Summer in Mayfair Read online

  ‘I’m not interested in getting into Nigel Dempster’s column.’

  ‘Bullshit, Bill. You thrive on gossip pages,’ said Suki.

  ‘Not when it comes to my work. I can be omnipresent on the social scene but I don’t want my work to be cheapened by café society.’

  Fair enough, thought Esme, although there must be some famous people who liked this kind of art, surely?

  ‘My father told me you know lots of rock stars. Don’t any of them collect art?’ she ventured.

  ‘They are generally too busy shovelling powder up their noses or injecting opioids into their veins. A good habit doesn’t come cheap.’

  ‘Well, whoever comes, I’ve bought loads of champagne. It’s the good stuff, as you realized after you’d calmed down,’ said Suki.

  Bill had initially berated Suki for ordering the wrong label. ‘We can’t serve that shit,’ he had said.

  Rather than arguing, Suki – in her usual apathy – was unwilling to rise to the bait and waited for her boss to discover there were ten cases of Bollinger in the back, the very one he normally served at all his gallery opening nights.

  ‘I’m not awash with money but need to give the impression I am. Money makes money.’

  It certainly didn’t seem to Esme as though he was cutting any corners. Searcy’s was doing the food. Probably the most expensive caterers in London had been instructed to provide bite-sized blinis and smoked salmon topped with sour cream and Beluga, foie gras on mini brioche with a caramelized onion marmalade and cocktail sausages from Suffolk. Esme had been surprised when Suki had balked at such indulgence.

  ‘Jesus, Bill, this is going to cost a bomb! What’s wrong with cheese and pineapple or mini quiches?’

  Bill looked like she had lobbed fish guts at him. He physically heaved.

  ‘Revolting, repellent and vile. That might suffice for your bourgeois friends in the Home Counties but I am catering to a different class of people. The kind that would use your home as a garden shed.’

  Here we go, thought Esme, quickly busying herself with some non-existent paperwork. She put a guest list in the desk drawer and waited for Suki’s counterblast. After all, Suki’s family home was hardly a hovel. Suki had told Esme the eight-bedroom house sat in 130 acres of Surrey countryside complete with tennis court and swimming pool. A Home County with lots of brogue- and sports jacket-wearers, Bill said, but having seen a photograph, it looked rather pretty. It had less majesty than The Lodge, but Esme suspected its four walls also contained less drama and heartache than her own home.

  While Esme admired the way Bill’s barbs bounced off Suki, she found it more difficult to remain detached because most of the time she was flying by the seat of her pants, learning as she recoiled from one bollocking to the next. When he accused her one morning, of being ‘a pathetic waste of space’, despite working late for four consecutive nights her self-doubt believed him. She wished she was more relaxed, like Suki, who knew this job was only a stopgap. But Esme was only one paycheque away from having to return to Scotland. If she didn’t find her way in the art world, she knew her father would expect her to become a tame society wife. Even though her first taste of independence had been brief, Esme knew she could never go back, never follow her mother’s unhappy path.

  But her pent-up anxiety risked turning to hysteria. One moment she was terrified to put a foot wrong, paralysed with fear of the next outburst and then the next moment, she’d be suffocated by suppressed giggles when Bill bounced around like a temperamental bald baby. She thought he would erupt when getting her pen to work one morning she accidentally flicked ink on his white jeans. She tried to gag her laughter but it was that irrepressible, inappropriately timed laughter – the kind that out of nowhere turned into tears of mirth – which sprayed from her eyes like a sprinkler.

  ‘It is not fucking funny, Esme. I got these jeans in Capri. Takes me two hours to get the zip up with a coat hanger and now I have to change. After all that effort.’

  Suki was looking at Esme when she said, ‘They look cool now, Bill. Tie dye.’

  Esme spat her coffee over her desk.

  ‘Go… and… get… a… cloth,’ said Suki like a mother to her child.

  ‘Christ!’ shrieked Bill. ‘Look what you have done!’

  He hopped around like he had walked through a hornets’ nest, his sunglasses falling from his head and landing askew on his nose.

  ‘Calm down, Bill, you’re going to have a coronary!’ said Suki, in hysterics.

  Bill spun around and stood stock still, as if the music had stopped. Hand on hip, right foot pointed forward in second position, sunglasses now on his chin. Esme braced herself for a storm. She picked up a bottle of Tippex with an expression that said, ‘Shall we give it a try?’

  ‘Give that to me,’ he said, snatching it from her.

  ‘I’ll do it for you, Bill. You can’t see the bits on your bum,’ said Esme.

  Bill bent over and offered his backside, tight as a drum in the white denim.

  ‘I can see you have done that before,’ said Suki, suggestively.

  ‘Shut up, Suki,’ said Bill, still enraged.

  Esme dabbed on the white paste, which worked a treat.

  ‘I think we’ve invented a new way of dry cleaning. Look, Suki, you wouldn’t even know Bill’s bum had been spat on by an octopus,’ said Esme, trying to make light of the situation, while internally praying this wasn’t the last straw that might get her fired.

  Suki came close and inspected Esme’s handiwork. She grimaced at Esme as the ink began to bleed through, the chalky paste being no match for the density of the ink.

  ‘Perhaps add another layer when this one has dried. Just to be sure,’ said Suki.

  Esme took a catalogue and began to fan Bill’s bottom.

  ‘Jesus. If Javier could see me now…’ said Bill, beginning to see the funny side.

  After the second coat, the stains were gone and the atmosphere went from red to amber alert.

  Feeling guilty that she was the cause of Bill’s raised blood pressure, Esme asked if he would like her to deliver the invitations.

  ‘How good are you with a map?’ he asked, handing her an A-Z.

  Although most of London wasn’t her stomping ground, she knew the majority of his clients lived in Kensington and Chelsea.

  ‘I’ll be fine. It will be good for me to learn my way around – for the next time,’ she grinned, hopeful that Bill had forgiven her.

  Bill returned her smile.

  ‘If there is a next time, missy.’

  ‘I really am sorry, Bill. I’d be furious if someone stained my favourite trousers,’ she said, scooping up the pile of invites and putting them in a carrier bag. Giving him her most contrite look, she pecked him on the cheek.

  ‘Maybe it was meant to be.’ Bill said. ‘If I’m honest, I was much smaller when I bought them. Perhaps you have done Javier a favour. He can have them.’

  Esme didn’t think Javier was the kind of man to be happy in cast-offs.

  ‘Lucky Javier,’ she said. ‘His will be the first invite I drop off. Want me to take the jeans too?’

  ‘Away with you, young lady. Make sure you get them all delivered today.’

  Esme walked to Green Park Tube station, not looking forward to being swallowed underground on such a glorious day. The air was hot and in short supply as she bought her ticket with money she’d borrowed from the red petty-cash box. She felt sweat spring at the back of her neck and trickle down her spine. It was cool to the touch but warm on her skin. She could have taken enough money for a taxi – it wasn’t like Bill or Suki ever even considered taking public transport – but her conscience wouldn’t allow for such extravagance when this was meant to be a peace offering to Bill. Anyway, it would be quicker by Tube.

  She had hated escalators ever since her laces had caught in one when she was a child. Her mother had pulled her shoe off just in time. It was the first step that was the worst and made her feel drunk going from iner
t concrete to moving metal with teeth. A man pushed past her, making her cling a little tighter to the handrail. She felt the wind of passing trains whip at her hair. It was filled with recycled grime and other people’s breath. Holding her own until the air was still, she gingerly stepped off, her feet sticking to the ground. Like coming off the ice wearing skates, the transition was abrupt. Esme had always been clumsy and uncoordinated; Mrs Bee claimed it was because her legs were too long to control, ‘like saplings,’ she said. At least they weren’t tree trunks, she supposed, but they had sustained multiple injuries, a series of twisted ankles and a litany of grazed knees and elbows.

  Looking along the platform, advertisements lined the walls. There was one that stood out to her – announcing an exhibition at the Wallace Collection, The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals prominent in its layout. Her father said the gallery was the best-kept secret in London. She had always wanted to go and if the preview went well, perhaps she would treat herself to a visit. She made a mental note to ask Bill more about it.

  She moved towards the tracks holding the invitations close, wanting to feel relevant but knowing that she had a long way to go before she felt a true part of this city. She knew her first task was to become a useful, if not vital cog in Bill’s business. But what then? Among the five or so people waiting for the train she felt as though she floated in the emptiness, loose and boundary-less, waiting for a kind of certainty to kick in. It didn’t. Instead, she was suddenly more unsure than ever, stuck between this new life and the one she’d left behind. She stared at the Tube map next to her, and spotting Camden further north, she remembered Cece and wished she’d called her. She needed all the friends she could get.

  The rumble of an oncoming train was magnified in sunken confinement. It felt deafening. An assault on her senses, pushing all available air into the dark chasm ahead like a syringe being prepped for use. It was eleven o’clock, the rush hour was over and Esme stepped into an all but empty carriage. A lone old man looked at her as if she had trespassed onto his property. He shook his newspaper in protest, peering over the pages at her with furious eyes. This was the kind of passive-aggressive behaviour she recognized in her father, typical of the old guard who believed they had automatic ownership of everything, even public transport. Esme could see this man was part of that tribe by his shoes. They were polished hand-made leather. Esme could tell a lot by a man’s shoes. Pointy toes belonged the cocksure. Brown shoes in the city, new money. Boots not to be trusted at all. Newspaper man was grumpy but harmless.

  She sat down and checked the map. She’d be at South Kensington in three stops. The plastic bag was heavy and sweated on her knee. Hand-printed and embossed with the gallery logo, the invites were made up in thick gold-edged card; ‘stiffies’ nearly capable of cracking flagstones upon delivery. Bill spared no expense when it came to first impressions, and for all his flare-ups and stress, he knew exactly what was needed to satisfy his highfaluting clientele.

  Back at ground level, she pulled out her A-Z and mapped her delivery route. Most of the addresses were in three pockets: SW1, SW7 and W8. If she was organized she could get the drop done in a couple of hours. Deciding where to go first, she chose to face her ghosts and picked the most familiar of all the addresses.

  Upon entering Pelham Place, she was sorry that the cherry blossom was over. In spring, the street floated in a cloud of softest pink. It was strange walking down a street that her family was no longer a part of. She hadn’t been back there since the house had been sold some eight years ago but it was so familiar that she still knew every crack in each paving stone and remembered how she used to skip over them to avoid bad luck.

  The stucco houses were three-storey with low ceilings. Unostentatious compared to some in the borough, relatively small but very pretty with their sash windows and polished doorknobs gleaming against black lacquered doors. There were no rogue residents in Pelham Place. No dusty net curtains or dirty windows. Everyone who lived here had a primary home in the countryside. The houses weren’t big enough for full-time occupation by the kind of families that picked Pelham Place as their London address. There was no competitive planting in the front garden and most instead had tamed roses, lavender and box in lead urns. Subtle colour schemes and architectural shapes were ideally suited to the formality of this moneyed borough – restrained yet expensive.

  Number 6 sat next to Cecil Beaton’s old house. When she was a child, he would doff his fedora at her and ask after her teddy bear, Gelatin, when she was playing in the front garden. Once, a very beautiful guest put a copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in her pram. Inside she had written, ‘To a sweet cherub. With my love. Vivien Leigh.’ One day Esme hoped she would give it to her own children.

  She was suddenly consumed by nostalgia for that lost little girl, whose mother could be seen cooking through the window, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Enid Blyton and sucking menthol cough drops. There was a trace of herself in this street, where she had felt comfortable and secure; where her mother had been the verdant version of her now-withered self. An aching familiarity made her feel she was still nine. Sweeties, splinters, bikes and buttered toast. Tangled hair, dirty feet, Simon and Garfunkel and bed by seven thirty. But with the bittersweet wave of sentiment came frustration, too. She was in London now to create new memories. Yet she couldn’t escape the pull of the past, her memory dwelling on the happy times, making it harder to move on.

  Two people living on the street had been invited to the opening and Esme put invites through their respective doors. Unable to restrain her nostalgia, she peered through the last letterbox, belonging to the parents of a girl who was at school with her. She’d often spend happy days there. As she peered through, her narrow view of black-and-white tiles was the perfect study for painting in perspective. Then a pair of chunky calves in sturdy shoes came into sight and a duster brushed against pink-and-white stripes and a starched apron. A housekeeper never wore a uniform in the countryside, even at Culcairn, but it was acceptable and indeed expected in townhouses for your maid to don a work outfit that screamed ‘servitude’. Esme thought this was fine in a hotel but pretentious and demeaning in a home. Embarrassed, she stood up and rang the doorbell.

  ‘Rosa!’ said Esme, giving the woman who opened the door a hug before she had time to get over her surprise.

  ‘Esme! I didn’t expect to see you again.’

  At the start of school holidays when she spent a few days in London en-route to the Highlands, Esme often popped into number 11. At first she’d come to see her friend, but soon she visited even when the family wasn’t there. Especially when the family wasn’t there. To see Rosa and taste her halo-halo, an exotic concoction of shaved rice and purple yam ice-cream.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Esme held up the envelope addressed to ‘J Richardson Esq’.

  ‘Are you having a ball for your twenty-first?’

  Trust Rosa and her good taste. She immediately knew that the envelope held an invitation to an event worth attending.

  ‘I wish! I’m twenty-two now. It’s for a gallery opening,’ said Esme, placing the invite on the hall table. ‘Is Anna home?’

  ‘Sadly not. She would have loved to have seen you.’

  ‘Shame. Would you mind if I grabbed some water? It’s so hot out there.’

  ‘Come. Come,’ said the maid, closing the door behind Esme. ‘And I’ve just made some spring rolls. You look like you need some flesh on your bones.’

  Esme sat at the kitchen table and allowed Rosa to fuss over her. As she bit into the crisp pastry skin, she remembered she hadn’t eaten properly for twenty-four hours.

  ‘Oh my goodness, these are delicious, Rosa,’ she said, wiping flakes from her mouth and reaching to pick up a second.

  ‘May I have another one? But I don’t want to scoff all your lunch.’

  Rosa laughed and piled another batch onto the plate.

  ‘No problem! Mr and Mrs Richardson are having fish pie
for dinner. No one likes my spicy food. Too scared,’ she said, rolling her eyes.

  ‘They don’t know what they are missing.’

  After she’d finished her exotic titbits, Esme took a gulp of water, and rose and said, ‘I don’t want to be rude, Rosa, but I have to get going. Got lots of these things to deliver by the end of the day, but at least I won’t faint from hunger now. It was lovely to see you again.’

  ‘I’ll be sure Mr and Mrs get the letter. Come see me again when you want some proper food. Anytime, Esme.’ She pronounced Esme’s name with an elongated ‘e’ at the end.

  ‘I’ll definitely take you up on that, Rosa. Thank you.’

  As she stepped out onto the street, for a moment it was like she was back in her old life. Her childhood rhythms of town and country houses, maids and balls, felt reassuring and familiar. But she knew the door had closed on that carefree world. The money that had paid for the lavish addresses and parties had been poured into care home bills and her father’s locked-down warehouse of untouched treasures. The home she still had, The Lodge, was filled now with little more than memories of loss and infidelity. The house of cards might have fallen, but she realized she was luckier than most. She had a chance to build a new life. She just had to not blow it. She reopened her A-Z with new resolve.

  With the bulk of the invitations left to drop off around Eaton Square, Esme took a short-cut down Pavilion Road to get onto Sloane Street. The cobbles made a passing car sound like it had a puncture, rubber flapping on stone. The uneven stones were an accident waiting to happen with her uncoordinated gait. Although her shoes were flat, she felt her ankle go on two or three occasions, the last time painful enough to make her stop. She put her bag on the ground and rubbed her leg. She was outside a shop and she realized she recognized the dresses that adorned the mannequins in the window. The designer was familiar from her mother’s wardrobe. Many of the shops had sales on at this time of year but not this one. Their clientele had no need for cut prices.