by Wendy Holden
"Just ignore that, will you? I meant I could help you with your audition," Niall growled. He had to take control of this situation. The director could come at any moment. Any of them could.
"I can hear your lines, now," he groaned. "You'll be called in a minute. It's been ages since the last one went."
Belle looked miserably through her hair at him. "I haven't learnt any lines," she confessed.
The old Niall would have stared at her in frustration and contempt. The new Niall, however, thought quickly. "I could teach you a few of mine," he suggested. "It could catch the director's imagination if you gave it a go." Then, as Belle began to tie her dress back up, he added, "Don't tie that too tightly."
Belle's speech, after all, might not be the only thing about her to catch the director's imagination.
Chapter Twenty
From his usual position on the wall opposite the hotel, Ken looked up at the white clifflike façade of the Portchester, with its ornate balconies and striped awnings fluttering agitatedly in the unseasonal breeze. He'd had a tip-off from Ignatio, one of the doormen, that Lanelle and Dizzi, newly minted reality TV stars, were about to storm out in a huff. There'd been some misunderstanding over a cocktail apparently. Ken had briefly wondered how you could misunderstand a cocktail. Unless they had misunderstood they had to pay for it, which wasn't impossible.
Keith was on the phone. He snapped it away. "One of my tippers. He says Jordan's in the Wolseley. Interested?"
Ken shook his head. "Nah. I'll wait for Lanelle and Dizzi."
It wasn't the most exciting of prospects, but it hadn't been the most exciting of afternoons. Lionel Blair had been in for dinner, but that was hardly going to make the front page of The Sun. The one possibility was Belle Murphy; she had not yet returned from wherever she had gone with her hair all over the place. And that had been ages ago.
Although even Belle was obviously fading fast on the picturedesk popularity index, the Barbie to Bardot pictures, which Ken had imagined were good for a couple of grand in Heat or Hello, had, in the end, not come out as well as he had expected and only fetched fifty pounds from Woman's Weekly. All the picture editors— apart from Woman's Weekly—had said the same thing, that the only pictures of Belle they would pay any serious money for were ones of her with a new man on her arm.
Twelve floors above them, in the penthouse of the Portchester Hotel, Jacintha the nanny was reaching the end of her tether. It wasn't just that Belle Murphy had no interest whatsoever in her adopted son. This was entirely to be expected. Plenty of people she worked for had no interest in their children; this was usually why they employed her.
Occasionally, admittedly, after too much champagne, Belle would be overcome by sentimentality, pluck Morning from his cradle when he was sleeping, and waltz theatrically round the room with him. Morning, however, rarely appreciated being yanked from his warm slumbers. Then, affronted by his crying, Belle would shove him bad-temperedly back at Jacintha.
The nanny was not concerned about the obvious fact Belle had adopted the baby only to generate positive publicity for herself, to appear to be a caring person. It was hardly unusual behaviour among celebrities, after all. Non-celebrities too, come to that. Plenty of people she knew of had had children for the murkiest of motives. To snare a husband here, an inheritance there, usually.
No, it was in other ways that Jacintha was finding Belle Murphy impossible. "Mind if I call you Jackie?" Belle had asked breathily when they first met. It was a suggestion that made Jacintha—the twentieth generation of her family to bear the name—cringe and squirm. But with, as she had imagined, all Hollywood before her, she had been unable to refuse Belle anything.
Hollywood had not, however, materialised for Jacintha, still less the Celebrity Supernanny-style programme she had imagined herself fronting. Instead, she had found that working for a film star could be extremely boring. There had been a confidentiality contract to sign, which had been thrilling. However, its promise that there was something to be confidential about proved groundless.
Where were all the parties, Jacintha would wonder. The weekends with celebrity friends? The jet-setting? Far from flying round the world from one glamorous location to another, they never even left London. And far from glittering at the centre of a sparkling circle of friends, her life a nonstop whirl of fabulous events, all Belle ever did was lie around and drink, occasionally rousing herself to stumble off to an audition. Or a bar, as Jacintha was beginning to suspect.
And, as neither Jacintha nor Morning were required at auditions, still less in bars, Jacintha had only, since the moment she had arrived in it, ever left the Portchester penthouse in order to go push Morning around the park opposite.
Not that this hadn't been exciting at first. It had been thrilling to run the gauntlet of the paparazzi, who had rushed up close to the buggy. As the flashes had gone off, Morning had began to scream.
"Can't help but feel sorry for it, can yer?" one of the photographers had remarked to Jacintha. "Sweet little thing. I hate to 'ear babies cry," he had gone on, "especially if I'm the one who's made 'em."
But before long, the prospect of snapping the same woman pushing the same buggy to the same park paled among the photographers, and it had now been some days since Jacintha had faced a lens wielded in anger. What happened now was that the paparazzi descended on the buggy as she passed them—as close as she possibly could—in order to coo at and pet Morning. An unphotographed Jacintha would then move off to push her charge endlessly round the crisscrossing paths among the tree-shaded, statue-studded green of the park.
Chapter Twenty-one
"Oh, for fuck's sake, Hengist, just get out, can't you?" The blonde in the tight, white jeans tugged hard at the little boy in the back of the car. Hengist had rammed himself down in the rear passenger-seat footwell and was hunting about for something.
"I've lost my King Arthur," he wailed, raising the flat, pale, rather hopeless-looking face that always so irritated his nanny.
"Sod your King Arthur," Totty snapped viciously. Now that she was about to be sacked by the Westonbirts, there seemed no reason to hold back the dislike she had always felt for their son. Hengist was unbelievably boring, and his penchant for small plastic figures of knights, which constantly slipped down the back of the seats and threatened her manicures in extracting them, more boring still.
"I've lost the sheep he was riding on, as well," bleated Hengist, his voice muffled under the seats.
Totty wrinkled her short forehead. Sheep? She had picked up little at school, admittedly, despite her parents sending her to the best ones in the country. But surely King Arthur had ridden on a horse?
"I couldn't find a horse to fit him," Hengist explained. "So I used a sheep from my toy farm."
Totty glared at him. But her dislike of him was not exclusive. Totty disliked all children. She had only come into nannying because, after the police raid on a party she had held in her flat, during which cocaine with a street value of thousands had been discovered, her father had threatened to cut her off from her inheritance unless she got a proper job. Nannying, which was just driving kids about after all, had struck Totty as the easiest possible work. She had had no idea how boring children could be.
But getting sacked was especially boring. Lady Westonbirt, who had been so nice at first and so delighted to have someone of Totty's aristocratic descent looking after darling Hengist, had turned considerably less nice after Totty failed to report for morning duty three days in a row. That the cocktails at Boujis were to blame had not been accepted as a defence. Nor would it be by her father, Totty knew, which was why it was essential to land a new job as quickly as possible, before he found out and the prospect of lifelong penury became a reality.
Dragging Hengist violently out of the car, she pushed the shocked boy, clutching his plastic king, up the steps and banged on the door. As she waited for it to open, she looked with contempt at the hand-drawn cat's face stuck on it, with a speech balloon coming out sayi
ng, "Happy Birthday, Hero."
The door was opened by a medium-height blonde wearing what Totty, eyes everywhere behind her Chanel sunglasses, guessed was head-to-toe Boden. Or perhaps that skirt was MaxMara. And, at a pinch, those shoes could be Emma Hope but were more probably LK Bennett. Either way, none of it was the couture Lady Westonbirt preferred and which Totty often amused herself trying on in her Ladyship's bedroom when Hengist's parents were out. No more, however. Damn it. Where was she going to get another job?
"Totty, isn't it?" The woman was smiling at her. Totty recognised that smile. Lady Westonbirt had worn it at first. It was a smile of acknowledgement of her lineage as much as it was of herself personally. With the native cunning often gifted to those with no intelligence to speak of otherwise, Totty sensed possibility. She pushed her enormous sunglasses up on top of her head, swung her shining hair about, and beamed. "Hi there," she barked in her grandest, most gravelly tones.
"I'm Vanessa Bradstock, Hero's mother. You probably know me from my columns." Vanessa flashed her an expectant smile.
"Absolutely," Totty assured her, although she had no idea whether the columns referred to were of the newspaper sort or the sort that stood, eight strong, supporting the portico of the family stately home in Wiltshire. Vanessa nodded, gratified.
"And you must be Hengist," she mewed, bending over the snivelling boy Totty had been shoving roughly before her but who she now made a great display of stroking comfortingly on the shoulder.
As she followed Vanessa down the narrow hall, Totty heard the sound of singing and laughter from behind the sitting-room door. Vanessa pushed the door—whose white paint was rather battered, Totty noticed—open.
Totty stared in astonishment at the sight of twelve or so of London's most difficult, spoilt children all clapping and singing a nursery rhyme against a cat-collage background and amid a sea of evidently homemade cupcakes.
"You've been busy," she remarked to Vanessa in surprise. Hero's mother had never struck her as the homemaking sort, much less the cake-making.
"My nanny did it," Vanessa admitted. Totty caught the bitterness in her voice and filed it away for future reference.
Totty now recognised Emma. Of course, it was that fat, northern one. The one she'd been so rude to when she'd first met her. She sniggered at the memory.
Vanessa pounced on the snigger. "What's so funny?"
Totty's cunning ear caught encouragement. She guessed that criticism of this apparently perfect nanny would not be unwelcome. "Oh, just that when I first met her I asked her what part of Eastern Europe she was from," she tittered in an undertone.
"Ha, ha," guffawed Vanessa, unnecessarily loudly. Emma, hearing the laugh, looked up from pass the parcel to see her employer and Totty de Belvedere both looking at her with smirks on their faces.
She returned resentfully to the game in hand. As she comforted a hysterical Hengist Westonbirt, who had missed by one place the unwrapping of the prize in the parcel, Emma felt rather like wailing herself. Just what did one have to do to please Vanessa?
"I mean, it's not as if there's any money in taking pictures anymore," Keith, alongside Ken on the wall, was lamenting the golden days that had passed. "I mean, it used to be good fun. A bit like hide-and-seek. But now there are too many muppets hanging around."
"Clampers!" someone yelled.
Ken, Keith, and the eight or so other photographers idling along the wall outside the hotel entrance suddenly snapped to attention.
"That's all I need," groaned Keith. "I've already been bleedin' ticketed today."
"You're joking!" yelped another pap into his mobile. He flipped it back together, shoved it into his pocket, and shared with the rest of the group the unwelcome news that Leonardo DiCaprio had been spotted going into one of the hotel's side entrances while they all monitored the front. There was a groan of disbelief.
"What a life, eh?" said Keith to Ken.
Ken nodded. "Wouldn't it be nice," he said, rather dreamily, as the thought occurred to him, "to do something more useful? Take some pictures that mattered for once? That meant something?"
Keith stared at his colleague. "You feelin' alright, mate?"
A few minutes later, Belle's limo pulled up. They all recognised its registration. Despite hers being a steadily sinking star, there still was, Ken noticed, as he always did with someone famous, that unmistakable change in the temperature.
But it wasn't until she got out that the mercury really soared. Belle was not alone. She was with a man. A young, handsome man. With red hair and jeans. There was no mistaking their relationship. Belle's dress was hanging open, exposing almost the whole of one breast, and the man's face was covered in red lipstick.
The pack, so passive and lethargic even a mere few seconds ago, were now leaping about, electrified, frenzied. "Belle, Belle. This way, Belle. Who's your friend?"
Not that it mattered that they didn't know. The journos found all that sort of thing out. Ken snapped away with the rest. Finally, some shots he could actually sell.
Totty was in the kitchen with Vanessa. She had lost no time in driving her advantage home. The possibilities proved to be far more extensive than she had ever dreamed.
"You can't be serious," she was exclaiming in a low voice, her eyes wide over the rim of the champagne glass Vanessa was refilling. It wasn't often she had a duke's daughter in her kitchen. "She's really after your husband?"
Vanessa nodded. Her own eyes, with their fixed-bayonet lashes, were bulging with all the indignation she could summon, as well as with alcohol, which always loosened her tongue. Somewhere within herself, she rather wished it hadn't, but the cat was out of the bag now, and she had the satisfaction of holding an aristocrat in thrall with her conversation.
"I caught them in the kitchen," Vanessa confided. "He was telling her she was wonderful."
"Wonderful!" Totty's unusual yellow eyes were staring into hers with unadulterated fascination. "Slept with her yet, has he?"
"I—I don't think so." Something within Vanessa struck a vague note of warning, that the waters she was about to enter were deeper and more dangerous than any she had ever encountered before. But she ignored it.
"Well, it's only a matter of time, obviously," Totty said briskly. "Have you," she added in a voice of sweet solicitude, batting her thickly blackened eyelashes at Vanessa, "ever thought of getting rid of her? For your own sake," she emphasised. "Your own peace of mind…You need to be able to trust the person who looks after your most precious possessions, after all."
Vanessa looked back at her speculatively. "Ye-es. I'd need a new nanny though. We're going on holiday soon, and I won't be able to go immediately. The children and the nanny will have to be the advance party."
During the silence of some seconds that Totty now allowed, she wondered where the holiday destination was. Hopefully the Caribbean. Asking would be a distraction, however.
"A new nanny," she repeated eventually. "Well, what about me?"
Across the kitchen table, Vanessa gasped. "You!"
"Me."
"But you work for Lady Westonbirt!" Awe and excitement brimmed in Vanessa's voice. Totty de Belvedere, the smartest nanny in London, the daughter of a duke, no less, was offering to work for her!
"That could, um, change. With, ah, immediate effect, actually." Totty beamed at Vanessa.
"Aren't you on a month's notice?" Vanessa's words were galloping over each other.
Totty pursed her glossy-pink-painted lips. "Yah. In theory. But…"—her voice dropped confidingly—"to be really honest with you, I'm not very happy there at the moment. Actually, I might leave. There've been a few problems…"
"Problems?"
Totty looked carefully down at the table. "Drugs…that sort of thing. Parties."
"Drugs!" Vanessa almost shrieked. "Parties! Lady Westonbirt?"
It never occurred to her to doubt what she was hearing. Or what she thought she was hearing; Totty was careful to do no more than insinuate.
"
Yah. Cocaine and parties…yup." Totty shrugged. "I'm not sure it's an environment I want to be in, you know what I mean, yah?"
"Oh, absolutely. Absolutely." Vanessa blinked, still absorbing the stunning news. Then she shook herself. "And of course I'd love to have you, Totty," she ardently assured the girl across from the table.
"Great. Perfecto. Start Monday, yah?"
Doubt shadowed Vanessa's face, "Well…the thing is, I've got Emma on a month's notice…"
But Totty, with her goal in sight, had no intention of letting anything block her path. "You can sack someone on the spot," she insisted.
"Are you sure?"
"There are certain situations when dismissal on the spot is entirely justified," Totty stated, adding, by way of bold invention, "I know a nanny who just got fired for having drugs in her handbag, in fact. She was sacked on the spot."
