Piranha to Scurfy (2007)
“The Milky Way was there and Charles’s Wain, Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Seven Daughters of Atlas. A young woman who was James Mullen’s secretary saw it in a shop window in Bond Street, draped across the seat of a (reproduction) Louis Quinze chair with a silver chain necklace lying on it and a black picture hat with a dark blue ribbon covering one of its corners.Cressida Chilton had been working for James Mullen for just three months when he sent her out to buy a birthday present for his wife. No...t jewelry, he had said. Use your own judgment, I can see you’ve got good taste—but not jewelry. Cressida could see which way the wind was blowing there.“Not jewelry” were the fateful words. Elaine Mullen was his second wife and had held that position for five years. Office gossip had it that he was seeing one of the management trainees in Foreign Securities. I wish it were me, thought Cressida, and she went into the shop and bought the scarf—appropriately enough, for an astronomical price—and then, because no shops gift-wrapped in those days, into a stationer’s around the corner for a sheet of pink-and-silver paper and a twist of silver string.Elaine knew the meaning of the astronomical scarf.MoreLess
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