Little Lady Agency and The Prince (7 page)

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.

‘In fact,’ Granny went on, reaching for the copy of
OK!
, ‘he’s in here.’ She flicked through it, until she reached the back pages. ‘Look, he was at a ghastly nouveau party and attacked a poor stout girl with a chocolate fountain.’

‘That was my friend Tiggy,’ I said faintly.

Granny looked up. ‘Was it? Oh, dear. Well, that’s the sort of shenanigans Nicky gets up to. Trashing hotels, exposing himself at charity balls, that type of overgrown-schoolboy nonsense. The boy’s nearly thirty! He runs with a dreadful crowd of Euro-trash Hoorays, he’s bringing shame and scandal on his entire family, and he hasn’t had a suitable girlfriend in his life.’

‘Isn’t that the point of being rich?’

‘Of course not. Besides, there’s a bit more to it than that.’

I was surprised to realise that Granny was genuinely uptight. The magazine was trembling in her tense grip, and her usually creaseless brow wrinkled with distress.

Alexander must be a very good old friend indeed, I thought. Granny was terribly loyal – one thing I was pleased to say I
had
inherited.

‘Which is?’ I asked.

Granny sighed. ‘Well, I should really let Alexander explain it properly, but, in a nutshell, the family have been offered a marvellous chance to fulfil Alexander’s great dream, but only if they play ball with the tourism people, who want some kind of Disney-fied royal family.

I started to say that I wasn’t exactly well-placed to advise on ideal family PR, but Granny hadn’t finished.

‘
However
,’ she went on, ‘they obviously can’t do that while the idiot grandson and heir is turning up at parties dressed as a Palestinian suicide bomber.’

Her voice had risen to a high quiver, and she took a sip of tea to calm down. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But Alex is such a gentleman, and I’m furious about the way Nicky is turning his name into some kind of byword for drunken tomfoolery.’

‘And you think I can do something about it . . . How?’ I asked gently. ‘I’d love to help, but I’m afraid I’m not very effective against that sort of professional cad type. I mean, Orlando von Borsch ran rings round me for years, remember? And he was just a stuffed-olive heir, not a prince.’

‘Well, princes aren’t what they used to be.’ Granny sighed deeply and passed me the magazine. ‘And I don’t think he’s a cad,’ she said. ‘I think he’s just a very silly boy who’s been allowed to play the fool for too long. It’s not only women who get away with murder because they’re pretty, you know.’

I looked more closely at the pictures, and, despite myself, my heart skipped. Prince Nicolas looked more like a rock star than a prince. Quite a saucy rock star too. One with several Ferraris in his garage and an ex-wife in every major marina.

‘That’s him?’ I asked, pointing, just to check.

She nodded.

‘Wow. Well, I see what you mean.’ Nicolas was exactly the sort of man who used to make me forget myself entirely. Brown-eyed, ski-tanned and with swimmer’s shoulders and narrow hips, he was twinkling away at the camera with his arms round two equally tanned leggy lovelies, exuding the exact amount of charm to sweep a girl off her slingbacks but stop just short of smarm. His red silk shirt was open a button too far, revealing a flash of dark chest hair, but instead of looking sleazy, he merely looked as if he’d been having too good a time to notice. Ditto his artfully dishevelled thick brown hair, which probably took longer to style than mine did. His only flaw was that the leggy lovelies were just a smidge taller than him in their Louboutins, and he seemed to know it.

If his grandfather had looked like that when he was younger, then no wonder Granny still had a soft spot for him.

I put the magazine on the table with some relief. There really wasn’t anything I could do here: Nicky wouldn’t give a girl like me the time of day.

‘Granny, you know I’d do anything to make you happy,’ I said, ‘but surely a stern talking-to from
you
would have more effect?’ I paused, as she began to prepare her innocent face. ‘Oh, no. No. You’ve already said I will, haven’t you? Oh, Granny!’

‘Oh, Melissa!’ she replied winningly. ‘Just a meeting?’

‘To say what?’ I protested.

‘That no nice girl will look him in the eye if he carries on tipping people into chocolate fountains!’

I fixed her with a square look. ‘Granny, he’s not in the market for a nice girl. Anyway,’ I went on, ‘Jonathan would go nuts. After that business in New York with Godric Ponsonby, I promised I’d scale back on the hands-on male stuff, as far as I could. Concentrate more on the lifestyle side of things.’

‘But that’s your favourite part of your job!’ exclaimed Granny, putting down her teacup in dismay. ‘Fixing up men!’

‘Jonathan and I drew up a contract. He agreed to cut down on the overtime, and I agreed not to take on clients who really need a therapist, not a secretary. We’re going to get married,’ I said, raising my voice above her tuts. ‘I never said I’d do this job for ever.’

But even as I said it, my eye returned of its own accord to the gleaming vision of Prince Nicky and his open-necked shirt. He had the sort of come-to-bed-you-sexy-lady eyes that didn’t just follow you round the room from the magazine, they winked at you.

‘Melissa,’ said Granny seriously, ‘do you do everything Jonathan tells you to? And I thought
I
was old-fashioned.’

I squirmed a little, trying to fight my own curiosity. Oh, what harm would it do to meet him? I was engaged to the most gorgeous man in the EU. If I did have tea with this fool, he’d no doubt show his true colours before the sandwiches were replenished. Granny would probably end up throwing the contents of the milk jug over him and the matter would be dropped faster than a hot scone.

With impeccable timing, Granny unleashed her most irresistible smile, the one that had allowed her to take advantage of London society for fifty years. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you’re a chip off the old block. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to have tea with a prince?’

When I paused, struggling with the terrible, familiar sensation that I was being played like a cheap fiddle, she added, ‘Two princes, come to that.’

And with that, I’m afraid to say, I was sunk.

4

I drove back to the office, my head buzzing with contradictory thoughts, and even though I’d been out for only an hour and a half, the answering machine was stuffed with calls. Top of the pile was one Dilys Lady Blennerhesket.

‘Hello, darling, so lovely to see you just now. Just to let you know I’ve spoken to Alexander and he’d be absolutely delighted to take us both out for dinner tomorrow night, if you’re around. Obviously, by that I mean do cancel whatever you have on, won’t you?’ she went on, at the exact same moment that I started to bridle about having prior engagements. ‘He’s going to make Nicolas come along, since he’s in London at the moment, and you can see what you’re up against. I mean,’ she added quickly, ‘you can see what he’s like. Seven for cocktails at the Blue Bar, then dinner at Petrus. That OK? Lovely! Speak to you later!’

I checked the time of the message again. Exactly two minutes after I’d left her at Claridge’s. Hmm. Either she’d made a very quick call to Alexander, or the whole thing had been set up in advance.