Best of Friends

‘You shouldn’t get so hyper about everything,’ was his standard phrase whenever Abby got in a flap about being late. Naturally, his saying this just made Abby even more hyper and irritated into the bargain. Could he not realise how annoying he was?

It was a relief to retreat to their room to get ready. It was a pretty nice bedroom, and one of the first she’d redecorated when they’d moved in. Floor-to-ceiling wardrobes (‘essential for hiding clutter’, as Abby herself said) and a bed with storage underneath. Everything was rich cream and cool apple green, and there wasn’t so much as an out-of-place magazine to ruin the aura of classic calmness. It was hell to keep it like that. As Abby professionally advocated the use of trios of decorative storage boxes to hide everyone else’s clutter, she felt she had to use them herself, but she could never remember which held what. She always ended up opening the wrong one for her jewellery and finding make-up instead. And she could never lay hands on a pen. It might be heresy to think so, but she almost missed the jam jar full of wonky biros that used to sit on her dressing table in the old house, before she’d learned how to declutter.

Abby’s cupboards were where it had all started, really. Not her wardrobe – recently featured in Style magazine – or her bathroom – a shrine to Zen-like bathing that had cost a fortune to install – but her kitchen cupboards, where a simple rotation system of putting new tins and jars to the back meant that nothing ever had to be thrown out because it was months past the sell-by date. The list on the cork board also helped. Any item taken from the fridge, larder or cupboard was listed in the handy notebook with the pen attached, so that when Abby did her once-a-month stocking-up shop, she knew exactly what was needed.

A naturally tidy person, she’d hit upon the idea of offering her tidy mind to others in an attempt to help people organise their lives. Jess had just turned ten and Abby found she had time on her hands.

Originally, she’d started sorting out wardrobes: helping women with scores of identical black clothes prioritise and bin anything they hadn’t worn for years. It had been a cottage industry, really – a few mornings a week in which she’d given her clients the courage to throw out much loved but threadbare garments and sell on those barely worn. She wasn’t a stylist, she told customers, just a de-junking merchant.

‘You can buy new clothes yourself afterwards – I’m just helping you let go of the old stuff.’

The breakthrough had come after two years of this when a customer had sighed at the pristine state of Abby’s kitchen cupboards and said she wished she was as organised.

Abby offered to write down her system.

‘No, do it for me,’ begged the woman.

Soon Abby was organising clutter-free systems for home offices and sorting out houses stuffed with possessions where nobody could find anything any more. She was ruthless with old cards, newspaper clippings and letters from old flames, but gentle with the person reluctantly throwing out all their treasures.

‘You’re not using it, it’s using you,’ was her mantra. ‘If it’s not useful or beautiful, dump it! You’ll feel so much better when your life is decluttered.’

When she decluttered the office of a magazine journalist, who wrote about the empowering experience of throwing out bin bags full of detritus, fame came calling.

At nearly seven o’clock, Tom’s ten-year-old Volvo creaked to a halt outside.

‘Sorry,’ he called as he slammed the front door. ‘I got stuck with drama club.’

Upstairs, fully dressed and clock-watching, Abby sighed. Typical Tom. Overseeing the drama club wasn’t even his job. What was the point of being the deputy headmaster if you had to do all the extra jobs instead of foisting them on other people? At home he never hesitated to ask Abby to do things for him, but at work, he metamorphosed into Mr No, Let-Me-Do-It.

After another five minutes of waiting for Tom to come up and change, Abby marched downstairs. She wasn’t going to say anything but she was ready and it was time they were out of the door.

Tom and Jess were in the kitchen together, laughing at some shared joke.

‘Dad, you old hippie,’ Jess was saying fondly. She had her chair pushed back and her feet up on another, black-stockinged legs stretched out comfortably. ‘Go off and listen to your old Jethro Tull records, right? You are never going to be cool.’

‘I can watch MTV with the best of them,’ Tom retorted mildly. He gave his daughter a pretend slap on the wrist. ‘I was just saying I like that Chad Kruger song. Don’t send me into the old people’s home just yet.’

‘Next week, then,’ grinned Jess. ‘Shooo. I’ve got chemistry homework and you’ve got some posh do to go to.’

Tom ruffled Jess’s hair. Jess didn’t move her head away. She smiled at her father.

Abby watched them silently, half pleased that they got on so well, half jealous that she no longer shared that same easy relationship with either of them. It was as if Jess and Tom were a tight little family unit and she was out in the cold.

Selina Carson slid through the throng with all the practised ease of someone who could throw a party for three hundred people in her sleep. As publicity director of Beech Productions, Selina knew better than anyone how to stretch budgets and coax favours out of people. Without her help, the tenth anniversary party would be above a grubby pub with sausages and chips to eat and one free glass of limp champagne each. Thanks to her, it was being held in a divinely proportioned new gallery with lots of outrageous modern art on the walls, including a modern version of Ingres’s voluptuous ladies of the harem, which was being ogled by many of the male guests when they thought nobody was looking.

The wine was good (‘Think of the publicity, darling!’ she’d said to the beleaguered wine importer she normally rang when organising parties) and clearly the dim sum were going down a treat. She just hoped that nobody got food poisoning, because the caterers were new and scarily cheap. Still, you had to economise somewhere.

‘Abby, darling, how lovely to see you. And Tom.’

Selina was relieved to see Abby, as she was running out of celebrities to introduce to the big advertisers and the company’s backers there tonight. Abby would be the perfect person to feed into the slightly bored groups and make them feel like movers and shakers. Even better, Selina could quietly explain this to Abby and Abby would know just what to do. She was a professional down to her fingertips, a direct result, Selina thought, of being that touch older when fame hit.

‘Your hair’s fabulous.’

‘Thanks, Selina.’ Abby grinned. She never entirely believed it when people complimented her, a trait she’d unknowingly passed on to her daughter. They were just being nice, she felt. Didn’t they know she was just a forty-something housewife who’d struck it lucky?

‘And, Tom, you look marvellous. Now, Abby…’ Selina grasped her star’s shoulder, whispered in her ear briefly, and then steered her round to a small group of men in suits. ‘Gentlemen, you must meet Abby Barton.’

A cigar-chomping advertising mogul, who was fed up with having to make small talk to lesser beings, grabbed Abby’s hand and shook it firmly.

‘Lovely to meet you. My wife adores your show,’ he said.

‘How nice of you to say so,’ cried Abby. Selina treated this like work but it wasn’t at all. People were really so sweet.

Duty done, Selina grabbed Tom’s arm and led him to the back of the gallery where small pockets of people stood on the edge of the crowd. To the left stood two very young women who were talking quietly together but eyeing the group as though they longed to be part of it but were too shy to approach.

‘Do me a huge favour and talk to those two, will you?’ Selina begged. ‘The red-haired one is the MD’s niece. She’s coming in to work as an assistant next week but she doesn’t know anyone yet and he wants me to keep an eye on her.’

‘They’ll want real TV people.’ Tom grinned lazily down at Selina. ‘They’ll be bored with a dull old teacher.’

‘Stop fishing for compliments,’ Selina scolded, thinking how lucky Abby Barton was. With his ruffled greying hair, angular face and eyes like deep-set pools of midnight black ink, Tom Barton definitely did not fit the mould of a dull old teacher. Just because he was utterly without vanity and clearly never bothered about what he wore, it didn’t mean that he wasn’t an attractive man. There was, she thought, something sexy about all that intense brain power, and his other-worldliness reminded Selina of a patrician Knight of the Round Table, always choosing the hard path because suffering was nobler. Tom made such a change from the thrusting young things who worked in television and who wore much better suits than Tom’s shabby grey one, but who could only talk about their new cars or their high-tech mobile phones. Tom could blind you with brilliance over the fall of the Byzantine Empire – Selina knew; she had hung on every word of that particular conversation, and, strangely, she’d never been interested in history before. He’d definitely grown better looking with age too. Lucky Tom. No, Selina corrected herself, lucky Abby.

She’d bet he was a darling at home. Those gentlemanly types were always rushing to open doors and carry in the shopping for you. Selina was unattached and had to drag her own shopping in from the car, more’s the pity.

For three-quarters of an hour, Tom and Abby didn’t catch sight of each other. Abby charmed her way through several groups of people, aware that her husband would be perfectly happy on his own. Tom said that years of suffering through parent-teacher nights meant there was no social occasion on which he was stuck for words.

It was nearly nine when Abby escaped from the final group, all of whom were nicely merry and already planning where they’d go next. She herself had stopped after one small glass of wine – it was her turn to drive home. She peered round the room and finally spotted Tom in a corner with two attractive young women. Twenty-somethings, dolled up in the high-street version of the designer suede skirt and cashmere knit that Abby was wearing.

The three of them certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves and were laughing as though they’d found more to talk about than television ratings and tax breaks for production companies. The blonde was nearly as tall as Tom and, from Abby’s viewpoint, she was definitely giving him the come-on, angling her skinny pelvis towards him, smiling, even flicking her hair coquettishly.

Abby felt the mildest tinge of irritation. Not that she was worried about Tom – heavens no. Tom was quite genuinely immune to flirting. If offered a choice between a discussion on the intellectual concept of school league tables or a torrid session in bed with a supermodel, he’d plump for the discussion. But that girl should know better. If she got any closer to Tom, she’d be on top of him.

‘Hello,’ Abby said breezily, and slipped an arm through her husband’s. ‘Ready to go yet?’

‘Oh, you can’t go now,’ wailed the blonde, her pretty face assuming a child-like petulance. ‘We’re having such a nice time. Nobody ever explained things to me in school like Tom can. He’s telling us all about girls in harems like in that picture over there.’

Abby wondered who she was. Somebody’s model girlfriend? A would-be TV star?

‘My wife says we have to go and we have to go,’ Tom replied, giving the blonde a warm smile.

Abby’s irritation level ratcheted up another notch. Tom made it sound as if she was a martinet dragging him away from fun. All she needed was a rolling pin to hit him over the head and she’d be perfectly in character.

‘Don’t let me tear you away, darling,’ she said, with heavy emphasis on the ‘darling’.

‘Yes, stay a bit longer,’ begged the blonde leggy section of his audience. ‘Just for another drink?’

‘Yes, do,’ said the other girl.

Tom shot a glance at his wife. His weakness was a captive audience.

‘Of course, stay,’ Abby said easily, her professional mask firmly in place. ‘I have lots of people to talk to, anyhow. I just thought we should get home to Jess before too long. Our daughter,’ she explained politely to the blonde.

Bright-faced, she surged back into the party and found Selina.

‘Anyone else you want me to talk to?’ she asked.

‘You look very flushed, Abby,’ said Selina in surprise. ‘Are you all right?’

The journey home was silent. Abby, glad to have the diversion of driving, stared grimly at the road and told herself that she was overreacting. Tom had simply been polite. Selina had asked him to talk to the girls, he’d explained.

All he’d been doing was enjoying a relaxing glass of wine after a long day, Abby thought. Nothing more. And it was probably nice to have people listen to him when he talked: he was always saying that the pupils in the boys’ school where he worked were so focused on exams that they only wanted to hear things they could use for the Junior or Leaving Certs.

‘I’m tired,’ he said, through a Grand Canyon of a yawn, without bothering to put his hand over his mouth. ‘Those duty parties are always exhausting.’

Abby’s anger resurfaced and she had to bite her lip so she wouldn’t point out that he hadn’t seemed in the least bit exhausted earlier. ‘Mmm,’ was all she said.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got a headache.’ And that was more or less true, she thought. Irritation always gave her a headache because she clenched her jaw so tightly.

‘Oh.’ With that, Tom leaned back against his headrest and closed his eyes. He could sleep anywhere.

Abby gripped the steering wheel tightly and drove on into the night, thinking of all the smart remarks she should have made to put the blonde twenty-something bimbo in her box. If only Tom still gave her that kind of attention.

CHAPTER THREE

The weekend whizzed past with the whole family resolutely doing their own things. Jess spent most of Saturday in her room revising, then Abby dropped her off at Steph’s to get ready for their friend’s party. Abby had given permission for Jess to stay the night at Steph’s, and she couldn’t very well argue when Steph’s mother phoned on Sunday to say the family were going out to lunch and they’d love to have Jess along.

Tom was caught up in rehearsals for the school drama group’s play all day Saturday and didn’t get home until late. On Sunday, he told Abby he’d have to spend the entire day marking homework, and he positioned himself at the kitchen table, his papers spread in front of him and a solemn look on his face. Feeling strangely abandoned, Abby retired to the living room with the papers and ended up dozing off in front of the television, only waking up later that evening when Jess slammed the front door.

‘How was the party?’ Abby asked eagerly, coming into the hall to greet her.

Jess shot her mother an irritated expression. ‘Boring,’ she said. Well, it had been boring. There were guys there, ones Jess didn’t know, but they hadn’t shown the slightest interest in talking to her. Steph had been a huge hit, though, which made Jess feel even more humiliated. She and Steph had done everything together since they were five, and now Steph seemed to be effortlessly admitted to this wonderful grown-up club, while Jess was outside looking in, like a kid with her nose pressed up against the sweet-shop window. Still, there was no point telling her mother that. Abby wouldn’t understand.

‘I’m going to my room,’ she said, and stomped upstairs, leaving her mother in the hallway feeling miserable.

Monday rolled round and Abby woke up when Tom placed her morning cup of tea beside her alarm clock. It was his sole domestic gesture, but even after seventeen years he still did it.

‘It’s a quarter past seven,’ he said shortly.

Comatose with sleep after a restless night, Abby groaned and thought about lying there for just five more minutes. But no, that would be fatal. She hauled herself up and took a sip of scalding hot tea. She preferred her liquids boiling and Tom was one of the few people who made tea the precise way she liked it. He was a morning person, and by the time Abby made it downstairs, he’d have made his toast, perked coffee and read half the newspaper. Once Jess had made people laugh by saying the reason they had such a happy family life was because Mum was a lunchtime person, she was a nighttime person and with Tom on the alert from six a.m., the three of them never met up. She didn’t say that any more.

Abby took another sip of tea and reached for the television remote. She loved breakfast TV but knew it was as dangerous as having just an extra five minutes in bed. Each TV segment ended with a teaser for something far more interesting, and it was so easy to lie there and plan to get up when the bit about spring fashion was over. Or the bit about Cajun cooking or, oh look, holidays in Austria, that’s interesting…

She hauled herself out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom to brush her teeth. A woolly-haired woman with puffy eyes, tired skin and a pale mouth that seemed to have disappeared into her face stared back at her. Without her make-up, her new copper streaks gave her the look of Bobo the clown.

She badly needed a stint at Sally’s salon.

Both Jess and Tom looked surprised when Abby arrived downstairs twenty minutes later, fully made up and wearing one of her best jumpers, a caramel angora polo neck, over her jeans.

‘I didn’t think you had a job this morning,’ was Tom’s only comment as he buttered his final piece of toast.

Abby shot him a glare but he’d retreated behind his newspaper.

‘Thought you said you were working from home today,’ Jess added.

‘I am,’ said Abby, smiling at her daughter brightly. ‘But that’s no reason not to look good. It’s too easy to sink into dressing sloppily around the house when you’re working from home.’

She hauled out the blender and began rooting around in the freezer for fruit for a smoothie.

‘It’s stupid dressing up for home, a complete waste of time,’ said Tom absently, his eyes still on his newspaper.

‘What if someone calls at the house? I don’t want to look a mess,’ Abby replied.

‘Why bother dressing up on the off chance that someone calls in?’ Tom asked. ‘You always look OK.’

Abby’s hand stopped reaching for the raspberries, her fingers as frozen as the fruit within her grasp. OK? She always looked OK? Why did that sentence have the ring of death about it? Why did Tom’s tone of voice mirror his professional one? ‘Your son’s work is fine, Mrs X, not thrilling but OK.’

Abby didn’t want to look OK. She wanted to look bloody drop-dead gorgeous like that blonde bimbo who had been drooling over Tom at the Beech party. She wrenched a bag of raspberries out and slammed them on the worktop. Had her husband always been this insensitive or had it happened recently?

When Tom and Jess were gone, Abby spent an hour tidying the house and putting on washing. Then she sat down at the big cream desk in her study and leafed through her appointments diary. She had two diaries now: the official one Katya, her assistant, kept, which was a large suede-bound book; and her own smaller, floral version, in which she scribbled notes to herself on things she had to do and remember, like what to take to tomorrow’s meeting at Beech with the new executive producer, a hotshot who would also be heading the company’s new commissions division.

Katya worked only two days a week when Abby wasn’t busy and three when she was. As a young mother with two small children, this arrangement suited her. When Abby was filming, Katya could be on call to help her and deal with phone calls, fan letters and new commissions. When Abby wasn’t filming, Katya could work from her own house and pick up Abby’s calls.

Today, Katya was at home while Abby was supposed to be working flat out on ideas for a talk at the Ideal House exhibition in three months’ time. But for once, Abby’s lively mind failed her. Usually, she could go into anyone’s home and see instantly what they needed to do to sort themselves out. She had an unerring eye for the root of the problem. Only today, she wasn’t in the mood. So she tried what she always did when she felt uninspired: opened up one of her notepads and wrote ‘ideas’ on it with a pale blue pen.

The creamy expanse of fresh paper normally invited creativity. Not today. Some doodling later, she gave up and flicked through a couple of recent copies of House Today, hoping for inspiration. In one magazine, there was a photoshoot of a television presenter called Candy, who worked on an afternoon chat show. Abby had met her once in Dublin and, innocently expecting some sort of camaraderie because they were both TV stars, had been startled to encounter frosty hauteur.

‘You’re from that sweet little programme on tidying houses, aren’t you?’ Candy had said bitchily to Abby. ‘I do so love to see newcomers getting on. But you have to be in this business for the long haul. I see so many people come, and then go when the ratings drop.’ And she went on to tell Abby all about her own successful career, clearly implying that the star of Declutter would not last the course.

Abby was far too vulnerable and unsure of herself to be a successful bitch, but she wasn’t a pushover.

‘It’s true, you never know when a show will start to lose viewers,’ Abby said, with some innocent eyelash-batting of her own. ‘The ratings have been so high – better than EastEnders for the final show in the first series – but we can’t sit on our laurels. Bye, so nice to meet you. I’ve always thought you’re such a trooper for all those years in the business.’ And she walked off, leaving Candy spitting at both the mention of mega ratings and the implication that she was getting old. Although she certainly didn’t look old in the magazine, Abby reflected grimly.

‘Candy welcomes House Today into her lovely home,’ cooed the editorial, under two large photos of a kitchen and a bedroom, both of which must have been overhauled by an army of Filipino cleaners if the sparkle on the granite kitchen worktops was anything to go by.

For once, Abby’s gaze didn’t concentrate on the house, searching out things she hated, like the swagged curtains so beloved of everyone and their granny. She stared instead at Candy, who looked spookily young with her long caramel limbs, wide blue eyes and skin plumped up and dewy as a just-picked peach.

‘She’s forty-eight if she’s a day,’ Abby said crossly. ‘They’ve touched up those photos.’

She unearthed her magnifying glass from a drawer and began to examine the pictures: Candy wearing low-slung denims with a saucepan in one hand; Candy, barefoot and curled up in a giant armchair. Abby peered closely but couldn’t detect a line anywhere. Bitch. She must have had some work done, an entire renovation job from the foundations up, at that. Abby slapped the magazine shut and glared at the wall behind her desk. On it hung the big ‘Star Certificate’ that the Declutter team had given her as a joke at the end of the last series.

‘Thanks, Abby,’ it said. ‘We love working with you. You’re a star.’ A big gold star surmounted the words. She’d been so touched.

Abby stared at it dully. ‘You’re a star.’

‘I don’t bloody well feel like one today,’ she said crossly.

On Tuesday morning, Abby was the first up. She wanted a head start on looking good because today she was going to meet Beech’s just-hired executive producer and new commissions head, a woman called Roxie O’Halloran, who apparently wanted ‘to toss around some new ideas for the show’. Abby had a bad feeling about that. She might not have much experience of this kind of meeting, but an instinct told her that ‘toss around new ideas’ was business code for ‘change everything utterly’. She’d rung Flora, the show’s director and a good friend, for inside information on the newcomer but Flora knew nothing and had blithely said that Beech were hardly going to change such a successful format, were they?