The Proposal

One address, however, she didn’t recognise. Georgia Hamilton.

Frowning, she clicked on the message and began to read.

Dear Miss Carrell,

Thank you for your reply to my advertisement in The Lady magazine. Perhaps we could meet to discuss my situation further. As I am due to travel in just three days’ time, it might be better to do this sooner rather than later. Are you available today? Please call me on the number below. I look forward to meeting you.

Kind regards,

Georgia Hamilton (MA Cantab)

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Annie, coming back into the room and handing Amy a cup of black coffee.

‘I did something a bit crazy last night.’

‘Do I need to call a lawyer?’

Amy explained about the advertisement in The Lady and her reply from Ms Hamilton.

‘It’s a Christmas miracle,’ gasped Annie, grabbing the magazine that Amy had flung down the night before. ‘It’s like Scent of a Woman.’

‘Scent of a Woman?’

‘That movie where Chris O’Donnell takes the blind man to New York. Al Pacino. Can you imagine if you were going with someone as sexy as Al Pacino,’ she said, her breath quickening in excitement.

‘Well, last time I looked, Georgia was a woman’s name,’ said Amy, unable to share her friend?

??s enthusiasm about this new development to the day.

‘Amy, last night you said you wanted to go back to New York, and here’s your opportunity.’

‘Except I’m not going to be accompanying Al Pacino. Best-case scenario it’s some no-friends weirdo; worst case . . . it’s a psychopath who wants to kill me and bury me under her petunias.’

‘It will be some little old lady who can’t carry her own bags . . . Now go, give her a ring and get it sorted. Otherwise you’re coming for Christmas at my parents’ place and you’re sharing a room with the dog.’

An hour later, Amy was getting off the tube at Chalk Farm station. She still felt terrible and looked worse. Her meeting with Georgia Hamilton had been arranged for eleven o’clock, giving her time to get over to the Forge for after lunch. It had meant there was no time to go back to her apartment in Finsbury Park to change, and not wanting to turn up to her interview in last night’s now half-bald sequinned dress, she had been forced to borrow something from Annie’s eclectic wardrobe: a lemon-yellow 1950s hoop-skirt dress two sizes too big and a pair of grey suede pumps one size too small had been the most conservative items she could find. What invariably looked fantastic on Annie made Amy feel like one of those crazy bag ladies she used to see shuffling around Penn Station in the nineties.

As she turned to cross the footbridge joining Chalk Farm with Primrose Hill, her phone beeped to register a text from Nathan: ‘So do we have a five-carat sparkler on our finger yet? X’.

Snorting, she switched off the phone and quickened her pace. It was beginning to rain, and Annie’s pink parasol would provide little resistance against the December elements.

Once she had crossed the Regent’s Canal bridge, it was like entering a parallel universe, she thought, noticing that the gritty minimarts and curry buffets she had spotted at the Camden end of Chalk Farm had made way for a more serene village atmosphere. Primrose Hill was quite lovely, with its Georgian architecture and leafiness, its boho bakeries, boutiques and pavement cafés, which all made Amy wonder why she didn’t come up here more often.

She stopped in front of a smart Victorian town house and checked the address she’d scribbled on a piece of paper.

Georgia Hamilton. 27b Chalcot Terrace. She had spoken to Ms Hamilton on the phone, of course, but it had been a very short and rather formal conversation, all ‘I’d be delighted to meet you’ and ‘I’d be grateful if you’d come to see me’. Amy hadn’t really been able to glean much about the woman from her voice. Elderly, polite, polished: that probably described half the people living in this part of London. She had googled the name, with similar results. Georgia Hamilton could be a tapestry cleaner, a publishing executive or a minor B-movie actress who hadn’t made a film since 1976. Whoever she was, she was rich. Amy could see from the two bells next to the door that the building was divided into flats, but even so, she liked to read the property sections of the newspapers on Sundays, and she was aware that a duplex apartment in Primrose Hill would cost more than a mansion with stables anywhere outside the M25.

Here goes nothing, she thought, pressing the button next to the brass plaque marked simply ‘Hamilton’, then jumped when the door buzzed and a disembodied voice said ‘Second floor, please.’

Amy pushed into the high entrance hall. God, it’s got a chandelier in the hallway, she thought, immediately intimidated. There was a vaguely musty smell in the air and the paintwork looked in need of a refresh, but even so, it was clearly a grand old house, with large vases containing fresh flower arrangements on each landing and expensive-looking pearlescent paper on the walls.

Ascending the wide staircase, she realised she was walking on tiptoes, trying not to make any noise in this hushed space, instinctively respectful of the history of the place. She supposed it was because it was exactly as she had imagined London to be when she had first read about it as a child: this was the sort of house that would have had servants and a nanny, the sort of place you could imagine Peter Pan visiting late at night.

‘Get a grip,’ she muttered to herself as she reached the top floor and knocked on the door marked with a brass ‘2’.

‘Miss Carrell, I presume?’

Amy took a moment to examine the lady in front of her. She looked to be in her early seventies, although it was very hard to tell. Her ash-blond hair, shot through with fine silvery strands, was cut short and tucked behind her ears, and she was dressed simply in a grey blous and wide black slacks with a string of pearls around her neck and matching earrings in her lobes. Elegant, that was the word that immediately sprang to mind. The sort of high-born elegance that made Amy wonder if Georgia Hamilton knew Vivienne Lyons and all her snobby friends.