Unsticky

by Sarah Manning

  As if organising the party wasn’t bad enough, now Grace was expected to do crowd control as well. ‘I am so out of my depth,’ she whimpered, and Madeleine was looking very disapproving - but oddly, it didn’t seem to be directed at Grace, more at Vaughn, as if she was going to give him a piece of her mind at their next coffee klatch.

  ‘Really, what were you thinking?’ Grace could imagine her saying to a chastened Vaughn. ‘It’s obvious she isn’t mistress material.’

  ‘Alex and Nadja aren’t your priority,’ was what Madeleine actually said. ‘Noah Skinner and his girlfriend, Lola, are. It’s the first time that they’ve been invited to one of these dinners and they’ll probably be very nervous too, so I suggest you put them on either side of you. Sergei is close to finishing a deal with the gallery so Vaughn needs to talk to him, but Nadja doesn’t like Alex so don’t sit them next to each other. Put Nadja next to Noah, Alex next to Lola and Harry and Sergei on either side of Vaughn. Would you like me to go more slowly?’

  Grace had only just started scribbling notes with a leaky ballpoint pen. She didn’t answer at first as she was busy drawing circles and arrows on the list. Finally she looked up. ‘It sounds like a Mike Leigh film,’ she remarked, and got another tiny smile from Madeleine. ‘So, like, does the catering firm sort out the flowers - and what about the goodie bags? Should it be lots of little things, or one big thing? What’s the budget? Do you have an account or do I need to pay for gifts and keep the receipts? Oh God, sorry. I don’t mean to keep bombarding you with questions.’

  Madeleine waved a dismissive hand as if mistress-whispering was all in a day’s work. ‘I suggest you choose the flowers once the menu’s locked down. We have an account with a florist; I’ll email you. Vaughn prefers the gift bags to be individually tailored to each guest. I’ll send you some details about each one. Aim to spend about one thousand pounds.’

  ‘For all of them?’

  ‘Each. There’s a one-thousand-pound budget for each one. I have the money with me. Grace, I really need you to calm down before Henri starts bringing in the sample dishes.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Grace muttered under her breath, then tried to find her happy place. Or a happier place. ‘I haven’t seen you at Vaughn’s gallery, have I?’ she asked, to show she was now calm enough to make polite conversation.

  ‘I have an office at the gallery,’ Madeleine revealed somewhat unwillingly, ‘but I’m Vaughn’s personal assistant, so my hours are flexible.’

  Grace processed that information. A lot of Madeleine’s flexible hours were filled in with sending emails to Grace containing reading lists, travel itineraries and links for articles that she needed to read. ‘Have you worked for Vaughn long?’ she asked.

  Madeleine looked at her watch again. ‘Almost twelve years.’

  Grace wondered how many other women’s reading lists and travel itineraries Madeleine had arranged in twelve years. ‘I hope I didn’t pull you away from anything important,’ she said sweetly. ‘This is all so new to me, but I bet you’ve done this for Vaughn’s other, um, girlfriends - right?’

  Grace really couldn’t blame Madeleine for pursing her lips so tightly that it looked painful. ‘My duties are varied,’ was all that she would say.

  But Grace never knew when to leave well enough alone. ‘When I met Alex at that party, he said I was younger than the others. Were they a lot older than me? Like, really sophisticated and could organise a sit-down dinner without breaking a sweat?’

  But it worked because Madeleine was giving the matter some thought. ‘Well, none of them talked this much,’ she clarified, fixing Grace with a steely look.

  Grace was saved from having to come up with a suitable response, when there really wasn’t one, by the arrival of a man in chef’s whites, followed by two lackeys wheeling in a trolley. And actually planning a menu was almost like fun, once Grace realised they’d brought samples to taste, and Madeleine would purse her lips even tighter than usual when Grace was veering towards the wrong decision.

  Grace played it safe and chose the plainest crockery and silverware. She’d chosen a selection of amuse-bouches to be served on trays with drinks, and a starter of mahi-mahi carpaccio, before nixing a game entrée (‘too fiddly and too gamey’) in favour of a posh version of surf and turf with scallops and tournedos of fillet steak and asparagus and ricotta ravioli for the two vegetarians. As she sipped from a selection of mineral waters that all tasted the same, she couldn’t remember why she’d been getting so hysterical.

  ‘Shall we do desserts now?’ she asked brightly, pushing her preferred water in the direction of one of the assistants who was tapping notes into a PDA.

  Madeleine and the chef exchanged looks. ‘Usually we provide a selection of artisan cheeses,’ the chef explained carefully.

  ‘Cool,’ Grace shrugged. ‘And what desserts have you got?’

  ‘Vaughn never serves a dessert,’ Grace was told firmly. But remembering Vaughn’s passionate reaction to a slice of bitter chocolate cake and seeing the currently scandalised expression on Madeleine’s face made ordering puddings absolutely the right way to go.

  ‘Well, I never got that memo. Have you a menu I can see?’

  The dessert menu was placed in front of Grace who took her sweet time running an eye down it. ‘Can you do the lemon meringue flan, the apple tart and the pot au chocolat as miniatures for each guest?’ she asked. ‘With crème fraîche on the side? Oh, and maybe some fresh fruit or a sorbet as a palate cleanser?’

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ Madeleine muttered as an aside. ‘Vaughn doesn’t care for dessert.’

  There were a lot of things that Vaughn didn’t care for, and Grace knew that dessert wasn’t one of them. ‘Quite sure,’ she insisted. She might not be anything like his other women, but if none of them had wised up to the fact that Vaughn turned into a pussy cat when the sugar rush was on him, then maybe they hadn’t been all that.

  Apart from a brief trip on Saturday night to Lily’s, ostensibly for a Chinese takeaway and an Ugly Betty marathon, but actually to do the unthinkable: present a united front with Dan to persuade Lily that she had to tell her parents she was pregnant, Grace spent most of the weekend assembling the goodie bags. Despite her extreme doubts, it hadn’t been that difficult. When she phoned the contact numbers on the guest-list, there had been assistants only too happy to provide shoe sizes, fashion preferences and the names of obscure brands of malt whisky.

  Mindful of her put-upon assistant karma, Grace had used Vaughn’s florist account to send each of them a huge bouquet when she ordered table centrepieces of white camellias, which would match the corsage on the little black Chanel dress that she’d blown practically all of that month’s clothing allowance on. It was a little too staid for her but if she fucked this up, then at least she’d have got a Chanel dress out of it.

  Only two people proved a problem - the artist, Noah Skinner, and his girlfriend, Lola. Neither of them had an assistant, though Madeleine had sent Grace a brief biography. They’d both studied at the Slade and were part of a collective of edgy artists who lived in Dalston and showed in Shoreditch, and Vaughn was very keen to represent Noah. Madeleine had bolded the last part, just so Grace got the message that Noah and Lola were to become her two new best friends.

  Grace didn’t know a lot about edgy artists but she knew enough to realise that £1,000 goodie bags might be misconstrued as a flimsy attempt to bribe them. Especially as Grace had done a Google image search and found a painting Noah had done, which looked like a pastiche of a Gainsborough with the words Fuck Global Capitalism graffitied over it. A Smythson portfolio case really wouldn’t go down too well. She’d also found a couple of photos of Noah and he had a carefree grin and looked like Robbie Williams when he’d been hanging out with Oasis, which made her feel nostalgic. She missed flirting with boys who had carefree grins, and if Vaughn had a carefree grin, she’d yet to see it. Grace knew precisely nothing about Noah’s girlfriend, Lola, except she was a very lucky girl.


  The problem of what to get Lola and Noah cast a shadow over the whole weekend. Which was a pity because it was Grace’s first weekend off since she’d signed on with Vaughn. She knew he was in London, but he was still so angry with her that he was maintaining BlackBerry silence, which suited her just fine. Madeleine had told Grace she could call her if she needed help, but Grace was determined to get something right on her own. She wanted the dinner-party to be a success as much as Vaughn did, just to prove to him, and to herself, that she wasn’t completely useless.

  By Monday morning, Grace was still devoid of inspiration as she updated her status on Facebook. And then she had a lightbulb moment. Even edgy artists were on Facebook and, amazingly, Noah had three friends in common with her: a boy who had dated her flatmate in her first year at St Martin’s, a French girl she’d worked with on a vintage clothing stall in Spitalfields in her second year, and a random DJ that she’d hooked up with two summers ago. Lola, the girlfriend, played bass in some shouty, faux riot grrrl band and had a thing about snakes, so Grace bought her a platinum guitar pick, an adoption certificate for a boa constrictor at London Zoo, and a spa day at a new holistic place that had just opened up in Hoxton.

  After serious trawling through weeks of Noah’s self-important status updates, Grace eventually hit paydirt. Noah is appalled at the cost of hand-made oil paints from the London Graphic Centre. Especially Vermillion Series 7. God, she hated fine artists, carefree grins notwithstanding, but in her lunch-hour she went to the London Graphic Centre in Covent Garden and ordered him twenty tubes of the stuff at fifty pounds a time.

  By Wednesday, D-Day - D for Dinner-party Day or Doomsday, depending on your politics - Grace was vibrating, rather than existing. She’d had an 8 a.m. hair appointment and had left the salon with an elaborate updo, which meant that she had to hold her head at a really awkward angle so she didn’t dismantle it, and try to bat off curious comments from both the fashion and beauty teams.

  Lily had spent ten minutes staring at Grace’s hair with a perplexed expression, her own woes temporarily forgotten, as she kept asking, ‘But how did you manage to do the plait thing by yourself? Is that a hairpiece at the back?’ Even Kiki had come out of her office to stare in disbelief, but she was working on budgets with the Editor, who wanted to know why Kiki had hired a helicopter for a safari-themed fashion shoot she’d done in Kenya, and that took precedence over Grace’s elaborate coiffure.

  By lunch-time, Grace had stabbing pains right between her eyes as she fitted in a quick bikini wax and pedicure while fielding calls on her BlackBerry. The chef had a million questions about chafing dishes and the exact timing of each course. The florist couldn’t make Vaughn’s Bulgarian housekeeper understand that he needed a fridge to put the camellias in and the artisan cheesemaker had had a problem with his goats. It made Grace long for the halcyon days of cupcakes, DIY streamers and a fish fingers and oven chips hot buffet. In fact, she was surprised that her brain wasn’t slowly leaking out of the holes in her head where hairpins were currently skewering her scalp, as Galya ripped off strips of wax and kept up a running commentary on the regrowth of Grace’s pubic hair.

  When Grace got back to the office to find Bunny on Facebook rather than getting prices so two fashion stories could be sent down to the repro house, she couldn’t be blamed for anything that she said. Which was a very loud and venomous: ‘Are you completely retarded or just incompetent?’

  Bunny gave a nervous start. ‘Everyone I phoned was at lunch,’ she whined. ‘And usually you ring and get the prices.’

  ‘I am busy,’ Grace growled. ‘I am busy with all sorts of important stuff and I ask you to do one thing and you’re playing Scramble and I just had a call from Prada who said you hung up on them.’

  Bunny had never seen Grace’s fight face before and she didn’t seem to like it very much. ‘They were really rude and—’

  ‘They’re Prada; they can be as rude as they bloody well want,’ Grace screeched, grabbing the list of fashion credits and slamming it down on the desk in front of Bunny. ‘Get on the phone, be polite to people and you’re not to leave the office until every last fucking shoe and hairclip has a price. OK?’

  ‘OK, Grace,’ Bunny whispered. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Sorry isn’t good enough!’ Grace looked up slowly because she couldn’t make any sudden movements and realised that the entire fashion team were staring at her in amazement. Or was it awe? It was something beginning with an a. Grace never shouted - usually furious pouting was her only form of attack.

  At 4.55 p.m., with the dress bag hanging over her shoulder, Grace was ready to clock on at her other job. She grunted a goodbye at Bunny, who’d responded really well to being held up for public ridicule and had even made Grace two cups of tea. There was a salient lesson in there somewhere but Grace’s mind was too crowded with fun facts about her guests and reminding the chef that he was going to serve apple slices rather than grapes with the cheese, to ponder it further.

  As she stepped into the lift, Kiki was hot on her heels. ‘I have an appointment as well,’ she murmured, though they both knew it was a lie. Kiki had never actually seen 5 p.m. in the office, ever. Even on press day. ‘What’s in the bag?’

  They both stared at the interlocking c’s on the dress bag. ‘Chanel sent this dress over even though we hadn’t asked for it,’ Grace quickly improvised. ‘It’s got to go to New York tonight so I promised I’d personally deliver it to the press office. Keep them sweet, you know?’

  Kiki inclined her head in tacit acknowledgement of Grace’s dedication. ‘Courtney said that Bunny was sobbing her little heart out in the kitchen after you tore into her,’ she informed Grace, with a faint note of praise in her voice. ‘I didn’t know you had it in you, Gracie.’

  ‘She’s useless,’ Grace muttered bitterly. ‘She spends all day on Facebook, and I’m pretty sure she nicked a D and G bikini from the cupboard last Friday. How come she’s not needed back at Oxford?’

  ‘Oh, she’s on sabbatical. I really wish she’d do something about her weight,’ Kiki sniffed. ‘She’s a good stone too heavy for a bikini.’

  It was the most cordial exchange Grace had ever had with Kiki. Plus it looked as if Bunny’s days were well and truly numbered. It put a spring in Grace’s step as the lift doors opened.

  chapter seventeen

  Grace had been to Vaughn’s house before. Many times actually, but it was always as a coda to an evening out and she’d follow him up the stairs to his bedroom, which was a symphony of grey, on the second floor, stay for an hour or so and then climb back down the stairs to a waiting car as Vaughn said she fidgeted too much in her sleep to stay the night.

  Although her mind was on other things and she was constantly being interrupted, this was the first time Grace had been able to explore it properly. It was just like the gallery and his New York apartment: spacious, with stunning views (from the top floor she could see Hampstead Heath and the whole of London laid out before her), but all period features and interesting architectural quirks had been ruthlessly gutted. The whole place was an antiseptic advert to the joys of minimalist living, Grace thought as she walked into something that wasn’t a living room or a lounge or anything other than an art gallery with some really uncomfortable furniture in it; a couple of bendy leather pieces that hadn’t been designed to be sat on. Only a room on the first floor at the end of a long corridor looked halfway lived in; it had softly curved walls, more pale wood, two fairly comfy sofas, even a rug adorned with blue and grey circles that probably didn’t come from IKEA and, hallelujah, praise be, a bar. It was practically a den.

  Back downstaris, the servers were setting up the crockery and cutlery Grace had selected on a vast table in the dining room. Grace wished she hadn’t gone with the camellia centrepieces now she’d properly seen the house; they were completely overshadowed by a huge painting of a Japanese girl wrapped in a flag with her mouth open in a silent scream, so Grace actually felt a moment of fondness f
or her grandparents’ collection of Capo Di Monte figurines. She should have gone for something more modern and eclectic like lemons or cacti because her centrepieces didn’t belong in this cold, impersonal house any more than Grace did. She felt a wave of panic wash over her like dirty grey water, and had to grip the back of a chair with icy hands.

  She honest to goodness screamed when someone touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘Well, there’s no need to ask if you’ve got everything under control,’ Vaughn said tartly in her ear.

  ‘Everything is under control,’ Grace panted, hand clutched to her heart as she turned round to face him. ‘You just surprised me.’

  Vaughn ran an assessing eye over her, starting with her hair, which Grace was hating more with each painful moment that passed, lingering over her breasts and hips, which were nicely showcased in boned satin, and finishing at her toes, which were wiggling nervously in her Oscar de la Renta slingbacks. He nodded but didn’t say anything so Grace guessed she’d passed muster. If she hadn’t, Vaughn would have been sure to let her know. And Christ, she really needed a cigarette and a stiff drink.