Hadiyyah considered this. “High heels. You have to wear high heels. Do you have high heels, Barbara?”
“Oh yeah,” Barbara said. “I find them just the thing for my line of work, crime scenes being otherwise rather grim.”
“You’re making fun. You can’t make fun if we’re to do this properly.” Hadiyyah bounced across the lawn back to her, trailing the Daily Mail article from her fingers. She spread this out on the wicker table once again and perused it for a moment, after which she announced, “A-line skirt. The staple of all wardrobes. Your jacket has to be a length that doesn’t draw attention to your hips and as your face is roundish-”
“Still working to lose the baby fat,” Barbara said.
“-the neckline of your blouse should be soft, not angular. Blouse necklines, you see, should mirror the face. Well, the chin, really. I mean the whole line from the ears to the chin, which includes the jaw.”
“Ah. Got it.”
“We want the skirt midknee and the shoes to have straps. That’s because of your lovely ankles.”
“Straps?”
“Hmm. It says so right here. And we must accessorise as well. The mistake so many women make is failure to accessorise appropriately or-what’s worse-failure to accessorise at all.”
“Bloody hell. We don’t want that,” Barbara said fervently. “What’s it mean, exactly?”
Hadiyyah folded up the newspaper neatly, running her fingers lovingly along each crease. “Oh, scarves and hats and belts and lapel pins and necklaces and bracelets and earrings and handbags. Gloves as well, but that would be only in winter.”
“God,” Barbara said. “Won’t I be a bit overdone with all that?”
“You don’t use it all at once.” Hadiyyah sounded like patience itself. “Honestly, Barbara, it’s not really that difficult. Well, maybe it’s a bit difficult, but I’ll help you with it. It’ll be such fun.”
Barbara doubted this, but off they went. They phoned her father first at the university, where they managed to catch him between a lecture and a meeting with a postgraduate student. Early in her relationship with Taymullah Azhar and his daughter, Barbara had learned that one did not make off with Hadiyyah without bringing her father fully into the picture. She hated having to admit why she wanted to take Hadiyyah with her on a shopping excursion, so she made do with, “Got to buy some bits and bobs for work and I thought Hadiyyah might like to come along. Give her something of an outing and all that. Thought we’d stop for an ice somewhere when we’re finished.”
“Has she completed her studies for the day?” Azhar asked.
“Her studies?” Barbara gave Hadiyyah the eye. The little girl nodded vigorously although Barbara had her doubts about the cookery end of things. Hadiyyah had not been enthusiastic about standing in someone’s kitchen in the summer heat. “Thumb’s-up on that,” she told Azhar.
“Very well,” Azhar said. “But not in Camden Market, Barbara.”
“Last place on earth, I guarantee,” Barbara told him.
The nearest Topshop turned out to be in Oxford Street, a fact that delighted Hadiyyah and horrified Barbara. The shopping mecca of London, it was always an undulating mass of humanity on any day save Christmas; in high summer, with schools on holiday and the capital city packed with visitors from around the globe, it was an undulating mass of humanity squared. Cubed. To the tenth. Whatever. Once they arrived, it took them forty minutes to find a car park with space for Barbara’s Mini and another thirty to work their way to Topshop, elbowing through the crowds on the pavement like salmon going home. When they finally arrived at the shop, Barbara glanced inside and wanted to run away at once. It was crammed with adolescent girls, their mothers, their aunts, their grans, their neighbours…They were shoulder to shoulder, they were in queues at the tills, they were jostling from racks to counters to displays, they were shouting into mobiles over the pounding music, they were trying on jewellery: earrings to ears, necklaces to necks, bracelets on wrists. It was Barbara’s worst nightmare come to life.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Hadiyyah enthused. “I always want Dad to bring me here, but he says Oxford Street’s mad. He says nothing would drag him to Oxford Street. He says wild horses couldn’t bring him here. He says Oxford Street’s London’s version of…I can’t remember, but it’s not good.”
Dante’s Inferno, no doubt, Barbara thought. Some circle of hell into which women like herself-loathing fashion trends, indifferent about apparel in general, and looking dreadful no matter what she wore-were thrust for their fashion sins.
“But I love it,” Hadiyyah said. “I knew I would. Oh, I just knew it.”
She zipped inside. There was nothing for Barbara to do but follow.
THEY SPENT A grueling ninety minutes in Topshop, where lack of air-conditioning-this was London, after all, where people still believed that there were only “four or five hot days each year”-and what seemed like a thousand teenagers in search of bargains made Barbara feel as if she’d definitely paid for every earthly sin she’d ever committed, far beyond those that she’d committed against the name of haute couture. They went from there to Jigsaw, and from Jigsaw to H & M, where they repeated the Topshop experience with the addition of small children howling for their mothers, ice cream, lollies, pet dogs, sausage rolls, pizza, fish and chips, and whatever else came into their feverish minds. At Hadiyyah’s insistence-“Barbara, just look at the name of the shop, please!”-they followed these experiences with a period of time in Accessorize, and finally they found themselves in Marks & Spencer, although not without Hadiyyah’s sigh of disapproval. She said, “This is where Mrs. Silver buys her knickers, Barbara,” as if that information would stop Barbara cold and dead in her tracks. “Do you want to look like Mrs. Silver?”
“At this point, I’ll settle for looking like Dame Edna.” Barbara ducked inside. Hadiyyah trailed her. “Thank God for small mercies,” Barbara noted over her shoulder. “Not only knickers but air-conditioning as well.”
All they’d managed to accomplish so far was a necklace from Accessorize that Barbara thought she wouldn’t feel too daft wearing and a purchase of makeup from Boots. The makeup consisted of whatever Hadiyyah told her to buy although Barbara sincerely doubted she’d ever wear it. She’d only given in to the idea of makeup at all because the little girl had been utterly heroic in facing Barbara’s consistent refusals to purchase anything Hadiyyah had fished out of the racks of clothing they’d seen so far. Thus it seemed only fair to give in on something, and makeup appeared to be the ticket. So she’d loaded her basket with foundation, blusher, eye shadow, eye liner, mascara, several frightening shades of lipstick, four different kinds of brushes, and a container of loose powder that was supposed to “fix it all in place,” Hadiyyah told her. Apparently, the purchases Hadiyyah directed Barbara to make were heavily dependent upon her observation of her mother’s daily morning rituals, which themselves seemed to be heavily dependent upon “pots of this and that…She always looks brilliant, Barbara, wait till you see her.” Seeing Hadiyyah’s mother was something that had not happened in the fourteen months of Barbara’s acquaintance with the little girl and her father, and the euphemism she’s gone to Canada on holiday was beginning to take on a significance difficult for Barbara to continue to ignore.
Barbara groused about the excessive expense, saying, “Can’t I make do with blusher by itself?” To this, Hadiyyah scoffed most heartily. “Really, Barbara,” she said, and she left it at that.
Once in Marks & Spencer, Hadiyyah wouldn’t hear of Barbara’s trailing off towards racks of anything the child deemed “suitable for Mrs. Silver…you know.” She had in mind that staple of all wardrobes-the aforementioned A-line skirt-and declared herself content with the fact that at least as it was high summer, the autumn clothing had just been brought in. Thus, she explained, what was on offer hadn’t yet been picked over by countless “working mums who wear this sort of thing, Barbara. They’ll be on holiday with their kids just now, so we don’t have to worry about having only the pickings left.”