that.’ She flung a bulky envelope on to the kitchen table.
Lottie turned it over curiously. It had the Royal monogram on the back and weighed a ton.
‘What’s this?’
‘Briefing,’ said Bella in a voice of doom.
‘Briefing? For the New Year party?’
‘Yes.’
‘For two days?’
‘Yes.’
‘The woman’s mad,’said Lottie, with conviction. ‘Nobody reads briefing of more than a page. What’s in all this bumf, for God’s sake?’
‘Protocol. When you get up. When you eat breakfast. Where you eat breakfast. Where you’re expected to be at all times of the day. How to curtsey. How to drink the loyal toast. Did you know that some people are allowed to say “The King, God bless him”? Not very many. Most people are expected to say “The King” and shut the fuck up.’
Lottie boggled.
‘Then there’s the Ball. Instructions on what to wear, skirt length (and fullness of), shoes.’
‘Shoes?’
‘Soft-soled Princess pumps are preferred,’ read Bella out loud. ‘Oh, God, it’s like I’ve fallen through a wormhole into another universe. Individually the words make sense but I don’t know what they mean when you put them together like that.’
She soon found out. Lady Pansy, it transpired, had taken the initiative. First off a small box arrived from a Scottish footwear manufacturer, containing shoes that were more like unstructured ballet slippers. They were light and pretty but too big for Bella’s feet.
‘Why doesn’t the woman bloody ask?’ fumed Bella, phoning the company. She was horrified to find that Lady Pansy had blagged them out of the company for free, as a gift to the Prince of Wales. ‘They are nothing to do with the Prince,’ said Bella tightly, down the phone to the Highlands. ‘Please send me an invoice. Yes, for both sizes. I shall be paying.’
But that wasn’t the only thing that Lady Pansy had ordered to turn Bella into a halfway decent guest at the Royal Family’s New Year house party. A large, flat box also arrived.
Lottie and Bella surveyed it cautiously. ‘It looks like one of those old-fashioned laundry boxes my grandmother used to have,’ said Bella.
They opened it. Inside was a ball dress.
‘That’s a ball dress and a half,’ said Lottie, extracting it from loads of tissue paper, an expression of fascinated horror on her face.
It was shiny. And very, very full. The material was so rigid, the thing could have stood up on its own, but it had a stiff underskirt anyway, just in case. It was patterned in huge vertical stripes of purple, turquoise, midnight blue and cerise. When Bella put it on, it turned out to have sleeves puffed to such bloated proportions she would have to go through doors sideways.
It was beyond dreadful.
‘But it ticks all the sodding boxes,’ said Bella, beginning to gibber. ‘No slits, no bare upper arms, full-length, full skirt, not black. AAAAARGH!’
Lottie was studying Lady P’s briefing. ‘“Tiaras may be worn.” Wonder if she’s going to send you one of those, too?’
But Lady P’s initiative had worn itself out with The Striped Horror. ‘Stripes,’ she said, when Bella rang to query the purchase, ‘are Very Slimming. And puffed sleeves are so youthful. The Queen,’ she added as a clincher, ‘agrees with me.’
Bella put the phone down, defeated.
But Lottie was made of sterner stuff. ‘Look, there could be a misunderstanding. Hope on, hope ever. Take a dress of your own as well.’
Bella looked at The Horror with loathing. ‘I don’t have anything that meets the criteria. I’ve got to do Scottish dancing in the thing. Me. You know me and dancing. I wish I was dead.’
Lottie was sobered.
‘Lady P has sent over instructions on how to dance Scottish reels. There are bits on the footwork and bits on the arm gestures. Only gentlemen raise their arms above their heads in the Highland Schottische, whatever that is. There’s no namby-pamby gender equality on a Highland dance floor, I’ll have you know. And there are even bloody road maps on the dances themselves!’
‘Bella,’ said Lottie very quietly, ‘I’m sorry, but I think you’re going barmy.’
‘So do I.’
‘Dances don’t have road maps.’
‘Scottish dances do. It’s deeply depressing.’
Of course Richard, bopping away for King and Country in Bar Bahia didn’t know that. He texted: We’ll boogie in the New Year.
To which Bella replied: Wanna bet?
Almost immediately her phone rang.
‘What is it, sweetheart? You’re not getting cold feet about coming to Drummon?’
‘Not cold feet, no. But I haven’t got time to do the necessary homework.’
‘Sorry, I missed that. Did you say homework?’
‘Yes.’
She could hear the latin rhythms in the club behind him.