Piers was fiddling with the other envelopes and Grace was sure she could make out the outline of a wad-like object, which made her concentration waver.
‘Ms Reeves . . . Grace . . . I don’t mean to rush you,’ Piers almost moaned as something in the inner pocket of his jacket began to ring. ‘Here’s a pen.’
Grace had only skim-read the top sheet, but it was enough to decide that there didn’t seem to be anything particularly sinister in the contract. She quickly signed her name and watched as Piers signed as a witness.
‘Do I get my own copy?’ she asked, because there’d been two copies of her
Skirt
contract, but all she could really think about was the three envelopes that Piers was withholding.
‘I’m not sure. I’ll ask Madeleine when I get back to the office,’ Piers said, as he tucked the contract away. ‘OK, these are for you. Vaughn said you’d know what to do with them.’
He’d got that right. Grace tried really hard to contain herself and not squeak like an overexcited little piggy as Piers finally handed over the envelopes. ‘Thank you,’ she breathed.
Grace saw Piers to the main doors, then ran up seven flights of stairs so she could lock herself in the wheelchair toilet before she eagerly ripped into the largest envelope. Inside were two stiff bundles of money; ten- and twenty-pound notes so shiny and new that Grace couldn’t resist holding them up to her nose. She then opened the second thickest envelope, which had
Clothing Allowance
helpfully written on it, and found another £2,000 inside. She plopped down on the toilet, then quickly stood up when she realised she hadn’t put the lid down first. Finally, she sank down and stared at the money spilling in her lap.
£7,000! Suddenly all the indignities of the past week didn’t matter.
Pffft!
Not when she had cold hard cash in her hot little hands. There was no doubt or hesitation now that the money was real. Through a sequence of events that she still didn’t completely understand, Grace was going to live the life that she’d only read about in the pages of
Skirt
: parties, champagne receptions, first-class travel and lots and lots of lovely frocks. And shoes. And bags.
Yes, there was the whole
thing
with Vaughn, but he was probably on his way to Moscow right now for a whole week, and if he was hardly ever going to be around, then Grace could deal. She’d be jetted off to some glorious locale once every fortnight, be glittering and witty, shag him then fly home again. There were worse ways to earn £5,000 and allowances a month. Hell, she’d worked in a pub in Dalston for four pounds an hour and had the landlord trying to shove his hand down the back of her jeans when his wife wasn’t looking. This was completely different. It was practically respectable.
If the nagging doubts hadn’t completely disappeared, then the contents of the third envelope would have made them melt away like drops of water on a hot griddle. Inside was a membership card to a spa equidistant between the
Skirt
offices and Vaughn’s gallery. It was the beauty equivalent of those invitation-only, private members’ clubs that wouldn’t even give out a street number. And thankfully, Kiki wasn’t a member. In fact, Grace remembered how Lily had spent weeks trying to sort out Kiki’s membership and they’d point blank turned her down.
Grace had been worried that the spa staff would give her knowing looks when she rolled up for her first appointment - that she was just the latest in a long line of Vaughn’s girls and they’d seen it all before. But they couldn’t have been nicer, even sending someone out to Pret a Manger to get her a sandwich when they’d realised she was on her lunch-break, though the spa was so luxurious that Grace had been terrified of getting mayonnaise on the white leather that seemed to coat everything from the walls to the couch that she lay starkers on while her pasty flesh was worked on.
Over the next few days, a new Grace started to emerge. It wasn’t just the best efforts of trained aestheticians with their tri-enzyme facials and bleach baths, but as if they’d also taken a rubber to Grace’s face to smooth out the frown and the pinched look from worrying about money, Kiki, and why none of her relationships ever lasted.
She was never going to be a beauty, but her grandad always said she scrubbed up all right and Grace was beginning to scrub up to the nth degree. All the little flaws that she’d catalogue as she stood naked in the bath and twisted and contorted so she could get an all-round reflection in the mirror above the sink were becoming a thing of the past. The little bumpy spots on the back of her thighs and arms had been pummelled away, her blackheads obliterated and her hair had recovered from its bleach bath and was now a glossy chocolate brown. Every time she passed a shop window, Grace couldn’t resist preening a little, then shaking her head to see her hair give a little shimmy then settle back down without ever losing its shape.
Still, Grace faced her first bikini wax with trepidation. She had heard tales of the close bond that formed between waxer and waxee. Mainly from Lily as she was the only one of Grace’s friends with a spa membership and she got on with everyone - but Grace wasn’t expecting a short, squat woman who eyed her up and down as she entered the waxing chamber and barked, ‘I’m Galya. Take off your knickers,’ in an Eastern European accent.
Lily hadn’t said anything about her waxer snorting in disbelief either, but then Lily didn’t wear boy-cut panties with the Superman logo on them.
‘On the table,’ Galya demanded, staring at Grace’s pubic hair. ‘You do this yourself, huh?’
Grace raised herself up on her elbows and nodded. She wanted to defend her trimming skills but realised it would be futile as the woman snorted again and started heating up the wax.
‘You want the Brazilian?’ Galya asked after a few moments of fraught silence.
‘Is that the one with the little landing strip?’ It had been a while since
Skirt
had done anything on the latest trends in waxing.
Galya approached Grace’s spread legs with a pot of wax. ‘New boyfriend,’ she sniffed. ‘First-timers always come for the new boyfriend.’
Grace looked helplessly up at the ceiling. ‘Well, yeah. Kind of. It’s hard to explain,’ she added as she eyed Galya and her spatula warily.
‘What’s he like?’
How to sum up Vaughn in one sentence to a woman whose first language wasn’t English. ‘Er . . . older,’ was the best she could do.
Galya cackled knowingly. Grace was rather warming to her. ‘How old?’
Grace picked a number. Any number. ‘Thirty-nine,’ she said decisively.
‘Then I take off everything. The older ones like that. Lift up your leg.’
It hurt like a bitch, though Grace wasn’t going to give Galya the satisfaction of even the smallest, ‘Ow!’ By the time she was ordered on to her hands and knees so Galya could wax a place where Vaughn would never go (not for £5,000 a month, not for all the couture gowns in Paris), Grace realised that all the times she’d known embarrassment before had just been a dress rehearsal for this moment.
There were other parts of her life that were in desperate need of a makeover too, but Grace had been putting it off until a week had passed and all that money was still stashed in the Marc Jacobs bag in her oven. Finally, Grace took it out. Then she hauled out one of the shoe boxes and started sorting through the bills - there were so many of them and none of them were in the right order. Grace couldn’t remember which ones were pending and which ones had been shunted over to a debt consolidation company and then promptly forgotten about. There was the interest and the late fees and the penalty charges and in the end, it was easier to go with gut instinct and prioritise the two most important debts.
The next day, Grace couriered over six months of back-rent to her landlady and ambled down to TopShop in her lunch-hour so she could pay off the £2,318 and 35p she owed on her storecard. That was the £5,000 completely gone and then some, but she dipped into the clothing allowance to buy a fitted tuxedo jacket from the new Kate Moss collection. Then she paid twenty pounds for a box of mediocre sushi from the place around the corner just like the rest of the fashion team.
On the Saturday, Grace bought a Zac Posen silk jersey dress in almost the same shade of green as one of the pictures she’d seen hanging up in Vaughn’s gallery, and a pair of Oscar de la Renta peeptoe slingbacks. That took up the rest of the clothing allowance and Grace was back to bananas, noodles and trying to scare up enough loose change to top up her Oyster card. Next month, she promised herself, she’d make another sizeable dent in the bills before she even thought about shopping.
Now she only had one thing to worry about, but another week rolled by and Vaughn had become nothing more than a shadowy Fairy Godfather, just lurking at the edges of her mind. So even Kiki at her most vicious couldn’t wipe the beatific smile off Grace’s face. Kiki had returned on the Monday from her annual fortnight in St Barts with the devil on her shoulder and had actually ripped up Grace’s ideas and flung them in her face during the monthly fashion and beauty brainstorm. Grace clutched the BlackBerry that had been couriered over that morning by Ms Jones as if it was a Kevlar shield and decided to rise above it. Keeping calm in the face of Kiki’s most savage mood yet would be great training for when Vaughn did put in an appearance.
‘I don’t know what you’re smirking about, Grace,’ Kiki hissed as Grace stared resolutely at her feet, which had been treated to their third intensive pedicure that lunch-time and were, for the first time in years, devoid of calluses and hard skin. ‘And your hair looks even more ridiculous than usual. Get out!’
Grace was only too happy to escape to the cupboard. They’d just had a delivery from Milan and were about to start work on the January issue (that actually went on sale in December), which meant parties, which meant party frocks. There was no harm in trying on a couple in preparation for next month’s clothing allowance. It was probably tempting fate but Grace was powerless to resist in the face of Miu Miu.
She was just easing up the zip of a little Roland Mouret number when she realised that her discarded jeans were humming and vibrating. Bending down carefully so she didn’t split the tight seams, she retrieved her new BlackBerry. It hadn’t done anything since it had been couriered over and she hadn’t given the number to anyone, so that meant . . .
‘Hello?’ It was hard to make your voice husky and alluring when you were wearing a dress so tight it was cutting off your blood circulation.
‘Grace. I need you to come with me to a party on Wednesday evening,’ Vaughn said, like it was a perfectly reasonable request for 12.35 p.m. on a Monday, when she hadn’t spoken to him for a fortnight.
‘Um, OK,’ she mumbled, her face flaring up because simply talking to him felt illicit. Grace made a mental note to phone her spa (
her
spa!) and book an emergency bikini wax, and a mani/pedi and maybe they could fit her in for a wash and blowdry after work on Wednesday and Jesus, two weeks ago all she’d ever had in the way of regular beauty treatments was a peel-off face mask as she watched
Project Runway
. . .
‘Grace,’ Vaughn said again, terse enough to cut right through all of Grace’s breezy notions that handling him would be just like handling Kiki. All of a sudden her mouth was dry and she had that funny taste at the back of her throat again. ‘You could try to be a little more articulate.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Grace clamped the phone under her ear while she made sure the cupboard door was shut. ‘Anyway, like, how are you?’
‘How am I?’ Vaughn echoed, sounding surprised that she’d even asked. ‘I’m fine. Have you done the reading? What did you think of the Karvovsky exhibition?’
Grace squirmed as much as she could in skin-tight silk crepe. She had bought one of the boring art books from Borders (the only one they’d had in stock) but mostly her research had involved reading a biography of Madame Pompadour. There was a long, fraught silence. ‘I went to the Tate Modern,’ she said at last.
There was a long sigh. ‘It’s not enough to just stand about looking pretty,’ he said through what sounded like tightly gritted teeth. ‘I thought I was perfectly clear about that.’
He’d said she was pretty before but now he dragged it up like an accusation. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said apologetically. ‘I got a bit carried away with spa appointments.’
‘Fine,’ Vaughn said, as if it really wasn’t fine. ‘Madeleine will send you some notes about Wednesday. She’ll try to keep them to bullet points, given your hectic schedule.’
‘Um, who’s Madeleine anyway?’
‘I believe you know her as Ms Jones. So, Wednesday. Come to the gallery for seven and be on time.’