A Royal Match (22 page)

Eades is the grandest of grand boys’ schools in England, and they know it. Royalty, the good, the great and the madly wealthy of the world all send their sons to Eades to be educated in the art of effortless charm and entitlement. I suppose they teach them hard sums, Latin and a bit of Greek too, but then so do other schools. It’s the effortless charm and sense of entitlement bit that sets them apart – and the fact that each and every Eades boy is distressingly fit. I suspect that their entrance exam includes a fitness test.

Billy Pyke, captain of the Eades sabre team and the boy I was about to fence, isn’t a bit grand, though. Well, his family is ridiculously rich and he speaks in the grand way all Eades boys do, but he’s actually from the East End of London. His father runs the country’s largest limo sale and hire business, but being ridiculously rich doesn’t necessarily make you grand. In fact, it can work against you and earn you the term
nouveau
, which is worse than being a pleb. Most boys from Eades can point to their name in
Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage
or, if European, the
Amanach De Gotha
. At the very least your people’s money has to go back hundreds of generations for it to be respectable in the high-stakes world of English boarding schools. Billy’s family money only goes back one.

‘Better to be titled and poor as a church mouse than rich and common,’ as they say here. Which is especially tragic for me because my parents aren’t titled and they aren’t rich, even new-money rich. They struggle to send me to Saint Augustine’s because they are obsessed with giving me the best education money can buy, which according to my mom isn’t available in LA. Also, she’s English and went to Saint Augustine’s, and she thought it was ‘super.’

Apart from the new-money thing, Billy is distressingly fit and cool, and tall, blond, blue-eyed and dashing. And did I mention older? He’s seventeen. Older is always a plus. So clearly it was pretty tricky to focus my mind on combat, knowing of the gorgeousness that lurked beneath
the tight white fencing gear and the electrically conductive metal mesh mask he was encased in.

The fencing master called ‘Play,’ and I advanced swiftly down the piste, preparing for an attack. Usually boys are a bit hesitant to hit girls on the chest. When I say hesitant, I’m speaking in nano-milliseconds. Obviously they still hit you, and just as hard! Nevertheless, their hesitation often gives a girl an advantage, because that’s all you need in sabre to grab the point. One second – less, even.

Billy was renowned for not being the least bit hesitant when it came to hitting girls. Actually, he was the most aggressive fencer I’ve had the privilege to be rinsed by. Sabre is all about speed and concentration, and the attacker always has priority, as long as the opponent’s target (anywhere above the leg) is continually threatened. I won my first point and after that I made sure that Billy’s target area was continually threatened for the rest of the bout.

If I say so myself, I was unbelievable. My mother, Sarah, often says that false modesty is artless, so all modesty aside, my footwork was faultless. Honestly, I was shocked by my own talent as each lunge sent the electrical recorder lights flashing and buzzing. I was a veritable Olympian. I was indestructible, and what’s more, I didn’t even feel the few hits Billy
did
manage. And in sabre that is something because it’s not like the graceful fencing you’ve probably seen in James Bond films or on ads for hair products. It’s brutal and you get bruised and sore and seriously sweaty.

At the end of the bout, I triumphantly tore off my mask; but instead of the usual spray of sweat and mucky hair, my unruly blonde mane came out like … well, like hair-commercial hair.
Incroyable
, as my French teacher would say.

The applause was deafening, but all I cared about – as the V was chalked onto the board and I strode towards Billy to shake his hand – was snog-aging him. Not that I would be allowed to, obviously. Single-sex boarding schools like to keep intergender activities strictly lips-off. ‘There must always be a balloon distance between boys and girls,’ Sister Constance likes to chant.

Time moved in slow motion as I stretched out my hand to shake his. I watched his hand begin to remove his mask, tugging the chin guard upwards, revealing inch by inch not the features of Billy, but Freddie, as in HRH – you know, Prince Freddie, heir to the British throne.

‘You have to put your seat belt on now,’ the flight attendant warned as she woke me. ‘We’ll be landing at Heathrow in a moment.’

Okay, it was only a dream, but it was kind of spooky actually because all summer I’d been txt-flirting with Freddie and Billy. I know it sounds bad, but you can’t blame me. We are talking about two wildly fit boys here – even by Eades standards – and after taking so long to pull a single boy (fourteen years), I now had two boys txt-flirting me. What girl is going to resist that? How was I ever going to choose between Freddie – heir to the British throne –
and Billy, captain of the Eades sabre team, who had rescued me from the jaws of a girl-eating attack dog before we broke up for summer?

My two best friends, Georgina and Star, both found the txt relationships of my summer hugely entertaining. I forwarded them every txt, even though a part of me wanted to keep some of them all to myself. Like the one where Freddie said his parents wanted to meet me.

Me
, Calypso Kelly, a complete nobody from America! No title, no money – not even new money – and yet the king and queen of the United Kingdom and all its other territories wanted to meet
me
. I could have swooned with the excitement of it all, only then Freddie went on to say how of course he’d never put me through that, because apparently it would mean spending a weekend at Bardington with his gran’s Labradors, who are elderly and quite nippy.

I sent a txt back telling him that I wouldn’t mind being nipped to bits by royal Labradors. I was madly restrained, in fact – deleting the bit about how I’d happily be mauled by them if it meant staying a weekend in one of his family’s castles.

Freddie sent back a txt saying:

ha, ha, ha! Freds x

You see, my fear of dogs is legendary at Eades ever since news got out about my attempted escape from
school to go clubbing one night last year. I was chased up a tree by one of the school’s attack dogs. That’s how I met Billy. He had helped me down while the girl-eating dog licked his hand.

Freddie knows all about my shameful stuck-up-a-tree experience, though he doesn’t know about the wobbly feeling I felt in my tummy as Billy helped me down and held me in his arms. And he definitely doesn’t know I’ve been txt-flirting Billy all summer.

I’d already pulled Freddie, but everything between us got complicated because Honey O’Hare, the most toxic psycho-toff ever, sold a camera-phone snap of us kissing in the bushes to the tabloids. It all ended in a bit of a messy misunderstanding, which is why I got mixed up and started flirt-txt-ing Billy.

Only now Billy’s txts were getting progressively steamier, and I knew I couldn’t go on flirting with two boys from the same school without it all blowing up in my face. So while my predicament may have made my holidays in LA and the prospect of returning to Saint Augustine’s exciting, I was going to have to sort my feelings out by the end of the week when I faced them both on the fencing piste. It was that or –
quelle horreur!
– risk having no boy txt-ing me at all! Just like the old days.

Even as my taxi dropped me at school, the thrill of having two fit Eades boys txt-ing me was beginning to feel more like pressure than a flattering thrill. And guess what? Mental telepathy really does work because no sooner did
this thought flash through my mind than my txt alert sounded:

Can’t wait to see your navel piercing … Freddie x

I txt-ed him back immediately!

Can’t wait to rinse you at sabre x Calypso

I didn’t really feel like confessing that I’d been rinsed by my parents, Sarah and Bob, and made to remove my navel ring. I quite fancied the idea of Freddie thinking of me as this madly cool, wild-child American girl who did her own thing and made her own rules. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.

I will turn fifteen on the fifteenth of December. Just ten days before Christmas. This explains a lot about me. Firstly, it means my parents are Catholic and didn’t practise birth control. They’ve never admitted this (the lack of birth control thing), but I ask you, what sort of unfeeling parents would purposefully elect to bring their child into the world at Christmas? Who do they think they are, Mary and Joseph?

Secondly, it explains why I am quite cynical. By the age of ten, I knew that when people said, ‘I just opted for One Big Present for Christmas rather than two small presents,’ they were
definitely
lying. What they were really opting for was the economy of one regular-sized gift.

That’s where my third skill comes in handy – my precocious gift for being able to keep my disappointments to myself – because you can’t really challenge people about the One Big Present Lie without sounding ungrateful, can you?

But that’s okay because cynicism and the ability to suppress disappointment help you survive the single-sex boarding school system of England. And those two aspects of my character are what I relied on the first day back at school as I scanned the dormitory list to discover with whom I’d be rooming.

My cynicism prevented me from hoping that I would be sharing with someone lovely and fun. And cynicism soon gave way to suppressing the disappointment that I didn’t have a valet to lug my seven-thousand-ton trunk up the ancient, narrow, dimly lit, winding stone staircase that leads to the dormitory rooms.

My parents, who insist I call them Sarah and Bob (what can I say, they still listen to Bob Dylan and eat tragic brown food), live in LA and had long since given up accompanying me back to school each term. Now that I was about to turn fifteen, they thought they were off the hook.

That’s the other thing. I was almost a full year younger than anyone else in my year – Year Eleven – something my parents took a sick pride in. They are always bragging to their friends about me, as if being the youngest, most physically immature girl in my Year is something to boast about. They weren’t the ones having to stuff their bra with
toilet paper throughout Year Nine. By the end of that year I was even lying about having my periods so that when I finally started to menstruate and discovered that I had blood on my white fencing breeches, I was so relieved I forgot to be embarrassed.

This summer I sat my parents down and said, ‘Look, Sarah, Bob, I know you love me, and you know I love you, but you have got to stop living vicariously through me!’ Star put me up to it, although she suggested I just say ‘get a life’ because Sarah and Bob still think I should have the same aspirations I had when I was six and wanted to be the next Marie Curie. Actually, let me put that more accurately:
they
wanted me to be the next Marie Curie, and I went along with it so they’d make a fuss of me.

My best friend, Star, always says, ‘It’s hard teaching your parents where their dreams end and yours begin.’ Although as far as I can see, her parents, Tiger of Dirge and Tracey the commensurate Rock Star Wife, are perfect parents – mostly because they’re always stoned, I guess.

There was no sign of Star’s or Georgina’s friendly faces in the mad scrum of toff parents, toff valets, guardians and girls (all dressed in the tragic Saint Augustine’s uniform of maroon pleated skirt and green ruffled shirt) clustered around the notice board. I scanned the lists of dorm rooms, hoping I’d be sharing with Arabella or Clementine, two of my other friends. But instead a cold band of fear tightened around my heart as I read the name on the list with mine for the Saint Ursula room: Honey O’Hare.

I was literally shaking as I backed my way out of the braying adults and girls squealing with delight or groaning with disappointment. As I turned around, I slammed straight into the culprit herself – or rather, the culprit’s new manservant.

‘Watch out, you American Freak!’ Honey shrieked in her special shrill way as she stepped out from behind the man. The poor fellow stumbled a bit under the weight of her heavy Louis Vuitton trunk and other assorted designer luggage, including a mauve Prada pet carrier no doubt containing her designer pet of the term.

‘I’m sorry,’ I apologised, trying in vain to make eye contact with the poor guy I’d bumped into. He was two hundred and ninety if he was a day.

Then Honey added darkly, ‘If you damage my manservant, your parents can buy me a bloody new one and pay to have him shipped out and processed through immigration.’

Honey is your
classic
psycho toff. In other words, she has all the characteristics you might imagine spoilt aristo-girls – also known as Daddy’s Plastic Girls – to have, only thank goodness for me they usually don’t. But Honey does. Unbridled, unrestrained horribleness exudes from the tips of her platinum card-breaking, Nicky Clarke-personally-coloured hair to her designer French soles. And mostly her horribleness is turned on me, who as an untitled, ordinary American is a classic sitting duck.