Christmas at Claridge's Read online

  She pressed her hand to the glass as the old, familiar ache seeped through her. This was her home, her manor. She belonged here; she was a true local, born and bred in the tall, gracious villa her parents still lived in, two streets away on Elgin Crescent; she and Tom had been educated at La Scuola Italiana a Londra in Holland Park Avenue half a mile away – her parents were big believers in raising children to be bilingual, although Clem was becoming more and more convinced that her father just wanted them as interpreters on his long and involved annual gastronomy tours through Italy. In fact, the two years she’d managed at St Martin’s in Covent Garden – it was supposed to have been three – were the longest she’d ever been away.

  Even now she was all grown up – supposedly – she lived and worked in buildings only 500 yards from each other. If Clem pressed her face to the window and looked to the right, she could see her flat above the hardware store, opposite the Punky Fish clothes shop. She loved it here, she belonged here. And yet . . .

  She wandered back to her desk, her eyes coming to rest upon the bag still sitting there, like a silent accusation. She stared at it for several long moments, knowing it was a bribe not a gift, before hurriedly lobbing it out of sight under her desk as the others came back into the room.

  Simon and Pixie were still laughing. Tom . . . Tom looked like death. He seemed to have greyed just in the time he’d been on the phone.

  ‘Tom, what is it? What’s happened?’ Clem asked urgently, unable to keep the alarm out of her voice.

  Simon and Pixie fell silent, and Tom looked up at them all with bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Tom?’ Clem’s voice wavered to see her brother look so broken, and she pushed her glasses onto the top of her head to get a better look at him.

  Silence cloaked them all, and only the intermittent ping of incoming emails and a truck reversing in the road provided any soundtrack.

  ‘That was Perignard.’ His voice had flatlined. ‘They’re pulling the project.’

  Clem’s hands flew to her mouth and Simon had to steady himself by grabbing the nearest desk.

  ‘But we’re going into production in twelve days,’ Simon said, almost laughing at the preposterousness of Tom’s words.

  ‘Not any more we’re not,’ Tom said, shaking his head.

  ‘But we’ve been working exclusively on this for the past year,’ Simon argued, his Celtic colour beginning to rise. ‘We’ve ploughed everything into getting the new machines manufactured. We’ve got a contract.’

  ‘They would argue that we’re in breach of that contract.’

  ‘How?’ Simon asked, growing redder in the face. ‘Everything’s ordered and being shipped as we speak. We’re bang on schedule and cost. I don’t understand.’

  Tom drew his lips into a thin line, his eyes unable to meet Clem’s, and she saw the tic quiver in his cheek. It was because of her, she realized. What she’d done.

  ‘Could someone please tell me what’s going on?’ Simon demanded into the vacuum.

  Without saying a word, Clem crossed the room and pulled the sheet off the bike. Simon almost howled as he caught sight of it. ‘It’s my fault,’ she said quietly, meeting all their eyes.

  ‘What did you do?’ Pixie whispered, walking over practically in a trance.

  ‘I fucked up.’ As usual, she didn’t need to add.

  An appalled silence followed.

  ‘You all know that this was the showpiece for the new Dover Street store,’ Tom said quietly.

  ‘It’s the window display; Perignard’s had state-of-the-art glass fitted especially so that anything short of a tank couldn’t get past,’ Pixie said proudly her eavesdropping having paid off. ‘With all the passing traffic, it’s an invaluable branding opportunity for us.’

  ‘Was,’ Tom corrected quietly.

  ‘No, no, hang on!’ Simon interjected agitatedly, his quick mind racing. ‘This doesn’t just affect Perignard. What about Berlin? We were going to unveil it to the trade in Berlin next week! It’s supposed to showcase the new technologies we’ve invested in. How can we do that now when the bike’s . . .?’ Words failed him as he looked at it, visibly paling as he took in the scale of destruction.

  ‘It’s clearly unusable in this condition,’ Tom said quietly. ‘Or, to quote Perignard, “not fit for purpose”. And they’re right.’

  ‘But surely we can repair it before next week?’ Pixie squeaked, looking at the bent spokes on the front wheel, where someone had squeezed in some bottles of Stoli, as though it was an obscure bottle rack.

  Simon gave her a withering stare. ‘The bike is vintage, so everything on it is made to bespoke dimensions. We’ve had it plated in rose gold. And if I told you that I was practically standing over the calf at birth, that would still be making light of the lengths I went to, to source the slink saddle leather.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They all stared at the trashed bike despondently.

  ‘Do they want the diamonds back?’ Pixie asked.

  ‘Obviously,’ Simon snapped.

  Clem could see Tom stretching his lips thin, trying to keep control of his emotions.

  ‘Can’t we just, y’know, regroup and get everything ready for Berlin next year?’ Pixie suggested, relentlessly optimistic.

  Tom inhaled deeply and slowly. ‘For one thing, our competitors will have caught up with us by then. At the moment we have the patent on the technology, but it’s already an arms race and I know for a fact that Hermès is maybe only two months behind us. This is our USP, and we banked on it being our springboard into the next tier, offering a deluxe product that no one else could bring to the table. It was what made us stand out for the Bugatti contract.’

  Clem’s head snapped up. She hadn’t heard anything about Bugatti before now.

  ‘Bugatti? What? Like the cars?’ Pixie chirruped.

  ‘Exactly like that,’ Simon muttered sarcastically.

  ‘I didn’t know there was a contract with them up for grabs,’ she said to Tom.

  ‘It was highly confidential. Si and I had to sign nondisclosure agreements; we couldn’t tell even you,’ Tom replied, looking at her feet. ‘But with Russia, China and the Middle East as their biggest markets now, offering a diamond-studded interior is exactly the edge they’re looking for.’

  Clem thought she was going to be sick.

  ‘And now there’s nothing to show them,’ Simon mumbled, folding his arms across his body and dropping his chin to his chest. ‘Any reputation we had for professionalism will be scuppered once this gets out. There’s no way we can get something else done for Berlin in the timeframe and . . . Fuck! We can hardly come clean about why we’re not showing the bike. We’re just going to have to say the technology’s not finessed yet and hope to God that Perignard keeps quiet.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Clem said quietly. ‘I really, really, really am.’

  Her words were directed at them all, but her eyes were on Tom. No one would look at her.

  ‘Simon, let’s go into the meeting room,’ he said, ignoring her again. ‘We need to review where we are on invoices and new business.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Simon said, grabbing his iPad and coffee from his desk, and shooting Clem a look that for once wasn’t suffused with repressed yearning.

  Clem’s heart beat double-time as she watched them walk off together, Simon’s hand slapping Tom’s shoulder in commiseration, their voices already low in consultation. She was always the one who made Tom smile when things were bad; now he could barely look at her, and when they did talk, it was practically with a snarl.

  Pixie, realizing she was alone with Clem, widened her eyes excitedly, clearly about to suggest a sympathy cupcake at the Hummingbird, but one look at Clem’s expression and she scooted quickly back to her desk.

  Clem stood stock still, resisting the urge to barge in to the meeting and demand to be allowed to help. This was her doing! She ought to be given the chance to fix it! That was what she wanted to say, but deep down, she knew a low profile was all T
om wanted from her at the moment.

  He had built the company from nothing, but in eight years it had come to be seen as the successor to prestigious British leather houses like Connolly and Bill Amberg. Tom wasn’t happy stopping there, though. He was going after the big guns – Hermès, Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton – he wanted his leathers wrapping the luxury world. He’d been just one bike away from taking that first step, and he’d done all that with the £10,000 their parents had given each of them when they’d graduated – or in Clem’s case, dropped out. Like the prodigal son, he’d used it as seed money to buy twenty hides, a specialist sewing machine and a six-month lease on this office.

  He had asked her at the time if she wanted to join forces – what they could do with a £20,000 start-up would bring forward his five-year plan by at least three years – but after the disaster of failing her second-year exams (although turning up would have helped, she admitted afterwards) Clem had been adamant that what she needed was to ‘get away’ and see the world and had promptly bought a one-way business-class ticket to Bali and sat on the beach for eight months, until she ran out of money and had to ask their father to sub the flight home.

  If Tom had been disappointed by her decision, he’d never said. He’d even ridden to her rescue when she’d been fired from her last and latest job as a sales manager at a chichi lingerie boutique on Westbourne Park Road. He had thrown her the lifeline of working for him, even though there was no real role to cover and her job was more display than anything else.

  Tom covered the corporate and trade accounts, and was the only point of contact for hotels, high-end architects, investment banks and car manufacturers etc., whether they wanted leather walls, floors, desks, tables, chairs, rugs, sofas, beds or steering wheels. Simon, on the other hand, dealt with the less sexy accounts, invoices, sourcing and production functions.

  She, by comparison, was called the Press and Marketing Manager, but it wasn’t lost on anyone that Alderton Hide didn’t advertise, they weren’t in retail or wholesale, and in the five months she’d been taking up office space, she’d managed only two one-line mentions in World of Interiors magazine. If she was honest, she mainly just answered the phone and flirted with the clients when they were examining the colour wheels.

  Her phone bleeped in her bag and she groaned as she reached down to retrieve it.

  ‘Where you been? Keep missing you. Electric tonight? New Scorsese on.’

  She tapped back in the affirmative, feeling her spirits lift slightly. Stella would have some words of wisdom to impart; she always gave sound advice – not including the time she said necking vodka shots through your eyeballs was the low-cal way to get drunk. Tom might not want her help, but surely there had to be something she could do. Stella always said she was charmed, born lucky. Something would come up to make everything right again. It always did – in the end.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Wassup?’ Stella demanded, shrugging off her khaki parka and collapsing into the seat Clem had reserved for her as Clem poured her an enormous glass of red wine from the carafe on the antique-mirrored table between them.

  ‘Bike-gate’s gone to a whole new level,’ Clem grimaced, handing the glass over. ‘Perignard’s pulled the account.’

  ‘No!’ Stella breathed dramatically.

  ‘Yep. No bike equals no lovely leather-clad, diamond-twinkly showroom.’

  ‘Shit.’ Stella’s eyes were wide over the rim of her glass.

  ‘Oh but no! That’s nothing! Apparently the bike was also the big raison d’etre for Berlin, which is where we get all our new business, and an “I-could-tell-you-but-then-I’d-have-to-kill-you” confidential pitch to Bugatti, which was the big prize all along. Over three hundred thousand in projected revenue, gone. Just like that.’ She took a big glug of her wine. She’d almost fallen over when Simon had told her the figure after his meeting. He hadn’t even looked angry, just scared.

  ‘Holy mutha.’ Stella tried stretching her legs out on the footstool, but it was too far away, perched as it was, comfortably under Clem’s ankles. She reached inside the stool and pulled out the black cashmere blanket instead, wrapping it around her legs. ‘You’d better drink up.’

  Clem did as she was told and scanned the room absently, looking for familiar faces in the queue for the bar. She had bagged seats towards the back as usual. The Electric was one of her favourite haunts. At the front, the heavy red velvet curtains were still closed, and smug couples were lying stretched out on the signature velvet beds. Almost all the leather club chairs were filled with couples or groups, laughing and dipping flatbreads into hummus before the lights went down.

  ‘Well, I had thought this might impress you,’ Stella said, rummaging in her jeans pocket and pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. ‘But after hearing that, probably not.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘An ad I saw in Ajeep’s. Cleaner looking for work.’

  ‘Oh right, great,’ Clem said, taking it from her lethargically.

  ‘Give her a ring,’ Stella insisted. ‘Remember what we talked about? That could be one way of making things up to Tom at least.’

  Clem shot her a look. ‘He’s just lost three hundred grand because of me; you really think he’s gonna care if I hire a cleaner?’

  ‘You know what they say,’ Stella tutted. ‘A tidy house equals a tidy mind.’

  ‘Who says that?’ Clem frowned as the lights began to drop.

  ‘Just ring her. And make sure you check the references,’ Stella hissed as blackness fell like a sheet from the rafters, and everyone swivelled around in their chairs to face the bright screen. A few latecomers darted into the last remaining seats and Clem stared, annoyed, into the playfully tossed-up hair of the girl who sat down right in front of her.

  Stella jiggled the box of popcorn loudly and Clem thrust her hand in, florets of popcorn spilling out of the cone all over the floor. They laughed at their messiness, prompting a few curt shushes from anonymous members of the audience. Clem pulled a face at them in the dark and lobbed a single floret into the crowd.

  To her astonishment, a moment later, it came back.

  Stella gasped, lobbing a fresh couple of her own in the same direction. Sure enough, several moments later, they were back in her lap. Both girls leaned forward, trying to see their combatants. A pair of cocky grins, almost blue-tinted in the cinematic glare, shone back at them.

  Not bad, Clem mused. That was certainly her favoured way of shrugging off a bad day. She poured herself and Stella a fresh glass each and sat back in her seat, deciding to let them stew for a bit and refusing to make further contact of either the eye or popcorn kind, even though several more florets were expertly thrown into hers and Stella’s laps.

  She tried to concentrate on the film, but the girl in front’s hair was in the way and she had to angle herself diagonally in her chair to see round her. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that the girl constantly fidgeted away from her boyfriend’s affections as he tried to caress her slender neck. Clem sighed. That was all she needed right now, a lover’s tiff right in front of her.

  The person on the far side of the girl appeared to say something to her and she leaned in to listen. Then she took something and turned around. ‘For you,’ she murmured, holding out a scrap of paper towards Clem and Stella.

  Oh.

  Clem took it with a surprised nod. Thanks.’ Then she opened it up to read it, Stella’s chin resting on her shoulder curiously.

  Wanna get out of here?

  ‘Cheeky beggars!’ Stella giggled, clearly delighted and straining to get a better look at their admirers. ‘What do you think?’

  Clem looked over, too, wondering which one she’d choose. From what she could make out, they looked a couple of years younger than her and Stella, but that had its own advantages as far as she was concerned. ‘Yeah, why not?’ she said in a low voice. ‘If I’m going to spend a night in the dark, I may as well spend it doing something other than brooding.’

&nb
sp; ‘What about Josh?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I thought you two were getting a regular thing going.’

  ‘Listen, I still like that he’s different to the other guys I usually go for but . . .’ she shrugged. ‘Every time I look at him now I’m reminded of what I did.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘And he so wasn’t worth it. It’s not his fault but . . . we’re not going to get past it. Come on,’ she whispered, checking her make-up in the mirrored table before standing up and bending down low to collect her bag, accidentally knocking the contents onto the floor as she did so.

  ‘Shit!’ she hissed, crouching down and hurriedly sweeping her purse, hairbrush, keys and spare ‘get lucky’ knickers back into her bag. The boyfriend in front turned at the sounds of the kerfuffle and Clem felt herself go limp as she met the glacial blue eyes that had held hers once before.

  The Swimmer.

  Her knees wanted to buckle, to force her to sit back down again so that she could spend the rest of the evening staring at the back of his head in the dark. How could she not have noticed him before?

  But it was too late. The cocky strangers had seen the girls get up and had themselves left their seats and were now making their way up to the doors to wait for them.