by Wendy Holden
"This is Xa." Bella pushed the blonde in Rosie's direction. "Short for Xanthippe. She's in fashion PR."
"Hi," rasped Xa. "We were just discussing this fabulous French circus, Cirque du Soleil. Have you heard of them?"
Here we go again, thought Rosie.
Just how was it, Rosie wondered, that Bella, her large-eyed Italianate face framed by a chin-length bob of glossy black, had managed to be at the front of the looks queue as well as the luck one? Rosie had always felt herself vague and smudgy-looking beside the strong and definite lines of her friend. Bella, however, disagreed. She had a theory about what certain men found attractive about Rosie. "They adore you because you remind them of that blond choirboy in the fourth form that they always wanted to roger behind the bike sheds." Rosie had never been entirely convinced about this; certainly she had failed to have an electric effect on either of the men present tonight. After a cursory glance following her entrance, they were now talking to each other with their backs turned. And Mark, of course, was in thrall to her to such an extent that he had as yet failed to turn up at all.
"This is Florian. He's married to Xa. Works in television." Bella handed her a glass of champagne and pulled at the sleeve of a tanned man with prosperous hair and aspirational glasses chatting animatedly to the fat, red-faced Simon.
Bella suddenly gave an excited squeal and nudged Xa. "Oooh. Almost forgot. How was the wedding?"
"Fabulous. The Naked Chef was there, as well as Ralph Fiennes."
"No!" exclaimed Bella, clasping her hands in ecstasy. "How amazing. I bumped into him in the cheese shop only the other day."
Rosie shifted from foot to foot, wishing desperately that Mark would come. And even more desperately that they had stayed at home after all and watched Scream If You Know What I Did Last Friday 13th. She disliked horror films but preferred them to horror dinner parties. This showed every sign of being Bella's worst yet, and Mark wasn't even here to appreciate it. Nor had there been any opportunity to have the longed-for word with Bella.
"Went to a rather glamorous wedding yesterday," Xa informed Rosie in a throaty bark. "Friend of mine who's a successful fashion designer."
Florian snorted contemptuously. "So why the hell couldn't she afford better church decorations? Bloody candleholders were bakedbean tins without the labels on."
"Baked-bean tins are tremendously chic," returned Xa crushingly.
"What about those ketchup bottles with the roses in, then?"
"HP sauce bottles, actually.'"
"It sounds wonderful," croaked Rosie valiantly.
"Oh, it was," gushed Xa. "The vicar had a tan and Gucci spectacles. And the organist was a woman who apparently used to play with Prince."
"How terribly glamorous," Bella said admiringly.
"You thought she was some newscaster at first," Florian said accusingly to Xa. "Though God knows how you know what any of them look like. You haven't watched the news since Princess Di died."
The doorbell rang. Mark, thought Rosie in relief. Bella disappeared behind the old-gold sitting-room door. "Mark, darling!" Rosie heard her exclaiming rather too brightly.
"I wasn't sure about Jerry wearing that turquoise and orange though…" Xa remarked. As Florian began to stare pointedly at her pink cardigan and lime-green skirt, Xa flared her nostrils furiously. "What exactly is it you don't like about this outfit?" she demanded. "The shop said I looked like a million dollars."
"Couldn't they have made it pounds?" drawled Florian. "Worth more. Still, I suppose we should be grateful they didn't say euros."
Mark, Rosie noticed, as he trailed into the sitting room after Bella, had made even less effort than usual. His hair was a mess, and he had tired brown shadows beneath his eyes and ink stains all down his suit. She also noticed, feeling gratified for the first time that evening, that even in that state, he was at least ten times betterlooking than any other man in the room. Xa had apparently noticed the same. Her face suddenly lit up and she began buzzing around him like a particularly chatty bee. The words Cirque du Soleil came floating over to Rosie. "Sweetie, I'm just going to check on supper," Bella announced to Simon as she descended the Kandinsky-inspired spiral staircase down to the basement kitchen. "Put something a bit more lively on, will you, angel?"
As Simon fumblingly replaced the Buena Vista Social Club with Ibiza Club Anthems Vol. 20, and Mark was finally stung into replying to Xa, Rosie slipped gratefully down to the kitchen after Bella.
Bella's kitchen was cutting edge in every sense of the word. An expanse of sandblasted glass and industrial stainless steel, with hundreds of recessed lights on the brilliant white ceiling, it looked like a submarine control room. There was no sign of Bella at the vast, eight-ringed, catering-standard stove. Following the faintly discernible scent of cigarette through the open French windows, Rosie found her friend on the deck outside, cheeks concave with the ferocity of her smoking. Bella started in surprise and coughed violently. "Damn, you caught me."
"Bel, you're supposed to have given up."
"Darling, I work on a glossy, remember. Two packs a day are the legal minimum for appetite-suppressing purposes. Speaking of putting one off one's food," she said, grinning, "how's it going up there?"
"Great." Rosie smiled back. "Xa was just explaining to Mark as I left how pews were a really fantastic place for Pilates. Said she'd done forty buttock clenches by the time the bride arrived."
Bella snorted. "Unspeakable, isn't she? Only had them round because Florian's apparently interested in doing some hideoussounding fly-on-the-wall documentary about the barmaids in Simon's pubs or something."
She stepped back into the kitchen, her metal heels clacking across the hand-polished slate floor tiles, and returned to the stainless steel-topped counter. This was dominated by a large earthenware bowl filled with an arrangement of feathery new carrots, frilly lettuces, bundles of magenta radishes, pearly potatoes, and gleaming tomatoes. Rosie gazed at it in admiration, thinking that it looked like something by Arcimboldo, the Renaissance painter par excellence of over-the-top fruits and vegetables.
"Gorgeous, isn't it?" Bella smiled. "Field of dreams dot com does a much better organic delivery box. I'm so glad we changed from Heart and Soil. Their apples were always a bit wormy and the tomatoes all had blossom-end rot. Although I must say I was quite tempted by Rocket Man. Dido at the office uses them and apparently the deliveryman is gorgeous. His knobbly russets are to die for."
Rosie nodded vaguely, wondering if the earth on the potatoes was real. It looked so rich, so brown, almost edible itself, in fact. Bella picked out a lettuce and began a prolonged session of rinsing it under the state-of-the-art tap.
"Yes, its organic all the way from now on," Bella said, shaking the lettuce energetically around her head in a wire basket and splattering Rosie with water. "I mean, how could anyone put any of those other ghastly things into their bodies?"
Rosie, who had always wondered how Bella could put a ghastly thing like Simon into her body, did not reply. But evidently she had, with the result that their staggeringly spoiled son, the unspeakable Ptolemy, now walked the earth. Rosie's attention returned to the display of nature's bounty and the countryside longings it provoked. Growing your own organic vegetables in your own garden, she thought, would be infinitely better than having them dumped on your front step in a sack by someone gorgeous from Rocket Man. However knobbly his russets.
"Darling, are you all right?" Having arranged the lettuce, Bella was snipping parsley over a gleaming silver baking tray in which were arranged six prime halves of lobster. "If you're wondering about the lobster, they're free-range and reared in happy seas. I checked. So don't come over all animal welfare on me."
"It's not that." Rosie blushed. The fact that she could not bear even to swat a mosquito was the source of endless teasing from both Bella and Mark. "After all, it's not as if they're very grateful," Mark would observe as, whenever the temperature rose, the mosquitoes responded by biting every exposed inch of Rosie's
pale skin.
"What is it, then? Tell Auntie Bella. Is it Mark?" Hope flickered in Bella's black eyes.
"Sort of."
Bella put down her scissors momentously. "Oh, darling, I told you he was hopeless from the start. Good-looking but deeply not worthy."
"No, it's me," Rosie said sharply. "I want to move."
"Well, I do think you could be a bit more central. I hear City Road's a good bet. And King's Cross is apparently the new Belgravia, though admittedly that's stretching it a bit."
"Not in London. Out. To the country."
"The country?"
"Yes. I've been thinking about it for a while actually, but I mean it now. I'm dying to live there."
"You sound," Bella said shrilly, "like Chekhov's Three Sisters. Except in reverse." She slammed the lobsters into an oven big enough to roast an entire sheep. "Darling, the country's ghastly. You never know what you're standing in, for a start."
"How can you say that?" gasped Rosie, gesturing at the Arcimboldo bowl. "You buy organic vegetables, don't you? They're grown in the countryside." She decided to give the earth on the potatoes the benefit of the doubt.
Bella shuddered. "Not mine, darling. Field of dreams dot com grows everything on an allotment in Tulse Hill."
Rosie tried another tack. "Bel, as far as I'm aware, you've never been to the countryside. How do you know what it's like?"
"I have so. Not here, admittedly—I'm always terrified that if I ever leave London they'll close the gates and not let me back in. But I've been to it in France. Dreadful. The ducks quacked all night."
"Are you sure they weren't toads?"
Bella reflected on this and went slightly red. Then she relaunched the attack. "But it would be awful. There wouldn't be anyone you know; it would be horribly quiet, pitch black at night…"
"Yes," said Rosie, smiling. "Exactly. It would be perfect to work in. So peaceful."
Bella's elegant shoulders slumped. "Can't you just go to Hampstead?"
"So you think it's a terrible idea. I thought you might."
"We-ell, yes." Bella tested a strand of spaghetti with her perfect white teeth. "And I'd miss you horribly," she added petulantly.
"Oh, Bel. You could always come and stay. Bring Tolly if you want. He's probably never seen a real cow."
"Darling, you haven't met his headmistress." From her bright black eyes, Bella flashed Rosie an assessing glance. "You really want to do it, don't you?"
Rosie nodded. "If only Mark could land himself this column he's always talking about, we could go straightaway. It would be bliss."
Bella vented her feelings by tossing the spaghetti furiously around in the pan.
"Well, I suppose there is one thing to be said for the countryside," she said eventually, sighing.
"There is?"
"Well, it is rather fashionable at the moment, darling. The new sex, the new black, the new gardening, and all that."
"Oh, surely not," faltered Rosie, faintly alarmed. "People want a better life, that's all. Seventy-five percent—"
"No, darling," cut in Bella, "they want better publicity. Surely you've noticed. You can hardly open Vogue at the moment without reading about some Oscar-winning actress making nettle jam in a converted cow shed, free-range chickens clustered round her ankles."
"Oh." Rosie was not a big Vogue reader, despite having once painted some chard for their cookery page.
"Dog kennels, barns, sheep dips, you name it, some hipster's put sisal down and is living in it," added Bella. "I had to style some obscenely trendy producer's former flour mill turned living space for Insider only last week. Amazing place. All the chairs were shaped like teeth and the coffee table was an elephant's head made of chicken wire. All the work of this terrifically happening designer called Basia Briggs, who even you must have heard of, darling."
Shaking her head, Rosie suppressed a shudder. She made a mental note to get a copy of the latest Insider and look in areas as far removed as possible from models who liked to sit on molars. On the other hand, Mark might be more interested in the whole movingout idea if he thought famous people did it too.
***
"To put it at its simplest," Florian was saying as Bella and Rosie, bearing steaming plates of lobster-topped pasta, reentered the dining room, "the idea my company's currently working on is, quite simply, a vintage television station. One channel, as I say, is aimed at middle-class mid-thirtysomethings and devoted entirely to seventies children's TV. Another will screen footage of the Second World War. Another, and this is the one we're really banking on, will be devoted to Princess Diana…"
"My idea," Xa said proudly, the brilliant beam she directed round the room marred only by a smudge of lipstick on her teeth. She caught Rosie's eye. "Your very charming boyfriend's just been telling us that you want to move to the countryside," she announced. "And that he doesn't."
Rosie flashed a furious look at Mark. How dare he discuss their disagreements in public? He gave her a glazed look in return; his bleariness, she suddenly realized, was actually inebriation. His late arrival was no doubt due less to excessive working hours than to excessive after-hours consumption of gassy lager with his colleagues.
"But I think the country sounds rather fun," slurred Xa. "We once thought about buying a beach hut in Norfolk. Simply brilliant for bucket and spade holidays."
She looked wistful. At least, Rosie thought, that was the charitable interpretation of her rolling eyes and slack mouth. "I'd love to live in a village," she drawled.
Across the table from Rosie, Mark's face was expressionless. He was either drinking everything in or had drunk everything already.
A muscle twitched in Florian's cheek. "We live in a village," he said through gritted teeth. "It's called Blackheath. And what about Orlando, anyway? Where the hell would he go to school?"
"I'm thinking of taking Orlando out of St. Midas's, actually," Xa retaliated. "There are at least ten other Orlandos in his class and it gets very confusing. Bloody headmistress is always bloody ringing up complaining how ginger Orlando has beaten up curly Orlando or run off with small Orlando's Pokémon cards."
"Oh, dear," said Rosie. "What an awful bully. How worrying for you. Which Orlando is yours?"
"Ginger."
"Oh."
There was a silence.
"Thought of the pub market?" Simon suddenly barked at Rosie, the long hairs on his eyebrows bristling. These, along with his stubby, snouty nose and pink face, always reminded her of a wild boar.
"Rosie wants to paint peacefully in the country, darling," said Bella, rolling her eyes at Rosie. "Not pull pints and dole out pork scratchings while everyone stares at her arse."
"Realized that. Actually meant the buildings. Hundreds closing every week now, and don't I know it. Quite nice old places, some of them."
"Oh. Shame," said Bella.
"Well, they're there to make money for pub companies first and foremost," Simon said thickly as he drained his red wine. "Don't run them as bloody charities."
There was another silence.
"Abattoirs," said Florian suddenly.
"I beg your pardon?" said Xa.
"Abattoirs," Florian repeated. "New rock 'n' roll, propertywise. Thousands gone into receivership since the mad cow thing. Did a program about it not long ago."
Rosie shuddered.
"Creutzfeldt-Jakob's apparently the best thing that ever happened to the rural property market," Florian added. "Specially now that the bottoms fallen out of chapels."
"Has it?" said Bella, watching Florian help himself to the Margaux.
"Oh, ya. Used to be ten a penny, but you can't get a Primitive Methodist this side of a hundred thousand these days. There was one on the moors outside Halifax going for one hundred twenty-two thousand last time I looked. But it has got planning permission for a swimming pool."
"Well," Bella said after a pause, "that doesn't sound very Methodist. Certainly sounds primitive though."
Rosie looked at her plate
, wishing they would change the subject. It had obviously never crossed either Simon's or Florian's mind that one might wish to move to the countryside for any motive other than profit. Assistance came in the unexpected and inebriated guise of Xa.
"Let's play charades now, anyway," she yelled suddenly. "The one where we have to guess London restaurant dishes. What's this, everyone?" She immediately launched into a series of impressions of Donald Duck, someone wearing a crown and the frantic mixing of something in a bowl.
"Two Fat Ladies," bawled Florian, so loudly Rosie saw Bella shoot an involuntary glance upward to where, three floors above, Ptolemy lay in state in his Terminator-themed nursery.
