Foetal Attraction Read Online Free PDF Page B

if men can play golf all day and call it ‘business’, why couldn’t women do the same thing with clothes-buying? Competitive Shopping, she called it. First hole, Harrods. Second, Harvey Nichols. Gillian had plans to employ Imelda as a little caddie to run along behind carrying her shopping bags.
    She rammed Maddy’s feet into unpitying black leather ankle boots, then stood back to appraise the finished product. ‘VPL – visible panty line.’
    Just as Maddy was stepping modestly out of the offending undies, a streaked head torpedoed into their cubicle. Why was it, Maddy pondered, that the shopping urge always struck the day you were wearing your most moth-eaten panties with questionable elastic and hadn’t shaved your pits? ‘Oooh, it looks faaaa-bulous,’ the head parroted, mesmerized by the splintery elegance of her own reflection. It was the same assistant who’d spent the last half an hour lying to Gillian that she looked ravishing, trendy and totally chi-chi in garments that flattened, fattened and distorted every part of her. ‘It’s so
you
.’
    The assistant finally focussed on Maddy with a look both aloof and malicious. ‘But perhaps a little small … I don’t think we have anything quite your size.’
    Maddy felt as crushed as the velvet hot pants currently around her ankles.
    ‘I take it you failed your O levels,’ Gillian rallied to her friend. ‘That’s why you work in a
shop
.’
    ‘Gillian, what the bloody hell are we doing here?’ Maddy jerked the curtain closed and surveyed her new friend’s latest sartorial suggestion with alarm. ‘Jodhpurs?’
    ‘We’re here because I want you to come out fox-hunting with me. And to the polo. Places where you can meet other men.’
    Maddy stood firmly, arms folded across her bare chest . ‘Not only am I allergic to blood sports, but I don’t want to meet other men.’
    ‘Listen, take it from one who knows. This Alexander Flake …’
    ‘Drake,’ Maddy amended wearily.
    ‘… is not serious about you. No sooner had you flown in, than he flew the coop. Yes?’
    ‘He’s on assignment.’
    ‘Trust me. With English men, it’s a case of “in, out and wipe” or marriage.’
    ‘You’re unbelievable.’ Maddy hauled her legs into one of Gillian’s silk lingerie rejects. ‘You’re a kind of cross between Madonna and Barbara Cartland. Do you know that?’
    ‘What a woman needs is to marry a rich old boy, the sort of human handbag you can put down by the door at parties and pick up on the way home for the cab fare. With a complementary toy boy on the side. I’ve got my eye on one now. He’s fifteen. Far too young. I’m saving him up for later.’
    ‘What? A kind of lay-by?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    Sales assistant number two catapulted her head into their cubicle. ‘Everything all right?’ she asked, in a tone conveying that everything was definitely not. She examined the designer lingerie Maddy was trying on, with deep suspicion. Maddy thought she was going to be arrested for wearing underwear above her station.
    ‘Get used to it, darling,’ Gillian cackled. ‘In England, it’s service with a snarl.’
    Ignoring the gaping assistant, Maddy jumped up and down, tugging ferociously until her thighs were eye-wateringly squeezed into the jodhpurs. To wear clothes like this required the figure of someone who had a long-term drug habit. ‘Gillian, if the good Lord had meant us to wear jodhpurs,’ she gasped, ‘he wouldn’t have given us internal organs.’
    ‘If tha gud Lawd …’ Gillian mimicked nasally. ‘After the clothes we’ll work on the voice.’
    ‘I can’t talk posh!’
    ‘It’s quite easy, really,’ Gillian articulated for the benefit of the sales assistant. ‘You just talk at all times as though you’ve got a dick in your mouth.’
    The assistant’s pallor went a lovely autumnal maroon, clashing with her Coutier-Hell’s-Angel, orange studded leather look. ‘Perhaps I’ll get the manageress, shall I?’
    Maddy had