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‘Erm, not sure really. I think the family just really want to set the record straight and feel like we’re the ones to do it. I’ve promised them it’ll be a nice piece,’ said Lala. ‘It will, won’t it?’
‘Of course!’ said Peregrine. ‘It’ll be excellent. I can see the headline now: PULLING THE TRIGGER WITH BRITAIN’S MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELOR!
‘Polly,’ he went on, ‘I’d like you to do the interview, so cancel whatever you were doing that weekend and start getting ready. I want you to find out everything you can about him. Why can’t he keep a girlfriend? Are the Duke and Duchess pressurizing him to get married? Does he think he’ll ever find The One? And can you talk to the picture desk about it, I want photos of Jasper through the ages. As a page boy at the King of Lichtenstein’s wedding, his first day at Eton, the university years, at the races, out hunting and so on. Everything.’
‘Sure,’ I said, but I was suddenly nervous. ‘La, what should I wear? And dinner, will it be smart?’
‘You need tweed for the shooting, a hat and some boots. Oh, and some shooting socks. And then it’ll probably just be black tie on Saturday night.’
‘Just black tie?’
‘Well, you know, a dress or skirt. Knee-length or longer. Heels,’ said Lala.
‘Polly, do stop fussing about the detail,’ said Peregrine. ‘Lala, take her to the fashion cupboard. Sort it out there.’
Back at my computer, I had a little red Instagram notification: Callum had followed me back. Only twenty-four hours later, I thought to myself, which seems odd when everyone has their phones on them all the time. And then I thought: stop being so psycho.
‘Lala, look, he’s followed me back.’
‘Who?’
‘That guy Callum I told you about from the weekend.’
‘Ohhhhh yes. The one who lives in Brixton?’
‘No, no. That’s Bill. You’ve met Bill.’
She frowned at me.
‘You know. Dark hair, used to work for Google, now developing his own app.’
‘Oh yes. Cute. Dimples?’
I frowned. ‘You have weird taste. But no, I don’t mean Bill.’
‘Who then?’
‘Callum.’
‘Is he the Instagram one?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is he the one who’s just added you on Instagram?’
‘YES. Jesus, I feel like we might both die of old age having this conversation.’
‘But who is he?’
‘A friend of Bill’s. I kissed him on Friday night after Bill’s dinner party. Do you really not remember me telling you all this yesterday?’
‘When?’
‘When we went to get coffee after talking to Peregrine about Jasper.’
‘Oh, then. Pols, that was eleven o’clock on Monday morning. I can barely remember my own name at eleven o’clock on Monday mornings.’
‘So I need to take you through the whole thing again?’
‘Yes. Come on. Let’s go to the fashion cupboard and you can talk me through it there.’
While I repeated the entire sorry story of Friday night, Lala and Allegra the magazine’s French fashion editor (nicknamed Legs on the basis that hers were skinnier than a pair of chopsticks), clicked through websites looking for suitably tweedy clothes. After half an hour of umming and aahing, they decided I needed the following:
1) One tweed Ralph Lauren coat
2) One brown felt hat with a feather sticking out of it (‘You must wear a hat, Pols, toffs like everyone wearing hats because it means they can pretend it’s still two hundred years ago and they rule everything’)
3) One pair of Jimmy Choo riding boots
4) One three-quarter-length black Dolce & Gabbana dress
5) One pair of Charlotte Olympia heels.
‘And not too much make-up, Pols, they don’t like too much make-up,’ Lala added sternly.
‘Why? What’s wrong with make-up?’
‘It’s vulgar. Makes you look like you’ve tried too hard.’
‘OK. And what shall I do with my hair?’
‘Mustn’t be too perfect, otherwise that suggests that you’re vain and have been indoors all day.’
‘Instead of running around outside killing things?’
‘Exactly. Happy? You never know, you might fall madly in love with Jasper and end up marrying him. Imagine that. Oh, except you don’t need a boyfriend any more.’
‘Callum is not my boyfriend. Did you not listen to a word of my story?’
‘But do you want him to be? You must like him, otherwise you wouldn’t have talked on and on about him.’
‘I had to keep talking on and on about him because you weren’t listening. And I don’t really know. I think maybe he’s just a distraction. Or maybe it’s just my biological clock.’
‘What ees thees clock?’ interjected Legs. Being French, she disliked most things, but she especially disliked: fat people, most forms of carbohydrate, London buses, flat shoes, any kind of comfortable or functional clothing, Peregrine and rain.
‘It’s a thing you supposedly get when you turn thirty,’ I explained. ‘It means you want to have babies.’
‘Pfff. You cannot possibly ’ave a baby. Babies are so unchic,’ said Legs.
‘No, no. Well, I don’t mean “no”. I want them at some point. But not now. I couldn’t afford one anyway. I can barely afford my own lunch.’
‘Pffff.’ Legs wasn’t big on lunch either. She always had an Americano with macadamia nut milk for breakfast, a Diet Coke for lunch, then several Martinis at whatever fashion dinner she had that night while she pushed a piece of fish so tiny you could hardly see it, let alone eat it, around her plate.
Later that week, I did my homework on the Montgomerys, which meant Googling them and leafing through old copies of Posh!. As far as I could work out, there were four main characters, all of whom would be there for the weekend. The main focus was obviously Jasper. Thirty-three-year-old Jasper, the Marquess of Milton. Suave, sandy-haired playboy, tall and obsessed with horse racing. By all accounts, he had impeccable manners until approximately ten minutes after he’d slept with you, when he would lose all interest and go back to studying the Racing Post. After leaving the Army he had moved home and seemingly learnt how to run the family estate.
Then there was his father, Charles, the Duke of Montgomery. Clearly, as a former army major, he was the kind of man who always had toast and marmalade in his 153-room house at 0755 hours and would then take a post-breakfast shit at precisely 0840, before walking his black Labrador and then settling down at 0930 hours to write a letter to the Telegraph about the state of the armed services. He had been hospitalized a few times for various heart operations, according to several newspaper reports, and remained as frail as a green bean.
The Duke’s wife, Jasper’s mother, was a woman called Eleanor, the Duchess of Montgomery. She grew up in a Scottish castle and was mad. Properly, totally mad, according to past Posh! interviews in which she only talked about her chickens. She was, as far as I could tell, in love with her chickens. At one point she had thirty-nine of them, all with different names. She had told one interviewer that, when they were born, her trick was to carry the chicks around in her bra so that she bonded with them. ‘I’ve never crushed any of them,’ she’d said. ‘I love them like they’re my own children. Maybe even more.’
Meanwhile, Jasper’s sister, Lady Violet, was in love with her horse. Apparently, nobody in this family could form proper human relationships, so instead they made questionably close friends with their animals. Violet was twenty-five and also living at home in Yorkshire, having attempted a cookery course, a secretarial course, an art foundation course and a needlework course. Presumably, she had now run out of courses. No boyfriend, although she had once been linked to Prince Harry. Who hadn’t?
So, that was the line-up for the weekend, the family that I had to interview for an eight-page piece in Posh! to prove what a normal, upstanding family they were.
Mum sent me a message that same afternoon.
Got the letter, the appointment is at 4.15 on 2nd February at St Thomas’ Hospital. Is that all right, darling? X
I checked my diary. It was the week after I was going to Castle Montgomery, so I would make Peregrine give me the afternoon off.
Course, easy-peasy. Will ring later Xxxx
3
ON THE SATURDAY MORNING, I caught the 7.05 from King’s Cross, which arrived in York station just before 10 a.m., where an idling taxi driver outside picked me up.
‘You’re wanting the castle?’ said the driver. His car smelt of dogs.
‘Yes please,’ I said, shutting my eyes and leaning back in the seat to try to denote that I wasn’t up for chatting.
‘I know that young Lord Jasper,’ said the driver, as the car kicked into action.
‘Mmmm,’ I replied, eyes still closed.
‘I’ve been driving him about since he was a lad.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘And if you ask me…’
I wasn’t.
‘… there’s something not right about that family. All that money, all them rooms, all them horses. And now Lord Jasper in the newspapers again. Still no wife. And all that carrying on between the Duchess and that gamekeeper, I ask you. It ain’t right.’
‘The gamekeeper?’ I opened one eye.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘If you ask me, it’s disgustin’, behaving like that while your husband’s heart’s playing up. If my Marjorie ever even thought about it, I’d have something to say about it. Not that I’ve ever given her cause for complaint in that department.’
I decided to gloss over this personal detail. ‘Does everyone know about the Duchess?’
‘Oh yeah. Everyone up ’ere does anyway. And Tony, he’s the chap, braggin’ about it in the pub every night.’ He shook his head.
‘How long’s that been going on for?’
‘Years, far as I know. I tell you, if my Marjorie…’
Twenty minutes later, he pulled up outside the front door. ‘Here you go then, that’ll be twenty-five pounds. Will you be wanting a lift back later?’
‘Oh no, thanks, I’m here for the night.’
‘Right you are. Here’s my card anyways, you never know.’
I climbed out and looked up. It made the Disney castle look poky. There were turrets and gargoyles grimacing out on various corners. It was the sort of place from which a treasonous medieval baron would have plotted his march on London. I tugged on a metal pulley by the front door. Nothing. I pulled it again. Nothing. I peered through the glass of the front door into the hall and spied a large fireplace. There was no sign of human activity – just a large stuffed bear standing beside a grand piano.
Feeling awkward, I tiptoed across the lawn at the front of the house to find another door, like a visiting peasant who had come to pay my rent. Then, through a large stone arch to the left-hand side of the castle, I saw a door suddenly swing open and a male figure, clad entirely in tweed, marched out of it, followed by a black Labrador. Tweed hat, tweed coat, tweed trousers. The only thing which wasn’t tweed was the man’s face: the face was red.
He turned and shouted back behind him, ‘I TOLD EVERYONE WE NEEDED TO BE READY AT ELEVEN AND AS USUAL IN THIS FAMILY, YOU’RE ALL LATE. I don’t know why we can’t ever do anything on time, it’s a bloody shambles—’
The tweed-covered man spotted me.
‘AND WHO ARE YOU?’ he bellowed.
‘Um, hello… I’m, um… I’ve come from Posh! magazine. I’m here to see Jasper, it’s for an interview?’
He frowned. ‘Oh, the journalist,’ he roared, in much the same manner in which someone would say ‘paedophile’.
‘I’m here today… and then staying tonight… and then writing a piece…’ I stuttered.
‘Nothing to do with me, you want my son Jasper. He’s probably up in his room. You’ll have to excuse me for a moment, I’m trying to get ready for this damn shoot.’ The Duke of Montgomery turned to roar through the open door, ‘BUT EVERYONE’S BLOODY LATE THIS MORNING!’
He looked back at me. ‘Go through there and find Ian, he’ll point you in the right direction. And if you could get any of my family to hurry up that would be marvellous. Where’s my bloody dog? Ah, there you are, Inca. Come on, good boy.’ He stalked past me under the stone arch, the dog at his heels, leaving the back door open.
Inside was a room that smelled of mud and damp towels and was stuffed with coats, boots, hats, fishing rods and dog beds. No actual humans. So I walked anxiously through the room, feeling like an intruder, worried that an alarm would go off any second, and into a corridor so long I couldn’t see the end of it. Huge portraits peered down at me from the walls. I squinted at the closest one, which depicted a plain-looking woman in a green silk dress, white hair piled on her head.
‘The Duchess of Montgomery, 1745,’ read a plaque beneath it. There were more Montgomerys lining the corridor. Male Montgomerys, female Montgomerys, fat Montgomerys, thin, bearded Montgomerys, baby Montgomerys. A waft of cigarette smoke drifted towards me as I started to walk down the corridor.
‘Who’s that?’ came a shriek from a room on the left. ‘Ian, is that you? I can’t find my trousers.’
‘Er, no, it’s not Ian,’ I said, sticking my head into a large kitchen to see a woman sitting at the table, cigarette in hand, smoke snaking its way towards the ceiling. She was wearing a dark green polo neck and a pair of white knickers. No trousers.
‘Who are you?’ she said.
‘I’m Polly. I’m sorry to, um, interrupt. It’s only that I was told to come and find someone called Ian because I’m here to talk to Jasper. I’m from Posh!.’ I was gabbling. ‘The magazine?’
The woman drew lengthily on her cigarette. ‘Yes, I’m trying to find Ian, too. I need my trousers. We’re all late this morning and in terrible trouble with my husband. As usual.’
‘Oh,’ I said, in a manner which I hoped suggested I was sympathetic and yet relaxed about being granted an audience with the Duchess in her knickers. Who and where was Ian?
A dog that looked like Bertie was curled up and sleeping on the back of a sofa underneath the kitchen window. ‘Oh, sweet,’ I said, nodding towards it, trying to make conversation so I could stop thinking about the Duchess’s knickers. ‘Do you have a terrier?’
The Duchess looked over her shoulder. ‘He was a terrier, yes. A Yorkie called Toto. But he’s dead.’
‘Oh.’
‘He’s dead too,’ she said, pointing at an orange guinea pig on a bookshelf beside the Aga.
‘Oh, right.’
‘I can’t bear to bury the pets, you see. So I have them stuffed by a taxidermist in town.’ She took another drag of her cigarette. ‘I might do the same to my husband one day.’
Thankfully, I heard the sound of footsteps approaching.
‘Ian, there you are,’ the Duchess exclaimed. ‘I can’t find my trousers. Have you seen them?’
I turned around. Ian was apparently a sort of giant butler, well over six foot, in a uniform, with his hair neatly brushed to the side. A pair of tweed trousers lay across his arm.
‘Are these the ones, madam?’
‘Yes. You are a poppet.’ The Duchess stubbed out her cigarette and stood up. She was tall, with pale, thin legs. I stared resolutely at the floor.
‘This is Holly by the way, she’s come to interview Jasper. How long are you here for?’
‘Well, today and tonight he said, I think, if that’s all right. I mean, I don’t have to stay, I just need to—’
‘No, do stay,’ said the Duchess, taking the tweed trousers from Ian. ‘Lovely to have some fresh blood,’ she added. It sounded like a threat.
‘Are you walking out with us today?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I replied, confused. ‘What does… um, what does that mean?’
‘What?’
‘What you just said. Walking out?’
‘Oh,’ she said, surprised. Then, quite slowly, as if she was talking to a small child, ‘As in, are you coming shooting with us?’
‘With a gun?’
She smiled at me. ‘Darling, no, we wouldn’t give you a gun. You don’t look like a trained killer. Walking out means coming along and watching. Jolly cold, frightfully boring. But you can stand with Jasper.’
I was relieved. ‘Oh, right. Then yes, I think so. If that’s all right.’
‘Have you got any clothes?’ she asked, standing up to put her own trousers on. One leg in, then the other. She maintained eye contact with me throughout. It was like some kind of weird, reverse striptease.
‘Uhhh, yes. In here.’ I jiggled my overnight bag.
‘Good, well, we’re already all terribly late. Ian, has someone made a room up?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Marvellous, in that case can you show Holly to her room and she can quickly get changed. I can’t tell you the row there’ll be if we’re not at the stables in the next ten minutes. And take her to Jasper’s room afterwards, will you?’ She stalked out, in the direction of the boot room.
‘It’s Polly, actually,’ I said to Ian, apologetically.
‘Welcome, madam,’ he replied, holding a giant hand out for my bag.
I followed Ian as he walked slowly out of the kitchen and back into the corridor, past more dead Montgomerys, up a twisting staircase, along another corridor, down some carpeted stairs and then he turned and opened a door.
‘Here you are, you’re in Nanny’s old room. There’s a bathroom just through there. I’ll give you a few moments to change and then take you to Lord Jasper.’
‘Great, thanks. Yes please.’
I stepped into the room as Ian closed the door behind me. It looked like it hadn’t been redecorated for fifty years. Flowery wallpaper, a yellowing carpet and a pink quilt on a narrow single bed. I pressed my hand on the mattress and winced as a spring pinged underneath it. There was a stuffed ferret with horrid little pink eyes on the mantelpiece. My phone buzzed from inside the bag. It was Lala.
You there? Keep me posted. Xxx
I chucked the phone down on the quilt. Later was fine, I needed to put on my tweed. A few moments later, I looked like a Victorian lady explorer off to discover the dusty crevices of the empire. Was I supposed to look like this? I fished my lip-gloss out of my bag and added some for effect, then glanced in the mirror again. If Joe could see me, he would die of a heart attack from laughing.
There was a discreet knock at the door and a gentle cough outside.
‘Sorry, sorry, just coming.’ I threw the lip-gloss on the bed and opened the door.
‘Magnificent,’ said Ian. ‘Follow me.’
Sedate apparently being Ian’s preferred pace, I followed him back up the carpeted stairs and along the corridor.
‘Lord Jasper,’ said Ian, stopping outside a closed door from behind which I could hear Van Morrison playing. ‘I’ve got the journalist from London here.’
Van Morrison stopped. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ came a groan.
‘She’s not called Jesus, sir. She’s called Polly,’ said Ian.
‘Good one,’ said Jasper, throwing opening the door and smiling at me. ‘Polly, hello, any friend of Lala’s is a friend of mine.’
He was handsome, I had to admit it. And taller than I expected, with blue eyes and dirty blond hair that he swept to the side with one hand. He was also wearing an absurd pair of tweed knickerbockers which gathered just beneath his knees, but his shirt was loose and unbuttoned. He, too, was barefoot. Was nobody in this family able to dress themselves properly?
Jasper held out his hand. ‘How do you do?’
But I didn’t have a second to answer how I was doing, because he immediately turned to Ian.
‘Now, Ian, my good man, I can’t seem to find a single pair of shooting socks. I mean, I don’t know what you do with them. Do you eat them? I buy a million pairs every year and then the shooting season rolls around again and they’ve all gone. It’s the bloody end, I tell you.’
‘I’ll have a look in your father’s room, sir.’ Ian turned and glided silently back along the passage.
‘Right, well, Polly, I’m so sorry. It’s a madhouse here, as you’ve probably already gathered. Did you meet my parents?’
‘Yes, your father was outside with his dog, and your mother was in the kitchen, looking for her trousers.’
‘And here I am, looking for my socks. What a shambles we all are.’ He pushed his hair to the side again. ‘You look superb anyway. Have you been out shooting before?’
I looked down at my tweed self-consciously. ‘Oh, thanks. And no, I haven’t.’
Jasper started doing up his shirt. ‘Well, give me two seconds and, socks permitting, we can be on our way. How are you with dogs by the way?’
‘With them?’
‘Do you mind them? Do you like them?’
‘Oh, no… I mean, yes. I love them. I’ve grown up with them. My mother has a small terrier called Bertie.’
‘How sweet. Mine is an abominably badly behaved Labrador called Bovril. Do you mind being in charge of him today while I shoot? I’ll tell you where to stand and all that.’
‘Sure. No problem. What about the interview though?’
‘What interview?’
‘Well, I need to sit down with you at some point and chat about, you know, the pictures in the paper and…’ I trail off, nervously.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that, we’ll have acres of time tonight over dinner. Now, let’s go and find these socks.’
An hour later, I was standing behind Jasper in a field on the side of a steep hill, holding on to Bovril’s lead with one hand, and my hat with the other. There were five other men spread out along the field, each holding a gun, each with a woman standing dutifully behind them, also holding some colour of Labrador on a lead. The wind was blowing odd noises towards us from a wood at the bottom of the field, some sort of weird warbling and the sound of crashing footsteps through thick undergrowth.
‘What is that?’ I asked Jasper.
He didn’t reply.
‘Jasper?’ I tapped him on the shoulder and he looked around. ‘What’s… that… noise?’ I mouthed slowly at him and pointed at the trees.
‘Hang on.’ He reached into his ear and pulled out an orange earplug. ‘What?’
‘Sorry. I just wasn’t sure what the noise was.’
‘It’s the beaters. They’re…’
‘What are beaters?’
‘They’re the people who flush the birds out. And they’re down there, in the woods, walking towards us from the other side to flush out the birds, to make them fly over us. Then… bang. See?’
It didn’t seem very fair, a load of people hollering in a forest, trying to make the pheasants fly towards a line of armed men standing on a hill. Beside me, Bovril yawned and lay down. I fished in my pocket for my phone, my hands already numb from the cold. ‘Beaters people who chase birds,’ I tapped into my notes with stiff fingers. ‘Jasper has dog called Bovril. Duchess mad, stuffs all family pets.’
A sudden, loud bang to the right made me jump so I slid my phone back into my pocket and looked up in the air to see a pheasant whirling in small circles towards the ground. It hit the grass with a thud. Bovril looked at it, then looked up at me, then whined.
I jumped again as Jasper’s gun went off. The smell of gunpowder floated through the air and there was another thud behind us as that pheasant tumbled to the ground.
‘Let Bovril off his lead, will you?’ instructed Jasper, eyes still on the sky as if scanning for the Luftwaffe.
Bovril, pleased to be free, bounded towards the dead pheasant, picked it up by the neck, and trotted obediently back, dropping it on my boot. I looked down at it and inched my foot away, uncertain of Jimmy Choo’s policy on accepting back boots which had pheasant blood on them. Frowned upon, probably.
The sound of gunshots rang out. Suddenly, dozens of birds were flying out from the wood. I clapped my hands over my ears and looked up into the sky. Pheasants poured overhead as the shooting continued, some tumbling from the sky like stones, some flying straight on over the hedge behind them. I’d keep flying if I were you, I willed them, keep going until you get to somewhere nice and warm, like Africa.