To Marry a Prince (26 page)

‘It is a great treat to be here with her,’ said Richard, retrieving his hand and flexing it out of sight. The Lady Social Secretary’s Botox did not seem to have frozen her iron grip. ‘Such a privilege to meet family friends.’

Janet sent him a look of utter devotion and he smiled back at her.

‘Hope you’ll be here for the Spring Dance,’ said the Captain of the Ladies’ Section. She had changed out of her golfing clothes into a snazzy cocktail number, and was giving it lots of cleavage and flashing eyes.

‘It sounds delightful,’ Richard assured her, avoiding the cleavage like a professional.

‘Do you play darts?’ said Janet, with an indignant look at the Mercedes-driving houri, and swept him off to the Ladies’ Bar, where he had a very jolly time allowing himself to lose by not too much in matches against the Junior Mums until Janet relented and took them home for dinner.

She had wanted to invite her usual complement of guests but Bella had begged her not to.

‘Let it just be us, Ma, just this once? Ask Neill and Val, if you like. But nobody else.’

Janet was disappointed. ‘But I was going to hire a butler.’

‘No-o-o-o.’

It was a cry of anguish.

‘But it must be what he’s used to?’

Bella sat her down in the kitchen and took both her hands. ‘Ma. This is me. Forget him.
Me
. If he were anyone else, would you hire a butler? Did you hire a butler when Neill brought Val home?’

‘No,’ said Janet, struck.

‘Well, then. Just treat him like you treated Val.
Please
. I just want us to be normal for once.’

‘You’re a funny girl,’ said Janet, succumbing to her desperate tone. ‘But if that’s what you want, darling, of course.’

So supper was for the six of them. Neill and Val had driven over from Dorset, but after a good meal and plenty of wine they would not be driving back again. Which made redundant the nice problem of whether
Janet should allow Richard and Bella to sleep together under her roof. The Brays had two fully appointed guest rooms, with en suite showers. Neill and Val would have one. Bella the other. There was also a box room which doubled as Janet’s sewing room and was fully of spooky dressmaker’s dummies and rolls of fabric. And there was Kevin’s study.

Kevin, who had given silent thanks to be relieved of the burden of a butler, was enough of a traditionalist to suggest that you couldn’t put the Prince of Wales on a couch in the study.

‘Bella could go on the couch?’ mused Janet doubtfully.

‘Don’t think he’d like that. Not very chivalrous.’

So Janet had given in and Richard was to share Bella’s room and en suite shower room.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered to Kevin, as she passed him in the hallway. ‘We owe you.’

It turned into a fun party. In the end Neill pushed a coffee table into the middle of the floor and taught them all how to row to Viking rhythm. Kevin threw himself into the part, roaring out what he swore were Anglo-Saxon incantations. Even Val joined in, looking happier and more at home than Bella had ever seen her.

And when they all said good night, Richard kissed Janet’s cheek with genuine affection.

‘I like your mother,’ he told Bella, sitting on the end of the bed to take his socks off. ‘She’s scared but she’s still in there, punching her weight.’

Bella was sliding out of the dress her mother had bought her last month, but paused on hearing that.
Janet had been so pleased to see her in it that Bella completely forgot the thing made her look like a middle-aged golf wife.

‘What do you mean, she’s scared? What has she got to be scared of? Kevin takes care of everything.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Richard. ‘He can’t take care of her getting things wrong, being ignored, becoming a laughing stock.’

Bella dismissed that, half angry at the idea. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

But hadn’t her mother said, ‘I wish I were competent like you’?

‘I told you, love. This is my job. I meet people who are scared of doing or saying the wrong thing all the time. And, believe me, Janet’s a bad case. She’s terrified.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Didn’t you see her when we were all playing Vikings this evening? She was never quite sure whether she was doing the right thing by joining in. Not sure we wanted her. Not sure she wasn’t pushing in and spoiling it. Wondering whether she ought to be making coffee while the rest of us did what people like us do?’

Bella sat down on her side of the bed. ‘No!’ she said. But not because she still disbelieved him. ‘Oh, poor Ma.’

Richard turned and gathered her up into his arms, as if he knew she needed comforting. ‘She’s like her daughter. She’s brave. She took a chance and joined in.’

‘You’re quite a psychologist, aren’t you?’ she said slowly.

But he shook his head. ‘I’m not anything. I just know what I see.’

Bella leaned against him, muzzy from wine and the pent-up anxieties of the last weeks. ‘And you’re kind. So very kind.’

He let her go, flipped down her bra strap and said in quite another voice, ‘Also a half-trained Viking and randy as hell. Get your clothes off, woman.’

‘What’s your worst New Year Ever?’ –
Tube Talk

It was their last chance to be alone together in the run-up to Christmas.

Ian said he couldn’t give Bella the updated diary pages. She suspected that was Wormtongue’s doing. But she didn’t sneak on him to Richard. For one thing it seemed feeble. For another, Richard was desperately busy, rushing about all over the country and out of it. She knew that because she saw pictures of him in the papers and on the News.

He did a good-will trip to New York, with a bunch of industrialists in tow, and sent her a text from the dance floor of Bar Bahia
: I’m boogieing for Britain here. Where are you when I need you?

She laughed and texted back:
Ready to boogie any time
.

It was really late by then, the small hours in London, and Bella knew she should have been asleep. Instead she was sitting cross-legged on her bed, with a pashmina shawl round her shoulders and thick ski socks on her feet, trying to sort out some files for the evil dentist. Work was becoming increasingly busy as people dashed in to sort out their dental problems before the holidays.
She wanted to get the whole system indexed and in perfect order before she left on Christmas Eve. There would be no handover period with her successor.

Bella had rented a car and would be picking up Granny Georgia at the airport before driving the two of them and Lottie down to the New Forest for Christmas. Bella would spend the rest of Christmas week with Janet and Kevin, before heading north to Drummon House, the Royal residence on the edge of the Highlands, for the New Year.

She was not looking forward to the New Year.

On Richard’s advice, Bella had braced herself for another Little Talk with Lady Pansy in advance of the invitation. It was an afternoon gig and Lady Pansy had served up a terrifying list of traditions and customs for the New Year, along with China tea in cups of porcelain so thin that their contents were cold before the first sip. Bella liked builder’s tea with a good slug of milk, or Earl Grey if she was pushed. She nearly gagged at the smoky, herbal stuff that Lady Pansy favoured. It was, as she told Lottie afterwards, somehow slimy and sharp at the same time.

‘Vomitorious,’ said Lottie, repelled.

‘Tell me about it. And then she went on for ever about the Family Traditions and how they had been spending New Year there since 1839 or something. I tell you, Lotts, my head began to spin.’

‘I’m not surprised. The woman sounds a complete pill.’

‘I don’t think she means to be. She’s very gentle and pleasant. I think she’s doing her best to turn me into a
good little courtier in the time available. But my family hasn’t done anything since 1839, and I can’t get worked up about traditions unless they have some point to them.’

Lottie grinned. ‘That’s my girl. Red Finn would be proud of you.’

Bella groaned. ‘Don’t talk to me about my father. I think he’s deliberately trying to make things worse. He was threatening to write to the
Despatch
about Royalty grinding the faces of the poor in the dust, the last time we spoke.’

‘One thing I’ll say for Finn – he’s consistent.’

‘So is Lady Pansy,’ said Bella, returning to her original grievance. ‘Just look at that.’ She flung a bulky envelope on to the kitchen table.

Lottie turned it over curiously. It had the Royal monogram on the back and weighed a ton.

‘What’s this?’

‘Briefing,’ said Bella in a voice of doom.

‘Briefing? For the New Year party?’

‘Yes.’

‘For
two days?
’

‘Yes.’

‘The woman’s mad,’said Lottie, with conviction. ‘Nobody reads briefing of more than a page. What’s in all this bumf, for God’s sake?’

‘Protocol. When you get up. When you eat breakfast. Where you eat breakfast. Where you’re expected to be at all times of the day. How to curtsey. How to drink the loyal toast. Did you know that
some
people are allowed to say “The King, God bless him”? Not very many. Most
people are expected to say “The King” and shut the fuck up.’

Lottie boggled.

‘Then there’s the Ball. Instructions on what to wear, skirt length (and fullness of), shoes.’

‘
Shoes?
’

‘Soft-soled Princess pumps are preferred,’ read Bella out loud. ‘Oh, God, it’s like I’ve fallen through a wormhole into another universe. Individually the words make sense but I don’t know what they mean when you put them together like that.’

She soon found out. Lady Pansy, it transpired, had taken the initiative. First off a small box arrived from a Scottish footwear manufacturer, containing shoes that were more like unstructured ballet slippers. They were light and pretty but too big for Bella’s feet.

‘Why doesn’t the woman bloody
ask?
’ fumed Bella, phoning the company. She was horrified to find that Lady Pansy had blagged them out of the company for free, as a gift to the Prince of Wales. ‘They are nothing to do with the Prince,’ said Bella tightly, down the phone to the Highlands. ‘Please send me an invoice. Yes, for both sizes. I shall be paying.’

But that wasn’t the only thing that Lady Pansy had ordered to turn Bella into a halfway decent guest at the Royal Family’s New Year house party. A large, flat box also arrived.

Lottie and Bella surveyed it cautiously. ‘It looks like one of those old-fashioned laundry boxes my grandmother used to have,’ said Bella.

They opened it. Inside was a ball dress.

‘That’s a ball dress and a half,’ said Lottie, extracting it from loads of tissue paper, an expression of fascinated horror on her face.

It was shiny. And very, very full. The material was so rigid, the thing could have stood up on its own, but it had a stiff underskirt anyway, just in case. It was patterned in huge vertical stripes of purple, turquoise, midnight blue and cerise. When Bella put it on, it turned out to have sleeves puffed to such bloated proportions she would have to go through doors sideways.

It was beyond dreadful.

‘But it ticks all the sodding boxes,’ said Bella, beginning to gibber. ‘No slits, no bare upper arms, full-length, full skirt, not black. AAAAARGH!’

Lottie was studying Lady P’s briefing. ‘“Tiaras may be worn.” Wonder if she’s going to send you one of those, too?’

But Lady P’s initiative had worn itself out with The Striped Horror. ‘Stripes,’ she said, when Bella rang to query the purchase, ‘are Very Slimming. And puffed sleeves are so youthful. The Queen,’ she added as a clincher, ‘agrees with me.’

Bella put the phone down, defeated.

But Lottie was made of sterner stuff. ‘Look, there could be a misunderstanding. Hope on, hope ever. Take a dress of your own as well.’

Bella looked at The Horror with loathing. ‘I don’t have anything that meets the criteria. I’ve got to do Scottish dancing in the thing.
Me
. You know me and dancing. I wish I was dead.’

Lottie was sobered.

‘Lady P has sent over instructions on how to dance Scottish reels. There are bits on the footwork and bits on the arm gestures. Only gentlemen raise their arms above their heads in the Highland Schottische, whatever that is. There’s no namby-pamby gender equality on a Highland dance floor, I’ll have you know. And there are even bloody road maps on the dances themselves!’

‘Bella,’ said Lottie very quietly, ‘I’m sorry, but I think you’re going barmy.’

‘So do I.’

‘Dances don’t have road maps.’

‘Scottish dances do. It’s deeply depressing.’

Of course Richard, bopping away for King and Country in Bar Bahia didn’t know that. He texted:
We’ll boogie in the New Year
.

To which Bella replied:
Wanna bet?

Almost immediately her phone rang.

‘What is it, sweetheart? You’re not getting cold feet about coming to Drummon?’

‘Not cold feet, no. But I haven’t got time to do the necessary homework.’