Grace had been worried that the spa staff would give her knowing looks when she rolled up for her first appointment - that she was just the latest in a long line of Vaughn’s girls and they’d seen it all before. But they couldn’t have been nicer, even sending someone out to Pret a Manger to get her a sandwich when they’d realised she was on her lunch-break, though the spa was so luxurious that Grace had been terrified of getting mayonnaise on the white leather that seemed to coat everything from the walls to the couch that she lay starkers on while her pasty flesh was worked on.
Over the next few days, a new Grace started to emerge. It wasn’t just the best efforts of trained aestheticians with their tri-enzyme facials and bleach baths, but as if they’d also taken a rubber to Grace’s face to smooth out the frown and the pinched look from worrying about money, Kiki, and why none of her relationships ever lasted.
She was never going to be a beauty, but her grandad always said she scrubbed up all right and Grace was beginning to scrub up to the nth degree. All the little flaws that she’d catalogue as she stood naked in the bath and twisted and contorted so she could get an all-round reflection in the mirror above the sink were becoming a thing of the past. The little bumpy spots on the back of her thighs and arms had been pummelled away, her blackheads obliterated and her hair had recovered from its bleach bath and was now a glossy chocolate brown. Every time she passed a shop window, Grace couldn’t resist preening a little, then shaking her head to see her hair give a little shimmy then settle back down without ever losing its shape.
Still, Grace faced her first bikini wax with trepidation. She had heard tales of the close bond that formed between waxer and waxee. Mainly from Lily as she was the only one of Grace’s friends with a spa membership and she got on with everyone - but Grace wasn’t expecting a short, squat woman who eyed her up and down as she entered the waxing chamber and barked, ‘I’m Galya. Take off your knickers,’ in an Eastern European accent.
Lily hadn’t said anything about her waxer snorting in disbelief either, but then Lily didn’t wear boy-cut panties with the Superman logo on them.
‘On the table,’ Galya demanded, staring at Grace’s pubic hair. ‘You do this yourself, huh?’
Grace raised herself up on her elbows and nodded. She wanted to defend her trimming skills but realised it would be futile as the woman snorted again and started heating up the wax.
‘You want the Brazilian?’ Galya asked after a few moments of fraught silence.
‘Is that the one with the little landing strip?’ It had been a while since Skirt had done anything on the latest trends in waxing.
Galya approached Grace’s spread legs with a pot of wax. ‘New boyfriend,’ she sniffed. ‘First-timers always come for the new boyfriend.’
Grace looked helplessly up at the ceiling. ‘Well, yeah. Kind of. It’s hard to explain,’ she added as she eyed Galya and her spatula warily.
‘What’s he like?’
How to sum up Vaughn in one sentence to a woman whose first language wasn’t English. ‘Er . . . older,’ was the best she could do.
Galya cackled knowingly. Grace was rather warming to her. ‘How old?’
Grace picked a number. Any number. ‘Thirty-nine,’ she said decisively.
‘Then I take off everything. The older ones like that. Lift up your leg.’
It hurt like a bitch, though Grace wasn’t going to give Galya the satisfaction of even the smallest, ‘Ow!’ By the time she was ordered on to her hands and knees so Galya could wax a place where Vaughn would never go (not for £5,000 a month, not for all the couture gowns in Paris), Grace realised that all the times she’d known embarrassment before had just been a dress rehearsal for this moment.
There were other parts of her life that were in desperate need of a makeover too, but Grace had been putting it off until a week had passed and all that money was still stashed in the Marc Jacobs bag in her oven. Finally, Grace took it out. Then she hauled out one of the shoe boxes and started sorting through the bills - there were so many of them and none of them were in the right order. Grace couldn’t remember which ones were pending and which ones had been shunted over to a debt consolidation company and then promptly forgotten about. There was the interest and the late fees and the penalty charges and in the end, it was easier to go with gut instinct and prioritise the two most important debts.
The next day, Grace couriered over six months of back-rent to her landlady and ambled down to TopShop in her lunch-hour so she could pay off the £2,318 and 35p she owed on her storecard. That was the £5,000 completely gone and then some, but she dipped into the clothing allowance to buy a fitted tuxedo jacket from the new Kate Moss collection. Then she paid twenty pounds for a box of mediocre sushi from the place around the corner just like the rest of the fashion team.
On the Saturday, Grace bought a Zac Posen silk jersey dress in almost the same shade of green as one of the pictures she’d seen hanging up in Vaughn’s gallery, and a pair of Oscar de la Renta peeptoe slingbacks. That took up the rest of the clothing allowance and Grace was back to bananas, noodles and trying to scare up enough loose change to top up her Oyster card. Next month, she promised herself, she’d make another sizeable dent in the bills before she even thought about shopping.
Now she only had one thing to worry about, but another week rolled by and Vaughn had become nothing more than a shadowy Fairy Godfather, just lurking at the edges of her mind. So even Kiki at her most vicious couldn’t wipe the beatific smile off Grace’s face. Kiki had returned on the Monday from her annual fortnight in St Barts with the devil on her shoulder and had actually ripped up Grace’s ideas and flung them in her face during the monthly fashion and beauty brainstorm. Grace clutched the BlackBerry that had been couriered over that morning by Ms Jones as if it was a Kevlar shield and decided to rise above it. Keeping calm in the face of Kiki’s most savage mood yet would be great training for when Vaughn did put in an appearance.
‘I don’t know what you’re smirking about, Grace,’ Kiki hissed as Grace stared resolutely at her feet, which had been treated to their third intensive pedicure that lunch-time and were, for the first time in years, devoid of calluses and hard skin. ‘And your hair looks even more ridiculous than usual. Get out!’
Grace was only too happy to escape to the cupboard. They’d just had a delivery from Milan and were about to start work on the January issue (that actually went on sale in December), which meant parties, which meant party frocks. There was no harm in trying on a couple in preparation for next month’s clothing allowance. It was probably tempting fate but Grace was powerless to resist in the face of Miu Miu.
She was just easing up the zip of a little Roland Mouret number when she realised that her discarded jeans were humming and vibrating. Bending down carefully so she didn’t split the tight seams, she retrieved her new BlackBerry. It hadn’t done anything since it had been couriered over and she hadn’t given the number to anyone, so that meant . . .
‘Hello?’ It was hard to make your voice husky and alluring when you were wearing a dress so tight it was cutting off your blood circulation.
‘Grace. I need you to come with me to a party on Wednesday evening,’ Vaughn said, like it was a perfectly reasonable request for 12.35 p.m. on a Monday, when she hadn’t spoken to him for a fortnight.
‘Um, OK,’ she mumbled, her face flaring up because simply talking to him felt illicit. Grace made a mental note to phone her spa (her spa!) and book an emergency bikini wax, and a mani/pedi and maybe they could fit her in for a wash and blowdry after work on Wednesday and Jesus, two weeks ago all she’d ever had in the way of regular beauty treatments was a peel-off face mask as she watched Project Runway . . .
‘Grace,’ Vaughn said again, terse enough to cut right through all of Grace’s breezy notions that handling him would be just like handling Kiki. All of a sudden her mouth was dry and she had that funny taste at the back of her throat again. ‘You could try to be a little more articulate.’
; ‘I’m sorry.’ Grace clamped the phone under her ear while she made sure the cupboard door was shut. ‘Anyway, like, how are you?’
‘How am I?’ Vaughn echoed, sounding surprised that she’d even asked. ‘I’m fine. Have you done the reading? What did you think of the Karvovsky exhibition?’
Grace squirmed as much as she could in skin-tight silk crepe. She had bought one of the boring art books from Borders (the only one they’d had in stock) but mostly her research had involved reading a biography of Madame Pompadour. There was a long, fraught silence. ‘I went to the Tate Modern,’ she said at last.
There was a long sigh. ‘It’s not enough to just stand about looking pretty,’ he said through what sounded like tightly gritted teeth. ‘I thought I was perfectly clear about that.’
He’d said she was pretty before but now he dragged it up like an accusation. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said apologetically. ‘I got a bit carried away with spa appointments.’
‘Fine,’ Vaughn said, as if it really wasn’t fine. ‘Madeleine will send you some notes about Wednesday. She’ll try to keep them to bullet points, given your hectic schedule.’
‘Um, who’s Madeleine anyway?’
‘I believe you know her as Ms Jones. So, Wednesday. Come to the gallery for seven and be on time.’
‘What kind of party is it? Do I need to dress up? Is it really swank?’
‘Grace, I don’t have time for this. Call Madeleine and she can fill you in,’ he said, and she could sense his impatience to finish the call. ‘I’ll see you on Wednesday.’
chapter twelve
At precisely 6.57 p.m. on Wednesday, Grace stood outside 17 Thirlestone Mews. She looked down at her perfectly polished toes peeking out of her vintage Roland Cartier silver sandals and told herself that everything was going to be all right.
The door was opened by Piers, his face pinking up as soon as he caught sight of her. He was the only person she’d ever met who blushed as much as she did, and if Grace’s gaydar wasn’t shrieking at a very high frequency, she’d have begun to wonder if he had a crush on her.
‘Hi. I’m expected . . .’
‘Hi. I think he’s expecting you . . .’
Grace felt a little ragged standing there in her expensive new dress, which was starting to stick to her clammy skin.
‘So, do I just go up then?’ she asked, though the moment it popped out, she wondered if she was meant to be more blasé. It wasn’t the sort of dilemma that had been covered in the Madame Pompadour biography. And Madame Pompadour had never turned up to meet Louis XIV with a spare pair of knickers, a toothbrush and her multi-vitamins stashed in her clutch bag or have to plan a sneaky cut and run from the office half an hour early so she could get to the spa for a quick wash and blowdry.
Grace followed Piers up the stairs, casting an interested glance at the two other girls who were standing behind the reception desk. Posh girls - she could tell immediately. Something about the self-assured way they held themselves and their shiny hair and crisp dresses that looked as if they’d been freshly pressed and put on five minutes earlier. They barely looked in Grace’s direction, though Grace couldn’t tell if they were following orders or monumentally not interested.
‘He’s through there,’ Piers told Grace, pointing down the corridor, when they’d finished the long climb to the second floor. Grace slowly walked up to the door and knocked softly on it.
‘Enter.’
Grace wriggled her shoulders and opened the door.
Vaughn was sitting behind his desk and frowning at his computer screen as Grace walked in. She hesitated, thought about perching on one of the Cubist armchairs but then he looked up and frowned a little bit harder.
‘Hey,’ Grace said, raising one sweaty paw in a salute.
‘Hello,’ he said, pushing his chair back so he could walk towards her. Grace wanted to inch back but she stayed where she was.
Vaughn was wearing one of his snowy-white shirts and impeccably tailored trousers, but he’d caught the sun on the high planes of his cheekbones, which made his eyes seem bluer as they fixed on Grace’s face and didn’t waver.
‘You’re on time,’ Vaughn murmured as he reached her, brushing her cheek with his lips, his hand just skirting her hip and slip-sliding off the jersey silk in a proprietorial gesture that made Grace give a nervous start before she could stop herself. He was frowning again. ‘I don’t like your hair.’
‘You told me to change it.’ Grace ran a defensive hand over her new cut, which she happened to love, from the blunt fringe to the long, razored layers that actually gave her cheekbones. ‘I got rid of the black.’
‘Why didn’t you just pick a new colour and stick with it? It looks like a Mars bar,’ Vaughn said flatly, moving his head so he could get a better angle to see the lowlights in Grace’s hair, which had been far too brown without a few streaks to give it some oomph. Vaughn ran an appraising eye over her new Zac Posen dress with its asymmetrical hem, which had cost most of her clothing allowance. ‘The rest of you looks very lovely,’ he said. ‘Green suits you.’
Then he picked up his suit jacket from the back of a chair and marched out of the room, without bothering to see if Grace was trotting after him like an obedient little dog.
There was a long, sleek car waiting for them outside with its engine running. A uniformed driver opened the door and Grace sank back against the plump leather and tried to will herself to unclench.
Vaughn crossed his legs and looked at her. ‘I don’t want you to drink too much at this party,’ he said. ‘Just one glass of wine, I think.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Grace immediately bristled.
‘It means that the first time we met, you downed a glass of champagne in one,’ Vaughn informed her. ‘The second time you phoned me drunk. You were absolutely steaming in New York and last time you admitted you had a hangover.’
When he put it like that, Grace felt like she should ask the driver to drop her off at the nearest AA meeting.
‘Fine,’ she said, her lips thin.
‘You can drink afterwards, when we have dinner,’ Vaughn conceded and Grace’s heart lifted, then sank to her knees. Ms Jones hadn’t mentioned anything about dinner. Grace had imagined that Vaughn would want to skip right to the sex part. But, no, he was determined to prolong her agony.
‘You’re annoyed with me,’ he went on, ‘but really, there was no polite way to say it.’
Grace looked at him from under her lashes. ‘Well, actually there was but you chose not to use it.’
Vaughn shrugged carelessly. ‘I gave you fair warning about what you’d be dealing with. Who you’d be dealing with. So there’s really no need for the sulky face.’
It took a great effort to rearrange her features into something less pouty. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just a bit nervous.’
That should have been Vaughn’s cue to say something nice to help Grace tamp down the rising hysteria, but he just gave her a bland smile that she didn’t like one little bit and didn’t say a word for the rest of the journey.
The party, given by a Russian businessman who collected art and trophy wives, was being held at his home in Kensington. It wasn’t a home like Grace knew homes, where you kicked off your shoes by the front door and were offered a cup of tea by your host. This was a home where a line of limos were gridlocked outside, and once Grace and Vaughn had hurried up the stone steps of the immense Regency townhouse, which took up most of the block, there was a uniformed flunky to take their names and announce them.
As Grace stepped over the threshold she was momentarily dazzled by the huge amounts of gilt and crystal that covered every surface, including the banisters of the sweeping staircase, and the sparkling stones dripping from the necks of every other woman present. A mêlée of guests milled over the imported marble floor and a hundred different French perfumes fought it out for olfactory supremacy. Grace counted five Roberto Cavalli dresses, which made her decide that the gathering was mostly former Eastern Bloc.
Kiki was always banging on about how only rap stars and Russian gangsters’ wives wore Cavalli.
Grace caught sight of herself in a huge ormolu mirror that took up most of one wall and inwardly shuddered. When she’d left the spa, she was certain that she’d never looked this good, this pretty, in her entire life. But now, she looked all wrong hanging from Vaughn’s arm, though that could be because Vaughn was still frowning. It was more than that; Vaughn looked at ease. He wore his suit with the same assurance as he’d worn jeans and a T-shirt, while Grace felt horribly contrived in her £1,000 plus change dress, like it was a costume rather than the most beautiful frock she’d ever owned. And Vaughn was right: her hair was stupid - and so were her tatty sandals. All of a sudden, vintage was just another word for second-hand.