Farm Fatale Page 4

  Guy, not one of the City's most ruthless financiers for nothing and as accurate at pinpointing vulnerability in people as in companies, had been quick to spot that Samantha was less than thrilled with some aspects of Basia's unique vision. Determined not to admit this was the case, however, Samantha had employed every trick in her professional book to conceal the truth.

  She had, for example, reacted with the utmost composure when Guy had homed straight in on the problem with the pared-down bathroom with its square Jade Jagger tub of thick Burgundian limestone. "Where the hell are the taps?" he had demanded.

  Samantha had simply pointed to the single verdigris tube, curved on its end like an umbrella handle, that rose through the flagstones by the bath and explained that a powerful stream of water was released by pressing on the floor with one's foot. "It's a triumph of maximum minimalism," she added, frowning slightly. Or had Basia said minimal maximalism?

  "It's like the bloody handbasins in train bogs" had been Guy's withering conclusion.

  Similarly, on the day the Bolivian rush matting, dyed to the precise shade of beigish burnt sienna guaranteeing best feng shui, appeared, an aspect of glacial calm had disguised Samantha's thwarted desire for something more sort of floorboardy. Nor had she batted an eyelid when Basia, riding roughshod over her plans for big mirrors in the sitting room, had insisted on the only decoration being a wire-wood goat sculpture in front of the window and a screened print of two naked women daubed in mud over the fireplace. By the time Basia announced that the only furniture permitted in the bedroom was a futon and an illuminated clock projecting onto the white-painted wall above it, a mere twitching muscle in Samantha's well-rouged cheek hinted at the pain with which she had parted from thoughts of Provençal four-posters with billowing muslin curtains.

  The only things Basia had allowed to billow anywhere in the house were the large canvas blinds hung in the lopsided manner the great designer proclaimed to be "fashionably askew" over the sitting room's huge bay windows. They were held in position with creosoted rope tiebacks especially sourced from the docks at Felixstowe. And, Samantha thought, they smelled like it. She had privately vowed to replace them with nice clean rope from the hardware store as soon as Basia had swept out of the house on a cloud of burning sage smoke for the last time.

  Yet Samantha would not hear a word against Basia, particularly if that word was Guy's. "She's the interior designer to the stars," Samantha raged as her husband hooted with derision at the decapitated gerbera heads floating in identical trays on the dining-room table. "And she fitted me in first. Half of Knightsbridge is waiting for her."

  "Sounds like the number ten bus," muttered Guy. He had failed to take to Basia after she had asked him whether, as a desk-bound suit, he had ever considered the benefits of a creativedrumming workshop.

  Still, Samantha thought now, there were compensations in this life. She had been intensely gratified by the fantastically trendy interior design magazine Insider wanting to photograph Basia's completed vision for a series about Urban Sancta.

  But where were they? Samantha slammed her delicate white cup of Japanese green tea back into its saucer and forced the corners of her mouth, turned firmly down in annoyance, to turn back up again. She pressed a finger to her forehead to massage out the incipient wrinkle plunging like a dagger between her eyebrows.

  Christ. The sage sticks. Oh my God. "Consuela!" screeched Samantha. "Get in here and do the sage sticks. Now." Basia's insistence that lighted sage sticks be waved around the house in order to combat the negative energies unknown visitors to the house might bring with them was central to her design philosophy.

  "Consuela!" bawled Samantha. "CONSUELAAAA! Oh, fuck."

  The bell rang so suddenly and with such ferocity that Samantha's cup and saucer leaped out of her hands with shock and descended with disastrous results all over the outfit she had with great care and after much agonizing chosen for the shoot. She gazed in despair at the soggy green stains. It was thus, contemplating her tea-soaked breasts, that Bella and Rosie found Samantha when they walked into the sitting room.

  Chapter Three

  As she threaded cornflowers through the rope tiebacks on the curtain, it occurred to Rosie that helping Bella on a shoot wasn't the easy alternative to a day bent over her drawing board she had imagined. Placing her face close to the rope, as was necessary for the fiddly business of threading, Rosie found the powerful smell of creosote and fish overwhelming.

  She jumped as Samantha stalked back into the room. Previously dressed to the nines, she was now clad to the tens in a restrictive black leather skirt and a tight pink cardigan that exposed a generous portion of her curiously shaped breasts. Breasts that, Rosie was interested to see, rose from the flat in separate domes with at least an inch of flesh between them, like a couple of pills in a packet. Although not aspiring to Samantha's air of rather contrived sexiness, Rosie nonetheless wished she had put on something smarter than paint-stained jeans and an old gray Gap T-shirt with obvious moth holes around the neck. Brushing her hair instead of bundling it back in a scrunchie might have been a good idea as well.

  Rosie had seen so much makeup in only one place before and that had been in Selfridge's cosmetics department. Samantha had selected different shades of eye shadow for her brow and eyelid, plus a thick slick of eyeliner, bright purple lipstick, and eyebrows that, penciled in thickly nearest the nose, dwindled to thin lines at the temples like the legs of a bee. She tossed her long, bouffant, and suspiciously bright auburn hair back over her shoulders and demanded to know what Rosie thought of her sitting room.

  "Urn, great," said Rosie.

  "Well, once I saw how wonderful these blinds looked in dear Hughie's flat in Manhattan, I was on the phone to Basia as soon as the Concorde hit the tarmac. Sorry, shouldn't put it like that after the crash, I suppose. Anyway, I got her to come straight round and put some up that looked just like Hughie's." Samantha paused as if waiting for something. "I'm talking about Hugh Grant's flat, obviously."

  "You went to Hugh Grant's flat?" The floppy-haired thespian was one of the few celebrities who had penetrated the blanket of vagueness and indifference between Rosie and the famous. For Mark's sake, Rosie was determined to take an interest.

  Samantha's small, heavily outlined eyes looked directly into Rosie's large gray-blue ones. She nodded, basking contentedly in reflected glory. There was no need whatsoever to admit that the closest she had been to the interior of Hugh Grant's apartment was a recent issue of Hello!

  "How do you know Hughie—I mean Hugh?" Rosie asked.

  "When did I meet Hughie?" Samantha laughed tinklingly. "It seems I've known him forever…but, no, it must have been that wonderful summer of the movie. Not—"

  "Notting Hill?" interrupted Rosie excitedly. Mark would be thrilled at this. She peered at Samantha. The kooky red-headed sister? Too old for that, surely. The bossy press officer in the Horse and Hound scene?

  "I was about to say 'not anything very recent,'" said Samantha icily. "I actually met Hughie on an earlier film."

  Rosie racked her brains. Duckface in Four Weddings? But too old again, surely. Despite her obvious attempts to stem the tide of age, Samantha was clearly on the wrong side of forty.

  "I'll give you a clue." Samantha raised a bee-leg eyebrow. "It was a period drama. Sort of Merchant–Ivory."

  Rosie blushed, wilting under the wattage of that expectant purple smile. "I'm so sorry," she hedged. "I don't know…I'm hopeless on films."

  "Punkawallah."

  Rosie racked her brain frantically. Was that the film about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen? That would at least explain the makeup. "I'm sorry?"

  "Punkawallah," Samantha repeated crisply. "You must have heard of it. Based on the novel by R. K. Stanborough, it's the dramatic true-life tale of a repressed maharajah and a viceroy with homosexual tendencies, set against the background of the crumbling Raj? No?"

  Rosie shook her head apologetically, wondering as she did so how anything could b
e based on a novel and yet be a true-life tale.

  Samantha looked thunderstruck. "But that's impossible," she declared. "It was an absolute landmark. The first of its kind. Ran for three hours."

  Rosie, embarrassed, shoved a handful of cornflowers furiously into the canvas.

  "It's always the bloody same," fumed Samantha. "The problem with that film is that it was the first period drama. Ahead of its time."

  Rosie continued stuffing flowers in the curtains.

  "As soon as Punkawallah came out," Samantha was in full furious flow now, "Merchant–Ivory stole the whole sodding idea. Suddenly, you couldn't find a beach anywhere without Maggie Smith in corsets having a picnic or Simon Callow drawing vaginas in the sand. Or someone in a crinoline dragging a bloody piano up it…" She fumbled for a cigarette, took a long, shuddering drag, and looked angrily at Rosie. "Worst of all," she announced, "my seminal performance in Punkawallah as the viceroy's daughter meant that, as far as every director was concerned, I'd been there and done that. For years after the film, I couldn't get bloody arrested. And all because I'd set the standard they now wanted others to reach."

  Rosie tried to think of something comforting to say, "But why? I mean, Emma Thompson has been in loads of period films…"

  "Precisely," snarled Samantha. "If it wasn't for me, people like Emma bloody Thompson would still be doing bloody fish-bloodyfinger ads."

  Another silence.

  "Hughie, of course, didn't get typecast," Samantha ranted, sucking on her cigarette. "Being a man. The film industry's so bloody sexist."

  Rosie tried to change the subject. "Very sad when he split up with Liz Hurley," she ventured, hoping she'd got it right and they hadn't gotten back together. "Was he with her when you knew him?"

  "Liz Hurley?" Samantha's thin nostrils flared like a flamenco dancer's skirt. "At the time I was starring in Punkawallah, Liz Hurley was nothing but a fat little punk from Peterborough."

  Rosie stared at her, puzzled. "Basingstoke, wasn't it?" she asked as a flash of inspiration struck her. Mark, she remembered, had once had to go there to do Liz Hurley's mother's fridge for "Chillin'."

  Another silence. If only, Rosie thought desperately, I could place this woman in one film.

  "I'm sorry, but what did you say your name was again?" she asked.

  "Samantha Villiers," declaimed Samantha resonantly.

  "Sorry, I meant the name you act under."

  "That," Samantha said furiously, with as much dignity as she could muster, "is the name I act under."

  ***

  "In the Villierses' kitchen"—Bella, pacing around, was murmuring into the handheld Dictaphone that served the purpose of a notebook, "the key is simple angularity. Solidified space creating a serene environment…oh, no no no, Freya," she suddenly chided the photographer's assistant who was arranging an orange on a plate. "Only tidy peel. Please."

  As Samantha came storming in from the sitting room, Bella turned to her brightly. "It's crying out in here for rustic coffee bowls," she declared. "And some comb honey would be lovely, sort of crushed into a torn-off hunk of freshly baked bread with the steam rising out of it…"

  But Samantha was not listening. "What are you doing?" she shrieked at the hapless Freya.

  Terrified, Freya dropped the gerbera head she was pulling apart. Bella had asked for flower petals to scatter among the cups and saucers.

  "Where did you get those from?" demanded Samantha.

  "Um, the room next door," gulped Freya. "They were lying on the floor…"

  "Floor? Floor?"

  "Well, sort of a big box on the floor. With sort of plastic trays on it. Had some cushions round it."

  "The dining-room table, you mean," hissed Samantha. "That's the whole bloody design concept you've ruined."

  "Er, I'd just like to take a few biographical details now, while Jorgen's setting up the next shot," Bella interrupted with a dazzling smile. "Could I just ask you, Miss Villiers, where you met your husband? Did I hear something about the foyer of his bank when you were working as a receptionist?" She held out the Dictaphone in Samantha's direction.

  Samantha looked thunderous. "Certainly not. We met on a film set."

  "How tremendously exciting. What was the film, Miss Villiers?"

  Samantha paused. This was a tricky one. It had been undisputedly a masterstroke, while sitting behind the reception desk of his bank, to tell the recently divorced vice president that she was an actress and had taken the job to research a role about a receptionist who rises to become the bank's first female president. Guy had been so captivated by this explanation—as well as Samantha herself—that the film's continuing failure to materialize had never seemed to occur to him.

  "I can't recall it immediately," Samantha said eventually with a tinkling laugh. "One learns as an actress to—as Hamlet put it— shrug off the mortal coil of each part as it is finished in order to don the new. At the moment, I'm so utterly consumed by my latest challenge, the part of Christabel, that I have no emotional space for anything else…"

  "How terribly interesting, Miss Villiers," Bella gushed. "And who exactly is Christabel?"

  "A femme fatale." Samantha tossed her hair. "Helen of Troy, Anna Karenina, Cleopatra. An irresistible siren who unleashes the forces of uncontrollable lust everywhere she goes. With far-reaching consequences."

  As Bella opened her mouth, Samantha held up a commanding hand. "I'm not at liberty to reveal any more about it, I'm afraid. The part is in development."

  Bella picked up her Dictaphone again.

  "In the Villierses' hall," she murmured, "one table is almost hidden by a bowl of polished Chinese stones, a vulture's feather, two porcupine quills, and bunches of tiny dried lotus-flower seeds tied with a ribbon of steel beads. Intricate? Yes. Affected? No. Original and interesting? Absolutely…"

  ***

  "My God, those people." Rosie shook her head and stared disbelievingly out the window as, shoot finished, they sped away from Roland Gardens in Bella's vast black four-wheel drive.

  "Par for the course, sweetie." Across the black leather-swathed gear lever, Bella's profile was tranquil. "Judging from the Polaroids, the shoot will be a great success. I'm sure the editor's going to want to use it as soon as possible, given that the Radical Minimalist look's probably not going to last long."

  Rosie looked at her watch. The shoot had taken eight hours. Her nerves felt as frayed as the deliberately unfinished edges of the hessian cushions she had spent the afternoon arranging in piles meant to look as if carelessly tossed by someone with an unerring sense of style. Unfortunately, with every toss, the cushion pile had looked more erring, less stylish, and increasingly frayed at the edges. Still, at least she would get paid for helping, and, infinitely better, she would soon be in the country and hundreds of miles from Samantha Villiers and anyone remotely like her.

  There had been neither time nor opportunity to discuss the great news with Bella until now. "Mark's agreed to move to the country," she told Bella triumphantly.

  Bella swerved to avoid a meandering drunk on the Cromwell Road. "Really? He didn't seem all that keen on it at dinner, I must say."

  "Things change," said Rosie enigmatically. She didn't have the energy to go into detail about the column. Nor, for the moment, did she have the details. "We're about to start the hunt for the perfect cottage," she added.

  "Oh, well," said Bella reassuringly. "Never mind. Just think of all that lovely tweed and cashmere you can wear."

  "Or fur." Rosie cast a meaningful glance at Bella's coat. "I just don't know how you can wear it." Her friend's relaxed attitude to the fur trade had long been a cause of anguish to Rosie.

  "What, this?" Bella looked down at her coat. "When literally thousands of acrylics have died for it?" She grinned teasingly at Rosie. "Of course it's not real, silly. It's my work coat. I keep my sables for the best."

  ***

  The perfect cottage was taking some finding.

  "Poor Mr. Dibble." Rosie sighed as, som
e days later, the postman's hunched, resentful figure trudged back past the kitchen window after depositing yet another avalanche of envelopes through the front door of the flat. Since Mark had registered with what seemed like every estate agent in the country, they got more mail than anyone else on the street.

  Following the sound of frenzied ripping in the sitting room, Rosie, piece of toast in her hand, wandered in to find Mark sprawled amid a sea of paper.

  "Former asbestos mill with planning permission in Blackburn." Mark waved a clipped-together piece of paper at her. "Great potential."

  "Mill?" Rosie's toast fell facedown onto the carpet tiles. She picked it up, trying not to think how long it had been since she last vacuumed. Months, certainly.

  She glanced at the photograph of the vast and ruined building stapled to the agent's details. Even with a blazing sun and a suspiciously Mediterranean-blue sky, the place was obviously barely standing. Nothing could be further removed from the cottage with roses round the door she had imagined. "What would anyone do with a mill?"