Best of Friends. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ six, they were due out at seven and there was no sign of her husband. Not that Abby was surprised by this. After nearly seventeen years of marriage, she knew that Tom had all the sense of urgency of an inhabitant of a desert island. Which probably made them a good match, she knew. She was fiery and wound up like a spring, while Tom was possessed of endless, monastic calm.

      ‘You shouldn’t get so hyper about everything,’ was his standard phrase whenever Abby got in a flap about being late. Naturally, his saying this just made Abby even more hyper and irritated into the bargain. Could he not realise how annoying he was?

      It was a relief to retreat to their room to get ready. It was a pretty nice bedroom, and one of the first she’d redecorated when they’d moved in. Floor-to-ceiling wardrobes (‘essential for hiding clutter’, as Abby herself said) and a bed with storage underneath. Everything was rich cream and cool apple green, and there wasn’t so much as an out-of-place magazine to ruin the aura of classic calmness. It was hell to keep it like that. As Abby professionally advocated the use of trios of decorative storage boxes to hide everyone else’s clutter, she felt she had to use them herself, but she could never remember which held what. She always ended up opening the wrong one for her jewellery and finding make-up instead. And she could never lay hands on a pen. It might be heresy to think so, but she almost missed the jam jar full of wonky biros that used to sit on her dressing table in the old house, before she’d learned how to declutter.

      Abby’s cupboards were where it had all started, really. Not her wardrobe – recently featured in Style magazine – or her bathroom – a shrine to Zen-like bathing that had cost a fortune to install – but her kitchen cupboards, where a simple rotation system of putting new tins and jars to the back meant that nothing ever had to be thrown out because it was months past the sell-by date. The list on the cork board also helped. Any item taken from the fridge, larder or cupboard was listed in the handy notebook with the pen attached, so that when Abby did her once-a-month stocking-up shop, she knew exactly what was needed.

      A naturally tidy person, she’d hit upon the idea of offering her tidy mind to others in an attempt to help people organise their lives. Jess had just turned ten and Abby found she had time on her hands.

      Originally, she’d started sorting out wardrobes: helping women with scores of identical black clothes prioritise and bin anything they hadn’t worn for years. It had been a cottage industry, really – a few mornings a week in which she’d given her clients the courage to throw out much loved but threadbare garments and sell on those barely worn. She wasn’t a stylist, she told customers, just a de-junking merchant.

      ‘You can buy new clothes yourself afterwards – I’m just helping you let go of the old stuff.’

      The breakthrough had come after two years of this when a customer had sighed at the pristine state of Abby’s kitchen cupboards and said she wished she was as organised.

      Abby offered to write down her system.

      ‘No, do it for me,’ begged the woman.

      Soon Abby was organising clutter-free systems for home offices and sorting out houses stuffed with possessions where nobody could find anything any more. She was ruthless with old cards, newspaper clippings and letters from old flames, but gentle with the person reluctantly throwing out all their treasures.

      ‘You’re not using it, it’s using you,’ was her mantra. ‘If it’s not useful or beautiful, dump it! You’ll feel so much better when your life is decluttered.’

      When she decluttered the office of a magazine journalist, who wrote about the empowering experience of throwing out bin bags full of detritus, fame came calling.

      At nearly seven o’clock, Tom’s ten-year-old Volvo creaked to a halt outside.

      ‘Sorry,’ he called as he slammed the front door. ‘I got stuck with drama club.’

      Upstairs, fully dressed and clock-watching, Abby sighed. Typical Tom. Overseeing the drama club wasn’t even his job. What was the point of being the deputy headmaster if you had to do all the extra jobs instead of foisting them on other people? At home he never hesitated to ask Abby to do things for him, but at work, he metamorphosed into Mr No, Let-Me-Do-It.

      After another five minutes of waiting for Tom to come up and change, Abby marched downstairs. She wasn’t going to say anything but she was ready and it was time they were out of the door.

      Tom and Jess were in the kitchen together, laughing at some shared joke.

      ‘Dad, you old hippie,’ Jess was saying fondly. She had her chair pushed back and her feet up on another, black-stockinged legs stretched out comfortably. ‘Go off and listen to your old Jethro Tull records, right? You are never going to be cool.’

      ‘I can watch MTV with the best of them,’ Tom retorted mildly. He gave his daughter a pretend slap on the wrist. ‘I was just saying I like that Chad Kruger song. Don’t send me into the old people’s home just yet.’

      ‘Next week, then,’ grinned Jess. ‘Shooo. I’ve got chemistry homework and you’ve got some posh do to go to.’

      Tom ruffled Jess’s hair. Jess didn’t move her head away. She smiled at her father.

      Abby watched them silently, half pleased that they got on so well, half jealous that she no longer shared that same easy relationship with either of them. It was as if Jess and Tom were a tight little family unit and she was out in the cold.

      

      Selina Carson slid through the throng with all the practised ease of someone who could throw a party for three hundred people in her sleep. As publicity director of Beech Productions, Selina knew better than anyone how to stretch budgets and coax favours out of people. Without her help, the tenth anniversary party would be above a grubby pub with sausages and chips to eat and one free glass of limp champagne each. Thanks to her, it was being held in a divinely proportioned new gallery with lots of outrageous modern art on the walls, including a modern version of Ingres’s voluptuous ladies of the harem, which was being ogled by many of the male guests when they thought nobody was looking.

      The wine was good (‘Think of the publicity, darling!’ she’d said to the beleaguered wine importer she normally rang when organising parties) and clearly the dim sum were going down a treat. She just hoped that nobody got food poisoning, because the caterers were new and scarily cheap. Still, you had to economise somewhere.

      ‘Abby, darling, how lovely to see you. And Tom.’

      Selina was relieved to see Abby, as she was running out of celebrities to introduce to the big advertisers and the company’s backers there tonight. Abby would be the perfect person to feed into the slightly bored groups and make them feel like movers and shakers. Even better, Selina could quietly explain this to Abby and Abby would know just what to do. She was a professional down to her fingertips, a direct result, Selina thought, of being that touch older when fame hit.

      ‘Your hair’s fabulous.’

      ‘Thanks, Selina.’ Abby grinned. She never entirely believed it when people complimented her, a trait she’d unknowingly passed on to her daughter. They were just being nice, she felt. Didn’t they know she was just a forty-something housewife who’d struck it lucky?

      ‘And, Tom, you look marvellous. Now, Abby…’ Selina grasped her star’s shoulder, whispered in her ear briefly, and then steered her round to a small group of men in suits. ‘Gentlemen, you must meet Abby Barton.’

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