LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      Abby stared into the cold hard depths of the hairdresser’s mirror. As if she hadn’t enough problems, now she was sure she could see fresh lines fanning out around her eyes. Ageing was like the San Andreas fault, she thought grimly: you never knew where the next crack was going to appear. Hitting forty had been the start of the slide, definitely. Since then – unbelievably two years ago – she felt her entire face had gone to pot.

      Beside her, Cherise, who secretly thought Abby looked even more attractive in reality than she did on television, gazed critically at Abby’s newly cut hair.

      Cherise, like every member of staff in Gianni’s Salon, was glowingly young, with dewy skin. She wore the hairstylist’s uniform of black hipsters, slinky little T-shirt and belly ring. Abby whipped her envious eyes from Cherise’s flat, toned stomach and smiled into the mirror. The wrinkles obligingly smiled with her. Despite her lovely new haircut, her smart Armani shirt, and the admiration of most of the salon, who had obviously recognised Abby, and watched her with interest, even though they pretended their eyes were glued to their copies of Hello!, Abby felt a chasm in the pit of her stomach. God, she was getting old. Old and tired-looking. Forty-two. It even sounded old. Other people said she was imagining it.

      ‘Do you like it?’ Cherise was anxious for some feedback.

      ‘Thanks, Cherise, it’s lovely,’ Abby said kindly, instantly apologetic for not having said something nice sooner.

      Abby was kind to everyone. That, said her producer on Declutter: Your Home and Your Life, was a huge part of her charm and, undoubtedly, the key to her success. It wasn’t fake kindness: it was the real thing. Abby liked people and they liked her back. The ratings on Declutter had proved that. In just two seasons, Abby Barton had been transformed from a mum with a part-time small business into a TV hotshot.

      Her fledgeling home decluttering service couldn’t keep up with demand, there were talks about Abby writing a book to go with the programme, and the filming of a third series was due to start shortly. Both the TV pundits and the viewers loved her, the bank now sent the family Christmas cards instead of irate letters, and, occasionally, people she only vaguely knew waved at her hysterically when their cars passed in traffic.

      She still felt the same underneath, though. As Abby said to her close girlfriends, she was waiting for people to realise that she was an impostor and that she didn’t deserve her new-found fame or the money.

      ‘Fame is transient – lack of self-confidence lasts for ever,’ she joked, making everyone crack up with laughter.

      ‘No one could ever say it’s gone to your head,’ her husband, Tom, said occasionally, huge praise from him.

      Tom had unruly dark hair streaked with grey, a narrow, clever-looking face, rimless glasses and an elongated frame from never giving in to either the biscuit tin or too many glasses of wine (unlike Abby). There was a distinct puritan streak in him, an austerity that made him perfect deputy headmaster material, but also deeply disapproving of people who lost sight of ascetic values.

      He’d have hated Abby to have changed from her old slightly scatty self into a full-blown celebrity obsessed with clothes, cars and holidays.

      However, intellectually brilliant but unworldly, he’d never actually realised that Abby, despite being quite happy to find treasures in second-hand boutiques during their hard-up days, had always secretly liked to spend money on her hair and on ludicrously expensive cosmetics. And that one of the advantages of her new-found financial success was that Abby no longer had to hide the cost of hairdos and new clothes by buying cheaper cuts of meat and special offer vegetables. Certainly if Tom were given the slightest clue to how much today’s jaunt to Gianni’s had cost, he’d be scathing about the waste of money.

      Money was a bit of a sore subject in the Barton household these days. After years of earning so little, Abby had imagined that her new, comparative wealth would make their lives much easier. Instead, in some ways it had made them more difficult, mainly because of Tom’s vision of himself as head of the household and breadwinner.

      At school, he might be viewed as a modern educator with plenty of innovative ideas, but at home Tom liked the traditional roles to be maintained. Despite her increased workload, Abby still did all the shopping and laundry, an arrangement that was beginning to grate. And she knew that he, like many men, did not feel comfortable about his wife earning more than he did.

      ‘I think it suits you a bit more feathery round the jaw,’ Cherise said now, fiddling with the fine ends and fluffing them up. ‘It’s kinder to the jawline.’ Then she smiled and stood back to admire her famous client from a distance. ‘Do you know, it takes years off you!’

      Abby had a sudden vision of herself saying the same thing to her Aunt Sadie when Sadie had finally given up her five-decade red-lipstick habit in favour of a subtle warm pink. White-haired Sadie, squinting in the mirror in disapproval at the sight of her mouth without its narrow slash of crimson, had actually looked much the same. Still seventy-six, just with a more suitable lip colour. The youthful Cherise probably thought of Abby in the same way that Abby thought of Aunt Sadie: a tough old broad vainly trying to keep age at bay. But all the money and fame in the world couldn’t do that.

      Outside Gianni’s with a bag of hair-care products, Abby slammed the rear door of her glossy black four-wheel drive – the purchase of which had almost started a war in the Barton household – opened the driver’s door and swung herself into the seat. Her hair had turned out well, she thought, glancing critically in the rear-view mirror. Those much-discussed strands of rich chestnut really brought out the sea-green tints in her eyes.

      A passer-by stared into the car and Abby saw the familiar quickening of recognition in the man’s eyes. She shot him a brief professional smile and gunned the engine, hoping she’d have manoeuvred out of the parking space before he realised that he hadn’t smiled at an acquaintance – which was what most people initially thought – but at Abby Barton, television celebrity and self-help guru.

      Being recognised still shocked Abby. After eighteen months of it, she still wasn’t used to complete strangers nodding to her in the supermarket, then their expressions changing as the truth hit them. That wasn’t someone from down the road or the woman they saw daily at the school gates. It was that celebrity, whatshername, the one with that TV show telling everyone how to sort out their lives.

      When Abby’s daughter, Jess, was with her, the teenager would give a running commentary on the person’s thoughts.

      ‘What’s she doing in the supermarket? Don’t famous people have someone to do their shopping?’ Jess would mutter, leaving her mother in fits of laughter as they hurtled their trolley away down an aisle. ‘And look at the state of those tracksuit bottoms. I thought them big telly stars were loaded and she’s out in trackies with a hole in them. Scandalous.’ With a witty tongue and a great eye for a comic moment, Jess somehow managed to make being stared at by strangers fun. At other times, without the fifteen-year-old riding shotgun, it wasn’t always quite so funny – especially, as Abby had discovered to her astonishment, since people felt that it was OK to say anything to famous people, even remotely famous people like herself.

      Hovering by the tampons one day, wearily deciding which type she’d buy from the dizzying range, she’d jumped when a woman said: ‘Wow! I thought you were much younger from the TV. They must use amazing make-up.’

      For once, it had taken a lot of effort to summon up the legendary Barton kindness. ‘They do. Truckloads of it,’ Abby had said between gritted teeth, and picked up the first box of tampons that came to hand – the wrong ones,

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