Kissing Toads (4 page)

‘We had sex,' Roo said. ‘That's a couple thing. Sometimes, anyway.'

‘You're always focusing on sex. Being a couple is about a lot more than that. Alex and I do all sorts of things together.'

Alex Russo is my boyfriend. We'd been together two years and we'd just set a date for the wedding, but I didn't think this was a good moment to tell Roo, even though I wanted her to be my maid of honour. Alex is incredibly desirable from every angle. He has a mews house where I live with him most of the time (I keep my own place for emergencies), the right background (third generation rich and second generation posh), the right clothes, the right accent, the right friends. He's got one Italian grandfather and one Persian (Iranian, actually, but Persian sounds more romantic), a genetic mix which means he's stunningly handsome: jet-black hair, creamy gold skin, classic profile. A friend at Armani wanted him to do some modelling, but he couldn't be bothered. He has a production company which doesn't produce very much yet, and is always just about to make a big film, which means he spends lots of time hanging out with actors who are going to be in it. He isn't famous in his own right but he moves in a cloud of distant fame, the rubbed-off kind that comes when your mother's second marriage features in
Tatler
and your father owns a winning horse at Ascot and your sister does time in the Priory with the daughter of a rock star. He's twenty-nine (five years younger than me), prefers wine to beer, shaves regularly, and has only a tepid interest in football. (He's mad about cricket, but nobody's perfect.) We look beautiful together. I was already fantasising about the wedding photos, and whether we should sell them to
Hello!
or
OK!

‘There's only one Alex,' Roo said with a curiously inscrutable expression on her face.

‘Yes, but there are lots of great guys out there,' I said untruthfully, wanting to be positive. ‘It's just that you always turn them down.'

In fact, the supply of decent single men is very limited; I'm not quite sure why. It isn't as if we've had a major war to wipe them out. Everybody knows the First World War produced a generation of lesbian spinsters because half the guys were dead, but that's ancient history. Nowadays, according to a friend of mine who's a pop psychologist, men are all so shattered by female emancipation they've retreated into their shells, becoming geeks, nerds, recluses, and, in extreme cases, serial killers with mother complexes. They have poor social skills and shrinking levels of testosterone – and it's all our fault.

Frankly, I'm not sure about this psychology stuff.

It just goes to prove what I told Roo before: never drop one guy until you've got another lined up. Forget all that ‘best to be off with the old love before you're on with the new' garbage. There was some French singer – I think her name was Pilaff – who always made a point of starting her next affair
before
she'd finished the previous one. And she sang about having no regrets, which goes to show she got it right. (
Je ne regrette rien
, which means
I don't regret nothing
. Not very good grammar, but the French can't help it: they're foreign.) Being single isn't a lifestyle choice, whatever your guru says: it's just desperate. I haven't been single since I was thirteen.

I've made periodic efforts to dredge up eligible single men for Roo over the years, but that's when her stubborn streak comes into play. I sometimes suspect that as soon as she senses I approve of the guy she loses interest. So there was no point in fixing her up with someone – even if I could think of someone to fix her up with – unless I was very, very subtle. Better to concentrate on the job issue.

I didn't want to promise anything until I was absolutely sure it was in the bag, but I dropped a few hints which I hoped would cheer her up. Roo didn't look particularly cheered – she was obviously determined to wallow in gloom – but you can't go on being miserable indefinitely, it's too boring, and with luck a little reluctant optimism would kick in later. I left her with the newspapers, which were so depressing they were bound to brighten her day. Roo is the sort of person who reads about famines and massacres in Africa or somewhere and feels ashamed of trivial stuff like agonising over her love life. Me, I expect I'm a coward but I'd rather not read about horrors, especially at breakfast. I mean, it's great if you can do something – like
Ground Force
revamped Nelson Mandela's garden – but mostly you just feel so helpless, because Africa's a long way away, and no matter how much money you give there are always more famines and more massacres, and nothing ever seems to change. I don't do the papers, but if I did I'd rather read about celebs having affairs, because that doesn't make you feel helpless or guilty, and there's always a chance of hearing about your friends.

Anyway, when I went Roo hugged me very hard, and I said she should come to a party with me and Alex that evening, whether she liked it or not, because staying in with a DVD and a bag of tortilla chips would only make her feel worse. Then I walked down the road deep in thought, so absorbed in my plans for Roo's future that I forgot to hail a taxi for at least ten minutes.

Roo and I go way back. The Harkers lived in the village – Little Pygford – while we had the big house out on the edge, with stables and paddocks and dogs and a huge rambling garden. After my father left, Mummy immersed herself in exotic shrubs, rockeries and compost heaps, becoming plumper and earthier as the relationship deepened, until she had a rustic complexion and sun-dried hair and was famed for her expertise with hardy perennials throughout the gardening world. My sister Pansy and I had already been saddled with bizarre floral names, though it could have been much worse: her other favourites included snapdragons, clematis and saxifrage. She wasn't exactly an affectionate parent – she preferred flowers to children – but she was vaguely kind and generous to everybody, and when Mrs Harker died of cancer Roo was semi-adopted into our household. ‘Three kids are no more trouble than two,' Mummy said, which was true for her, though probably not for the au pairs. (We got through dozens.) Geoff Harker was an engineer who went away a lot, building bridges and flyovers in countries that were roadless and bridgeless, and during his absences Roo stayed with us. When Daddy left, less than a year later, she became part of the family.

There's no point in saying much about my father because since he debunked he hasn't really featured in my life. He was dark and disreputable, in a classy sort of way, and very, very charming, and for ten years I was his little princess, until he left his wife for someone else's and went to live in the South of France. I wrote to him a few months later, when we had an address to write to, saying I'd saved my pocket money for the ferry and would sneak away to join him. He wrote back, quite briefly, telling me it wasn't a good idea and I should stay with my mummy, and maybe I could come for a visit when I was a bit older. After that he barely wrote at all. The visit I dreamed of never happened, and even Christmas cards stopped, though sometimes I imagined they were intercepted, by my mother or, more likely, the woman who had stolen him from me.

Three years ago I was making a programme on a garden near Antibes and I went to see him. His second wife had died long before, booze I think, and he was living in the villa she had bequeathed to him, a pink and white spun-sugar house with vines over the terrace and a view that just about made it to the sea. We lunched on the terrace, beside the view, waited on by an adoring housekeeper; he looked older, sort of smaller, the way people do when you see them through grown-up eyes, but the same, the same smile, the same charm. I'd dressed and made up very carefully, looking ultra-glamorous, basking in my new stardom. Suddenly this girl came running up the steps – about seventeen, no make-up, short, dark hair, big French pout, tatty jeans. ‘This is my daughter,' Daddy said, as if I wasn't, or didn't count. ‘My darling Natalie.'

It's just as well we don't carry guns in Europe, because if I'd had one, I'd have shot her on sight.

He was all over her, ruffling her short hair, swapping smiles and whispers, like I was a distant acquaintance given a privileged glimpse of their happiness. I felt overdressed, overmade-up,
old
. All he remembered of me was a few improbable anecdotes; she'd spent her whole life with him, and until that moment I didn't even know she existed. She was clearly the most important thing in his world, and he hadn't mentioned her to Mummy or me, not because
she
didn't matter, but because
we
didn't. We'd been brushed aside and all but forgotten. Roo says that's how some people deal with pain, but just then I didn't care. I couldn't even be angry. I felt as if my insides had been emptied out and a thin veneer of my Self was desperately hanging on, trying to appear unaffected and totally cool about everything.

We'd been looking at a photo of Pansy which Daddy had found in an English society magazine when Natalie showed up. ‘Is this your sister? Of course, I haven't seen her since she was a baby . . .' At the time Pansy had her hair cropped and dyed black; she didn't really look like Natalie, but there was, I suppose, a resemblance of style if not content. Anyway, Daddy was glancing from the pictured daughter to the one who was present, comparing them, excluding me, except as an audience, saying: ‘She's not as pretty as my Nat, is she?' like I was meant to agree. I'm not Pansy's biggest fan but suddenly I felt hot all through.

‘Pan's a supermodel,' I said. ‘She's ravishing. She took Paris fashion week by storm.'

Pansy isn't a supermodel. She'd done a bit of modelling in Paris that year for a designer friend who's into eco-couture, attracting attention from the British press because of the green angle and because she's my sister. But hearing him compare her in that disparaging way with his pouty Eurobrat made my blood boil.

I don't think he noticed. He's the sort of person who doesn't notice unpleasant things. I left a bit later, though I had to sit in the car for a while before I could drive, I was shaking so badly.

So much for my dad. These days, my immediate family is just Mummy, who prefers flowers, Pan, a sisterly pain in the bum, and Roo.

No wonder I love Roo best of all.

My plans for her future had taken longer than I'd wished to get off the ground because the person I needed to talk to, Major John Beard-Trenchard, was away until the following week. I'd called him on his mobile, explained the situation, and fixed up lunch, but he was playing golf in the Caribbean and visiting exotic gardens and couldn't be induced to come home early. (When I say
in the Caribbean
, I don't mean literally, since golf happens on golf courses, but, on the other hand, the balls seem to shoot off anywhere, frequently into water, so it could have been literal after all. Boring game, anyway.)

I'd better take a moment to explain how the Major comes into this.

He really was in the army, somewhere back in the year dot (he still tends to stand in that rigid military way, as if he's got a musket up his backside, though it could be stiffness in the joints), but plants have always been his real love: he brought horticulture to television in the early days when the only other gardening programme was Bill and Ben. Nowadays he holds directorships and sits on Boards, and has his own company, Persiflage Productions, specialising in all things rural. He's an old friend of my mother's (horticultural types invariably are); rumour has it she once saved his life, or his reputation, or whatever. Something to do with begonias. He produced
Earth Works
, the series which kick-started my career. Apparently he was discussing it over lunch with Mummy, saying he needed a female sidekick for Mortimer Sparrow to give it a bit of glamour, and she suggested me. I was acting at the time, resting between jobs, so I accepted the offer, though I wasn't really that keen. Any child of Mummy's can't help knowing about gardening, but I had no intention of digging, or weeding, or getting my hands dirty. (Fortunately, you have researchers to do all that.) Anyway, by the end of a year I was getting more fan mail than Morty and I left to present
Gilding the Lily
, which focused on the gardens of the rich and famous.

This gave me a lot more scope to develop my image, wafting between banks of flowers in designer dresses, which I didn't have to pay for because I was going to wear them on television, and hanging out with A-list stars. Fame, as everyone knows, is catching – a bit like measles – and I caught it. I'm not much good at maths, but this is the kind of equation I can handle: the total famousness of any given group of famous people is more than the sum total of their fame. Or something. I became a star in my own right and
Gilding the Lily
ran and ran, until it ran itself out of prime time and into an afternoon slot, at which point I left. Julian, my agent, says it's essential to quit while you're ahead, and not to get stuck in the dead zone between two and six when the only people who watch are OAPs, on the dole, or chronically ill. Of course, for a TV personality,
not
being on TV, even for one season, can be the kiss of death, but overexposure is equally fatal. Too much of one face on the small screen and viewers get ‘face fatigue'. Remember that guy with the big mouth and the cockney accent who used to be on
all the time
? And the woman with the flick and the gravitas? One moment they're there, and then they're gone. In the trade, we call them the Disappeared. And the worst of it is,
you can't even remember their names
 . . . But I wasn't worried. I wanted the chance to get back to acting, though Julian said I shouldn't diversify. (Sometimes, I'm afraid he thinks I'm a one-talent girl, which is rubbish.) I'd been talking about a role in a new period drama for the BBC when Crusty called. Crusty is Pan's name for the Major, Crusty Beardstandard. She says he's one of those crusty old men who are all heart underneath. He was making a new series – six episodes – all on one garden. A garden, apparently, that hadn't been properly gardened for centuries, and existed in a state of nature round a castle in Scotland recently acquired by a friend of his.