Well Groomed (90 page)

‘I need this wedding to go ahead!’ For a moment she looked distraught with fear, the huge eyes luminous with tears, red mouth gashed apart with a wail of absolute desperation.

‘And you’ll get it.’ Hugo walked across to the kitchen until they were almost nose-to-nose. ‘On two conditions.’ He suddenly smiled.

Too frantic to see the irony of the situation, Lisette gnawed at a glossy red lip. ‘What conditions?’

‘Firstly, you guarantee me that your grim ex-file never sees the light of a Sunday exclusive.’ His blue eyes danced as coolly as light refracting through ice. ‘Not that you’d ever show it to anyone unless you were certain your film was going to crash and die anyway. After all, publishing it would leave you without a leading actor. You could hardly expect Niall to roll up to work after the printing presses roll with that.’

‘He’s under contract!’ she ground her teeth.

‘Con being the operative word.’ Hugo backed away and started to scan the steel shelving to their left. ‘You’re bloody lucky he hasn’t drunk himself to death over this. If it weren’t for Zoe Goldsmith he probably would have done.’

Lisette looked at him for a long time, ignoring the kitchen help who was trying to edge his way behind her to open the dishwasher.

‘Niall wasn’t really threatening to kill himself, was he?’ she asked worriedly, her voice dropping to a hushed croak.

Searching through a shelf of catering-sized sauce bottles now, Hugo grinned over his shoulder. ‘And deprive you of an income? He’s far too kind. Anyway, he’s got Tash and her mother on his side now. And he’s getting married next Saturday – provided you agree to condition number two.’

‘Which is?’ She watched as he peered between two jars of mustard.

‘Come Saturday, you give your share of that horse back to its rightful owner.’

‘And who’s that?’ Lisette lifted her chin, eyes glancing towards a shelf on the right.

‘That’s for you to decide.’ Hugo backed away, following her gaze and finally locating an envelope hidden there, tucked beneath a vast tin of tomato purée. ‘I want you to be a maiden name of honour at the wedding, Ms Norton. And you know, I rather think you have it in you. That’s the ridiculous thing. You really do want Niall to be happy, don’t you? You want him to be as content in his second marriage as you are in yours – to your bloody career.’

‘And you?’ She watched him in disbelief. ‘What’s in this for you? You love that bloody scatty, mixed-up creature.’

‘Oh, I’ll cope with the loss.’ He turned the envelope over in his hands. ‘After all, love and marriage need their horse and carriage, don’t they?’

He calmly ripped up the rectangle without gazing at its contents.

‘You knew I was going to sign the bloody horse over to you all along, didn’t you?’ Lisette laughed in amazement.

‘I’m a professional eventer.’ He shrugged. ‘I always examine the mouth of any nag I’m offered. You didn’t really believe that I couldn’t see the wooden gift horse for the trees, did you?’

‘And you’re still willing to let Niall marry her on Saturday?’

‘I’m all for it.’ Hugo smiled. ‘She’s one of the loveliest women I’ve ever encountered. He’s one hell of a lucky bastard, if you ask me.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I must go. Do I take it I have your agreement? Only I said I’d get back to Niall ten minutes ago.’

Lisette nodded mutely.

‘Good.’ Hugo ran his hand through his hair. ‘Don’t look so glum, darling – you’re going to one hell of a wedding next weekend. Now I must push off, there’s a rather affectionate pack of spaniels I’m eager to reacquaint myself with.’

As soon as he’d gone, Lisette escaped to the loo and pressed her burning face to the cool window at the rear of the cubicle.

To her amazement, Niall was in the bar when she came out, knocking back mineral water and charming everyone in sight. Standing at the huge, unlit fireplace, he made a brief announcement.

‘Tash apologises that she can’t make it,’ he said loudly, with a strange glint in his eyes. ‘But the wedding is still very much on, and we all look forward to seeing you next weekend, if not at the ceremony then at the reception afterwards. It should be a bloody brilliant affair.’

He walked up to Lisette and gave her a soft kiss on the cheek. ‘Sorry I’m late, angel. I’ll pose all you like for the
Cheers!
guy now I’m here.’

Lisette’s eyes were brimming with tears as she took in his kind, craggy face which bore not one streak of malice.

‘You don’t have to,’ she found herself saying.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. I know how much this means to you.’

She shook her head very slowly and determinedly. ‘Nothing means that much, Niall. Please don’t get married next weekend.’

‘But I want to.’ He smiled easily. ‘You see, you’ve done me a favour, angel. You’ve given Tash and me the chance to show just how much we care about one another.’

Lisette stared at him in horror.

‘Does she know you’ve been seeing Zoe Goldsmith?’ she managed to splutter.

‘Of course,’ Niall told her calmly. ‘She knows everything. We have no secrets – I can safely say she’s the best mate I have, which is why she’s going to be standing at my side on Saturday morning.’

‘Rather forgiving, isn’t she?’ Lisette frowned, trying to keep calm.

‘She’s an extraordinary girl, so she is.’ He grinned. ‘And so’s the chap she wants to spend the rest of her life with.’

‘He’s an unfaithful bastard!’

‘Shh.’ Niall winked. ‘Don’t tell her that. Jesus, I’ve tried enough times, but she’s ludicrously attached to him.’

TO ALLAY HER NERVES, Tash walked to Fosbourne Holt House very early on Saturday morning while the grass on the verges was still misted by a patina of dew, like the skin of a ripe Muscat grape dusted with the first mildew of noble rot. Behind her, Beetroot dived in and out of the hedgerows, snorting madly at molehills so that her pale muzzle was covered with earth like a finger dipped in cocoa powder.

Fosbourne Holt House was the sort of country pile that Tash had day-dreamed of living in as a child, long before she developed an adult understanding of the cost of central heating. Although large, it wasn’t as sprawling or decrepitly stately as Ben Meredith’s family seat, Holdham Hall, which had been gaining a wing per century since Jacobean birth. But Fosbourne’s solid, muscular bulk, strawberry pink brick walls, glittering windows and tall, fat chimneys had appealed to Tash ever since she’d been to a hunt ball there the year before and glimpsed it properly for the first time. Before that, she had hacked past it almost daily for a year, standing up on her stirrups time and time again like a jockey riding into the winners’ enclosure as she’d sought to see more of the seventeenth-century house than its lichen-speckled roof and multiple chimneys. Set in acres of hilly, flint-strewn parkland, it hid its beautiful face like a bashful, fan-wielding courtesan, peeking up behind a high brick and flint wall.

Walking the final few hundred yards across the fields, Tash caught her breath as the house finally crept into view beyond a mist-drenched pheasant copse. Last winter, it had been a floodlit, unset jewel nestling amidst a black, moonless velvet night – cool, steely and romantically remote. Now it was enveloped in the ornate, sculpted setting of daylight, and glittered all the more brightly for it.

It was surrounded by soft, sumptuous grounds. Tall, isolated oaks dotted the parkland at intervals like proud bodyguards on the look out for danger, and there was such a profusion of green everywhere that Tash felt as though she should burst into strains of ‘Jerusalem’ and encourage Beetroot to stop rubbing her neck in goose crap and start showing a bit of respect by kneeling down or something.

‘
Verde que te quiero verde
,’ she sighed, transfixed. Beetroot panted alongside her, entering into the spirit of things with a fresh green stain on her neck.

Yet it was the house itself that provided the richest colour in the park, like a jaunty brooch pinned to Robin Hood’s doublet. Decked out in its midsummer finery, it was coated in variegated ivy, honeysuckle, mauve wistaria and a climbing quince that was dropping the last of its tomato red blooms like feathers from a scarlet boa. Zandra Rhodes couldn’t have designed a brighter outfit for a wedding.

The bulk of the building now housed the British headquarters of a high-flying electronics company, with partitioned offices which fragmented most of the grand old halls and rooms. But the commercial owners had sympathetically left the entire first floor untouched and hired it out for conferences, parties and – now that wedding ceremonies were allowed to be conducted in specially licensed venues – marriages. Today’s was only the third to be held in the house, and to Tash’s alarm the owners had taken out an advert in that week’s
Marlbury Weekly Gazette
proudly declaring that Niall O’ Shaughnessy was using it for his celebrity marriage ‘to be covered by
Cheers!
magazine’.

Tash closed her eyes and hoped to God that everything went to plan.

Not wanting to disturb the security staff, she settled on the roots of one of the guardsmen oaks and looked at the house for a self-indulgent few minutes. At her feet, amid the dried humus and warty toadstools, a small clump of clover was battling for life in the shade. Bang in the middle of it was a four-leafed one, so small that Tash wondered if her ropey botanical skills had identified it correctly at first. But, as she turned it around in her fingers, she knew she was right. It was the first one she’d ever found, and there seemed to be something prophetic in it, however tiny. Standing up, she whistled for Beetroot and started trailing back to the house.

‘C’mon, Bee,’ she sighed, carefully pocketing her find. ‘You need a bath, and I have a speech to rehearse.’

From eight o’clock that Saturday morning, florist’s vans started rolling through the high security gates at the entrance of the park and unloading their contents from the gravel car park at the side of the house and into a side entrance which led directly to the back stairs. When the flower arrangers ran out of foliage, a Sloaney girl was despatched into the park with a pair of secateurs to pillage from the hedgerows. Soon, several rhododendron bushes and a climbing ivy to one side of the house were starting to look suspiciously bald.

Later that morning, a piano tuner poled up to perfect the tone on the Steinway grand which was due to be played during the ceremony by Niall’s great friend, the film-score composer Roger Allice, who had written a wedding anthem especially for the ceremony.

‘It sounds like he’s head-banging the piano, so it does,’ Niall had moaned when it was played down the phone to him earlier that week. ‘I think perhaps we should have stuck to Handel.’

By lunchtime the imposing double front doors of the house had been opened by security staff and the first of the groom’s party started to arrive in anticipation of welcoming guests. With them was Beetroot, her biscuit-coloured coat gleaming like a wire brush from an early-morning bath, a huge ivy-coloured ribbon tied to her collar which caused her to sit down and scratch frantically every few paces.

The three ushers – Gus, Hugo and Rufus – were relieved to see that no guests had turned up yet. Niall’s family had a reputation for arriving so early at weddings that they regularly attended other people’s ceremonies before waiting through to see their own family member getting hitched. Ma claimed it got her in the mood – like watching a short at the cinema before catching the main programme.

‘No sign of
Cheers!
yet then?’ Rufus looked around eagerly, clutching on to Beetroot’s lead as she tried to drag him towards a potted bay tree. His new crew cut was hidden beneath an old dressage topper, and he had borrowed Gus’s yellow dressage waistcoat. A can of Becks was poking from each pocket.

‘Obviously not.’ Hugo glanced up the steps, which were covered with quince petals like a very ragged red carpet. He was pale-faced with sternly controlled nerves, blue eyes watchful, mouth curled into that half-smile he always wore when he was uncertain. Yet such was his remarkable sangfroid that the only real outward sign of anxiety was a tendency to tug at his shirt-cuffs beneath his well-cut, well-brushed and well-used morning suit.

Gus was holding together less well. Despite his own smart, hired morning suit, his shirt was already stained with horse slobber and his straw-coloured hair was clumped into tangled tassels because he hadn’t combed it after his shower that morning. His thin, angular face was as bleached as a piece of Bondi Beach driftwood.

‘I feel like I’m about to ride for England on a strange horse.’ He wrinkled his nose as he paced around outside with a last, nervous cigarette. ‘And that dog still smells.’

‘She’s probably decomposing a wedding anthem,’ Hugo muttered.

‘Two to one she’ll bite the groom.’ Gus winced against his cigarette smoke. ‘That animal seems to have it in for Niall.’

‘On the contrary, I’m sure she’s Beetrooting for him,’ a voice pointed out calmly and, giving Beetroot a big pat, the best man dashed up the grand staircase to check that all was well above.

‘I don’t have a great deal of confidence in Niall’s choice.’ Gus watched the long legs bound up the stone steps. ‘Doesn’t strike me as very organised – no use at all at the stag night. Didn’t even hire a stripper.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Hugo said lightly. ‘You didn’t stay as long as I did. Shit, here come the superficial wedding photographers.’ He nodded towards a silver hatch-back that was turning into the gates, the rear of its driver-side sun-visor plastered with
Cheers!
stickers.

Inside Fosbourne Holt House, the long hall ran for the entire length of the first floor, with huge floor-to-ceiling windows to one side which let in thick, slanted stripes of sunlight, dancing with shadows from the rampant wall-climbers. Today, the hall had been set out to resemble a church with a wide central aisle, a vast bank of flowers and candles where there would normally be an altar, and row upon row of ‘pews’, which in this case were the far more comfortable and ornate gold banqueting chairs that belonged to the house. One of the staff was busily ripping seat numbers from the back of them, left over from a recent music recital staged in the same room.