Guilty Pleasures

You hypocrite thought Cassandra narrowing her eyes. You charge the highest fees to make parents feel better about themselves but at the slightest hint of trouble, you throw the blame straight back at them.

‘Ruby has an enormous amount of love and attention from her family, Miss Broughton, I can assure you of that. I can also assure you that there are other schools who would be only too glad to take responsibility for a bright, capable pupil like Ruby.’

She opened the car door and climbed inside.

‘As I said, a wonderful talk, Miss Grand,’ Miss Broughton said as Cassandra slammed the door.

Through the tinted windows, she looked up at the Gothic beauty of Briarton Court and shivered. For a moment she thought about taking her daughter away. That would show the old bitch, thought Cassandra. She wouldn’t want to lose the high grade exam results Ruby was likely to chalk up, would she? But then the reputation of the school was unparalleled and more importantly, the calibre of the pupils, of the friends that her daughter would forge, was also excellent. Besides, she didn’t want the inconvenience of moving Ruby again. She looked away from the school and told Andrew to drive to London as fast as he could. She then turned her attention to dissecting the new issue of Vogue as it started to rain.

6 (#ulink_e43954eb-840b-53aa-a515-c0b7e95cfc59)

Emma told the taxi to go slowly. Past Prada, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Past Hermès, Celine and Louis Vuitton. Past the window displays of grand twinkling diamonds: De Beers, Tiffany and Cartier. Past some of the greatest, most desirable luxury brands in the world. London seemed to have grown so much richer since the last time she had been shopping in Mayfair. Bentleys and high-end Audis lined the road, beautiful women with expensive haircuts and winter tans floated out of jewellers with big smiles and sparklers.

‘So where d’you want dropping, love?’ asked the cabbie, now visibly annoyed. He’d spent the last ten minutes snaking up and down Bond Street, with Emma pressing her face up against the window.

‘Do you know the Milford shop?’ she asked.

‘Not the foggiest, love. What’s it look like?’

Emma knew how he felt. It had been so long since she had last visited the Milford store that she could scarcely remember it either, and now having gone up and down the length of Bond Street, she was no wiser. Milford had four stores worldwide, all in prime locations; Rue St Honoré in Paris, Fifth Avenue in New York and Via Condotti in Rome, but the London shop was the flagship. Strange, then, that it seemed impossible to locate.

‘There it is,’ she said finally, and the taxi pulled up outside an anonymous-looking store on the lower stretch of New Bond Street.

‘It’s my shop. Well, sort of,’ she explained to the cabbie as she handed him a crisp twenty pound note.

‘Yeah, right,’ said the taxi driver under his breath as he roared off. Emma loitered on the pavement, unsure whether she really wanted to go in. It was a rather forbidding place, painted in a dark blue with a tiny window display of some not terribly exciting wallets and gloves. Taking a deep breath, she pushed the mahogany door but it wouldn’t open. She tried again, this time harder, but still it wouldn’t budge. Then she noticed a bell to the side of the door and after pressing it twice, a buzzer sounded and it opened with a creak. The ghostly quiet which greeted her reminded Emma of going into a church. The store was dingy and very old-fashioned and it smelt slightly musty, like a country house boot-room. Where’s the glorious smell of leather? she thought distractedly. There was a beautiful staircase in the middle of the room leading to a mezzanine floor, but the rest of the store was dark and depressing, with small windows which let in very little light. Behind the counter, an old man with a pince-nez eyed her curiously, then continued with his telephone conversation. Emma had the curious sensation of feeling both intimidated and ignored at the same time.

Since leaving Price Donahue, Emma had dealt with her sadness and anger in the only way she knew how – by losing herself in work. She had requested Milford’s press cuttings and financial reports to be Fed-Exed over and had examined them with forensic thoroughness. She had quickly discovered that the company’s financial position was dire. While the luxury leather goods industry was now a multi-billion dollar business – in the last two decades designer handbags had been one of the biggest growth areas in the whole of the fashion industry – Milford was barely staying afloat. Looking around, she knew exactly why. It was a Saturday afternoon and the shop was deserted. Emma wandered over to the nearest shelf and picked up a leather bag. She pulled a face. You didn’t need to be a fashion expert to know that it was ugly. It was dark brown but it wasn’t the warm, rich brown of milk chocolate; it was sludgy like mud. She ran her fingers over the bumpy leather – ostrich she wondered – it was obviously expensive but it wasn’t an item she’d want in her wardrobe in a month of Sundays.

‘Can I help you?’ asked a stern-looking shop assistant with blonde hair the texture of candy-floss and a brass name-badge announcing her name as ‘Barbara’. She looked at Emma’s fleece and jeans with undisguised distaste.

‘I’m just looking,’ said Emma as brightly as she could.

‘For anything in particular?’ asked Barbara snootily.

‘Actually, can you tell me which is your most popular bag?’

The woman looked stricken that anyone should base a choice on anything as vulgar as popularity.

‘It’s this one,’ she said, indicating a brown leather tote. ‘It’s called the “Rebecca”.’ I wonder where that came from, thought Emma. She picked it up. The leather was certainly beautiful but the materials could not disguise the frumpy shape and the overcomplicated knotted tassels.

‘It’s rather expensive,’ said Barbara.

Emma picked up the price tag. £3,000! For that? she thought to herself.

As if reading her thoughts, Barbara added: ‘The craftsmanship on all the Milford range is superb.’

‘Hand-stitched?’ asked Emma remembering the summer after school she had spent working at Milford. In actual fact, the time she had spent with the workmen in the factory had been the part she had enjoyed the most. It had been a fascinating place. She remembered the wonderful smell of the warehouse where thousands of rolls of leather were kept; there were crocodile skins from Australia, python skins from India, calf skins from Brittany and goatskin from Scotland which was used to line all the handbags. She remembered watching Jeff Conway, Milford’s head cuireur, stretch and beat leathers until they were butter soft and the white-coated artisans hunched over their work-stations, crafting the bags from start to finish, using needles, awls and pinces de cuir. Creating a bag had seemed like creating a work of art, not something that rolled off an assembly line.

‘There is some hand-crafting involved,’ said Barbara cautiously.

‘But not hand-stitching?’ repeated Emma, making a mental note.

Barbara was getting visibly irritated.

‘If madam requires hand-stitching then perhaps you’d like to consider our bespoke service. But the price is considerably higher.’

‘I didn’t really want to pay too much,’ said Emma.

‘Then perhaps madam would be better off in another store. Oxford Street has an excellent selection of mid-market accessories.’

What a cow thought Emma. No wonder the shop was empty. Luxury retail wasn’t just about the product, it was about the experience. If you were spending that much on something, you wanted to feel pampered and flattered, as if the luxury reflected back on you and your incredible good taste.

Emma handed the Rebecca back to Barbara and left the shop. As the door closed behind her, Emma inhaled a deep draught of fresh air.

‘Thank you, Barbara,’ she whispered to herself as she walked off towards the brighter, glossier shops of London’s most fashionable street. The snooty assistant didn’t know it, but she had done Emma a huge favour, because now she knew exactly what she needed to do.

Julia Grand sat in her daughter’s spacious Knightsbridge apartment, drinking a chilled glass of Pouilly Fumé, thinking there could be few more pleasant places to spend a Sunday afternoon. A sprawling lateral Regency conversion, the flat had been decorated in Cassandra’s favoured dove grey, chocolate and cream and was being flooded with lazy winter light from Hyde Park which lay beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. The long walnut dining table had been set with Meissen porcelain – Julia noted that it was a different set from the one she had seen on her last visit – while Lucia, Cassandra’s housekeeper, was preparing a light lunch of poached salmon and asparagus. Julia considered for a moment how much Cassandra must be earning to afford this luxury and felt a burst of pride at her daughter’s accomplishments. Of course, Julia liked to think she’d had a considerable hand in Cassandra’s success; raising her as a single mother, the years of looking after Ruby, but she was sure her daughter wouldn’t think of it that way.

She looked over at Cassandra, wearing what she called her ‘après yoga’ look of cashmere jogging pants and a skinny white vest. Cassandra was leaving for Milan that afternoon and so she was taking armfuls of clothes from her cedar-lined wardrobes and folding them between tissue paper before putting them into two Louis Vuitton trunks. Julia had kept a fascinated inventory as she watched Cassandra pack: ten pairs of red-soled shoes, most of which looked unworn. Twelve skirts, twice as many dresses, cashmere sweaters in a rainbow of complementary colours and finally, almost a dozen coats, one each from the main designers showing at the Milan collections, which she would wear to the corresponding show. There must have been hundreds of thousands of pounds of clothes in those trunks which, according to Cassandra, would be completely redundant by the time the shows were over. Julia considered it an abject waste of money; think of what all that money could really buy! A Picasso sketch, perhaps, or a Corot landscape. Now that would be something worth having.

‘So. Tell me again what Roger told you?’ asked Cassandra, finally fastening the latches on the trunks and taking a seat at the dining table. Julia tried not to smile; Cassandra had a habit of making every conversation feel like a business meeting.

‘He said that Emma has come back from Boston in time for the shareholders, meeting tomorrow.’

‘And do you think it’s significant?’

Julia shrugged.

‘She’s already told Roger she doesn’t want to be CEO. I suspect she’s just there to show willing and formalize Roger’s appointment so we can all move forward.’

Cassandra frowned slightly.

‘So everyone is happy with Emma’s share in the company?’ she asked.

‘I never said that,’ replied Julia diplomatically, knowing that her daughter had not been pleased with Saul’s bequests. ‘But what can we do? Roger has already engaged a lawyer; apparently we can’t contest the will simply because we don’t like what it says.’

Cassandra was silent for a moment and Julia reached across the table to take one of her hands.

‘I was desperately disappointed at the reading of the will. It should have been you, darling. We know that. But there seems to be very little we can do.’

‘Is this the sort of fight you put up when Dad left you?’ snapped Cassandra, pulling her hand away. Cassandra was angry. She was already well aware of the legal situation with Saul’s will; her own lawyers had taken the full force of her fury when they had explained it was watertight. So Cassandra had contacted her financial advisers to explore the possibility of buying Emma’s shareholding should she decide to sell, but even with a conservative valuation on Milford, they were talking very big numbers indeed. Cassandra might be the highest-paid editor in London, but it was still way out of her financial grasp.

Julia looked at her daughter wondering how she could be so fearsome. She blamed Cassandra’s emotional detachment on herself of course, for allowing her husband Desmond to leave. She had tried to put that day in a box at the back of her mind. The day Desmond had left her for another woman, leaving her to bring up Cassandra and Tom by herself. In the years that followed Desmond had given very little financial support to Julia; maintenance payments dwindled to nothing once he’d moved to South Africa twelve months after their divorce. But it wasn’t money Cassandra wanted from her father; it was love, support, approval. So Julia had spent the last two decades trying to make up for it. That was why she had volunteered to bring up Ruby when Cassandra had made the move to New York and it hadn’t been easy. Suddenly burdened with a three-year-old grandchild, Julia had been forced to cut her time back at the Oxford gallery she owned with the result that it had almost gone under. It had taken the business a decade to recover but Julia had taken the sacrifice on the chin: everything she did was for her children.

Julia held her hand to her breast as if she had been stung.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cassandra with an unusual tone of softness. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I’m just incredibly frustrated by the whole thing.’