An hour later, downstairs in the huge dark panelled drawing-room hung with tapestries, members of the party were beginning to unthaw and retreat from the fierce red glow of the beech logs smouldering and crackling in the vast fireplace. Lizzie Vereker, sustained by at least six glasses of Buck’s Fizz, had perked up and forgotten her extra pounds and her straining red dress.
Neither Rupert nor Beattie Johnson had arrived yet, but there was plenty to gaze at. Paul Stratton’s new wife, for example, was absolutely gorgeous. She had entered the room looking little girlish and apprehensive, eyes cast down, clinging to Paul’s arm and hardly speaking. She was wearing a yellow silk dress which matched her thick piled-up gold hair, and a beautiful tobacco-brown fringed silk shawl covering her shoulders and wound high round her neck.
After replying in shy monosyllables to Tony and Monica’s questions, she had allowed herself to be introduced to James and also to Tony’s youngest brother, Bas, who was a terrific rake with black patent-leather hair, a smooth olive complexion, and a very overdeveloped little finger from twisting women round it. Now a small smile was beginning to play around Sarah’s full coral lips at Bas’s extravagant compliments, and the shawl was beginning to slip to reveal the most voluptuous golden shoulders and bosom. She and Paul must have been somewhere hot for their honeymoon, decided Lizzie.
Paul didn’t seem to have reaped the same benefit. His dark hair, which he’d once brushed straight back, had gone silver grey and been coaxed forward, almost to his eyebrows, and in little commas over his very pink ears. Sarah, being young, had obviously encouraged him into a Paisley bow-tie and a wing collar, the points of which kept being bent over by a new double chin. His once hard angular face seemed to have softened and weakened. He still, however, had the same all-embracing smile that passed over you like a lighthouse beam, and still liked the sound of his own voice. He was now talking to Freddie Jones, the electronics multi-millionaire.
‘Three million unemployed,’ he boomed, ‘is a Mickey Mouse figure. Didn’t you see that article about that factory manager who was offering people two hundred and twenty pounds a week merely to stuff mattresses, and simply couldn’t get staff? The working classes just don’t want to work. They’re shored up by moonlighting and the great feather bed of the welfare state.’
Paul made the mistake of thinking that someone with such capitalist instincts would automatically vote Tory. Freddie Jones listened to him carefully but didn’t say anything. He was plump and jolly, with rumpled red-gold curls, round, merry grey-blue eyes, a snub nose and an air that life was a tremendous adventure. Lizzie thought he looked much more fun than anyone else.
Across the room, she noticed, James had broken swiftly away from Sarah Stratton, and was now talking to a very slim woman with dimples and short brown curls tied up by a blue bow. She was wearing a pale-blue midi dress with a full skirt and a top, of which the satin lining was the strapless bodice, and the gauze over it covered her arms down to her wrists and her shoulders and tied in a pussy-cat bow at the neck. It was the most ghastly dress Lizzie had ever seen. But the woman, who Lizzie deduced must be Freddie Jones’s wife, seemed frightfully pleased with herself, and was laughing away, rolling her eyes and gazing up at James’s beautiful bronzed face with excessive admiration.
Apart from Sarah Stratton, Lizzie decided hazily, the men looked much more glamorous than the women this evening, gaudy peacocks in their different tail coats, red with grey-blue facings for the West Cotchester Hunt, red with crimson for the neighbouring Gatherham Hunt, dark blue with buff for the Beaufort. If he hadn’t been so good- looking, James in a dinner jacket would have been outclassed.
Helping herself to another Buck’s Fizz, Lizzie wandered somewhat unsteadily over to the seating plan for dinner at the Town Hall. She was sitting next to Freddie Jones. James was on Monica Baddingham’s right. Maybe his predictions about his brilliant future were about to come true.
Laughing uproariously, two handsome young bloods in red coats now rushed up and started marking the seating plan with red asterisks.
‘What
‘Singling out the worst gropers,’ said one. ‘We’re starting with Bas Baddingham and Rupert Campbell- Black.’
‘Better put one beside my husband,’ said Lizzie.
‘Who’s he?’
‘James Vereker.’
‘We were just about to.’ They all collapsed with laughter.
‘Have some more fizz,’ yelled Monica Baddingham in her raucous voice, arriving with a jug which contained almost straight orange juice now. ‘I can’t think what’s happened to Rupert. We’ll have to leave in a sec, or we’ll be late for dinner.’ She drifted off.
‘Do we dare put an asterisk by Tony’s name?’ said one of the young bloods.
‘Of course,’ said the other, seizing the Pentel.
Giggling, Lizzie glanced across the room to see James beckoning imperiously.
He’s had enough of Mrs Jones, so he wants to palm her off on me and press the flesh, thought Lizzie.
Ignoring James, she turned back to the seating plan. Next minute James had crossed the room and seized her wrist.
‘May I borrow her?’ he asked coldly.
‘Of course,’ said the young bloods, ‘as long as you bring her straight back.’
James dragged Lizzie away. ‘Do pay attention when I signal.’
‘I was having a nice time.’
‘This is work,’ hissed James. ‘I want you to meet Valerie Jones. She’s opening a boutique in Cotchester next month. You must go and buy something. ‘
Never, never, thought Lizzie sulkily, if she sells dresses like that blue thing she’s wearing.
‘Lizzie writes novels,’ James told Valerie Jones, as if to explain his wife’s scruffy appearance.
‘I’d laike to wraite novels if I had the taime,’ said Valerie Jones, in an incredibly elocuted voice, ‘but Ay’m so busy with the boutique and the kids and moving in and we do have to entertain a lot. People are always saying, You should wraite a book, Mrs Jones, you’ve had such a fascinating laife.’
She screwed her face up in what she obviously thought was a fascinating smile.
Close up, Lizzie noticed that Valerie Jones had very clean nails, perfectly shaved armpits and the very white eyeballs of the non-reader and non-drinker. She was tiny and very pretty in a doll-like way, but Lizzie suddenly understood the expression: blue with cold. Valerie’s china-blue eyes were the coldest she’d ever seen. The pink and white skin also concealed the rhinoceros hide of the relentless social climber.
‘I’ll leave you girls to get acquainted,’ said James. ‘Better have a word with Paul Stratton, or he’ll think I’m avoiding him. We must have a dance later,’ he added admiringly to Valerie. ‘I bet you’re as light as thistledown.’
‘Seven stone on the scales this morning,’ simpered Valerie.
And six-and-a-half of that’s ego, thought Lizzie. ‘Where d’you live?’ she asked.
‘At Whychey,’ said Valerie.
‘Quite near us,’ said Lizzie. ‘We’re at Penscombe.’
But Valerie wasn’t remotely interested in where Lizzie lived.
‘And only quarter of an hour from the boutique, so Ay can rush down there, if there’s any craysis, or a special client comes in. They always ask for me.’ Valerie put her head on one side. ‘Ay don’t know why. Ay think Ay tell people the truth. Ay mean, what is the point of selling somebody a gown that doesn’t suit them? It’s such a bad advertisement for the boutique.’
‘Which house in Whychey?’ asked Lizzie.
‘Oh it’s lovely; Elizabethan,’ said Valerie. ‘We had to do an awful lot though, ripping out all that horrid dark panelling.’ Lizzie winced. ‘And of course we’ve completely re-landscaped the garden, but it’ll be a year or two before Green Lawns is the paradise we want.’
Lizzie looked puzzled. ‘The only Elizabethan house I know in Whychey is Bottom Hollow Court.’
‘We changed the name,’ said Valerie. ‘We thought Green Lawns sounded prettier.’
‘Where did you live before?’
‘Cheam,’ said Valerie, with the flourish of one saying Windsor Castle. ‘We never thought we’d find anywhere as perfect as Cheam. All our help broke down and crayed when we left. But Gloucestershire has so much to
