Little Lady Agency and The Prince

  ‘Yes,’ I said, beaming.

  ‘Really?’ She frowned in disbelief.

  ‘Yes!’ I protested. ‘From Samaritaine!’

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on with French fashion these days,’ she said, stalking back to the drawing room.

  ‘Ignore her,’ muttered Jonathan, as I spluttered impotently. ‘You look adorable.’

  I thought we could creep into the drawing room without a big scene, since Daddy was standing with his back to the door, holding forth about something, but I’d reckoned without the eyes in the back of his head.

  ‘. . . now where you’re going wrong, William, is listening to the other chap’s opinion. Schoolboy error! Distracts you from your own, ah, Melissa, nice of you to drop in at last!’

  My father spun round with his usual vulpine grin of welcome, and I took an involuntary step backwards.

  On a good day, Daddy wasn’t a bad-looking man, if you went for the ghastly silver-fox type of Englishman, but he seemed to have undergone a makeover of quite Trinny and Susannah-ish proportions. His grey hair was teased into youthful fullness, the bags under his eyes had vanished, and his skin had taken on a Caribbean glow not usually associated with the damp native climate of the Cotswolds.

  As his welcoming smile widened into a veritable rictus, I noticed numbly that he’d also invested in a whole new set of teeth that made even Jonathan’s gleaming American dental work look rather shabby.

  I assumed that was why he was smiling so much. My father liked to wring full value out of everything.

  ‘And you’ve brought Justin with you, I see,’ he went on, as I searched frantically for the right thing to say.

  ‘Jonathan,’ my mother corrected him, shimmering forward, her long white hands extended. ‘As you very well know. Ignore him, darling, he’s just trying to be foul. Although you never really have to try too hard, do you, Martin?’ She clasped Jonathan’s arms and beamed up into his face as if he was the only guest she was really bothered about. ‘So glad you could come!’

  ‘Belinda, not even a strike on the Channel Tunnel could keep us away,’ he replied, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘I’ve been looking forward to it all week.’

  Mummy liked Jonathan. He knew how to be really charming and still sound like he meant it.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she said, turning to me, and squinching up her face in an air kiss. She seemed to be lightly tanned too. I wondered if my father had done a two-for-one deal at the village salon. ‘Braveheart’s been missing you,’ she added accusingly.

  Mummy was something of a dog lover, and it seemed only logical when Jonathan first moved from New York that he should park his West Highland terrier with her while he found somewhere to live in Paris. From what I’d seen of him lately, he was even less keen to move to France than me, living as he was in the lap of doggy luxury.

  But before I could start apologising, my father grabbed Jonathan by the shoulder – no mean feat, since Jonathan was at least four inches taller.

  ‘Now then!’ commanded Daddy. ‘I’ve been waiting to show you something!’

  Jonathan looked at me with a faint flicker of trepidation.

  ‘It’s just the sword,’ I whispered. My father claimed to have ‘acquired’ the sword that executed Anne Boleyn. He liked to show it to potential sons-in-law. The first time William had visited as Emery’s official fiancé, he’d actually taken it down and started swinging it about, nearly decapitating Mrs Lloyd, the housekeeper, which, I think, shocked my father into signing whatever ghastly prenup William’s lawyers had drawn up.

  ‘Come on!’ barked my father. ‘Just time to have a quick trip up to the armoury before dinner!’

  I patted Jonathan on the arm. One of the billions of things I loved about Jonathan was that he refused to be intimidated by my father.

  ‘Great!’ said Jonathan, in a cheerleading voice. ‘Bring on the, er, armaments!’

  My father – or, rather, the TV actor who seemed to be playing my father – clenched his jaw and led the way out of the drawing room.

  ‘Lars? William?’ I looked at my brothers-in-law hopefully. ‘You’re not going to join them?’

  Both shook their heads rather too quickly.

  With Jonathan gone, I dutifully made the kissy-kissy hello rounds: first, Lars, who, like Allegra, was dressed in head-to-toe black. I steeled myself to kiss Lars. He always had worrying bits of food detritus in his thick black beard, and smelled vaguely of glue. Every time I saw Lars and Allegra they seemed to be in the middle of some endless row, which they kept on the boil like a pan of everlasting stock.

  ‘Hello, Lars,’ I said, aiming a kiss at a clean bit of beard. ‘You’re looking very well.’

  ‘See?’ he hissed cryptically at Allegra. ‘See? Even Melissa can tell!’

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Allegra. ‘He’s on some ludicrous Swedish herb diet that is making him extremely flatulent, and yet is apparently doing him no end of good. I, on the other hand, am running out of Diptyque candles and have had to ban him from the gallery.’

  ‘Allegra!’ snarled Lars.

  ‘I see you’ve had your hair cut,’ she observed, ignoring him.

  I patted my chic new bob proudly. I’d been hoping someone would notice. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Jonathan thinks it makes me look rather Audrey Hepburn!’

  Allegra peered more closely. ‘You have got big ears, haven’t you? I’d never noticed before. Lars, look. Hasn’t Melissa got big ears?’

  ‘No!’ snapped Lars. ‘They’re more protruding than big!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snarled Allegra. ‘They’re enormous. Like some kind of ceremonial cup!’

  ‘No! It’s the angle! The angle that makes them seem large! You have no eye, Allegra! No sense of proportion!’

  I swung away before Lars could get his tape measure out. Honestly. My family were the bitter end.

  I turned my attention instead to Emery, who was perched uncertainly on the arm of a chair while William made short work of a plate of M & S smoked salmon mini roulades.

  Emery was three years younger than me, with long hair the colour of milky tea that fell in shiny curtains around her face like one of those martyred women you see washing garments in rivers in pre-Raphaelite paintings. Compared with Allegra’s exhausting torrent of opinion, Emery was a calming lake of vagueness.

  Which wasn’t to say she was completely without Romney-Jones wiles – vague or not, Emery had managed to entrance a high-flying, sports-mad American lawyer, bagging herself a house in Chicago, a pied à terre in New York, and a six-year-old stepson called Valentine at the same time. Over the years, however, she’d cunningly established herself as someone who simply couldn’t be asked to do anything, whereas Allegra simply refused whatever requests were made of her. The end result was that I got three times the sisterly responsibilities.

  Tonight Emery was wearing a floaty silk kaftan in peacock colours over skinny jeans, and a matching expression of unspecific bewilderment. She looked lovely. Lucky Emery had inherited my mother’s beanpole figure, which allowed her to carry off loose clothing. I need underpinnings, and lots of them – the one time I let Emery badger me into a smock top, four people in a row offered me a seat on the number 19 bus home.

  ‘Hello, Emery,’ I said, leaning forward to kiss her. On closer inspection, Em wasn’t looking as ethereal as normal. In fact her cheekbones were looking almost rounded. Good, I thought, with a glimmer of Schadenfreude. About time she caught up with the rest of us.

  ‘Hello, Mel,’ she murmured. ‘Like your hair. Takes years off you.’

  I didn’t mean to, but as she raised her cheek for a kiss, I got a good view down her wafty neckline, and believe me, she wasn’t the ‘Pancake Em’ of old. It was dumplings ahoy down there.

  ‘Mind if I don’t get up?’ she went on, as I bit my lip on a number of observations. ‘Not feeling all that well tonight.’

  ‘Oh, no! Really?’ I slid down next to her in the huge armchair. ‘What sort of not well???
?

  ‘Don’t know. I haven’t been feeling myself for a while, actually.’ She pushed her hair behind her ear and sighed. Her kaftan rose and fell and I realised it wasn’t just the cheekbones: there was quite a bit more of Emery beneath the folds all round. ‘Sort of . . . like when you stuff yourself at Christmas lunch? And none of it seems to be going anywhere?’

  I took in her rosy cheeks and her swelling bosom – and the penny dropped. ‘Congratulations!’ I whispered, nudging her affectionately.

  Emery’s eyes narrowed. ‘Shh. I mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, listen, I won’t tell anyone. Congratulations! Were you planning to announce it over dinner? Gosh, how exciting!’

  Emery shot me a furtive look, closely followed by a nervous one towards the open door. ‘Will you shut up? I’m not talking about it. Not in front of Daddy, anyway. You know what he’s like – as soon as he thinks an heir’s in the offing, he’ll have me under house arrest here. I’d rather move into Wormwood Scrubs. At least the warders wouldn’t try to arrange photoshoots.’

  ‘I won’t let on,’ I promised happily. ‘When’s it due?’

  Her porcelain brow creased. ‘Um. Not exactly sure.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ Emery rolled her eyes as if I’d asked something absolutely unreasonable. ‘I don’t know – four months? Three months? Some time in the summer?’

  ‘But, Emery—’ I began.

  ‘Darlings, you should have said drinks were being served!’ carolled a familiar voice.

  ‘I swear that woman can hear the opening of a wine bottle at five hundred paces,’ murmured Emery, as I wriggled out of the chair to greet our grandmother.

  Granny was the only member of the Romney-Jones clan who ever addressed me as if I were her first-choice conversation partner, and to be honest, family evenings were only bearable if she were there. Even I had to concede that there was a faint whiff of scandal about Granny, but at least in her case it was a glamorous 1950s nightclubs-and-mink-knickers kind of scandal, rather than the tax ‘confusion’ that my father was prone to.

  ‘Don’t you look chic!’ she exclaimed now, enveloping me in a waft of chiffon and Shalimar. ‘What have you done with that charming American chap of yours?’

  ‘Oh, he’s seeing the sword,’ I said, letting her tweak and rearrange my black shirt. A quick sideways check in the dusty gilt mirror above the fireplace confirmed I’d gone from semi-Sloane to la dolce vita. I had to admit that Granny had the Touch.

  ‘I was waiting till you got here before I came down,’ she muttered into my ear. ‘Bloody unbearable, the lot of them. William’s been stuffing food down his gullet like a competitive eater since the moment he arrived, and Lars and Allegra have already broken a door.’

  Before I could ask Granny how on earth that had happened there was a feverish banging of the dinner gong and everyone in the drawing room leaped about three inches out of their armchairs.

  ‘Dinner is served,’ cackled my father, wielding an enormous gong beater.

  The dinner gong was a monstrosity my father took great delight in dragging out whenever we had company. He liked to claim it was an ancestral relic from the Raj but Granny let slip that he’d picked it up from a cinema that was closing down in Chippenham in the 1970s.

  ‘He really will have to tone down that tan before too much longer,’ observed Granny. ‘Or else questions will be asked about holidays and local party funds.’

  At the door, Jonathan was standing at Daddy’s side, looking only slightly disconcerted by his trip to see the sword. He offered me his arm to lead me into dinner and didn’t make any comment about the glacial temperature of the house away from the main fire, which was good of him.

  ‘How did the small talk go?’ I whispered.

  ‘I told your father I had a hunting rifle,’ he whispered back as we clattered down the freezing hall to the dining room. ‘And that my prep school had a cannon we fired on July fourth. You reckon that’s enough?’

  ‘Should be plenty,’ I said, relieved.

  ‘I’ll leave the Uzi till next time,’ mused Jonathan. ‘Keep that one up my sleeve.’

  I looked up at him in surprise. I think he was joking. It was quite hard to tell with Jonathan sometimes.

  We filed into the baronial dining hall, which was looking even more oppressive than usual since, in honour of the occasion, Mummy had elected to dispense with electric light and had instead found some vast silver candelabras from somewhere. Poor Mrs Lloyd the housekeeper must have been polishing herself into a new housemaid’s elbow.

  The major advantage of this lighting arrangement was that layers of dust and cobwebs were rendered invisible, while the glass eyes in the mounted stag’s head gleamed and the deep oak panelling took on a National Trust grandeur it certainly didn’t have by day.

  ‘How marvellous!’ said Allegra, looking predictably at home in the gloom.

  ‘I won’t be able to see my food,’ whined Lars, taking his place opposite me.

  ‘Isn’t that the best way with British food?’ asked William cheerfully.

  ‘William,’ murmured Emery automatically.

  She was looking peaky, I thought, worried. Maybe I should mention something to Mummy about it.

  Emery caught me looking at her and clenched her eyebrows at me.

  It was a long table, which made the battered silver basket containing the bread rolls seem even further away. In fact, an outside observer might have speculated that the place settings had been shifted downwards so that we all seemed to be sitting a little nearer to my mother at one end, leaving my father snorting and raging at a relatively safe distance.

  To my embarrassment, having gone through all this ludicrous palavar of showing off, my parents had taken it upon themselves to serve Heinz tomato soup to start, and what looked like M & S lasagne to follow, with the remaining tureens filled up with new potatoes and that awful diced-carrots-and-peas mixture so popular with schools and hospitals. The fact that they’d pressed Mrs Lloyd into wearing a pinny over her black slacks to silver-serve this bizarre selection to us only put the tin lid on things.

  The wine, however, was flowing as lavishly as usual, mostly towards my father’s end of the table.

  ‘Melissa!’ he roared now, his new teeth gleaming in the candlelight. ‘Stop hogging the potatoes!’

  ‘But I’ve only had two!’ I dropped the serving spoon as if it were red-hot.

  Jonathan, installed at my father’s right hand, gave me a look. He was always telling me I should stand up to my family more. For Jonathan’s benefit, I forced out a nervous laugh, as if Daddy were only teasing, although I was fairly sure he wasn’t. ‘I mean, is that a hint that you’d like the dish passed up the table?’

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘It’s not. If I wanted the dish passed up I’d tell you. Jonathan, what in the name of God are you doing to my leg, man?’

  Allegra, on his left, glowered at her plate. ‘It’s Jenkins, Daddy. Can’t you smell him under the table? He’s probably hoping to polish off this dinner too, the scrounging mutt!’

  She punctuated the last part of the sentence with an obvious sub-table swipe towards the older of my mother’s two basset hounds.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s why we’re eating low-fat lasagne, everyone,’ explained Mummy, projecting her voice from the other end. ‘Jenkins was awfully naughty and gobbled up the lamb while it was cooling on the kitchen table.’ She refilled her wine glass from the bottle nearest her. ‘And the petit fours for afters too, I’m afraid. And the cheese. Bad Jenkins,’ she added, beaming indulgently as he galloped out from under the table as fast as an elderly and overweight dog could manage, obviously propelled by my father’s shoe.

  ‘How did he manage that?’ Allegra asked, eyeing Jenkins suspiciously. ‘I saw them in the fridge.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s Melissa’s fault.’ Mummy wagged a finger at me.

  ‘My fault?’ I protested. Pretty much ev
erything that went wrong chez Romney-Jones was my fault, but this was a new one.

  ‘That naughty Braveheart of yours helped him open the fridge.’

  ‘What?’ I shot an embarrassed look towards Jonathan. I was supposed to have trained all the wilfulness out of Braveheart – Jonathan was forever telling his friends what a dog whisperer I was.

  Jonathan wrinkled his brow innocently. ‘Is there no end to that dog’s new tricks?’

  ‘I know,’ Mummy beamed. ‘I saw him up on his paws, prising the door open with his little nose. Very clever!’ Then she saw my father’s furiously dilating nostrils, and hastily added, ‘But terribly wicked. Still, plenty of cheese in the cellar! Did you know your father’s been made Honorary Head of the Cheese Council, Melissa?’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Well done, Daddy!’

  ‘I had no idea,’ said Jonathan politely. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘You’re not on Daddy’s famous Cheese Diet, then, I take it,’ said Allegra with a sardonic lift of her eyebrows.

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But I hear sales of Stinking Bishop are up twenty per cent! You grate it over everything,’ I explained to Jonathan. ‘Even puddings. Amazing how the weight drops off.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Jonathan neutrally.

  Allegra and Lars took advantage of this flurry of conversation to shoot a few phlegmy volleys across the table at each other in Swedish, culminating in Allegra spitting, ‘And I haven’t forgotten about the tin opener!’ in English while stabbing several carrot dice menacingly with her fork.

  There was an awkward pause, then Lars glared and hissed, ‘Allegra, no smiling! Be careful of your stitches!’

  Allegra scowled, then winced, then did a half-scowl with extra-narrowed eyes.

  ‘If you have any more lifts and tucks, Allegra, I shall have to have your birth certificate altered,’ observed Daddy, with breathtaking hypocrisy. ‘Your surgeon’s had more input into your appearance than your mother and I.’

  ‘If only it were that easy,’ she shot back.

  ‘Allegra! Martin!’ cried Mummy, in a strangled tone.

  Looking across the table, I was struck by Emery sipping at her water glass and wincing. She always looked vaguely pained, as if the sheer unfairness of life were bearing down heavily on her wispy shoulders, but tonight she was looking about as strained as I’d ever seen her.