The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Elizabeth Day
boutique places were fully booked when I tried, by other guests, most of whom, presumably, would have got their PAs to do it for them. Ben’s fortieth was going to be a grand affair. Le tout W11 in attendance.
In the end, the only place available was a Premier Inn just off the motorway roundabout. The room cost £59.99, which seemed absurd.
‘Are you sure?’ I had asked on the phone when the receptionist recited the price list.
‘Yeah. Breakfast not included. But there’s a Little Chef across the road.’
The glamour!
And now, here we were. Lucy upset in the bathroom. Kettle boiled. Me standing trouserless on scratchy carpet. As I unpacked my dress shirt and bow-tie, I didn’t explain why Ben hadn’t asked us to stay. It unsettled me to have to stare it in the face.
Although it would have taken us less than ten minutes to walk to the party, Lucy insisted on a taxi.
‘Shoes!’ she said, pointing down to a pair of bright red, sparkling, strappy heels.
‘Very nice,’ I lied. ‘Are they new?’
She flushed with pleasure.
‘Yes. I got them off eBay.’ She twirled her right ankle, the better to show off how truly garish they were. Like every conventional woman, Lucy likes to pretend she is unconventional by buying attention-seeking shoes. In all other respects, she was playing according to type: a long A-line dress in a stiff, dark green material with two thin straps, her shoulders covered by a pale red pashmina. She held a tiny evening bag in one hand. I knew, without it being opened, that it would contain a folded tissue, a lipstick worn down to the nub, a pen, a compact mirror and our hotel room key. She would always insist on carrying a hotel room key.
‘Have you left the key at reception?’ I asked, by way of a test.
She shook her head. ‘You know I never like to do that. What if they go in and steal something?’
‘You do realise they have a master key?’
‘Well,’ she said, climbing indecorously into the taxi. ‘Still.’
The cab driver turned back to look at us.
‘Tipworth Priory?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘How did you know?’
He chuckled. ‘The way you’re dressed sort of gives it away, mate. Not normally that much call for black tie around these parts.’
Ben and Serena Fitzmaurice were famous for their parties. It was a point of pride for them. This one was ostensibly Ben’s fortieth but was doubling up as a housewarming. They had bought the seventeenth-century Tipworth Priory a few months previously. It was their second home.
During the week, they lived in a white, stucco-fronted house in the expensive part of Notting Hill. At the weekends, or so they had told me, they needed ‘more space’ for the children.
‘We just want to get away,’ they had said, as they pored over glossy brochures from estate agents with three names and no ampersand. It baffled me as to quite what they were getting away from. Still, it wasn’t for me to try and fathom the desires of the super-rich. I had nodded and murmured sympathetically when they talked in this way and soon enough they’d stumbled across Tipworth Priory in a picturesque part of Oxfordshire that had fields and sheep and all the requisite trappings of the countryside, while also comprising cafes that served soya lattes and organic mackerel salads in light-filled converted chapels. An outpost of a Soho private members’ club had just opened up nearby, doing wonders for the local economy, if not the local inhabitants, who promptly complained to the reporters at the Tipworth Echo that they were being priced out of their own villages.
In fact, Ben and Serena had had their own run-in with the local press at the time contracts were exchanged, involving a kerfuffle over the eviction of a handful of elderly monks who still lived in the Priory. The Fitzmaurices confided that they felt it had all been terribly overblown and the monks became, in their retelling, a light-hearted dinner-party anecdote designed to highlight the amusing narrow-mindedness of benighted country folk.
(I read subsequently in the Echo that a new location was found for the monks in a nondescript Oxford suburb. They are now housed in a purpose-built block sandwiched between a multi-storey car park and one of those discount stores that sells value packs of pickled onion crisps and more plastic clothes pegs than anyone could reasonably need over the course of an average lifetime.)
With the monks out of the way, Serena and Ben were able to set to work on the interior. They did a lot of things involving faux-rococo marble fireplaces, built from monumental stone veined with grey like the bloodshot white of a wide-open eye. The chandelier in the main drawing room was imported from Italy – a splintering waterfall of glassy splendour, which, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be constructed entirely from upended wine glasses. It was, Serena and Ben thought, a humorous accent; a sign that although they recognised beautiful design, they were not ones to take themselves too seriously. But I knew that the chandelier had cost £250,000. More, if you count the packaging and transport costs. I couldn’t help but admire the grandiosity of it. The sheer, unthinking excess.
I hadn’t seen it since the renovations had been completed, over three weeks ago. In spite of myself, I was intrigued to look at what they’d done to the place. I wondered whether Serena’s somewhat déclassé penchant for white lilies and plush carpets and luxury hotel fixtures and fittings would have denuded the building of all its character.
As we approached Tipworth Priory that evening, the taxi indicating into the long sweep of driveway, the overall effect was impressive. Our route was lined with spherically trimmed box hedges, each one encircled by a purple halo of light. The Priory exterior was Grade-I listed so, much to my relief, Serena hadn’t been able to get her paws on it. The resplendent Cotswold stone was intact, emitting a warm buttery glow in the dusky sunshine. There was still stained glass in the windows. On the front lawn was a large marquee, bedecked with flowers in purple and white. A fountain featuring a stone boy with an urn tilted forwards on his shoulder had purple and white petals floating in the water. As the taxi came to a halt, we heard the electric whir of a generator and the facade of the house became sharply illuminated. I got out of the car and noticed that a giant ‘B’ and ‘S’ in the same shade of virulent purple were now being projected from some unseen source of light onto the wall. Typical Serena.
‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘They don’t like to do things by halves, do they?’
The taxi driver snorted.
‘You can say that again, love.’
I shot her a look. She started to pick at the tender flakes of skin edging her thumbnail. The fare was £6.60. I handed over a ten-pound note and waited for the precise change.
‘You should have given him a tip,’ Lucy said, as we walked up the steps and tugged on an ornate pulley system to ring the ancient bell.
‘At that price? Not likely.’
I could hear footsteps echoing on flagstones and then the door opened and Ben was there, arms flung wide, shirt untucked, bow-tie undone round his neck, hair a wild mess of curls, broad smile on his face.
‘Hello, my dears!’
He ushered us in, embracing Lucy and giving her a kiss on each cheek, then crushing me into a bear hug and slapping me on the back. ‘So pleased you could come early,’ he continued, leading us through a hallway strewn with Moroccan rugs which occasionally parted to reveal a series of gravestones. Lucy’s heels click-clacked against a ‘Dearly Departed’ and when I looked down, I realised I was standing on ‘Emily, beloved wife of …’ How strange, I thought, to end your life like this. Buried in a priory graveyard and now merely flooring for a rich man’s party.
‘Forgive the chaos,’ Ben said. ‘Pre-party madness, you know how it is.’
We passed a group of girls in black skirts and white shirts with their hair pulled back in ponytails of varying degrees of severity.