The Magnificent Mrs Mayhew

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Not at all,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m enjoying it. Learning so much from a true master.’

  ‘People are making their way to their seats,’ said John, his arm a bar against Sophie’s back now, ready to steer her forwards. ‘Anyway, have a good evening, Rebecca, Edward.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Rebecca appeared to answer for them.

  Edward and Rebecca were not seated on their table. They were with similar less important people in the middle of the room; John and Sophie were on the next table to Robbie Williams, whom Gerald called Robin when Elise forced an introduction upon him.

  ‘Is something going on between Edward and your new assistant?’ asked Sophie as John pulled out the seat for her.

  ‘I have no idea. I don’t get involved in the personal lives of my staff,’ he said. ‘Though who could blame him, tied to that miserable fish-faced shrew,’ he added for her ears only. ‘I suppose we will find out on Sunday if he brings her to the party, won’t we?’

  As Sophie was refreshing her make-up in the ladies’ powder room, after coffee and before the entertainment began, she was joined by Dena Stockdale.

  ‘We can’t get the chance to chatter across the table,’ Dena said to her via the mirror.

  ‘We must set up that lunch,’ said Sophie mischievously, in the sure and certain knowledge that it would never happen.

  ‘We must. Lovely evening, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s fabulous, yes.’

  Dena fished a Chanel compact out of her bag and dabbed the pad into the powder before sweeping it across her cheeks.

  ‘I didn’t know John’s brother worked for him,’ she said eventually, taking out a Chanel lipstick now. She clearly had a favourite brand.

  ‘That’s right,’ replied Sophie, with a smile she didn’t feel like giving out.

  ‘But that wasn’t his partner with him as I understand it?’

  ‘No.’ Sophie was determined to make Dena work for this conversation.

  ‘Striking-looking girl with that red hair and red dress. Stare at that colour combination for too long and you’re bound to get a migraine.’ Dena dropped a tinkly laugh, but Sophie didn’t grace it by joining in. She wasn’t going to bitch about someone she barely knew, to a bitch she barely knew. In fact, she found herself coming to Rebecca’s defence.

  ‘It’s brave, but I think she carries it off perfectly. You have to be so careful with bold colours as it’s too easy to look ridiculous, don’t you think?’ There, a little snide comment of her own, which Dena didn’t pick up on.

  ‘Personally, I insist on being part of the employment process,’ Dena went on. ‘Christopher doesn’t take anyone on without me vetting them first.’

  ‘Oh, why’s that?’ asked Sophie. ‘Don’t you trust him?’ Another barb? My, Sophie, you’re on a roll tonight.

  ‘Lots of ambitious people are drawn to Whitehall hoping to fast-track one way or another, if you know what I mean,’ said Dena. Her lipstick was dark wine-coloured and gave her the appearance of a heart problem.

  ‘No, I don’t know what you mean,’ said Sophie, feigning innocence, forcing her to explain.

  ‘I prefer Christopher to have men working for him. Removes any temptation,’ said Dena, with a stressed softness in her voice that smacked of sympathy and annoyed the hell out of Sophie. What was she trying to intimate?

  Sophie dropped her lipstick into her bag and closed it with a snappy gesture that indicated her mood perfectly.

  ‘I don’t think there is automatically any temptation when you employ female staff, Dena. As John has always said, “Why go out and buy a cheap cut of scrag end when you have a fridge full of fillet steak at home”,’ said Sophie. It might have sounded up her own backside, but she knew what Dena was trying to imply and she needed shutting down. She took a step away before being halted by Dena’s hand on her arm.

  ‘Some men – and I’m not saying John is one of them – have a taste for different cuts of meat, Sophie. Even fillet steak gets very boring after a while.’

  She was smiling, a nasty, patronising smile that wrinkled up her nose. The bigger the crocodile, the bigger the smile said Elise once.

  ‘I’ll bear your wisdom in mind,’ said Sophie with a pearly-white smile in return that could easily have blinded that crocodile.

  Chapter 6

  Four days before Doorstepgate

  Two days after the Cherlgrove Ball, Sophie spent the morning decorating their baroque-style dining room with flowers and candles, confetti and bunting, which she had stitched from gold cloth to celebrate John’s parents’ golden wedding anniversary. The long dining table had been set for both his and her side of the family. Outside caterers had been engaged to cook a five-course dinner for them all. Sophie added a finishing touch to the flowers with a spray of gold paint. John coughed as it hit the air.

  ‘Overkill, Sophie, is that really needed?’

  ‘It’s gold, John, so yes, I think so.’

  John’s eyes strayed upward to the bunting. Sophie had embroidered the number 50 onto many of the triangles. ‘And what’s with all that stuff? Have you ever heard the expression less is more?’

  In private she received his approval less and less, and that didn’t mean more.

  ‘I think they’ll appreciate the effort.’

  He made a noise that intimated they wouldn’t.

  ‘Not going to spray yourself gilt are you? Like that woman in Goldfinger?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  She went upstairs and changed out of her jeans and came down again to await the arrival of their relatives. She’d made a fifties-style full-skirted dress in eau-de-nil for the occasion.

  ‘You look beautiful, darling,’ said John. She knew that he wouldn’t be able to tell she had made it herself because it was more tailored to fit her than anything she could ever buy.

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘Goodness, they’re early,’ remarked Sophie. Her in-laws and parents were sticklers for time, neither arriving early nor late. Usually.

  John checked his watch. A Rolex, obviously. Even at leisure, he wore the best.

  ‘That’ll be the photographer,’ he announced.

  ‘Photographer?’ Sophie felt the first stirrings of panic. She hadn’t figured on the fact that John wouldn’t have missed a PR opportunity, even for a private gathering – and both sides of the family would have encouraged such a move. They were all hanging onto John’s coat tails because as he rose, so would they.

  ‘I’ll go and change,’ she said hurriedly.

  ‘No, you look perfect.’

  So she posed with John for the photographer by the French windows. The late afternoon sunlight draped them with a deep golden light and he wouldn’t need to add a filter in his studio. Single shots of Sophie next. Then the photographer pulled a notepad out of his pocket.

  ‘Who’s the designer of the dress, Mrs Mayhew?’ he asked.

  Sophie’s heart kicked a beat.

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t quite remember.’ She should have pulled any old designer’s name out of the hat. The magazine might have had a few complaints that they’d got the editorial wrong, but because Sophie Mayhew was caught on the hop, she didn’t.

  She tried to wave the question away. ‘I just bought it.’

  ‘They’ll want to know,’ said the photographer, pencil tapping on his pad. ‘They always want to know.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked John, walking over from the other side of the room.

  ‘I need the name of the designer of your wife’s dress,’ said the photographer. ‘For the copy.’

  ‘Tell the man, Sophie,’ said John with a little laugh, ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Sophie felt her cheeks begin to heat.

  ‘I don’t really want to.’ Well that was lame, said a voice inside her.

  ‘Excuse us a moment,’ said John, taking Sophie’s arm none too gently and steering her out of the door into the hallway. There, he whirled her around so her back was facing him and forced d
own the collar.

  ‘There’s no label,’ he said, releasing her roughly enough for her to have to take a step forward to steady herself.

  ‘Look, it’s second-hand, vintage,’ she lied. ‘I saw it and I fell in love with it and—’

  ‘Go and change, Sophie,’ said John, his face suffusing with colour. ‘Second-hand? Are you stupid? What the fucking hell are you playing at?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? Vintage, upcycling . . . it’s all the rage these—’

  ‘Our image is not vintage and up-fucking-cycling, Sophie, in case you haven’t grasped,’ said John, managing to concentrate a scream into a whisper and it being none the less harsh for the lack of volume. ‘Put something else on and do it now. The fucking photographer will have to take all the shots again now, you stupid bitch.’

  John’s hand made a furious comb through his hair.

  ‘Take off that rag before I rip it off here and now in the hallway,’ he said again, grabbing her arm and pushing her forward by it towards the staircase and she winced audibly which infuriated him more, because the photographer would have heard her. She and her idiocy had made him do that and turned him into the bad guy, was his thought process. Sophie knew this because she had been here a couple of times before and he’d told her as much then. He’d never hit her, but sometimes his words hurt as much as if he had.

  As Sophie scurried up the stairs, she had a sudden vision of the scene in Rebecca where the girl turns up dressed as Caroline de Winter and Maxim barks at her to go and change before the ball. She was angry at herself as she blasted through their bedroom and into her dressing room. What madness had possessed her to wear one of her own creations and then choose a lie that probably made matters worse? She could have avoided that scene if she’d put on something in her wardrobe made by someone else. Didn’t it even cross her mind that John would plunder the occasion for a PR opportunity? He had a point, she thought as she slipped out of the dress, screwed it up, never wanted to see it again because it would be forever tainted with the memory of him handling her as he had just done. How ridiculous it would have read: ‘Mr Mayhew in Hugo Boss, Mrs Mayhew in a dress she’d made herself.’ John would be laughed at. His wife reduced to making her own clothes. He was right, she was wrong. She could have argued that Victoria Beckham made her own clothes but John would have argued back that she was not Victoria Beckham. She would never win an argument with him; there was no bend in his soul.

  So she pulled out an olive green dress she had worn once before, paused momentarily to study if that would be a good match in photographs for what John was wearing. His suit was a strong dark blue, it was fine. She put it on, then swapped her jewellery and altered her hairstyle because pinned up it looked too severe with this much plainer dress. She slid in two combs above the ears. The reflection that stared back from her mirror was now photo-ready again, but she certainly didn’t feel it.

  John was talking to the photographer when she walked back into the dining room. Charming him to forget anything he might have heard that jarred with the image of the Mayhews as the perfect loving couple.

  ‘We were about to send out a search party,’ he chuckled. ‘I know you didn’t feel comfortable, so you did the right thing to change. We didn’t mind waiting.’ He turned back to the photographer. ‘Now I recognise this one instantly. Stella isn’t it? Stunning.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sophie. ‘This one is a Stella McCartney.’

  ‘I’m such a lucky man,’ said John F. Mayhew, folding his arms and tilting his head in order to admire his wife. ‘Now, let’s take those photographs before the others arrive.’

  As the last pose was being staged, the doorbell sounded. Extra staff had been employed to serve and a butler had been engaged to answer the door, a needless expense thought Sophie, but she’d had no say in the matter. Someone in John’s office had sorted it all out. Rebecca perhaps? She had looked like the sort of person who might enjoy pomp and ceremony, or at least be fascinated by it.

  The clan Calladine had arrived by the sound of the voices. Sophie prepared to greet them like official guests rather than family. It was odd that she’d had a conversation with Magda Oakes at school once about siblings. Magda didn’t have any and was asking Sophie to explain the family dynamics when one had them. All Sophie could tell her was that they were people who shared her parents and her home yet she felt no real connection to them. Magda said she found that odd. Didn’t they play together? Or help each other when they felt they needed it? No, said Sophie. ‘Well that’s rubbish then,’ Magda had said. ‘Yep,’ was Sophie’s reply. She hadn’t thought about it much until then, until she’d analysed it so she could explain it to Magda. That triggered a phase where she became a little obsessed by families and how they interacted with each other. She made notes in a book about it, how Irina’s mother and father rang her every Saturday and they spoke for at least an hour, how much she looked forward to hearing from them. How Polly Rice’s grandmother sent her letters and cards, how Joanna Falstaff’s sister, who lived quite close, would take her out for tea once a week. Fatima Ghazi was terribly homesick and cried a lot because she missed being in the bosom of her family. So much so that she’d eventually had to leave and attend a non-boarding day school – none of these things Sophie experienced. She rejoiced when the end of term came to go home because she missed the family dogs and couldn’t wait to see them, but there were no human arms waiting for her to rush into.

  Victoria was seven years older than Sophie, Annabella six years older. None of the sisters ever socialised outside family occasions, they were three very separate entities. Annabella arrived first into the dining room, followed by her squat little husband Pearson who was a merchant banker which, in his case, was both his profession and what he was in Cockney rhyming slang. That he would inherit a title one day had been the attraction for Annabella, because his monosyllabic line in conversation and his ability to look down on everyone from a great height, despite being five foot five, most certainly wasn’t.

  ‘Oh my, this looks fabulous, you have been busy,’ said Annabella, eyes flicking everywhere. Annabella was the queen of one-upmanship; Sophie knew she was hunting for an opportunity to brag, and she always found one. ‘You’ve had the floor re-polished, I see. We’ve just changed the whole of our downstairs to Spanish cherry. I can’t tell you what it cost.’ Even though she would within the half-hour.

  Victoria followed behind with her parents. Victoria’s marionette lines looked particularly deep today, telling of her misery. Her glass wasn’t only always half-empty, but it had a crack in it and there was a person with their hand out ready to steal it and then smash it with a hammer. She made Eeyore look like Tigger. ‘Have you any ibuprofen in the house?’ were her first words. Her husband Giles didn’t join in the ritual of air-kissing because he had a thing about germs. He didn’t do physical contact. Not surprisingly they didn’t have children.

  ‘How are you, Daddy?’ asked Sophie, seeing him drop rather heavily onto a chair.

  ‘Mustn’t grumble. Now then, John, I see Wax is making rather an idiot of himself with his proposals for the NHS.’

  ‘Oh don’t get me started, Angus.’

  Sophie should have been used to witnessing how inconsequential she was to her own. It still gave her a skin-twist of hurt, although she never let it show but today, because of what she had endured, it pinched extra hard. She’d been a disappointment to her father by arriving into the world as a girl and not as the son he coveted – the son he’d eventually found in John F. – and she knew this because he had written and told her so in a letter that he had sent to her when she was fourteen explaining why she would not be coming home for the summer holidays. Then she had failed to become head girl at St Bathsheba’s, thus spoiling the clean sheet of her mother and two sisters. She had redeemed herself by being beautiful enough to hook the king fish in the pond, so she did have some value, but little more than a maggot in a bait box.

  Strangers fawned over her, the pr
ess were fascinated by her, but to her family she was a mere add-on to her husband. An accoutrement, a golden key to a treasure vault. If the Calladine and Mayhew families combined were a Christmas tree, she would be a very small decoration buried deep in the branches. John, of course, would be the showy star on the top.

  The doorbell again: the Mayhews had arrived now in a fleet of prestigious cars, Celeste and Clive heading the almost presidential convoy in their Bentley; the middle son Robert and his new girlfriend, who wouldn’t last very long because they never did, and Edward and his fiancée Davina who made the hairs on Sophie’s neck rise. They flooded into the room to be greeted by the Calladines who congratulated Clive and Celeste on being married for fifty years. Celeste Mayhew was resplendent in a new mink that Sophie couldn’t acknowledge as being as admirable as everyone else thought it was. John’s political stance on fur was very publicly anti, but there he was asking his mother to give him a twirl in her new animal-suffering monstrosity. Sophie wanted to rip it from her back and give it a decent burial.

  A waitress in a black dress and white starched apron appeared with a tray full of champagne. Giles took two glasses, both for himself. Giles drank a lot. Being married to Victoria, that was understandable. He obviously had no qualms about germs in champagne.

  Sophie stood amongst them, as she had so many times, feeling like the central post in a merry-go-round, watching everything whirl around her without feeling part of them at all. Today, she felt it more than ever. Snippets of conversation drifted to her. Giles: ‘Is this the real stuff then, Mayhew, or one of those sparkling wines?’ Victoria: ‘They can’t get my medication right. I put on a stone with the last lot of tablets. That did wonders for my anxiety – not.’ Clive Mayhew: ‘I didn’t expect all this. The bunting is a little overkill though.’ Alice Calladine: ‘I do hope we get the same treatment next year for our golden wedding celebrations.’ Celeste (to the photographer): ‘Gucci. And don’t forget to mention that it’s female mink, they’re far superior: lighter, softer and it takes more of them to make a coat so ultimately that makes them more expensive.’ Sophie had a sudden vision of herself tearing across the room and jumping through the picture window like a superhero into the garden, galloping over the grass like one of Elise’s horses and running away from them all. But to where? Where would Sophie Mayhew go where she wouldn’t be recognised? She was more famous than Madonna in Britain. The newspapers already referred to them as the new JFK and Jackie. Ironic considering that the antecedents of both the Kennedy and the Mayhew clans had once been so close.