by Wendy Holden
Her mother angled the paper away, and her thick forefinger, a forefinger that for as long as Alexa could remember had been plunged in washing-up bowls, grappling with peelers, hanging out washing or stirring mugs of instant coffee, now stabbed repeatedly at the bus tour ad. ‘You can go all sorts of places. Scotland, Wales, even Dutch bulb fields.’
‘Very nice,’ Alexa said acidly. Coach tours, how unbelievably dreary. How unbelievably cheap and miserable and provincial. The ad was inviting readers to book Christmas trips already, for something called a Turkey and Tinsel Tour. She felt almost physically nauseous.
‘They’re nice coaches these days,’ Mum was saying. ‘Got lovely toilets and everything.’
Toilets! Alexa shuddered with horror. No one said toilet. Or lounge. Or pardon.
‘Pardon?’ Mum said, looking at her.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Alexa muttered.
‘No, but you made a funny noise. Anyway, love, come on. Which one do you fancy?’ Her mother’s face was bright beside the newspaper.
‘Fancy?’ Alexa’s brain, normally so quick, was struggling to understand.
‘I thought it’d be just the thing to cheer you up. You and me could go on one, I thought. There’s a Lincolnshire Cheese Weekend . . .’
Her mother was suggesting she went on a coach tour?
‘A Whisky and Haggis Tour of Scotland . . .’ Mum went on cheerfully.
The words fell on Alexa’s amazed ears like cymbals on a stone floor. Lincolnshire Cheese Weekend? When she had stayed at Lincolnshire’s finest stately homes? Whisky and Haggis Tour of Scotland? When her previous experience of Caledonia was baronial piles with stalking, fishing, shooting and maids who packed up your clothes in tissue paper?
There was a painful sensation in her heart; was it breaking, or was this organ failure?
‘Or there’s Choirs and Steam Trains – that’s a three-day tour of Wales,’ Mum continued blithely.
Alexa was gasping for air. Wales! The only thing about Wales she cared about was the Prince of it.
‘I can’t,’ she managed in strangled tones. ‘I’m going to . . . to . . . to . . . London! Tomorrow!’
Mum looked amazed. ‘You what, love? London?’
She made it sound like Mars, Alexa thought contemptuously. ‘Yes. London. I’ve got a job interview there,’ she snapped, adding, in a wheedling voice, ‘Although I’m going to need you to lend me the train fare.’
Once Mum, stunned, had reeled back downstairs, Alexa snatched up the latest copy of Socialite from the top of the pile by her bed.
She had almost forgotten what optimism felt like. But now all her old determination came roaring back. Working at Socialite, she would meet more influential people in a week than she had managed in three years at university. Once she had installed herself, she could spin the web in which she intended to catch a very grand fly indeed.
She flicked to the magazine’s party pages. She was not the only one catching a grand fly, by the looks of it. Leading London socialite Lady Florence Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe seemed to have been promoted.
Frotton Park’s celebrated annual charity polo competition got off to a dramatic start when the Hon. Fizzy Slutt slid out of the saddle after scoring. Fortunately billionheir fiancé James Hugh-Fortune was on hand to mop Fizzy’s fevered brow, as was best friend Lady Florrie Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe, who, as is increasingly the case these days, had HRH in tow.
Had the ubiquitous, all-conquering Lady Florrie managed to attain official royal girlfriend status?
Chapter 6
The front door of the flat slammed shatteringly. Lady Beatrice Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe, deep in the pillows and even deeper in dreams, reared up from under the bedclothes in panic. For a disoriented moment of blind-dark terror, she felt certain that someone, somehow, had breached the cast-iron security of the Palace Gate flat and she was about to feel the chill edge of a murderer’s axe in her skull. Then she realised what it really was. Her sister. Back from a night out.
‘Florrie,’ she growled into the pillow. ‘Bloody Florrie.’
Beatrice wondered angrily what time it was. She’d gone to bed at midnight herself, and hours must have passed since then.
She sat up, rolled over and fumbled for where the alarm clock was buried Through bleary eyes, she saw that it was three a.m. Fury seized her. Three bloody a.m.! If her sister had to come back at this hour, then why in God’s name couldn’t she open the front door quietly? But never in her life had Florrie evinced the smallest degree of concern for others. Which was infuriating enough in itself; what was more infuriating still was that she had always got away with it.
Too angry now to go to sleep, Beatrice flung her legs out of bed, padded across her bedroom carpet and opened the big white-panelled door of her room. Down the shadowy, picture-hung corridor, she could see the sitting room at the end – brilliantly lit; Florrie had turned all the lights on – and Florrie herself sprawled out with her shoes on over the pale yellow sofa.
‘My head!’ Beatrice could hear her moaning. ‘Beattie!’ came the sudden sharp yell. ‘Omigod, I’m dying, I swear it. Get up and get me some Nurofen, would you, there’s a darling.’
Beatrice winced. She hated being called Beattie; her name was bad enough without being abbreviated to sound like a cockney char, even if that seemed roughly the relationship she enjoyed with respect to her sister. She marched down the passage to the sitting room in her pyjamas and stood over her prone sibling, arms akimbo.
‘It’s three in the morning, for God’s sake.’
Yet despite occupying, as she almost always did, the moral high ground, there was, Beatrice sinkingly felt, something about Florrie that made this seem redundant.
It was that she was so lovely. The fact that normal rules simply didn’t apply to people who looked like her was something Florrie, in her sister’s view, took full advantage of. She was possessed of the kind of beauty that had people rushing up to give her flowers in the street, striking up conversations from the other side of the road and exiting Tube carriages and re-entering them just to have the pleasure of looking at her again. It was the sort that prompted streams of men to follow her down the pavement, and for some of them even to propose marriage. Beatrice knew this because all these things had happened, some more than once, at times when she had been out with her sister.
Even now, despite the beginnings of what would doubtless be one of Florrie’s famous hangovers, her sister still appeared far younger than her twenty years and as pure as if the mere thought of alcohol had never so much as crossed her alabaster brow.
One slender white arm was draped languidly over her lovely oval face with its perfect bow-shaped lips and flawless skin. Florrie’s beauty had an old-fashioned quality; it was easy to imagine her floating about thirties salons in shimmery column dresses, laughing tinklingly into martinis.
It was so bloody unfair, Beatrice thought. By most people’s standards, she herself was very attractive, being tall and slender as most of the family were. But next to Florrie, she was nothing.
She had her father’s black hair and dark complexion, while Florrie had inherited the golden beauty of their mother. But it wasn’t simply that she was dark and Florrie was fair. It was more subtle than that.
Florrie spoke in a lower, huskier voice that made all the difference. Her eyebrows were spread at a better angle. Beatrice had gazed often enough in the mirror to know that her nose, while similar to Florrie’s, was longer, lacking absolutely her sister’s delicious retroussé. Her mouth was also thinner and flatter than Florrie’s pert, peachy pout. More elongated here, more squashed there; in some ways the same, but ultimately absolutely not. Her face was like Florrie’s – but reflected in a hall of mirrors.
Florrie’s great big eyes – violet-blue to her own dark brown – were closed. Her long pale-blond hair was pulled back, revealing neat little ears adorned with, Beatrice noticed with a stab of fury, a pearl earring that looked suspiciously like one of her own. A
nd which, more to the point, she had already refused to lend Florrie some days ago. Draped carelessly over the sofa, Florrie’s long, slender body with its elegant small breasts looked longer, slenderer and paler than ever in a minidress of some thick, pale, pearly material. Beatrice recognised the Valentino that Igor, the oligarch’s son, had recently presented Florrie with. There was a big orange stain on the front of it that looked like ketchup.
Pale high-heeled sandals, one of which had smeared mud on the cushions and one of which had its strap broken, hung off long, delicate white feet. The sandals were hers too, Beatrice saw, outraged. Her new ones. She hadn’t even worn them yet.
Please God, Beatrice prayed, let her leave this flat soon. Please God let Ned propose so she, Beatrice, could become Marchioness Dymchurch, have her own estate and fortune and get away from her bloody sister.
He had, she was sure, been within a hair’s breadth of asking her to marry him tonight, but then the waiter had interrupted and asked whether he wanted gravy. The result was that Ned, incapable of holding two thoughts in his head at once, had never got back to the subject, for all her efforts to lead him there.
‘The Nurofen, darling?’ Florrie drawled.
‘Get it yourself,’ Beatrice said unsympathetically. But it was three in the morning – probably quarter past by now – and Florrie had wrecked her new sandals and, by the look of it, lost one of her earrings.
Her sister opened the huge, dewy, violet-blue eyes that could look so bored and blank but which now expressed hurt, surprised innocence. ‘Darling!’ she chided. ‘You might get it for me. You really might. I feel terrible.’ She rolled over and groaned, but she even did that beautifully, Beatrice noticed, the deep-cut back of the dress emphasising her pale and delicate shoulder blades. ‘Perhaps I should lay off those Aladdin’s Cave cocktails,’ Florrie muttered into the pale primrose sofa cushions.
‘They’re the ones that cost two hundred pounds each, aren’t they?’
Florrie rolled back, her expression impish, and nodded her head enthusiastically before clutching a cushion to it and groaning. ‘They’re yummy.’
‘How did you afford them?’ Beatrice demanded, knowing that her sister had spent her way through her entire monthly allowance a fortnight ago.
‘Oh darling,’ Florrie sighed. ‘Not all that Genghis Khan stuff again.’
‘Genghis Khan?’
‘Oh, silly me, I mean Nelson Mandela.’
‘Nelson Mandela?’
‘You know what I mean. Financial responsibility and all that.’ Florrie yawned.
Not for the first time, Beatrice reflected that the hundreds of thousands that had been poured into her sister’s education might just as well have been poured into a black hole and to all intents and purposes had.
She and Florrie were two of ten children, although only they and their brother had that particular combination of mother and father. Lord Whyske and Lady Annabel had had six marriages between them, of which the union producing herself and Florrie was their second in both cases. She, Ed and Florrie were, as Beatrice saw it, the centre of the family Venn diagram, although it was painfully obvious that hardly ever were they the centre of their parents’ thoughts. Lady Annabel moved constantly between social events; Lord Whyske, meanwhile, seemed always to be in meetings with lawyers – about business or his latest divorce. And when he wasn’t, he made a point of disagreeing with whatever Lady Annabel had said on any topic. There was no love lost between them; Beatrice had learnt that the only constant of her parents’ behaviour was that they always took opposite viewpoints. Was it any wonder, she would muse, that of the three children her parents had had together, she herself was unnaturally controlling, Florrie was semi-feral and of Ed the least said the better?
She emerged from these thoughts to find her sister looking at her pleadingly from behind her cushion.
‘I really do need a Nurofen, darling. I had several Aladdin’s Caves practically to myself. And then I danced for ages.’ She began to hum ‘Brown Sugar’ and moved her arms languidly about. ‘Omigod, we had such fun. HRH and I were sticking our tongues out at each other. He was on great form.’
Dread reared up in Beatrice like a terrified horse. Of course, it had always been a danger. Florrie had been a member of the young royals’ set for some time, albeit a star in one of the more distant galaxies. But now the papers were beginning to pick up on it. There had been something in Socialite just the other day.
The idea of her sister being linked romantically to the ruling house was too ghastly for words. For one thing, it would completely overshadow her own wedding – always presuming it happened. For what was a mere marchioness compared with a princess, especially a princess who looked like Florrie?
‘I thought you were out with Igor,’ she said accusingly.
‘We’re taking a break from each other,’ Florrie said vaguely.
This was not, so far as Beatrice was concerned, good news. Admittedly she had never liked Florrie’s Russian lover and the way he sat about their flat demanding, in a rolling accent, the answers to questions like ‘Why have one London mansion when you can have two?’ and ‘Why queue up with the losers in first class when you can have a plane to yourself?’ Igor’s father owned, among other things, an airline business, and Igor had his own Learjet on permanent standby. ‘Igot’ seemed a more suitable name, Beatrice thought, given how frequently his listeners were reminded of his possessions and his father’s wealth. According to his son, Igor Senior earned ten thousand pounds an hour just in interest.
Ned had been disgusted the weekend Igor had crashed a shooting party at the Whyske family seat and blasted everything in sight with a Kalashnikov with ‘Rock and Roll’ stamped on the side. When, apparently for fun, he shot the bowler off the head of the butler delivering the guns’ lunch to the moor, Beatrice had found her calls to Ned unanswered for weeks.
But while Igor was a liability, he was less of a risk to her own happiness than a prince of the blood royal. Oligarchs’ sons attracted little general attention; they were two a penny after all.
‘Why the break with Igor?’ Beatrice asked nervously.
Florrie stretched her arms in the air and gave a voluptuous sigh. ‘He’s a bit demanding,’ she said with a smile.
She wasn’t joking, Beatrice knew. Some of Igor’s requirements were most unusual, even though Florrie had accepted them in her usual breezy way. Her sister was, Beatrice had discovered since they had started sharing the flat, quite startlingly open about sex, usually in the kitchen on Sunday mornings as Beatrice made tea and the Russian snored in Florrie’s bedroom. Beatrice, narrowly avoiding slopping boiling water over her wrists, felt the insight into Igor’s preferences didn’t make liking him any easier.
‘Oh, I’m going to make a cup of tea,’ Beatrice said jumpily, twisting so hard on her bare heel that her skin burnt against the carpet.
‘Make me one, will you, darling?’ Florrie called as Beatrice stomped in the direction of the flat’s smart black and stainless-steel galley kitchen.
As she waited for the kettle to boil, Beatrice strove to calm herself down. Florrie had been out with the prince. But so what? The prince had taken lots of girls out. It was not a serious gesture, nor was Florrie, Beatrice was fairly sure, seriously interested in him, whether as a person or a prince. And particularly the latter. Social class was not a subject that interested Florrie. Duke, dustman, it was all the same. All that mattered was whether they amused her. Or whether she wanted to sleep with them.
Besides, making an effort, pursuing something, was not Florrie’s style. She never made a play for anyone. Not even her worst enemy – which was what Beatrice frequently felt like – could accuse her of man-eating. The far more depressing truth was that Florrie just attracted men like jam drew wasps, simply by virtue of existing. She never tried in the least, which of course made her all the more irresistible.
Beatrice poured the water into two mugs and carried one through to Florrie, who had now left the sitting ro
om and was settled happily in Beatrice’s bed. ‘Mine’s all unmade.’ She smiled beseechingly.
‘Your trouble is that you’re lazy, Florrie,’ Beatrice grumbled as she passed the tea into her sister’s frail hands. ‘You really must be the idlest girl in Britain.’
‘I know!’ Florrie beamed, her smile lighting up her face and showing a row of small, even pearly-white teeth. ‘Aren’t I awful?’
Chapter 7
It was a few days afterwards, and in the sitting room of the flat, the telephone was ringing. Beatrice dived between the antique furniture to answer it.
‘Darling!’ exploded the other end.
‘Mummy!’ Beatrice beamed, relieved that her mother had finally responded to her frantic texts and answerphone messages transmitting the triumphant news. Ned Dymchurch had proposed at last, which meant that Lady Annabel, whose organisational skills were as formidable as the rest of her, could finally sink her teeth into the wedding.
‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it?’ she burst out, unable to stop herself.
‘Amazing!’ cried Lady Annabel.
‘I can’t believe it!’ Beatrice exclaimed. It had indeed been a close-run thing. The sommelier, tiptoeing purposefully towards their ice bucket, had almost done for it this time. Only Beatrice seizing the bottle herself and sloshing it violently into both their glasses had saved the moment.
‘Me neither, darling. All my dreams have come true!’ There was a little yelp of ecstasy at the end of Lady Annabel’s sentence. ‘So, is our princess there?’ she added.
‘Princess?’ Beatrice frowned. Her heart began to hammer. ‘Princess who?’
She realised in a flash that they were talking at cross-purposes. Of course they were, she chided herself bitterly. What had she been thinking of, to imagine her mother was remotely interested in her?