The First Wife by Emily Barr

that!’

    Julia told me, just as I was leaving, that I ought to try to catch the eye of a rich man. ‘Not that you even need to try, Lily Button. Your hair will do that for you. If I could have changed one thing about my life, I would have given myself thick hair. Thick curly hair. You have no idea. Anyway, put some lipstick on,’ she advised. ‘And smile at people. And don’t forget us, now that you’re on your way up in the world.’
    ‘Julia,’ I reminded her, ‘I’m not on the guest list. I’m handing out drinks and canapes, for six pounds an hour!’
    ‘Canapés!’ she echoed. ‘See? Meteoric rise. You look lovely.’
    I was worried, now, that I had overdone the make-up. All I knew about make-up was the rouge that Grandma had brushed with light spidery strokes onto my cheeks for special occasions, but according to Julia, rouge was now called ‘blusher’, and was not really necessary for me. Tonight I had put on some very light foundation out of a tube. I was wearing eye-liner, mascara and, on Julia’s instruction, lipstick. It was a brownish-red one. I felt like a little girl who was maladroitly trying to be a grown-up. All the same, Sarah Summer seemed not to be sniggering at my painted-on face.
    When I stepped into the kitchen, I tried to hide my reaction. Apart from the first time I cleaned it, I had never seen it properly messy. Now every surface was covered, with layer upon layer of things. There were little puff pastry cases, and sheets of paper that looked as if they had been printed from the Internet, and there were supermarket bags everywhere, plonked down on each surface with three on top of the hob. The whole of one worktop was taken up by boxes of glasses, one of which was teetering, on the brink of falling to the floor.
    ‘OK,’ I said. I smiled. ‘What would you like the end result to be?’ I pushed the box of glasses so it was safely anchored and picked up the plastic bags from the hob, finding them a more appropriate place.
    She laughed. Her face was so pretty. She was probably in her late thirties, but apart from the little lines around her eyes, she could have been my age.
    ‘Oh Lily,’ she said, ‘you are an angel sent from heaven. I did broach the idea of buying in some proper catering from one of the many fine eating establishments in this town, but Harry seemed to think there was something charming about us throwing it all together ourselves and being all “oh, just something we whipped up in the kitchen” about it. Needless to say, he’s not been planning to spend much time with the apron on himself.’
    I took a blue and white striped apron from a hook and put it on. The strings went round my waist three times before they were short enough to tie. I wondered whether it was Harry’s.
    ‘So, these are recipes?’ I checked, picking up one of the print-outs. I touched one of the plastic bags. And these are ingredients?’
    ‘Just do whatever you can. I’m off to change. Can you believe, Lily, that we’re going away tomorrow? Look at the state of this place!’
    ‘It is a little bit mad,’ I felt brave enough to say ‘Shouldn’t you be packing?’
    ‘Oh absolutely,’ she agreed. ‘It is. Mad, I mean. We’ll do the packing at the very last minute. It all sounded like a good idea at the time. Don’t feel obliged to follow any recipe. Just make it up as you go along. Anything you can do that looks pretty on a plate and doesn’t poison people will be an unspeakable improvement on anything we might have done. When you come in after the New Year, the place will probably still look like this.’
    She breezed out of the room. I picked up the first carrier bag, and started to unpack.
    Ten minutes later, I was jigging on the spot to the raucous Christmas music that had been blaring through the house for the past few minutes, the tasteful jazz all gone. I was cutting up logs of goat’s cheese and putting it onto slices of baguette, then adding a sliver of red pepper out