It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Read online

  “Hey, Ellie,” she said, sort of skipping into the room and dumping a load of Selfridges and House of Fraser carrier bags on a chair. “What’s up? I’ve barely seen you all week.”

  I told her we’d cracked the deadline and I’d really been looking forward to a night out to celebrate, but Ben and Claire were both busy.

  “But you must come out with us!” Rose said. “Come on! It’ll be brilliant.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?” I asked suspiciously, imagining myself playing gooseberry to Rose and Oliver.

  “Pip, Ness, Chloë, me,” she said. “Just a low-key girls’ night out, I promise. We’re going to a new bar that’s opened down the road. It’s meant to be really nice.”

  I hesitated. I knew Rose’s idea of a low-key night out – the last one I’d been to had ended after four o’clock in a club in Chelsea, with us having to scrape Chloë off some rugby player she’d picked up. Music too loud to talk over, nowhere to sit, skinny girls shrieking at each other – not my idea of fun. But, I realised, it must be Oliver’s, if it were Rose’s.

  “It won’t be like last time, I promise,” Rose said, seeming to read my thoughts as she so often does. “This place is really new, no one’s discovered it yet, and Pip knows the owner so we’ll get a table.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But if it’s horrible, I’ll…” I cast around for a dire threat, “I’ll tell Vanessa about the time you shagged Mick.”

  “Waaah!” Rose said, “No! Anything but that!”

  I hadn’t mentioned Mick in a while, but clearly the memory had lost none of its power. Rose had been in sixth form and I was in my first year at uni, and we were both back at Dad’s for the summer holidays. We’d been out to the local nightclub – a total dive called Mask-u-raids – with some of my old schoolfriends, and Rose, presumably feeling there was no need to act cool as none of her crowd were there, had really let her hair down and got totally plastered on alcopops.

  By around midnight she was superglued to a brawny, tattooed, shaven-headed twenty-something man. I considered trying to break it up, but figured he was probably harmless and Rose was quite capable of looking after herself, and sure enough she staggered home the next day, brutally hungover but in one piece.

  “Oooh, my head,” she moaned. “And oooh, my knees and elbows. I feel like I did ten rounds with Mike Tyson.” I laughed, and Rose went on, “The weird thing is, he looked sort of familiar. Do you think he’s on telly or something?” I gazed at her in horror and pissed myself laughing. “You mean you didn’t realise?” I said. “That was Mick, who’s been our bin-man for, like, eight years.” And ever since then, when I’ve wanted to coerce Rose into loading the dishwasher when it’s my turn, or doing the Ocado order or whatever, I’ve wheeled out the prospect of revealing all to Vanessa, who, being an appalling snob, would mock Rose mercilessly and quite possibly defriend her.

  Rose and I had a giggle about Mick the binman, and as usual I realised that she had made me feel much more cheerful, so I headed upstairs to get dressed. Sadly my good mood didn’t last long, as I realised that my recent weight loss had left me with absolutely no clothes that fitted – even my bras were too big. I ended up wearing a denim mini skirt that sat so low on my hips that it was barely a mini any more, a slouchy black jumper that wasn’t really meant to be slouchy, leopard-print tights and black boots. Rose said I looked amazing and she couldn’t believe how thin I’d got, but I suspect she was just being kind – half a stone isn’t much really and there was no way I could compete with her in her designer skinny jeans, flat over-the-knee boots and backless gold top.

  Her friends were being kind too, though, because when we walked into the bar – it was called Eve’s and it was decorated in a style that I suppose was meant to echo the garden of Eden, with loads of lush plants, murals of tropical jungle scenes on the walls, snakeskin print fabric sofas and bowls of fake apples everywhere – they all broke into a chorus of, “Wow, Ellie, you look amazing! How fabulous to see you!” It was quite sweet really.

  We sat down at our table and all ordered fancy cocktails and started chatting away. Pip told us about the filthy text messages she’d been getting from Hans the ski instructor, and had us all in stitches with his ‘damn you, autocorrect’ moments. Apparently the latest message had said he wanted to kick her aunt. Chloë was checking out a group of men in suits at the next-door table, but when they came over and said hello and she found out that they were estate agents, she lost interest. Rose produced some juicy gossip about her friend Gervase, who was apparently having a passionate affair with a married man he’d met at work. After the second round I found myself telling Vanessa all about Ben’s running-and-porridge boot camp, and how none of my clothes fitted any more.

  “But you must come and see me at work,” she said. “I’d love to sort you out with a new wardrobe, I adore doing that sort of thing, and I’ll get you a discount too. Go on, you can’t deprive me of a chance to play personal shopper,” and the next thing she’d whipped out her Blackberry and we were comparing diaries and discovering that we were both free the next afternoon at two (actually I hadn’t needed to consult my diary to know that, but it’s just as well to play along in these situations).

  Vanessa’s a fashion buyer for Black & White, the uber-smart department store on Bond Street. I’d only been in there once before, with Rose when she’d been on a desperate quest for a hat to match her taupe shoes, and the place had frankly terrified me with its fragrant, deep-carpeted swankiness, sneery assistants and eye-watering prices. However I was feeling quite flush that month and I hadn’t spent any money on clothes for ages, and it felt quite glamorous and exciting to be pushing open the heavy glass doors and heading to the first floor to find the personal shopping department, where I’d arranged to meet Vanessa.

  “So, Ellie,” she said. “I’ve picked out a few pieces that I think will work for you.” She was all bouncy and excited, and I could tell that, like me, she really loved her job, and I felt myself warming to her quite a bit. “I’m thinking some classic, timeless pieces for work, with some more directional bits and accessories to make them a bit younger and more fun, and then some great casual stuff that will make your weekend-wear look just a bit more pulled together.” She smiled a bit pityingly at my black trousers and stripy top. I’d thought I was doing rather well by pinning a corsagey thing to my denim jacket and nicking another of Rose’s scarves, but clearly she’d seen through me. “And one or two totally fabulous things for evening. And then when we’re done, I’m going to send you downstairs to Martina who will sort you out with some decent bras – trust me, they’ll make you look taller, curvier, the works.”

  I thanked her yet again for giving up her Saturday afternoon and going to such a huge amount of trouble, and said, “Right, let’s get on with it then.”

  Vanessa ushered me through to a sort of super-cubicle – a room almost the size of my bedroom at home, with mirrors all along two walls, a squashy gold-coloured chaiselongue, a little table with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and a tray with coffee things and a plate of fancy chocolate biscuits. Knowing Black & White’s clientele, I doubt many of those ever got eaten. Along the other wall stood a garment rail absolutely groaning with clothes.

  “My god!” I said. “I’ll never try all those on, I’ll be dead of exhaustion.”

  “No you won’t,” Vanessa said in a steely tone that reminded me a bit of Rose. “Besides, once we get an idea of what suits you we’ll be able to tell which of the things I’ve pulled out for you are worth you trying on and which aren’t, and we’ll discard the ones that aren’t and I’ll pop out and get some more styles I think will work on you. So – what’s first?”

  “Casual stuff, I suppose,” I said, clinging limpet-like to my comfort zone.

  “Casual? No, I don’t think so,” Vanessa said. “Come on, put this on.” And she took a dress off the rail and held it out to me in the manner of a conjuror pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

  I flinched away from i
t. “I can’t wear that,” I said. “It’s pink.” And so it was – a deep, almost lilacy pink like a peony. Looking at it, I realised that almost every single garment I own is either black, white, grey, beige or denim. “And what’s more it’s got a hole in it.” It did too – a massive great cut-out bit across the shoulders at the back.

  “Nonsense,” Vanessa said firmly. “This colour will be amazing on you. And this is a really versatile piece – perfect for going out in the evening in the summer, daytime parties, even for work with a jacket over it. Now try it, please, just for me?” And such was the magnetism of her personality that the next thing I knew I was looking at myself in the mirror, covered from collarbone to knee in pink. I looked amazing. The dress lengthened my legs and made a waist magically appear where no waist had been before. The colour made my eyes look a brighter green and my skin look rose-petal perfect. And when I turned around to look at the back, no trace of bra strap showed in the hole.

  “Wow,” I said. “You’re good.” I couldn’t stop smiling.

  “See?” Vanessa was grinning like a maniac too. “Now we’ll put that in the ‘probably’ pile and move on.”

  My admiration for Vanessa’s skill increased to something approaching reverence as the afternoon wore on and I tried on jeans that made my arse look all pert and tiny; suits that actually fitted rather than bulging out in all the wrong places; tops that had random tucks and frills and drapes that made them flattering and interesting instead of just tops. She’d even brought a few scarves in different sizes, and showed me various clever ways to tie them so they looked… right, somehow, not like I’d just wound them round my neck because there was a bit of a nip in the air. “But you’re not buying these here,” she said, “You’ll go to the high street, where scarves are three quid, not fifty like this one. They’re fashion pieces, you change them every season to update your look.”

  I nodded obediently. By this stage we’d finished the champagne and we’d both flopped down on the chaise longue, exhausted, and started on the biscuits, and the rail full of clothes had been sorted into a big pile ‘yes’ section, a smaller ‘maybe’ section and a very small pile of ‘no’s, most of which I’d rejected because my conscience simply wouldn’t allow me to spend more than fifty quid on a top.

  “Well,” Vanessa said, “that’s what I call a good afternoon’s work. I’ve missed doing this so much, although the buying side is great fun too.”

  So I asked her about her career and she told me how when she stopped modelling at twenty (she’d got too big, she said, and looking at her I realised that although she’s tall, athletic and far from fat, Vanessa’s actually not skinny: she just wears clothes that fit her and really, really suit her figure), she’d worked her way up from folding garments on the shop floor (another surprise), and eventually done a couple of years’ stint in the personal shopping department before training as a buyer. And she said that far from going off to be a Lady Who Lunches if she and Tom had children, she was planning to cut short her maternity leave and hire a nanny and go back to work as soon as she could, because she felt her brain would atrophy otherwise. She told me a bit about the shop’s background – how it was formed when an old-fashioned draper’s shop called White’s had merged with an old-fashioned corsetry shop called Black’s, and for ages it had sold gloves and parlourmaids’ uniforms and bloomers and suchlike to well-to-do Mayfair ladies, and then in the 1950s it had started to import ready-to-wear fashion from Paris, and the rest was history. Well, it was all history, of course, but you know what I mean.

  Then she said, “Actually, I was chatting the other day to one of my colleagues, Barri, who’s head of marketing, and he mentioned that he’s looking for a press and communications person. You wouldn’t be interested, would you?”

  I said it depended on various things, and although I was very happy where I was one keeps one’s eyes open for opportunities, and then she told me the salary and I gulped and said I’d think about it and maybe send a CV, and took this Barri guy’s email address. Then we went and paid for everything and even with Vanessa’s discount it was eyewateringly expensive, and there were so many bags – how is it that clothes can be so heavy? They don’t feel heavy when you’re wearing them – I decided to take a taxi home, which made me feel like the indulged daughter of some Middle Eastern potentate. But of course, as is always the way, there were no taxis to be had, and it began to rain – a thin drizzle that had everyone putting up their umbrellas and trying to shelter under awnings and generally making the crowded streets even more rammed than they’d been before. I pushed my way on to a side street and headed south, hoping my luck would improve. But the drizzle intensified, and soon it was proper, full-on rain, and the only taxis I could see had their lights stubbornly off, and one of them drove too fast through a puddle and sent a sort of junior tsunami over the pavement, soaking my trousers so they stuck damply to my calves with every step.

  “Fuck,” I muttered. One of my carrier bags was soaked too, and the thick, expensive paper was disintegrating into mush. I didn’t feel glamorous at all any more; I just felt like me, caught in the rain on my way home to spend a Saturday night on my own. I ducked into a doorway to squash the clothes from the bag that had got soaked into one of the intact ones, and realised I was right outside Gilbert’s, a wine bar where Claire and I had been a few times before she had Pers. I’d go in, I decided, and dry my hair under the hand dryer and have a glass of wine while I waited for the rain to stop.

  A few minutes later I was ensconced at a table in the corner, sipping Sancerre and trying to look aloof and mysterious, not like the kind of tragic loser who drinks alone on a Saturday night, or, worse still, like I’d been stood up. I wished I had a book with me, but instead I used the Black & White Spring/Summer catalogue to hide behind while I checked out the other people in the bar. There were the usual crowds of tourists, wearing those see-through rain cape things that no Londoner would be seen dead in, and poring over huge maps, soggy from the rain. There was a table of girls who looked like they were on a hen night, although it was hard to tell because, this being Mayfair, they were all terribly well dressed and glamorous and there wasn’t an L-plate or cock-shaped deely-bopper in sight. And there were loads of couples on dates: a silver-haired man with a much younger blonde woman who certainly wasn’t his daughter, judging by the way he was pawing her thighs; two teenagers who looked barely old enough to have been allowed in, staring at each other in shy, tortured silence; a couple sitting next to each other at a banquette with their backs to me, her dark head and his lighter one almost touching at they talked intently. Then the girl stood up and slid out of the booth and the man followed and held her coat for her while she slipped it on, and she lifted her sheet of silky hair out of the collar and it swished down her back, and before she’d even turned round I’d recognised her, and him. Claire and Ben.

  I felt a flood of heat rush over my face, and held the Black & White catalogue higher, praying that its oversize format would obscure my face. But they wouldn’t have noticed me; they wouldn’t have noticed anyone. It was like they were surrounded by an invisible bubble of intimacy made for two as they moved easily through the crowd towards the door, Ben’s hand sort of hovering over Claire’s back, so her hair occasionally brushed against it. He held the door open for her and the wind whipped her hair over her face, and I imagined I could hear her laughter, and then Ben put up a big black umbrella over them, and they walked off together, their shoulders touching.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Every day the next week when I walked into the office, Duncan and Ruth and whichever of the volunteers were around looked at me and went, “Swit swoo!” and made me give them a twirl and tell them what I was wearing and what label it was, and although by Friday I’ll admit it was starting to get a bit old, I was actually really pleased. Of course, their being so lovely made me feel even guiltier about the fact that I was spending my lunch breaks polishing my CV, and that by Thursday it was winging its way to barri.doherty@black
white.co.uk, the email address of Vanessa’s head of marketing. I’d been working with Ruth and Duncan for four years by that stage, after leaving my previous job as a lowly press officer at Amnesty International, and I’d grown really fond of them, and of course I loved YEESH and everything it stood for. However much I told myself that everyone had to advance their career somehow, they’d find someone to replace me really easily, and that a stint in the private sector would do my CV no harm, I still couldn’t stifle the sense that I was betraying them, but I consoled myself with the thought that I was a dead cert not to get the job, given that I was neither an ex-model nor dating anyone whose name Barri would recognise.

  So it was quite a relief when the week was over. Rose and I were both home that Friday night – she was still giving Oliver the silent treatment, as far as I could make out, which seemed a bit harsh since several weeks had passed since his Commitment-related transgression, but that’s Rose for you. We were sitting in the living room, me watching telly and picking at a jacket potato in a desultory sort of way; Rose painting her toenails. I’ve always wondered, when the women’s magazines go on about ‘pampering yourself’, exactly who they think they’re fooling. As far as I can tell, nothing could be further from pampering than the stuff like manicures and pedicures and eyebrow shaping and face masks that Rose spends so much time on. It’s boring repair and maintenance, necessary if you’re not going to let yourself go altogether, but it’s about as close to pampering as cleaning the kitchen floor – a task Rose approaches with as much enthusiasm as I do manicures.

  “Rose?” I said.

  “Mmmm?”

  “You know Ben and Claire?”

  “Like, durrr, obviously. Why? What’s up?”

  I paused. I was torn between wanting to tell my sister, and knowing that as soon as I did, I’d have to stop pretending that what I’d seen in the bar last Saturday hadn’t happened. All week I’d been trying to stop my thoughts lingering on them, how they’d looked together, Claire happy and laughing, Ben solicitous, almost tender as he held Claire’s coat for her, opened the door, covered her with his umbrella. How had they got together, I wondered? I’d imagined a moment of revelation in which Ben removed Claire’s glasses and said, “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful!” (except Claire doesn’t wear glasses, and she always looks beautiful). In my head, imaginary conversations between the two of them played on an endless loop. They went pretty much like this.