Katy Carter Wants a Hero Read online

  ‘Sorry, of course she is. Anyway, are you seeing her at the moment?’

  Ollie looks shifty. ‘Sort of.’

  He’s shagging her then.

  Men.

  Nina with her blonde hair and Jordanesque cleavage probably is attractive if you like that kind of thing, which unfortunately most men seem to. Ol was smitten for months. At first they’d been like Siamese twins joined at the tongue, but when Ollie tried to pick up his social life, Nina tightened her grasp. I have strong suspicions that he wasn’t even allowed to go to the loo alone, that’s how possessive and paranoid she is, and poor old Ollie could do so much better. Still, I’ve kept my feelings to myself. It never does to diss your friend’s partner, does it?

  Ol’s honeycomb-hued eyes narrow suspiciously. ‘What’s all this sudden interest in Nina for, anyway? You can’t stand her.’

  OK. So maybe I haven’t done such a great job of pretending to like her. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate her talents. Like cooking, for example.

  ‘Doesn’t she run a catering company?’

  ‘Yep. Domestic Divas.’

  ‘Are they expensive to hire?’

  He shrugs. ‘About four hundred quid or so for a night. Why? Are you interested?’

  Bollocks. It may as well be four trillion billion quid, that’s how skint I am right now. James has just borrowed what meagre funds were left in my account to ease another of his cash-flow problems, and my Flexible Friend has fallen out with me, so it looks like hiring a caterer is out.

  I’m stuffed.

  ‘What is it?’ Ol asks.

  With a heavy sigh I tell him all about the dinner party, about how James’s promotion totally depends on impressing his boss and about how terrified I am of cocking up. Again.

  ‘You know I’m useless in the kitchen,’ I wail. ‘I’m going to ruin everything. James is desperate for promotion. He says we really need the money and I can’t let him down. Not after the last time.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ says Ollie. ‘The famous getting plastered at Henley Regatta and passing out in the strawberries.’

  ‘Yes, yes! OK!’ Why is it that my friends always remember my least glorious moments? Why can’t they hold on to all the fabulous things I do, like… like…

  Well, I’m sure there are lots. There’s far too many to recall, that’s the problem. But getting bladdered in front of James’s boss at Henley didn’t exactly put me in the good books.

  ‘Hasn’t Nina taught you to cook?’ I say slowly, as though the thought has just occurred. ‘I’m sure I remember something about you being trained up to help.’

  ‘She had me marinating, sautéing and basting until I was on my knees.’ He takes a swig of Guinness. ‘It was nothing like 9½ Weeks and I really missed Fray Bentos.’ Then he looks at me and groans. ‘Oh no you don’t, Miss Carter! I can see where you’re going with this.’

  I fix him with my most desperate and hopefully winning gaze. ‘Ollie, you could save my life here if you helped me cook for this flipping dinner party. I’ll never manage it alone. You know how useless I am.’

  ‘Yep,’ says Ollie. ‘You’d burn water.’

  ‘James’s boss will be expecting something amazing. Come on, Ol, I’ll be your best friend for ever. I’ll do all your marking. Walk Sasha. Take your cover lessons. What do you think?’

  ‘I think I need another drink.’ Ollie looks longingly towards the bar. ‘You’re asking me to give up precious Saturday drinking time to cook for a bunch of bankers.’

  ‘Please! I’m a desperate woman.’

  Ollie drains his pint. ‘Why do you have to impress these idiots? If they don’t like you as yourself then sod ’em.’

  ‘I can’t be myself,’ I say miserably. ‘I’ll be a total embarrassment to James.’

  Ollie plucks a note out of his wallet. ‘In that case, Katy, why does he want to marry you?’

  And leaving me to ponder this very valid point, he weaves his way through the Friday-night crowd. I stare sadly into my wine glass. How can James love me as I am? I’m not all elegance and grace like Millandra or blonde and skinny like Nina. I’m short and ginger and frequently say the wrong thing. I can’t cook, I wear the wrong clothes and I’m a total disappointment to his mother. I’ve tried really hard to support his career and improve my image, but I never seem to get it right.

  I’ve known James even longer than I’ve known Ollie, because he used to live next door to my godmother, Auntie Jewell, in Hampstead. In fact we practically grew up together, because my sister Holly and I used to spend our school holidays with Auntie Jewell while our parents trekked to Marrakesh or Morocco or basically anywhere else where they could smoke dope all day and forget about their children.

  Not that I’m bitter or anything. It just might have been nice to have had normal parents who cared about my homework and who actually fed me on a regular basis. Reading tarot cards before breakfast is all very well, and of course I’m glad I know how to cleanse my chakras, but when you’re seven, a bowl of Frosties and a packed lunch is slightly more useful, isn’t it?

  Anyway, I’m digressing.

  Auntie Jewell isn’t really my auntie at all; I think we only have the most tenuous of family ties, something really vague like cousins eight times removed. I do know that she was great friends with my grandmother and our families have remained close ever since. The story goes that Auntie’s parents, in total despair at ever getting their wayward daughter off their hands, paid for a London season and launched her on the unsuspecting cream of polite society. I’ve seen the debutante pictures and she was stunningly beautiful, if unrecognisable without her long silver hair and obligatory mini zoo of pets. She pissed off her peers, hardly surprisingly, by receiving a proposal from the extremely eligible Rupert Reynard, Duke of Westchester. Their wedding was the social event of the year, attended by royalty, and after honeymooning in Cannes they settled down to married life in Rupert’s ancestral home. At this point the story varies depending upon who you talk to. Our version is that Jewell finally had enough of her husband’s womanising and ran away with the under-gardener. No doubt Rupert Reynard saw things very differently. Jewell has never breathed a word about her reasons for leaving her husband, but relations between the two families have been strained ever since, not least because Rupert left her penniless.

  ‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ Jewell always shrugs whenever anyone points out the unfairness of her situation. ‘Besides,’ she’ll add cheerfully, ‘I did all right in the end.’

  Which is true. She became a model and spent the early Sixties as the muse of famous pervy artist Gustav Greer. His blobby pink pictures of a naked Jewell grace galleries from the Tate Modern to the Saatchi. ‘Dreadful things,’ Jewell likes to shudder. ‘The poor man couldn’t afford to pay me so I used to take sketches and pictures instead of cash.’

  Just as well she did. For some inexplicable reason the art world decided that Greer’s nausea-inducing pictures of Jewell’s boobs were actually fantastic works of art and worth a fortune. Gustav fuelled the frenzy for his work by conveniently suffocating on fumes when he tried to paint his own body. Suddenly Jewell found herself possessed of a very desirable collection of modern art, which she promptly swapped with a friend for a Hampstead house. And there she’s stayed ever since, tending her herb garden and growing ever more eccentric.

  The times I spent living with Jewell were among the happiest of my childhood, and I was always devastated when my parents reclaimed me. It was so reassuringly normal to go to the local school and bring back A3 sheets dripping with poster paint for Jewell to stick up in the kitchen, rather than being praised in a rather random fashion by whichever of my mad parents was least stoned. It was nice to go for tea with girls called Camilla and Emily and not have to worry about inviting them back to my parents’ chaotic house. How could I ever have invited friends home? They all lived in neat and tidy semis with colour televisions and fitted carpets. We had a crumbling barn conversion swarming with cats and dog
s, where there was no television of any kind and where carpets were an unknown quantity. At my friends’ houses we ate fish fingers and chips; at mine we took pot luck with whatever my mother wanted to conjure up on the erratic Aga. And how could I explain to other children that my parents were hippies and still lived life as though it was the Seventies? At home it was easier not to have friends at all, but at Jewell’s I could totally reinvent myself, and I loved being an anonymous schoolgirl rather than Katy Carter from that strange family at Tillers’ Barn.

  James St Ellis lived next door to Jewell and his life was a thing of amazement to me. Every day he came home from prep school for an hour of homework followed by an hour of music practice before he escaped into the garden. We spent summers building dens and climbing trees, or at least what summer he did have before his parents dragged him off to the South of France or to summer school. We made up stories, dared each other to eat insects and once we even ran away to the end of the road. James loved to come into Jewell’s kitchen and eat sausages and chips at the old pine table and, if we were really lucky, Fab lollies from the freezer. But Holly and I were never invited back to his house, and if his mother ever caught us playing in his garden she’d shoo us home with a curled top lip and wrinkled nose. Not that James cared. He’d rather have been at Jewell’s anyway. He spent hours making a hole in the fence so that he could squeeze into our garden, and didn’t seem to care that he had splinters in his hands for a whole summer.

  Then, one Christmas holiday, James didn’t want to play any more. He’d started at Winchester that autumn and had more exciting friends to hang out with. Our dens fell down, the gardener mended the hole in the fence and it was as though James had never existed. Sometimes we’d glimpse him, taller and more aloof, getting out of his parents’ car or sitting on the terrace with a friend, but he didn’t deign to speak. And that was fine, because at this point my parents decided to move and James was the least of our problems. Holly and I were dragged to Totnes, and for the next few years were shunted between Devon and London like two sulky parcels. James’s parents split up, the house next to Jewell was sold and our playmate was forgotten. Holly buried herself in textbooks and I discovered Mills and Boon novels, hoarding them and reading each tattered copy over and over again until my world was full of mysterious sheikhs, strong brooding tycoons and granite-jawed millionaires. One day I just knew I’d find a romantic hero of my very own who’d be captivated by my (ginger) beauty and tamed by his love for me. He’d rescue me from my crazy family and sweep me away to a world of glamour and passion, and we’d live happily every after. Mills and Boon had promised; didn’t this happen to every heroine, from humble chambermaids to feisty slave girls? All I had to do was sit tight and wait my turn. Sooner or later my hero would come along and sweep me off my feet.

  Except he didn’t.

  In fact all my handsome princes had the very unfortunate habit of turning into frogs almost as soon as I kissed them. It was all very disappointing.

  Just as I was considering suing Mills and Boon under the Trade Descriptions Act and my sexual organs had forgotten what they were for, Fate decided it was time to put me out of my misery. Rewind to four years ago: I was getting dressed up for Auntie Jewell’s birthday party without a clue that my life was about to change in the most unexpected way.

  Jewell’s birthday parties are legendary. Every year she posts a notice in The Times and sends out invitations to her eclectic collection of friends and relatives, who drop everything in order to attend what’s always a fantastic bash. That year the theme was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I’d spent weeks starving myself to get into a green shimmery fairy costume.

  OK, I’d spent ten quid on control knickers, but my intentions had been good.

  Anyway, just minutes before I was due to leave, my then boyfriend decided to dump me by text message, leaving me with a dilemma: did I howl until I looked like a goblin or did I head out to the party alone? Usually I dragged Ollie along for moral support because Jewell adored him, but that summer he’d pushed off to the Andes. Deciding to leave my broken heart for later, I set out for Jewell’s party in Ollie’s temperamental VW Beetle, complete with fairy costume, wings and wand. What could possibly go wrong?

  Quite a lot as it turned out, because Fate has a nasty habit of flicking V signs at me. Unless you’ve broken down on the A5 dressed in a fairy costume, you can’t possibly have any concept of what it means to be embarrassed. Tooting lorry drivers and whistles abounded as I desperately tried to look under the bonnet before eventually remembering the engine lived in the boot. Not that I had a flipping clue what to do once I did locate it. It just made me feel better to be doing something, anything rather than throwing myself under the next juggernaut. Even the AA didn’t want to know, because Ollie hadn’t paid his membership.

  Ollie was very lucky he was in the Andes…

  I’d collapsed on to the ground and buried my head in my hands. I was well and truly up that famous creek without a boat, never mind the paddle. What on earth was I going to do?

  And then it happened. The moment I’d been dreaming about since I was about twelve. A beautiful sleek Mercedes pulled up, the door swung open and a tall, lean body slowly uncoiled itself.

  ‘Can I help?’

  I looked up and was instantly lost for words, which for me is pretty darn unusual. I opened my mouth to speak but it was as though he’d pressed my mute button, because I couldn’t make a sound. This tall, dark stranger was simply too beautiful to be true. He had eyes of the most amazing ice blue, cheekbones so chiselled the royals should ski off them rather than trekking to Klosters and long, black gypsy curls that blew in the wind. The sun shone behind him like a halo. Well either that or he really was an angel.

  ‘Has the car broken down?’

  I’d forgotten all about the car, but my voice box was well and truly buggered, that was for sure. He could have stepped straight from the pages of my latest Mills and Boon.

  Just my luck to be dressed like Tinkerbell.

  The man stepped forward, his eyes crinkling as he looked (most powerfully) down at me. Then he said, ‘Bloody hell! Katy? Is that you?’

  I screwed my eyes against the sun and tried to figure out who he was, but no, he still looked like he’d materialised from a romantic novel.

  ‘It’s me, James,’ the stranger said, taking my hand and pulling me to my feet. ‘I used to live next door to your Auntie Jewell? Don’t you remember? We used to play together all the time.’

  My chin was practically in the London sewer. This divine-looking man was snotty little James? This alpha male who smelt of expensive aftershave was the same annoying creature who used to rip the wings off flies and pull my ponytail?

  No. Way.

  ‘It really is me,’ James laughed, dropping a kiss on to the corner of my mouth. ‘But I promise I won’t throw worms at you any more! You look amazing, Katy. Who’d ever have thought you’d grow up to be so beautiful?’

  Luckily for James the cliché police were off duty, not that I cared. Being five foot three and ginger, I know I’m not beautiful, but hey! A girl’s allowed to get swept off her feet once in a while, isn’t she?

  And sweep me off my feet is exactly what James did. He insisted on chauffeuring me to the party, where he was greeted with rapture by Jewell, but he never left my side or let go of my hand. That night he whisked me away to a beautiful hotel where… well, you can probably work that out for yourselves! Anyway, the rest is history and by the time Ollie came home I’d practically moved into James’s smart flat and was head over heels in love with my perfect romantic hero. And if Ollie was a bit narky and made snide comments, then it served him right for not paying the AA.

  So there you have it. James St Ellis is perfect. And I still can’t believe that somebody so perfect would be interested in dumpy little old me. OK, so at times he can be a bit bossy, but he’s only doing it for my own good. It’s because he loves me and wants the best for me that James sometimes comes across as a li
ttle bit insensitive. When I think about it, lots of the things he says make perfect sense: I do need to dress more smartly, lose a stone and think about the future if I’m to make the most of myself. And he’s right: my disrupted education isn’t as good as it could be — and is certainly no match for his Oxbridge one — so I do need to listen to him when it comes to finances, politics and career stuff. If he’s bossy it’s only because he cares, unlike my parents, who never gave a monkey’s what I did. My life with James is a million times removed from the haphazard one I had with them. I really have been rescued by a handsome prince and my own fairy tale has come true! So what if I’ve had to change a little and improve myself so that I’m good enough? James is worth it because he’s everything I ever dreamed about when I was growing up.

  He’s my romantic hero, and if I’m not exactly the perfect romantic heroine then I’m working on it, because I do love James. I’m sure I do. When he’s bossy or grumpy I remind myself how stressful it is working in the City, especially with all this credit-crunch stuff going on, and that he doesn’t mean the things he sometimes says to me. He’s on edge; who wouldn’t be seeing their colleagues and friends losing their jobs on a daily basis? I’m the one he comes home to, the one who listens and the one on whom he vents his bad temper. I can’t say I like it much, but nobody ever said relationships are easy; you have to work at them, don’t you?

  Although placating James’s bad moods has started to feel more like hard labour lately…

  But that’s what adult relationships are all about, working things through I mean, and loving the other person even when they’re not behaving in a particularly lovable manner. Real love deals with issues rather than quitting, which has always been my parents’ preferred method. They’d row, Dad would vanish off in his VW van and Mum would hook up with someone called Rain or Baggy for a few months until Dad came back full of tall tales and with his pockets packed with hash. Not quite the example I want to live my life by! My preferred method of rebellion has been becoming a total square, working as a slave to the system and subjugating myself to the patriarchy — my mother’s words, not mine — rather than exploring my inner goddess or trekking off to Marrakesh.