A Serving of Scandal

by Prue Leith

  Kate could not stop her. Weaving between the tables, she walked straight to where it had been agreed the buffet would be. She stopped in consternation. ‘I thought you said everything would be ready before we left for church. We leave in fifteen minutes.’ She surveyed the bare trestle tables and the littered floor in dismay.

  God, it looks like a war zone, thought Kate. On the ground around the long tables were a mass of polystyrene blocks out of which they were to build the tiered back to the buffet. The wedding cake, still in unassembled tiers, sat in three boxes. The boxes of flowers and greenery were stacked to one side, and the tools of Adrian’s trade (wire, secateurs, ribbons, pins) were waiting in a shallow tray. An aluminium stepladder lay on its side, a full watering can next to it.

  Kate’s voice, she hoped, was steeped in confidence. ‘Don’t worry, Lady Suskind, it’s all under control. We never put the food out until the very last minute. I like everything to stay in the fridge, covered up. Food dries out so quickly, and besides, we need to keep it cool. We’ll do the buffet while you’re in church.’

  ‘Kate, that is not what you told me when we went through all this. Is something wrong? Has the food not arrived, is that it?’

  ‘No, everything is fine, I assure you, Lady Suskind. The food is here, in the fridges, ready to go.’

  ‘But surely you could get on with the flowers and decoration before you bring the food out. How long will it all take?’

  ‘Please, Lady Suskind, don’t worry. It will take us at most half an hour to add the cloths, flowers and food, and you will be gone well over an hour. We’ll be fine. Don’t give it a thought.’

  ‘But surely the florist needs more time. He took all morning …’

  ‘Truly, Lady Suskind, we are fine. But how about you? I would be a bag of nerves if my daughter was getting married. Would you like a quick glass of fizz before you set off?’ Kate caught her head waiter’s eye and he nodded.

  Lady Suskind persisted. She turned to Adrian, ‘Are you under control, young man? You have certainly done a lovely job on the rest.’

  Kate stared hard at Adrian, willing him to toe the line.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘And yes, it won’t take a jiffy to get this lot done.’ He gave a dismissive wave towards the buffet and the gear on the floor.

  Lady Suskind did not look entirely reassured as she took the glass of champagne from George, but she nodded and said, ‘Well, I must leave it to you.’ Then she accepted Kate’s suggestion that she inspect the food before she set off for the ceremony.

  Kate had the driver lower the tail lift of the refrigerated truck so Lady Suskind could get in. But fear for her wedding finery and the icy blast of chilled air cut the visit short. She admired the two towering gâteaux St Honoré, made from caramel-covered choux, filled with whipped coffee and vanilla flavoured cream. Talika had assembled them early this morning in Kate’s kitchen, using silicone moulds to get a perfect witch’s hat shape. Kate had been nervous that the damp weather would soften the caramel, but it was fine, thin and brittle.

  While Lady Suskind made her hurried inspection of the trays of lobster and crab, the terrines and mousses, bowls of salads and platters of meats, Kate sneaked a glance at her watch. Joan had been gone twenty-five minutes. The wedding was at two-thirty and they’d be back sometime after three-thirty. It was getting a lot too close for comfort.

  The minute their client hurried off to round up the wedding party, Kate rang Joan on her mobile.

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘No. Nightmare. There’s a stationer’s with thick paper cloths, not too bad, but they are out of cream and white. I’ve tried the hotel – duty manager too junior to dare give them to me, and a restaurant, but they use runners not full cloths. Am looking for a store now, but the traffic isn’t brilliant.’

  ‘OK, but if you can’t find anything in the next ten minutes, come back. As soon as they’ve left for the church, I’m going to raid their linen cupboard.’

  Kate cut the call and dropped her mobile into her apron pocket. She found the wine waiter. ‘Have you got any napkins?’ she asked, ‘I know we ordered two or three dozen extra for tray-cloths and so on.’

  ‘Sure, how many do you want?’

  ‘All of them. Your chaps will have to pour the champagne from unwrapped bottles and fold tea towels over your arms. I’m sorry, but the linen for the buffet hasn’t arrived and I need everything I can lay my hands on.’ She did not wait for an answer, but picked up the pile of napkins and hurried back to the buffet.

  ‘Adrian, come and help me. We need to pin these round the boxes.’

  Adrian was boiling up for a tantrum. ‘But they are all wrong! The background is supposed to be plain white. My design—’

  ‘Tough,’ said Kate. ‘No option. And silver brocade won’t kill you. The alternative is coloured paper. So be grateful.’

  ‘I cannot work with this sort of—’

  ‘Just shut up, Adrian,’ she snapped. ‘Do you want this job or not? Decide now.’

  Adrian rolled his eyes but he did help. And he was much quicker than she. He had the boxes neatly wrapped and pinned in the big brocade napkins, their edges sharp, the pattern the right way up. Together they lifted the tables into place to make two long wide service stations each side of the smaller square table for the cake.

  Kate made sure the cake table was slightly in front and separated from the others so the bride and groom could get round to cut the cake without presenting their backs to the guests, or, more important, to the photographer.

  Then they were stuck again. They couldn’t continue assembling the tiered backdrop until the tables were covered.

  Kate ran across the lawn and through the house. All of the Suskind staff had gone to the wedding so there was no one to ask permission from, or even to ask where the linen cupboard was.

  But Kate found it almost at once. A small room on the landing outside the first floor bedrooms. It looked like a bed-linen shop, stuffed full of sheets, blankets, duvets, everything you could think of.

  But there were only two white tablecloths and both of them were round, with deep lace borders. Most of the bed linen and towels were coloured or patterned, in separate shelves marked Pink Room, Green Room, Peach Room, Lilac Room. Each shelf had different piles, all in matching colours, over stickers on the shelf edge: towels; duvet covers; flat sheets; fitted sheets, etc. This is one organised housekeeper, thought Kate.

  The Master Bedroom had white linen sheets. Kate simply pulled all the flat sheets down. No duvet covers. Cream Room was out of flat sheets but had two duvet covers, which she added to her pile. She started for the door, then turned back and added the round tablecloths, and all the white pillowslips. Just in case.

  She raced down the stairs, across the lawn and into the tent. Joan was back, empty-handed, and everyone fell on the linen and got to work.

  Suddenly it was fun. Maybe I’m a crisis junkie, Kate thought. Her spirits lifted as the buffet tables swiftly materialised. She found herself even grinning at Adrian, who had forgotten his sulks in supervising the others.

  They folded the heavy linen double sheets so that the deep embroidered edges ran along the front drops each side of the cake table in the middle. Adrian used the Suskinds’ lace cloths for the cake table, one on top of the other and artfully, apparently casually, draped, ruffled and pinned to disguise the fact that they were round and the table was square.

  Once the cloths and back tiers were in place, Adrian arranged the flowers and pinned the garlands in no time at all. And then the waiters brought out the food, and positioned it under Kate’s direction. Joan and Adrian assembled the cake between them and everyone helped clear up the debris. It was exactly three-thirty.

  Kate clapped her hands for silence.

  ‘Thank you, all of you. I honestly believe Nothing Fancy has the best team in the world. And Adrian, you have excelled yourself. This is beautiful.’ And then they all clapped, relief and pleasure and pride combined. It was a good
moment.

  The party went wonderfully well. As always, a good many guests got completely plastered, among them, to Kate’s amusement, the elegant Lady Suskind. After her daughter and new son-in-law had cut the cake, she was standing next to Kate by the buffet, now full of pastries for tea. Suddenly she turned, wobbling a bit and smiled broadly.

  ‘Kate,’ she said, ‘you are just so good! There was I thinking you would never be ready, but you were of course.’ She peered down at the front of the buffet cloth. ‘And how did you find tablecloths with our family monogram on them? So clever!’

  Kate smiled and opened her mouth to tell her the truth. But then she thought, No, I’ll tell her tomorrow. Just for today, I’ll leave her thinking we are miracle workers.

  By nine o’clock that evening it was all over. The guests had gone to a post-wedding ball at the golf club, and Kate’s job was nearly done. The wait staff were paid, the vans were packed, the marquee and kitchen tent picked clean of litter. The chairs were stacked and the tables dismantled, and the hired gear was checked and ready for collection.

  Kate was folding the pilfered linen and stacking it into her car to take to a good laundry, when Adrian, who had come back to collect his vases and stands, said, ‘Well, Kate, are you going to marry this government chap? I hear he’s mad about you.’

  Kate looked at him astonishment. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Isn’t it true? It was all the gossip in the kitchen today. Even Joan thinks it’s true, and I met some friends of yours at dinner a few nights ago and they said—’

  ‘Stop, stop. What friends?’

  ‘A couple you used to work with in some restaurant. Carole something. Says she read it in the paper …’

  Kate dismissed this with a shake of the head, ‘But Joan? She cannot believe it. She knows better than anyone …’

  ‘She does. Ask her …’

  Kate, exhausted though she was, was galvanised into action. She left Adrian abruptly and rushed into the kitchen to find Joan.

  She was pulling on a waterproof anorak, and looked really tired. Kate had a second of regret that she was about to challenge her. But she had to.

  ‘Joan, Adrian says you believe this rubbish about me and Oliver Stapler. Do you?’

  ‘I … er … Well, yes, I think I do. Unless you tell me differently, of course. But he obviously seeks you out, and you seem to …’

  ‘Well, none of it is true. None of it, do you understand?’

  ‘OK, OK, Kate. But it’s not just me. Even Lady Suskind …’

  ‘Lady Suskind? Good God, what has she said?’

  ‘Well, some of the guests were talking about it. She said she hoped when you were a grand cabinet minister’s wife you wouldn’t give up Nothing Fancy … And she knows the Staplers. She said she’d asked them to the wedding and she assumed they’d said no because his wife would not want to meet you.’

  Kate felt utterly deflated. It had been such a triumphant job, and she’d not given the Oliver matter a thought for hours.

  ‘Oh Joan, it’s not true. And I hope you’ll do me a favour and scotch any rumours you hear.’

  Joan said she would, and put a motherly arm round Kate. ‘It’s all Dennis’s fault, you know. He was the one that told the paper that you drove home together, and that you and Mr Stapler often shared a bottle of wine and sent the rest of us home.’ Kate was silent, trying to absorb this information. She nodded slowly. ‘Dennis, of course. Of course it was. I should have guessed, he’s such a snake. I don’t know what I’ve done to him to make him so dislike me, but he does.’ She shook her head, then looked directly at Joan and said, ‘But Joan, how can you say I “sent you home”? You make it sound as if I let you go because I wanted to be alone with Oliver. Well, I did – in the sense that I enjoyed a drink with him. But I let you go because if the work was done there was no reason for you to hang around.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate, I didn’t mean …’

  ‘I was thinking of you, not me.’

  But Kate knew this was not quite true. As far as Oliver was concerned she thought of little but him, and her, all the time.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Oliver could not believe how fast things were moving. He seemed to have no control, or even any say, in any part of his life.

  Ruth, once she’d done her bit, standing beside him outside their Lambeth house to be photographed and hear him publicly declare that he was innocent of adultery and that he loved her, had gone back to the West Midlands and resumed her cool distance. Far from being gratified, she’d hated the whole performance, and the pictures showed her looking either glum or disdainful.

  Of course he’d not enjoyed it either; it was against his nature to talk to strangers about such personal matters. He’d longed to order them all to stop muck raking and go away and do something worthwhile with their lives.

  He had telephoned Ruth twice during his Middle East trip: once from Tel Aviv, and two days later from Cairo. She had failed to return his first call, and was cool on the second. They had a rather formal exchange about the press trying to make something of the fact that he, a Labour minister, sent his daughters to a non-state school.

  ‘If that’s all they can dredge up,’ said Oliver, ‘it must mean the Kate story has run out of steam. Just as long as the other stuff doesn’t surface.’

  ‘Why should it? They questioned you months ago and you’ve paid the duty on the china, haven’t you?’

  ‘And a fine. But both matters are on the public record, if anyone cares to look.’

  ‘I doubt if anyone is interested.’

  ‘I just feel uneasy. It would be a load off my mind if we found that necklace. You have really looked, haven’t you?’

  ‘Of course I’ve looked.’

  He had waited for her to say something encouraging, however banal: ask him how the trip was going, wish him a safe flight home. But nothing.

  He’d said, ‘All right, darling. See you at the weekend.’

  ‘Yes. Goodbye then.’

  In the ensuing days of little sleep, strange food, air-conditioned hotel rooms and long meetings that ended in bland and meaningless statements, Oliver realised he had never felt more lonely.

  His political career hung in the balance, his wife was cold, his children indifferent. Unused to self-pity, the thought that he had no real friends surprised him. But it was true. There was no brother or old mate he could discuss his troubles with – all his closest friends were politicians or civil servants and he could hardly embroil them in his troubles.

  The one person who might have lent a sympathetic ear and said something sensible was Kate. And she was the one person he couldn’t speak to.

  He’d still have liked to lift the phone, commiserate, and discuss their joint problem, but it was too late now. He had not done it at once, when he should have, and now he dare not. Terry was right: he must give no ammunition to the press or the Tories. Anyway, he had behaved like such a cur he doubted if Kate would talk to him if he did call.

  Two weeks later, after a weekend in the country which he had spent in his study catching up on work while his family were off competing in some horsey event, he arrived at his office to find Terry sitting at his desk.

  The press supremo didn’t apologise and he didn’t get up. ‘I asked Helen to let me in. Hope you don’t mind?’

  Oliver dropped his red briefcase on the sofa and sat down beside it. He didn’t answer. He did mind, but what was the point in saying so?

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ Terry took his time opening his briefcase on Oliver’s desk and extracting a file, which he did not open.

  Oliver swallowed his irritation. He could not believe they were to have a conversation with Terry occupying his desk while he sat halfway across the room on the sofa. But he was damned if he would take the chair opposite the desk, like a supplicant for a job. Terry can come over here, he thought. But Terry looked up and said, ‘We have decided to sue Scandal Sheet. That piece was without d
oubt libellous.’

  Oliver’s heart sank. They had discussed taking legal action endlessly, and Oliver thought he’d won the argument. Apparently not. ‘But why?’ he asked. ‘What good would that do? If we aren’t going to sue the Standard, why sue a one-man-and-his-dog outfit? They won’t have any money, they’ll just fold.’

  ‘Probably.’ Terry gave the slightest of shrugs. ‘I’d rather have gone for the Standard, since they do have money, but according to the lawyers we have less of a case. They could argue that the Standard was asking legitimate questions in the public interest – and that goes for everyone who reported on the stories in local rags and elsewhere. But Scandal Sheet is different. The piece is not hedged about with “allegedly” and “according to our sources”, etc. If you are telling the truth, then their account is straightforward lies.’

  As always, Terry had the knack of making Oliver angry. ‘If you are telling the truth’ indeed. How dare he? Terry knew damn well it was the truth. To give himself time to cool down, Oliver stood up and filled a glass with water from the jug on the corner of his desk. He did not offer Terry one, but returned to the sofa wondering sourly why the man bothered to come and discuss anything with him. If the past weeks had taught him anything it was that Terry was not going to listen to anyone who didn’t agree with him.

  But Oliver challenged him nonetheless. ‘Terry, this is mad. It will just start the press hare running again. Apart from some comment on the Scandal Sheet piece, everyone has pretty well dropped it. The story is on its last legs, surely?’

  ‘That’s not the point. The point is to teach the bastards a lesson. It’s a good opportunity for the Government to rein in the press a bit. We will undoubtedly win, and that will give the rest of Fleet Street something to think about.’

  ‘And in the meantime my poor wife has to endure having her job as a breeder and horsewoman ridiculed, and Kate McKinnon has to put up with new attentions of the paparazzi.’

  ‘Yup. I imagine you are right, Oliver. But I presume, since you protest your innocence and both the ladies’ good names, you would prefer all three of you to be exonerated, would you not?’