Simply Divine (23 page)

Even candidates who scraped through Victoria's restaurant tests were far from home and dry. They still risked one of the editor s celebrated spot checks in which she had a member of staff call the would-be employee's parents' home (the number, with address, was demanded on the
Fabulous
application form) to make sure that the person answering had a suitably patrician tone of voice. By these combined methods any social chameleons of humble origin were prevented from getting their plebeian feet under
Fabulous
desks. Some, it was said, were filtered out right at the beginning of the process simply by Victoria's casting an eye over the parental address. If it was a number rather than a name, the letters were filed straight in the bin, a process which had always struck Jane as somewhat unreliable, ruling out as it did any members of the Prime Minister's family, for starters.

Yes, it was certainly strange that none of the usual hurdles had been placed before her, thought Jane now, crossing the dirty platform to her Northern Line

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connection at Stockwell. Especially as she was not at all sure she could have jumped over any of them. The word 'toilet' had certainly passed her lips from time to time, and she had yet to see anyone, herself included, eat a Caesar salad without resorting to a blade of some sort. And, although thinner than she used to be, she was certainly not racehorse skinny.

There was, however, one highly plausible explanation for Victorias keenness to get her on board, one quite detached from all the flattery about her superior editing skills. Josh. All being fair in love and circulation wars, it was entirely within the rules of the game for Victoria and her rival to poach as many members of each others staff as possible. Bagging as key a person as the
Gorgeous
features editor was certainly a feather in the
Fabulous
editor's cap, and would be even if Jane's parents had lived at 13 Railway Cuttings and she ate her salad in the lounge with a saw held like a Biro.

The contract duly arrived next day. As Jane had expected, Josh affected utter insouciance when she handed in her notice. His casual acceptance, however, lost some of its conviction after Valentine spotted him half an hour later smoking furiously in one of the stairwells.

Yet Jane's bombshell was short-lived in its effects. Midway through the afternoon it was superseded by a bigger bang altogether—Valentine's news that Champagne was leaving Dai Rhys the footballer. He had overheard it being discussed at a neighbouring table at San Lorenzo that lunchdme.

'Surely not,' said Jane. 'She's just been all over
Hello!.
All over him.'

Valentine raised an eyebrow. 'Well, she's given him the

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red card now. Brought on a substitute.'

'But who?' asked Jane, faintly surprised at Valentine's apparently sound grasp of the argot of the terraces. 'Who could possibly be left?'

'Remember when she did the National Lottery draw a few weeks ago?' asked Valentine.

Jane shuddered. The memory of Champagne in a pink sequinned dress struggling before an audience of millions over a task as simple as selecting a set of numbered ping pong balls was still fresh. 'Mmm?' she said, wondering where this was leading.

'That young unemployed scaffolder from Sheffield won it. Wayne Mucklethwaite, wasn't he called? Biggest Lottery winner ever?'

'Ah, yes,' said Jane, light dawning. 'I think I see what you're getting at.'

At least, she thought, she would no longer be around to chronicle the inevitable demise of that relationship as well. Which reminded her. Champagne had not yet been told she was leaving. No point putting off the blissful moment, Jane decided, picking up the receiver.

She almost sang her news when Champagne answered. In reply there was a sharp gasp at the other end, followed by another, and another. 'Uh, uh, uh,' went Champagne. Jane's stomach contracted with concern. Was Champagne having a seizure with the shock of it? Or had she caught her
in flagrante
again? Jane listened carefully. Limited though her experience was, it didn't sound orgasmic to her.

'Champagne? Are you all right?' she asked, feeling vaguely guilty. Was Champagne, after all, capable of human feeling? Was she finally realising how much she depended on Jane?

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'Uh, uh, uh/ went the dreadful, rasping gasps. 'Yah, I'm, uh, uh, fine. On the, uh, uh, Stairmaster, actually. I'm in the, uh, uh, gym. Leaving, are you? Oh well, good luck.'

And that, it seemed, was that. No 'Thank you for all you've done'. It would, Jane thought, have been unbelievable, had it not been so eminently believable.

'Um, well, good luck to you too. I, urn, hope it works out with Wayne,' Jane said.

'Oh, yah. Absolute sweetie,' said Champagne smugly.
'So
generous. Just bought me a necklace with the most
humungous
diamond in it. I suppose I do rather deserve it though. After all, I
did
pick his balls on
National Lottery Live!

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Tally stared worriedly upwards as the embroidered canopy above her and Saul rocked alarmingly backwards and forwards. She was torn between praying that the Elizabethan bed wouldn't collapse, which it threatened to, and that Saul wouldn't stop. He was, she had discovered to her amazement, capable of making love to her for a whole hour, which was exactly fifty-seven minutes longer than anyone else had ever managed.

And that, Saul realised, about to collapse himself from exhaustion, had clearly been quite some time ago. Even Champagne hadn't required so much servicing. He should have known. The quiet ones were always the worst.

His spine felt twisted beyond repair from the lumpy old mattress of the Elizabethan bed. 'But Elizabeth the First slept in it,' Tally had told him indignantly when he had suggested it was less than -comfortable. No wonder she was called the Virgin Queen, then, it was on the tip of Saul's tongue to say.

'You're amazing,' he panted to Tally. 'I want to marry you. Now.' He was speaking no less than the truth.

A loud, sudden knock on the heavy oak bedroom door pre-empted Tally's reply Saul's face dropped in shock. There had been no one in the house except Tally since he

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first came here, well over a week ago now.

Drained of all colour, every hair on his body erect, Saul clung to Tally in terror. As he watched, rigid with fright, the door creaked open and light from a guttering flame shone into the room, sending the shaking shadow of a bent and fearsome-looking creature wobbling terrifyingly across the walls. Saul gibbered hysterically as a huge and brutish face, its brilliant eyes shining and its lines and creases made more hideous still by the dramatic candlelight, shuddered slowly into view.

'What's
that?'
he shrieked.

'It's Mrs Ormondroyd,' said Tally calmly. 'The housekeeper. She must have come back from her sister's.'

Saul looked in horror at the fearsome expression plus nylon overall and ghastly lumpy legs now issuing through the door. He fumbled for his cigarettes with a shaking hand.

'Dinner's in an hour, Miss Natalia. Oh.' Mrs Ormondroyd s gimlet eye alighted on Tally, sitting up in bed with the sheets pulled over her breasts, and Saul, who wasn't making much effort to conceal anything. 'Didn't realise you had comp'ny. Very sorry, I'm sure.' She couldn't, Saul thought, have sounded more disgusted if she had discovered Tally in bed with her father, her brother and a couple of Alsatians.

Dinner was, for Saul at least, a revelation. He poked uncertainly at the rapidly-cooling surface of what looked like a chop. He tried to cut it, only to find that it was so well done you practically wanted to give it a round of applause. Saul frowned. He hated overcooked meat. He much preferred it bleeding. Badly injured, at the very least.

'What's the matter?' asked Tally, discerning his disgruntled face through the gloaming of the freezing dining room.

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'It's cold,' Saul said. He had to shout it twice before she heard him at the other end of the refectory table. Saul realised in a flash why so much of the aristocracy had loud voices. Conversation in places like this would otherwise have been impossible.

Tally sighed. It was too much effort to explain that food always arrived cold in the dining room. The distance between it and the kitchen, not to mention the icy blasts encountered in the various corridors en route, meant that only the hardiest of dishes arrived at the table in a vaguely eatable condition. Over the centuries, the Venery cooks had refined their menus by a process of trial and error (which was certainly how those eating them saw them) down to the few items that could cope best with the adverse conditions. Those dishes were but two: the Brown Windsor that had already featured on tonight's menu, and which Saul had instantly christened Primordial Soup. The other was the cutlets he was staring at now.

Saul gazed down at the meat, an island surrounded by a sea of thick, greasy slop. The plate hardly set the ensemble off to best effect, being made of what looked like tarnished tin. Saul pushed it away, noticing as he did so some marks and scratches on its rim. He screwed up his eyes to examine them in the gloom. 'Tally,' he asked, 'are these plates solid silver?'

'Yes,' Tally called back. 'Mrs Ormondroyd's smashed all the Sevres now, and this is all we have left. Even she can't manage to destroy metal, although I daresay she's made a few dents.'

Saul raised his eyebrows and took a sip of wine. It really was remarkably good. He groped towards the bottle and read the label. 'But this is Margaux nineteen forty-five!' he shouted in amazement.

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'Oh dear, I am sorry,' yelled Tally. 'It's just that I can't afford to send Mrs Ormondroyd to the Threshers in Lower Bulge any more. I told her we should economise and see if there was anything left in the cellar. There are quite a few bottles down there, she says, so I suppose she can use it to cook with if it's too horrible to drink. It might help her cutlets.'

The only thing that would put Mrs Ormondroyd's cudets out of their misery, thought Saul, was a controlled explosion. 'No, no, no need to do that,' he said hurriedly, thinking of the excitement an influx of fifty-year-old Bordeaux would make on the London wine markets. And the profit he could make out of it. Til get rid of it for you,' he assured Tally. 'No problem.' She beamed at him gratefully.

Later, shivering by a sickly fire in the Blue Drawing Room over the mugs of thin, tepid Nescafe grudgingly produced by Mrs Ormondroyd, Saul returned once again to the attack. 'We could do such wonderful things here together once we were married,' he urged, trying not to stammer with the cold and clasping both her chill hands in his. Tally hesitated. It wasn't that she had any particular objections to rushing headlong into matrimony with someone she had hardly met. Her ancestors, after all, had done it for generations; the Fourth Earl, for example, had married a Somerset heiress to whom he had been introduced only once before, in the cradle. But there
was
something she wanted to know first.

'What happened with you and Champagne D'Vyne?' Tally asked, screwing her courage to the sticking place. 'Weren't you quite keen on her?' Tally was desperate to be reassured that Saul was not still in love with the bird-brained philistine who had been so rude about Mullions, still less the glamorous, blonde, and beautiful party-girl-

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about-town whom, if Jane was to be believed, every man in the universe lusted after.

Saul took another deep drag on his cigarette. It was true that on paper his liaison with Champagne had been an ambitious entrepreneur's dream come true. Yet he had soon discovered that the cost of running her far outstripped any business benefits she might bring. Incidents such as being made to book an entire suite at the Savoy because she wanted a room service club sandwich hadn't helped. Nor had the time she demanded a Jacuzzi full of champagne because of all the extra bubbles.

Saul shuddered as the memories crowded in. Not to put too fine a point on it, going out with Champagne D'Vyne was one of the worst experiences of his life. She had been the most unstimulating woman he had ever met, which was odd when you considered she wanted seeing to at least three times a night. Then there had been her dreadful, loud, spoilt, braying voice. The people in the flat above had banged on the ceiling merely when he played back her answerphone messages.

'Urn, it just wasn't to be,' he muttered eventually to Tally, not sure he wanted to relive the trauma by putting the details into words. 'We weren't quite, um, suited,' he added. 'She was a bloody nightmare,' he said finally.

'Was she
really
that bad?' sighed Tally, blissfully, thinking that Jane, who had frequently uttered those very same words, had more in common with Saul than she realised. 'I don't know her at all, you see.'

'Obviously you never read her column,' said Saul bitterly, 'otherwise you'd know everything about her including the colour of her knickers. When she bothered to wear them, that is.'

'No, I never read any of them,' confessed Tally,

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wondering what it would be like to wear no knickers. Nothing short of dangerous in the winter at Mullions, she imagined. Mrs Ormondroyd, she knew, always wore at least four pairs in January. 'I don't buy magazines,' she added. She didn't admit that the real reason Mullions no longer subscribed to any publications was the cost. And the fact that she had hated to see the Lower Bulge newsagents tiny, spindly son struggle the mile up the winding Mullions drive, his fragile old bicycle visibly sagging beneath the weight of all the papers and magazines Julia had once taken. 'So I'm afraid I haven't the faintest idea of what's going on anywhere.'

'In that case,' said Saul, dropping a kiss on her head, 'I think you and I are going to get on just fine.'

Suddenly, the telephone shrilled outside in the gloom of the passage.

'I think it might be for me,' Saul said, leaping up to answer it. 'I've got a couple of deals on the boil at the moment.'

'Who was it?' asked Tally, when he returned a few minutes later. 'One of your deals?'

Saul shook his head. 'Wrong number.'

In Clapham, Jane put the phone down in astonishment. Saul Dewsbury was
still
there. And what did he mean Tally couldn't come to the phone because she was having a shower? The only showers at Mullions were those that appeared unexpectedly through the ceilings during thunderstorms. Still, if Tally was having a fling with Dewsbury, on her own head be it. She had made her four-poster and now she could lie on it, Jane decided. She had more than enough to think about. Such as how to lose a stone overnight before she began her new job at
Fabulous
tomorrow.

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Chapter 15

Beautiful, lissom girls with long blonde hair crowded the foyer of the
Fabulous
offices. Uncomfortably stuffed into her first-day-smart clothes, Jane's heart sank as she realised that everyone else was at least two sizes smaller than she was. And they all looked exactly the same, which was to say, different from her. Not only did they have identical clothes - tiny white T-shirts revealing brown navels, skinny black trousers and high-heeled boots — they had symmetrical features too. Waiting for the lifts, Jane decided, was like standing in the middle of an exceptionally glamorous multiple birth, twenty-two years on.

Everyone had a tan, a delicious little nose, cheekbones higher than the Andes, glossy hair and pert little breasts. They all wore minimal make-up and that type of dark nail polish that made their fingers look as if they had been trapped in the door. Talk about a clone zone, Jane thought. The people who thought Dolly the sheep was such a breakthrough should have come here first, where it had all obviously been going on for years.

There must be, Jane supposed as she entered the lift, an appearance-improving machine somewhere in the building, probably up by the managing director's office. She imagined it to be called the Glamourtron, a tall silver

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cylinder with sliding doors. It was here that Personnel summoned one on arrival, and into here one stepped, grey-thighed, mottled of face, split of end, stained of teeth, bloodshot of eye and bulging of waistline. One would stay inside the cylinder for ten minutes (possibly longer in extreme cases; Personnel to decide). There would be a mild humming and then the doors would spring back. Out one would step, tanned, blonde and glossy-haired, with a delicious nose, pert chest, and cheekbones as high as the Andes. Dressed in tiny white T-shirt, skinny black trousers and trapped-in-door nails. Jane felt excitement rise within her. Would Personnel call her today?

The lift finally arrived at the
Fabulous
floor and out Jane stepped, her nostrils filled with the same delicious perfume absolutely everyone seemed to be wearing, and entered the
Fabulous
offices. As at
Gorgeous,
about a third of the space was devoted to the large glass box denoting editor territory. Victorias photographs, Jane could see through the windows, were blown up even bigger than Josh's. Victoria with Princess Diana, with Cherie Blair, with Karl Lagerfeld, with John Galliano, with Donatella Versace.

Jane wondered when Victoria herself would put in an appearance. Or, for that matter, when anybody would. The office was empty. Jane busied herself in the familiar task of flicking through the papers, in which, as usual, Champagne and her lottery winner received radioactive publicity.

Today's shots showed Champagne and Wayne Mucklethwaite, the richest 24-year-old man in Britain, almost invisible under designer carriers in Bond Street. Talk about label dame
sans merci,
thought Jane, making out bags from Chanel and La Perla that could hardly have

196

been intended for Wayne. Relief that her days of dealing with Champagne were at an end flooded through her. The thought of never hearing those arrogant, barking tones again was nothing less than utter bliss.

'Hello,' said someone. A gangly girl with big eyes, a short, lacy skirt and long blonde hair had appeared in the office. Tm Tish. Victoria's secretary. You must be Jane.' Jane nodded, feeling suddenly self-conscious as the rest of the staff finally started to trickle in. Til introduce you to everyone, shall I?' offered Tish helpfully.