The Personal Shopper (51 page)

She followed him up and they came out into a big, pale yellow room, flooded with light from the tall Georgian windows at both ends

Plaster from the small holes in the ceiling had splattered the bare floorboards, but she didn’t dwell on that. It was a fabulous room, and so empty compared with the rest of Ed’s flat.

‘There’s a roof problem,’ he began, ‘I’ve had to take loads of stuff downstairs from the other rooms.’

‘Other rooms?’ Annie repeated.

‘Yeah, there’s this dining room, well, it was Mum’s sitting room, then there’s her kitchen next door and then her bedroom upstairs and two little attic bedrooms.’

Annie gaped at him, eyes wide, mouth hanging – not entirely flatteringly – wide open.

Finally, when her power of speech had returned she
 
asked him in utter amazement: ‘
You own the whole house?!
’

‘Well, I owe my sister a third . . . Mum helped her buy her flat . . . so the arrangement was Hannah would get a third when it was time to sell up.’

But Annie didn’t seem to take this in.

‘You own the whole house?’ she repeated. ‘A whole house, on my favourite street . . .’ Annie was heading towards the dining room door, eager to see the rest of the rooms. ‘Ed, baby,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘do you realize? All this time you’ve been hiding your most attractive feature from me!’

Chapter Thirty-four

The Preppie returns:

White cotton button-down shirt (Brooks Brothers)

Slim-fit khaki chinos (Banana Republic)

Midnight blue cashmere V-neck (Brooks Brothers)

Hiking boots (some things are harder to change)

Est. cost: $390

‘Are you sure, Annie? I mean, are you really, really sure?’

‘You look brilliant. Absolutely fantastic! Completely shaggable – and take that as a big compliment because I’m a gay man. Very gay,’ Connor added, waving a copy of the
Daily Mail
at them.

Right across the top of page five was a photo of him and Hector attending a film première in matching kilts with the caption:
The Manor’s Connor McCabe shows off the new man in his life.

‘Shut up will you!’ Annie shot at him. ‘You were supposed to stay in the kitchen with Dinah and keep out of our way.’

But
Annie’s favourite Ukrainian client,
Svetlana
,
was laughing: ‘Is fine,’ she said in her melodious alto. ‘I miss a man’s opinion of how I look.’

‘OK, come and see in the mirror,’ Annie instructed, stepping back to admire her handiwork.

She directed Svetlana towards the huge three-sided mirror in the corner of her bright white office. The room, which had once been Ed’s tatty sitting room, was now transformed. There was a desk with computer and telephone in one corner with a filing cabinet next to it topped with a monumental stack of fashion magazines. The room’s centrepiece was a comfortable pink sofa, with close at hand the mirror and several all-important clothes rails on wheels. The rails were for clients to hang up their many, many clothes: the ones they’d bought with Annie, the ones they’d dragged from the back of the wardrobe, the ones they needed help to part with or help to dare to wear.

‘Oh this is very good,’ Svetlana declared as she took a careful look at herself from all possible angles.

She was in a tight white Chanel suit with black trim on the jacket lapels. Black and white T-bar shoes and a small black patent bag completed the look.

The gas baron’s soon-to-be-ex-wife had her hair pulled back, soberly but softly, and her make-up had been under-applied by Annie in a way intended to make her look beautiful but vulnerable.

This was a dress rehearsal for her day in the divorce court. Annie liked to clothe her very wealthy divorcees in white Chanel
, telling them
: ‘White is a rite of passage colour. Chanel is as smart and appropriate as you can get, plus a couture suit costs reassuringly more than your wedding dress did. And it always seems
to have a winning effect on every
judge: male or female.’

‘Perfect,’ Annie agreed with Svetlana, smoothing the back of the jacket down. ‘You go kick Igor in the balls tomorrow. Just make sure,’ she added with a twinkle, ‘that you do it . . .’ her voice dropped low, ‘
sexy but ladylike
.’

This made both Connor and
Svetlana laugh. Then Svetlana
’s eye fell on the big black and white framed portrait photograph which dominated one of the white walls.

She walked towards it: ‘A client?’ she asked. ‘He is very handsome, no?’

‘Oh yes, babes, isn’t he?’ Annie agreed and felt . . . well . . . She walked over to stand beside Svetlana, so they were both looking at the photo of the roguish man in a black leather jacket leaning his chin on a balled-up fist, suppressing a grin and unmistakably hamming it for the camera.

‘That’s Roddy,’ Annie said and she felt OK. She was even able to smile proudly and add: ‘That’s a gorgeous photo of my late husband, Lana and Owen’s daddy.’ She looked at Svetlana and gave a wink. ‘We were very lucky to have had him. Weren’t we, Connor?’

That’s how Annie thought of it now. She had made peace with the reality that Roddy was no longer with them; now she was able to appreciate all the time they’d had
together. She felt blessed to have had him. She tried to think of his life as completed, rather than tearing herself to pieces with the thought that it was unfinished. Only very recently had she begun to
really
believe that just as
 
much happiness as she’d once had would come her way again.

There was something else Svetlana wanted to ask: ‘Are you going to come back to The Store, Annah? Or are you staying here in your lovely office where we have to come to you?’

In all honesty, Annie hadn’t decided.

Paula was the one who had phoned first to announce Donna’s demise with the words: ‘Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead!’

‘Maybe two or three days a week,’ Annie told Svetlana. ‘Maybe something like that can be arranged, but I don’t know yet . . . I like working for myself. I like taking clients to whatever shop I think will suit them best. And I love bossing them about in my office!’

When Svetlana had left (by taxi –
although
getting her driver back was one of her top settlement priorities), it was time to see what Dinah and Billie were doing in the kitchen upstairs.

The former dining room had been transformed into a modern, glamorous kitchen (but by using only the finest discount suppliers, Annie had come in under Ed’s careful budget).

‘How’s the cake? Oh Billie, what a brilliant idea! Is it a boat?’ Annie asked looking at the grey, knobbly sausage of mauled icing Billie had plonked into the middle of the iced ‘welcome home’ cake.

‘No, stupid!’ came the insulted reply. ‘It’s a plane.’

‘Aren’t you changing, Annie? You know . . . to look your most fabulous?’ Dinah asked, expecting Annie to
 
have a whole top-to-toe outfit planned for this big reunion moment.

‘Something from your New York trip,’ Connor urged. ‘It was three weeks ago and you’ve not shown off a single thing.’

‘Ah, New York!’ Annie gave a sigh. ‘I told you, Connor, it was a total shopping disaster. There I was in the shopping capital of the Western world with three empty credit cards and I never got round to shopping! I
 
never even got up the Empire State Building! I . . . we
 
.
 
. .’ and all of a sudden she felt slightly shy in front of her two best friends in the world.

‘Shall we take that to mean that you and Ed were a little bit too busy to go shopping?’ Connor asked.

‘Errm . . . maybe,’ was all the answer she made.

‘Is that the sound of a taxi engine outside?’ Annie ran over to look
out of the window.
‘It is! It’s him!
’ she shrieked.
He must have landed early.’

As Ann
ie flew to the stairs, Connor winked and sai
d, ‘I don’t think she’s really very keen on him, is she?!’

Annie pulled open the front door and launched herself at Ed.
First of all, he concentrated on her, but then he also had to come inside and gasp with
admiration as he saw his transformed home for the first time.

‘It
looks incredible!’ he told her. ‘Absolutely incredible.
Unbelievable.
’

‘So do you,’ she said
, arms tight round his waist.

‘Cashmere!’ she noticed immediately. ‘You bought yourself cashmere? The sales assistants over there must be even better than me.’

‘Yeah, they are,’ he teased. ‘But you’re the one I wanted to rush back to.’

Later that evening, Annie curled up with Ed on the sofa. There was still an endless amount to talk about but it was difficult trying to have a conversation while Owen and Lana seemed to be trampolining to something loud and blasting in their attic bedrooms upstairs.

‘Shall I go and tell them to keep it down?’ Annie asked.

‘No, no,’ Ed insisted. ‘I like it! They’ve picked a good song,’ he said approvingly. ‘And anyway, it makes this old place feel alive again. Like a proper home. I hated it when upstairs was all shut off and empty.’

‘Yeah, well, there’s alive and then there’s trashed,’ Annie warned.

‘You really do like this house, don’t you?’

‘I love it,’ Ed admitted. ‘It’s going to be such a wrench to sell it, especially now that you’ve made it so beautiful.’

‘And what if you didn’t have to sell?’ Annie wondered. ‘What if someone bought a third of the house, so that you could buy your sister out?’

‘Sell off the basement and maybe the garden as a separate flat, you mean?’ Ed asked. ‘Do you think that would raise enough?’

Annie shook her head and waved a rectangular piece of paper in front of Ed’s face.

‘I have a plan,’ she told him mischievously, as he took the paper from her hand and saw that it was a cheque for a hefty six-figure sum.

‘I’ve sold my flat – to the tenants,’ she began. ‘And with that money and a mortgage, that’s how much I could offer you for a third of your house, which I think is generous,’ she added, ‘and then all four of us could live here . . . together.’

She realized her heart was beating very fast as she waited for the enormity of this offer and all its implications to settle on Ed.

She felt as if she was proposing to him – and in a way she was: ‘What do you think?’ she finally had to ask when he still hadn’t made an answer.

‘Oh . . . goodness!’ he managed at last, with the hand-in-hair rummage which she knew meant he was nervous. ‘Are you sure, Annie? I mean, are you really, really sure? What about the children? This might be too fast for them.’

Holding his hands tightly, she took the time to explain to him that she was making the offer because of the children. She’d talked it through with them at length. They were the ones who didn’t want to leave, who loved their rooms, who felt at home here and, most importantly, who deeply approved of Ed. (Provided he acted like their teacher and absolutely nothing else at school . . . in fact if he could practically ignore Lana at
 
school if possible . . .)