Simply Divine (5 page)

Josh read. He clapped his hands and rocked with mirth. He laughed so much at the Guifstream stories that his monocle fell out. 'It's hilarious,' he gasped, dabbing his streaming eyes with the handkerchief from his top pocket. It's fantastic. A star, my dear, is born.'

Damn,
thought Jane, uncrossing her fingers.

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Chapter 3

Whatever it was Tally desperately wanted to discuss, she wasn't going to break the habit of a lifetime and arrive on time to do so. Sitting waiting in the corner of the local wine bar on Saturday night, Jane had got through one glass of house white and half a bowl of peanuts already. Not that she was too annoyed. No one could hold a candle to Champagne in the irritation stakes. And anyway, it was impossible to be angry with Tally. She was much too sweet and awkward. With her funny nose, large eyes, long legs and towering height, Tally had reminded Jane irresistibly of a startled ostrich the first time they clapped eyes on each other at Cambridge.

'Do you remember,' Jane often said long after she and Tally had become friends, 'that first English tutorial on Memory when we were asked what our earliest recollections were and you said yours was of the line of servants' bells ringing in the breakfast room at home. I thought you were the most ghastly snob!'

'I suppose I should have said they were ringing because the window sash had broken again and there was a howling gale blowing through the room.' Tally sighed. 'And that I was in there because my bedroom ceiling had collapsed and 1 was sleeping on the breakfast room floor.'

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Tally, Jane soon realised, was not your typical upper-class girl, despite having had almost a textbook grand upbringing. From what Jane could gather, her mother had wanted her to ride but Tally was almost as scared of horses as she had been of the terrifyingly capable blondes strapping on tack at the Pony Club. Lady Julia had managed to force her daughter to be a debutante, with the result that Tally was now on intimate terms with the inside of the best lavatories in London. 'I was a hopeless deb,' she admitted. 'The only coming out I did was from the loo after everyone else had gone. I once hid in the ones at Claridge's for so long I heard the attendant tell the manager she was going to send for the plumber.'

Tally did, however, live in a stately home, Mullions, and was the descendant of at least a hundred earls. The earls, however, had done her no favours as far as the house was concerned. 'Trust' was the Venery family motto. 'I
so
wish it had been Trust Fund,' Tally sighed on more than one occasion. For the heads of successive generations had, it seemed, trusted a little too much in a series of bad investments and their own skill at the card table. A sequence of earls had squandered the family resources until there was nothing left for the upkeep of a hen coop, let alone a mansion.

'It's embarrassing really, having such hopeless ancestors,' Tally would say. 'These wasn't a Venery in sight at Waterloo or Trafalgar, for instance. But once you look at the great financial disasters, we're there with bells on. The South Sea Bubble, the Wall Street Crash, even Lloyds; you name it, we're there right in the middle of it, losing spectacularly, hand over fist.'

Tally's own father, who had died in a car crash when she was small, had tried to reverse the situation as best he

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could while saddled with a wife as extravagant as Lady Julia. But without much success. The result was that Mullions had been more or less a hard hat area for as long as Jane had known it. Nonetheless, Tally had, after Cambridge, decided to dedicate herself to restoring her family home to its former glory, continuing the work of her father.

Highly romantic though all this sounded, in practice it seemed to consist of Tally rushing round the ancient heap doing running repairs to stop it falling down altogether, and using any time left over to apply for grants that never seemed to materialise. As time had gone on, Tally seemed to have gently abandoned hope of getting the place back on its feet. She had confessed to Jane frequently that getting it on its knees would be a miracle. 'Although I suppose it possesses,' she sighed, what
House and Garden
would call a unique untouched quality.'

Jane scooped up another handful of nuts and looked forward to what was always a plentiful supply of stories about Tally's insufferably grand mother. Lady Julia was as determined as her daughter that Mullions should go on — as long as someone else did all the work. She was markedly less willing than Tally to struggle into waders to drag weeds out of the oxbow lake or crawl along the Jacobean lead gutters pulling leaves out to stop blockages. Even more useless was Tally's brother, Piers. He seemed to prefer spending all his time — including holidays — at Eton. She must remember, Jane thought, to tell Tally about the crusty in the paper who had looked so like her brother. Tally would be amused.

Tally did not look amused, Jane thought, as the tall, grave-faced figure of her friend finally appeared in the wine bar. But she certainly looked amusing. What on

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earth was she wearing? Tally had never exactly been a snappy dresser but even by her standards this was eccentric. As Tally threaded her way between the tables, Jane saw she had on what looked like an ancient, enormous and patched tweed jacket worn over an extremely short and glittery A-line dress.

'You look amazing,' Jane said, truthfully, leaping up to kiss Tally's cold, soft, highly-coloured cheek. 'Is that vintage?' she asked, nodding at the dress which, at close range, looked extraordinarily well-cut and expensive, if a little old-fashioned.

'Mummy's cast-offs, if that's what you mean,' Tally answered, slotting herself in under the table and stuffing what was left of the nuts into her mouth. All my clothes have fallen to bits now, so I've started on hers. I must say they're very well made. The stitches don't give an inch. When I was scraping the moss out of the drains yesterday—'

'You surely didn't scrape them out wearing
that?
gasped Jane. 'It looks like Saint Laurent.'

'Yes, it is, actually,' said Tally vaguely. 'But no, I wear her old Chanel for outdoor work. Much warmer. This glittery stuff's a bit scratchy.'

'How is Mullions?' asked Jane. This usually was the cue for Tally to explode into rhapsodic enthusiasm about duck decoys and uncovering eighteenth-century graffiti during the restoration of the follies. This time, however, Tally's face fell, her lips trembled and, to Jane's dismay, her big, clear eyes filled up with tears. The end of her nose, always a slight Gainsborough pink against the translucent whiteness of the rest of her face, deepened to Schiaparelli. This, clearly, was what Tally wanted to talk about.

'Whatever's happened?' Jane placed her warm hand over

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Tally's bony cold one. Tally swallowed, pulled it away and tucked her thin light-brown hair behind her ears before lifting her reddened eyes to Jane.

'Mummy,' Tally whispered. 'She's gone mad.'

Jane frowned slightly. Was that all? But surely Julia had always had a screw loose? She had more than once, Jane remembered, sent Tally back to the new term at Cambridge with instructions to 'drive carefully back to Oxford, dear'. After her father had died, the horses in the carriage block had been the nearest Tally seemed to have to a stable family background.

'How do you mean, mad, exactly?' asked Jane carefully.

'Don't ask how it happened. I've no idea. But she says she spent a night sitting naked on top of a mountain in the Arizona desert and it changed her life,' choked Tally. Julia had, she explained to an amazed Jane, recently flown off on holiday in all her usual first-class, chignonned splendour and had returned a barefoot New Age hippy with her hair around her knees. 'And now she wants to go round the world and enlarge her horizons with Big Horn,' Tally finished.

'What's that?' said Jane. 'A New Age travel company?'

'Her new boyfriend.' Tally closed her eyes as if to block out the horror of it all. 'He's a Red Indian she met in Arizona. Only now he's living at Mullions. And he never says anything. Ever.'

'What?
said Jane. It couldn't be true. Lady Julia Venery, a New Age hippy? A woman whose idea of crystal therapy was looking at the window display of Tiffany's. And a Red Indian boyfriend? Julia, whose only previous experience of reservations was the kind one made at The Ritz. T can't believe it,' she said. 'What does Mrs Ormondroyd make of it?' The powerfully-built, raisin-faced housekeeper at

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Mullions was in a permanent state of outrage as it was.

'Big Horn's causing havoc,' sniffed Tally. 'Mrs Ormondroyd put his prayer flag in to wash with a red jumper and it came out streaked like a sunset. He was furious, in a silent sort of way. And now he's trying to build something called a sweat lodge in the rose garden. Mr Peters is not amused.'

The sour old butler/gardener had never been amused the entire time Jane had known him. Neither, come to that, had Mrs Ormondroyd. Unsure what to say or do in the face of such disaster, Jane ordered two more glasses of wine, and another bowl of peanuts.

'Can't Piers do anything?' she asked.

Tally sighed so heavily the top layer of peanuts rolled on to the table. 'Gone AWOL,' she groaned. 'No one at Eton has seen him for ages. Apparently he's—'

'Joined a gang of environmental protesters?' Jane leapt in as the photograph of the crusty clicked into place in her head. However unbelievable it seemed, it was only half as unbelievable as the Julia story.

'How on earth do you know that?' gasped Tally, shocked out of her misery to look quite her old self.

Jane explained about spotting his picture in the paper. 'Nick was furious,' she added.

A wintry smile crossed Tally's strained features. 'That makes me feel better at least,' she said ruefully. 'Piers was last heard of a hundred feet beneath a runway at Stansted, glorying in the name of Muddy Fox. He seems to be rather notorious. Been arrested at least twice, apparently,' she sighed. 'Still, he's not the first of the family to do that. My great-great-great-grandfather was thrown into jail three times for running up gambling debts. By my great-great-great-grandmother, apparently.'

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They lapsed into silence. It struck Jane that the conversation was getting surreal. Two glasses of wine on an empty stomach plus Tally's mad family history was a potent brew - even without the week she'd had.

'Never mind,' she said eventually. 'Look on the bright side. If Piers goes on making headlines like this he'll get his own chat show. Then you'll really be able to put Mullions back to rights.'

But instead of cheering up, Tally's face fell even further. She took a deep swig from her glass and coughed violently.

'Now I have to tell you the worst thing of all,' she stuttered, after Jane had banged her on the back and her eyes had stopped streaming. Jane looked at her apprehensively. Short of Mrs Ormondroyd and Mr Peters opening a Tantric sex workshop, it was difficult to imagine what that might be. 'Mummy wants to sell Mullions.' Tally's voice was as tight and dry as her face.

'Nof
Jane gasped. This really was a disaster. Nick at his most scathing and Champagne D'Vyne at her worst paled by comparison. '
Why?

'To pay for her travels. It's her right, she inherited the house in Daddy's will. And she can do what she likes with it - there's no title to hand down anymore since the Ninth Earl, my grandfather, lost it on a hen race in 1920.' Tally paused and swallowed. 'Mummy says the place is an old wreck and we'd be best advised to get shot of it while it is still worth something. She s-s-s-says,' Tally gasped, her self-control deserting her, 'that she suddenly realised she'd spent her entire life [gulp] perpetuating [sniff] an outmoded feudal system.' Tally clapped her bony hand to her mouth as the tears spilled down her long, thin cheeks.

'Well, she took a long time to work that out,' said Jane. 'Did she never get any clues from the fact she lived in a

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stately home with servants' bells and a stable block?'

Tally said nothing. Both red hands were covering her face now. With a twinge, Jane saw the signet ring with the Venery family crest shining dull and gold on Tally's little finger.

'But you've had that place for four hundred years, for God's sake,' Jane raged, feeling suddenly furious. 'You cant let go of it now. Can't you stop her?'