A Royal Match (16 page)

‘So, as I was saying before Star went berserk,’ Honey continued, staring pointedly at Star, ‘Freddie is probably worried that you are still trying to trade on his royalty, darling. Princes do tend to get the teeniest bit worried about these things.’

Star snapped, ‘Funny that, Honey, given that
you
were the one who told him that Calypso was doing just that.’
Honey raised her eyes towards the ceiling and stood with her hands on her hips, her puffy, pouty lips bursting with indignation. ‘That is so untrue, darling. I was just mucking about. I thought that he might have a sense of humour. If being amusing is a crime now, fine, shoot me.’

I really would have liked to shoot her.

Honey was the first to introduce herself to my parents too, charging down the stairs, clutching her ghastly new pink rabbit, Duchess. ‘
Sooo
thrilled to meet you, Mr and Mrs Kelly,’ she smarmed. ‘My name’s Honey O’Hare. I’m a very close friend of Calypso’s. We’re more like sisters, really.’

What? Why on earth was Honey sucking up to
my
parents, my ‘nobody’ parents – untitled, without so much as a helicopter or a pile in the country to make them worth wasting her breath on.

‘Swell,’ Bob said.

‘Super,’ agreed Sarah.

‘Any friend of Calypso’s is a friend of ours. Call us Bob and Sarah, Honey,’ Bob told her vaguely, looking about the crowd for me.

I was standing on the steps, but Star pushed me forward so that I sort of fell into their arms and they cuddled me really hard. Then Dad picked me up and swung me around like I was five or something. He had tears in his eyes. ‘Oh, Calypso,’ he sobbed.

Could he make more of a spectacle of me? I wondered as I applied more lip-gloss.

Yes. He could.

Sister Constance swooped down in an attempt to restrain the atmosphere. She extended her hand stiffly, speaking in her most imperious voice. ‘Mr and Mrs Kelly, welcome to England. Perhaps you’d like to come into my office. As I said, you are free to take your daughter for the weekend, although as you will appreciate her workload …’

Bob, being Bob, was having none of her imperiousness, though. ‘This is just swell, Sister. Just swell. Sarah and I can’t thank you enough.’ With that, he grabbed her in a bear hug and gave her a little spin, which caused the entire school, teachers included, to smirk.

I just kept reapplying my lip-gloss.

‘Quite,’ was Sister’s response.

She smoothed her habit down and rearranged the large wooden crucifix that hung around her neck, and without further lapses into the strange realm of my parents’ Californian informality she bustled them through the doors and down the corridor into her office.

I waited for the onslaught. At least when I was just the class freak I was largely ignored. I would gladly swap those good old days of invisibility for this new hell of being the subject of an international news scoop and having my parents turn up and swing my nuns around.

‘Your parents are so cool,’ Clemmie cooed.

‘Wow,’ was all Star could say. And this from a girl whose father thought nothing of falling backwards off his chair at breakfast and spending the entire day on the floor with cereal all over his face.

‘They certainly have a lot of energy, don’t they? I mean, for parents, that is,’ Georgina said.

‘They do yoga,’ I explained.

I didn’t really know what else to say. I was running out of lip-gloss.

My parents had booked a room in a chintzy hotel near Heathrow. It was quite strange being on my own with them after everything that had happened this term. I suddenly realised how much I’d changed. I mean,
hello
, I’d pulled the Prince and become a media sensation.

We ordered dinner from the room service menu. I had the most enormous burger with chips and my parents didn’t so much as mention the word ‘carbs’ or the dangers of eating gluten products. I kept waiting for them to start on me about being a slapper, and complain about how they’d had to drop everything and spend exorbitant amounts of money on flights across the Atlantic, etc, but all they did was ask me to take them step by step through the evening of the Eades social.

They wanted every detail.

Especially my dad, who kept asking questions like, So
where was Star when this was happening? Or where was this Honey girl when you were dancing, and how much do you trust Georgina? It was like an interview, but not a threatening one. I got the impression they were really keen for me to realise that I was the victim and not the criminal.

They didn’t once tut or sigh but made sympathetic noises, and when I told them about Freddie accusing me of trading on his royalty I noticed a knowing look pass between them. At the end of the story my dad declared that I’d been framed, and Mom agreed. Dad said he was going to get to the bottom of it.

Later, we watched an in-house movie. Actually it was all really cool. It was weird, though, sharing a room with my folks. My parents were in the same bed together. I mean, they always sleep together, but not when I’m in the room, if you know what I mean. They had offered to get me my own room, but I would have felt too lonely. Actually it was kind of nice. Apart from when my mom started snoring. I swear I don’t know how my father puts up with it.

Saturday was great. We went for a ride on the London Eye and Dad kept telling lame jokes the way he does when he thinks I’m down, but I didn’t mind. On the Eye I even snuggled close to them and told them I was really pleased they’d come.

And I was.

On Saturday night my parents – or rather, Bob and Sarah, as everyone was now calling them on their insistence – took Clemmie, Arabella, Georgina, Star, Honey
and me to dinner at Pizza Express in Windsor. I’d tried to convince them that I didn’t want Honey there, but Sarah (even I had been reduced to calling my parents by their first names now) said, ‘Nonsense, she’s one of your closest friends, Calypso. It will be super.’

Honey brought the horrible pink Duchess in her new matching pink Prada bag and my mother made the most awful fuss of it, and asked me why I didn’t have a rabbit.

I was gobsmacked. HELLO,
you
were the one who said being deprived of a pet was character building!

But I didn’t get a chance to say it because Honey said, ‘I know. Isn’t it a shame, Sarah? I offered her my old rabbit, Claudine, but she refused.’ Honey looked at Sarah sadly and sighed heavily.

I glared at her, as did the other girls, but my parents were completely taken in. So I said, ‘You don’t just give pets away because you’re sick of their colour.’

Honey made her ridiculously puffy lips wobble as if she were about to cry. ‘I just thought it would be really sweet if our rabbits could be as close as we are, darling,’ she explained – only she was looking at Sarah when she said it.

My mother was such a softie. She reached out and took Honey’s hand and my hand. ‘Come on, you two. I suppose in a way, Calypso, Honey was just, well … maybe it’s a bit like recycling?’ she suggested, trying to smooth things over.

Surely, though, even
she
could see what an utter psycho toff Honey was for giving away her pet because it wasn’t this season’s colour?

‘It’s a pet,’ I reminded my mother. ‘Not an empty milk carton, Sarah!’

‘Calypso. Don’t be churlish,’ Bob chastised.

‘Oh, whatever,’ I said churlishly.

Sarah explained to Honey that the whole tabloid fiasco had been really hard on me.

I couldn’t believe my parents were being so taken in by Honey. I know I’d never told them about her horribleness, but wasn’t it blatantly obvious in her every mannerism that she was evil incarnate?

‘Swell,’ Bob said, trying to change the subject. ‘Let’s order.’ Then he called over a waiter and asked which pizzas were gluten- and carb-free, which made all the girls giggle. Apart from me. I was still feeling extremely churlish.

Star gave my hand a supportive squeeze under the table, which helped a bit, and then my father asked about her father’s band and that cheered me up even more because it meant Honey was left out of the conversation entirely.

The pizzas (loaded to the rafters with carbs and gluten) arrived and we all tucked in. Arabella asked Sarah about her work and my mother was surprisingly funny, regaling us with stories of the latest melodramatic plot lines and the hissy-fits the stars were always throwing – especially the men.

I started to relax. I even started to look at my parents in a different light. I mean, it was quite sweet of them to drop everything and come all this way to see me in my hour of need, and they seemed to be making a surprisingly good
impression on my friends. I was glad they’d come. It hadn’t occurred to me that I wanted them to come, but now they were here I realised how much safer I felt. And their visit had helped to take my mind off Freddie … for a while.

My parents had been really kind about the Rough-and-Tumble photographs. Bob had told Sister Constance that we shouldn’t be too hasty in blaming the paparazzi for the photograph. ‘From what I understand, Sister, there were an awful lot of security guards patrolling the grounds that night, what with the Prince there and all. More often than not, you find these things turn out to be inside jobs.’

Inside jobs? Honestly, where does my father come up with these lines … oh yeah, I forgot, he’s a Hollywood writer.

‘By the way, Calypso,’ Sarah suddenly said. ‘Jay sends his love. Asked if you got his package.’

‘Jay as in James?’ Honey asked, all ears.

Sarah went, ‘No, Jay as in Jay, my assistant. Why? Has Calypso mentioned him?’ She looked at me questioningly.

I shook my head at her in a pleading, please-don’t-go-there sort of way.

Sarah tilted her head, trying to grasp what was going on.

Honey screeched, ‘
Told
us about him, Sarah? She had his pictures pinned all over the board. She was so mad keen on him. Well, at least she was until she pulled Prince Freddie.’

So this was it. I was going to be exposed as even more tragic than Honey and the others always imagined. Just
when I thought it couldn’t get any worse.

I reapplied my lip-gloss.

I closed my eyes and resigned myself to my fate. Fine. Bring it on, I decided as I kept running the lip-gloss over and over my lips. Let’s just have it all out …

Sarah laughed. Well, I couldn’t blame her, she had no idea what she was about to do to me. No idea that she was about to turn me into an object of ridicule. I could already feel the slap of Post-it notes landing on my back.

Then she said, ‘I was exactly the same at your age,’ and giggled like a teenager.

I opened my eyes and looked up at her and she gave me a wink.

Oh, thank you, Sarah. Thank you for being weird, and Californian, and liberal, and understanding. I love you!

‘One boy after another,’ she went on, looking at me conspiratorially. ‘Every one of them was The One, the love of my life. I used to write all their names on my pencil case.’

I have never loved my mother as much as I did at that moment. I wanted to run out and graffiti a bus stop shelter.
Sarah is the coolest mother in the world
.

‘So tell us about what it was like at Saint Augustine’s when you were there, Sarah,’ Georgina urged.

So she did – only she made it all sound so funny and mad, and not a bit boring like she did on the plane when she first brought me out here nearly four years ago and promised me it would be ‘super.’

I could tell that Honey was peeved that she was no
longer centre stage, because she’d started sending text messages on her phone.

Bob leaned towards her and said, ‘Is this one of those third-generation phones, Honey?’

Honey looked up. ‘Sorry, darling? What was that?’

‘I just wondered if your phone there took photographs.’

‘
Absolutely
, darling,’ she said, beaming, thrilled to be in the spotlight again. ‘Shall we take one of all of us? Star, you take it,’ she ordered, handing her the phone.

Typical of Honey to want Star excluded from the photograph.

‘Oh, no, I’m sure the guy that served us wouldn’t mind,’ Bob insisted. ‘That way we can all be in it.’ He summoned the waiter back.

After the waiter had taken a few shots, my father asked if he could have a look at the camera-phone and Honey eagerly swapped places with Sarah so she could show him all the phone’s various features. Then Honey lost interest and left Bob to play around with it on his own.

‘Hell of a lot of scandal these camera-phones are causing in Los Angeles,’ he remarked after a while. ‘Now anyone can snap a photo of a star in a restaurant or at a premiere – a
nywhere
, really.’ He smiled at Honey.

She smiled back, only it was a wobbly, weird smile.

I didn’t understand what was going on at first, but then Bob casually passed the phone over to me, and there on the screen was the photo of Freddie and me, kissing in the bushes.