Farm Fatale (36 page)

    "Know that type," he observed conversationally. "Bit of an arsehole. What my girlfriend used to call MTF. Must Touch Flesh."

    Rosie spluttered on her champagne. "What do you mean? You haven't even met him yet."

    "Calm down. I don't mean your
boyfriend
. That guy you were talking to. Bit of a lech."

    "Oh. Yes." Rosie suddenly felt exhausted. Her nerves were raw with lack of sleep as well as everything else. If only Mark would make an appearance. Then she could go home to bed, safe in the knowledge that he still walked the earth. She stared hard at the crowd.

    "We never introduced ourselves," the stranger said, smoothing out a cushion and gesturing for her to sit down. "I'm, um, Kevin."

    "Rosie."

    "What do you do?"

    "I'm an illustrator. How about you?"

    He ignored the question. "An illustrator?" he repeated eagerly. "Can you paint? Portraits, I mean."

    "Sort of." The one of her mother's golden retriever painted last Christmas had been very sort of, Rosie recalled. Then there was the birthday one of Mark that, on the grounds of being insufficiently flattering, had never made it to the wall. Come to think of it, Rosie wasn't sure it had made it to the cottage.

    "Could you…" Kevin started to say, but he never finished his sentence as, at that precise moment, all hell broke loose.

The guests were arriving in earnest by the time Mark descended the stairs in as dignified a manner as he could, given the weight of his jewel-festooned turban and the difficulties of walking in tight brocade slippers with turned-up toes. He felt utterly ridiculous. The thought of anyone seeing him like this was horrendous, but he did not dare disobey Samantha. There was the screenplay to consider, for one thing. And there might still be a chance of some Eastern promise later if he did her bidding.

    The film project,
Charlotte in Love
, had now attained full-blown blockbuster status. In Mark's imagination, at least. Following the huge success of
Shakespeare in Love
, the time was surely right for an exploration of the romantic life of another great English literary figure, the creator of
Jane Eyre
. He already had a cast in mind. Joseph Fiennes, after all, was born to wear a stovepipe hat, while Samantha had whalebone corsets written all over her. Which would come in handy if, as he planned,
Charlotte in Love
spawned a whole series of Authors in Love, next up, the similarly underpinned Jane Austen.

    As Sholto passed the bottom of the stairs and directed a look of frank appreciation toward his crotch, Mark felt sick. And not only with embarrassment. The pair of ludicrously tight gold trousers had forced the realization, as he struggled to button the waistband, that his previously flat stomach, thanks to all the chocolate chip cookies, was now more cheese board than washboard. The trousers were also agony to wear and possibly ruled out fatherhood on a permanent basis. Having slowly but successfully reached the bottom of the stairs, Mark snatched at a passing champagne glass to drown his sorrows and, he hoped, anesthetize the pain in his abdomen. He launched himself on the variously costumed and screeching crowd.

"Hello," said someone dressed, rather unconvincingly, as a vicar.

    Recognizing, through the whorls and refractions of the champagne glass, that it actually
was
the vicar, Mark lowered his drinking vessel.

    "Didn't recognize you. Was looking through a glass darkly," he added, sniggering.

    The vicar looked pained.

    "How's business?" Mark snatched another brimming glass from one of the constantly passing trays.

    "Brisk," the vicar said bullishly. "I've got to go in a minute to attend to a couple of deaths, and there's a marriage to sort out."

    "Sort out?"

    "Young couple getting wed in a month or so. They want to have 'The Owl and the Pussycat' read out during the service, but I've found out it's only because the groom wants to hear the word 'pussy' in church."

    As the vicar disappeared toward the front door, Mark staggered through the entrance to the marquee, narrowly missing a pair of ridiculous stuffed sheep.

    "Hi," drawled someone to the side of him. It was the thin girl he had met on the hillside earlier in the afternoon. All traces of tie dye and cobwebs had gone; a silver-sequined yashmak, a glittering silver bra, and a matching skirt split to the thigh were their somewhat spectacular replacements. The bra, Mark noticed, was several sizes too large.

    "I know," said the girl, following his gaze. "Made for someone breast-feeding, I guess."

    "Breast-feeding who?" Mark gawked at the capacious cups. "The five thousand?"

    The girl shrugged. "Dunno. I just sneaked in, grabbed it, and shoved it on."

    Somewhere in the foggy depths of Mark's brain suspicion stirred. An unaccustomed flash of illumination struck him.

"You're not really supposed to be here, are you?" he asked her.

    The girl regarded him narrowly. "Why you giving me the third degree, man? You a cop or something?"

    Mark stuck his chest out and drew himself up. "Actually, I'm a journalist." At the unwelcome remembrance that he wasn't one anymore, he grabbed at another passing champagne vase.

    The girl looked unimpressed. "A couple of my friends from school want to be journalists. They're all doing crap media studies courses now. One of them," she snorted, "is writing a thesis on 'The Significance of the Invisible Questioner on
The Naked Chef
.'"

    "Whatsh that?"

    "You know. That woman on the program that you never see who asks the Naked Chef all those stupid questions all the time."

    Mark nodded slowly, despite having no idea what she was talking about. What woman? Personally, he made a point of never watching the chirpy TV cook in action; along with every other male of his acquaintance, he loathed the Naked Chef with messianic passion and prayed for the day he suffered a fatal accident on his scooter or burst into flames with the friction of sliding down that nauseating banister. Mark hated to think of how rich he must be. And the fact that a mere bloody cook was taking up space in
The Times
that could be filled by a trained journalist. Like himself, for example.
Bastard
. He forced his thoughts off the vile subject.

    "You at school?" he asked her. She was quite pretty, really, if you didn't look too closely at the ironmongery.

    The girl shook her head. "I split. It was a turnoff."

    "Why?"

    "The drug scene, for one thing. So dumb."

    Mark nodded. "Very stupid. I've seen so many careers go down the tube because of too much charlie." He hadn't—not least because salaries at the paper were barely enough to keep the staff in aspirin, much less Class A narcotics. But he wished to appear worldly-wise.

    The girl looked witheringly at him. "Hey, don't get me wrong. What was dumb was that most people were so goddamn stupid they couldn't tell whether they'd been sold an eighth of grass or an eighth of dried lawn."

    Mark stared. No doubt about it now. That degree of denseness confirmed all his suspicions about her accent. Public school, definitely.

    He slugged back the rest of his champagne. "You know," he slurred, "you remind me of myshelf at your age."

    The girl looked considerably less flattered than he had expected. Yet it was true; the memory of his eighteen-year-old self looking at eighteen-year-old girls and wondering what it would be like to screw them was flooding back strongly.

    "No, really," Mark continued, "you do. What
are
you doing here, anyway?" he pressed.

    "Meeting someone."

    "Who?" Shuffling unsteadily closer, Mark slapped a clammy hand on her back. "Boyfriend?"

    "No, not boyfriend. Someone I haven't seen for a while." She paused. "Thing is, they don't know I'm coming.
Hey
,
look
," the girl suddenly exclaimed, "isn't that Matt Locke over there? Down in the corner?" She pointed excitedly. "Oh, God, I think it is. I
love
him." Her laconic manner having completely evaporated, she was staring ecstatically into the distance as if she had spotted Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince William rolled into one.

    "Matt Locke?" Mark echoed unsteadily. "What, you mean
Matt
Locke
? The livesh on the moor and never comes out of his houshe Matt Locke?"

    The girl, thrilled, was bouncing up and down beside him. "
God
, how fab. I mean groovy," she added hurriedly, reining in excited schoolgirl and replacing it with laconic L.A.

    Mark peered hard in the direction in which her finger was pointing. This was difficult, considering there suddenly seemed to be two of everything. Could she really mean those…that thin, scruffy youth sitting in the corner of the tent? The candle flame illuminating his features revealed nothing at first, but then he smiled at his companion and Mark recognized the famous face. "Christ. Looksh in a bit of a bloody shtate, doeshn't he?"

    The girl looked at Mark in disgust. "Haven't you heard of casual chic, man? Matt's far too cool to go in for this fancy-dress crap,
obviously." Her eyes ran contemptuously up and down Mark'
s costume. "It's a good idea anyway. Everyone knows he's supposed to be reclusive. He probably doesn't want to be recognized, and no one apart from us seems to have worked out who he is. He's practically on his own." She threw a scornful look round the inebriated crowd. "Anyway, this gang wouldn't notice if the queen came and mooned them."

    Mark cleared his throat and tried to look sober. "At least his girlfriends look good." He screwed up his eyes again. They
were
very glamorous, those two girls sitting next to the alleged star. They wore suits—surprisingly similar suits; perhaps they were twins—that showed a lot—
a lot
—of cleavage. The type of thing Rosie would look good in.
If
, Mark's lips twisted, she could ever be bothered.

    "Whaddya mean, girlfriends? There's only one of them."

    Mark tried hard to focus. The two women gradually fused into one. One who looked, for some reason, familiar. It was difficult to see her face, what with her hair dangling everywhere and the flickering candlelight, but something about that mass of blond hair and the line of her cheek reminded him of…
Rosie?
Hang on a minute…

    "Thatsh not
hish
bloody glamorosh girlfriend. Thatsh
mine
."

    The girl looked at him with respect for the first time.

    This breakthrough went unnoticed by Mark, the inside of whose head was tossing with an explosive mixture of champagne and jealousy. "
Oy!"
he yelled, lumbering over like an angry bull whose motor skills and sense of direction weren't everything they could be. "
You lot." There seemed to be four people now. Two set
s of identical twins.

    Hearing something loud coming her way, Rosie looked up sharply. Relief shuddered through her when she saw Mark, albeit in a costume from the further side of fancy-dress common sense. "My boyfriend," she said to Kevin, and scrambled to her feet. "Mark!" she gasped. "Darling! I've been so worried about you, disappearing like that. I was frantic. Where have you been?"

    Mark reeled as the blood came to a boil in his head. She had the bloody cheek to ask him where he'd been? When here she was, practically
in flagrante
with a bloody pop star? A man whose riches and success were beyond Mark's wildest dreams? Even if said superstar did look like a builder's laborer, Mark knew he looked nowhere near as ridiculous as he did himself.

    The loss of the column had had a worse effect on Mark than Rosie had feared. He looked more than agitated. Ferocious, even. And drunk, quite possibly. "I'm so sorry about 'Green-er Pastures,'" she whispered, touching Mark's arm and, in doing so, setting light to the blue match tip of his fury.

    Vicious with drink and jealousy, he exploded. "Shorry?" he bellowed. "You don't look like you're bloody shorry."

    Definitely drunk, Rosie thought. Drunker than she had ever seen him, in fact. This was no time to row about why he hadn't left a note. Aware of Kevin watching closely, she took both Mark's hands, hoping the gesture would bring him to his senses. "To be honest, I'm not all that sorry," she said, intending to launch into a speech about there being more important things in life than by-lines. "I'm glad—"

    At this, Mark erupted spectacularly for the second time. "
Glad
?" he screamed, ripping his hands out of her grasp. "Glad, are you? Glad! Yes, you look pretty bloody happy. Sitting there with your tongue down his bloody throat"—he stabbed a finger angrily in Kevin's direction—"while I sweat down to London and grovel to save my bloody job."

    Rosie felt as if a bucket of icy water had been flung into her face. "What?"
Tongue?
Was Mark joking? She looked incredulously into his red-veined and furious stare and concluded swiftly that he wasn't.

    "We were just talking—"

    "Talking?" yelled Mark. "Ugandan bloody dish cushions, more like. All that shtuff about never knowing who anybody bloody famoush is when you can shpot a shelebrity in dishguise at fifty paces. Even if"—Mark looked contemptuously at Kevin—"he looksh like a fucking tramp."

    "Thanks a lot," muttered Kevin.

    Rosie reeled backward. Had Mark gone mad? Had he lost his mind as well as his column?