Beautiful People (18 page)

    "Just listen to me." She pushed her hair back, sniffed, and gave him a rueful smile. "What a wreck. My career's in ruins, my boyfriend's left me…"

    "My girlfriend's left me," Niall volunteered immediately, before he could stop himself or wonder why he had come out so unexpectedly with such an outrageous lie.

    But was it such a lie? What relationship did he and Darcy have anyway? With a stark, unrelenting clarity that was entirely new to him, Niall could see he had lusted after her at first, had been excited by her lofty and famous connections. But had he ever felt love for her? Sympathy even? It seemed to him there had always been resentment on his part. Had his love for Darcy ever been more than love for what her family represented? For what being with her could do for him. Only it hadn't done anything.

    So if something or someone better or more useful came along, he was available. He sensed now that, in Belle, someone had and that it was a chance that might not come again.

    There was a movement beside him. Belle was diving to the orange bag that sat on the floor. She pulled out something big, green, and glassy. Something with a gold-foil neck and a label. A bottle of champagne. With the cork out. He watched as she took a deep swig, her eyes closed in apparent rapture.

    "Have a drink?" Belle wiped her fizzing lips and proffered the bottle.

    "Er, fine…thanks." As he grasped it, Niall registered that the bottle was room temperature. She carried around warm bottles of open champagne in her handbag? Jesus. This woman was a serious mess. Which, so far as he was concerned, might be a seriously good thing.

    "You must think I'm such a worm," Belle was watching him drink with eager eyes. "Being so shallow, when you're really deep and authentic."

    Perhaps it was the champagne, which always went straight to his head, but there was something about her absolute, unexpected honesty and his own recent self-revelations that made Niall now want to unburden too. "I'm not really that authentic," he confessed.

    Belle giggled. "Sure you are. You're from a housing project in Glasgow, aren't you? Your daddy's a butcher?" Her green eyes stared questioningly into his.

    Niall swallowed and took a deep breath. He had not even told Darcy what he was about to admit now. "Well, I am from Glasgow, yes. But my dad's not a butcher. Well, only in a manner of speaking. He owns a chain of meat-processing plants."

    There was a burst of laughter from Belle. "You don't say." Her expression was radiant with delight. She began to laugh. "Hey. I really believed you, you know. You were very convincing."

    Niall felt mirth rising unstoppably up his throat. "Well, I am an actor. In theory, anyway."

    Belle exploded again. "Me too. I'm an actor, in theory." And off she went into peals again. "Here, have another drink," she gurgled, passing him the bottle. "Oh," she added, shaking it, "it's empty. Never mind. I got another." She dived into the orange bag again, emerged with another gold-foil-topped bottle, uncorked it with expert speed, and thrust it at Niall.

    Niall took a long swig, wiped his mouth, and handed the bottle back.

    "I'm not even called Niall. My name's actually Graham."

    "Graham!" yelped Belle.

    Niall could hardly get the words out now for laughing. "My mother's a ps-psy-psycho…"

    "Psycho?" shrieked Belle, face suddenly blank with alarm.

    This struck Niall as funnier still. "Psychologist. I grew up in a detached house in one of Glasgow's smartest suburbs. We had gardeners, a nanny, and a weekend cottage on Loch Lomond…"

    "Hee hee…" She was shaking her messy blonde head in delight. "You'll be telling me next that you don't even like Shakespeare and, um, his genius for exposing motives and basic human truths…"

    "I don't!" Niall shouted. "I don't! I don't! I don't!" The sense of lightness was almost as intoxicating as the drink. He felt crazy and reckless, fabulously irresponsible.

    "To be or not to be," he declaimed in hollow tones, his eyes turned up and hands crossed, corpse-like, on his breast.

    "Lend me your ears…" Belle added with gusto. She frowned. "Is that the same speech?"

    "That is the question," Niall continued in a mournful bass. For some reason, his failures to land leading roles now seemed hilariously funny. He remembered the faces of some of the directors auditioning him, floppy-haired shorthouses to a man, and wanted to double up with laughter.

    Then he stopped. He remembered that he and Belle were here in this theatre for a reason. She had to get a part to save her career, while his own career might, Niall now acknowledged to himself, depend on a rather more physical part he had in his possession.

    "I can help you," he told her suddenly.

    Belle, in mid-swig, flashed him a lecherous grin. "Sure you can, honey." The alcohol was reinflating her libido. In a sudden, lightning move, she was on one of his knees, facing him, grinding her crotch against his thigh, rubbing his penis beneath its layers of demin and cotton, pushing her breasts—naked and exposed in her suddenly open dress—into his face and gasping as if she were about to climax on the spot. She was, he found himself thinking, like a one-man band of sex. He had never imagined it was possible to do so much at once. No wonder she had the reputation she had.

    He was surprised at how erotic he found her. She was so obviouslooking. "Not that sort of help," he protested, pushing her away.

    "Aw! Spoilsport!" Belle pouted through her hair. Her hand was still on his penis. "Someone here wants to," she smirked, stroking her nails in a practised fashion up and down his ramrodstraight organ.

    "Just ignore that, will you? I meant I could help you with your audition," Niall growled. He had to take control of this situation. The director could come at any moment. Any of them could.

    "I can hear your lines, now," he groaned. "You'll be called in a minute. It's been ages since the last one went."

    Belle looked miserably through her hair at him. "I haven't learnt any lines," she confessed.

    The old Niall would have stared at her in frustration and contempt. The new Niall, however, thought quickly. "I could teach you a few of mine," he suggested. "It could catch the director's imagination if you gave it a go." Then, as Belle began to tie her dress back up, he added, "Don't tie that too tightly."

    Belle's speech, after all, might not be the only thing about her to catch the director's imagination.

From his usual position on the wall opposite the hotel, Ken looked up at the white clifflike façade of the Portchester, with its ornate balconies and striped awnings fluttering agitatedly in the unseasonal breeze. He'd had a tip-off from Ignatio, one of the doormen, that Lanelle and Dizzi, newly minted reality TV stars, were about to storm out in a huff. There'd been some misunderstanding over a cocktail apparently. Ken had briefly wondered how you could misunderstand a cocktail. Unless they had misunderstood they had to pay for it, which wasn't impossible.

    Keith was on the phone. He snapped it away. "One of my tippers. He says Jordan's in the Wolseley. Interested?"

    Ken shook his head. "Nah. I'll wait for Lanelle and Dizzi."

    It wasn't the most exciting of prospects, but it hadn't been the most exciting of afternoons. Lionel Blair had been in for dinner, but that was hardly going to make the front page of
The Sun
. The one possibility was Belle Murphy; she had not yet returned from wherever she had gone with her hair all over the place. And that had been ages ago.

    Although even Belle was obviously fading fast on the picturedesk popularity index, the Barbie to Bardot pictures, which Ken had imagined were good for a couple of grand in
Heat
or
Hello
, had, in the end, not come out as well as he had expected and only fetched fifty pounds from
Woman's Weekly
. All the picture editors— apart from
Woman's Weekly
—had said the same thing, that the only pictures of Belle they would pay any serious money for were ones of her with a new man on her arm.

    Twelve floors above them, in the penthouse of the Portchester Hotel, Jacintha the nanny was reaching the end of her tether. It wasn't just that Belle Murphy had no interest whatsoever in her adopted son. This was entirely to be expected. Plenty of people she worked for had no interest in their children; this was usually why they employed her.

    Occasionally, admittedly, after too much champagne, Belle would be overcome by sentimentality, pluck Morning from his cradle when he was sleeping, and waltz theatrically round the room with him. Morning, however, rarely appreciated being yanked from his warm slumbers. Then, affronted by his crying, Belle would shove him bad-temperedly back at Jacintha.

    The nanny was not concerned about the obvious fact Belle had adopted the baby only to generate positive publicity for herself, to appear to be a caring person. It was hardly unusual behaviour among celebrities, after all. Non-celebrities too, come to that. Plenty of people she knew of had had children for the murkiest of motives. To snare a husband here, an inheritance there, usually.

    No, it was in other ways that Jacintha was finding Belle Murphy impossible. "Mind if I call you Jackie?" Belle had asked breathily when they first met. It was a suggestion that made Jacintha—the twentieth generation of her family to bear the name—cringe and squirm. But with, as she had imagined, all Hollywood before her, she had been unable to refuse Belle anything.

    Hollywood had not, however, materialised for Jacintha, still less the Celebrity Supernanny-style programme she had imagined herself fronting. Instead, she had found that working for a film star could be extremely boring. There had been a confidentiality contract to sign, which had been thrilling. However, its promise that there was something to be confidential about proved groundless.

    Where were all the parties, Jacintha would wonder. The weekends with celebrity friends? The jet-setting? Far from flying round the world from one glamorous location to another, they never even left London. And far from glittering at the centre of a sparkling circle of friends, her life a nonstop whirl of fabulous events, all Belle ever did was lie around and drink, occasionally rousing herself to stumble off to an audition. Or a bar, as Jacintha was beginning to suspect.

    And, as neither Jacintha nor Morning were required at auditions, still less in bars, Jacintha had only, since the moment she had arrived in it, ever left the Portchester penthouse in order to go push Morning around the park opposite.

    Not that this hadn't been exciting at first. It had been thrilling to run the gauntlet of the paparazzi, who had rushed up close to the buggy. As the flashes had gone off, Morning had began to scream.

    "Can't help but feel sorry for it, can yer?" one of the photographers had remarked to Jacintha. "Sweet little thing. I hate to 'ear babies cry," he had gone on, "especially if I'm the one who's made 'em."

    But before long, the prospect of snapping the same woman pushing the same buggy to the same park paled among the photographers, and it had now been some days since Jacintha had faced a lens wielded in anger. What happened now was that the paparazzi descended on the buggy as she passed them—as close as she possibly could—in order to coo at and pet Morning. An unphotographed Jacintha would then move off to push her charge endlessly round the crisscrossing paths among the tree-shaded, statue-studded green of the park.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Hengist, just get out, can't you?" The blonde in the tight, white jeans tugged hard at the little boy in the back of the car. Hengist had rammed himself down in the rear passenger-seat footwell and was hunting about for something.

    "I've lost my King Arthur," he wailed, raising the flat, pale, rather hopeless-looking face that always so irritated his nanny.

    "Sod your King Arthur," Totty snapped viciously. Now that she was about to be sacked by the Westonbirts, there seemed no reason to hold back the dislike she had always felt for their son. Hengist was unbelievably boring, and his penchant for small plastic figures of knights, which constantly slipped down the back of the seats and threatened her manicures in extracting them, more boring still.

    "I've lost the sheep he was riding on, as well," bleated Hengist, his voice muffled under the seats.

    Totty wrinkled her short forehead. Sheep? She had picked up little at school, admittedly, despite her parents sending her to the best ones in the country. But surely King Arthur had ridden on a horse?

    "I couldn't find a horse to fit him," Hengist explained. "So I used a sheep from my toy farm."

    Totty glared at him. But her dislike of him was not exclusive. Totty disliked all children. She had only come into nannying because, after the police raid on a party she had held in her flat, during which cocaine with a street value of thousands had been discovered, her father had threatened to cut her off from her inheritance unless she got a proper job. Nannying, which was just driving kids about after all, had struck Totty as the easiest possible work. She had had no idea how boring children could be.

    But getting sacked was especially boring. Lady Westonbirt, who had been so nice at first and so delighted to have someone of Totty's aristocratic descent looking after darling Hengist, had turned considerably less nice after Totty failed to report for morning duty three days in a row. That the cocktails at Boujis were to blame had not been accepted as a defence. Nor would it be by her father, Totty knew, which was why it was essential to land a new job as quickly as possible, before he found out and the prospect of lifelong penury became a reality.