"You know perfectly well it is, darling," said Samantha smoothly. "Well, I suggest we change from Pol to Veuve this year. Starting with the party."
"Fine," muttered Guy sleepily.
"And I thought as a party centerpiece, we could buy one of those water features from the garden center and get the champagne pumping through it. I'm sure Wilbursdean could manage to fix it, don't you?"
"Depends on how long he's here."
"And we'll have it from six to eight." Ignoring the last remark, Samantha wrinkled her Botoxed brow, trying to remember whether it was smarter to say o'clock after the time or p.m. "Don't you think, darling? Darling?"
She looked contemptuously across at her snoring husband. He could pretend to be asleep all he liked, but she was determined not to shoulder the burden of the party alone. Although she fully intended it to be her night of triumph, Guy, or at least his checkbook, had to be involved. For a start, a number of important catering decisions were yet to be made.
Of course, there was one surefire way of raising his level of interest. As well as everything else. Screw your courage to the sticky place, Samantha urged herself, snaking a hand over Guy's clammy chest and down toward his sleeping penis. Strange how Hamlet stuck in the mind. She was amazed to find him as hard as iron.
Guy, who at that very moment was lowering his mouth onto one of Lalla's nipples, awoke with a start. "What the…?"
Samantha maneuvered herself on top of him. He'd gotten very fat lately. Like sitting on a bloody water bed, she thought, stuffing him determinedly inside her and starting to grind slowly back and forth. "Fork supper or finger buffet?" she demanded.
Guy, sleep-fogged and conscious of nothing but the strong clench and release action of Samantha's vaginal muscles, grinned happily up at her. If this was a new game, he liked the sound of it. "Finger buffet definitely," he said, circling her nipples with his perspiring digits.
Samantha was delighted. Decisions at last. Now for the menu. "Miniature Peking duck rolls," she recited at him. "Baby hamburgers and tiny tartes au citron." Guy's eyes widened. Even Lalla had drawn the line at food tricks. At this rate, if he played his cards right, he'd be getting the Ping-Pong balls in the bargain. He nodded hard. "Whatever you say."
"Lavatories," Samantha said suddenly, clenching him hard. Guy goggled. He only got the Chinese clutch on very special occasions as it was, and now she seemed to be suggesting golden showers. "If you're sure," he croaked.
"Well, I'm not," said Samantha. The glossy catalog sent to her by the mobile lavatory-unit specialists, Royal Flush, featured two clear favorites. The Oxford, a gleaming navy-blue van with a marble floor, fresh flowers, gilt-framed mirrors, and prints of medieval herbs on the walls, and the Cambridge, a gleaming ice-blue van with a black-and-white-check floor, concealed cisterns with gold flushing handles, and pictures of stately homes. Both were exquisite. Samantha, remembering the concealed cisterns with particular pleasure, moaned ecstatically. Her hands moved upward with slow rapture over her nipples. "It's a question of how blue we want to go, I suppose," she murmured.
"Very blue," gasped Guy, jiggling up and down beneath her excitedly. "The bluer the better."
The Oxford then, thought Samantha, mentally ticking the Toilets box in her head. Really, this was more efficient than a board meeting. Which reminded her. "Sod it," she spat, leaping off Guy at the precise moment he was about to erupt like Vesuvius. "My meeting with the party organizers was five minutes ago."
For Samantha was taking no chances. Everything about the party was to be as sumptuous and professional as possible. The party would be, Samantha was determined, the most lavish that Dame Nancy, let alone the rest of Eight Mile Bottom, had ever seen. It was her opportunity to fight fire with fire-eaters, not to mention with mime artists, with canapes, and with living statues. To this end— and for the delicate matter of the guest list—Samantha had sought expert and expensive advice from Lady St. Felix and the northern editor of
Tatler.
They were awaiting her in the sitting room. At first, they were difficult to pick out among the mass of decorations and pictures, but after a few moments of persistent peering, Samantha spotted them by the fireplace.
"Fancy dress," she declared, trotting bossily toward them. "It
must
be fancy dress. Marie Antoinette and her court, I thought." She had spent the last few days picturing herself undulating up and down in panniers and a straw hat tied with ribbon. "Now we're living in the country, I simply must do her during her Hameau period," she had declared to Guy.
"Why not do her during her post-revolution period?" had been his uncharitable suggestion.
"Awfully ten minutes ago, Marie Antoinette," sniffed the northern editor of
Tatler, a girl of twenty-two with no chest whatsoever, th
e biggest overbite this side of the Natural History Museum dinosaur section, and the name Boudicca Anstruther-Gough-Cleethorpes. She crossed one racehorse leg over another. "
Arabian Nights
are
much
more fashionable. Zany Hohenzollern-Briggs brace-removal party was
Arabian Nights
and it got a double-page spread in the magazine."
Samantha looked thoughtful. It was certainly an idea worth considering. The scene in
Punkawallah
where, as the viceroy's daughter, she had stripped off to a sequined bikini, joined an Indian wedding party, and taught them all the hokey pokey, had, after all, been a sensation. And if it meant a double-page spread in a society glossy…
The meeting moved on to the guest list. At the top of Samantha's was the mysterious pop star who lived in what several neck-craning drives past had revealed to be an establishment of truly enormous proportions.
"What's he called again?" she demanded, glittering silver pencil poised over a pad of neon-pink notepaper specially bought for the occasion.
"Matt Locke," drawled Boudicca.
"But he'll never come," Lady St. Felix added. "He's a hermit."
Samantha's eyes sparkled. "What, he was in Herman's Hermits?
Fantastic
. I used to love them." She'd show them she knew a thing or two about pop music.
Boudicca sniggered. "
Who?
They're prehistoric, aren't they? Matt's only twenty-four, bless him."
Samantha went red with fury.
"Hermit as in never seen in Eight Mile Bottom," supplied Lady St. Felix, as Boudicca's bony brown shoulders continued to shake.
Samantha, her discomfiture forgotten, gave her a calculating stare. "So, he's never been to anyone's party in the village before?"
Lady St. Felix pursed her lips. "Wouldn't even open the village fête last year. So I stepped in. Noblesse oblige and all that."
Samantha's heart swelled with excitement. She knew a challenge when she heard one.
"Yah. After both Matt's albums went double platinum, he became a virtual hermit—you know, a sort of recluse," declared Boudicca. "They're saying in the music industry that he's absolutely terrified of his next album being, you know, panned."
Samantha licked her lips, certain she knew better. Of course Matt was a recluse. Bound to be if all the available local company was a load of muddy yokels, tombstone-toothed Sloanes, hen-keeping alcoholic actresses, and dried-up old toffs. Well, his problems were over now that she was here. There was no doubt he'd leap at the chance to come to a party with miniature Peking duck and smart hired toilets. And what a coup
that would be. Her star guest
, in every sense of the word.
***
Despite four cups of coffee, half a package of cookies, and five Marlboros, Mark was feeling far from well. The throbbing in his head had intensified. The knowledge that he was a good ten miles from the nearest migraine medicine did not help. Nor did the fact that Rosie had found the whole of last night's episode hilarious.
Why, Mark demanded of himself, was it so amusing that, desperate for inspiration for the column, he had gotten up in the middle of the night and gone walking in the woods at the top of the hill by moonlight? What was so chortlesome about his slipping, smashing forehead first into a tree, and returning home in the early hours with a mild concussion and an egg-shaped lump protruding from his head?
"Thanks for all your sympathy and support," he had snapped at Rosie. "It's not easy, this column business. Try thinking of a few ideas yourself for a change." When Rosie had pointed out indignantly that she was always suggesting things, Mark had lost his temper completely. Information, such as her latest offering, that someone had altered the teashop sign and painted out the
h
in Penny Farthing, was hardly going to get the newsroom conga-ing. It had been a relief to see the back of her when she'd left to go to the farm.
Alone in the upstairs box room, Mark stared furiously at his laptop, waiting for inspiration to strike. The banging in his head was almost indistinguishable from the constant thudding on the other side of the wall. Hopefully, Guinevere was battering one of the brats to death in the attic. When it came to the slaughter of the firstborn, Mark thought savagely, he was with Herod all the way. After four attempts, the most recent "Green-er Pastures" had struggled past the editor, yet here he was, a week later, facing the tortuous process anew. And with a few special requests from On High to consider. "Get some animals," the editor's last email had read. "Readers like animals. Rumor has it there are quite a lot of them in the countryside." Mark scowled. Sarcastic bastard.
As a series of screams from the road outside rent the air in synchronicity with a staggeringly loud crash from the other side of the wall, Mark sank his head in his hands. Animals seemed about the size of it. Maddeningly, though, Rosie seemed serenely oblivious to the horrors of the rest of the street.
Animals, he thought. Perhaps they
were the answer. It would b
e easy enough to keep them—plenty of people round here did, after all. That field at the back was full of cattle that seemed to require no attention of any sort. Cheap to feed as well, just grass. He and Rosie could easily keep, if not a cow, then certainly some smaller-scale herbivore such as a goat or a sheep in the garden. Now that Rosie had gone to all that trouble to sort the lawn out, it seemed ludicrous to leave all that grass unused when it could easily support some livestock. He would get around her by pointing out that not only would it browse back and forth, neatly clipping the grass, but in doing so would also produce eminently useful milk. Not to mention column fodder.
Add a few hens, for the hell of it, not to mention the eggs of it, and you'd be away. Free material as well as free food. Mark slapped his thighs in triumph. What a brilliant idea. Amazing he hadn't thought of it before.
It was surprisingly easy to look the whole subject of animals up on the Internet. Once his modem had battled its personal demons and heaved itself onto the cyber superhighway, Mark was gratified to find a multitude of sites devoted to animal husbandry. There seemed very few animals, in fact, that you could not husband, although he desisted exploring some of the more unsavory-sounding sites suggested by the search engine. Sheep or goats? Pigs or hens? All four? An entire farm, even; you were bound to be able to order one off the Internet, possibly at
www.old-macdonald.co.uk
. You could, after all, buy practically everything else on it. Mark had even seen a penis for sale once, a wrinkled gray specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, offered on a slightly sinister auction site.
Half an hour later, his spirits had sunk again. There was one aspect of animal rearing he had failed to take fully into consideration. The cost.
"You need a minimum of one acre for a sheep," www.mintsauce. co.uk had informed him. Well, that was a downer for a start. Even the optimistic estate agents details hadn't managed to expand the strip at the back of Number 2 to more than four hundred square feet. An acre would have to be rented. Cost, already, and that was before you'd even got to the animals. "Pedigree lambs cost around £50 for a ewe to £90 for a ram…" Mark whistled softly under his breath. "Three sheep is a good minimum. Additional costs include sheep minerals, shearing, vaccinations, plus, when the time comes, £20 to 25 to slaughter and butcher a sheep. Vet's visits cost around £30 a time, or £70 for an emergency call…" "Bloody
hell
," muttered Mark. He hadn't realized sheep were a luxury sport.
Chickens, then. Surely they couldn't involve that much outlay, as it were? According to
www.cockadoodledoo.co.uk
, you'd be looking at £6 to 10 per bird—
that
was more like it. "Costs also include £300 to 400 for a henhouse, food and drink dispensers, fencing against the fox, poultry mash or pellets, shavings…"
Next Mark had tried goats. "Goats get lonely so you need a minimum of two," said
www.billythekidxo.uk.
"Goats need a waterproof, insulated, and partitioned goat shed plus antiterroriststrength fencing. Cost around £200 to 500 to include hay racks, milking equipment tools, and winter coats. Annual costs £300 to
350 a year for two."
Finally, desperately, he tried bees. Surely they would be cheaper? The discovery that a new hive cost a cool £200 and a nucleus of bees £100 seemed to argue otherwise. Even his next great idea—catching some out of the air—became less than feasible when it emerged that the necessary protective clothing was £80. There was, Mark realized glumly, no such thing as a free bee. Despite what everyone said about journalists getting lots of them.