by Wendy Holden
‘Clemency said that?’ Laura wanted to roll on the floor in a foetal position and scream.
‘Indeed she did. And I have to say, Laura, that I agree with her when she ventured to suggest that you’re not, after all, quite ready to be an editor yet. So what we’ve decided is that Clemency takes the helm and you back her up as deputy editor. How does that sound?’
Like a nightmare, Laura thought, biting so hard on her biro that it snapped. But it would obviously be madness to let that show. She raised her chin and beamed at her adversary through gritted teeth as she dropped the mangled plastic pieces in the bin. It might be round one to Clemency, but she would win in the end. The question, as ever, was how?
Chapter Nineteen
‘I’m fresh out,’ Edgar said when Laura knocked on his door a few days later. She had decided she could use a caipirinha after all. ‘Been drinking them all afternoon.’
Laura would normally have considered this a waste of time and pathetically typical of Edgar. But now, after the best part of a week filled setting up the demeaning articles Clemency had burdened her with, she had a different view. A day spent guzzling industrial-strength cocktails would have been a sight more fun than trying to locate famous people and their pets. Even Carinthia hadn’t descended to this level.
She and Edgar went to Gorblimey Trousers, the downstairs pie-and-mash joint run by Bill and his husband Ben. They were ex-Google executives who, in the spirit of Silicon Valley innovation, had supplemented the pie and mash with a large, slick bar. The place, as usual, was crammed with gangs of nerds from nearby Silicon Roundabout. They were knocking back tequila slammers and accidentally setting fire to their facial hair with flaming sambucas.
‘You look all-in, dearie!’ cried Bill, pumping his cocktail shaker. Both he and Ben were the type of Americans who imagined they had no American accent at all. They had taken this delusion a stage further by affecting the cockneyisms they felt fitted their new calling.
‘What’s with the long boat-race?’ Ben demanded. ‘You’re all down in the north and south.’
‘Those sad mince pies!’ Bill added. ‘Fed up of being all on our Jack Jones, are we, dearie?’
The two of them were obsessed with Laura’s romantic fortunes. They both considered Harry wildly dishy. ‘Lovely bottle and glass,’ they said to Laura; a reference to his bottom, she gathered. They had been dismayed to hear the relationship was over.
‘As a matter of fact, I’m not on my Jack Jones,’ Laura told them. Caspar was the one bright spot in her life at the moment.
‘Oooh! Who’s the lucky man?’ trilled Bill.
‘Not him, we hope,’ Ben whispered, nodding his modish-tousled head after Edgar. He had spotted someone he knew and was now shoving towards them through the forest of beards, laptops and cups of craft coffee, knocking everything over with his satchel as he went.
‘Clumsy fucker!’ shouted a man in a tweed cap.
‘Dyspraxic fucker, actually,’ Edgar replied with dignity.
The someone Edgar was going towards was Esme, the frowny blonde who lived in the top flat in Laura’s building. She was a life coach whose own life was currently in meltdown. Her boyfriend, a samphire-gatherer who ran a website called Dreadful Trade, had just dumped her after a row that the entire street had heard.
‘Come on, dearie!’ Bill slid a glass of champagne across the zinc counter-top towards her. ‘Tell us everything! Who is he and when can we meet him?’
Laura looked from Bill to Ben. She was dying to tell them she was going out with a hugely famous film star. They adored celebrity and would be thrilled for her. They would get on like a sambuca on fire with Caspar, who also liked to talk in rhyming slang. But could she trust them?
‘She’s cracking, I can tell!’ Bill nudged Ben. ‘Look at that smile.’
‘She so is! Come on, Laurypops. Tell your Uncle Ben!’
A sudden flood of reckless happiness possessed Laurypops. Oh what the hell. Why not?
‘Back in a sec!’ Bill trilled as he and Ben were now pulled away to take part in a selfie with some architects wearing white Nehru jackets to which CCCP badges were pinned. The Soviet nostalgia made Laura think of Kearn and the fact that Wyatt had today been given her marching orders by Clemency. ‘Wrong hair, wrong weight, wrong shoes, wrong attitude, wrong wrong,’ she had been heard saying to Karlie afterwards. ‘What editor in their right mind wants someone like that about the office?’ They had both then looked accusingly at Laura.
Sod them all, Laura thought now, taking a triumphant sip of her champagne. Why was she even worrying, when she had an international film star up her sleeve? No magazine managing director in his right mind would get rid of someone with such contacts. Or demote her, for that matter. Why on earth hadn’t she mentioned it today? Laura shook her head. Sometimes she just didn’t think.
‘Come on, smile!’ Bill and Ben were urging the architects. ‘Flash us your Hampsteads!’
Hampstead Heath, teeth, Laura recalled.
An edition of the London Evening Standard lay on the end of the bar She pulled it towards her.
The front page headlines were hard to take in. She was tired and a little tipsy, but even so, what she was reading could not be possible.
CASPAR BONDS WITH BOUCHE
007 is Latest Love of Sizzling Star
She closed her eyes and opened them again. But the words were still there. Laura seized her glass of champagne and downed it in one, then looked back at the newspaper. The letters had not melted away or rearranged themselves. They had not moved at all.
‘Apparently they met out jogging!’ Bill called from across the bar.
‘Jogging?’ Laura looked up, bewildered.
‘Savannah says in the article that their eyes met through the morning mists of some ancient Suffolk village!’
‘What?’ Heart hammering, Laura read the paragraphs again. Caspar had gone jogging. He had left a note to say so. And what had Lady Mandy yelled at Savannah? ‘You’ve been out jogging for simply hours.’
What had made no sense before was now hideously, obviously clear. Early one morning, just as the sun was rising, deep in the English countryside in one of the tree-shaded lanes of Great Hording, two Hollywood superstars had, quite literally, run into one another.
‘We collided round a corner,’ Caspar was quoted as saying. ‘I fell over. When I looked up there was Savannah in her tight Lycra. And her dogs in theirs. They all have specially designed sportswear.’
Laura’s teeth were chattering with the sheer shock of it all. Caspar was making a dreadful mistake. Savannah Bouche would only be using him.
Caspar, it had to be said, did not seem to see it that way. ‘Savannah completes me,’ he told the paper. ‘She’s the yin to my yang, the words to my music, the custard to my pudding. Actually, scrub that. She doesn’t eat a lot of pudding.’
To be fair to the journalist, they hadn’t been quite convinced. Wasn’t Caspar, they asked, apprehensive about the future of the relationship given the revolving door of Savannah’s love life?
‘The revolving door closes here,’ the actor answered, happily mixing his metaphors. His tone was rapturous, the writer noted.
Laura was appalled, almost more for Caspar than herself. He had let her down yet again, but seeing him fall into the undersized, shellacked Bouche claws was horrible. He had no idea what he was getting into.
‘We’ve committed to each other by both having tattoos done of the Pacific fault lines, in solidarity with earthquake victims,’ was Caspar’s final word.
Laura shoved the paper back down the bar. She doubted Caspar knew where the Pacific even was, despite having flown over it countless times. As for love, this was nothing of the sort. It was lust. Or, given Savannah was involved, maybe just an evil spell.
She gazed gloomily into her empty champagne glass. Laura had never been the self-indulgent type and her natural resilience was now asserting itself. She was disappointed, but her encounter with Caspar had only been a one-nig
ht stand. She had been right to take his avowals with a pinch of salt and she felt glad, in retrospect, that she had teased him so much. While she had hoped for more, what had happened was hardly a tragedy; she’d had a lot of fun. It would be quite some time before the Hollywood Karma Sutra faded from her memory.
*
Thursday afternoon. Laura had just returned from interviewing, under Clemency’s instructions, the owner of a Chelsea children’s boutique who had cornered the market in aspirational dress-up wear. Costumes available included consultant paediatrician, barrister and newspaper editor. ‘My customers see their children as the leaders of tomorrow,’ said the supermodel-like shop owner. It was, Laura thought, all very Great Hording.
She was looking forward fervently to the next opportunity to escape both Society and London and go to the countryside with Lulu. Even if, now, Great Hording looked unlikely to save her career. The ‘Elite Enclave’ article was obviously on hold, possibly permanently. There had been no point even mentioning it in features meetings that revolved around the UK’s top five aristocratic nudist beaches and the best stately home lakes for wild jet-skiing. Anything remotely critical of the moneyed classes would obviously be thrown out.
The boutique interview had been doubly boring because Laura had had to note the shop owner’s every remark down by hand. She had been unable to find her smartphone before leaving the office. She had looked everywhere and asked everyone, even Clemency, who had been especially unhelpful. ‘So that was actually a phone?’ she said sneeringly. ‘I thought it was borrowed from a museum for a shoot.’
Laura had ignored her. So what if her mobile was old? She didn’t have the money to update it whenever a new one came out. It still worked, didn’t it?
Her desk, as Laura now returned to it, looked depressingly tidy. Clemency had lost no time in reintroducing, in an even more extreme form, the draconian diktats about orderliness that Carinthia had previously imposed. It wasn’t just about desks and jackets draped over chairs now, it was about pens lined up at right angles to keyboards and drawers subject to random inspections. One junior assistant had had her belongings cast over the carpet tiles and Clemency walking through the mess, crunching a bottle of nail varnish beneath her high heels. The bright pink stain could still be seen in the centre of the office, flashing a warning to all.
Laura hated having to toe – as it were – the tidy line but there seemed no sense in deliberately courting danger. While it increasingly seemed pointless even trying to remain in the job, her pride and natural sense of justice resisted giving in and handing the advantage to Clemency. Why should she?
She started up her computer and began to rummage around her desk again for the missing phone. No sign. It was strange, especially given the instrument’s age and decrepitude. No one was likely to have stolen it, after all.
Instinct now made her glance over to Clemency’s secretary. It seemed to Laura there was something distinctly familiar about the phone Karlie was peering intently into.
‘That’s mine!’ Laura muttered, leaping to her feet and sprinting across the office. In doing so she narrowly avoided a collision with a rail of clothes being pushed by the new intern who had replaced Wyatt. Anais was a dozy Sloane with a scar on her forehead caused by the impact of her diamond necklace while headbanging. In the Society of Clemency Makepeace, this kind of thing got you a job, albeit an unpaid one.
But anyone who wore family jewels to the mosh pit probably didn’t need a salary, anyway.
‘Give me that!’ Laura snatched her phone out of Karlie’s elegant hand.
Karlie, as usual, was utterly unapologetic. ‘Excuse me,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I just found it in the bin and was trying to find out whose it was. Clemency wants you, by the way. She’s in her office.’ There was an emphasis on the ‘her’.
Laura turned and went reluctantly in to what, for a brief time, had been her own domain.
Wearing her trademark red dress and matching lipstick, her fiery hair adding to the general diabolical effect, Clemency sat behind the glass desk on her own individual take on the editor’s chair. This was a specially commissioned David Linley throne made of rare English fruitwoods and featuring built-in shoe storage. ‘This celebrity hen thing,’ she said, waving a printout at Laura.
Laura’s heart sank. Given her superior research skills, finding a famous person who kept poultry hadn’t been all that difficult. But writing something interesting about a celebrity chicken-fan had been impossible. Just what was there to say?
‘It’s all wrong!’ Clemency stormed, driving her point home by tearing the printout in half. It seemed to Laura rather extreme. She had done her best, after all.
‘Could you explain why?’ she asked, keeping her tone steadily neutral so Clemency could not accuse her of insolence and complain to Christopher about her.
‘You were supposed to write as the chicken, not about it.’
‘As the chicken? You mean – impersonate it?’ Was impersonate even the word, given that it was a bird?
‘That’s right. So get out there and start again.’
Laura took a deep breath and returned to her preternaturally tidy desk. Having humiliatingly lost her position as Society’s editor she was now hanging on by her fingertips by assuming the identity of a celebrity chicken. Would she even make it to the end of the week?
Chapter Twenty
It was a stunningly beautiful morning and Kiki was jogging down a valley at whose end the sea rose like a glowing blue wall. The air vibrated with the heat to come and the sun was bright though the hour was early. Sticky light like sugar syrup slicked over the leaves of the trees. The birds were singing so loudly she could hardly hear herself think and the colours of the hedgerow flowers were dazzling. Kiki had no idea what any of them were, but she knew what they could be worth. She had seen some in arrangements by Wonky. Despite all this loveliness, Kiki’s heart was sore. And not just because her new leopardskin Lycra sports top was a size too small. All was not well. Trouble had come to Paradise. Distrust was in the air. Suspicion stalked the land.
Something big and green now roared round the corner and almost knocked her over. Pressed into the hedge, gasping, Kiki glared at the driver of the Ocado van. The passenger-side window slid down and the driver leant over towards her.
‘I can haz house of Sir Gay Gobblemoff?’
‘Fuck off,’ yelled Kiki.
‘I apologise. Sir Gay Fuckoff, then?’
‘Don’t you have satnav?’ Kiki snapped before remembering that Great Hording was a satnav-free zone. Another thing Sir Philip Peaseblossom had arranged in the interests of village privacy. For what that was worth now.
The van roared off, leaving Kiki alone with her troubles. Great Hording, she knew, was not the happy place it had once been. It looked as lovely as ever and was going about its business much as usual. But things had changed since the dread night of the pub quiz. Villager had turned against villager, each suspecting the other of leaking the image of the cheating politician to the press. Jolyon Jackson himself had disappeared to London while the fuss died down. Whether he would be forced to resign remained uncertain, but, as befitted a defence minister, he was fighting an intense rearguard action. Images of him striding cheerily round children’s wards had appeared daily ever since. There was probably not a sick infant in his entire constituency who had not been kissed or given a playful punch on the shoulder, injuries notwithstanding.
She could learn from his tactics, Kiki thought. Distraction was the way to repair a reputation. The Golden Goose’s role in the Great Pub Quiz disaster might be forgotten if she could make it the centre of some other successful diversion. The question was – what?
Perhaps a party for the village, to bring everyone together and smooth things out after the recent disturbing events?
Kiki saw that she was jogging past Addings, weekend home of the Threadneedles, and remembered that she had seen Wyatt in Fore Street only yesterday. With her blue hair, black lipstick and Gothic clot
hes she had cut a very different – and much plumper – figure to her social peers, blonde girls with endless legs and hardly started shorts. Rumour had it that Wyatt was back for the summer, having been sacked from Society magazine. Well, Kiki thought, lips tightening, if she thought she was inviting Kearn to Great Hording to see her, she had another think coming. Suspected – thanks to Kiki – of photographing the cheating Jolyon Jackson, the troublemaking runt was persona non grata.
The crazy collection of red and white striped towers, steep fish-scale-tiled roofs and pennants, spires and gargoyles that was Riffs was coming into view and Kiki was reminded of another Great Hording outcast: Roger Slutt. She had heard him on the radio a day or two before; his remarks about Great Hording had been far from complimentary, although he hadn’t mentioned the village by name, thank God.
Riffs was now on the market, guitar-shaped pool and all. But the rumour currently doing the village rounds – apart from the ones about Jolyon – was that someone had bought it and would be arriving this weekend. Who this someone was, not even the massed powers of Great Hording could establish; Roger Slutt’s legal representatives refused to release the name.
Flitting across Kiki’s mind came the uncomfortable memory of her conversation with Lulu. But nothing seemed to have come of that, thank God. She had certainly not viewed it; someone would have seen her, if so.
George Clooney had been mentioned. Now he and Amal had twins they were reportedly looking for somewhere more private than Berkshire. The urbane actor would be the perfect choice, Kiki thought, to fill the last gap in the village’s range of top people from every sphere. She wondered if the new tenant would nab a part in the Great Hording pantomime. Lady Mandy would be announcing the lucky Cinderella line-up any minute. Her cast list for the annual entertainment was subject to change right up until the last minute, depending on who was in or out of favour. It had the status of a state secret, except much more important, as Sir Philip Peaseblossom was the first to admit. No one was party to what it contained until the mistress of ceremonies was ready to release it.
