‘Irish won’t wear the costume.’ Shirley barged into Coleman’s office, waving her arms. ‘She says she wants a word with you.’

Coleman was just out of the shower and still in the process of securing a towel around his waist. His head waitress looked him square in the eye before deliberately running her eyes down the perfect triangle of his rippling chest, still wet and steaming.

‘Don’t you ever knock?’ he said.

‘Do I need to?’ she said, smarting at the rejection.

Smoke from the cigarette that was permanently carved into the corner of Shirley’s full mouth disappeared into the curve of her bleached blonde bouffant. She was clearly still angry with him for cutting off their arrangement. Coleman had been sleeping with her since her divorce, six months ago, but the affair had run its course. Coleman knew Shirley was developing feelings for him and he didn’t do love. He was still fond of Shirley. They were old friends and he didn’t want to lead her on or make promises he couldn’t keep. She deserved better than that and she would get over it anyway. In the meantime, she was glaring at him, thunderously.

Coleman sighed and reached for his shirt.

‘Send her in then. What’s her name again?’

‘I just call her Irish. I dunno. Laura? She’s only been here three weeks and ain’t much of a waitress.’

‘Why did you take her on then?’

Times were good at Chevrons. London was swinging and there were any number of great waitresses willing to put on a sexy kitty costume and swing. Everyone wanted to be a kitty girl. It could get rough sometimes, depending on who was in but scuffles among the punters just added glamour to the place. The money was good and Coleman ran a clean house. There was no excuse for employing dead wood.

Shirley shrugged. ‘I dunno. Candy left. We were short staffed. I needed someone fast and she turned up at the door – begging for work. Fred’s wife said she was hard-up. I felt sorry for her.’

Coleman shook his head. Shirley had never felt sorry for anyone in her life. She was trying to get at him.

‘I put her in the flat upstairs.’

‘Jesus, that dump? It’s virtually derelict!’

She made her don’t-care face.

‘She seemed happy enough to take it. Though she’ll have to leave that too,’ she added, dropping her cigarette into his ashtray without stubbing it out.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I want you to get rid of her.’

‘I never hired her.’

‘Yes, but she’s crap and you’re so good at getting rid of people.’ She gave him a pointed glare before walking out of the open door and waving the Irish girl in.

Coleman winced when he realised that the girl had been standing there all along. She must have heard everything.

Flustered, he turned his back to her to finish buttoning up his shirt and threw a ‘take a seat’ look over his shoulder.

He had forgotten that the sofa was still made up as a bed from the night before.

He had also forgotten that he wasn’t wearing trousers.

Lara looked at the bed then across at the man with the towel around his waist and tried to decide whether it was safe to sit down or not.

Chancing it seemed like the best option. As she perched herself on the edge of the white sheet she noticed the dip in the pillow where his head had been. The sheets were probably still warm from his naked body. She shivered.

‘I hear that you don’t like the Chevrons uniform,’ Coleman said.

‘That’s right.’ The Irish girl nodded. ‘Would you like to know why?’

‘Not really.’ Coleman was about to turn and tell her to simply wear the damn thing or take the door, when he realised that he was not wearing trousers. Shirley had him so flustered that he had buttoned his shirt and knotted his tie but was still basically naked from the waist down. He paused and stayed with his back turned but it was important to act normal – to keep talking.

‘But I suppose I should hear you out.’

‘Well,’ Lara began, wondering if he was going to turn round or expected her to continue talking to his back.

‘The fabric is really nasty and cheap and the way they are designed makes them chafe at the gusset. If the girls put on an inch of weight here or there, they rip.’

Coleman knew that he could not keep his back turned indefinitely. Perhaps if he argued his point (whatever that was) the Irish girl would think this was simply the way men did business in London.

‘The girls aren’t supposed to put on weight,’ he said, turning around too abruptly. He gripped urgently at the waistband of the falling towel. ‘Those costumes were very expensive.’

Lara did not know whether to be offended or amused. She had seen Coleman in the club and heard the other waitresses talking about him, but this was her first proper conversation with him.

He was a hard man, the girls said. He could handle himself, but he wasn’t a greedy bully like his boss – the volatile, loquacious bully, Bobby Chevron. The girls respected Coleman but they were not afraid of him. He was clean cut and good looking with a scarred jawline, aquiline nose and blond hair kept short and square. He had remarkably old-fashioned manners and never laid a hand on any of them (although that was more often than not much to their disappointment). He called all the girls ‘ladies’ although several of them, Lara suspected, were anything but. Lara had been warned that even if he did make a pass, she wasn’t to go near him because he was Shirley’s property. In her two weeks, Lara had also heard endless rumours about these gangster boys. Apparently they tortured each other and roughed up rival gang members. Some of the girls found that exciting, but it meant nothing to Lara. While everyone seemed slightly in love with enigmatic Coleman, Lara’s impression of him had been that he seemed rather outdated. Like his club. Chevrons was stuck in a 1940s time warp, with its men in Saville Row suits and waitresses wearing those stupid, cheap kitty costumes with crippling stilettoes. In the rest of London being young and free was the hip thing now. Men were growing their hair and joining bands. The sexy women were doing their own thing: wearing miniskirts and flat boots, going on the pill and sleeping around.

This situation she found herself in now epitomised that opinion. If Coleman was a modern man he’d have simply said, ‘Pass me my trousers would you?’ or, perhaps, dropped the towel altogether and conducted their meeting in the semi-nude. As that very thought occurred to her, Lara felt herself redden and decided to take the matter into her own hands.

She took the trousers from the arm of the sofa, and simply walked across the room and handed them to him.

‘Well, Mr. Coleman.’

‘Just Coleman,’ he said, taking the trousers off her and, visibly relieved, stepped behind the open door of the shower room. ‘I just have one name.’ Then blurted out, ‘I’m an orphan.’ He immediately grimaced to himself at the revelation. What was wrong with him today? Why was this stupid stuff coming out of his mouth? Was he this flustered by forgetting his trousers?

‘Oh,’ said Lara, slightly taken aback. This guy was not the self-assured, arrogant Neanderthal she had been expecting. Nonetheless, she had a point to prove.

‘Well, Coleman. I don’t care how expensive your costumes are, they look cheap and awful. And let’s face it, Coleman, nobody wants to be served drinks by a girl who looks uncomfortable in what she’s wearing. You want the waitresses to look sexy but happy – am I right? And if they’re not comfortable, they’re not happy.’ Lara was shocked by herself. If she had not caught him without his trousers, she wondered if she would have been as confident.

Now that he was fully dressed, Coleman was starting to pay attention to what Lara was actually saying, and he didn’t like it. Of course his girls were happy! Shirley made sure of that. He paid them well. In some clubs, the girls had to buy their own costumes, which were docked out of their wages. Who did this girl think she was coming in here telling him how to run his business? He came back into the room ready for a fight, and was surprised to find her holding out half a dozen sheets of paper towards him.

‘Look at these,’ she said. He accepted them gingerly, thinking they might be some kind of a legal writ, suing him for making her wear an uncomfortable costume. Unlikely, but possible.

But it was just a bunch of drawings. Sexy pictures of women’s figures with hurriedly drawn squiggles for their pouting mouths and big, bovine eyes. They were wearing an array of short, revealing outfits.

‘What are these?’ he said, immediately thrusting them back to her. The words and gesture came out harsher than Coleman intended. But he wasn’t in the habit of holding somebody else’s offerings and it felt unnatural. Exposing. As if he were back in school as a small child handing work in to the teacher and getting it thrown back in his face. Truthfully, he was embarrassed and uncertain of how he was meant to react.

Lara felt hurt by the immediate rejection but, equally, she believed this meeting was a chance. Not a big chance, maybe not even a chance at all. But it was something. Maybe. And even a maybe-something was better than nothing. So Lara took a deep breath, and pushed them back into his hands.

‘They are designs for waitress costumes for Chevrons,’ she said, keeping her voice as steady and firm as she could. ‘As you can see,’ she said, moving in next to him, ‘they’re as sexy and revealing as their current ones, but a bit more up to date. This baby-doll minidress is the most practical.’ She picked out one from the middle of the pile. Lara stood a full head shorter than him. As she pointed to the pictures she could sense him looking at the side of her face, instead of the page he was holding. ‘The whole costume is made in one, circular piece, so it’s fluid, which gives the girls easy movement. They’ll be able to walk quickly and with more confidence, which is so important when you’re carrying drinks.’ He coughed slightly, and she felt his breath catch the side of her neck. ‘Plus, I have sourced a fabric which is water resistant and quick drying in case of spills.’

He nodded, slowly. He seemed flummoxed. ‘This isn’t really my thing,’ he shook his head and handed them back, more gently this time. ‘You need to speak to Shirley.’

‘I already tried.’ Lara refused to take the drawings from him and added, as diplomatically as she could, ‘She didn’t seem interested.’

Coleman looked at the girl. She had brown hair that fell, unfashionably straight, to her shoulders and she wore a plain dress which, while short, hung on her like a sack. Over this was a cream hand-knitted cardigan like one that Coleman remembered seeing on a postcard Bobby had sent back from a trip to Ireland. Her eyes were dark brown and hopeful, her long nose and clear white skin gave her an earnest, serious look, which made Coleman feel peculiarly sad. He noticed that she wasn’t wearing any makeup and the intimacy of that fact pinched him and made him feel sadder again. The only time Coleman saw a woman without makeup these days was if they were in bed with him. Even then, they rarely spent enough of the night to take it off. ‘Irish’ did not look like a fashion designer to him. Did fashion designers even exist in Ireland? Wasn’t it all fields and cows? Poets, writers and spectacular alcoholics, sure. But fashion designers?

She was talented. He could see that clearly from the extraordinary drawings he was still holding. She was naive, certainly. Yet she had come straight off the boat and had the hutzpah to come in here and sell to him.

He held up the picture of the baby-doll dress.

‘How much would this one cost?’

‘About two pounds per costume; three if you go with the marabou trim.’

Coleman sucked his teeth and paused.

‘That’s expensive.’

‘How about I make one up for you?’ she added quickly. ‘I can have it by tomorrow. One of the girls can model it. You can see how it looks in the flesh?’

Coleman pushed back a smile. It wasn’t expensive. He had just wanted her to keep selling it to him, keep her in his office. Because since this Irish girl came into the room, Coleman felt a peculiar sense of loss rising up in him. Beyond their harsh introduction, beyond the towel, beyond her criticism of Chevrons’ staff costume and her strange request to design new ones, Coleman simply felt as if a piece of him had gone missing in her presence. He was afraid that if he gave her what she wanted, then she would leave the room and, if she did that, he might never get it back. Confused by the irrational feeling that was drawing over him he nodded.

‘Bring me in something by Friday.’

Lara grinned and Coleman caught his breath at the innocence of her clean face.

‘What’s your name?’ he said, handing her the pictures and watching as she put them back into her bag.

‘Lara,’ she said. ‘Lara Collins.’

She held out her hand and as he took it, Coleman felt such heat in touching her it was if he had been branded.

He pursed his lips, which was as close to a smile as he could manage and, with great reluctance, nodded her towards the door.

After she had gone he stood for a moment and, finding his voice unable to reach the dizzy heights of speaking, he mouthed her name into the empty, silent room. Lara Collins.