Charlie Glass's Slippers

by Holly McQueen

Genres: Family Life; Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

In this delightful, clever spin on Cinderella, Charlie Glass—a heroine as loveable as Cannie Shapiro and Bridget Jones—inherits her father’s shoe empire and snatches up a drop-dead-gorgeous, multi-millionaire Prince Charming. But is he truly the key to her happily ever after? When Charlie’s beloved father, iconic shoe designer Elroy Glass, dies after a long illness, everyone expects that he’ll leave his business to his glamorous wife and eldest daughters. After all, they’ve been running the company for years. But Elroy surprises everyone from beyond the grave: at the will reading, it’s announced that his fashion empire has been left to Charlie, his youngest—and plumpest—daughter. Before she can run the company, Charlie decides she needs to make a few changes in her life. After several weeks at a California boot camp, she returns to London a new woman: thinner, blonder, and ready to revitalize the Elroy Glass brand. But as she’ll soon discover, a good esthetician and a killer pair of stilettos can only go so far, and there’s more to reinvention—and running a fashion empire—than meets the eye. Endlessly entertaining, surprising, and ultimately inspiring, Charlie Glass’s Slippers is a modern-day fairytale about finding your own magic and transforming yourself from within.

Release date: August 5, 2014

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 464

Sample

Charlie Glass's Slippers

chapter one

If Lucy could see me now, she’d get all huffy and puffy about me behaving like a waitress.

“Gaby wants you to help with the catering?” Lucy screeched when she called me last night, just as I’d begun the fiddly process of piping pistachio cream onto six dozen halves of pale green macaroon. “I thought she got everything catered! She gets her children’s birthday parties catered. I bet she gets an average Tuesday morning breakfast bloody catered! Why does she want you to help with the catering for your own father’s memorial service?”

“Because her usual caterer has let her down at the last minute, and there’s nobody else available at short notice.” I paraphrased, slightly, what Gaby actually said when she called earlier in the day, which is that there was nobody else “decent” available at short notice. “But really, Luce, it’s not a big deal. It’s a tea party after the service, so it’s just a few crustless sandwiches and dainty cakes.”

“So? Why can’t she cut the crusts off a few sandwiches herself ? Why can’t she do a trolley-dash round Waitrose and get a few dozen boxes of bloody mini yum-yums? Not that I’m suggesting Waitrose makes stuff as delicious as yours, Charlie,” she added, loyally. “But that’s not my point. What are you making, anyway? You’re not going to go berserk, are you?”

“God, no, not at all,” I said, wondering—as I still am—if baking three dozen pistachio macaroons, the same number of miniature scones, five whole lemon drizzle loaves, three Victoria sponges, and (my pièce de résistance) one perfect, glossy, gleaming Sacher torte might count as going berserk. “Like I said, it’s not a big deal. Just a few cakes. And if I have anything left over, I’ll bring them round to you on my way home from Gaby’s tomorrow.”

“If you have anything left over? All the guests work in fashion, Charlie. I don’t know why Gaby’s bothering to cater it at all. Honestly, couldn’t she just stick a couple of arugula leaves on a plate and see if anybody dares to take a nibble? Oh, and talking of mad anorexics, is Robyn gracing your dad’s memorial with her presence, or is she having too hectic a schedule of detox wraps and sea-salt scrubs at a Thai spa?”

Robyn is my other (half ) sister, and Lucy’s no more a fan of her than she is of Gaby. In fact, to say that Lucy isn’t a fan of my sisters is rather like saying the French Revolution was a bad time to be a bit posh.

“That’s not fair, Luce,” I said, putting down my piping bag for a moment so I could hurry and check the oven to make sure lemon drizzle loaf number four wasn’t browning too much at the edges. “Robyn really got herself into a bad way after Dad died. She needed to get away from it all. And yes, in answer to your question, she’s back from Thailand and she is coming to the memorial.”

“And the Ice Queen? She Who Must Not Be Named? The High Priestess of Mordor?”

These three are all names that Lucy (and okay, me, too) has attributed, over the years, to just one person.

“Diana? No. She’s not coming.”

“To her own late ex-husband’s memorial service? But she looked so happy at the funeral, bless her coal-black heart. I’d have thought she’d be taking the opportunity to be right up there at the front of the church tomorrow, popping champagne corks and singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel.’”

“Nope. Bunions. Well, to be more precise, surgery to remove her bunions. Won’t be seen in public until she’s back in her heels, apparently.”

“Good. I hope the surgery hurts. And then I hope she gets another great, big bunion, right in the same place. In fact, I wish a plague of bunions upon her.”

Which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the way Lucy feels about my stepmother. And the fact that I didn’t object in any way tells you, I guess, pretty much everything you need to know about the way I feel about my stepmother, too.

“Well, just promise me one thing about tomorrow, Charlie. Will you promise me that even if you’re making the food, you won’t let Gaby turn you into a waitress for the afternoon? Or any other kind of drudge.”

“Lucy, making a few cakes isn’t being a drudge! You know how much I love cooking. And don’t you think it’s nice that Gaby actually thinks I’m good at it? Good enough to serve her snooty fashionista friends? Gaby doesn’t usually think anybody’s good at anything! And anyway, I’m doing it for Dad, really, not for—”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“Fine,” I sighed. “I promise, Lucy, that I won’t let Gaby turn me into a waitress for the afternoon.”

“Or any other kind of drudge?”

“Or any other kind of drudge.”

Well, one broken promise out of two isn’t so bad!

Anyway, Lucy was unfair to imply that I’m being turned into some kind of drudge, because Gaby has put a huge amount of effort into this afternoon, too. She’s managed to transform this rather shabby, empty space—Dad’s original flagship store, up the less posh end of the King’s Road—into a perfectly pristine party venue, complete with freshly whitewashed walls, a newly polished floor, and big black-and-white photos of Dad hanging everywhere, with ELROY GLASS: DESIGNER, FATHER, LEGEND printed beneath. Which is a nice echo of the obituary in the Times the other week, where the writer called Dad “the legendary British designer bad-boy whose subversive footwear has graced the feet of the glitterati since the 1970s.” And Gaby stage-managed the entire memorial service, complete with eulogies and hymns and choirboys: she’s been desperate to give full vent to her superb planning skills ever since she was (in her view) cheated out of organizing a proper funeral thanks to Dad suddenly becoming uncharacteristically religious right at the end and asking to be buried in the traditional Jewish manner, meaning within twenty-four hours of his death, and therefore without giving Gaby the time to do things “properly.”

(Lucy also asked, in our phone call last night, why on earth Gaby was holding the memorial service in a Church of England church, when Dad was Jewish by birth and atheist by conviction. I don’t know the answer to this question, but I think it probably has its roots in the fact that Gaby’s not all that keen on . . . well, her roots. And in the fact that all the synagogues are in dismal bits of north London while St. Anthony’s church is picturesquely and glamorously located on one of the smartest streets in Chelsea.)

“Charlie?”

This is Gaby now, waving me over to where she’s standing, by the far wall next to one of the framed black-and-white photos of Dad. She’s stepping away from the crowd of very thin, very groomed, very surprised-looking women she’s been talking to, which is just one of the many crowds of very thin, very groomed, very surprised-looking women who have been invited to the memorial. Today’s illustrious guests are mostly fashion editors and buyers, with a smattering of VIP customers thrown in for good measure. Not who I’d have invited, if I were the one actually hosting Dad’s memorial—I’d have asked, oh, I don’t know, Dad’s extended family, his oldest friends, and just a few of the doctors and nurses who took such good care of him these past nine and a half years—but then, Gaby is the PR director of Elroy Glass Ltd, so she must know what she’s doing.

“Oh, for crying out loud, Charlie,” Gaby hisses at me now, when I manage to totter across the floor without a fatal mishap. “Couldn’t you have worn something a bit more suitable on your feet?”

I shoot her a bit of a look. “Well, the thing is, Gaby, when I got dressed this morning, I didn’t know I was going to be doing quite so much walking about with a heavy tea tray.”

“A nice flat ballet pump would have been a much better choice.” Gaby has missed—or ignored—my pointed remark. “Where did you even dig those shoes out from, anyway?”

“They were my mother’s.” This silences her, but I carry on anyway. “And I wanted to wear something Dad had made, and the ones he made specially for Mum are the only ones that fit me. Oh, which reminds me: did I tell you that there are at least two hundred old pairs of Dad’s shoes in a load of boxes up in the storeroom?”

“Fantastic.” Gaby rolls her eyes. “More crap to sort out.” She’s looking stressed and irritable—or rather, even more stressed and irritable than usual. It’s a wonder, really, that she is as immaculate as she is: head to toe in sharp black Armani, her dark bob practically blinding me as it reflects the light, her skin and nails buffed to perfection, and her eyebrows—of course—meticulously tweezed into inquiring arches. It gives me an odd glow of pride in her: my sister, Gaby, the thinnest, glossiest, and most surprised-looking of them all. “Look, I called you over because I need you to go and help with Robyn.”

“Help?” I cast my eyes about the room, looking for our other sister. There she is—chatting animatedly to a redhead in a black dress. But I can’t see what Gaby is looking so worried about: Robyn doesn’t look like she’s about to howl, or burst into hysterical song, or produce a pair of kitchen scissors and start hacking off her own hair, all unexpected delights she blessed us with at the funeral three weeks ago. “She seems okay.”

“She’s high as a fucking kite,” Gaby whispers, furiously. “And that girl she’s talking to is a journalist for Grazia, and the last thing I need right now is having to explain to Mummy why her darling Robyn is being described as ‘confused’ and ‘excitable’ in an article on page four of Tuesday’s magazine. Just go and get her away, will you? Becca can handle the tea on her own for a bit.” She waves a hand at the other girl who’s been carrying around a tea tray—a mousy girl in John Lennon glasses who I think is either Gaby’s au pair or her cleaner—and mouths come on, come on, keep it moving at her. “Please, Charlie,” she adds, turning back to me. “Robyn listens to you.”

Which is obviously desperate flattery, but if you knew how rarely Gaby utters the word please, you’d do what she asked you, too.

“No problem, Gab. I’ll go and sort it out.”

“Good. And when you’ve done that, Charlie, pop up and bring down the rest of the cakes, would you? I thought it might be nice for me to say a few words about Daddy, and I could do it before I cut into that Sacher torte. It was Daddy’s favorite, wasn’t it?”

“Yes!” I try not to look too amazed that she remembered this. “He loved it! I used to make it for all his birthdays, remember, and . . .”

“Good, good. I can use that.” She nods, thoughtfully, as if she’s just been asked to deliver a eulogy about a near stranger and she’s carefully gathering together any little snippets of personal information she can find. “Okay, Charlie. Thanks for your time.”

Knowing when I’m dismissed, I set out manfully across the packed room, my mission to make it over to Robyn without a slip or stumble. Or ankle twist. Or, for that matter, an incident involving any of my vertebrae. Balance, I’m quickly working out, is the key to successful high-heel wearing.

“. . . and I’m telling you, the hot-stone massages there were absolute heaven,” Robyn is saying, in a tone that’s merely mildly manic, as I approach her and the journalist. “I really felt like the stones were kind of drawing all my grief to the surface. Honestly, I’d recommend Chiva-Som to anyone who’s just had a death in the family. You know, I’ve even been thinking a stay there should be made available on the NHS. Not two weeks, of course, but maybe just one week, or even just a nice long weekend . . . Oh, hey, Charlie!” She greets me with a little wave. “I’ve been telling Eloise here about what an awful state I’ve been in since Daddy died. I mean, the mess I was in at the funeral. Cutting off my beautiful hair and everything!”

Of course, I should mention that even without her beautiful hair, my sister Robyn is still a total stunner. Sharp of cheekbone, long of eyelash, and pouty of lip, she would have been a model, like her mother, Diana, if she’d grown another couple of critical inches taller. She’s skinny enough to be a model, thanks to a triple-whammy combination of great genes, a fondness for eating disorders, and an even greater fondness for cocaine. Today she’s looking even more model-like than usual, in a thigh-high black minidress and her usual six-inch heels with—disloyally—a slash of Louboutin red on the sole. It’s all a bit much for three o’clock on a Friday afternoon (let alone your own father’s memorial service), but at least it makes me feel temporarily better about my own ill-advised footwear.

“Honestly, without amazing people like Charlie to support and care for me, I don’t know how I’d have survived my daddy dying at all!” Robyn goes on. Her pupils, now I’m up close, are a little bit dilated, and she’s wearing a rigid smile. “She was the one—weren’t you, Cha-Cha, darling—who sat me down after my daddy’s funeral and said, ‘Book yourself a first-class flight right this very minute, Robyn. Take yourself off somewhere lovely and warm and sunny, where you’ll have time to grieve, and heal, and pamper yourself.’”

“Er—I suppose I might have said the thing about grieving and healing,” I begin, “but I’m not sure I said . . .”

“Sorry—who is this, exactly?” Eloise-from-Grazia asks Robyn. (She’s another stunner, is Eloise: so young and so naturally beautiful, in fact, that I’m surprised Robyn has put her looks-related paranoia on hold for long enough to talk to her.)

“Charlie, you mean? She’s my sister!”

“Your sister?” Eloise’s lovely mouth falls open in amazement. “But you don’t look . . .” She stares hard at me. “God, sorry—Charlie, is it?—I didn’t mean . . . Well, you’re really pretty and everything, it’s just . . . you’re . . .”

“Half sister,” I interrupt, with a smile, to save Eloise the embarrassment of having to avoid the dreaded “F” word. Fat, that is. Besides, it was nice of her to say the thing about me being pretty. Quite often, people comparing me and Robyn are so blown away by the difference between our respective waistlines that they can’t see anything beyond that.

“Oh, but Gaby and I never think of her as a half sister—do we, Charlie, darling? At least, I don’t.” Robyn grabs a pistachio macaroon from a plate that’s being whisked past by the frantic Becca, and makes all the ooohing and aaahing noises she always makes when confronted with food, to divert everyone’s attention from the fact that she’s not actually eating any. “Surely you know, Eloise, that my daddy was an absolutely awful womanizer? Mistresses in every port, illegitimate offspring everywhere?”

“That’s not exactly true!” I say, as Eloise’s green eyes widen to match her open mouth. “In fact, that’s not true at all. There’s only Gaby and Robyn and me! And Dad was only married twice—to their mother and then to mine.”

“Oh, yes, I do recall something about that now.” Eloise-from-Grazia looks rather embarrassed. “Didn’t he . . . er . . . run off with the Irish cleaner, or something, while he was still married to Diana Forbes-Wilkinson?”

“Yes! The Irish cleaner was Charlie’s mother!”

Before I can add any mitigating information to Robyn’s pronouncement, we’re interrupted by the Tatler photographer whom Gaby, in an impressive coup, has persuaded to cover the event. He asks us to pose for a picture; then, after a swift glance at the picture in his digital camera, asks me if I’d mind stepping to one side, “so I can just get the other two on their own instead.”

Evidently I’m not Tatler material.

“My mother was the housekeeper,” I tell Eloise, as soon as the photographer has wandered off to take more shots of thin people. I’m determined to give Mum her due, and to make one other very important fact clear. “And they ended up happily married, by the way, and having me. Besides, Dad didn’t just run off with her. It was . . . complicated.”

Complicated, I could point out, by the fact that Dad and Diana’s marriage was over in all but name long before Mum even came on the scene. They were really only staying together, at that point, because they were partners in the shoe business—Dad the design genius, Diana the hard-nosed businesswoman—and the husband-wife brand was a great selling point. But I don’t like to say anything flippant about her parents’ marriage in front of Robyn.

“And it was the swinging seventies, Eloise,” Robyn interjects, evidently having no qualms about being flippant about her parents’ marriage herself. “I mean, Mummy was already cheating on Daddy with most of the neighbors before he took revenge and shagged the housekeeper. God, sorry, Cha-Cha.” She slings a bony arm around my shoulders. “You know I don’t mean anything horrible about your mum. Especially not today, when the three of us should all just be thinking about poor Daddy.”

For the first time today—in fact, almost for the first time since Dad died, three weeks ago last Wednesday—I feel a stab of something painful, somewhere deep down inside. So I gather it up as quickly as I can, pop it into a mental box marked To Deal with Later, and carry on as if Robyn hasn’t spoken.

“Anyway, Robyn, I came over here to tell you that somebody really wants to talk to you . . . er . . . over there.” I gesture, vaguely, towards the swirling vortex of blondes that are filling the room. “That blond woman in . . . um . . . the black dress.”

“Fuck, that’s Jessica from Vogue. Sorry, El, darling, but I have to go and talk to her, or she’ll just get uppity and refuse to take my calls from now on.”

Robyn is already hightailing it across the store, leaving me and Eloise-from-Grazia stuck with each other.

“Well, Robyn seems quite . . . high on life this afternoon,” she says, as soon as Robyn’s out of earshot.

“Oh, you know Robyn. Always high on something!” Which wasn’t what I meant to say at all. Gaby is going to kill me. “High in a . . . a metaphorical sense, I mean!”

“And you’re the third Glass sister,” Eloise continues. She’s gazing at me with curiosity in her beautiful green eyes. This may not be much, I grant you, but it’s more interest than anyone else has shown me this afternoon. “The cleaner’s daughter. Wow—your family is complicated.”

“Housekeeper. And what family isn’t?”

“So do you work for Elroy Glass, too?”

“God, no. I mean, I don’t work for Elroy Glass the company. I’ve been looking after Elroy Glass himself for the last nine years! Dad, that is,” I add, in case she hasn’t understood me.

“Looking after him? As your job?”

“Um, yes. Absolutely,” I add, hoping to make this fact sound better than she’s just made it sound. I smile at her. “Motor neuron is a pretty life-altering illness, you know. Dad needed someone to help him do everything, from eating and washing to . . .” I stop myself, before I start to regale a total stranger with the pretty depressing details about the day-to-day indignities of living with a debilitating neurological condition. “Anyway, yes, in answer to your question. Looking after Dad is . . . sorry, was . . . my full-time job.”

“Wow. That must have been hard.” But Eloise-from-Grazia is distracted already, as a skinny blonde waves at her from across the room, mouthing, Come and say hi, sweetie! “Oh, sorry . . . I really need to go and get round to a few more people. But it was nice talking to you, er . . .”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie.” She hoists her bag up farther into the crook of her arm, turning away as she does so. “And my condolences, of course, about your father.”

It’s the first time anyone has said this to me at Dad’s memorial.

I fight back the prickly feeling that’s crept up, quite suddenly, in my throat, and go and busy myself with another tray of teacups.

Charlie Glass's Slippers

chapter two

I suppose I should be more upset by Eloise-from-Grazia forgetting my name and then swanning off to talk to someone more interesting. But it’s hardly worth getting offended. I mean, fashion people aren’t going to waste their time chewing the fat with someone who’s so obviously not one of them.

I’m not one of them, in fact, in more ways than you’d think. Mostly because I’m the combined size of at least three of them. And I’m not Putting Myself Down when I say that, by the way (Putting Myself Down being another one of Lucy’s pet peeves). I’m just stating an out-and-out fact. The average size of the women in this room has to be . . . a four. Well, if it’s a four, then my ratio is accurate. At least in the bum department, seeing as my (roughly) planet-sized rear end is the reason I had to buy my new dress in a size sixteen rather than the fourteen, which fitted okay everywhere else. It’s a wrap dress, specially ordered from the euphemistically titled “plus” section of H&M online, so at least I’ve managed to fasten the tie-belt a bit tighter around my waist, and hopefully not look as though I’m (partially, at least) a size sixteen. I felt pretty good in it, especially teaming it with these shoes. They’re peep-toed four-inch heels, and they’re made from soft, silver leather that’s covered with tiny, glittering crystals—impossible to walk in but magical to look at. Anyway, what with the new dress, the vintage shoes, and careful makeup to emphasize my eyes and bring out my cheekbones (which I’m still determined to believe are lurking there somewhere), I was congratulating myself on scrubbing up well, until I got to the church earlier and realized that everyone else was kitted out in Armani Privé and new-season Stella McCartney.

Talking of Armani, Privé or otherwise, Gaby has caught my eye from across the room. She’s mouthing Sacher torte!!! at me as if she’s a drowning woman and the only thing that will save her is a life raft made from traditional Viennese chocolate cake.

Fine—Sacher torte it is. I stop faffing with teacups and set off for the staircase at the back of the store to go up to the first-floor storeroom, where I’ve stashed the rest of my baked delights.

It’s yet more tortuous progress, because the stairs are shallow and uneven. This isn’t exactly news to me, but navigating these stairs in spindly heels is an entirely different ball game from running up and down them in sensible buckled Mary Janes, the way I used to when I was a child. This, Dad’s original flagship shoe store, was my and Lucy’s favorite Saturday-morning hangout when we were six and seven. Down on the shop floor, where the scary-eyebrowed fashionistas are now fiendishly networking, there was a thrilling air of decadence, with loud music, popping champagne corks, and a revolving door of perfumed and glamorous customers, who all seemed to be half in love with Dad. But up in the stockrooms above, things were even more thrilling, at least for a couple of six-year-olds. In the first-floor stockrooms, you could play endless hours of “shoe shop” with the pairs of shoes you secretly took down from the shelves; or, up in Dad’s airy, light-filled studio on the second floor, you could pull a couple of chairs up to one of the many windows and spend whole afternoons “spying” over the backyards of the neighboring stores, which would occasionally—grippingly—feature the canoodling couple from behind the counter at the café next door, or some of the staff from the nearby health food shop gathering to smoke weird-smelling homemade cigarettes out in the back.

There was even one—only one—glorious Saturday morning here with Gaby and Robyn. I barely ever got to see my half sisters until I went to live with them when I was eight, so an unexpected opportunity to hang out with them would have been exciting enough even if it hadn’t been here at the store. Admittedly, things weren’t absolutely perfect—Dad let each of us pick out a pair of shoes to play dress-up with, and we all inadvertently picked red pairs, which made Gaby go into a mood because she thought we’d copied her, and made Robyn cry because she wanted both of us to wear boring black ones—but it’s a happy memory for me nonetheless. Though when I tried to mention it to Gaby earlier today, in an attempt to create a glow of rosy nostalgia for the old place, she simply stared blankly at me and claimed it had never happened.

Of course, this place hasn’t housed an Elroy Glass store, much less a flagship one, ever since my stepmother, Diana, finally got her way four or five years ago and moved operations to a swanky new site on Bond Street instead. She is the CEO, after all—a position she’s occupied ever since she married Dad thirty-five years ago—and Dad had been so ill that he’d stopped even the pretense that he was still designing many months previously, so I suppose it was her prerogative. The old store has been let out to a succession of businesses ever since—most recently an antiquarian book dealership—but seeing as it’s not really at the plum end of King’s Road anymore (really, it’s more like the prune end of King’s Road), it’s never exactly regained its old atmosphere. In fact, after Gaby’s swift and merciless makeover downstairs, to get the place suitable for today’s party, it’s more lacking in atmosphere than ever before. Which makes the quiet, almost padded calm of the unchanged upper floors feel melancholy in comparison.

Dad’s old studio has been taken over by these big crates, filled with old pairs of his shoes, that at some point have been moved up here from the more convenient first-floor stockroom by one of the intrepid but unsuccessful shopkeepers who have leased the place over the last few years. I’ve used one of the crates to conveniently store my cakes on—the two remaining lemon drizzle cakes and the rich, glossy Sacher torte that Gaby has sent me to fetch—but there’s another crate free, luckily, for me to perch on and rest my protesting feet.

“Oi! Charlie!”

The voice takes me by surprise. Though the windows up here are grubbier than they used to be in Dad’s day, there are still enough of them that I can easily look out over the back of the store. Two buildings along, and almost at a right angle to the back of this building—the site of the old health food store, actually, where the dodgy cigarettes were smoked—a man is waving at me from out of an open second-floor sash window.

It’s Ferdy Wright, t