At twenty-two, Claudia Slade-Welch had a great deal going for her. She knew this because people were always telling her so. She was lucky to have thick blonde hair, lucky to have splendid breasts—no need for a Wonderbra there—and lucky to have legs long enough to counterbalance what might otherwise have seemed a rather large bottom.
The luck didn’t end there. As if all this wasn’t enough for one girl, Claudia had also been blessed with an endlessly glamorous mother and a father who wasn’t only charming but famous to boot. Only when she was asked where she lived were people able—for a few fleeting seconds—to feel sympathetic towards her rather than envious. Renting a room in a friend’s house didn’t have much of a glamorous ring to it, they thought. It sounded mundane, if not downright dull. Until someone else happened to mention in passing that the friend in question was Caspar French. Then everyone, especially the women, changed their minds in an instant and gasped, ‘My God, how fantastic! You lucky, lucky thing…’
The trouble was, as Claudia had come to realize over the years, she never actually felt as lucky as everyone else thought she should feel. As a child, reading endless Enid Blyton books, she had first suspected that her mother wasn’t a normal Enid Blyton-type mother. Normal Enid Blyton-type mothers were never called Angie for a start. Nor did they wriggle into glitzy mini dresses and flirt with almost everyone in trousers, from her husband’s celebrated circle of fellow actors to Claudia’s own beloved homeroom teacher at school, Mr Elliott.
Time hadn’t improved matters. Normal mothers were supposed to be looked up to. Claudia, growing and growing like an over-watered sunflower, had overtaken tiny, five-foot-tall Angie by the time she was eleven. Being ten inches taller than your own mother, she discovered, wasn’t a comfortable sensation. Nor was it helped by Angie’s habit of pointing it out at every opportunity, of faxing diet sheets to the matron at her daughter’s school, and of wailing loudly at parties: ‘…and I thought the whole point of having girls was so one could borrow their clothes! I mean, tell me, where did I go wrong?’
It wasn’t the kind of remark an Enid Blyton mother would make. For a time Claudia’s father had remonstrated with his wife, in that famously sexy, laid-back manner of his. But Angie, who had never taken any notice of anyone, least of all her husband, had carried on regardless. Then the divorce had happened and Claudia had seen little of her father for the next few years. On his infrequent trips back from Hollywood she hadn’t dared to whine. Instead, she had stoically endured her mother’s careless insults, pretending instead to be as happy as anything. As she grew older, she took care never to introduce Angie to any boyfriends she particularly liked.
One week after her eighteenth birthday, Claudia had moved out of the family home and into the first of several chaotically shared flats.
But there was never any real getting away from Angie, short of upping sticks and emigrating to Siberia. For the past two years, she had been passionately involved with an already married hotel owner on the Costa Smeralda and Claudia had enjoyed the break. Now that affair was over. The hotel owner, possibly fearing for his health, had decided to stay with his rich wife. And Angie Slade-Welch—together with her sickening twenty-one-inch waist and size-three satin stilettos—was back.
She hadn’t been invited to tonight’s party but had, predictably, turned up anyway. Watching from a safe distance as her mother approached a well-built sculptor friend of Caspar’s and swung into action, Claudia absently helped herself to three prawn and cucumber canapés from the tray of a passing waitress.
‘If you want to do something useful,’ said a voice at her shoulder, ‘you could always introduce me to that hunky chap talking to your mother. When she’s finished with him of course.’
Claudia turned to Josie, an ex-flatmate from last year.
‘By the time my mother’s finished with him, there might not be much left to introduce.’
Josie giggled. ‘Well, if there is.’
‘And I don’t know who he is anyway.’ Claudia tried not to sound annoyed, but it was a bit much. It was her birthday, supposed to be her party, and she had forked out a fortune on caterers, yet Caspar had done his usual trick and casually suggested he might invite a few of his friends along too. ‘Just to make up the numbers,’ he’d said with a grin before she’d had a chance to object. ‘No need to look so alarmed, Claudie, only half a dozen or so. No undesirables, I promise.’
It was her own fault, Claudia decided with a sigh, for having been stupid enough to believe him. But it was still irritating, having her own party invaded by so many of Caspar’s friends that there were more strangers in the house than people she actually knew. They ate like gluttons too. The expensive caterer, thin-lipped because she had only been asked to supply food for forty guests, had just warned her they were about to run out.
What annoyed Claudia most of all was the fact that—having successfully hijacked her birthday party—Caspar hadn’t even had the common courtesy to show up. And everyone thinks I’m so lucky to be living in this house, thought Claudia, her expression mutinous. Huh.
‘Where is Caspar anyway?’ asked Josie, her appreciative eye still lingering on the broad shoulders of the sculptor.
Claudia pulled a face. ‘Congratulations. You’re the fiftieth person to ask me that question tonight.’
‘Come on, cheer up.’
Claudia tried. ‘Okay. Sorry. He’s just impossible, that’s all.’ Flipping back her heavy blonde hair she shook her head in exasperation. ‘D’you know, it’s not as if he’s even gone out anywhere. He’s upstairs in his studio, bloody painting. I went up and banged on the door at nine o’clock. He wouldn’t come out. He said he was on a roll and didn’t dare stop.’ Claudia, whose knowledge of art was pretty much limited to the water-lily print on her duvet cover, glanced up in disgust at one of Caspar’s paintings hung above the mantelpiece. ‘I mean, it isn’t as if there’s any hurry. His stuff sells really well now. He’s hardly short of cash.’
Josie was slightly more knowledgeable. ‘Money means nothing to these artistic types.’
‘Evidently not.’ Claudia spoke with feeling. ‘Particularly when it comes to offering to go halves on the food.’
‘Stop moaning. You don’t know how lucky you are.’ The waitress was back with her tray. Josie chose the canapé with the biggest prawn on top. Through a mouthful of puff pastry she said, ‘I’d love to live here.’
‘That could be arranged. Oliver’s moving out at the end of the week. He’s going back to New York.’ Claudia’s mind was on other things. This was the third time the red-haired waitress had circulated with the same tray. She touched the girl’s arm. ‘Excuse me. We’d like to try the blinis.’
‘Sorry, they’ve gone,’ said the girl with the red-gold hair. ‘These cucumber thingies are all that’s left.’
The mini blinis stuffed with Sevruga caviar, a specialty of Kenda’s Kitchen, were what Claudia had been looking forward to all evening. Instead, they’d been guzzled by a bunch of gastronomic philistines who would no doubt have been just as happy with sardines on toast. This really was the living end.
Bloody bloody hell, Claudia seethed inwardly, not trusting herself to speak.
‘Um, if there’s a room going free in this house,’ said the waitress, ‘I’d be interested.’
Claudia couldn’t have looked more startled if one of the prawns had opened its mouth and asked the time.
Josie burst out laughing. ‘Talk about seizing the moment.’
‘Sorry,’ said the waitress, registering the expression on Claudia’s face, ‘but if you don’t ask you don’t get. And I am desperate.’
Poppy wasn’t exaggerating. Canceling her wedding three months earlier had been the easy bit. Becoming known—practically throughout north Bristol—as The Girl Who Jilted Rob McBride, had been much more of an ordeal. An old lady whose ginger cat Rob had once rescued from a tree had shouted abuse through the letter box of Poppy’s home. She had received horrible phone calls. One of Rob’s ex-girlfriends from years ago, passing her in the street, had called her a bitch. And Poppy’s father—except he was no longer her father—had said coldly, ‘I think you’d better go.’
Which was why, just four days after her nonexistent wedding, she had found herself on a coach bound for London. Poppy had chosen this city for three and a half simple reasons. Firstly, more coaches traveled more often to London than to anywhere else. She had also, on a school day trip years ago, fallen in love with the Portobello Road and Petticoat Lane antiques markets.
The third reason, so flimsy it only just qualified as one, had to do with her real father. Poppy needed time to make up her mind about this. Even if she wanted to try and find him, she realized her chances of doing so weren’t great. All she did know was the name of the man who had had a brief but passionate affair with her mother and that he had once—twenty-two years ago, for heaven’s sake—lived in London.
But if this was flimsy it was nothing compared with the fact that London was also home to Tom, which was why she had only allowed it to count as half a reason. Poppy knew, with the benefit of hindsight, that she had been spectacularly stupid, but at the time, she had made a conscious decision not to ask. And now it was too late, she thought ruefully. When you weren’t even in possession of something as basic as a person’s surname… well, then you really didn’t have a hope in hell of finding them again.
Still, she had at least had one thing going for her on arriving in London. She hadn’t expected too much of the place, hadn’t imagined the streets to be paved with gold.
And she had been right, they weren’t, but Poppy had taken the grim reality in her stride, refusing to be appalled by the low standard of rented accommodation available within her price range. She also refused to be offended by the amount of unfriendliness she encountered, which some people appeared to have elevated to an art form.
Mentioning no names, thought Poppy now. Manfully keeping her opinions on the subject to herself, she directed a guileless smile at the tall, blonde, cross-looking girl whose party—and home—this evidently was.
‘The room,’ Claudia said at last, ‘isn’t going… free. This isn’t the Salvation Army.’
No, thought Poppy, they’re far more welcoming.
‘I didn’t mean free-free,’ she explained patiently. ‘I meant available. Look,’ she went on, ‘this chap Caspar I keep hearing about, maybe I could have a word with him, see if he’d be willing to let me take the room.’
‘Why are you desperate?’ said Josie, who was incurably nosy.
‘You should see the place I’m in at the moment.’ Goodness, a friendly voice. Poppy turned to her with relief. ‘Purple wallpaper with yellow lupins all over it. Holes in the carpet, missing floorboards, groping old landlord, incontinent cat—you name it. There’s a heavy metal freak upstairs and a Glaswegian bloke with a beard who steams his own haggises. Or haggi. Anyway, the smell is terrible. The flat’s a dump. But this,’ Poppy concluded with an appreciative sweep of her arm, ‘this is a fabulous house. I mean it, I would be so happy to move in here! This place is a palace—’
‘The trouble with palaces,’ Claudia cut in, ‘is they cost more to live in than dumps. I don’t want to sound funny—’
Of course you do, Poppy thought.
‘—but I doubt very much if you could afford the rent.’
‘I might be able to,’ Poppy said mildly. ‘I only do this in the evenings. I do have a proper job.’
‘Oh.’
‘What is it?’ Josie asked, warming to the girl who was standing up so well to Claudia at her huffiest.
‘I’m a stripper,’ said Poppy simply. ‘It’s great, and it pays well. I recommend it. If you ever want to earn good money, just become a stripper in a pub.’