One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [76]
‘You rest on your laurels. Not good for reputation or business,’ Christian said sternly, and then, just as I was about to take a bite from the enormous muffin Maggie had bought me, added, ‘or figures.’
I put it down guiltily. Christian might be vast himself but he had an uncompromising Frenchman’s view of spreading behinds.
‘We need to go to France more,’ Maggie said decisively. ‘We’ve got lazy.’
‘Or,’ Christian threw up his hands, ‘you just do commissions. Give up the shop.’
This was where we’d recently made money, doing up people’s houses, so the shop had suffered a bit. To be honest, these days I thought of it as a nice place to go to chat to Maggie, to discuss said commissions, which of course was an extravagance. But the thought of closing it, of sitting at home like a couple of housewives playing at interior design, horrified us. This was our respectable working-girl front: we liked dressing up and marching into work in our clever, high-street-take-on-designer clothes. But rents had soared in Munster Road and we were paying through the nose to read Interiors wearing Boden.
‘It’s sheer laziness,’ Maggie said firmly again. ‘We used to go to France four times a year. We only went once last year.’
‘But we did well,’ I reminded her. ‘Only one lorryload, but we made more than we would have done with four lorryloads years ago. We’ve got better.’
But I knew what she meant. The moment we were solvent, we lost our drive. Without the worry of wondering where the next cheque was coming from, or whether the shop would be a success, we relaxed, lost our edge; and a bit of me, at nearly forty, wanted to relax. Surely one didn’t have to battle through life for ever? Surely we were allowed a spot of complacency, a bit of middle-aged spread? But Maggie was already consulting a diary.
‘Montauroux is on the fifteenth,’ she said, squinting and rooting in her bag for the reading glasses we both now needed: she perched them on her nose. ‘And Fréjus is on the twenty-third. We’ll go to both.’
‘Ah. Slight problem. I’ve just told Laura I’ll go and stay with her on the twenty-fourth. There’s a shoot at the Abbey.’
Despite having just spent a very spoiling weekend there, the words ‘Shoot’ and ‘Abbey’, juxtaposed with my very privileged sister, were designed to send shock waves down Maggie’s spine.
‘That’s OK,’ she said evenly. ‘The fair’s on the Friday. If you drive through the night like we used to, you’ll be back in time for the slaughter on the Saturday.’ She sent me a flat stare over her spectacles: less best friend, more partner. I wriggled briefly, but the eyes had me pinned.
‘Right,’ I conceded weakly. ‘France it is.’
Christian smiled, enjoying this little exchange. ‘I think she right, you know. You need the stimulation,’ he advised me.
Maggie gave me a triumphant look and swivelled to the computer screen – as much as one can swivel in a Louis Quinze – to make the ferry reservations.
‘Oh, and by the way, Lucinda Carr rang,’ her back informed me as she waited for P&O to flash up their wares. ‘She wants one of us to look at her dining room. The Gustavian Grey has not turned out as planned, apparently.’
‘Well, why can’t you go?’ I yelped. Lucinda Carr was a terrifying Chelsea housewife: pencil thin and waspish, the wife of a wealthy investment banker. She scared the pants off me. The client from Hades in Hermès.
‘Because I’m doing this, and you know how hopeless you are on the computer.’
There was no disputing this, but I realized she’d deliberately lined herself up a task so I could be dispatched.
Grumbling