Best of Friends

‘How was the party?’ Abby asked eagerly, coming into the hall to greet her.

Jess shot her mother an irritated expression. ‘Boring,’ she said. Well, it had been boring. There were guys there, ones Jess didn’t know, but they hadn’t shown the slightest interest in talking to her. Steph had been a huge hit, though, which made Jess feel even more humiliated. She and Steph had done everything together since they were five, and now Steph seemed to be effortlessly admitted to this wonderful grown-up club, while Jess was outside looking in, like a kid with her nose pressed up against the sweet-shop window. Still, there was no point telling her mother that. Abby wouldn’t understand.

‘I’m going to my room,’ she said, and stomped upstairs, leaving her mother in the hallway feeling miserable.

Monday rolled round and Abby woke up when Tom placed her morning cup of tea beside her alarm clock. It was his sole domestic gesture, but even after seventeen years he still did it.

‘It’s a quarter past seven,’ he said shortly.

Comatose with sleep after a restless night, Abby groaned and thought about lying there for just five more minutes. But no, that would be fatal. She hauled herself up and took a sip of scalding hot tea. She preferred her liquids boiling and Tom was one of the few people who made tea the precise way she liked it. He was a morning person, and by the time Abby made it downstairs, he’d have made his toast, perked coffee and read half the newspaper. Once Jess had made people laugh by saying the reason they had such a happy family life was because Mum was a lunchtime person, she was a nighttime person and with Tom on the alert from six a.m., the three of them never met up. She didn’t say that any more.

Abby took another sip of tea and reached for the television remote. She loved breakfast TV but knew it was as dangerous as having just an extra five minutes in bed. Each TV segment ended with a teaser for something far more interesting, and it was so easy to lie there and plan to get up when the bit about spring fashion was over. Or the bit about Cajun cooking or, oh look, holidays in Austria, that’s interesting…

She hauled herself out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom to brush her teeth. A woolly-haired woman with puffy eyes, tired skin and a pale mouth that seemed to have disappeared into her face stared back at her. Without her make-up, her new copper streaks gave her the look of Bobo the clown.

She badly needed a stint at Sally’s salon.

Both Jess and Tom looked surprised when Abby arrived downstairs twenty minutes later, fully made up and wearing one of her best jumpers, a caramel angora polo neck, over her jeans.

‘I didn’t think you had a job this morning,’ was Tom’s only comment as he buttered his final piece of toast.

Abby shot him a glare but he’d retreated behind his newspaper.

‘Thought you said you were working from home today,’ Jess added.

‘I am,’ said Abby, smiling at her daughter brightly. ‘But that’s no reason not to look good. It’s too easy to sink into dressing sloppily around the house when you’re working from home.’

She hauled out the blender and began rooting around in the freezer for fruit for a smoothie.

‘It’s stupid dressing up for home, a complete waste of time,’ said Tom absently, his eyes still on his newspaper.

‘What if someone calls at the house? I don’t want to look a mess,’ Abby replied.

‘Why bother dressing up on the off chance that someone calls in?’ Tom asked. ‘You always look OK.’

Abby’s hand stopped reaching for the raspberries, her fingers as frozen as the fruit within her grasp. OK? She always looked OK? Why did that sentence have the ring of death about it? Why did Tom’s tone of voice mirror his professional one? ‘Your son’s work is fine, Mrs X, not thrilling but OK.’

Abby didn’t want to look OK. She wanted to look bloody drop-dead gorgeous like that blonde bimbo who had been drooling over Tom at the Beech party. She wrenched a bag of raspberries out and slammed them on the worktop. Had her husband always been this insensitive or had it happened recently?

When Tom and Jess were gone, Abby spent an hour tidying the house and putting on washing. Then she sat down at the big cream desk in her study and leafed through her appointments diary. She had two diaries now: the official one Katya, her assistant, kept, which was a large suede-bound book; and her own smaller, floral version, in which she scribbled notes to herself on things she had to do and remember, like what to take to tomorrow’s meeting at Beech with the new executive producer, a hotshot who would also be heading the company’s new commissions division.

Katya worked only two days a week when Abby wasn’t busy and three when she was. As a young mother with two small children, this arrangement suited her. When Abby was filming, Katya could be on call to help her and deal with phone calls, fan letters and new commissions. When Abby wasn’t filming, Katya could work from her own house and pick up Abby’s calls.

Today, Katya was at home while Abby was supposed to be working flat out on ideas for a talk at the Ideal House exhibition in three months’ time. But for once, Abby’s lively mind failed her. Usually, she could go into anyone’s home and see instantly what they needed to do to sort themselves out. She had an unerring eye for the root of the problem. Only today, she wasn’t in the mood. So she tried what she always did when she felt uninspired: opened up one of her notepads and wrote ‘ideas’ on it with a pale blue pen.

The creamy expanse of fresh paper normally invited creativity. Not today. Some doodling later, she gave up and flicked through a couple of recent copies of House Today, hoping for inspiration. In one magazine, there was a photoshoot of a television presenter called Candy, who worked on an afternoon chat show. Abby had met her once in Dublin and, innocently expecting some sort of camaraderie because they were both TV stars, had been startled to encounter frosty hauteur.

‘You’re from that sweet little programme on tidying houses, aren’t you?’ Candy had said bitchily to Abby. ‘I do so love to see newcomers getting on. But you have to be in this business for the long haul. I see so many people come, and then go when the ratings drop.’ And she went on to tell Abby all about her own successful career, clearly implying that the star of Declutter would not last the course.

Abby was far too vulnerable and unsure of herself to be a successful bitch, but she wasn’t a pushover.

‘It’s true, you never know when a show will start to lose viewers,’ Abby said, with some innocent eyelash-batting of her own. ‘The ratings have been so high – better than EastEnders for the final show in the first series – but we can’t sit on our laurels. Bye, so nice to meet you. I’ve always thought you’re such a trooper for all those years in the business.’ And she walked off, leaving Candy spitting at both the mention of mega ratings and the implication that she was getting old. Although she certainly didn’t look old in the magazine, Abby reflected grimly.

‘Candy welcomes House Today into her lovely home,’ cooed the editorial, under two large photos of a kitchen and a bedroom, both of which must have been overhauled by an army of Filipino cleaners if the sparkle on the granite kitchen worktops was anything to go by.

For once, Abby’s gaze didn’t concentrate on the house, searching out things she hated, like the swagged curtains so beloved of everyone and their granny. She stared instead at Candy, who looked spookily young with her long caramel limbs, wide blue eyes and skin plumped up and dewy as a just-picked peach.

‘She’s forty-eight if she’s a day,’ Abby said crossly. ‘They’ve touched up those photos.’

She unearthed her magnifying glass from a drawer and began to examine the pictures: Candy wearing low-slung denims with a saucepan in one hand; Candy, barefoot and curled up in a giant armchair. Abby peered closely but couldn’t detect a line anywhere. Bitch. She must have had some work done, an entire renovation job from the foundations up, at that. Abby slapped the magazine shut and glared at the wall behind her desk. On it hung the big ‘Star Certificate’ that the Declutter team had given her as a joke at the end of the last series.

‘Thanks, Abby,’ it said. ‘We love working with you. You’re a star.’ A big gold star surmounted the words. She’d been so touched.

Abby stared at it dully. ‘You’re a star.’

‘I don’t bloody well feel like one today,’ she said crossly.

On Tuesday morning, Abby was the first up. She wanted a head start on looking good because today she was going to meet Beech’s just-hired executive producer and new commissions head, a woman called Roxie O’Halloran, who apparently wanted ‘to toss around some new ideas for the show’. Abby had a bad feeling about that. She might not have much experience of this kind of meeting, but an instinct told her that ‘toss around new ideas’ was business code for ‘change everything utterly’. She’d rung Flora, the show’s director and a good friend, for inside information on the newcomer but Flora knew nothing and had blithely said that Beech were hardly going to change such a successful format, were they?

‘Stop obsessing, Abby. We’ve got a winning formula and you’re a big part of it.’

At the back of the bathroom cupboard, Abby found her highly expensive and rarely used Eve Lom cleanser and moisturiser. If it was good enough for superstars, it was good enough for her, she decided. Serious cleansing was the answer to holding back the wrinkles.

‘What’s got you up so early?’ mumbled Tom, shuffling into the bathroom ten minutes later. His legs were thin under his oversized T-shirt, thin and pale. He had a long-distance runner’s legs, he used to joke. She wondered if he’d be hurt if she called his legs ‘OK’ instead of sexy, which was what she always used to say if he moaned about how skinny they were.

She went back to rubbing scented body lotion assiduously into her shoulders and back. Tom didn’t ask if she wanted help with the hard-to-reach bits. Once, he would have been only too eager to do so, slowly rubbing the lotion into more interesting places. Abby tried to tell herself this didn’t matter.

‘I’ve a meeting with the production team this morning to run through ideas for the show,’ she said curtly.

Abby loved meetings. Nothing made her feel more businesslike than sitting round the long table in Beech’s modern office on the river-front, everyone with bottles of mineral water and clean pads in front of them, tossing ideas around, the creative buzz almost palpable. It made her feel like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl – beautifully dressed but a bit of a fraud. Hopefully, today’s meeting would be enjoyable too. Flora was right: she probably was obsessing about the new executive producer.

‘When you’re in the shop later,’ Tom said, turning on the shower, ‘don’t forget I need new razor blades – you know the ones I like – and we’re low on espresso.’

He stepped into the shower.

Ridiculously, Abby felt like crying. It wasn’t because her husband seemed completely unaware of the system that meant they never ran out of staples like coffee or razor blades, and that, ironically, underpinned her career success and therefore their comfortable lifestyle. It was because she finally realised what she’d turned into: his mother. The only difference was that occasionally – very occasionally – they had sex. She didn’t even bother to cast her mind back to when that had last been. Apart from the sex, she was a doppelgänger for the late Mrs Beryl Barton, replenisher of razor blades and laundry angel, who required only the odd vague compliment to keep her running on oiled wheels.

OK. You look OK.

Fiercely, Abby began to apply her ‘photo opportunity’ panstick with the skill that came from watching the Declutter make-up artist work on her face. She might not be a twenty-something leggy blonde, but she could still do more than OK.

At least the perky young receptionist in the Beech office was pleased to see her.

‘Hello, Abby!’ Livia smiled from behind the wall of her sleek glass and chrome desk. ‘They’re waiting for you in the meeting room. Will I phone someone to get you or do you want to go up yourself?’

‘Don’t get anyone, Livia,’ chided Abby. ‘I do hate fuss.’

‘I know,’ sighed Livia. Abby was so lovely to work with, a rarity in their business. Honestly, she never demanded anything, not like some of the stars who rushed in and out of Beech’s offices, rudely requesting taxis immediately and treating Livia like someone who could only hear if she was screeched at.