Bad Brides (20 page)

‘There you go, dear,’ he said. ‘Get that down you, it’ll help.’

One step brought him to Milly’s side, picking up her hair and twisting it to the top of her head, his lips pursed in consideration. Eva downed the coffee in one go recklessly. It had been
rum in the flask, and it did the trick, jolting her effectively back into the present moment. She gasped, swallowed, sat up straighter, threw back her hair and rejoined the buzz of activity in the
RV.

They were on a tight schedule, and the team of freelancers were at the top of their game: Milly was already stepping into the Matthew Williamson dress, which was puddled on a special throw cloth
on the floor of the vehicle to avoid any marking. The stylist and her assistant were easing the silk-chiffon up Milly’s narrow torso, her bony shoulders, cooing softly as they did so; they
pulled up the concealed zip at the low waist, slipped the covered buttons at the side of her waist into their little silk loops. The back was open, two overlapping panels at the shoulders exposing
her shoulder blades.

Close up, the blades were too sharp, the tiny vertebrae too visibly knobbled. But from a distance, the harsh edges blurred by sunlight, Milly looked like a perfect princess bride. The
hairstylist piled her curls to one side, high and over one ear, echoing the asymmetric neckline, taking the look from simply beautiful to high-fashion elegance: Milly’s lips had been painted
in a daring fuchsia, glossed with gold, which drew the focus to them, again turning the ridiculously pretty dress into something more cutting-edge.

Eva picked up her suede jewellery roll and unfastened it, spreading it out on her lap, no doubt at all in her mind about the earrings the dress needed: she and the stylist had already agreed
upon them. They were a new interpretation of the classic chandelier style, slender silver chains dangling from a horizontal hoop, each chain bearing a sculpted leaf made of bluebell and powder-blue
quartzite, the leaves tinkling like tiny fountains against each other. The bluebell leaves were the colour of Milly’s eyes, the powder-blue quartzite a perfect match for Tarquin’s
otherworldly irises, and the earrings were shown off perfectly by the high-piled hairstyle which left Milly’s white neck bare.

As Milly stepped down from the RV, the make-up artist handing her down the steps, the stylist and her assistant positioned on either side, ready to take swathes of the dress in their hands so
that it would never touch the dirt of the farm track, Tarquin’s indrawn breath of awe was clearly audible. The hairstylist glanced at Eva sympathetically and reached for his hip flask again
now that this part of his job was perfectly done. Tarquin, wearing a linen shirt, a white and blue silk Paul Smith waistcoat in a chintz print, and a tailored pair of white Armani trousers, came
forward to take the hand that his fiancée was extending to him. Milly’s dazzling smile said that she was perfectly aware that she had never looked quite so beautiful.

‘I can’t breathe,’ Tarquin said, staring at her in wonder. ‘You literally take my breath away.’

‘So how are you managing to talk?’ the hairstylist muttered to himself, filling the cap of his flask and tossing its contents back with a practised dash of his wrist.

‘Milly, you were telling me before about the muffins you like to bake for Tarquin?’ the journalist asked as they walked slowly and carefully over to the cashmere rug that had been
laid (with two more sturdy rugs underneath it for protection) beneath the spreading branches of an apple tree.

Milly was being closely trailed by the stylist and assistant as if they were bridesmaids carrying her train, but Tarquin was ahead, his invisible mascara being touched up by the make-up artist,
so Milly could reply confidently: ‘Yes, I love to bake. I’ve definitely got a housewife side to me whenever I get the chance. I actually got a great idea from
Devon and
Cesare’s Baking Battle
recently – she made a batch of muffin mix and then baked it in a cake tin for a bit longer than the muffin recipe with lots of icing sugar on top. It was
delicious – Tarquin loved it! I served it with whipped cream and raspberries.’

Word for word, this was what Eva had done at the weekend, baked a muffin cake for a brunch that Milly and Tarquin had hosted. Trailing behind them, Eva heard Milly’s words with
incredulity. She had heard Milly parrot her own deeply felt speeches on the difficulties of ethical mining, or sustainable resources and healthy water supplies in the Third World, many times before
in
Guardian
or
Independent
interviews, and had had no problem with that; Eva was quite aware that Milly’s principles were not yet as fundamentally rooted as her own, and if
Milly needed to use Eva’s words in the process of working her way into the heart of the issues, that was fine.

But going so far as to say that she baked something I made? Which, actually, was from a Delia Smith recipe – but Delia isn’t trendy enough for Milly. She put Devon and Cesare in
there instead because they’re so much sexier.

Eva must have cleared her throat, made a noise of some sort, because Milly glanced back, the earrings dangling from her lobes chiming like fairy bells at the movement, and said quickly to the
journalist: ‘Oh, and you will get in a bit of bumf about the earrings, won’t you? They’re made from recycled silver, melted down. We’re trying to get a Fairtrade
classification for the process – there really isn’t any way to source silver ethically yet, though you can get some from a mine in Bolivia without using cyanide or mercury. Right now
though, we prefer to use recycled from a closed-loop process.’

Eva realized she was nodding seriously. Milly was hitting all the important points, explaining the difficulties of morally sourcing metal and the solutions the Responsible Jewellery Council were
evolving. Milly then moved onto quartzite, fingering one earring for emphasis, and by the time they reached the picnic area and Milly was lifting one thin white leg from the Hunter welly and
waiting while a pale leather Reed Krakoff strappy sandal was fitted to her foot, Eva had filed the muffin cake anecdote away to be discussed with Milly later.

Though she did sidle up to the journalist as Milly was lowered by stages to the cashmere rug and say: ‘Actually, it was a Delia Smith recipe Milly used for that muffin cake. Not a Devon
one.’

‘Oh, really?’ the journalist said blankly, looking down at her notepad but not bothering to make a note of the correction.

Feeling relieved at having set the record straight, Eva turned to see Milly, who was by now stretched out on the rug, her head in Tarquin’s lap, his long legs extended in front of him.
Milly was being positioned to lie in a curve wrapping around him, her arms outspread, her legs together, the myriad tiers of the skirt opened like petals by the stylist and the assistant for
maximum effect. From an aerial view, it looked as if she had been dropped there from the sky, an angel fallen slowly and gracefully to earth, caught by the arms of her lover: the photographer was
climbing a stepladder held firmly still by two of his sidekicks as a third reached up to hand him a Polaroid for the first shots. With Milly and Tarquin’s golden hair, blue eyes, pale skin,
and reddened lips – Tarquin’s had been very lightly stained by the make-up artist to echo Milly’s – they were absolutely ethereal, a perfectly matched pair.

‘Feed her some blackberries,’ the photographer instructed. ‘Let’s get a really nice-looking one.’

‘Not over the dress! Not over the dress!’ the stylist yelped like a terrified Chihuahua. ‘The stain will
never
come out!’

The assistant picked out a rich, purplish-black berry, fat with juice, and placed a newspaper underneath it as she leaned cautiously over the fringed edge of the blanket, handing it to Tarquin;
docilely, he took it, holding it over Milly’s parted, glossy lips. The deep rich colour against the fuchsia lipstick and the pastels of the rest of the scene immediately drew the focus.

‘Oh
wow
,’ the make-up artist breathed in appreciation. She spoke for the entire group, who were all sighing at the exquisite tableau in front of them.

‘It’s like an eighteenth-century painting,’ Eva observed. ‘A Watteau or a Boucher.’

‘Yes! Perfect, yes!’

The
Telegraph
journalist scribbled away furiously: Eva’s comment would end up in the opening paragraph of the adulatory interview that would run alongside the photo shoot. Milly
tilted her head to cast Eva an approving smile: she didn’t have the faintest idea who Watteau or Boucher were, that they were famous for beautiful pastoral paintings, decorative allegories of
nymphs and their swains picnicking in the countryside, but she knew that, yet again, Eva had said the perfect thing, had steered Milly’s image into exactly the place it needed to be.

Tarquin, however, knew precisely what Eva meant, and his sky-blue eyes rose for a moment to Eva’s face, his reddened lips parting in a sweet smile.

‘Gosh, what a compliment,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Eva! I was thinking this is sort of like a
fête galante
, isn’t it? Or is it more like a
fête
champêtre
?’

Eva considered this, the thought process on her expressive face.

‘
Galante
, I’d say,’ she concluded. ‘You’re both dressed so beautifully.
Champêtre
is more country-style.’

‘Um – could you just clarify the distinction,’ the journalist whispered to Eva: this was pretty high-level intellectual stuff, even for a
Telegraph
writer.

‘They both have outdoor settings. A
fête galante
really translates as “gallant party” and describes eighteenth-century aristocrats at leisure in the beautiful
grounds of their chateaux.
Champêtre
is pastoral, more in the countryside rather than in a landscaped garden,’ Eva explained.

Milly, never happy when she wasn’t the centre of attention, wriggled a little and said seductively to her fiancé in a baby voice: ‘Sweetie, feed me – feed me the yummy
blackbewwy.’

‘Oops! Sorry, darling.’

Tarquin returned his gaze to his beloved and the photographer promptly started snapping away. Milly altered her position every few seconds, little moves of the head, twists of her body, offering
a whole range of different poses and angles just as professional models did to maximize the effects of the set-up. When she raised one slender white hand and hovered it just over Tarquin’s
cheek, as if caressing him adoringly – you never actually touched in photographs, to avoid denting the skin or smudging any make-up – the photographer was beside himself.

‘Oh come on, cover shot, cover
shot
!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is bloody
perfect . . .
’

And it was. A month later, that very image was the cover of the Saturday magazine, Milly reclining beautifully in Tarquin’s lap, the skirts of her dress spreading over the pale blue rug,
her eyes half-closed in ecstasy as she seemed to stroke her lover’s face. Ironically, the picture editor Photoshopped in a Gala apple instead of the blackberry, deciding that the proportions
worked better, and that it echoed the ripe apples on the branches of the tree just visible in the shot; Tarquin, who had written a song about blackberries and beloveds in the meantime, was rather
cast down for a while, but Milly consoled him in the way outlined by the hairstylist, which definitely helped to cheer him up.

Some extra set-ups had been sketched out, and there were more dresses to be worn, but after the runaway success of the picnic rug photographs, the consensus was that they were done; the early
start was beginning to tell on all of them, the sun was now fully overhead and casting too much light for the hazy effect they had wanted to capture, and everyone packed up. Milly kept her full
hair and make-up, however. She had a meeting with Maitland Parks, the celebrated film director, later on that day, and wanted to walk in looking as stunning as possible. She also made a spirited
attempt to ‘borrow’ the Dolce and Gabbana lace dress, but the stylist was far too experienced with the manoeuvrings of young actresses to allow any such thing; she knew perfectly well
that Milly would claim a few days later that she’d accidentally burnt a hole in the dress, or spilt Coke on it, and it wasn’t worth returning to the magazine.

‘If she wants to
borrow
something,’ she said in an aside to her assistant, ‘she can call Dolce’s PRs directly, get them to bike something over, and then
they
can have the fun of chasing her to get it back in one piece.’

‘What if she actually hangs onto it?’ the assistant asked.

The stylist’s eyebrows shot practically to the roof of the RV. ‘
Please!
Dolce’ll just blacklist her if she doesn’t give something back,’ she said
pityingly. ‘And she doesn’t want that to happen. None of the major labels are giving her stuff for free yet. Angelina Jolie she
ain’t
– she’s just another
little starlet on the make.’

The stylist was quite right: Milly was very much on the make. The afternoon appointment with Maitland Parks in the penthouse suite of the Charlotte Street Hotel was of great
importance to her, and she was determined to create the best impression possible. Maitland Parks was barely in his thirties, but had already directed two very well-received arthouse films in the
mumblecore genre – hyper-naturalistic, partly improvised movies about young adults, recently graduated from college, loafing around waiting aimlessly for their lives to start.

Now, with backing from a major studio, he had the budget to step up to the big leagues, and was planning a film set in Portland, Oregon, dimly understood to be about a group of postgraduate
students researching aspects of human behaviour while falling in and out of love with each other. The cast was to be a roster of young, beautiful actors in their early twenties, and there was
already a big buzz around
And When We Fall
, the working title of the screenplay. Milly had been on the phone to her agent almost every day for the last few weeks, insisting that she get a
chance to meet Maitland when he came to London for casting.