Simply Divine (10 page)

She wandered through into the gloomy living room and switched the lamps on. One bulb pinged defiantly back at her and conked out. Jane slumped on the sofa and stared at the very rug where, barely twenty-four hours before, Tom had done all those unimaginably wonderful things to her. She clenched her fists and screwed up her eyes. She wanted Tom, desperately. But she had no number, no idea where he was. They'd been ships that passed in the night. That had been the point of the encounter. Then.

If she couldn't have Tom, she'd have to make do with Gordon, Jane decided, reaching for the bottle. This called

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for extreme measures in every sense of the word. Anaesthetising. Comforting. The deep, deep peace of the double gin.

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Chapter 6

One of the bitterest pills to swallow, Jane considered, was not just that her love-life and work life were on the kind of downward trend not seen since the Wall Street Crash. Much worse was the fact that Champagne seemed set on an endless upward trajectory. For, if the first Champagne Moments column had been a sensation, the second almost caused riots. Within hours of
Gorgeous
appearing on the news-stands, it had sold out. People, it seemed, simply couldn't get enough of her. Champagnes combination of stunning beauty and astounding vacuousness seemed to have struck some kind of chord with public and media alike. The Lost Chord, a despairing Jane supposed.

Champagne, naturally, was well aware of her popularity. 'If there's no beginning to her talents,' Jane sighed to Valentine, 'there's certainly no end to her demands.' Only yesterday Champagne had called insisting
Gorgeous
hire a Learjet to fly her to a polo match, a request that followed hard on the Blahnik heels of a recent demand for a helicopter to take her to a shooting weekend.

'Doesn't she ever use roads?' Jane had marvelled aloud.

'Well, you always said she was an airhead,' Valentine reminded her. Josh then amazed them both by revealing he had promised Champagne a company car as a

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compromise, which left Jane wondering who was compromised, exactly. Josh had then played his trump card by saying he'd thrown in a chauffeur too.

'She's worth it,' Josh said shortly. 'Our circulation is on the up.' But it wasn't just her own magazine that Champagne dominated. International heavy-hitters from American
Vogue
to Russian
Tatler
were rushing to profile her. Her increasingly frequent appearances on TV translated straight into column inches in the tabloids. When she appeared on
Have I Got News For You,
Ian Hislop, after asking Champagne how she kept her figure, had been rendered unprecedentedly speechless when Champagne had said she worked out 370 days a year. The press had gone wild.

'What would you say to those who call you an egomaniac?' Bob Mortimer had asked her on
Shooting Stan.
'Oh, they're completely wrong,' Champagne had replied. 'I absolutely
loathe
eggs.' This became Quote of the Week in every paper from the
Daily Mail to
the
Motherwell Advertiser.

Most notorious of all was Champagne's appearance on
Newsnight
when Jeremy Paxman asked her whether it was true she spent each and every night out partying. 'Absolutely not,' Champagne had replied, apparently deeply affronted. 'As a matter of fact, I spent last night finishing a jigsaw puzzle.'

'A jigsaw puzzle?' Paxman had asked sardonically, raising one of his famously quizzical eyebrows.

'Yah, and I'm bloody proud of myself,' Champagne had declared. 'It's only taken me ninety-four days.'

'Ninety-four days? Surely that's rather a long time for a jigsaw,' Paxman bemusedly replied.

'Well, it said three to four years on the box,' said Champagne triumphantly.

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On the strength of this performance, negotiations to give Champagne her own chat show were well advanced.

It was odd, Jane thought, that a public, not to mention a press, that had already endured years of Caprice, Tamara, Tara, Normandie and Beverley could possibly have the stomach for yet another pouting party girl, but stomach it most certainly had. Perhaps it was, Jane mused, because Champagne seemed somehow to combine all of them. She had Caprice's looks, Tara's class, Tamara's chutzpah, Beverley s shopping obsession, and probably now close to Normandie's money as well.

Oddly enough, Champagne never seemed to encounter any of her rivals. Jane had two theories as to why. Either they all avoided her or, as was far more likely, Champagne spent night after night with them in Brown's, Tramp and, the Met Bar but could recall absolutely nothing of it afterwards. Champagne's memory, Jane considered, made a goldfish look like Stephen Hawking.

Not that this in any way held her back. No breakfast TV programme was complete without at least a reference to her; there was talk of her kicking off at Wembley, and rumours were beginning to circulate of a planned tribute in Madame Tussaud's. 'I hope that's true,' Jane said to Valentine. 1 might get more information for the column out of a waxwork.'

'What we need,' said Josh, 'is the new sex.' The Monday features meeting had begun.

'You're telling me,' simpered Valentine, examining his cuffs and pursing his lips in his best John Inman fashion.

'You know what I mean,' Josh snapped. 'I'm talking about what's the latest hip thing. The new rock and roll,

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the new black, the new brown, the new whatever. What's really, really hot just now?'

'Well, this office for a start,' said Valentine huffily. 'The air conditioning is a joke.' He flapped a plump hand about in front of his perspiring face.

Josh took no notice. 'Is being common the new smart?' he wondered aloud. 'Are men the new women? Is staying in the new going out?' He looked round the table. 'Where's Lulu? There must be something fashiony we could do. Are low heels the new stilettos? Is short the new long? Is underwear the new outerwear?'

'Lulu's still in bed,' said Jane, who had received a telephone call from the absent fashion editor to this effect a few minutes before. 'Her alarm didn't go off.' She paused. 'So,' she asked tartly, 'is absence the new presence? Is staying in bed the new getting up?'

'Poor Lulu needs her rest,' said Josh, leaping, as usual, to the fashion editor's defence. 'She needs to rest. She gets ill very easily, poor dear.'

'You're telling me,' said Valentine. 'She's certainly the only person I've ever known claim they had bunions in their ears.'

'Oh, shut up,' said Josh. 'Let's concentrate on the matter in hand. What's hot, what's hip. Is death the new life? Is being fat the new thin? Is,' his eyes widened as if knocked sideways by the brilliance of his own train of thought, 'rock and roll the new rock and roll?'

As she entered the sandwich shop at lunchtime, trying to psych herself up to a mayonnaise-free, butter-free and most of all fun-free lettuce leaf roll, Jane spotted Valentine. He was muttering darkly in a corner with Ann, the deputy editor
of Blissful Country Homes.
A monthly celebration of Agas, applique screens and City bankers downshifting to

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barn conversions in Bicester,
Blissful,
as it was known, was a stablemate in the same magazine company as
Gorgeous.

Meeting her gaze, Valentine rolled his eyes and beckoned Jane over. 'I've just been telling Ann about Josh. How he can be so rude to me, considering the strain I have been under, I can't imagine.'

'Strain?' asked Jane, relieved that she wasn't the only one suffering at the moment. There was nothing like someone else's woes to take one's mind off one's own. She looked at Valentine's shining, agitated face. 'Why, what's the matter?'

'It's Algy, my cairn terrier,' wailed Valentine. 'I went away last weekend and put him in a kennel where he got in with all the wrong dogs. He now refuses to come tq heel and poos all over the house. It's very upsetting.'

'I know just how Valentine feels,' Ann said sternly to a nonplussed Jane. 'One of my tabbies isn't well at the moment. It's dreadful. I have to inject my poor pussy twice a day.'

Never had a day been so designed to test Jane's patience to the full. She returned from the sandwich shop to find a letter from the BBC asking Champagne to go on
Desert Island Discs
and recommending she choose a mixture of contemporary and classical music. Jane snorted. Probably as far as Champagne was aware, Ravel was a shoe shop, Telemann someone who came to fix the video and Handel something that her bulging designer shopping bags were suspended from. None of this improved the fact that top of her list of jobs this afternoon was getting more column inches out of Champagne.

Jane delayed the evil moment as long as possible, rummaging about her desk and returning telephone calls, sometimes to people who hadn't even called in the first

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place. Eventually, however, she bowed to the inevitable.

'What
the fuck
are you doing calling this early?' barked the sleepy, furious voice at the other end. Jane looked at the clock. 'It's ten past three, Champagne,' she said with exaggerated patience. 'In the afternoon, that is.'

'Is it? Oh. Had no idea. Bloody late night last night,' honked Champagne.

Jane hardly dared breathe, let alone say anything that might knock Champagne off this particular train of thought. Like a truffling pig, she had caught the first tantalising whiffs of that rare and precious commodity Anecdote. 'Really?' she asked gently. 'What were you doing?'

'Went to the races with Conal. Bloody good fun, actually.'

'Which ones? Sandown? Kempton Park?'

'No, the East End somewhere.'

Jane frowned. Which of the racecourses was actually in London? None, as far as she knew.

'Bloody funny horses,' Champagne continued. 'Really weird and small-looking. Went bloody fast, though.'

The penny dropped. 'Do you mean you've been to Walthamstow?' Jane gasped. 'The dog track?' Conal O'Shaughnessy had clearly been attempting to inculcate Champagne into working-class culture. Jane was not sure how successful he'd been.

'Yah, and then we went for supper,' Champagne recalled after a few minutes' hard thought. 'Conal tried to make me have a green Thai curry but I told him no way was I going to eat anything made out of ties. Particularly green ones. Hermes ones I might have considered.'

'Have you seen this?' asked Valentine as Jane stopped scribbling and put the phone down. He flopped an open

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copy of
Vogue
on her desk. Jane coughed as the powerful smell often different scent inserts filled her nostrils. Below her on the glossy page Champagne sprawled across an advertisement spread for an aftershave called Leather, her ice-blonde hair spilling over a clinging leather catsuit and her nose hovering above an improbably large and clumsy frosted glass bottle. 'My favourite scent is Leather,' ran the slogan.

'Well, it would be,' said Jane. 'Essence of wallet.'

'On the other hand, it's great to see her getting a good hiding,' said Valentine.

'It's absurd,' grumbled Jane. 'Champagne's endorsing practically every product there is. Talk about a legend in her own launch time. Even that ridiculous poodle of hers is doing a dog food ad, for which I expect it gets paid more than I earn in five years.'

'Never mind,' said Valentine, putting a hot, damp palm on her shoulder. 'Just remember this. She may have the looks, the wealth, the boyfriend, the ad endorsements, the national newspaper columns, the TV appearances, the talk of film deals, the world at her feet . . .' His voice trailed off.

'Yes?' prompted Jane, fixing him with a beady eye.

'But she can't possibly be happy,' Valentine finished valiantly.

'Can't she?' asked Jane tightly.

Valentine was saved from answering by Jane's phone ringing. He scuttled across the room and disappeared behind the pile of newly-arrived gold lame oven gloves heaped on his desk for review.

'I was just calling to say,' Champagne boomed, 'when you call me to read my column back to me, call me at the Lancaster.'

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'The Lancaster?' echoed Jane. The Lancaster was the most expensive luxury hotel in London. A former office block off Piccadilly, the new, all-suite hotel had swiftly upstaged the Metropolitans chic. Each suite famously boasted extensive views over its own butlers, hot and cold running individual fax lines and an outside temperature gauge in the wardrobe so you could choose exactly the right clothes to combat any hostile elements encountered between leaving the hotel lobby and stepping into the limo. 'But why?' asked Jane. Was Champagne's huge flat in Eaton Square no longer good enough?