The Things We Do to Our Friends(40)

When I was young, we would go clothes shopping in Bordeaux. My mother dragged me around, pulled me into dark shops with oiled wood floors where you had to ring a bell to enter. Even at the time, it was old-fashioned. I was forced into starched dresses, garments pulled over my head roughly, cutting into me at the armpits or the waist and never quite fitting. Those items were wrong when I was seven, more suitable for a child much younger. Then I was older, and there was no money for clothes, although I craved what Adrienne and Dina wore—flared jeans and brand-new pedal pushers. Wanted to fit in with them and look the part. Perhaps if we’d had money when I was a teenager, I would have grown to have loved shopping, but there was no point—better to see fashion as unimportant and take a lofty stance against consumerism.

That wasn’t to say I didn’t notice it, though; I wasn’t interested in it for myself, but I drank it all in when it came to my friends, and with Tabitha and Ava, their clothes were a constant source of fascination. They both wore dresses a lot. Tabitha chose slippery little pieces that draped on her, or skimmed her body like a second skin in some places. Her obsession with Klimt was easy to see—necklines often fell in a deep V to reveal the bones of her chest. Lots of gold too.

Ava was not a painting or an ornament. She had all the clean lines of a brutalist building that was mid construction, as her dresses were structurally complex in the vein of scaffolding. Leather cut with net and fabrics I’d never even seen before that rippled or creased. There was always a tie or a place where the material was cut out, forcing her to fiddle with it. I’m sure this was on purpose. It drew the eye to her neck as she readjusted a bow or a zip. It made me want to reach out and touch her, and often I did, because all of us felt our way around each other with touch. Where one of us ended and the other began—the boundaries were barely there anymore.

Clothes were essential to the project, and I’d thought Ava would be guiding that part of it, but she was indifferent. For the Landores, Imogen was in charge. She loved the act of shopping; her capacity for rooting around for the perfect items seemed endless. So I went over to their flat to prepare for Tom Landore. Predictably, Imogen had been called in to perform some type of makeover. She’d bought a range of clothes: a pink silk slip, lace underwear, a designer leather handbag that I knew cost more than a month of my rent.

We always converged in Tabitha’s room. I was never in there alone, though, only when she was there too, and that day I sat on the bed. Imogen stood in front of me, her expression filled with judgment.

Tabitha moved into a variety of yoga poses by the window.

“Landore will go for you. You look enough like one of those magazine models. You just need to smarten up a bit,” Imogen said, holding up the long slip with delicate straps against herself and then tossing it over toward me.

“Underwear?” I asked. “I think I just need a swimsuit.”

“Oh, I know he won’t see it. That’s just a little something. To get you in the mood.”

Imogen sounded hateful about the mood. I picked up the slip. It was an intense pink. I put it to one side, mentally noting that Samuel would appreciate it for Perfect Pieces.

“Breathtaking!” Tabitha called over.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

Imogen’s eyes widened. “Well, well. Clare finally comes out of her shell and objects to something! I knew you would eventually.” She sounded triumphant, and a little nasty.

I met her eye. “What else do you know about them?” I asked.

“About who?” she asked innocently.

“The Landores,” I replied.

She just pursed her lips and called for Tabitha to come over.

“We’re starting?” Tabitha asked, snuggling up on the bed close to me and stroking my elbow.

I turned to her. “How did you find Mrs. Landore?” I asked.

“Oh, you don’t need to bother thinking about that!” she said breezily.

“I want to know, though.”

“Okayyy.” She stretched the word as if she was humoring a small child. “Through Samuel. She’s a close family friend.”

“And he’s okay with this?”

“Of course he is!” Tabitha turned to face me, her expression so very serious. “He approached her; he just told her what we do and how we could help her protect herself.”

We both lay back on the bed and Imogen stood in front of us to present, clearly enjoying her new involvement. She always did like the research side of it all.

“Chop chop, Immy,” Tabitha said fondly.

Imogen gave her a small smile.

“You’re always so fucking slow with everything,” Tabitha continued.

Imogen’s face fell for a second, but she recovered quickly and began. “Tom Landore seems like a bit of a dick. He’s not Eton or anything, but he did go to Oxford—PPE, as you’d expect. Moved up here to work for a bank and they bought that weird glass place. It’s not all in the house. He’s made a ton—not that she’ll see any of that.”

“You know how much money he has?” I asked.

“I have elements of his accounts. Enough for these purposes,” she replied, closing down the conversation. I wondered if it linked to Perfect Pieces, then I pushed the thought from my mind. Part of this was the pact I made with myself early on. I would never search on the internet for any information about them, ever. Doing so brought what we were doing to life too much and reminded me that these people were real. I’d only ever seen a few photographs of him, formal ones in the house. I remembered one of him standing, suit on, one hand on his wife’s shoulder as she sat below him.