Alice walked her usual route to Kensington Gardens, releasing Agatha from her lead, so that she could sniff her favourite spots along the avenue of sycamore trees. She found comfort in the familiar morning commute: the runners, the young mothers with their pushchairs, the scooter kids and a gentleman Sikh who she often saw walking with his stick. In the distance, the ducks took off, skimming the surface of the pond and up towards the sprawling branches of the bare elms and the white sky above. There was an icy chill in the air, and Alice shivered, retrieving her woolly beret from her pocket and pulling it low over her ears.
She didn’t usually allow rude people to bother her, but her encounter with Mr Mantis smarted. She’d dearly wanted to buy the ground-floor flat herself when it had come onto the market eighteen months ago, but the property had rocketed in value, and it was completely out of her budget. She’d re-mortgaged too many times and taken out too many loans over the years to help Jasper, and her line of credit was running out.
But it irked her that the spacious flat, with its stately period features, had been sold to such thoughtless neighbours who’d ripped the guts of it out, the endless building work causing no end of dust and noise. It puzzled Alice that they’d managed to get such a modern refurbishment in a listed building past the planning department. She didn’t trust for a second that they had the right permissions. And now, having removed all of the insulation, they had the gall to complain about Agatha. Agatha was a dream compared to most dogs. Well, compared to any dog, as far as Alice was concerned. It was most discombobulating to be complained about for just living one’s own life in one’s own home. It was most un-neighbourly. People just didn’t have any manners these days and, as Mrs Doulton had always insisted, manners were everything.
Sometimes, it felt as if the world was just changing far too fast. Take her neighbourhood, for instance. Alice had bought the bohemian basement flat before Notting Hill and its environs had become full of rich bankers. At the time, the half-derelict mansion block flat had been a bargain and she’d paid for it outright in cash from the sale of her mother’s jewellery. She’d kept only the Victorian spinner necklace from the box of shiny baubles she’d inherited and tried to stop minding so very much that Jasper, her younger brother, had got the whole family estate. She couldn’t fathom why her free-spirited parents had kept such an antiquated clause in their will, passing Hawthorn Hall down the male line. But then, they probably hadn’t expected to die in a helicopter crash, after one of their legendary parties, causing Jasper to inherit when he’d been a clueless eighteen-year-old. Thank God for Mrs Doulton, who’d stayed on to run the whole place.
The pull of Hawthorn Hall was always there, but it would never be Alice’s. And anyway, what would she do with it if it were? She wouldn’t want to rattle around in Sussex all by herself. Hawthorn was more suited to Jasper and his boys, although Sassy (or @yummymummyinthehall as she apparently called herself on Instagram) had no clue how to run the place.
Besides, Alice loved London. Though, at this time ofyear with the Christmas decorations up, it was hard to combat the feeling that her life hadn’t quite panned out as she’d hoped. As she crossed through the ornate, rusty-red Queen’s Park gate and waited at the lights, a threesome of London buses squished together at the stop opposite, the sides of each decorated with a variation of the same advert for the latest movie romcom, depicting a perfect family opening presents next to a roaring fire.
She’d always assumed that she’d have her own luxury house like the one in the advert by now. In her mind’s eye, she could perfectly envisage a hallway, a massive tree, the bannisters up the stairs decorated with ivy and lights, her brood of talented children jumping around in excitement; the comfortable, stylish drawing room filled with eclectic, arty friends; and in the centre of them all, pouring champagne, her husband, who she imagined was tall and mysterious – like a friendlier Captain von Trapp.
But this fantasy had somehow failed to materialise in any shape or form. She rarely pondered the fact that she was childless and single, but Christmas did rather serve to rub it in. Not for the first time, she wondered how it had all happened so fast – that her fertile years had passed in a flash whilst she’d been working. She’d assumed that if love were to find her, then it just would, despite Jinx telling her repeatedly that it wasn’t how it worked these days. She’d steadfastly refused to put up her profile online, finding the whole idea of dating a stranger utterly distasteful and embarrassing. But having failed over the last twenty years to meet even one single, eligible man, Alice had reluctantly concluded that Jinx might have been right all along.
The buses were on the move now and they drove off in unison on their route towards Clapham. The pedestrian crossing flashed, breaking her out of her reverie. She walked determinedly forward, pulling Agatha who wanted to say hello to a Labrador going the other way.
Her life was perfectly satisfactory, Alice reminded herself. Besides, in her experience, children were totally overrated and not nearly as rewarding as a dog. And she had her business.
Yes, right foot forward, she thought. There was work to be done.
Ten minutes later, Alice arrived at a cream Regency building. Its glossy black door had once been the portal to a gentlemen’s club, but the building was now full of offices. Like everyone else who crammed their businesses into the tiny spaces inside, Alice had chosen it solely for its prestigious postcode, just a stone’s throw from Berkeley Square.
Inside was far more utilitarian than the Doric columns outside might have suggested. Walking two at a time up the grey stairs with their reinforced steel treads, Agatha panting and hopping up beside her, Alice passed several offices until she got to the door with the frosted glass, which read, ‘The Good Household Management Agency’.
It had been Mrs Doulton who’d suggested the name for the agency since a book with ‘good’, ‘household’ and ‘management’ in the title had done very well for her distant relative. Alice knew that her old mentor would have been very proud that she’d been in business for over twenty-five years. Though probably, like Alice, she’d also be a little disappointed that in that time she’d failed to move into better, more brightly lit and spacious offices. They’d come close, of course, when the agency was doing well in the boom of the two-thousands, but the rent had sky-rocketed. And in recent years, the Covid pandemic certainly hadn’t helped.
It was a non-stop job supplying the carefully vetted domestic staff for her clients’ extravagant townhouses and sprawling country piles. Running the kind of high-end, event-filled life of the uber rich required good staff and Alice prided herself on supplying only the very best. Her old-fashioned Rolodex was stuffed with everyone from chefs, nannies, chauffeurs, estate managers, PTs and PAs, to mixologists, maids, gardeners and housekeepers, many of whom had been on her books for years.
She understood that for her clients, exceptionally high standards needed to be maintained and her staff knew that discretion was the key. No matter what the problem behind closed doors, staff from Alice’s agency were always on-hand to fix it.
‘Morning,’ she said, entering. ‘How are we?’
The cramped office contained two desks in the reception area – one for Helly and one for Jinx, and a green sofa. Alice’s office was through a glass divide, but she rarely ever closed the door.
Helly put down her knitting, the ball of purple wool falling off the front of her desk and spinning towards Alice’s feet.
‘Oh, Alice, quick,’ Helly said, and Alice grabbed the wool before Agatha got hold of it. Agatha considered Helly’s knitting to be a particularly fun game and had once managed to unravel a whole jumper.
Helly was in her early twenties and had the kind of modern cropped haircut that Alice had always wanted at her age but had never quite mustered the nerve to get. She had multiple piercings in her ears and a nose stud, although Alice had drawn the line at Helly’s septum ring in the office. With her deadpan voice and all the piercings, Jinx had worried Helly wouldn’t take to the work, but Alice had spotted a well-brought-up, organised young person with an old soul. And, despite Jinx’s initial misgivings, she had turned out to do her job surprisingly well.
Jinx was warming herself against the fan heater, and now turned around in a way that a starlet from an old movie might, her arms outstretched.
‘There you are. My baby, my baby,’ she said in a silly voice, scooping up Agatha and nuzzling her.
‘Good morning to you too,’ Alice said, pointedly, making Jinx laugh – the same deep, raucous laugh she’d had since they were children at school together. The kind of laugh that had got them into trouble with their teachers.
After their A levels, when Jinx had been off on multiple gap years, they’d lost touch, and in her early twenties, when Alice had been dealing with the fall-out of her parents’ sudden demise, she’d watched from afar as Jinx, armed with that very laugh and a swagger to match, had become an ‘It’ girl in London in the mid Nineties.
Always pictured in the gossip columns on the arm of some minor prince or playboy, Jinx’s first celebrity wedding to an oil magnate’s son had lasted all of six months. When Jinx had called out of the blue from the South of France, in floods of tears, explaining that she was penniless and humiliated, Alice hadn’t hesitated in helping her out. Husband number two had seemed a better prospect, but he’d turned out to be a rotter too. Husband number three had hardly been any better. And when husband number four had died unexpectedly in a hot tub – which Jinx hadn’t been in at the time – Jinx had cleaned up her act and declared that she was off men forever. It was then Alice had invited her to come aboard to help run the agency. From day one she’d been a natural, and in recent years had really come into her own, branching out into a very successful concierge service for their clients.
‘What on earth are you wearing?’ Alice asked, squinting at Jinx’s stripey taffeta dress with puffed sleeves. She looked alarmingly like a deckchair.
‘Don’t you love being old enough for things to come back into fashion?’
‘It’s very Princess Diana,’ Alice ventured, knowing the compliment would land with her friend, who loved the royals and had never really stopped being a Sloane Ranger – for whom the iconic Princess had, of course, been the main torchbearer. ‘But maybe one for spring? Didn’t you hear we’re expecting snow?’
‘Hasn’t the royal family been cancelled? I don’t know why you two still harp on about them,’ Helly said, not looking up from her knitting.
Alice, who along with Jinx had mourned profoundly the passing of the late Queen, was saved from entering a debate about loyalty and service when the buzzer sounded.
Helly leant into the comms screen.
‘It’s that girl for the interview,’ she said. ‘She’s early.’
‘Good,’ Alice said. ‘Bring her in.’