by Fiona Walker
‘You’re the best of the lot,’ Faith whispered now, planting a kiss in the sweetness of that velvet muzzle before moving on to finish clearing up, feeling only slightly disloyal to her own beloved Rio, who was far more spectacular but less cuddly.
Finding that she was sweeping her brush over two dusty riding boots, she looked up to find that Rory was standing in his office doorway watching her, pewter eyes filled with rare affection.
‘Sorry I won’t be at your birthday party.’
‘S’okay,’ she shrugged, staring at the head of her broom, anxious not to give away her acute disappointment. ‘Bloneigh’s more important.’
‘I’ll bring you back a present. You deserve something lovely.’
‘Thanks.’ The phone in her pocket let out a series of angry pips. ‘I’d better go. That’s Mum. She’s got one of her literary evenings at the shop and I promised to hand round wine.’
‘Good girl,’ he grinned as he took her brush and she headed for her bike. ‘Hey, Faith!’
She turned back and stared at him as he sauntered from the aisle into the light. Illuminated in a low ray of sunlight so golden red that his skin looked like copper, he doffed his baseball cap to her.
Faith was so loopy with love that she freewheeled down the hill towards Oddlode with her feet out at right angles, hollering happily.
Chapter 4
Sylva Frost tapped her long, perfectly manicured nails on the face of Nell Cottrell, who was all over the weekly gossip magazines and tabloids spread out on the smoked glass table in front of her. It was a pretty face, olive-skinned and green-eyed with passable bone structure and a neat bob of black hair framing it, but it was no great shakes. Dillon Rafferty could do better. Certainly his first wife – Hollywood aristocracy and Oscar-winner Fawn Johnston, daughter of the heavyweight director George – had been pure class. This single-mum Sloane Ranger looked like a little scrubber by comparison, albeit a well-bred one. Dillon obviously liked mixing with the gentry.
Sylva, whose Slovakian origins couldn’t have been more humble, tapped harder and then flicked through the pages to search for shots of herself.
In order to maintain her profile it was essential that Sylva made the weeklies, and she rated her success by what she called the IFOJ and IFOP scales. If she was IFOJ (In Front of Jordan), she was doing well; if she was IFOP (In Front of Posh), she was truly on song. If she was BKK (Behind Kerry Katona) then she needed proactive PR, and fast.
This week she had done poorly, her best position being five pages into Heat. She didn’t appear in OK!, Cheers!, Closer or Reveal until almost half way through, captured on the red carpet at an awards ceremony the previous week, despite accompanying a hotly tipped young British actor and wearing a dress that barely covered her pale bikini line and dark areolas. Unfortunately it was a dress that had also been wrapped around a young WAG fresh from the celebrity jungle and, in a readers’ poll as to who looked better, the WAG had gained sixty-five per cent of the votes.
Sylva smarted and peered more closely at herself.
‘Maika! ’ Her mother, Mama Szubiak, who was also her manager, called out from the kitchen, using the Slovak word for kitten. ‘Rodney wants to start shooting now.’
‘Tell him to wait!’ Sylva yelled.
As usual they spoke in English, an affectation they had first struck up in Sylva’s childhood home, a small apartment in Bratislava that she had shared with her seven siblings and her ever-arguing parents. Back then, Mama had chosen Sylva to share her private language. Having taught herself English with the aid of an old dictionary and endless American movies shown on TV after the fall of communism, Mama had imparted her secret ‘code’ to her youngest and favourite daughter as a way of excluding the rest of the family, especially her second husband. She had married Sylva’s father as a young widow, thinking him safe and secure, but he had turned out to be lazy and unfaithful. Deeply anglophile and very ambitious, Mrs Szubiak had been instrumental in propelling her pretty daughter to stardom, first in Slovakia and latterly in the UK. Sylva’s beauty and talent was Mama’s ticket to freedom, but it was not easy to control her; even as a young modern pentathlon star in her native country she had been so wilful that she had almost ruined all of Mama’s dreams. Years later, and now one of Britain’s biggest celebrities, her daughter could still be just as obstinate and wayward.
Now Mama turned back to the television documentary crew whose fly-on-the-wall series charting the day to day life of the Slovakian glamourpuss and mother of two, Sylva’s Shadow, had been a huge hit on satellite and freeview since its first episode eighteen months earlier.
‘Give her a little more time,’ she told Rodney, the long-suffering producer, who was holding his palms up in despair at having been kept waiting for over three hours. It was his daughter’s seventh birthday and he was missing her party for this.
He would have told mother and daughter to get stuffed long ago were he not so madly in love with Sylva, not to mention terrified of Mrs Szubiak, who might be under five foot tall but was over eighteen stone with strange werewolf eyes and a helmet of dyed golden hair shaped like the tip of a bullet.
He flashed a tired smile and reached for his phone to text his wife and let her know it was going to be another long day and that he wouldn’t make Pippa’s pool party. He hadn’t been home in time to read his children a bedtime story for weeks because he was too busy documenting the life of the nation’s favourite superstar single mum. Then again, nor had Sylva been around at her children’s bedtime, not since the episode in which his team had shot her in the nursery, reading lovingly from her own children’s book Sylva Linings, based on her take on Slovakian folk stories, curled up in a vast squishy sofa wearing fluffy slippers and cream cashmere PJs, a small boy under each arm. A perfect tableau of devoted young motherhood, it had warmed hearts across the nation. However, when not enacting such scenes for her film crew, as far as Rodney could tell, she left child-care to one of her army of Slovakian nannies – all relatives – who brought the children zipped into designer bed bags, still warm and scented from their baths, to be kissed by their mother at seven o’clock before whisking them away again.
Rodney prided himself on his easygoing metrosexual liberalism and felt that children – especially those with absent fathers like Sylva’s kids – needed lots of hands-on parenting and one-to-one bonding. His wife thought Sylva was appalling, but despite his moral disapproval in principle, Rodney could never bring himself to criticise the woman who made his loins feel on fire with just a flick of her pretty head and a wiggle of her pert backside. She was the ultimate pocket plaything. Standing in her handmade baby blue kitchen, he sent his wife a text message and then stared out through the deep-set latticed window at the beautiful garden, lavishly tended by two strapping male Slovak cousins of Sylva and filled with baby blue, lilac and mauve flowers. Sylva loved blues. The first time that Rodney had seen her – sitting on the blue gingham cushions of the antique cast-iron swing chair that he could see through the window now, beneath the willow arch woven with blue clematis, her blonde hair spilling across her exquisite tanned face from which the bluest of eyes sparkled, those magnificent silicone breasts jutting improbably and fantastically from an absurdly tight, plunging periwinkle T-shirt, all his blood had rushed to his groin. Now he only had to see a certain shade of powder blue – on a magazine advert, a breakfast cereal packet, a curtain pattern – and he found himself semi-erect.
Meanwhile, amid the magazines in her dining room, Sylva banged her small fist on Kerry Katona’s cleavage and called for her mother.
‘Order the Complan and the Ben & Jerry’s, Mama. I am going to have to put on weight again.’
‘Please, no!’ Mama Szubiak gasped.
Her daughter nodded with a resigned sigh. ‘There is no other way.’
‘You could fast. Lose weight instead.’
‘I did that last time, remember? I have to stick to the rules.’
Sylva was a brand name, a new breed of celebrity wh
o was most famous for being famous and consequently knew that she had to keep her name in the headlines to maintain her status. In addition to dating stars, wearing a path in launch party red carpets, bearing beautiful babies, merchandising endless products and living her life in the full glare of non-stop publicity, Sylva had discovered a route to guaranteed front-cover stardom which was quicker (and less messy) than marrying a Premiership star. The media was obsessed with size, equally damning of fat and skinny yet unable to stop itself salivating over the slightest hint of weight change. As a result, dramatic shifts in any celebrity’s dress size were always a headline-grabber. Every six to eight months, faced with a headline drought, Sylva piled on about twenty pounds, taking her from her size six petite perfection to a size ten tabloid-dubbed ‘porker’, or on one memorable occasion when she’d overdone the milkshakes, a size twelve ‘super-porker’. The glossy weeklies loved it, printing gruesome and unflattering shots of her thickening waist, hefty thighs and double chins, daubed with day-glo shout-lines like ‘Sylva Cellulite Shocker!’ Then, while the box-out editorials were still sympathetically and hypocritically speculating as to the reasons for all this ‘misery eating’, she would just as swiftly drop the weight again, guaranteeing yet more media coverage as her new fabulous figure was admired while her ‘drastic weight loss’ was now contemplated. Then, the next time she felt her IFOJ and IFOP ratings drop towards BKK, she would go the other way, fasting her way to a dangerously gaunt size four, which would launch another paparazzi feeding frenzy as shots of her ‘dangerously thin’ body were plastered over the front facing pages opposite the beauty ads and the editorial commentaries sympathetically speculated why devoted mum of two ‘Super-skinny Sylva’ was ‘starving herself’. After a few weeks of conjecture she could let her body weight return to its meticulously maintained norm. Thus her status as tabloid headliner was continually reinvigorated in a cyclical pattern of feast and famine. It was an admittedly drastic way to stay famous; such extreme yo-yo dieting was hard work – the drastic weight changes played havoc with her body, and she had not had a period in almost six months – but it was highly effective.
Mrs Szubiak was a hugely ambitious woman who loved nothing more than to see her daughter on the front covers of all the magazines piled up in the Amersham hairdressers where she went to get her blonde bullet hairdo welded into shape each week, but even she could see that the regime was not healthy. Every time Sylva piled on the pounds she was also terrified that, this time, she wouldn’t be able to lose it and would lose her fame and fortune completely. A star getting fat was a great story; a star staying fat was old news.
‘I think we must find another way,’ she said now.
‘It is the best way, Mama. We know that.’
‘A new lover, perhaps?’
‘I have a new lover,’ Sylva pointed out. The hotly tipped young British actor was both gay and living in LA, but their ‘relationship’ was holding up in front of the camera lenses thus far.
‘He is not famous enough,’ Mama said with a dismissive sniff.
‘He was nominated for an Oscar this year, which is more than Jonte ever has been.’ Sylva’s short-lived second marriage, which had recently ended in a quickie divorce, had been to dashing Brit actor and serial co-star shagger Jonte Frost. As well as procuring her younger son, Hain, marriage to Jonte had lent Sylva much-needed credibility and propelled her into an entirely new celebrity super league, one in which she was desperate to stay after years as a disposable WAG. With her parallel careers of glamour modelling, writing, acting and singing; her perfume, cosmetics and underwear lines to promote; her television series and her fitness DVDs, it was essential to keep her brand constantly in the press. Dating one of Jonte’s younger, hunkier screen rivals was a good tactic.
‘He is not famous enough,’ Mama repeated, making her way to the large reproduction Regency bureau, which she unlocked with a small key kept on a chain around her neck. ‘We must find you a better man, maika, a man who will put a ring on your finger again.’
‘We could try a woman this time?’ Sylva suggested. The trend for glamour girls to have a Sapphic phase was admittedly getting rather well-worn and sleazy – fed up with years of men wanting them only for their bodies, blah blah, get together with another woman, blah blah, media-fuelled talk of bisexuality adds to the cool factor, blah: Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Jodie Marsh, Angelina Jolie, blah blah – but Sylva thought it still had mileage if handled delicately. Hadn’t a publicity-hungry supermodel once let loose a rather saucy rumour about a glamorous drag queen that had worked well? Sylva envisaged something on a rather more classy scale: perhaps an androgynous aristo in tailored tweed, or a gorgeous raven-haired rock chick.
But Mama pretended not to hear. She would never entertain the idea of Sylva having a relationship with a woman, however artfully staged. Like Queen Victoria, she refused to believe lesbianism even existed.
In the bureau were her files – tens of neat pink ring binders in which she kept many acres of Sylva’s cuttings (though only the most recent ones: all of the others having been archived into many large boxes in an attic room because they took up so much space). Beside these recent cuttings, so meticulously filed, was a baby blue ring binder that she now drew out and opened.
Sylva sighed. ‘No, Mama, I don’t think we can make that work. Not yet. It’s too soon after Jonte.’
‘Of course we can make it work.’ Mrs Szubiak placed the file on top of the magazines in front of her daughter, obscuring Nell Cottrell’s beautiful face, although her famous escort still peered out above it, looking very handsome and self-satisfied. ‘It is time for my little girl to star in another fairytale.’
Ironically, as Sylva’s mother opened the file, Dillon Rafferty’s name was at the top of the index list in her neat, curling handwriting, along with a dozen other potential targets, all of which Mrs Szubiak had studied carefully, compiling very detailed biographies full of information and photographs to help her and her daughter in their quest. Among them was at least one dotcom billionaire, two Oscar-winning actors, several rock stars, an oligarch and a red-blooded Royal prince within a couple of croaks of the throne.
On the spine of the blue file, also in Mrs Szubiak’s neat copper-plate capitals, was one word: HUSBANDS.
‘It is time,’ she told her daughter grandly. ‘To select Number Three.’
‘Must we?’
‘Yes,’ she covered Sylva’s delicate hand with her own, gnarled and hardened from a tough life before their escape to England. She would never allow her daughter to know such a life again.
Long ago, Mama had decided that marriage for Sylva was as much a career move as launching a new clothing range or promoting her latest ghost-written book.
‘Third time lucky, as they say in this country,’ she said determinedly.
‘Third time lucky,’ Sylva echoed, sliding the file towards her mother so that she could once again study the magazine shot of Dillon Rafferty and his new girlfriend. ‘Who do you have in mind?’
As if she needed to ask …
The knotty forefinger with its long, nicotine-yellow nail landed on Dillon’s nose. ‘Let’s start at the top of the list and work our way down, as before.’
‘Nothing like aiming high.’ Sylva felt a shiver of excitement course through her. On cue, ‘Two Souls’ started playing on the distant kitchen radio, which Mama kept permanently tuned to Radio Two. ‘Tell Rodney I’m ready for him to start shooting now, Mama.’
Mrs Szubiak gasped, clutching the file to her chest. ‘You are surely not going to let him see our plans?’
‘Of course not,’ Sylva stood up and, turning to the huge Venetian mirror above the ornate fireplace, ruffled her thick blonde hair – a metre long including extensions. ‘I am going to do some gardening with the kids. Plant veggies. Dillon’s got an organic farm shop, hasn’t he? He’ll approve. It seems the perfect start to our masterplan.’
Mama regarded her daughter slyly. Sometimes she couldn’t be quite sure whe
ther Sylva was being serious or not.
‘The children are not here,’ she reminded her.
‘Aren’t they?’ Sylva asked, vaguely recalling that her small boys and their doting entourage of nannies were currently splashing around in the pool of Lissom Hall, the nearby private spa that had made her an honorary member after so many photo shoots staged there. ‘In that case, I’ll plant veggies on my own. Tell Rodney that I’m going to the garden centre in five minutes. They can start shooting me there. I’ll take the Cayenne.’
She raced upstairs to change into denim hot-pant dungarees with nothing but a lacy cream and blue camisole underneath, matched with patterned baby blue wellies and topped with a floppy straw hat that cast a bewitching dappled shadow on her high-cheekboned face.
Sylva knew how to set a scene.
Chapter 5
Dillon and Nell were fast-tracked through customs at Heathrow and, accompanied by his record label PR, Tania, and the super-efficient airport’s VIP liaison executive, pushed their overloaded luggage trolleys past the banks of photographers intent on getting a shot of the global chart-topper and his new squeeze.
