Playing for Keeps Read online

  ‘Sorry. Of course I have.’

  ‘Looks like we’re boarding,’ Anthony said. It sounded as if Anthony couldn’t wait to get on the plane. I walked him to the gate and helped him fish out his boarding pass as if he were my son off to start school and leaving for the first time.

  ‘It’s fine, I’ve got it,’ he said.

  We crashed noses together as we both went in for a farewell kiss.

  ‘Call me when you land.’

  ‘Yes. You said. And I will. Hope it all goes to plan. You know, the shop and everything.’

  ‘But Anthony, you’ll be back for the opening, right?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  Anthony was holding up the queue because I was talking to him so he pulled away, waved and winked at me before turning to leave.

  My heart sank to my shoes. What was wrong with me, talking about my shop opening and him not going off with Italian girls? Those weren’t the things I wanted to say to Anthony at all. Deep down, I’d wanted him to have changed his mind and stayed in London while I had so much big stuff going on in my life. Isn’t that what boyfriends did?

  As I made my way out of the airport, people barging into me and not bothering to apologise, I wondered what the strange feeling was I was having about Anthony leaving. Surely he had to have a life as well as me? It was just that Anthony had always been there for me whenever the big things happened. In a selfish corner of my heart I think I’d hoped he would put off his commission, delay it for a while just until the shop was open. He had no idea how just having him near me made me feel strong. It’s not that I couldn’t do it all without him. I could take on the world single-handedly if I put my mind to it. I only wished I’d told him how I was feeling before I let him go instead of all that nonstop chat about me, me, me when all I wanted was to ask him to hold me one last time and tell me I could do this.

  But that was it. His flight took off and I would have to bite the bullet and just get on with things. The first week without Anthony was perhaps the longest of my life. I never thought I’d get over the pain of missing someone so much. But as Anya rightly pointed out, we weren’t joined at the hip and if I didn’t give him the space he needed I’d regret it.

  That was the last thing I wanted. With things so strained between us I didn’t want the distance in miles to add to the distance I knew was forming in our relationship. I set my sights on working hard, launching the shop and starting to rebuild whatever was missing between me and Anthony.

  Chapter 6

  The day of the staff interviews for the shop arrived. Since asking Anya to help me with the selection process she’d been super-keen. She arrived at the shop draped in a Dolce and Gabbana cape dress. She was revelling in the fact that she had cleavage now she was pregnant. To me Anya only looked to be able a fill the bra of a newly budding teen. But I didn’t want to burst her bubble; it was an improvement on an otherwise flat chest.

  The dress was mustard-gold and had a low-cut front. The fit was A-line from the bust. The fabric caressed her body in gentle ripples and showed off an eight-month bulge, her make-up done to perfection.

  ‘I know it’s not hard for you, Anya,’ I said as we arranged ourselves at the table in the back office. ‘But did you have to outdress and outmake-up me? It is my shop after all.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she said looking me up and down. ‘I thought you intended to be understated.’ Anya was holding a compact up to her face and smoothing down firmly gelled and slicked-back hair. It was scooped into a long ponytail that hung far down her back. I whipped out my compact and mirror and topped up my matte Mulberry Kissed pout then stood to run my hands down the tight, forest-green dress I’d decided to wear.

  The shop fitting was close to completion and it was less than a month until the opening. I wanted the manager and sales assistant to be onboard quickly so they could stock the shop with me and put last-minute finishing touches to the overall appearance before the Grand Opening events I had lined up. The events would take place over three days beginning with the unveiling of the shop name on the Thursday afternoon followed by a celebrity evening bash on the Friday evening and then the official opening day on the Saturday in the shiny new shop.

  A lot of our followers were wondering what the shop would be called. I was keeping very quiet about the name but had lined up as much press to cover the unveiling event as I could. I’d also managed to arrange an interview with a local radio station just for good measure.

  The response to the advertisement for the posts of manager and sales assistant had completely blown my mind and I was pretty sure I’d shortlisted the best the long list had to offer. The tension was building as the shop opening drew nearer but I found I was coping perfectly fine not having Anthony around. Meanwhile he had broken the news to me that one month wasn’t going to be enough time for him to finish. His commission had spiralled into a much larger project and, when pressed, I gathered he was having the time of his life. Yet we still insisted over the phone that we missed the other terribly.

  He’d called me that morning from a clifftop in Salento to wish me luck with the interviews.

  The back office of the shop had been reinvented from the crumbled-down state it had been in, barely used by the last owner, I’d imagine. The new desk was large and slick, in walnut, and Riley had positioned two office chairs on one side and one for the interviewee on the other, just inside the office door. She’d arranged a supply of tea, coffee and water for me and Anya, and the application forms and curricula vitae were in a pile on the desk between our chairs as well as notepads and a camera for snapping each candidate to remind ourselves of who was who.

  Riley popped her head round the door.

  ‘The first of the interviewees have arrived. Three of them and they’re early. They must be eager to please.’

  ‘Thanks, Riley. Give us five minutes before you send in the first,’ I said, doing a quick rechecking of my make-up.

  It was a Tuesday morning. Autumn had kicked in with a bang. My quiet mews had been scattered with bronze and copper leaves when I’d set off earlier, as if we were in a rush to get to winter. I was in no hurry. As far as I was concerned I still had masses to do before the first customer crossed the threshold. I had shaken off images of the shop standing in the middle of King’s Road devoid of any passing trade, all the stock gathering dust until it withered away, untouched and unsold.

  ‘Ready for this, Madge?’ Anya asked. ‘How about a strategy? Good cop, bad cop? Who should I be?’

  I opened my mouth, about to say, ‘Well, what do you think?’ but Riley knocked on the door and introduced a woman called Babette Morrier for the position of manager.

  I smiled at the tall blonde who’d walked in on a wave of Calvin Klein Eternity. but before she reached the chair and could take a seat Anya bellowed, ‘Next!’

  ‘Sorry?’ Babette asked, looking from me to Anya. I screwed up my brow and turned to Anya for an explanation. Riley popped her head back inside.

  ‘Did you say something?’ she asked.

  ‘I said, "Next",’ said Anya. ‘This interview is terminated.’

  ‘Anya! What the…?’ I began, but there was no time to finish my sentence before a red-faced Babette barged past Riley and left without another word.

  Riley came in and closed the door.

  ‘What was that all about?’ I demanded of Anya.

  ‘Madge, please. You know better than I do that leggings are not trousers. No matter how slim your legs are, you don’t expose legging-clad legs in public. They are for indoors only, or lazy dressers and mothers whose children have vomited down their dungarees.’ She shuddered at the word ‘dungarees’. ‘Riley, bring in the next contestant.’

  Riley and I were speechless. She looked at me for assurance and I nodded for her to go ahead and call the next interviewee. Mind you, Anya was spot on. What was I thinking? I was blinded by Babette’s cute jacket and swishy hair. I hadn’t taken in the full picture.

  The next to enter the room
was a short woman, reasonably decked out in high-end, high-street attire, perfectly acceptable. I waited a moment for Anya to bellow ‘Next’ but as she didn’t I offered the woman a seat.

  ‘Hi.’ I gave her my biggest ‘good cop’ smile. ‘You’re Pauline Bennet?’

  ‘Yes, nice to meet you and I wasn’t expecting you, Miss Stankovic.’ Pauline blushed a deep shade of crimson and couldn’t take her eyes off Anya for the whole time I tried to talk to her. Anya never opened her mouth. At the end of the interview, once Pauline had left, Anya grabbed her application form, screwed it into a tight ball and threw it over her shoulder.

  ‘Er …?’ I said, palms up to the ceiling.

  ‘Did you see how close together her eyes vere set? You seriously think I could trust her to be in my best friend’s shop?… All day?… You and I not here to keep an eye on her?’ Anya shook her head from side to side and got up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I gasped as she walked to the door. For one moment I feared Anya was going to the front of the shop and was going to line up the candidates and do an inspection.

  ‘The toilet, Madge. This baby is pressing on my bladder like you can’t believe.’

  ‘See you in five.’ It was my turn to shake my head. I poured some coffee for me from the Thermos and filled Anya’s glass with water. It was going to be a long day.

  By the afternoon Anya and I had conducted sixteen interviews. We were tired and frazzled and even the perky Riley was a bit on the flat side.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said flopping into the interview seat. ‘That’s everyone. Do you think you found the right people?’

  I looked at Anya and we smiled at each other.

  ‘Pretty sure,’ I said.

  Though it was true that Anya had reduced at least two people to tears, had enraged an ex-employee from French Connection who was probably overqualified for the post of manager anyway, and had asked one interviewee if she wouldn’t mind lowering the actual tone of her voice because it was causing the baby to kick, we’d come to a mutual agreement about who would fit the bill.

  For the shop manager we would offer the post to Jaime Silverman, a twenty-seven-year-old manager from Warehouse in Kensington High Street who had three years experience of running the family shoe shop in Bethnal Green until it closed down a year ago.

  ‘I was as pleased as anything when that happened,’ Jaime had told us during the interview. ‘I didn’t want to get tied down by the family business so I had to put Dad right on that one. Dad decided to take early retirement, and we’d already moved from East London to West so Mum could be near her ageing family. It was time for me to move on. When I started at Warehouse my parents described it as the time I ran away from home. But I literally live around the corner from them now.’ She’d raised her eyebrows and tutted. ‘The Warehouse job is great but I feel I can put my own stamp on things at Shearman Bright. That is what you want, isn’t it?’

  I had nodded wholeheartedly.

  Jaime, a tall, elegant brunette, had a captivating smile. I think Anya liked her for her brusque, no-nonsense manner. I liked the fact that she was experienced and competent and seemed the ideal person to help me understand how a shop was supposed to operate, therefore taking away the amount of input I’d have in the day-to-day running.

  Our new shop assistant had breezed through the door, shoulders flung back and head held high. He was a five-foot-six-inch guy in a Hugo Boss suit, dark grey with a salmon-pink shirt and flamingo-pink square in his top pocket. His tie was peacock blue. He made his way, purposefully, to the chair and fell into it like the dying swan in Swan Lake. He smiled and put his hand in front of his mouth before shrieking: ‘Oh my God, you’re Anya Stankovic. I’ve been following your career since you were the face for L’Oréal in 2010. I was fifteen years old and you turned my life around. I was sorry about those semi-nudes that found their way into that French magazine, whatever it was called. I choose to forget because they didn’t get your lighting right anyway.’

  ‘I told them the exact same thing,’ Anya enthused. At that stage she’d got up to shake his hand.

  ‘Zac Choudhary,’ he’d beamed, standing and bowing. ‘It’s an honour to meet you.’ It was a curtsey more than a bow he gave but he had Anya wrapped around his little finger. I did, however, manage to extract from him what experience he’d had in sales and it was vast. He was working for a luxury men’s footwear concession in Selfridges but insisted that Shearman Bright bags, especially the women’s handbags, spoke to him and he could sell them in his sleep.

  ‘Trust me, I know leather and I know how to match a person to a bag.’

  ‘I’m convinced you can,’ Anya had said, turning to me with a ‘my work here is done’ expression on her face. She picked up Zac’s application form and drew a big star on it. She slapped it down on the desk in front of me while staring at Zac’s pink ankle socks. ‘I love a man who can carry off pink.’ She was falling in love with this flamboyant man by the second.

  ‘Thank you for coming in, Zac,’ I said, getting to my feet and offering him my hand. ‘We’ll let you know.’

  ‘Ahh,’ he gasped looking closely at my fingers. ‘Did you get this manicure at Peter Jones?’

  I looked over my shoulder at Anya, who had a raised eyebrow, then back at Zac.

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes I did.’

  ‘They do a to-die-for French polish. Have you tried it?’

  ‘I… er…’

  ‘Then do,’ he went on. ‘But make sure you ask for Candace. Love that girl. Great at waxing too.’

  He left then, swishing his way through the door and turning back to wave his fingers at Anya. She did the same.

  Once all the interviews were done, Anya left me and Riley to clear up the shop-floor-cum-waiting-room and interview-room-cum-!

  office. Riley took charge of the application forms and we planned to contact everyone the next morning.

  I thanked Riley for all her help and watched her leave with the box file of forms to drop off at the office, and went to get my handbag and keys to lock up. I spotted another screwed-up application on the floor under the desk. It belonged to the girl who’d dared to come before Anya carrying a mock-leather handbag.

  ‘Could it really have hurt her to spend a few pounds more to impress the owner of a leather handbag shop?’ she’d ranted.

  As I went to unravel the piece of paper so we could contact her in the morning with a ‘thank you but no thank you’ letter there was a timid knock on the door. I was pretty sure we’d interviewed everyone we had to. I went to the door. My mouth dropped open when I saw who was standing behind it.

  Chapter 7

  I didn’t know if I should panic at this point. I was looking into the eyes of the woman I’d suspected of trying to curse me or my shop because she was a witch or, failing that, an inexperienced stalker.

  ‘If you came for the interviews, I’m afraid you’re a little late,’ I said, knowing full well she wasn’t at the back of my new shop for that reason.

  She stepped a little closer as if she was expecting to be asked into the office. Her skin was clear and smooth but not as tan as when I’d first seen her walk past the shop. She was in white again. She wore a wide-skirted summer dress, a man’s navy sweater over the top. I wondered where she could have come from. It seemed strange that her clothes were out of season, almost as if she’d turned up in London in the summer and stayed longer than she’d intended, only having packed for a summer vacation.

  As we stood there, just staring at each other, her mobile phone began to ring from the straw shoulder bag she was carrying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘No one ever calls.’

  She was British from what I could make of her accent, maybe from the south west despite the obvious foreign look to her clothes and accessories, which were more exotic. More hippy chic than anything else. I watched her long hair fall across her face as she plunged into her bag to turn off the phone. She seemed agitated.

  ‘There,’ she
said before looking up at me red-faced. ‘I… I hope you don’t mind the intrusion but I was passing by… yet again… and when I saw you wave off that girl with the red hair and go back in I decided to take the plunge.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, taking a step back and folding my arms. ‘But have we met?’

  ‘No. Never. B… but I know who you are. Magenta, right? Magenta Bright?’ She put out a small hand for me to shake. I took her hand, which was limp in mine, and which she withdrew fairly rapidly. ‘Stella. Stella Knowles. You’re going to think this a little odd but we have a mutual friend.’

  ‘Do you want to come in and take a seat.’

  She exhaled, in relief it would seem. Had she expected me to boot her out right there and then? Not when she mentioned the mutual friend. I was intrigued. As she took a seat in the interview chair and crossed her legs, which were still pretty suntanned compared to her face, I contemplated staying by the door… you never knew. Instead I took a seat in my interviewer’s chair, leaned my arms across the table and smiled at Stella, who seemed too embarrassed to look up at me.

  ‘So, who is this mystery mutual friend? Do they owe us money? Do we like them?’

  She finally raised her eyes and smiled. ‘We loved them. Well, I still do and you did… once.’

  I sat back in dread. This was the girlfriend of one of my exes. Was she coming here for notes? Had he dumped her and she wanted to see if I knew how to win him back?

  ‘Well…’ I gave a nervous snort of a laugh. ‘I haven’t been in love that many times.’ I was racking my brain but I had a feeling I knew who she was going to dredge up.

  Here was a girl who had come from abroad, tanned skin and summer clothes. A dead giveaway now that I thought about it. I held my breath.

  ‘Hugo,’ she said just before I said the name for her. ‘He’s a great friend of mine. He doesn’t know I’m here.’

  ‘What? In the country?’

  ‘He knows I’m over from Brazil but he has no idea I tracked you down.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but why on earth have you tracked me down? Hugo and I are old news. Our relationship ended a long time ago. In fact you could call it the relationship that never really was. I met him as a teenager.’