‘I’m waiting, Grace.’ Vaughn had put down his pen so he could look at her, as if she’d just peed on his pristine white rug. ‘Why do you spend money you haven’t got on things you can’t possibly afford?’
She could feel crimson staining her cheeks though her shopping binges weren’t any worse than Vaughn being packed off to rehab when he was her age. But having to say the words out loud, describe how shitty and worthless she felt so that there was no other choice but to go out and buy the outer trappings that would make her shiny and perfect, was too hard. Even harder than trying to articulate the revulsion she felt once she got home and realised how much money she’d spent on an impossible task because she was never going to be anything other than shop soiled.
‘The clothing allowance . . . it barely covers one outfit and shoes,’ she heard herself insist weakly. ‘And then I started having to buy clothes from the general allowance and there was always something every week that I’d have to buy a new dress for.’ That at least sounded much better than admitting that she binged on designer goods like he wanted to binge on cake.
Grace realised that Vaughn hadn’t really been angry before, he’d just been reeling her in, softening her up, because he was blisteringly angry now, eyes blazing away in his pinched white face.
‘You’re breaking my heart, Grace,’ he sneered and God, at the moment, she’d never hated anyone as much as she hated him for doing this to her, for raking up things that were best left buried in shoeboxes under her bed. ‘Don’t lie to me. All but one of those statements in your hand dates back to before I met you, so why don’t you try again?’
‘If I hadn’t left my knitting tote in your car, then you wouldn’t know about any of this and quite frankly, it’s none of your business. You were getting ready to dismiss me for, like, gross misconduct so just do it and then I can go and I can take my stuff with me.’ Grace couldn’t quite believe it but she was on her feet and grabbing handfuls of paper so she could stuff them back into their boxes and bags so they wouldn’t be out on display, where she had to see them and talk about them and—
‘Sit down!’
Vaughn had never shouted at her before. He never had to because his coldest, quietest voice was like a scream, but he was shouting now and it was enough to shock Grace into sitting down so suddenly it felt like she’d jarred every bone in her body. ‘I’m going,’ she said defiantly, but she was still sitting down with crumpled pieces of paper clutched to her chest.
‘Put the paper back on the table,’ Vaughn said like she hadn’t even spoken. He wasn’t shouting any more but looked as if he was grinding the enamel off his back molars. ‘So, what’s your solution?’
Grace looked at the paper covering Vaughn’s desk, then she looked at Vaughn who was staring at her grimly. Looking down at her feet was the better option. The arrangement with Vaughn was meant to have been her solution and all it had done was get her deeper into debt. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I guess I’ll declare myself bankrupt.’
‘Do you know the consequences of declaring yourself bankrupt?’ Vaughn asked her, and as long as it made the envelopes stop coming and the people from finance companies stop calling, Grace didn’t really care.
‘I’ll Google it,’ she said exasperatedly, because she was fresh out of other ideas, and really what was the point of Vaughn getting his hands dirty with her mess, other than getting a sadistic kick out of watching her squirm with shame? ‘I know I’ve fucked up and yes, my credit rating is probably screwed for ever, but I’m not really in the market for a mortgage so who cares if I declare myself bankrupt? It just doesn’t matter. There’s no other way out. So are we done here?’
‘Don’t you want to know your magic number?’
‘I. Don’t. Care.’ It was surprisingly easy to sound as if she meant it, as if she’d never spent weeks living on ramen noodles or had countless sleepless nights worrying about bailiffs.
Vaughn tore off a sheet of paper from a pad and wrote something on it, then pushed it across the desk. ‘Read it out loud.’
Grace shoved it back at him. And then they were playing push me, pull me until Vaughn stood up so he could tower over Grace, and force the piece of paper into her hand. ‘Read it out loud,’ he repeated in a growl that made every single hair on her body stand up.
What was written on the piece of paper was scary but when Vaughn was like this, hanging on to his temper by the most gossamerlike of threads, he was even scarier. Grace’s fingers curled round the finest linen bond paper that Smythson had to offer and scrunched it in her fist.
‘Just . . . I can’t. Please don’t make me.’
Vaughn was already prising open her fingers, one by one, so he could retrieve the crumpled ball of paper and smooth it out.
‘Read it out loud.’
Grace knew that he’d never hit her in anger. Bent over his knee as foreplay didn’t count, not when she was giggling madly. But she could tell that Vaughn was dangerously close to wrapping his hands around her throat and throttling her for a little bit because she’d reached the absolute zenith of infuriating.
Grace forced herself to focus on the piece of paper. There were a lot of numbers; it almost looked like a phone number. Then she read them out loud and after she’d done that, she pushed Vaughn away so she could slowly walk to his bathroom and throw up.
chapter twenty-six
The office was quiet the next morning. Kiki and the rest of the fashion team were skiing, Lily, who hadn’t even texted a thank you for the espresso machine, was still on her honeymoon, and practically everyone else had either taken the short week as holiday or called in sick. Only the various assistants to the various section editors were in and Grace was the only one who wasn’t on Facebook.
Grace had made a To Do list the moment she got into work and was steadily ticking off items on it. So far, she’d called her bank manager to make an appointment to discuss her overdraft, though now that she wanted to speak to him, he was nowhere to be found. She’d also called a debt hotline, but after spending half an hour on hold, Grace went on eBay and began estimating how much money she could make if she sold off her shopping-binge trophies. There was no point going to see her bank manager or phoning up her creditors unless she had some money to give them. All she could think about was her magic number in all its five-figure glory. Seven figures if Grace added the forlorn eighty-three pence at the end of it. Now she knew exactly how much she owed, it couldn’t be hidden away any more. It was her mess and it was up to her to clean it up, because there wasn’t anyone else to do it for her. Certainly not Vaughn, or his allowances. He’d banished her to the guest suite last night with this tone of grim finality to his voice that had made Grace realise that he didn’t even have the energy to make her dumping official.
After Googling ‘bankrupt’ Grace logged on to net-a-porter.com for five minutes just to cheer herself up and take the nasty taste out of her mouth. She started to add things to her wishlist on autopilot and came to with a start as she realised her mouse finger was just about to click on the proceed to purchase button. Christ, she thought, what the hell was wrong with her?
As if on cue, her BlackBerry started to ring, almost as if Vaughn knew she was up to no good, but when she answered it with a very tentative, ‘Hello?’ it was Madeleine Jones.
‘Happy New Year, Grace,’ Madeleine trilled. ‘I hope you’re feeling better.’ She probably wanted to make sure Grace was fighting fit and unlikely to relapse when she told her she was fired. Because Vaughn would so get her to deliver the news.
‘I’m fine. And Happy New Year to you too,’ Grace said by rote. ‘I take it he didn’t sack you then?’
‘He threatens to sack me once a week on average. After the first year, I stopped worrying,’ Madeleine said dryly, and Grace couldn’t imagine her taking shit from anyone, not even Vaughn. ‘I really am sorry that I forgot to organise your flu jab. It’s horrible being ill when you’re in a foreign country.’
‘Well, it got me out
of having loads of ski instruction from the infamous Chip so it worked out OK,’ Grace said, because that had been one hell of a silver lining. Madeleine laughed, and Grace appreciated the fact that she and Madeleine had moved past the frosty phone calls of last summer, but she wished that they could just cut to the chase. ‘Can I help you with something?’
There was the most delicate of pauses. ‘Vaughn asked me to call you . . .’
Grace closed her eyes and wondered why she was dreading what Madeleine was about to say. It wasn’t as if it was unexpected, and even a fake relationship couldn’t last if you spent most of the time moving from one argument to the next.
‘He’s going to be in Berlin for the rest of the week,’ Madeleine continued. ‘I’m sending a courier over with the security codes so you can get into the house. Please don’t lose them. In fact, if you could memorise them, then destroy the paper, that would work.’
‘OK.’
‘That was a joke, Grace,’ Madeleine sighed. ‘I’m also sending some cash to tide you over.’ She was talking in rapid bursts as if she was uncomfortable with the conversation and wanted to get it done with as quickly as possible. ‘Not the full allowance - you’ll have to talk to Vaughn about that when he gets back. I think that’s everything, but please set the alarm before you go to bed each night.’
‘He didn’t say anything else?’ Grace asked tremulously, but she was already resigned to the agony being prolonged for a few more days and it would give her time to tick off a few more items on her To Do list.
‘Well, he wanted me to remind you to button your coat,’ Madeleine said.
‘Because really it would be best if I just went back to my place . . .’
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Grace. In fact, I don’t even think that’s an option right now.’
It was comforting to know that even though Vaughn was done with her, he hadn’t been planning to send her back to Archway and the yellow ice straight away. ‘He’s really furious with me, isn’t he?’ she asked Madeleine before she could stop herself.
‘You know I can’t answer that,’ Madeleine said gently. ‘Now do call me if you need anything, and please remember to set the alarms, because if the house is ransacked while you’re at work, then he really will be furious. We’ll all have to emigrate.’
It might have been the first time that year that Grace had actually smiled.
She wasn’t going to stay in Hampstead - Grace was adamant about that. It wouldn’t kill her to not have any hot water, it would be character building, but when she got back to Vaughn’s house that evening, she found every single one of her possessions stacked neatly in packing crates in the hall. Every single one. There was even a balled-up pair of socks, which she didn’t recognise but might have been Liam’s, listed in the inventory provided by the removal company. It was a perfectly executed moonlight flit, except there was a receipt from Mrs Beattie for January’s rent, plus a month in lieu of notice.
It narrowed Grace’s options down considerably. Sure, she had friends with sofas, but twenty crates and twelve garment bags wouldn’t be quite so welcome. All she could do was wait for Vaughn to come back and savour the pleasure of having the whole house to herself, including Vaughn’s premium cable package and a state-of-the-art kitchen.
The week drifted by and Grace felt as if she spent most of it on hold trying to speak to her bank manager. She also set up an appointment with a debt specialist who wouldn’t see her until she could find the contents of her shoeboxes, which had gone AWOL. They weren’t in Vaughn’s study, and it seemed ironic that now she was ready to face facts and all those little red figures, she was stuck in at least three different holding patterns.
But on Friday Grace no longer felt as if she was drifting. Suddenly the real world was beginning to intrude again. Madeleine had woken her up with a text message telling her that Vaughn would be home that night, and Lily arrived back at work that morning with another perfect suntan and a look of utter disdain each time she glanced Grace’s way. Lily had reached the stage of gestation where she just looked fat, rather than pregnant, which made Grace feel slightly vindicated, but she still wished she hadn’t run to squeeze into the lift just as the doors were closing, and had to share a confined space with Lily for thirty seconds.
‘Look, you have to talk to me eventually,’ Grace sighed in exasperation as the lift doors opened and they both headed out to get some lunch. As soon as she’d seen Lily breeze into the office that morning, she’d realised all the little things that were missing, like swapping bitchy emails and checking the Eat website to see what the Soup of the Day was and how many fat units it had, and the times they’d pretend they had appointments so they could go to the cinema. Grace wasn’t prepared to have a Lily-less existence just yet, even though she was still pissed off with her. ‘We work in the same office and I still have your DAY Birger et Mikkelsen blue tunic.’
It was the one thing guaranteed to force a reaction out of Lily. ‘I’ve been looking for that everywhere!’ she gasped in relief before she remembered that she’d put Grace on no speakers. ‘I want it back and that doesn’t mean you need to talk to me. Not after what you did. Not after what you’ve been doing. With him.’
‘Look, we don’t have to talk about him.’ Grace touched Lily’s sleeve lightly and tried to avert her eyes from the two bottom buttons on Lily’s coat, which had been left undone because her hips were getting themselves ready for the childbearing. ‘Tell me how the wedding went.’
She’d already heard in mind-numbing detail about the wedding from everyone else in the office. It had been a beautiful day. Lily had looked like Velvets-era Nico. Dan had cried when he’d recited his vows. But Lily seemed to have forgotten all about that. ‘Your dress was way too short on my cousin,’ she said, elbowing Grace out of the way so she could be first through the revolving doors. ‘And why did you get us a stupid espresso machine when you know I can’t drink coffee?’
After that stressful encounter, Grace was relieved to come home to a house that still didn’t have Vaughn in it. She tended to camp out in the upstairs living room that had a massive HDTV mounted on the wall and sofas that you could actually lie on, like she was doing now as she worked her way through a huge plate of shepherd’s pie and watched the America’s Next Top Model marathon she’d persuaded Vaughn’s Sky+ box to record.
Grace was snickering gently as Tyra Banks exhorted one of the girls to smile with her eyes, when she caught a movement in the doorway and looked up to see Vaughn standing there.
‘Oh, hey,’ she said, through a mouthful of potato.
‘Hello.’ Vaughn stayed in the doorway as Grace heaved herself up and started straightening the cushions. ‘You don’t need to do that.’
Vaughn thought that the floor and the backs of chairs were where his clothes and accessories lived but she was a guest in his house, so she carried on fussing and primping. ‘I wasn’t sure what time you’d be back. Madeleine said it would be late.’
‘A couple of meetings got cancelled so I pushed up my schedule.’ Vaughn dumped his briefcase, coat and laptop bag on top of a Frank Lloyd Wright sideboard, which was far too old to take their weight. ‘Where are you going?’
Grace was on her feet, dinner tray in her hand. ‘Going to put these in the dishwasher.’ Though actually she was getting out of his hair, which was standing on end like he’d spent the last six days pulling on it.
She wasn’t expecting Vaughn to follow her out of the room, down the stairs and into the kitchen, and she could feel the back of her neck tingling, just from being so close to him, though she wasn’t sure if it was from fear or longing. And in the end she had to turn around.
Vaughn was leaning against the door, like he wasn’t sure if he was welcome in his own kitchen; it was an uncharacteristically humble gesture and Grace let down the defences she’d spent all week building up. ‘You look like you slept in a wind tunnel,’ she said with a strained smile so Vaughn would know she was trying to lighten the moo
d and not being snarky.
‘I had a very long, very arduous meeting as soon as I got back to the office this afternoon that made me tear my hair out, quite literally,’ Vaughn explained, and there was all this stuff she had to say to him, but Grace didn’t feel as if she could struggle her way through to the finish line. From the way that Vaughn was leaning against the door, he didn’t either.
‘Have you eaten anything?’ she asked.
‘I had something on the plane.’
‘I made this huge shepherd’s pie. There’s tons left, if you want some.’
Vaughn ate two helpings, but refused to drink Grace’s wine. Instead he opened a bottle of Merlot that was probably older than she was and sipped a glass as Grace loaded the dishwasher, wiped down the stove top and the counters and packed what was left of the shepherd’s pie away in a Tupperware container.
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