Siena thought it would be hard to find another human being who looked less like her than Ines, but didn’t say so.
“Lots of the girls ’ere are unusual,” Ines continued. “Take Katya. She ’as a beeg nose.”
Siena looked across at the mighty Russian supermodel and giggled.
“I’m sorry, but she does!” insisted Ines. “And look. Lisa ’as no teets at all, she is like a leetle girl. And Daria.” She pointed to an exquisitely beautiful girl with impossibly high cheekbones, reading a novel in the far corner of the room. “She ’ave no hair at all.”
“What do you mean?” laughed Siena, admiring the girl’s sleek white-blond bob. “Of course she has hair.”
Ines raised one eyebrow knowingly. “Not after two o’clock she doesn’t,” she said.
At ten to four, Siena was feeling so nervous she thought she might be sick. Thank God for Ines’s magic pill. If she’d eaten so much as a vol-au-vent she was certain it would be making an ignominious reappearance the second she stepped out on that catwalk.
The noisy, excited hum of the audience was clearly audible backstage, not surprisingly, as only a giant pair of paper-thin steel screens separated the anxious models from the throbbing crowd of fashionistas in the main body of the room.
Siena, who had a total of five outfits to wear during the show, had spent the past hour desperately attempting to master the art of walking sexily in her ludicrously high boots. Nervousness about her own performance had completely eclipsed all other considerations. Having fantasized for weeks about what she would say when she met McQueen himself, in the event she forgot all her preprepared razor-sharp repartee and simply nodded like a dazed rabbit when he’d approached her to wish her luck.
Now, with ten minutes to go before the show, she was pacing up and down in front of a big white board, on which was scrawled in black marker pen:
I am Sexy. Powerful. A dominatrix BITCH!!
I am a lioness. A Warrior Queen.
But always . . .
FEMININE.
Enjoy yourselves out there!!!!
Oh God. She felt her stomach give another hideous lurch—not very warrior queen. Tiny beads of sweat were breaking out on her forehead, no doubt already wreaking havoc with the trowelfuls of dominatrix makeup that caked her face: huge arcs of silver eye shadow swept above sinister, kohl-blackened eyes and blood-red, gloss-slicked lips. All the girls were made up the same way, but whereas Ines looked bizarre, like an unusually leggy circus clown, Siena looked much more disturbing, a debauched fallen angel. Instinctively she reached up to wipe the sweat from her forehead.
“No!” yelped a voice from behind her. Davide, the chief makeup artist—known as Camp David to the models, for obvious reasons—grabbed both of her hands and pinned them behind her back. “Nevair touch ze face. One smudge and eet ees ruined!” he wailed.
“God, okay, okay,” Siena snapped. “I won’t touch. It’s just so fucking hot in here now with these lights, I’m sweating like a goddamn pig.”
“First you complain ees cold. Now you say ees hot. Let me tell you, eef you wipe your face, you weel look like a peeg. Don’t touch!” Davide wagged his finger at Siena like a schoolteacher before darting off to spray some more silver shimmer on one of the German girls’ arms.
Ines, who looked a lot more comfortable than Siena in silver flip-flops, combat pants, and a floaty green floral top, came bounding toward her like an overexcited puppy. Siena tried to muster a smile. How could Ines be so calm? Never mind “I am a lioness.” She felt like she was about to be fed to the fucking lions.
“Do you know ’oo is out there?” Ines asked breathlessly. She was now literally jumping up and down with excitement, two long red plaits flapping behind her like tails on a kite.
“Sure,” said Siena, trying to sound calm and in control. “I know who’s out there. The world’s press, a bunch of coked-up, plastic-faced movie actors, and every buyer from here to Bangkok. And I gotta tell you, the thought of walking down that runway is scaring me shitless.”
“No, no,” said Ines, grabbing Siena’s hands in her own. “’Aven’t you ’eard?”
“Heard what?” asked Siena impatiently.
“Jamie Silfen! Ees here!” Ines looked like she might be going to explode.
Siena felt her legs start to give way beneath her. “No,” she stammered. “He can’t be. Are you sure? He can’t be here.” Ignoring Davide’s advice, she began pulling at her elaborately curled hair in despair. “It’s my first show,” she wailed. “I have no fucking idea what I’m doing out there. Oh shit, Jamie Silfen is gonna see me making an ass of myself. Where is he? I didn’t see him out there.”
Ines gestured through the tiny crack in the steel partition wall. “Third row. Glasses. Beeg sheepskin coat.”
Siena scanned the audience. Holy fucking shit. There he was. Jamie Silfen, one of the biggest, most powerful casting agents in Hollywood, sitting within a hundred feet of her.
In her more hopeful moments, she had imagined that perhaps some of the lesser-known agents might have put in an appearance at the McQueen show. But this was unbelievable. Even her father was in awe of Silfen. For over fifteen years, he’d had the Midas touch in the business, and his name had become synonymous with box-office success. If Silfen cast your movie, you could expect to see your profits double. As an actor, even an established box-office draw, you respected Jamie Silfen as a man who could make or break careers with a nod of his shiny bald head.
What the hell was he doing at a fashion show in France?
“I wonder why ees ’ere?” said Ines, reading Siena’s mind. “You theenk someone is doing a movie about the catwalks, maybe ee wants to see for ’imself? I don’t theenk ee is eenterested in fashion, you know? Just look at ees coat. Eet’s revolting!”
But Siena had tuned out. Jamie Silfen. Jamie fucking Silfen was out there, and he was going to be watching her. Opportunities like that didn’t come around twice, and Siena knew it. She had to seize the moment, to make a real impression on him. This could be it. Her chance.
Almost instantly, she found her nervous energy evaporating, replaced by the familiar pumping adrenaline of raw ambition.
She thought of Duke, and a slow smile spread across her face.
“Lena, Anna Maria, Ines, Siena!” The stage manager was striding toward them, clapping his hands for action.
“Let’s go, ladies. You’re first up, in”—he looked at his watch—“two minutes exactly. I want everyone in their places. Now, please, girls!”
Ines smiled down at her new friend. “Nervous?” she asked.
“Not at all,” said Siena, grinning from ear to ear. “I can hardly wait.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Caroline Berkeley wandered into the dining room of her beautiful Cotswold manor house and checked the place settings for the third and final time.
She didn’t want either of her brothers or their ghastly wives anywhere near her at tonight’s dinner, but every time she put her head around the door, bloody Christopher had moved everything around, trying to sit himself next to the wholesomely pretty Muffy Arkell. The damn cheek!
Caroline had met and married Christopher Wellesley less than a year after her ignominious return to England. Or rather, she’d met him again. Christopher had been one of the many eligible bachelors on the scene in London, back in her youthful heyday, and though they had never slept with each other then, they had become firm friends, losing touch only when she settled permanently in Los Angeles.
The general rumor had always been that the gauche, awkward heir to one of the grandest estates in Oxfordshire was secretly gay. This, as Caroline was later to learn, wasn’t true. He just rather preferred a quiet day’s fishing on the Test, or a nice glass of claret, to sex. Oddly, though, this wasn’t a problem for her anymore. After everything she’d been through with Duke, she found her new husband’s sexual reticence, combined with his uncomplicated loyalty and adoration, to be just what the doctor ordered.
&nbs
p; The year after Duke’s death had been a living hell for Caroline. Stuck in a tiny apartment with a son whom, she soon discovered, she barely knew, she had thought at first that she might go mad. Her relationship with Charlie had quickly unraveled, not that she really blamed him for that. Setting up home with her and Hunter had never been part of his agenda when they began their affair, and he had continued to provide her with some financial support for two years after they split.
She didn’t resent Charlie for leaving her. But for the first time in her life, Caroline found, to her horror, that she was unable to land herself a wealthy date. Whether it was her age, or a taint by association from her long tenure as Duke’s mistress, or a combination of the two, she didn’t know. But suddenly, it seemed none of the real players in Hollywood would touch her with a ten-foot pole.
At forty-six, having never worked a day in her life, she was ill equipped to begin any sort of proper paying career. She took on occasional work as a party organizer for friends of friends, and did the odd bit of interior design. But other than that, her time was spent at home in the poky Los Feliz apartment, either alone or with Hunter, nursing her disappointment and a growing sense of depression. She soon started drinking heavily.
In the end it was Hunter who had persuaded her to move back home to England. Although she knew he was genuinely concerned for her, she also knew that he was finding her drinking and the accompanying mood swings increasingly difficult to live with.
“I haven’t been much of a mother to you, have I?” she had observed, in a rare moment of honesty, when he’d first suggested it.
Hunter shrugged. “You did your best. I know it’s been hard for you.”
“But how will you cope here on your own? I mean, what are you going to do for money?”
He didn’t like to tell her that he was already living almost entirely on his own earnings from after-school jobs—the trust Duke left him paid for his education, clothes, and utilities at the apartment but not much else—and that he could cope a whole lot easier if he didn’t have a drunk, despairing mother to worry about all the time.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “And you can come visit, you know? Or I could go over there? Let’s face it, you’re miserable here, Mom. At least in England, you have friends and family you can rely on for help.”
Caroline wasn’t so sure about that. She’d burned her bridges with most of her so-called friends from the old days, and she’d barely spoken to either George or William in the last decade. But she was miserable in L.A., so miserable it was slowly killing her. England couldn’t be any worse.
As it turned out, thanks to Christopher, it was a whole lot better. When they met up again, the bond between them had been stronger than ever. He was fifteen years her senior, but still a spring chicken compared to Duke. He had never married, never wanted children, and the estate was already entailed to his nephew.
“I can’t leave you anything,” he’d told her bluntly. “And I’ve very little ready cash. No flashy cars or holidays in Mauritius or any of that lark. But I think I could give you a pretty decent life here.” He gestured vaguely around his exquisite medieval manor house, Great Thatchers, with its formal gardens and rolling parkland undulating far into the distance. “And I think we’d have a lot of fun together.”
Caroline thought so too.
She wrote to Hunter and told him she was getting married, and that she had given up drinking for good. “Christopher’s been A.A. for twenty years, so we’re going together,” she’d said brightly.
Hunter was pleased to hear her so happy, and took an instant liking to Christopher when he flew over for their quiet wedding at the village church in Batcombe a few months later.
For the first two years of his mother’s marriage, he had flown over to visit at Christmas, and they’d all gotten on happily enough. But gradually, the natural distance there had always been between mother and son began to reassert itself. Caroline’s visits to L.A. became less and less frequent, and Hunter had neither the money nor the time to keep making the trip to England to see her.
She was pleased when she heard about Counselor, both happy and frankly surprised at his success, although she never watched the show. “Absolute drivel,” Christopher called it, and Caroline privately agreed. But she had called to tell him she was proud of him, and she was.
It was enough for both of them to know that the other was happy and settled. They were wise enough to know that after all these years, it was too late for them to ever be really close.
“Ah, there you are,” said Christopher, hobbling up behind his wife and wrapping his arms around her.
Now seventy, he suffered occasionally from debilitating attacks of gout, a consequence of his earlier hard-drinking days. For the past two weeks, he’d been walking with a stick and grumbling at Caroline that he was in far too much pain to take the trash out, walk the dogs, or contribute to the running of the household in any way.
“Oy!” he said, seeing that she had rearranged the place cards again. “That’s not fair. I want to sit next to that lovely Arkell woman, not your dreadful sister-in-law.”
“Well, you can’t,” said Caroline firmly. “I want her to sit next to Gary Ellis. Besides,” she turned around and kissed him affectionately on the top of his shiny bald head, “I thought you only had eyes for me.”
“I do, my darling, I do.” He grinned at her. In her striped blue Thomas Pink shirtwaist dress, unbuttoned low enough to reveal a hint of cleavage, he thought Caroline was looking terrific, as always. She was nearly fifty-three now, but she could have passed for ten years younger, at least. “I’m just trying to be gentlemanly and rescue her from that creep Ellis,” he said. “I can’t think what possessed you to invite him.”
Gary Ellis was one of Caro’s newer “finds,” and was about as popular among the Cotswolds huntin’-shootin’-and-fishin’ set as the profiteering Rhett Butler was among the southern gentlemen of Atlanta.
He was a developer, famous for turning some of the most beautiful swaths of English countryside into hideous concrete shopping centers, and he had just bought himself a weekend cottage outside Batcombe. He was also loud, a Cockney, and well known for his dodgy business practices, as well as his garish checkered suits and lewd and outrageous sense of humor.
“Don’t be such a snob,” said Caroline. “I like him.”
Christopher gave her a knowing look, the same one she remembered her father using whenever he caught her fibbing.
Liking Ellis had nothing to do with it. She had invited him for one reason and one reason only, and they both knew it: He had his eye on a couple of Christopher’s lower fields. Christopher had been appalled at the very suggestion of selling one square inch of his estate, but Caroline was unwilling to wave goodbye to the prospect of oodles of ready cash until they’d at least heard what Gary was proposing. He might only want to build a couple of perfectly tasteful houses, and what was so wrong with that? She wouldn’t have minded having a few nearer neighbors, or a bit more money in her pocket.
Besides, having Gary there might distract her other guests from the unremitting tedium of her brothers’ company. Despite their bitter resentment that, after all the appalling things she’d done, she had managed once again to land on her feet and had become, for the second time, infinitely more wealthy than either of them, George and William were impressed enough by the Wellesley name and the grandeur of Great Thatchers to continue to pay court to their errant sister and her new husband. And as both lived within fifty miles of Batcombe, they had become, to Caroline’s disappointment, quite regular visitors and dinner party guests.
She knew that they would both vehemently disapprove of Gary Ellis and everything he stood for, but it couldn’t be helped. She had not yet completely given up hope of persuading Christopher to change his mind about those fields.
By nine o’clock, the party was in full swing. As well as George and William and their wives, dreary Lucy and even drearier Deborah, she had invited a rather eccentric loc
al lesbian woman in her seventies who was a lifelong friend of Christopher’s; Gary Ellis; and their neighbors, Henry and Muffy Arkell.
Henry owned Manor Farm, a much smaller but, some thought, even more beautiful little estate about five miles west of Thatchers. He also turned out, to Caroline’s amazement and delight, to be the elder son of her onetime great friend from L.A., Lulu De Seville.
“I don’t believe it,” she said to Henry, when they’d first met at last year’s hunt ball. “You’re little Max’s big brother? He was always great friends with my son, Hunter. What a small world.”
“Yes indeed,” said Henry, who vaguely remembered hearing something from Max about Caroline sleeping with his stepfather and a godawful row ensuing as a result. “Actually, I’m Max’s half brother,” he smiled. “Different fathers. I believe you knew Max’s father better than mine.”
Caroline had the good grace to blush, and Henry instantly warmed toward her. “And he’s not so little these days, either. He’s just finishing Cambridge, and then he’s hoping to go back out to L.A., I think. Wants to direct.”
Since that first meeting with Henry, she and Christopher had been invited to dinner at Manor Farm on a couple of occasions, and tonight they were finally returning the favor.
Caroline sat with Gary Ellis on her left and Henry on her right, in seventh heaven. Gary and Millicent, the lesbian, had been making horribly blue jokes all night. The latest involved a farmer’s wife performing fellatio on a variety of different livestock.
George’s po-faced wife, Lucy, looked like she might explode with disapproval. “Did Caroline tell you that Henrietta, our eldest, had a little boy last month?” She was babbling boringly on to poor Christopher in a desperate attempt to rein in the bawdy banter. “Cosmo. He’s really terribly sweet,” she gushed. “Isn’t he, George?”
Now a QC, a very senior lawyer, in his mid-sixties, Caroline’s brother seemed to have become even more small-minded and ridiculous with age. He didn’t reply but instead nodded absently at his wife, puffing pretentiously on an in-between-courses cigar.