A Random Act of Kindness Read online

  My mother gives me the look she uses when she suspects me of lying. I think of getting up to show her photographs of it on my phone, but I change my mind and sink back down again because honestly, it’s not worth the effort.

  I crunch on my celery stick and look at her face with those new, strange eyes and wonder what my father thinks about it. The work she’s had done ages her. Only people afraid of losing their looks have that kind of extreme appearance, the kind that makes them look stretched and plumped and filled and tightened. When you see a face like that you immediately put them in the category of the middle-aged. When I was a personal stylist I saw the same shiny foreheads and immobile mouths on a daily basis. It rarely made women look young. It made them look as if the humanity had been taken out of them.

  My parents are leaning towards each other on the red sofa, still recovering from the Harpenden house revelation, forcing them to come up with some new reason for protecting me from Mick or protecting the flat from me. Time to change the subject.

  ‘I saw an interesting woman today. You’d have liked her,’ I say to my mother. ‘She was wearing Chanel.’

  ‘You sold her Chanel?’ My mother brightens, visibly impressed. ‘Is she anyone we’d know?’

  She’s got the wrong end of the stick, but I don’t want to ruin it, so I smile brightly. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say. Client confidentiality. Can I refresh your glass?’

  Vodka, tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, celery salt, fresh celery. Glasses refreshed, I sit down again on the red footstool and the hit of my drink is so strong that for a moment I have the horrible feeling I’m going to topple off it.

  ‘Is she a television personality?’ my mother persists eagerly, hankering after the days when she, too, was a name and hung out with the stars.

  I smile enigmatically, not wanting to ruin it for her.

  ‘I can guess who it is,’ she says smugly, mollified by her own imagination.

  The doorbell rings. In my semi-drunk state it doesn’t sound like the doorbell. It sounds like an alarm, harsh and urgent and motivating, and the three of us are galvanised out of our alcohol-numbed torpor into action, struggling to our feet in uncomprehending panic.

  ‘Who is it?’ my mother asks, keeping her voice low as if we’re in hiding.

  I open the door and it’s my upstairs neighbour, Lucy. She comes in full of drunken merriment. ‘Hey! I saw your light on and I—’ She suddenly notices my parents. ‘Oh, hello!’

  I can guess what my mother is thinking behind her frozen face. She hates people who drop in unexpectedly. She thinks it’s the height of rudeness.

  ‘Bloody Mary?’ I ask Lucy.

  ‘Ooh, yes. Is this a party?’

  Lucy’s got curly blonde hair and the kind of cheerful superficiality that actors are good at during those times when they’re not talking about a new role. They take acting seriously, but they treat life with a very light touch, which is a welcome relief if you belong to my family. Lucy’s wearing a black unstructured asymmetric dress with a lot of zips. Comme des Garçons. I know because I sold it to her. She’s playing Lady Macbeth at The Gatehouse and she still has her stage make-up on. She’s electrified with post-performance adrenaline.

  Lucy’s ambition is to direct. She’s been in all the best crime dramas: Scott & Bailey, Silent Witness, Endeavour, Shetland. Whenever she’s in something, she invites me upstairs so we can watch it together on her flatscreen TV and she points out the flaws in the acting, things that I’d never have noticed – like when someone fluffs a line, or winces before the knife’s been raised, or fails to respond to the scene.

  And that’s the way she’s looking at me now, slightly critically, as if I’m not playing the part of host very well, so I introduce her to my parents and while I mix another jug of Bloody Marys she fills us in on how the night has gone. The theatre was packed. There had been a heckler. The audience was so caught up that at the end there was a long, thick silence after Malcolm’s closing lines.

  ‘Malcolm McDowell?’ my mother asks hopefully, ready to claim acquaintance because he bought her a drink once.

  ‘Malcolm. Duncan’s son,’ Lucy says. ‘“This dead butcher and his fiend-like queen”.’

  My mother’s disappointed. ‘A dead butcher?’ she echoes, confused.

  ‘He’s talking about Macbeth! The fiend-like queen – that’s me. And they’re holding up Macbeth’s head and this orange light comes over them – it’s like an Isis video. Cheers!’

  Lucy brings a whole new element to the night. There are some things that my parents will only say to me, which shows some kind of loyalty, I suppose, so the conversation stops being personal. Lucy sits on the footstool and I sit on the Barcelona chair while my parents loll on the sofa. We’ve reached the hazy stage of drunkenness where words become particularly meaningful.

  Lucy’s still talking about the play and her excitement about the concept of the ‘Pahr off sgestion’.

  We’re momentarily perplexed but rooting for the concept anyway. ‘Par? Path?’ I prompt helpfully.

  She takes a couple of shots at it.

  ‘Parf – parf –.’ She takes another sip of the drink to clear her head and leans forward. ‘Power of suggestion,’ she says, exaggerating the words at us as if we’re deaf. ‘The three Weird Sisters, psychics as we call them, I play second psychic as well … anyway, the thing is, they put the idea into Macbeth’s head. They plant it there. Hadn’t occurred to him to become the Thane of Cawdor before then but he thought, you know what? I can do that. See what I mean? It’s dark, right?’

  ‘Aha! Brainwashing,’ my father says.

  ‘Not brainwashing.’

  ‘Visualisation,’ I say.

  ‘You see?’ Lucy asks happily.

  ‘They didn’t read the future, they just gave him a goal to aim for,’ my father says.

  ‘Yes!’

  My mother’s face turns my way. ‘What are your goals, Fern?’

  ‘To make a success of my business.’

  She remains unimpressed. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Well,’ I shrug, ‘the Thane of Cawdor thing’s already gone.’

  My mother hates flippancy. ‘She had so much promise,’ she says, turning to Lucy for support. ‘She’s thrown it all away. She needs to do more with her life.’

  ‘Why does she?’ Lucy asks. ‘She’s got a nice life. You’ve got a nice life, Fern, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I want to hug her.

  My mother says icily, ‘She’s got a market stall.’

  Cheerfully unaware, Lucy replies, ‘I know. Great, isn’t it? There was a waiting list and everything! She was really lucky to get it, weren’t you, Fern?’

  My mother’s not used to people disagreeing with her. She glares at Lucy from the depths of her narrow eye sockets. When Lucy remains oblivious to the silent death stare, my mother stands up and announces coldly, ‘I’m going to bed.’

  Retires: hurt.

  ‘Goodnight,’ we say in unison.

  As she stands, the fur on her cape quivers as if it’s alive – and about to throttle her.

  The thought comes into my head with no particular emotion or malice.

  My mother goes through the door that leads to the bathroom and bedroom and closes it quite firmly.

  ‘Was it something I said?’ Lucy asks, surprised.

  My father looks at his watch. ‘My word! It is getting awfully late. It’s almost midnight.’ He puts his glass down and stands up.

  I stand up, too, and he gives me a hug, a proper hug, and for a moment I feel his soft, shaved cheek against mine.

  He says goodnight to Lucy and follows my mother to bed.

  ‘Insane!’ Lucy whispers thrillingly, widening her eyes at me after he’s gone. ‘Are they always like this?’

  I think about it. ‘Actually, yeah.’

  ‘What has she got against market stalls?’

  I shrug and try to laugh it off. ‘She was hoping I’d be a model, like her. And then, as
I’m only five foot five, she was happy to settle for me being a fashion designer.’

  ‘Oh, I get it. You’re not living up to her motherly expectations. “What are your goals, Fern?”’ Lucy says, in an accurate imitation, and adds in her ordinary voice, ‘And that whole Malcolm McDowell thing – what was that all about?’

  ‘She met him when he was in Caligula,’ I say gloomily. ‘But nothing came of it. That’s my mother. Always hoping for the best and always disappointed.’

  We stare at each other for a moment and then for no reason at all, we suddenly start to laugh, muffling it with our fists on our mouths.

  ‘And the dead butcher bit. Did she think Macbeth actually was a butcher?’

  The tears are rolling down my face. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘“She had so much promise and she’s thrown it all away …”’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘You know what?’ Lucy says, giggling weakly. ‘You should do stand-up. You’ve got enough material.’

  ‘I could do stand-up.’

  ‘That’ll teach her. This could be your Thane of Cawdor moment.’ She wipes her eyes and raises her glass. ‘Happy to help.’ She looks at the time and finishes her drink. ‘I’d better go too, I suppose. Time to take my Night Nurse medicine. I’m incubating a cold.’ To prove it, she sneezes into the elbow of her black dress. Her zips jingle.

  ‘Bless you,’ I say, dodging out of the way as she checks for damage – I don’t move far enough to be rude but I do try to get far enough away to avoid the germs that might have escaped around her slim arm, because what could be worse than catching a cold at this crucial time in my business career?

  (Plenty, as it turns out.)

  I see Lucy out into the cool night and she totters up the wooden steps, waving all the way, then curses softly for a few moments outside her front door while she finds her keys.

  I lock the door and stand in the now spinning centre of the flat that I live in, with my parents tucked up in the bedroom, my friend safely upstairs.

  I wonder if the night will have repercussions. My mother’s very good at keeping a grudge going, but she can only keep it going as long as we’re together and they’re going back in the morning.

  I brush my teeth in the kitchen sink then make up the sofa, switch the lights off and wrap myself up in my duvet.

  Surprisingly, I sleep well.

  LOT 4

  A sky-blue silk satin Sixties-style A-line dress with bracelet-length sleeves and feather trim to neckline and cuffs, scalloped knee-length hem, unlabelled.

  I wake up next morning wound up tightly in my duvet and all the events of the previous night come tumbling back into my head, starting with the alarming fact that my parents are asleep in my bedroom.

  The sun is flickering in my eyes, the light filtered by the lacy green leaves of the tree fern in the garden. The sky is a clear blue and it was a frock of that same pure, uplifting colour that lost me my dream job.

  At least I’ve told my parents now, so that’s one problem out of the way.

  I’d been dreading telling them – it’s true, my mother’s had many disappointments in her life, not just the fact she ended up marrying my father instead of Malcolm McDowell because she failed to become as famous as Jerry Hall. I’ve disappointed her too, and I’m not sure it’s anything I can put right.

  I studied fashion at St Martin’s, but not just to please my mother – I genuinely had ambitions of becoming a fashion designer. Like her, because of her, I’ve always loved clothes. I’ve been buying vintage clothing since my early teens. I enjoyed studying the construction of the pieces as much as wearing them.

  But in my final year, compared with my fellow students, I knew that I didn’t have the imagination or the vision to design clothes that were often avant-garde and unwearable for the average person. I lacked the sheer sense of performance that it takes to bring a collection to the catwalk. To be honest, I’d been winging it anyway, because my passion is for clothes that make a person look good. Otherwise, what’s the point? Me, I always choose style over innovation.

  After graduating, I spent a few years in fashion sales and I was thrilled when I landed the job as personal stylist in a large department store in Oxford Street.

  One of the first things we needed to know about a client was their budget and then we were encouraged to stretch it – although, not all our clients were rich.

  There are many reasons why people need help shopping for clothes. These days, people are less confident about their appearance than ever. Sometimes they don’t have the confidence to try something new. Sure, they can choose the labels that also have a line of accessories like beaded bags and matching hats, but although it makes shopping easier, it’s self-defeating in a way. There’s always the risk that someone else is going to show up wearing exactly the same thing and that they’ll both have to spend the whole occasion keeping as far away from each other as possible to avoid looking like middle-aged twins.

  Fashions change. Partners aren’t always helpful enough – or patient enough – to give an honest second opinion. After two outfits, a man will say that anything looks great, just so that he can be done with the whole boring business and go home. Friends aren’t always tactful and those who follow trends are the worst. There’s nothing more demoralising than shopping with a fashionista who pushes into the dressing room, tries on the stuff that her friend has just turned down and looks fabulous in everything.

  As a personal stylist, my job was to make my clients look in the mirror and see themselves differently. I was supportive, admiring and knowledgeable. For a period of two hours, I was the perfect friend; bringing coffee or prosecco, zipping and unzipping, encouraging them to own the clothes – can you sit in it? Eat in it? Dance in it? And then I’d get them thinking about accessories: bags, shoes, scarves, pendants, fur cuffs, sunglasses – the beautiful final touches that make a look. It was a brilliant feeling to see a woman admiring herself in the mirror with happy disbelief – and keep on looking. For me, that was the ultimate job satisfaction. I discovered I, too, had the ability to see women through their own eyes and boost their confidence by transforming them into someone new.

  The client who got me fired was an elderly man shopping for his wife. His name was Kim Aston. He arrived for the two-hour appointment, a neat, slightly built man about my own height, wearing a suit and a bright, multicoloured silk tie. His greying hair was short and swept back from his forehead.

  He looked nervously at the glittering chandeliers and the ornate chairs and faced me with a frown. ‘I was just about to leave,’ he said as soon as I introduced myself.

  ‘Are you in a hurry?’ I asked.

  ‘No. It’s just that—’ He looked up at the enormous chandelier again as if its blatant, lavish extravagance was putting him off. ‘I didn’t think it was going to be so—’ He shrugged and tailed off.

  I smiled understandingly, because I knew what he meant. Our department was ostentatiously luxurious. Cream carpets, mirrors, drapes. We were selling the experience: this is what it’s like to be rich and have a personal shopper, a valet, an attendant, someone to admire you and to make you look the best you can be while you sit back and enjoy it then hand over a credit card at the end. We were selling the promise that all this could be theirs. And for two hours it was theirs to enjoy. But Kim Aston found it intimidating and I could understand that, too.

  I said, ‘Would you prefer coffee or tea with your glass of champagne?’

  That’s how we did it. We took it for granted that the client would have coffee or tea and a glass of champagne, to relax.

  ‘Tea, please.’

  I tapped in the order on my iPad and led him through to the dressing room where the clothes I’d chosen for his sick wife were hanging.

  On the telephone he’d been quite sure of what he wanted. Loose-fitting dresses, elasticated waists, silky fabrics and bright colours – size 14, he thought, or maybe a little bigger. I’d chosen six for his wife that I thought she might
like, based on the image I’d built of her, but in the dressing room I realised I’d got it wrong because he looked at my selection anxiously, as if he’d already bought them all on impulse and realised he’d made a terrible mistake.

  My colleague Mario carried the tray of drinks in and put it on a gilt, glass-topped table next to the cream velvet and gilt chair.

  I handed Mr Aston his glass. There was nothing like a glass of fizz to boost the confidence of a wary shopper.

  He held it at eye level and stared through the bubbles as if he were in a dream.

  ‘You said your wife likes bright colours,’ I said, ‘but if you’d prefer a more muted palette, I do have some things in mind that fulfil your criteria. What do you think of this? It’s silk jersey, very comfortable to wear and not restrictive,’ I said, showing him a red-and-blue Diane von Furstenberg wrap-around dress.

  He smiled faintly as if amused. ‘We’ve been married forty-five years,’ he said. ‘It goes by very quickly.’ He looked at me closely. ‘You’re too young to know that yet. It’s all ahead of you, all that potential. For my wife, she’s reached the finish line and she’s having her bottle of water and her banana.’

  I laughed, because it was a nice way of putting it.

  ‘She’s still interested in fashion,’ I said, ‘which is lovely.’

  He sighed. ‘I’m not sure that she is interested in fashion. She’s not fashionable,’ he said thoughtfully, sipping his champagne, ‘she wouldn’t enjoy being called that at all. She’s a very practical woman. She’s always had short hair.’ He looked at me as if expecting me to comment favourably on this example of her practicality.

  ‘It’s often best to stick with a hairstyle that you know suits you,’ I pointed out. ‘Some women have the face for it.’

  ‘And it dries quickly,’ he said. ‘She has it trimmed every six weeks.’

  ‘Good! So it keeps its shape.’

  He put his drink down and took the dress from me. His face softened. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I like this one,’ he said, worried he’d offended me, holding it up high as if his wife were a tall woman, a woman he was used to looking up to. ‘But no. This isn’t it. It’s rather plain, you see.’