desperate eyes looked out of the serene, beautiful mask. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Worry is really bad for him, I couldn’t risk him worrying. When he first became ill he handed over everything to me to look after. I just cashed in all our savings, and told him that it was all right. I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘So everything hangs on this?’ Troy queried.
Isobel nodded. ‘But I can’t change how I look permanently,’ she warned him. ‘So I can’t go blonde.’
‘Well, OK by me,’ Troy said with a sense of the stakes in this gamble growing greater by the minute. ‘OK by me, if you think you can get away with it. The bank account was going to be secret anyway so it makes no difference to me. As long as you think you can keep it up at home.’
‘But I can’t have my hair dyed.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘What about a wig?’ He turned to the sales assistant. ‘Wigs,’ he said firmly. ‘Blonde wigs.’
‘Of course if madam does not wish to alter her own style, that is an ideal solution,’ the sales assistant said smoothly. She nodded at her deputy and the woman slipped from the room. ‘Perhaps just a little trim, just to enhance the profile, would be a good idea?’
‘I’ll have a trim,’ Isobel said. ‘But I won’t colour it.’
The sales assistant nodded and stood aside as the rack of wigs came in with the fitter behind them.
‘Another glass of champagne Sir?’ she asked Troy, who settled down on the sofa once more as the hairdresser came in and started to trim Isobel’s hair into a neater shape.
‘Yes please,’ he said.
Isobel faced the mirror, ready to be fitted with her wig. First they crammed her own hair into a flesh-coloured skullcap as tight and uncomfortable as the bathing hats she used to wear for swimming at school, and then they forced the huge mane of hair on top. Isobel felt so mauled by the struggle to get them on that she was scowling when she looked at the mirror to see the effect.
She saw a petulant beauty, a spoiled, glossy, golden woman who could be almost any age from mid-twenties to forty. The brightness of the hair enhanced the perfect colour of her skin, made her eyes darker, made her eyelashes dramatically thick and black. The wide bouffant style made her face look slim and elegant. She had the look of all the women who gaze from the pages of the society magazines, the women who feign unawareness of the photographers, who share a joke laughing but never screw up their eyes when the flashbulbs pop, who are always there at the parties, at the awards nights, who ski in winter and sail in summer, who know New York and go to the Paris fashion shows, who call each other ‘darling’ and kiss without lips touching cheek. They are the women who once married rich men and are still managing to hold on to them. They are the women who organise the charity balls, who launch fragrances, who own racehorses, who put their names to bestselling autobiographies created by ghost writers about imaginary events.
‘Bingo,’ Troy said from the sofa. ‘Cinderella.’
‘A very high presence,’ the saleswoman said approvingly. ‘Delightful.’
Troy rose up. ‘We’ll take it all,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it all now.’
‘Madam should really take two of the wigs,’ the hairdresser advised. ‘When one is being washed and set she can use the other.’
‘Oh I suppose so,’ Troy said.
‘And of course we can deliver,’ the saleswoman offered.
He shook his head. ‘We have a car outside.’ He turned to Isobel. ‘D’you want to keep it all on? We could invite Freddie over here for tea. Try it out on him?’
The wealthy woman in the mirror smiled with perfect confidence. ‘Why not?’ she asked her reflection.
Freddie, pouring tea for the three of them on the terrace, was delighted to meet Zelda Vere.
‘An author of mine.’ Troy introduced her. ‘A new author, and a very exciting new book to be finished …’
‘Within the year,’ Isobel promised.
‘Whenever,’ Troy said. ‘Freddie is an interior designer, and man about town.’
Freddie grinned. ‘D’you take milk? Really? How can you, Troy?’ When Isobel accepted milk and sugar he looked stunned. ‘I’m so lactose intolerant you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Zelda has a professional interest in body piercing,’ Troy said quietly, with a discreet glance at the nearby tables. ‘I was attempting to describe to her a Prince Albert.’
Freddie’s bright gaze met Isobel’s. ‘You really need to see one,’ he said.
‘I was hoping that I might,’ she replied, and then realised that her voice, her hesitant politeness, was all wrong with the acid pink suit and the brassy blonde hair. She tossed her head and tried again: ‘I promised myself a look at yours.’
Freddie let out a small scream of laughter. ‘Here?’ he asked.
The new brassy-headed Isobel did not flinch. ‘If you like.’
‘Now, now, children,’ Troy interrupted. ‘We’ll go back to my flat for the Doctors and Nurses experience.’
‘But why d’you want to know?’ Freddie asked, pouring hot water into the tea pot.
‘For my novel,’ Isobel said. ‘My hero is a dark, brooding Satanist and I wanted to give him something of a … a gimmick.’
Freddie looked slightly offended. ‘A Prince Albert isn’t a gimmick,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s a statement.’
‘About what?’
He hesitated for a moment, and then decided to tell her. ‘You can either be the person that you were born to be: nicely brought up, good parents, nice job, reasonable income, polite children, agreeable home – right?’
Isobel nodded, feeling the weight of her hair give her nod an extra emphasis.
‘Or you can redefine yourself. You get to an age when you’ve done all that was expected of you. You’ve got the education that gets you the job that gets you the pension and then you look around and say – so have I lived all my life and worked all my life just so that I can have a pension when I’m old? That’s what happened to me. I was an accountant, I spent years and years getting my exams, getting my partnership, working for my clients, and suddenly I woke up one morning and thought I am so damn bored of this I can hardly get out of bed. It’s my life, and it bores me to tears.’
Isobel waited. She had an odd sense that she was hearing something of immense importance, that this man whom she had taken at first to be something of a fool was telling her something that she should hear.
‘Well, I cut loose,’ Freddie said quietly. ‘I came out. I told my mother and father that I was gay. I chucked in my job, I trained as an interior designer, and I studded my penis with jewellery.’
Isobel blinked and felt her mascara cling to her eyelashes like tears.
‘It’s my way of saying that I don’t have to sit in a pigeonhole. I don’t have to be what people think of me. I can find my own way, I can be someone else. I don’t have to have the identity my parents chose for me. I don’t even have to stay with my first choice of identity. I can set myself free.’
Isobel nodded. ‘I do know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Though it’s not true for everybody. Some people have to stay inside their boundaries. Some people take a choice, which isn’t perhaps the easiest choice, but it’s the right thing to do. Some people want to do the right thing more than they want to do anything else. Some people see the rules and stay inside them. Some people have to.’
Freddie shook his head. ‘No-one has to.’