A Reluctant Cinderella

by Alison Bond

  In the corner of her desk was the gold-plated champagne bottle that she had been awarded a couple of years back by a prestigious champagne company as their Businesswoman of the Year. She kept it on her desk to remind her how marvellous she was. It might sound ridiculous, but sometimes, stuck on a deal point, arguing with a lawyer, or doubting words said in haste to a client, she needed to be reminded. This week she had looked at that gold-plated champagne bottle a great many times.

  The insistent knocking at her front door continued.

  It couldn’t possibly be anyone she wanted to see. There was nobody. She willed her visitor to give up, but they kept on knocking, on and on, and eventually she caved. She climbed the stairs wearily and opened the creaking basement door, telling herself once again to oil the hinge. She glimpsed herself in the hall mirror and winced at the figure she saw there, dishevelled in shades of grey – skin, clothes and the shadows under her eyes.

  She opened the front door reluctantly.

  Leanne stood on her doorstep, obscured by a beautiful bouquet of pale silvery-lilac tea roses. ‘You took your time,’ she said. ‘They’re not from me. They came to the office, and they’re playing havoc with my hay fever. Take them, will you? Can I come in?’

  Samantha took the flowers and Leanne followed her inside. She had a feeling that she would have been unable to stop her even if she’d wanted to.

  ‘Nice place,’ she said. ‘What’s it worth?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Course you do; you’re just being discreet. I’d say a million two, that about right? I’ve been calling your mobile all morning.’

  ‘It doesn’t work in the basement. No signal.’

  ‘Have you done your basement? Good one. That’ll add a few grand.’

  Leanne lingered in the kitchen while her boss read the card accompanying the flowers. ‘Are they from the billionaire?’ she asked.

  Samantha handed her the card while she inhaled the sweet heady scent of them, a smell that turned her stomach and unsettled her mind.

  ‘It’s his father’s money. He’s not a billionaire,’ she said.

  ‘Not yet.’

  To thank you, glasnost, Alek.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Leanne.

  ‘It’s a private joke.’

  ‘Roses and private jokes,’ said Leanne. ‘Is there something going on between you two? Something sexy? A little Eastern promise perhaps?’

  ‘Alek’s your age, not mine.’

  ‘Then you should introduce me. Soon.’ She nodded towards the flowers. ‘They’re gorgeous.’

  ‘Coffee?’ said Samantha, reaching for the canister of Madagascan beans.

  ‘Much as I’d love to sit here and let my boss make me coffee – which would be a first by the way – I’d rather you told me what’s going on. You’ve been fired?’

  ‘What?’ She dropped the canister to the floor and coffee beans rattled across the polished floorboards of the kitchen, falling into the cracks between them, and rolling into corners from which they would never be salvaged. Fired? ‘Who told you that?’ she demanded.

  ‘Everybody. I just nod like a dickhead and say that I know and that I’m weighing up my options. Jackson has told me that there is a job for me if I want to stay.’

  Jackson. She missed him.

  ‘I haven’t been fired.’

  ‘Well, you know, “let go”, whatever.’ She made the quotes in the air with her fingers.

  ‘I’ve been suspended, that’s all.’

  ‘Sounds bad.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t. I’ll be back soon so Richard can just keep on walking by. Prick.’ How dare he? ‘I’ll be back,’ she said firmly.

  Leanne shrugged.

  ‘Is that really what people believe?’ Samantha was crushed. ‘What about the clients? Have any of the clients been told? Do they think I’ve been –’ she pressed her eyes closed – ‘fired?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Only a handful have called in. I put those calls through to Jackson.’

  ‘Okay, on whose instructions?’

  ‘Jackson’s.’

  ‘What about the Welstead boys?’

  ‘Richard’s taking care of them.’

  ‘Okay.’ This was bad. Suspension was appalling enough, but rumours about being fired? They would spread like honey around the busy bees of her profession. For all their bullish bravado, sports agents were terrible gossips; a juicy morsel could spread from Newcastle to Portsmouth before you could blow a whistle. So far there had been nothing in the newspapers, but perhaps they were biding their time. If Richard got his perfectly man-manicured fingernails into the Welstead brothers she would have a fight on her hands to get them back.

  Think.

  Damage control.

  It was good of Leanne to come. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Samantha, ‘this must have put you in a very awkward position.’

  ‘I’ve been in worse positions,’ said Leanne. ‘Actually I haven’t told you yet about the position I got into with that new Nigerian guy playing up front for Charlton Athletic. Talk about athletic …’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘No, maybe later.’ She leant over the roses and inhaled them, then promptly sneezed. ‘What is it, Sam?’ she said. ‘What’s happening?’

  So she told her.

  Her assistant sat and listened with disbelief as Samantha explained how Jackson and Carl had confronted her with the facts as they understood them.

  ‘I can’t work again until I’m in the clear, at least not officially. I’ve closed the deal for Gabe Muswell’ – she pointed at the flowers – ‘but I don’t really think anyone will care. It’s such a small deal.’

  Surely only in this beautiful game could a five-thousand-euro-a-week deal be considered small. But Gabe was happy, Christine ecstatic and Samantha content that she had wrung every drop of potential from Gabe’s moment in the sun. To be frank, she was grateful for the distraction.

  ‘I’m in pretty serious trouble,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s ridiculous. You’re so boring it’s untrue,’ said Leanne.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Yeah, but you know what I mean. You’re straight, square, ethical and stuff. Either you’re a fantastic liar or you’re the last person on earth who would be involved in something corrupt. I’m a good judge of character, ask anyone. Actually don’t, I try to play it a little dumb sometimes. Don’t want you to blow my cover.’

  ‘I’ll put you down as a reference for court.’

  Leanne paled. ‘Court? Surely it won’t go that far?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Maybe you’d better make me that coffee.’

  Her assistant (ex-assistant?) went off to snoop around the living room while Samantha swept the coffee beans from the kitchen floor and started grinding some more. She glanced at the roses. She should call him, just to say thank you. The brief negotiations had been handled by a lawyer at his end and they hadn’t spoken since the night they met. Sometimes, her thoughts drifted to him and she found herself remembering all sorts of odd things. His eyebrows almost met in the middle in a way that would normally have her reaching for the wax strips, but on him she found it alluring, the way he struggled to pronounce ‘th’ so ‘that’ became ‘zat’ and her name was ‘Samanza’ which made her sound like a different person.

  The coffee machine steamed and hissed and she forgot about the Russian and his roses while she fixed their drinks.

  Leanne knew absolutely nothing about Samantha outside work. She looked around the tasteful house, all minimalist and modern, giving away nothing about the person who lived here. She thought of her own small flat a few tube stops north in Tufnell Park, scattered with DVDs and half-read novels, the walls coated with art that shouted about her taste in music and her fondness for 1950s glamour. There was no personality in Sam’s home.

  ‘I thought you’d moved?’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ said Samantha.

  ‘A year or so ago,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I
spend a whole week ordering furniture and stuff for a house in Kentish Town? Sullivan Street, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That wasn’t for me,’ said Samantha. ‘It was a sort of investment.’

  ‘You’ve been renting it out?’

  ‘Something like that, yeah.’ Samantha waved the subject away with her hand. ‘So what do you think?’ she said. ‘How long before I get my job back?’

  ‘You reckon you’ve been set up?’ said Leanne, while she toyed with the touch-screen remote that controlled the entertainment system.

  ‘It seems unlikely. No, I think it’s a mistake, a bureaucratic blunder, a sequence of coincidences,’ said Samantha. ‘Why? What do you think?’

  ‘I think a high-profile woman like you might have made a few people angry over the years, I wouldn’t rule anything out.’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible, though I can’t imagine anyone who would want to discredit me.’

  ‘You need to think about who stands to gain from your disgrace,’ said Leanne. ‘You need to think about your enemies.’

  ‘I don’t have any enemies.’

  ‘Don’t be naive, Sam. Everyone has enemies.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘There’s a bunch of guys scattered around town who probably don’t think too highly of me, plus there’s a girl down at Chinawhite on a Thursday who despises me. She says I stole the love of her life,’ said Leanne. ‘I didn’t steal him.’ She laughed, a dirty throaty laugh that seemed out of place in Samantha’s despair. ‘I may have borrowed him for a short while, but I didn’t steal him.’

  They sipped their coffees.

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ said Samantha firmly. They would find the S. Sharp who had 300K in CoralBanc and the mistake would be corrected. Then she could have her life back again.

  ‘Thanks for coming over, Leanne,’ she said, standing up and lifting her chin, fixing Leanne with a defiant stare that she didn’t deserve.

  She’d made it all the way to the top on her own. She didn’t need anyone. Not even now.

  12

  At seventeen Samantha Sharp left her old life behind and moved to London, intent on making her fortune.

  She packed everything she cared about into a small backpack, her fingers trembling with excitement. This was it – this was what she had been waiting for.

  The face in the mirror was more beautiful than she realized. She saw unruly wavy hair that cost too much to control, boring brown eyes, and a thin face that needed sunshine and a square meal to look attractive. The beholder saw perfect pale skin, high cheekbones and romantic hair like a gypsy, dark eyes flashing with self-contained intelligence.

  Life starts now.

  ‘I’ll be back in a few days,’ she told her foster parents, a couple in their fifties who hadn’t the slightest idea how to relate to this smart and independent young woman living in their box room.

  ‘Call us when you get to your brother’s,’ they said.

  And she did. She called them and told them that she would not be coming back.

  ‘Liam thinks he can get me a job,’ she told them, ‘in the hotel where he works. I’m going to stay for the summer.’ By the end of the summer she would be eighteen and she wouldn’t have to tell anyone a thing.

  She could hear the anxiety in her foster mother’s voice and wondered how nervous she’d sound if she knew she was saying goodbye for the last time. They were probably less concerned about her welfare than they were about getting into trouble with social services for letting her go. But how hard would anyone search for a girl that nobody wanted? Nobody wanted, that is, except Liam.

  ‘Liam will take care of me,’ she said. ‘We take care of each other.’

  She’d done it. She’d really done it. She was free. She felt like dancing.

  ‘You told them?’ he said, waiting for her in the pub across the road from the phone box with two bottles of beer and a bag of peanuts. He lifted his glass to his little sister.

  ‘To Samantha Sharp,’ he said. ‘May all her dreams come true.’

  She was with Liam, in the greatest city in the world, and they had nobody to answer to but each other. She was already halfway there.

  She fell for London quickly and passionately, a teenager with a crush, ignoring all the faults in the object of her desire and seeing only the good and the long, happy life they could have together.

  One night, early in the relationship, she found herself in Soho as it was getting dark. She bought a bunch of grapes from a market stall at end-of-the-day prices and stood in the shadows on Berwick Street watching the traders pack up their fruit and veg, popping the sweet crimson grapes into her mouth one at a time. A man with a fluorescent orange jacket washed the street clean with a hose and the neon lights of Rupert Street reflected in the wet surface. Shops pulled down their shutters with a determined rattle and their staff locked up and said their goodbyes. The offices nearby spewed out their workforce relentlessly and the streets were crammed with thirsty media types, heading into bars in packs, picking up take-out as they headed for home, jabbering into mobile phones and generally not letting the pace of their lives slip even for a moment.

  After a while it grew quiet, the last market trader pulled away in a white van, the last shop flicked out its lights and the last worker found a place to wind down for the evening. There was no traffic and a peaceful hush fell over this lively little corner of her new home town.

  London. At last.

  The kind of place where you could become whatever you wanted without anyone around to tell you no, to tell you to be realistic, to think smaller. And though she had no idea exactly what it was that she wanted to be, she sensed that here she would discover herself.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered.

  An unshaven man carrying his worldly goods in a pink holdall he had found dumped at Victoria Station heard her as he made himself comfortable in a shop doorway. ‘Thanks, darling, I love you too. Spare any change?’

  She found her way with nothing more than her small backpack and a copy of the Carnegie book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

  His rule number one: don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

  For the first time in her life she had nothing to complain about. She was in London, with Liam, and the rest of her life stretched tantalizingly ahead. She would get a job, she would save her money, she would buy her own house and then she would be happy.

  She knew everything there was to know – she was seventeen, an adult – and foremost among these things she knew was the value of money. She was sick of being a ‘have not’ surrounded by irritating ‘haves’ who never missed an opportunity to rub her face in their good fortune. Whether it was the girls at school with their expensive haircuts and active social lives, or the woman at the pub where she worked who always complained about ridiculous things, like her husband not having enough annual leave to go on all the holidays they wanted to take. She didn’t know how she was going to do it, but she was determined to have enough money to feel comfortable, to get a professional haircut without worrying that the same amount of money could feed a family for a week, to take a holiday somewhere other than a Haven holiday park, to live a little, to live a lot.

  Liam worked at a busy hotel popular with middle management and the middle classes, the Royal Victoria, a seething mass of cheap labour with a constant turnover of personnel. Until he found her a job there she stayed on his sofa in his tiny flat in Camberwell and cleaned and cooked for him in lieu of rent.

  ‘Anything?’ she asked, eating vegetable curry for the third time that week, the end-of-the-day vegetables from East Street market and the spices from a little shop she had found off the Walworth Road. A full belly for barely more than the cost of a first-class stamp. They spent more on the beer to wash it down. And if there ever came a day when it was a choice between food and drink they would both take drink. When you had enough to drink you could forget that you were hungry.

  You could forget everything.

  ‘Not yet,’ he
said, reaching for second helpings because he’d skipped lunch. ‘But there’s a rumour that one of the chambermaids is about to be fired for offering “special services”. Something will turn up.’

  Everything was so expensive here. They stretched the little they had as far as it would go. Liam scavenged what food he could from the hotel kitchens and they would get a buzz on at home before taking the bus into the West End around chucking-out time so they could laugh at people piling out bleary eyed onto the street, diving onto tables of half-finished drinks and polishing them off. They drank a lot. But they were young; they could get away with it. They still thought that they would live for ever.

  Sometimes, before he clocked off for the night, Liam would take her for a spin around Chelsea in one of the hotel cars.

  He was in the driving pool, which meant a lot of waiting around for not much money. But, as a special treat sometimes, instead of driving impatient hotel guests to appointments he would drive his giggling little sister up and down the King’s Road until one or both of them had had enough. Usually him. She could never have enough of these streets, of this city.

  She liked to watch Sloane Rangers striding into Oriel in their beautiful clothes, their high heels tapping past a tramp and his dog without even glancing down. She laughed at the Japanese tourists who liked to stop dead in the middle of the pavement gazing forlornly at a fold-out street map while men in grey suits swerved around them with sour faces as if the fraction of a second this curve added to their commute was a fraction of a second too long. She liked it best when their late-night drives coincided with the end of a play, either at the Royal Court Theatre or sometimes the Palace, and the way the empty road suddenly filled up with smartly dressed culture vultures picking over every black cab, or tourists trailing around the corner like sheep to take the coaches back to middle England, back to the kind of place she had left behind for good.

  By her eighteenth birthday she had a steady job as a chambermaid at the Royal Victoria. She learnt how to clean a room in five minutes flat so that she could spend the rest of the allocated fifteen minutes lying on the bed reading the guests’ magazines, browsing through their wardrobes, or testing the lotions and potions left in the bathroom. She liked to pretend, even if just for ten minutes, that she was someone else, someone better.