‘It’s so good to be back, isn’t it?’ asked Beverley, breathing in the air and looking utterly enchanted by her surroundings. ‘Did you find it as difficult as I did during the pandemic? When you couldn’t come here to shop?’
‘I’ve actually never been inside Selfridges before,’ replied the ghost. ‘I’m more of a Topshop girl.’
‘Of course you are. What do you think of this?’ she asked, pulling a Vera Wang dress from one of the rails and holding it up to her body in the mirror. ‘For the scene in the dentist’s surgery when Carolyn meets Dr Westerley, before she learns that he spends his winters as a ski instructor in Switzerland?’
‘You don’t think it’s a bit over the top?’ asked the ghost. ‘Women don’t tend to wear gowns like this when they’re getting the plaque scraped from their teeth. It’s more the sort of thing one might wear to a New Year’s Eve ball on a cruise ship.’
‘But that’s the problem with young women these days, isn’t it?’ replied Beverley with a sigh. ‘They don’t dress to impress. They never realize that today might be the day they finally encounter the man of their dreams. Instead, they just throw on whatever they find at the back of their wardrobe, something that doesn’t smell too bad or isn’t too wrinkled and might get them through the day without half the threads coming loose. DON’T! They wear polyester and rayon, jackets without a centre back seam, and – I SAID, DON’T! – match short skirts with plunging necklines. No, the women in my books need to look a million dollars from the second they wake up until the moment they slip into a blissful, silent sleep, where they dream of weekend breaks with Ryan Gosling on the Amalfi coast. So, make a note: red Vera Wang maxi-dress. Floral print, V-neck, silk wrap. To be used in Chapter Two.’
‘Fine,’ said the ghost, tapping this information into her phone and taking a photograph of the dress in question for future reference. ‘I suppose she’ll be wearing a bib anyway, so the dress won’t get too stained.’
‘A bib?’
‘Yes, you know, those plastic bibs they give you when you’re lying in a dentist’s chair? To stop all the crud from your mouth falling on your clothes when they’re polishing your teeth.’
‘You really do live in some sort of sixties kitchen-sink drama, don’t you?’ said Beverley, looking appalled by these earthy descriptions. ‘Every time you talk I half expect Alan Bates to come in and demand a plate of mashed potatoes and a pint of ale to wash it down. Let’s be clear, there’ll be none of that sort of thing in my book. No one needs that level of detail. What would you have Carolyn do next? Go to the toilet?’
‘The characters in your books don’t use the bathroom?’
‘Of course not. Look, think about when you’re sitting at home, enjoying one of your takeaway kebabs while watching a romantic comedy on television. There’s Nicole Kidman drinking a glass of champagne as fireworks explode over Sydney Harbour Bridge. Behind her, Hugh Jackman gives her a shoulder massage while singing selections from Les Misérables into her ear. Now picture Nicole putting her glass down and saying, Excuse me for a moment, Hugh, but I need to go and take a shit. It rather spoils the mood, don’t you think?’
‘I suppose so,’ admitted the ghost.
‘It’s fine for fiction to reflect reality,’ continued Beverley, warming to her theme now. ‘It just needs to be a lot more hygienic. You can attend every creative writing course in the country and I guarantee you that not one of the tutors will ever offer that piece of advice and, quite honestly, it’s pure gold.’
A young woman with dark hair painfully scraped back from her forehead came over and stood next to Beverley, admiring the Vera Wang. She had immaculate skin and carried a scent of Chanel Chance Eau Fraîche about her person. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘And it’s ten per cent off at the moment. Would you like me to see whether we have one in your size?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Beverley, turning around with a withering expression on her face. She wished that she’d been wearing a pair of sunglasses so she could have slowly taken them off and destroyed this insolent creature with a look. ‘My size?’
‘Yes, what are you, a fourteen? I think the one you’re holding is a six. I can take a look in our stockroom, if you like. Vera Wang looks very elegant on the older woman.’
Beverley opened and closed her mouth several times, hoping that a series of lacerating words would emerge, leaving the sales assistant squirming in a pool of self-recrimination for the rest of the afternoon but, to her disappointment, nothing emerged. She turned to her ghost, wearing a do-your-job expression.
‘We’re not actually buying,’ explained the ghost. ‘We’re just browsing. For Carolyn.’
‘For who?’
‘Carolyn Worthington. She’s a secretary in a publishing house in Central London but dreams of marrying a wealthy man and living a luxurious lifestyle on the Côte d’Azur. Also, she needs to have her wisdom teeth removed as they’ve been giving her terrible gip. We’re trying to find something for her to wear when she goes in for the operation.’
‘Right,’ said the sales assistant, nodding her head and appearing completely unfazed by any of this. ‘Well, that is just so exciting!’
‘DON’T!’ roared Beverley as another atomizer came her way.
‘I should probably point out that Carolyn is fictional,’ continued the ghost. ‘She’s a character in a novel. We’re just looking at what she might wear. If she was, you know, real. To give us a sense of her character.’
The sales assistant continued to smile, nodding like a bobblehead toy. She’d probably heard stranger things than this across the shop floor. ‘Well, that’s just super, and if I can help in any way, please do let me know,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to set you up with a dressing room?’
‘No, we’re fine, thanks.’
‘My size,’ muttered Beverley as the woman walked away. ‘I could fit into this if I spent a week on a juice diet. I did one once, actually, but I ended up smelling of kale. Have you ever tried one?’
‘A juice diet?’ asked the ghost. ‘No.’
‘No, I didn’t think so,’ said Beverley, looking her up and down, eager to transfer a little of the body-shaming her way. ‘Anyway, let’s keep going. We need to think about shoes next.’
As they made their way further into the depths of the store, they passed the book section and Beverley glanced around the tables for a few moments before making her way towards the fiction shelves.
‘I just want to see whether Jonathan Coe has anything new out,’ she explained, running a finger along the spines before examining the books to the left of these, where copies of a novel by Chris Cleave were face out. ‘How extraordinary,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘What’s that?’ asked the ghost.
‘You don’t see?’
The ghost looked at the shelf, uncertain at first what her employer was getting at, until, finally, the penny dropped.
‘Cleave, then Coe,’ she said. ‘No Cleverley.’