The Personal Shopper (4 page)

Annie had left four years later with several defining attributes: the qualifications necessary for art school (not medical school, much to Fern’s disappointment), the firm conviction that if she ever had children they’d go to a school like that from day one, no matter what the cost, and finally, perhaps most importantly, she’d learned that even if you didn’t fit in, you had to be yourself, because people responded so much better to down-to-earth reality than to nervous, put-on airs and graces.

‘Ah, Mrs Valentine, lovely to see you. And how are we doing?’

The headmaster, Mr Ketteringham-Smith, ramrod straight and severely smart in his light grey meet-the-parents suit, was greeting at the main door in person with a charming-verging-on-the-smarming smile.

‘Top form, headmaster,’ she assured him with her best smile. ‘And how about you? You’re looking fit.’

‘Oh, well . . . am I?’ He was flustered by the compliment.

‘Definitely, you look like y
ou’ve been coaching the rugby
single-handed.’ This, admittedly, was going a tad far, but at least Lana was not around to be humiliated to death by her mother flirting with the head.

‘Well . . . erm . . . like to keep my hand in, now and again,’ came his reply.

She restrained herself from the cheeky answer to this becaus
e although there were many
interesting men to be found wandering the corridors of St Vincent’s on a parents’ evening, slightly balding Mr Ketteringham-Smith was not one of them.

Annie, perhaps understandably, had a thing about dads. Well, first of all, she’d never had much of one. Who had Fern chosen to give her heart to? Fern had picked a cargo ship captain. What an obvious mistake! Cargo ship captain? The warning was in the title. Mick Mitchell was always away. Not just at work, an hour’s commute away, but on the other side of the world away: places like Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. The
brief times he was home, he still liked to be captain, which infuriated Fern, who was used to doing everything for herself and by herself when she was without him. But it
 
was the all-too-regular medical evidence (requiring hefty doses of antibiotics) of the other women in the other ports that finally sank his boat.

Owen and Lana’s dad, Roddy Valentine – mischievous and funny, a Celtic blue-black-haired heartthrob – had been so much better at family life at first. But
 
then he was an actor, away a lot, and despite his assurances Annie had not been able to stop herself from
 
wondering about
 
the possibility of other women. However, nothing had
 
prepared her for the abrupt and sho
cking end to her
 
marriage
. Overnight, Roddy had become history and she’d had to deal with it, somehow get over it, use every ounce of strength to pick herself and her two devastated children up and carry on.

How had this happened? It was a story that she didn’t like to tell. It was a story that somewhere in her head she didn’t really believe. She still didn’t like to hear his name unexpectedly, as it made her jump. Although Roddy had left over two and a half years ago now, she still woke up most mornings and looked across the bed for her handsome husband, momentarily convinced that it had all been a terrible dream.

A schoolboy handed her an information sheet and she scanned it over, checking the order of events and the rooms she should be heading towards.

An hour and a half had been allocated for form teacher talks, then it was into the hall for the headmaster’s speech and the performances. Would anyone notice if she skipped the main event?

‘Annie! Hello! How are you?’ Becca Wolstonecroft was bounding over, a plump, curly-blond-haired, friendly face, mother of four. Either fabulously rich sending four kids here, or fabulously broke, Annie hadn’t yet figured out which.

‘You’re looking wonderful – as usual,’ Becca said, kissing her on the cheek.

‘Oh that’s sweet of you,’ was Annie’s response. ‘Maybe you need new glasses, babes.’

‘No, no. Now that’s it, Annie, I’m going to have to get you to make me over one of these days. Look at me!’ Becca tipped her chin down and gestured with her arms. ‘I look like a bloody Lab
rador
.’

Annie choked back the laugh this deserved. Not just because it was funny, but because, yes, blond knee-length fake fur wasn’t perhaps the best look for Becca’s short, stocky physique.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Annie insisted. ‘It’s cuddly and . . . so
 
.
 
. .’ she struggled . . . ‘warm.’

‘Oh yes well, a warm, cuddly Lab then!’ Becca exclaimed.

‘Right, OK. Do you do anything on a Tuesday evening?’ Annie asked.

‘No,’ she said hesitantly.

‘Next Tuesday evening, then.’

‘Hmmm?’ Becca sounded confused.

Annie had already whipped her pink mock croc Filofax out of her handbag – she didn’t hold with electronic diaries, having crashed too many of them in the past. She also didn’t hold with handing out her business card and expecting people to call: they never did, you had to get them to commit while you had them by the short and curlies. She never left a St Vincent’s event without netting at least one new client.

‘Next Tuesday evening,’ Annie began. ‘Me in your wardrobe sorting you out, telling you what to keep and what to bin. Explaining in detail, with pictures, what and where you need to buy to make sure you always look amazing from now on.’

Becca was looking very doubtful: ‘Erm . . . well . . . What do you charge?’

‘Probably just a bit more than the value of your current outfit,’ Annie teased.

‘And what do you think that is?’ Becca looked down at her furry coat.

‘Hmmm . . . all in, including the M&S shoes . . . two hundred and twenty pounds?’ came the guess.

‘Good grief
!
How much!?
’ Becca look
ed genuinely horrified.

‘It’ll be mates’ rates,’ Annie assured her. ‘We’ll be all done for less than a trolley dash round the M&S food hall.’

‘Well, er . . .’

‘Look, I’ll pencil you in. What’s your telephone number and I’ll phone to confirm a few days before?’

‘OK, great.’ Becca brightened up, obviously under the delusion that when the call came, she’d be able to play for time. But Annie happily scribbled the number down knowing perfectly well that on the phone, she would win.

‘C’mon.’ Becca dived for a change of subject. ‘I want to get Eric’s teacher out of the way first. Shall we go up to
 
Godzilla’s room together?’

‘Don’t,’ Annie warned her. ‘I’ll probably shake her by the hand and call her that.’

Lana’s, and therefore Eric’s, current form teacher was the school battleaxe: the kind of dragon who roared just for the sake of roaring and enjoyed sending children scurrying away in fear.

‘Eric!’ Becca called to her husband, Eric senior, a red-faced man stuffed into a pinstriped suit. ‘This way. Let’s get started.’

Upstairs in the corridors and in the classrooms, parents were milling, looking at the artwork on the walls (‘
Gosh, Jessamy’s showing so much talent, look at the brush strokes. We should take her to Florence for the summer holidays. She should be inspired by the masters
’); leafing through jotters and textbooks (‘
Isaac’s just brilliant at maths . . . look at this, he hasn’t set a foot wrong. The Kumon classes after school were worth every penny
’); waiting for their turn to speak to the form teachers (‘
George already thinks she’s Oxbridge material . . . that’s right, she’s ten in April . . . but she already reads Dickens. Oh? Henry’s on to James Joyce?
’)

At St Vincent’s, parents were very, very interested in how their children were doing and never missed the opportunity for a progress report.

‘Jill!’ Annie tapped the shoulder of one of the mothers, who had recently become a client of hers. ‘Look at you! Lovely.’ She smiled, appreciating Jill from head to toe, taking in the caramel mac they’d bought together, the gorgeous velvet scarf tied just so, and the confident Bobbi Brown glow on Jill’s face.

Smiling back, Jill said: ‘Thank you,’ just as Annie had taught her: ‘
Thank you is enough, no more “oh this old thing?” or “I just threw this on” or “I ran backwards through a bush on my way over here” . . . or whatever else you used to say in response to compliments
.’

After several minutes of chat, Jill pointed surreptitiously and whispered to Annie: ‘There’s Tor! Tor Flemin
g. She’s been completely stuffed
in the divorce: Richard’s keeping the house, he gets joint custody of Angela with all the plum holiday weeks
and Tor doesn’t even g
et an allowance. Totally stuffed
. I think she’s going to fall apart. Look at her. No-one needs you more than her, Annie.’

Annie followed the discreetly pointed finger to the mother of one of Lana’s classmates. Poor Tor. Her bare, exhausted face hovered above a shapeless pale blue anorak and beneath a scruffy mid-brown bob with a tragic grey parting. Worst of all, Richard – tall, handsome and commanding, expensive navy blue overcoat, smart golfing umbrella to hand – was several steps ahead of her, scrutinizing a painting on the wall with too much interest. They’d obviously decided to put Angela first and come to this evening together.

Annie bustled forward, straight past Richard with an effusive ‘Tor! How are you? I haven’t seen you for ages, you’ve got to come round . . .’

Soon enough, it was Annie’s turn to pull up the chair
 
opposite Lana’s form teacher, the feared fifty-something, super-strict Miss Gordanza.

After a curt hello, Miss Gordanza turned to the three pages of typed notes she had on her desk about Lana – and term was only in its first half.

‘Well, Mrs Valentine, there were certainly some difficulties with Lana in the run-up to Christmas,’ Miss Gordanza began, adjusting purple cat’s-eye spectacles on her over-powdered, pointed nose.

‘Difficulties’ was putting it mildly. Lana and her gang of friends had egged each other on to play a series of
 
increasingly daring and dodgy pranks throughout the
 
Christmas term: raw fish hidden in classrooms over
 
a holiday weekend and then the spectacular treacle-based sabotage of the school orchestra’s brass instruments. The Christmas concert had come to a very sticky end.

An MI5-scale investigation had followed involving the headmaster, various teachers, Lana, five of her friends and all relevant parents. The girls had been punished and had left for the holidays in disgrace. Back at school in January, a clever penance had been devised: Lana and the others involved were now in charge of the school’s charity fund-raising group, although Lana was still trying to weasel out.

‘She’s enjoying school a lot more,’ Annie was telling Miss Gordanza. ‘She promised me a fresh new start this term and she seems to be keeping to that. She’s really into her GCSE course . . .’ she heard herself gushing a lot more enthusiastically than Lana might have.

‘I’ll be keeping a close eye on her,’ Miss Gordanza said as Annie fixated on the harsh fuchsia lipstick on the teacher’s thin lips. It was the kind of pink tide line that wouldn’t have dared to rub off, even at night. Probably Miss Gordanza woke up every morning to that same little pink pinched mouth.

‘Yes, so will I,’ Annie assured Godzilla, focusing on her gold locket, because the teacher was wearing the national dress of fifty-something battleaxes: a navy skirt with knife-pleats and a pale acrylic turtleneck, stretched tight over the ample bosom to create a little trampoline for the locket. She probably wasn’t going to agree to a makeover though, was she?

‘There are . . . I mean . . . Lana is bound to have issues because of her father’s . . . ah . . . situation,’ Miss Gordanza went on awkwardly. ‘But I’m sure they’re not beyond the control of this school.’