‘Some textiles exhibition thing. I think they’re giving away scarves to all the guests,’ she adds, her gaze shooting sharply to me. ‘Like a goody bag thing.’
Scarves? Damn. OK, think, quick.
‘Oh, didn’t I mention?’ I say casually. ‘We’re giving away a wonderful gift for supporters at our launch. It’s actually … a handbag.’
Her head pops up. ‘A handbag?’
‘Inspired by the exhibition, of course,’ I add, lying through my teeth. ‘They’re rather beautiful.’
Where I’m going to find thirty handbags which look like they were inspired by an exhibition of antique fans, God only knows. But I do not want to lose Susie Jackson to the V & A, let alone all our other patrons.
I can see Susie mentally weighing her options. Scarf from the V & A versus handbag from Willoughby House. A handbag’s got to win. Surely?
‘Well, I might be able to fit it in,’ she allows.
‘Great!’ I beam at her. ‘I’ll put you down as an acceptance. It’ll be a lovely evening.’
I ask for the bill and finish my croissant, allocating this meeting a ‘B plus’ in my mind. When I get back to the office I’ll write my report, and tell Mrs Kendrick about the clash. And find thirty appropriate handbags to give away.
Maybe I’ll try the V & A shop.
‘So!’ says Susie with a weird, sudden brightness as the bill arrives. ‘How are your children? I haven’t heard about them for ages. Have you got a photo? Can I see?’
‘Oh,’ I say, a bit surprised. ‘They’re fine, thanks.’
I glance down the bill and hand my card to the waiter.
‘It must be so cute, having twins!’ Susie is babbling. ‘I’d love to have twins – you know, one day. Of course I’d have to find a man first …’
I’m half listening to her and trying to find a picture of the girls on my phone, but something’s bugging me … And suddenly I have it. How much was that bill? I mean, I know this is Claridge’s, but even so …
‘Could I see that bill again?’ I say to the waiter. I take it back and read down the list.
Coffee. Yes.
Pastries. Obviously.
Coffee gateau costing fifty pounds? What?
‘Oh,’ says Susie in a weird voice. ‘Oh. I meant to … um …’
I slowly lift my head. She’s staring at me defiantly, her cheeks getting pinker and pinker. But I still don’t understand what’s going on, until another waiter approaches, holding a huge patisserie box tied up with ribbons and hands it to Susie.
‘Your cake, madam.’
I stare at it, speechless.
No way.
She’s ordered herself a cake and put it on our bill? At bloody Claridge’s?
The nerve. The absolute, copper-bottomed nerve. That’s why she started babbling: she was trying to distract me from looking at the bill. And it nearly worked.
My smile is still fixed on my face. I feel slightly surreal. But I don’t hesitate for a moment. Six years of working for Mrs Kendrick has taught me exactly how to proceed. I punch in my PIN and beam at Susie as the waiter gives me the receipt.
‘It was so lovely to catch up with you,’ I say as charmingly as I can. ‘And we’ll see you at the launch of Fabulous Fans, then.’
‘Right.’ Susie looks discomfited. She eyes the cake, then looks up warily. ‘So, about this cake … they put it on your bill, I don’t know why!’ She gives an unconvincing stab at laughter.
‘But of course!’ I say, as though astonished she’s even bringing it up; as though buying fifty-quid coffee cakes for people is what we do all the time. ‘I wouldn’t hear of anything else! It’s absolutely our treat. Enjoy it.’
As I head out of Claridge’s, I’m seething with fury. We’re a charity! A bloody charity! But as I arrive back at Willoughby House, twenty minutes later, I’ve simmered down. I can almost see the funny side. And the plus is that Susie definitely owes us one now.
I pause at the front door, put on my velvet hairband and slick my lips with pink lipstick. Then I head into the spacious tiled hall, which is staffed by two of our volunteers, Isobel and Nina. They’re chatting away as I enter, so I just lift a hand in greeting, and head up to the office on the top floor.
We have a lot of volunteers – women of a certain age, mainly. They sit in the house and drink tea and chat and occasionally look up to tell visitors about the items on display. Some have been volunteering for years, and they’re all great friends and this is basically their social life. In fact sometimes the house gets so full of volunteers, we have to send some home, because there’s no room for visitors.
Most of them hang out in the drawing room, which has the famous painting by Gainsborough in it and the amazing golden stained-glass window. But my favourite room is the library, which is stuffed full of old books and diaries written by family members, in old scratchy copperplate. It’s barely been changed over the years, so it’s like walking back in time when you go in, with glass-cased bookshelves and the original gas-lamp fittings. There’s also a basement, which has the old servants’ kitchen, preserved just as it was, with ancient pans and a long table and a terrifying-looking range. I love it, and sometimes go downstairs and just sit there, imagining what it was like to be the cook in a house like this. I once even suggested we have an exhibition of the servants’ life, but Mrs Kendrick said, ‘I don’t think so, dear,’ so that was the end of that.
The stairs can seem endless – there are five floors – but I’m pretty used to it now. There is a cranky little lift, but I’m not wild about cranky little lifts. Especially cranky little lifts which might break down and leave you trapped at the top of a lift shaft, with no way down …
Anyway. So I take the stairs every day, and it counts as cardio. I arrive at the top, push my way into the light, attic-level office and greet Clarissa.
Clarissa is my colleague and is twenty-seven. She’s the administrator and also does a bit of fundraising, like me. There’s only the two of us – plus Mrs Kendrick – so it’s not exactly a huge team, but we work because we’re all simpatico. We know Mrs Kendrick’s little ways. Before Clarissa, a girl called Amy joined us for a while, but she was a bit too loud. A bit too sassy. She questioned things and criticized our methods and ‘didn’t quite fit in’, according to Mrs Kendrick. So she was axed.
Clarissa, on the other hand, fits in perfectly. She wears tea dresses a lot, and shoes with buttons which she gets from a dance-wear shop. She has long dark hair and big grey eyes, and a very earnest, endearing way about her. As I enter, she’s spritzing the plants with water, which is something we have to do every day. Mrs Kendrick gets quite upset if we forget.
‘Morning, Sylvie!’ Clarissa turns and gives me a radiant smile. ‘I’ve just got back from a breakfast meeting. It was so successful. I met six prospects who all promised to put Willoughby House in their wills. So kind of them.’
‘Brilliant! Well done!’ I would high-five her, but high-fives are very much not a Mrs Kendrick thing and she might walk in at any moment. ‘Unfortunately, mine wasn’t quite so good. I had coffee with Susie Jackson from the Wilson–Cross Foundation and she told me the V & A are having an event the same night as our Fabulous Fans launch.’
‘No!’ Clarissa’s face crumples in dismay.
‘It’s OK. I told her we’d be giving away handbags as a gift and she said she’d come to ours.’
‘Brilliant,’ breathes out Clarissa. ‘What kind of handbags?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll have to source some. Where do you think?’
‘The V & A shop?’ suggests Clarissa after a moment’s thought. ‘They have lovely things.’
I nod. ‘That’s what I thought.’
I hang up my jacket and go to put my receipt for coffee in the Box. This is a big wooden box which lives on a shelf, and mustn’t be confused with the Red Box, which sits next to it and is cardboard, but was once covered with red floral wrapping paper. (There’s still a snippet of it on the lid, and that’s how
it got the name the Red Box.)
The Box is for storing receipts, while the Red Box is for storing faxes. And then, next to them is the Little Box, which is for storing Post-it notes and staples but not paper clips, because they live in the Dish. (A pottery dish on the next shelf up.) Pens, on the other hand, go in the Pot.
It sounds a bit complicated, I suppose, but it’s not, when you get used to it.
‘We’re nearly out of fax paper,’ says Clarissa, wrinkling up her nose. ‘I’ll have to pop out later.’
We get through a lot of fax paper in our office, because Mrs Kendrick sometimes works from home, and likes to correspond backwards and forwards with us by fax. Which sounds outdated. Well, it is outdated. But it’s just the way she likes to do things.
‘So, who were your prospects?’ I ask, as I sit down to type up my report.
‘Six lovely chaps from HSBC. Quite young, actually.’ Clarissa blinks at me. ‘Just out of university. But terribly sweet. They all said they’d make us legacies. I think they’ll give thousands!’
‘Amazing!’ I say, and draw up a new document. And I’ve just started typing when there’s the sound of unfamiliar feet on the staircase.
I know Mrs Kendrick’s tread. She’s coming up to the office. But there’s another person, too. Heavier. More rhythmic.
The door opens, just as I’m thinking, It’s a man.
And it’s a man.
He’s in his thirties, I’d say. Dark suit, bright blue shirt, big muscled chest, dark cropped hair. The type with hairy wrists and a bit too much aftershave. (I can smell it from here.) He probably shaves twice a day. He probably heaves weights at the gym. Looking at his sharp suit, he probably has a flash car to match. He is so not the kind of man we usually get in here, that I gape. He looks all wrong, standing on the faded green carpet with his shiny shoes, practically hitting the lintel with his head.
To be truthful, we rarely get any kind of man in here. If we do, they tend to be grey-haired husbands of the volunteers. They wear ancient velvet dinner jackets to the events. They ask questions about baroque music. They sip sherry. (We have sherry at all our events. Another of Mrs Kendrick’s little ways.)
They don’t come up to the top floor at all, and they certainly don’t look around, like this guy is doing, and say, ‘Is this supposed to be an office?’ in an incredulous way.
At once I prickle. It’s not ‘supposed’ to be an office, it is an office.
I look at Mrs Kendrick, who’s in a floral print dress with a high frilled collar, her grey hair as neatly waved as ever. I’m waiting for her to put him right, with one of her crisp little aperçus. (‘My dear Amy,’ she said once, when Amy brought a can of Coke in and cracked it open at her desk. ‘We are not an American high school.’)
But she doesn’t seem quite as incisive as usual. Her hand flutters to the purple cameo brooch she always wears and she glances up at the man.
‘Well,’ she says with a nervous laugh. ‘It serves us well enough. Let me introduce my staff to you. Girls, this is my nephew, Robert Kendrick. Robert, this is Clarissa, our administrator, and Sylvie, our development officer.’
We shake hands, but Robert is still looking around with a critical gaze.
‘Hmm,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit cluttered in here, isn’t it? You should have a clean desk policy.’
Instantly I prickle even more. Who does this guy think he is? Why should we have a clean desk policy? I open my mouth to make a forceful riposte – then close it again, chickening out. Maybe I’d better find out what’s going on, first. Clarissa is looking from me to Mrs Kendrick with an open-mouthed, vacant expression, and Mrs Kendrick abruptly seems to realize that we’re totally in the dark.
‘Robert has decided to take an interest in Willoughby House,’ she says with a forced smile. ‘He will inherit it one day, of course, along with his two older brothers.’
I feel an inner lurch. Is he the evil nephew, come to close down his aunt’s museum and turn it into two-bedroom condos?
‘What kind of interest?’ I venture.
‘A dispassionate interest,’ he says briskly. ‘The kind of interest my aunt seems incapable of.’
Oh my God, he is the evil nephew.
‘You can’t close us down!’ I blurt out, before I’ve considered whether this is wise. ‘You mustn’t. Willoughby House is a slice of history. A sanctuary for culture-loving Londoners.’
‘A sanctuary for gossiping freeloaders, more like,’ says Robert. His voice is deep and well educated. It might even be attractive if he didn’t sound so impatient. Now he surveys me with an unfriendly frown. ‘How many volunteers does this place need? Because you seem to have half the retired women of London downstairs.’
‘The volunteers keep the place alive,’ I point out.
‘The volunteers eat their body weight in biscuits,’ he retorts. ‘Fortnum’s biscuits, no less. Isn’t that a bit extravagant, for a charity? What’s your biscuit bill?’
We’ve all gone a bit quiet. Mrs Kendrick is examining her cuff button and I exchange shifty looks with Clarissa. Fortnum’s biscuits are a bit of a luxury, but Mrs Kendrick thinks they’re ‘civilized’. We tried Duchy Originals for a bit, but then went back to Fortnum’s. (We rather love the tins, too.)
‘I’d like to see a full set of accounts,’ says Robert. ‘I want cash flow, expenses … You do keep your receipts?’
‘Of course we keep our receipts!’ I say frostily.
‘They’re in the Box,’ confirms Clarissa, with an eager nod.
‘I’m sorry?’ Robert looks puzzled, and Clarissa darts over to the bookshelf.
‘This is the Box …’ She gestures. ‘And the Red Box and the Little Box.’
‘The what, the what and the what?’ Robert looks from Clarissa to me. ‘Is any of this supposed to make sense?’
‘It does make sense,’ I say, but he’s stalking around the office again.
‘Why is there only one computer?’ he suddenly demands.
‘We share it,’ I tell him.
Again, this is a bit unconventional, but it works for us.
‘You share it?’ He stares at me. ‘How can you share a computer? That’s insane.’
‘We make it work.’ I shrug. ‘We take turns.’
‘But …’ He seems almost speechless. ‘But how do you send each other emails?’
‘If I want to correspond with the girls from home, I send a fax,’ says Mrs Kendrick, a little defiantly. ‘Most convenient.’
‘A fax?’ Robert looks from me to Clarissa, his face pained. ‘Tell me she’s joking.’
‘We fax a lot,’ I say, gesturing at the fax machine. ‘We send faxes to supporters, too.’
Robert walks over to the fax machine. He stares at it for a moment, breathing hard.
‘Do you write with bloody quill pens, too?’ he says at last, looking up. ‘Do you work by candlelight?’
‘I know our working practices may seem a bit different,’ I say defensively, ‘but they work.’
‘Bollocks they do,’ he says forcefully. ‘You can’t run a modern office like this.’
I don’t dare look at Mrs Kendrick. ‘Bollocks’ is very, very, very much not a Mrs Kendrick word.
‘It’s our system,’ I say. ‘It’s idiosyncratic.’
Beneath my defiance I do feel a tad uncomfortable. Because when I first arrived at Willoughby House and was shown the Boxes and the fax machine, I reacted in the same way. I wanted to sweep them all away and become paperless and lots of other things, too. I had all kinds of proposals. But Mrs Kendrick’s Way ruled, as it does now. Every idea I put forward was rejected. So gradually I got used to the Boxes and the fax machine and all of it. I suppose I’ve been conditioned.
But then, does it matter? Does it matter if we’re a bit old-fashioned? What right does this guy have to come and swagger around and tell us how to run an office? We’re a successful charity, aren’t we?
His gaze is sweeping around the room again. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he
says ominously. ‘This place needs knocking into shape. Or else.’
Or else?
‘Well!’ says Mrs Kendrick, sounding a little shell-shocked. ‘Well. Robert and I are going out for lunch now, and later on we’ll have a little chat. About everything.’
The two of them turn to leave, while Clarissa and I watch in silence.
When the sound of their footsteps has disappeared, Clarissa looks at me. ‘Or else what?’ she says.
‘I don’t know.’ I look at the carpet, which still bears an impression of his big, heavy man-shoes. ‘And I don’t know what right he has to come and order us around.’
‘Maybe Mrs Kendrick is retiring and he’s going to be our boss,’ ventures Clarissa.
‘No!’ I say in horror. ‘Oh my God, can you imagine him talking to the volunteers? “Thank you for coming, now please all fuck off.”’
Clarissa snuffles with giggles, and she can’t stop, and I start laughing too. I don’t share my slightly darker thought, which is that there’s no way Robert wants to run this place, and it’s a prime piece of London real estate and it always comes down to money in the end.
At last, Clarissa calms down and says she’s going to make coffee. I sit down at my desk and start typing up my report, trying to put the morning’s events behind me. But I can’t. I’m all churned up. My anxious fears are fighting with defiance. Why shouldn’t this be the last quirky corner of the world? Why should we conform? I don’t care who this guy is or what claim he has on Willoughby House. If he wants to destroy this special, precious place and turn it into condos, he’ll have to go through me first.
After work I have to go to a talk on Italian painting given by one of our supporters, so I don’t arrive home till nearly 8 p.m. There’s a quiet atmosphere in the house, which means the girls have gone to sleep. I pop upstairs to kiss their slumbering cheeks, tuck them in and turn Anna the right way around in bed. (Her feet always end up on the pillow, like Pippi Longstocking.) Then I head downstairs to find Dan sitting in the kitchen with a bottle of wine in front of him.
Surprise Me Page 5
