by Wendy Holden
“Sounds like a real dreamboat.”
“Hey, well, you’ve got to know what you’re dealing with in this game,” Geri said huffily. “No point me steering you towards some sex god who turns out to be penniless and as gay as New Year’s Eve into the bargain.”
“No, absolutely,” said Anna, realising Geri sounded annoyed. Alienating her would not be a good idea. Not now, when, however mad her schemes sounded, they represented a better route to escape than any she could think up herself. “Thanks. Really, he sounds wonderful. Just the job.”
“Good,” said Geri, mollified. “Anyway, get here as early as you can. And don’t forget—look gorgeous.”
***
How amazingly self-confident, thought Cassandra as she trotted into the entrance hall holding her invitation like a shield. How almost show-offy for the Tressells to have the party in their own house. Only people with nothing to hide and everything to reveal dared expose their homes to the scrutiny of other St. Midas’s mothers and fathers, most of whom, when their own children’s birthdays came round, preferred to pay up the thousands demanded by Hollywood theme restaurants for a couple of burgers, a shake, and a photo opportunity with an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike.
“It’s very cutting edge,” was all Geri had said to Anna of the Tressell home and current world headquarters of her operations, a converted former prison in Islington. Well, Anna thought, entering in Cassandra’s Gucci-heeled wake, there was certainly plenty of glass. Through the transparent hall roof, the grey London sky brooded above. She wondered what the drill was when, as it occasionally must, a passing pigeon let fly a splatter or two. She glanced briefly at the shattered-blue-glass-effect floor, before realising that banging noise was Zak trying to shatter it further by removing his black patent shoes and using the heels as hammers.
“Stop that now.” Geri detached herself from a milling group in the light, circular hall where, stuffed as usual into her plunging uniform, she was rounding up the arrivals and their broods with the efficiency of a sheepdog.
Among the throng, Anna spotted Allegra shepherding a child in a pink net tutu. Slobodan shuffled in behind her with a pair of basin-cut boys, looking, as usual, as if he’d just got out of bed; Anna wondered whose. A plump, dark-haired girl who confirmed Anna’s worst suspicions about Jett’s video was being clung to by a pale, frightened-looking child with noticeably scarred knees—Otto Greatorex, Anna realised. A slender and extremely handsome Japanese man was visibly buckling under the weight of a very large, pink-faced child in a—possibly real—tiara, whom he held in his arms; this, Anna realised, must be Hanuki, the first male Japanese Norlander. Well, he’d certainly got his hands full.
The parents and godparents, distinguishable by their un-hassled expressions, brimming glasses of champagne, and complete absence of any children near them, stood chatting in one group while the nannies and children formed a loose collective at the other end of the vast hall. The pink-faced child, Anna noticed, had already thrown up something purple and sticky down the front of Hanuki’s white shirt. Beside her, Zak was banging on the floor again.
“Children and nannies in there,” Geri shouted above the chaos, pointing at a room in which serried ranks of forms and tables could be glimpsed. “Parents and godparents this way.” She pointed to where a waitress stood by a door bearing a tray with yet more champagne glasses.
“Not so fast,” Geri murmured as Anna headed automatically after Slobodan, Alice, Trace, and the rest of them. “You’re helping me with the nibbles. Best way for you to meet people. I’ve OK’d it with Kate, so Cassandra can’t object. Leave Zak with Trace.”
Zak looked mutinous as the massive Trace, her face set, clasped his fat wrist in her strong grip and whisked him off into the children’s room.
“You look very smart, by the way,” Geri said. “Lost weight, haven’t you?”
Anna nodded and grinned. “All thanks to dish soap.”
Geri stared. Then her face relaxed. “Oh, I see, that old Fairy Liquid trick. Do that, do you?”
“No, not me,” said Anna. “Cassandra.”
Although the housework workout had no doubt helped, it had been Cassandra’s habit of obliterating temptation by squeezing dish soap over Zak’s leftovers and any other cooked food she found in the kitchen that had really made the difference. A pizza and several sandwiches Anna had made for her own supper had, several times, been rendered inedible this way. She had been furious at the time, but now, given that her trousers hung slackly from her waist and she’d managed to tuck her shirt in, she felt almost grateful to Cassandra. Almost.
“The idea,” Geri was explaining, “is that the grown-ups have their party while the children have their tea, their games, and the party entertainer. Then we all get together for the Promises auction and the disco.” Gingerly, she touched the skin beneath her eyes, careful not to smudge any of her precisely applied makeup. “I’m knackered. I was up more or less all night wrapping forty Pass the Parcels in recycled paper containing Third World–friendly items. Did you realise that these days you have to have a present between every layer?”
As yet more sleek parents and sleeker offspring arrived, Geri hustled Anna into a vast kitchen off the main hall in which a production line of chefs was busy making faces from basil, mozzarella, anchovies, and olives on a collection of mini pizzas. “Olives!” whispered Anna. “I didn’t think children liked olives.”
“Well, these ones do,” said Geri. “What’s more, they can distinguish between about ten different types. Olive oil as well—they spend so much time in Tuscany they think ‘Like A Virgin’ is a song about first cold pressings.”
Anna giggled. “They’re very glamorous, these chefs,” she muttered. Male and female, each one had the heavy eyebrows, lithe limbs, and bee-stung lips of a supermodel. They smouldered at each other as they arranged the anchovies into smiles.
“They’re from some screamingly expensive Italian restaurant by the river, apparently,” Geri hissed. “But I’ve got better things lined up for you than them. Take these.” She thrust a plateful of perfect miniature bacon sandwiches at Anna, each complete with tiny rind, baby crusts, and heart-shaped dab of tomato ketchup beside it. Each bore a plastic skewer bearing the initials SS. “Make sure you eavesdrop on all the conversations,” Geri warned, as they sailed forth through a sliding aluminium side door that led from the kitchen to a large, light, glass-walled reception room. “They’re hilarious. I once overheard three women talking for hours about vaginal sprays and how much their husbands earned.”
Giggling, they swept into the crowd.
“Why do people in England despise success so much?” a woman in violently coloured clothes was saying to a toned, tanned man with close-cropped white hair as Anna and Geri started to circle the room.
“Who’s that?” Anna mouthed.
“Julian, of course,” said Geri, her eyes fixed longingly on her employer’s face. “Oh, the woman? Son at St. Midas’s. He’s got the concentration span of a gnat. They’re hoping he’s autistic, I believe. She’s a happening fashion editor.”
“Looks more like a what’s happened fashion editor,” observed Anna, taking in the pink hair, yellow dress, and orange tights, topped off with a large black fedora. She looked with interest at Julian Tressell, short-cropped, sandalled, and dressed from head to foot in white linen, his only decoration a CCCP Soviet–era Lenin badge in deep red enamel and gold.
“Yes, she is rather post-nuclear.”
“And who’s that?” Anna slid her eyes meaningfully at Kate Tressell talking to a pneumatic blonde in a tight white dress and hot pink heels that added at least a foot to her height. Beside her exuberant beauty, Kate’s hemp suit, though doubtless eye-wideningly expensive, looked drab and monastic.
“Champagne D’Vyne,” whispered Geri. “You know, that spectacularly thick society columnist. She’s supposed to be getting married next month to an
unfeasibly rich landowner called Juan Legge, but it’ll never happen. She always trades them in at the last minute for something better.”
“Lucky her.” Anna took in Champagne’s ripples of ice-blonde hair, undulating figure, and spectacular tan. Netting landowners must be a breeze when you looked like that. She strained to hear the conversation.
“Are you thrilled about the wedding?” Kate was asking.
“Oh yah,” Champagne replied in a bored voice. “Beside myself.”
“Will you be wearing white?”
“God no. I thought Versace.”
Anna and Geri caught each other’s eye.
“You go that way and I’ll go this,” Geri hissed, shoulders shaking. “Meet you in a minute.”
Anna veered away and headed towards a pair of matronly thirtysomethings in sensible heels.
“…well, at the moment we’ve got what you might describe as a below stairs problem.”
“Oh really? Does it involve wearing paper pants?”
“No, the nanny, silly.”
“Oh. Of course. The nanny. Oh, yes please. Bacon sandwiches, how adorable.”
Anna now bore down on a thin woman with an Anna Wintour crop and a lilac cashmere cardigan listening to a tall, haughty blonde in a lime green lacy dress.
“We know he’s a boy, yes. Well, if he has my looks and Marco’s brains, he’s bound to be fine.”
And both of your modesty, thought Anna, proffering her wares.
“No thank you.” Both women looked at the food in horror. “What are we going to call him?” continued the blonde. “Well, we were thinking about Wyndham, but it sounds a bit bottomy, and then Louis, but when you come to think of it, that’s rather redolent of lavatories as well…”
Anna stood as the woman in the cardigan, apparently unable to stop herself, slid out the skewers from a couple of sandwiches, peeled off the bread topping and, without moving anything from the tray, crammed the pieces of bacon hurriedly into her mouth.
“Yes, you’ve got to be careful,” she agreed, amid much loud sucking of red-tipped fingers. “You need to steer clear of anything that’s going to be pilfered by centre forwards or triplicated in the nursery. We had the most awful time—our first choices were Atlanta or Aurora, both once solidly B1, but now skidding firmly into C2 territory, I’m afraid. We considered Cheyenne, but…”
“So trailer trash.”
“Mmm, so in the end we called her Doris.”
“Lovely. So millennium.”
Anna drifted away to where a reed-thin woman in a linen dress with eyebrows plucked into surprised-looking arcs was talking animatedly to an exhausted-looking man. “I went straight to my homeopathic doctor, and she said my stomach was like a pond that hadn’t been cleaned for years.”
The man paled. They both shook their heads at the sandwiches.
“Vegetarian,” said the man.
The woman’s eyes lit up. “Really? Are you? How very interesting…”
“That was Frank Gibbons,” whispered Geri as she swung by with her plate of sandwiches. “Siena’s godfather. Edits the Guardian.”
“Really? Who’s that he’s with?”
“His wife. He’s so busy that the only time they get to speak to each other is at parties.”
Anna grinned. Geri, she noticed, had got rid of even fewer sandwiches than she had herself.
“Last round before we refuel,” Geri said as they parted ways again. “We’ll need to reheat. I’m not sure your financier has arrived yet, by the way. Probably delayed closing the deal that will make his fortune. Even more of his fortune,” she added hurriedly.
Anna moved off in the direction of two more glamorous women in skimpy dresses and the type of strappy sandals that, on lesser mortals, would have been a display case for bunions and stubbed, square toes.
“…unfortunately he’s at that stage where he thinks bottoms and poo are hilarious,” one was saying to the other.
“Tell me about it,” said the other woman. “Marcus’s hand is practically welded to his you know what. Dreadfully embarrassing when we were on holiday—there we were, outside the Fairfaxes’ wonderful palazzo, feasting on pasta, when Mango Fairfax suddenly says what on earth is Marcus doing? And we all look and—well, frankly, he had his hand on it and was yanking it up and down for all it was worth…don’t suppose we’ll be asked there again. No thank you, I don’t eat bacon.”
Or anything else by the look of you, Anna thought as she sailed off, almost colliding with Geri who was hurrying urgently towards her.
“Look, look, he’s over there. Just arrived. Your financier. Talking to those men,” hissed Geri. “Grey suit. Quick, girl, get over there with your nibbles.”
Obediently, Anna wove her way through the throng to the other side of the room where a group of smartly dressed men were having a loud and braying conversation. She approached the grey back—it seemed rather broad—and hovered. A narrower navy one next to it turned and grinned at her. “Delicious,” he said, stuffing two in his mouth at once. “Sandwiches aren’t bad either.”
Anna rolled her eyes. The old ones, she thought, were most definitely the old ones. Irritatingly, the grey back was the last of the group to turn and attack the sandwiches. And when he did, Anna wished he hadn’t bothered. Not only was he plump, pink-faced, and almost bald, he was also Orlando Gossett. Anna threw a burning mortar of a glance over to where Geri stood, open-mouthed, on the other side of the room. Was this her idea of a joke? Her pale face and shocked expression, however, suggested she was as surprised as Anna was.
“Orlando…what…what on earth are you doing here?” Anna stammered. Gossett looked at her in astonishment.
“You’re very familiar,” he boomed. “But, since you ask, I’m one of Savannah’s thousands of godfathers.”
“Oh, are you?” asked the navy suit. “Me too.”
“Yah, Julian’s an old mucker of mine—built me an outdoor sauna recently, as it happens,” honked Gossett. “Quite an achievement considering I live in a mansion block in Fulham. Actually,” he said, screwing his small blue eyes up at Anna, “you know…you are familiar actually. Didn’t we meet at a wedding or something?”
“Yes, in Scotland,” said Anna. “Thoby and Miranda’s.”
“Gosh, your company gets around, doesn’t it? Well, the eats here are a damn sight better than they were at Bollocks’s. Worst food in the world, that was. Canapés looked like cat sick. Tasted like it too.”
“Can’t say I’ve ever tasted cat sick,” Anna retorted. “But the food was dreadful.” Even if the waiters weren’t, she added mentally, a sudden vision of Jamie sliding across the screen behind her. She was jolted from her musings by what felt like her spine leaping out from between her shoulderblades. Orlando Gossett was slapping her on the back.
“I remember now. Course. Friend of Lavenham’s, weren’t you?”
Anna nodded.
“Enjoy the other day?”
“What other day?”
“Lavenham’s wedding, of course.”
It felt as if a bucket of freezing water had been flung in her face. “Wedding?”
“Yah. Whirlwind stuff. You didn’t go? Actually, I didn’t either. No one did—tiny private do at the Chelsea Register Office, Lavenhams and de Benhams only, and then off to this island—Knacker, I think it’s called.”
“You mean Necker,” said Geri, who had just floated up. “How ghastly. Necker’s so five minutes ago. Anyone who’s anyone’s honeymooning in the Maldives. Or going backpacking, like Lachlan Murdoch…” The jaunty note in her voice dried up as she saw Anna’s white-green face.
“De Benhams?” stammered Anna, her tongue moving slowly around her dry mouth. “Seb’s married Brie de Benham?”
Orlando nodded emphatically. His eye caught one of the waitresses circulating with glasses of champagne and he threw
back his head to drain his existing flute. Champagne cascaded down his shirt front. “Yah,” he bubbled, foaming at the mouth. “Everyone’s thrilled. Lavenham’s mother, particularly. Apparently couldn’t wait to see the back of the last girlfriend.”
Anna staggered away with her tray and headed out to the kitchen. It was empty; the chefs were presumably busy with the children. She sat down at the counter and stared, stunned, into space, unable to decide whether the numb feeling inside her was devastation or indifference. Seb married to Brie de Benham. It was so utterly predictable she almost wanted to laugh. So expected—and yet not expected at all. Geri rubbed her sympathetically on the back. “Never mind. He was a bastard. Treated you like shit.”
Anna’s eyes pricked. Her throat ached. She sniffed. No, she told herself. I will not cry. She wiped a hand across her nose. “It’s the shock, I suppose. Not that it’s that much of a surprise. He was always going to marry someone like her.”
“Were you in love with him?” Geri’s voice, though incredulous, had softened.
Anna nodded miserably. “Yes. Yes I was. He was very good-looking. Impossibly handsome. But in the end he turned out to be just impossible.” Geri rubbed her back again. “Yes, I loved him. But I was very let down.” Anna stopped and forced a smile at her friend. “Sound like Princess Di, don’t I?”
Geri thrust a brimming glass of champagne at her. “Sounded like a nasty piece of work to me. Looked like one too—that handsome but shifty type. I vaguely remember him from that Scottish wedding.”
“Shame you didn’t remember Orlando Gossett as well,” Anna sniffed, mopping her eyes with a piece of kitchen towel. “I’m amazed you forgot him. He more or less smashed you to bits during the eightsome reels.”
“Believe me, I haven’t forgotten,” Geri said. “I’ve still got the scars. But he never actually told me what he was called. So when I saw his name on the party list, I was none the wiser. I judged solely on his other criteria, although I have to say,” she added, wrinkling her brow, “my informant who claimed he was reasonable looking has rather low standards. Subterranean, even.”