by Wendy Holden
Then a thought occurred to him. Perhaps Italy could be an advantage so far as his A-level results were concerned. The middle of the Tuscan countryside might be somewhere the long arm of the examinations board was unable to stretch to reach.
Might, but probably not, given his mother. She would have the date from the school; she would no doubt ring up on the day. And he had a feeling the results could be texted.
"Oooh, almost forgot." Georgie turned at the door. "The Faughs are coming for dinner next week." She wagged her finger playfully. "So don't go out. Jago and Ivo will be dying to see you."
Italy faded instantly in the face of this much greater threat to happiness. A burning, unpleasant sensation swirled through Orlando. He had never liked his parents' friends, Hugh and Laura Faugh, and liked their sons less.
"It's so nice that they're your own age," Georgie fluted.
Orlando couldn't imagine why Georgie thought Ivo and Jago were his age. They were two years older at least. She really should overcome her vanity about wearing spectacles.
"They're such a good influence. Such nice, tidy boys. So well dressed," Georgie added, her gaze hooking on Orlando's oversized black T-shirt with its glow-in-the-dark, printed-on skeleton ribcage. He shrugged. So his clothes were tacky. He didn't care. He had bought this T-shirt weeks ago in a pound shop; it had appealed to his childish sense of humour.
The Faugh brothers, he knew, would never have worn such a thing, nor did they ever go in pound shops; facts that raised his T-shirt even higher in his eyes. The last time he had seen them, at a House of Commons garden party Georgie had dragged him determinedly along to, they had been wearing tight, dark-blue designer jeans with visible creases and high waists, all straining over the twins' large bottoms. Tucked into the jeans—and also into the underpants beneath, Orlando suspected—they wore merchant banker striped or checked shirts, open at the collar to expose a gold chain and with double cuffs and cufflinks. Tied around the twins' shoulders had been cashmere pullovers, jade for Ivo and ginger for Jago.
"And, of course, they're so clever," Georgie reminded him now. "Both at Cambridge."
Behind the curtains of his hair, Orlando grimaced. Cambridge was a word that struck fear into him. He had been dragged to the town several times over the past year by his mother, positioned in front of various spiry college entrances, and instructed to admire them.
"Wouldn't you just love to go there?" Georgie had demanded, eyes blazing with ambition. Orlando had taken one look at what seemed an endless stream of self-satisfied geeks coming out of the front entrance of King's and thought that no, actually, he wouldn't. Even if, given his academic record, there was a hope in hell of him going to Cambridge as anything other than one of the tourists that seemed to throng outside the innumerable tea shops, he wanted to go there about as much as he wanted to go to Italy. At the age of eighteen. With his parents.
Downstairs, Orlando's father Richard was thinking about the Italian holiday too. He felt uneasy.
Georgie often made him feel uneasy. She was his childhood sweetheart and wife of nearly thirty years. But while he loved her devotedly, she had never been happy with his rank-and-file MP status. Georgie had always nursed ambitions for him beyond anything he had wanted.
These had never been fulfilled, however. He had remained a backbencher and would, Richard suspected, always remain one. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that he would never be a power in the land, but he was aware that Georgie hadn't.
"He's thrilled!" Richard heard Georgie trilling. She was back downstairs from breaking the holiday news to Orlando.
Richard felt a clutch of panic. "But darling, it's awfully expensive."
Georgie's expression was defiant and defensive. "I had to act fast. We haven't got anywhere else lined up. Have we?"
Her husband flinched at this full-frontal attack on his lack of social influence. For all his twenty years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, he had failed just as spectacularly as his son to bond with anyone who might have a suitable holiday home. Like Orlando, he had not tried, because, like Orlando, Richard had a built-in aversion to the types of people who swaggered about bragging about their wealth and influence. The fellow members of Parliament that Richard liked best were just like him: hardworking backbenchers struggling to maintain a place in London, as well as a constituency one.
Some MPs, of course, lived in their constituency and used cheap hotels when staying in London, but this option was not open to Richard. He represented a particularly unfashionable swath of Hertfordshire—albeit with one or two smart villages—in which Georgie flatly refused to live. Which was why Richard was now struggling to maintain a large, if battered, Highgate terrace house. Given their financial circumstances, hanging on to it sometimes felt like hanging on to a balloon in a Force 10 gale.
There was also the upkeep of a small flat in the constituency. Richard wished he had suggested to Georgie that they holiday there. It might be on the High Street and above a Chinese takeaway, but at least it was free.
He looked dumbly at his wife now. It didn't really matter what he thought about the villa; it was a fait accompli anyway. And given that their household outgoings were no longer as enormous as they had been, the expense was more bearable. There would, for example, be no more school fees for Orlando; he had taken his A levels this summer, and they could afford a little financial leeway. It would, in fact, be their first real treat holiday for fourteen years, since Orlando had started at prep school and his education had started to dominate the budget.
To what end, Richard was not sure. His only son had never been academic, a fact that had emerged early. Personally, Richard had been all for Orlando going to the local state primary, which had a good reputation. But Georgie had had other ideas. "Contacts!" she would insist. "He has to make contacts. Good contacts will get him through life."
Of course, Richard mused, household expenses could easily go up again if Orlando went to university, as his mother was determined he should. Personally, Richard rather hoped that he wouldn't. Better the boy should leave and do something useful with his life, although goodness knew what. Not politics, obviously; too many family resources had been sacrificed to that already.
"Oh, by the way," Georgie added, as she clacked off across the kitchen tiles in her high heels, "I've asked the Faughs for dinner next week."
"Oh, my God," was her husband's response. He looked as if he were about to be sick.
"Richard!" Georgie's eyes bore into him. "Hugh's one of your closest friends!"
"That's stretching it," Richard muttered, sensing again that resistance was useless.
Hugh Faugh. Why on earth did Georgie persist in believing he was a close friend? They had never been close friends, even though their lives had, at one stage, run quite closely together. They had entered Parliament the same year, young Conservative MPs still wet behind the ears, or as wet as Hugh's ears ever got considering, or so Richard always suspected, he blow-dried his thick, black, shiny hair to give it that characteristic full, upward-sweeping look.
"Hair gets votes," Hugh had once told him in that booming, confident, maddening way in which he said everything. He had swept an unimpressed look over Richard's even-then-thinning, greying scalp and his pale, dry, nondescript face with its monkish features, and raised one of the virile, black eyebrows marking his own highly coloured, handsome, if rather heavy, face.
Had his underperforming follicles, Richard occasionally wondered since, stood in the way of Parliamentary favour? Would a more thickly populated pate have ensured election to the great offices of state?
But he knew in his heart that it wasn't killer hair he lacked. It was killer instinct. Certainly, soon after entering Parliament, his and Hugh's careers had dramatically diverged. Hugh, the more forceful and swashbuckling of the pair, had immediately disappeared into a cloud of glory with never a backward glance, gaining promotion after promotion, while Richard Fitzmaurice, bar the odd Commons committee, had never really moved off t
he backbenches. He had contented himself with being a well-thought-of constituency MP, which was, as he reminded himself many times through the years, what he had, after all, been elected for. That this wasn't well thought of by Georgie was just one of those things.
Great friends with Hugh, Richard thought with uncharacteristic sourness. Oh, absolutely. Great friends to the extent that Hugh, recently promoted to the Shadow Cabinet, had taken to stalking past him in Westminster corridors without even acknowledging him. But Georgie had been beside herself in delight to find that her husband's former university friend was now so elevated, and this, Richard suspected, was one of the reasons she had invited him for dinner.
Of course, Hugh would have accepted with alacrity. Not the least cause of Richard's disquiet was the fact that Hugh, or "Freebie Faugh," as he was known in the corridors of power, was notorious for his interest in all things complimentary. He was famous, in particular, for the zest with which he proved there absolutely was such a thing as a free lunch—and a free dinner as well.
Thank God, the summer recess was coming soon, Richard thought. Time for a change of scene. Time for Italy.
Chapter Eight
"Am I speaking with Mitch Masterson?"
"Yeah," Mitch drawled, not bothering to conceal the fact that, contrary to his doctor's instructions concerning his increasing weight, he was chewing on a jelly doughnut as he spoke. It was his second jelly doughnut, as well. And he had just had lunch into the bargain.
"I have Arlington Shorthouse on the line for you," the female voice said.
Her words electrified Mitch. His hand jerked in shock, and the coffee he was about to swig to wash down the last of his second doughnut now landed on the front of his shirt. His eyes watered, and he wanted to scream as the scalding liquid made contact with his nipples.
There were many reasons why NBS Studios, of which Arlington was head, could be calling him. At least fifty reasons: Mitch had upward of fifty clients after all, and they were all actors. But it was the fact that Arlington himself was calling that rang alarm bells.
Arlington, even though he was a well-known workaholic and famously hands-on, only called agents directly for two reasons. One was because he wanted to launch a career. The other was because he wanted to end one. Mitch, for whom thoughts of Belle Murphy were never far away, had a sudden, sickening, guilty feeling that had nothing to do with jelly doughnuts.
"Good morning, Mr. Shorthouse," he said meekly, as if his own good behaviour could somehow mitigate for his client and earn her a reprieve. And yet it wasn't a surprise that the end had come.
Since being dumped by Christian Harlow, Belle had hit the ground running—literally, and more than once after oblivionseeking, champagne-fuelled benders in nightclubs that had been mercilessly covered by the press.
Day after day, Mitch had opened the tabloids to find, to his despair, lurid photographs of his former star client struggling, blind drunk, in and out of limos in wisps of dresses with a glaring absence of underwear. All of which would have been unlikely to impress the only person, apart from the state attorney, who mattered. This was the teetotalling and puritanical head of her studio, who felt his stars should be paragons of American virtue at all times. Arlington Shorthouse, the man who was ringing now. Doubtless to knock Belle's career on the head.
Arlington's next words, however, knocked Mitch as flat as Mitch could be knocked, given that he was sitting up at his desk. "We're making the Galaxia movie," the studio head announced in the quiet, ominous voice that could, Mitch imagined, freeze vodka solid. "We start shooting in the summer."
Mitch blinked. That was sensational news. Of course, many studios had tried and failed with space sagas since George Lucas had brought out Star Wars. But NBS's track record meant it had a very good chance. It was a prospect almost as dazzling as the sunshine.
It was also a relief. The news was clearly connected to one of his actors, and Belle, for all her troubles, was the best-known actor on his books. Arlington could hardly be ringing about anyone else. Perhaps he wasn't about to fire her, after all.
"You've got someone I want to offer one of the two main roles to," Arlington said.
A main role? Holy crap. In the darkness below his striped shirt, beneath his flabby upper arms, Mitch felt a nuclear glow of moisture. Sweat gathered on his forehead. Belle's career was saved, and his own was too. She'd be back at the top, the biggest movie actress of the day, probably the best paid too, which was the bit that interested Mitch. And would interest the Associated Artists CEO, when it came to doling out the promotions.
And not before time. Mitch had been passed over not once but many times too often recently, and there were other unpleasant reminders of the extent to which his status had slipped within the company. Associated's thrusting, younger agents, who felt they were too important to handle anything other than superstars, were increasingly palming off their smaller or older clients on him. Thanks to people like Greg Cucarachi, who was one of the palmers-off in chief, Mitch's list was currently thick with duds, small-timers, oldtimers, and also-rans, and he had heard that some of the other agents sneeringly referred to him as "the graveyard."
The graveyard! Ha! He'd show them. With one of his clients a star in the new Galaxia film!
"Who is it?" Mitch asked, his voice smiling.
"Darcy Prince," replied Arlington Shorthouse.
Mitch's mind instantly dissolved into a fog. He felt he was standing over a bath and watching the pictures that had formed of Belle and himself—on the red-carpeted entrance to the Kodak Theatre, the Oscar-night paparazzi going crazy—disappearing down the plughole.
"Darcy Prince," he repeated, with a calmness he did not feel.
Darcy Prince? Who the hell was that?
Mitch groped about in the mist in his mind, panicking that Arlington had rung the wrong agency, that someone else was going to get this big chance, and wondering about the chances of finding this Darcy Prince and taking him or her on anyway, all in the next few seconds.
Then, with a great rush of relief, he realised that he did, in fact, represent Darcy Prince. He remembered the name vaguely; it had been in the latest sheaf of hopeless cases dumped on him by Greg Cucarachi the other day. Mitch had filed the slim sheet of details away without even reading them, never expecting he would ever have to. Now, with the receiver containing Arlington tucked unsteadily under his flabby, stubbly chin, Mitch shot again in his chair over to his filing cabinet, trying to open it silently and fish out the details with trembling, sweating hands.
"Darcy Prince!" he said in musing tones, whilst frantically shoving his stubby hands into overstuffed folders that cut his fingers. Was it a man or a woman, he wondered.
"Yes. I was just in London, and I caught Darcy in a play there," Arlington remarked. "What was it called?" he mused.
"Er…" gasped Mitch, screwing up his eyes as he tried to remember what was currently going down in the British capital. Mamma Mia was all that came to mind. Was that a play, strictly speaking? And if it was, was Darcy Prince in it? He should know, of course, should have the information at his fingertips, being her agent.
"A Doll's House. That was it," Arlington said, his thin voice faintly warmed with self-congratulation. "She was impressive."
A Doll's House? Was that some kind of Bratz musical, Mitch wondered. But at least he was now straight on one thing. She! She! Darcy was a woman. He had secured the crucial information on gender.
And now, miraculously, he had also found Darcy's details. He scanned them eagerly.
Name: Darcy Alethea Desdemona Prince
Nationality: English
Address: 43 Montague Mansions, Wilton Street, London SW1
Age: 24
Education: St. Paul's Girls' School, London; Girton College, Cambridge (BA Hons—first class—English); Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA)
Mitch could see why Greg had dumped her on him. There was nothing remotely Hollywood about this woman. She had never even made a film. No doubt, what
ever two-bit London agency represented her—it obviously wasn't a big one—had one of those deals with Associated in which they paid the American agency to handle their clients' L.A. interests.
These were known as "drawer deals," because the dark inside of a filing cabinet into which they were immediately shoved, never to be extracted, was usually all these British clients saw of the famous bright lights of Hollywood. And at Associated, most of these unfortunates were shoved in filing cabinets in Mitch's office.
Acting career: Ophelia in Hamlet, Cambridge Shakespeare Company, 2005; Cordelia in King Lear, CSC, 2006; Viola in Twelfth Night, RSC, 2007. Nora in A Doll's House, Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, 2008
Mitch blinked. This was all way off the usual Hollywood acting resumé. Most of the women he handled didn't mention their education or early experience, and not without good reason.