Alice tried to hide her amazement. Colonel Markham seemed to have shed twenty years and looked almost dashing as he twirled his grey moustache.
‘Yes, she is. She’s renting Ivy Cottage.’
‘Is she? Well. That is interesting.’ He reverted hurriedly to his normal tone of voice. ‘Interesting for you I mean – having a new friend in the village.’
To Lorraine, who was humming at him while rearranging the lumps of sugar, he said:
‘One of those steak and kidney pies, please, Mrs Watford. I’m in a hurry.’
Lorraine picked a chicken and mushroom pie out of the fridge behind her and presented it to him. He opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it and handed over the money before beating a retreat. Alice made haste to pay for her items and followed hot on his heels.
***
The week rolled on, following its usual pattern. Work during the day, watching TV, baking or chatting to a friend in the evening. There was no return of the irritability of Monday, but Alice was still conscious of a lingering dissatisfaction. She felt as if she was waiting for something to happen – but a voice at the back of her mind kept whispering that it never would. This was it, for life. She tried to cheer herself up with the thought that soon Mia would be back but even that made her gloomy. Mia was passing through: she would leave Alice behind.
She was turning these dreary thoughts over in her mind as she walked home from school on Friday afternoon. Passing the village hall, she spotted something new on the noticeboard.
NOTICE OF MEETING
Public meeting to be held on Saturday 16th May at Gently Rising village hall.
Topic: Lord de Beeble’s proposed use of village facilities for an interview process.
All welcome. 7pm start. Refreshments will be served at the close of the meeting.
The meeting will be chaired by Mrs Elaine Jowlett.
Initially, the reaction in the village to Lord de Beeble’s advert and the surrounding media interest had been one of curiosity and excitement but over the last couple of days, Alice had noticed a turn in the tide. There had been rumblings of discontent from certain members of the community – dark prophecies of what all this attention would mean for the village: traffic, noise and perhaps even litter. It seemed that these discontented elements had come together under the leadership of Elaine Jowlett, local scout leader and a lifelong Gently Risinger. If she had set her mind against Lord de Beeble using the village hall for his interviews the meeting promised to be a lively one. Alice reached for her phone; Mia had asked her to keep her up to date with any developments and this was, if she knew Gently Rising, a development.
***
The famine-ridden cheeks of the model were barely visible above the stretchy tube of white trellis packaging, more normally found around wine bottles, that formed the tall neck of her dress. Her body, to just below her pelvis, was clad in a blue mesh made out of twisted and stapled salt and vinegar crisp packets. Her feet were in sandals created from polystyrene trays.
Something was wrong. Saskia called the stylist over.
‘It’s not working. She looks too… alert, you know? And something’s missing.’ Rummaging through the pile of garments on the table, she picked out a blue cone-shaped hat; chains of figure-of-eight packing chips cascading from the point of the cone down to the floor. She watched as the stylist arranged the hat on the model’s head and gave her some instructions on her pose and facial expression.
‘That’s it, man. That’s the vacuum.’
When Saskia had launched her magazine, there had been some speculation over the meaning of its name: The Vacuum. Certain commentators had assumed it was an ironic reference to society’s perception of woman as a domestic animal. It wasn’t. It was Saskia’s way of referring to something that was so painfully, achingly cool, it was off the scale. ‘Cool’ was no longer cool enough for Saskia Stonor. Things were categorised into ‘icy’ (quite cool), ‘forty below’ (really cool), and ‘the vacuum’ (off the scale). Young, rich and pretty, Saskia had done what everyone had expected her to do by heading straight from St. Andrews University to an indecently well-paid job in the City. The CEO was an old friend of Daddy’s and he’d ushered her into a plum role from where she could expect to progress year on year with a fat bonus every Christmas and a guaranteed directorship by the time she was thirty-five. Life was easy for Saskia. A couple of years passed, years in which she had hung out with other rich City friends: skiing in Courchevel, holidaying on friends’ yachts in the Seychelles, long weekends in Miami and Monaco. Cabs, bags, heels, jewels, tans, booze, coke and late, late nights – these were precarious props of her day-to-day life. And then, a breakdown.
Totally unexpected, embarrassing for friends and family, and not at all part of the grand plan. Gone were the late nights, priceless morsels of food and ten-thousand-pound drinks bills; instead life contracted to the hushed, airbrushed interiors of an exclusive rehab clinic and private convalescent home. The empty space that appeared in her circle of friends was referred to with thinly-veiled contempt, before closing up completely. Breakdowns happened to the weak. Saskia was consigned to that other, lesser part of the world that was beneath notice.
‘OK, that’s a wrap, guys. Meditation time. Gather in, everyone.’
Models, stylists and photographer alike shuffled into a circle and held hands. Saskia closed her eyes and hummed. The others joined in, modulating their pitch to hers. Yoga and meditation were two of the things she’d picked up at the ayurvedic retreat in India. Crabs was another, but Saskia didn’t drop that into the conversation quite as often. After leaving the private convalescent home, Saskia had moped around at her parents’ house in the country for a while, directionless. The chance mention of ayurvedic healing in a newspaper article had set her off on a quest to find out more, throwing herself in at the deep end with a month-long stay at a retreat in Goa. She had been an instant convert. The calm of the retreat had suited her post-rehab introspection and the ideologies discussed there seemed to fit with many of the big questions she’d been asking herself. Pre-breakdown, her life had been hectic and superficial. At the retreat, she learnt a New Way. This New Way involved respecting and contemplating nature, taking time each day to meditate alone, and regularly disappearing off to an out-of-the-way hut to have sex. Hence the crabs.
Her salvation could have been Christianity, homoeopathy, scrapbooking, power-walking or Toby-jug-collecting. Saskia was a lost soul looking for succour, and she would have grasped at the first plausible-looking system of beliefs to come her way.
In Goa, she found herself.
In New York, she temporarily misplaced herself again.
A new friend she’d met in the retreat had invited her to come and stay for a while. This friend, Zelia, was the fashion editor of a major women’s magazine. For something to do, Saskia had gone into the office with her a few times, and in the end, they found her a job helping out one of the stylists. Yoga and meditation were still a major part of her daily routine, but she found herself being lured back into her previous lifestyle of long hours and hard partying. Zelia warned her to slow down, but she’d got the taste for it and soon was tumbling down the slippery, champagne-soaked slopes of debauchery towards the precipice. Fortunately, at the vital moment, her grandfather died. Summoned back to England for the funeral, Saskia had time to step back, reflect, and breathe a sigh of relief. New York had nearly succeeded in dirtying her newly-cleansed soul, but she had been plucked to safety just in time. Standing at the edge of the grave in a black Miu Miu dress, she sent up a silent prayer of thanks to her grandfather for sacrificing his physical body in order to save her soul. And for the inheritance of around twelve-point-five million, of course.
‘OK guys, thank you for sharing that with me. Let’s get this all cleared up now and Bo, I want to see some copy by midday tomorrow, no excuses. Chop chop, guys, let’s move it.’
The magazine had been a flash of inspiration. Back in Britain with cash piling up in the bank, s
he needed a new focus. She thought about setting up a yoga centre, but it seemed too small-scale. She wanted to educate… not the masses, exactly: more the chosen few. Saskia had learnt a hell of a lot and it would be bordering on immoral not to share her insights with others. With her mixture of life experience in the superficial City, spiritual Goa and stylish New York, she knew now what was authentic, what was beautiful and above all, what was cool. Or rather, what was the vacuum. And so, the magazine was born – its objective to raise humanity out of the gutter and on to solar-powered, ethical-diamond-encrusted scooters; to lift their eyes from their suburban shagpile to the eco-luxe headpieces worn by the cognoscenti. The Vacuum repudiated everything vulgar, mundane and crass – such as making lots of money in the City – and instead promoted the avant-garde, the ecologically innovative and the dazzlingly odd. It didn’t make money, but then that had never been the intention. Making money was greedy and base. The magazine was a work of art and like many artists, its editor did not always receive the acclaim she deserved. If she had, the whole point of the magazine would have been missed – it was opposed to what was popular and was, itself, often misunderstood. Saskia preferred to run The Vacuum at a loss, pouring in a few hundred thousand from her own pocket now and then, rather than succumb to the tastes of the general public.
‘Ciao, guys. Good work today. Ciao-ciao.’
Outside, the traffic roared past and Saskia picked out the welcome yellow light of an available black cab. She abhorred climate-destroying cars and didn’t own one herself. Instead, she used public transport whenever she wasn’t running late, and a cab when she was. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she was running late. Inside the cab, she had time to post an enlightening TikTok and tap out a couple of motivational tweets, before they pulled up outside La Vache Qui Pleure, an upmarket steakhouse. Not a big eater of meat as a rule, she’d suggested a new experiential plant-based restaurant, where diners were encouraged to chant over their food for good energy but Henry had demurred. ‘Bob hates London as it is,’ he’d said, ‘the least we can do is help him face it on a full stomach.’
***
Noblet spotted Saskia approaching through the candlelit restaurant and stood up to give her an awkward peck on the cheek. She hugged him to her for a few moments, despite the stiff resistance.
‘Noblet,’ she breathed. ‘Great to see you, man.’
Noblet muttered something that sounded like ‘very pleasant’ but she’d already turned away to kiss Henry full on the mouth and give him an even longer hug.
‘Are you OK, babe? You look pale.’
‘How can you tell in this light?’
‘Call it a sense then. Your aura’s faint.’
‘My aura and everything else is fine, darling. Sit down. Let’s order some wine.’
‘Yes!’ agreed Noblet. ‘Wine! Wine, wine, wine. Lovely, lovely wine.’
Then he picked up his menu and studied it with close attention.
‘Everything go OK at the shoot?’ asked Henry.
As Saskia related the events of the day at the magazine, Noblet continued ostensibly to inspect the menu whilst drifting into reverie. For once, the topic of his thoughts was not Victorian literature. It was something far weightier. It was socks. It had all started that morning when his mother had eyed him over her cup of tea, glanced at the open doorway and then beckoned to him. He’d leaned towards her, eyebrows raised. She had beckoned again.
‘I can’t get much closer without dipping my shirt in my kippers, Mother,’ he said, without attempting to lower his voice. ‘Do you want me to come over there?’
‘Sshhhh!’ she hissed. ‘Try to be discreet for once in your life, Noblet. I want to talk to you,’ her voice sank to as close to a whisper as she could manage, ‘about socks.’
‘What?’
The teacup was replaced on its saucer with an irritated rattle.
‘Socks,’ she rasped.
When Noblet had told his brother that he suspected their mother might be losing her marbles, he hadn’t exaggerated. Here was yet another symptom of her decline into senility. He humoured her.
‘Go on,’ he nodded, brightly.
‘It’s a subject I doubt you have given much thought to. When you marry, you will need to be prepared for it,’ she continued, in the same voluble attempt at a whisper. ‘Your wife will expect it.’
‘She’ll expect socks?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow. Are you saying my wife will expect me to give her socks?’
Lady Caroline looked like she might explode – and then did.
‘Sex, you imbecile! I quite said sex!’
Sally, walking into the room with a fresh pot of tea, swivelled on her heel and exited without spilling a drop.
‘For goodness’ sake, Mother! Do you think I want to discuss that with you over the breakfast table? Or over any kind of table if it comes to that?’
‘What you want and what you need are entirely different. You need to know what you’re doing, Noblet.’
‘Goddamn it!’ Noblet banged one fist on the table, causing a kipper to bellyflop out of his plate and land on the tablecloth where it lay, beached in a pool of its own grease, looking like it wished it were somewhere else. ‘I’m thirty-nine years old. We live in the twenty-first century – or some of us do, anyway. I have enough experience of…’ he glanced behind him and dropped his voice, ‘“socks” to be able to acquit myself in the marital bed, thank you!’
His mother looked surprised but for once allowed the subject to drop.
Ever since then, however, socks kept popping unbidden into Noblet’s mind. Despite his show of confidence, his experience was limited. He’d never met, let alone stripped down to his socks with any of the ‘busty Bethans’ selling stories on him in the tabloids. A few forgettable flings in his twenties and a more recent relationship with a professor of Jacobean literature formed the sum total of his vaunted experience. What would be expected of him by the successful candidate? Having come through gruelling rounds of interviews, would she expect her prize to swing from chandelier to chandelier, Tarzan-style, naked but for a pair of pants embroidered with the de Beeble coat of arms, before ravishing her on a copy of Who’s Who? Personally, when it came to socks, he could take it or leave it. He knew it wasn’t very manly to admit it, but he preferred a bit of snuggling in bed to wild nights of passion: all that thrashing and grunting and sweaty flesh and—
‘Rump?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Noblet pinged back to the present.
‘Or fillet? I hardly ever eat meat these days – evil methane – but when I do it’s got to be a rump steak. Call me bourgeois’ – Noblet thought ‘boring’ was more likely to spring to mind – ‘but I love it. The steak here is unreal, isn’t it, babe?’
‘It’s good,’ agreed Henry.
‘And you’ve got to have it bloody, of course,’ said Saskia, lasciviously. As she tipped up her glass, the red wine leaving purple, feathery trails over the inside of the bowl, Noblet thought of raw garlic and crucifixes. The waiter was hovering by the table and Noblet chose and ordered.
‘Fillet steak, well done, please.’
‘So suburban to be scared of a little blood, man. Get out of your comfort zone.’ Looking up at the waiter she changed the order to rare. Noblet reiterated his request that it be well done. Saskia wagged her finger and overruled him; Noblet all but yelled his order at the man and their table began to attract attention from fellow diners. Henry intervened.
‘Let it go, Saskia. You’ve got to let the man order his own supper, sweetheart. He can try some of yours if he wants to.’
The waiter, having allowed the corner of his mouth to twitch once, withdrew with a flourish reminiscent of a triumphant matador.
‘So, Bob…’ said Henry, with the air of a man who hasn’t quite decided what he’s going to say, but who knows it won’t be anything to do with steak, ‘looking forward to tomorrow?’
‘Absolutely
not.’ Sulkily balling a piece of bread in his fingers, he flicked it across the room, not noticing as it hit a neighbouring diner in the eye. She shrieked and he glowered at her. ‘Bloody Londoners. Attention-seekers, every man jack of ’em.’
A waiter came over and topped up their glasses. Noblet picked his up and tossed it back.
‘You’re gonna look the dog’s after Henry’s taken you shopping, man. If I had it my way, he’d be more experimental but you can’t deny the man’s got taste.’ Saskia smiled as she ran a finger down Henry’s well-cut lapel.
‘If you ask me, the whole idea is verging on the ridiculous. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and dressing me up in Savile Row suits isn’t going to make me James Bond.’
Aged ten, Noblet had been forced, kicking and screaming, into a pageboy outfit which included velvet knickerbockers and a frilly collar. Looking at his face now, Henry was vividly reminded of that moment.
‘Don’t worry, Bob – there’ll be no velvet. Or frills.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Listen, we need to smarten you up a bit. Your potential wives will be making an effort, it’s only fair that you do too.’
From somewhere within the gloom of the restaurant, a three-piece band oozed into the first bars of ‘Summertime’. A husky female voice seeped like syrup into Noblet’s veins, mingling with the wine and softening the edges of the evening. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad little restaurant after all. Maybe London wasn’t such a bad little town. Maybe the shopping trip wasn’t such a bad little idea.
‘You know what, Henners? Maybe you’re right. Maybe this shopping trip won’t be hotal tell after all.’
‘You should have stayed with us, Noblet, man. There’s plenty of room. We’ve had the spare room redone and the energy in there now is unreal.’
At the sound of Saskia’s voice, the syrupy, winey sensation seemed to hold its breath for a moment, but after another gulp and a particularly breathy note in the song it continued on, slithering right down to his toes. Noblet had made the mistake of staying with Saskia and Henry once before. He wouldn’t fall for that again. Fermented drinks, activated charcoal, jackfruit with everything and chanting before breakfast. Somehow Henry had avoided most of it, but like all honoured guests, Noblet was forced to partake of his hosts’ most outlandish delicacies.
Lord Seeks Wife: A hilariously funny romantic comedy Page 5