by Wendy Holden
Xa flung him a contemptuous stare. "It's got to be something off a menu, you moron. Who's this?" She mimed the crown again, then someone at the wheel of a car that then apparently twisted out of control. By the way of finale, Xa threw herself violently into Bella's mantelpiece-free chimney breast, whose fireplace was so minimal it was merely a square hole in the wall.
"Princess Di!" shouted Bella in sudden triumph. "Princess Di, a cake, and a duck…oooh, oooh…it's got to be the foie gras on a sweet-corn pancake from Kensington Palace!"
***
"I take it all back," Mark slurred as, what seemed like years later, they waited for the night bus in Upper Street.
"You do?" Rosie's heart almost stopped. She had spent the whole of the walk to the stop propounding the countryside-is-stuffed-withcelebrities argument. Had she got through at last?
"Yes," Mark hiccuped as the N73 rounded the corner, packed to the gills. "Much better evening than I thought. Quite interesting." He heaved himself on as the bus doors sprang open. "You'd miss all that sort of thing in the countryside. Nothing to do there."
Almost violent with disappointment, Rosie shoved him determinedly on board the reeking vehicle, then, thanks to his lack of coordination, she paid the inevitable price as it tried to move off.
"When a woman is tired of London, Mark," she said sighing, once she had struggled free, "she is not necessarily tired of life. Just sick of getting trapped in the closing doors of the night bus."
Chapter Two
Rosie awoke the next morning with a fuddled head and the pressing memory of an illustration of a member of Parliament she needed to do by the afternoon.
"William Hague!" she gasped. "I need William Hague."
"Well, that's something you don't hear very often." Mark groaned from under the duvet. During the night, Rosie had been dimly aware of him rushing out of bed and making buffalo-in-agony noises in the bathroom.
"I'd better go and get the papers. There's bound to be a picture of him I can copy in one of them."
Craster Road, East Ham, looked its usually unlovely self as Rosie tramped down it. A collection of upturned wheelbarrows, odd socks, and plastic containers festooned the few front gardens not covered in concrete paving to provide a berth for a large mustard-colored car at least ten years of age. At the end of the road, Rosie turned toward the Tube station and its adjoining newsagent. Walking past the green wire fence dividing the pavement from the soggy park and children's zoo, she remembered how, six weeks ago, a gang of thugs had broken in and terrorized all of the little animals. Her urge to leave the city, Rosie knew, had crystallized from that moment.
The tiny Asian newsagent looked up from his high stool in front of the register and smiled faintly as she approached. He was, she saw, reading the etiquette page of Good Housekeeping.
"How are you?" Rosie deposited a sheaf of newspapers on the counter.
"Bearing down," replied Mr. Jayhind, adding up her bill on the keys with elegant fingers and a lugubrious air.
"You mean bearing up."
"No. Bearing down."
Her head still throbbing slightly, Rosie smiled at him. "I know what you mean."
Mark had left for work by the time she returned. Spreading the papers out so that they almost entirely covered the hairy orange floor tiles (an enormous improvement in the decor), Rosie eventually found a picture of William Hague with one of his constituents. "Barn Stormer" read the headline above the picture of an ancient structure standing in the middle of a moor not so much desolate as anguished. A man was standing next to it, receiving the congratulations of the Tory leader. Rosie peered closely at William Hague's face. Could she use it?
Her eyes flicked through the story. Mr. Brian Stormer, a former driving instructor from Neasden, had, it explained, rebuilt his barn's entire fifteenth-century structure using wattle and daub techniques he had taught himself. What had particularly caught the Opposition leader's attention was the fact that Mr. Stormer had sourced his own yak hair for the daub; a feat that prompted unkind speculation on the part of the paper that Hague was planning to address his own follicularly challenged condition via this ancient means. Rosie, however, noticed only the barn-restorer's remarks on rural life: "Moving to the country was the best thing I ever did. I've got my peace of mind back."
Rosie sighed with envy. Little as the idea of mixing animal hair with lime, soil, and aggregate appealed to her, it looked more fun than spending the afternoon in East Ham drawing a dome-headed politician while the floor shook with the force from the downstairs neighbor's TV.
Still less appealing was going to the supermarket afterward, a chore that Rosie had been putting off for days. But it was her turn this week, as so often, despite the alternate-week system they had, it seemed to be. Damn. She didn't have a pound coin for the trolley.
Rosie miserably anticipated Mark's reaction to the lack of supper. They'd just have to fall back on the Shanana Tandoor Palace. She fought the urge to cry. How much longer could she bear this wretched city? But if leaving London meant leaving Mark…? With a sinking heart, she slid her key into the flat's lock.
To her amazement, she entered the hall to Mark singing in earsplitting style. He had apparently come home early and was fiercely whistling in the kitchen, where, to judge from the accompanying billows of bacon-scented smog, he was making himself a sandwich. Rosie's repeated attempts to slam the door brought him shooting out into the hallway.
"Guess what!" he yelled ecstatically.
"What?"
"Something fantastic." He was grinning so hard and wide, she feared his face might split. "Househusband. His wife's run off to Monaco with an investment banker."
Rosie looked uncomprehendingly at him. Then enlightenment dawned. "Oh. I see. Something's happened. He's got some material for a change, you mean?"
"What? No, you chump. Househusband's wife left him for a capitalist pig. Slightly defeats the object of the column, the New Man role-reversal thing, wouldn't you say?"
Rosie shrugged. After the afternoon she'd had, Househusband officially ranked at the bottom in her list of concerns.
"As a result of which"—Mark was now capering gleefully round the hallway—"Househusband went on a drunken bender in his car, had an accident, and lost his license. So he can't drive Miss Daisy anymore. Even if his wife hadn't taken her to Monaco with her, which she has. So guess what's happened now?"
"Can't imagine. Wife and Forex dealer writing the column between them, are they?"
A slightly scared expression, as if the idea hadn't actually occurred to anybody, briefly crossed Mark's face. Then the grin returned. "No. They've given me a column. At last."
Rosie swallowed. This was it then. All of Mark's dreams had come true. They'd never leave London now. At least, he wouldn't.
"This is my chance," yelped Mark. "The big break I've been waiting for."
"Good for you," croaked Rosie.
"Well, don't you want to know what I'll be writing about?"
Rosie bulldozed a smile across her face. "Tell me."
"You'll be thrilled."
"Will I?" Rosie doubted it.
Mark nodded. "Now that Househusband's collapsed, they need to start a weekly column about something else. Some other current topic. So I had this idea of doing something about people who've moved from the city to the country. The editor agreed it would be the perfect subject."
Rosie stared. Funny, but there was something familiar-sounding about that.
"Very keen, he was," Mark continued, "especially after I'd thrown in all that stuff you said about the countryside being the new rock 'n' roll and how every supermodel worth her Wonderbra contract is chopping wood and making chutney. Loved all those statistics too—seventy-five percent of actresses converting butcher shops or whatever it was you said. The editors got this idea that moving from the city to the country is the millennium dream and he wants me to write about what it's really like to swap the city for rural heaven. Thinks that will wow thousands of readers dying to leave loft apartment
s in Docklands for sweeping acres of Derbyshire."
"But how are you going to do that?" asked Rosie. "How can you write about what the countryside's really like from East Ham?"
"Well, we won't be living in East Ham obviously."
"You mean…?"
Mark nodded. "We'll move to the country. I'll go freelance. Write it from there. We'll leave London."
As tears of joy and relief sprang to her eyes, Rosie leaned back against the wall. That the afternoon from hell had mutated into the evening in which all earthly desires were granted was all a bit too much to take in.
"I've finally got a column!" Mark's eyes were shining. "I can't tell you how much it means to me. Rosie!" He flung his arms about her and whirled her round in the air. "I love you, I love you. I love you."
"I love you too." Rosie giggled. There was no one quite as ebullient as Mark when he was happy, just as there was no one quite as miserable when he wasn't. She suddenly felt exhausted, as if she had fought a long and losing battle and then suddenly and unexpectedly won. Yet in the sunny blue skies of her happiness, there hung a tiny cloud of concern.
"Will they pay you well? I mean, will it be enough to live on?"
Mark dumped her unceremoniously back on the carpet tiles, a cagey look on his face. "We're still discussing that. Cuts, you know. They're being their usual difficult bastard selves about it." He grinned devastatingly at her. "But hell, Rosie, what does it matter? I've got my byline at last. Picture byline if I can swing it. Or find a reasonable passport one."
Rosie tried not to dwell on the fact that the paper's refusal even to fund a proper photograph hardly promised wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
"Anyway," Mark enthused, "houses will be much cheaper in the country. We'll never be able to afford to buy anything in London, not with property prices the way they are. We can't afford this disgusting dump even," he added, swinging an arm round the flat he had so recently defended against all of Rosie's criticisms. "But we'll definitely be able to manage a deposit on something small somewhere in the country."
Rosie nodded. It was what she had been saying for weeks.
"And you can illustrate from anywhere. All you need is a drawing board and a few paints. All I need is a PC with email. Which the paper is supposed to be providing." He beamed at her. "Along with a mobile."
Rosie smiled. He was repeating her own words back to her, with the exception of the paper providing the laptop and mobile. That was a surprise.
***
Following the announcement of the great news, Mark rushed out and bought a bottle of wine from the liquor store while Rosie called the Shanana Tandoor Palace. They spent the evening lying happily on the floor perusing an old map book. Wrapped warmly in a sense of shared purpose, they turned the pages, laughing at names like Slack Top and Tingley Bottom. "I'll start ringing the agents tomorrow," Mark said. "We should probably buy up north. It's cheaper."
As well as, Rosie thought, nodding enthusiastically, being the least likely place to be stuffed with the kind of people Bella puts in Insider.
Mark caressed the Cotswolds with a lingering finger. "Plenty of time to join the Jag and paddock set once 'Green-er Pastures' takes off."
"Is that what you're calling it?" Rosie clapped her hands. "Clever you. Mark Green. Of course."
"Yes, and the subtitle's 'The Good Life for the Millennium.'"
"What does that mean?" Images of digging up potatoes in the rain sprang alarmingly to Rosie's mind. "We won't have to lift leeks or anything?"
"Course not. Just something to press all of the readers' middleclass organic buttons, that's all. I can write about what I like. Guess what the subject of the first columns going to be?"
"Tell me."
"The hunt for the perfect cottage, obviously."
"Oh, Mark." She leaned over and kissed him, feeling that she had never before been so content with him. The good life after all.
Mark's face was as happy as it was handsome, glowing with pleasure as well as the heat from the electric fire. As slowly, lingeringly, he removed his lips from hers, she saw his eyes had narrowed slightly as they always did when sex crossed his mind. Rosie inhaled the faint salty scent of his sweat; he pushed up her shirt and fingered her stiffening nipples and she gasped with anticipated pleasure. Lowering her hand to his crotch, she felt the familiar, delicious tension within her as her fingers caressed the familiar, delicious hardness.
The phone chose that moment to shrill in the hall.
"Damn," Mark snarled. "Who the hell rings up at this hour?"
"You don't have to answer it." Rosie, lifting herself on her elbow, had a distinct sense of missed opportunity.
"Might be work." Mark scrambled up.
"It's Bella," he said, loping back into the sitting room almost instantly. "Says it's an emergency."
"An emergency?" Rosie rushed to the phone, images of Simon in a coffin and Ptolemy attached to an IV racing through her mind.
"Bella?"
"Darling, you are there. So sorry to bother you this late."
"Are you all right?"
"Well, yes and no, darling."
"What's the matter? Is it Simon?"
"Simon?" Bella sounded astonished. "No, darling, this is a real emergency."
"Ye-es?"
"My assistant Lulu's gone down with the flu—or on some Guardsman, more probably—and won't be able to help me style a terribly important shoot for Insider. House in Roland Gardens, done by this incredibly hot interior designer called Basia Briggs…whom I think I mentioned the other day. Darling, I'm perfectly desperate…"
"Bella wants me to help her shoot someone called Basia Briggs," Rosie announced to Mark as she came back into the room.
"Basher who?" asked Mark, pulling her down again. "Sounds pretty bloody dangerous to me."
Seconds later, pinned against the floor, Rosie forgot the hairy orange carpet tiles and the danger of friction burn. "Thank God for 'Green-er Pastures.'" She giggled. "In every sense of the word."
***
Samantha finished the single tahini-smeared cracker that constituted lunch, looked at the slender sliver of watch on her wrist, and permitted herself a rare wrinkle of the brow. Where were those wretched magazine people who were coming to photograph the house? She'd been up at the crack of dawn getting the place ready—well, Consuela had, anyway.
She scrutinized her surroundings with a gimlet eye. Her impeccable sitting room was, she knew, the epitome of urban good taste; no less an authority than designer to the stars Basia Briggs had proclaimed it so. Although not until Samantha had paid her a sum Guy claimed equivalent to the gross national product of a small African country to redesign it.
Samantha's husband, Guy, had not been impressed with the celebrity design guru's unique vision. "Looks like bloody Lenin's tomb," he complained, waving a tanned, manicured hand at the vast vase, more than a meter square, which Basia had placed in the center of a coffee table the size of a double bed.
"Vase fascism," Samantha had hotly retorted, "is a central tenet of Basia's design philosophy. She wanted to challenge the fact that I filled the same vases in the same place with the same flowers every week."
"And what the hell's that?" Guy had raged at the next item to incur his displeasure, a beige object as big as a Labrador dominating the dining-room mantelpiece.
"The fossil, you mean?" In her heart of hearts, Samantha wasn't entirely convinced that the colossal, curved ammonite Basia had placed in the spot formerly occupied by the candlesticks and the Staffordshire dogs was one of her more successful innovations. Not the least because Samantha was now obliged to tiptoe about the sitting room as too hasty or clumsy a step might cause the heavy object to fall off. The thought of watching four million years of evolution (not to mention several thousand pounds of hard cash) smash into the grate was too great a risk to run.
"Lost a bit of one of your necklaces again?" Guy said next, producing what looked like a large piece of glass from under a cushion. Samantha sna
pped that it was a crystal, one of the many placed about the house by the shamanic-energy consultant Basia insisted she engage at a fee entirely separate from Basia's own. "Basia says it's all about balance," Samantha finished in as dignified a manner as she could manage.
"Quite. Her bank balance," Guy said drily, hastily erecting a wall of newspaper between himself and Samantha as she continued her passionate defense of crystal therapy.
"Can't you feel the difference?" she demanded. "I've slept better than I've done for bloody years."
Guy lowered his paper again and stared directly at her undereye area, purple beneath its Touche Eclar concealer. "Darling, you're a terrible actress," he informed his fuming wife. "Considering you are an actress, that is."
