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  Over dinner they were addressed on the difference between tax evasion and avoidance, the benefits of gifts and corporate bonds and how to invest them in order to derive the highest possible after-tax return. It didn’t help that Aunty Sylvia, who wasn’t quite pissed as a pudding, but well on her way, kept egging him on.

  “Go on, Nigel. Don’t be shy. Tell them how you helped the Osbournes with their tax planning strategy.”

  “Ah, well now, that wasn’t easy,” he said, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers. “You see, the change in tax law in 1998 means that gains made outside the U.K. can be taxable in the U.K. It was actually the March 1998 budget which extended CGT to cover expats for up to five years after their departure.”

  All the time Nigel was speaking, Ruby couldn’t take her eyes off his face. When they were introduced, her first impression had been that Nigel possessed a warm, kind, if pudgy face, which smiled easily. She could see why Aunty Sylvia found him attractive. Having said that, there was something odd about his features. Something almost effeminate. Try as she might, she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

  During one of the rare moments that Nigel paused for breath, Aunty Sylvia squeezed his hand and said: “This man has got the most brilliant financial brain. Tell them how you’ve helped the Stings.”

  “Sylvia, I’m not sure I should really say any more. It’s meant to be confidential.”

  “Millions, he saved them. Millions. I tell you, anytime, and I mean anytime, you need financial advice, Nigel is your man. He’s so gifted, they named a loophole after him. The Nigel Brompton Loophole.”

  “Ah well, you see, that was based on my discovery that each year the Inland Revenue…”

  “More wine, anybody?” Phil broke in. Ruby could tell by the taut expression on her father’s face that he was coming close to shoving Nigel’s head up his own loophole. Phil began going round the table, filling glasses. “By the way,” he said to nobody in particular, “you’ll never guess what I’m working on at the moment. I’m designing the packaging for a heart defibrillator—you know the thing with the electric paddles that doctors use to restart people’s hearts.” He put down the wine bottle and went over to the coffee table. He came back with a brown cardboard box. He explained that the defibrillator company were making battery-operated machines for home use and had given him one to play with.

  “Wow, this is fantastic,” Aunty Sylvia enthused. She took another glug of wine and then began opening a plastic pouch. It contained rubber gloves, a surgical mask and scissors to cut off the patient’s clothes. “We have to test it out.” She unfolded the instructions and cast her eyes over them. Bearing in mind how much she’d had to drink, it was doubtful that she was absorbing any information. “Right, come on, Phil, pretend to have a heart attack.”

  Nigel made the point that it had to be dangerous to pass an electric shock into a healthy heart. “You’re right,” Aunty Sylvia said, momentarily defeated. “Ah, but there is something here that we could try to bring back to life.” With that she got up. “OK, everybody. Charging two hundred. Stand clear.” A moment later she had clamped the paddles to what remained of the leg of lamb. Pausing for dramatic effect, she pressed the shock button. Then everybody—including Nigel, who it appeared wasn’t entirely without humor—burst into helpless, hysterical laughter. “Do we have an output?” Aunty Sylvia said, warming to her part of Dr. Corday. Ronnie shook her head in reply.

  “OK, let’s try a shot of adrenaline.”

  “Sylvia,” Ronnie said gravely, doing her best to play along and at the same time stifle her giggles, “you’ve done your best. I think we should stop.” She placed her hand on her sister’s arm. “We have to face it. The roast is gone.”

  Sylvia heaved a theatrical sigh and rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. “You’re right. OK, people, I’m calling it,” Sylvia said. “Time of death, ten after eight.”

  Everybody roared.

  “Nobody could have done any more,” Nigel said, patting Aunty Sylvia’s hand and grinning. Then he deposited a rather self-conscious kiss on her forehead and in a whisper that only Ruby overheard, he told her how funny and adorable she was.

  “Ooh, ooh, Phil,” Ronnie said, her hand clamped to her stomach. “It must be all the excitement. I just felt the baby kick.”

  “OK, BE HONEST, both of you,” Aunty Sylvia said later on as she, Ruby and Ronnie scraped plates and loaded the dishwasher. “Do you think Nigel’s boring?”

  “Do you?” Ronnie asked, putting a dishwasher tablet into the dispenser. She hadn’t been in therapy for donkeys’ years without learning how to neatly lob a question back to the client.

  Aunty Sylvia became thoughtful. A double helping of Pavlova had helped her sober up. “Maybe a little. He did go on a bit tonight, didn’t he? But I think that was only because I was egging him on and he was nervous. He’s not very good in company, but he did get more lively toward the end. When we’re alone I see the real him. He’s kind, grounded and completely trustworthy. With Nigel, I always know where I am.”

  “And he’s got the most beautiful eyebrows,” Ruby heard herself say. Ruby had figured it out. It was Nigel’s perfectly shaped and arched eyebrows that gave him that strangely effeminate look.

  “Yes, I noticed them as well,” Ronnie said. She lowered her voice. “He doesn’t pluck them, does he?”

  “Ronnie, Nigel does not pluck his eyebrows.” Aunty Sylvia seemed deeply offended by the suggestion. “They’re completely natural. I admit it’s an odd sort of look, but I’m getting used to it.” She paused. “If I’m honest, the real thing that bothers me about Nigel is his lack of edge.”

  Still playing therapist, Ronnie asked her sister to define edge.

  “I dunno. Emotional baggage. Hangups. Possessing deep dark secrets. All the men I’ve ever been out with have fallen into one of those categories. Nigel, on the other hand, is an open book. What you see is what you get. Nothing about him could surprise me.”

  “In other words,” Ronnie said, “he’s not a project.”

  “I was sure that I didn’t want another project. Now I don’t know. There’s something missing. Maybe I’m just addicted to troubled men. I get such a kick out of trying to change them.”

  “But you know you can never change them,” Ronnie said. “Pretty soon it all goes sour and they make you unhappy.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “You’re absolutely right.” But Ruby could tell she wasn’t entirely convinced.

  Chapter 12

  At half past eight on Monday morning, Ivan the Terrible appeared on Ruby’s doorstep.

  “Sorry I not come Saturday.” He was puffing like a worn-out steam engine. “I try to come, but I left bollock on bus. Today I hef new one. I ask man at plumber’s merchants to geev me best bollock. Oh, and I make no charge for one I lost.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Ivan,” Ruby said. As she let him in she couldn’t help noticing how pale he was. “Ivan, you seem incredibly breathless. You don’t seem at all well.”

  “Pleez. Not to worry,” he said. But she was worried. Ivan’s hand was clamped to his chest and he was wincing in pain. She insisted he come into the living room and sit down. “I think we should call a doctor.”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “It’s nothing. I eat too much herring and black bread thees morning. It geev me pain.” With that he let out a loud and not unconvincing belch.

  “All right. If you’re sure you’re OK.”

  “No worries. I em fine. You go.”

  Ruby left, but not before she had promised to phone during the day to check on him.

  SHE ARRIVED AT the shop to find Chanel leaning on the counter reading the horoscope column in the Daily Mail—a sure sign that her spirits were improving and that she was getting back to her old self. The therapist Ronnie had recommended was clearly helping. The moment she heard Ruby come in, Chanel looked up.

  “OK, get this: ‘For months now, Saturn, the planet of structure and
stricture, has been retrograde in your sign, but as it begins to move forward again and is joined by Jupiter, planet of growth and opportunity, things are really starting to look up. Prepare to celebrate.’”

  “Wow, sounds great.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Chanel chuckled. “Shame I’m not a Pisces.”

  Ruby burst out laughing. Chanel was getting her sense of humor back, too. It was going to take time for her to come to terms with not being able to have a baby, but she really was making progress.

  “Oh, by the way, this might interest you.” She closed the newspaper and slid it across the counter toward Ruby. “I remember you saying ’ow Sam ’ad to rush off the other night. I think this might explain why.” Ruby stared at the headline on the front page: “Claudia Loses Baby.”

  “Oh, my God,” Ruby said, truly shocked. She hadn’t much cared for the woman, nor did she think she was the best mother in the world, but there was no way she would have wished this on her. “That’s so awful. I can’t believe it. I didn’t tell you, she was here in the shop the other day, buying swimsuits.” She read through the article. Apparently, Claudia had gone into premature labor on Saturday afternoon. Later that evening, doctors gave her drugs to try and stop the labor, but yesterday she finally gave birth to a boy. He had lived for three hours.

  “No wonder Sam was in such a state when he left,” Ruby said. “How could I have imagined for one minute that Claudia wasn’t pregnant?”

  Chanel frowned and asked what she meant.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Just me getting carried away that’s all.”

  But Chanel wouldn’t let it drop and Ruby ended up telling her about the incident in the fitting room and how she’d imagined seeing Claudia wearing a prosthetic stomach. Chanel didn’t have to think twice.

  “You daft wally,” she laughed. “It’ll’ve been one of those new pregnancy girdles—the ones they’re all wearing in Paris.”

  “I know. I know. Forget it. I was just being an idiot.”

  A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was Sam.

  “Sam, hi. I’ve just been reading about Claudia Planchette losing her baby. It’s so sad. I had no idea she was one of your patients and that’s why you had to rush off the other night. It must have been awful. Bet it’s a media circus outside the hospital, though.”

  “Just a bit. There have to be a hundred paparazzi here, desperate to get a shot of her leaving. She wasn’t my patient, though.”

  “Oh, sorry. When you left you seemed so uptight. I just assumed.”

  “No, it was something else.” He sounded exhausted.

  “Sam, have you had any sleep recently?”

  “I think I may have caught a couple of hours back in March,” he said with a soft laugh, “but I’m actually on my way to bed now. I was just ringing to suggest that instead of going out Friday night, you come to my place. I’ll cook. Real food. Not junk.”

  She said that would be great.

  “Unless, of course you’d rather go out. I just thought staying in would be more relaxing.”

  She was pretty sure “relaxing” was a euphemism for wanting to ravage her. At least she hoped it was. “Staying in will be perfect,” she said.

  The following day, he paid a surprise visit to the shop. “I had a couple of hours to spare, so I thought we could maybe go for coffee.”

  She’d suggested several times that he pop in so that he could see where she worked, and she couldn’t have been more pleased to see him. She also loved the way he surprised her by turning up unannounced.

  The problem was that when he arrived, the shop was full of customers. Chanel insisted she could cope on her own, but Ruby felt guilty about leaving her.

  In the end Sam said if they couldn’t go out, he would go to Starbucks and bring back coffee for all three of them. Chanel, who was clearly smitten with Sam, gazed after him as he disappeared.

  “Wipe away the drool,” Ruby giggled. “The customers will see.”

  “Don’t care,” Chanel said dreamily. Ruby had never imagined that grounded, down-to-earth Chanel was capable of such girlish giddiness. “God, you’re a lucky girl. ’Ave you seen those brown eyes? The way they draw you in? I bet ’e’s a wonderful doctor. ’E’s the kind of bloke you could really talk to.”

  Chanel went off to serve a customer. By the time Sam reappeared ten minutes later with cappuccinos, the rush had subsided and Ruby was kneeling on the floor unpacking a box of crib blankets that had just been delivered.

  “You know,” he said, “this place is so…” He was looking up at the giant crystal chandelier and the gold and brocade rococo crib that Stella had insisted Ruby buy from a manufacturer in Paris and put in the window.

  “Like the infant Louis XIV’s nursery?” Ruby suggested.

  “I was going to say ‘classy,’” he said. “But I guess that’s a pretty good description. I can see what you mean when you say this place isn’t you. I imagine a Baby Organic store being very minimalist. I could see white walls, huge color photographs of mothers and children maybe…”

  He’d got her. Oh, he had so got her. Ruby felt her skin prickle with delight.

  In the end she didn’t get much time to talk to Sam, partly because the phone kept ringing and partly because Chanel seemed intent on telling him her entire gynecological history. While Chanel talked, Ruby carried on unpacking blankets. “So anyway, they removed the fibroids in ’98. All the women in my family ’ave fibroids. Goes back four generations apparently. Then they checked me for polycystic ovaries. Now, apparently, you get ’airy with polycystic ovaries. So, my Craig—who admittedly was under a great deal of stress at the time—turns to this doctor and says, ‘Excuse me, mate, are you accusing my wife of ’aving excess facial hair, because if you are, you’d better step outside.’ ’E can be so sweet, my Craig.”

  Sam listened intently, asked questions and seemed to take a genuine interest in Chanel’s problems.

  “The upshot is they can’t find nothing wrong with me. By rights I should ’ave no problems falling pregnant a second time, but there you go…”

  Sam nodded slowly and offered Chanel a sympathetic smile. Ruby could tell from her expression that she was positively glowing. She wondered how many of the doctors Chanel had seen over the years had actually taken the trouble to offer her some comfort and warmth. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I do understand what you’re going through. I also know what it’s like to want answers and not get them. The point is that medicine has come a long way, but it doesn’t know everything. What you need is support right now. Some counseling might be a good idea. I could recommend somebody.”

  Chanel thanked him and explained that she was already seeing a counselor. She seemed so moved by his kindness that Ruby thought she might be about to cry, but Chanel being Chanel, she wouldn’t give in. “So, anyway,” she said, managing a half-smile, “me and Craig are thinking about fostering. We thought we’d see ’ow we get on and then maybe think about adoption later on.”

  “You never mentioned fostering,” Ruby said, flattening the cardboard box that had held the blankets. “I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

  Eventually Sam said he should be getting back to the hospital. “I have a prenatal clinic in a half hour.” He turned to Chanel. “Good luck with the fostering. I hope it works out.” She smiled again and thanked him.

  “OK,” Ruby said to Sam. “See you Friday.”

  He put his arms round her waist and gave her a quick kiss and a squeeze. “I can’t wait,” he whispered into her ear. “And this time, I promise there won’t be any interruptions.”

  RUBY WANTED EVERYTHING to be perfect for Friday. She booked an appointment at the überposh beauty salon round the corner, where she parted with over a hundred quid to have her brows and legs plucked and waxed and her skin exfoliated to the silky softness of an Hermès scarf.

  Then, an hour or so before she was due to meet Sam, panic set in. She had just got out of the shower and was massaging moisturizer into damp skin, just
like they told you to do in the mags, when the thought hit her.

  Like most women, Ruby was insecure about her body. She thought her legs could do with being longer and slimmer. She was less than keen on her hair, which was so fine and wavy that every morning when she woke up, it looked to her as if a family of hamsters had been nesting in it. If hangups about the external parts of her body weren’t bad enough, now she was starting to fret about her internal parts.

  She wrapped herself in a towel and went into the living room. The phone was lying on the coffee table. She picked it up and dialed Fi’s number.

  “Fi, it’s me. I think I’m suffering from vagina anxiety.”

  “What?” Fi giggled. “How d’you mean, vagina anxiety?”

  “OK, Sam’s a gynecologist, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And he must have seen thousands of vaginas, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So, what if…”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re thinking, suppose your vagina doesn’t pass muster.”

  “Correct. I mean the vagina is practically the man’s habitat. He must have seen some fairly amazing ones in his time.”

  Fi didn’t say anything. “Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly constitutes an ‘amazing’ vagina? Apart from the obvious tightness factor, but since you’ve never given birth, you can’t have any problems in that department.”

  Ruby made the point that it wasn’t her vagina per se she was worried about, it was the look of the area in general. “I mean they must vary.”

  Fi said as far as she knew all vulvas looked like cross-sections of dried pear. Then she went into a long tale about how her friend Amy once went out with a bloke called Lawrence, a self-confessed chauvinist who liked to think of himself as a bit of a vulva connoisseur. “Poor Amy was so paranoid about having a substandard vagina that she used to spend hours squatting naked over a mirror. Look, Sam’s a lovely, sensitive bloke who sees you as a whole person. He won’t be anything like Lawrence of her labia.”

  Deep down, Ruby knew Fi was right about Sam, but it didn’t stop her going hunting for a hand mirror. Of course it was nowhere to be found, and in the end, the only vaguely reflective surface she could find was the bottom of her Illy coffee tin.