Virtue (36 page)

Godiva sighs, looks out again over the lands of Belhaven. ‘You know, Georgina,’ she finishes, ‘this really is the most important thing to me. One day, the world will look back and know that I cared.’

The Duchess of Belhaven would like to make it known that all fees for this interview have been donated to charity
.

Search:

Godiva Fawcett

Sources:

All

From:

1969–72

Publication:

Daily Express

Byline:

William Hickey

Date:

23 10 73

Headline:

Good God-iva

A little bird tells me that, after over a year of public breastbeating, Godiva Fawcett, better known these days as the Duchess of Belhaven of the
troisième part
, has finally managed to land herself a role as public spokesperson for a high-profile charity. And a good thing too, thinks Hickey: after such an adventurous early life, it would be a shame to see the lovely Godiva sink into a future of fete-opening, hunt-following and choosing the proper knife and fork. No news as yet as to who the lucky organisation is, but doubtless the beneficiaries of her largesse will not be suffering from anything too disfiguring to make a nice photocall. Expect much baby-dandling, orphan-cuddling and sincerity. Don’t expect anything to do with scars, pus or contagion.

I actually forget all about the dream until we’re passing through Trafalgar Square on the bus on Thursday night. The bang on the head was heavy enough that I didn’t wake up, despite my desperation to do so, and by the morning all I had left was a cross-looking Henry and a vague sense that something had happened in the night. But as we pass the spot where my kidnap happened, it all comes flooding back. ‘Good grief,’ I say.

Harriet, painting her lips a vivid scarlet with the help of a trimmed-down paintbrush, lowers her compact and says, like your teachers used to tell you not to, ‘What?’

I tell her. As I speak, she raises the compact once again, smacks her lips a couple of times, clamps down on a Kleenex and pouts. Then she says, ‘Good grief indeed.’ Then she says, ‘Blimey O’Reilly. So you’re still obsessing about your old girl, then?’

The cheek. ‘I think it was more metaphorical than literal,’ I protest. ‘Dreams usually are, you know.’

Harriet shakes her head. ‘No. That’s dreams about big old houses you’ve never been in, or flying or stuff. When you dream about your mother, you’re dreaming about your mother.’

‘Balderdash. If you’re going to say that, you might just as well say that I was dreaming about your bloody stalkers.’

Harriet humphs. She’s still deep, deep in denial. ‘I don’t have a stalker,’ she says, to illustrate my point.

I sigh. Harriet has only received another dozen or so creepy emails from her non-stalkers since the march (‘Saw you didn’t even have the grace to honour your mother’s memory on Saturday. Shame. I was looking forward to seeing you there. I had a present for you’), but the blinkers are still firmly on. I’ve tried screaming, and shouting, and pointing to the lump on my head, and talking reasonably, and even threatening her, but all she does is set her mouth and say, ‘Well, obviously I’m going to be careful.’ So, silly me, I’m scared to go anywhere without her, insist on following her everywhere, as if someone my size would be any use against a nutter with a hotline to London’s skinhead community. Then again, it seems to have worked: nothing seems to have happened in the past five days, and now I can take a night off because we’re going to be surrounded by Everyone Who’s Anyone, Darling in the London restaurant community and no one, but no one, who shouldn’t be there will get past Lydia’s bouncers.

They have to have bouncers. Of course they’ve got bouncers. All new bars these days are built with aquarium windows so that the handbag thieves have plenty of room to scope the yuppies before they pop in and set themselves up for the night. So when there’s a launch, everyone within a mile’s radius knows about it within seconds of the paper coming down from the windows. Bars have been known to go bankrupt on the backs of their launch parties. Obviously, underfinanced bars run by nitwits, but it’s still a fact.

Of course, the owners of the Ski Bar probably think they’ve got bouncers because it lends them a certain exclusive cachet, like chrome swipe cards and a no-suits policy, but fortunately for them, they’ve hired Lydia to do their launch, and what Lydia doesn’t know about bouncers, their uses and abuses, probably isn’t worth knowing.

Lydia is Dom’s new boss. Lydia specialises in top of the market launches and plucked Dom from the obscurity of front-of-house at Barley Cane to start at the bottom in her PR company. He’s been there four weeks now, still in the middle of the honeymoon period, and we’ve already discovered the perks of having a mate in restaurant PR: that we will never, ever have to pay for a drink on Thursday night again. Because Thursday night is launch night, and all the PRs go to each other’s launches when they’re not doing launches of their own, and nobodies like us get to tag along.

Despite the fact that she eats out three or four times a week, Lydia is pencil-thin to fit into the designer gear she blags from her fashion PR friends in return for setting them up with the wherewithal to dine their clients without paying. Lydia has bags of energy and is always bestest, bestest friends with her staff in between the eighteen-month tantrums when she sacks them all, which usually precedes a five-week holiday somewhere in the Arizona desert. But she’s the best in the business, everybody knows that, and Dom says he reckons he’ll have learned everything he needs to know by the time she sacks him, and then he’ll be able to set up on his own. ‘It’s a licence to print money, love,’ he says. ‘And I don’t want to be living on catering wages when I’m forty.’

As we stand in the queue, Harriet says, ‘So you’re still thinking about that horrible old bat, then?’

I nod. Grace is rarely off my mind, though God knows I’d like to expunge every memory if I could. She hasn’t, of course, been in touch. I didn’t expect her to be. And I’m damned if I’m getting in touch with her.

‘Poor old you.’ Harriet makes an effort to sound sympathetic. ‘All that and a headache too. How are you feeling?’

‘Okay,’ I reply. I’ve pretty much recovered. For four days, I nursed a headache and a sense of approaching doom, and though, obviously, I didn’t have to work on Sunday and Monday because we were closed, things were pretty tough on the following two shifts. Even Harriet decided to lay off for a while, and behaved immaculately, taking up the slack when I had to pop off and sit down on a chair in the alleyway for a few minutes and close my eyes, though a strange virus seems to have struck Roy’s new botanical collection, and their leaves are beginning to mottle and curl. But she’s added a new twist to her act, trussing up her victims with liquorice bootlaces, an idea she introduced just as Roy was starting to ask questions, and he was so thrilled that he forgot all about his line of thought.

Dom’s working the table in the foyer, scanning lists of names and ticking them off. He looks harrassed. ‘Look,’ he is saying to a man in a ski jacket that looks like it’s been inflated with a bicycle pump, ‘you’re the third Adam Collyer who’s come in tonight. You can’t
all
be Adam Collyer.’ Dom isn’t just being firm because it’s his job. He has certain standards and this man, who seems to have had his hair cut in the highlighted beach-bum curtains of 1991 despite being thirty-five if he’s a day and is blessed with a set of teeth that some roebuck somewhere must be sorely missing, doesn’t live up to them. ‘Well, it’s hardly my fault that someone else is pretending to be me, is it?’ he is saying. ‘Which ones were they? I’ll go and find them.’ Yer, right. Like no one on a door has ever heard that one before. ‘There have been over three hundred people through the door already tonight,’ Dom replies. ‘I wasn’t keeping an eye on what the Adam Collyers looked like.’

‘Rich and Stinky are going to be
siriusly
pissed off about this,’ says Adam the Third. Dom treats him to a welcoming smile. Rich and Stinky are the owners of this new glamour spot, a pair of former City traders who jumped over the wall to set up a company promoting off-piste snowboarding holidays for other Sloane Rangers. The business has done well, branching out into a healthy trade in branded skiwear, lipsalve and so forth, and now they’re launching the Ski Bar to make some cash in the four months a year when the snow’s gone from the Alps and the rest of us are treated to the sound of braying in the streets of London. They’ve even managed to get cigarette sponsorship from St Moritz, boom-boom.

‘Ah!’ says Dom, ‘you’re a friend of Rich and Stinky’s! Why didn’t you say?’

‘Didn’t think I had to,’ says Adam the Third.

‘Well, we can get this sorted out in no time,’ says Dom, turns slightly to his left and says, ‘Rich! Stinky! I’ve got Adam Collyer here!’

Rich looks up from where he and Stinky have a small blonde woman pinned at bay against a coat rack made from old chair-lift parts. Her suntan would make a Spanish shoemaker wince with pride. ‘Air Yair?’ he says. ‘Wear?’ and I realise that he and Stinky must be distantly – or of course, not so distantly – related to Harriet. I stand back in amazement as they speak. Not a word emerges unscathed. You don’t
learn
to speak like that; you’re born to it. Liz Hurley could practise in front of the dressing-room mirror for the rest of her life and still never learn.

‘Here.’ Dom points at Adam the Third.

‘Well, he’snur A’am Coyer,’ says Stinky. ‘Who the blaryal ar year?’

Adam the Third, unabashed, sticks out a hand. ‘Ha-o Stinky. Rory Cottrell. Wazza school waya bra’er. Met at that fraferl Jane creacher’s chalet at Zermatt.’

‘Air furguards sake,’ says Stinky, catching him a violent slap on the upper arm. ‘Why didn’t yer sayser? Wappened to the Jane creacher, anyway?’

‘Married some Franch skiern strata. Nafterer furra moneya course. Slarve.’

‘Well, dafta be larve. Couldn’t be furra sex appeal, could it?’

‘Too righ. Sirius paper bag job, that one.’

‘Yah,
sirius
.’

They roar and treat each other’s upper arms to another bout of violence. Dom sighs, turns back and puts a third tick beside the fated Adam Collyer’s name. ‘Hello, darlings,’ he says, kisses us both. ‘Avoid the gluhwein like the plague. Ranjiit’s behind the bar.’

Then he turns to the pair of scarecrows jiggling in line behind us and says, ‘Hi, there. Can I have your names, please?’

Lydia is in the middle of the main room, talking to Terry Marshall. Terry is the bar correspondent for the
Evening Argus
, and wrote a book last year called
How to Get Drunk for Free
. Terry hasn’t paid for a drink since 1987, and the whites of his eyes have been yellow since 1992. It doesn’t take much to get Terry going these days, and he has already started singing. ‘Have you heard this one, then?’ he yells into Lydia’s ear as she gamely smiles her welcoming smile. ‘
Lid
dia oh
Lid
dia say
have
you seen
Lid
dia, Liddia the
tatt
oed
lay
dy …’

‘I have, Terry,’ says Lydia, who has heard it from these very lips every time she’s done a launch since she entered the business in 1993. ‘Very good.’

‘Music hall,’ barks Terry, ‘you can’t beat a bit of music hall. Ah. Now. Who have we here?’

Lydia’s eyes light up. ‘Anna! Harriet! Welcome! Have you got a drink? Have you met Terry Marshall?’ and before we’re even able to say, ‘Yes, Lydia, we were only spanking him a month ago,’ she has slipped off into the crowd. This is what’s technically known in the trade as the Teflon Shuffle, that ability to pass on anyone, however sticky, without ever seeming to have been there. Lydia’s ability with the Teflon Shuffle is renowned throughout the industry. PR companies actually send their trainees to her launches to observe how it’s done.

‘Hi, Terry,’ says Harriet. ‘How are you?’

‘Well, well,’ bellows Terry, wiping the corners of his eyes with a wad of crumpled bog paper he’s brought out from his pocket. ‘Bloody awful launch, though. Never seen so many ugly people in one room in my life.’

Mr Marshall has a point, though. The press may offer little to write home about, but their leather-patched tweed jackets look positively tempting beside Rich and Stinky’s field of acquaintance, who have turned out en masse to lig every last drop they can. Because what is just about acceptable in the low-lit wooden schnapps bars of Kandersteg is just
so
not attractive in the less kindly illumination of the urban wilds. Because, you see, though skiboarders like to think of themselves as the surfers of the mountains, it’s not like that at all. They’re more like the trolls of suburbia.

Where surfers are long and lean from a diet of shellfish and amphetamine, these people are square and squat from a diet of dope munchies. Where surfers have smooth, blemishless skin from constant exposure to sunlight and salt water, these people have rashes on their necks from constant exposure to man-made fabrics. Where surfers chug the occasional beer from the neck of the bottle, these people chug anything they can get, and their chapped lips are perpetually blackened by the berry stain of gluhwein. Surfers come from the coast, where the air is clean and long legs are a great aid in breasting sand dunes. Skiboarders come from the central counties, where short, thick little legs are a great aid in dipping sheep. You can’t take a boy from a farm in Gloucestershire and turn him into an Adonis: it just won’t happen.

Harriet executes a perfect Teflon Shuffle on Terry Marshall. She appeals to his sympathy. ‘We’ve been here twenty minutes, Terry,’ she lies, ‘and we still haven’t managed to get a drink. I’m going to die if I don’t go to the bar. Can we get you something while we’re there?’

‘Poor old you,’ says Terry. ‘No, you’re all right.’

We slip away and Terry disappears among the cackle of trolls. I brush against a pop-eyed brunette who has obviously stolen her teeth from a chain-smoking buck of the same family that Adam the Third got his from. She goggles, says, ‘Mind out.’ Then, she tries to take a puff of her Silk Cut extra-long with lips that have difficulty stretching closed, trails smoke up through her seagrass hair. ‘You okay, Biccie?’ says a bloke with a bobble hat. Oh, please. ‘Yeah,’ says Biccie. ‘Though obviously some people can’t see where they’re going.’ Puts a glass of red wine to her face, pushing lips forward in a trough to meet it, and a trail of spare goes down her chin to join the rest on her collar.