Sitting Pretty Page 16

  We ate out at a different type of classy restaurant every night, so I could familiarise myself with fine dining menus and the etiquette they required, and which wine I should order with which food. The first was a French restaurant, called L’Escargot, where we ate Escargot á la Bourginion – snails in garlic butter, which were absolutely delicious, accompanied by glasses of light and lively – Henry’s words, not mine – Petit Chablis. Next came the Cuisses de Grenouille – frogs’ legs, which really did taste like chicken. With these we drank gorgeous appley and melony – my words, not Henry’s – Pinot Gris. And to think I’d always been a Sauvignon Blanc kind of girl, and at the cheaper end of the market at that – stick a Buy One Get One Free label on a bottle and it practically shrieked out ‘Beth! Beth! Come and get me!’ from its supermarket shelf. This new job was broadening my horizons before I’d even started it. It would be broadening my waistline too if I had to eat too many dinners like this. I’d have to watch that – my fancy-pants clothes allowance wouldn’t go far if as soon as I bought something I started bulging out of it!

  ‘I hope you won’t be offended, Beth,’ Henry said to me, after the waiter had finished clearing the entree plates from our delicious chateaubriand – its accompanying glass of Medoc Rouge serving to remind me how much I preferred white wine, however fancy the red was. Here it comes, I thought. I’d known this was all too good to be true. My table manners were worse than the Tasmanian Devil’s and I’d managed to splash garlic butter all over the pristine table cloth. Add to that the fact that I was clearly a wine peasant and of course he couldn’t bring himself to let me loose in one of his posh hotels. ‘I’d like to book you an appointment to get your hair done before you go on your first assignment.’

  ‘My hair?’ I supposed it was looking less than its best at the moment, and split ends would definitely not be de rigueur where I was going to be staying. He went on, however, to mention a much more upmarket hairdresser than anywhere I’ve ever been able to afford. It did need a bit of a tidy up – well, probably a lot of a tidy up – but yikes! It was going to be the most expensive hair cut I’d ever had in my life. Would he give me an advance on my future wages to pay for it? There was no way I would have enough money. And while I was busy worrying about how much the hair cut would cost, he started talking about a facial, manicure, and pedicure. Double yikes! It was starting to look like this job was out of my league for reasons other than the ones I’d already come up with. I needed to let him know – maybe I could get away with just the hair cut for now, with an advance, and when he’d paid me for the first assignment I could afford the facial?

  ‘Er, Henry.’ I swallowed the tiny morsel of pride I had left since I’d taken to a life – well, a few weeks anyway – of sofa squatting crime. ‘I hope you know how very grateful I am that you’ve offered me this job …’

  ‘Let me stop you right there, Beth.’ He put his hand up to silence me but in a nice, friendly way. ‘In my line of work I deal with a lot of people, and I think it’s made me a pretty good judge of character. I’ve already been impressed by the way you looked after Talisker when I was away. You were the only one who always bothered with all those little things like rinsing out and refilling his drinking water every day, not just topping it up – you know how slimy the inside of a cat’s water bowl can get, and you’d be amazed how many so-called pet sitters don’t bother. That was one of the reasons why I always asked for you. But then you told me what your husband had done and how you’d reacted to it and the difficulties you’d put yourself through so you could stay here and do the job you enjoyed and, well, I thought that showed a kind of gumption you just don’t see very often. It took imagination and initiative and a fair amount of guts to do what you did, Beth, and I’d say you’ve got all of those in spades.’

  ‘I don’t know if all the other customers whose sofas I borrowed would agree with you,’ I shrugged, feeling my face flush at being complemented for doing something which was basically wrong.

  ‘Anyone with half an ounce of imagination and empathy would appreciate the respect you showed their homes while you were doing it. You certainly went the extra mile with Talisker,’ he started to argue, pausing as the waiter came back with the dessert menu. ‘I can recommend the Soufflé au Grand Marnier,’ he said as he looked down at his menu. There were dessert wines too and I worried that if I had any more alcohol he’d have to carry me out of there. I should have said no when he offered me an aperitif.

  ‘Actually, I’d love the Crème Brûlée,’ I told him, hoping there wasn’t a wine to go with that.

  ‘One Soufflé au Grand Marnier and one Crème Brûlée please,’ he ordered. ‘And I think we’ll have a glass each of the Muscat.’ He handed the menus back to the waiter and smiled at me. He wouldn’t be smiling if, after all this rich food and wine, I threw up in the taxi back to Wintertown. I mentally crossed my fingers that I could distract him somehow and tip my glass into his. There’s never a handy plant pot around when you need one.

  ‘Henry,’ I bit the bullet. ‘About my hair cut …’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ll need to get a move on and book that for you, but they know me there so it shouldn’t be a problem. It’ll have to be an evening appointment, to fit in with your other work commitments, won’t it?’

  ‘It’s just, well, the thing is …’

  ‘Is there another salon you’d rather go to? They have an excellent head stylist.’

  Oh my giddy aunt! He didn’t just want to book me into probably the most expensive salon in the whole of Hampshire, he wanted me to see their probably even more expensive head stylist. How much of a dog’s dinner did I look right now?

  ‘That sounds lovely but very … expensive,’ I trailed off. My face must be Santa Claus red if the heat I could feel in it was anything to go by.

  ‘I have an account there,’ Henry said, looking a little nonplussed for a tiny moment before it seemed to dawn on him just what I was worrying about. His mouth opened and then shut again. ‘You didn’t think I was expecting you to pay for it, did you, Beth?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘This is on company expenses. I’m sorry, I should have explained. As part of your assignments you’ll have to use and report back on all the beauty facilities in the spas at most of the hotels you’ll be staying in. It’ll help you to fit in if your skin, hair, and nails look like they’re used to those sorts of treatments. Also it will give you a level against which to judge the spas you’ll be visiting. It may sound like an extravagance but believe me, it will be money well spent. Especially if any of the spas at any of my hotels are falling down at all in what they are doing for the guests. You need to go in there, armed with the knowledge of what they should be doing, and how they should be doing it.’

  I think he was too polite to tell me that someone who looked like an ex squatter who walked dogs and scooped poo for a living would look out of place in any of his establishments. He was clearly trying to turn this sow’s ear into the closest thing to a silk purse he possibly could before letting me loose amongst the shiny-haired, tiny-pored, mani-pedied posh people.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The following night, before taking me to a seafood restaurant, where I was praying he wouldn’t force me to try oysters, Henry took me clothes shopping. No chain department stores for him, although I was allowed to have a look through Designers at Debenhams. I felt a bit like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman – except I was a pet sitter, not a prostitute. Come to think of it though, now I was spending time with Henry, I’d realised he wasn’t just some stuffy-sounding fuss-pot in a suit. I’d noticed that he did have a bit of a mid to late thirties, shorter haired, Richard Gere look about him.

  ‘How about this one?’ Henry held up a beautiful cashmere sweater which looked like it would cost more than my wages for a month. ‘This colour would look great with your eyes.’

  The dark purplishpink wasn’t a colour I’d ever have picked for myself – I’d always been a practical blues and bro
wns and greens kind of dresser. In fact, I could probably get dressed in the dark and find that whatever items I’d grabbed from the cupboard, drawer, back of the chair, or the floor all still went with each other. Not, of course, that clashing clothes would be a problem when pulling a reluctant dog away from its favourite tree, or trying to crush a cat’s worming tablet into its food without it noticing and developing a sudden and stubborn eating disorder. As long as you were giving them food and attention, animals wouldn’t care if you turned up wearing gold lamé leggings, Noel Edmonds’ worst jumper, Pat Butcher’s loudest earrings, and a pair of yellow, purple, and orange stripy knickers on your head.

  ‘I’ll give it a try,’ I said, with more enthusiasm than I felt for something that would more than likely make me look like I’d been rolling around in beetroot juice.

  ‘What size are you, a ten?’

  Bless him. ‘Ten to twelve, depending on the make,’ I told him, flattered that he’d had me down as a ten. I put my hand out to feel a sumptuous sea green version of the jumper he was holding. It was so soft. It felt like stroking Talisker.

  ‘You know, Beth, you don’t have to dress for practicality any more, not in this job. You’re not going to be worried about getting covered in pet hairs, or mud or whatever. You can feel free to express yourself. Well …’ his top lip flickered ever so slightly, ‘just as long as you don’t have an inner Goth waiting to get out. You might just stick out a bit then.’

  Catching his eye, I couldn’t help smiling. I liked his dry sense of humour. Henry Halliday had such a warm, easy-going way about him for a boss. He was going to be great fun to work for, I just knew it. Half of me wanted to keep pinching myself to see if this was real. But the other half wouldn’t let me, just in case I woke up and found myself back on a client’s sofa with a hairy animal stretched out on top of me with its head on my chest. If this indeed was a dream, I was happy to let it go on for as long as possible.

  I didn’t like to tell Henry that the earth colours he’d always seen me in probably expressed me down to the ground – no pun intended. He might give up on me as a bad job and find someone else to train up as his new mystery guest, someone who could locate and embrace her inner Joanna Lumleyness while I was still racking my brains trying to remember if I ever had one. And if I did, wondering where it had been hiding itself all this time.

  ‘Here you are.’ He handed me the selection of knitwear he’d picked out. ‘Try these on and see what you think.’

  It was funny, I thought as I carried the jumpers and a couple of long, pretty, floaty cardigans I’d never have looked at in a month of Sundays to the changing room. If Alex had ever picked out clothes for me to try on I would probably have been quite annoyed, but the way Henry did it wasn’t high handed or chauvinistic. It was a bit like shopping with a British, slightly older, and a lot calmer Gok Wan, which got me thinking – was Henry gay? That might explain why there was no wife, fiancée, or girlfriend on the scene.

  Spending all this time with Henry, I’d come to learn what a lovely man he was – not the OCD, anally retentive fusspot that Davina, probably inadvertently, treated him as – he was just someone with high standards. And why shouldn’t he be? Apart from being quite handsome in a well-clipped and groomed kind of way, he always smelled so good – lemon verbena, orange, and geranium, a scent I now recognised, thanks to my one-time foray into his pristine bathroom. I flushed, wondering if he had any idea about me helping myself to a dollop of his L’Occitane shower gel that first morning I’d slept on his sofa. It was the one thing I hadn’t been able to replace.

  He was smart. After all, he’d spotted a gap in what some might think of as an already overcrowded market and created a tailor-made company which seemed to be doing all the right things at all the right times in all the right places. He was incredibly kind, as evidenced by his offering me this job, and taking so much trouble over helping me to get ready for it. And he had that pithy, witty sense of humour which was worthy of Stephen Fry. And yet with all this, this man was single. How could that be? Yes, the more I thought about it, the less straight Henry Halliday seemed.

  It occurred to me that I’d better get a move on or he’d be wondering if I’d got my head stuck in an arm hole, managed to stumble into the mirror, and was now lying on my back on the cubicle floor like a concussed tortoise with a bleeding forehead. It wouldn’t be the most stupid thing I’d ever done, and going on my recent behaviour, he would probably think it was just par for the course.

  The assistant who’d shown me to the cubicle had hung everything up, in order of shade, on the neat row of hooks on one side. On the other, between two more hooks with Yes and No signs over them, and above another whose sign said Maybe, there were a couple of chiffon scarves hanging up, with a little notice asking customers wearing makeup to use them while trying on their selected garments. You didn’t get that in Primark.

  I wondered which of these girly shades I should get out of the way first. The palest one was a sort of marshmallow pink and I could just see me wanting to hurl myself head first into a chocolate fountain wearing it. Pulling off my own dark green jumper which, although my best one and definitely not one I would have worn for work, was probably already suffering from a massive inferiority complex at being so close to these much fancier items, I gently removed the marshmallow one from its hanger. It really did feel like it was made from the hair of particularly fluffy kittens.

  As we were going on to dinner afterwards I was, in fact, wearing lipstick, so I put the scarf over my head and gingerly tried on jumper number one. It was like being enveloped in a soft, downy cloud. Stroking my arms, there was no denying how gorgeous and luxurious it felt, but I was right about the colour – I hated the pinkness. Taking it off even more carefully than I’d put it on, as I definitely wasn’t having it, I put it back on its padded hanger, hung it on the No hook, and took the next one. This was more of a Battenberg cake shade of pink. I hated it on me, but thought I was definitely getting hungry.

  It wasn’t until I got to the raspberry coloured one that I started to get a glimmer of what Henry had said about my colouring. This polo necked creation did indeed bring out the bluish-green of my eyes and I surprised myself by rather liking it. I stepped out of the cubicle to show Henry.

  ‘Oh yes, that colour really suits you,’ he smiled, ‘and they’ve got some lovely scarves over there if you’d like me to find you one to go with it.’

  ‘Oh, er, yes thank you,’ I dithered, as he went off to look at what appeared to be silk scarves, before I turned and headed back to the changing room. I didn’t dare think how much all this was costing him, or rather his company. I just prayed that I would be able to do justice to his faith in me. And that it would all be tax deductible enough to make up for my failure if I didn’t.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  When Henry and I arrived at the seafood restaurant, the maître d’ kindly took my bags and stored them safely in the cloakroom for us. They contained the raspberry jumper, a deep-purple cardigan, and a beautiful white silky top to go under it, a silk scarf which would go with both, a pair of very upmarket – for me at least – jeans, and a pair of boots I’d never have dreamed of looking at, let alone trying on, from a shop I’d never have dared to go into on my own.

  ‘Now then, how do you fancy starting off with half a dozen Whitstable oysters?’ Henry asked me before he’d even opened his menu.

  ‘Mm hmm,’ I gulped. And not in a happy-to-swallow-an-oyster kind of way. Was he really going to make me do this?

  ‘They also do a fantastic Moules Mariniere, and their chargrilled razor clams are delicious.’ He was starting to sound like Billy Bunter on his way to the just-about-to-open-for-business tuck shop. ‘Or do you fancy sharing the Plateau de fruits de mer – the seafood tower, with a bit of everything?’

  I wondered if that would be a better way of getting out of eating the bits that I didn’t like without him noticing.

  ‘Anyway, have a look and see what y
ou think.’

  ‘Mm hmm,’ I nodded and opened up the beautifully crafted menu I’d been given and searched for this sampler tower of torture. Oysters Kilpatrick jumped straight off the page at me. As did Oysters Rockefeller. There were also lobster, crab claws, crayfish, scallops, and grilled prawns– yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes again. There were mussels – I could eat those if I really had to and there weren’t too many of them. Ditto the clams, razor or otherwise. But those blasted oysters kept rearing their ugly heads off the page and jeering at me. We’re slippery and slimy and we’re going to slither down your throat and make you gag and throw up in front of your nice new boss. We might even make you throw up all over his shiny shoes. It was almost as if they knew how disgustingly ill Alex had been when he tried them at some fancy brunch buffet, just after we’d gotten engaged. Even after they’d finally stopped coming back up and bringing everything else he’d ever eaten or drunk in his life with them, he’d been in bed for days, sweating and moaning and clutching his stomach. The very thought of emptying one of those shells into my mouth and trying to swallow its contents made me go hot and cold all over.

  Henry and the waiter were discussing wine. I heard champagne, Chablis, and Chardonnay mentioned, but my ears pricked up properly when I heard the words Sauvignon Blanc. It would be a treat to try one from the higher end of the market. As soon as the waiter left I said, ‘It all looks absolutely delicious, Henry. I do have to confess that I’m not a big fan of oysters, though.’

  ‘Had a bad experience with one before?’ Henry sounded sympathetic. ‘If that happens the first time you try them it can put you off ever trying them again. Don’t worry about the oysters, are there plenty of other things on there that you do like? Or would you rather order separate dishes?’

  ‘No, no the tower would be lovely,’ I gushed, full of relief.