The Independent Bride

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Pepper flushed. ‘Not money, if that’s what you think,’ she said indignantly. Being thought a sponger was a new experience she could have done without. ‘I can look after myself. But—I just thought—if anyone in my mother’s family wanted to see me, I’m going to be in London for a while. We might get a cup of coffee some day. That’s all.’

‘I see.’ The lawyer pondered.

She said with difficulty, ‘I don’t remember my mother, you see. Since—I mean, recently I’ve been thinking about that. And I think I’d like to meet my aunt. This feud thing has gone on too long. I don’t even know what it was about.’

For the first time the lawyer smiled. ‘I’ll ask,’ he promised.

He must have asked swiftly. Now, at the end of the day, Pepper was taking a phone call in her hotel room.

‘Pepper?’ said a voice that bubbled over with enthusiasm. ‘Oh, I can’t believe this. It is so good to talk to you after all these years.’

‘Who is this—?’ began Pepper, and then fell over her own words.

She knew that voice. She still had dreams of it saying, ‘Come on, what does it matter if you get dirty? You’re going to see the kingfishers.’

‘Isabel?’ she said in disbelief.

She had thought it was a dream. Her grandmother had said it was a dream. Or a prolonged case of a preschooler’s imaginary friends. Mary Ellen had even threatened to take her to a psychiatrist— ‘To get it out of your system for good and all.’

‘Izzy? Izzy, is that you?’

Izzy’s laugh had not changed either. In the memory that Mary Ellen had said was disturbed fantasy, she and Pepper had visited together just once when they were children. Izzy must have been about eight—and muddy; Pepper had been ten, in her best dress—and longing to be muddy, too.

Now Izzy sounded just the same as she had in Pepper’s memory: as if she could take on the world—and have the time of her life doing it.

‘Yup. It’s me,’ said Isabel Dare ungrammatically. ‘I gather you’re over in the UK for a while. Want to come and play?’

Pepper sat down hard in the overcrowded little room. In the mirror on the opposite wall, she saw that she was grinning all over her face. She embraced the disputed memory with relish. More, with laughter.

‘You’ve got more ditches for me to wade through?’

‘You remember, then?’ Izzy gave a choke of amusement. ‘Better than that. I’ve got a spare room that just happens to be empty. Fancy sharing a flat with your cousins?’

And Pepper thought, Home!

She had never shared with friends of her own age. It was a revelation.

Pepper had never come out of her room at the Calhoun mansion until every hair was neatly in place. Isabel and Jemima thought nothing of wandering around in their underwear with their hair in curlers while they swapped plans for the day. They shared clothes and housework and invitations with careless freedom. Then fought to the death over a low-fat yoghurt. They read each other’s horoscope aloud over Sunday breakfast. They split bills without arguing but battled over whose turn it was to wash up a couple of coffee cups. After a week of stunned disbelief, Pepper began to talk, too.

At first it was just little ironic asides. ‘I’ve lived in New York, Paris and Milan. But I’ve never lived in chaos before.’

‘Good experience for you, then,’ said Izzy cheerfully.

But Jemima was curious. ‘You must have. I mean you were a student, right? Everyone lives in chaos when they’re a student.’

‘Not me. I had my electronic personal organiser. And a maid.’

‘A maid?’ they chorused.

‘Well, someone to do the housework.’

‘We do our own housework,’ said Jemima firmly.

‘Unless Jay Jay is giving a party for all her cool friends,’ said the irrepressible Izzy. ‘Then we call in a stylist to run it. And a firm of industrial cleaners afterwards.’

Jemima threw a cushion at her.

There was some truth in the accusation, though, as Pepper found out. Izzy’s friends were a casual bunch, but Jemima took her socialising seriously.

‘It’s because she’s a fashion model,’ Izzy told Pepper when they were alone. She sounded unwontedly serious. ‘She seems to make a decent living. But her agent says she could be really big. That’s what the networking is all about.’

‘I know about networking,’ agreed Pepper with feeling. ‘I’ve been trying to put together a new retail idea. The business plan is beautiful. Now all I have to do is get the capital. Networking rules!’

That was when she moved on to full-scale confidences. Well, she didn’t tell them everything. Not ‘you’re a potato’ and ‘I paid men to date you’. But why she left Calhouns. And what she was trying to do in London.

‘And if it all collapses, I can hire out as a consultant,’ she ended flippantly. ‘That’s what unsuccessful entrepreneurs do between projects.’

‘So tell us about Out of the Attic,’ said Jemima, a dedicated shopper.

Pepper lit up. She loved her project.

‘It does two things. Most important, it looks at shopping as a form of entertainment. It has to be comfortable, stimulating, and aesthetically pleasant. So we turn a shop into a treasure trove. You don’t go through racks, you discover things. As if you were going through an attic, in fact.’

Jemima, the clothes professional, pursed her lips. ‘But you want people to move through the shop fast, buying as much as they can carry?’

‘They can buy. The stock is on site. But clients have the chance to look at things in a pretty environment before they decide what they want to try. They check their coats and bags at the door. They can get a coffee. They can sit and look at stuff.’

Jemima was unconvinced. ‘Sounds like an awful lot of effort to sell one garment.’

‘It would be. But most people will buy more than one. And they’ll take a catalogue home with them. We’re talking lifestyle here. And building a customer base.’ Pepper was warming to her theme. ‘I’m thinking we should have a Girls’ Night Out facility. An exclusive show for a few friends after work.’

Izzy was enthusiastic. ‘Great. Shopping and a party at the same time.’

Pepper nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’

‘But you don’t shop and you hate parties,’ Jemima pointed out.

‘So? There aren’t enough people like me to build a business on. I know what other people want.’

Jemima stayed sceptical. ‘And what would the clothes be like?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t just be clothes. They’re too seasonal and subject to fashion.’

‘You mean you don’t know,’ Jemima crowed.

Pepper was stung. ‘I know. I’ve got a couple of designers on standby. The brief I gave them was pretty and practical.’

Jemima looked down her nose.

‘You probably don’t want to believe it,’ Pepper told her with feeling, ‘but most clothes in the mall are designed for adolescents who don’t feel the cold, never sit down and think they ought to be sexual predators. There’s this great big market out there who don’t fulfil the brief. My clothes will be for them.’

‘You mean the Size Fourteen Syndrome,’ sniffed Jemima.

Pepper glared. ‘And what is wrong with being size fourteen? Do you know how many people are?’

Jemima opened her mouth, caught Pepper’s eye and thought better of it.

‘There’s only one problem with being size fourteen,’ Pepper announced. ‘It’s not cool. I’m going to make Out of the Attic so cool no one who comes in will be ashamed of herself, no matter what size she is.’

Jemima cast her eyes to heaven. ‘Dream on.’

But Pepper was unmoved. ‘I’ve done the market research. And I’ve lived size fourteen. Women are just waiting for Out of the Attic. You’ll see.’

‘Excuse me, Master.’

Steven was miles away. He was standing by the high window staring down into the quad.

Not with pleasure. Other people saw a medieval hall the colour of warm butter, with mullioned windows that overlooked a succulent velvet lawn. Steven saw crumbling stonework, blocked guttering and the cost of a new roof that made his eyes spin just to think about.

Queen Margaret’s College was an ancient institution and a historic building. It was also broke.

Valerie Holmes, who had been the Master’s secretary for so long that she remembered when Steven Konig was a new undergraduate, looked at him with sympathy. Poor chap, she thought. He was the classic compromise candidate: neither the pure academic that the old guard wanted, nor the racy media darling that the politicians had been pushing so hard. As a result, he was disliked by both sides. And he knew it.

She coughed gently. ‘Master?’

Steven jumped and turned guiltily. ‘Oh, it’s you, Valerie,’ he said, surprised. ‘Is the car here already?’

He had an appointment to do a television interview and they were sending a car for him. It was Valerie who had insisted on that. She knew how much he hated the publicity stuff. But when you were Master of a college that was falling down you had to do it.

But this was not the car reluctantly provided by Indigo Television. This was something a lot more troubling. Though Valerie was much too discreet to say so.

‘No, Master. The car won’t be here for another hour.’

Steven sighed. He pushed a hand through his dark hair. She really should have reminded him to have it cut, thought Valerie, momentarily distracted. But at least he had shaved this morning. Sometimes, when he strode in from his morning jog round the Parks, he looked more like a guerrilla who had been in the jungle for too long than a senior member of the university.

He gave her his best grin, the conspiratorial one that made his eyes twinkle. Not a lot of people saw that grin. Most of them thought the Master of Queen Margaret’s College was a dour workaholic. And those were his supporters. Valerie knew different—as she told her husband.