Cristina Odone - The Dilemmas of Harriet Carew

Guy’s most vicious attacks are reserved for the authors who dare stray into the rather far-flung area he considers his patch: ‘What?! That idiot Crispin Kerr – the one who looks like a shampoo advert with all that blond hair – he’s got a book out on the Gobi Desert. What does that ignoramus know about the Gobi? Nothing, nada, niente ! How could anyone be fooled by that man!’ And, ‘Ha! Did you see what’s happened to Seb Colley? That pathetic TV series of his on the last maharajahs has bombed. That brilliant TV critic, the one on the Sunday Tribune , L. L. Munro, he’s really put the boot in. Calls it “Curry kitsch” and a “sorry sari saga”.’

I admire my husband’s single-minded pursuit of his objective – but I sometimes yearn to remind him that the ‘idiot’ Crispin Kerr’s books and documentaries and Francis Bolton’s ‘silly’ biography must be nice little earners.

It’s almost lunch time. ‘Does she have a lunch today?’ I ask Anjie hopefully. Most days, Mary Jane takes out, or is taken out by, some bigwig, allowing us a breathing space that I usually fill with running errands and Anjie with catching up on the stars in her secret stash of Grazia and Heat .

‘Yup.’ Anjie gives me a happy wink.

‘Good.’ I have been meaning to check out the hospice shop for a winter coat. My old black one from Hobbs, which has stood by me as long as Guy has, is embarrassingly threadbare.

Mary Jane emerges from her office, visitor in her wake. As usual, her expression is impenetrable, and it’s impossible to gauge whether HAC has just received a donation of a quarter of a million pounds or a ticking off for a poor performance.

‘It was a pleasure, thank you ever so much.’ Mary Jane puts on the gracious hostess act. ‘Would you like Anjie to order a minicab for you?’

But the moment the City man disappears, shocking Mary Jane by preferring tube to taxi, our boss reverts to type:

‘I’ve got a lunch.’ She stands by Anjie’s desk and looks down her nose at her. ‘I’m expecting a couple of important calls. I hope it’s not too much to ask that you put the answering machine on when you go for lunch.’

‘Will do,’ Anjie answers breezily, looking up from her screen for a nanosecond.

Mary Jane turns to me with an appraising look. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet. He’s a big potential donor. A property developer who’s ruffled a few feathers, so he’s trying to win brownie points by helping local charities … We’ll check dates when I come back.’ With that, she’s off.

Out comes Grazia : ‘Oh dear, I think Liz is getting too thin,’ Anjie worries over a photo of Liz Hurley looking gaunt.

‘I’m off to the hospice shop. See you in about an hour.’

‘Don’t rush back, girl. I’m meeting my William for a sandwich,’ Anjie answers, immersed in Brangelina’s latest exploits.

* * *

The hospice shop is on the High Street, a few minutes’ walk from HAC. I enter, and find myself surrounded by rows of sagging paperbacks, with Polo next to Crime and Punishment next to Forever Amber ; musty fox collars; and chipped, incomplete china sets. A tiny, bent woman, laden with carrier bags, is scouring the shelves. Unkempt grey curls escape her rain hat and mumbled words escape her lips.

I toy with the thought of buying the ancient porcelain doll that sits, staring in blue-eyed surprise, above a dented Lego box and a plastic Christmas tree. Maisie, for Christmas? But then remember my mission and set it down again on its ledge.

I pick my way past the counter that displays gaudy paste jewellery and silver cigarette lighters and christening cups, and make for the rack of second-hand clothes.

Guy calls the hospice shop the ‘bankrupts’ boutique’. Bankrupt is right. Alex came rushing in after school yesterday with the joyous news that he has been chosen for the First XV. Guy and I delighted in his achievement – until he explained he would now need a First XV blazer that costs £79.99, a tie for £12.99, and rugby shirt at £19.99, not to mention new boots and a proper kitbag with school logo.

‘A kitbag?’ Guy can’t hide our mounting despair. ‘Is that strictly necessary?’

‘Da-aaaaaaad! I don’t want to be left out when the others all have one.’ Alex throws us a look of such wretchedness I swallow my reservations and hear Guy do the same. ‘OK, OK, we’ll see what we can find at the second-hand shop.’

Alex smiles and then stuns us with: ‘And guess what? Mr Farrell says we’re going on tour to South Africa at Christmas!’ Alex punches the air. ‘Cape Town here we come!’

The trip to Cape Town, coupled with the discovery that the Griffin’s second-hand shop doesn’t have a blazer that fits our son, means I have no choice but to get myself a coat here. I had hoped to buy the charcoal wool one I had seen in Debenham’s pre-season sale, but that would mean condemning Alex to a hopelessly short-armed rugby blazer.

At Bristol as an undergraduate I bought all my clothes at the Oxfam shop. As did Charlotte: we had a spectacular array of flapper dresses for our evening wear, and some very pretty cropped beaded cardigans and flouncy skirts for everyday. My Oxfam bargains amused James, my then boyfriend: ‘Ooooooh, a bit unconventional, isn’t it, to wear someone’s granny’s cardigan?’ But as I was doing English, with lots of Keats and Coleridge and the Gothic novel, and Charlotte, Art History, our romantic taste in clothing matched our subjects.

‘Who wants to be like those dreary Sloanes?’ Charlotte would pout prettily as she donned an Oxfam cardy and gypsy skirt. ‘All those silly Laura Ashley pastels and bright-coloured cords?’

Never in a million years did I suspect that I would continue shopping at Oxfam. It was fine for a cash-strapped eighteenyear-old, but the sight of shabby elderly women browsing among the bric-a-brac nowadays sends a little shiver of anxiety down my spine. Will I be the same in my sunset years? Badly dressed, hunched under the weight of debts and family burdens, myopically searching for something ‘nice’ to cheer up the house, or the grandchildren. Penury in my thirties is one thing, but I really don’t want to be still hand-to-mouth when I’m in my sixties.

Guy refuses to address the issue of our retirement. I’ve told him how Charlotte and Jack plan to buy a farmhouse in France when Jack retires, because the living is cheaper and the French state health-care better than the NHS; and how my mother’s neighbours have moved to Spain because of the sun and the fact that they can live in a villa by the sea for the price of their little house in Tonbridge.

But Guy infuriates me by refusing to even consider making plans. ‘Oh, Harriet, you needn’t worry: things are going to get better. Just you wait: I have a very good feeling about Rajput – it’s like Bollywood meets Dad’s Army .’

I, however, am not convinced that those bickering maharajahs are going to be our meal ticket.

I resign myself to the prospect of being a regular client of this hospice shop for many years to come. Apparently, this is not as shaming in Guy’s circles as it is in mine: Guy’s mother was very open about buying her tweed suits at the charity shops in Gosport. I had assumed the Carews would consider buying second-hand clothes as demeaning as buying their own furniture. Instead: ‘Spending money on frocks is such a waste.’ Cecily Carew eyes me up and down as if I were a clothes-horse. ‘School fees and the house: those are our family’s priorities.’

For my part, I don’t want to be caught scouring the racks of clean if slightly musty clothes that someone better-off has set aside for the ‘less fortunate’, so I plan each foray to the hospice shop with precision. A) Fold one of my oldest skirts into a carrier bag. B) Step into the shop with said carrier bag. C) Look around: if I see someone I know, I smile, hand in the cast-off, and retreat. D) If the coast is clear, I pick what I want and slip behind the curtain to try it on. Then I buy it and sneak out of the shop.