Free Charlie Glass's Slippers by Holly McQueen Page A

solicitor to make an inventory of Dad’s things like this, but then I suppose it’s also the most depressing part of Robyn’s nature that she might easily appear on the doorstep one day this week and try to squirrel away Grandma’s antique candlesticks and Great-Auntie Rachel’s pearl earrings.
    “You’d better come in, then.”
    “No, really, if you’ve people over for dinner, I’m sure I can find a better time . . .”
    “It doesn’t matter. Honestly. In fact, I’ve even got about half a ton of leftovers. If you eat meat and don’t faint at the sight of pecans, that is.”
    It turns out that both the above apply, and that Olly is, by his own admission, hungry.
    “But really, Charlotte—sorry, Charlie— I won’t make a peep,” he says, as he steps into the flat and starts removing his suit jacket. “I’ll just take a plate of food and let you get on with your dinner. The last thing I want to do is ruin your evening!”

chapter four
    I never thought I’d say this after the debacle that was Saturday night, but there was one good thing that came out of the dinner party. And that one good thing is the reason I’m sitting here, three days later, on a lush leather sofa in the poshest house I’ve ever been in, waiting for my first job interview in almost ten years.
    Honestly, you’ve never seen anything like this house. It occupies almost the square footage of my entire mansion block, a huge, white-stuccoed early-Victorian edifice behind thick iron gates on an eerily quiet road to the southern side of Holland Park Avenue. There’s a huge, Bentley-filled driveway out the front, and out the back is the largest private garden I’ve ever seen in London (actually, pretty much the largest private garden I’ve ever seen anywhere ), a gorgeous expanse of bucolic green that I can see out of the French windows. It has an indoor pool (I know this because Annabel, the leggy, efficient girl who showed me in, said she was going downstairs to see if she could find Mr. Broderick in the pool) and a gym (I know this because when she couldn’t find him in the pool, she said she’d also looked in the gym) and a library (I know this because that’s the room I’m waiting in now, surrounded by mahogany bookshelves and volumesand volumes of books, on this lush leather sofa by the French windows).
    Oh, and it even has an elevator , for Pete’s sake. And I know this because Annabel has been striding around on her iPhone out in the hallway, badgering some poor elevator maintenance man about an appointment for which he was due at eleven but for which he (apparently) won’t make it until noon.
    Annabel isn’t the very best advertisement for taking a job here, it must be said. But Marit, Pal’s sister-in-law, who not only turned out to be surprisingly sweet and helpful but who also gave her former employers a call on my behalf suggesting they see me for the cook’s job, told me that the Broderick family themselves are delightful people. A Frank Broderick and a Susannah Broderick, apparently, with a teenage son (Rob? Ron? I’ve forgotten what Marit told me, which isn’t a great start) who still lives at home. The father—Frank—is in a wheelchair, apparently, though whether through age or infirmity I don’t know. Still, I suppose this might explain the elevator. Though it probably wouldn’t explain why Annabel was trying to find Mr. Broderick in the gym, of all places.
    Anyway, she still hasn’t come up trumps on the Mr. Broderick front, so I’ll have to find a way to while away the time until she does, and keep my nerves at bay.
    I get up and go to have a little look at the fan of magazines and papers that are laid out on a gorgeous Art Deco coffee table, pick up a couple of my favorite travel magazines, and head back to my chair for a bit of a flick through. Actually, one of them is the same issue of the Incredible Expeditions magazine that Lucy was accusing me of betraying her with the other night. I leaf my way