Christmas at Claridge's Read Online Free Page A

splashed into the hot oil.
    ‘From now on I shall stick to married men and public school boys with recreational drug habits. At least you know where you are with them.’
    Shambles flew out of the cage and swooped above Stella in the kitchen, enjoying the hot thermal current coming off the frying pan, before settling on the windowsill. Clem watched despondently,
distracted. Five o’clock? Tom would definitely be back by now ordinarily. This was no mere spat.
    ‘What’s wrong with me, Stell? Why do I always mess things up? I’m a one-woman disaster zone.’
    ‘No you’re not. You’re just one of life’s energy force fields. You attract everything to you and sometimes things just spin a little bit out of control, that’s
all,’ Stella murmured, her hands moving quickly so that in a few moments more, she placed a steaming, oozing toasted sandwich in front of her beleaguered friend. ‘Now get that down you.
I need your body.’
    Clem sighed appreciatively and tucked in. Stella always knew how to rally her. A shoot-from-the-hip Finchley girl, she’d been raised by her father after her mother died when she was four,
and she had a bustling, maternal nature that soothed Clem and brought her down from her more outrageous antics. Their friendship had been instantaneous and intense since the day they’d met at
St Martin’s College, where Stella was studying Fashion Design and Clem was doing the Fashion Journalism and Marketing course. Clem had been hired as a model by one of the more pretentious
design students, Taylor Dart, who had put on a still-life fashion installation in a mechanics’ workshop. Stella had been helping Taylor with the fittings as he had all the technical
dressmaking ability of a goat, and she and Clem had bonded for life over the armless dress he had reserved for her.
    Unlike Taylor, Stella had an unerring instinct for what women wanted to wear – and more importantly how they wanted to feel – and her graduation show had been one of the standout
presentations that year, with editors and buyers keeping close tabs on her as she apprenticed with Topshop and then the Burberry Brit division. But Stella had quickly grown restless with giving her
best ideas to others so they could profit from them, and when Clem mentioned in passing that her florist friend Katy had told her a stall on Portobello was coming up, the deal had been done. It
might not be the glossy shop front she dreamed of on Westbourne Grove, but at least everything had her name on the label, and as one of the most famous markets in the world, it was a fashion
mecca.
    Stella wandered over to the capacious bags she had bundled in with, and pulled out various bolts of fabric. She was genuinely gifted and her stall in the market was always thronging at the
weekends. Clem had worked on the stall for her for a while, but after the third successive theft, in which half of Stella’s collection was lifted while Clem either flirted with the guys in
the betting shop or slept behind the changing-room curtain, they had agreed it was better if she simply donated her body to fashion and left it at that.
    Clem stood up and took off her jumper, standing in the middle of her flat in just her knickers, as Stella began to wind a length of dusky pink butterfly-print silk-chiffon around her lean
frame.
    ‘Ooh, I like that,’ Clem murmured, looking down as Stella moved nimbly round her, pleating, tucking and folding. ‘What are you going to make with it?’
    ‘Not sure yet. Let’s see,’ Stella mumbled with pins clenched between her teeth, lifting up Clem’s arms.
    Clem looked out and into the flats opposite. Old Mrs Crouch, who’d lived in Portbello all her life, so for well over seventy years, was picking some basil from her window box. Clem gave
her a wave. The old lady was used to seeing Clem half-dressed and didn’t bat an eyelid at the goings-on over the road.
    ‘Do you think we should have some resolutions this year?’ Clem asked