Rebecca Campbell - The Favours and Fortunes of Katie Castle

I started in the shop. There was a card in the window: ‘Help Wanted. Experience preferred.’ Well, I had experience . Penny and Hugh interviewed me. I did my trick of being girlie and grown-up at the same time: girlie to Hugh and grown-up to Penny. The shop’s on a little lane just off Regent Street. It looks quite small from the front, but it goes on up for ever, stairs winding into the sky. I should say that it starts out as a shop, and then it becomes a studio, where the samples are made, and then at the top it turns into an office. I spend most of my time at the top, with Penny, who goes home at four o’clock every day except Friday, when she goes home at three. That’s why she always phones me at five past six to find out how we’ve done.

The girls in the shop don’t like me very much. We all chatter away whenever I drop down to see how things are going, but I know they bitch about me when I’m gone. That’s just the way shops are – there’s nothing else to do. If it’s not the fat bums and flabby tits of the customers, then it’s the stupidity and meanness of the bosses, and that sort of includes me. They don’t like the way that I skipped upstairs, leaving them behind. They think I think I’m too good for them now, which I do, and I am. But our warfare is cold, and mainly takes the form of sulks and obstinacy over rotas.

Things are different with the studio. The problem there is that I have to tell them when things go wrong. I have to make them do things they don’t want to do, and then I have to make them do them again. I have to tell them off. Penny is too grand to concern herself with such matters as stretched necks, lumpy zips, badly distributed ease on the sleeve head, sloppy felling, and wavering seams. And that means, of course, that it’s me who has to stand there as Tony, our unreliable, temperamental, irascible, but entirely essential sample machinist, throws one of his tantrums, spitting out curses in Maltese and rending pieces of calico to frayed white ribbon. It’s me that has to endure the open enmity of Mandy, with her leopardskin pants, and tongue to match.

But I didn’t care. And why didn’t I care? Because my life was perfect.

A poet died in my square. I read her poems once, but they were all me me me. The flat isn’t mine, of course. It’s Ludo’s. But it felt like mine. I’d made it mine. Everything apart from the brick and slate had been chosen by me. Out had gone Ludo’s schoolboy clutter – his saggy old armchair; his disgusting family-heirloom curtains; pictures of dead people. So now we had clean lines, a gleaming wood floor, blinds that seemed to make the rooms lighter, rather than darker when they were down. There were always flowers. Ludo hates flowers. ‘I’d see the point if you could eat them,’ he’d say. His horrible old books were confined to his study – the Smelly Room, I called it.

Ludo. Everybody loved Ludo. He was so helpless. He looked like a completely random pile of clothes, hair, shoes and beer bottles somehow come to life. I tried to do for him what I’d done for the flat, but it didn’t take. It was like trying to polish suede. At least I managed to get him to cut his hair, which was something, even if he resented it in that slow-burning way of his.

The really funny thing about Ludo is that he was a teacher. And he didn’t even have to be. He could have done all sorts of things, he was so clever. But instead of all sorts of things, he taught English at a school in Lambeth – the kind of school where even the teachers carry knives. I suppose it was some kind of reaction against his parents. Or rather against Penny. He’d spend all night marking in the Smelly Room. He had views about the National Curriculum, but none of our friends ever listened.

Seducing Ludo was easy. I could tell that he liked me because he blushed the first time he met me. I was still in the shop then, and he came in to see Penny. Although it was August he wore a hairy tweed jacket, like a cowpat with arms.

‘Mum in?’ he said to Zuleika, the Lebanese girl who’d been there for years without doing very much, unless you count having lovely skin as doing something. Before she had the chance to answer I carpe diemed .

‘She’s lunching with Vogue . You must be the genius. I’m Katie Castle.’ Before he knew what was happening I had him out of there and into Slackers winebar. During the first bottle of Pouilly Fumé; we did, in a slow spiral down-wards, his favourite books, his favourite films, his job, his loves, his hates, his inner despair, his aching loneliness, his family. I sighed and nodded, eyes moistening in sympathy. And then, in a textbook manoeuvre, I led him from that dark place and showed him that life could be fun. I joked, I flirted, I sparkled, and we spiralled up through the second bottle, like pearl fishers. I made it seem as though he was doing the entertaining: I laughed at his first jokes, moved closer, bent towards him, touched his arm.

And, you know, it really wasn’t all pretend. Underneath all that hair and cobwebs and mustiness, I found a perfectly nice looking man, with a lovely, shy smile and really quite kissable eyes. Even if he hadn’t been my big chance, I still might have fallen in love with him.

We made it back just before Penny – I was always a good judge of a lunch time. Zuleika was fuming, but that didn’t matter. Penny made her entrance and enveloped Ludo in her customary critical embrace. And instantly, with that famous low cunning of hers, she knew.

‘Darling, have you been getting in the way of the girls?’ she declaimed, and without pause swept Ludo up the stairs to write the cheque. But on his way out, a long, long half-hour later, he asked for my number, and his fate was sealed.

Of course Penny tried to fight it. Penny understood me very well. Because, I suppose, we’re really quite alike. Or could it be that she always thinks the worst of people and the worst, on this one occasion, just happened to be true? I always had an ally in Hugh. Hugh loves women and the prettier they are the more he loves them. And whatever they might say in the shop, or the studio, or anywhere else, I am pretty. Hugh always thought I was good for Ludo. ‘You’re good for Ludo,’ he’d say. ‘You bring him out of himself. Stop him from brooding and sulking all the time like a wolf in its lair.’ It became clear that Ludo was a disappointment to him. Hugh was big and bold and successful and confident. He’d sent Ludo to his old school, hoping it would turn him into a copy of himself. Instead poor Ludo emerged broken and resentful. To Hugh and Penny’s despair, and despite insanely good grades, he refused to even apply to Oxford, but went instead to some college in Wales, ‘Not even a wretched redbrick,’ as Hugh bemoaned, ‘looks like a Bulgarian nuclear power station.’

It was always hard working out Hugh and Penny as a couple. Hugh was posh, you couldn’t escape that. He had that faint sheen that only posh people seem to carry with them, even into late middle-age. Not like my parents. Not, I suspect, like Penny’s. Penny had been an actress. She would rattle off titles from TV series in the sixties I’d never heard of. She talked about a play. There had been a couple of films. Sean Connery was mentioned, but I never worked out in what connection. She said that she had given it all up for Hugh and Ludo. Penny Moss – her maiden name – began as a hobby. She made her own clothes in the sixties – tie-dyed headscarves, crocheted ponchos with matching berets, that sort of thing, I imagine. People liked them. She began to sell them to friends. The next thing she knew she had a Saturday stall in Portobello, just a bit of fun, really. And then the first shop.

All this time Hugh’s enterprises – things in the City, investments, speculations – were starting to ‘go a little stale’ as he put it. And then, sometime in the early eighties, there came a point when Penny Moss began to bring in more than he did. Rather than pick up the gauntlet, he capitulated. Drew up the drawbridge and took to golf. Penny used to drag him into the office, occasionally, to help with hiring and firing, but it was more symbolic than anything. He didn’t seem too bothered about it. He’d bought the fabulous house in Kensington. He still had a few investments, and Penny Moss was doing nicely. Why work when, again in his words, he could simply ‘live off his hump’?