Beautiful People (6 page)

    "Aren't you a bit old for this?" Georgie was gesturing at the television, where a giant purple cat was demonstrating how to make pineapple-topped pizza.

    "Yes," Orlando agreed readily. He had no idea why he was watching it either. He had a vague inkling that the world of children appealed to him more and more as he got older and the pressures of adulthood revealed themselves. But he could not have said this to his mother, nor would she have wanted to hear it.

    Neither had he said to his mother that a model agency had approached him. This was because he could easily picture her indignation—with him. So desperate was Georgie for him to be a success at something that she would have phoned Wild up on the spot and offered his services.

    As Orlando reached his late teens, the fact that he was less and less the child his mother had hoped for was becoming more and more obvious. Of course, he loved her—as he did his father—very much, and he knew that she loved him. But he also knew that she found him annoying. As she saw it, Orlando knew, he resolutely refused to make the most—or indeed, anything—of the opportunities she lavished on him. While Orlando, although he tried to feel grateful, was increasingly, bleakly aware that he had not wanted these opportunities in the first place.

    The expensive private school, for which his parents had scrimped and saved to send him, was the most glaring illustration of this. It maddened Georgie that the only determination Orlando had shown in regard to Heneage's was in relentlessly not trying to become friends with the sons and daughters of what his mother called the movers and shakers.

    "You never get asked to anyone's house for the weekend," Georgie wailed at one particularly frustrated moment.

    Actually, he often got asked these days, but he was careful to make sure his mother did not know he had refused. The frantic, competitive social fray revolving around whose smart house everyone else was staying at in the holidays—or which festival in the grounds of whose grandparents' castle everyone was heading to with their tents and Temperley party dresses—filled him with horror.

    He was not academically gifted either and was further hampered in success of this nature by what had been diagnosed as borderline dyslexia and by more than borderline lack of interest in either the subjects or his teachers. So far as the teachers were concerned, the lack of interest was mutual.

    Despite the staggering fees that his parents paid to make sure the most was being got out of him, most teachers wrote Orlando off immediately and told Georgie and Richard that he simply was not trying.

    These teachers seemed, Orlando had noticed, to make more effort with the equally unmotivated children of richer and more famous parents, but he had never mentioned this to his mother and father. It had suited him to be left more or less to his own devices at school.

    Now, however, Orlando heartily wished he had made more effort. He had taken his A levels at the start of the summer, and the results were due in the middle of August. They would be terrible, Orlando knew. It was largely to stave off thoughts of this future misery that Orlando currently spent as much time as was possible in his bedroom watching chubby twelve-year-olds throw pies at each other.

    "I came to show you this," Georgie beamed, waving a coloured picture at him. She picked her way over the trainers.

    The image was of a long, low house in golden stone with a red roof. It had a patio with big white sunshades on it and was surrounded by cypresses. There was a blue sky and a swimming pool in the foreground.

    "What is it?" Orlando asked.

    "A farmhouse in Tuscany!" Georgie trilled. "I've booked it. For the whole of August."

    "Great. You and Dad deserve a break."

    As did he, Orlando felt with a surge of joy. And this was one he had never even dared hope for: being left alone and unbadgered by his mother when the exam results came out.

    "You're coming too, of course, darling. There's plenty of room. And a pool!" Her voice might be light, but Georgie's eye, Orlando saw, was steely. And he knew of old that resistance to the iron will of his mother was not an option. His chin sank onto his chest in a defeated attitude, and, as his mother fussed around picking up T-shirts, he sank glumly into the beanbag.

    Then a thought occurred to him. Perhaps Italy could be an advantage so far as his A-level results were concerned. The middle of the Tuscan countryside might be somewhere the long arm of the examinations board was unable to stretch to reach.

    Might, but probably not, given his mother. She would have the date from the school; she would no doubt ring up on the day. And he had a feeling the results could be texted.

    "Oooh, almost forgot." Georgie turned at the door. "The Faughs are coming for dinner next week." She wagged her finger playfully. "So don't go out. Jago and Ivo will be dying to see you."

    Italy faded instantly in the face of this much greater threat to happiness. A burning, unpleasant sensation swirled through Orlando. He had never liked his parents' friends, Hugh and Laura Faugh, and liked their sons less.

    "It's so nice that they're your own age," Georgie fluted.

    Orlando couldn't imagine why Georgie thought Ivo and Jago were his age. They were two years older at least. She really should overcome her vanity about wearing spectacles.

    "They're such a good influence. Such nice, tidy boys. So well dressed," Georgie added, her gaze hooking on Orlando's oversized black T-shirt with its glow-in-the-dark, printed-on skeleton ribcage. He shrugged. So his clothes were tacky. He didn't care. He had bought this T-shirt weeks ago in a pound shop; it had appealed to his childish sense of humour.

    The Faugh brothers, he knew, would never have worn such a thing, nor did they ever go in pound shops; facts that raised his T-shirt even higher in his eyes. The last time he had seen them, at a House of Commons garden party Georgie had dragged him determinedly along to, they had been wearing tight, dark-blue designer jeans with visible creases and high waists, all straining over the twins' large bottoms. Tucked into the jeans—and also into the underpants beneath, Orlando suspected—they wore merchant banker striped or checked shirts, open at the collar to expose a gold chain and with double cuffs and cufflinks. Tied around the twins' shoulders had been cashmere pullovers, jade for Ivo and ginger for Jago.

    "And, of course, they're so clever," Georgie reminded him now. "Both at Cambridge."

    Behind the curtains of his hair, Orlando grimaced. Cambridge was a word that struck fear into him. He had been dragged to the town several times over the past year by his mother, positioned in front of various spiry college entrances, and instructed to admire them.

    "Wouldn't you just love to go there?" Georgie had demanded, eyes blazing with ambition. Orlando had taken one look at what seemed an endless stream of self-satisfied geeks coming out of the front entrance of King's and thought that no, actually, he wouldn't. Even if, given his academic record, there was a hope in hell of him going to Cambridge as anything other than one of the tourists that seemed to throng outside the innumerable tea shops, he wanted to go there about as much as he wanted to go to Italy. At the age of eighteen. With his parents.

Downstairs, Orlando's father Richard was thinking about the Italian holiday too. He felt uneasy.

    Georgie often made him feel uneasy. She was his childhood sweetheart and wife of nearly thirty years. But while he loved her devotedly, she had never been happy with his rank-and-file MP status. Georgie had always nursed ambitions for him beyond anything he had wanted.

    These had never been fulfilled, however. He had remained a backbencher and would, Richard suspected, always remain one. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that he would never be a power in the land, but he was aware that Georgie hadn't.

    "He's thrilled!" Richard heard Georgie trilling. She was back downstairs from breaking the holiday news to Orlando.

    Richard felt a clutch of panic. "But darling, it's awfully expensive."

    Georgie's expression was defiant and defensive. "I had to act fast. We haven't got anywhere else lined up. Have we?"

    Her husband flinched at this full-frontal attack on his lack of social influence. For all his twenty years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, he had failed just as spectacularly as his son to bond with anyone who might have a suitable holiday home. Like Orlando, he had not tried, because, like Orlando, Richard had a built-in aversion to the types of people who swaggered about bragging about their wealth and influence. The fellow members of Parliament that Richard liked best were just like him: hardworking backbenchers struggling to maintain a place in London, as well as a constituency one.

    Some MPs, of course, lived in their constituency and used cheap hotels when staying in London, but this option was not open to Richard. He represented a particularly unfashionable swath of Hertfordshire—albeit with one or two smart villages—in which Georgie flatly refused to live. Which was why Richard was now struggling to maintain a large, if battered, Highgate terrace house. Given their financial circumstances, hanging on to it sometimes felt like hanging on to a balloon in a Force 10 gale.

    There was also the upkeep of a small flat in the constituency. Richard wished he had suggested to Georgie that they holiday there. It might be on the High Street and above a Chinese takeaway, but at least it was free.

    He looked dumbly at his wife now. It didn't really matter what he thought about the villa; it was a fait accompli anyway. And given that their household outgoings were no longer as enormous as they had been, the expense was more bearable. There would, for example, be no more school fees for Orlando; he had taken his A levels this summer, and they could afford a little financial leeway. It would, in fact, be their first real treat holiday for fourteen years, since Orlando had started at prep school and his education had started to dominate the budget.

    To what end, Richard was not sure. His only son had never been academic, a fact that had emerged early. Personally, Richard had been all for Orlando going to the local state primary, which had a good reputation. But Georgie had had other ideas. "Contacts!" she would insist. "He has to make contacts. Good contacts will get him through life."

    Of course, Richard mused, household expenses could easily go up again if Orlando went to university, as his mother was determined he should. Personally, Richard rather hoped that he wouldn't. Better the boy should leave and do something useful with his life, although goodness knew what. Not politics, obviously; too many family resources had been sacrificed to that already.

    "Oh, by the way," Georgie added, as she clacked off across the kitchen tiles in her high heels, "I've asked the Faughs for dinner next week."

    "Oh, my God," was her husband's response. He looked as if he were about to be sick.

    "Richard!" Georgie's eyes bore into him. "Hugh's one of your closest friends!"

    "That's stretching it," Richard muttered, sensing again that resistance was useless.

    Hugh Faugh. Why on earth did Georgie persist in believing he was a close friend? They had never been close friends, even though their lives had, at one stage, run quite closely together. They had entered Parliament the same year, young Conservative MPs still wet behind the ears, or as wet as Hugh's ears ever got considering, or so Richard always suspected, he blow-dried his thick, black, shiny hair to give it that characteristic full, upward-sweeping look.

    "Hair gets votes," Hugh had once told him in that booming, confident, maddening way in which he said everything. He had swept an unimpressed look over Richard's even-then-thinning, greying scalp and his pale, dry, nondescript face with its monkish features, and raised one of the virile, black eyebrows marking his own highly coloured, handsome, if rather heavy, face.

    Had his underperforming follicles, Richard occasionally wondered since, stood in the way of Parliamentary favour? Would a more thickly populated pate have ensured election to the great offices of state?

    But he knew in his heart that it wasn't killer hair he lacked. It was killer instinct. Certainly, soon after entering Parliament, his and Hugh's careers had dramatically diverged. Hugh, the more forceful and swashbuckling of the pair, had immediately disappeared into a cloud of glory with never a backward glance, gaining promotion after promotion, while Richard Fitzmaurice, bar the odd Commons committee, had never really moved off the backbenches. He had contented himself with being a well-thought-of constituency MP, which was, as he reminded himself many times through the years, what he had, after all, been elected for. That this wasn't well thought of by Georgie was just one of those things.