7

When You Wish Upon A Michelin Star

THE NOTION OF wives doing all the cooking and housework is no longer publicly fashionable. But I know for a fact that it goes on behind closed doors.

Two weeks later, on a hot Sunday night in July, with the kids still not bathed and in bed, I endured the usual hostess panic that since nobody was going to turn up there’d be too much food; or if they did show they’d have new lovers or lawyers in tow so there’d be too little; or everyone would have food allergies, which would mean either insulting me by not eating my dinner or eating the meal and throwing up over each other. I called for Cal to help me with the children and catapulted back into the kitchen just in time to catch the cats stripping the last of the sesame-seeded seared tuna out of the salad. All that remained was a little sad spag and a frond or two of wilted seaweed. Any hope of cordon-bleu sensation bit the gastronomic dust.

‘Listen, Cal,’ I said, when he bounced in five minutes later to find me desperately rummaging through the freezer, ‘I’m just not up to going to your uni ball any more. Why don’t you ask Victoria?’

Victoria? She’d never go out with the likes of me. This modelling business your sister’s in, well, it’s all about contacts. Right? Entrée into places. Stuff like that? Well, the only entrées I’ve got access to are on a menu. Oh, sure, I can get entrée … as in prawn cocktails and canned soup. I can get the power table at McDonalds’ with a minute’s notice.’

‘That’s all right. Victoria doesn’t eat in public anyway. Models live in a state of permanent terror that they might actually develop some muscle tissue.’

When Hugo arrived to find his wife armed with a hair-dryer trying to defrost eight chicken breasts, he gave me a homicidal look. I’m not exaggerating. If looks could kill, I would have been donating my organs to medical science right there and then. Actually I wasn’t sure if he was angry about the chaos, or that I’d invited Victoria without consulting him. (Victoria would never forgive me for denying her a Close Encounter of the Sven Kind.) Hugo says my sister doesn’t visit, she invades, which she was doing right now, cascading into the kitchen in a swirl of silk scarves and duty-free bags.

‘Alcohol! Quickly!’ She seized my glass of Pinot Grigio.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I have just spent the last week modelling muumuus for drunken electrical engineers in Dubai. If Sven doesn’t marry me soon, my next gig is glamour-posing for amateur photographers in Milton Keynes.’

‘Is that so bad?’

She slumped despondently over her wineglass. ‘Darling, it’s Kosovo without the perks.’

‘I know something that will cheer you up. Cal’s planning to ask you out.’

Now it was Cal’s turn to shoot me a homicidal look. ‘Ah … yeah.’ He nervously readjusted the worn leather belt on his Levi’s 501s.

Victoria placed her manicured hands on the hips of her spray-on snakeskin trousers. ‘Put it this way, Calim,’ my sister replied, ‘if I were naked, you’d bore the pants on to me.’

‘Victoria!’ I snapped. She might have severe PMT (Post Modelling Tension), but there was no need to take it out on my best buddy.

‘Okay, so it’s no to sex,’ Cal replied gamely. ‘How ’bout some indiscriminate heavy pettin’, then?’

‘I’m not being rude.’ Victoria sighed. ‘It’s just that you’re so insignificant.’

Beet-faced, my loyal friend took a small bow. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that last act of abject humiliation was brought to you by Calim Keane. Excuse me, but I have a date to read bedtime stories.’ He left abruptly, bounding up the stairs two at a time.

Before I could shove my half-sister down the waste-disposal unit, Victoria exclaimed, ‘I suppose the fact that Britney has rather enormous tits is a rather exasperating detail.’

‘God.’ My stomach churned. ‘Is she really so brazen that she’s actually turned up?’

‘I just passed Jabba the Slut parking her Porsche. Forget the chicken breasts, Elisabeth, and just concentrate on your own.’ She thrust her hand down my bra and hoicked my tiny tits to the top of their lace cups. ‘Leave It To Cleavage. That’s the only show men are really interested in.’

I glanced in Hugo’s direction over by the wine rack, where he was scrutinizing vintages – my husband could put the bore into Bordeaux. ‘Victoria, Hugo is not a breast man!’

On cue, the largest pair of mammaries in the northern hemisphere glided into view. It was like a photo-finish in a blancmange bake-off. The female to whom the Siamese soufflés were attached followed some five minutes later. My husband’s eyeballs pogoed out of their sockets and boinged! into her bra cups, where they gambolled around in the throes of ecstasy before boomeranging back socketwards.

‘You were saying?’ crowed my sister.

When Sven waylaid Britney with kisses on the kitchen threshold, I thought it was an opportune moment to retreat with Victoria for some tandem toilet time.

‘For God’s sake, don’t let on that you know about Britney and Hugo. He told me not to tell you. He wants me to be suave,’ I bleated, plonking my posterior on the lavatory seat. ‘I can’t be suave.’

‘Of course you can, sweetie. All you have to do is stand still and look brain-dead … Hurry up, I’m bursting.’

‘I have a degree. I can’t look brain-dead.’ I washed my hands while Victoria took her turn to pee.

‘Try winsome, then. Britney does a terrific winsome.’

‘How?’ I handed her a toilet roll.

‘You just look like a neutered dog. You keep looking at him till he pats you – and then you take his leg off. That’s my number one Useful Girlish Tip,’ she philosophized, pulling the chain. ‘The only other way to keep a man happy are a few Martha Stewart Moments in the kitchen. Oh, and some feminine mystique.’ She paused to fart before sashaying out of the bathroom. ‘Men love that.’

WANTED – Suave, sophisticated, winsome, discreet, dynamic ‘Trophy Wife’ with enormous cleavage. Must be an experienced Michelin Star cook and general Domestic Goddess, appropriate for Power Coupling. Applicants without feminine fucking mystique will not be considered.

I fastened my face. It was going to be a bumpy night.