Katy Carter Wants a Hero (2 page)

It doesn’t help that Ed Grenville, James’s arch-rival, has a wife who’s such a genius in the kitchen that in contrast Nigella appears amateurish. Sophie, with her perfect blonde bob and immaculate house and immaculate children, would make a Stepford Wife appear sloppy. I’ve got my work cut out if I’m going to compete with her.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m suited for this corporate wife stuff. I bet Jake doesn’t expect Millandra to cook supper for his fellow highwaymen. He’s far more likely to gallop off into the forest with her to a shady dell where there’s wine cooling in a babbling brook and a picnic laid out on a blanket. He’ll feed her strawberries and then lie her back on the blanket and start to kiss her throat. She won’t have to spend her Saturday trying to disguise Marks and Spencer food. Oh for the good old days when women faked orgasms rather than our cooking!

Not that Millandra will fake her orgasms.

If I ever get the time to write one for her, that is.

Catching my eye, Ollie mouths, ‘Pub?’

I nod. Now I’ve remembered the dinner party, I could do with a drink or six.

Forget making Ollie the villain of my novel. I’ll buy him a pint and soften him up for the brilliant idea that has just occurred to me.

Pub here I come.

‘One glass of white wine and a packet of pork scratchings!’

Ollie deposits the spoils of his trip to the bar on to the table. ‘Did I ever tell you about when I worked in a slaughterhouse?’

I grimace. Ollie’s famous for his disgusting collection of student jobs. From plucking turkeys to a gutting line in a chicken factory, you name it, he’s done it. I really don’t want to hear about the revolting skin diseases of all the pigs he’s looked after. Suddenly I don’t fancy my pork scratchings any more.

Ollie peers at me over his Guinness. ‘Tell me all about the latest work of literature. Is it rude? I’m sure I could see steam coming off that exercise book.’

‘You’ll have to wait until it’s published like everybody else,’ I tell him, picking unenthusiastically at my scratchings. Is it my imagination or can I see a pustule?

‘But if I don’t find out what happens to Millandra, I’ll explode,’ he wails. ‘It’s the only thing that kept me going through the rest of the meeting. Besides,’ he fixes me with a beady look from behind his trendy glasses, ‘it’s the least you can do after volunteering us all for summer school.’

‘Sorry about that. I wasn’t listening.’

‘Too busy thinking about Millandra’s nipples? Can’t say I blame you. I could hardly think of anything else myself.’

I chuck a scratching at him.

Ollie catches it. ‘Don’t waste them.’

‘You don’t eat pork scratchings!’

‘I don’t,’ his eyes sparkle through his glasses, ‘but Sasha does!’ and on cue his red setter appears, drooling messily on to the sawdust floor and looking as though she hasn’t been fed for months. ‘Here you go, girl!’

Time to take the plunge. ‘Ol, I need a favour.’

‘Not my body again?’ He grins.

My face does an impression of a tomato ketchup bottle. Bloody Ollie always knows exactly how to embarrass me.

Although personally I don’t fancy Ollie, about four years ago, at an end-of-term party, I got trolleyed on a potent cocktail of cheap white wine and the overwhelming relief that six weeks of teenager-free time was stretching ahead. On the way back from the party with my beer goggles firmly in place, I suddenly decided he was teaching’s answer to Brad Pitt and surprised us both by snogging his face off. All I can say in my defence is that I was totally pissed and it was one of the rare times Ol was single. Luckily he went to the Andes on a hiking holiday the very next day and by the time he returned I’d got together with James, so things soon went back to normal.

Ollie often likes to make me squirm by alluding to this drunken escapade.

‘You want me,’ he insists. ‘You might deny it but you do.’

‘I bloody don’t. Your body’s totally safe from me. I’m not asking you for carnal favours.’

‘Boring,’ sighs Ollie. ‘So what do you want?’

‘It’s more a question of who. Have you seen Vile Nina lately?’

Ol wags a finger at me. ‘I thought we’d agreed not to call her that. Nina’s all right when you get to know her.’

I think I can be forgiven for being sceptical here. Out of all Ollie’s girlfriends, Nina with her Sabatier tongue has to be one of the worst. They’ve all been totally vile but she’s the top of the vile pile. Still, it won’t help my cause if I antagonise him.

‘Sorry, of course she is. Anyway, are you seeing her at the moment?’

Ollie looks shifty. ‘Sort of.’

He’s shagging her then.

Men.

Nina with her blonde hair and Jordanesque cleavage probably is attractive if you like that kind of thing, which unfortunately most men seem to. Ol was smitten for months. At first they’d been like Siamese twins joined at the tongue, but when Ollie tried to pick up his social life, Nina tightened her grasp. I have strong suspicions that he wasn’t even allowed to go to the loo alone, that’s how possessive and paranoid she is, and poor old Ollie could do so much better. Still, I’ve kept my feelings to myself. It never does to diss your friend’s partner, does it?

Ol’s honeycomb-hued eyes narrow suspiciously. ‘What’s all this sudden interest in Nina for, anyway? You can’t stand her.’

OK. So maybe I haven’t done such a great job of pretending to like her. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate her talents. Like cooking, for example.

‘Doesn’t she run a catering company?’

‘Yep. Domestic Divas.’

‘Are they expensive to hire?’

He shrugs. ‘About four hundred quid or so for a night. Why? Are you interested?’

Bollocks. It may as well be four trillion billion quid, that’s how skint I am right now. James has just borrowed what meagre funds were left in my account to ease another of his cash-flow problems, and my Flexible Friend has fallen out with me, so it looks like hiring a caterer is out.

I’m stuffed.

‘What is it?’ Ol asks.

With a heavy sigh I tell him all about the dinner party, about how James’s promotion totally depends on impressing his boss and about how terrified I am of cocking up. Again.

‘You know I’m useless in the kitchen,’ I wail. ‘I’m going to ruin everything. James is desperate for promotion. He says we really need the money and I can’t let him down. Not after the last time.’

‘Ah yes,’ says Ollie. ‘The famous getting plastered at Henley Regatta and passing out in the strawberries.’

‘Yes, yes! OK!’ Why is it that my friends always remember my least glorious moments? Why can’t they hold on to all the fabulous things I do, like… like…

Well, I’m sure there are lots. There’s far too many to recall, that’s the problem. But getting bladdered in front of James’s boss at Henley didn’t exactly put me in the good books.

‘Hasn’t Nina taught you to cook?’ I say slowly, as though the thought has just occurred. ‘I’m sure I remember something about you being trained up to help.’

‘She had me marinating, sautéing and basting until I was on my knees.’ He takes a swig of Guinness. ‘It was nothing like
9½ Weeks
and I really missed Fray Bentos.’ Then he looks at me and groans. ‘Oh no you don’t, Miss Carter! I can see where you’re going with this.’

I fix him with my most desperate and hopefully winning gaze. ‘Ollie, you could save my life here if you helped me cook for this flipping dinner party. I’ll never manage it alone. You know how useless I am.’

‘Yep,’ says Ollie. ‘You’d burn water.’

‘James’s boss will be expecting something amazing. Come on, Ol, I’ll be your best friend for ever. I’ll do all your marking. Walk Sasha. Take your cover lessons. What do you think?’

‘I think I need another drink.’ Ollie looks longingly towards the bar. ‘You’re asking me to give up precious Saturday drinking time to cook for a bunch of bankers.’

‘Please! I’m a desperate woman.’

Ollie drains his pint. ‘Why do you have to impress these idiots? If they don’t like you as yourself then sod ’em.’

‘I can’t be myself,’ I say miserably. ‘I’ll be a total embarrassment to James.’

Ollie plucks a note out of his wallet. ‘In that case, Katy, why does he want to marry you?’

And leaving me to ponder this very valid point, he weaves his way through the Friday-night crowd. I stare sadly into my wine glass. How can James love me as I am? I’m not all elegance and grace like Millandra or blonde and skinny like Nina. I’m short and ginger and frequently say the wrong thing. I can’t cook, I wear the wrong clothes and I’m a total disappointment to his mother. I’ve tried really hard to support his career and improve my image, but I never seem to get it right.

I’ve known James even longer than I’ve known Ollie, because he used to live next door to my godmother, Auntie Jewell, in Hampstead. In fact we practically grew up together, because my sister Holly and I used to spend our school holidays with Auntie Jewell while our parents trekked to Marrakesh or Morocco or basically anywhere else where they could smoke dope all day and forget about their children.

Not that I’m bitter or anything. It just
might
have been nice to have had normal parents who cared about my homework and who actually fed me on a regular basis. Reading tarot cards before breakfast is all very well, and of course I’m glad I know how to cleanse my chakras, but when you’re seven, a bowl of Frosties and a packed lunch is slightly more useful, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’m digressing.

Auntie Jewell isn’t really my auntie at all; I think we only have the most tenuous of family ties, something really vague like cousins eight times removed. I do know that she was great friends with my grandmother and our families have remained close ever since. The story goes that Auntie’s parents, in total despair at ever getting their wayward daughter off their hands, paid for a London season and launched her on the unsuspecting cream of polite society. I’ve seen the debutante pictures and she was stunningly beautiful, if unrecognisable without her long silver hair and obligatory mini zoo of pets. She pissed off her peers, hardly surprisingly, by receiving a proposal from the extremely eligible Rupert Reynard, Duke of Westchester. Their wedding was the social event of the year, attended by royalty, and after honeymooning in Cannes they settled down to married life in Rupert’s ancestral home. At this point the story varies depending upon who you talk to. Our version is that Jewell finally had enough of her husband’s womanising and ran away with the under-gardener. No doubt Rupert Reynard saw things very differently. Jewell has never breathed a word about her reasons for leaving her husband, but relations between the two families have been strained ever since, not least because Rupert left her penniless.

‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ Jewell always shrugs whenever anyone points out the unfairness of her situation. ‘Besides,’ she’ll add cheerfully, ‘I did all right in the end.’

Which is true. She became a model and spent the early Sixties as the muse of famous pervy artist Gustav Greer. His blobby pink pictures of a naked Jewell grace galleries from the Tate Modern to the Saatchi. ‘Dreadful things,’ Jewell likes to shudder. ‘The poor man couldn’t afford to pay me so I used to take sketches and pictures instead of cash.’

Just as well she did. For some inexplicable reason the art world decided that Greer’s nausea-inducing pictures of Jewell’s boobs were actually fantastic works of art and worth a fortune. Gustav fuelled the frenzy for his work by conveniently suffocating on fumes when he tried to paint his own body. Suddenly Jewell found herself possessed of a very desirable collection of modern art, which she promptly swapped with a friend for a Hampstead house. And there she’s stayed ever since, tending her herb garden and growing ever more eccentric.

The times I spent living with Jewell were among the happiest of my childhood, and I was always devastated when my parents reclaimed me. It was so reassuringly normal to go to the local school and bring back A3 sheets dripping with poster paint for Jewell to stick up in the kitchen, rather than being praised in a rather random fashion by whichever of my mad parents was least stoned. It was nice to go for tea with girls called Camilla and Emily and not have to worry about inviting them back to my parents’ chaotic house. How could I ever have invited friends home?
They
all lived in neat and tidy semis with colour televisions and fitted carpets. We had a crumbling barn conversion swarming with cats and dogs, where there was no television of any kind and where carpets were an unknown quantity. At my friends’ houses we ate fish fingers and chips; at mine we took pot luck with whatever my mother wanted to conjure up on the erratic Aga. And how could I explain to other children that my parents were hippies and still lived life as though it was the Seventies? At home it was easier not to have friends at all, but at Jewell’s I could totally reinvent myself, and I loved being an anonymous schoolgirl rather than Katy Carter from that strange family at Tillers’ Barn.

James St Ellis lived next door to Jewell and his life was a thing of amazement to me. Every day he came home from prep school for an hour of homework followed by an hour of music practice before he escaped into the garden. We spent summers building dens and climbing trees, or at least what summer he did have before his parents dragged him off to the South of France or to summer school. We made up stories, dared each other to eat insects and once we even ran away to the end of the road. James loved to come into Jewell’s kitchen and eat sausages and chips at the old pine table and, if we were really lucky, Fab lollies from the freezer. But Holly and I were never invited back to his house, and if his mother ever caught us playing in his garden she’d shoo us home with a curled top lip and wrinkled nose. Not that James cared. He’d rather have been at Jewell’s anyway. He spent hours making a hole in the fence so that he could squeeze into our garden, and didn’t seem to care that he had splinters in his hands for a whole summer.

Then, one Christmas holiday, James didn’t want to play any more. He’d started at Winchester that autumn and had more exciting friends to hang out with. Our dens fell down, the gardener mended the hole in the fence and it was as though James had never existed. Sometimes we’d glimpse him, taller and more aloof, getting out of his parents’ car or sitting on the terrace with a friend, but he didn’t deign to speak. And that was fine, because at this point my parents decided to move and James was the least of our problems. Holly and I were dragged to Totnes, and for the next few years were shunted between Devon and London like two sulky parcels. James’s parents split up, the house next to Jewell was sold and our playmate was forgotten. Holly buried herself in textbooks and I discovered Mills and Boon novels, hoarding them and reading each tattered copy over and over again until my world was full of mysterious sheikhs, strong brooding tycoons and granite-jawed millionaires. One day I just knew I’d find a romantic hero of my very own who’d be captivated by my (ginger) beauty and tamed by his love for me. He’d rescue me from my crazy family and sweep me away to a world of glamour and passion, and we’d live happily every after. Mills and Boon had promised; didn’t this happen to every heroine, from humble chambermaids to feisty slave girls? All I had to do was sit tight and wait my turn. Sooner or later my hero would come along and sweep me off my feet.