Surprise Me

I slowly lift my head. She’s staring at me defiantly, her cheeks getting pinker and pinker. But I still don’t understand what’s going on, until another waiter approaches, holding a huge patisserie box tied up with ribbons and hands it to Susie.

‘Your cake, madam.’

I stare at it, speechless.

No way.

She’s ordered herself a cake and put it on our bill? At bloody Claridge’s?

The nerve. The absolute, copper-bottomed nerve. That’s why she started babbling: she was trying to distract me from looking at the bill. And it nearly worked.

My smile is still fixed on my face. I feel slightly surreal. But I don’t hesitate for a moment. Six years of working for Mrs Kendrick has taught me exactly how to proceed. I punch in my PIN and beam at Susie as the waiter gives me the receipt.

‘It was so lovely to catch up with you,’ I say as charmingly as I can. ‘And we’ll see you at the launch of Fabulous Fans, then.’

‘Right.’ Susie looks discomfited. She eyes the cake, then looks up warily. ‘So, about this cake … they put it on your bill, I don’t know why!’ She gives an unconvincing stab at laughter.

‘But of course!’ I say, as though astonished she’s even bringing it up; as though buying fifty-quid coffee cakes for people is what we do all the time. ‘I wouldn’t hear of anything else! It’s absolutely our treat. Enjoy it.’

As I head out of Claridge’s, I’m seething with fury. We’re a charity! A bloody charity! But as I arrive back at Willoughby House, twenty minutes later, I’ve simmered down. I can almost see the funny side. And the plus is that Susie definitely owes us one now.

I pause at the front door, put on my velvet hairband and slick my lips with pink lipstick. Then I head into the spacious tiled hall, which is staffed by two of our volunteers, Isobel and Nina. They’re chatting away as I enter, so I just lift a hand in greeting, and head up to the office on the top floor.

We have a lot of volunteers – women of a certain age, mainly. They sit in the house and drink tea and chat and occasionally look up to tell visitors about the items on display. Some have been volunteering for years, and they’re all great friends and this is basically their social life. In fact sometimes the house gets so full of volunteers, we have to send some home, because there’s no room for visitors.

Most of them hang out in the drawing room, which has the famous painting by Gainsborough in it and the amazing golden stained-glass window. But my favourite room is the library, which is stuffed full of old books and diaries written by family members, in old scratchy copperplate. It’s barely been changed over the years, so it’s like walking back in time when you go in, with glass-cased bookshelves and the original gas-lamp fittings. There’s also a basement, which has the old servants’ kitchen, preserved just as it was, with ancient pans and a long table and a terrifying-looking range. I love it, and sometimes go downstairs and just sit there, imagining what it was like to be the cook in a house like this. I once even suggested we have an exhibition of the servants’ life, but Mrs Kendrick said, ‘I don’t think so, dear,’ so that was the end of that.

The stairs can seem endless – there are five floors – but I’m pretty used to it now. There is a cranky little lift, but I’m not wild about cranky little lifts. Especially cranky little lifts which might break down and leave you trapped at the top of a lift shaft, with no way down …

Anyway. So I take the stairs every day, and it counts as cardio. I arrive at the top, push my way into the light, attic-level office and greet Clarissa.

Clarissa is my colleague and is twenty-seven. She’s the administrator and also does a bit of fundraising, like me. There’s only the two of us – plus Mrs Kendrick – so it’s not exactly a huge team, but we work because we’re all simpatico. We know Mrs Kendrick’s little ways. Before Clarissa, a girl called Amy joined us for a while, but she was a bit too loud. A bit too sassy. She questioned things and criticized our methods and ‘didn’t quite fit in’, according to Mrs Kendrick. So she was axed.

Clarissa, on the other hand, fits in perfectly. She wears tea dresses a lot, and shoes with buttons which she gets from a dance-wear shop. She has long dark hair and big grey eyes, and a very earnest, endearing way about her. As I enter, she’s spritzing the plants with water, which is something we have to do every day. Mrs Kendrick gets quite upset if we forget.

‘Morning, Sylvie!’ Clarissa turns and gives me a radiant smile. ‘I’ve just got back from a breakfast meeting. It was so successful. I met six prospects who all promised to put Willoughby House in their wills. So kind of them.’

‘Brilliant! Well done!’ I would high-five her, but high-fives are very much not a Mrs Kendrick thing and she might walk in at any moment. ‘Unfortunately, mine wasn’t quite so good. I had coffee with Susie Jackson from the Wilson–Cross Foundation and she told me the V & A are having an event the same night as our Fabulous Fans launch.’

‘No!’ Clarissa’s face crumples in dismay.

‘It’s OK. I told her we’d be giving away handbags as a gift and she said she’d come to ours.’

‘Brilliant,’ breathes out Clarissa. ‘What kind of handbags?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll have to source some. Where do you think?’

‘The V & A shop?’ suggests Clarissa after a moment’s thought. ‘They have lovely things.’

I nod. ‘That’s what I thought.’

I hang up my jacket and go to put my receipt for coffee in the Box. This is a big wooden box which lives on a shelf, and mustn’t be confused with the Red Box, which sits next to it and is cardboard, but was once covered with red floral wrapping paper. (There’s still a snippet of it on the lid, and that’s how it got the name the Red Box.)

The Box is for storing receipts, while the Red Box is for storing faxes. And then, next to them is the Little Box, which is for storing Post-it notes and staples but not paper clips, because they live in the Dish. (A pottery dish on the next shelf up.) Pens, on the other hand, go in the Pot.

It sounds a bit complicated, I suppose, but it’s not, when you get used to it.

‘We’re nearly out of fax paper,’ says Clarissa, wrinkling up her nose. ‘I’ll have to pop out later.’

We get through a lot of fax paper in our office, because Mrs Kendrick sometimes works from home, and likes to correspond backwards and forwards with us by fax. Which sounds outdated. Well, it is outdated. But it’s just the way she likes to do things.

‘So, who were your prospects?’ I ask, as I sit down to type up my report.

‘Six lovely chaps from HSBC. Quite young, actually.’ Clarissa blinks at me. ‘Just out of university. But terribly sweet. They all said they’d make us legacies. I think they’ll give thousands!’

‘Amazing!’ I say, and draw up a new document. And I’ve just started typing when there’s the sound of unfamiliar feet on the staircase.

I know Mrs Kendrick’s tread. She’s coming up to the office. But there’s another person, too. Heavier. More rhythmic.

The door opens, just as I’m thinking, It’s a man.

And it’s a man.

He’s in his thirties, I’d say. Dark suit, bright blue shirt, big muscled chest, dark cropped hair. The type with hairy wrists and a bit too much aftershave. (I can smell it from here.) He probably shaves twice a day. He probably heaves weights at the gym. Looking at his sharp suit, he probably has a flash car to match. He is so not the kind of man we usually get in here, that I gape. He looks all wrong, standing on the faded green carpet with his shiny shoes, practically hitting the lintel with his head.