Lily let herself be guided slowly through the kitchen as if she was just approaching the ninth month of a multiple pregnancy. Grace snagged a couple of spoons and they sat on Lily’s extremely naff but extremely comfortable canopied swing and gently rocked as they ate the rapidly melting ice cream.
There wasn’t much Grace could say but she liked to think that just being there for Lily in a companionable silence was enough. Also, she was still trying to process the shock, because Lily didn’t ever fuck up. The fuck-up gene was missing from her DNA. And was it wrong to be gloating just a little bit that Lily had well and truly fucked up this time? Probably.
‘Is that top from Paul and Joe?’ Lily asked eventually.
Grace looked down at her grey cotton smock. ‘Yeah, I got it at the sample sale last year.’ She chased a stubborn scoop of ice cream around with her spoon. ‘Too hot to wear anything clingy, isn’t it? God, this weather is so unBritish.’
Lily nodded. ‘I called round for you last night but you weren’t in.’
‘Oh, I was working.’
‘Doing what?’
‘There was some wedding going on.’ Grace was just congratulating herself on not actually lying, technically speaking, when Lily gave an anguished sob.
‘I’m not going to get to have my special day now.’
‘You can move the wedding up, Lils.’
‘I’ve been planning my wedding since I was thirteen, and me waddling down the aisle wasn’t part of the picture.’
‘Look, it’s September now. You won’t be showing that much if you have the wedding in, like, November or December. That will still give you enough time to organise everything.’ Grace held up her hand to ward off the protests that Lily had good to go. ‘You might have to downsize a little, but it would be kinda cool to get to share your special day with it - the baby, I mean.’
Lily nodded slowly. ‘I s’pose. I hadn’t thought about that.’
Grace knew that she wasn’t a particularly good friend, that she never did the right things or said the right words or responded in the right ways. But just this once, she wanted to buck the trend. ‘Remember when we went to
The Golden Age of Couture
at the V and A and they had that gorgeous draped gown by Madame Grès? You get married in winter and we can find you something like that in a really heavy silk jersey and it will skim, not cling. You’ll look beautiful, Lily.’
It worked. A proper smile was lighting up the other girl’s face for the first time that evening, chasing away the tear-tracks and the trembling bottom lip. ‘I do look good in white,’ she said. ‘Though maybe white would be pushing it. Do you think I could get away with ivory?’
They sat in the garden until dusk started creeping in, bringing a slight chill with it. Grace made scrambled eggs on toast and they were broaching the ever-thorny topic of bridesmaids’ dresses when Dan stumbled through the door, full of apologies and mixed blooms from the garage.
‘I’m so sorry, babe,’ he blurted out, managing to look shamefaced, while simultaneously shooting death rays at Grace.
‘Let’s hope the baby gets Lily’s looks and
her
disposition,’ she hissed out of the side of her mouth, as she brushed past Dan.
Life was happening all around her, Grace mused as she unlocked her front door. Lily would have the baby, her dad would buy them a bigger place, and no way would she come back to work. Grace’s visits with hand-knitted baby clothes would become less frequent and then Lily would disappear into the sunset with the other yummy mummies she’d met at her NCT classes. But for the first time, Grace didn’t feel like she was stuck where she was, being who she was, without any hope of ever changing.
This
thing
with Vaughn wasn’t built to last, but while it did, Grace felt as if it was giving her the potential to change; to be the Grace she wanted to be or at least, more like the Grace she wanted to be. It wasn’t just the outside stuff, the spa-ing and the pretty clothes and the posh weekend breaks. It was being with a man like Vaughn, who’d obviously seen something in her that she still couldn’t see herself. If she took her cues from Vaughn, let him guide her, got used to being in his world, then it would all rub off on her. She’d have that glossy patina that the posh girls, the successful girls, the sophisticated girls had that was nothing to do with how shiny their hair was but came from walking in a world which was always good to them. Grace wanted the key to that magic kingdom and Vaughn could give it to her for the next six months - or until the next pretty girl caught his eye.
Grace filled the kettle on auto-pilot, put a tea bag in a mug, got the milk out of the fridge and all the while she imagined the unspecified point of time in the future when Vaughn wouldn’t be able to recall her name or the shape of her breasts or what she’d been wearing the first time they met.
The kettle boiled at the same time that the BlackBerry let out one impatient buzz. Grace picked it up and opened the email she’d just been sent.
Please click on the link to view your travel itinerary for next weekend.
Regards
M Jones
Grace clicked on the link and discovered that she was booked on a flight to New York at 7.30 p.m. the next Friday. She took a ruminative sip of her tea and winced as she burned her tongue.
chapter sixteen
Time seemed to speed up over the next few weeks so Grace felt as if she was always arriving, or leaving, but never staying still long enough to remember to breathe in and out. Or get the eight hours’ sleep a night that she needed to resemble anything close to a human being the next day.
Grace was so tired that she’d taken to napping at the spa when she was getting her hair and nails done. She’d even set up an alarm system with her two favourite interns so she could have a power snooze in the fashion cupboard first thing in the morning, as the rest of the fashion team rarely put in an appearance much before eleven. Kiki was still suspicious though, and didn’t have a good word to say about her hair. ‘I think I preferred the black,’ she’d sniped when she’d caught Grace fingering her newly restreaked hair in a meeting. ‘And I absolutely hated the black.’
What with Kiki cranking the handle on the bitchometer, Lily overloading her with wedding prep and her contractually obligated dates with Vaughn, Grace was feeling a little ragged. But there were compensations. Not just the allowances, but the sleek black car that was always waiting to take her to work on the mornings after she’d been out with Vaughn. Or flying business class, not cattle class, on her three trips to New York, and staying in an Art Deco suite at the Plaza Athenée when they’d gone to Paris. It was all a blur really. When she tried to think back to the places she’d been, Grace could recall very few details, just the same things that kept cropping up over and over again. The delicate flutes of champagne, which now tasted as familiar to her as Diet Coke, the scent of expensive perfume as women she didn’t know leaned in to almost brush their lips against her cheek, the flat airless atmosphere of airport departure lounges.
The only detail that stood out in stark relief was Vaughn. It was early November now, and though Grace had swapped bare legs for woolly tights and had got used to the way her hair swished about her shoulders, her feelings about Vaughn hadn’t changed much from the first day they’d met.
He still had her on the freaked-out setting and Grace couldn’t imagine that changing any time soon. She’d started to think of him as two separate people. There was Good Vaughn, who was as elusive as a rainbow after a rainstorm, but was funny ha ha rather than funny weird and had bought her a £3,000 crystal-embroidered Marc Jacobs dress in Paris. Then there was his far more ubiquitous evil twin, Bad Vaughn, who found fault with everything that Grace said, did and wore, from letting her phone roll over to voicemail instead of answering it in five rings or less, inserting the word ‘like’ at random intervals (‘It’s not like anything, Grace. It either is or it isn’t’) to her wearing flat shoes because ‘I never realised just how short you are.’
During the second trip to New York he’d been outbid at an auction and had sunk into such a dark mood that he hadn’t spoken to Grace all evening. He’d only started speaking to her again when they were back in his huge but spartan Central Park apartment, and that was to tell her to relax because she’d been far too tense to even think about having sex with him.
Bad Vaughn was definitely her companion for this evening, Grace thought glumly. She’d wanted to go to the restaurant at the Pembroke Hotel for weeks after she’d read a review in
ES Magazine
. She’d even sent Madeleine some beauty freebies as a thank you when she’d managed to book them a table, and Piers had emailed her that afternoon to say that he’d heard Madonna was going to be there. But Bad Vaughn was doing everything in his power to ruin it for her.
‘ “Amish organic free-range chicken with foraged mushrooms”,’ Vaughn recited from the menu with a sneer. ‘Ridiculous. And this fashion for truffle fries is getting very boring.’
‘What about the lobster?’ Grace suggested brightly, looking at the daily specials. He’d obviously had a stinker of a day and Bad Vaughn didn’t deal with stress very well. ‘You like lobster, right?’
‘I’ll have the lamb,’ Vaughn decided, as if he was ordering his last meal. ‘And don’t try to humour me. What are you going to have?’
Grace flushed. He had this uncanny knack of sounding like her grandmother telling her to stop showing off when she was little. No put-down since had ever taken the wind out of Grace’s sails quite so effectively. Though Vaughn came a close second.
‘I’m going to have two starters instead of a main. Maybe the crab cakes and the country salad or something.’ Grace watched Vaughn wince at her mumbling. ‘No dessert,’ she added pointedly, because if he was going to keep on being mean to her then she wasn’t going to order dessert solely so he could eat it. ‘I’m not that hungry.’
They got through the meal with the barest minimum of conversation. Every time Grace tried out another amusing
bon mot
to show Vaughn that she’d done the required reading for that week, it was met with a grunt until he finally told her that she was giving him a headache. She could tell he was seething about her decision not to even look at the dessert menu, but his BlackBerry kept ringing with calls that he just had to take so he couldn’t bring pressure heaping down on her.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he hissed as it rang again, and he picked it up with a white-knuckled hand. ‘Now what?’ he barked into the receiver.
Grace looked at her reflection in the back of her spoon and tried not to eavesdrop on a very tense conversation about a collection of photographs for a new exhibition, which had been impounded by Customs for being obscene. Vaughn’s head sank lower and lower until he looked like he had no neck and he kept rubbing the bridge of his nose the way Grace did when she was getting a headache. He pushed his plate away virtually untouched and stood up.
‘Finish your dinner,’ he said shortly. ‘I’ll be waiting outside. I need to take this call. We’ll have to stop at the gallery on the way home.’
‘Um, do you want me to ask the waiter for a doggie bag?’ Grace asked, but Vaughn just scowled at her and walked off.
He was still scowling when she finally emerged from the restaurant.
‘I was beginning to think that you’d climbed out of the bathroom window and disappeared into the night,’ he snapped, as he held the car door open for her.
‘I had to get this.’ Grace handed him a little box containing a generous portion of bitter chocolate cake that she’d sweet-talked from their waiter. She really wished she hadn’t bothered now. ‘Thank you for taking me out to dinner.’
Vaughn peered at the contents of the box and Grace peered at his face and the warring emotions on it: surprise, delight and, inevitably, rejection. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said stiffly. ‘But I can’t eat this.’
‘You can watch me eat it then,’ Grace replied in exasperation. ‘Might even let you have a bite if—’
Grace didn’t even have a chance to finish the sentence with a sassy little quip, before Vaughn was hauling her into his arms so he could kiss her. He’d never kissed her like this before. Biting, hungry kisses, as if he couldn’t get enough of the taste of her, his hand tangling in her hair to tip Grace’s head back to meet his mouth.
His other hand was already sliding up her skirt in a possessive way, and just as she was about to protest because she didn’t want their driver to get an eyeful, Vaughn pulled away to talk to him. ‘Take us to the gallery,’ he ordered in an unsteady voice.