by Wendy Holden
‘Laura! Is so lovely to see you!’
Lulu obviously had night-vision glasses. Or else ate a lot of carrots.
Laura reached out to give her friend a hug but felt her lips, in the dark, make contact with an unshaved and bristly cheek. In the meantime, Lulu’s ‘mwah, mwah’ could be heard being bestowed some distance away.
‘Is you I kiss, Laura, yes?’ Lulu sounded doubtful.
‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’
Laura wondered who she had kissed herself. The waiter? One of the women behind them? They could now be heard receiving the bill. ‘Shall we go Dutch? I’ll just get my bag, I put it down here...’
‘You like this restaurant? Is original, no?’ Across the flimsy table, Lulu sounded to be shuffling off something squeaky, possibly leather or crocodile.
‘It’s definitely that,’ Laura had to agree.
‘Is where comes everyone to see and be seen,’ Lulu asserted.
‘Where’s my bag?’ The voice behind had a sharp, panicked edge. ‘I can’t find it!’
‘Me neither!’ Her companion joined in the chorus of alarm.
Something heavy was now put on the table, accompanied by a tinkle. Laura pictured one of Lulu’s vast designer totes, rattling with gold decoration. ‘Is making table fall over,’ Lulu murmured as the flimsy surface lurched alarmingly sideways. ‘I put bag on floor.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ Laura said quickly. Possibly another of Umbra’s advantages was that it made expensive handbags ripe for the picking. ‘Hang it on the back of your chair.’
‘Would you like to see the menu?’ The waiter’s voice came suddenly out of the darkness.
‘Is it in Braille?’ Laura asked.
The waiter ignored her remark. ‘Today’s specials are pâté et saucisson en sauce tomates and haricots blancs en sauce tomates sur pain grillé,’ he announced coldly.
They ordered one of each. ‘And two champagne glasses,’ Lulu added. It was her signature drink.
‘With champagne in them, madam?’ the waiter asked sardonically.
‘Moët,’ confirmed Lulu. It was her favourite brand. Laura loved champagne too but it always went straight to her head. With regret she remembered the office. ‘Not for me. I have to work this afternoon.’
Lulu groaned from across the table. ‘So I will drink both glasses. Has been heavy morning.’
Laura braced herself for the news that the wedding plans were in difficulty. Lulu was marrying the successful rapper and hugely wealthy businessman, South’n Fried, famous for his aggressive lyrics, for wearing several expensive watches at once and having a whole Knightsbridge house for his collection of designer trainers. The pair had bonded over their shared love of handicrafts – a guilty passion that South’n Fried had kept hidden from his manager and fans for years, lest it ruin his reputation as the poster boy for urban discontent.
Their first months together had been a secret idyll of wildflower-pressing in Wiltshire and tie-dying in Tintagel. But all too soon South’n Fried had been torn away to begin his ‘Bust Yo Ass’ world tour. This had left Lulu with the wedding arrangements, which, in line with the expectations of South’n Fried’s fanbase, had initially been envisaged as a three-day extravaganza on the French Riviera. This had slowly changed focus and was now a strange hybrid of the simple boho ceremony the couple would secretly have preferred and the high-octane spendfest traditionally associated with celebrity rapper weddings. Jewelled hessian tablecloths and ‘found’ glass milk-bottles rolled in diamond dust had been some of the uneasy compromises so far suggested.
There were more, as Laura now heard.
Finding a gold-plated tractor to convey Lulu and South’n Fried to their chosen little country church was proving a headache. To further complicate things, the farmer who owned the barn upon which Lulu’s heart was set for her simple rural celebration was objecting to the inside being gutted and fitted out with a hot tub, underlit dance floor and an enlarged entrance for the twenty-tier, thirty-foot home-made lemon drizzle cake.
‘And vicar not like helicopter either,’ Lulu mourned, as she sipped her brace of champagnes. If indeed champagne it was. Waiting for her Coke to arrive, Laura had accepted her friend’s offer of a sip. It had tasted suspiciously like elderflower fizz to her.
‘Helicopter? I thought you were arriving in a tractor.’
‘Helicopter is to scatter flowers on guests. For picturesque rural touch outside church. Vicar say disturb bats in tower. But why old ladies in tower in first place? Hmm?’
The food arrived. Laura, who had chosen the pâté et saucissons en sauce tomates, tasted it gingerly. Would it be the flavour sensation Umbra seemed to pride itself on?
‘Is good, no?’ Lulu, from the darkness across the table, spoke through a mouthful of haricots blancs en sauce tomates sur pain grillé.
Laura hesitated. The waiter, bestowing the dish with impressive accuracy on the table, had waxed lyrical about tomato coulis bursting with southern Italian sunshine, circular rings of pasta hand-rolled by nonnas in Naples and tiny sausages from a village near Ferrara which made them only at particular times of the year. But what it reminded Laura of more than anything else was tinned spaghetti hoops and sausages. She decided not to say so, however. Lulu, whose choice Umbra had been, might be hurt.
‘How’s yours?’ she asked. Lulu’s dish had arrived with a similar fanfare about beans gathered in a glowing Tuscan dawn placed with loving precision on a slice of bread made with a century-old culture.
Lulu, in the darkness, seemed to be hesitating. ‘This flavour, you know? Remind me something but can’t put my foot in it.’
‘Put your finger on it,’ Laura translated.
‘Make me think of toast on beans at my finishing school, hmm?’
Laura, remembering the vast bill which the neighbouring ladies had been unable to pay due to the disappearance of their handbags, could only admire the chutzpah of Umbra’s owners. Across the table, Lulu continued to talk about the wedding. A fiddler was to lead the guests from the church to the barn. ‘How lovely,’ said Laura, charmed as well as surprised at what seemed a genuinely simple rural touch. ‘Very Thomas Hardy.’
‘Very Harry Winston,’ corrected Lulu, explaining that the fiddler’s Stradivarius was encrusted in priceless diamonds and the fiddler herself was Simon Rattle’s favourite soloist.
They moved on to the wedding dress, which was as simple and rustic as anything designed personally by Karl Lagerfeld could be, and Lulu’s tiara, which was to feature hand-dived Hebridean pearls in a nod to South’n Fried’s apparent Scottish ancestry.
‘How is Vlad?’ Laura asked eventually, deciding she had heard enough and turning the subject to her friend’s Estonian butler. She was very fond of Vlad, who ran with military efficiency Lulu’s designer-logoed Kensington mansion.
‘Vlad is addict of harchas,’ was the alarming news.
Addict? Laura stiffened with alarm. Harchas?
‘Me too now,’ Lulu said. ‘We do it every Sunday morning in kitchen.’
Laura tried not to panic as she imagined the two of them steadily consuming this mysterious narcotic amid Lulu’s Chanel saucepans as the bells of nearby Kensington Church called the faithful to prayer. ‘But... what is it?’
‘Seriously? You don’ know harchas?’ Lulu sounded astonished. ‘But you must! You catch up double-decker bus.’
The Archers omnibus, Laura realised. Lulu had become a devotee of the radio soap and had the last two months’ worth backed up on her iPod in preparation for a long flight. She was going to Miami the following day to join South’n Fried on the latest leg of the ‘Bust Yo Ass’ tour. ‘Love Roger Oldridge,’ she added. ‘Remind me of Donald Trump.’
This was more than enough. Laura rose to her feet in the blackness. ‘I’ve got to go back to work.’
Emerging from the tenebrous hole of the restaurant was like coming out of a dark prison. The sunshine was painfully strong; for Laura, at least. Lulu was unaffected; like Carinthia, she wo
re oversized black sunglasses at all times.
Lulu’s appearance was always startling but it was doubly so after being in a black cave for an hour. Looking at her was a bit like looking directly into the sun. Everything blazed and shone, from the big blonde hair which reared from her forehead before tumbling to her waist, to the white teeth framed by glossy pink lipstick glowing in the plump brown oval face. Lulu’s figure, curvaceous rather than skinny, looked more pneumatic than ever in a tiny white leather quilted biker jacket festooned with gold zips. Tight pink leather trousers strained over her generous hips and the look was rounded off with matching pink suede ankle boots whose blocky heels were studded with crystals.
Lulu was, like her, twenty-three – or so Laura calculated; one could never be entirely sure – but their personal styles could not be more different. Beside her exuberant friend, slim and dark in her unvarying outfit of dark jeans, tight black blazer, close-fitting navy shirt and ankle boots, her black hair swept up into a working ponytail, Laura felt like Night next to glorious Day.
She kissed her friend’s warm, scented cheek in farewell. ‘Give my love to South’n Fried. Ring me when you get back.’
Chapter Three
Laura walked quickly back to work, her mind filling with all the different tasks to be completed. Nailing down the location/activity for the Savannah Bouche interview was the priority. Tomorrow was Saturday and no one would be working. If she was to climb Ben Nevis, go to Sainsbury’s or visit A&E in the company of the actress, she needed to be told now.
Her eyes had not yet fully adjusted to the glare of the London sun as it bounced off the spotless Bond Street pavements and ricocheted off the diamonds in the jewellers’ windows. The gleamingly clean glass panes reflected her lean figure as she walked along. She remembered how drab she had felt next to Lulu, but then, the latter’s label-cluttered look wasn’t really her thing. ‘You are not a billboard,’ her Parisian grandmother, Mimi, always told her. ‘Initials are for the optician’s chart.’
Laura’s label-free thing worked, anyway. Brought up in Paris on a budget narrower than her trousers, she had been surprised and pleased to find that glossy-mag London aspired to the French-girl look she had adopted mainly from necessity. In Britain, gratifyingly, it was regarded as the height of chic. Even her hair, cut in a blunt fringe just above her brows, the rest flopping in a shining black mane on her narrow shoulders, was admired, although Laura stopped short of admitting that its gamine chop was due to kitchen scissors and the shine came from the home-made beer rinse that Mimi, now ninety-four, had used all her life.
Society’s office was located in a gracious eighteenth-century square whose gracious eighteenth-century houses had long been replaced by more utilitarian Edwardian and twenties buildings containing movie corporations, retail offices, social media empires and the headquarters of the British Magazine Company. The Art Deco block of Society House took up the south-east corner of the square, its name carved in gold capitals above a silver metal revolving door which turned constantly to admit and release a stream of visitors and staff.
Delivery boys yanked their trolleys past helmeted motorbike couriers bearing clipboards from which pens swung like metronomes. The boom and pouf of boxes being thrown into the open-doored backs of vans was counterpointed by the swift clack of kitten heels as magazine staff in oversized designer glasses hurried in and out clutching smartphones and expensive handbags.
A slim woman with punky hair, a black asymmetric skirt and towering black high heels stood on the pavement looking indignantly about. An editor expecting a taxi, Laura knew. She would be unable, quite literally, to move a foot otherwise. That the taxis and the shoemakers round here worked in tandem was something Laura had long suspected. Not that the editors put up much of a fight. ‘I’ve never really seen the point of walking,’ Carinthia had once airily declared. ‘Just putting one foot in front of another – why bother?’
As she neared Society House Laura drew a deep, satisfied breath, relishing the familiar scent of perfume mixed with petrol fumes. She looked up at the building’s flat white façade, taking delight, as ever, in spotting the sixth-floor window nearest to her desk and noting, as she did so, the line of bigger windows on the floor above it, where Christopher Stone, CEO of the British Magazine Company, had his lair.
Laura loved the feeling of belonging here, of being part of this exclusive, glossy world. Fitting in had not been easy, but her first year at Society had ultimately been a triumph. The ‘Three Weddings and a Scandal’ story had simultaneously elevated her professional stock to gilt-edged status and got rid of her worst office enemy, the vicious Clemency Makepeace.
Approaching the revolving door, Laura smiled. It was bliss to enter the office building in the knowledge that Clemency was no longer there, plotting against her with her glossy red hair and glassy green cat’s eyes that could look so innocent but conceal such evil.
Carinthia and Wyatt had not returned from lunch, nor had Brad Plant returned any of her calls, or answered any of her emails. Possibly, as it often went with big celebrities, the whole interview was off and he had not yet bothered to tell her. Perhaps – ghastly thought – he had gone with one of Society’s rivals. The idea gnawed unbearably at Laura, who was compulsively competitive, especially over any feature that had been her idea. This determination to protect her journalistic territory came, she was sure, from her father.
A new set of proofs waited on her desk and Laura started diligently to work her way through them. As she did so, the conviction she was reading a parody of Society magazine returned. The feature was a set of short profiles of ‘London’s Hottest Totty’, which seemed both outdated and offensive.
Carinthia routinely countered such objections with the claim that Society was simultaneously ironic and above political correctness. She prided herself in her intolerance of such social advances as breastfeeding in public and gender-neutral toilets, although had learnt not to say so before Laura, who, with Vlad in mind, defended the latter in particular against the editor’s contention that it was liberalism gone mad.
And anyway, Laura thought, reading on, wasn’t liberalism, however mad, infinitely preferable to such ‘hot totty’ as Lady Squiffy Farte who took her maltipoo daily to Harrod’s pet spa for claw polishes, blow-dries and a blueberry face mask? Or society artist Rupi von Rumtopf, here described as ‘the best thing out of Austria since Mozart’, whose art involved taking photos of pieces of priceless porcelain a split second after he’d blown them up.
Imagining Harry reading all this, Laura cringed. They were meeting later, to see the new Bond film. This starred Laura’s friend and sometime lover Caspar, a formerly struggling actor who had shot to fame last year. She had vaguely hoped Harry might be a bit jealous, but he had been characteristically taciturn on the subject.
As Carinthia had still not showed, Laura thought about bunking off early and tidying up her flat in advance of Harry’s visit. Not being subject to the same name-and-shame regime as her desk, it habitually looked as if it had been burgled. Most of the rest of the staff had gone anyway, the few, that was, who came in on the last day of the week and weren’t Friday-to-Mondaying at someone’s country house. Laura had been surprised, when she started at Society, just how many of the staff spent their weekends hunting, shooting or attending elaborate balls amid ancestral acres. For some people it was as if the twentieth century had never happened.
A sudden disturbance at the door now made her look up. Carinthia came staggering in, her clothes awry, her sunglasses skew-whiff on her face, her usually smooth brassy bob sporting a distinct hedge-backwards aspect. She looked as if she had either been hit or had fallen over.
Laura sprang to her feet. ‘What’s the matter?’
Carinthia did not answer but rushed, gasping, past Laura’s desk and slammed into her office. The blinds fell down and crashed agitatedly against the windows; the rattle of wine bottles could be heard. Laura turned to Wyatt, who trailed in the editor’s wake. Beneath the blue hai
r her large white face looked shell-shocked. ‘What happened?’
Wyatt sighed. ‘There was kind of, a riot?’
‘A riot?’ But the lunch had been at L’Esprit, haunt of the rich and powerful. Riots were not its business; rather, casually expensive food served amid plutocratic calm. ‘What happened?’
‘Well, we were put at the back, which I thought was fine but Carinthia didn’t like.’
Laura could imagine. Where one sat in L’Esprit was crucial. Favoured and important clients got the tables towards the front while tourists and non-regulars were put at the rear. If Carinthia had been thus relegated, it could only mean that L’Esprit’s famously smooth-but-firm maîtresse d’ had had enough of her histrionics.
‘And this woman was there breastfeeding, and, um...’
A cold feeling went through Laura. ‘Surely Carinthia didn’t ask her to... stop?’
Wyatt’s unkempt blue head moved up and down. ‘She was pretty drunk, she’d been adding her own vodka miniatures to her Bloody Mary.’
‘What did the breastfeeding lady say?’
‘That she’d breastfeed where she liked and Carinthia was a fascist.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘So Carinthia yelled that she was a nipple-flashing Nazi...’
Laura covered her face with her hands.
‘...and started screaming that if that was how things were she’d get her tits out as well...’
‘You’re joking!’
‘...and kind of ripped off her blouse...’
‘NO!’
‘And the maîtresse d’ said could she just stop it because there was a journalist from the Evening Standard at the very next table and—’
‘Seen this?’
The voice was Demelza’s and the sound was that of a tabloid newspaper landing with a thud on the desk. The front page was worse than Laura’s worst nightmare. ‘NIPPLES AT DAWN’ was the headline above a breathless account of the scene at L’Esprit. The accompanying picture, presumably from the journalist’s smartphone, showed Carinthia, who the piece described as ‘the last of London’s legendary glossy magazine editors’, drunken, shouting and exposing a pair of skinny breasts to tables of outraged men in pinstripes.