My insides turned to liquid as my eye caught something in the corner of the page.
Me. There was a photograph of me, aged about five, sitting in the garden on Lady Phillimore Day, laughing up into Franny’s face as she tugged my long plaits and looked radiant with happiness.
It was captioned, Elizabeth “Betsy” Phillimore, adopted daughter of Lord and Lady Phillimore, owners of the notorious Phillimore Academy.
My mouth went dry. Where did I fit into this? I forced myself to read the words, though they were dancing and blurring.
You’re a billionaire businessman, the article started. You’ve got friends in high places, and your fingers in many pies. The only thing you don’t have is class. So where do you turn? To the last bastion of establishment—the English finishing school, where respectability and social acceptance can be bought, albeit at a price.
Political donor and Serbian entrepreneur Luka Jankovic this week announced his engagement to society party girl Venetia Hargreaves, a student at the notorious Phillimore Academy in Halfmoon Street London—and finally ended his campaign for a British passport. Leggy, polo-loving Venetia appeared in this paper earlier in the week, extolling the virtues of the “new-look” finishing school that teaches its students not only the art of eating in the smartest restaurants and dressing for success, but also, it seems, making adept marriages of convenience. New-look? Or just the same as the marriage market that London’s smartest heiresses were trained for a hundred years ago?
That wasn’t what the dressing-for-success classes were about, I thought wildly. And the eating in restaurants thing—that was about handling your chopsticks in a sushi bar, not freeloading with rich businessmen, as the paper was suggesting!
I started to feel physically sick. What did they mean…the notorious Phillimore Academy?
It’s not the first time Phillimore girls have helped out a billionaire in need. Twenty years ago, behind the £2,000-a-term closed doors, aristocrats and playboys treated the Academy as their own private dating agency, wining and dining the privileged young women sent to learn the ins and outs of the upper classes. Rich wild girls like Coralie Hendricks (pictured left) and Sophie Townend (pictured right, as a Bond girl) cavorted in private hotel orgies and caused mayhem at high-society balls, but when their moneyed indulgences tipped over from youthful exuberance into scandal, the establishment was swift to close ranks and hide the resulting human wreckage.
“There is nothing in the paper this weekend,” moaned Liv. “Pass me the magazine section, will you? Betsy? Betsy! What’s up?”
My eyes were glued to the page. Several outrages were hushed up by the well-connected owners, including aspiring racing driver Rory McAlmont’s fatal late-night Aston Martin crash on Chelsea Bridge, which killed him and his passenger, heroin addict Antonia Greene. Whispers also persisted about a newborn baby abandoned at the Academy, possibly the illegitimate child of a former student. Lord and Lady Phillimore adopted a daughter around this time (Elizabeth, now twenty-seven), though they denied any knowledge of her origins at the time and made strenuous efforts to keep the matter out of the papers.
I felt as if I were floating a foot outside my body. They were talking about me. Me, in the paper. Next to a heroin addict and a dead-boy racer who might or might not be my parents. No, I thought, the blood draining from my face as I put two and two together. No…
Elizabeth Phillimore, or Betsy, as she’s now known, has taken over the mantle of the Academy, reinventing it for a new generation of party girls. Speaking to Imogen Twist this week, she joked about the importance of parties in a girl’s life and revealed her vision for today’s aspiring social climber: “There’s something about being able to carry off a pair of heels that makes men take you very seriously.”
“That wasn’t what I meant!” I gasped in agony.
“Betsy, give me the paper, I want to read the morbid scandal pages in the middle,” said Liv. “Ooh, let me distract you with a croissant.” She dangled a pastry in front of my nose, but I was barely aware of it.
Whoever had written this gloating feature had done my detective work for me. Why had I bothered being discreet when I could have just gone straight to Imogen and her muckraking mates? I thought bitterly.
Here they all were. Coralie Hendricks: three times married, currently divorcing film producer Mark Sheen. Sophie Townend: ex-Bond girl, beat coke addiction to become Green Party activist. Simon Fitzgerald: died in skiing accident in 1987. Bingo Palmer: jailed for his part in an insurance scam involving his father’s zoo. Hector Phillimore: fled criminal charges by disappearing in 1980.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but the words were imprinted in white on the inside of my eyelids. Scandal. Addict. Criminal. Betsy.
The newspaper fell from my limp fingers.
Franny and Lord P must have known what a collection of wasters were hanging around. They must have known all along that I was the result of some seedy shag at a messy party. The unwanted accident of two stupid, selfish rich kids with plenty of perfect manners and nothing decent underneath, and they’d taken me in to make sure no nasty whispers got out.
“Oh, thanks,” said Liv. “Finally!” She grabbed the paper off me and stuffed the croissant in her mouth. I heard her choking on it.
“Oh, my God!” she cried. “Have you seen this…Oh, no. Oh, Betsy!”
I wasn’t listening. Her voice sounded a long, long way away.
Liv went through several stages of fury, horror, indignation, and finally fury again in the time it took me to stop feeling numb.
“You should sue!” she kept saying, marching up and down the kitchen, growling and throwing her hair around. “This is defamation of character! It’s outrageous! You’ve been totally misrepresented. I’m going to ring Dad’s barrister and get right onto it.”
She stopped, hands on hips. “Betsy, please say something. You’re seriously worrying me.”
I didn’t know what to think first. There was just too much.
“Say something,” she pleaded. “Don’t make me throw water over you.”
“Where’s my phone?” I asked.
Liv crumpled in relief. “I don’t know. I’ll look.” She moved stuff up and down on the counter, then grabbed something. “Here! Oh, it’s out of battery. I’ll plug it in, shall I?” As she did, I heard it bleep. “Oh, my God, Betsy, you’ve got like twenty messages! Shall I play them?”
“No!” I said, and sank my head onto my hands. “They’ll be people ringing to feel sorry for me. Or cancel their deposits. Or just have a good laugh.”
Liv wrapped her arms round me and hugged me hard. “No one’s going to be doing that! And if they do, I’m going to…I’m going to…” She buried her head in my hair. “I’m not going to let them in.”
There was the sound of a key in the lock, and we both froze.
“Hello?” called Jamie’s voice. He didn’t sound his usual flippant self. “Betsy? Liv?”
We exchanged panicked glances.
“I can pretend you’re not here if you…” Liv began with a worried frown, but I shook my head.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Jamie might know what to do.”
We didn’t even bother to joke about his scandalous experience. It didn’t seem funny anymore.
“Betsy, are you OK?” Jamie burst through the kitchen door without any preamble. He looked as if he’d just got back from the gym—he was unshaven, his hair was damp, and he was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a hooded top under an old sweater. I’d never seen him looking so rough, but I’d never been so pleased to see him.
“I’ve just seen the paper. I don’t know what to say. I’m disgusted. Imogen rang; she says she’s been trying to get hold of you since last night—apparently the news desk have been trailing that bloke of Venetia’s for months, trying to pin something on him, and this was the best chance they’ve had. He’s an arms dealer, been making huge donations to the Labour party.”
“And that’s meant to make her feel better how, exa
ctly?” demanded Liv.
Jamie shrugged and looked mortified. “It’s not. It’s just that they’ve twisted what they could about the Academy to make him look as bad as possible. I bet they’ve been sitting on that other stuff for years, waiting until the injunction ran out or something.” He turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “You know what the press are like. It’ll be nowhere near as bad as that—one of them was probably in rehab for about a month, and someone else once got a bit tipsy at a party. It’s only gossip, Betsy; it’ll be forgotten by the morning.”
“No, it won’t,” I said dully. “Not here, anyway. How can I forget that?” I gestured at the newspaper, lying accusingly over our breakfast things.
Liv and Jamie exchanged glares over my head, and I could tell they were dueling eyebrows.
“Don’t,” I said, unable to tear my eyes away from the photograph of Venetia, who’d set all this in motion, the vacuous bimbo. “Don’t have a row now. Please.”
Liv’s house phone rang on the wall, and we all jumped.
“I’ll get it,” said Jamie, and picked up. “Hello? No. No, I think you’ve got the wrong number.” His voice sounded harsh. “Yes, if you ring back in an hour you’ll still have the wrong number. Good-bye.” He replaced the receiver and grabbed my coat and hat from the chair where I’d left them the previous night.
“Come on,” he said, pulling the hat over my head. “We’re going out.”
Jamie steered me out of the house and toward his car, which he’d parked so quickly that two of the wheels were on the curb.
He opened the door for me—a nice touch, I thought in some dim part of my brain—then went round the other side and got in, bracing himself against the steering wheel.
“So! Where do you want to go?” He turned to me and cocked an eyebrow. He was trying to act normally, but I couldn’t.
“I don’t know. Anywhere. Somewhere that won’t be full of people reading that paper…” I shuddered.
“All right,” he said. “I know just the place.”
We set off, and I slumped in my seat as he drove through the Sunday morning streets of Clapham. Well-dressed couples with their babies in strollers, going about their business, heading to the pub for a roast, safe in their worlds, knowing who they were, where they came from.
And me in the car, feeling soiled.
I didn’t know where Jamie was going, but he was taking the scenic route round all the London landmarks I hadn’t had time to revisit in the mad few weeks I’d been back. We headed over the green common full of dog walkers and crossed the river into Westminster, past Big Ben and the sugarcraft carving of the Houses of Parliament, up toward Fleet Street where the offices were empty and the streets were deserted apart from cleaners and a few tourists making the hike to St. Paul’s Cathedral.
As I watched the old black-and-white buildings turn into the glass skyscrapers of the City, Jamie kept up a soothing barrage of chat, about a new bar he’d been to here or an interesting shop there, until I felt the numbness begin to ebb away. We were deep in the oldest part of town now, yet in the middle of the highest tech area, and the Sunday silence was strange but lovely. It felt like we were the only people there.
“Where are we going?” I asked as he turned away from the city streets and into a jumble of pavement stalls and Bangladeshi curry houses. Brick Lane.
“We’re getting more breakfast. Isn’t that one of your rules?” He made a sudden signal and parked neatly in a tiny space outside a sari shop. “Stay there. I’ll be right back.”
I sat back in my seat and waited. There were more people around now, and the queue from the bagel bakery Jamie had headed into stretched out into the street. Some folks were carrying flowers from the nearby Columbia Road market; others were obviously on their way back from a night out, shivering in tiny skirts and leather jackets. There were lots of cabbies. None of them peered into the car and pointed at me.
Jamie returned surprisingly quickly with a large brown bag and almost dragged me out of the car. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, handing me a plastic cup of very hot coffee.
We set off down Brick Lane, weaving though fashion students and locals browsing the flea market. Jamie obviously knew where he was going, though I didn’t, not being an East London girl, and before long we’d got off the main street and were standing outside a huge white church, built like a wedding cake and looming above us.
“Don’t panic, this isn’t an elopement,” he said with a wink, and herded me into the gardens, where we sat down on a bench and he dispensed breakfast: smoked salmon bagels and cheesecake.
“Right, I guarantee no one here will give a toss about Petronella Hotsy-Totsy or whatever those girls were called,” he said. “You’re safe.”
“Thanks,” I said, and bit into my chewy bagel. It was very good and distracted me nicely, as food always did. Kathleen hadn’t been daft with her breakfast rule.
We ate in silence, watching the sun move around the white stones of the church, and a comforting peace settled on the bench between us.
“We used to live round here when it was really scabby, not trendy scabby,” said Jamie, stretching out his long legs in a patch of light. “Before Ken’s empire really got going. He wasn’t always Mr. Chelsea Town House, you know. He used to be Mr. Grimy Shoreditch Terrace.”
“What? And look at him now.” Jamie was trying to make me feel better, I could tell, but it wasn’t working. “He’s on the run from the tax man in Spain.”
“No, don’t look at him now. Look at me and Liv now. I mean, I don’t think it matters what your parents do. It’s what you do with your own life that counts. I’ve had no help from Ken with Party Animals—he thinks it’s a total waste of my degree studies. As he’s fond of telling me, when he makes an appearance.”
I threw my coffee cup into a bin. “It’s not the same. All right, so you’re doing your own thing now, but you know you get your wheeler-dealing from Ken. You know you’ll be a silver fox like his dad when you’re seventy. It’s like insurance. I haven’t got that. I’ll never know if my parents were killed in some car crash, or died in a skiing accident, or whatever it is that they’re hinting at in that article. You can look at Ken, even if you don’t want to be him, and know that’s where you came from.”
“Not necessarily.” Jamie crossed his leg over his knee, making a defensive block.
“All right, so you can do things differently,” I conceded. “But you know what you’re playing with. I just feel…” I looked around the churchyard, trying to find a way to express the nauseating uncertainty I felt. “I feel like I’m just veneer, not solid inside. The outside sounds posh and looks right, but underneath…I don’t know who I am.”
Jamie drew in a long breath through his nose and let it out again.
“OK,” he said after a long pause. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone, and that you can’t tell Liv. Under any circumstances.”
He turned on the bench and looked at me. His gray eyes were clear and serious. “I mean it. This has to stay between you and me.”
“Fine,” I said, and even though I was still aching with misery, my skin prickled at the intensity of his gaze and the secret we were sharing. “I won’t tell.”
Jamie looked away and said in a quiet voice, “Ken probably isn’t my dad.”
My mouth dropped open. “How do you know?”
“I don’t know for sure. Neither does Mum. She found out she was pregnant a few weeks after she and Ken got together, couldn’t work out her dates very well…Not the sharpest stick in the pile, my mother. Typical model, lots of boyfriends, went to some pretty debauched parties, you know how it is.” Jamie’s voice was light and flippant, his usual anecdote voice, but I could tell it hid something sore.
“He might be my father,” he went on, “but he was definitely the one who stuck around and offered to marry her. Then when Liv was born, there was no doubt she was Ken’s little girl, and that’s why he basically treated her like
a princess and left me to sort myself out.”
“But you’re so like him!” I protested.
Jamie’s mouth twitched. “In what way? I’m good with people? Good at making money? Partial to after-hours partying? That’s not genetic. That’s observation.” He raised his hands and dropped them, meeting my eyes with a frank look. “I know you reckon I’m a bit of a playboy, and I know to an extent I am, but most of it’s an act. I’m good at fitting in, like you are. Mum sent me and Liv to a therapist when they got divorced, to make sure we weren’t screwed up too badly, and he diagnosed me as an attention seeker, brought on by family trauma. But it wasn’t. I just wanted to be like Ken. So like him that he’d have to say, yes, you’re a chip off the old O’block.”
“You’ve done that,” I reminded him. “You’re a huge success! You’ve built up your own business from scratch, you’re constantly dating gorgeous women—”
“Again, like you,” said Jamie. “Not dating the gorgeous women, obviously, but from what Liv says, the guys aren’t too shabby, and you’ve done well. You got your degree, not your parents.”
I looked down at my fingers, where I’d chewed my nails. “I work in a shoe shop, Jamie.”
“You manage a very fashionable shoe shop. And now you run a life-coaching college.”
“Yes, one that’s about to close down through publicity that I brought on myself because I allowed a journalist to nose around.” I was biting back tears of frustration. “Everyone’s going to cancel their deposits, and demand their money back, and we won’t be able to carry on! It’s all over. And it’s my fault because I didn’t put my foot down hard enough about Adele and her stupid idea that marriage is the only thing smart girls should be doing. I should have talked to Venetia! I should have seen that she was only doing this for the money.”
He grabbed my hand. “Betsy, people will forget. No one believes that sort of feature anyway; it’s just tacky gossip—”
The Finishing Touches Page 34