I needed to find a way to get him to agree to my plan, and fast. I thought of Freezer, the neighbours’ white cat, who Adam adores. I could threaten to kidnap him and send Adam one of his whiskers every day in the post until he capitulated, but Adam would know I’d never do that. I could offer to do his laundry for him for a whole year, but he knew me well enough to know I’d give up after a couple of weeks. You would too, trust me, if you’d seen the state of Adam’s floordrobe.
He finished his beer. ‘Right,’ he said, sliding down off the stool and putting his jacket on. ‘Time to go. Thanks, Tans, that was fun.’
‘Adam,’ I said. ‘Please? Please will you at least try?’
He looked surprised. ‘Sure, I’ll see what I can do. You only had to ask.’
Three
Adam was as good as his word. The next evening at half past nine, I got a text telling me that Renzo was still at his desk and that the whole team was putting in a late night, and that Adam himself was heading home. Which was okay by me, because I was still at my own desk in the Luxeforless office, finishing off the report for Barri.
A week later, my spy informed me that Renzo was taking a client for dinner at the Arts Club, which was useful intel but of no practical help, because I wouldn’t be able to get in, not being a member. I was desperate, but not so desperate that I couldn’t see being turned away by an inscrutable door bitch was not the look I was after.
The following Tuesday, Adam’s text revealed that ‘the target’ (clearly my housemate was getting well into this whole James Bond vibe) was attending an all-day conference, which would finish with ‘networking over canapés’ in the evening. Again, there was no way I’d be able to crash that one.
And on Friday, my hopes were dashed when Adam texted me shortly after lunch to inform me that Renzo had left the office early to spend the weekend with friends in the south of France.
All in all, it was not a great start – but it was something. Sooner or later, I told myself, the stars would align and I’d be able to turn up at the same place he was, looking my best, as if entirely by coincidence. Our eyes would meet across the room and he’d realise he couldn’t live without me.
Or something. In the meantime, though, I had promises of my own to keep.
I shut down my computer, pushed back my chair and stretched my aching shoulders. Some people think a job in fashion is all about glamour, and while I do get to go to events sometimes, and there’s the occasional overseas trip, most of the time I’m in the office in front of my computer, just like anyone else.
‘Fancy a drink?’ I asked Felicity. ‘If you don’t have plans?’
‘Actually, I’m meeting friends later at Annabel’s,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we head over there now?’
‘You’re a member?’ Renzo was, too.
‘Sure,’ she said, picking up her handbag and swishing her hair. ‘Come on.’
I followed her across the office and we went into the ladies’ together and spent a few minutes topping up our make-up.
‘Oh my God, is that a Milk eye crayon?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t even know you could get that stuff here.’
‘I bought it in New York,’ Felicity said casually.
Humbly, I brushed some of my Primark shadow onto my own eyelids while taking a sideways look in the mirror at my new colleague.
Her handbag was Chanel. Her coat was cashmere. Her jeans fit her so perfectly, making her waist look tiny and her bottom pert and curvy, that they could only have been purchased after several hours of painstaking trying on and must have cost hundreds of pounds.
Samples were a massive perk of working at Luxeforless, and the staff sale was a treasure trove of bargains, but somehow I didn’t think Felicity’s clothes were knock-downs or freebies.
I could see her conducting a similar sideways assessment of me, taking in my jumpsuit, which I’d bought at New Look but could – if you didn’t look very hard – pass for one from the iconic Theory collection, and my battered Stan Smith trainers.
‘You’re so lucky, Tansy,’ she said kindly. ‘With your figure, you can wear anything.’
But I knew she was thinking, That’s one hundred per cent polyester.
She spritzed on some perfume and slid her beautiful coat over her shoulders.
‘Ready?’ I said.
‘Come on then.’ She smiled, and we headed for the lift together.
Even though it was me who’d asked Felicity out for a drink and I was technically the senior colleague, having been at Luxeforless for almost two years as opposed to her few weeks, I had no doubt at all who was in charge. Felicity made her way confidently along Piccadilly, dodging the tourists like a pro.
As she went, she threw the odd remark at me: what Kris thought about Lucy’s strategy in the lingerie department and how Felicity was going to develop it; what Lisa had said to her about Sally; and, most significantly of all, the lovely chat she’d had with Barri over blueberry and buttermilk cake (‘To die for!’) when he’d taken her to the patisserie down the road.
If I needed any confirmation that Felicity’s tenure with our employer was somehow different from mine and that of the rest of my colleagues’, there it was. At the end of my first week at the company, Barri had invited me out for lunch, too. When I asked for extra feta cheese on my superfood salad, he’d raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Image matters in this business, you know, Tansy. You’ve got the look right now. Make sure it stays that way.’
And that freaked me out so much I’d hardly been able to eat anything at all.
‘Here we are. Hello, hello, how was your trip home to Barcelona?’ Felicity cooed, kissing the intimidatingly beautiful girl at the door of Annabel’s on both cheeks. ‘This is my friend Tansy. Pru’s got a table booked for later but you’ll be able to squeeze us in now, won’t you, my lovely?’
‘Of course, Felicity,’ the girl said. ‘Follow me.’
So we did, and a few minutes later we were sitting opposite each other in a booth as voluptuously cushioned as Felicity herself, with a bottle of pink champagne reclining in an ice bucket in front of us.
I didn’t want to think about how much it would have cost. I did know that when the bill eventually came, though, I’d have to pay my share, and I hoped my credit card had its big girl pants handy, because it was going to need them.
‘So, Tansy,’ Felicity said, tipping about fifty quid’s worth of fizzy wine into our glasses, ‘tell me all about you.’
I laughed. ‘This is like writing a Tinder profile! All the pressure.’
‘Are you on Tinder, then?’
‘Not as such,’ I replied. ‘I mean, I’ve got the app on my phone. Doesn’t everyone? But I was seeing someone until really recently, so I’ve been kind of inactive. How about you?’
‘Well, so,’ Felicity said, leaning back in her chair and doing an almost invisible gesture with her head that somehow brought our waiter scurrying over to top up our glasses (there goes another twenty quid, I thought, feeling slightly sick), ‘I’m single. Although I grew up in the UK, I went to uni in America, because my dad’s from there. I studied history of art at Vassar, and I kind of stayed in New York for a bit. But my little sister Pru is here, and my mum, and I wanted to experience the whole London thing as an adult, you know.’
‘Does your sister work in fashion too?’ I asked.
‘Pru? God, no.’ Felicity laughed. ‘She’s not really working at the mo. She’s done some reality TV and a bit of modelling and brand ambassador stuff. So she keeps pretty busy. But she doesn’t work work. I guess I got the ambition and she got the looks.’
I’d already got the sense, obviously, that Felicity’s background was a privileged one, but now I realised just how privileged. If her sister didn’t need to ‘work work’ and moved in the circles that got her on to Made in Chelsea or Britain’s Next Top Model, presumably Felicity could also be a lady of leisure if she wanted to.
I also thought, looking at her perfect, pearly skin, enormous green eyes and full, pouti
ng lips, that either her sister must be off-the-scale stunning, or Felicity had insecurities far deeper than I’d imagined.
‘But you’re gorgeous,’ I protested. She waved a hand dismissively, and the waiter must have thought he was being summoned, because he apparated by our side and filled our glasses up yet again. As the fizz went to my head, I found myself worrying a bit less about the bill.
‘So you were seeing someone, but now you’re not,’ Felicity said. ‘Who was he? What happened?’
I said, ‘His name’s Renzo. He works for a hedge fund – their office is just around the corner, actually. We dated for a few months but we split up just before Christmas.’
‘Hookers and blow?’ Felicity asked sympathetically.
‘What?’ I laughed. ‘No, nothing like that. Fortunately.’
Taking another sip of my wine and looking around the glittering, opulent room, I realised that, in Felicity, I’d found not only a potential new friend, but also an opportunity. The doors that were open to Renzo but closed to me were, without question, open to Felicity. It sounds shallow, I know, but it was true. In her company, I’d never need to worry about being turned away at the door of a place where I might see Renzo. With her and her model sister, I could present him with a picture of glamour and desirability he would surely find hard to resist.
It felt like I was already being disloyal to my new friend, and somehow even compromising myself, but it was clear: Felicity was the missing piece in my plan to get him back.
The only question was how much I revealed about my idea. I was pretty sure that if I told her, she’d hoot with laughter, order another bottle of fizz and start making a list of all the places where we could hang out in the coming weeks.
But then, I genuinely liked Felicity. I’d have wanted to spend time with her even if winning Renzo back hadn’t been part of my game plan – although, admittedly, it would have been at the local pub rather than in swanky private members’ clubs. I didn’t want her to feel I was using or manipulating her. I genuinely wanted to be friends with her. Since I’d lived in London, I’d had a succession of housemates – most recently Charlotte and Adam, who’d become real friends – but my social circle was way narrower than I wanted it to be. When I’d been dating Renzo, that hadn’t seemed to matter. But now, especially with Charlotte leaving, loneliness threatened me like a dark cloud.
Also, if I told her that I was determined to persuade Renzo to change his mind, I’d have to tell her why he’d dumped me in the first place, and I wasn’t even close to ready to do that.
So I said, ‘We just kind of drifted apart. The hours those guys work – we struggled to find time to see each other, and it seemed like the relationship wasn’t going to move on to the next level, you know?’
‘I totally get that,’ Felicity said. ‘When I was in New York, I was dating a guy who worked in the fine art department at Sotheby’s. He travelled loads for work – LA one week, Tokyo the next, Switzerland the week after – you get the picture. Getting to see him got to be this massive effort. So I called it a day.’
She looked down at her hands and sighed, and I wondered how much her ‘calling it a day’ had had to do with her decision to uproot and move back to London.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s tough breaking up, even when things aren’t working.’
‘Yeah, well. We should hang out together more often. You can show me where to find hot guys in London.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t be single, would I? But we can try. And even if we don’t find anyone, we can have fun looking.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Felicity said, but it turned out we couldn’t, because we’d finished the bottle. As casually as you’d get another round in at your local, she waved the waiter over and ordered another.
‘Pru and her friends will be here soon,’ she said. ‘You should stay. Join us for the night. We’re going to have some food and then go down to the basement later and dance.’
I didn’t need a spreadsheet to work out what all that would cost. More champagne, two or three courses and probably wine with dinner, cocktails to finish the evening off – it was unthinkable. It would come close to the cost of my monthly rent.
So I said, ‘I’d love to, but I really can’t. I promised my housemate I’d have dinner with her tonight.’
I felt terrible lying to Felicity again, but admitting that I wasn’t in the same league as her and her friends felt somehow too shameful to admit – almost as shameful as admitting the true cause of my break-up with Renzo.
So I stayed and chatted to her until her sister (who was so ridiculously hot you’d literally stop and Instagram her in the street) arrived, and then, after insisting on paying my share of the bill, I went home to spend the rest of the evening on my own.
Four
I’d intended to spend the morning making a start on planning my spring/summer collection for the following year. It was my favourite part of my job: putting together a range that would excite the Luxeforless customer, and my head was already full of ideas.
I drained the last of my coffee and turned to my computer screen. No doubt I had an inbox full of emails, but they could wait: the creative force was strong in me for the first time that year, and I was going to make the most of it.
Then Priti from reception came hurrying over, looking even more harassed than usual.
‘There’s a delivery for you, Tansy.’
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Is it the fit samples for my workwear dresses from Turkey? I wasn’t expecting them until next week.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s from China, and it’s a fuckload of stuff. Something’s gone wrong somewhere.’
Shit. My inspiration forgotten, I jumped up and hurried behind Priti to the reception area, the rubber floor dulling the clacking of our heels.
A fuckload of stuff. She hadn’t been kidding. There were six huge cardboard crates crowding the space between the lift and her desk.
Wordlessly, she handed me the delivery note. Some of it was in Mandarin, and made no sense to me, but the translation did.
Luxeforless X Guillermo Hernandez. Five hundred items.
‘But these are… These were meant to arrive last year. I cancelled the order when the supplier said they couldn’t fulfil it in time.’
And never mind that: the order should have gone, bar a handful of samples for me to check, to our warehouse and fulfilment centre in Dartford, not come to Luxeforless’s Soho HQ, which according to Barri embodied the ‘edgy yet effortless mood of the brand’.
There was nothing edgy about these enormous boxes, and nothing effortless about sorting out the headache they presented me with. The order had been cancelled. The limited-edition run of Christmas party frocks, which had cost only a few pounds each to manufacture but would have sold on our website for two hundred and fifty pounds, had so little intrinsic value that it was barely worth the cost of returning them to China – and I was under no obligation to do so, anyway, given that the order had been cancelled months before.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Priti asked, giving one of the cartons a poke with the pointy toe of her camel suede mule, then wincing as her own toes protested at the pressure.
Fuck only knows, I thought.
But I said, ‘Let’s find space for them in the sample room for now. We can decide what to do once I’ve spoken to Lisa.’
We looked at each other, and then, by unspoken mutual agreement, we kicked off our shoes before heaving and dragging the boxes into the already crowded space where all the prototype garments lived. The room was already packed with samples in various stages of production, alongside racks and racks of finished garments, all with their labels and tags in place, destined for the staff sale at the end of the season.
So Priti and I had to undertake something like a game of fashion Jenga, as rails threatened to collapse on top of us and piled-up crates of bags and shoes teetered as we heaved them around, before at last we’d slotted my st
upid, sequinned, unwanted frocks into a corner.
‘That’s going to have to do for now,’ I said at last.
‘I guess,’ Priti said doubtfully, shaking her head as she stepped gingerly out of the room, slid into her shoes and made her way back to her desk, smoothing her violet wings of hair back from her face.
I hurried back to my own desk, but the morning had gone, and my inspiration with it. I was just about to leave for my lunch break, which I planned to spend walking through Mayfair on the off-chance of bumping into Renzo, when Barri’s voice rang out across the office.
‘Could you all gather round, please.’ Felicity and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
‘What’s this about?’ she asked.
‘No idea.’
Meetings involving all the company’s one hundred and twenty staff weren’t unusual, but they were held on a quarterly basis and scheduled in everyone’s diary at the beginning of the year. Whatever this was, it was clearly some kind of emergency.
‘I hope he isn’t going to take too long,’ Felicity whispered. ‘I’ve got an express manicure booked at half one.’
We all shuffled down to the far end of the office, some of us scooting along on our wheeled chairs, others perching on the corners of desks. Felicity and I chose to stand at the back, as far away from Barri as we could get.
‘Greetings, gang,’ my boss said, hooking his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans, which were, as always, cut just slightly too snug.
Still, he seemed in a good mood, bouncing up and down slightly on his Cuban-heeled cowboy boots and smiling warmly.
‘I’ve called you all here at short notice because I have a very exciting announcement to make,’ he said, and I watched all my colleagues arrange their faces into expressions of eager anticipation.
‘As you are aware, here at Luxeforless we take corporate responsibility very seriously. We aim to be an exemplary corporate citizen on a global and local level.’
It's Not You It's Him: An absolutely hilarious and feel-good romantic comedy Page 3
