Not that anyone else seemed to be stepping forward to help. Lars and Allegra left after breakfast, arguing about who should drive back to their London house in Ham, and Granny bailed out soon after.
‘I’m absolutely hopeless with babies, darling,’ she sighed regretfully, pulling on her kidskin gloves and adjusting her fur hat in the hall mirror as the deafening roar continued upstairs. ‘One was quite enough for me.’ She leaned up to kiss Jonathan’s cheek. ‘So lovely to see you again, Jonathan dear. Take care of Melissa for me, won’t you? Now, Melissa,’ she went on, with a meaningful twitch of the eyebrows, ‘would you give me a hand with my luggage?’
I’d almost forgotten about the ‘word’ she’d wanted to have with me the night before, but when I’d loaded the monogrammed luggage into the tiny boot of her sports car, she took my hands and said, ‘Monday afternoon, tea at Claridge’s. I have something I need your advice on,’ and winked.
‘I’ll need to check my diary,’ I began. ‘I’m rather frantic right now what with working a—’
‘Splendid!’ said Granny. ‘Love to Nelson!’
And she zoomed off, sending gravel and small birds flying in her wake.
Jonathan and I spent a pleasant hour tramping through the woods around the house with Braveheart and the rest of the dogs before I was summoned back to the house to ‘sort things out’ for Emery. Maternity nursing isn’t exactly a Little Lady Agency service, but I did what I could, made some phone calls and some lists. Emery, obviously, hadn’t had a chance to lay in the normal supplies one needs when faced with a squalling infant, and so I did my best to raise a cot, steriliser, sheets, blankets, Babygros, bottles, and posset rags, while William busied himself with the vital task of researching the fastest possible buggy on the internet.
Meanwhile, Jonathan manfully chatted to my father, then at six o’clock we escaped back to London where Jonathan had booked us into the Dorchester’s most honeymoon-y suite for the night, to save Nelson the bother of playing gooseberry in his own flat.
‘It has a spa,’ he said. ‘I reckoned you’d need some unwinding.’ He dumped my overnight bag on the gigantic bed, and massaged his temples as if to rub out the ringing in his ears. ‘What I really fancy is one of those hot oil body massages.’
‘Ooh, me too,’ I said, kicking off my shoes. ‘Should I ring reception and book?’
Jonathan gave me his most smouldering look. ‘Who says we have to go down to the spa for that? Come here.’
I must admit, Jonathan’s idea of room service was pretty blissful.
In the morning, I drove him to the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo, where we had an emotional goodbye (he ignored two calls on his mobile to demonstrate his extreme reluctance to leave me), and then I headed back to the Little Lady office in Pimlico to start the week.
As I crawled through the slow traffic, already missing Jonathan’s wry smile and his subtle aroma of Creed and maturity, I picked at a croissant and tried to think of three positive things about the day ahead.
It was my trademark cheering-up device: find three things to be positive about, and even the most dismal situation doesn’t seem quite so bleak. I knew it worked, since I’d had to resort to it many times over the years.
One, I had plenty of work on at the agency to fill in the hours until I joined him in Paris on Thursday evening. Condensing my usual busy week into three and a half days meant I really had to focus my attention on exactly who I was dealing with. Once or twice, my mind had still been picking at the previous client’s problem while I was sorting out the next – which had given poor Rory Douglas a shock, for one, when he came to me for advice on getting rid of a lingering house guest and I’d absentmindedly started advising him on a more flattering haircut.
London drizzle began to obscure my view of the roadworks ahead. I flicked on the wipers and focused on my positive things.
Two, I was seeing Granny for tea at Claridge’s this afternoon, and that was always a treat.
So long as whatever she wants you to do won’t turn out to be something awful, nagged a little voice in my head. I pushed it to one side.
Three – and this really cheered me up – Nelson had his wine course on Monday nights, and that usually meant half a bottle of whatever they’d been tasting, plus Nelson in a ‘relaxed’ mood. He routinely claimed that he wasn’t even remotely drunk after these things (‘We don’t actually drink it, Melissa,’ he’d slurred the first night, ‘we ’preciate it . . .’), but on more than one occasion, I’d spotted him trying to boil the Magimix, thinking it was the kettle.
Just to prove that I was right to think positive, when I pulled up outside the agency, there was half a parking space right in front of my door and I popped the Little Lady Agency Smart car right into it.
The Little Lady Agency was on the second floor of a big Victorian white-faced terraced house, above an upmarket beauty salon so discreet it didn’t even have a sign on the door. I wasn’t entirely sure I knew what it was called, officially – it wasn’t the sort of establishment I could possibly afford to frequent myself. Most of its clientele were dropped off by drivers wearing dark glasses.
I waved to Serena the Botox technician, and removed my high heels to attack the stairs at a trot, as was my morning exercise habit. Two flights of stairs had certainly improved the state of my thighs over the past two years. Gasping very slightly as I reached the top steps, I reached into my capacious day bag for the keys and was delighted to see a vast bouquet of pink and red roses propped up against the post table.
‘Counting the hours,’ I read, unlocking the door and pushing it open with my hip, and my heart fluttered up into my throat as I buried my nose in the thick scented petals.
Jonathan had an unerringly old-school touch when it came to romantic gestures. He must have arranged it before he left Paris, and I knew he was absolutely rushed off his feet bending the new French office to his considerable will.
I closed my eyes to enjoy the musky fragrance better. Proper roses. At least three times a week I had to rush-deliver flowers just like these to get someone out of a missed-anniversary scrape. Jonathan didn’t even wait until he had making-up to do.
No, I thought, getting a crystal vase out of the cupboard, I really was a lucky girl.
My morning transformation from Melissa to Honey Blennerhesket always took at least fifteen minutes, and it was one of my favourite parts of the day. I hummed happily as I got changed in the spare room, and allowed myself a moment to note just how much longer my short little legs looked in black stockings, then slipped on the tight skirt, buttoned up the shirt, spritzed myself with perfume and applied a glossy layer of scarlet lipstick.
Ready to go! I thought, smacking my lips in the mirror.
My two morning clients went smoothly – a wardrobe consultation and a preliminary chat about a party I’d agreed to help plan – and at two o’clock I went off to Claridge’s to see Granny.
She was ensconced in a deep easy chair in the corner of Claridge’s lavishly appointed lounge, flicking through a copy of OK! magazine. Not for the first time, I fervently hoped that I’d inherited Granny’s anti-ageing genes. Sitting there in her slinky Chanel suit, her silver bob swinging around her cheekbones, Granny didn’t look a day over fifty-five, despite the fact that her real age was somewhere between seventy-three and seventy-seven, according to which of her passports you looked at.
Nelson claimed I had her way with men, though I didn’t see it myself. There’s a difference between working with men, and plain working them, and even if I was pretty good at the former, I knew from family lore that Granny was an expert at the latter.
When she spotted me, a broad smile crinkled up her bright blue eyes, and immediately she slapped the magazine closed and sprang to her feet.
‘Melissa! Darling!’ she said, spreading her arms wide, and hugging me. ‘How lovely to see you! I’ve ordered tea and cakes, if you don’t mind. Do you?’ She held me at arm’s length as I started to demur. ‘Oh, no! Don’t say you??
?re on one of those ridiculous diets? Haven’t I told you a million times, men like a little something to get hold of?’ she went on, as I settled myself into an armchair.
‘Well, they’ve plenty to get hold of with me,’ I said. Not as glumly as normal, though, because if there’s one thing having a boyfriend does for a girl, it boosts the confidence no end.
‘Quite! I mean, what’s the point of a corset if you’ve got nothing to winch into it?’ retorted Granny, as the tea tray arrived, and the young waiter poured us both hot cups of Earl Grey. ‘Oh, I could do with this!’ she said, seizing her cup and taking a sip. ‘I’ve been run off my feet.’
Granny shook her head at the offer of lemon slices and her hair shone glossily. However ‘run off her feet’ she was, she’d obviously managed to fit in her Monday morning hair appointment.
‘Have you heard the latest from home?’ she enquired.
I shook my head.
‘Well, William’s put his back out shooting something, poor Emery’s stuck there till the baby’s old enough to fly, and so your father has sprung into action.’ She hovered a long finger over the cake stand, wavering between an eclair and the pristine pink fondant fancy I’d been eyeing up myself. Then she picked both and put them on her plate. ‘He’s quite the doting grandfather. Anyway, he’s dug up that dessicated old nanny of yours from retirement.’
‘Nanny Ag?’ I exclaimed delightedly. ‘How lovely! Is she still working?’
I adored Nanny Ag. Her real name was Agatha Dunstable, and we were meant to call her Dunstable, but we didn’t. Allegra called her Nag. Emery was far too scared of her to address her by name in the nine years she was with us. I loved her, though. When I was a child, Emery got most of the attention because she was an adorable baby, and what little was left went on Allegra, three years older, and her amazing, dinner-stopping tantrums. Allegra would refuse to breathe until she got her own way, which made for some dramatic soup moments. Nanny Ag had come to us via a very troublesome family of Scottish lairds so there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen, heard, then trampled down with quite disproportionate ferocity for her size.
Even now, she always seemed to know what we were up to, and I still sent her Christmas and birthday cards; in return I got short spidery postcards detailing the weather in Grange-over-Sands, and a Blue Peter annual every Christmas. ‘She must be about a hundred and twenty by now, surely?’ I added wonderingly.
‘Nannies start at seventy and don’t age. She’s arriving at the end of the week,’ said Granny. ‘Either your father has a short memory, or he’s very keen to keep Emery at home for some nefarious reason.’ She raised her eyebrow. ‘I wonder what that could be?’
‘That he’s keen to spend some time with his grandchild, and help poor Emery out?’ I responded stoutly. ‘You don’t have to look for nefarious reasons all the time. Anyway, what’s this mysterious favour you want me to do?’
She had the grace to look slightly abashed, but before she could speak, her phone rang.
I gave her a look. ‘Granny,’ I said in shock, ‘didn’t you turn your mobile off when I arrived?’
My grandmother was even more of a stickler for manners than I was. Mainly so she could have more rules to break, but even so, I was the only seven-year-old at prep school with her own evening gloves.
‘Oh, dear, do forgive me,’ she said, checking the number. Her cat’s-eyes flicked up at me, then down at the phone, then a faint pinky blush spread over her cheeks.
Blimey. Granny never blushed.
She hastily rose to her feet. ‘Would you excuse me a second? I know it’s terrible, darling, but I really have to take this call, so I’ll just pop out . . .’ She was edging her way between the chairs, but I could see her eyes were twinkling with excitement.
An admirer, no doubt.
‘Fine!’ I said, seizing my chance to grab the other mini chocolate choux bun.
She was gone for a good five minutes, so while I had the chance I leaned over and picked up her copy of OK!.
Nelson loathed all celebrity magazines, and banned them from the house on the grounds that people like that should be firmly ignored, not encouraged, but secretly I loved flicking through the party pages, in case I spotted anyone I knew. Not that I moved in those kind of perma-tanned, PR circles myself, but there was usually someone in there that either I’d been to school with, or Allegra had, or Emery had – we went to about fifteen schools between us, what with Allegra’s expulsions and Daddy’s scandals – and pre-Lars, Allegra had had an international line-up of moody rich boyfriends. Actually, before I met Jonathan, I’d had some fairly colourful boyfriends too, but whereas Allegra’s cast-offs tended to be rich theatre producers or hedge-fund managers, mine were the sort of slip-on-shoe-wearing idlers who described themselves as ‘photographers’ because they thought it would persuade girls to take their kit off.
Fool that I was in those days.
I peeled back the pages happily and poured myself another cup of tea while I breathed in the heady chemical aroma of pure OK!. There’d been a crop of truly ghastly parties in London recently – I’d heard on the grapevine that an old schoolfriend, Tiggy Waterford, had been dunked head first into a chocolate fountain by some dreadful oik at a Russian oil billionaire’s birthday bash in Chelsea, who’d then compounded his outrageous behaviour by offering to lick her clean. I think that’s what she said, anyway.
Was that the same party? I peered closer at the page. That certainly looked like Tiggy. She was wearing some marshmallowy confection of a dress, and she’d put on a bit of weight since our pony-grooming days, so I could see how a particularly dim posh bloke might think it hilarious to use her as a dip—
‘OK, OK!? I don’t think Jonathan would approve!’ exclaimed a voice right in my ear and I jumped so hard I nearly spilled my tea. ‘Or Nelson,’ Granny went on, wagging a reproving finger with some glee.
I put the magazine down. ‘They don’t run my life. I am allowed to read what I like.’
Granny curled herself into the chair, tucking one leg underneath her. She tilted her head as if to disagree, then beamed at me. ‘Well, quite. I know what a splendid, independent businesswoman you are, and actually I want to talk to you about a little business plan I have.’ She paused significantly. ‘A secret one.’
‘By that, do you mean you don’t want Daddy to know?’ I sighed. ‘Because that’s pretty much understood by—’
‘No, no! I mean I don’t want anyone to know! I need to rely on that famous discretion of yours.’ Granny pressed her red lips together and folded her hands so all three of her diamond eternity rings sparkled up into her face. ‘It’s a matter of international diplomatic importance.’
Despite myself, I was intrigued. ‘Go on.’
‘You must promise not to breathe a word to anyone.’
‘I won’t.’
‘And you must promise not to say anything until I’ve finished telling you the whole story?’
‘I won’t.’
‘Even if you want to stop me?’
‘I won’t! Just tell me!’
‘Well,’ said Granny conspiratorially, ‘do you remember my old, old friend Prince Alexander von Helsing-Alexandros? Of Hollenberg?’
‘Not specifically,’ I said carefully.
My grandmother, I should explain here, was what some people would call ‘a bit of a goer’ in her younger days. Indeed, my father called her a lot worse. I prefer to think of her as being rather ahead of her time. What everyone was agreed on, though, was that in her day, Granny had been a real scorcher. Her wardrobe of couture cocktail dresses and saucy little fur capes, which I sometimes borrowed for more glamorous Honey occasions, spoke for itself.
Granny liked to throw a veil over the exact details of her past, even within her closest family, but, as I understood it, she’d had a brief yet apparently stellar career as a nightclub singer in the fifties, after which she’d lived in Mayfair for some years as the companion of a mysterious aristocrat, before marrying my grandfather
, Lord Wasdalemere. Mummy had been their only child, and Grandad had died when I was about four, after a particularly fabulous party thrown by Granny to celebrate one of his peonies winning Best in Class at the Chelsea Flower Show. He’d died, she assured me, a very happy man.
Call me an old romantic, but it really warmed my heart to know that Granny was there at his side, right at the end.
Luckily for Granny, she was left pretty well off, and with her own income too (I assume from her hit record, ‘Cool Kitty Cat’). While she didn’t marry again, I don’t think she was lonely, put it like that. It didn’t surprise me in the least that she had various princes in her past.
‘Oh, you do remember Alexander!’ exclaimed Granny. ‘He gave me that car – you know, the one I gave to you to learn to drive in.’
‘No, I don’t think I . . . Oh, God,’ I said, as the jigsaw pieces fell into place and various events began to rise with white-hot clarity in my mind. I must have been the only girl in England to learn to drive in a Porsche 911, but my lessons with Granny had come to an abrupt halt when I’d driven it into a parked Range Rover while she was telling me how to three-point turn in the car park of the Hurlingham Club. ‘He was that man we went out to the Savoy with, so you could tell him . . .’
Granny nodded. ‘Wasn’t he lovely about it? He’s a darling.’
‘So you want me to do some job for him?’ I asked. ‘But I’m sure you’re more than capable of—’
She shook her head. ‘No, no. Not him. His grandson, Nicolas.’
‘His grandson?’ I made some mental calculations. ‘Should I know him too?’
‘Hmm,’ said Granny, suddenly looking less frisky. ‘That’s the point. You might do. He’s not exactly discreet when it comes to maintaining an appropriate public profile. Poor Alexander has told him, and told him, but Nicky won’t listen.’
My heart began to sink. I could see what was coming as clearly as if it had floodlights, warning sirens and one of those moose-scooping things you see on the front of American trains.