by Wendy Holden
Orlando stared at the long-legged blonde. He didn't recognise her, but he knew the people with her horribly well. Swaggering between the tables, laughing hysterically, came two stunningly unattractive youths in jeans and loafers with big bouncy hair and enormous teeth. Orlando now remembered where he had heard the name Totty before.
Totty, it seemed, was in nowhere near as good a mood as her companions. She ripped off her sunglasses to reveal eyes flashing in fury. "What are you two doing here?" she roared at the children. They backed away, frightened.
Orlando felt sick. He had absolutely no idea what to do. His instinct was to fell Totty to the ground, but obviously that was out of the question, especially with the children present. He realised miserably that his extensive and expensive education may have included balloon debates and school parliaments, but it had conclusively failed to teach him how to handle an occasion of this nature.
Emma's, however, had been more successful in this respect. "Don't speak to the children like that!" she growled, controlling with only the greatest of difficulties the urge to clamp her hands round Totty's long, brown neck and squeeze hard. She struggled to comprehend the unbelievable yet apparent fact that Totty Belvedere had succeeded her as Cosmo and Hero's nanny. What had possessed Vanessa? And James, who had always seemed so kind and sensible…
Totty looked at Emma. There was, the other girl felt, something of the hypnotizing snake in the eviscerating stare. She watched Totty's face twist with contemptuous recognition. "Just fuck off, okay?" she snarled. "This is my job now. Not yours."
"Not anymore, damn you," shouted the shaking voice of James as he hurtled through the tables, a shattered, weeping Vanessa stumbling behind him.
"News picture desk, please, darlin'," said Ken. "Tell 'em it's Ken from Mega."
"Okay," came the disembodied, nasal tones of the receptionist.
There was a scrape and a scramble at the other end as the call was put through.
"Yeah?"
Ken recognised the graceless voice of the news picture editor. Dick "'Dastardly'" Richardson. "Wotcha doin' comin' through to me, mate?" Dastardly demanded, irritated. "It's Showbiz you want, innit?"
"Not this time," said Ken lightly, flicking through the images at the back of his digital camera. "These pictures are news."
Chapter Fifty-five
Her face was so beautiful; the long sweep of lashes like the hairs on sea urchins, the tiny ears that actually really were shell-like, reminding him of the tiny, tasty clams he liked to use for vongole, the ones the French called palourdes. But this was no time to stand staring at her. She had fainted. She needed help.
"Fast work, Chef!" grinned Nino, the commis chef and the latest, youngest recruit, his naughty dark eyes full of laughter as Marco entered with Darcy in his arms. Rodolfo had brought her up from the carpark. "Mad dogs and Englishmen," Rodolfo had remarked as he handed her over, shaking his head.
She was so light Marco could have carried her however her limbs were arranged. But he had no intention of missing the opportunity of making her embrace him. As she now dutifully draped her long, white arms where he requested, he felt not the triumph he had expected, but something rather more tender. She was so beautiful, so light, so pale, so helpless, like a child.
He walked through the restaurant ignoring the winking brigade of chefs. He was, in fact, barely aware of them or of the excitement outside in the restaurant courtyard, where something between a fight and a reunion seemed to be taking place. For him, as he took her upstairs, the only thing that mattered was the beautiful burden he held.
The wonderful dream was continuing, Darcy thought. She was lying on something yielding and squashy in a cool, shady room. Someone with kind, dark eyes was very close. She felt safe, loved. She smiled.
Her eyes flew open. Recognising Marco, she gasped, jerking herself up into a sitting position and glancing round the simple, white room in alarm. "Where am I? What am I doing here?"
"Relax. You just fainted."
"Fainted?"
Tumbling into her brain now came a clatter of recollections: the red car beneath the trees, Christian's muscular bottom, Belle's tousled head. She closed her eyes. The dream was a nightmare after all.
"You've been running a bit too much," he said. "It's hot out there."
"I have to run," Darcy said miserably. "My thinstructor says so."
"Your thinstructor?"
"The man who's helping me get thin."
"'Helping you get thin? You have a beautiful body. Why do you want to get thinner?"
Darcy sighed. "I don't know," she said, staring at the worn, yet clean floorboards. "I don't know about anything anymore," she added in a whisper. "I've made such a mess of everything."
He did not break her silence. He sensed there was more to come. And indeed it almost was: Darcy breathed in, gathering her strength to launch into the whole sorry saga of the film, Christian, Niall, and Belle. But her shoulders slumped and her eyelids drooped. The effort seemed too much, the subject too long-winded and irrelevant now. Up here, with Marco, none of it seemed to matter. Even Christian. She felt above it and strangely distant.
It occurred to Darcy that the only real, lasting joy she had experienced in recent weeks, perhaps even recent months or years, was here in this very place. She had loved sitting outside Marco's, listening to him rhapsodising over perfect razor clams or the ultimate arugula, or whatever was exciting him that morning, as she sipped coffee and watched the people going by in the square. And even better than the listening was the tasting. The cheese, the olives, the bread…
His work was so creative. He made so many decisions every day, every hour. He was in complete control of what he did and had a clear view of what he wanted to achieve. A degree of self-expression she had always felt denied herself. It seemed to Darcy now that she had spent her life first being ordered about by her parents, then by Niall, then by directors, few of whose vision she had ever understood. She recalled the half-naked Lear and winced.
Oh, what had she done with her life? What had been the point of it all? She had never been in control. Chance and the desires of other people had plotted her path, never her.
She finished speaking and shot him a shamefaced look. She must have been talking for hours, banging on about herself, making him miss the lunchtime service altogether, probably.
But there was no censure in the eyes that steadily held hers. They were so kind. It seemed to Darcy that no one had ever looked at her with quite such understanding.
A warm glow spread through her, to her very finger ends. She wiped her eyes and smiled back.
Chapter Fifty-six
Mitch looked at Greg Cucarachi sorrowfully. "It's unfuckingbelievable."
"Tell me about it," replied the other.
Mitch squeezed his eyes together. "Just…" Failing to find a word big enough to express all he felt, he put a plump, perspiring hand to his sweating forehead and let the gesture do it for him. "Your client Christian Harlow…"
"And your client Belle Murphy…" put in Cucarachi, quickly.
"Were driving somewhere in your client Christian Harlow's Ferrari, but your client Christian Harlow was going too fast to be able to stop when he saw…"
"The scooter, yeah…" Cucarachi confirmed.
"The scooter…the scooter…" Mitch could hardly get the words out. "But not, like, any old scooter. The scooter with Jack Saint on it. And not any old Jack Saint. Jack Saint the famous director…"
"You got it," Cucarachi confirmed wearily. He was in Mitch's office, right opposite him, slumped despairingly in one of the chairs facing his desk. There was to be no goading today. The two agents were, for once—for the first time, in fact—united. United in a tragedy affecting both of them.
"All that lost money." Cucarachi groaned. "All we'll get is the signing-on fee."
"But that's a lot," Mitch pointed out encouragingly.
Greg flicked him a look. "For you, sure. You had two stars in
this movie. I j
ust had Christian Harlow." Mitch said nothing. He knew it was best not to intrude on private grief.
"This picture was gonna make Christian a big star. It was his big break," Greg wailed, suddenly impassioned.
"Yeah, and it was," Mitch returned dryly. "He's in a hospital in Florence with both his legs in plaster. And it was an even bigger break for Belle. Both arms and several ribs. She's gonna have to be entirely reconstructed."
"Again," pointed out Cucarachi.
"Darcy seems pretty relaxed about the whole thing," Mitch remarked. "Sorry about the accidents, sure. But much less worried than I thought about the film being written off."
"That's crazy," Greg opined. "That's gotta be an act. She's an actress, after all," he reminded Mitch.
"Yeah, but a British one, remember. You know what they're like."
"Crazy."
"Really crazy," Mitch rejoined. He frowned. "You know, I could have sworn she was almost relieved about it."
"You're kidding."
"No, really. All she seemed to care about was the money."
"That figures," Greg said, nodding. "Not that crazy after all, then."
"Except that she said she wanted to put it into a nursery."
Greg blinked. "She said a nursery? Not 'up her nose'?"
"A nursery. Like, you know, for kids."
There was a silence. Mitch reached for a jelly doughnut from the bag on the desk. "Want one?" he offered.
His lean, trim co-worker looked at the fistful of sugar-encrusted fried dough being brandished at him. He looked about to refuse, then his trim eyebrows raised themselves in resignation. He reached for it. "Hey," he said, chewing. "They're not half bad."
Mitch, eyeing his colleague, was starting to think that perhaps Greg wasn't so bad either.
"They say Saint's got no idea about anything," Greg mused morosely as he chewed. "That knock from the accident's completely changed his personality. He's got no recollection he's a filmmaker at all. He thinks he's a cat now." Cucarachi shook his wire wool hair. "Like—what's that about?"
Mitch shook his head. "What a business. Who'd be an agent?"
"You said it, buddy."
The two agents looked at each other in sorrowful complicity.
In the aubergo, Hugh Faugh was slamming his meaty fists against the newspaper spread out on the table.
The picture that formed the centre spread of the newspaper was of Ivo and Jago laughing on a park bench with a blonde in a miniskirt who was placing small sachets of white powder in their hands. "Peer's daughter Totty de Belvedere (right)," read the caption, "passes the drugs to MP's sons Ivo and Jago Faugh."
"Oh, Christ. How could you. How bloody could you?" Hugh groaned to his sons, his fingers over his eyes so as not to see, yet again, the headline '"Family Values?" in massive fat black type. "How could you be so stupid?"
Family values indeed, Orlando thought sardonically. Hugh's anger seemed directed less at what had been done than at the fact the twins had been caught doing it. He almost felt a stir of pity for Ivo and Jago. With a father like this, what chance had either of them ever had?
"You're a pair of fucking idiots!" Hugh roared at his sons. "Not only have you been kicked out of Oxford, you've probably cost me my job."
Alerted by some party factotum in London that the pictures had appeared, Hugh had rushed straight out to the Rocolo news agent and then spent an agonized hour waiting for the British papers to arrive. But that agony had been sweet relief compared to his anguish when he had finally seen what the papers contained. From the blizzard of phone calls he then proceeded to field, and the loud protestations and pleadings he was heard to make, it was clear that Hugh was determinedly fighting for his political life and that his political masters were equally determined to switch off his life support.
It couldn't have happened to a nicer family, Orlando tried to make himself think. He dredged up every miserable memory of their stay he could remember to force himself to rejoice in the Faughs' downfall. What had happened was, after all, a sweeter and more agonising revenge on his tormentors than he could ever have planned, even in his wildest flights of retaliatory fantasy. Odd then, that he felt far from exultant. If anything, he felt rather sorry for them.
It turned out that Totty de Belvedere had something of a talent for destroying careers. Orlando had learnt with outraged bewilderment what she had tried to do to Emma's, although there had been a happy ending. As Totty and the Faugh twins were led away by the local police, there had been tears, apologies, and heartfelt hugs from the couple who had arrived so suddenly and turned out to be Cosmo and Hero's parents. The reunion had been so dramatic that he had left Emma to it in the end; it seemed to have nothing to do with him.
A sharp cry had stopped him in his tracks as he reached the edge of the courtyard. "Hey!" cried Emma, dashing after him. "Phone number, please. And address, and mobile, and NHS number, and blood group, and…"
And then, yet more drama. As he had left the restaurant, his A-level results had been texted through. He had got a D and an E, better than he had expected. Two whole passes. Enough, even, to take some sort of course.
He was no longer a failure. On the contrary, it was the gilded youth of Oxford that had fallen.
Chapter Fifty-seven
Orlando pushed his mother's trolley across the smooth marble surface of the airport floor. There was so much marble around; part of being in Italy, he supposed.
Georgie's luggage was heavy. He found himself wondering vaguely how so many flimsy bits of material came to weigh so much. And how Georgie could bear to spend so much time in the airport shops, which seemed universally boring to Orlando. Still, they probably kept her mind off things.
"Orlando!"
"Orlando!"
Someone in blue and white. Jeans and a polo top. Emma, standing there, exactly where they had arranged to meet, smiling at him.
"Great!" he exclaimed, wheeling Georgie's heap over at such speed he could hardly stop it. "You made it."
He held her close. She held her face up to his. It was fresh and glowing, like a new pink rose, he thought. He longed to kiss it but felt shy in such a public place. Then, as she continued to look at him, he decided that he didn't feel so shy after all. When he had finished, her eyes were still closed. Encouraged, he bent his neck and kissed her again.
"Guess what," he whispered into her clean-smelling hair. "I got two A levels!"
"Orlando! You didn't!" The air was filled with her delighted shriek.
"It's especially fantastic," Emma added into his chest, which was
as far as the top of her head reached, "because I was going to offer you a job."
"A job!" he squawked.
She nodded. "I'd have offered you it anyway, but now that you've got the A levels, you can train properly."
He blinked. Training? What was she talking about?
"I'm opening my nursery," Emma explained. "Darcy's given me the start-up money. I want you to join it."
"What—as a nanny?" He screwed up his eyes in disbelief.
"A manny," Emma corrected him. "A male nanny. Men make great nannies, I told you. And I'm planning to recruit a lot of them."
A great surge of excitement possessed Orlando. Along with a great clench of fear. His beam faded. His mother had been dealt many blows of late. Could she bear what might be the bitterest of all, that her son was about to be a nursemaid?
"I'll pay you plenty, don't worry," Emma added chuckling. "Enough to make your mother realise it's a proper career with proper rewards. And don't worry, there'll be rewards. It's going to be a massive success."
Orlando felt more cheerful. If Emma said it, it would happen. "That would be great." He shook his head in a puzzled way. "Fantastic. Really cool. Wow!"
"It's a deal then," Emma exulted, hugging him again and pulling his face down towards her. Her insides were popping with joy.
"Cosmo and Hero will be there too," she told him. "James and Vanessa are desperate for me to look after them again.
" She permitted herself a small, triumphant smile. "Oh, and Morning will be coming too. He'll be in the baby room."
"Morning?" Orlando looked Emma up and down, as if she had hidden the child who so evidently was not hanging from her front somewhere else about her person.
"I've been given temporary custody of him. Belle's in no state to look after him—not that she was when she wasn't in traction in a hospital," Emma added, rolling her eyes.