Last of the Summer Moët Read online

  Laura rose to her feet but just then a powerful waft of expensive aftershave announced the arrival of Christopher Stone, the British Magazine Company’s CEO and ultimate boss of everyone present. The few staff members still around stood sharply to attention, but Stone, a dapper figure with a pink handkerchief in the jacket of his grey Savile Row suit, ignored them. He glided swiftly in his Jermyn Street brogues towards the closed door of Carinthia’s office. The signet-ringed hand below the expensive if understated watch was holding a copy of the Standard.

  Laura’s phone now rang, and while she meant to ignore it in the face of this latest twist in the drama, her screen told her that this was, at last, the elusive Brad Plant. The representative on Earth of Savannah Bouche was finally getting in touch.

  ‘Buckingham Palace,’ he snarled in his nasal American tones.

  ‘What?’ Laura was confused.

  ‘Buckingham Palace? You know it? Big building at the top of the Mall?’ He pronounced it ‘maul’.

  ‘Of course I do. What about it?’

  ‘Miss Bouche wants to go on a tour of it. With you. While you interview her.’

  Laura only half heard. Her attention was on Carinthia’s office door. Christopher Stone had closed it behind him, and nothing could be heard from within. What was going on?

  ‘You still there?’ snarled Plant from the other end.

  Laura forced herself to concentrate. ‘Buckingham Palace? She wants to meet there?’

  Was there a worse option in the whole of London? Buckingham Palace had famously huge queues. There would be crowds of mobbing tourists. There had to be a better alternative. ‘What about a pod in the London Eye?’

  ‘Miss Bouche wants the Palace,’ Brad cut in. ‘We’ve arranged a private tour.’

  Oh, what did any of it matter, Laura thought. Carinthia was almost certainly being sacked, at this very moment. Which meant that, as her deputy, she would be next.

  Not for the first time since coming to Society she was facing the prospect of being fired for no fault of her own. What was unusual was that this time Clemency Makepeace had nothing to do with it.

  ‘Okay,’ she said to Brad Plant.

  And so it was arranged. Laura – presuming she was still in gainful employment – was to present herself at the Palace main entrance at ten o’clock on Monday morning.

  She put the phone down at the precise moment Christopher Stone emerged from Carinthia’s office. His lightly tanned face wore its usual calm expression, but there was a clench to his jaw and a light to his eyes that made Laura fear the worst.

  Her heart sank as, in his gleaming hand-made shoes, he rapidly traversed the black carpet tiles between them and stopped before her desk. Laura shot to her feet at the precise moment that Christopher Stone placed a pair of lightly tanned knuckles down on the table and leant over towards her. The collision was sharp and violent.

  ‘Ow!’ howled the CEO of the British Magazine Company, reeling away and clutching his smoothly shaved chin.

  Laura was rooted to the spot, buzzing with the horror of having headbutted the man described in a recent piece by the Financial Times as the most powerful man in magazine publishing. That really was it, then. Whatever slim chance there had been had evaporated. She was surely finished now.

  Stone turned back towards Laura. He was still holding his chin, and his watering eyes glittered coldly. She cringed inwardly, expecting marching orders of the most vehement persuasion.

  ‘Carinthia is leaving,’ Stone told her.

  Laura bowed her head.

  ‘Arrangements are being made for her to enter a rehabilitation facility,’ Stone went on, in the light, clipped voice that belied the heft of the power he wielded. He paused and looked Laura keenly up and down. She waited to be informed that her services were no longer required either.

  ‘You will edit Society until she returns.’

  Chapter Four

  That evening, Laura could not concentrate on the Bond film. Even the fact that her friend had the star part did not stop her thoughts wandering to her new, completely unexpected promotion.

  She was editor of Society and could do anything she liked with the magazine! It was a heady prospect, a glittering opportunity that she was determined to make the most of. Carinthia would not, as the Evening Standard had declared, be the last of London’s great glossy-magazine editors. Laura Lake, the new generation, would take the torch forward.

  Laura had already decided that she would make Society more relevant to its readership. Research had shown that a great many young working women read it, but there was little in its pages that reflected their lives. Perhaps a fashion shoot on the perfect job-interview outfit? She would get Raisy and Daisy on it first thing Monday morning.

  Annoyingly, printers’ deadlines meant that a feature about the correct way to eat caviar (off the back of your hand) had gone through. But it would, Laura was determined, be the last of the old-school Society. She would retain its wit and glamour, but not the articles which risked pushing it over the edge into self-parody.

  Laura was absolutely determined that the interview with Savannah Bouche would send out a strong signal about her editorship. It would be far from the usual unctuous celebrity profile. Most reporters just sat there in fawning silence while Savannah issued a stream of statements about ending every war, empowering every woman and valuing every human life. None of these statements were ever challenged. Laura planned to challenge them.

  What did Harry think about Savannah? Laura wondered. There had been no time to ask him yet. She slid him a sidelong glance. Harry’s tall, sprawling frame had, for the past three hours, been constrained by the small cinema seat next to her. Very possibly it was the longest they had ever sat anywhere together. Harry seemed unable to stay in the same city as her, even the same country, for very long.

  Part of her liked this air of mystery; the way he would arrive in the night after weeks without a word, only to disappear in the morning. But it was also frustrating. He sometimes spent all weekend asleep in her flat, evidently exhausted, with only his worn, suntanned face to hint where he might have been. Still, there were compensations. Harry was exasperating, but the one thing he wasn’t was boring.

  And the other thing he wasn’t, she now realised, was awake. Harry was sunk in his seat, completely asleep. As her gaze lingered on his lean, intelligent face with its high cheekbones, level brow and rumple of dark hair, she felt a backwash of tenderness. She rarely saw the ever-watchful Harry with his guard down. He looked like a little boy.

  The long mouth smiled; he was watching after all. Like Brer Rabbit, with one eyelid ever so slightly open.

  The film was finishing. James Bond’s mouth was locked on the lips of a beautiful blonde. The camera panned back, revealing the couple to be lying on the top deck of a blazing white superyacht in the middle of a brilliant blue sea.

  Monty Norman’s four-note motif struck up, and the words ‘JAMES BOND WILL RETURN’ rolled up the screen, followed by thousands of fast-moving credits. At the top was:

  JAMES BOND........................CASPAR HONEYMAN

  Laura stared, still unable to quite believe it. As the new 007, Caspar was now a fully fledged celebrity, living in a Malibu mansion next door to Cher, or so he claimed. ‘You should come over,’ he had added in a casual, unconvincing tone which reminded Laura of what a terrible actor Caspar actually was. That her friend had reached such heights of fame and fortune was astonishing. As a suave and steel-nerved superspy, moreover. The idea of Caspar being loyal to Queen and country, or to anyone apart from himself, was hard to believe.

  The credits kept rolling, sheets of them. Did Caspar actually know who the second grip in the Chilean crew was? Almost certainly, if she was a woman. This first film for the franchise, The Caucus Imperative, had been filmed in locations all over the world and in the few conversations Laura had had with him, he had declared himself ‘shagged out’.

  Some of the shagging had certainly involved Merlot D’Vyne, the s
ocialite niece of a famous nineties It girl. She was playing Bond girl Prudence Handjob and it was her arms in which 007 had been left atop the yacht. Laura wondered how the real-life relationship was going.

  She struggled to her feet. Her legs in their tight dark jeans felt stiff. She stretched her arms in their navy shirt and flipped out her long mane of straight dark hair. Harry, from his seat, was watching her appreciatively.

  As they shuffled out through the foyer, crunching popcorn into the carpet, she glanced up at the illuminated posters advertising The Caucus Imperative. The film’s designers had done their best to make Caspar look cool in the trademark Bond manner. But there was still something bulging and manic about his round brown eyes.

  Laura smiled. She could remember as if it were yesterday those eyes rolling in despair as Caspar bewailed his lack of acting success. His big Bond break had been wildly unexpected; so down on his luck had he been at the time he had been reduced to being a Prince Harry impersonator. She herself had been so desperate she’d been living in a magazine fashion cupboard.

  What a difference a year made. Now she not only had her longed-for job as a journalist, she was actually acting editor! Even Harry had been impressed when she told him, once he had stopped laughing at the story of Carinthia, the nipple-flashing fascist.

  They emerged into a London whose sky glowed dirty orange above a road shining with rain, car headlights, the yellow signs of taxis and brightly lit shops. Night had fallen while they had watched Caspar running over rooftops and leaping from helicopters.

  ‘What did you think?’ she asked Harry. He remained rather annoyingly unmoved by the fact she had once gone out with James Bond.

  ‘I liked that bit when he got clubbed and shoved in the vat of baked beans,’ Harry replied. ‘Shame he came round before he got to the canning machine.’

  Laura smiled. Perhaps Harry was jealous after all. The baked beans episode had reminded her of the horrible flat where Caspar had lived at his lowest ebb. The loo had lacked a seat and the only utensil had been an unwashed spatula that the four or five residents – all male – shared to eat beans straight out of the tin. ‘Do you think that sort of thing really happens?’ she asked.

  ‘What – a protocol that could destroy the world with poison gas from contaminated baked beans?’ Harry gave an incredulous snort.

  ‘Well, all of it. The spy thing.’

  Harry grinned. ‘If you’re asking me whether James Bond is an accurate reflection of the security services...’

  ‘Which I could be,’ Laura returned. Harry was always infuriatingly elusive about what he knew of MIs 5 and 6. But he had to know something. All Harry’s exposés involved international miscreants, and it seemed unlikely he investigated them without official help. Their first date had been at the Not Dead Yet Club, a place awash with foreign correspondents and diplomats. That Harry was a spy himself did not seem out of the question. Perhaps he, not Caspar, was the real James Bond.

  ‘...the answer is...’ Harry went on.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That I really wouldn’t know. Shall we get a chicken katsu curry?’ Laura, who had been brought up on a diet of French classics by her Parisian grandmother, shuddered. She found Harry’s lack of interest in food both baffling and appalling. His idea of Sunday lunch was a bag of steak ridge-cut chips followed by a packet of Skittles.

  Inside the takeaway, Laura tried not to wince as she watched the server ladle the curry gloop over what had been a perfectly respectable chicken escalope. ‘I don’t know how you can eat that stuff,’ she said as they walked out, Harry’s dinner in a plastic bag.

  ‘Boarding school,’ he replied easily. ‘The food was horrendous. Dead Man’s Leg and Nun’s Toenails.’

  ‘Oh God, yes. We had this thing called Skeleton Stew...’

  Only after offering up her own memories of school food did Laura realise he had steered her off the subject of spies completely, and they were now turning into her street.

  Laura lived in Cod’s Head Row, Shoreditch. It was an area of London once synonymous with grinding poverty but now synonymous with grinding affluence. Quite literally, given the preponderance of artisan coffee roasters.

  Despite being situated in the London of 2018, most of the Cod’s Head Row businesses were more in tune with the mediaeval countryside. There was a shop selling hand-churned butter and another trading in obscure artisanal cheeses. ‘Nigel Forage’, the greengrocer, stocked only the produce of local allotments and leaves hand-gathered from the nearby park. Laura never bought those. The nearby park contained far too many dogs.

  The fact that these establishments served a thriving local community of drystone-wallers, glassblowers, weavers, blacksmiths and spoon-carvers only exacerbated Laura’s feeling of being stuck in the rural fourteenth century. Since when had the inner city got like this?

  Laura lived in a scruffy first-floor walk-up above Gorblimey Trousers, a self-conscious pie-and-mash caff run by husband-and-husband team of ex-Google executives. On either side was Reaping the Whirlwind, a scything workshop, and Bodgers, which made chopping boards from reclaimed wood and stamped them with expletives. Opposite was Barberella, which sold beard oil made from reclaimed fatbergs. Laura’s flat, which was the second in the building she had occupied – the lease having expired on her former top-floor apartment – reflected none of the local trends. There was no shred of dawn-gathered indigo in it, not a single artisanal ceramic and no upcycling of any description. If anything it was downcycled, the last building on the street not to be carefully restored in a manner suggesting it had never been altered.

  Laura got out her keys and unlocked the battered front door. As it rattled shut behind them, she felt her heart beat faster in anticipation of the night ahead. Perhaps, this time, Harry might stay longer. The whole of tomorrow, even. It was Saturday, they could go for a walk, have lunch, go to the park. She crossed her fingers that her upstairs neighbour Edgar was out at one of his raves. Edgar was a manic depressive trust-funder with wild, unbrushed hair, oversized geek glasses and a passion for fisherman’s jumpers and psychobabble. While he could occasionally be amusing, he was more often relentlessly boring in a very loud, droning voice. The music that he played at all hours was loud and boring as well.

  Fortunately, the flat, as she let herself in, seemed quiet. No thumping was coming from the floor above.

  Harry followed her in, looking about him in amusement. ‘No one could accuse you of overdecorating.’

  Laura shot him a look. ‘Ever heard of minimalism?’

  But like most of Laura’s style statements, the bareness of the flat was less to do with aesthetics than lack of money. It consisted of a bedroom, a sitting room with a kitchen at one end, and a tiny bathroom. It was completely bare apart from a mattress on the floor in the bedroom and a rail for clothes, a scratched leather sofa in the sitting room and mismatched table and chairs in the kitchen. And yet the building’s elegant bones were still visible; the high ceilings, original panelling and long windows with thin old glass and shutters you could close at night. The broad, unvarnished oak floorboards were dented with what Laura liked to think were the seventeenth-century heels of Huguenot silk-weavers. Many had fled France for Britain to escape religious persecution and settled in Shoreditch because it was cheap. Refugees from Paris, not unlike her. They would, Laura felt, be bemused by the number of Parisians who now flocked to the area because it was expensive and blew fortunes on punky cushions and statement wallcoverings.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Harry, as she handed him a can of lager from the fridge and took out a box of eggs. ‘You’re not having curry?’

  Laura shook her head as she broke the eggs into a bowl and then opened the window to snip off herbs from the pots outside. They were from cuttings that Mimi, her Parisian grandmother, had given her. She grew herbs in a window box that overlooked the whole city. Something of the view, Laura felt, had gone into the herbs. They tasted like Paris to her.

  Mimi stayed on Laura’s mind as she w
hipped up the eggs. She adored spending time with the indomitable elderly Frenchwoman who had brought her up from infancy, shared with her the tiny Montmartre flat and lovingly supervised every aspect of her life.

  Adding salt and pepper and tipping the fluffy mass into the frying pan, Laura wondered what Mimi was eating now. Together with her three closest Parisian friends, her nonagenarian grandmother had recently thrown old age to the winds, unleashed her inner explorer and embarked on a series of what seemed non-stop tours of the globe. ‘The Fat Four’ as they called themselves, although none was even remotely plump, were currently on a cruise of the southern hemisphere, and quite out of WiFi’s clutches. The knowledge that she would not be able to speak to her grandmother for months was dispiriting; Mimi was a fund of wisdom on everything from lipstick to love.

  A few minutes later, as they sat at the wobbly table, Harry glanced from his congealing heap of curry to the fluffy yellow omelette Laura was cutting into with her fork. ‘That looks good.’

  ‘Want some?’

  She took her plate and slid on to his knee, parting her legs to face him. ‘Close your eyes and open your mouth.’ He obliged and she kissed him slowly. She put the plate down and the food was forgotten as they stood up as one. Laura led him to her room and the mattress on the floor.

  Afterwards they lay amid the creased blue sheets. Harry smiled at her lazily and raised himself on one elbow, revealing a lick of hair in his armpit that made her swallow. How was it that she knew every inch of him so intimately, and yet didn’t know him at all?

  Suddenly he was standing up, pulling his jeans back on. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Why?’ wailed Laura. He was spending the whole weekend with her, wasn’t he? The night, at least.