Dressing the Dearloves Read online

  ‘Sixty pounds on the dot thanks, love.’

  Sylvie’s hands shook as she handed over the notes. The driver sniffed unhappily at the size of the tip, and she felt too ashamed to say goodbye. Her account was empty until some residual payments trickled in, her overdraft at critical limit. That’s what happened when you declared yourself bankrupt and all your assets went into liquidation.

  As the cab drove away, Sylvie gathered up her meagre luggage in one hand and made an effort to straighten her spine. She muttered under her breath, ‘Get a grip!’ The rain continued to drizzle down, and she knew it would be frizzing her long dark hair beyond repair. Sylvie was clutched by a sudden anxiety. She didn’t even know if her old friend from college was home, but there was nothing to be done about it now. Fumbling in her pocket, she lit up a cigarette and gasped as the first rush of nicotine hit her bloodstream, sucking in deeply. She gathered up her luggage again and her courage and called to the first-floor window.

  ‘Penns? Penns!’ Her voice cracked as she drew nearer, lugging her stuff up the cracked bluestone steps.

  Penny was like most old friends. They’d lose touch for years at a time, not bothering with the niceties of regular emails and calls, but always seemed to pick up again where they’d left off whenever they saw each other. Penny always had several suitors on the go and carried a frankly exhausting air of melodrama about her, which conveniently made her the focus of any conversation.

  With her willowy, fair good looks and aristocratic drawl, Penny tended to cruise through life on a waft of free drinks and party invitations. She was a bit of a disaster zone, with an endless stream of men flitting through her life, but she always seemed to stay buoyantly afloat despite the chaos that surrounded her. Most importantly, Sylvie thought now, Penny didn’t judge or tend to overwhelm you with sympathy. In fact, Penn’s narcissistic tendencies felt like just what she needed at the moment. Which must have been why she came here . . . Far better that than Ben’s suffocating kindness or Tabs’s motherly concern. Let alone her mother’s clucking! Sylvie just couldn’t cope with the thought of any of them right now.

  Reaching the top step, she banged on the wooden door, dropping cigarette ash all over her bags.

  ‘Penns, Penn . . . are you home?’ Her voice was hoarse from all the recycled air and the effects of the alcohol. And if she was thirsty at the airport, she was almost gagging for a glass of water now. She took a last drag on her Marlboro Light, coughed, and crushed it under her heel.

  Finally, a light switched on in the hall, visible through the frosted pane of glass overhead, and Sylvie wilted with relief. The door opened slowly as it dragged against ill-fitting carpet. A huge purple amethyst pendant at her friend’s throat, held in place by a solid brass chain, caught the light, momentarily blinding Sylvie. Penny, her eyes ringed with last night’s kohl, her hair tousled and a phone to her ear, leaned her hip on the doorway and smiled down lazily at Sylvie.

  ‘Hold on a sec . . . Hello, doll! I thought you’d wash up here eventually. Come on in . . .’

  Sylvie stepped into the hall and felt as if she’d stepped into a time warp – straight back into their student days. Despite her ridiculously extravagant lifestyle, Penny had managed to pay off her mortgage ages ago, but hadn’t bothered decorating her home more than superficially. It still bore the telltale signs of past tenants and owners who’d optimistically decked out the kitchen in Bauhaus orange and the bathroom in brown and avocado tiles. But while Penny had become internet famous recently for her designs at a risqué lingerie label, and also moonlighted as a DJ and sometime model for Miss Selfridge, she’d clearly not bothered doing anything with her house. The same movie posters (Betty Blue and Paris, Texas) were Blu-Tacked to the hallway walls, and on a side table an incense stick curled its fragrant smoke to the ceiling, leaving ash all over the litter of mail, keys and cigarette lighters. There was something comforting to Sylvie in the familiar sameness of it, after spending years in her new friends’ elegantly converted lofts and minimalist hipster shared workspaces.

  Wearing a barely-there kaftan and jingling from tiny bells tied to her brass ankle bracelets, Penny led her through into the living room, dominated by a huge floor-to-ceiling mirror in a gilt rococo frame leaning against the wall.

  ‘Yep. We’ll meet you there,’ she said huskily, hanging up the call as Sylvie returned from the kitchen, greedily chugging down her third glass of water.

  Penny tossed her mobile down onto the sari-covered sofa, which was sagging in the middle, and turned to look at Sylvie. ‘Oh God, you poor love, you look terrible. Come here for a hug, then.’

  Tears sprang to Sylvie’s eyes – she’d been fighting them off all through the flight, but now they threatened to spill over. Penny enveloped her in a fug of Opium and stale cigarette smoke, and Sylvie hugged her back and let out a low sob.

  ‘Don’t cry, hon,’ Penny said, rubbing Sylvie’s arms with a look of faint alarm as she pulled away. ‘What did that old bugger Winston say, hey? “Success is not final, failure is not fatal! It’s the courage to continue that counts . . .”’ She raised a May Day fist to try to tempt her into a grin.

  ‘Thanks, Penn,’ sniffed Sylvie, hunting for a tissue to blow her nose. ‘It’s been pretty awful.’

  ‘Darling, let’s not talk about it just yet,’ Penny soothed, clapping her hands together, ‘because I have a fabulous treat for you. Just the thing you need.’

  ‘Um, really?’ Oh God, no, Sylvie thought. All she wanted to do was to curl up into a ball on Penny’s threadbare sofa, anaesthetise herself with wine and watch old episodes of The Sopranos. ‘Penn, I don’t know, I . . .’

  ‘Chop chop, darling, get yourself ready, then we’re heading out.’ Penny checked her reflection in the mirror and, satisfied, swung around with a brilliant smile. ‘It’s not the end of the world, is it? Besides, there’s nothing that a perfectly mixed cocktail won’t improve. Let Aunty Penny show you a good time. You know you need it, sweetheart.’

  Sylvie dropped her bags with a thud and looked around at the crystals on Penny’s mantle, the peeling posters on her walls and the wine-stained coffee table with its overflowing ashtray. With another wave of exhaustion threatening to drown her, she sighed. Wasn’t that, after all, exactly what she’d been trying to do on the plane? Drown her sorrows?

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘In for a Penny . . .’

  ‘Hah!’ Penny gave a husky laugh. ‘. . . in for a pound. You got it, doll.’

  Sylvie resigned herself to a night following Penny around the traps, falling into her crazed vortex. But she reassured herself that, after being away from London for so long, there was absolutely no danger of running into anyone she knew. No one need ever know that she was back in town.

  3

  ‘Take our picture please, Olu,’ Penny purred, pushing her smart phone into the hands of a beautiful young Nigerian man.

  She always went for a type, did Penny, reflected Sylvie as she tipped back her head to drain her cocktail. High-cheekboned, ebony-skinned young men who came to the capital in search of a better life but usually ended up driving minicabs, dealing hash on desolate street corners and dancing with skinny white girls in Covent Garden. Which was where Penny had met Olu (short for Oluwakanmi), her latest fancy.

  Boys like Olu were Penny’s particular form of rebellion. Penny’s father was an Eton old boy and her mother hailed from somewhere in deepest Kent but had scaled the social ladder through the sheer force of her devastating good looks, which Penny had inherited in spades. Penny’s mother was elegant but brittle, and the two had a notoriously stormy relationship. Evelyn Williams was determined that her children would not descend the ladder again by even one inch, and every time Penny dragged another one of her young minicab drivers to flaunt in their face at lunch, her mother wouldn’t talk to her for a month afterwards.

  Olu, with his liquid brown eyes and the most stunning facial structure Sylvie had ever seen, flashed them a luminous grin. ‘Say Negronis, girls,’ he sai
d in his thick accent, holding up Penny’s phone.

  ‘Negronis!’ Penny cried, throwing her arms around Sylvie before collapsing in laughter against the side of the banquette. Despite her jetlag, Sylvie felt herself uncoiling ever so slightly as she took a drag on her cigarette.

  The four of them – Penny, Sylvie, Olu and Jon – were sitting outside on the rooftop of a cool little bar in Peckham Rye, watching the sun go down over the London skyline.

  Back when she had left for the US, Peckham had been one of those dangerous places Sylvie wouldn’t have dared roam in after dark, especially with her unavoidably posh accent. But some of her friends had cadged money from their parents to put down deposits on flats in the area. At the time, sensible real estate investment was the last thing on Sylvie’s mind. Instead, she’d been consumed with dreams of making art through fashion. Back then nothing else had mattered to her. With a head seemingly full of endless inspiration, as she cycled to work and cycled back afterwards to meet her friends, she had not a care in the world about her future – except for what she was going to wear or who she might meet that evening. But the fullness of time had revealed her friends’ good sense and her own folly. Sylvie couldn’t help but think now, if she’d only been smart enough herself, she could be living here in one of London’s newly minted suburbs instead of condemned to a lifetime of renting. Not that she could even afford to rent! And besides, where would she have found the deposit? Her parents had been in absolutely no position to loan it to her back then and were probably even worse off now.

  Sylvie reached for her drink. God, if Ben hadn’t asked her to move in with him six months ago, she’d probably be homeless . . . a frightening prospect, particularly in New York. Sylvie shook her head. She didn’t want to think about that now. Or Ben. No, she definitely didn’t want to think about Ben at all.

  As Penny and Olu laughed next to her, leaning together to look at the photos on Penn’s phone, Jon asked Sylvie quietly, ‘So, stranger, how does it feel to be back home?’

  Jon wasn’t much taller than she was, but he was breathtakingly handsome. They’d all fallen in love with him at some stage over the years. All the girls did, given Jon’s flawless olive skin and dark, almost Spanish features, before they realised they were fighting a losing battle. Because Jon was not in the slightest bit interested in the so-called fairer sex.

  Sylvie took a deep breath. ‘Really odd,’ she said, jiggling the ice in her glass nervously. ‘Like I don’t quite belong. Either here or New York. Not any more, at least.’

  Jon looked at her sympathetically. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘It’s . . . It was just really hard.’ Sylvie stumbled through her explanation. She’d tried to prepare for this on the plane, but the look of genuine concern in Jon’s eyes was making it more difficult than she’d expected. ‘Really competitive, you know? It’s just dog eat dog, the New York fashion scene. My backers got cold feet, and I realised I just wasn’t cut out for it in the end.’

  Jon patted her shoulder sympathetically. ‘Bastards. Never mind. You’ll start again, Sylvie. You’re so talented.’

  Am I? Sylvie thought. Really?

  Jon opened his mouth to say something else but just then Penny nudged him in the ribs, nodding towards a ridiculously pretty tanned young thing with a bushranger’s beard, man bun and ripped surf T-shirt as he loped past their table.

  ‘Just your type, don’t you think? Go get him, lover.’

  Jon pouted. ‘Oh, honey – he should be so lucky.’

  For such an angelic-looking girl, Penny had a surprisingly loud, dirty laugh. Olu looked away.

  ‘Here, girls, what do you fancy?’ asked Jon, standing up and pulling out his wallet. ‘Drinks on me.’

  ‘You choose,’ winked Penny, chugging on her cocktail. ‘Make mine a double. And hurry up, Tiger, don’t let him get away. Olu can be your wing man – can’t you, Olu?’ she asked with a wink.

  ‘What is this, “wing man”?’ Olu asked, frowning, to which Penny snorted her drink through her nose.

  Jon frowned, smoothing down his already slicked-back hair. ‘S’all right, mate, just ignore her . . . Okay, girls, wish me luck!’ he said, walking towards the curved copper bar, his eyes firmly trained on the surfer’s departing behind.

  ‘I think I’ll . . .’ Olu trailed off, pointing towards the men’s room.

  ‘Yes, you go,’ Penny said, smiling up at him sweetly. ‘Give us some time for a little chat.’ She turned to Sylvie, her eyes narrowing, and placed a manicured hand on Sylvie’s leg.

  ‘So . . . what do you think?’

  ‘About what?’ asked Sylvie, shifting uncomfortably under Penny’s grip.

  ‘Olu, of course! Gorgeous, isn’t he? God, the things he does in bed . . . He makes me come like a freight train . . .’ Penny trailed off appreciatively, lost in an erotic reverie.

  Sylvie laughed, breathing a sigh of relief and blowing out a long plume of smoke. For a moment there she’d thought Penny was about to quiz her on why she was back in England, or her sketchy plans for the future. It was quite one thing fibbing to Jon, but Penny – as an experienced teller of lies – wouldn’t be anywhere near as easy to fool. But, as always, Penny was too caught up in her own soap opera to ask Sylvie anything about herself.

  As Penny leaned in to confide the extent of Olu’s sexual appetite, Sylvie nodded and smoked, and wondered why she seemed to have so many people in her life who were so totally self-absorbed. Gisele, Penny . . . It felt lonely, floating around in this miasma all on her own. Except floating was probably the wrong word. It was more like drowning.

  Though there was Ben, of course. She flinched at the thought of him. He was always so sweetly concerned, asking how she felt and trying to make things better. ‘What can I do, babe? I hate seeing you like this.’ It was living with Ben, during those last weeks in New York, which had been the final straw for Sylvie. She’d started to feel like she couldn’t breathe, that she was slowly being asphyxiated. She’d had to escape.

  She was still thinking about Ben when she became aware of a sudden shift of energy in the room, a ripple passing through the bar like a subsonic boom.

  From her position at the edge of the banquette, Sylvie couldn’t quite see what was happening. It was clear from the whispers and seat-shuffling that something – or someone – important had just walked in. Studiously eyeing their drinks, people were behaving as if they were far too cool to notice, but Sylvie craned her neck to see why they were feigning indifference. And then she saw, to her disbelief, a group making its way across the floor towards them. Her stomach plummeted. Fuck. She froze, cigarette in midair as a trio of glossy women walked right up to their table.

  ‘Penns, Sylvs . . . great to see you, yah,’ said Olivia Frankston-Greene. ‘Heard you might be back in town.’

  Sylvie’s nemesis (or one of her closest friends, once – she could never quite remember which) was dressed in a shimmery green satin shift, Sylvie automatically noticed, cut on the bias, under an army-style khaki vest with chunky Doc Martens. The nineties look was definitely back in – that much was obvious from Olivia’s several thousand pound outfit, culled fresh from the Paris catwalks where it had shown last week. And trailing behind her were two familiar faces. Birgitte Knusberg and Jenny Oxenbold, a chirpy, chubby girl Sylvie had once quite liked for her sweetness.

  It was amazing, Sylvie thought. Even though Olivia had crossed the roof terrace to speak with them and not the other way around, an air of boredom was already radiating from her. Olivia glanced away to see who else was in the bar and, satisfied all eyes were upon her, settled her pale grey eyes back upon Sylvie.

  Sylvie hated herself in that moment. She loathed the urge welling up inside her to impress Olivia, or somehow defend herself from the onslaught which was surely coming.

  The eldest daughter of a department store magnate, Olivia was usually seen in the Sunday papers, jet-setting off to the family bolthole in Mustique, or flying back from LA to launch a new line of fragrances.
Sylvie and Olivia had had a friendship at college – they’d been competitive but close. That is, until Sylvie had fallen into bed one night with some boy that Olivia had fancied, and since then, Olivia could barely bring herself to talk to her. And when she did, she’d go straight for the jugular.

  ‘I hear congratulations are in order, Sylv.’ Olivia brushed Sylvie’s arm – her palm was cool but Sylvie jumped at her touch. ‘We thought you were done . . . that’s what everyone was saying. But it turned out you were plotting a comeback the whole time, you sly thing.’

  ‘I – uh – I don’t know what you mean . . .’ stammered Sylvie.

  ‘Yah,’ said Olivia sweetly. ‘You’ve paired up with Harvest now, haven’t you?’

  ‘What?’ Sylvie asked, confused.

  She knew the label Olivia was referring to – it was one of her main competitors. Set up only a year after she started Dearlove, it was owned by the Carter sisters from upstate New York. Harvest was stocked in many of the same boutiques as she was. Sylvie had always been a little surprised to notice their designs were remarkably similar to her own. They were even targeted at the very same customer: the kind of woman of means who considered herself bohemian, even though that was a contradiction in terms. Gypset rather than gypsy. Sylvie had tried to ignore the similarities in their design and just focused on doing her own thing, but it had frequently been unnerving that their work mirrored her own ideas so completely.

  Birgitte chimed in. ‘Those scarves? You know, the really busy-looking printed ones?’ Every sentence she uttered seemed to end with an upward inflection, so that Sylvie couldn’t quite tell if Birgitte was asking a question or making a statement. ‘Harvest has them?’ she said impatiently. ‘Or they look just the same?’