The Finishing Touches

by Browne, Hester

  “How’s things up in Edinburgh? Has Fiona opened a London branch?” he said, holding me at arm’s length now and giving my outfit an approving once-over. “You look really smart!”

  “This? Oh, it’s just a sale bargain,” I heard myself mumble. “Hobbs, seventy percent off.” What was he talking about? Apart from the fact that I’d just cycled across town and was on the rumpled side of disheveled, my A-line skirt was creased like a concertina and I’d got meringue on my shirt from where Clemmy’s pastry bag had exploded under fierce pressure. “Huge discount.”

  “Well, it looks very Miss Moneypenny,” said Jamie with an appreciative look, and my insides turned to water. I tried to think of something offhand but flirtatious to say, like the hundreds of glossy-shinned socialites he hung out with would.

  “Mmnngh,” I said instead.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Liv tossed her head so hard she flicked hair in my eyes as well as her own. “It’s Betsy! There’s no need to go into chat-up mode! She’s just come back from Halfmoon Street, like I told you—I told you, didn’t I, that she’s pretending to be a management consultant? I did, Jamie, you weren’t listening, as usual. That’s why she looks like that.”

  I nodded geekily.

  Jamie nodded too, expecting me to elaborate. He smiled encouragingly, showing his lovely white teeth and the dimple on his chin.

  “It’s…” I struggled to put the bizarre last few days into words that would make sense. “It’s…complicated.”

  Liv looked between me and Jamie and obviously interpreted my inability to speak as weariness. “She’s had a long day at work, Jamie; she doesn’t want to talk about it now, can’t you see that? Betsy, there’s been a change of plan—again.” She shot a disparaging glance at her brother. “Some ex of Jamie’s has opened a bar down the road, so we’re going to try that out, if that’s OK with you.”

  My spirits sank. Jamie seemed to know every blond woman in London, all of whom he claimed to be “great friends with,” which Liv and I privately agreed was a euphemism for two-night stands upwards. Plus, I hadn’t brought the outfit for a trendy night out, even if I did have the energy.

  “She’s not an ex,” said Jamie patiently, checking his phone. “She’s an old friend, called Kirstie, and I said I’d call in and support her new project. Is that so awful? I’m a professional event planner; I need to know about new venues. Whereas you just research them on an amateur basis. With your team of exes. Sorry, dinner dates.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?” demanded Liv.

  “Not really,” said Jamie, but then, unable to stop himself, he looked up from his mobile. “Any weddings coming up this month that I ought to know about? Now Dad’s probably not going to be available to give you away, I suppose I’ll be the one marching you down the aisle.”

  Liv put her hands on her hips and looked at me for support. “See? He’s been back in this house about ten minutes and already he’s winding me up. For your information, Jamie, I’m having a complete man detox for the foreseeable. Dad’s really dumped me in it, and from now on I am totally learning how to do without a man. Betsy’s going to teach me how to cope. I don’t need you patronizing me about how I…how I pay my whatsits.”

  Jamie turned to me. “What can I say? Apart from good luck, Betsy. If Liv wants to join you and me in the big bad real world of work, then who am I to stop her?”

  Liv started to make noises about the nature of Jamie’s “work,” but I was too delighted by the way he’d bracketed us together. “You’ll let me take you out tonight, won’t you? At least let me do that,” he went on, still looking at me in his “no one else in the room” manner. “Before Liv starts her ‘I Will Survive’ routine?”

  “That’s fair enough,” I said, pretending to be stern. “But you have to let us choose the wine. And talk to us about mortgages over dinner.”

  “Deal,” he said, then checked his watch. “Listen, we could go now, if you want—have a drink before we eat? Or do you want to get changed? Not that you don’t look great as you are,” he added quickly.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but Liv had grabbed me anyway and was pulling me toward the door.

  “Oh, give it a rest, this is us you’re talking to, not Tabitha Hotsy-Totsy-Plotsy,” said Liv, dragging me toward the stairs. “Give us five minutes. Make yourself at home—but don’t take that as permission to go through my bills, all right?”

  “In five minutes? You must be joking,” retorted Jamie, and this time it was me pulling Liv upstairs before the squabble could kick off again.

  One of the advantages of temporarily sharing Liv’s house was that I also got to share her wardrobe, which was epic and ran into two rooms, not including her accessories cupboard and makeup trunk. Though she was a good four inches taller than me, she tended to wear her clothes on the short side—skirts and dresses only; she “didn’t do” trousers—so it balanced out well enough, given that my legs didn’t require as much showcasing as hers.

  Liv dressed me up almost absentmindedly at the same time as she changed her own outfit. “Here, wear this; it’ll bring out your eyes,” she said, rustling through the rails and throwing garments at me. “Honestly, Jamie! He is doing my head in. I think it’s the most sick-making version of Mr. Social Chameleon I’ve seen so far. And I say that,” she added, pausing only to tweak the dress I’d tugged over my head so the neckline went from eye-watering to eye-catching, “as someone who remembers his eco-warrior phase. When he had the dreadlocks and only drank organic vodka.”

  “What do you mean?” I pulled out the only jewelry I had—my gold bee necklace—and added some more serum to my restraightened hair. I didn’t see any point in trying to compete with Liv; I’d given that up years ago.

  “Oh, he’s flown back to bail me out, apparently, but he’s only saying that because he’s furious with Dad. Although you know what Dad and Jamie are like—if they weren’t so identical they might actually get on.” Liv pulled her hair into a bun, stuck a gold prong-thing in it, and added some nude gloss to her full lips. In her loose shirt and massive statement necklace, she looked like she’d just slouched out of David Bailey’s studio in 1968. “Not just that, though—when he wasn’t giving me a hard time about my financial dyslexia, as he kept calling it, he was going on about changing his life and settling down, and how Dad skipping off has been a wake-up call for him.” She turned round. “Settling down! The man who keeps a toothbrush in his laptop bag.”

  “Blimey,” I said. I couldn’t imagine Jamie with a Labrador and a baby carriage. “Won’t there be a lot of disappointed ladeez out there?”

  “Depends what he terms ‘settling down.’ I wouldn’t put it past him to have found a religion where he could keep a fully stocked harem just off Kings Road.” Liv added a final swipe of blush to my face, almost in passing, and cheekbones sprang out of nowhere. “I think it’s all an act. He perked up and started being his usual self the moment you arrived, you notice.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?” I asked, transfixed by my reflection in her ornate boudoir mirror. Liv’s hours loitering in the Harvey Nichols cosmetics hall hadn’t been in vain. I normally only went for red lips and jet-black eyelashes, but now I was beginning to think I should invest in blush.

  “I don’t know,” said Liv glumly. “But just brace yourself for a smug-arse lecture about how turning thirty changes your perspective on everything. I’ve had about as much as I can take from a man who spends more on novelty martinis than I do on the mortgage.”

  There was no sign of the lecture over the first round of drinks we had at Kirstie’s new bar, though—or the second, which was brought over by Kirstie herself, who was as gorgeous and giggly and “thrilled to see you, darling” as I thought she’d be.

  I looked on, rather enviously. I knew the good old rules for navigating parties as if I knew everyone, but I’d never quite have that bare-shouldered flirtiness that women like Kirstie had with men like Jamie. It wasn’t the same as Li
v’s easy, sweet nature—it was a specifically targeted, men-only charm beam, and Liv and I might as well have been invisible.

  “Definitely an ex,” muttered Liv in my ear as Kirstie tousled his hair slightly more than affectionately. I wouldn’t have minded tousling it myself—Jamie’s hair was a dirtier blond than Liv’s, but it had a very touchable softness to it, even though it didn’t fall so far into his eyes as it used to.

  He spotted Liv’s tense expression and finished up his chat quickly. “So,” he said to me as Kirstie wiggled away, his business card in her pocket, “what’s this about curtseying lessons?”

  We ate olives and bread while I told Jamie about the piles of yellowing place cards I’d found pre-prepared for a test on seating four Royal Families and the Dalai Lama, and the catwalk left over from the sixties.

  “Divinity and Anastasia have been using it to choreograph their acceptance speeches for when they win American Idol,” I told them. “I found them up there with a karaoke machine, weeping into microphones and thanking their mothers. Not doing any singing, mind you. They’re getting someone else to do that for them, apparently. Miss McGregor’s popping Advil like M&M’s.”

  “But tell him about your new plans,” Liv prompted as our appetizers arrived on strange black plates. “That’s the really amazing part. The part that I’m going to be helping with,” she added, waving her fork at Jamie, against all Academy rules. “My ignorance is going to be their gain, or something.”

  “So it’s a three-year course now, is it?” Jamie inquired.

  I reeled off my ideas before they could start squabbling again, with Liv chipping in whenever I paused for breath. Jamie seemed impressed, especially by Tiptoeing Through Modern Social Minefields.

  “I can’t believe there isn’t something like this already—it’s a great idea!” he said. “If you want someone to come in and give the bloke’s point of view, I’m happy to do that. Explain the mysteries of life from the poor, misunderstood male perspective.”

  “Oh my God,” moaned Liv, but Jamie ignored her.

  “How to break it off without destroying his ego,” he suggested. “What a guy means when he says—”

  “The sexy blonde wearing your dressing gown is just a friend?” Liv interrupted. “And/or his sister?”

  “He values your friendship too much to start a relationship?” I added.

  “You remind him of his mother, ‘in a good way’?” Liv was only just warming up, I could tell. “Or ‘in a bad way’?”

  “He suddenly switches from thinking marriage is the devil’s own community service to hustling the next woman he dates down the aisle?” I said.

  Jamie held up his hands. “Give me a break! I said I’d do a lesson, not explain every reason you two have ever been dumped. But, since you’re asking,” he went on, holding up his fingers to mark off the questions, “in order, one, she usually is a friend; two, girls who make you laugh and don’t play mind games are a rare and precious thing; three, all men marry their mothers eventually, I’m sorry to say; and four…” He stopped and looked self-conscious for a split second. “Four, sometimes you just feel like moving the party back home instead of going out every night to find it, OK? And sometimes you meet someone you don’t want to risk losing to another guy. You’ve got to move in quickly—it’s only you women who like to spin things out.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that was nonsense and that men proposed the day they found their first ear hair, but as he lifted his wineglass to drain it, something in his expression made me stop. Jamie’s default setting was tie-loosened super-confidence, but I thought I could see a flicker of vulnerability about the way he half-hid his face with the glass and shot his cuffs slightly, something I’d never seen him do before.

  Ooh, I thought, it’s personal. Maybe that was why he’d rushed home from New York with his tail between his legs. Some girl’s turned him down, after all these years of playing the field and calling everyone “babe” to be on the safe side. First time for everything.

  Liv glanced over at me, then looked at her brother. She was sitting between me and Jamie and had to keep bouncing her gaze back and forth as if she were at a tennis match, and the resulting neck strain seemed to be making her grumpy.

  “Sounds like you’ve got yourself a new teacher there,” she said to me. “Well, more a professor, really. You could do a whole course on Understanding the International Playboy, just using Jamie’s BlackBerry.”

  I nudged Liv under the table. She obviously hadn’t noticed Jamie’s expression, or else she was still stinging from his brotherly lecture earlier.

  “What?” she demanded. “I’m just saying. Let Jamie into the Academy and it’d be like putting an alcoholic in a brewery and asking if he wants to test the beer. Genius—until he falls into the vat, or whatever it’s called.”

  “Stick to uncorking wine bottles, Olivia, and leave the metaphors to the grown-ups,” said Jamie, but I could tell she’d touched a nerve.

  “Don’t joke about teaching, because I might take you up on that,” I said, trying to lift the mood again. “I need some experts. But you’d have to promise not to offer personal coaching. The current students are terribly charming and rich, and frantic to get themselves on the celeb party circuit. You’re the man of their dreams, in so many ways.”

  Jamie looked up at me and saw I was joking. He was gratifyingly quick on the uptake about my jokes, unlike his sister. “Oh, really?” He pretended to rub his hands like a Victorian maiden abductor. “Tell me more. What delicious young debutantes are currently being finished?”

  “Well, they’ve barely started to be honest, but at the moment, there’s Clementine the Goth, Divinity the footballer’s daughter, Anastasia the Russian squillionairess, and Venetia the…”

  I wasn’t sure how to describe Venetia. I suddenly realized I didn’t know much about her at all, other than that she had her extensions done at Richard Ward and intended to marry a man with his own landing pad.

  “The trainee Bond girl,” I finished, and as I said that, my mind made a connection with some other, older trainee Bond girls, and I remembered Nell Howard’s phone numbers in my handbag.

  My brain seized up instantly with “call her/don’t call her” arguments that had been plaguing me all day. I wanted to call her, but something in me kept putting off the moment.

  “I’m going to powder my nose,” Liv announced, shoving her chair back. “I mean that in the finishing school sense, not in the London club sense, in case you’re wondering, Jamie.”

  “Thanks for those two delightful images,” he said, and moved his chair so she could squeeze past. As he did, he leaned forward far enough to brush my hand with his arm, and an electric tingle ran right up my skin and into the inner depths of Liv’s borrowed dress.

  Before I could even enjoy it, the tingle was replaced with a familiar ache as Jamie gave me a brotherly grin. Sitting here bantering with Jamie was one thing, but it was all done on the understanding that I was far too sensible to fall for his charms, and he was far too irresponsible and blonde-addicted to go for a hardworking math geek who grew her own tomatoes.

  We knew each other too well—in every sense, I thought regretfully. If we’d met once as kids, when he was a bit tubby and I had a ginger Afro, then seen each other now, as adults, maybe it’d be OK to sweep the school years under the carpet. But I’d been best mates with his sister since I was eleven. He’d witnessed every terrible haircut I’d had, and I’d seen him date every girl with a name ending in A between Cheltenham and Pimlico. Amanda, Diana, Isabella—all gorgeous.

  The killer ironic blow was that when I wasn’t being a village idiot, I did make him laugh. And he had said that was a rare and precious thing…

  “You look very stern—what are you thinking?” he asked as he pulled his seat back in. He ended up a little nearer than he had been before. I could feel his knee very close to but not touching mine.

  I blinked. I couldn’t tell him exactly what I was thinking, so I s
kipped back ten seconds. Not a lie. “Um, I was thinking about calling this woman I met at Franny’s memorial tea,” I said. “Nell Howard. She was a student at the Academy when I was left on the step—she thought she might have known my mother. Without realizing, if you know what I mean. She knew the girls that were there then.”

  Jamie opened his eyes wide, just like Liv did when she wanted to convey utter bewilderment. It was one of the few things they had in common. “What? Seriously? After all these years, and you’re thinking of calling her? Call her! Now!”

  “I will! I just—”

  “Just what?” he demanded. “And don’t give me the excuse you’re thinking up.”

  I managed a small smile. “I want to, but I’m not sure what I might find out,” I confessed. The noise in the restaurant was getting louder as more customers drifted in from work, and I had to lean forward to avoid raising my voice too loud. He leaned forward too, to hear me, and I got a distracting noseful of eau de Jamie.

  “You might find out who your mother is,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, but what if she’s…I don’t know…a serial divorcée with three other kids? Or a junkie, or a…” I wanted to say “not a ballerina,” but I knew that sounded stupid.

  Jamie made a tsk noise. “Listen, she can’t be worse than the parents Liv and I have. A mother who cared about us so much she moved to Arizona because her new man wanted a ranch, and a father who’s just skipped town to avoid a nasty tax conversation, leaving poor dopey Liv trying to boil eggs in a kettle.” He twisted his mouth up at the corner. “If I could ring someone up and have another throw of the parental dice, I’d be on that phone like a shot, believe me.”