Farm Fatale (2 page)

    "She did get lost."

    Mark was zipping up his gray suit trousers. "She was horrified to discover we lived in the one part of east London without a single Britart studio, edgy designer atelier, or appearance in a Guy Ritchie film." He shrugged on the crumpled jacket. "Look, do we have to go, seriously? Can't we stay in and have a curry? I got a new video yesterday—
Scream If You Know What I Did Last Friday 13th
."

    "Sorry," Rosie said firmly. "We've been booked for ages. We can't put her numbers out."

    After several attempts at slamming it, Mark finally succeeded in shutting the flat door behind him. Rosie struggled upright from the beanbag chair. The unenticing prospect of a long day bent over her drawing board painting Pisces and plum tomatoes stretched ahead. But it wasn't really the work that was the problem. It was the surroundings. Rosie looked glumly around at the sitting room, at the rumpled, crummy, paisley cotton throws that somehow hinted at the cheap and nasty floral-print sofa they were meant to be disguising. She contemplated the plants, their dusty leaves accentuating the dark foliage snaking across the disgusting seventies wallpaper. Through the grimy windows, the surrounding tower blocks pressed in like bullies on a playground.

    Moving into the wardrobe-size kitchen, she looked up at the strip-lit ceiling, where yellow stains represented decades of cooking that owed nothing to Delia Smith. Once upon a time, she remembered, there had been talk of repainting. Probably around the same time that there had been talk of removing the hideous wallpaper and of replacing the hairy orange floor tiles with sisal from a John Lewis store. None of which had ever come to anything.

    How easy it would be, Rosie thought, if she could simply pick up her things and move away on her own. But that was impossible. Difficult though Mark often was, she loved him.

    "Although God knows what you see in him," Bella, who was no fonder of Mark than he was of her, would say. "I suppose he's good-looking," she would grudgingly admit.

    
And
passionate, Rosie would silently add, even if sometimes it did take the form of bad temper.
And
funny, although he could be acerbic at tinies.
And
enthusiastic.
And
ambitious.
And
…well, that would do.

    As she ran hot water over the pots in the sink and squirted in the shampoo standing in for dishwashing soap until someone—no doubt her—remembered to buy some, Rosie tried not to think of Bella's wenge wood–fronted dishwasher, not to mention her gardener, housekeeper, hot and cold running nannies, and brace of cleaners. Or the fact that, despite a supposed full-time job as a stylist for a fashionable interior-design magazine, Bella had so much time and money on her hands that she could change the inside of her house almost as often as her clothes. Rosie had picked up the telephone only the day before to find Bella wondering where she could get Bakelite light switches for her downstairs loos.

    Rosie sighed. That Bella had been at the front of the queue when good fortune was dispensed was indisputable. The lucky star that had, throughout her teens, ensured that Bella never went short of boyfriends, money, or the latest clothes had more latterly ensured that she never got parking tickets, failed to catch a waiter's eye, or hung about more than five minutes for a taxi. In the fullness of time, this obliging planet had also delivered Simon, heir to a brewing fortune, who had fallen for Bella at a Chelsea dinner party.

    Six months of weekends in Paris and Venice later, Bella had walked up the aisle in a Ben de Lis dress, having arrived in a landau driven by four of the brewing company's shire horses. Following a honeymoon in Porto Ercole, she had arrived back to a white-stuccoed slice of North London real-estate splendor. Number 28 Campbell Crescent boasted an original fanlight, four lavatories including two en suite, an upstairs sitting room the size of a ballroom, a porticoed entrance flanked by sculpted bay trees in pots of impeccable plainness, and a gleaming, period boot scraper. The whole ensemble drove Mark mad with jealousy.

    As she rinsed a sequence of chipped mugs under the tap, Rosie anticipated the approaching evening with dread. Shy, gauche, and gentle, she always felt more like a waitress than a guest at her friend's loud and competitive dinner parties. Odd, really, considering how well she knew the territory. Not to mention the conversation, which rarely varied. School fees (the ruinous nature of). Property prices (the completely justified/obscene rise of, depending on whether one was selling or buying). Cleaners (the cheek of). Beach holidays in Norfolk (the wonders of).
The Naked Chef
(ditto). The children's television of the early 1970s (ditto). Exotic foreign circuses (ditto). Organic delivery boxes (ditto). Ralph Fiennes (ditto), whom someone had always spotted in their local cheese shop (ditto). Rosie's heart sank at the prospect.

    The thought of seeing Bella was the only saving grace. She desperately needed to talk to her about the countryside, with particular reference to ways of persuading Mark to move there. Bella, while a committed urbanite and unlikely to support the idea in principle, would certainly rise to the challenge of forcing Rosie's boyfriend to do something he didn't want to. And in any case—Rosie grinned as the thought struck her—Bella's competitive North London neighbors were an anti-urban argument in themselves. Usually. Her heart beat fast with fear at the thought that her friend might, just this once, have invited someone reasonable.

Luckily, she hadn't. That they were worse than ever was made obvious in the first five seconds.

    "Sorry I'm late. Someone under the train at Aldgate East," Rosie gasped, noticing that Mark wasn't there yet either.

    "Really," said a hard-bodied blonde whose sticklike arms rattled with bracelets. "People are so bloody inconsiderate, aren't they? Don't they realize some of us have dinner parties to go to?"

    "This is Xa." Bella pushed the blonde in Rosie's direction. "Short for Xanthippe. She's in fashion PR."

    "Hi," rasped Xa. "We were just discussing this
fabulous
French circus, Cirque du Soleil. Have you heard of them?"

    Here we go again, thought Rosie.

    Just how was it, Rosie wondered, that Bella, her large-eyed Italianate face framed by a chin-length bob of glossy black, had managed to be at the front of the looks queue as well as the luck one? Rosie had always felt herself vague and smudgy-looking beside the strong and definite lines of her friend. Bella, however, disagreed. She had a theory about what certain men found attractive about Rosie. "They adore you because you remind them of that blond choirboy in the fourth form that they always wanted to roger behind the bike sheds." Rosie had never been entirely convinced about this; certainly she had failed to have an electric effect on either of the men present tonight. After a cursory glance following her entrance, they were now talking to each other with their backs turned. And Mark, of course, was in thrall to her to such an extent that he had as yet failed to turn up at all.

    "This is Florian. He's married to Xa. Works in television." Bella handed her a glass of champagne and pulled at the sleeve of a tanned man with prosperous hair and aspirational glasses chatting animatedly to the fat, red-faced Simon.

    Bella suddenly gave an excited squeal and nudged Xa. "Oooh. Almost forgot. How was the
wedding
?"

"Fabulous. The Naked Chef was there, as well as Ralph Fiennes."

    "
No!
" exclaimed Bella, clasping her hands in ecstasy. "How
amazing
. I bumped into him in the cheese shop only the other day."

    Rosie shifted from foot to foot, wishing desperately that Mark would come. And even more desperately that they had stayed at home after all and watched
Scream If You Know What I Did Last
Friday 13th
. She disliked horror films but preferred them to horror dinner parties. This showed every sign of being Bella's worst yet, and Mark wasn't even here to appreciate it. Nor had there been any opportunity to have the longed-for word with Bella.

    "Went to a rather glamorous wedding yesterday," Xa informed Rosie in a throaty bark. "Friend of mine who's a successful fashion designer."

    Florian snorted contemptuously. "So why the hell couldn't she afford better church decorations? Bloody candleholders were bakedbean tins without the labels on."

    "Baked-bean tins are
tremendously
chic," returned Xa crushingly.

    "What about those ketchup bottles with the roses in, then?"

    "HP sauce bottles,
actually
.'"

    "It sounds wonderful," croaked Rosie valiantly.

    "Oh, it was," gushed Xa. "The vicar had a tan and Gucci spectacles. And the organist was a woman who apparently used to play with Prince."

    "How
terribly
glamorous," Bella said admiringly.

    "You thought she was some newscaster at first," Florian said accusingly to Xa. "Though God knows how you know what any of them look like. You haven't watched the news since Princess Di died."

    The doorbell rang. Mark, thought Rosie in relief. Bella disappeared behind the old-gold sitting-room door. "Mark, darling!" Rosie heard her exclaiming rather too brightly.

    "I wasn't sure about Jerry wearing that turquoise and orange though…" Xa remarked. As Florian began to stare pointedly at her pink cardigan and lime-green skirt, Xa flared her nostrils furiously. "What exactly is it you don't like about this outfit?" she demanded. "The shop said I looked like a million dollars."

    "Couldn't they have made it pounds?" drawled Florian. "Worth more. Still, I suppose we should be grateful they didn't say euros."

    Mark, Rosie noticed, as he trailed into the sitting room after Bella, had made even less effort than usual. His hair was a mess, and he had tired brown shadows beneath his eyes and ink stains all down his suit. She also noticed, feeling gratified for the first time that evening, that even in that state, he was at least ten times betterlooking than any other man in the room. Xa had apparently noticed the same. Her face suddenly lit up and she began buzzing around him like a particularly chatty bee. The words
Cirque du Soleil
came floating over to Rosie. "Sweetie, I'm just going to check on supper," Bella announced to Simon as she descended the Kandinsky-inspired spiral staircase down to the basement kitchen. "Put something a bit more lively on, will you, angel?"

    As Simon fumblingly replaced the
Buena Vista Social Club
with
Ibiza Club Anthems Vol. 20
, and Mark was finally stung into replying to Xa, Rosie slipped gratefully down to the kitchen after Bella.

    Bella's kitchen was cutting edge in every sense of the word. An expanse of sandblasted glass and industrial stainless steel, with hundreds of recessed lights on the brilliant white ceiling, it looked like a submarine control room. There was no sign of Bella at the vast, eight-ringed, catering-standard stove. Following the faintly discernible scent of cigarette through the open French windows, Rosie found her friend on the deck outside, cheeks concave with the ferocity of her smoking. Bella started in surprise and coughed violently. "Damn, you caught me."

    "Bel, you're supposed to have
given up
."

    "Darling, I work on a glossy, remember. Two packs a day are the legal minimum for appetite-suppressing purposes. Speaking of putting one off one's food," she said, grinning, "how's it going up there?"

    "Great." Rosie smiled back. "Xa was just explaining to Mark as I left how pews were a really fantastic place for Pilates. Said she'd done forty buttock clenches by the time the bride arrived."

    Bella snorted. "Unspeakable, isn't she? Only had them round because Florian's apparently interested in doing some hideoussounding fly-on-the-wall documentary about the barmaids in Simon's pubs or something."

    She stepped back into the kitchen, her metal heels clacking across the hand-polished slate floor tiles, and returned to the stainless steel-topped counter. This was dominated by a large earthenware bowl filled with an arrangement of feathery new carrots, frilly lettuces, bundles of magenta radishes, pearly potatoes, and gleaming tomatoes. Rosie gazed at it in admiration, thinking that it looked like something by Arcimboldo, the Renaissance painter par excellence of over-the-top fruits and vegetables.

    "Gorgeous, isn't it?" Bella smiled. "Field of dreams dot com does a much better organic delivery box. I'm so glad we changed from Heart and Soil. Their apples were always a bit wormy and the tomatoes all had blossom-end rot. Although I must say I was quite tempted by Rocket Man. Dido at the office uses them and apparently the deliveryman is gorgeous. His knobbly russets are to die for."

    Rosie nodded vaguely, wondering if the earth on the potatoes was real. It looked so rich, so brown, almost edible itself, in fact. Bella picked out a lettuce and began a prolonged session of rinsing it under the state-of-the-art tap.

    "Yes, its organic all the way from now on," Bella said, shaking the lettuce energetically around her head in a wire basket and splattering Rosie with water. "I mean, how could anyone put any of those other ghastly things into their bodies?"

    Rosie, who had always wondered how Bella could put a ghastly thing like Simon into her body, did not reply. But evidently she had, with the result that their staggeringly spoiled son, the unspeakable Ptolemy, now walked the earth. Rosie's attention returned to the display of nature's bounty and the countryside longings it provoked. Growing your own organic vegetables in your own garden, she thought, would be infinitely better than having them dumped on your front step in a sack by someone gorgeous from Rocket Man. However knobbly his russets.