Little Lady Agency and The Prince (21 page)

‘Um . . .’ I felt floundery.

‘That’s the kind of insider knowledge that Melissa’s so good at getting,’ said Jonathan confidently.

My heart sank. ‘Um, yes!’ I said, in response to a gentle nudge from Jonathan. ‘Absolutely!’

‘Listen, guys, we’ll be in touch,’ he said, and we all shook hands again and went off into the Paris evening. Dom and Farrah towards some trendy new bar that I pretended to have heard of, and me and Jonathan towards a coffee somewhere considerably less trendy, I hoped.

True to his word, we got a bus towards the river, where Jonathan bought me an ice cream and we walked along the Left Bank, listening to the jostle and gabble of buskers and street-sellers, soaking in the busy evening atmosphere.

I’d have been more soakable if my mind hadn’t been racing, trying to work out how on earth I could find out where Kylie went jogging. If she did.

‘That went well, don’t you think?’ said Jonathan. Now we weren’t in a business situation, he’d reverted to the familiar off-duty Jonathan I knew and much preferred. By off-duty, I mean he’d taken his cufflinks out and rolled up his sleeves a little, revealing fine strands of pale gold hair.

‘All down to you, though,’ he added. ‘Dom thought you were great. It’s a smart move, you know, letting them feel that no detail is too small. Bills, clubs, milk deliveries . . . Builds confidence in the whole package.’

‘So are you actually organising Dom and Farrah’s move right now?’ I asked.

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Oh.’ I licked my ice cream. ‘Does that mean you’ve handed in your notice at Dean & Daniels?’

He paused. ‘Not yet. Not exactly. You want another
glace
?’

I peered at him out of the corner of my eye. It really wasn’t like Jonathan to be so evasive.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m OK with this one. So when are they moving?’

‘It depends. I’m looking at a couple of properties for them. They’re looking at June, July – before Paris empties out for August . . .’

‘And when are you going to resign?’ I stopped walking and looked at him. ‘What’s the timetable? Because obviously I need to resign from my clients too.’

I ignored the little flip in my stomach as the words left my mouth.

Jonathan smiled and shrugged. ‘I hadn’t fixed a date beyond September, but I guess . . . August first? Give me time to make the transitions. How about that?’

‘Don’t you have to give Dean & Daniels more notice than that?’ I asked curiously. ‘It’ll take them ages to find someone who can take over from you.’

‘I’m . . . hmm, playing that one by ear, shall we say,’ he said, and neatly swiped the ice cream from my hand, giving it one lick before depositing it in a nearby bin. ‘Anyway, that’s quite enough business. Here we are, walking along the Seine – how much more romance could you want?’

‘None,’ I assured him.

10

My knowledge of Paris was based largely on films –
An American in Paris, Paris When it Sizzles, Day of the Jackal
(Nelson’s favourite) – and to an extent, my weekends with Jonathan lived up to my Technicolor expectations.

The Marais apartment, for a start, was the top floor of an old-fashioned ‘
hôtel particulier
’, built around a cobbled courtyard and hidden from the street by one of the anonymous gates I found so fascinating. Jonathan had picked up the ‘in’ areas immediately, and took great pains, while standing on our balcony, to demonstrate how close we were to the Place des Vosges, a huge seventeenth-century square where aristocrats had once paraded and where yummy mummies in puffa jackets now wheeled their mini-puffa-jacketed offspring.

I was much more excited about wandering through the boutiques and tiny galleries that filled the narrow alleyways of the Marais. I made endless lists of things I wanted to find, for my own interest, as well as for the benefit of future clients – the glowing brass and glass cafes on the Left Bank where every customer looked like a philosopher or a writer, the higgledy-piggledy flea markets at Porte de Vanves and the stalls of old books in the Latin Quarter. Everywhere you looked in Paris, there was some exquisite detail to admire: even the
métro
was stylish, with its art nouveau flourishes and decorated station walls, unlike the spare Underground signs (and the frankly incomprehensible New York subway, all numbers and no names). I wanted to eat
tarte au citron
and drink
noisettes
at polished counters and wear cropped cigarette pants, and buy a scooter and swan around in my own Jean-Luc Godard film.

In real life, though, I couldn’t find a pair of cigarette pants that didn’t make me look like a skittle, and Jonathan refused to get a scooter. He also insisted on doing a fair amount of dull trekking round residential areas. Each time we left the apartment there was another dramatic set of wrought-iron carriage gates with a mysterious courtyard just beyond, or another boutique with one perfect red-leather bag in the window. Jonathan indulged me for maybe an hour, then insisted we get back to business. I tried to tell him that it was my business to know where to get the perfect bag, but he laughed and dragged me away to the next ‘up and coming area’.

But on balance, if I could just get over my innate English fear of feeling stupid when I tried to speak French (and taking it personally when the French speaker sniggered at me), I didn’t see why Jonathan and I couldn’t make a little corner of Paris’s bustling village our own.

When I came back on the Eurostar on Monday I brought with me some fresh Poilane bread for Nelson, fabulous weather and an excellent mood, which was further improved when I called in at the newsagent’s on the corner to get the new week’s magazines. I discovered, on picking up the new
OK!
and
Hello!
that Nicky’s appearance at the Sail Away dinner had made the back pages, albeit tucked away in a corner.

‘Someone you know, love?’ enquired the newsagent, as I squeaked with delight at the sentence: ‘Prince Nicolas of Hollenberg revealed his boyhood enthusiasm for the delights of the ocean wave, while generously donating a cruise on the family yacht as the star prize in the raffle.’

‘Yes,’ I said, beaming. ‘Me!’

I showed him the page: it was just a tiny picture, but you could clearly see me standing next to Nicky, with Nelson and Leonie in the background. We all looked glassy-eyed and shiny of forehead, but Nicky looked perfect, staring into the camera with a practised smile.

‘Ooh, dear,’ said the newsagent, looking at the magazine, then looking at me. ‘It’s true what they say about the camera piling on the pounds, eh?’

‘It’s the way I’m standing,’ I said stiffly, then realised he thought I was Leonie, the only dark-haired girl in the picture.

‘Who’s that blonde bird?’ he went on in more approving tones. ‘What a cracker! You don’t get many of them to the pound, eh? Eh?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you don’t,’ and hastily swept up the magazines, grabbed the new
Tatler
and a packet of chocolate digestives, paid and left.

Once I got in and changed into my work clothes, I checked the messages, then settled down with a coffee to peruse the magazines properly. One of the perks of my office was that my accountant (Nelson) encouraged me to spend lavishly on glossy mags to write off against tax as ‘research’. Obviously, I then had to devote time to reading them too, also for ‘research’.

There was a little shot of Roger and Zara too, probably because, apart from Nicky, she was the only one of us who looked sufficiently glamorous enough to belong there. Her cheekbones stood out a mile. So did Roger’s horrible hand-me-down dinner jacket, although I had to admit his new clean-shaven look was making him seem almost eligible. Chunder and Piglet were also featured under their real, betitled names, positively snoring with ennui, alongside some cricketers and a couple of friends of my mother’s.

As I was turning the page round to see if I recognised one of the chinless men lurking in the background, the office phone rang.

‘Hello?’ I said, hoping it would be Jonathan.

It wasn’t.

‘The Little Lady Agency?’ I said. ‘Good morning!’

There was a long pause at the other end.

‘Hello?’ I said, again. This wasn’t unusual. Clients called me in states of high agitation. Sometimes they were hiding from their not-quite-ex-girlfriends, or trapped by the tie in their washing machines, or paralysed with indecision in Rigby & Peller.

‘Hello?’ I said, one more time.

‘Melissa?’ said a surprised voice.

I put the pen down. ‘Hello, Emery,’ I said heavily.

Emery’s phone manner was enraging. She always managed to sound surprised when someone answered, and quite often appeared to have forgotten who she’d rung up to begin with.

‘I can’t speak for long,’ she said, in a more focused way than normal. ‘I’m in the garden and I’ve got a leak issue.’

‘I didn’t know you were growing vegetables, Em,’ I said, confused. ‘Organic?’

‘No, a
leak
issue, I mean, with my . . . you know. Anyway, Mel, you’ve got to come home.’

This was the way things used to be in the Old Days. Before I started my agency and got some self-respect and a backbone, I was forever being plagued by imperious Romney-Jones demands to ‘pop home’ to run up some curtains or deal with a furious journalist. But gone were the days when my family could summon me like a dog.

I didn’t mind
listening
to Emery from afar, though. I could file simultaneously. ‘What’s happened now?’

‘Daddy’s playing up about what to call the baby, and he and Nanny Ag are at daggers drawn over the nursery, and Mummy’s knitting weird matinee jackets instead of Allegra’s animals. Yesterday I found her using Braveheart as a model.’

‘Em, come on, that’s just normal,’ I said. ‘Can’t you get Nanny Ag on side? She likes you.’

Emery’s patented sigh gusted down the line.

I wasn’t falling for that.

‘Well, what about William?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t he home to back you up?’

‘He’s had to fly back to Chicago for work. Anyway, he and Daddy fell out about . . . oh, I don’t know, he shot something he shouldn’t have.’

Poor William. Reduced to stalking the estate in search of fresh food. I felt my resolve waver in a rush of sympathy, but I stiffened. It was a slippery slope down to organising the whole darn shooting match, and what with Nicky and swotting up on tailors and manicurists in Paris for Jonathan, I just didn’t have time.

‘Look, Em, you’re a mother now,’ I said. ‘You’ve got every right to put your foot down about things. Just tell them! Try shouting.’

‘I tried shouting . . .’ Emery’s voice wobbled and I knew her limpid blue eyes would be welling with glassy tears. ‘It was too weird. I was nearly sick. I knew it would be like this. Just come back for the evening? Please, Mel? We’re meant to be talking about the christening, and Daddy’s stressing us all out about the guest list already.’

I looked at the diary. Now I wasn’t going to have to break it to Sebastian Ogilvy that red jeans hadn’t been in fashion since the late eighties, I could leave the office at 3 p.m. And I supposed Gabi could come over and talk about her catering plans over lunch, rather than after work . . .

‘You could pretend you were coming home to see Braveheart,’ said Emery, a little too quickly for the one Romney-Jones supposed to be too ethereal for machinations. ‘I can say I rang you because he was off his food, or something? Please? You could set off really early in the morning and be back at work by ten. And,’ she added as the coup de grâce, ‘I
need
you, Melissa. I need my sister here. I mean, Allegra keeps popping up to yell at Mummy, but she’s not the same as you. She scares the hell out of poor baby.’

There was a pause while I imagined Allegra flitting malevolently around the nursery like something out of
Snow White
.

‘Please?’ she added, wobbling her voice.

‘Oh, God,’ I said, caving in like a sandcastle. ‘Fine. Just make sure Mrs Lloyd makes something nice for supper, because I’m not driving all that way to argue over a bowl of mulligatawny soup.’

‘Fab!’ Emery said, sounding better at once, and rang off.

Hating myself for being such a pushover, I made another pot of coffee and helped myself to the box of magnificently rich French chocolates I kept in the top drawer of my desk, to be doled out as daily rewards. It was a diet trick personally recommended by Solange. (‘Just have a little of the best, Melissa.’ Disapproving stare at my stomach. ‘That is the trouble with the English. You stuff yourself with rrrrubbish.’) I could see where she was coming from, but due to the stressful nature of my work, I’d already scoffed nearly the whole top layer.

Picking up the phone again, I rang Nelson at work, to let him know I wouldn’t be in for dinner.

‘But I’ve got line-caught scallops!’ he said, sounding disappointed. ‘I was going to cook them tonight. Can’t you just ring home, have them put you on loudspeaker, and tell them off from the comfort of your own kitchen?’

‘No,’ I said glumly. ‘They’d all just shout at once. Anyway, I thought if I went now and offered some advice, it would save time later.’

‘The only thing that would save time with your family would be to put them on television and let the public vote them into space, week by week,’ said Nelson.

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ I said, thinking with dread of the horrors in store at the christening. Daddy was bound to invite every relative he wanted to show off to. It could run into hundreds. ‘Anyway, I’ll be back tomorrow morning, so rather than waste it, can’t you—’

‘It won’t go to waste,’ he said airily. ‘Leonie’s coming round.’

‘Leonie?’ I felt an odd twinge in my stomach. ‘You didn’t say she was coming for
dinner
.’

‘Didn’t think I had to,’ said Nelson.

‘Oh. Of course not.’ I said. ‘Um. I didn’t realise you two had reached the dinner-at-home stage.’

‘Scallops don’t keep,’ said Nelson. ‘I thought it might be nice to get to know Leonie a little better, before we have to go off sailing for a weekend. For someone who was doing a good impression of Cupid last week, you don’t sound very pleased.’