Kissing Toads (19 page)

Which made it pretty idiotic to call in a TV makeover team, I reflected. But that's celebrity thinking. A normal person would go out and buy a seed catalogue; a celeb summoned Mortimer Sparrow and Delphinium Dacres. HG wasn't really dumb: he just couldn't kick the thought processes of a lifetime.

It was his tragic flaw, I concluded, and, as with all tragic flaws, only trouble could come of it.

  

I thought working with Alex would be a ball; I was wrong. The problem was, he'd never done a regular job in his life. I'm rich, successful and famous, but I didn't get there without hard work (well, sometimes); Alex has just had the easy life handed to him on a plate. He evolves wonderful plans but never gets round to making them happen, he has business lunches that never produce any business, he plays at being a model, actor, impresario without ever staying the course. The pressure was on with the historical scenes – we needed to get them done quickly so we could pay off the extras and get back to the garden – but Alex was magnificently unaware of pressure. He fussed over Fenny when he should have been rehearsing, routinely got his lines wrong (‘They aren't that good; what does it matter if I alter a few words?'), fiddled with his costume, adding out-of-period accessories, ignored direction when it didn't suit him. I mean, I argue with Russell occasionally, but that's different: I'm a professional. I know what I'm talking about. Alex isn't, and doesn't. I got pissed off with him, Russell got pissed off with him – he pissed everyone off. Probably because of that, our sexual chemistry wasn't working the way it should. But then, with Fenny around we never managed to have sex any more.

In the bedroom, Alex said the Basilisk's décor was ‘total pants', but later declared the fertility goddesses reminded him of his nanny, and started dancing around naked with a devil-mask over his crotch. He wanted to shag on the zebra-skin rug, claiming it made him feel animal, but I preferred the comfort of the bed, so we had a row instead. Not a screaming row, just a bicker, but we'd had too many bickers lately. Alex was letting me down, spoiling my lovely scheme of how things should work out, and it was really getting to me.

Then Brie arrived.

Brie
adored
the castle,
loved
the décor, gushed over HG at the first opportunity. ‘It's so exciting the way you've done it up,' she told him (I hadn't explained to her about Basilisa). ‘Most of these places are really dull, all stodgy paintings of people's ancestors and ornaments on every table and that old-fashioned furniture that's always so bloody uncomfortable. Frankly, I can't see why anyone should rave about antiques just because they're old. New stuff is much more fun. I think the castle is fabulous. The purple gallery, the African bedroom, the Indian room where I am – it's all so cool.'

HG responded by treating Brie rather as if she were an entertaining child, an attitude she mistook for encouragement. Later, he disappeared off to have dinner on his own. Several of the crew were already claiming there was a priest's hole or a dungeon where he hid when he wanted to get away from us all.

Acting-wise, as I'd guessed, Brie had very little to do, her only lines being in the short scene when Alex relinquishes her, when she had to say: ‘If you're going to leave me for yon Sassenach hussy, Alasdair McGoogle, may the curse of all the powers o' night rest upon both ye and her!' Whether her original character had ever said anything of the kind we didn't know, but Russell thought it would be dramatic to throw in a curse and altered Nigel's script accordingly. (He altered Nigel's script whenever he got the opportunity, on principle.) Unfortunately, Brie couldn't do a Scots accent, and when we gave her a crash course of conversation with Morag to get her attuned, she really upset the old fruitbat, telling her: ‘
Do
shut up, you silly cow. Everyone knows that religious stuff is a load of horseshit.'

In the end, Russell sneakily decided to record someone else's voice when she had gone, without telling her anything about it. Ten to one Brie wouldn't notice.

The one part of my plan that did seem to work out was the bit about improving relations between Brie and Alex.

Initially they refused to air-kiss or even shake hands, treating each other as if they were mutually poisonous. Unlike Alex, Brie
was
capable of concentrating on work, but she had so little to do, and was so bad at it when she did, that her efforts were immaterial. Once her scene was out of the way she was at a loose end, and wound up thrown into Alex's company because he was her only available kindred spirit. The rest of us were professionals with jobs to do, and HG, after the first evening, preferred to be reclusive in his dungeon. Brie was happy to drool over Fenny provided he didn't crap anywhere near her, and by the second day she and Alex were getting together to bitch up media acquaintances and share scandal about the other ‘stars' in
Celebrity Murder Island
, some of which Alex had watched. He still said, behind her back, that she was common, and refused to concede she might actually be quite pretty, but he admitted she could be ‘amusing' and said grudgingly that it was okay for her to be my second bridesmaid. While I was filming the scene when I had to grope my way through a computerised reconstruction of the maze before vanishing into the dark for ever, he and Brie were hanging out, whispering and giggling a lot. When Fenny was found to have peed on Russell's discarded jacket, I was sure it was at their instigation – Alex looked innocent, Brie smothered laughter. I'd forgotten that Alex's sense of humour, like some of his other qualities, had never really grown up.

I removed Fenny from their vicinity, leaving him in the custody of Jules in the hope that Elton and Sting, once he got used to them, would provide better role models. Roo calmed Russell and promised to get the jacket cleaned, which dealt with the matter, but it left a sort of residue of bad feeling, like dregs in a wine glass.

Alex also enjoyed playing on the nerves of the more highly strung extras (minor actors often have more temperament than stars, to compensate for their lack of success). He removed a claymore from the castle weaponry and left it in their allocated dressing room, lavishly stained with stage blood. More blood was splashed all over the floor, the walls, and people's street clothing, reducing one woman to hysterics. She claimed, not for the first time, that the programme was jinxed, while one of her mates cried, ‘We're all doomed!', if only because someone had to.

Brie thought that was funny too.

Roo didn't.

In a display of uncharacteristic toughness she took Alex on one side and spoke to him very quietly and at some length, only releasing her stranglehold on his shirt-collar when she had completely finished. The expression on her face showed quite clearly that murder
was
one of the future options.

Afterwards, Alex complained, ‘I'm not sure I like your friend Roo any more. She's getting awfully stuffy. Why do all these people take themselves so seriously?'

‘We're trying to make a TV series,' I said. ‘We have to take it seriously.'

‘Well, I don't think I want stuffy Roo as one of your bridesmaids. She's been acting so uptight lately . . .'

‘I don't care what you think!' I snarled. ‘It's my wedding, and I'll do what I bloody well like!' What with pressure of work, and pressure of Alex, my tolerance levels were right down.

‘Can't we get rid of those two?' Russell grumbled the next day, eying Alex and Brie with distaste. ‘We don't need them for shooting any more.'

But we couldn't. I'd rashly promised them both they could remain at Dunblair till we'd finished the re-enactment scenes, and there was no way they'd pass up the prestige of a stay with Hot God (even if he was absent for most of it) for so much as an hour. Which meant, since we still had to do the razing of the computerised maze (Alex looking brooding in the background) and all the bits with HG himself, that we were stuck with them for at least another week, maybe a fortnight.

‘I do love Alex,' I told Roo, ‘but working with him was a mistake. He just isn't
focused
. Anyway, I'm afraid he's a bit bored up here. He's used to the big city lifestyle with clubs and restaurants and parties all the time. I think he expected this set-up to be much more glamorous, what with HG being such a big star. There isn't enough here for him to do.'

‘Walking?' Roo suggested. ‘Deer-stalking? Feeding the sporrans? Fishing for monsters in the loch?'

‘He likes watching television,' I said, ‘but HG doesn't have very many channels. There's only twenty or so. It seems a bit strange to me: he doesn't even have UK Old Gold or Sky B-Movies 3.'

‘Extraordinary,' said Roo.

‘At least Alex is getting on with Brie . . .'

‘I noticed.'

‘He doesn't
really
like her all that much,' I explained. ‘He said last night she was a natural-born Essex girl with a giggle like a tap with hiccups, but he's sort of forced into her company at the moment, so they've had to bond. They've both got plenty of mutual friends they can enjoy being nasty about. It keeps him entertained. He's just a child at heart.' It was that sweetness and simplicity, that touch of playground innocence (under the sophistication and the taste for wearing my thongs) which I'd always loved in him – wasn't it?

‘He needs plenty of toys,' Roo deduced.

‘I thought you liked him?' Until Dunblair, Alex and Roo had always got on.

‘Sort of,' Roo said. ‘I
do
like children. But I prefer them to be less than four feet high.'

And then: ‘Are you
sure
you're in love with him?'

‘Of course I am. I'm going to marry him, aren't I? I wouldn't marry someone I didn't love. You can't expect people to be perfect all the time. You know your problem? You're too idealistic. You think someone's going to come along like . . . like Mr Darcy, all handsome and strong and silent, but real life isn't like that. Real life means falling in love with a real person, somebody who'll care for you and make you happy, but who has faults that you have to put up with.'

‘I was in love with Kyle,' Roo said quietly. ‘He was a real person. With faults.'

‘Yes, but . . . he didn't make you happy, did he?'

She had no answer to that.

What with all the hassle, I hadn't had much time to concentrate on getting close to Elizabeth Courtney, or figure out what had actually happened to her. Apparently, after her disappearance Alasdair had been so heartbroken he had destroyed nearly all the pictures of her, unable to bear the anguish of looking on her face again, but Nigel had unearthed a surviving portrait from one of the storerooms and hung it in the hall. Elizabeth wasn't quite what I'd expected – not really beautiful at all, with a long, rather horsey face – but the more I looked at the picture the more sympathetic I found her. She seemed to be smiling, or maybe her mouth was naturally turned up at the corners, and her eyes were lovely, narrow but very bright, full of light and laughter. There was strength in her face, too, the courage and determination to go against the crowd. She didn't look like someone who should have died tragically.

Meeting her gaze, I said, ‘I'll find out the truth. I promise.'

I'd come in from filming and was standing in the hallway, still in costume, talking to a portrait, when I heard a voice behind me.

‘Are you busy, Miss Dacres?'

That bloody butler. Ideal butlers are supposed to move silently, performing their duties so unobtrusively that you are hardly aware of their presence, but as Winkworth had no other butlerish qualities it seemed unreasonable that he should be capable of such noiseless movement. I felt stupid, but had no intention of showing it.

‘What is it?' I asked coldly.

‘Telephone call for you.' He passed me a cordless handset.

Mobiles worked erratically in the castle, and you weren't meant to carry them during shooting (Alex did, but he had no signal so it didn't matter), so I'd left the landline number for anyone who wanted to contact me.

‘Hello?' I said to the receiver.

‘Delph?'

‘
Pan?
'

It was my sister.

We weren't big on regular calls and sibling chit-chat, so I was surprised. At the last count she'd been back in Paris, sharing a flat with some friends on the Ile St Louis. They'd set up their own label, a sort of counter-culture coûture, basse more than haute; Pan was designing as well as modelling. It was the kind of thing that would have had much more of a following in London – the French are too elegant for grunge – but Pan was pig-headed and liked living in Paris. I sometimes suspected it was because she was more comfortable at a distance from me.

‘Where are you?' I asked.

‘Café Valjean. How are the wedding plans?' She sounded unusually hesitant. And it wasn't like her to call about any plans of mine.

‘Hectic. Are you coming?'

‘'Spect so.
Encore de bière, s'il v' plaît
: Look, I have to talk to you.'

‘Where did you get this number?'

‘Mum. I talked to her too. She wasn't much bothered, but she said I should tell you.'

‘Tell me what?' Pan's conversation was always confusing – she spoke the way she thought, leaping from one subject to the next like a jumping bean – but it was unlike her to skirt round an issue.

‘Dad turned up the other day.'

‘What?' Just for a second, I felt
pale
– not just pale-cheeked but pale inside, in my stomach, a horrible draining sensation, as if all my Self was oozing away.