Well Groomed (5 page)

‘No, no – well, not exactly.’ Alexandra glanced at Pascal who was whipping something in the kitchen now. ‘This is one of Rooter’s pups.’

‘Rooter?’

‘Great big hairy thing that one of Tash’s admirers gave to her while she was staying with us in Champegny.’

‘Yes, I remember.’ Sally thought back. ‘Looked like a large pampas grass arrangement on legs.’

‘And Rooter was none too pretty either.’ Alexandra cuddled her coat closer.

‘Was?’

‘Poor old darling breathed his last in Pascal’s herb garden last month.’ She looked rather tearful. ‘He went out with a bang – literally. He was on the job with one of my spaniels at the time. Poor darling, I was rather attached to the old thing. He’d been with us almost two years.’

‘Don’t tell me that’s the result?’ Sally pointed to her stomach in shock.

‘No, no – far too early for those to pop out, although God knows who we’ll palm that litter off on this time. The whole valley is populated with Rooter’s progeny now. There are shaggy yellow dogs of varying sizes on every street corner. No, this is an earlier vintage. My friends the Gallaghers – do you remember?’

‘We had dinner with them when we stayed with you.’

‘Yes, darling – and they had a little Manchester terrier called Bet with a very wet nose that was prone to point up unfortunate places?’

‘I remember.’ Sally crossed her legs.

‘Well, the Gallaghers have moved back to Edinburgh now – Hamish’s job, I think. And Rooter clearly rooted just a few days before they came back. Poor little Bet – Lord knows she must have winced, she’s so small. Anyway, halfway through quarantine out popped five puppies. This is the runt. She’s already four months old, but not as big as her ma. Hamish Gallagher saved her for me.’

‘She’s divine.’ Sally lifted up the coat and looked at the strange little creature – a leggy mixture of black and tan fluff, pointy snout, vast opal eyes and big, petal ears the colour of golden biscuits. She was utterly endearing with her gamine Audrey Hepburn face and waifish, waggy tail, and was now quite settled in her fuggy hideaway.

Niall returned just as Pascal was threatening to throw the drying meal out of the window. He was weighed down with crockery, had knives and forks poking out of every pocket and smelled slightly of the two vast Bushmills that Marco Angelo, their local Italian landlord, had pressed upon him.

‘He asked if you could do a portrait of Denise for her birthday next summer.’ Niall hiccuped slightly, winking at Tash and setting his load down on the table with a clank. ‘Says to make her look ten years younger and three stone lighter, or she’ll never talk to you again.’

‘Bless him.’ Tash grinned, hastily setting places.

Marco and Denise Angelo ran the immensely successful Olive Branch with its Michelin-starred Italian restaurant. Known locally as Ange and Den, they were only slightly more famous for their food and hospitality than they were for their flamboyant bilingual arguments and smashing china. Today was obviously a harmonious day at
casa
Angelo, Tash surmised, from the stack of chip-free china that Niall had returned with.

‘Now – at last – you can both have your present!’ Alexandra gasped with relief and opened her coat, just as a small, fluffy bundle of long legs and big petal ears threw up on her expensive woollen trousers.

‘
À table!
’

They were still madly opening presents when Pascal called them over to eat, leaving Polly, Tom and Tor sulky and frustrated as they were forced to relinquish new toys before trying to break them properly.

The meal was a glorious victory of skill over time. Pascal had taken the turkey off the bone to cook it quickly, poaching it in gallons of wine and double cream before grilling it in a cranberry glaze. The result was as moist and melting as watermelon, and surrounded by piles of glossy, crisp vegetables dripping with butter and black pepper.

Sally eyed the others’ plates jealously as she ate the soggy pizza which Tash had hastily defrosted and microwaved when Matty announced that he and his family would not sacrifice their vegetarian ideals for Christmas. She was also sipping mineral water as she was the designated driver for the day.

‘Can I have a piece of turkey?’ Tom begged.

‘No, you can’t,’ Matty snapped, pedantically picking pieces of pepperoni from his pizza slice before reaching across to do the same on Tor’s. ‘These pizzas aren’t all veggie, Tash.’

‘Aren’t they?’ she asked guiltily. She had realised that earlier, but had hoped that if she burned them enough they wouldn’t notice.

Etty, who had called Pascal ‘James’ three times now, was eyeing Tash’s left hand beadily.

Tash hoped she’d remembered to wash her hands since returning from the Moncrieffs’. She had a feeling that she hadn’t. No wonder Matty was picking at his pizza like a medieval king’s poison-tester.

The leggy puppy, whom Niall had named Beetroot, sat on Tash’s lap throughout and was stuffed with turkey breast. She munched happily, her white teeth and pink tongue working furiously, and showed no more signs of nausea, for which Tash was relieved, having no desire to change yet again.

‘Do you really like her?’ Alexandra asked again over Christmas pud, anxious not to inflict an unwanted burden upon her youngest daughter.

‘I love her – we love her.’ Tash grinned at Niall and then her mother. ‘I’m so sorry about Rooter, Mummy. He was a lovely character.’

‘’E smell like a
pissoir
,’ Pascal pointed out, dousing the pudding in brandy for the third time and applying his lighter.

The two magnums of champagne were polished off with wildly indulgent speed and followed by several bottles of Chianti which Niall had bought for the occasion and which Pascal, who was a Gallic wine snob, pronounced ‘undrinkable’.

Etty by far out-drank anyone and became quite raucous over Niall’s sublime Irish coffee and Sainsbury’s discount petits fours. Her bearskin and fur discarded, she turned out to be wearing a rather creased silk handkerchief dress and to have Carmen waves as even as corrugated iron in her gun-grey hair. Her face flushed from the booze and the heat of the fire, she watched Tash and Niall with her clever green eyes, liking the way they touched so often, passed glances as instinctively as two old carpenters working a double-handed lathe together. They weren’t so silly and infatuated as to finish one another’s sentences and call each other by sickly nick-names, she noticed with approval, but they had a simpatico rhythm, a way of reacting to one another, which denoted people so similar they could almost share identical genes.

As she settled in front of the fire with Alexandra and Pascal while the others started wrapping up for a cold, dark post-prandial walk with the kids, she caught her daughter’s hand and squeezed it.

‘I think we’re going to have another family wedding soon,’ she whispered in a very loud stage hiss, nudging her grey-pencilled eyebrows towards Tash who was trying to fit Tom into a pair of her wellies, and Niall who was tickling Tor until she dissolved into shrieking, delighted giggles.

‘Really?’ Alexandra looked terribly excited.

‘Oh, yes.’ Etty hiccuped slightly. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already asked her. I expect they’ll announce it tomorrow – with the whole family gathered.’

‘Gosh, do you think so?’ Alexandra found she couldn’t stop smiling. Whether it was from the champagne or her mother’s certainty, she couldn’t work out. Tash getting married to lovely Niall! The thought filled her with warm little shivers of hope.

‘What makes you so sure, Etty?’ Pascal puffed out his cheeks sceptically.

‘Once one reaches my grand age,
chéri
, one knows it all,’ she said haughtily. ‘Besides,’ she hissed under her breath, ‘she ees wearing a ring on her engagement finger. One of those modern, trendy designers, I think. Probably Tiffany’s.’

‘What?’ Alexandra and Pascal both craned around to gape, but Tash had pulled on her gloves and had Tom’s hand in one furry mitt, the door latch in the other.

Sally, who hated walking and was afraid of the dark, plumped down beside her mother-in-law, certain that she had just caught the tail end of the most riveting piece of gossip.

‘I think I’ll stay here and chat, Matty.’ She smiled blithely at her husband as he donned his crocheted hat once more. ‘Keep an eye on Linus in the face of all this drunkenness.’ She nodded towards Pascal, who was vaguely trying to offer his step-grandson a champagne cork instead of his dummy to stop him bawling.

‘Sure,’ Matty struggled into his cord jacket, unaware that Polly had tied the sleeves together.

‘We’ll only be half an hour or so,’ Tash told her mother as she wandered out, letting in a rush of cold air in her wake. ‘Just march this lot across the fields in the dark to see Zoe’s kids’ old ponies then back.’

‘’Bye, darling!’ Alexandra waved her off and turned back to Pascal and Etty. ‘This is so, so exciting. I can’t wait to talk to James about it tomorrow.’

Etty and Pascal both exchanged horrified glances.

‘About what?’ Sally refreshed her glass of mineral water with a vast slug of brandy.

‘Tash and Niall are engaged!’ Alexandra confessed sotto voce as Matty followed the others out, having finally unknotted his sleeves.

‘Ohmygod, how wonderful!’ Sally whooped. ‘Lisette will be so, so angry.’

Crunching over crisp, hard grass, Niall linked his fingers through Tash’s and pressed a warm, steamy-breathed kiss into her cold ear.

‘What’s this?’ He fingered a scratchy lump through her glove.

Tash looked down, trying to remember.

‘Oh, that – I’d forgotten I still had it on,’ she laughed. ‘I pulled a cracker with Rufus this morning. It was my prize – he put it on me and proposed on Wally’s behalf.’

‘The little snake!’ Niall pulled her closer. ‘I hope you said no?’

‘I said I’d think about it.’

‘And have you?’

‘Well, Wally’s a great listener.’

‘Bad breath.’

‘Lovely brown eyes.’

‘Farts in public, so he does.’

‘Tremendously loyal.’

‘To Gus.’

‘Sleeps with me more often than you do.’

‘Eats his own faeces.’

‘I’ll say no.’

‘Good.’

When they got back, Etty was snoring on the sofa with a glass of brandy tipping into her silk cleavage, and Pascal was watching the blue video and furtively drinking the last of the Chianti. He hastily discarded it into a dead pot plant when the door opened.

Talking in hushed voices, Alexandra and Sally were side-by-side on the sofa having a cryptic conversation about sympathetic vicars which they instantly changed to Royal gossip when the walkers trooped in, blowing out steam and banging their palms together.

‘You ready for the off soon?’ Matty asked his wife, hangover already cramping his temples.

Sally hiccuped mildly and stretched an arm over the crocheted blanket on the sofa-back to clasp his.

‘’Fraid Alexandra and I got a bit bladdered, darling.’ She went slightly cross-eyed as she smiled up at him, cheeks flushed from the fire which she’d recently banked up with logs. ‘Looks like we’ll have to shack up here for the night after all – go to Sophia’s party tomorrow perhaps?’

Matty hissed through his teeth, but he couldn’t really complain. He saw Niall, his oldest friend, so seldom. And they hadn’t had a chance to catch up yet. He could argue out the Sophia thing tomorrow. But there was one thing that he was singularly determined upon: they were going to sleep on the floor here tonight, not in the Moncrieffs’ vast, dog-smelling, draughty farmhouse.

‘Where are you staying, Mother?’ He looked down at Alexandra’s glossy brown crown.

‘Oh – some local hotel Pascal booked us into. The Royal Beech, isn’t it, darling?’

‘Oak, I think,’ Pascal was sniffing around in the kitchen for more wine.

‘But that’s miles away!’ Tash laughed. ‘At least three-quarters of an hour’s drive.’

‘Oh dear, I suppose we’d better set off. Kick Granny, will you, Polly?’

‘Niall,’ Sally started cautiously as she returned from a trip to the loo, ‘this might sound very odd, but there appears to be a large white turkey asleep on your bed.’

‘NIALL AND TASH ARE to be married, darling. Isn’t it tremendously exciting?’ were the first words that Alexandra had directed towards her ex-husband, James French, for almost two years.

He took them with remarkable calm, his rather dour and flabby but still patrician face scarcely affording a twitch of a muscle in response. His murky green eyes, tinged with the red cross-latticing from a boozy Christmas Day, flickered fractionally towards his tall younger daughter and her scruffy partner before returning to the excited, brimming gaze of his first wife.

‘Really?’ He could barely be bothered to utter the word.

Alexandra had cornered him in their elder daughter’s more formal sitting room – an oppressive panelled tomb of crimson and oak, redecorated almost as often as Sophia herself. They were downing pre-lunch drinks as Sophia dashed around feigning panic, her black hair swept up to Ivana Trump heights, her long slim body swathed in Ralph Lauren wool, her face as exquisitely painted as the Old Masters adorning the panelled walls. Even though she had every finite detail of her lunch meticulously planned and listed on the schedule pinned to the fridge by a magnet, she could not relax.

Once a successful cover-girl who had been tipped for years to be a future supermodel and then grown too old to be super enough, she had achieved coffee-table tome fame instead by marrying into one of the oldest aristocratic families in the country – the hunting-mad, flat-chinned, acutely unacademic Merediths, who had square miles of estates attached to their several inherited titles, but barely enough realisable wealth to buy a square meal.

At first the family had staunchly disapproved of Sophia’s middle-class connections and glitzy past, perceiving her as a ‘showgirl’. Yet during the six years of her marriage to the amiable, oafish heir to the family’s estates, Ben, she had proved herself to be far more commercially astute than the rest of the clan, who thought that opening one’s house to the public was simply a matter of propping the front door ajar with a gumboot scraper and getting a local lout to direct cars into a flat field somewhere. Drawing on her celebrity-circuit and café-society connections, Sophia had transformed the Merediths’ stately gothic pile, Holdham Hall, into a popular venue for charity functions, film location shoots and rich-at-play events, which in turn drew great swathes of the public for a nose around during the five summer months that the house was opened, hoping to spot a star – one of whom was Sophia herself, a
Tatler
and gossip-column regular.