Simply Divine (15 page)

'Christ, what an old
dump,'
Champagne honked, lighting a cigarette. Her brilliant grass-green gaze swept pitilessly over the crumbling, wet bricks and soaked window frames which looked at their most irredeemably rotten in the rain. 'Could you tell whoever is in charge here,' she ordered in loud and patronising tones, 'that Miss Champagne D'Vyne has come to look round the house.'

'Actually, that's me,' muttered Tally, embarrassed. 'I live here. I'm Natalia Venery. How do you do.' It was only after she had stuck her hand out that she realised her palms still carried a fair proportion of the Chinese Bedroom with them. Champagne recoiled.

'I didn't realise you were coming alone,' Tally said, feeling rather disappointed. She realised she had been secretly looking forward to meeting the famously sexy rock star Jane had told her about. There hadn't been such a high-profile musician at Mullions since Thomas Tallis had dropped by in 1580.

'Yes, well, can't be helped,' snapped Champagne. 'Conal

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can't come this morning, and as I'm in charge of spending his money anyway, I thought I might as well give the place the once-over myself.'

'I suppose he must be very busy,' Tally said brightly.

Champagne frowned. I'm pretty bloody busy
myself,
actually,' she said indignantly. 'I've got ten parties* three premieres, a dress fitting and a skin peel to cram in before the end of the week. Conal's only got the Brit Awards and a court appearance.'

'A court appearance?' asked Tally, before she could stop herself. 'Oh dear.'

'Yah,' drawled Champagne, her heels scraping on the mossy stones as she tottered in Tally's wake round the side of the house. 'It's very boring. Some ghastly drummer the Action Liposomes had long before they became famous has crawled out of the woodwork. He's saying that
he
wrote "Hot To Trot" and has the rights to all the profits from it. So he's suing Conal. Can you bloody
believe
it?'

'How dreadful,' said Tally, grateful to Jane for her crash course in popular culture, thanks to which she knew 'Hot To Trot' was the Action Liposomes' mega-selling hit and not a racehorse, as she would otherwise have assumed.

'Oh, it's all a fuss about nothing, of course,' Champagne said dismissively, pausing theatrically by the back door. 'Conal says the guy's just trying it on. Jealousy, you see. People can't cope with other people's success. It's just one of those ghastly things that happens to you when you're famous. Believe me, I
know.
People have no
idea
how hard you have to work to be successful. The
sacrifices
you have to make. Oh no, they just try and put you down. People want to put
me
down all the time.'

'Really?' said Tally mildly.

'Yah,' howled Champagne, whipping herself into a

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frenzy of self-pity. 1 mean, people think I have the most
amazingly
glamorous life. But I don't. I get parking tickets on the Bentley just like everybody else.
I've
had to wait for delayed Concordes as well.'

There was a silence. Tally shifted from Wellington to Wellington, not quite knowing what to say. 'Would you like to see round?' she ventured nervously.

Champagne nodded and took another drag of her cigarette. 'Bit remote out here, isn't it?' she barked, suddenly, as if the thought had only just occurred to her. Under her thick eyeliner, her eyes snapped suspiciously around. She cocked her head in the direction of the few desultorily twittering birds that could be heard. 'Very quiet,' she boomed. 'Where's the nearest Joseph?'

Tally looked blank. 'Um, in the village church, I should imagine,' she said, puzzled. Champagne had not struck her as the pious type.

'What?
⁵
honked Champagne, her face contorted with contemptuous amazement. 'I mean Prada, Gucci, Joseph. Where do you go for retail therapy?' she shouted, as if to a moron. 'Shopping!'

'Oh, um, there's the village for milk and stamps and things,' Tally stuttered, panicked. 'Lower Bulge, it's called.'

Champagne threw her head back and laughed. 'Lower Bulge! Definitely my kind of town. Is there an Upper Bulge as well?'

Tally nodded, trying not to look too offended. 'Yes, there is, as a matter of fact.'

Champagne laughed so much she almost lost her balance on the mossy, cracked path. To hide her blushes and confusion, Tally started to force open the door of the kitchen entrance, which had swelled and stuck again with the damp. It took a few minutes.

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'What time do you have to get up to milk the pheasants round here?' Champagne demanded as she strode ahead of Tally into the kitchen only to collide with Mrs Ormondroyd carrying a big bowl of evil-looking slop towards the back door.

'Ugghh!' shrieked Champagne.

The housekeeper looked thunderous.

'This is Mrs Ormondroyd,' stammered Tally. 'She's the housekeeper here. Mrs Ormondroyd, this is Miss D'Vyne. She's come to look at the house.'

'Charmed, I'm sure,' muttered Mrs Ormondroyd, sounding anything but. She took in Champagne's scanty clothing with a single, withering stare. Like a threatened peacock, Champagne immediately pushed her cleavage out still further and looked contemptuously at the housekeeper's nylon overall. The standoff ended only when Mrs Ormondroyd, who was still holding the slop bowl, moved off with massive dignity through the back door, where she could be heard emptying it down the drain. Tally let out a silent sigh of relief. The slop wasn't supper then, after all. 'Christ,' said Champagne. 'What a dragon.'

'Her heart's in the right place,' said Tally loyally.

'Shame nothing else is,' remarked Champagne. 'She looks like someone's driven over her face.'

Tally prayed Mrs Ormondroyd hadn't overheard. She would, she knew, be lucky if tonight's Brown Windsor was even tepid. Or brown, come to that. She led Champagne down the kitchen passage into the Marble Hall.

'It's freezing,'
bawled Champagne 'Haven't you got any central heating?'

'Just one old and rather unreliable boiler, I'm afraid,' faltered Tally.

'We just met. Back there. Haw haw haw,' honked

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Champagne. There was a distant crash from the direction of the kitchen. Bang go the chops as well, thought Tally, She realised, guiltily, that the prospect wasn't too disappointing. 'We have some wonderful statues,' Tally said quickly, gesturing at the marble figures surrounding them. 'They're considered very fine.'

Much to her amazement, Champagne gazed at them. 'Talk about a six-pack,' she exclaimed, running her hand over the muscular stomach of Mars.

'It's a copy from Praxiteles, actually,' corrected Tally.

'You trying to be funny?' Champagne snapped.

Tally swallowed. She decided to try and interest Champagne in the portraits. 'These are all Venerys,' she said, waving an arm in the direction of the Ancestors.

Champagne looked at them with interest. 'Filthy bastards,' she pronounced delightedly, after peering at them for a few seconds. 'On the other hand, it's pretty obvious from their weird red noses.'

'I'm sorry?' said Tally, taken aback. The Ancestors' eyes were visibly bulging. More blue veins than the painters had ever intended stood out from the canvases.

'You just said they were all venereal,' honked Champagne. There was a visible frisson of fury from the pictures on the wall.

'No, no, not at all,' said Tally, horrified. 'Venery is the family name.'

Champagne raked the portraits over again with her brutally frank gaze. 'Oh,' she said. 'Still, who on earth would want to have sex with that lot anyway?'

'Would you like to see some other paintings?' Tally said brightly, aware of the Ancestors' painted pupils
boring furiously into her buck. 'We
nave a very
important
Dutch School in the Green Drawing
Room.'

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'How
boring,'
Champagne boomed. 'Who on earth wants to look at a painting of a
Dutch school?

To say that Champagne held the treasures of Mullions in low esteem was an understatement. Fifteen minutes later, Tally was close to despair. When shown Queen Victoria's corset, which lay in a display case in the Green Drawing Room, Champagne had expressed disgust that the Queen-Empress wore such filthy old underwear. She had been interested in the Library until she realised it contained no videos. Tally's offer to show her the Grinling Gibbons elicited enthusiasm until she proudly brought Champagne before the carved Blue Room fireplace and was asked where the monkeys were. Tally's explanation that the tapestries were by Gobelins met with blank disbelief. 'But how could they reach?' Champagne stormed.

Nor had she been impressed by Tally's self-deprecating explanation that the nearest Mullions got to an indoor pool was the parts that the fire buckets dotted about to catch the rainwater could not reach. What Champagne really wanted, Tally realised, was not a country house but a country house
hotel.
And, probably, the more overheated, overstuffed, overdecorated and overpriced the better.

There seemed scarcely any point in showing Champagne the bedrooms, but she insisted. She also insisted on grinding out her fifth cigarette in the ancient oak of the staircase. And it was as a near-desperate Tally led the way up to the first floor that disaster struck. As Champagne staggered by, her high heels sinking into the soft old oak, one of the biggest portraits of the Ancestors suddenly broke free of the wall, swung drunkenly on one nail and fell. The heavy frame containing the Third Earl crashed just inches from Champagne's feet. Another

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nanosecond and her skull would have been smashed. Oh, for another nanosecond, Tally thought. After all, Champagne's skull wouldn't have made much of a mess. It wasn't as if there were brains in it.

It took almost a full minute for Champagne to realise she was still alive. Her green eyes widened and her vast red mouth opened in a roar that brought down an avalanche of plaster and almost the rest of the portraits as well. 'Get me out of this hideous dump,' she screamed at Tally. 'Now! It's
disgusting.
I
hate
it. I don't want to live in some old
shithole
with walls covered in venereal disease and
goblins\
We're going to St John's Wood like everybody else. If it's good enough for Liam and Patsy, it's good enough for Conal and me.'

When the white limo finally disappeared from sight, a hugely relieved Tally examined the fallen picture. Miraculously, the heavy Jacobean frame had hardly a scratch, and the stairs had not sustained too much damage either. Tally sank to her knees on the damp marble floor and gazed around her. The Ancestors, their equilibrium apparently restored, gazed at her with approval. She could have sworn that there were twinkles in some of their painted eyes.

She pulled a face at them and sighed. Selling Mullions was going to be even more difficult than she had first thought. Particularly now the house seemed to have taken matters into its own hands.

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Chapter 1O

'Oh dear,' said Josh, devouring the front page of the
Sun.
'He's been knocked off the number one spot and is plunging down the charts.'

It was a week later. Jane looked up from the papers in which she, too, was reading the sorry tale of how Conal O'Shaughnessy had lost his case against his former drummer. 'Hot To Trot' had after all been ruled to be the creation of one Darren Diggle from Wigan, to whom the humiliated heart-throb had been forced to pay a multimillion-pound compensation package.

'And you know what that means,' crowed Josh. 'Goodbye, Champagne. Farewell, my bubbly.' He was clearly thrilled. All stories about Champagne were good news for
Gorgeous,
as, Champagne being their columnist, the magazine always got a mention.

'That's nice,' said Valentine. 'Dumping him just before they were about to get married. What about for richer, for poorer? The poor sod needs her support.'

'Champagne would certainly have had the "for poorer" bit written out of the marriage service,' said Jane. 'And I don't think support is her strong point. You can tell that from looking at her underwear.'

When
 
Champagne rang, Josh was
 
proved right.

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She had had absolutely no scruples in dropping O'Shaughnessy* like a shot. 'Rather a pity, really,' she honked to Jane. 'I never liked his music all that much, and quite frankly he was a bit common. But he really had the most
enormous
willy.'