Laura looked at the shoes in her hand and knew before the assistant had come back with her size that she would buy them, even if they didn’t fit. They were red, and that’s all they needed to be. She was almost famous for them around here, and Jack always teased her about it – ‘You know what they say – red shoes, no knickers.’ Of course, he knew full well she’d be the last person to go knickerless. Maybe that was why he found it so funny. Anyway, she preferred him saying that to his other response, which was to roll his eyes. ‘You’ve got almost fifty pairs!’ he’d cried last time before he’d caught sight of her expression and quickly crossed the kitchen to apologize, saying he secretly quite liked that she had a ‘signature’.
The shop assistant came back, shaking her head apologetically.
‘All I’ve got left is a thirty-six,’ she shrugged. ‘We’re completely out of thirty-eights, even in the other colour-ways.’
Laura bit her lip and stalled for a moment as the assistant moved to return the shoe to the display shelf. ‘Well . . . I’ll take them anyway,’ she muttered, looking away as she reached into her bag for her credit card. ‘They’re such a good price now. There’ll be someone I can give them to . . .’
‘Okay.’ The assistant hesitated, casting a glance at Laura’s red patent slip-ons, which she’d polished so hard at the breakfast table that morning that their eyes met in the reflection.
A minute later, she savoured the jangle of the bell on the door as it closed behind her and stood for a moment on the pavement, adjusting to the brightness outside and the change of pace. The day was already limbered up and elastic, the late-November sun pulsing softly in the sky with no real power behind it, local businessmen rushing past with coffees-to-go slopping over the plastic covers and pensioners pushing their shopping carts between the grocer’s and the butcher’s, tutting over the price of brisket; a few mothers with prams were congregating around the bakery windows, talking each other into jam doughnuts and strong coffee to commiserate over their broken nights.
Laura turned her back on them all – glad their problems weren’t hers – and started walking down the street in the opposite direction, swinging the carrier bag in her hand so that it matched the sway of her long, light brown hair across her narrow back. Her studio was in a converted keep, just beyond the old yacht yard, eight minutes away. People tended to have a romantic notion of what it must be like when she told them where she worked, but it wasn’t remotely pretty to look at. Tall and ungainly on its stilts, it towered over all the corrugated-panel workshops and dilapidated boat huts on the banks, and her square studio-room atop them looked like it had been bolted on by an architect who’d trained with Lego. The wood was thoroughly rotted, although you wouldn’t know to look at it, as it had been freshly painted two summers previously by a student at the sailing club who was after extra cash. She loved it. It felt like home.
She turned off the high street and marched down the shady grey-cobbled lanes, past the tiny pastel-coloured fishermen’s cottages with bushy thatched roofs – which were now mostly second homes for affluent Londoners – and over the concrete slipway to the compacted mud towpath that led down towards her studio. It sat on a hillock in the middle of the estuary. ‘St Laura’s Mount’, Jack called it. The brown water merely slapped at the stilt legs during the high spring tides, but the path over to it was only accessible at low tide, which was why she was enjoying a late start this morning. Strictly speaking, if she really cared about doing a nine-to-five working day, she could have bought a small dinghy to row over in, but she rather liked the idiosyncratic hours it forced upon her. But even more than that – and she could never admit this to Jack – she loved the occasional stranding overnight, when her absorption in her work led her to ignore the alarm clock and the path became submerged. After the first ‘stranding’, she had brought a duvet, pillow and overnight bag to the studio so that she was properly set up for the eventuality, but Jack hated it. He felt it encouraged her – enabled her – to continue working when it was time to stop and come home.
The tide was almost fully out now, and the mudflats looked as glossy as ganache, but Laura didn’t stop to watch the avocets and bitterns picking their way weightlessly over them. Their mutual fascination with each other had worn off a while ago and now they existed in apathetic harmony. She walked quickly up the two flights of metal stairs and unlocked the door. Jack was forever telling her they had to up the security on the place. She had thousands of pounds’ worth of materials in the studio.
Dumping her handbag on the floor and carefully lifting the too-small shoes out of their box, she placed them on the windowsill. They looked like two blood-spots in the all-white interior. The wide planking floorboards had been painted and overvarnished so that they looked glossy and more expensive than they really were, and it had taken over twenty tester pots and Jack on the edge of a nervous breakdown before she had found the perfect white for the walls. She hadn’t wanted it to look cold in the winter, but it did, in spite of her best efforts – there’s precious little that can counteract the pervasive grey light that characterizes the Suffolk winter. She had had some blinds run up in sandy-coloured deckchair stripes and that had helped warm things up a bit. It had to – the windows ran round every side of the room so there were lots of them. Jack always used to worry that she was too exposed working up here, with 360-degree views where anyone could see her alone in the creek. But Laura insisted that neither bored teenagers nor avid bird-watchers had any interest in her.
The red flashing light on the answering machine caught her eye and she went over to listen. After several years of working alone with only Radio Four for company, it was still a surprise to realize that people were actively seeking her out and calling her up with commissions. The move from jewellery hobbyist to professional goldsmith had been accidental, when the charm necklace she’d made for Fee’s mother had provoked a positive response at the WI. After weeks of ignoring Fee’s nagging, well-intentioned demands to set herself up properly, her friend, young as she was, had taken it upon herself to place a formal advert in the Charrington Echo. Rather serendipitously, the editor of the FT magazine had been holidaying in neighbouring Walberswick at the time and happened to chance upon it whilst waiting for her lunch order in the pub. An hour later she had knocked on Laura’s door and from there it had been but a hop, skip and a jump to the prestigious placement in the FT magazine’s jewellery pages.
Today there were two messages, both from Fee – now working as her self-appointed PR and manager on the days she wasn’t manning reception at the leisure centre. Through squeals and much clapping, she was forwarding appointment dates for three prospective new clients. Yesterday there had been another one, and this was several weeks after the article had come out. Laura scribbled the dates and times in her diary, shaking her head over the fact that the commissions were still coming in. The feature had been about new-generation jewellers, and the box on Laura had been the smallest, squeezed in at the very last minute. She had pretty much dismissed it as soon as she’d seen it because they’d cropped the photo so you couldn’t see her shoes, but clearly lots of people hadn’t, because the little red light was still happily flashing most mornings when the tide finally let her in.
Laura walked over to the bench and began casting a critical eye over the previous day’s work – a necklace that was for a wedding next week. She caught a glimpse of the grey heron beating past the east window, and knew her eleven o’clock appointment had arrived hot on her heels. Good old Grey. He was better than any CCTV system. He stood for hours in the reed bed, only retracting his neck and leaping into flight when one of her customers passed by on the path to the studio. Like the avocets and bitterns, he just ignored her now.
‘Hello?’ a male voice drifted up questioningly, and she heard his shoes on the patterned metal treads.
‘Come up to the top,’ Laura called before taking a deep, calming breath. She slid the unfinished necklace into a drawer and refilled the kettle, somewhat aghast to notice that the limescale had flourished unchecked so that it looked more like a coral reef in there.
‘Hello,’ the voice said, near now.
She set a smile upon her lips, took a deep breath and turned. ‘Hi,’ she replied, as a well-dressed man emerged through the doorway.
He stopped where he was, either transfixed or appalled by the sight of her. In keeping with her ‘take me as you find me’ defiance (and in direct contrast to Fee’s ‘take me, I’m yours’ dress sense), she was sporting a grubby pair of boyfriend jeans that fell so low they exposed the upper curve of her hip bones, and a faded black Armani A/X sweatshirt of Jack’s. The only things about her that were shiny were her teeth and the glossy red flats on her feet.
‘Ms Cunningham?’ he enquired, holding out a hand.
‘Laura,’ she replied, shaking his hand so lightly that her fingers slipped away just as he squeezed and he was left gripping her fingertips. He looked down at their star-crossed hands and released hers.
He straightened up. ‘Robert Blake. You were expecting me?’
In her dreams, maybe.
His movements were assured, extending a sense of total control and purpose, and Laura immediately understood nothing ever happened in his life accidentally or without reason. He was utterly imposing and yet curiously boyish – as though she could still catch a glimpse of his twelve-year-old self in his face.
It was an intriguing clash. His voice was deep and he was tall, five foot eleven or so, mid-thirties with coppery-brown eyes and a wide full-lipped mouth of extraordinarily even teeth. His hair was carefully combed from his face but she could see it would only take one of the easterly zephyrs that zipped round the yard to unleash a riot of light brown curls and an easy smile. His bespoke shirt and mannered formality told her he’d seen the world; the light in his eyes told her he’d seduced women on every continent.
Laura nodded, knowing she was probably blushing. ‘Of course. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’
His eyes lifted off her to scan the room and she saw them rest on the tiny new shoes, still in their box.
‘You found your way here okay, I hope?’ she asked quickly, motioning for him to sit on one of the huge white sofas.
‘Eventually, although I thought my satnav was playing up at first. It took me a while to believe you’d really be down that tiny track. I don’t usually have to pack wellingtons for a meeting,’ he said, giving her a small, amused smile that made her stomach flip for joy and confirmed all of her instincts.
He sat down and looked back at her, and she caught a flash of the oyster-coloured silk lining of his jacket and the hand-stitching on his shoes. She could see nothing of the twelve-year-old in him here.
‘All my clients have problems trying to find me on their first visits out here. I suppose I really ought to move to somewhere more accessible, but . . . I like to be near the water.’ She shrugged, all out of small talk. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Or coffee? It’s only instant, I’m afr—’
‘No,’ he interrupted, before softening it with a ‘thanks’.
Laura picked up her notebook from the workbench and sat on the sofa opposite. It was set just slightly too far back and she had to perch on the front of the cushion.
She took a deep breath and exhaled quickly. Soonest done, soonest over. She wasn’t a great people person at the best of times, much less dealing with people who looked like that. ‘So, how can I help you? What is it you’re after?’
He took his eyes off her and paused for a moment, bringing a fist to his mouth as though he intended to cough into it. ‘Well, it’s for my wife,’ he said, his voice quieter than before, as though his wife might be hiding out on the stairs. ‘Obviously Christmas is coming up, but it’s her birthday, too, on the twenty-third. I need to get her something special.’
She nodded, knowingly. Obviously he wanted it in time for Christmas. Obviously he was married.
‘Is there enough time? Are you busy?’ he asked.
‘Rushed off my feet. Everyone wants their pieces for Christmas,’ she said, scribbling his name in her notebook.
‘Is that because of the article in the FT?’
‘Yes. Did you see it too?’
‘It’s how I found you.’
‘You and thirty others,’ she murmured, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’ She looked up to find him staring at her intently, and knew he was finding her odd. From the cut of his suit, she guessed the women in his life wore jeans in child sizes with crystals on. ‘What were you thinking for your wife?’ she asked.
‘I want a charm necklace for her. With seven charms.’
His certainty was surprising. Most clients didn’t have a clue what they wanted. ‘That’s specific. Why seven?’
‘That’s just how many I want,’ he replied, shrugging.
‘I see,’ she said, getting up and lying the notebook on the coffee table. ‘Well, I’ve got a selection of some charms I can show you now, just to give you an idea of what kinds of things I can do.’ She reached into what looked like a filing cabinet, pulled out a shallow drawer and brought it over, setting it down on the table in front of him. Some miniature charms were lined up in a neat display in military rows upon red velvet. ‘And of course, if you’ve got anything specific in mind that you don’t see here, I can make it to order.’
She sat down again, waiting for his response to the little treasures – her collection was small but refined – but he didn’t even look at them.
‘The entire necklace must be bespoke,’ he said.
Laura sat back. ‘Ah, well now, that will be significantly more difficult to arrange in time for Christmas, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s four weeks away,’ he countered, sitting up straighter.
‘Yes. But as I said, I am incredibly busy at the moment.’
‘Can’t you delegate?’
‘It’s just me,’ she replied, her politeness stretching to gossamer-thinness.
He looked out through the east window opposite him for a few moments and she could tell by the set of his jaw that he was irritated.
‘Okay. Let me explain fully what it is that I’m looking for here,’ he said, leaning forward so that his elbows were on his knees, his hands clasped together. He looked like a president come to read to schoolchildren. ‘My wife’s birthday is on the twenty-third. She hates that her birthday is on the twenty-third. Every year we throw a big party for her birthday, and every year we open the door to people saying, “Merry Christmas”. It puts a lot of pressure on me to come up with something really special that makes her birthday stand apart from Christmas. Are you with me?’
Laura sat back and frowned at him. She most certainly was not. Gorgeous he may be, but his patronizing tone was pushing all her buttons.
‘When I read that article on you, about your charm jewellery, it gave me the idea for the perfect present for her – a charm necklace, but with a difference. I don’t just want it to be decorative, or to signify last year’s holiday. I want every charm on this necklace to represent her relationship with each of the most significant people in her life. That’s why there are seven. And that’s why I can’t just . . . choose one off a tray. They have to be unique to her.’
Laura nodded, intrigued. ‘It’s a great idea. It goes a lot further than most of the jewellery I’m asked to create. Most of the time, people want charms for notable life events such as christenings, twenty-firsts, wedding anniversaries and suchlike. I’ve never been asked to . . . well, tell a life story before. It would be an exciting project for me professionally, and I can guarantee your wife would finish up with something incredibly special. But that’s a very labour-intensive commission. If you’d be happy to wait till after Christmas . . .’
‘No. Categorically not.’
‘Well then, let’s see – if you’d consider dropping the number to, say, three or four charms, there might be enough ti—’
‘No,’ he said firmly, interrupting her again.
Laura sat back, irritated and offended. He wasn’t even trying not to be rude. ‘Well then, I’m afraid we’re at an impasse, Mr Blake. There simply isn’t enough time for me to interview your wife for that many charms.’
‘You can’t interview her anyway,’ he said briskly. ‘It’s a surprise. It’s absolutely imperative that she knows nothing about it.’
Laura pursed her lips grimly. The project – ambitious though it might be – was fast losing its appeal. He might be easy on the eye, but she did not fancy several hours in his company, listening to stories about his no doubt twenty-two-year-old wife.
A BlackBerry buzzed quietly in his suit pocket and he took it out.
Laura watched him with building anger as he frowned at the message on the screen before pocketing it again. His behaviour since arriving here had been bullish and arrogant. ‘There won’t be anything for her to find out about,’ she said, shutting the notebook to signify that the meeting was over. ‘Not from me, anyway. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have to be realistic about my delivery times and my commitments to my existing clients.’
‘Are you saying . . . ?’
‘I’m saying it might be your wife’s birthday, but it is also Christmas for everybody else. If you cannot wait or compromise, then I can’t help you.’
They stared at each other, horns locked, and Laura felt the red mist descend. She didn’t fool herself for one second that she was Miss Congeniality. She knew perfectly well how tricky she was. But even she was more capable of compromise and basic manners than him.
Robert Blake stared at her for a moment, his anger seemingly matching hers, then walked away – but not towards the door. He went to the window, taking in the view. Laura’s own eyes were drawn to the horizon beyond him, and she could see, further out in the estuary, the newly exposed mud-banks drying out in the sun. In another four hours it would be slack water, and then the tide would start its silent creep back, rustling the reeds and smothering the mud that always sucked at it so greedily.
He noticed the shoes beside him and picked one of them up. It still had the tissue and toe-shaper in it.
‘For your daughter?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have a daughter,’ she replied briskly.
‘Boy?’
‘What? No,’ she snapped, flummoxed by these forays into personal chit-chat. She watched him replace the shoe carefully.
He jammed his hands casually in his pockets and wandered back towards her. ‘We’ve got off on the wrong foot,’ he said with no apparent trace of irony. ‘Perhaps I should have stated earlier that I’m paying double your fee.’
‘Double my fee?’ she echoed.
‘That’s right,’ he replied, and she saw victory creep into his eyes, the unassailable conviction that this would seal the deal. Christmas would belong to his wife alone after all. He was a businessman used to winning. No doubt the car parked on the quay with the perfectly correct satnav was a Volante or Carrera; no doubt he had a mistress who was already jockeying to be his second wife; and no doubt the fact that he was here for his wife’s present and not trawling Bond Street meant he’d already bought her the W1 trophies of the Cartier Tank watch, the Asprey tennis bracelet, the Theo Fennell diamond key and the Tiffany eternity ring.
Laura stretched herself an inch taller. ‘It’s not a matter of price,’ she said with impressive firmness, revelling in her own small victory. He had picked the wrong person to lord it over. As far as she was concerned, this was a matter of wills now, and when push came to shove, she chose which commissions she took. She was going to win this. ‘I have other clients. I can’t let them down.’
‘You don’t need to. I arranged for your assistant to contact them all on your behalf this morning and reschedule.’ He checked his watch. ‘And naturally I’ll compensate you for any commission that you lose on account of this reshuffling.’
‘Fee’s cleared my diary? On your orders?’ Laura croaked. Her head was beginning to spin.
‘You’ll find the timings much more convenient now.’
She stood up hotly, hoping to God Fee hadn’t installed CCTV for training purposes. She felt his eyes on her as she marched towards the door. There was simply nothing more to say. She had been reasonable; she had been polite. And now she was all out of both. ‘You need to leave now. I’m sorry not to have been able to help you,’ she said coldly, opening the door. She held out an arm and motioned for him to leave. ‘I hope you’re more successful hijacking Christmas for your wife somewhere else.’
His shock was palpable. ‘Now hold on! Did you hear the terms I offered you? I’m paying double your fee.’
‘There’s no need to talk to me as if I’m an idiot. You’re the one who’s not hearing, Mr Blake.’
‘Surely this is an offer too good to refuse.’
‘I don’t think so. This is my business and I work for exactly who I like, and that does not include people who rearrange my diary for their spoilt wives. It will no doubt surprise you to learn that I don’t do this for the money.’
There was a flinty silence as he took in her cold anger and her firm hand on the open door. ‘Okay, look, I’ve offended you, I can see that,’ he said, backtracking quickly. ‘But you are the only person I can come to for this.’ It seemed he’d decided flattery was now the best form of attack.
‘I find that hard to believe. There are plenty of jewellers out there and most are a lot more experienced than me.’
‘But the charms . . . no one else is doing what you’re doing. Look, I’ve bought Cat everything over the years – watches, diamonds, you name it. But this necklace, it’ll be the only piece that actually means anything to her. Please.’ His voice cracked suddenly. ‘This gift has to show her how much I lov— What she means to me.’ He paused for a moment, his previously gloating eyes now boyish and appealing. ‘Everything rests on it.’
But Laura was unmoved. ‘You had the nerve to order my staff to rearrange my commitments to suit your schedule, and that is bang out of order in my book. Now I’ll ask you again: Please. Leave. I have a lot of phone calls to make.’
They both knew she had won. Slowly, he walked to the door, then stopped by the steps in front of her. ‘You’re making a big mistake.’
‘That’s my loss, then. Goodbye,’ she said stonily, slamming the door firmly behind him. ‘And good riddance.’
She was pretty sure he heard that.