Simply Divine (26 page)

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wonder this is called the Blue Drawing Room. Look at the colour of my hands.' The patches that were not black with soot were, Tally saw, almost indigo with chill.

'Here, let me,' she soothed, taking the tattered bellows from him and trying not to mind that he had been thrusting their Elizabethan carved oak end straight into the burning embers. 'I'm used to it.' A few well-directed wheezes later, she had persuaded a respectable blaze into being.

Saul gazed at her pinched face in astonishment. How did she manage to be so thin and yet apparently immune to the worst the cold could throw at her? She really did have the constitution of an ox. Mrs Ormondroyd, on the other hand, just
looked
like an ox.

'Why do you never get colds?' he asked.

'We were never allowed to wear socks after March,' Tally answered. 'And we took cold baths every day. It was very good training for learning to live in an English country house.'

'We?' asked Saul.

'My brother Piers and I,' said Tally.

'Your
brother?
gasped Saul, alarmed. He had not bargained for this. Visions of a patrician, urbane head of the family in a fifteen-piece tweed suit suddenly appearing brandishing a riding crop and grilling him in merciless detail about what he was up to loomed large and hideous before him. His heart thundered like the last furlong of the Grand National as all his carefully-laid plans swayed and shuddered in the balance. Penthouse balconies, herringbone brick drives and video entryphones swooped mockingly before his racing vision, then faded dramatically away. The figures on his imaginary bank balance morphed from the hoped-for brilliantine black to an angry,

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frustrated red. Tally had a brother. What a nightmare. Was the brother here? Spying on him? Concealed somewhere in this vast, rotting warren of a house?

'Where is he?' asked Saul. He had intended the query to sound insouciant, but it flew out in a high-pitched

yelp.

'Oh, I'm not sure,' said Tally, sighing into the flames. 'He could be anywhere.'

Saul, having heard what he most feared, was somehow able to stifle the cry of panic that threatened to loose itself from the moorings of his throat. But he was able to do nothing about the shocked, colourless white of his blood-drained face.

'The last we heard he was underneath a runway at Gatwick,' Tally added.

Saul's head spun. 'WTi-what?'

'Under a runway at Gatwick,' repeated Tally. 'He's an environmental protester, you see. He went AWOL from school and the only time I see him now is in the papers if he's been throwing mud at a minister or something. He hasn't,' she ended sadly, 'been near Mullions or his family for months.'

Saul let out a sigh of relief so vast he feared it might extinguish the hard-won fire. His feet tingled with the joy of the reprieved. 'How fabulous ... I mean, how dreadful,' he stammered. But Tally was too lost in her thoughts to notice. It made her sad to think of her brother. They had been close as children, had clung together in the face of their mother's more eccentric excesses and affectations. Tally had written regularly to him at school, bowled up frequently with picnics and chatter and advice about girlfriends and in between times had sent him money she could ill afford to spare. Piers's current lack of

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Saul's head spun. 'Wh-what?'

communication was a disappointment she felt keenly.

'Who was on the telephone, by the way?' she asked, changing the subject. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder before, but the faint hope that it might be Piers struck her as she edged into a mice-dropping-free corner of the sofa.

'Wrong number again,' said Saul smoothly, after an infinitesimal silence. It was, too, he justified to himself. His business contacts had strict instructions from now on to call him on his mobile.

Feeling more in control again, Saul lit a cigarette and stood in as upright a manner as he could muster given that he was several spine-twisting nights on Mullions' mattresses the worse for wear. He felt gingerly at his left cheek. Shaving in wobbly Elizabethan mirrors had done nothing for the symmetry of his sideburns. No wonder the Tudors had always gone in for beards. Much safer. He cleared his throat; his ticklish cough was getting worse. Tally looked at him expectantly.

'You ought to be in pictures,' announced Saul.

Tally flushed. It was true that someone had once compared her to Celia Johnson. It was very sweet of Saul to try and flatter her, but really, one had to be realistic.

'I'm much too tall to be a film star,' she faltered.

Saul looked nonplussed. 'No,
notyou,'
he said, in rather more astonished tones than Tally might have wished for. 'The house. Here.' He thrust a brochure into her hand.

Tally gazed at it. 'The ultimate location' read a line of mock Elizabethan script rolling across the front of a familiar-looking combination of golden stone and oriel windows, viewed from across a pearly lake. It looks astonishingly like Mullions, thought Tally, fascinated to see that some turrets of the gatehouse had fallen off to leave just the same gap-toothed effect as on the one at the

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end of their own estate road. She looked closer. It
was
Mullions. 'Where on earth did you get this from?' asked Tally, gazing up at Saul, bemused.

'From myself,' said Saul, turning up his hands for dramatic emphasis. 'I put it together, using a few of my contacts from the advertising world.'

'But what is it? What does it mean?'

Saul gritted his teeth. Some people really were slow. 'It's a brochure,' he said, with exaggerated patience. 'A brochure advertising Mullions to film companies.'

Tally looked at him blankly.

'It's a brilliant idea, don't you see?' Saul urged, a chilly touch of impatience creeping into his voice. 'The film world is crying out for locations like Mullions. Period dramas needing backgrounds. You know,
Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,
that sort of thing. There are a few films that I happen to know are going into production at the moment. We can target them. They'd pay a fortune.'

'But wouldn't they need, oh, I don't know, electricity, loos, food and all that?' gibbered Tally, shrinking against the sofa back as she tried to think quickly. 'Wouldn't they wreck the house?'

'Oh, no, no, no,' said Saul, fingers firmly crossed behind his back. 'You'd never know that they'd been there afterwards. Film units bring their own jennies. That's filmspeak for generators,' he added, rather pompously. 'But you don't have to worry your pretty little head about any of it. All you need to do is pop out and say hi when Tom and Nicole roll up in their trailers.'

Tally gasped, feeling dazzled. Saul had obviously thought it through. 'I know so little about it,' she murmured. 'You're the expert. But it sounds harmless enough.'

Saul looked at her huffily. 'Well, don't overwhelm me with your enthusiasm.'

Feeling guilty as well as scared, Tally gave him a contrite and dazzling smile. 'It sounds a wonderful idea,' she said. Thank you so much, darling. We must,' she added, straining to please, 'get these brochures
off
as soon as possible.'

Sa'ul grinned, a hint of triumph in his eyes. 'Actually, I sent them out yesterday.' In a lightning move, he grabbed both her hands and pulled her close, gazing into her face with heart-melting sincerity. 'I won't ask you again,' he croaked, reflecting as he did so that the combination of the bed, his cough and the freezing cold would probably see he didn't survive to, 'but now you have proof that I'm desperate to help you and Mullions, will you marry me?'

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Chapter 16

Deciding what to wear for the Movers and Shakers party was a nightmare. Desperate, Jane had even considered asking Champagne if she could borrow one of her dresses, but thought better of it after realising they probably wouldn't fit over her head. Just as she was juggling the idea of her all-purpose black trousers teamed with an all-purpose black jacket, or all-purpose black jacket teamed with all-purpose black trousers, or perhaps a daring combination of both, the telephone on her desk shrilled.

Ten minutes later she put it down. Her ears were singing as she went into Victoria's office. 'I've just had Champagne's hotel in New York on the line,' she reported.

Victoria looked up from the card, personalised in neat serif capitals, on which she was writing in the thick, black-inked oversized hand developed at prep school to make sure it got to the other side of the paper.

'They say Champagne has checked out.'

'Why?' said Victoria, absently. 'I thought it was the best one in town. We even got her the Presidential suite.'

'It is and we did,' said Jane through gritted teeth. 'But it's not good enough for Champagne. She's just checked out in a fury because the lifts to the penthouse are too slow for her.'

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Victoria nodded. 'Quite right too,' she said with the air of one who'd seen more penthouses than Bob Guccione. 'Slow lifts can be
very
frustrating.'

'There's something else,' Jane said, keeping the urge to scream and throw things just about under control. 'The photographer called me earlier and said he and Champagne were among those invited to the exclusive dinner Ralph Lauren held after his show. Apparently it was unbelievably lavish. Champagne, caviar, lobster, you name it.

Victoria nodded, looking bored. So far, so run-of-the-fashion-mill, said her face. 'Yes? And?'

'Well Champagne apparently decided in the middle of it all that she wanted lasagne,' said Jane. 'She stormed out of the dinner when she was told there wasn't any and went back to the hotel and demanded they found some for her.'

'Well, I jolly well hope they did,' said Victoria hotly. 'Those hotels are supposed to be able to get you anything. A white elephant steak at four in the morning if you want it.'

'Oh, they got it all right,' said Jane. 'It's just that Champagne's exclusive at-home interview with Ralph Lauren, which we fought off all the competition to get, may now be in some doubt.'

Victoria breathed in deeply and exhaled, flaring her nostrils dramatically as she did so. She fixed Jane with a look of pitying patience. 'Sooner or later,' she said, in exaggeratedly patronising tones, 'even the most sophisticated and privileged among us gets the urge for something simpler. Many's the time I've come back from some A-list premiere or party, thrown off my heels and asked for nothing more than the maid to rustle me up a simple eggs Benedict.'

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Jane sighed. OK, if Victoria wanted to play hardball, she'd got herself a game. She hadn't wanted to tell Victoria this, but. . .

'That's not all. I've had a call from the British Consulate as well. There's been some trouble with Customs. Champagne was held at Heathrow on the way over.'

Result, this time. The colour drained from Victoria's face. Jane saw her mind flicking swiftly through the Rolodex of possibilities, of which there seemed really only one. A drugs charge would mean the column would certainly have to go.

'Why?' Victoria croaked, the fingers of her right hand clenched into a white-knuckled knot round her Mont Blanc.

'She refused to hand over her passport on the grounds that the photograph in it wasn't flattering enough,' said Jane. 'They had to practically prise it out of her hand, apparently. She held up Concorde for half an hour. Joan Collins is talking about suing for the delay.'

To disguise the relief she felt, Victoria put on her most indulgent expression. 'Well, say what you like about Champagne, she's never boring.' Equanimity restored, her pen hovered over the card again. 'And, more to the point, she's certainly had an effect on the circulation.'

I'd like to have an effect on her circulation, thought Jane as she left Victoria's presence. Like cut it off completely.

She returned to her desk, just in time to answer the telephone which had been ringing for ages, ignored, as usual, by Tish who was otherwise occupied flicking through the latest
Vogue.
Jane's heart sank as the familiar honk blasted through the receiver. After the exchange she had just had with Victoria, Champagne choosing now to

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call - collect, naturally - from New York was like a blow upon a bruise.

'Four bangs,' squawked Champagne. 'I've managed four bangs so far!'