by Lucy Lord
‘Mais non!’ Jorge reverted to his father tongue, slamming the flat of his hand on the steering wheel and causing the car to swerve slightly. ‘Lo siento. But Papa – Henri – is also an artist. Quelle coincidence! You are right about the island providing inspiration – the light, the colours, the sky and the sea . . .’ He took one hand off the steering wheel again to gesture around at the silvery olive groves and colourful spring flowers bordering the road, and up at the cloudless blue sky.
‘Exactly! And that’s wonderful about your father – I have to say he looks the part.’ Bella laughed.
‘Oh yes, he likes the artistic image.’
‘I’d love to see some of his work.’
Bella was thrilled. Day two and already they’d met a local artist. Soon they’d be surrounded by fellow writers, and musicians, and sculptors, and poets . . . Her imagination was running away with her again.
‘In that case, I know exactly where to take you now.’ Jorge did a sudden U-turn in the middle of the road – his driving was erratic, to say the least. Bella looked over her shoulder at Daisy, strapped into her car seat, but she was grinning away as ever, apparently loving the impromptu fairground ride.
A couple of minutes later the car took a sharp turn to the left, down a steep, winding dirt track that was clearly leading to the coast. Dirt track wasn’t exactly the right expression though, thought Bella, not when the ‘dirt’ in question was white sandy rubble, bordered either side by thick, highly scented pine forest. These paths, leading to unspoilt coves of almost invariable beauty, were among her favourite things about Ibiza.
‘So where are you taking me?’
‘The Art Resort. It’s a beach bar and holistic health centre, run by a Swedish couple – the Larssons. They like to display paintings, photographs, sculptures – anything creative by local artists. Henri’s work is there, most of the time. I am sure they would like to meet a new local artist.’
‘Gosh, thanks – I mean merci, or gracias – I promise I’ll stop speaking English soon . . .’
‘No hurry.’ Jorge turned to smile at her again. ‘As we always say here, mañana . . .’
‘Mañana,’ Bella repeated, feeling even happier. Such a beautifully lazy sentiment.
As they descended the track, a girl came into view. She waved, and Jorge drew the convertible to a halt.
‘Hola, Summer!’
‘Hola, Jorge,’ smiled the girl. ‘Hi,’ she added to Bella in one of those indeterminate, yet educated, slightly Americanized European accents. ‘I’m Summer.’
Never had a name been more appropriate, thought Bella.
Summer was about five foot nine, a good three inches taller than Bella (who felt distinctly stumpy in comparison), with long, streaky blonde hair tied back in a simple plait. Her unmade-up face was perfectly proportioned, with high cheekbones, a pretty mouth that turned up naturally at the corners and large, wide-apart, dark-blue eyes that held you in a direct gaze. She was slim but not skinny, with beautifully shaped arms and shoulders revealed by a faded indigo vest top. Bella imagined that her long legs, hidden at the moment by a tiered white cotton maxiskirt, were equally exquisite. Her skin had that enviable golden hue, without so much as a hint of pink, that suggested Scandinavian genes.
‘Hi.’ Bella smiled back. ‘I’m Bella.’
‘Great to meet you, Bella.’ Summer reached over the half-up window and into the car, and they shook hands. The handshake was warm, dry and strong. She was liking this girl already.
‘And who is this?’ Summer looked over at Daisy, strapped into her little car seat. ‘Wow, she’s so beautiful!’
‘Thanks! I have to say I agree with you, but then I guess I’m biased.’ Bella peered back at Daisy, who was grinning up at Summer with glee. ‘Hey, Daisy, meet Summer. Summer, this is Daisy.’
‘Hi, Daisy,’ said Summer. ‘Is it OK if I hug her? I won’t take her out of her seat.’
‘Of course,’ smiled Bella, and opened the car’s back door to give Summer better access to her daughter. The girl leaned in and gave Daisy a gentle squeeze, showering her little face with kisses. Daisy grinned and gurgled some more from under her white, lace-bordered sunhat. ‘It looks as though she’s taken to you already.’
‘All the pequeños love Summer,’ said Jorge. ‘It is her job to look after them.’
‘Really? Where?’
Summer dragged herself away from Daisy to smile at Bella.
‘My mother teaches yoga on the beach, at dawn. There are very many “yummy mummies” here . . .’ Bella could hear her putting the words in inverted commas, as she rolled her cool, dark-blue eyes. ‘So I look after the babies, at the crèche . . .’
‘If I came down to the beach at dawn, to do some yoga, and get rid of my bloody baby weight . . .’
‘I see no baby weight,’ said Jorge. Bella smiled at him gratefully, even though he was lying through his perfectly white teeth.
‘. . . you could look after Daisy?’
‘For sure. It would be my pleasure.’ Summer handed Bella a card. ‘Call me.’
‘We’re on our way to meet your padres anyway,’ said Jorge. ‘Bella’s an artist . . .’
‘Oh, they’ll love you,’ smiled Summer. ‘I must go now, but hope to see you – and Daisy – soon on the beach.’
And she continued to walk up the sandy white track, turning once to give them another friendly wave.
‘So how do you know Summer?’ Bella asked, reluctantly dragging her gaze away from the gorgeous girl walking up the hill.
‘We were childhood sweethearts. You know – first love . . .’ Jorge shrugged nonchalantly.
‘Really? ’ Bella wondered why she was so surprised – they were certainly good-looking enough for one another. ‘So why didn’t it last?’
‘Does first love ever last? I suppose we both grew up.’
‘She’s very beautiful,’ said Bella wistfully.
‘Yes, she is. But there are many beautiful people in Ibiza.’
And Jorge turned to her with his dazzling white smile again.
Chapter 3
Tamara Gold pouted at herself in the mirror as she applied a third layer of mascara. The mascara was unnecessary, as the long, fluttery eyelash extensions were individually applied on a weekly basis, but Tamara had yet to learn the meaning of ‘less is more’.
Tamara had been a cute kid whose red hair, pretty freckled face and slightly goofy grin had landed her many a movie role and legions of fans. The child star was smoking weed by the time she was twelve, snorting coke at thirteen and had been in rehab three times by the age of fifteen. She had been clean for nearly ten years now, and intended to stay that way.
The grown-up movie star bore almost no resemblance to the child actress; so successful had her transformation been that few people remembered the goofy little redhead. The tiny frame that had enabled her to carry on playing ten-year-olds into her mid-teens had not blossomed as well as she’d hoped, so Tamara – encouraged by her unscrupulous parents – had paid for her first breast implants herself the day she turned sixteen. The teeth came next – Hollywood perfect veneers corrected the gappy grin shortly after the boob job, and ‘preventative’ botox three times a year kept her crooked dermatologist in the expensive brandy and cigars he favoured.
Freckles were out of the question for a movie goddess, so Tamara kept out of the LA sun and had her slender, boobalicious body spray-tanned twice a week by one of her many beauty therapists. The ginger hair was dyed a lustrous chocolate brown that now fell in heavy waves down to her most recent breasts, and contact lenses in a vast range of greens gave the impression that she had extraordinary eyes that lightened or darkened to match her mood. Only her parents and Jack, her fiancé, knew that they were really a sludgy shade of hazel. Tamara’s sexy, bee-stung pout was pure collagen, and two hours a day with a personal trainer gave her delicate frame the muscle definition that Hollywood now required.
In short, pretty much everything about Tamara Gold was fake. But th
e effect was stunning, and she knew it.
‘Tamara! Surely you must be ready by now?’ Jack Meadows, her fiancé, was rapping at the bathroom door impatiently. ‘Our first guests have arrived.’
‘Go greet them, then.’ Tamara checked herself out again in the multi-mirrored bathroom. ‘You’re good at that, with your educated charm.’ The final words were laden with bitter sarcasm.
She and Jack had met on the set of their first movie together, an enormously successful remake of Antony and Cleopatra, in which they’d fallen deeply in lust with one another. Their on- and off-screen romance had been so widely publicized – the new Liz Taylor and Richard Burton – that they now rivalled Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as Tinseltown’s most high-profile couple. ‘Jamara’ didn’t have quite the same ring to it as ‘Brangelina’, though. ‘Tack’ didn’t even bear thinking of.
Tamara thought she loved Jack – as much as she could love anyone, damaged little girl that she still was – but sometimes he could be a real pain in the ass. He had been educated at Dwight, one of the most prestigious boys’ schools in New York; Princeton, and then – to cap it all – the Lee Strasberg school of acting. He was respected, with or without her.
Whereas she had been a classic Hollywood car-crash kid, endlessly mocked in the tabloids, paparazzi constantly with their cameras up her skirt – even after she’d got clean, for chrissakes. Being with Jack gave her kudos. His kindness and decency also gave her the sense of security that had been lacking for most of her life. So she needed him.
But there were times when she thought, Screw you, Jack, I can do this on my own.
Now, having slithered into a tiny emerald green satin bikini that matched the brightest of her contact lenses, she looked into the mirror that reflected the mirror behind her, which gave her a great view of her perfect, tight little bottom.
‘Kiss my ass, Jack,’ she said, thrusting it out, kissing her own hand and patting it, and then kissing her reflection in the mirror. ‘And all you fuckers out there can kiss my ass too.’
She took one more look at herself and smiled. Yes, she looked beyond fabulous, as her gay hairdresser was wont to say.
She was ready to face her public.
*
Jack Meadows was thinking about a phone conversation he’d had with his mother that morning. His mom, who couldn’t stand Tamara, had been trying to persuade him to call the wedding off, and while she could be a little overbearing at times, Jack knew his mom always had his best interests at heart. The conversation had ended with Jack saying, somewhat weakly, ‘Dad likes her,’ and his mother finishing, triumphantly, ‘That’s a ridiculous argument, and you know it. Your father likes all pretty young girls who wear next to nothing.’
Which was a fair description of his dad, rock legend Filthy Meadows.
When he and Tamara had first met, in the hothouse environment that was a movie set, they had taken an instant shine to one another. Tamara, for all her faults, was clever and witty. Jack also sensed the vulnerability beneath the veneer, and had the urge to protect her. OK, so he wanted to get her into bed, too, but who wouldn’t? She was gorgeous.
The chemistry between them was something that couldn’t be faked, and one of the reasons that Antony & Cleopatra had been the highest-grossing movie of the year. There had been some narcissism on both sides, too. Jack, who at six foot three was about half a foot taller than most movie stars, had the same green eyes and lustrous black lashes as his fiancée – though his were real. His curly mop of black hair had been cropped short for the film, while hers had been hidden by the bobbed wig obligatory for anybody playing the Queen of Egypt. As they gazed into one another’s eyes for yet another close-up, it was almost like looking into a mirror.
Jack had been aware of Tamara for years – how could anyone not be? She was rarely out of the tabloids – but their paths had never crossed until the epic movie, mainly because of his mother’s insistence that her only child had a proper education. He’d been a straight-A student at his New York boarding school, studied English Literature at Princeton, and had only got into acting by chance. Despite (or perhaps because of) being surrounded by veterans of the film and rock world while growing up, he’d never wanted to pursue either route himself, and spent most of his school holidays lying in his favourite hammock, his face buried in a book.
In Jack’s final year at Princeton, Chad Junior Martell III, one of his best buddies, was meant to be playing Hamlet in the end-of-year show, but had got so hammered at a frat party that he was hospitalized for a couple of weeks – a combination of liver damage and head injuries.
‘Go on, Jack, do it for me?’ Chad had pleaded from his hospital bed. ‘I know you know the play inside out and back to front.’
‘Me? Act?’ Jack didn’t even like speaking in public. ‘Are you crazy, dude?’
‘For me?’ Chad had repeated. ‘There’s nobody else who could learn the lines in time, and I’m in enough crap as it is. If the show’s cancelled because of my bender, I could be out on my ass.’ He sensed Jack’s hesitation. ‘And I think you’d make a great Hamlet, with your goddamn annoying intelligence and introspection.’
Chad’s words proved prophetic. Jack made the best Hamlet that any Ivy League college had seen for years and, having conquered his initial stage fright, realized that he loved acting. If he wanted to act, he had to do it properly, though – which was why he’d enrolled at Lee Strasberg. It probably would have been easy for him, with his rock-star parentage, LA contacts and extraordinary good looks, to get crappy parts in crappy movies, but that wasn’t Jack’s style.
His first role had been in a critically acclaimed indie film about the Spanish Civil War; its juxtaposition of tragedy and wry humour had earned comparisons to the Coen brothers. That had been nearly ten years ago, and now he was a big, blockbuster star, while still retaining credibility. Johnny Depp – although quite a bit older than him – was about the only other movie star who could command lust and respect in equal measure. Men wanted to be him, and women wanted to fuck him.
And now he had Tamara.
He had proposed to her as she’d been giving him a particularly great blow-job, looking up at him with those long-lashed green eyes, so similar to his own (or so he believed at the time). By the time he’d come in her mouth he was already regretting it, but the studio loved the engagement, and Tamara had been so adorably, kittenishly grateful that he hadn’t had the heart to renege on his offer. As soon as news of their engagement hit the Press, their joint bankability had soared overnight.
And Tamara was beautiful, sexy and funny – when she chose to be. He was very fond of her, and most men on the planet would give their right arm to be in his shoes (if that wasn’t the most ludicrous mix of metaphors he’d ever entertained).
But he did know, with horrible certainty, that his mother was right.
*
‘Will her highness ever make an appearance, I wonder?’ Natalia Evanovitch languidly looked over the top of her enormous Chanel sunglasses at her friend Poppy Wallace.
The pool party was heaving now, Jack’s Spanish-style villa thronging with stars, starlets, rockers, groupies, agents, producers and money men – all clamouring to be heard under the blazing California sun.
‘Course she will, and who cares how late she is anyway? It’s her party and she can do what she wants to.’ Poppy sat up from the adjacent sunlounger to take a sip of her frozen Margarita through a kitschy neon pink straw.
‘She always does what she wants to. Little bitch.’
‘Aww come on, Nat – you don’t have to be so harsh on her. I think she had a pretty rough time growing up . . .’
Natalia, whose cold, dark childhood in Kiev had been more than ‘pretty rough’, snorted. ‘Oh, the poor little darling, struggling to handle all that wealth and adulation from such an early age. My heart bleeds for her!’ She clutched her chest dramatically, and Poppy chuckled, leaning back against the sunlounger again.
They were an amazing-looking pair of
blondes.
Natalia, nearly ten years older than Poppy’s thirty-four, was a little over six foot tall, with the longest, most elegant legs you were ever likely to see outside airbrushed photos in magazines. Diamond-encrusted clips held her platinum blonde hair off her exquisite, high-cheekboned face in a glamorous up-do. Her high-cut, halter-neck, silver swimsuit was also cut out at the sides, emphasizing her still-slender waist.
Poppy, by contrast, was the epitome of LA surfer girl chic – even though she was originally from the English Home Counties and had spent most of her adult life in London. Her blonde hair was loose and free-flowing around her shoulders, her Heidi Klein string bikini casual and sporty, and her tan (whisper it) was natural. She knew she shouldn’t, but she loved the feeling of the sun on her body, without any greasy gloop to stop the rays penetrating her skin.
She’d endured enough gloomy English winters to think ‘fuck it’ now that she was living in LA – whatever her agent, manager and dermatologist told her.
‘Do your best, you evil, ageing UVs,’ she said, happily turning her pretty face up to the sky. It was only slightly disingenuous – she was vain enough to spritz a weightless SPF-15 over her gamine features if ever they were at risk of burning.
‘You’ll regret it when you’re my age,’ said Natalia, whose all-over application of Factor-50 every morning was almost religious.
Poppy laughed again.
‘Oh sod off. You know you look fantastic.’
Poppy and Natalia had met a few years previously in London, at the launch of Poppy’s best friend Bella’s first art exhibition. Natalia, who had made a lot of money in her former life as a high-class hooker, had bought the majority of Bella’s paintings, and subsequently lent Poppy her ultra-modern, uber-luxurious villa in Ibiza as the venue for her wedding reception.
As Natalia smiled her feline smile, Poppy’s iPhone beeped.
‘Oooh, look Nat – it’s from Belles. Photo of my god-daughter. Isn’t she gorgeous?’ She passed the phone over, and Natalia, who had never had any maternal urges, smiled again.