Jane's thoughts instantly flew to the other person she knew who was similarly equipped. She swallowed, but looked determinedly on the bright side. At least Champagne wasn't getting married now. She would be spared the details of bridesmaids, luxury Portaloos, honeymoons and the rest of it. And all for a marriage that probably wouldn't have lasted five minutes anyway. Jane had little doubt Champagne would have dumped O'Shaughnessy without a qualm the moment a better prospect presented himself. Champagne's idea of emotional baggage, after all, was being fond of her Louis Vuitton.
It was more than enough to make even Elizabeth Taylor feel cynical about marriage, Jane decided. And to think she had so fervently wanted a wedding herself. To Nick, of all people, who still rolled up at the flat with almost weekly regularity, ostensibly to unearth another armful of embarrassing albums and a mouldering jumper or two. Jane, however, suspected the real reason was to check she had not moved somewhere else. If only she had the energy to, she thought sadly. But at the moment the last thing Jane felt like doing on a Saturday was trailing miserably around the type of peeling, smelly South London prison-cell bedsits her single salary could afford.
Spending Saturday househunting would, however, have one distinct advantage. It would keep her away from the shops. Jane had always known life as a single woman was a social minefield. But it was not until the eggs-in-wrong-
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basket incident at the supermarket that she had realised it was a shopping one as well.
Saturday shopping, Jane had come to realise, actively conspired against the single. A recent visit to Heals had almost resulted in a nervous breakdown as she found herself alone amid a sigh of blissed-out couples testing out vast, comfy sofas with names like Figaro and Turandot and bouncing up and down on enormous beds called Renoir and Picasso. As she fled from the mass of the young, beautiful and sexually fulfilled, Jane wondered vaguely what Thackeray would have made of the CD rack his name had been so freely given to, and also which of the Brontes the elegant silver wine rack was honouring. The alcoholic Branwell, perhaps?
There was no escape in John Lewis, where Jane found herself at close quarters with yet more cheerful couples weighing up the rival claims of seagrass and seisal. At Harvey Nicks, beautiful thin girls with perfect bottoms and unstructured-linen-clad boyfriends compared brands of aubergine crisps in the food hall, while at Selfridges dreamy twosomes dithered over duvets. Sainsbury's checkout queues were nothing less than a conspiracy of besotted lovers with trolleys full of rocket salad, parmesan, vine-grown tomatoes and champagne. Usually, Jane made her way home from these excursions with nothing but M&S knickers and a huge single-woman-sized chip on her shoulder.
Still, hope was in sight. There was Amanda's dinner party to look forward to. At least that should sort out Tally. Jane was beginning to realise she was rather counting on a result from it herself.
Champagne, byway of profound contrast, lasted barely twenty-four hours without a new man on her arm. Jane
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opened the papers two days later to find the centre spreads of the tabloids devoted to a shot of Champagne, skirt riding up to her waist and apparently innocent of underwear, snogging someone in the back of a limousine. The snoggee, according to the practically identical accompanying reports, was 'one of London's most eligible bachelors, dashing millionaire property developer Saul Dewsbury'.
'She's certainly met her match this time,' Valentine remarked. 'So to speak. Because from what I hear, Saul Dewsbury's responsible for more burnt fingers than the Spanish Inquisition.'
According to Valentine, Dewsbury had a reputation for being as ruthless in the bedroom as he was in the boardroom. Valentine accordingly suspected his liaison with Champagne was as much about business as it was about pleasure. 'It usually is,' he said. 'My father's in property, so I've heard a few stories about Dewsbury. His last girlfriend's father was leader of a council where he was apparently trying to get planning permission for some Princess Diana-themed wine bars. Dewsbury dumped her as soon as it was granted. And I think he got about five hundred acres of prime Sussex countryside out of someone else, which apparently he's made into a Space Experience.'
Jane sighed. 'That column's going to have more plugs than the John Lewis homes department. Not that it doesn't already.'
Her fears were justified. Suddenly Champagne, followed by the ever-eager paparazzi, seemed to be spending her entire life in one or other of the businesses in which Dewsbury had an interest. These ranged from a West End theatre which Dewsbury was converting into luxury flats with individual lifts and plunge pools, to a disused medieval City church he was transforming into a nightclub. A
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Georgian townhouse had just been demolished in all but facade to accommodate a gym for the twenty-second century, whose colour-sensitive walls would reflect the collective mood of the gym-goers.
'Talk about making hay while the
Sun
shines,' remarked Valentine one day, scrutinising a picture of Champagne in a sparkling leotard bicycling for all she was worth while the wall behind her loomed an ominous black. 'It's ridiculous. The column's practically a prospectus for Dewsbury at the moment.'
In the end, Jane lost her patience. Tve told her we're not running another word about him,' she told Valentine a day or so later. 'I absolutely refuse ever to plug him again. Champagne's furious. She says she couldn't think of anything else to say. Claims to have writer's block.'
'Well, I'd agree with the block bit,' said Valentine.
Champagne, however, seemed to be utterly in Dewsbury's thrall. And looking at the pictures of them that appeared almost daily in the papers, Jane didn't find it too hard to see why. Extremely handsome, and with cheekbones so sharp you could cut cigars on them, Dewsbury looked as cool and dangerous as a Smith & Wesson on ice. Thrillingly ruthless, thought Jane, feeling herself going emerald with envy. Damn Champagne. It wasn't fair how men came buzzing round her like bees to a honeypot. Or, in Dewsbury's case, a moneypot.
On the day of Amanda's dinner party, Jane finally screwed her courage to
die placement
and called her to say Tally would be replacing Nick as her partner that evening. Amanda's voice had been acquiescent, but tight. 'So up herself she could practically tickle her tonsils,' Jane giggled to Tally over a pre-dinner party departure gin and tonic in the flat.
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'And her husband's so boring,' whinged Tally, who seemed to be going off the whole idea.
'He definitely puts the Square in Square Mile,' said Jane. 'But just imagine his incentive package. More to the point, think of those of his friends.'
Amanda cast a satisfied glance around the bathroom. She was particularly proud of the fleur-de-lis lavatory paper. To most people, the Balkan war had meant mass graves and Radovan Karadzic. To Amanda, watching the highlights on breakfast TV as she lunged backwards and forwards on her rowing machine, it meant that attractive Bosnian fleur-de-lis shield.
The hall was faintly scented from the light bulbs dabbed with essential oils. Not for the first time, Amanda congratulated herself on selecting precisely the right shade of paint for the walls. Biscotti, with the dado and picture rails picked out in Etruscan. She looked round brightly as she descended the stairs, the half-smile on her face fading as she noticed the morning's copy of
La Republicca
loitering unread on the doormat. She hated being reminded that, having decided to take the paper to practise Italian for their Tuscan holidays, neither she nor Peter ever bothered to look at it.
She bent over the banister to look down into the basement kitchen. Yes, there was Peter, by the Aga, chopping chillis as requested. He looked distracted, as usual. The dinner party would, if nothing else, be a chance for her to catch up with whatever was going on in his head at the moment. Peter was always too tired when he came home to tell her anything. But at table, he would have to regale their guests with something of what had happened in his life for the past month or so. Really,
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dinners were quite useful in that way if you thought about it.
She trotted into the sitting room (or was it drawing room, she never could decide) to plump up the Kettle Chips. 'Peter,' she called. 'Peter, darling. Have you remembered to slice the lemons for the gin and tonic?'
There was no reply from the kitchen. Amanda returned to peer down over the banister. Her husband was nowhere to be seen. Panic shot up Amanda's gorge. It was almost eight sixteen. People would be arriving any minute. She hated it when everyone came en masse, requiring one to perform the feat of taking coats, pouring drinks and making small talk simultaneously.
Dashing inelegantly up the elegant, sweeping staircase to the first floor, Amanda banged on the bathroom door. A faint gasping could be heard from inside. Amanda shoved it open. She screamed.
Towering over the washbasin, her husband had his trousers down and his penis flopped into a sinkful of cold water. 'Peter,' she stammered, realising that, subconsciously, this was the moment she had always been expecting. The reason for his distraction. The moment when-Peter confessed that his suppressed passion for Fish Minor back in the fourth form was why he could never love her as a woman needed to be loved. Amanda gazed at him in wide-eyed, speechless anguish.
'Sorry,' Peter said matter-of-factly, straining a watery-eyed smile in her direction. 'Just had a pee and forgot I'd been chopping chillis. Dick feels like it's on fire. Talk about a red-hot poker.'
Amanda descended in disgust. As if she hadn't enough to put up with. First there had been that wretched Jane Bentley ruining her
placement
by saying she was turning
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up with Natalia Venery instead of her boyfriend. Please God they weren't going
out
with each other, thought Amanda, sending up silent prayers in the direction of the decorative baskets suspended from the oak-effect kitchen beams. Merchant banks were hardly bastions of liberalism. A couple of lesbians at table could scupper Peter's chances of promotion until well into the next century. Then there had been that arrogant bastard Saul Dewsbury who had called at the eleventh hour — quite literally, at eleven o'clock that morning - to say not only would his girlfriend and Amanda's star guest, Champagne D'Vyne, not be coming, but he doubted he could make it himself.
Amanda stole a look through the glass oven door. There sat the boeuf en daube and the luxury coquilles St Jacques warming beneath. Thank goodness there were some things, Harrods Food Hall for instance, that never let you down.
She shuddered. It had been a close-run thing with Dewsbury; for a few minutes, her numbers had hung precariously in the balance. He had agreed to come in the end, though only after Amanda had gone through the rest of the guest list with him. He'd made an abrupt volte-face after that — there was obviously someone he wanted to meet.
But who? Amanda racked her brains as she circled the dining table, making sure the forks were tines down in the French style. Probably it was the deeply dishy Mark Stackable, the unfeasibly young head of investment with Peters firm Goldman's. Through the medium of Peter, Dewsbury had often tried, without success, to get Stack-able to underwrite his projects in the past. He was probably trying again. At the thought of Stackable, Amanda felt a frisson in her gusset. It wasn't just out of politeness she'd placed him next to her at table.
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She scattered the cushions a little more, and gave a final ruffle to her artful-casual arrangement of glossy magazines. Then again, Dewsbury might well be wanting to catch up with Nicola Pitbull, Goldman's head of development. It was unlikely he had any interest in meeting her useless and deeply embarrassing artist husband Ivo who everyone thought must have got something on Nicola, otherwise she would never be seen dead with him. Not for the first time, Amanda wondered what that something was.
Apart from herself and Peter, that only left Sholto Binge, a financial journalist who was an old school friend of Peter's, and of course Jane and Tally. None of whom Dewsbury would give two hoots about.
'Everyone here now, darling?' Peter hissed half an hour later, as, firebucket style, he relayed the gins and tonic from the kitchen to Amanda in the hall.
'Apart from Saul,' said Amanda through clenched teeth. 'Honestly, the
cheek
of the man. I practically had to
beg
him to come, and now he's late.
Christ,'
she added, glancing through the sitting-room door at her guests. 'Ivo's eating the potpourri. He must think it's vegetable crisps. I'd better go.' She snatched up a bowl of Japanese crackers and dashed to the rescue.
'Ivo, my darling,' said Amanda, gliding up to him with the bowl. 'Do try some of these. They're delicious.'
Ivo stretched out a hand and stuffed one into his mouth. 'Hmm,' he said, after chewing for a few seconds. 'Not mad about peanuts, actually. Think I prefer the other things.'
'Have you met Natalia Venery?' Amanda interjected hastily, before Ivo could resume his consumption of Elizabethan Rose.
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Tally, draped on a piano stool next to Ivo, nodded. 'Yes. We're having a lovely chat,' she said, gazing at Amanda with large and pleading eyes. Amanda, either unable or reluctant to realise that this was SOS code for Tally's having failed utterly to light the conversational blue touchpaper and wanting help, moved complacently on to the large navy-blue damask sofa where Jane was trying to put as much space as possible between herself and an edgy, skinny blonde wearing a bright red suit. The blonde was smoking furiously, a deep frown creasing the space between eyebrows so plucked they were practically nonexistent.