Chapter 28
Evening Florence:
Black flared stretchy trousers
Black and grey chunky cardigan
Black T-shirt
Fluffy black sheepskin slippers
Annie had escaped from the dungeon and now she was back home. She came into the hallway and set down her bags feeling almost tearfully grateful to be here.
‘You’re so late!’ Ed called out from the sitting room. ‘Babies are in bed. Lauren and I have already watched twenty-five episodes of The Summer I Turned Pretty!’
Good grief… it had taken Annie almost forty minutes of fumbling around in the dark to finally get to the door of the storeroom.
Forty minutes! Forty minutes of wondering if she was ever going to get out, if she was going to have to pee in a corner of the room, try to eat a lesser handbag to survive…
surely leather had some protein or basic nutritional elements…
if she wasn’t going to be found until four days later when Paula realised she was going to need to check a box or two…
and quite hallucinatory thoughts about a murderer with night-vision goggles…
Anyway, she had eventually reached the door, turned the knob, unlocked herself, pushed the light button in and everything had been put to rights.
The bag had gone back into box no.7. In fact, she felt as if she’d finally seen some cold, calm sense about that bag.
It was just a bag. It was just a piece of crafted leather to hold things in.
A bag was not going to change her life, get her out of this dark room, find her a new career…
or any of the other things she was hoping it could do.
She was going to have to do all of those things.
For herself. Without the ￡2,400 bag. In fact, being locked up in the dark had put things into perspective and she could now think of about fifty things she would be better spending ￡2,400 on.
So, once the lights were back on, the bag had gone in its box, everything else had been neatly filed away and then she’d picked up her own bags and hurried up the lift, out of the fire door, down the street to the Tube and home.
‘I’m very tired,’ Annie told Ed. ‘I got locked in the storeroom for nearly an hour.’
She expected some tender love, care and sympathy in response to these words, but instead she heard Lauren issue a ‘What?!’ followed by a burst of vigorous laughter, followed by Ed, trying hard to keep a straight face, telling her that there was some dinner left in a pot on the hob.
She slunk into the kitchen and gratefully helped herself to some of the ratatouille Ed had made earlier.
She sat down at the island with the plate of food, knife, fork and a much-needed glass of wine.
Checked her phone, no reply from Owen to the message she’d sent earlier.
That bloody boy, she couldn’t help saying under her breath.
Honestly, he was going to cause her to worry herself to death.
* * *
At almost the same time the following evening, just as she was about to check for the reassuring green dot beside Owen’s name, as she still hadn’t heard back from him, her phone began to ring. And it was Florence.
‘Hello, my darling, how are you?’ Annie began.
‘I have very exciting news!’ Florence began. ‘Tell me your email address and I’m going to send you two very important pictures.’ Annie told her and then put her laptop up on the counter so she could see these pictures in full.
‘OK, coming through,’ Florence told her. Annie waited for a few moments and then here it was, Florence’s email. A forward of an email from a K. Lawson, named:
Surprising evidence!
‘This sounds intriguing—’ Annie said.
‘Open it,’ Florence encouraged her.
‘OK,’ Annie said, hitting the button. It was a colour photograph of a man and woman, who looked to be in their late fifties, early sixties.
It was a formal portrait, standing side by side, the man holding out a box with a medal before him.
Both were very smartly dressed in a three-piece grey for the man and a navy skirt suit and hat for the woman.
If Annie had to guess when it was taken, she would say late eighties, early nineties, judging by the woman’s hair, shoes and shoulder width.
‘Who am I looking at?’ she asked Florence.
‘You are looking at Mr and Mrs Fielding. Mr Fielding has just been presented with some sort of Italian service medal that they dish out to diplomats.’
‘Oh…’
‘Now look carefully behind them…’ Florence went on. Annie made the photo larger on her screen.
‘Oh my goodness… is that the claw of a lobster on a white dress that I can see behind them?’
‘Yes, and above it the head of my very youthful-looking fifty-eight-year-old mother. Terence was her lover in Rome. And he gave her the items. His mother had entrusted them to him to take to the museum in Paris, but not all of them made it there.’
‘Oh my word!! How exciting and intriguing. Surely somewhere there must be a better photo of her in that dress. I bet she looked wonderful in it!’
‘She was such a glamorous woman, wasn’t she? But scroll on down.’
Annie did as she was told and now saw another photograph of a diary entry. It was rather spidery handwriting in black ink. She scanned through the words until she saw the relevant lines.
I gave Terence the items I wanted to donate to the museum in Paris.
He was supposed to drop them off when he passed through en route to Rome.
Well, the museum phoned me today. They have only received four pieces.
That bloody son of mine has taken two dresses and the black velvet jacket to Rome.
He must have! And they won’t be for his wife.
Certainly not. They will be for this woman he has told me about.
Emily P whoever she is. He says he wants to get a divorce and marry her.
But she won’t hear of it. She wants to return to her husband in London, apparently.
Quite right. Terence needs to give it up and return to the side of his wife, before he blows up his entire career.
Gave her my Schiaparelli! The insolence of the boy.
Still, if she can wear those clothes, she must be a very lithe and graceful woman.
I haven’t been able to step into them since I exited my thirties.
‘Provenance!’ Florence declared.
‘That’s incredible…’ Annie exclaimed. ‘And such a fascinating tale. I hope you’re not too upset about your mother…’
‘No, no… my father was very preoccupied with his work. I think it’s understandable that she had to… take a year out perhaps.’
‘Those items belong to you,’ Annie told her. ‘And they are worth a lot of money, Florence. I think you should take some time to carefully consider what you want to do with them.’
‘Isn’t your show in only a few days’ time now?’
‘It doesn’t matter. We can say we made it all up, we created the photo with AI for the publicity…
’ This thought had only just occurred to Annie, and she would use it if she had to protect Florence.
‘If we tell them there’s not a dress, everyone will forget in a few days.
There are still many amazing things to sell.
Your clothes are safely at home with me.
I can bring them back to you if you want. Just say the word.’
‘Will you give me tonight, Annie?’ was Florence’s request. ‘I’ll call you in the morning to let you know what I’ve decided. And thank you… you’ve been so helpful. So kind. Really. It’s made everything about my task in this house better.’
‘Thank you,’ Annie said and felt herself breaking into a smile. ‘Goodnight, Florence. Call me when you know what you want to do.’
* * *
‘Ed? I haven’t heard from Owen all day today, or all day yesterday and he hasn’t been on Instagram for twenty-four hours, which is a bit weird.’
It was bedtime, Ed was brushing his teeth and Annie was making a final check of all her social media feeds, and her messaging apps and taking a last look for Owen and his green dot on Instagram.
‘You know, I’m just going to call him…’ she said, as she dialled and Ed did a round of rinsing and gargling.
She found ‘Owen’ in her contacts and pressed call, but as expected, the number rang and rang with no reply.
He never answered. That was normal. Every young person in the entire world had their phone on silent at all times, so why was she even bothering?
‘Annie, please stop worrying about Owen,’ Ed said as he stepped out of the en suite and into the bedroom. ‘Have you tracked him? On “where’s my son right ”?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘It’s registering at his halls of residence.’
Ed rolled his eyes.
‘So why are you worrying?’
‘Because I don’t think it’s moved from there in two days.’
‘But how do you know?’ Ed protested. ‘You can’t have been tracking him every minute of the day! You’ve been insanely busy.’
This was true. There was no getting away from the fact that Ed had a point here.
‘So, he could have gone out, done things and gone back home again… and I’ve just not noticed?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why not reply to my messages, even with a smiley face?’
‘I don’t know!’ Ed shrugged. ‘He’s a student in his very first term. He might be spending hours trying to work out how to use the washing machine, or how to drink beer upside down… I don’t know, but I am certain you would know if there was any kind of problem at all.’
‘But we don’t even have a number for anyone else who lives in his flat. Why didn’t we think of that?’
‘Yes… we should have thought of that. Then you could have your anxious phone calls ignored by not just one boy but a whole group of them.’ He smiled. ‘Owen would die if you started phoning other people to check up on him. And rightly so!’
‘Suppose…’ Annie admitted grudgingly.
‘So big, big day tomorrow… the Day Before The Show…’
‘You have got us a lovely babysitter from your school, haven’t you, for the day of the show?
Because you, Lauren and Dinah are all coming, remember.
I am going to be away all day tomorrow. From dawn until very well after dusk.
Ideally, I’m going to get Lauren to come to Gallery of Textiles with me too.
All day. There is so much to set up! So, Dinah is doing nursery pick up and will be with the twins until you get home. OK?’
‘Yes, I have the head girl, no less, she is coming to babysit our precious twins on Show Day.’
‘Impressive.’
‘OK… OK, busy lady, get into bed. It’s snuggle up and sleep time.’
Ed turned the cover down and began to get comfortable. ‘Come and join me,’ he encouraged with his most encouraging smile. ‘How about a pre-sleep shoulder massage?’
‘You are too good to be true,’ she told him and smiled back.
‘I’ll be very glad when the show is over. You’ve not been able to think about much else and all the stress,’ he added. ‘You’ve been talking in your sleep.’
‘I have not!’
‘You have… about Owen, and about Devon? From The Row? Honestly, those words, clear as a bell and over and over, last night… when I admit you were a bit traumatised from being locked in the storeroom…’
Annie could tell from the completely strained look on Ed’s face that he was trying very hard not to laugh, once again, about her being locked in the storeroom.
No, that wasn’t fair, there had been some sympathetic noises from Ed last night as he’d listened to her storeroom drama but hearing that she’d been talking about a handbag out loud in her sleep was a touch mortifying.
‘So who is Devon?’ Ed wondered. ‘And does he row? Has he got ridiculously big biceps? Is he “hench”?’
Now, it was Annie’s turn to giggle. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Wait till you meet Devon… our backstage bodybuilder. No! Not really!’
‘So who is he? She? They?’
‘She is a handbag.’
Ed groaned and put his hands over his eyes. ‘No, Annie, no! Not a handbag. You can’t be talking out loud in your sleep about a handbag!’
‘Honestly, I am not buying another handbag. We know that. We know I have enough handbags, all the handbags. No need for even one more bag.’
‘Correct.’
‘So don’t worry about it.’
‘Are you sure? I don’t need to walk you to the handbag cupboard and make you count your handbags before bed?’
‘No… no, thank you.’
‘So, come to bed,’ he urged her.
‘Yes, of course, let me just go take my face off, brush my teeth. I’ll be right there.’
But once she was in the bathroom, she was looking at her phone, scrolling through messages, looking at her to-do lists, and spotting a reminder to herself put in the calendar months ago about their wedding anniversary.
She did have to get Ed a present. She really did.
He was too good not to deserve a lovely anniversary present.
And she did have the most amazing idea, but she hadn’t done anything to make it a reality.
And unless she did something very soon, it wasn’t going to happen.
‘Siri?’ she whispered into her phone. ‘You’ve got to help me with some internet shopping…’