by Jemma Harvey
Evidently Alex’s perfections were to be set aside for more important matters.
‘Who did Posh use?’ I murmured wickedly.
Delphi all but blenched. ‘I don’t model myself on Victoria Beckham,’ she said. ‘I don’t follow; I lead. Which reminds me, once I’m married I’m going to broaden my professional horizons. I think it’s time I became a lifestyle guru . . .’
According to T.S. Eliot, J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons. Lately, I seemed to be measuring mine in champagne corks. A few days after my celebration with Delphi, Crusty invited both of us to lunch to discuss the show. The location moved from the Ivy to the Garrick, with its pictures of legendary thespians like Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt, its misogynistic rules (we weren’t allowed in the main dining room), its modest Euro-English cuisine. Working on Behind the News hadn’t involved glamour-lunching; socialising usually happened in pubs and bars, the sleazier the better. I’d generally avoided drinking during the day and when Crusty ordered Krug as a matter of course I asked timidly for mineral water. (My glass got filled anyway.)
‘Sensible girl,’ Crusty said approvingly. ‘But don’t worry, champagne isn’t a real drink. I always think it’s a lot like Perrier, only nicer.’
He drank it like Perrier, I noticed.
The working title of the series had changed several times, as is the way with titles. God’s Scottish Paradise, Redesigning Eden and The Rock Star and the Rockery had given way to Dunblair: Quest for a Garden (the castle was called Dunblair) and now, Crusty informed us, The Lost Maze of Dunblair.
‘They grew maize?’ Delphi demanded, at sea.
‘He means maze as in Hampton Court,’ I hazarded.
‘Exactly.’ Crusty beamed further approval at me, which would have been embarrassing if Delphi had paid any attention. ‘Dunblair was originally the property of the McGoogles, an old Scottish family going back to the time of Hadrian, or thereabouts.’
I could see Delphi opening her mouth to ask about Adrian and murmured sotto voce, ‘Chap with the wall.’
‘Some time in the sixteenth century the incumbent McGoogle planted a maze, asserting, according to local tradition, that when it was grown high enough to hide him, he would marry.’
‘Why?’ Delphi interjected.
‘Probably wanted to put off getting married,’ I suggested, a little thoughtlessly. ‘Any excuse. Besides, folklore is like that. When the first apple ripens on the tree planted yesterday the queen will be with child. That sort of thing.’
‘Anyway, the Laird was quite old before the hedge outgrew him – he was a tall man – and he took as his bride a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Unfortunately, her heart was given to Another.’ Crusty clearly favoured the old-fashioned cliché – I could hear the capital letter. ‘She trysted with her lover in the secrecy of the maze, until one night her husband caught them there and slew them both in his jealous fury. After that it was said to be haunted; several people who wandered into it were never seen again. Bonnie Prince Charlie hid there from the British, although this time it was the soldiers sent to search for him who disappeared.’
‘Convenient,’ I remarked.
‘It’s a wonderful romantic story,’ Delphi enthused.
‘There’s more. In the Victorian era there was a laird called Alasdair McGoogle who came into his inheritance at an early age. He was handsome and popular with his tenants, so everyone was upset when instead of the wife chosen for him by his family he married an English girl. However, on their wedding day the whole district was invited, and there was drinking, dancing and games far into the night. Some say the bride ran into the maze to tease her husband or hide from him, others that she was decoyed there by her rival, but she never came out, nor was her body ever found. Alasdair was so distraught he razed the hedges to the ground and ordered all copies of the plans destroyed, so the maze could never be planted again. Then he went to Africa, died of a fever, and was succeeded by a long-lost cousin.’
‘He dunnit,’ I said promptly. ‘The cousin.’
‘The rival girlfriend,’ Delphi said. ‘And I bet she married the cousin in the end.’
‘Actually, I believe she did,’ Crusty conceded. ‘But there’s no way of finding out what really happened. However, HG –’ presumably Hot God – ‘thinks he may have found a surviving plan of the maze at the back of an old painting. It’s in a poor state of preservation, but it may be recoverable. His idea is to bring in full-grown hedges and restore the maze to its original glory.’
‘What about the ghosts?’ I asked.
‘HG is calling in a psychic researcher.’
‘Oh God,’ Delphi said. ‘Not one of those people who wander round picking up sinister vibes, and saying they feel a supernatural chill when everyone knows the central heating doesn’t work?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Under the moustache, Crusty smiled ruefully. ‘But we’re also getting a serious historian on the case – Nigel Willoughby-Purchiss, you must have heard of him – and we’re considering incorporating some dramatic re-enactment into the programmes.’
Delphi looked dubious – she was losing too much of the limelight. Then her expression brightened. ‘I could do that,’ she said. ‘After all, I am an actress. I could play the vanished wife.’
‘Which one?’ I said, wondering if she would appropriate both.
‘The English one. I don’t do accents.’
‘That sounds like a great idea,’ Crusty said, looking unfazed. It occurred to me that with Delphi acting as well as presenting he would have one less person to pay. Maybe he was more devious than I’d expected.
We went on to discuss further aspects of the maze and the mystery, while I panicked inwardly, seeing my job growing several new heads, like the Lernean Hydra after pruning. (That’s the mythical monster, not a plant.) At the end of the meal Crusty paid with a card. ‘It’ll all go on expenses for the show,’ he told me.
Damn.
‘Who’s Nigel Willoughby-Purchiss?’ Delphi demanded when we were alone.
‘He’s the latest TV historian.’ She didn’t watch educational programmes, naturally. ‘Did a series recently on the Minoans. Young men with pecs running round the ruins of Knossos half naked. It got quite good reviews, at least from gay critics.’
‘Is he good-looking?’ Delphi enquired hopefully. Possibly she thought he might be a prospect for me. ‘Some of those academic types are.’
‘It depends. If you admire men with no chin and a long twitchy nose like a shrew . . .’
‘They shouldn’t allow people like that on television,’ Delphi said. ‘It puts off the viewers.’
‘He’s got character,’ I said for the sake of argument. ‘And brains.’
Delphi treated the remark with the contempt she felt it deserved.
Actually, what he had was the right kind of name. Names are hugely important in the media: it’s the first – sometimes the only – part of you people see, whether in the newspapers or in the credits: it’s the part that hangs around when your face has gone. For off-the-wall yoof TV you want to dye your hair purple and call yourself something like Pollenta Le Vain, but for shows appealing to an upmarket intellectual audience you need a posh forename like Piers, Simon or Hugh (preferably spelt Huw), and a really memorable double-barrelled surname. Something like Firmly-Knittingstall, or Teabag Multistori, or Mountflummery-Massiveturd. The sort of name that nobody could possibly make up and nobody will ever forget. A name that says immediately what a unique person you are. In the name stakes, Nigel Willoughby-Purchiss had a head start.
The job I had taken as a soft option seemed to be offering me a plethora of new challenges, whether I wanted them or not. Not only working with Delphinium and Crusty, expenses and all, a temperamental rock star, and a larger crew than I was accustomed to, but now actors (more temperament) a fashionable historian (academic temperament), a professional psychic (sensitive temperament) and a bevy of ghosts. When I got home and dosed my champagne headache wit
h Nurofen it occurred to me I hadn’t thought of Kyle for at least three hours. If nothing else, my new producership was likely to keep me far too busy to miss him in the foreseeable future. Thanks to Delphi, I thought.
On a wave of remorse I told myself I should be happy for her and Alex. Just because love made me wretched, swinging between extremes of ecstasy and anguish, didn’t mean it had that effect on everyone else. For Delphi, the course of true love really did run smooth. Next summer, she would marry her prince while I wept pleasurably in her train.
Provided I wasn’t dolled up in taffeta frills or lilac chiffon, of course.
Delphinium
One of the things everybody knows about a career in the media is that it involves a lot of lunches. There are business lunches (plenty of those, especially in the run-up to a new series), and friendly lunches (occasionally), and look-at-me lunches where you lunch with the right people in the right places in order to be seen. You can combine the being-seen element with either of the other two by simply choosing suitable restaurants, like the Ivy and the Rip-Off Café, even if you’re not being seen with anyone significant. But with the Hot God show and my own wedding in the offing I felt I was due for a proper look-at-me lunch, so I went to Skittles with my celebrity best friend, Brie de Meaux. Skittles is the newest, trendiest, hottest, coolest, hippest, hoppest restaurant in town, and may well remain so for at least a month. The prices are so high they cause the edges of your plate to curl up, and the cuisine is in the latest mode, concerted Euro-Asiatic fusion, or con-fusion, involving things like Deep Egg, Windy Sausages, Prawn Blisters and Blood Ice. (The last item sounds like a sculpture by Marc Quinn, but is, I think, something to do with oranges.) The knack is to be seen eating there at the right time (now), to mention nonchalantly in the hearing of several journalists that you have been doing so for at least a year (even though it’s only been open a few weeks), and to shake the dust of the place from your feet before it’s discovered by city suits and the vulgar herd. Brie and I both know how to play that game, and I spotted two society columnists rubber-necking from tables at the side as soon as we went in. Good.
Roo is my real best friend, of course, but Brie is my official best friend, the one I dish up for interviews and colour supplements when I need a high-profile supporting act. She’s a former glamour model who’s trying to turn respectable with minor acting roles (she can’t act), a pop record (she can’t sing) and glittering appearances at any event where celebs can appear and glitter. Her real name is Jilly Evans; she chose Brie de Meaux because she’d seen it somewhere and thought that as it was French it must be classy. By the time she found out what it meant it was too late, but in fact it’s worked well for her. Having a name that looks familiar before you’ve even started always helps. To look at she’s very pretty, with a café-au-lait complexion from a Pakistani grandmother, sea-green eyes and blonde hair recently turned brunette to enhance her new image. She’s not as tall as me and used to have all-over curves, but as her career advanced her boobs got bigger and her hips and thighs got smaller, until now she looks like two melons on a stick. Even though she wants to be Taken Seriously, she can’t bring herself to have a reduction.
She had just emerged triumphant from Celebrity Murder Island, where viewers had voted her a particularly gory death after she seduced the fiancée of a TV property dealer. The lesbian touch was a stroke of genius, giving her a sort of credibility with the liberal left while spawning male erotic fantasies everywhere. In Skittles those members of the hoi polloi who had been able to get in gawped at us, while lesser lights from the media smiled and nodded as if we were mates, even though we weren’t. I let Brie enjoy her moment of glory. After all, lesbian sex in a tropical paradise on prime-time TV was, so to speak, a mere splash in the fan compared with a garden makeover for Hot God lasting six forty-five minute episodes, and a forthcoming marriage to feature lavishly in Hello! or OK! Brie was reputedly much engaged but hadn’t come near marriage except for an aberration with a plumber when she was fifteen, which didn’t count.
We studied the menu in mutual incomprehension and chose at random, since to betray ignorance and ask for subtitles would be fatal. Brie suffers from several eating disorders and has days when she’ll touch nothing except salad and spa water, and days when she’ll pig out on four courses with extra chips, depending on which disorder is in the ascendant at the time. That day, it turned out, she was on something called the Hodgkins diet, which involved only eating food of certain colours at specified meals. ‘Today it’s red,’ she announced. ‘Tomato, red peppers, lollo rosso, red meat, red fish.’
‘What if that stuff you ordered isn’t red?’ I asked.
‘I’ll just pick out the bits that are. Anyway, there was carpaccio of tuna in there somewhere. Tuna’s red.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s a sort of mauvy brown,’ I argued.
‘That counts as red.’
Which only goes to prove my private theory that all diets are just eating disorders in a more controlled form.
When the starters arrived Brie duly picked out the red bits, with disastrous results, since some of them were raw chilli. Once she had drunk about a bottle of water, recovered, complained, ordered something else instead – a tiny cup of pale pink froth which was apparently salmon cappuccino – we were at last able to settle down to serious conversation. Inevitably, Brie wanted to talk about Celebrity Murder Island, boring on at some length about the ageing children’s TV presenter who had been elected sole survivor. Interestingly, she didn’t mention her lesbian girlfriend at all.
So I did.
‘How is Morgana? Are you still seeing her?’
‘Shit no. That was just for the cameras.’ As I’d guessed. ‘Off the record, she was awful. One of those arty Islington types. I’d have much preferred her boyfriend, only he wasn’t there.’
‘Was the sex good?’ I knew ears were twitching at every adjacent table.
Brie shuddered. ‘Don’t ask. I mean, I thought it would be, because women are supposed to know what other women like, right? Our bodies all work the same. The kissing was okay, but her tits were so small I could feel the ribs underneath and she had a bush like a wire brush. She wanted me to go down on her and she didn’t even have the consideration to shave. It was disgusting.’
‘Did you?’
‘Only for a minute or two. Cunnilingus is bloody difficult. Give me dick any day – it’s so much easier to get at.’
By now, the ears had stopped twitching and were extended on stalks. Brie, I knew, was perfectly well aware of that.
‘It just goes to show,’ I said, ‘how wonderful men are.’
‘Finding the clit, you mean? Well, yes . . . if they manage it, which lots of them don’t. How’s Alex in that department?’
‘Gifted,’ I said, which wasn’t precisely true. Alex can find the clit but he’s never really figured out what to do with it when he gets there. It doesn’t matter much – I can handle it myself.
‘By the way,’ I added, casually, ‘we’re getting married. We’ve set a date.’
Brie said things like ‘Wow!’ and ‘Fantastic!’, turned pale green over my ring, and eventually asked ‘When?’
‘Oh – in the summer, when I’ve finished the new series. Organising things is going to be difficult: I’ll be on location at the castle all the time while we’re shooting. They’re going to do some historical re-enactment scenes, so I’ll have a chance to act as well.’ Brie had recently been turned down for a part in a period film, so I knew that would make her even greener. I like her very much – in a social sort of way – but I wasn’t going to let her think she was the star in our friendship.
‘The castle?’ she queried.
‘Didn’t I tell you? We’re doing a garden makeover at this place in Scotland, Dunblair Castle. For God. You know – Hot God. I gather I’ll be staying with him for the duration of the series.’
Brie said ‘Wow!’ again, more than once. ‘How did you land that one?’ she demanded unwisely.
‘Hot God asked for me,’ I lied airily. There are times when it’s obligatory to lie. I wasn’t going to say that the executive producer was a friend of my mother, and the person Hot God had really asked for was Mortimer Sparrow. Apart from the need to upstage Celebrity Murder Island, there were those stalking ears to consider.
(Hot God should be grateful to me. Did he really want people to know he was a fan of Morty?)
‘Is he going to appear in the programme?’ Brie persisted. ‘I mean, he hasn’t been filmed for years, and last time one of the paparazzi got into the grounds of that castle he was torn to pieces by Rottweilers.’
‘Of course he’s appearing,’ I said, concluding, with authority, ‘He wants to get involved in the whole makeover process – replant the maze, that sort of thing.’
‘He grows maize in the garden?’
‘M-A-Z-E. As in Hampton Court.’
Brie looked blank. She had obviously never been to Hampton Court.
‘I hear he’s got, like, really fat,’ she went on. ‘Positively obese. Like Brando when he got older. I expect that’s why he doesn’t want to be photographed.’
‘I’ll let you know,’ I said sweetly.
‘Is Alex going?’
‘No.’
‘Won’t he mind being left out of the party?’
Brie and Alex don’t get on. He says he hates silicon, her looks are ordinaire, her personality is even more ordinaire, she’s self-centred, insincere and on the make. She says he’s a spoilt little rich kid, too pretty to be hetero, self-centred, insincere, and would be on the make if he wasn’t too lazy. You get the picture.
‘I’ll arrange for him to visit sometimes,’ I said.
‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, ‘leaving him alone for so long?’
For answer, I just smiled and flashed my chartreuse diamond. As I turned my hand, it took the glow from the nearest wall lamps and transformed it into a thousand splinters of starlight. So there.
We weren’t due to start shooting until March, since before that the ground would be too frozen for digging and Hot God would be spending the winter on his private island somewhere in the South Pacific. Roo got some temporary work for one of the digital channels on the sort of stocking-filler show which you can only bear to watch if you’ve had half your brain removed. She was struggling valiantly against depression, but with a daily grind of karaoke kittens, a haunted laundrette, and an old woman forced to live in a shoe, her stiff upper lip was beginning to wobble.