d done too.

‘We’re going out with your
teacher
!’ she
reminded her daughter. ‘I don’t think we’re likely to bump into the living god that is Seth, are we?’

In the concert hall, they had to squeeze past twenty people or so to get into their seats: Ed leading the way, then Lana, Owen and finally Annie.

During the performance Annie kept catching sight of Ed’s face appearing over the top of teen boobs hoicked up in a padded bra underneath a boob tube. They were listening to a song about a teenager being in love with an art teacher. Another time Annie might have loved this song, all haunting and melodic, moody drumming piano in the background, but instead, she felt her world view shift a little uncomfortably.

Was Lana attracted to Ed? Despite her cool disdain, maybe she had a little crush? That wouldn’t be so surprising, any teacher slightly more attractive than Frankenstein could usually be guaranteed a decent pupil fan base.