Page 18 of Hit For Six
Monty needed to tackle such a delicate situation the old-fashioned way, pausing the frame on a bigger screen and analysing the content properly. He sped across to the lounge and flicked on the TV, pressing play on the footage he’d recorded and fast-forwarding to his first six of the game. All these hours when he could have been fighting her case. But better late than never.
As the action-packed few seconds pinged onto the screen, Monty was mad with himself for not checking the footage sooner. Now there wasn’t a doubt in his mind about what had really happened. Who was the idiot designer behind that dress? It had to be a man. He couldn’t believe his delusionalcolleagues, who were flinging emails to and fro like hot potatoes this weekend; each of them intent on covering up the potential fallout by jabbering on about trivialities like hotels for next year’s London Fashion Week, or the upcoming buyer’s trip to Japan, or Keanu Reeves unwittingly making upmarket High Street trendy again, after being spotted wearing a sharply-tailored Beau-re-mi suit on a recent jaunt around Paris with his girlfriend. Okay, perhaps the magazines were going wild about the latter now, but the positive spin wouldn’t last long. And it didn’t change the fundamental fact that BRM had screwed up. Whoever was behind the design of Lola’s dress was not getting away with it.
Monty pulled a bedsheet out of the chest of drawers and stood in front of the mirror, mummifying himself in the white fabric as if he was fashioning a toga for a fancy dress party. He was on a mission. Once he’d satisfied himself with his efforts, he began to snip away at the right side with scissors to create a single floaty shoulder strap, diagonal to the narrow and flimsy criss-crosses of material on the right. He didn’t have pins to hold things in place so he improvised with a stapler from his desk drawer, holding his breath that he wouldn’t pierce his skin. But the quality didn’t matter. When he noted the positioning of the ties of the Beau-re-mi dress in his mind’s eye and imagined Lola’s side turn as she made purchase with the ball, Monty’s findings were conclusive.
He ran back down the stairs two by two, still in his makeshift dress and knocked on the door of the bottom apartment, pacing about and almost tripping over several times on his hem as he waited for Aunt Sally to open the door.
Sally wasn’t Monty’s real aunt but she’d insisted that he call her such the moment he’d moved into his Royal Crescent apartment. Aunt Sally’s last name, on the other hand, was Lunn, although she claimed that she wasn’t in any way related to theoriginal baker of the city’s famous buns. She was his token granny now that one of his real ones had passed away, and the other one had cut his mother– and consequently her offspring– out of her life after Helena had taken offence at her choice of second husband and his lower middle class roots. Monty had tried to covertly reconnect with Granny Carmichael and his Scottish heritage but Eliza Carmichael was a terrible gossip, who loved to push her daughter’s buttons and ensure that word wended its way back to southern England. Now he was strictly forbidden from further correspondence.
‘Monty! What a delight,’ said Sally when she finally opened the door. ‘Come in– although, this is a bit early for our usual, isn’t it? I’m afraid I can’t offer you a nightcap just yet– I’ve barely digested my supper. Oh,’ she gasped as she registered his unusual choice of attire, then frowned as she looked down at her baggy jeans and rainbow jumper. ‘I hadn’t realised we were dressing up.’
A once weekly hot chocolate withallthe trimmings, a generous tot of rum, a pile of biscuits, and an armchair debate about the state of the world, had long been the mismatched couple’s ritual. Sally was a night owl. And as wise as one too.
‘You look delightful as ever, Aunt. I’m sorry to catch you off guard but I need a bit of a favour, and I’m willing to be your apprentice because it might take a while.’
Monty gestured at his get-up and grimaced.
Sally gave Monty the onceover as she escorted him into the lounge, her brow creasing momentarily as she turned him around to assess the extent of the job. He felt like a car going into the garage for a service.
‘We need to replicate this tonight?’
‘We do, I’m afraid. I’ll explain once we get going.’
‘Then it’s a good job the sewing machine is still out and Mr. Bobbin from two doors down has lumbered me with umpteencrotch adjustments for his trousers.’Woah. Way too much info.‘Let’s get you inside and pinned up.’
Four hours later, Sally had ditched Monty’s handiwork, using his mockup as a template to recreate Lola’s asymmetrical dress with some of her own spare material. It was as identical to the real deal as one could get. No wonder the woman had been a seamstress for the Theatre Royal in her former life.
‘Cheers!’ said Monty, toasting a mug of cocoa with his neighbour, guzzling half of it down the hatch in one and relishing the burn.
Sally sipped her drink a little more thoughtfully and then announced:
‘If it’s meant to be, it will be, Monty. But let’s hope this assertion of yours will give romance even more of a fighting chance. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my younger years, it’s that time flies and before you know it, you’ll be looking back on all of those juicywhat ifsthat you might have made a reality had you only been a bit braver. So try to limit them. Even if you make a fool of yourself.Especially if you make a fool of yourself.’
Sally raised her eyebrows again at Monty’s dress, implying that he needed to take heed of those last pearls of her wisdom, and they hugged, Monty yawning embarrassingly, despite his younger years.
He trudged wearily back up the stairs to his apartment and crashed onto his bed, closing his eyes as the old woman’s words swirled around his head… and then he remembered the other thing he’d vowed to do before he hit the pillow.
***
The next morning,Monty woke with a start and a headache, his mind racing with all of the facts he’d learned about SensoryProcessing Disorder before he’d sparked out. He had even more sympathy for Lola now. Even if that was the last thing she would want. Even if she only had a mild case of SPD. It sounded like it could be a minefield and he vowed that he’d inform himself as much as he could about her condition, regardless of whether he should be lucky enough to lay his eyes on her again. The alternative was a depressing thought. But he couldn’t dwell on it. Today’s urgent meeting might have been pushed back to ten o’clock and he might only have snatched four hours’ sleep, but Monty needed to make coffee, shower, and jump in the car.
Beau-re-mi’s headquarters were located in a stunning– but not particularly accessible– village in the Cotswolds. In an increasingly hybrid industry, Monty, like many of the other staff members of the fashion brand, only drove in a couple of times a week.
All eyes turned to the door when he finally walked in twenty minutes late. But he couldn’t have helped his tardiness if he’d tried. His heart had gone out to the homeless guy shacked up in the doorway of a property at the end of the Crescent that morning. The ground floor apartment had recently gone on the market for just shy of a million quid and the juxtaposition had punched Monty hard in the gut. He’d given a thankful ‘Beefy’ a few notes and had been reluctant to leave when the older man had opened up to him about his difficult teenage years that had led to him running away from home and waving goodbye to his dream of becoming a professional rugby player. The chasm between them had struck a deep chord.
‘Monty?What on earth?Is this meant to be some kind of joke?’
Frederick, who was standing teacher-like before the meeting table giving a flip chart backed speech to his employees, swept his pointer stick up and held it mid-air, as if he’d just led his orchestra into a crescendo. Monty snapped out of his musing,remembering that he had, indeed, changed into a floaty dress in the gents’ loos. He’d toyed with the idea of driving in his outfit to save time, and swiftly changed his mind when he’d considered the complexity of using brake, clutch and accelerator. Monty still hadn’t embraced the automatic car, his decade old Polo annoyed his father. Although, surely, if one’s folk were modelling themselves on old money, they’d want the prestigious and trustworthy gear system of a vintage Bentley.
‘Absolutely not,’ his son replied. ‘I couldn’t be more serious.’
‘What are you doing, then, dressed up like that?’ Frederick barked, eyeing Monty as if he was a drag queen. ‘We’re having a serious meeting here so we can deflect some of the accusatory pieces that have been bobbing about on social media. God, I curse the day of its invention. The sheer audacity of the general public to suggest that we’ve been cutting corners with the quality of our fabric! Organza costs a bomb. And the absolute irony when this sordid situation came about via the actions of a Beau-re-mi employee… My flesh and blood, no less,’ he hissed between clenched teeth.
‘Well now. That all sounds a little chicken and egg to me,’ Monty quipped, having excellent hearing, even if he was standing on the other side of the room.
Talk about another punch to the body parts. Saturday’s camaraderie couldn’t have been more fake. Frederick didn’t care about Monty’s cricketing career at all. It had been ages since they’d had an argument in the workplace, but his father would have been in full-on battle mode no matter Monty’s choice of outfit.
‘As I was saying,’ Frederick went back to his diversion strategy and Monty let the meaningless twaddle go in one ear and straight back out the other. ‘Does anybody else have any ideas? The positive pieces ref do-gooder Keanu arefantastique, but the hype will soon die a death. He doesn’t have any celebrityfriends to influence. The press will turn back on us before we know it.’
