famous Instagram dog and Florence was interviewing him last week…’
‘I was actually interviewing his owner,’ I said, trying to regain control of the situation. ‘She’s a Japanese poet, very successful, her second book’s just coming out and she—’
‘And Florence was up on stage,’ went on Octavia, ‘and he started rogering her leg. Isn’t that hysterical? The pictures went everywhere. My whole office were crying with laughter about it.’
Octavia turned to another gaggle of people standing beside the fireplace: Elizabeth, along with two others I assumed were Octavia’s parents. He was wearing a sleeveless maroon jersey over a pink shirt and had the jowls of a middle-aged UKIP supporter; she looked like Patricia, a helmet of perfectly brushed brunette hair sitting on top of a taut, joyless face.
‘Oh, Mummy, Daddy! You must see. This is Florence, Florence, these are my parents, Lord and Lady Belmarsh.’ She held up her phone for them and explained the story all over again to hoots of genteel laughter.
I looked to Rory for support but he just grinned and rolled his eyes at me, as if Octavia was a small and unruly child. I felt like someone had forced a poker down my throat and was stoking the embers of last week’s humiliation.
‘Well, well, well, Florence, you do seem irresistible!’ said Mortimer, still looking at me as if I was a rib of beef.
Luckily, there then came the sound of a gong and Elizabeth announced dinner. I drained my water and put the glass back down in the mirrored drinks cupboard with such a noise I worried the shelf had cracked. Luckily not.
The dining room was dim, the only light coming from several candles strung along the mahogany table. The candlesticks were made from deer antlers and, on the wall, several foxes’ heads with sharp incisors snarled down at us. I looked from the heads to an oil portrait hung from the wall behind Mortimer (alas, I’d been placed next to him). The portrait was a nude, a pale-skinned woman sitting on a rock beside a pool of water, leaning forwards to wash her hair in it. You could see the crease of her bottom.
Mortimer followed my glance. ‘That’s Elizabeth, you know.’
‘What?’ I flicked from him back to the white bottom on the rock.
‘Done years ago,’ he said, as he stuck his finger and thumb into his mouth to retrieve a piece of gristle. ‘It was her wedding present to me.’
Dinner wasn’t much better than lunch. Elizabeth, tonight in a red kaftan with jewelled slippers that curled at the toes, had carried a large porcelain dish through from the kitchen and announced that we were having game pie. She’d passed plates of this around the table and we’d helped ourselves to vegetables from bowls in front of us.
I managed two mouthfuls of the pie but it was stringy, tasting much as I imagine rat might. In the dark, I looked down at my plate again and tried to hunt for my next mouthful. Something small and spongy rolled under my fork. An eyeball?
‘And what do you do with your time,’ Morty asked, ‘apart from terrorize poor dogs, ha ha!’
‘I work in a bookshop,’ I replied, giving up on the pie and lifting a forkful of mashed potato to my mouth. Couldn’t go wrong with mashed potato. ‘That’s why I was interviewing this Japanese poet. Because she’s pretty well known and has got her sec—’
He didn’t let me finish. ‘Oh, a bookshop. So you’re in trade?’ I might as well have told him I worked in a brothel.
The potato was cold.
‘You know the one, Daddy. Frisbee in Chelsea?’ interrupted Rory from the other end of the table.
‘Oh, I simply adore Frisbee,’ Elizabeth interrupted, clapping her hands together. ‘How wonderful. I’d love to work in a bookshop.’
‘I know it,’ barked Lord Belmarsh. ‘Looks like a charity shop from the outside.’
‘It’s actually a very special place,’ I replied, spearing a small piece of cabbage on my plate in the hope that it was edible. I’d eaten almost nothing at lunch and was now well into my third glass of red wine. If I couldn’t eat this cabbage I feared an embarrassing accident. ‘It’s been there since 1967.’
‘But she’s not going to work there for ever because she’s writing her own book, aren’t you, darling?’ said Rory.
The cabbage disintegrated in my mouth. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be there, to be honest,’ I