Vintage (16 page)

“Hey, babes.”

It was Gina Busiri, her best friend and former colleague from the Gloria Hotel. “I’ve come to see you, like I said I would. I’m at the station.”

“What? Now?”

“Yes. Like we agreed.”

“Shit,” said Kelly. “I forgot.”

“Charming!” Gina laughed. “Just come and get me, will you?”

Truthfully, there was no one that Kelly would be happier to see than Gina. They’d clicked the very first day they met, two years earlier, when they sat side by side at the Gloria Hotel’s induction day for new staff. At sixteen, they were the youngest girls in a room full of older women, but they couldn’t have infiltrated the Polish and Romanian cliques if they’d wanted to. So they gravitated toward each other. They shared a fag and a moan during the first coffee break and had been firm friends ever since.

They did their best to work the same shifts and they covered for each other. If one of them had a heavy night and would rather take a nap on an unmade bed than make it, then the other would keep a lookout and warn of a supervisor’s approach. And while chambermaids were meant to pool what paltry tips they found, Gina and Kelly shared them only with each other. Soon they were spending most of their time outside work together too.

Plenty of Kelly’s former colleagues were consumed by jealousy when they heard that Kelly had moved to Sussex. Only Gina understood the pain Kelly felt at having left London behind. Gina sympathized with Kelly about her relationship with her mother. Her own upbringing had been hell in a different way. Gina’s father had been a violent man. Together with her older brother, Gina had spent her childhood following her mother through a variety of women’s shelters.

The girls talked about their families sometimes but most of the time they just tried to have fun. Clubbing at the weekends. Hitting Topshop on payday. These were the things that made them feel better about life.

“You’re the sister I never had,” Kelly often told her dear friend.

Which was why it was particularly embarrassing that Kelly had forgotten about the visit. Thank goodness Gina was so easygoing she wouldn’t hold it against her.

Kelly dressed as quickly as she could but the Land Rover was nowhere to be seen. Guy had taken it into town to pick up parts for the rotavator. So Gina had to get a taxi from the station to Froggy Bottom. Only she didn’t have the cash to pay her fare. She banked on Kelly having some money at the farmhouse but Kelly didn’t have a penny either, so she let herself into Guy’s flat and took a twenty out of the ginger jar on his mantelpiece. A very obvious place to hide your money, she thought. Guy was the trusting type. She’d pay it back. One day. If he noticed it was missing.

“Give me the tour!” Gina said excitedly.

Kelly led her friend through the house, desultorily pointing out its features. The five bedrooms, all with working fireplaces. The wood-paneled study. The inglenook fireplace in the kitchen. The old beams. The tiny door in the wall that had once led to a salt cellar. Kelly pointed them out as though she were noting the scratches on a rental car. Meanwhile, Gina walked around the farmhouse touching everything she could reach: the walls, the old furniture, the mullioned windows with their glass thickened at the bottom of the panes after centuries of slow dissolution. She gazed at it all with the reverence someone might have held for a proper stately home.

“Wow. Wow!” she said. “This is crazy. You could do so much with this place. You’ve even got an Aga.”

“I don’t know how to work it,” said Kelly. “I can’t turn it off.”

“And a Welsh dresser! I’ve always wanted a Welsh dresser.”

“You can have it.”

“If I had somewhere to put it, you know I would take you up on that. How old is this table?” Gina murmured as she ran her hands over the oak, worn smooth with age. “Just think of how many people must have sat here over the years.”

“Gina,” said Kelly. “What are you wittering on about? It’s all old crap.”

Then the girls wandered out into the cottage garden that Guy tended as a hobby when he got in from the vines.

“Are those the grapes?” asked Gina, pointing at the rows marching up the hill.

“Yeah. Pinot noir from there to there. The rest are chardonnay and pinot murn-something.” She had always struggled to say pinot meunier.

Still Gina seemed impressed.

“This is, like, amazing. And it’s all yours.”

Kelly shrugged.

“Kelly!” Gina reacted to Kelly’s nonchalance. “This place is crazy. It’s so beautiful. The view coming over the hill when the taxi brought me here was incredible!” Gina whirled around in the little cottage garden with its firework displays of delphiniums as though she were standing in the garden of Eden itself.

“You haven’t seen it in the rain,” said Kelly flatly. She dragged Gina out of the sunshine into the fuggy darkness of the farmhouse again. “Did you bring me any cigarettes?”

“How’s life at the Gloria Hotel?” Kelly asked later.

Gina shook her head. “It’s a lot less fun since you went.” She paused and sighed. “I’ve got to get out of there.”

“Well, duh,” said Kelly.

“What else am I going to do? I’ve been trying to get some money together,” she said. “I made about five hundred quid last week.”

“Five?”

She didn’t need to tell Kelly that she hadn’t made that five hundred quid in tips from hotel customers grateful for the professional way she’d emptied the wastepaper basket and folded the ends of their toilet paper rolls into tidy triangles.

“Oh God,” Gina sighed after a moment’s silence. “There have got to be easier ways to make money. One of them got his wife’s dress out.”

“What’s so bad about that? Was it made of a synthetic fabric? Too cheap for your delicate skin?”

“He didn’t want
me
to wear it.” Gina frowned. “I can’t tell you how hard it was to keep a straight face. It’s all right for you,” she said. “You’ve got it made now. You’ve got all this. I’m stuck, Kels. I’ve got no money. I’ve got no qualifications to do anything different.”

“What else would you do?”

“I could do my A levels. I always wanted to go to college. If I hadn’t had to move school every term, I might have done it. I could have done a nursing course or something.”

“And end up dealing with old men’s bits for a fraction of the money you get for doing the same now? Forget nursing, Gina. Forget A levels. Aim higher.”

“How?”

“I mean, aim higher with your class of punter. How many did you have to do for five hundred?”

“Five.”

Kelly tutted. “You could have made that off one.”

“You reckon? You haven’t seen the competition. The
bar at Montrachet is crawling with girls fresh in from Moscow. That’s what all the rich guys want now. They’re more exotic.”

“You’re exotic,” said Kelly.

It was true. Gina didn’t look like the average pasty British girl. She was tall and slim with a neat, narrow waist and smooth long limbs. She’d inherited her Egyptian father’s dark eyes, which combined with her mother’s pale English skin to leave Gina looking more like a Spanish or Italian princess than a girl who had grown up in battered-women’s homes in South London.

“You’re gorgeous, Gina. You could be raking it in. You just need to make more of yourself.”

“That’s exactly what the careers teacher said when I left school. I don’t think she meant I should scrub up to get a better class of John though.” Gina managed a laugh but Kelly knew it was time to change the subject.

“I’d help you out,” said Kelly. “You know I would. But it’s not how it looks here. I can’t get any money out of this place for five years. It’s in a trust.”

“I know,” said Gina. “You told me already.”

“After that, I’ll sell this place like a shot, I swear. And I’ll lend you the money to do whatever course you want and you can come and live with me in my new house. In London.”

“You’d do that for me?” Gina started to sniffle. She dabbed at her eyes.

“Oh, don’t get emotional on me, please,” said Kelly. “It’s the least I can do for my best friend.”

Fortunately, at just that moment, Guy reappeared with the Land Rover, drawing Gina’s attention away from Kelly to the window. He jumped down from the driver’s seat and crunched across the courtyard.

“Who is that?” asked Gina, catching sight of him and
giving up on being miserable for a moment. She gave a low whistle.

Kelly rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’s the bloke I’ve been telling you about. The one who’s making my life a misery.”

“The wine guy?”

“Yes, the wine guy. You’d think those bloody vines were his children.”

“You never told me he was so fit.”

“He’s not.”

“Have you gone blind? He’s gorgeous!”

He certainly looked textbook good as he unloaded a box from the back of the car and carried it to his door. His thick blond hair, usually cut so short, was starting to curl over his collar. He could have been modeling his check shirt and jeans for a catalog. But Kelly couldn’t separate the way Guy looked from the way she felt about him or the way he treated her, which she had decided was dismissive.

“You’ve got weird taste, Gina.”

“I can’t believe you’re living next door to that and you slob around all day in your pajamas! Get him to come in and have a drink with us,” Gina suggested. “Go on.”

“No,” said Kelly flatly. “He wouldn’t want to anyway. I don’t know how you can make booze and be so square. But now he’s brought the car back, let’s go down the pub and have a proper drink. Quick,” Kelly grabbed her bag from the Welsh dresser. “Before he comes back down from his flat.”

Guy reemerged just in time to see the taillights of the Land Rover disappearing through the farm gate as Kelly put her foot down and escaped from the “Valley of Doom” as she had come to call her new home.

Guy was furious. The parts he needed to fix the rotavator were still in the back of the car. He’d planned to spend that evening getting the damn thing sorted out. He kicked the barrel full of flowers he had placed outside the farmhouse in an attempt to make nice with Kelly. He almost broke his toe.

“Bloody, bloody, bloody,” he swore. The pain was so bad he only just managed not to use the F word.

The girls didn’t get return until the pubs closed, which, this being the deepest darkest countryside, was much later than closing time in any city. In fact, the sky was already beginning to lighten again by the time the Land Rover crested the hill. Guy had intended to wait up and confront Kelly but he fell asleep in his armchair around midnight, a book about the pruning methods used in the Champagne region still open on his lap. He was so tired he didn’t hear the girls tumble noisily from the Land Rover or Kelly’s loud cursing as she tripped over the barrel that Guy had earlier kicked.

“That pub was all right,” said Gina.

“Thank God. There’s nothing else to do around here,” said Kelly.

“Then you should make your own fun,” Gina suggested.

“You sound like my gran.”

“Seriously, you know what? You could hold an incredible all-nighter in this place. Your own mini-Glastonbury.”

“What?”

“A festival. Right here in Froggy Bottom.”

“Gina, you are a genius,” Kelly exclaimed.

“A Gina-us,” said Gina before she was stricken with an attack of the hiccups.

Kelly was suddenly energized with excitement. Gina’s
idea was brilliant. Kelly insisted that they stay up and thrash out some of the details before they lost enthusiasm. She pulled out a bottle from Dougal’s cellar—an extremely rare claret that tasted much better watered down with Diet Coke—to drink while they discussed how the first-ever Froggy Bottom Festival might happen.

“First of all we need music,” said Kelly.

“That’s easy.”

Gina’s brother, Antony, fancied himself a DJ. He was having some success in the clubs. He’d probably appear for free if he could headline, Gina suggested.

Kelly had Gina call him right away. They caught him between sets at a club in Clapham. He agreed that the idea was a brilliant one. They could definitely count him in and he’d ask his DJ mates to see if anyone else was up for it too. Less than half an hour later he’d recruited a couple of friends.

Kelly and Gina danced around the kitchen. Kelly put on a CD of garage tunes and cranked the volume up loud, not caring whether it woke Guy up as it drifted across the courtyard and in through his window.

“We need to make some proper plans,” said Kelly after a while. She found some paper and they started to make notes.

“So we’ve got your brother and those two other guys. We can have camping on the field below the chardonnay. That’s pretty level.”

“You could stick a Portaloo in the car park.”

“There’s a load of old bricks behind the barn. We could build a massive barbecue. We could roast a pig!”

“That’d be crazy! What will we do for drinks?”

“Get a load of beers from the cash-and-carry,” said Kelly.

“Beer? What about your wine?”

“Sure, we’ll sell some of that too. If people really want it. And there’s tons of the old stuff in the cellar. We could get rid of that. We’ll just dust off the bottles. By the time people have had a few beers, they won’t care what they’re drinking.”

“Speaking of which … ” Gina gestured to her empty glass.

Kelly duly disappeared into the cellar and returned with a bottle of 1997 Amarone Classico from Quintarelli.

“This is Italian,” she said. “Might be better than this French shit.”

Kelly pulled the cork and poured out two glasses at a retail cost of approximately forty pounds a glass. The girls each took a couple of swigs and pulled identically disappointed faces.

“That is so nasty! You got any white?” Gina asked.

“I’ll have a look.”

The planning continued over a bottle of 1996 Corton-Charlemagne Domaine Jean-François Coche-Dury.

“That’s better,” said Gina, as she took a gulp that was worth more than her shoes. “Tastes a bit like Jacob’s Creek. Got any ice cubes?”

Gina added a couple to her glass. Kelly hesitated and decided against it.

“I quite like this how it is,” she said.

“How much do you reckon we can charge for this party, then?” Gina continued.