Marrying Up (27 page)

Alexa stared. ‘You’re going to gamble, you mean? What’s that going to do for us apart from lose us money?’

Barney looked affronted. ‘Well, admittedly, it’s been a while since I took up the cards in anger, but I daresay the old magic’s
still there.’

‘We can’t afford to gamble!’ Alexa snarled.

Barney sighed. ‘On the contrary, my dear Alexa, we can’t afford not to. But it’s merely a front, I assure you. I look as if
I am playing cards but I’m actually sizing up the joint. Spotting who is around, getting a feel for the possibilities. You’re
doing the same across there.’ He pointed to a grand white building hung with international flags that filled the entire opposite
side of the square.

‘Anyone who’s anyone visiting Monaco goes to the Hotel des Bains at some point or other, just as they do the Casino,’ Barney
explained. ‘Pick a seat in the bar with a good view, and when you see someone promising, move in.’

It was a hot day at PapPixRiviera, but only in the temperature sense. Otherwise it was as dead as the flies in the bottom
of the picture agency’s grimy metal-framed windows.

Sweating gently in the soupy air, which the fan seemed only to stir, not cool, Jason Snort, chief of the bureau, sat with
his meaty brown legs up on his desk. His baggy shorts, combat waistcoat and big boots reflected his view of his work as a
type of warfare. With one hand he fiddled idly with the shark tooth strung round his neck. It had been a gift from an admiring
tabloid newspaper editor. ‘From one shark to another,’ the accompanying note had read. Jason tugged at it wistfully. Those
had been the days.

Would they ever come back? The Cannes film festival was long over, the summer silly season yet to begin. But would it begin?
It had been widely reported that, thanks to the credit crunch, many of the celebrities whose yachts, thongs, snogging and
general high jinks made for big paparazzi business during the summer would not be coming this year. The hairdressers of Saint-Tropez
were worried. Very worried. The pool boys of Villefranche were in despair. The yacht-polishers of Antibes were being laid
off left, right and centre, which made a big change from being laid left, right and centre, Jason mused sardonically. While
the tennis coaches of Mougins were at their wits’ end – not that that was far.

The slump had even touched the previously untouchably glamorous Hotel du Point on the Cap. Jason had heard they were so desperate
you could pay for your drinks with book tokens.

He passed a hand through his trademark zinging auburn quiff. Beneath his tanned and frowning brow, his eyes roamed over his
desk. Pinned up behind his computer were printouts of his finest hours, of which there had been many. There he was, grinning
between Brad and Angelina. Sharing a beer with Piers Morgan. Mugging with Sharon Osbourne, with Paris Hilton, with Katie Price,
with Hugh Grant. Were those days really over? His eye caught his collection of long lenses, lined up on the shelf above his
computer ready for him to grab and run at the first hint of a story. But would he ever use any of them in anger again?

Meditatively, Jason swigged a warmish bottle of 33 lager and looked out of the window into the broiling Nice street. Nothing
much going on out there. Nothing much going on anywhere. His sidekick, Des, his partner in the bureau, was even out taking
pictures at a meeting of the Ventimiglia Narrow-Gauge Railway Enthusiasts’ Society. Could business get much worse?

Things weren’t what they had been. It had been years, for instance, since any of the Monaco royals had put a foot wrong, and
back in the day they’d been an industry in themselves.

The Sedona royals should, strictly speaking, be filling the gap. Giving him something to snap; wasn’t that what royal families
were for? But they kept their noses disgustingly clean; Queen Astrid and King Engelbert were as square as Rubik’s Cubes. Prince
Giacomo had had potential – there had been the odd good story – but he was obviously practically kettled these days.

And no new crown princess in sight. The royal press secretary Hippolyte had dragged him in endlessly recently to record various
horse-faced no-hopers traipsing in and out of the chateau. Only the Babe from Bergen had been more or less as advertised,
except that she’d run away from a Prince Maxim covered from head to toe in cow shit. Now that
would
have been a picture. But since
then, nothing and no one. When were those bloody royals going to come clean and admit that Maxim was gay?

The large black phone on his desk shrilled. Languidly Jason picked it up. Probably the Ladies’ Circle of Menton calling to
ask whether he might be interested in covering their annual general meeting. The awful thing was, given the state of the business,
he probably was.

‘Yeah?’ Jason snarled, as if he had mere seconds to spare before rushing off, lens in hand, to snap some megastar.

‘It’s Hippolyte.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ve got a tip-off for you.’

‘Yeah?’ This, disbelievingly.

‘Yeah . . . I mean yes,’ Hippolyte corrected himself.

‘Hope it’s better than the last one,’ Jason grumped. ‘The Babe from Bergen?’

‘Much better,’ Hippolyte promised fervently. ‘Between you and me, Jason, hopes are high that this might be the next Queen
of Sedona.’

‘Yeah?’ Jason snapped disbelievingly on his gum. ‘Bloke, is he?’

‘No,’ Hippolyte said nervously. What was that supposed to mean? Did Jason know something about him? he wondered. He had long
suspected that Madame Whiplash tipped the press off about some of her clients. ‘Transvestite, then?’ the photographer mocked.

Hippolyte felt nauseous. Transsexuals made up a good proportion of the Madame Whiplash crowd. He strove to keep his head.

‘A girl,’ gasped the private secretary. ‘A lady, in fact. Lady Florence Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe.’

Queuing at the baggage carousel at Nice airport, Polly’s glance fell on two women. A languid, blonde and very beautiful girl,
whose eyes did not lift from her iPhone, was being dragged across the marble concourse by a determined-looking woman Her mother,
Polly guessed. A porter dragging an enormous quantity of Vuitton luggage hurried after them. The mother was glamorous, Polly
thought, but in a tough sort of way; there was an aggressive chop to her shining auburn hair and a forbiddingly straight line
to her magenta-lipsticked mouth. She wore new jeans, zebra-print ballerina flats, and a white shirt turned up at the collar.

Polly found herself in the queue behind them at passport control. The man in the booth held the mother’s passport up to his
eyes. ‘Lady Annabel . . . Tre . . . Tre . . .’

‘Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe!’ snapped the woman, as if it were as straightforward as Smith.

Polly stiffened at the name. Where had she heard it before? She racked her brain, digging and delving, and eventually, triumphantly,
emerged with the information. The girl in the newspaper story she had read that last evening with Max! She had been Lady someone
of that name, was this her? Who had almost married the heir to the throne or something? She observed the shuffling blonde
with interest as, in her skin-tight jeans and sequinned flip-flops, she followed Lady Annabel in her high
clacking heels through Nothing to Declare. Polly, grasping her battered holdall, followed behind the Vuitton mountain.

In the arrivals hall she watched Lady Annabel head for a driver with a cap sporting the legendary Hotel des Bains. Outside,
as Polly waited for the bus in the intense, bright heat, a gleaming black limousine glided by. Lady Annabel was in the back,
bolt upright and apparently barking instructions to the driver; Lady Florence, meanwhile, was still slumped over her gadget,
texting away. She didn’t seem to have raised her eyes once since her arrival. Did she even know where she was? Polly wondered.

Her own hotel, the Splendido, failed to live up to the pictures on its website. Much less the description. ‘This roomy, light
hotel full of old-fashioned charm, offers a traditional Nice welcome in an atmospheric street . . .’ Polly recalled as she
stood before the scruffy, peeling building with the broken sign.

There was certainly an atmosphere, if not a particularly encouraging one. The Splendido was in the darkest and most piratical
of the many dark and piratical back streets in which Nice Old Town seemed to specialise. As for old-fashioned charm, it had
it in spades if you liked shabby, old-fashioned foyers that smelt mustily of food. The traditional Nice welcome, meanwhile,
seemed to involve an elderly hotelkeeper who had a grudge against the entire world; Polly lugged her bag herself up a seemingly
endless series of cracked and winding wooden stairs to the tiny, smelly top-floor room.

Here there was a narrow, lumpy bed; the view, when one leant out of the high window with the perilously wobbly sill that threatened
to detach itself at any moment, was of loaded washing lines protruding from the windows of the building opposite.

And yet Polly couldn’t have minded less about any of it. What did it matter, when tomorrow she would get to Sedona and see
Max? She felt almost ridiculously happy. She unpacked her few things and skipped out of the hotel to explore the
city, the concierge staring after her in glum amazement.

At the end of the gloomy alleyway containing the Splendido, Polly turned left, under a large archway, and found herself at
the edge of a bustling market. Long lines of stalls were heaped with exotica: olives, honey, marzipan fruits, heaps of spices
on earthenware, unfamiliar fish and cheese of all sizes, endless variations on species of vegetables: big potatoes, small
potatoes, great flapping red peppers. The salad heaped on the wooden stalls still looked to have the dew on it.

Polly sat down at a bar opposite the flower market and ordered a Kir. Sipping it, she gazed happily at the masses of roses,
bucket upon bucket of blooms in shades from cream through orange and yellow to a deep, passionate, velvety red.

Afterwards, she continued her exploration. The area around the port, an eighteenth-century rectangle of crumbling arcades,
shuttered windows and peeling burgundy walls, seemed to her wildly romantic. There was about it a salty whiff of older, more
adventurous and colourful times.

She liked, too, the tin chairs painted an azure blue that stood about the promenade. A group arranged loosely in a four, with
one of them pushed untidily back, suggested some earnest discussion, heads close together, laughter, and then disagreement
blazing like a sudden flame, one of the group stamping off, offended.

There were other stories too: the two chairs whose seats faced each other, as if some carefree soul had sat in one with legs
stretched out on the other, strumming a guitar. The two chairs close together, tilted towards each other, as if lovers had
watched the sunset over the water. Polly sighed, and was gripped by longing. Tomorrow, though. She only had to wait until
tomorrow.

She sat down in one of the chairs. The sea before her swelled thickly, a great spread cape of glittering blue. Seagulls wheeled
and called above in the bright air; the sunshine beat down between the palm trees.

Her gaze followed the points of land stretching out into the sea, one after the other. One of those must be below Sedona.
No, it wasn’t long now.

At either side of the throne room entrance stood a herald in red tights, a red feathered bonnet and a short, stiff tabard
embroidered with the Sedona royal coat of arms. Their backs were rigid, their eyes were rigid, the long silver instruments
from which the royal standard descended were rigid, ready to play the welcoming fanfare as the new princess-to-be arrived.

In her ermine-trimmed robes of state, Queen Astrid eyed a large fly that was buzzing irritatingly about her crown. It was
hot, even hotter than the day the Babe from Bergen had visited. Hopefully Lady Florence was not the fainting sort. Stonker
had assured her she was as tough as old boots. Or had that been the mother?

Stonker, who always spoke in terms of horse flesh, had proclaimed Lady Florence to be a deuced fine filly. And as Max obviously
preferred animals to women, a filly would probably suit him.

Although of course it wouldn’t really. Astrid knotted her fingers and tried to hold back the sickening guilt that every day
seemed to press more heavily upon her. The situation was becoming unbearable. At least the confrontations at lunch and dinner
were over. These days Max rarely came down for meals. He shut himself in his room and ate from trays. Nor did he seek her
out in private any longer. He had, she suspected, completely given up on her.

Engelbert sat beside her, positively radiating heat. As a nod to their English guest, the green satin sash of the Ancient
Order of Lancashire Clogmakers was strapped over his generous stomach. Astrid herself sported the blue and white striped riband
of the Fellowship of Cheese Rollers. She had no idea what cheese rolling actually was. Perhaps Lady Florence, when she arrived,
which should be any moment now, might explain.

Engelbert was shifting and squinting at his watch. ‘I thought English people were punctual,’ he grumbled.

He stared, irritated, at his sons. Giacomo was practically supine in his chair, fiddling with a lock of unsuitably long blond
hair. At least Max, whom Engelbert had practically frogmarched to the throne room, was here this time. He slumped against
his gilt-framed damask seat, the image of misery. Engelbert, who hated his sons to look sulky, leant over.

‘Cheer up, Max,’ he ordered.

As her elder son raised his head and swept both her and her husband with a single resentful glance, misery almost overwhelmed
Astrid.

Hippolyte, proud and upright beside the throne room entrance, was savouring a feeling of blissful relief. Rich, pretty, titled;
Lady Florence ticked every box. At last he would be able to relax. And in a manner that did not involve large middle-aged
men dressed in tight leather.

All she had to do was arrive. Hippolyte breathed out carefully in his restricting morning suit and ran a finger round the
sweaty inside of his collar. How much longer would she be? He had warned her somewhat forceful mother Lady Annabel that being
fashionably late was frowned on in Sedona, where the convention was to be royally early. It seemed unlikely they had been
held up anywhere; Hippolyte himself had organised the limousine. Lady Annabel had wanted to come by helicopter, and had been
nonplussed to be told that there was nowhere in Sedona to land one.