Farm Fatale (43 page)

    Rosie looked up. "If you like."

    "Oakie Cokie is my therapist." Matt searched her face for a reaction. She looked back at him blankly. What did he want her to say?

    "I don't want to sound like an egomaniac or anything," he said, his eyes fixed on her in a mixture of amazement and amusement, "but I thought you might have heard I'd become, um, a bit of a recluse. I mean, I'm not trying to blow my own trumpet, but it was on the front page of all the papers and
OK!
did a special commemorative edition…Oh my God, just listen to me." He let out what sounded suspiciously like a snort. His shoulders were shaking, Rosie saw.

    "Yes, I did know that." She smiled at him uncertainly. Was he laughing?

    "Want to know why?" His smile had switched itself abruptly off.

    I know why, Rosie thought. Bella told me. Champagne D'Vyne broke your heart. "If you want to tell me," she muttered.

    "Christ, I can't get over you. No one's ever said that before. People are usually right in there with the most personal fucking questions."

    Rosie sketched on. His lashes, she saw, were the longest she had ever seen on a man.

    "It was all to do with…" Matt began, addressing his knees, then paused. Rosie's pencil stopped, waiting for the first mention of Champagne's name. She felt, suddenly, intensely curious.

    "…the first two albums being such hits. You know the story. Or perhaps you don't?" As Matt flicked an amused, green glance up at her, Rosie blushed and shook her head. "OK, well, it was like this. One minute I was singing into my mother's hairbrush, then I was driving a van, doing church-hall concerts. No one had a fucking clue who I was. I was so underground I practically hit the water table. Next thing I knew, some A and R men saw me in a pub in Northampton and thought I was the hottest thing since vindaloo. Then Geordie was all over me like a rash, I hit Abbey Road, and
Posh
Totty
hit number one. Suddenly there I was. Playing more stadiums than David Beckham."

    Rosie put her pencil down.

    "At first"—Matt pushed a lock of hair out of one eye—"there was no stopping me. My second album—
What Did Your Last One
Die Of?
—came out and was even bigger than the first. I could do no wrong. I thought I was God's gift. And of course it went straight to my head. Used to have two seats booked on every flight, one for me and one for my ego. I'd have the entire top floor of a hotel reserved because I didn't want anybody else near. All my hotel bills had at least ten thousand pounds extra on them for damages. I made it a point of honor to wreck the rooms, throw the TV sets out of the windows and all that." He smiled mirthlessly, eyes roaming unhappily up and down the windows. "Harder than it sounds, by the way. TVs nowadays—well, you cant throw them out of windows anymore. They're all huge."

    Matt's eyes narrowed. His lips twisted ruefully. "I was such a plonker. Refusing to sit anywhere but the very front of first class because the other passengers were too noisy at the back. Ordering five Savile Row suits a week in materials more suited to soft furnishings than menswear. Going to the Met Bar so often I practically had my own bloody sofa. You ever been to the Met Bar?" he suddenly demanded.

    Rosie shook her head. It had always sounded terrifying to her. Mark had gone there for some feature, she recalled. Having been deemed insufficiently cool to enter on his own merit, he had had to book a room to enter the hallowed portals of style as a hotel resident. The managing editor had been furious at the cost. But not as furious as Mark at the indignity. Her heart lifted slightly at the memory.

    "Well, don't bother," Matt snapped. "You'll only meet people like me. Full of champagne and self-loathing. There I was, the boy who slapped the world's face, determined to knee it in the balls as well. There was nothing I wouldn't do; no one I wouldn't do it with. Girls?" His eyes shot to the ceiling. "My motto was the Four F's. Find 'em. Feel 'em. Fuck 'em. Forget 'em."

    He shot a chastened glance at Rosie. "Sorry," he muttered. "But it happened. Hell, I even had a reputation for the number of pint glasses I could dangle off my cock."

    Rosie, head lowered over her work again, hoped he was not going to ask her to guess how many. Why was he telling her all this? Who did he think she was, Susie Orbach?

    There was a silence.

    He had, she saw as she glanced up, withdrawn into himself again. His expression had darkened.

    "Fame was fun at first. For about five minutes. Then I got sick of it.
Really
sick of it. Sick of the grungy greasefests in airport McDonald's, sick of the planes, sick of if-this-is-Monday-it-must-beMilwaukee." He rubbed his eyes and looked at her desolately. "But, hey, what was my problem? My career had taken off like a rocket, I was working every hour of the day and traveling to countries I never even knew existed. But," he finished, his voice dropping an octave, "I was pretty confused and unhappy."

    "But why?" asked Rosie, thinking irresistibly of Mark, who was confused and unhappy for precisely the opposite reasons. "When you had the world at your feet like that." Perhaps this was where Champagne D'Vyne came in.

    Matt shot her a sardonic look. "Because I hated every minute. I was stressing obsessively and was completely fucking terrified about the future. The first album was huge and trying to beat it was impossible. Then when I did beat it, I realized I was expected to do it again, four months later. The promotional stuff was manic. Every day it was 'You have a meet-and-greet here, then an interview there, then a TV show here,' and in the end, I just couldn't do it. The fans never left me alone. They even took soil from my garden. They cut bits of my hair off when I was in the supermarket. In the days when I still went to the supermarket." He paused. Rosie thought she had never seen anyone that wistful about Tesco. There was a silence. Then Matt spoke again. "I was all over the papers, all the time. My entire private life had been reduced to something that cost thirty-five pence. So I started to go off the rails. Took so much charlie my septum almost fell out. Got on the booze as well, for good measure—and I had a few of them, I can tell you. Half a bottle of sherry first thing in the morning. Hair of the dog, it was. But then I had the dog as well and in the end I opened an entire kennel." He groaned. "And there were other problems. Relationships and things…"

    
Relationships and things
. Champagne D'Vyne, in other words, surely. No wonder he'd had a breakdown if he'd had to cope with her leaving him along with everything else. And what sort of a woman could she be, Rosie wondered, unceremoniously abandoning a lover already suffering to such an extravagant extent it made her own recent traumas over Jack and Mark look like a grazed knee.

    "Sorry. I'm crapping on," Matt muttered, looking at her sheepishly. "You're wondering what all this has got to do with the party."

    "Sort of," mumbled Rosie.

    "After the breakdown," Matt told her, "my confidence was at an all-time low. I hid away here in Ladymead. I could barely get up, let alone write songs. I'm better at the getting up now, but the songs are still a struggle. And as for going onstage, well, I walked off a stage in L.A. a year ago and I haven't set foot on one since. Not that anyone saw me walk off. I was playing behind a wall of bricks meant to represent the alienation of the rock star." He flashed her a grin. "Pretentious,
moi
? I'd gone bonkers, basically." Silence again.

    "I don't know what to say," Rosie said eventually, "except that I feel better than I have done for years about being totally poor and a complete failure at everything. I'd always imagined being rich and famous to be fun, you see."

    Matt shot her a suspicious look, as if checking to see that she wasn't being sarcastic. Then he laughed.

    "Of course it's bloody fun. It's the best fucking fun in the world. It's a dream come true. A privilege. My problem was that I couldn't see any of that. Spent all my time feeling sorry for myself." He twisted his lips. "How sad was I?"

    "Well, relationship problems can sometimes affect you that way," Rosie said slowly, thinking of her own recent past and curious about the part Champagne D'Vyne had played in all this. Hadn't she been the real root cause of his breakdown? But he had not mentioned her. Had she hit him that hard then? That deep?

    Matt was looking at her, blinking as if jolted from his train of thought. "Oh…yeah," he said. "Course they can. Listen, are you sure I'm not boring the arse off you? Only it's making me feel a lot better."

    Rosie shook her head. Hearing about Champagne—Mark's replacement on the paper, after all—would be interesting. On the basis that any enemy of his was a friend of hers.

    "Oakie's my latest therapist," Matt said, veering off the elusive subject once again. "I'd tried everyone under the sun before him. Every treatment imaginable from having crystals shoved up my sphincter to primal screaming."

    Rosie giggled, thinking that having small, sharp things shoved up your bum probably would have that effect.

    "Then I found Oakie, who told me that the only way to build my confidence up again and literally get my act together was to go out and meet people. Get used to contact again. Start with smallscale social events, like that bloody stupid fancy-dress party. I wanted to turn it down, but he wouldn't let me. It was him that made me go." Matt's eyes widened. "
On my own
. It was the first time I'd been out of Ladymead for
months
. By the time I met you, I was shitting myself. The thought of meeting other people was
terrifying
."

    He bent his head. "You were the first woman I'd spoken to for ages," he muttered, addressing the floor. "It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be."

    Thanks, thought Rosie, suppressing a smile. Surely now he'd get on to the subject of his legendary girlfriend?

    "And then when you mentioned you were an illustrator, I hit on the idea of the portrait."

    Rosie looked over at the wall of paintings. Imagine. Her humble daub hanging next to those. "It's a great idea."

    Matt looked pleased. "Glad you think so. Oakie said sitting opposite someone else for hours on end would be kill or cure. Although whether for me or you, I'm not sure. And the bonus, of course, is that there will hopefully be a nice picture at the end of it as well."

    "Oh," said Rosie, deflated.

***

"Madam?"

    "Yes?" It was Murgatroyd. The session had ended. At the large oak door on the way out, Rosie paused.

    "Mr. Locke has asked me to ask you, before you leave, what your travel plans are."

    "Travel plans?" repeated Rosie, before the penny dropped. Of course. No doubt Matt thought the entire world could fly off to Rome and Cap Ferrat on a whim, just as he could. He probably imagined she was hopping over to Capri that very weekend, in fact, and was worried about the effect her globetrotting would have on the sittings. "I'm not going anywhere," she said flatly. In any sense of the word, she reflected miserably.

    Murgatroyd raised an eyebrow. "Mr. Locke means travel to Ladymead, madam. He wonders by what means you get here. He hasn't noticed a car or a bicycle."

    "I walk. From the village." Rosie's heart was already sinking at the prospect of walking back.

    "That's what he thought. He asked me to ask if you would mind if he sent the car for you."

    "Not at all, I'd love it," said Rosie, amazed and delighted.

    "He thought you might appreciate a lift home as well, madam," Murgatroyd continued. "If you'd just come this way, madam. You can tell me on the journey what time you'd like to be picked up in the morning."

Bella tried not to sound astonished at Rosie's account of Ladymead, delivered, as promised, the moment she arrived back at Cinder Lane. "Hmm," she said. "It's what you can't see that counts. Darling, you might mention
Insider
to Matt. I could do with something huge for the October issue." She paused. "How's it all going, anyway?"

    "Oh, OK, I think," said Rosie doubtfully. "The first session seemed to go quite well." It was hard to work out how it was really going. Or what she thought about it. Matt was so very different from what she had expected. As was the fact that she had assumed the role of his confidante.

    "I wasn't meaning the
work
, darling."

    "Well, what else is there?"

    "
Darling
," said Bella. Rosie pictured her fingers drumming impatiently on the Biedermeier console that supported the telephone. In fact, she could actually hear them.
Tap
,
tap
,
tap
. "Exclusive access to eligible rich bachelor and all that?"
Tap.

    "Matt's not interested in me. He's not even interested in having his portrait painted. It's part of his therapy apparently."

    Bella sniggered. " That old line."

    Rosie was indignant. "It's true. He's had a nervous breakdown and now he wants to be back on his feet. The idea of the picture is that he practices human interaction while it's painted."

    "Human interaction, eh? It gets better and better, darling."

    "Oh, lay off, Bel," Rosie wailed. "You've got it completely wrong. And even if he was interested in me,
which he isn't
, I wouldn't touch him with a barge pole. He's not a very nice person." In her heart of hearts, however, she was no longer sure she still believed either of these things. The lift home in the Mercedes had smashed through the last of her defenses.