‘Jesus, you’re leaving it late! I started when I was twenty!’ Kara, who had a face like a boa constrictor, leaned forward and flared her nostrils with difficulty. ‘By the time I was your age I’d had six procedures… eyes, ears, plus a full face-lift!’
‘And you had your knees done,’ her husband chimed in. ‘What is it you always say? Nothing worse than a woman with pudgy knees.’
‘You’re telling me.’ Kara mimed gagging. ‘I mean, we were in Tuscany with the Mainwarings over Easter and you should have seen Kizzy’s knees. So pudgy and gross, I felt nauseous every time I looked at them!’
‘OK, darling, calm down,’ said her husband. ‘Some people prefer the natural look.’
‘Well, they shouldn’t.’ Kara shuddered. ‘It’s just wrong. They should have more consideration for others.’
She actually meant it. Ellie longed to ask Kara’s husband if he’d had his knees done too. Across the table she caught Zack’s eye and struggled to keep a straight face.
The conversation turned to Tuscany, where everyone else appeared to have holidayed. Several of them owned villas there. Bob said, ‘How about you, Ellie? Where d’you like to vacation?’
‘Has everyone visited San Gimignano?’ Kara was on a roll now, her snake eyes with their barely-there lids flickering around the table. ‘It’s fifty kilometers from Florence, a completely feudal medieval village with this massive wall around it. We stayed at a farmhouse nearby and just did nothing for a month. Totally idyllic.’
‘Ellie?’ repeated Bob.
She smiled at him. ‘I like Cornwall best.’
‘Corn-waaaall?’ He made it sound like a wall made of corn. Mystified, he shook his head. ‘Bottom left-hand corner of England, am I right? Can’t say I’ve ever been there.’
‘Oh, you should.’ Ellie put down her wine glass. ‘It’s beautiful. My favorite place is Looe, it’s just—’
‘Loo?’ Bibi clapped her hands in delight. ‘You mean like the toilet? Oh, wow!’
‘That’s exactly how I’d describe it,’ Kara drawled. ‘We were invited down there once. What a nightmare. The place was full of oiks.’
The fork in Ellie’s hand was loaded with seafood in a saffron sauce. The temptation was enormous. ‘I go there.’
‘So you’ll have seen them. Wearing knotted hankies on their heads and drinking cans of lager on the beach. Screaming babies, kids dropping ice creams, souvenir shops…’ Kara’s upper lip did its best to curl.
‘Well, I’ve never been to Italy.’ Ellie looked at Zack, wondering if she should be saying this. ‘But I’m fairly sure they have souvenir shops in Florence. And babies that cry.’
‘Oh well, we’re all different.’ A thin smile of satisfaction stretched itself across Kara’s face. ‘Some of us are probably just suited to Tuscany more than others.’
Bibi said, ‘We tried it once, Bob, didn’t we? Bored the backside off us. Give me Disney World any day.’
Ellie could have hugged her. Kara looked as if she’d been bitten by a mongoose. The waiter arrived to refill their glasses. Across the table, Zack’s mouth was twitching.
Hopefully this meant she wasn’t about to be sacked on the spot.
At the end of the evening Bibi hugged her goodbye. On impulse Ellie stepped back and removed the jeweled combs Bibi had admired earlier. ‘Here, you said how much you liked them. I want you to have these.’
‘Oh God, I can’t believe it, that’s so kind of you! Hang on…’ Bibi said, ‘let me give you something too.’
Hastily Ellie stopped her. ‘No, you can’t do that.’
Well, she could, but the item Bibi was struggling to unfasten was a multicarat diamond tennis bracelet, which was a slightly embarrassing exchange for a couple of combs from Primark that had cost one pound fifty each.
***
They left the hotel at eleven fifteen. In the taxi Ellie said, ‘Sorry about the thing with Kara. I hope I haven’t got you into trouble.’
Zack was finding it almost impossible to tear his gaze away from her. In this light her eyes were huge. Her hair, no longer fastened up in a semichignon, now framed her face and her chin was tilted at a determined angle. Her expression was unrepentant; she was apologizing for possibly causing problems in the business sense but not for saying what she’d said.
‘Doesn’t matter a bit. She’s a crashing snob, and I wasn’t wild about her husband either. I didn’t know you were such a fan of Cornwall.’
‘Oh God, I love it. Ever since we started going down there when I was a kid. We used to stay on a caravan site between Looe and Polperro. Then after that it was camping