‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Honey shrieked back at her. ‘Do you know who I am? Daddy sued the last person who threatened to treat me like anyone else, and he won’t think twice about doing it again.’
I looked over at Portia and our eyes met again in a look of shared disbelief, but the rest of her face was concealed behind the magazine. I suspect she was hiding her suppressed giggles – the same ones I was trying to suppress by applying my lip-gloss.
Miss Bibsmore grinned. ‘He can sue ‘imself sick far as I’m concerned. I is what I is. I spent the first nine years of my life in a pram! If I wanted to see the light I ‘ad to peer out from under the canopy. No footman, no butler, no servant for me, just a pram and an old tartan rug that kept falling off. Then, when I was well enough to get out of the pram, they put my legs in these braces.’ With that, Miss Bibsmore hiked up her skirt and stuck one of her metal-encased shins athletically up in the air. ‘So if you think I’m afraid of your father setting a pack of nancy fancy lawyers on me, you’ll be disappointed.’
‘Well, perhaps the school will feel differently,’ Honey began mildly, but there was an obvious threat there.
I looked at Portia and Portia looked at me. We were struggling to stop our eyebrows riding up our foreheads by this point. Neither of us knew what to say.
Honey, on the other hand, was far from stuck for words. ‘… when my lawyers shower them in litigation suits for allowing an insane old witch like you to care for me.’
Miss Bibsmore’s eyes were glinting gleefully as she asked, ‘Insane am I? Well then, you had better watch out all the more, ‘adn’t you?’
Portia rose imperiously from her bed, clearly deciding enough was enough. ‘Thank you, Miss Bibsmore, I think we’re all clear now and we wouldn’t want to keep you from your rounds.’ She spoke with a calmness of one whose family traced its roots back to the Domesday Book and had survived the Catholic purgings of England with their title and lands intact.
Miss Bibsmore seemed to concede Portia’s suggestion. That is, she stuck her lower lip out and humphed. One thing was certain, though: she was on the warpath and Honey had been marked down as Enemy Number One.
‘I am so complaining,’ Honey muttered under her breath. Then she turned to Portia. ‘I’m calling Daddy now.’ She began to punch numbers into her phone, but Miss Bibsmore snatched the tiny little gem of a mobile from her, popped it in the pocket of her long skirt and shuffled out of the room. ‘And you can take that poor creature down to the pet shed an’ all. No pets in rooms or I’ll have you rusticated.’
Miss Bibsmore didn’t officially have the power to rusticate girls, but the fact that she even used the word proved she wasn’t to be messed with. I was definitely going to regret the thought running through my mind, but as I watched Honey’s mouth open and close in uncharacteristic helpless shock, I couldn’t help admiring Miss Bibsmore’s style. I was beginning to think I liked the cut of her jib. And as I caught Portia’s eye I got the feeling she might even be feeling the same way.
SIX:
God’s Law Versus Sod’s Law
Within seconds of Miss Bibsmore’s departure, Star and Georgina burst into our room in a tumble of long limbs, long hair and laughter. They tripped over my fencing kit, which had been dumped on the floor by Oopa, and landed on the floor in a giggling heap.
‘Guess what!’ asked Star, untangling herself from Georgina and dive-bombing onto Honey’s bed by the window. I looked at Honey, anticipating fireworks, but before she could formulate her put-down, Georgina declared, ‘It’s the best news ever!’
I thought they were going to mention how we’d all had our navels pierced in the break. I hadn’t had the mettle to tell them that Parental Control had made me take mine out. Star pulled Georgina onto the bed and waved me over.
‘Please tell me, Star’s finally being sanctioned?’ Honey hazarded sarcastically.
‘We’re sharing!’ cried Georgina, throwing her arm over Star’s shoulder. The two of them started bouncing up and down on the bed, punching the air with their fists.
‘Wow, that’s soooo cool,’ I told them enthusiastically, although really I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. I remembered a time when Star and I were considered the school freaks – not that I enjoyed being the school freak, obviously, but it meant we were closer than close. Besides, as far as Star was concerned, Georgina and Honey et al. were the school freaks. She hadn’t even wanted to be friends with Georgina initially – that was my idea. Now they were finishing each other’s sentences.
Georgina went, ‘Calypso! You have got to meet Indiamaca …’
Pulling a stray lock of her strawberry blonde hair from her mouth, Star added, ‘Yaah, she’s a new girl, an actual princess from Nigeria. Only she calls herself Indie.’
They were still jumping up and down on Honey’s bed. I guess Honey probably felt she wasn’t in a position to say anything as Georgina was the closest thing she had to a real friend. Even though Georgina knows how toxic Honey is, the two of them have known each other since they were four, when they were packed off to school at Hill House in Knightsbridge. They learnt to ride together, ski together, use Daddy’s plastic together and pull together. Plus their biological fathers still attend the same hunt meet, so I guess that gives them a bond that won’t ever totally be broken.
Watching Georgina’s exuberant bed-jumping, I was quite glad it wasn’t my bed now. The mattresses at Saint Augustine’s are about as comfortable as lying on lumpy porridge because we all jump up and down on them.
‘Calypso, she’s soooo nice you have to love her and also she’s got this amazingly cool limited edition Hermès bag. They covered it in a purple Nigerian fabric just for her. So individual,’ Star enthused.
‘And loads of vintage clothes, all purple because that’s her favourite colour,’ Georgina added.
‘Oh, how cool,’ I said, trying to get into the swing of their enthusiasm for this new girl.
‘And she plays guitar! I showed her one of my songs, Calypso, and she totally got it,’ Star said.
I should explain that Star writes these Gothic anthems about the despair and pointlessness of being a successful rock star’s daughter and the miserable privilege of her life in an all-girls boarding school. Love Star though I do, even I want to eat my own tongue when she starts playing her minor chord compositions.
‘She said she loved my angst. Isn’t that gorgeous?’
‘I love your angst too!’ I blurted for want of something more ridiculous to say.
Thankfully though, Star didn’t hear my pathetic suck-up attempt because Georgina had cut in breathlessly. ‘She used to go to Cheltenham Ladies’, only she said it was too plebbie. She’s already pulled loads of Harrow boys.’ Harrow on the Hill, known as The Dump on the Hump, was another toffer-than-thou school for boys. There was always a lot of debate amongst the girls of Saint Augustine’s about whether it was cooler to pull Eades boys or Harrow boys. Eades was a lot closer to us, which made Harrow seem more exotic, although that was mainly because we didn’t pull as many of them and they didn’t get to break our hearts as much.
Star went, ‘I told her about you and Freddie, Calypso, and she can’t wait to meet you. We both love her, don’t we, George? She’s our new best friend.’
‘I can’t wait to meet her either, she sounds really cool,’ I sort of lied. I say ‘sort of’ because while I was thrilled that my friends were in a great room together, I couldn’t help feeling a bit jealous. Okay, make that hugely jealous. Especially about Indiamaca, because if she was their New Best Friend that made me … the old best friend! And when did Georgina become George anyway?
I looked out over the lawns that trailed into the oak woods with their flaming leaves and wondered how long before the trees would be bare and we’d have snow. I love snow. Star and I used to sneak off up into the woods on our own in winter to make snow angels.
It’s a Saint Augustine’s tradition to have snowball fights with the new Year Seven girls. Once a year,
someone has to throw a snowball at Sister Constance as she steps out for her morning perambulations (that’s what she calls her meditative wanders though the school grounds and woods). Sister just laughs these attacks off and throws snowballs back at us – unlike the lay teachers, who, if you hit them with a snowball, shower you in blues.
Once Star was gated for hitting Ms Topler, our evil English teacher. It was not only an overreaction but resulted in Star’s parents and every member of Dirge turning up at the school to complain. Star’s mad extended family is like a pack of wild things when they’re on a mission. All the members of Dirge and their roadies and friends think of Star as a surrogate daughter. It’s so sweet when they all turn up for Parent Teacher Day, and the school is infiltrated with long-haired tattooed men and their wildly dressed rock chick girlfriends.
Star says parents don’t pay the equivalent of twice the average annual wage in order to have their daughters taught by teachers who have no sense of fun. I think Sister Constance agrees because she overruled the gating and Ms Topler got a telling off.
But now as I sat listening to my friends’ excited chatter about their new exotic friend, I wondered if maybe Star would prefer to do snow angels with ‘George’ now, or purple star angels with Indie! So much for Sister Constance’s rule about not sharing with the same girl two terms in a row, I thought to myself bitterly.
‘So much for Sister Constance and her rule about not sharing with the same girl two terms running,’ Honey sneered, eerily echoing my own thoughts.
‘Sod’s Law, darling.’ Georgina shrugged as she air-kissed Honey. ‘But anyway, tell me about your summer in Kenya, darling,’ Georgina asked airily. I noted the way she pronounced Kenya Keenyah. ‘Star and I had the best time in LA with Calypso,’ she told her, grinning at me fondly.
I was always very aware of the way the other girls spoke when I came back from LA. The way you speak defines you, and after four years here, I pretty much sound like them. Even so, my accent still lets me down when I spend too long in LA, which leaves me open to very bad pisstakes of the way I speak. Ironic, given that in LA everyone does very bad piss-takes of my English accent.
‘Absolutely terrific,’ Honey replied, stroking Absinthe’s mauve fur with her mauve-coloured nails.
I wondered what Miss Bibsmore would say about her nails. I suppose Miss Bibsmore hadn’t terrified Honey that badly or she would have legged it to the pet shed with Absinthe.
I was looking over at Portia, who had barely said a word. I wondered if, like me, she was feeling left out, or whether she was really absorbed by the magazine she was reading and rereading.
Suddenly Honey dropped Absinthe like a bag of sugar on the bed and started posing in front of the mirror. ‘Goffy – that’s what we call Mummy’s latest husband, Lord Aginet – bought me Oopa, the most adorable manservant ever.’
Star and I rolled our eyes at one another, but Honey didn’t notice as she played with her expensively long, Nicky Clarke-personally-coloured hair. ‘Portia met him,’ she continued. ‘Darling, didn’t you think him adorable?’ she asked rhetorically, not even looking at Portia for confirmation. ‘He was a refugee. The luckiest refugee in the world as it turns out. Goffy discovered him in Nairobi and said I could have him.’
‘He’s a man, not a discovery, Honey,’ I blurted before I could stop myself.
‘Yes, you really should pay more attention in biology, darling,’ Star added, dragging out the word daaaahrling in the OTT way Honey did.
‘Oh, what would you know with all your father’s plebbie hangers-on,’ Honey snapped back, referring to the roadies who hung around Star’s family’s estate in Derbyshire, where they did a spot of valeting (between spliffs) when the band wasn’t touring.
‘They’re roadies and friends, actually. At least I don’t go round referring to people as manservants or exploiting refugees. What century are you from anyway?’
‘Yes, darling, how old are you really? Underneath all that surgery of yours?’ Georgina teased. The smile on her face didn’t do anything to break the chill in the air, though. I had never heard Georgina openly tease Honey. She and Honey, well, apart from the odd falling-out, were always civil to one another.
Honey ignored the remark, or at least she appeared to as she began brushing her hair. ‘Honestly, Oopa would lay down his life for me and little Absinthe,’ she sighed, as if relishing the idea of poor Oopa lying dead in a ditch for the sake of her and her rabbit. ‘But enough of me,’ she said, speaking directly to Georgina. ‘How’s your padre, darling? Daddy said he had a drink with him at his club recently and invited Koo-Koo and him to join us for Christmas in Saint Moritz.’
No one ever mentions Georgina’s father unless she does. Sure enough, I noticed her eyes welling up with tears. Her father divorced her mother a couple of years ago after his second bypass operation. After her mother had nursed him back to health, he had announced that he felt ‘suffocated’ by her and that if he was going to die in the near future – which looked highly probable – he’d rather do it in the arms of a younger, less intelligent (he actually used the words ‘supportive’ and ‘less demanding,’ but Star says it amounts to the same thing) woman than Georgina’s mother.
Georgina had a bit of a scary brush with bulimia over it and she’s still really cut up about it. Catholics aren’t meant to get divorced, although Honey’s mother does it all the time. Not that all the girls at Saint Augustine’s are Catholic. Some parents merely send their daughters here because it’s conveniently close to Eades, where their sons and heirs go.
Georgina’s father had married Koo-Koo over the summer at what was once Georgina’s family seat in Gloustershire. Georgina used being with me in LA as her excuse not to attend the wedding, and we all took our cue from her and didn’t mention it. Koo-Koo is a twenty-nine-year-old and refuses to let Georgina stay overnight anymore. Koo-Koo says, ‘It’s better for everyone this way.’ As a consequence, Georgina barely sees her father now.
Honey knows about all this, of course. She was just mentioning him to get back at Georgina, to be cruel in the way small boys pull legs off bugs or older boys say they’ll txt you and never do.
Honey definitely hit her mark. Georgina looked miserable. I tossed her my lip-gloss but she didn’t even attempt to catch it, and it just landed on the floor, near her feet.
‘Oh my God, what’s that, darling?’ Star asked, breaking the toxic tension. Picking up a piece of dusty fluff from the top of the radiator, she held it up, pretending to examine it carefully.
‘Don’t worry,’ she announced in mock relief, ‘it’s just a piece of dust. For a minute there I thought it might be your brain, Honey.’
Georgina bent down and picked up the lip-gloss. She smiled at me as she applied it. Honey sneered, probably to give herself time to think up a sarcastic response, but Star pressed her advantage. ‘I always forget, darling, you don’t actually have a brain, do you, Honey? They sucked it out during the lipo.’
Georgina chucked me my lip-gloss and I started applying like mad. Who knew where this confrontation would end? Okay, so Honey was a walking advertisement for teen cosmetic surgery, but suggesting that she may have had liposuction was suggesting she may have once been fat, a taboo topic at Saint Augustine’s, where specialists were on tap if any girl showed the slightest sign of developing an eating disorder. But as everyone knows, Saint Augustine girls are slim – mostly because they feed us inedible grey slops.
Honey smiled evilly. ‘Star, you are too, too hilarious. How fortunate your parents are giving you their full support to break into vaudeville.’
Star’s response was to pull the lip-gloss out of her pocket and apply it ostentatiously close to Honey’s face. ‘Wear your pain like lip-gloss’ was one of our secret mottos. Lip-gloss is a girl’s biggest asset when dealing with difficult situations. When Star and I were out of the cool-loop, we used to use it as a secret sign to show we weren’t dealing with something. It made me feel a bit better seeing Star use our special sign
language.
And then out of the blue, Portia remarked, ‘Oh yes, lip-gloss. What a good idea,’ and although she didn’t apply any she smiled at me warmly. It seemed significant.
SEVEN:
Aloof Demeanours Versus the Scent of Eau de Parbitch
Georgina doesn’t like to get involved in Honey’s issues with other girls. None of us do, really, and so, keen to change the subject, Georgina grabbed the Tatler Portia was reading and asked her, ‘So darling, what about you? Good summer? Calypso, Star and I had our navels pierced, see!’ She and Star both lifted their shirts to expose their rings.
I was about to come clean and fess up when Portia looked Georgina straight in the eye and replied, ‘Hardly,’ her voice laced in pain.
I suddenly felt really guilty and self-obsessed. I hadn’t even bothered to ask about her summer when she’d asked about mine.
‘Mummy was killed in a car accident,’ she explained flatly and then picked up her magazine and adopted an absorbed look. None of us knew what to say to that, apart from Honey, of course.
‘Darling, how absolutely devastating,’ Honey remarked breezily, gathering up her rabbit and popping her into her matching mauve Prada pet bag. ‘I’m so sorry, but these things do happen.’ Her lower lip dropped in a look of regret as she gave the room a little wave. ‘I’m just going to take Absinthe down to the pet shed before the hideous Miss Bibsmore returns.’ She rolled her big violet eyes at the thought. ‘Do you want to come, darling?’ she asked Georgina.
Georgina looked up at her but not with the sort of look you could interpret. Star claims that one of the major reasons parents pay exorbitant sums of money to send their girls to Saint Augustine’s is so they can develop a poker face – known to the toff parents as an Aloof Demeanour, a sort of non-look. Honestly, if you could buy an Aloof Demeanour, effortless charm and a sense of entitlement on Bond Street, England’s boarding schools would be out of business in a day. Nuns are very good at poker faces. They’re very good at poker too. Sometimes when they invite us around for tea they cut us in on a game. They always beat us, but we only play for sweets, which they then insist we eat or take with us afterwards, so that’s okay.
A Royal Match Page 18