Farm Fatale (6 page)

    Samantha looked thunderous. "Certainly not. We met on a film set."

"How tremendously exciting. What was the film, Miss Villiers?"

    Samantha paused. This was a tricky one. It had been undisputedly a masterstroke, while sitting behind the reception desk of his bank, to tell the recently divorced vice president that she was an actress and had taken the job to research a role about a receptionist who rises to become the bank's first female president. Guy had been so captivated by this explanation—as well as Samantha herself—that the film's continuing failure to materialize had never seemed to occur to him.

    "I can't recall it immediately," Samantha said eventually with a tinkling laugh. "One learns as an actress to—as Hamlet put it— shrug off the mortal coil of each part as it is finished in order to don the new. At the moment, I'm so utterly consumed by my latest challenge, the part of Christabel, that I have no emotional space for anything else…"

    "How terribly interesting, Miss Villiers," Bella gushed. "And who exactly is Christabel?"

    "A femme fatale." Samantha tossed her hair. "Helen of Troy, Anna Karenina, Cleopatra. An irresistible siren who unleashes the forces of uncontrollable lust everywhere she goes. With far-reaching consequences."

    As Bella opened her mouth, Samantha held up a commanding hand. "I'm not at liberty to reveal any more about it, I'm afraid. The part is in development."

    Bella picked up her Dictaphone again.

    "In the Villierses' hall," she murmured, "one table is almost hidden by a bowl of polished Chinese stones, a vulture's feather, two porcupine quills, and bunches of tiny dried lotus-flower seeds tied with a ribbon of steel beads. Intricate? Yes. Affected? No. Original and interesting? Absolutely…"

"My God,
those people
." Rosie shook her head and stared disbelievingly out the window as, shoot finished, they sped away from Roland Gardens in Bella's vast black four-wheel drive.

    "Par for the course, sweetie." Across the black leather-swathed gear lever, Bella's profile was tranquil. "Judging from the Polaroids, the shoot will be a great success. I'm sure the editor's going to want to use it as soon as possible, given that the Radical Minimalist look's probably not going to last long."

    Rosie looked at her watch. The shoot had taken eight hours. Her nerves felt as frayed as the deliberately unfinished edges of the hessian cushions she had spent the afternoon arranging in piles meant to look as if carelessly tossed by someone with an unerring sense of style. Unfortunately, with every toss, the cushion pile had looked more erring, less stylish, and increasingly frayed at the edges. Still, at least she would get paid for helping, and, infinitely better, she would soon be in the country and hundreds of miles from Samantha Villiers and anyone remotely like her.

    There had been neither time nor opportunity to discuss the great news with Bella until now. "Mark's agreed to move to the country," she told Bella triumphantly.

    Bella swerved to avoid a meandering drunk on the Cromwell Road. "Really? He didn't seem all that keen on it at dinner, I must say."

    "Things change," said Rosie enigmatically. She didn't have the energy to go into detail about the column. Nor, for the moment, did she have the details. "We're about to start the hunt for the perfect cottage," she added.

    "Oh, well," said Bella reassuringly. "Never mind. Just think of all that lovely tweed and cashmere you can wear."

    "Or
fur
." Rosie cast a meaningful glance at Bella's coat. "I just don't know how you can wear it." Her friend's relaxed attitude to the fur trade had long been a cause of anguish to Rosie.

    "What, this?" Bella looked down at her coat. "When literally thousands of acrylics have died for it?" She grinned teasingly at Rosie. "Of course it's not real, silly. It's my
work
coat. I keep my sables for the best."

***

The perfect cottage was taking some finding.

    "Poor Mr. Dibble." Rosie sighed as, some days later, the postman's hunched, resentful figure trudged back past the kitchen window after depositing yet another avalanche of envelopes through the front door of the flat. Since Mark had registered with what seemed like every estate agent in the country, they got more mail than anyone else on the street.

    Following the sound of frenzied ripping in the sitting room, Rosie, piece of toast in her hand, wandered in to find Mark sprawled amid a sea of paper.

    "Former asbestos mill with planning permission in Blackburn." Mark waved a clipped-together piece of paper at her. "
Great
potential."

    "Mill?" Rosie's toast fell facedown onto the carpet tiles. She picked it up, trying not to think how long it had been since she last vacuumed. Months, certainly.

    She glanced at the photograph of the vast and ruined building stapled to the agent's details. Even with a blazing sun and a suspiciously Mediterranean-blue sky, the place was obviously barely standing. Nothing could be further removed from the cottage with roses round the door she had imagined. "What would anyone do with a mill?"

    "
Fix it up
, obviously. You could get about twenty executive flats in there. Not to mention a swimming pool, gym, parking for forty cars, and quite possibly a helipad as well." Rosie looked at him in horror. "Not that we're going to obviously," Mark added. "It's hardly the sort of thing
we'd
want."

    "No," said Rosie emphatically. "We want a little cottage. With roses round the door."
And a lavender-bordered path,
she added silently.
And a springy lawn spattered with daisies…

    "Cottages are quite expensive," Mark cut in. "We might have to settle for something we can do up." Rosie nodded. No problem. Painting was her job, wasn't it? Mark shook the pile of particulars between both hands. "Quite a few things here actually. A former butcher's shop near Derby…"

    "Ugh!" Rosie grimaced.

    "We're not looking for a manor house in the Cotswolds, you know."

    "I know. It's just—a butcher's shop?"

    Mark sighed extravagantly. "Buying something with fifty acres might be a bit beyond our budget."

    "It's not where it is," Rosie said, sighing, "but what it is. I'm
vegetarian
, remember?"

Samantha, perched perilously on one of the six blasted-granite disks that served as kitchen stools, looked up from her magazine and sighed. Her dissatisfied gaze lingered on the glass bricks of the walls, dazzlingly illuminated by sunken-floor uplighters. Held gingerly between her fingers was one of the thin porcelain cups Basia had decreed as the only type of china permitted in the house. As usual, it contained Japanese green tea, the only permitted beverage besides Evian.

    She resumed her reading of the magazine.

    
It is here, in the rustic dream that is her thick-walled, fifteenth
century
manor
house,
that
society
potter
Carinthia
D'Arblay
Sidebottom goes about her exquisite and distinctive craft. In the hall,
a lavender-scented silence pervades; brilliant sunshine floods the stone
flags and glances off the glittering diamond-pane windows. Presently,
Carinthia brings in a hand-painted tray on which everything, from
the colorful mugs of steaming coffee to the thick rounds of shortbread
biscuit, is homemade…

    Suddenly, Samantha longed with all her soul for a homemade shortbread biscuit, but these did not figure on Basia's list of Ayurvedically balanced foods for Pita personalities. This list, the legendary designer had insisted, should never be deviated from if Samantha's energies, both spiritual and physical, were to harmonize perfectly with those of the house. Judging from the permanent bad temper she had been in since Basia left, her energies still had some way to go.

    Samantha groaned. As if the turbulent state of her chakras was not enough, there remained a mere
four weeks
before filming started to get inside the head of Christabel. She simply had to research Christabel's location, motivation, personal conversation, the
lot
. And today was location.

    "CHRISTABEL: LOCATION," Samantha had written on the first sheet of her fat new pad. Underneath it she had written "THE COUNTRYSIDE." Christabel, Samantha knew from the production notes, lived in the countryside. But what she didn't know, had no idea about, in fact, was what the countryside was actually like. She was far from sure she had ever been there. After a few minutes more of pondering on this, Samantha had yelled for Consuela and sent her out for the latest editions of
Country Life, Country Living,
Which Gazebo?, Charming Castles, Cottage Beautiful, Country Homes
and Interiors
, and
Period Living
. It was in the glossy pages of
Cottage
Beautiful
that she had stumbled across the wonderful world of Carinthia D'Arblay Sidebottom.

    Samantha read on:
As one approaches the imposing yet romantic
building, a panoply of textures asserts itself: lichened tiles, herbaceous
borders, Carinthia's sparkling-white washing fluttering in the lavender
scented breeze, old stone the rich gold of digestive biscuits…

    Samantha's fingers tapped on the zinc-topped table. Why did she feel so discontented all of a sudden? It wasn't as if she was lacking a panoply of textures herself, even if, sadly, digestive biscuits did not feature among them. Basia had been extremely keen on textures, as the Neolithic ax head, Maserati connecting rod, and carefully arranged pieces of broken glass currently festooning the windowsills attested. Admittedly, the textures, like the colors, weren't quite the ones Samantha had originally had in mind. Had it really been a good idea to allow Basia to paint all the outside brickworks a shade midway between khaki and brown? Guy had already forcibly expressed his doubts that explanations about fantastic chi would wash with the royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's planning department.

    Forcing these unpleasant reflections aside, Samantha returned to Carinthia's sparkling-white washing.
Inside, deep-silled windows
painted simply in white provide a natural setting for garden flowers
in handmade jugs. Elsewhere, Carinthia's use of bold color, antique
printed textiles, and reclaimed timber gives the tiny cottage a Tudor
Mediterranean
feel…
Tudor Mediterranean, well,
yes
, thought Samantha,
that
sounded much more the sort of thing she'd originally been after with Roland Gardens.
Upstairs, gingham throws,
rose-stenciled loo seats, and toile de Jouy abound…
The words stabbed Samantha to the heart. The thought of Basia's spartan futon muscling to the front of her mind, she stared jealously at pictures of white-painted Victorian iron bedsteads piled high with vintage eiderdowns and crisp white sheets (no doubt fresh from the line) whose lavender scent seemed to billow from the very page.

    
Outside, in Carinthia's vegetable patch, leeks, potatoes, and onions
are encouraged to go to seed for aesthetic reasons, while in a corner of the
"wild garden," Carinthia's bower stands wreathed in tantalizing whiffs
from the honeysuckle winding elegantly round the weathered pillars of
an eighteenth-century temple of Diana…

    Emitting a snarl, Samantha jerked her head up. Out of the single-pane kitchen window, its frame painted not crisp white but battleship gray, Basia's zen garden was all too visible. An untantalizing pile of sand, wet pebbles, and a verdigris turtle, it was raked daily, amid much muttering, by Consuela, whom Samantha had to forcibly discourage from polishing the turtle. This, on Basia's explicit instructions, had to be left to weather naturally. Even the
Insider
people had stopped short of photographing the zen garden, although they had been very excited and complimentary about the rest of the place. It had apparently been given six pages in the forthcoming issue of the magazine. That, at least, was
something
. Yet the faint glow of comfort in Samantha's breast faded as a cursory examination of the Carinthia article revealed it to be ten pages long.

    
Carinthia leads me to the kitchen, where she motions me to a
roomy shepherd's chair at the deep-grooved farmhouse table where
generations of families have broken bread. She crosses the delightfully
uneven Elizabethan baked floor tiles
[on which generations of families have broken their legs? Samantha imagined viciously] and stir
s
something savory and satisfying in a vast iron pot on the shining stove.
Lunch is imminent…

    Samantha ground her teeth, remembering without enthusiasm her own lunch of a single slice of rye bread topped with olive oil and thyme. She closed her eyes as, utterly without warning, a mighty wave of shuddering envy of society potter Carinthia D'Arblay Sidebottom crashed over her. Samantha was aware of a violent longing for an exquisite little cottage—as long as it wasn't
too
little—and a glamorous garden with a delicious touch of wildness and without a verdigris turtle in sight. Suddenly, Samantha felt she hadn't wanted to be
anybody, not Nicole Kidman, not eve
n Catherine Zeta-Jones, quite so desperately as she now wanted to be Carinthia D'Arblay Sidebottom.