Once in a Lifetime. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ least we heard about it. Forewarned is forearmed,’ Shotsy said grimly. ‘DeVere’s have their own handbag buyers and they won’t want to hire me. Too many cooks and all that.’

      ‘You’re brilliant at what you do, Shotsy,’ protested Charlie.

      ‘Brilliant means nothing. This is hostile takeover time and no matter what sort of flannel they’ll give us about merging the two companies and how the staff will join up seamlessly, it won’t happen, not when DeVere’s and Kenny’s have such different cultures. People like me will be made redundant. End of story, kaput. I wish we could still smoke inside.’

      Charlie stood up, got two empty take-away cups and put one in front of Shotsy. ‘Decant your coffee and come out on to the roof. You can smoke and we can talk.’

      ‘Thought your mother had put you off nicotine for life?’ said Shotsy, pouring her espresso into the take-away cup.

      Shotsy was one of the few people who seemed to understand that Charlie’s mother wasn’t quite the loveable revolutionary glamourpuss she pretended to be.

      ‘Tough growing up with a mother like that,’ she’d said shrewdly on their first meeting, an event in the shop. ‘She has very strong opinions on everything, your mother.’

      Charlie sent her a grateful look. Shotsy wasn’t a member of the Kitty Nelson fan club, won over by the purred ‘dahling’s and the war cry that she’d let her daughters live their lives their own way because it was wrong to inflict archaic moral codes upon them.

      ‘I can’t stand the smell of smoke,’ said Charlie now, ‘but I need to hear everything and you need cigarettes to get your brain working.’

      The roof terrace was far less glamorous than it sounded–a flat area of the store’s roof, surrounded on all sides by slanting mountains of tile. To get there, the women had to climb the back stairs that led past accounts and credit control.

      Finally, Charlie pushed the old metal door open and they emerged, panting, into the cool February sunlight. Charlie shivered without a jacket but still waited until Shotsy had a couple of decent drags on her cigarette inside her before asking: ‘What do we do?’

      ‘Keep our eyes and ears open, and wait,’ said Shotsy.

      ‘That’s it: wait?’

      ‘Nothing else we can do. We’re just the worker bees.’

      Charlie wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold. ‘If DeVere’s buy us, they mightn’t make radical changes,’ she said hopefully. ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right?’ She thought how much she loved her job; and she was good at it, too. Shotsy was brilliant as an accessories buyer; she understood that women who could never afford to dress head-to-toe in designer clothes still loved having the designer glamour that went with an expensive handbag or a pair of designer sunglasses. How could DeVere’s belittle what the Kenny’s staff had to offer?

      ‘It mightn’t be broken,’ Shotsy said, stabbing out her cigarette, ‘but they’ll still want to fix it so that Kenny’s isn’t Kenny’s any more. It will become DeVere’s. Branding,’ she added in a low voice, ‘that’s what it’s all about now. People like me are part of the Kenny’s brand, and we just wouldn’t fit the DeVere’s brand. There’s no reason they won’t keep you, though, Charlie.’

      ‘Except for one thing,’ Charlie pointed out. A horrible idea had just occurred to her. ‘DeVere’s don’t stock Organic Belle. It’s like what you said a moment ago: Organic Belle wanted to keep their brand exclusive, so Kenny’s is the only stockist on the east coast. There’s us and Pathologie in Galway, and then the three Organic Belle shops in Cork and Kerry. And now Harrods. That’s it. I’m sure DeVere’s were furious they couldn’t get it. What if they decide not to stock it out of pique, just to make a point? Or if the Organic Belle people pulled out? What then? I’m out of a job.’

      ‘There’s making a point and there’s doing business,’ Shotsy said. ‘They’re not stupid.’

      ‘Getting rid of you would be stupid, but you’re sure they’d do it,’ Charlie retorted.

      ‘Let’s hold off worrying until we know what’s happening.’ Shotsy rearranged her platinum hair and opened the door to the fifth floor. ‘Just keep your eyes and ears peeled. After all, David’s a good man. He wouldn’t sell out without looking after all of us, would he?’

      She didn’t say it with conviction, Charlie thought. David Kenny was a good man and he did look after his staff. But if he needed to sell the department store for some reason, perhaps he mightn’t be able to look after them quite as well as he had in the past.

      

      The rest of the afternoon on the cosmetics floor was mercifully busy so Charlie didn’t have a moment to brood. There were three women who worked in the Organic Belle department and Charlie was always the most popular both with newcomers to the range and with long-standing customers coming back for more. She had a kind of empathy that allowed her to understand how someone could feel nervous walking into an elegant department store and facing the beautifully made-up women behind the counters.

      Part of her attraction was that she didn’t fit the traditional vision of stunning beauty usually found manning the counters in cosmetics departments. Yes, her subtle make-up was beautifully applied, thanks to the courses she’d taken when she signed up with Organic Belle in the first place, but she chose never to look too glamorous or inaccessible.

      Charlie was petite with a curvy figure, shiny chestnut hair that she wore in a groomed ponytail, a round, smiling face with neat features, and slightly cat-shaped eyes inherited from her mother. However, she didn’t have her mother’s fine-boned face or the fabulous lips that Kitty Nelson painted various shades of red: pillar box, fire engine, crimson. And she’d missed out on the long, elegant legs her mother and sister liked to show off with their high heels, sheer stockings and lashings of attitude.

      What she did have was a friendliness that drew people to her.

      Her husband was constantly trying to make her understand how important that was, and how long legs, sultry lips and a hand-span waist couldn’t hold a candle to innate kindness.

      ‘You light up a room when you smile, do you know that?’ he would say to her.

      ‘Stop it, Brendan!’ Charlie would laugh, and kiss him. But she loved him saying it. She hadn’t known such kindness since her father left.

      Growing up with her mother and sister, two fiercely strong personalities, Charlie had often felt like a plump little mouse who’d snuck into the lions’ cage. The lions ensnared people with their glamour and ferocity, and nobody could quite believe that Charlie, who listened far more than she talked, could possibly be related to Kitty and Iseult.

      Her champion had been her father, who was just as capable of being the egotistical big cat as his wife and older daughter, but who adored his little Charlotte.

      And then one terrible day, when Charlie was fifteen and Iseult was eighteen, he’d packed his bags and left.

      ‘I’m not leaving you, Charlotte,’ Anthony Nelson told her, extracting tissue after tissue from the box to wipe away Charlie’s tears. ‘I love you, remember that.’

      ‘But you are leaving,’ Charlie had sobbed.

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