Blue and Green Should Never be Seen! (Or so Mother says) Read online

  “So, Griselda, tell me: what exactly is this consultancy of yours that Marianne keeps talking about?”

  Hmmm, so she didn’t know much of what I was trying to do? Interesting. Lucky me: I had my sales pitch ready.

  “You see, Miss John … Marjorie, I’m a fashion consultant. What I do is quite simple: I analyse people’s wardrobes, the way they dress, and I give advice on how they could maximise their potential. My service will improve the way you look and … at-choo! … excuse me. Yeah … I was saying, by improving how you look I want to believe I can also improve your experience, both when you are shopping, so that you can remove your frustration when … at-choo! … excuse me, you buy clothes, and also make you look better when you’re among your peers.” A damn cat had just decided my lap was going to be its bed of choice, and it turned a couple of times before settling on me. Its tail was right under my nose, which instantly started itching.

  “Oh, that sounds very interesting my dear. I think you might actually have a cold. If you want, I have a blanket here; it’s quite clean, except that sometimes the cats sleep on it.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Miss J … Marjorie. Shall we go and look at your wardrobe?” I tentatively suggested, hoping to get out as soon as I could.

  “Very well, my dear; please follow me.” She stood and made a gesture to follow her upstairs. When she reached the door she turned and addressed the cats “You be good boys and girls while Mommy goes upstairs, OK?”

  A few of them decided to follow us. I prayed to God to save me.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mother couldn’t believe I’d left the security of my secretarial job and a highly regarded nanny position with one of the best families in the neighbourhood to – how did she put it? –pursue a dream.

  “GiGi, what is all this nonsense about being a fashion thing … what did you call yourself?” she said on the phone.

  “Fashion consultant, Mother.”

  “Yes, that was it. Listen, my dear, before you ruin your prospects altogether, you have to consider that you don’t know anything about fashion.”

  “Excuse me?” Sometimes my mother has that ability, surely a learned skill, to piss me off with the second sentence coming out of her mouth.

  “There’s a difference between shopping for yourself and getting paid for doing it on someone else’s behalf.”

  “I know that; the difference is, first of all, that I get paid.” I was already fuming. Why was she always trying to put me down; pick holes in everything I was doing? She did the same when I considered moving to France and I was still regretting it. And the other time I wanted to have a jet-ski business in Devon. OK, for the latter I didn’t have any funds to start with, but that wasn’t the point. What happened to ‘Follow your dream, darling, as long as you’re happy’? When was it that that sentence went out of fashion? (Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother; however, there have been plenty of times when I could easily have throttled her!)

  “Don’t patronise me, young lady. First of all, your taste might not be the same as someone else’s,” she continued. Brace yourself, GiGi, I thought; wear your helmet and wait for the cannon salvo. You won’t get out of this conversation easily. For a moment I just thought of taking up the fight, just to have the excuse of hanging up the phone. “Do you remember last week when you came for dinner?”

  Yeah … I did … what was her point? I asked her what she was getting at, knowing full well that she’d explain it to me whether I wanted her to or not.

  “You were wearing blue and green. Don’t you know that blue and green should never be seen? If you don’t understand the basics, how could you even consider giving suggestions to others?” Except that she was referring to a JP Gaultier outfit that took ages to hunt down, and it was a piece of art.

  “Mother, fashion evolves, as opposed to other things, or people who are still stuck in the Jurassic age.”

  “Watch your mouth, young lady; I’m still your mother.” Now she was getting upset; she didn’t like me reminding her that, occasionally, she should have refreshed her views and fully embraced the twenty-first century.

  “Look, I do know what I’m doing. I have clear ideas and I’m good at this. Why don’t you try to be supportive for once, instead of trying to pooh-pooh every idea I ever have?”

  “I’m not doing that, GiGi; I’m just trying to be realistic. Use your common sense. It’s risky starting a business from scratch and being self-employed.”

  Let’s be honest: my mother takes pleasure in explaining how the world goes around, what was right (her view) and what was wrong (my view, for example), and everything has to conform to her way of seeing things. No room for negotiations there; it’s like trying to have a discussion with the Prime Minister – not going to happen! She was on her second marriage and enjoying the money left to her by her father (that’s even without taking into account her divorce settlement, as she was divorced at a time when blame was apportioned and so she received the larger share). Without having to worry about the day-to-day nitty-gritty, she could pontificate as much as she pleased.

  I’m being unfair, I know; she’s been a good mother, although careless at times. Well, my father disappeared many years ago with his secretary and she had to raise me, my brother and my sister single-handed; of course she would feel protective towards us. However, there comes a point in life when you have to let your offspring go, let them make their own decisions, even if they are the wrong ones, and let them learn from that. That’s called life.

  “Mom, this is something I want to do; so you can either be supportive, or we can close this conversation here, right now.”

  “Oh, OK: don’t get upset, darling, I just wanted to avoid you being disappointed. It’s a tough world, what with the recession and all …”

  “I know, but I also think I have to do what I really want to, rather than keep a job just because it’s the safe and secure option. I can go back to that anytime, if I fail.”

  “You have to think you won’t be buying for yourself, if you really want to make it a success,” she continued; but at least, by not mentioning my old job I knew she wasn’t totally hostile to my ideas. I rather disagreed about that, though; I had to buy for my clients what I would like or, better, what I thought would be best for them. Leave them on their own, and they’d go back to buying the same old stuff. I had to be the catalyst to make them change, to embrace a new vision and, ultimately, become happier with themselves.

  “How is Jordan, by the way?” Jordan was her second husband, or “the toy boy”, as I used to call him. He knew that and on a few occasions we joked about it. He was twelve years younger than my mother and had a small firm building houses in the surrounding areas. He was actually quite funny and always glued to Google Maps, trying to find plots that could be suitable for building purposes. He would then approach the landowners – on occasion just people with a very large garden – and try to work out a deal, quite often successfully. I never asked why, at his young age, he stuck with my mother, but there was some sense in what he was doing. Apart from nagging me, Mother had a lot of interests and she was quite an interesting person, so I guess he got the better part of the deal. With the number of times he’s told me that he makes every effort to stop my mother from nagging; however, I doubt he’ll ever change that about her. I guess it’s just a mother thing. Am I wrong on that?

  Mom would have benefited as well from some of my consulting, to be honest, as she was going through phases. Occasionally she had very good taste, but at other times she could really scare me with her leopard-print leggings, or even her plain ones for that matter. It’s also not as if she didn’t know, as she’d mentioned it on many occasions, that I spend a lot of money on clothes and needed to curb that. I had to look good in my secretarial job, and even more so now, with my new venture taking shape. That didn’t stop Mother, though. I was gobsmacked that during this conversation she hadn’t brought up that pet subject of hers, about my spending, but she seemed to have resisted
that urge – so far, at least.

  “Oh, he’s fine. He’s almost finished building a set of terraced houses, and we’re planning to go to the Caribbean after that, for a well-deserved vacation. “

  Bummer! They never invited me when there was a “Caribbean” matter. Only for Christmas, to eat a chewy, dried-out turkey and carbonised potatoes. Mum hated cooking at the best of times, but she would never let Dad hire a cook or, unless it was a special occasion, go out to have a meal. I appreciated that she’d spent some time as a single mum, but, it wasn’t as though she was hard up or anything like that.

  “OK: have a nice vacation.” I could have started listing the number of diseases you can get for overexposing yourself to the sun, suggesting all sorts of sun cream, just for the fun of hearing her nagging back. If they had some already, I could have suggested she bought a different brand, in the same way as Mom would have done if I was the one going away – but I resisted the urge. “Text me when you arrive, and send me a postcard. Have a lovely time.”

  “Will do, my dear. And be careful with that dream of yours; it isn’t wise to leave something solid and secure, like your secretarial job, for an adventure. You know Uncle James did something like that and got burned when …”

  “Mom! Gotta go. A client is calling. “It wasn’t true. “Talk to you later.”

  “OK, but …”

  “Bye!” and I hung up the phone. She could get on my nerves in a matter of minutes; perhaps she was doing some kind of training, as she was getting better and better at it. And I had to go back to my business.

  CHAPTER 11

  It’s a difficult job, but someone has to do it. I mean, I needed to save Marjorie from herself and I had to use my utmost imagination if I had any chance of earning that huge amount of money. She seemed the type of person who would actually pay no matter what result I delivered, she was that nice; but the point I was trying to make was a different one. No matter how bad the clothes are, and despite the cats setting off my allergies, I felt I had to “really earn” that sum. I had to come out of those three or four weeks with pride and a feeling that I had deserved the job.

  Not an easy task, nonetheless, but hey: if you want to achieve a result you have to work for it. Success doesn’t fall from trees.

  Marjorie’s wardrobe was – how should I say? – unusual. It was a decent one, if you were actually living in some rural area in the Dales, in the sixties. She would certainly have looked quite classy at the bovine market on Sunday, and for the Thursday quiz in the pub (still in the sixties, though. I hadn’t checked, but I was sure they had moved on as well) – but in the twenty-first century in Berkshire she might look a bit outdated. OK – let’s see. A fake Barbour from a garden centre in Bagshot: not my first choice. Another one, but this one was in blue rather than olive-green. A set of flannel shirts, squared almost tartan. “Marjorie, are you Scottish?” I had to ask. I was pretty sure that number of squares couldn’t be associated in any way, shape or form with any of the most well-known Scottish clans (and if that was the case, tartan would be more than welcome), but perhaps some minor clan? Maybe a secret one.

  “No, my dear: what a question. My family is right here from Berkshire, I believe at some point one of my great-grandfathers married an Irish lady, but I’m sure nobody after that even dared to do such a thing.”

  Near the pseudo-tartan shirts (a quick check revealed they were coming from the very same garden centre) – Ta-Daaa – was a very pretty collection of wellies. Of course they matched the coats: olive-green and blue. They were the top end, I should say – Hunter wellies – and I could also spot a few others. One pair had red flowers on them; there was a Christmassy pair in red with snowflakes and, of course, for the grand occasions, one pair with cats.

  I’m being horrible, I know; poor Marjorie also had clothes that were more “regular”, but there was nothing I was impressed with, nothing that would make her stand out from the crowd.

  I had to spend a few days cataloguing the existing clothes and asking Marjorie how she ended up buying such outfits. It came out that, since the departure of her beloved husband a few years back, she’d decided to settle for “comfortable”. She spent the first period of her life after her husband’s death alone, not willing to see anybody or be involved in any kind of activity, despite all the efforts of her close friends and family. Eventually the requests and the invites became less frequent and she started dedicating more time to her cats: a couple at first, and then more and more, mostly from the nearby rescue centre in Old Ascot. The cats and her garden became her centres of attention, her reasons for living, mostly to fill her day and cover the pain she was still feeling for her departed husband.

  I’ve never been in love in such a way, and I felt my heart sinking as her story was unveiled. She’d had a love that made her life happy, worth living and breathing, and made the two of them want to grow old together. They met when they were both in their mid-twenties and had never been separated since, not even for a short vacation. They were inseparable, two faces of the same medal; friends couldn’t think about one without the other. The cancer had taken him almost a decade ago, and since then Marjorie had started her slow but inescapable decline. So, could I make any difference, with my little clothes advice and fashion tips on the tip of my tongue? Could I really transform Marjorie from an old cat lady into someone that could, again, enjoy the many years of life she had to come?

  I had my doubts – some big ones, actually – that kept me awake at night. That, and my allergies, which made my nose become as big as a potato and as red as Father Christmas, despite the overdose of Benadril, corticosteroids, decongestant sprays, plus some other witch-doctor countermeasures I found from friends and family. I promised myself I would go beyond my capabilities to do what I could for Marjorie, and walk away without a penny if I couldn’t make a difference.

  I worked like a horse, early mornings at her house, showing her ideas I’d had the day before, and in the afternoon scavenging the most exclusive underground shops. I called in favours, made promises I couldn’t maintain, just to come back to Marjorie with something suitable. We started getting somewhere and from being the nice girl who went to visit her for a chat, I became something different, something more. Perhaps a friend, I would say, despite being one permanently affected by allergies and with an odd fixation with clothes. We talked about our lives, our desires, the dreams we’d realised and the ones we hadn’t. We laughed, we cried and we shared afternoon tea and cakes.

  I was almost done with my work there. Marjorie got it: she perfectly understood what I was saying, not only about appearance, but also about the need for a human being to be out with others, especially one that loved us. To love, be loved and give the best of ourselves –even if sometimes the others are just cats.

  I had a final surprise for Marjorie, when after six weeks (yes, I was late), she looked like an elderly model. I took her to my friend Mario, a hair stylist in Maidstone who could do wonders. Not that Marjorie needed them; she was an attractive woman still in her prime. It was just that the curly, white-blond hair was more suitable on a mop than on somebody’s head. I was not disappointed; I can hardly describe the joy I found in her transforming into an even more beautiful woman than she already was. Her perplexed look soon transformed into a smile and then an even bigger one, as Mario proceeded with his work. She was happy and so was I.

  The proof is in the pudding, or so they say, and for Marjorie it was in a dinner that Marianne had organised, involving most of the old “Lady Gaga’s” friends. As soon as Marianne saw the results of my efforts (and maybe the result of my allergy), she looked me straight in the eye. There was no need to speak, and at that point, I knew from her expression that I could never go back to being a secretary. Also because they’d fired me the previous week for not showing up!

  I knew I had a new career: something that was mine alone and that would make me happy going to work, every single day, for the rest of my life.

  CHAPTER 12
/>   We were ready to face Lady Whilsham, or at least, I was. Ritchie was shaking like a leaf and kept wandering around the office trying to figure out what he needed for the meeting. I teased him: “Ritchie, you have to do the bottoms-up approach in these situations.”

  “Oh, my beloved teacher, what would that be?”

  “You start from the bottom and you go up, like a checklist. Do you wear shoes? Do you wear socks? And so on. Can’t be unsuccessful.”

  “Ha ha: very funny. You say that because you’ve done it umpteen times. Presentation is everything; I have to have the right pad, the right pen. GiGi, this is a biggie; we can’t fail.”

  “Don’t worry; we’re going to be fine. Just be yourself.”

  “I don’t like myself at the moment, not until I find the right pen.”

  Eventually we were able to get out of the door and catch a taxi. And they say women take too long to get ready. Ha!

  Fifteen minutes later we were in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where you could actually smell the richness even from within the taxi.

  Lady Whilsham lived in an end-of-terrace in one of those little roads between Old Brompton Road and the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital; although I’m sure she wouldn’t be amused if I called that beautiful three-storey house, with lovely cream bricks, an “end-of-terrace”. A willow was growing in the front garden, and many other properties in the surrounding area were under renovation. For sure, they were digging underneath the properties – one of the latest fashions in that area. As space came at a premium and there were limitations on how much you could extend the properties, the very rich started expanding underground, sometimes even two or three levels, adding hidden garages, swimming pools and even cinema rooms.