We don't usually dress up, but Ms Rights said she had been looking for her tiara that morning.
I thought she wore it every day.
‘Only mentally, Marion, only mentally,’ she said. ‘And what about your broomstick? Is that why you always look so cheerful?’
For the record, I never look cheerful. But I was more concerned with the ‘underneath the venom, there’s a happy person’ implication.
The other day she arrived at work clutching a latte and announced that she needed some advice.
‘My husband came back from the States and gave me a pair of suspenders. Red suspenders. What do you think this means?’
‘To much information,’ I thought but tried to appear unperturbed. ‘I think it probably means he would like you to wear them dear,’ I said, trying to rapidly banish the resulting picture from my head.
‘Yes, but you don’t understand, they’re Gordon Gekko suspenders, you know – the sort you wear to hold up your pants…’
Ah, American suspenders… Braces. Trousers not knickers. Got you. I should know this stuff since I’ve spent the last month inserting these very words and their siblings into my book to make it more, well, American for the publisher on the other side of the pond.
But now I was even more perturbed. ‘Why is he buying you braces?’
'I don't know, that's what I'm wondering...'
‘Does he like you to wear men’s clothes?’ asked another, whose meek voice belayed the fact that she won the ‘unfortunate things I did in my youth’ contest in the office the other week, up against a lot of fierce, very fierce competition.
‘Have his mother, sister, female friend, cousin, whatever, take him aside and tell him what constitutes an appropriate present for a woman,’ I counselled.
Banish from the list: braces, gladioli, carnations, a Magimix, cosmetic sets bought on planes (we generally wear one shade of lipstick and don’t need three others in crap colours) more than two airport perfumes in which we’ve expressed an interest, and a tea-tray with four cups and saucers. The final item was the gift I received on the last birthday my husband spent at home.
I should have known then something was afoot.
