Free The Dress by Kate Kerrigan

her.’
    â€˜It’s that sort of talk I don’t want inflicted on poor Minnie Yewdell this afternoon.’
    â€˜I don’t know what you’re talking about Frank. You know I am always perfectly charming to your business associates. I shall be the perfect wife.’
    Six hours later Minnie Yewdell was perched nervously on the edge of one of their Eileen Gray Bibendum armchairs. She was a small redhead, wearing far too much make-up and way out of her depth. She seemed terrified that the modernist chair with its soft black leather edges might close in and swallow her up.
    Frank found himself looking across at the poor woman and realizing his wife’s promise to be charming to her might have been optimistic. Joy hated it when her guests looked uncomfortable. She said it interfered with the line of the furniture. Frank knew she was only half-joking.
    As Joy got up to fetch more drinks Frank saw the eyes of the three other female guests follow her across the room. Joy was wearing a simple Chanel shift dress with day pearls and low, black stilettos. As she raised her tall, slender frame from the chair he noted each woman self-consciously checking their own outfits, flicking the hem of a skirt or fingering the collar of a blouse, painfully aware they were, inevitably, wearing the wrong thing. They had all made a huge effort to impress his wife and were frothed up in full skirts, wide belts and voluminous blouses, the latest craze. ‘Dior,’ he had heard one of them say, too loudly. Joy didn’t go in for fashion fads; she liked to carve out her own style. Even walking across her own drawing room, Joy Fitzpatrick was magnificent. His wealth and her beauty, plus her innate sense of style, put her beyond the jealousy of Manhattan’s elite wives. She was their queen. If you didn’t know Joy Fitzpatrick you were out of the circle and if you were out of the circle in New York society, well then, life just wasn’t worth living.
    â€˜You’re a lucky man,’ T. J. said to him. ‘She’s one beautiful lady.’
    Frank smiled and nodded but as he watched his graceful wife wander over to their elegant, mirrored cocktail bar the thought crept up on him, not for the first time, that actually, he didn’t give a rat’s arse about any of this social-climbing, polite chit-chat nonsense.
    However, he liked Ted and was determined to help him and his wife fit in to the exclusive social club in which he had found himself living.
    Joy stood over her nervous new guest with the Martini shaker.
    â€˜No, really,’ Minnie objected, lifting the glass a little higher, ‘it’s way too early for me.’
    â€˜Nonsense,’ Joy said smiling.
    â€˜Ooh, don’t get me tipsy,’ Minnie said. ‘In South Carolina we ladies don’t drink so much as you do here in New York.’
    Joy’s smile vanished. Frank felt sick. It was going to be one of those afternoons. Despite Joy’s composure he knew his wife was always on edge when she had guests. Joy said she needed the Martinis to loosen her up – to loosen them all up. His wife spent her life creating expectation from her peers and exceeding it but Frank knew this was not so much because she wanted to impress them as because she felt she needed to. Ever since she was a child, she had felt the world’s eyes judging her. Judging what she was wearing, how she behaved, the way she wore her hair. In the early years it had touched him, and he had comforted her and loved her insecurities away.
    Joy tapped the cocktail shaker slightly on the side of her new guest’s glass and said, a little sharply, ‘If you’re feeling unwell, Minnie, I can ask Jones to bring the car around?’
    Joy gave Frank a look across the room that clearly said, ‘Why am I entertaining this gauche overdressed southerner in my home?’ Between the strong cocktails and the tense moment, Frank could see that Ted’s