For All the Wrong Reasons (50 page)

Daisy flushed at the sarcasm. She hated Miss Crawford and Victoria and most of the bloody girls here. Just because she didn't do very well at school. It wasn't as if she didn't already know she was thick.

Tears prickled in the back of her throat, and Daisy forced herself to see a mental picture of Mummy opening her last report, which was full of Cs and Ds, and saying it didn't matter a bit, because Daisy had tried her best.

“Miss Markham. This is one of your only O level classes. Maybe you should have been streamed in the CSE class after all.”

“No I shouldn't,” Daisy said.

Where did that come from? She was terrified of Miss Crawford. But it had popped out, defiant, mutinous.

“And why not?”

“Because I'm good at writing and I like books,” Daisy stammered.

“Good at writing!” The scorn dripped from her teacher's narrow, red-painted mouth. “You're no Chaucer. That's a detention tonight and one demerit to Sackville House.”

Victoria was a Sackville prefect. She stopped giggling and scowled at Daisy.

“I could ask you to read the next ten lines, Daisy, but why put the class through it?” Miss Crawford sighed theatrically. “Miss Garnett, can you continue?”

“Yes, Miss Crawford.”

Arabella Garnett tossed her sleek mane of auburn hair over her slender shoulders and began to read, pronouncing each word perfectly.

Daisy sat there mercifully dry-eyed. She had been going to cry, but luckily Miss Crawford and Victoria had been their usual hateful selves, and that gave her the resolve to keep the tears back. They could wait until she got upstairs at break.

There were a couple of good things you could say about St. Mary's, Withambury. It was nestled in a picture-perfect setting in the Surrey countryside, and Daisy liked going for walks outside the school grounds. Now she was a fourth year, she was allowed to. She also liked the fact that finally she had got her own miniature cubicle. It had space for a bed, a sink with a mirror, and a cork board for sticking pictures up on. Sharing a room with Isobel Soames hadn't been
that
bad, because Isobel was quite nice, not a bully like those prefect bitches and the snobby girls in the Oxbridge Preparation set who thought you should curtsy to them just because they were clever. But still, she hadn't enjoyed it. Isobel was pretty, very pretty—honey-blonde hair, pale green eyes, small perky breasts, and a cute dusting of freckles.

And Daisy wasn't.

It was tough, getting changed in front of Isobel. Daisy used to keep a towel around her ample thighs and try to struggle into her cream school shirt as quickly as possible, so her dimpled bottom and pudgy upper arms were hidden. And it was worse because her friend tried to be so nice about it.

“You've got such a pretty face, Daisy.” She'd be almost pleading. “If you just lost a bit of weight.”

“I know,” Daisy would say, and then she would change the subject.

Like she hadn't tried. Daisy longed to be slim and beautiful and toss her long, gleaming hair over her shoulders in what the girls all called “The St. Mary's Flick.” But she had her hair cut in a bob, because long hair made her face look even fatter, and when she tried to stop eating, she just couldn't. Her diets were secret; Victoria and Mercedes and Camilla would all be so mean if they found out. Daisy tried eating fruit and skipping pudding and sometimes she even lasted a week. But she got so hungry she could cry, and then one day it would be fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies for tea, and she'd crack—and a week later, she'd weigh more than she'd started out at.

Nothing worked. Diets only made her fatter. PE lessons were a nightmare; she couldn't run, she couldn't shoot netball—she could hit a rounders ball, but she couldn't get to the bag in time. Besides, the bitchier girls always used to give her wobbly bottom and chunky thighs contemptuous glances which made Daisy feel about three inches high. Next year things would be even worse. Fifth form girls got to take PE lessons in the health club at the local town. This was meant to be a big treat; for Daisy, it simply meant random townies would get a good look at her cellulite and her embarrassingly large boobs that barely fitted into a D-cup.

Daisy had given up on her body. She ate what she liked, and she ate for comfort. When she failed her mock CSE in maths, she ate a whole bag of fun-sized Marathons. (Why did they call minuscule, unsatisfying morsels fun-sized? Fun-sized was a full bar with 20 per cent extra free.) Getting her own cubicle had been an immense relief. She sat next to Isobel at lunchtimes, but mostly she kept to herself. After all, on her own, she could do her favorite thing short of driving out of St. Mary's gates at the end of term reading.

Daisy loved books. Not Chaucer and Dickens and Evelyn Waugh, or whatever other boring set text they had to do in O level English; she loved Jeffrey Archer and Judith Krantz, Jilly Cooper and Shirley Conran. Her copy of
Lace
was falling apart at the seams. In her books, the women were all slender and beautiful, the men were dashing rakes, or determined power-players. Daisy was scared of flying, but with her trashy novels she could move seamlessly from the sun-drenched French Riviera to the snowy romance of the Russian Steppes. She yearned to be ravished by Rupert Campbell-Black, to work her way up to a vast empire like Abel Rosnovski; she wanted to be beautiful-yet-feisty like Maxime and Pagan, to shop at Scruples, and generally to be anything other than Daisy Markham at St. Mary's, Withambury.

Daisy had the best collection of trashy novels in school, and gradually her classmates wised up to it. Soon after she'd set them all out on the shelves in her little cubicle, Lucy Gresham had sauntered in.

“Hey, Daisy.”

“Hey Lucy,” Daisy said, pretending she hadn't heard Lucy hiss “fat cow” under her breath when she'd sneaked an extra cream cake at tea that day.

Lucy stood there, doing The Flick with her long, expensively highlighted blonde hair. Everyone knew Lucy went to London on the train every exeat weekend and had her hair done at Vidal Sassoon. Her parents were very rich. Daisy's parents were struggling to keep up their middle-class lifestyle, even though she was an only child, and she was at St. Mary's on a bursary, because her mother had been Head Girl there thirty years ago.

“I see you've got the new Jilly Cooper,” Lucy said casually.

“Haven't you?”

“Mummy doesn't want to have it in the house, because it's got s—e—x in it,” Lucy admitted.

Daisy paused. “Would you like to borrow it?”

Lucy obviously would. “Have you finished it?”

“The day I bought it, of course,” Daisy said sternly. As though you could put down a Jilly Cooper! She had strained her eyes finishing it under the bedclothes with a torch, but it had been worth it. “Here.” She picked up the thick white paperback with its embossed gold letters and passed it over.

“Thanks, Daisy,” Lucy said, sweeping out.

Soon she was acting as a mini-library. The girls considered Daisy an expert and asked her opinion on which one to borrow next. There was a queue, so nobody returned the books late. Apart from Victoria and Arabella, most of the fourth form stopped teasing Daisy.

They still didn't like her much, she could tell, but it was bad manners to pick on someone you owed a favor to.

Victoria got mad and bought more than one copy of every new trashy novel worth reading, but her play backfired. Daisy was established as the pulp fiction queen. The girls liked gathering in her cubicle, talking to each other about the books they'd just read.

“You know,” Emma Wilkins told her one day, “you should write one of these, Daisy.”

Daisy flicked through
Kane and Abel.
“Don't be daft, it'd take me ten years.”

“I bet it wouldn't.” Lucy agreed with Emma. “You know all about this stuff. You should write one. You could let us read the chapters.”

“You'd be great at that,” Emma said. “You could put me in it.”

Daisy smiled, her fat face dimpling. This was the first compliment anyone had ever paid her at school. She'd love to be a writer. Maybe she should try it.

ALSO BY LOUISE BAGSHAWE

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Venus Envy

 

OUTSTANDING PRAISE FOR LOUISE BAGSHAWE'S FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS

“This American debut by the author of four erotic bestsellers in the U.K. serves fair warning that there's a new sexy romance queen panting at the gates, with one difference: Bagshawe doesn't try to sugar-coat her characters' ruthless, selfish, or venal behavior, giving her story a witty edge.…
Designing Women
meets
The Wife of Bath's Tale
in this blithely erotic, name-dropping romp through Tiffany's, Cartier and an entire Yellow Pages of designer showrooms and posh eateries.… this title could hit the big time—Jackie Collins, watch out!”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Glitz galore…”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Even more compulsive than Jackie Collins' latest.”

—
Company

“A gripping tale of revenge & ambition … Brilliant.”

—
Heat

First published in Great Britain by Orion, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd.

FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS

Copyright © 2000 by Louise Bagshawe.

Excerpt from
The Devil You Know
copyright © 2003 by Louise Bagshawe.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001048649

ISBN: 0-312-98728-5

St. Martin's Press hardcover edition / April 2002

St. Martin's Paperbacks edition / March 2003

St. Martin's Paperbacks are published by St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

eISBN 9781466838963

First eBook edition: January 2013