Last of the Summer Moët

by Wendy Holden

  ‘It’s bloody tough, let me tell you,’ Caspar whined. ‘The workouts are a nightmare.’ He raised a vast tanned bicep. ‘And I’ve got to go jogging every morning. I hate jogging! Loathe it!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Caspar. It’s better than when you were a struggling actor.’

  A theatrical sigh. ‘You know, I kind of miss that?’

  Laura was astounded. ‘Miss dressing as a Grenadier Guard on stilts outside the Royal London Experience?’

  ‘At least it was...’ Caspar paused. ‘What’s the word?’

  ‘Crap?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Embarrassing?’

  ‘Authentic.’

  Laura changed tack. ‘Well, what about that flat in Brixton?’ It had been the most disgusting thing she had ever seen.

  Caspar shook his thick, dark hair regretfully. ‘You know, I kind of miss that too? It had character.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t have a loo seat,’ Laura reminded him. ‘Or any cutlery. You all used the same spatula to eat cold baked beans from the tin.’

  ‘Happy days!’

  Laura was sitting up on the bed now, slender arms folded over her naked breasts. ‘The French call this nostalgie de la boue,’ she told him. ‘Nostalgia for the mud. Looking back fondly on a ghastly way of life you couldn’t wait to escape at the time.’

  Caspar let his head fall back among the pillows. ‘You’re right, of course.’ He shot out a contemplative smoke ring. ‘I am supremely fortunate to be the current face of a half-century-old five-billion-dollar franchise whose plots have spanned the globe, the sexual revolution...’

  ‘But the Bond girl’s called Prudence Handjob!’

  ‘You should have heard what they wanted to call her. It wasn’t Hand, I can tell you that. Anyway, as I was saying, 007’s survived the Cold War, 9/11, the title Octopussy and George Lazenby. So why,’ Caspar wailed, rolling his head to face hers and looking tragic, ‘aren’t I happy?’

  Laura was speechless. Fame was all Caspar had ever wanted. ‘You poor, poor thing,’ she eventually managed, ironically.

  Caspar took this at face value. ‘I know! It’s unbelievable.’ His manicured hand met his moisturised forehead. ‘Why does no one take me seriously?’

  Laura stared. ‘But you’re playing James Bond. No one takes him seriously.’

  Caspar reared up in the bed, eyes blazing. ‘But why not? Our production values are sky high! And I’m a brilliant actor!’

  Laura eyed him cautiously. Caspar had always been self-deluded, but this was on a whole new level.

  ‘I’ve looked at the algorithms,’ he went on excitedly. ‘Adultery and murder have never been out of style. Nudity peaked in the seventies though.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oscar nominations, of course. Haddock’s been looking at the stats.’

  ‘Haddock?’

  ‘My English butler in Malibu. Didn’t I mention him?’

  Laura suppressed a smile. ‘So what has, um, Haddock come up with?’

  Caspar took a deep breath, closed his eyes and let rip. ‘One in every seven Oscar-winning movies has been about World War Two. Husbands and wives are the most common relationship in Oscar-nominated films. The commonist occupation is a doctor. Nearly one in five scenes are set in restaurants.’

  Laura considered. ‘So if you have a war film with a married doctor in a restaurant, you’ll sweep the board?’

  Caspar ignored her. ‘Plenty of British spies in World War Two,’ he stated confidently. ‘And Bond spends a lot of time in restaurants. He also knows lots of doctors – Dr No, for instance.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  Caspar looked at her indignantly. ‘Isn’t it obvious? That we should start thinking of Bond as an award-winner. Oscars might be some way off, admittedly...’

  He stopped and glared at Laura again, as if daring her to agree.

  ‘But there are others. The International Film Awards, for one. Known as the Ivys. They’re new, it’s the first ceremony this year, but people think they’ll be very prestigious. Be good if Bond could win one. Something’s got to make it all worth it,’ Caspar groaned.

  Laura had heard enough.

  ‘Check your privilege!’ she scolded. ‘Remember how desperately jealous you used to be of Orlando Chease!’

  Caspar snorted at the reminder of his former great rival, who had – albeit briefly – previously been in the frame for the Bond part. ‘God, where is he now?’

  ‘About half a mile away.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No, really. He lives here, well, his parents do.’ She had picked this up from Kearn. ‘They were all supposed to be at the quiz, I think.’

  Caspar’s attention had wandered. He was rummaging in the biscuit tin and picking out an iced Moneypenny. Then he dropped it with a groan.

  Laura eyed him ironically. ‘What’s the matter? Her legs too short as well?’

  ‘No, it’s the bloody diet. Practically all I am allowed to eat is egg whites.’ Caspar rubbed his smooth, well-tended face. ‘Honestly, Laura, I used to think that line about money not bringing you happiness was a lie made up by rich people to stop the rest of us murdering them.’

  ‘You mean it isn’t?’

  ‘No!’ Caspar clutched his hair theatrically, although not hard enough, Laura noticed, to actually risk pulling any of it out. ‘Money can’t buy you love, Laura.’

  Laura’s thoughts flew to Savannah Bouche. It could certainly buy her. Was she still with South’n Fried? Things seemed to have gone rather quiet on that front.

  Caspar’s large, brown, long-lashed eyes were trained on her meaningfully, Laura noticed. He now flashed her his most sincere smile. ‘Which is why it’s just so great to be back with you, babe.’

  ‘Back?’ She raised an eyebrow. They had never exactly been a couple in the first place. Just where was this leading?

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ Caspar murmured, edging his body on to hers again. ‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever really loved.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  His brown eyes were wide with sincerity. ‘It’s true. I’ll never forget how we met.’

  ‘On Amy Bender’s bed!’ They had been part of a contemporary art installation in Paris. Laura giggled at the memory.

  He was gazing at her beseechingly. ‘We’ll always have Paris, won’t we, Laura?’

  ‘What exactly do you want, Caspar? We’ve had the sex, you don’t have to smarm up to me any more.’

  Caspar looked hurt. ‘It’s not just sex, Laura. I think you and I could have a meaningful relationship.’

  Laura was so surprised that her mind entirely emptied for a moment. When everything reloaded, there was Harry. She felt suddenly terribly guilty. But why? He obviously wasn’t worrying about her.

  ‘But what about Merlot?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Merlot D’Vyne? Who played Prudence?’

  ‘That’s over.’ Caspar was playing with her hair. ‘She really wasn’t very deep.’

  ‘You mean you are?’

  Caspar sighed. ‘Stop getting at me. I want to be with someone I can trust. You can’t imagine the flaky women out there.’

  Like Savannah Bouche, for instance. ‘I think I can,’ Laura assured him.

  Caspar was turning his warmest and most sincere gaze up to melting point. ‘Now I’ve found you again, I don’t want to let you go.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to find me. I’ve been sitting in the Society office five days a week for over a year.’

  ‘Laura, I’m serious. You’re the woman for me.’

  But are you the man for me? Caspar was notoriously unreliable. He had let her down before. Because of him, she had been alone and vulnerable in London. But she had found her own way in the end, spectacularly well too, which was why, try as she might to summon up those old feelings of anger, Laura couldn’t.

  He put his face close to hers. His breath held only the faintest suggesti
on of mushy peas, with an after-tang of champagne. ‘Laura. Listen to what I’m saying. I love you.’

  Difficult words to resist, of course. And when delivered by a devastatingly handsome man she was, despite herself, extremely fond of and helplessly drawn to, all the more irresistible. For all her efforts not to let it, a flash of excited hope went through Laura. She believed in love – she had grown up in Paris, after all. Like all French women she loved the idea of love as much, if not more, than love itself.

  He was nuzzling her neck now. ‘Actually, I adore you.’

  She arched her back and angled her chin so she was staring at the room’s beamed ceiling. How many lovers, over the centuries, had looked up at these same beams?

  He had hold of both her hands and was wrapping her arms round himself. She felt herself ricochet wildly between steady self-belief – of course he should love her, Caspar was a flaky worm and she was a wonderful person – to absolute disbelief because one of the most famous film stars on the planet was begging for her affections.

  ‘Say you’ll be with me!’ he implored.

  She felt her grip of the situation slipping. Time had passed, after all, since their last encounter. Perhaps he had changed, and not just in the sense that his formerly hairy chest was now waxed smooth and the colour of butterscotch and his formerly soft tummy was a rigid six-pack. Should she let herself trust him? Or would he – yet again – turn out to be a huge and hurtful waste of time?

  One of Mimi’s maxims floated to the front of her mind. ‘Just because you have only one life doesn’t mean you should be afraid of wasting it.’

  ‘But you’re in LA, with Haddock,’ she pointed out. ‘Next door to Cher.’

  ‘Great woman!’ put in Caspar quickly. ‘You’re gonna love her! She’s so funny. Know what she said to me the other day? “Gee, Caspar, I can’t believe I’m still dancing about on a stage. I thought I’d be dead by now.”’ He shook his head. ‘Awesome.’

  Laura cut off further celebrity reminiscences. ‘And I’m based in London.’

  To where she would return tomorrow, in fact. She felt a powerful, terrible longing to stay here, in this soothing sage-white room, and make love to Caspar for ever.

  ‘London! But that’s great!’

  ‘Why great? It’s about three thousand miles from Malibu.’

  ‘The Ivys!’ There were lightbulb signs in his eyes. ‘They’re being held in London! You can come with me! It’ll be your first official outing as the new woman in my life!’

  Laura stared. ‘Is that what this is all about? You just want me as arm candy at an awards ceremony?’

  Caspar laughed long and hard at this. When he recovered he said, ‘Are you joking? There’s no way I’d take you if I didn’t love you. When was the last time that hair saw a salon?’

  ‘How dare you? And, anyway, you haven’t even been nominated yet.’

  ‘No, but I will be. Come here.’ He closed her objections with his lips. ‘We hardly started the Hollywood Kama Sutra. Let me show you the Executive Producer.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Laura awoke to find sun streaming across the Golden Goose’s crisp white duvet. Through the fishnet effect of the diamond-pane windows the sky showed a sparkling blue. It was going to be a beautiful day. A beautiful day with Caspar. They could go down to the beach, walk hand in hand at the edge of the sand, paddle in the frothing waves, show the glamorous families that she too knew how to enjoy herself.

  Laura stretched luxuriously, extending her arm to touch Caspar’s warm, still-sleeping body. It touched only rumpled cotton, however. She sat up. Caspar had gone. A note lay on the sheet in his familiar uncertain handwriting and yet more uncertain spelling. ‘Soz, babes, had to go jogging. Then being picked up by limo. You looked too beautiful to wake up. See you at the Ivys. Be in touch soon. Cxxxx’. He had added for good measure a particularly crude drawing of one of their more adventurous positions.

  Laura sighed, rolled over on to her stomach and stared at the window. The sky outside seemed less blue now. Why hadn’t he woken her and taken her with him? He would be going back to London to get his plane, after all.

  Why were men always leaving her in bed? She was an independent woman with a brilliant career – well, it would be, once she had written her article about Great Hording. She was beholden to no one and she made her own way.

  Laura threw back the duvet and sprang out of bed. She had work to do, an investigation to begin. No time like the present, Laura thought, diving under the power-shower and gasping at the Niagara force of it. And really, it was just as well Caspar had gone. Her cover would have been, not just blown, but blasted to smithereens. She would see him soon anyway, at the Ivys.

  She finished in the bathroom and put the clothes abandoned last night on the floor back on. Fortunately they were so tight the creases did not show. Then she closed the door and slipped downstairs. She was hungry, as always in the mornings, and the smell of coffee, for a half-Frenchwoman especially, was almost too much to bear. Breakfast was one of the few subjects over which she and Mimi disagreed; the latter always skipped it, with an eye to her ligne. But the Englishwoman in Laura was partial to her morning toast and marmalade. To bacon sandwiches even more, and she could smell those too. According to a brochure she had half-read in Caspar’s loo, the pub did legendary ones, with meat from rare-breed pigs fed on ambrosia and served in golden sourdough with ketchup in diamond-encrusted bottles. Or something like that.

  But they were not for her this morning. She had to get out of the pub without Kiki Cavendish seeing her. The manager definitely now had suspicions. Last night she had cast many a dark look over at the Dumb Blondes table and there had been an obvious confab with the question-setter about whether they could be allowed to win (the answer, obviously, had been no). But it was more than that; her notes had gone missing. Laura had a horrible feeling that she had handed them in by mistake, thinking that they were answer sheets. That Kiki was now on to her was all her own fault.

  Loud voices were coming from the bar as Laura tiptoed down the stairs. She recognised the booming tones of Jolyon Jackson the Defence Minister, but not bantering, as last night when he had been the life and soul of the party. He sounded incandescent with rage and was yelling about press intrusion, a bloody cheek, a gross breach of trust, a private event and what the hell fuck shit did Kiki think she was doing?

  Laura reached the bottom of the stairs. The pub’s rose-fringed front door stood open before her. Bright morning light, spilling over the stone floor, lit a shining path to the outside, to freedom. No one would see her leave. But if a government minister was shouting at the manager about press intrusion, it was Laura’s job as a reporter to know why. Especially if, as seemed likely, her lost notes had something to do with it. Damn the moment of triumphal madness that had distracted her attention and made her hand in her papers with the rest!

  She turned back towards the entrance to the bar, revising as she did her previously critical view of the pub’s excess of hipster decoration. The retro one-armed bandit and the old-fashioned twist-handle bubble-gum machine had a useful space between them. One in which she could listen without being seen, whilst hearing and seeing everything. Laura slid in and crouched down. What exactly was going on?

  ‘How dare you let an arsing journalist in the bar?’ the Defence Minister was yelling. ‘We don’t do journalists in Great Hording! That’s the whole arsing point of it!’

  Within the bar, amid the strange slash-top tables and bizarre scribbly wallpaper, Jolyon Jackson was still going at Kiki hammer and tongs. His broad back, made broader still by a vast rugby shirt in belligerent red and black stripes, was turned to Laura. In front of him she could just see Kiki, resplendent in several vest tops at once and the trademark flowing black trousers. She was twisting her hair up frantically into its pencil and her eyes, bereft of the glasses which had slid off her nose and were swinging from their chains, were wide and scared, as well they might be.

  Jackson picked up a br
oadsheet newspaper from the neat pile in which the Sunday press was customarily arranged at the Golden Goose and shook it hard. The property, money and homes sections slithered from the bundle and crashed on to the polished stone floor.

  ‘Look at this!’ Jackson’s huge, hairy hand, its signet ring flashing in agitation, shook the paper’s front page. ‘It’s a disaster!’

  Kiki took a deep breath and positioned her reading glasses carefully back on her nose as if she was seeing the headline for the first time and had not set eyes on it at five that morning when Pavel, having been to get the papers from the newsagent in Lowestoft, knocked on her door and tactfully left an edition on the threshold before slipping away. Just as well, as Kiki, plucked from deep sleep to grab a towel about her before opening the door, had let it go in sheer horror after looking down to see these words leap up at her from the front page.

  JACKSON CHEAT SENSATION!

  New Profumo Affair erupts at posh village pub quiz

  Beneath the headline was a huge photograph of the Defence Minister checking his smartphone under the table with obvious furtive intent. This in itself was no surprise to Kiki; she herself had seen him flout the rules. The question was, who had taken the picture?

  ‘They’re comparing me to Profumo!’ Jackson wailed. ‘A man who had to resign after it emerged that he was sleeping with the same woman as an arsing Russian diplomat!’

  Kiki furrowed her tanned brow. She was well informed on many subjects; reigning celebrities, in-vogue decorative styles, what suited the fashionable over-fifty. But she had little knowledge of history. ‘I’m not sure I follow, Mr Jackson. You’re not sleeping with the same woman as an arsing... I mean a Russian diplomat.’

  Jackson’s huge hairy hands clutched despairingly at his face. ‘Can’t you arsing see? They’re drawing a parallel, making the point that I’m a defence minister who’s done something untrustworthy. They’re saying if I can’t even obey the rules of a pub quiz, how can I be trusted with keeping the country safe?’

  Kiki didn’t disagree. The thought of Jolyon Jackson with his finger on the nuclear button had never been especially reassuring. But the interests of Jonny Welsh and the Golden Goose took priority. Her erstwhile lover had already been on the phone several times this morning demanding an explanation.