Kissing Toads (11 page)

‘Spots,' said Roo.

‘Yuk. Must be awful for Hot God, having a son with zits. I mean, it reflects on him genetically. Roo, I'll never get all my luggage in here. Couldn't you have borrowed a bigger car?'

‘Big cars make me nervous,' Roo said. ‘HG offered me a cream-coloured Bentley, but I was afraid I'd scratch it.'

‘Let's get this straight,' I said. ‘You could've picked me up in a Bentley, and you chose a
Mini
?'

There are times when I despair of Roo.

In the end, I left two suitcases at the airport to be collected later, and crammed everything else into the back of the car. Roo complained she couldn't see out of the rear window, but, as I said, there was nothing there but a load of landscape. We drove for hours (or what seemed like hours) through more and more landscape, the kind that looks good in pictures or as background in Christmas cards. I can never figure out why some celebrities want to go and live miles from anywhere, when you can be a recluse perfectly happily on a gorgeous estate about an hour from London, and all the people who want to invade your reclusion can do it much more easily from mainline stations or after a short drive down a motorway. After all, there's no point in being a recluse if the world doesn't want to beat a path to your door, is there? Should I ever decide to take up reclusivity I shall do it somewhere civilised, like Wiltshire or Gloucestershire, out of sheer consideration for my fans and media colleagues. Which shows I'm really a very unselfish person, whatever people may say.

The castle stood beside a lake (or loch) and looked
wonderful
, like something out of Disney, all funny little towers and roofs like upside-down ice-cream cones, with a row of crumbling battlements in the middle and a big arched doorway like something in a cathedral. I was a bit disappointed there wasn't a moat, but I suppose they had the lake instead. (Of course, with his kind of money Hot God could have moved the castle somewhere more convenient, like Surrey, but not the lake.) It looked like a real Cinderella castle, and although I've met my Prince Charming I couldn't help thinking it would be a great place for Roo to put on her crystal slippers and dance with Mr Right. A sixteen-year-old with spots didn't sound a promising candidate, but there were bound to be others.

‘Did you say Nigel Thingummy-Whatsit was here already?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Is he as unattractive as you said?'

‘Well,' said Roo judiciously, evidently trying to be fair, ‘after three or four wee drams his chin does look slightly less receding, in a poor light.'

‘What's a wee dram? It sounds like some kind of Scottish loo.'

‘It's a measure of whisky.'

‘Horrible stuff.' I shuddered. ‘It's the colour of wee, too. They'd better have champagne.'

We'd parked outside the castle and various minions appeared to take my luggage. In the lead was a man who was clearly the welcoming party: just under six foot, gingery-fair hair, grin. I don't like gingery hair: it's invariably accompanied by ginger eyelashes, and everyone knows villains in novels have ginger eyelashes. And I don't like men who grin. Sophisticated guys smile; grinners are always laddish, beer-guzzlers, football fans, too red-blooded for comfort. I knew I was leaping to conclusions – the guy couldn't help his hair, though he could help the grin. It was the kind of grin that says,
How about a quick one?
, and I don't mean a drink. I wondered who he was.

‘Harry Winkworth,' Roo supplied. He shook my hand. His grip was rather too firm, almost a squeeze, though not quite.

‘Hot God's PA?' I hazarded, for Roo's private ear.

‘Butler.'

Butler? The
butler
was grinning at me? As it happens, I've never had a butler, but I know how they're supposed to behave. At school, Sapphira Fox-Huntley's family had a butler: he was about a hundred and wouldn't retire and her mother did all the lifting in case he hurt his back. And Alex's father has a butler at the country house, only he's Middle Eastern and looks so sinister he could be running a spy ring on the side. But I've seen period films and read a couple of Georgette Heyers, and
real
butlers are dignified, unflappable, preferably elderly, and should never show emotion. As for this Harry Winkworth person, his grin might be merely familiar rather than suggestive, but he had no business to grin at me at all. It just wasn't butlerish.

He picked up a brace of baggage in the offhand manner of someone with serious muscle and offered to show me to my room. I said ‘Thank you' in a cool, repressive way and from the tail of my eye I noticed he grinned again, for all the world like a bloody Cheshire cat. Was he too yobbish to know when he was being snubbed? I followed him into the castle, a bit disappointed that Hot God himself wasn't there to welcome me, but, on the other hand, glad I would have the chance to change and reapply my make-up before making a stunning first impression.

Roo had warned me about the décor but my mind was elsewhere and it wasn't till I got to my room that I received the full impact. Here, Mrs God had gone all folksy and ethnic. Devil masks on the walls with malevolent expressions – not the sort of thing you want staring at you when you're getting undressed – tasselled spears and shields upholstered in animal skins, carved wooden furniture with batik print cushions, an eight-foot teak giraffe lurking in a corner. The bed had a frilled canopy with sweeping muslin curtains, suspiciously like mosquito netting, supported by a set of primitive female statues of the sort who have tits to the navel, huge round bellies and buttocks like a hippo. And glancing through a half-open door into the en suite, I saw a mural of bright green jungle with a waterfall cascading down towards the bath taps and a leopard skulking in the undergrowth.

The whole room looked as if it had been done over by
Changing Rooms
on acid.

‘I can't stay here,' I murmured faintly. ‘I haven't got my malaria pills. Isn't there somewhere a bit more . . . subdued?'

‘All the ones with bathrooms have been allocated,' the butler said cheerfully. ‘This is the African Bedroom. HG thought you would like it.'

‘He did?' Well, at least he had put some thought into the accommodation chosen for me, even if he had the artistic taste of a gorilla.

Still . . .

‘What are
these
?' I enquired, indicating the tit-and-bum carvings. In my horror at the décor, I had forgotten I was supposed to be putting Winkworth in his place.

‘Fertility goddesses,' he said. ‘HG thought they would be in keeping with your image.'

‘
What?
I'm not
fertile
– I mean, I'm not pregnant or . . . or anything, and I
don't
have a figure like an overinflated balloon!'

‘You present a gardening programme. That makes you a kind of modern goddess of fertility – or at any rate of fertiliser.'

That did it. He was taking the piss, I knew he was taking the piss, he knew that I knew, but I couldn't do anything about it. I assumed an air of quiet dignity guaranteed to reduce him to the nonentity he really was.

‘Thank you so much. If you would just send the maid to help me unpack . . .' I'd never needed a maid to help me unpack; I'm quite capable of unpacking myself, but in a place like this it would be fatal to show it.

‘There isn't one,' the Cheshire cat said smugly. ‘A couple of village girls come in and clean, but not till tomorrow. You could have Morag the housekeeper, only she's got religious mania so she'll probably disapprove of you. However, if you don't mind a jeremiad on the minimalism of your underwear . . .'

I gave him a look that would have fried an egg.

‘In that case,' I said, abandoning dignity for something more forceful, ‘you –
you personally
– can bring me a pot of tea, lapsang souchong, with lemon and no sugar, and two aspirin.' I glanced round the room again, wincing. ‘No, a
bottle
of aspirin. And sleeping pills. Lots of sleeping pills. I'm going to have
very
bad dreams in here.'

‘
Jumanji
.' he said. ‘You know, that film about the jungle board game that came to life. Watch out for the giraffe: it could turn nasty.'

I turned my shoulder on him by way of dismissal and presently I heard the door shut. I unpacked hastily, noticing that several of my things needed ironing. On
Gilding the Lily
I'd had a wardrobe assistant/hairdresser/make-up artist who saw to it I looked pressed, styled and beautiful every time I appeared on camera, but here, Crusty had said, I wouldn't need one, since Hot God had such a large staff. Ha! I thought. Some staff! Did religious mania allow time for ironing?

Roo arrived at the same moment as my tea, and I sent Winkworth off to fetch a second cup, rather glad that he would (probably) have to walk a long way to get it.

I encountered Hot God for the first time that evening. We assembled in the Relatively Normal Drawing Room for pre-dinner drinks. There was no sign of the spotty Dorian, but Crusty was there, Nigel Willoughby-Purchiss, and, of course, Mortimer Sparrow, who'd arrived shortly after me. It wasn't an impressive array of male talent. Roo's a kind person and I realised her description of Nigel's charms had, if anything, erred on the side of generosity. Morty is a pin-up for middle-aged women who see him as a cosy, guy-next-door type; he has a fair, rumpled look which he thinks goes with his metier, a thickening waistline hidden under a succession of baggy jumpers and sweatshirts, a wife no one ever sees and a bad case of roving hands. He greeted me with an enthusiasm which was a mixture of lechery and hypocrisy and was then deflected by Roo, who bore up nobly while he talked to her about how famous he was, how difficult it was being famous, and how good he was at making allowances for non-famous colleagues, particularly if they were young, female and attractive. He must be really worried about his career, I thought, to be pushing himself so hard.

Hot God arrived last. It's always a shock when you meet someone like that – someone who's been in the public eye much of his life, constantly photographed at twentysomething, thirtysomething, fortysomething – and discover they've got old. Icons are supposed to be immortal, beyond the reach of wrinkles and sags. Hot God hadn't grown fat; instead, he seemed to have shrunk. His skin – his whole body – had crumpled, as if he had spent too long in the bath. Roo had warned me about the eyepatch, but he had removed it. One eye was still a bit pink and puffy, though the other retained a little of the demonic twinkle he used to show on stage. Not that I'd ever been to any of his concerts; I know his classic hits because everybody does, but that's about all. I'm not one of those people who sit listening to music for hours, or go around plugged into a Walkman looking brain-dead. I like music to be there in the background where it belongs. Of course, rock stars are something else. Rock stars are a major social asset, like royalty, as long as you don't have to listen to them play.

Anyway, it didn't matter what Hot God looked like, though I was a bit daunted when he said he didn't have champagne.

‘I don't like it,' he said. ‘I never did. It upsets my guts.'

Too much information. Icons aren't supposed to have guts (or cataracts). They're supposed to be made of celluloid and live for ever.

Winkworth presented me with a vodka and diet tonic; good anticipation, but it didn't excuse his attitude. I took a restorative gulp and set about fascinating my host, turning on sparkling charm in bucket-loads (or whatever sparkling charm comes in). Roo had told me Dunblair was informal but I'd still dressed up a little, in a fluted skirt of jade-green velvet and a long sweater sewn with feathers whose deep V-neck showed off my cleavage and the leftovers of my ski-tan. As far as I could see, HG appeared to be appreciating both. Then a woman with the face and personality of a drystone wall intervened, wielding a glass bowl.

‘The children o' the ungodly shall burrn in the fires o' heil,' she announced. ‘Ha' some peanuts.'

This could only be Morag the housekeeper.

‘She's a character,' HG said indulgently.

He would probably say the same of the grinning butler, I thought, my enthusiasm for rock icons cooling abruptly. In my opinion there were far too many Characters in Dunblair. Then Morty gatecrashed the conversation, and it turned to flowers.

The fact that Morty had started his career as a voice-over on paint commercials hadn't prevented him from becoming an authority on all matters horticultural. With such series as
Earth Works
,
Sparrow in the Garden
and the appallingly twee
House Sparrow
(including interior design), he had become a household name, rather like lavatory cleaner. He had done several books, mainly remarkable for large colour photographs, much deplored by my mother, who hated the modern tendency to turn a garden into an outdoor room and thought nothing should get in the way of the plants. But he hadn't had a regular slot on prime-time TV for nearly a year, and everyone knows viewers have short-term memory loss. After all that booze and drug-taking I would have expected HG to be the same, but instead they both plunged into a passionate exchange of floral chit-chat, Latin names whizzing to and fro like ping-pong balls. ‘
Lavandula conservatoria . . . Floribunda ponderosa . . . Gossiporia austropossum . . .
' You get the picture. My mother always says men love to get hold of a little knowledge and show it off. It's a guy thing.

I don't need to do homework. When I want to sound expert, I simply ring Mummy and ask: ‘What's that awfully pretty yellow flower you've got growing down by the pond?' or ‘What was that blue stuff that did so well the other winter despite three blizzards and a deep freeze in May?' and she comes up with the answers. Then I can impress the hell out of people who think I'm just a camera-friendly bimbo. Mummy may not have been great at parent–child bonding, but, when it comes to gardening expertise, she's better than a whole library of reference books.