Beautiful People

by Wendy Holden

  How could anyone love a mutt like that, Christian wondered. Sugar was bad-tempered and vicious. Belle spoilt it rotten, and it wasn't grateful in the least. She lavished it with love, which it did not return one iota.

  Belle swung her thin, brown legs off the bed and scooped the dog against her naked breasts. "Sugar!" Christian watched scornfully as she lavished the dog's bony skull with kisses. "This morning," Belle crooned, "I'm taking you to the dog beautician for a manicure."

  He drew himself upright against the pillows, pulling up his powerful legs and letting them fall open with just a swatch of oyster sheet covering his manhood. This was less for reasons of modesty than fear that sight of his organ—of which Christian was justifiably proud— might rouse the dog to some act of jealous and irreversible savagery.

  Belle licked her lips. Her eyes on the satin heaping between his legs, she put the dog carefully on the floor. But as Sugar growled warningly, Belle paused in her slithering progress across the sheets. "We'd better not, baby," she said to Christian in tones of breathy apology. "It might upset Sugar."

  "Oh, for Chrissakes," snarled Christian, impatient with the whole idea of the dog's importance, as well as the idea he wanted to have sex with this scrawny tramp yet again. He'd performed for the last time last night, knowing that this morning he was going to dump her.

  Belle had outlived her usefulness, and it was time he moved on to someone who could get him through the final bit of the journey: right up to the top of the Hollywood ladder.

  Christian's eye, sufficiently deep set to hide how small and sly it actually was, caught the row of acting awards, gold masks, wreaths, globes, and lumps of engraved glass that stood proudly on the two mirror-panelled nightstands at either side of Belle's bed. He felt a twinge of envy. He'd have all that too, one day. It was all in front of him, Christian thought, his blue gaze sweeping appreciatively down the front of his massive, oiled, and waxed pectorals to the thick stem of his manhood. Which, from now on, would be servicing someone else. Someone more useful.

  Because it was all over with Belle now. She had let her career hit the skids with a turkey film. And so he had to move on for the good of his own career. How was that his fault? She had no one but herself to blame. He was only doing what anyone in his position would do at the moment.

  "We can have some time together later," she said, as she wound an arm around his neck. Christian felt her silicon breasts squash unpleasantly against him. He remained rigid, however. "It's over, baby," he muttered into the brittle, musky-smelling, white-blonde hair massed against his lips. "We're over."

  He felt her convulse with shock. "Over?" Belle gasped disbelievingly.

  "I've gotta move on," he explained.

  "Move on? Move on from me? But why?"

  "Look, baby. It's business, yeah? Only business. No offence. Nothing personal."

  Belle's eyes were bigger than he had ever seen them. He had not imagined, given the constraints of her facial surgery, that so much stretching was even possible. "Business?" she managed to force out. "Nothing…personal?"

  "This is Hollywood," Christian said. "So you were huge last year. But a year's a long time in showbiz. You're losing it, and now you've lost me." He put his handsome, heavy head, with its great ridges of cheekbone, on one side and gave an apologetic grin. "It's just the way things are, baby."

  "Don't leave me," Belle wept, stretching out her thin arms to him in abject and heartfelt appeal. "I thought…I thought…you loved me."

  "Loved you?" His amazement was genuine. Didn't she know? No one loved anyone in Hollywood. They just had sex with them; that was all.

  Chapter Six

  The memory of the beautiful boy haunted Sam. With his amazing pale-green eyes, touched with yellow, not to mention all his other attributes, he remained with her as magnificent salmon do with the fishermen whose hooks they have slipped. The fact that she had managed to snap him on her mobile phone only increased the sense of him being the one who got away.

  Sam pored over the image. She had spent most of the week since it was taken at Wild's sister agency in New York and was haunted in her absence by the fear that rival scouts might have snapped the boy up in the meantime.

  At the first opportunity, which happened to be the Friday following that when Orlando had escaped her, Sam rose from her desk at around the same time she had the week before. Her logic was that the beautiful boy might have to cross the piazza again at the same time, that he had some regular reason for being there.

  With this in mind, her PA, Nia, had been instructed to book today's lunch with a magazine fashion editor, one recently appointed to an important glossy, in the same restaurant in Covent Garden in which Sam had met Jack Oeuf the week before.

  "I'll be back at two-thirty," Sam called as she left. Nia, a thin-faced brunette with shining, black shoulder-length hair and dressed in regulation Wild black polo sweater and black capri pants, flashed her boss a slightly knowing smile. Nia knew, just as Sam did, that a return before three was highly unlikely. There was, Sam felt as she left, something rather insubordinate about Nia.

  In Covent Garden, Sam had given herself a few extra minutes to dawdle in the piazza. Carefully, she stepped round the taped-down, chalked renditions of Marilyn Monroe and St. Paul's. She didn't want to risk another mouthful from the pavement artists, who clearly had artistic temperaments, if no other attribute in that respect.

  "Visualising" success had always been one of Sam's buzzwords. She firmly believed that if you could imagine something to yourself, it would then happen. She had visualised seeing Orlando again so many times that the possibility he might not, after all, appear was unthinkable. Nevertheless, as the gilt-faced clock of the actor's church boomed one, the lunch hour, Sam found herself having to think it.

  She glanced at her watch. There was always the possibility that the new fashion director would be late at the restaurant, thus giving her a few more minutes. This prospect faded as Sam reflected that Genevieve was not the late type. Fashion directors fell into two categories: those who looked like messy bedrooms and those who looked like research scientists. Genevieve was in the latter category, a stick-thin brunette with dark retro spectacles, severe hair, and plainly cut clothes in shades of aubergine, charcoal, and moss. She was also extremely organised.

  Swinging her beige cashmere angrily over her shoulder, Sam moved crossly off. Her glance swept, uninterested, over a group of rickety schoolgirls with narrowed, much-eyelined eyes and miniskirts exposing long, white skinny legs. Although that girl there, about twenty, walking purposefully along by herself, with reddish-brown, shoulder-length hair and a pale blue cardigan, she was interesting. Remarkably pretty, with thick, shining hair and a sweet, open, heart-shaped face. Milkmaidy. Healthy. Fresh. A milkmaid moment in fashion was long overdue, Sam found herself thinking. But, of course, the girl wasn't tall enough and she was far too fat.

  Emma was coming to meet Cosmo and Hero from their Friday morning music appreciation class at the Royal Opera House.

  As she entered the foyer, grand, high-ceilinged, and blazing with mirrors, she slowed down. The children were not out yet, but the other nannies were already there. The other nannies, who looked after Hero and Cosmo's friends and acquaintances, invariably made Emma feel uncomfortable.

  It wasn't just that she was the newest of the circle. She was so unlike them as well. The other nannies were so poised and polished: slim and groomed, all high heels and skinny jeans, their shiny, swishy hair caught up with sunglasses. And the most poised and polished of them all was Totty de Belvedere.

  Totty looked after a gloomy-looking child called Hengist Westonbirt. The first time Emma had seen Totty, at a children's party, she had wondered how, given the exigencies of car seats, nappy changing, fiddly buttons, bathtime, and the rest of it, Totty managed to maintain such impressively long and manicured nails. Perhaps she had an assistant. For her part, Totty had asked Emma what part of Eastern Europe she had come from.

  "None. I'm from Yorkshire,
" Emma had answered, looking Totty steadily in the eye.

  "Oh, God. Sorry!" Totty had clapped a hand with long manicured nails to her lipsticked mouth and squealed with laughter.

  The children were now coming out of the auditorium, but only Hero and Cosmo looked pleased to see their nanny.

  "Woo woo!" chortled train-mad Cosmo, steaming across the carpet beneath the huge and brilliant chandeliers. Hero, meanwhile, lispingly informed Emma that the orchestra had played her favourite film tune.

  "'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!'" exclaimed Emma delightedly.

  There was a scornful noise from behind. Emma turned to find herself staring into the tiger-yellow, much-mascara'd eyes of Totty de Belvedere. "What is it about kids and 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'?" Totty swung back her striped blonde hair scornfully. "Hengist's obsessed with it too." She shot a look of deep dislike at her charge, who was shuffling unhappily along beside her.

  "Poor Hengist," Cosmo remarked as they walked out into the sunlight of the piazza. "I don't think he likes Totty very much. She isn't very nice, is she?"

  Chapter Seven

  "Are you on Facebook, darling?"

  The voice came from the other side of Orlando's bedroom door. As it happened, he was watching morning children's television. A pair of chirpy northern presenters with gelled hair were sitting on a purple sofa and bantering with someone dressed in a bright-yellow chicken suit.

  The door opened, and his mother came in. As usual, she was dressed in clothes designed for someone several decades younger than she was. Georgie was small and thin and proud of the fact she could get into Miss Sixty jeans like the slimmest of teenage girls. She was wearing them today with a flimsy purple blouse. Her make-up, as always, was immaculate. Georgie's face was thin and rather rabbity with over-plucked eyebrows, but she made the most of what she had, as she believed everyone should.

  "Oh…you're not on Facebook…" Georgie sounded disappointed as she stumbled in her high-heeled sandals on the piles of trainers and hooded tops that lay scattered over Orlando's bedroom floor.

  Facebook. Orlando groaned silently. Georgie was obsessed with the social networking site. She kept up with fashion and trends with an energy that amazed her son, who did neither, but Facebook was a special interest, with its opportunities for demonstrating social one-upmanship. His mother was a hopeless snob, Orlando knew, but hopeless in the positive sense that she was too kind-hearted, too spontaneous, and too nervous to make a real success of snobbery, as well as utterly lacking the visceral instinct that made the flint-eyed parents of some of his school peers so terrifying, and, in some cases, the peers themselves.

  Nonetheless, Georgie had badgered him mercilessly to get his own Facebook page, sending him endless "Georgie Fitzmaurice has invited you to join…" messages from her own account and making her friends, also in their mid-fifties but all keen Facebookers, do the same.

  Orlando secretly thought Facebook a boring waste of time, the acme of insincerity, a magnet for neurotics and the socially insecure. He held out as long as he could, but his email inbox had become so choked with invitations from mature ladies that the site crashed every time he launched it. He had had to give in.

  After that, whenever curiosity got the better of him and he was actually on Facebook, Georgie seemed miraculously to know and would appear, as she had done now, lean over his shoulder, and try to catch a glimpse of who his cyber-friends were.

  "Orlo!" she would exclaim. "You've only got ten friends! And half of them are mine! Shouldn't you have three hundred or something? I hear that's the normal minimum. Tania Whyte-Oliphant was telling me yesterday that Ariadne—she's the part-time model, going to Cambridge—has over six-hundred friends on Facebook! And Eliza Cocke-Roche gets poked over a thousand times a day!"

  "Mum!" Orlando would groan. He absolutely didn't care about Facebook. But he did care about his mother, and to see her stooping to such levels was far more distressing than his cyber-unpopularity…

  Facebook, however, had been the first indicator of his recently altered status. Some time before he grasped the extent to which his looks had changed, Orlando was puzzled to find that his inbox was suddenly full of people proposing themselves as cyber-acquaintances. None of them were middle-aged women either.

  From having ten friends, Orlando suddenly began to find he had twenty, then fifty, then a hundred, then hundreds and hundreds. Most of them were girls. Some he knew: girls from his own school, sisters of his school friends, girls in the sixth form. But many, many, he didn't. He had scrolled through, dumbfounded. There was page after page after page of them, some extremely pretty, with long blonde hair and big pink smiles. Others smouldered from behind black tresses. All seemed to be staring at him expectantly. Orlando was scared of all of them. What did they want?

  As the numbers spiraled towards the thousand mark, Orlando stopped going online, terrified of his mother seeing the hugely increased figures. Her excitement would have been excruciating.

  "Aren't you a bit old for this?" Georgie was gesturing at the television, where a giant purple cat was demonstrating how to make pineapple-topped pizza.

  "Yes," Orlando agreed readily. He had no idea why he was watching it either. He had a vague inkling that the world of children appealed to him more and more as he got older and the pressures of adulthood revealed themselves. But he could not have said this to his mother, nor would she have wanted to hear it.

  Neither had he said to his mother that a model agency had approached him. This was because he could easily picture her indignation—with him. So desperate was Georgie for him to be a success at something that she would have phoned Wild up on the spot and offered his services.

  As Orlando reached his late teens, the fact that he was less and less the child his mother had hoped for was becoming more and more obvious. Of course, he loved her—as he did his father—very much, and he knew that she loved him. But he also knew that she found him annoying. As she saw it, Orlando knew, he resolutely refused to make the most—or indeed, anything—of the opportunities she lavished on him. While Orlando, although he tried to feel grateful, was increasingly, bleakly aware that he had not wanted these opportunities in the first place.

  The expensive private school, for which his parents had scrimped and saved to send him, was the most glaring illustration of this. It maddened Georgie that the only determination Orlando had shown in regard to Heneage's was in relentlessly not trying to become friends with the sons and daughters of what his mother called the movers and shakers.

  "You never get asked to anyone's house for the weekend," Georgie wailed at one particularly frustrated moment.

  Actually, he often got asked these days, but he was careful to make sure his mother did not know he had refused. The frantic, competitive social fray revolving around whose smart house everyone else was staying at in the holidays—or which festival in the grounds of whose grandparents' castle everyone was heading to with their tents and Temperley party dresses—filled him with horror.

  He was not academically gifted either and was further hampered in success of this nature by what had been diagnosed as borderline dyslexia and by more than borderline lack of interest in either the subjects or his teachers. So far as the teachers were concerned, the lack of interest was mutual.

  Despite the staggering fees that his parents paid to make sure the most was being got out of him, most teachers wrote Orlando off immediately and told Georgie and Richard that he simply was not trying.

  These teachers seemed, Orlando had noticed, to make more effort with the equally unmotivated children of richer and more famous parents, but he had never mentioned this to his mother and father. It had suited him to be left more or less to his own devices at school.

  Now, however, Orlando heartily wished he had made more effort. He had taken his A levels at the start of the summer, and the results were due in the middle of August. They would be terrible, Orlando knew. It was largely to stave off thoughts of this future misery that Orlando currently spent as much ti
me as was possible in his bedroom watching chubby twelve-year-olds throw pies at each other.

  "I came to show you this," Georgie beamed, waving a coloured picture at him. She picked her way over the trainers.

  The image was of a long, low house in golden stone with a red roof. It had a patio with big white sunshades on it and was surrounded by cypresses. There was a blue sky and a swimming pool in the foreground.

  "What is it?" Orlando asked.

  "A farmhouse in Tuscany!" Georgie trilled. "I've booked it. For the whole of August."

  "Great. You and Dad deserve a break."

  As did he, Orlando felt with a surge of joy. And this was one he had never even dared hope for: being left alone and unbadgered by his mother when the exam results came out.

  "You're coming too, of course, darling. There's plenty of room. And a pool!" Her voice might be light, but Georgie's eye, Orlando saw, was steely. And he knew of old that resistance to the iron will of his mother was not an option. His chin sank onto his chest in a defeated attitude, and, as his mother fussed around picking up T-shirts, he sank glumly into the beanbag.