Well Groomed

by Fiona Walker

  TO ALLAY HER NERVES, Tash walked to Fosbourne Holt House very early on Saturday morning while the grass on the verges was still misted by a patina of dew, like the skin of a ripe Muscat grape dusted with the first mildew of noble rot. Behind her, Beetroot dived in and out of the hedgerows, snorting madly at molehills so that her pale muzzle was covered with earth like a finger dipped in cocoa powder.

  Fosbourne Holt House was the sort of country pile that Tash had day-dreamed of living in as a child, long before she developed an adult understanding of the cost of central heating. Although large, it wasn’t as sprawling or decrepitly stately as Ben Meredith’s family seat, Holdham Hall, which had been gaining a wing per century since Jacobean birth. But Fosbourne’s solid, muscular bulk, strawberry pink brick walls, glittering windows and tall, fat chimneys had appealed to Tash ever since she’d been to a hunt ball there the year before and glimpsed it properly for the first time. Before that, she had hacked past it almost daily for a year, standing up on her stirrups time and time again like a jockey riding into the winners’ enclosure as she’d sought to see more of the seventeenth-century house than its lichen-speckled roof and multiple chimneys. Set in acres of hilly, flint-strewn parkland, it hid its beautiful face like a bashful, fan-wielding courtesan, peeking up behind a high brick and flint wall.

  Walking the final few hundred yards across the fields, Tash caught her breath as the house finally crept into view beyond a mist-drenched pheasant copse. Last winter, it had been a floodlit, unset jewel nestling amidst a black, moonless velvet night – cool, steely and romantically remote. Now it was enveloped in the ornate, sculpted setting of daylight, and glittered all the more brightly for it.

  It was surrounded by soft, sumptuous grounds. Tall, isolated oaks dotted the parkland at intervals like proud bodyguards on the look out for danger, and there was such a profusion of green everywhere that Tash felt as though she should burst into strains of ‘Jerusalem’ and encourage Beetroot to stop rubbing her neck in goose crap and start showing a bit of respect by kneeling down or something.

  ‘Verde que te quiero verde,’ she sighed, transfixed. Beetroot panted alongside her, entering into the spirit of things with a fresh green stain on her neck.

  Yet it was the house itself that provided the richest colour in the park, like a jaunty brooch pinned to Robin Hood’s doublet. Decked out in its midsummer finery, it was coated in variegated ivy, honeysuckle, mauve wistaria and a climbing quince that was dropping the last of its tomato red blooms like feathers from a scarlet boa. Zandra Rhodes couldn’t have designed a brighter outfit for a wedding.

  The bulk of the building now housed the British headquarters of a high-flying electronics company, with partitioned offices which fragmented most of the grand old halls and rooms. But the commercial owners had sympathetically left the entire first floor untouched and hired it out for conferences, parties and – now that wedding ceremonies were allowed to be conducted in specially licensed venues – marriages. Today’s was only the third to be held in the house, and to Tash’s alarm the owners had taken out an advert in that week’s Marlbury Weekly Gazette proudly declaring that Niall O’ Shaughnessy was using it for his celebrity marriage ‘to be covered by Cheers! magazine’.

  Tash closed her eyes and hoped to God that everything went to plan.

  Not wanting to disturb the security staff, she settled on the roots of one of the guardsmen oaks and looked at the house for a self-indulgent few minutes. At her feet, amid the dried humus and warty toadstools, a small clump of clover was battling for life in the shade. Bang in the middle of it was a four-leafed one, so small that Tash wondered if her ropey botanical skills had identified it correctly at first. But, as she turned it around in her fingers, she knew she was right. It was the first one she’d ever found, and there seemed to be something prophetic in it, however tiny. Standing up, she whistled for Beetroot and started trailing back to the house.

  ‘C’mon, Bee,’ she sighed, carefully pocketing her find. ‘You need a bath, and I have a speech to rehearse.’

  From eight o’clock that Saturday morning, florist’s vans started rolling through the high security gates at the entrance of the park and unloading their contents from the gravel car park at the side of the house and into a side entrance which led directly to the back stairs. When the flower arrangers ran out of foliage, a Sloaney girl was despatched into the park with a pair of secateurs to pillage from the hedgerows. Soon, several rhododendron bushes and a climbing ivy to one side of the house were starting to look suspiciously bald.

  Later that morning, a piano tuner poled up to perfect the tone on the Steinway grand which was due to be played during the ceremony by Niall’s great friend, the film-score composer Roger Allice, who had written a wedding anthem especially for the ceremony.

  ‘It sounds like he’s head-banging the piano, so it does,’ Niall had moaned when it was played down the phone to him earlier that week. ‘I think perhaps we should have stuck to Handel.’

  By lunchtime the imposing double front doors of the house had been opened by security staff and the first of the groom’s party started to arrive in anticipation of welcoming guests. With them was Beetroot, her biscuit-coloured coat gleaming like a wire brush from an early-morning bath, a huge ivy-coloured ribbon tied to her collar which caused her to sit down and scratch frantically every few paces.

  The three ushers – Gus, Hugo and Rufus – were relieved to see that no guests had turned up yet. Niall’s family had a reputation for arriving so early at weddings that they regularly attended other people’s ceremonies before waiting through to see their own family member getting hitched. Ma claimed it got her in the mood – like watching a short at the cinema before catching the main programme.

  ‘No sign of Cheers! yet then?’ Rufus looked around eagerly, clutching on to Beetroot’s lead as she tried to drag him towards a potted bay tree. His new crew cut was hidden beneath an old dressage topper, and he had borrowed Gus’s yellow dressage waistcoat. A can of Becks was poking from each pocket.

  ‘Obviously not.’ Hugo glanced up the steps, which were covered with quince petals like a very ragged red carpet. He was pale-faced with sternly controlled nerves, blue eyes watchful, mouth curled into that half-smile he always wore when he was uncertain. Yet such was his remarkable sangfroid that the only real outward sign of anxiety was a tendency to tug at his shirt-cuffs beneath his well-cut, well-brushed and well-used morning suit.

  Gus was holding together less well. Despite his own smart, hired morning suit, his shirt was already stained with horse slobber and his straw-coloured hair was clumped into tangled tassels because he hadn’t combed it after his shower that morning. His thin, angular face was as bleached as a piece of Bondi Beach driftwood.

  ‘I feel like I’m about to ride for England on a strange horse.’ He wrinkled his nose as he paced around outside with a last, nervous cigarette. ‘And that dog still smells.’

  ‘She’s probably decomposing a wedding anthem,’ Hugo muttered.

  ‘Two to one she’ll bite the groom.’ Gus winced against his cigarette smoke. ‘That animal seems to have it in for Niall.’

  ‘On the contrary, I’m sure she’s Beetrooting for him,’ a voice pointed out calmly and, giving Beetroot a big pat, the best man dashed up the grand staircase to check that all was well above.

  ‘I don’t have a great deal of confidence in Niall’s choice.’ Gus watched the long legs bound up the stone steps. ‘Doesn’t strike me as very organised – no use at all at the stag night. Didn’t even hire a stripper.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Hugo said lightly. ‘You didn’t stay as long as I did. Shit, here come the superficial wedding photographers.’ He nodded towards a silver hatch-back that was turning into the gates, the rear of its driver-side sun-visor plastered with Cheers! stickers.

  Inside Fosbourne Holt House, the long hall ran for the entire length of the first floor, with huge floor-to-ceiling windows to one side which let in thick, slanted stripes of sunlight,
dancing with shadows from the rampant wall-climbers. Today, the hall had been set out to resemble a church with a wide central aisle, a vast bank of flowers and candles where there would normally be an altar, and row upon row of ‘pews’, which in this case were the far more comfortable and ornate gold banqueting chairs that belonged to the house. One of the staff was busily ripping seat numbers from the back of them, left over from a recent music recital staged in the same room.

  ‘It looks jolly lovely,’ she called out cheerfully as she spotted the morning suit wandering in. ‘The floral arrangements are simply super, aren’t they?’

  The hall was decked entirely in white summer flowers which had given the florists no end of nightmares as James French was very snobbish about carnations or chrysanthemums and had banned them entirely. As a result a wildly expensive range of roses, lilies, irises, phlox, jasmine and orchids dripped and drooped from the foliage-strewn walls with the languid decadence of porcelain-pale nymph’s fingers beckoning from a mystical forest. There were so many flowers banked on the grand piano that it looked as though it had been planted out like a novelty wheelbarrow in a suburban garden, and the florists had even trailed jasmine and ivy around its legs and those of the stool.

  ‘Where shall I set up, mate?’ The Cheers! photographer wandered into the hall behind the best man, loaded down with padded bags, his creased suit scattered with red petals. ‘Christ, it’s like walking into a garden centre, innit?’

  Behind him, a scrawny, long-haired assistant was buckling under a tripod, his pockets bulging with film reels. ‘Over here okay?’ He dropped the tripod to one side of the flower ‘altar’.

  ‘Have we met?’ The photographer scratched his head. ‘Don’t tell me – you were in a film with this Niall geezer? The one about the Scottish rebel, wonnit?’

  ‘No – but you’re right. We have done some pictures together – quite a few, in fact.’ The familiar face flashed him a wicked smile. ‘And we’re about to star in the best one yet.’

  Driving around the narrow, interlacing Fosbourne lanes with an out-of-date ordnance survey map, and a very simplified set of directions drawn by Henrietta which made the tiny, winding Berkshire C roads look like the gridded streets of New York, Matty French found himself ploughing the Audi through the same ford in alternate directions several times. Because his window was open from asking directions, his right arm was now soaked with muddy water. At least it cooled him down slightly; the car was unbearably stuffy.

  ‘You should know the area better than me,’ he told Sally. ‘Surely you remember where this house is?’

  ‘I never saw the place.’ She was hurriedly coating her legs in fake tan make-up, most of which was splattering over the car’s upholstery. ‘Why don’t we drive back to the farm and ask?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think they’d be too keen.’ He turned Henrietta’s instructions upside down and peered at them again. ‘Gus Moncrieff was hardly friendly earlier. If we’d stayed any longer, I think he’d have seen us off the premises with a shotgun.’

  ‘He was behaving a bit oddly, wasn’t he?’ Sally wiped her hands on the chamois leather from the glove compartment. ‘So was Penny come to that – she grabbed the kids as though it was a ransom swapover. I thought they’d at least invite us in for a cup of coffee until Tom and Tor were settled and dressed. Penny even tried to whip Linus away until I pointed out he wasn’t one of Tash’s pages. I mean, he can barely walk – he’d never make it up the aisle.’

  ‘Nor will Niall if he’s as pissed as he was the last time I saw him,’ Matty said darkly, trying out a lane he hadn’t attempted before, only to realise that it was the driveway to a remote farm with nowhere to turn the car around until they were practically in the milking yard.

  By lunchtime, it was absolutely classic wedding weather. Now flying high in an unblemished forget-me-not sky, the sun hadn’t been crossed by a cloud since dawn, and had strengthened enough to drench the house and grounds in sumptuous, saturated warmth. Arms were bared, sunglasses donned, faces tilted upwards and tights discreetly removed in the privacy of cars before the wedding guests drove into the Fosbourne Valley and tried to decipher Henrietta’s map.

  Growing tired of holding on to Beetroot while he waited outside to welcome guests, Rufus tied her to the bay tub – in which he had stashed his cans of lager – and told her to guard them. Donning a pair of dark glasses, he lolled on the steps and lifted his topper as the first cars started rolling up the carriage sweep.

  ‘Here come the innocents.’ Gus narrowed his eyes against the sun as he and Hugo bounded down the steps from the house, both loaded up with service sheets. ‘I thought you were going to show people where to park, Rufe?’

  ‘I am.’ Rufus grinned idly and waved his hat in the direction of the car park as a flashy Discovery trundled past. ‘I’m sure that’s Alan Rickman.’

  ‘It’s Jack Fortescue,’ Hugo said witheringly.

  The mildest of veil-lifting breezes cooled the faces of the early arrivals as they clambered from their cars in the vast gravel stretch of car park beside the house and stared up at the multi-coloured foliage bobbing jauntily and shaking pollen on them all. Close to, the house smelled as glorious as it looked – a heady mix of honeysuckle, jasmine and trailing roses.

  The wind was just light enough to keep hats on heads without the need of a protecting hand, yet cool enough to stop those hats feeling as though they were made of thermal wool with bobbles on top.

  ‘Couldn’t want for a better wink from God, could you now?’ pointed out one of Niall’s relations who had arrived predictably early and whose rose button-hole was failing to counter-balance the hip-flask weighing down the opposite inside pocket.

  Hugo, who was ushering him inside, nodded vaguely and handed him a service sheet. He hoped the day went according to plan, whether or not God was winking at them; he felt unusually nervous. He’d only just realised quite how newsworthy Niall’s wedding was.

  The Cheers! photographer, who had set up his tripod inside the hall, had left his lanky assistant to guard it and was now roaming around outside taking shots of the arriving guests in the hope of catching one or two celebrities flashing serene smiles. He was furious to find his pitch being queered yet again by a small gaggle of freelance tabloid paparazzi who had been tipped off and were hoping to catch celebrities flashing their knickers as they clambered from the rear of Mercs.

  ‘Clear off!’ he told them huffily. ‘I’m on an exclusive job here. What are you lot after?’

  ‘Same as you, mate.’ One of the paps shot him a wink. ‘Piccies.’

  They all surged forward as a car drew into the carriage sweep with someone who looked startlingly like one of the Baldwin brothers in the passenger seat, but it turned out to be Tash’s cousin Olly and his boyfriend Ginger, who was most alarmed to find a man leaning on his bonnet and pressing a camera lens into the windscreen of his Porsche.

  ‘I had no idea wedding photographers were so adventurous these days,’ he said in surprise. ‘I thought it was all about getting into a line and trying not to stand with a tree behind your head.’

  The Cheers! photographer, who had wasted almost half a reel of film on Olly before he realised his mistake, was furious.

  He then enlisted the help of a burly security guard to throw the tabloid stringers out into the lane. But confined there, they simply rushed to their cars, drew step-ladders out of the boots, and set them up at the far side of the brick and flint walls, over which they pointed their zoom lenses.

  ‘You’d think Princess Diana was coming,’ the Cheers! photographer hissed through his teeth, and then almost fainted as a convertible Audi crunched on to the gravel.

  ‘I say,’ called a soft, plummy voice tinged with shyness, ‘is this the O’Shaughnessy-French wedding?’

  ‘Y-yes, ma’am,’ the photographer gulped, trying to peer beneath the broad-brimmed hat and dark designer glasses. She was certainly radiant, and blonde, and very, very classy. His eyes automatically darted to the boot,
wondering if she had a date stashed in there.

  She giggled. ‘Please don’t call me that, however flattering. I’m here incognito – I do so hate being recognised these days.’

  ‘Of course, I quite understand,’ he oozed, slyly checking the amount of film he had left in his camera.

  ‘Are you from Horse and Hound, then?’ she asked as she put the car into reverse and looked around for a parking space.

  ‘Er – I don’t quite understand?’

  She started to laugh. ‘I thought you knew who I was?’

  ‘Um—’

  ‘Julia . . . ?’ she coaxed teasingly.

  He started to colour, realising the enormity of his mistake.

  ‘Sorry, love, I thought you were the other one,’ he gulped.

  ‘What? Lucinda Green?’

  ‘Who?’

  She laughed even more. ‘Darling, my name’s Julia Ditton. I wouldn’t bother photographing me – I’m not nearly famous enough for you. But I overtook Minty Blythe rattling along the A34 in a Beetle convertible about ten minutes ago, so she’ll be here any sec.’

  ‘It must have been left back there!’ Matty sighed, close to despair. ‘That bloody ford is straight ahead.’ He started a three-point turn.

  ‘No, we’ve already tried that left turn.’ Sally was spinning the map around and around almost as frantically as her husband was spinning the wheel. ‘It just goes to Fosbourne Dean, which is useless. What about the lane on the right?’

  ‘That takes us back towards the farm.’

  ‘We’ll just have to go back there and ask.’ Sally looked at her watch. ‘We could be driving round in circles for hours. I told you we should have followed that Volvo with all the hats in it – they had to be wedding guests.’

  ‘I hope not – they looked like retired barmaids on an outing to the races.’ Matty was appalled. ‘Although, in retrospect, it could have been a contingent of Niall’s aunts.’

  ‘For a card-carrying socialist, you can be such a snob!’ she laughed.