Free Little Lady Agency and The Prince by Hester Browne

She paused. ‘I’m thinking about pigeons, you know, to put like a London spin on it. Do you reckon you can clean pigeons?’
    I reached for the biscuit barrel. Although I had a massive diamond engagement ring, Jonathan and I hadn’t set a date for our own wedding yet. Just thinking about trying to organise it at the same time as Gabi’s gave me hot flushes and, in any case, Jonathan wanted to ‘get things straight’ in Paris first. What with moving and work and Jonathan’s insane diary, we’d barely even begun to discuss it, to be honest.
    ‘Do you want to come over to ours for some supper?’ I suggested. If Nelson was within earshot, it might just keep Gabi within the bounds of reality. ‘I should be finished here about six, and Nelson’ll be back from his wine class by eight-ish.’
    ‘As long as Nelson’s cooking,’ said Gabi cheerfully. ‘Actually, I need to ask him about getting some goats for the ceremony.’ I heard her clicking again. ‘Nelson . . . goats . . .’ she mumbled.
    ‘Riiiiight,’ I said, then spotted a note in my own diary. ‘Oh, actually, Gabi, I should warn you – Roger’s coming round for a trial-run manicure.’
    Gabi made an affectionate gagging sound. Even people who loved Nelson’s friend Roger were not oblivious to his hygiene shortcomings. There was a good reason that a strapping six-foot sailing expert with a private income and a full head of hair was still more single than Cliff Richard. Not that that was the whole problem.
    It’s difficult to describe Roger Trumpet to anyone who hasn’t met him, but put it like this: if Nelson was a Labrador, and Jonathan was a very well-bred Irish setter, then Roger was like the oldest and gloomiest of my mother’s basset hounds. Adorable on birthday cards, less so at parties where he’d been known to clear the room in under twenty minutes, just by drinking a bottle of wine in a particularly baleful manner. He also usually smelled like he’d recently rolled in something untoward.
    I was terribly fond of him, though, as was Nelson. Roger was, after all, the raw material on which I’d honed every homme -improving skill I had. Not, sadly, that I’d wrought much long-term effect.
    ‘I hope he’s paying you,’ said Gabi disapprovingly. ‘You want to watch out, people taking advantage of you left, right and centre. Are you still on for sourcing those “Save the Day” cards, by the way?’
    Honestly. Virtually everyone I knew liked to haul themselves up to the moral high ground before asking for favours themselves.
    ‘Absolutely, yes, Mrs Lumley, we’ll have those keys round to you by courier this afternoon!’ said Gabi abruptly, which I assumed meant that her boss, Hughie, had rolled in from his long lunch, so we left the conversation there and I went back to the post, exhausted.
    The one intriguing handwritten envelope amongst the bills turned out to be from my office landlord, Peter, a retired violin teacher who lived in Stow-on-the-Wold. He didn’t see why he should spend his remaining years at the mercy of central heating, he wrote, and so the time had come to sell up and buy the little house in Sicily that he’d escaped to in his head during the thirty years of listening to children scraping away at ‘Frère Jacques’.
    Oh, how nice, I thought automatically, then realised with a start that this might mean it wasn’t just Peter packing his bags for pastures new.
    I reached for a second chocolate biscuit.
    Peter wrote that he hoped the sale of the flat he’d bought in Pimlico for five thousand pounds all those years ago might now be able to fund that dream, but rather than turf me out on my ear, he wanted to give me first chance to buy it. If I was interested, I should get in touch with the estate agents who’d brokered the original letting agreement when he moved out a few years ago, but that I should do so within a month, before he opened it up to everyone else.
    That estate agent was, naturally, Dean &