Eva ducked her head and sipped her coffee, which was going cold now but still provided an energy boost. The shoot had started very early, just before dawn, to capture the morning mists, the atmosphere of delicate, febrile romance that Milly and Tarquin incarnated: the whole crew had stayed at a hotel nearby in order to be up for the 5 a.m. call. Three set-ups later, it was eleven-thirty now, the rose-gold sunrise now faded, and the autumn sun was beaming gloriously in the pale blue sky. Milly and Tarquin had already run through a cornfield hand in hand, picked fruit together, balancing precariously on ladders propped against a giant pear tree, and now they would lie in each other’s arms on a picnic blanket. The photo spread and interview were provisionally titled First Love, Last Love.
‘Very teen magazine,’ Milly had said derisively when the Telegraph rang her PR to propose it. ‘But as long as we can use Milly and Me jewellery, and the clothes are proper designer, no highstreet crap or someone’s rubbishy cheap line for H&M . . .’
The Matthew Williamson gown that the stylist was now reverently removing from its zipped sheath, draping it over her arm as if she were selling a bolt of hand-embroidered silk, was definitely ‘proper designer’. The stylist proffered it to Eva first, as per Milly’s strict instructions that Eva’s approval was crucial for the overall aesthetic of the photo shoot. Eva, a designer herself, instinctively knew exactly how Milly should be styled and presented to achieve the perfect branding of Milly’s image that would represent both her look and the jewellery line.
‘It’s gorge,’ Milly breathed. Eva had shown her photos of all the dresses selected for the shoot, a long list of floaty stunners interspersed with a couple of more fitted lace ones for variety, and this was definitely the pièce de résistance. It was made from ivory silk-chiffon, sleeveless, with an asymmetric neckline, ruffles clustered heavily on one shoulder and tumbling down the fitted bodice diagonally in a soft fall to the narrow waist. The skirt, a glorious riot of cascading tiers embellished with pearlescent sequins and delicate beads, was as full as the bodice was slim, but not ballgown-wide, which would have dwarfed Milly’s small frame.
‘It’s actually from his bridal collection,’ the stylist said enthusiastically. ‘But it’s like so much more sophisticated than like one of those awful strapless wedding dresses, you know? I mean, if this were mine I would like totally consider hand-dyeing it afterwards and wearing it to openings. It’s really an investment piece, which for a wedding dress is utterly like profound and really speaks to the whole symbolism of weddings.’
Eva had learnt over the few years she’d been in business to tune out the way in which most stylists talked, and she let this one’s stream of consciousness roll over her. She had come to realize that everyone in fashion now considered themselves artists in their own right. Fashion exhibitions were very prestigious now: the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, plus the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, regularly assembled hugely successful displays, from the costumes of David Bowie to the couture wardrobe of Daphne Guinness to the Punk: Chaos to Couture show at the Met. All had drawn huge amounts of press coverage and sell-out crowds.
So stylists feel they’ve got to talk like they’re perpetually interviewing for the job of junior curator at a museum costume department, Eva reflected. And, ironically, there’s a journalist here from the magazine who’s going to write the copy, but she’s not listening to a word of this drivel any more than I am.
‘Oh Tark, you’re not going to think it’s bad luck, are you, me wearing a wedding dress?’ Milly cooed for the benefit of the journalist, who was scribbling away making notes of the dialogue between the young lovers.
‘We make our own luck,’ Tarquin replied poetically, pushing back his own tangle of fair curls. His blue eyes were soft as he gazed at his fiancée. ‘No, wait – you are my luck, Milly.’
‘Stop!’ the hairstylist muttered sarcastically to Eva. ‘It’s just too beautiful. My withered old heart will burst.’
‘He really means it,’ Eva said to him under her breath. ‘Honestly, it’s not for the journo.’
‘He needs a good rogering if you ask me,’ the hairstylist hissed back. ‘Tie him up and suck him dry. See what lyrics he comes up with after that. Maybe they’ll even make sense for once.’
Eva went bright red, dropping her head forward so that her thick hair fell over her face, hiding her embarrassment at the vivid image this conjured up. She found herself imagining kneeling down in front of Tarquin, hearing him groan as she licked him reverently, feeling his hands twine lovingly in her hair, maybe pushing it away from her face so that he could watch her as she performed what she would consider an act of love and worship on him. It was by no means the first time she had had erotic fantasies about Tarquin, but now was a particularly mortifying time for it to happen. She knew it was a terrible idea for her to let her imagination run rampant about the fiancé of her best friend – not just terrible, the worst idea in the world! – and she was desperately hoping that her love for Tarquin would burn itself out naturally with time.
But when someone talks about sucking him dry, how can I help it? It makes me think about all sorts of things I know I shouldn’t!
Even through her heavy curtain of hair, she was miserably aware of the hairstylist’s sly, knowing gaze on her. People bustled around the small interior, seating Milly at the lighted make-up table built into the specially converted RV, the make-up artist swivelling Milly on the chair, squatting on a step stool to have her hand steady enough to pat Milly’s Cupid’s-bow lips with a tiny brush dabbed with Chanel gloss. The hairstylist, who had been curled up in a padded recess by the window, unfolded himself and stood up, leaning over Eva, taking the coffee cup from her. He reached into his travel case, took out a silver hipflask and, uncapping it, slugged a little of its contents into the cup, returning it to her.
‘There you go, dear,’ he said. ‘Get that down you, it’ll help.’
One step brought him to Milly’s side, picking up her hair and twisting it to the top of her head, his lips pursed in consideration. Eva downed the coffee in one go recklessly. It had been rum in the flask, and it did the trick, jolting her effectively back into the present moment. She gasped, swallowed, sat up straighter, threw back her hair and rejoined the buzz of activity in the RV.
They were on a tight schedule, and the team of freelancers were at the top of their game: Milly was already stepping into the Matthew Williamson dress, which was puddled on a special throw cloth on the floor of the vehicle to avoid any marking. The stylist and her assistant were easing the silk-chiffon up Milly’s narrow torso, her bony shoulders, cooing softly as they did so; they pulled up the concealed zip at the low waist, slipped the covered buttons at the side of her waist into their little silk loops. The back was open, two overlapping panels at the shoulders exposing her shoulder blades.
Close up, the blades were too sharp, the tiny vertebrae too visibly knobbled. But from a distance, the harsh edges blurred by sunlight, Milly looked like a perfect princess bride. The hairstylist piled her curls to one side, high and over one ear, echoing the asymmetric neckline, taking the look from simply beautiful to high-fashion elegance: Milly’s lips had been painted in a daring fuchsia, glossed with gold, which drew the focus to them, again turning the ridiculously pretty dress into something more cutting-edge.
Eva picked up her suede jewellery roll and unfastened it, spreading it out on her lap, no doubt at all in her mind about the earrings the dress needed: she and the stylist had already agreed upon them. They were a new interpretation of the classic chandelier style, slender silver chains dangling from a horizontal hoop, each chain bearing a sculpted leaf made of bluebell and powder-blue quartzite, the leaves tinkling like tiny fountains against each other. The bluebell leaves were the colour of Milly’s eyes, the powder-blue quartzite a perfect match for Tarquin’s otherworldly irises, and the earrings were shown off perfectly by the high-piled hairstyle which left Milly’s white neck bare.
&
nbsp; As Milly stepped down from the RV, the make-up artist handing her down the steps, the stylist and her assistant positioned on either side, ready to take swathes of the dress in their hands so that it would never touch the dirt of the farm track, Tarquin’s indrawn breath of awe was clearly audible. The hairstylist glanced at Eva sympathetically and reached for his hip flask again now that this part of his job was perfectly done. Tarquin, wearing a linen shirt, a white and blue silk Paul Smith waistcoat in a chintz print, and a tailored pair of white Armani trousers, came forward to take the hand that his fiancée was extending to him. Milly’s dazzling smile said that she was perfectly aware that she had never looked quite so beautiful.
‘I can’t breathe,’ Tarquin said, staring at her in wonder. ‘You literally take my breath away.’
‘So how are you managing to talk?’ the hairstylist muttered to himself, filling the cap of his flask and tossing its contents back with a practised dash of his wrist.
‘Milly, you were telling me before about the muffins you like to bake for Tarquin?’ the journalist asked as they walked slowly and carefully over to the cashmere rug that had been laid (with two more sturdy rugs underneath it for protection) beneath the spreading branches of an apple tree.
Milly was being closely trailed by the stylist and assistant as if they were bridesmaids carrying her train, but Tarquin was ahead, his invisible mascara being touched up by the make-up artist, so Milly could reply confidently: ‘Yes, I love to bake. I’ve definitely got a housewife side to me whenever I get the chance. I actually got a great idea from Devon and Cesare’s Baking Battle recently – she made a batch of muffin mix and then baked it in a cake tin for a bit longer than the muffin recipe with lots of icing sugar on top. It was delicious – Tarquin loved it! I served it with whipped cream and raspberries.’
Word for word, this was what Eva had done at the weekend, baked a muffin cake for a brunch that Milly and Tarquin had hosted. Trailing behind them, Eva heard Milly’s words with incredulity. She had heard Milly parrot her own deeply felt speeches on the difficulties of ethical mining, or sustainable resources and healthy water supplies in the Third World, many times before in Guardian or Independent interviews, and had had no problem with that; Eva was quite aware that Milly’s principles were not yet as fundamentally rooted as her own, and if Milly needed to use Eva’s words in the process of working her way into the heart of the issues, that was fine.
But going so far as to say that she baked something I made? Which, actually, was from a Delia Smith recipe – but Delia isn’t trendy enough for Milly. She put Devon and Cesare in there instead because they’re so much sexier.
Eva must have cleared her throat, made a noise of some sort, because Milly glanced back, the earrings dangling from her lobes chiming like fairy bells at the movement, and said quickly to the journalist: ‘Oh, and you will get in a bit of bumf about the earrings, won’t you? They’re made from recycled silver, melted down. We’re trying to get a Fairtrade classification for the process – there really isn’t any way to source silver ethically yet, though you can get some from a mine in Bolivia without using cyanide or mercury. Right now though, we prefer to use recycled from a closed-loop process.’
Eva realized she was nodding seriously. Milly was hitting all the important points, explaining the difficulties of morally sourcing metal and the solutions the Responsible Jewellery Council were evolving. Milly then moved onto quartzite, fingering one earring for emphasis, and by the time they reached the picnic area and Milly was lifting one thin white leg from the Hunter welly and waiting while a pale leather Reed Krakoff strappy sandal was fitted to her foot, Eva had filed the muffin cake anecdote away to be discussed with Milly later.
Though she did sidle up to the journalist as Milly was lowered by stages to the cashmere rug and say: ‘Actually, it was a Delia Smith recipe Milly used for that muffin cake. Not a Devon one.’
‘Oh, really?’ the journalist said blankly, looking down at her notepad but not bothering to make a note of the correction.
Feeling relieved at having set the record straight, Eva turned to see Milly, who was by now stretched out on the rug, her head in Tarquin’s lap, his long legs extended in front of him. Milly was being positioned to lie in a curve wrapping around him, her arms outspread, her legs together, the myriad tiers of the skirt opened like petals by the stylist and the assistant for maximum effect. From an aerial view, it looked as if she had been dropped there from the sky, an angel fallen slowly and gracefully to earth, caught by the arms of her lover: the photographer was climbing a stepladder held firmly still by two of his sidekicks as a third reached up to hand him a Polaroid for the first shots. With Milly and Tarquin’s golden hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and reddened lips – Tarquin’s had been very lightly stained by the make-up artist to echo Milly’s – they were absolutely ethereal, a perfectly matched pair.
‘Feed her some blackberries,’ the photographer instructed. ‘Let’s get a really nice-looking one.’
‘Not over the dress! Not over the dress!’ the stylist yelped like a terrified Chihuahua. ‘The stain will never come out!’
The assistant picked out a rich, purplish-black berry, fat with juice, and placed a newspaper underneath it as she leaned cautiously over the fringed edge of the blanket, handing it to Tarquin; docilely, he took it, holding it over Milly’s parted, glossy lips. The deep rich colour against the fuchsia lipstick and the pastels of the rest of the scene immediately drew the focus.
‘Oh wow,’ the make-up artist breathed in appreciation. She spoke for the entire group, who were all sighing at the exquisite tableau in front of them.
‘It’s like an eighteenth-century painting,’ Eva observed. ‘A Watteau or a Boucher.’
‘Yes! Perfect, yes!’
The Telegraph journalist scribbled away furiously: Eva’s comment would end up in the opening paragraph of the adulatory interview that would run alongside the photo shoot. Milly tilted her head to cast Eva an approving smile: she didn’t have the faintest idea who Watteau or Boucher were, that they were famous for beautiful pastoral paintings, decorative allegories of nymphs and their swains picnicking in the countryside, but she knew that, yet again, Eva had said the perfect thing, had steered Milly’s image into exactly the place it needed to be.
Tarquin, however, knew precisely what Eva meant, and his sky-blue eyes rose for a moment to Eva’s face, his reddened lips parting in a sweet smile.
‘Gosh, what a compliment,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Eva! I was thinking this is sort of like a fête galante, isn’t it? Or is it more like a fête champêtre?’
Eva considered this, the thought process on her expressive face.
‘Galante, I’d say,’ she concluded. ‘You’re both dressed so beautifully. Champêtre is more country-style.’
‘Um – could you just clarify the distinction,’ the journalist whispered to Eva: this was pretty high-level intellectual stuff, even for a Telegraph writer.
‘They both have outdoor settings. A fête galante really translates as “gallant party” and describes eighteenth-century aristocrats at leisure in the beautiful grounds of their chateaux. Champêtre is pastoral, more in the countryside rather than in a landscaped garden,’ Eva explained.
Milly, never happy when she wasn’t the centre of attention, wriggled a little and said seductively to her fiancé in a baby voice: ‘Sweetie, feed me – feed me the yummy blackbewwy.’
‘Oops! Sorry, darling.’
Tarquin returned his gaze to his beloved and the photographer promptly started snapping away. Milly altered her position every few seconds, little moves of the head, twists of her body, offering a whole range of different poses and angles just as professional models did to maximize the effects of the set-up. When she raised one slender white hand and hovered it just over Tarquin’s cheek, as if caressing him adoringly – you never actually touched in photographs, to avoid denting the skin or smudging any make-up – the photographer was beside himself.
‘Oh come on, c
over shot, cover shot!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is bloody perfect . . .’
And it was. A month later, that very image was the cover of the Saturday magazine, Milly reclining beautifully in Tarquin’s lap, the skirts of her dress spreading over the pale blue rug, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy as she seemed to stroke her lover’s face. Ironically, the picture editor Photoshopped in a Gala apple instead of the blackberry, deciding that the proportions worked better, and that it echoed the ripe apples on the branches of the tree just visible in the shot; Tarquin, who had written a song about blackberries and beloveds in the meantime, was rather cast down for a while, but Milly consoled him in the way outlined by the hairstylist, which definitely helped to cheer him up.
Some extra set-ups had been sketched out, and there were more dresses to be worn, but after the runaway success of the picnic rug photographs, the consensus was that they were done; the early start was beginning to tell on all of them, the sun was now fully overhead and casting too much light for the hazy effect they had wanted to capture, and everyone packed up. Milly kept her full hair and make-up, however. She had a meeting with Maitland Parks, the celebrated film director, later on that day, and wanted to walk in looking as stunning as possible. She also made a spirited attempt to ‘borrow’ the Dolce and Gabbana lace dress, but the stylist was far too experienced with the manoeuvrings of young actresses to allow any such thing; she knew perfectly well that Milly would claim a few days later that she’d accidentally burnt a hole in the dress, or spilt Coke on it, and it wasn’t worth returning to the magazine.
‘If she wants to borrow something,’ she said in an aside to her assistant, ‘she can call Dolce’s PRs directly, get them to bike something over, and then they can have the fun of chasing her to get it back in one piece.’
‘What if she actually hangs onto it?’ the assistant asked.
Bad Brides Page 15