Beautiful People (16 page)

    "Come on, Belle," he groaned now, shifting his buttocks on the cold wall. "Come outside and give us all a break. Preferably with the kid."

    He glanced in desultory fashion around him at the other eight or so photographers present that morning. He knew most of them; they were freelancers like him. Some lounged on the wall as he did, flicking through YouTube on their laptops. Some bantered and joked with the hotel doormen, their eyes on every passing limo, scanning number plates for registrations they recognised.

    Ken glanced at the cadaverous features of the man next to him. Keith, a long-time colleague and competitor, worked for rival agency Top Pictures. Keith's skin was flaky and grey—as, Ken knew, was his own—with the constant pap diet of crisps and coffee.

    Keith looked preoccupied and was rustling through one of the London free sheets. As he stopped and sucked loudly through his teeth, Ken leant over to see at what. A large photograph of Tom Hanks shopping in Covent Garden dominated the page.

    "Spent all day waitin' outside 'is 'otel yesterday," Keith complained. He shook his head resentfully. "That's great, that is. Bloody great. You spend all day sitting outside some hotel in Knightsbridge, and he's there in bloody Covent Garden. What kind of a job is this, eh?" He drove a fist into his forehead.

    Ken nodded absently. His eye was on the double yellow line on which his car was parked. It was at least twenty minutes since the traffic warden had last appeared, and he would be back any moment. His car looked, Ken thought, particularly dirty and battered this morning, piled high with yellowing newspapers, scrunched crisp bags, and torn chocolate wrappers. It wasn't the line to be in, Ken thought morosely, if you wanted a decent car. It wasn't the line to be in if you wanted a decent anything: flat, life, relationship, you name it.

    The hotel doors revolved, and a frisson swept the line of photographers, but only a couple of grey-suited businessmen had come out. Tanned, smooth-skinned, and bouffant-haired, they regarded the line of snappers with supercilious amusement.

    Beside him, Keith moaned on. "I blame digitalization. Mobile phone cameras. People think all they have to do is wait outside some celebrity's house and they'll make a fortune."

    Ken looked at him. "Well, that is all they have to do. So long as the celeb turns up."

    He knew what Keith meant however. He himself had entered the business peachy-keen and fired up, lens primed, all agog, convinced he was about to hit the big time, or at least photograph it. Now he knew better. The paparazzi life was a grindingly dull one. The last thing it was was glamorous.

    It was also, he was increasingly beginning to feel, worthless.

    But on the other hand, what else could he do? This, so far as Ken was concerned, was the most depressing aspect of all.

    There was a frisson again as the hotel revolving doors spun and Belle stepped out, blinking in the bright sunshine, her half-tied dress rippling like a leopard-skin flag in the breeze and flying up to expose thin white legs in long brown boots. She carried an orange bag in which the head of her small dog could just be seen, its malicious black eyes swiveling about.

    An electric ripple of excitement shot through the crowd of snappers. Ken, zooming and shooting away with the rest, noticed that Belle looked less groomed than usual; she had a hurried, thrown-together, rather sluttish appearance that rather suited her, he thought. Of course, it would be deliberate down to the last misplaced hair: a new, rumpled look, more Bardot than her usual varnished Barbie one. Yes, thought Ken with a leap of spirit in which excitement was mixed with relief. From Bardot to Barbie. It was a picture story. Everyone would buy it. So long as he got there first.

    His fingers frantically switched the calibrations on his lenses, moving the infinitesimal distances back and forth with the pulsing muscles in his fingers, playing them with the practised skill of a clarinetist.

    "Look over here, Belle. That's right, down the lens," he shouted. The difference between a face staring straight into camera and off to the left could be hundreds of pounds. Thousands, sometimes.

    "Belle, over here!"

    "Over here!" insisted Ken.

    "Marry me, Belle," yelled another in the line of cameramen. Ken, as his finger pulsed the camera button, registered the tactic. Anything to stand out. A comic approach might get the celeb's attention and a better picture.

    "Hey, Belle," called someone else. "Got a new man, yet?"

    She laughed theatrically at this and shook her rumpled head. Her mussed hair flew around her like an aureole. Very fetching, thought the massed paps, snapping away. "I'm giving them up!" she shouted.

    "Don't do that," one of the paps shouted back. "Get another one. Give us something to shoot."

    "I'll do my best," Belle yelled, slipping her emaciated body into the car. You could hardly see her sideways on, Ken saw. As her limo slid away, he packed away his lenses.

    He walked towards his battered car just in time; the traffic warden was coming round the corner, face grim, affixed-noticedispensing machine poised.

    But he'd be back tonight, Ken knew as he started up his knackered engine and drove away. Jennifer Lopez was supposed to be checking in, straight off the plane from L.A. He felt weary at the very thought of it.

Niall had almost not bothered coming to this audition, only there was sod all else on offer. His agent had begged him to try out for the Scottish serial-killer part currently on offer in
The Bill
, but Niall had refused it on the grounds that he didn't do cheap sensational murders. Although it had occurred to him on the way here that, as cheap sensational murders went, you would have to go a long way to beat
Titus Andronicus.

    He'd entered the theatre with the usual lack of expectation. Things were bad at the moment. Worse than he had imagined they could ever be. He had been turned down recently for Shakespeare parts he had not realised existed. At the moment, Niall knew, his self-confidence was taking the downward lift to the basement. As it had been ever since Darcy left for L.A. First class into the bargain, as if her stupendous success needed to be any further underlined.

    He'd begged her not to go. In vain, he had pointed out the artistic and moral consequences of her getting on the plane and going to meet the big, famous director. Had she no self-respect? Respect for her art? Respect for him? She had wailed and clung to him, her big black eyes filled with fetching tears, her slim body pressed to his in supplication, her arms lovingly about him. But she had gone all the same.

    He felt betrayed. Emasculated even. Not jealous, of course. His current resentful feelings were nothing to do with the money, the fame, the first-class flights, the celebrity friends, the fun, the glamour, the money, the fame. The money, the fame. No, it was because he and Darcy had dreamt the same dream. Believed in the same things. Or so he had imagined.

    It was with boiling, resentful thoughts such as these that Niall had given his name to the box office and been waved through to the theatre to take his turn on the stage.

The other auditionees swept Belle a surprised glance when she entered and trilled a champagne-fuelled "Hi!" at them. They were sitting slumped against the brickwork in their loose, black clothes, staring at battered copies of
Titus Andronicus
and mouthing the words to themselves.

    It was difficult, Belle thought, to make out which of them, if any, was female; all had that rather Gothic, waxen-faced, consumptive, crinkly-haired look she had come to associate with British thespians.

    "ITV's in the next building," one of them remarked in lofty tones.

    Belle stared. She had no idea what ITV was. "Isn't this the National Theatre?"

    "Yeah. You're in the wrong place. Chat shows are next door."

    "Actually, I've come to audition for
Titus Andronicus
," Belle assured him brightly, thankful for the champagne she had swigged in the taxi and the swirling, light-headed courage it gave her.

    This caused a sensation among the seated. "As who?" one of them asked.

    Belle giggled. "The Queen," she said airily. She had tried to learn some lines in the car, but the print had just fuzzed and swum about before her eyes. She was vaguely thinking of doing a tap dance for the director. It had helped Catherine Zeta Jones interest Michael Douglas after all.

    The thespians looked at each other, rather sneeringly, it seemed to Belle. "You mean Tamora?" one of them asked. "The one who eats her children in a pie?"

    Belle blanched. "Are you kidding?" She shook her tousled blonde head in astonishment. "This Shakespeare guy was wasted being Shakespeare. He'd have been dynamite in horror movies."

Vanessa said nothing to James about what she had heard pass between him and Emma in the kitchen. As a result, he imagined that she had not heard after all. But the extent of Vanessa's insecurity was something James underestimated. He had very little idea that, coursing not very far beneath Vanessa's brashly confident exterior was another, vulnerable Vanessa—one uncertain of her talents, social position, fitness to be a mother, and how to be happy. And that Emma, instead of being a miracle in human form, was a constant reminder to her of her shortcomings; that Vanessa was, in short, jealous was something he could likewise not imagine.

    Vanessa, for her part, would have scorned the idea she was jealous of her nanny. She knew only that Emma made her angry.

    And now an outlet for the anger had presented itself. Hearing James tell Emma she was wonderful only intensified Vanessa's former feeling, now her conviction, that Emma had to be got rid of. Before, Emma's main sin was to make Vanessa feel inadequate; now she had more or less concrete proof that the nanny would be content with nothing less than her husband.

    Vanessa did not ask herself whether she really believed this was the case. A case could be made; that was the point. And the time to get rid of Emma was now, as Vanessa was about to book a holiday to Italy. Among the wine, the delicious food, the mellow villages, and the sunshine, romance could only thrive, or so Vanessa imagined. For this reason, Emma had not yet been told about the vacation. Vanessa did not intend that the nanny should get ideas.

    Emma, for her part, would have been staggered had she guessed what Vanessa suspected, or had convinced herself she suspected. Emma was as fond of James as any conscientious and dedicated nanny would be to the kindly and supportive father of her charges. It had never occurred to her to desire him however. While she liked him, she did not find him physically attractive; James was ancient— in his mid-forties, at least—and looked like a slipshod professor. As for the material benefits of snaring him, Emma intended to make her own money her own way.

    On the afternoon following the James and Emma love-in, as she waspishly thought of it, Vanessa came back at teatime after a long lunch with the editor of her column to find the house transformed.

    It took a few minutes to remember that it was her daughter's birthday and that this, presumably, was her party.

    The sitting room was full of paper flowers and cardboard trees. The carpet was completely covered in a thick green mat of fake grass, the sort one sometimes saw in greengrocers. Dotted around the edge of it was a large variety of cats: some fluffy toy cats from Hero's own collection, some cut-out large pictures of cats mounted on cardboard, some hand-drawn or painted in bright colours and mounted the same way.

    "It's a surprise for Hero. She hasn't seen it yet. A pussy-cat's picnic," Emma, in the middle of the room positioning the last of the animals, explained. "Like a teddy bear's picnic, but because Hero so loves cats I thought…"

    "Yes, yes," snapped Vanessa, irritated at the suggestion that she was incapable of making the imaginative leap from teddies to pussies. It occurred to her to wonder when Emma had had the time to make all these cats. Surely she could not have stayed up late for nights on end to make them all? They must have, Vanessa persuaded herself, been manufactured during time with the children, when Emma ought to have been looking after them.

    "It must have taken ages to make those cats," she remarked. Emma, catching the spiky note in her employer's voice, realised at once she had done something wrong, but she could not imagine what. Should she have made the cats faster or something?