by Fiona Gibson
As soon as I’ve said it, my nervousness seems to ebb away. I know what to say now, and how to say it. For the past decade I have been immersed in this company and used its products every single day. I can do this.
I glance sideways at Sonia and her besuited coterie, then turn back to the front. ‘Because every woman we meet is an individual with her own hopes and concerns. The fact is, she has willingly come to our counter, and we should respect her for that, whether or not she decides to make a purchase.’ I stop, take a deep breath and plough on: ‘She’s likely to be a busy person who has given us her time when there’s probably a hundred other things she could be doing. Shouldn’t we value that? Should we really regard her as a problem or a drain on our resources?’
The atmosphere is changing in the room. My colleagues are relaxing, shoulders shifting, and I pick up the odd murmur of agreement. ‘Anyway,’ I continue, ‘a woman who enjoys the counter experience might decide to treat herself that day, or she may take away nothing more than a good feeling, a sense of happiness, and if that happens, then we have done our job very well.’
I clear my throat and continue. ‘For instance, recently I had a new mum with her little boy and baby at the counter. Her name was Jane. She just needed – I don’t know – to be taken care of for twenty minutes or so. To be treated and enjoy a little respite from all the responsibility, you know?’ I catch Nuala’s eye. She is smiling broadly, then glances around as if fearful of being told off. ‘And then,’ I go on, feeling as fired up now as when I told Ralph to stop his toilet perving, ‘there was an older lady, an absolute beauty, in her sixties, who said she’d never worn make-up in her life – can you believe that? Not even a lick of mascara!’ Laughter fills the room. ‘But even so,’ I continue, ‘she enjoyed the experience because it was new to her.’ I pause, picturing Gilda as she studied her reflection in the mirror: I like it. Gosh, that’s a surprise. Thank you very much! ‘I mean,’ I add, ‘can you imagine trying your first lipstick at that age and discovering you love the effect? What a pleasant surprise that must be!’ There are more murmurs of approval.
I look back at Sonia. Her mouth is set firm like a trap, the sinewy bits of her neck jutting out, reminding me of poultry.
Aware of tiny knots forming in my stomach, I turn back to the audience and spot Zara, who seemed to have me down as some kind of Geddes and Cox turncoat, and who is now nodding and mouthing, Go on!
‘Lorrie?’ Sonia is waving at me. ‘I think you’ve said enough, thank you …’
I turn to block her from my vision. ‘So,’ I continue, picturing Cameron and Amy now, feeling proud of their mother even though I peddle face creams for a living, ‘I believe our approach is just right and I know that Claudine and Mimi, our founders, would agree when I say that any woman, no matter how much money she has to spend, is welcome to stop by again and again, and it doesn’t matter if she takes up a whole hour of stool time …’ I lace the phrase with distaste – ‘because looking after her is what our job is all about.’
I stop, and smile. My trousers seem to have loosened and I can breathe normally again. Even the pinchy sensation in my toe has abated. As I remove the microphone from my tunic, the applause starts, tentatively at first, then building until the room fills with a gale of clapping, and even the odd cheer. I laugh, filled with relief, and stride past Sonia who gives me an alarmed look as if I have just vomited down the front of her red dress.
I hand my microphone back to the blonde woman and bob back down onto my seat. ‘Oh my God,’ Andi breathes. ‘You were amazing!’
‘Well, we’ll see …’
‘Totally brilliant,’ Helena says, grabbing my arm. ‘Thank God someone around here still talks sense!’
The sharp clack of heels causes the hubbub to die down. Sonia has reclaimed the stage. ‘Okay, thank you, Lorrie. That was very … illuminating. Now I’ll hand over to Dennis Clatterbrock who’s spearheaded the acquisition. He’ll take us through a brief overview of La Beauté’s new parent company.’
So that’s Mr Chiselled’s name: Dennis Clatterbrock. I’d have had him down as a Dylan or a Ben.
I don’t take in much of his speech, apart from the fact that Geddes and Cox’s main focuses are their screen wash, stock cube and tomato fertiliser brands. How very relevant to all of us sitting here, eager to return to our counters and get on with the business of selling eye shadow. ‘Tomo-Grow,’ he’s boasting now, as a photo of plasticky-looking tomatoes appears on the screen, ‘outperforms the nearest competitor by thirty-seven per cent. We’re talking sixty-two per cent growth year on year …’ Is he talking product sales or huge, bulging tomatoes? ‘That’s three units sold every minute. It’s idiot-proof. Takes the gardening out of gardening …’ Luckily, Stu pretty much takes care of our plant maintenance. I just ‘help’. We even have a couple of tomato plants of our own – they have actually borne fruit, amazingly – although Stu prefers to use a natural organic feed.
I watch Dennis Clatterbrock, tall and imposing with an actorly voice, his fleshy hands resting on the lectern as pie charts and graphs flash up onto the screen. His supposedly ‘brief overview’ seems to be rumbling on for a week. I feel like the teenage me, fidgeting impatiently as Mrs Rippon, my English teacher, rambled on about the symbolism and metaphors in Macbeth until nothing seemed to make sense anymore. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me. At the very least, I seem to have a faulty attention span, and Cam has already surpassed me in the general knowledge stakes. I can’t even tell what’s proper art and what’s just been left lying about by the cleaner – that mop and bucket at the Nutmeg Gallery – or even identify a lobster pot.
My stomach growls as, finally, Dennis Clatterbrock turns his attentions to our beloved French brand. ‘… Ascertain whether a customer has expressed a specific product need prior to allocating stool time … We are not in the business of giving away products for free … Samples are to be used as add-ons, as a thank you to those spending over £100 …’
For God’s sake! We usually dish out freebies like sweets. They cost the company pennies. What’s with the meanness all of a sudden?
‘… So thank you, everyone, for coming this morning,’ he concludes. ‘I hope you’re as excited as I am to be part of the Geddes and Cox family. Take a look at our website, familiarise yourselves with our product portfolio and be reassured that today is the day we go from strength to strength.’
And that’s it. There’s a short, stunned silence, then we all rise from our seats and shuffle past the messed-up array of pastries and fruit towards the exit, funnelling through it in muttering groups, and step out into the bright summer’s day.
‘Blimey,’ Helena mutters.
‘You did really well there,’ says Nuala, scuttling towards us. I catch her glancing around, as if scared of being caught fraternising with the lowly counter staff.
‘Thanks,’ I reply, ‘although it’s probably not what they wanted to hear …’
‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we?’ she trills, leaping away in order to hail a cab. She doesn’t offer to share one with us. Too mortified, probably. Instead, Helena, Andi and I take one together and barely say a word the whole journey back to work. It’s as if we’re too stunned to even speculate as to what might happen next.
Back at the store, the three of us take over from the rather frazzled-looking relief team. Clicking into counter lady mode, I advise on eye creams, loose powders and our top-of-the-range hydrating gel. I traffic stop as if nothing untoward has happened today, and do complete make-ups for a couple of young women who are giddy on prosecco, having enjoyed a boozy lunch.
Rather childishly, I am terribly generous with free samples, delighting the women with tiny pots of cream and serum even though they have only purchased one item each. ‘Wow, are you sure? Thank you!’
‘Yes, of course. Take them home and enjoy them …’
Come and get it! I feel like crying, wishing I could send a hail of complimentary mascaras flying across the floor for customers t
o scramble over. Because what my job really boils down to is making people happy; it’s simply what I do.
Or at least, it’s what I did.
Chapter Fifteen
Back home, I find Cam and Mo in the garden, passing Mo’s new guitar back and forth as if it were a baby they’ve just brought home from hospital.
‘Be careful,’ Mo warns my son. ‘Don’t be so rough. You nearly clunked it on the table …’
Both in rumpled band T-shirts and baggy shorts, they’re installed on our spindly wrought-iron chairs, the table littered with the remains of a pizza and an ashtray, I happen to note. Hmm. I’ve delivered the smoking-is-bad sermon before and I’m not planning to lecture him now.
‘All right, Mum?’ Cam says, somewhat belatedly, picking at a pizza crust.
Maybe I am. I’m still feeling quite proud of how I handled myself up on that stage this morning. ‘Good, thanks,’ I say, not expecting him to remember that I’ve been to a conference.
‘There’s broken glass all over,’ he adds, glancing down at the ground. Of course – the breakage during the tense dinner with Mum. I’d completely forgotten to sweep it up.
‘Oh yes, just a little accident when Grandma was here.’ Dutifully, I fetch the dustpan and brush and sweep it up, then leave the boys to their musical endeavours.
As Amy is over at Bella’s and Stu, presumably, is out on deliveries, I throw together a quick bowl of pasta, lifting it from the doldrums with the remains of Stu’s home-made pesto from a kilner jar in the fridge. Mmm, it’s so basilly. He really is terribly handy to have around the house.
Sufficiently fortified, I fetch my laptop, install myself at the kitchen table and study Geddes and Cox’s website. While I have nothing against stock cubes or even tomato fertiliser, I can’t imagine how a brand like La Beauté will fit in alongside them. I find profiles of key team members – Sonia Richardson and Dennis Clatterbrock beam, fakely, from a gallery of similarly executive types – and sense a stab of yearning for what already feels like the ‘old’ ways. Presumably there’ll be no more kind and encouraging messages from Claudine and Mimi, or those occasional afternoon teas in a fancy hotel that they’d invite key counter staff to whenever they came to London. What will happen to our founders now? Will they still be connected to the company in some way? I can’t help feeling that they’ve sold out, but what would I have done, in their shoes? Perhaps they’d simply had enough. Yet I wish, perhaps naively, that we’d had some warning. ‘We’re a family,’ Claudine told me when I emailed to say thank you for the spa voucher. ‘We try to take good care of the people who work with us.’ Next time they were in London, the sisters made a point of taking me for lunch – alone – to check I was managing okay. What would they make of terms like stool time and NPC?
Cam and Mo wander in, bickering good-naturedly as they amble up to Cam’s room. I switch on the radio and position it at the kitchen window, then pull on Stu’s grubby old gardening gloves. With Pulp’s ‘Common People’ drifting from the kitchen window – Stu and I have reached the 6 Music lifestage – I experience a sense of calm as I pluck straggly weeds from the plant pots and between the paving stones. Although I’m enjoying this simple task, I still regard the tomato plants, with all the care they require – the pinching and pruning and spraying with a special kind of tea – as exotic reptilian pets and so decide they’re best left alone.
Stu arrives home and gives me a keen thumbs up through the kitchen window. ‘Good work,’ he mouths.
I laugh, feeling oddly proud of my efforts, and sweep up the weeds before giving everything a good dousing with the watering can. Working inside the house is never as gladdening as this. I’ve tried to garner some kind of satisfaction from domestic work but still haven’t managed to find any. The part of parenting I loved was the playing, the reading stories, the taking off for a weekend with a tent and sleeping bags stashed in the boot – all the fun and adventures. As I mentioned to Ralph – clearly, he was riveted – when you clean a room you’re actually just counting the seconds until someone stomps in and trashes it again.
Stu appears at the back door and holds out my phone, which he has a tendency to answer, like an efficient secretary. ‘Pearl’s home,’ he announces.
‘Oh, great!’ I smile and take it from him, relieved that she’s back. I am always eager to see her during her brief spells between jobs abroad. ‘Hey, welcome home. I’ve missed you!’
‘Missed you too,’ she says. ‘Just got back this morning …’
‘Can’t wait to hear all about it. Shall we meet up? When are you free?’ Her month in Dubai seems to have stretched indefinitely.
‘Well, I’m out walking Toby in London Fields right now. God, he was pleased to see me. Poor Mum and Dad, though. They’re brilliant dog-sitters but they always seem quite bereft when I take him home …’
I laugh. ‘How about I come out and meet you? I can head out straight away—’
‘Great,’ she says.
Fifteen minutes later we’re hugging at the edge of the park as if it’s been years since we’ve seen each other.
‘So,’ she says as we fall into step, ‘the family has this top-floor apartment, 360-degree views, pool with little underwater lights and a fountain, all that …’ She pauses as Toby, her wiry rescue terrier, stops to greet a passing Alsatian.
‘Sounds amazing.’
‘Oh, it was. And the only people in it pretty much all of the time were the cleaner, the other nanny and me.’
‘The other nanny?’ I turn to Pearl in surprise. Tiny and trim in skinny jeans and a baggy black sweater, she wears her ash-blonde hair cropped short and her face devoid of make-up apart from customary red lips. At forty-nine, she could easily pass for a decade younger.
‘Yep, the Connaught-Joneses have two, at least when they’re in Dubai—’
‘And what do they do? For jobs, I mean?’
‘Both lawyers by day, with incredibly active social lives by night. Barely saw them for the whole month. They hardly saw their daughter either.’
‘And there were two nannies for one little girl? What was the point of that?’
Pearl laughs. ‘To ensure that Lois’s every need was catered for in case, you know, one of us had to nip to the loo or prepare her lunch or something. So, most of the time, we were both hovering around her, fussing really, and the other nanny, Cleo, was getting quite competitive about it: “Hey, Lois, come over here for a story while Pearl tidies up …”’
‘Only they had the cleaner for that …’
Pearl nods. ‘Exactly. I suggested to Cleo that we set up a shift pattern but that didn’t work. So we were scrambling over each other, foisting attention on her …’
‘Lucky girl …’
‘Not really. She just wanted her parents, hurled herself at them whenever one of them happened to come home.’ She pauses, and Mum’s accusatory tone flits into my mind: All I meant was, children like being with their mothers most of all. ‘God, it’s so good to be back and be normal,’ Pearl adds, squeezing my arm. ‘Don’t suppose you fancy a drink?’
‘Oh yes, I could murder one.’
As we make our way across the park to the pub, I fill her in on recent developments at work.
‘I’m sure you’ll be fine,’ she asserts. ‘They need people like you who know the company inside out.’
‘They were all so young, though – the new management, I mean. Young and ballsy and thrusting …’
‘Who needs thrusting in the beauty business?’
‘Well, they think we do! They seem to think we’re this gentle outfit who just trundle along, being kind to people, never pushing a sale …’ I pause. ‘Which we are, I suppose.’
‘Yes, but a lot of your customers are our age, aren’t they? They want someone who understands them …’
‘I hope you’re right,’ I murmur.
Although the pub is bustling on this warm summer’s evening, a young couple happen to vacate one of the outside tables as we approach, and we claim it
quickly.
‘White wine?’ Pearl asks.
‘Yes please,’ I say, as she hands me Toby’s lead. He strains to watch her as she disappears into the pub, panting excitedly as she reappears with our drinks. ‘Looks like he’s really missed you,’ I remark.
‘God, yes. He’s been following me around the flat all day, nuzzling against me, trying to lick my face …’ She laughs and ruffles the top of his head.
‘Maybe I should get a dog. Must be lovely to have someone so delighted to see you every time you come home.’
‘Yes, but you have Stu for that.’ We laugh, and she gives me that look; Pearl seems to think that, one day, Stu and I will glance at each other over a plate of toast on a Sunday morning and realise we are desperately in love. ‘How’s that mad business of his going?’
I sip my wine. ‘Pretty well, amazingly, and mostly through word of mouth.’
‘All those harassed North London cooks …’ She clasps a hand to her chest. ‘“Oh, my God, I’m fresh out of chervil!”’
‘And he’ll literally zoom off at any hour of the day or night …’
‘Where does he get the stuff?’
‘Any supermarket en route, or a specialist shop if he needs to. He’s become an expert on pretty much every North London food store and their opening hours.’
She beams. ‘So simple, so clever. Aw, darling Stu. Your first love.’
I laugh and push back my hair. ‘We were only ever mates, you know that. That French guy, Antoine, was my first love … remember I told you about him?’ Pearl nods. ‘Well, he’s been in touch on Facebook. He’s coming to London on Sunday, we’re meeting up …’
