Choral Society

by Prue Leith

  When they arrived, Angelica was excited and admiring. Bill gave her a formal little peck on the cheek, but then looked her slowly up and down.

  ‘You look good, Becca, how come you get younger every time I see you?’

  She certainly wasn’t going to tell him about the botox. ‘Must be because I’m working for me rather than for you,’ she said, then realised how ungracious that sounded and added, glancing at Angelica to show it was a joke, ‘or maybe the gym and the beautician.’

  She went ahead, showing them through the house, explaining that so far they had only redecorated one bedroom, the new dining room and the conservatory because they needed those rooms photographed for the brochure and the website. And until four weeks ago, Pencarrick was full of regulars and Joanna didn’t want to upset them.

  Rebecca was surprised at her own nervousness. She still, it seemed, needed Bill’s approval. Why did she mind so? She supposed it was because he had taught her all she knew, and she wanted to prove to him that she’d learned the lessons well. But of course he had never intended to teach her: she’d picked it up herself by working for him. And, she thought, he owed his own success principally to his charm: he was the master of bullshit. But he was still a damn good decorator, and if he mocked her efforts she knew she’d be hurt as well as miserable.

  She led them into the big bedroom, which was all but finished, with only the carpet to be laid. She had kept the Victorian desk, the dressing table and the Edwardian basin in the corner. And of course the four-poster, from which she had removed the claustrophobic drapes and replaced them with a light and lacy suggestion of them, with the rest of the fabrics in peach, cream and brown.

  ‘Mum, it’s heaven! Can I have this room?’

  ‘Don’t think so, darling. We’ll ask Joanna, but I think it’s being kept pristine for the brochure photographs.’

  Bill did not say much beyond ‘very nice’, and Rebecca was beginning to get anxious that he didn’t like what he saw, but when she ushered him into the dining room and put the lights on, he stopped dead. Rebecca smiled to herself. She knew Bill’s taste and she knew he’d love this. It was the sort of scheme that most of his rich clients didn’t have the guts for. Rich green curtains the colour of malachite, wood-panelled walls, and straight-backed chairs covered in blood red and glowing green; dark wood tables With modern, deep-red candelabra. The two giant chandeliers were thin black metal with crystal and burgundy glass drops, and there were hidden ceiling spots to cast pools of light on tables, but not on middle-aged faces.

  ‘Rebecca,’ he said, ‘this is just wonderful. Really original colour scheme. Stunning in fact.’

  She turned to him, searching his face. ‘Really? Do you mean it, Bill?’ He put his hands on her shoulders and said, ‘I do. Yes. This is a triumph.’ Then he held her at arms’ length and said, ‘Maybe you were right, Becca. I should have trusted you with proper decorating. Not just the chores.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t though. You’d have sucked me into your business and I’d have stayed in your shadow for ever.’

  Rebecca was so delighted with his approval she could not resist a little swagger, or rather a swing of her hips as she preceded him down the corridor. His praise was like champagne, lifting heart and body.

  In the conservatory, with its pale blinds, Cornish slate floor, grey glass tables and white orchids in pots, Bill complimented her on the muted colour scheme.

  ‘It’s a perfect contrast with the riot of colour outside: blue sea, deep-green pines, strident autumn flowers and emerald lawn. Becca, it’s very clever. The colours must be even louder when the azaleas and rhodis are out. You’ve really thought about it.’

  The truth was, Rebecca had not thought of anything of the kind, but she nodded sagely.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘important not to compete with Nature.’

  Lucy and Joanna were sitting at a table with a tray of coffee. Rebecca suddenly remembered that Bill had met Lucy at her disastrous dinner party and she had a moment of anxiety, fearing one of them would bring it up. But they didn’t, and Bill concentrated on Joanna whom he’d not met before, and was gratifyingly enthusiastic about her interiors.

  ‘Rebecca’s hit just the right note,’ he said. ‘Good design without gimmicks or looking as if you’ve tried too hard.’

  The women showed him the plans for the rest of the hotel, explaining that the works would be done over the winter, and Joanna produced the laptop and took them through her schemes for all the rooms.

  Bill listened in near silence, mostly nodding approval, but once commenting, ‘I see you are making good use of my suppliers, Becca!’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that, darling. I did nick some contacts from Inside Job. And I’m afraid I copied the Make It Over software. It’s brilliant.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘So thank you.’

  ‘Mum, you are impossible!’ Angelica shook her head, but she looked amused rather than disapproving.

  For a moment Rebecca thought Bill would cut up rough, but he just shook his head and said, ‘Same old Rebecca, then.’

  After a while, Joanna went back to her office and Lucy took Angelica to see the kitchen and the plans for next year to include the teaching space.

  Left on her own with Bill, Rebecca said, ‘Bill, I was hoping you’d recommend me for jobs you don’t want – when I’ve done this one of course, and have proved I can come in on time and on budget, I mean.’

  Bill expressed himself willing and almost at once came up with a client in Devon whose house, just inherited, had been untouched for fifty years.

  ‘It’s a nice job, because the client is more interested in the garden than the house, so you’d have a pretty free hand.’

  ‘But if it’s a huge house needing a total overhaul, why don’t you want it?’

  ‘Getting there all the time would be a bore, and anyway I’m too busy for the next six months at least. He might agree to have you, and it’s probably only an hour’s drive from here.’

  Julius Thurston, he summarised, was a sixty-year-old, divorced, mega-rich stockbroker who already had a big house in Chelsea but was keeping this one because it had enormous neglected grounds and he wanted to create a garden to beat all gardens. Rebecca’s ears pricked up at ‘sixty-year-old’, ‘mega-rich’ and ‘divorced’.

  ‘What’s he like? Do you like him? ‘

  ‘Becca, restrain yourself, he’s probably gay. And if he isn’t, with all that money he could net a thirty-year-old.’ This was unkind, and Rebecca was about to snap at him when he said, ‘Anyway, what happened to your French banker?’

  ‘Nothing, why should anything have happened to him? He’s still around and, you’ll be surprised to know, still adores me.’

  Then Rebecca remembered that she was on a mission to schmooze Bill, and she decided to forgo the chance to be sulky. They had a drink on the terrace before he left and he was great. Maybe he realises, thought Rebecca, that long-term it’s in his interest that I make some money.

  The day was a great success. They didn’t discuss Rebecca’s allowance once, which was a relief, partly because she was, as usual, overdrawn, and also because she feared Bill would suggest he pay her less now that she was getting fees from Joanna. And she had not told him that she’d let her London flat for a heap of money while she was down here for four months. With luck, when the next month’s rent came in, she would be just about solvent again, provided he kept up her allowance.

  Instead, wonderfully, they talked almost exclusively about how he could help her get started as an interior designer. He was a bit miffed that she hadn’t come clean about how big the Pencarrick project was, or asked for his help before, but he relented when she told him she’d wanted to surprise him. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘if you’d helped, how would I have known I could do it without you? Or that the results were mine and not yours?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Bill with, she thought, a hint of admiration in his voice.

  By the time he left for London he’d not only agreed to p
assing on clients, but that she should go to a designer trade fair in his place to see what was new for both of them, and to find him a factory in the Far East that would rip off some Fortuny hanging lamps which cost a couple of grand each. Bill thought they could get them made (with Indian sari silks rather than Italian designer fabric) for a couple of hundred, delivered.

  When Rebecca had waved him off she shrugged into a thick fleece and sat on the seat at the edge of the lawn. She looked down at the endless crashing sea, and realised that almost for the first time in her life she was not constantly thinking about a man; not the man she had, nor the one in her sights; or some fantasy bit of perfection. These days she spent more time thinking about the price of door handles or the shape of lampshades.

  And the truth was, she had rather lost interest in the French banker.

  Except in bed, she thought, he bores me to death. He’s great in the sack. He can keep going for hours, and wants to please me rather than himself, which must be rare as hens’ teeth, but still, I’d rather be shopping.

  They couldn’t use Rebecca’s flat any more as it was let, so she sometimes spent a night with him in his hotel – he stayed in a suite at the Hilton next to Tower Bridge – and then he went off to work at dawn and she could have a nice lazy morning with breakfast in bed.

  But, oddly, she preferred to stay with Joanna.

  Rebecca stood up and walked along the cliff edge towards the rocky steps down to the beach. She started to climb down the steep path, feeling extraordinarily content. It was partly the way the day with Bill had gone, but it was deeper than that. She felt relaxed, sort of stretched out and happy.

  Her thoughts returned to Jean-Pierre. Up until now she’d always preferred the company of men to that of women. Not now. Must be diminishing libido, she thought, but I much prefer my women friends’ company to my lover’s. The three of them often took the train to Paddington, arriving in good time for the Messiah rehearsal. Then, next day, Joanna would go to meetings in the City, Lucy would meet travel agents or publicists about Pencarrick and Rebecca would go shopping for bathtubs or flooring or whatever. And then they would all go back to Cornwall, first class, and have dinner together on the train.

  Rebecca’s new life as a professional decorator gave her more satisfaction than she could have possibly imagined. She simply loved it, even the costings and the admin.

  And she relished being a serious buyer. When she told the Lighting Emporium that she was looking for lights for twenty bedrooms, suddenly she’d get the full treatment: the boss in attendance, a cup of coffee, nothing too much trouble. Feeling important was a buzz. But it was also a kind of validation of her power and independence. And it was good to be making her own money.

  She crunched along the stony end of the beach, a chill breeze on her face, occasionally trying, unsuccessfully, to skip flat pebbles on the fleeting patches of smooth sea that came and went between the breakers. Rebecca smiled at beach, sea and sky and said to herself, aloud, ‘If you pull off the Devon job for Bill’s billionaire, woman, you’ll be in clover. Could you be growing up at last, I wonder?’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Lucy held her mobile slightly away from her cheek. Her agent’s voice was insistent and getting louder.

  ‘Lucy, in four years I have never had an author turn down an invitation to be on Orlando’s Glorious Food.’

  ‘OK, so I’ll be the first.’

  ‘It would be mad to refuse. The only telly programme that sells more books is Robert and Janine. And Orlando even outsells them on cookbooks. Every cook and would-be cook in the country watches him. You have to accept.’

  ‘But the programme is utter rubbish!’

  ‘No it’s not. It’s very good television, which will help to sell Peasant Soups. Like him or loathe him, Orlando has a huge following.’

  Lucy felt trapped. She sat down and covered her face with both hands, one still clutching the mobile. ‘I don’t loathe him. I’m over that I hope. But we don’t get on. There is all this baggage between us…him ousting me from the Globe…’

  ‘Baggage? He worships you!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was singing your praises at a foodie lunch the other day – something about you teaching him how to write a good recipe …’

  When Lucy had given in and put the telephone down, she re-ran the conversation in her head. It was true Orlando’s weekly pages in the Globe had improved. They were less strident and breathless, with fewer ‘wows’ and ‘cools’, but they still had a freshness and enthusiasm which kept you reading to the end. And she knew, and hated, that he had upped the circulation of the paper, and that the Globe was delighted with him. They were, if the gossip was right, paying him three times what they’d paid her.

  And he was intensely embarrassing on television. So what if four million people regularly watched his show? It was still a mindless mix of trivia about food, glamour, gossip, the latest fad and cooking-made-easy. She just didn’t see how she could fit into it. The only thing in its favour was that it was marginally less awful than the other show he hosted, the food quiz that she had been offered in her heyday and turned down as insulting to the viewer!

  They’d hired Orlando instead – and put him on the telly route to fame and fortune. No wonder he ‘worshipped her’, she thought: every time she made way for him, he triumphed.

  Lucy refused to cook on the show. The producer tried hard to persuade her to don a chef’s jacket and join Orlando to cook soups from her book, but Lucy was adamant. She was not a chef, never had been, and would not pretend to be by wearing a chef’s jacket.

  They suggested an apron, but the truth was that Lucy did not want to cook with Orlando at all. And, surprisingly, her agent had agreed with her.

  ‘I think you’re right, Lucy,’ she said. ‘You could look staid beside all that razzle-dazzle, and there would be the danger that he would take over and hog the limelight. We need to position you as the grande dame of cooking, which you are: the authoritative, scholarly writer who produces the best cookbooks, with the best writing and the best recipes. Not a telly-celeb cook.’

  Lucy had not liked the words ‘staid’ and ‘grande dame’ but she recognised the truth of them. Her agent went in to bat against Orlando’s producer, and won: Lucy would talk and taste, but not cook.

  Lucy arrived at the studio wearing her ‘Rebecca suit’. It still had the effect of lifting her spirits and making her feel stylish and confident. She’d dithered about the purple pendant but decided it would be too glamorous for a conversation on a couch, and distracting for the viewer.

  When the studio make-up artist had finished with her face and hair, Lucy looked as good as that time Rebecca had organised her makeover. Better in fact, since she was a lot happier now.

  ‘I wish I could make myself up like that,’ she said, ‘but even if I learnt how, it would take me hours.’

  ‘No it wouldn’t. You’d be slower than me of course, but you should manage it in twenty minutes or so.’

  Twenty minutes! That, thought Lucy, is the difference between me and other women. Rebecca probably spends more than that twice a day and Joanna would regard it as time well invested. But to me it is a complete waste of time. Poor Josh, I could be a better-looking mate for him if I tried harder, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

  The sound man, a jovial Australian, stuck a miniature radio mike to Lucy’s skin, just out of sight down her cleavage, and hooked the battery pack to the back of her skirt. Between them they connected the two with a wire under her jacket. Then someone led her to the sofa at the far end of the studio, where the interviews and chat went on. The central section of the set looked like a street market with stalls of colourful fruit and veg, jams and preserves, breads and cakes, fish, game, even a coffee stall. Most of it was fake set-dressing, but the coffee stall was real, with a plumbed-in old Gaggia machine and little café tables with spindly metal legs. At these sat invited members of the public, who came to worship Orlando – and to hope for a ten-
second appearance on the telly.

  The last third of the studio was set up as a country kitchen for cooks and chefs to show off their skills. Every programme had at least two hands-on demonstrations, plus tastings and chat.

  Lucy rather liked the tense but friendly atmosphere of TV studios, with the dozen or more crew, directors, runners, and she-knew-not-what doing their jobs efficiently and calmly. It was like a good restaurant kitchen, she thought, no one yelling, everyone moving to the orders from the head chef, but all aware that at any moment, if one of them messed up, the whole thing could go pear-shaped. Under the blanket of calm, there was a thin sheet of shared anxiety.

  The show opened with Orlando prancing onto the set to a burst of applause from the coffee drinkers, backed up with a good bit of recorded clapping. He skidded to a stop in front of a camera and went into his introduction. He was reading from the teleprompt but you would never have known it. He waved his arms around and spoke in the exaggerated manner of children’s telly presenters. Lucy braced herself, hating it.

  He ended his introductions by bouncing up and down on his feet and clapping his hands together. Then, stressing every important word as though the audience were a bit backward, he confided in an excited whisper, ‘But now to our star turn.’

  Still in the stage whisper, and arbitrarily emphasising words, he mouthed, ‘I am thrilled, really thrilled, to introduce my chief guest for today’s show. She is a legend in the food world. I doubt there is a top chef in the country that does not have her books on his shelf; the only writer ever to get as many literary awards for the quality of her writing as foodie awards for the quality of her recipes, and a veritable inspiration to us all. She is, of course, the wonderful Lucy Barnes.’ He turned to her, leaning back and silently applauding. The floor manager orchestrated some well-rehearsed clapping from the mini-audience. The light on the camera trained on Lucy glowed red: she gritted her teeth and forced a smile.