KATHLEEN TESSARO 3-BOOK COLLECTION: The Flirt, The Debutante, The Perfume Collector

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

The Flirt first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2008

The Debutante first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2010

The Perfume Collector first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

Copyright © Kathleen Tessaro 2008, 2010, 2013

Ebundle cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

Kathleen Tessaro asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007330676, 9780007366019, 9780007419838

Ebook Edition © December 2013 ISBN: 9780007548521

Version: 2017-11-29

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Flirt

The Debutante

The Perfume Collector

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

KATHLEEN TESSARO
THE FLIRT

Praise

‘More heart than you’ll ever find on a catwalk … written with élan and panache.’

Daily Mail

‘It’s friendship, not elegance, that proves Louise’s real saviour, and the friendships that develop through the book are drawn carefully and with insight.’

Independent

‘A perfect pick-me-up.’

Cosmopolitan

‘It’s surprising that this is Kathleen Tessaro’s first novel as her style shows the confidence and ease of a more seasoned writer. A charming, entertaining novel.’

Punch

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Chapter 1: La Vie Bohème

Chapter 2: A Self-Made Woman

Chapter 3: Tea for Table Five

Chapter 4: 45 Chester Square

Chapter 5: Free Lunch or a Shag

Chapter 6: Armenian Plumbers

Chapter 7: The King of the Tennis Ball

Chapter 8: A Stranger at the Garrick Club

Chapter 9: 111 Half Moon Street

Chapter 10: A Subtle Twist of Fate

Chapter 11: The Interview

Chapter 12: The Rules

Chapter 13: Professional Massagers of the Female Ego

Chapter 14: La Dame aux Camélias

Chapter 15: High Tea at Claridge’s

Chapter 16: A Brief History of the Professional Flirt (A Small Digression)

Chapter 17: The World’s Most Exclusive Hairdresser

Chapter 18: Another Moriarty Original

Chapter 19: A Man’s World

Chapter 20: Nick the Nose

Chapter 21: Make Me a Willow Cabin at Your Gate

Chapter 22: The Cardinal Rule (A Moment of Silence, Please, for Freddie)

Chapter 23: A Clean Break

Chapter 24: The Ghost Chair

Chapter 25: The C Word

Chapter 26: Breakfast at Graff

Chapter 27: Professional Massagers of the Female Ego at Large (Part One)

Chapter 28: Professional Massagers of the Female Ego at Large (Part Two)

Chapter 29: No Ordinary Mark

Chapter 30: Drip, Drip, Drip

Chapter 31: Professional Massagers of the Female Ego at Large (Part Three)

Chapter 32: To the Lighthouse

Chapter 33: The Savoy

Chapter 34: All Hail Athena

Chapter 35: Love According to Flick

Chapter 36: The History of the Cyrano (Another Digression)

Chapter 37: The Perfect Plan

Chapter 38: The Perfect Plan (Hughie’s Version)

Chapter 39: Venus Blinks

Chapter 40: The Invitation

Chapter 41: On the House

Chapter 42: It’s Me … Emily

Chapter 43: Walk with Me

Chapter 44: Into the Care of Mr Lewis

Chapter 45: International Polo Player

Chapter 46: Leticia Eats

Chapter 47: The Last Resort

Chapter 48: The Next Generation

Chapter 49: Waiting

Chapter 50: Meant for Better Things

Chapter 51: A Suitable Client

Chapter 52: Unusual

Chapter 53: The Opera

Chapter 54: Liberty

Chapter 55: Professional

Chapter 56: Perspective

Chapter 57: Two for the Price of One

Chapter 58: Domestic Harmony

Chapter 59: Faux Pas

Chapter 60: Speed

Chapter 61: A Deadly Virus

Chapter 62: The Good Wife

Chapter 63: A Cold November Evening

Chapter 64: Life Jogs On

Acknowledgements

La Vie Bohème

The ad appeared in the Stage in the second week of September, when the Edinburgh Festival was officially over and real life made its unpleasant appearance again in the collective consciousness of the large number of unemployed young actors who populate the London area.

It read:

Unique situation available for an attractive, well-mannered, morally flexible young man. Hours irregular. Pay generous. Discretion a must.

Please send photo and brief romantic history to:

Valentine Charles

111 Half Moon Street

Mayfair, London

Hughie Armstrong Venables-Smythe was sitting at his usual table, next to the window in Jack’s Café, armed with a pen he’d nicked from the waitress, a strong cup of builder’s tea and his mobile phone, which was running out of credit. Outside, the sun was radiant, the air sharp with a brisk autumn breeze. Elderly shoppers, dragging battered tartan trolleys, paused to examine the merits of the half-price bleach in pink plastic baskets outside the Everything For a Pound shop on Kilburn High Road. Others hurled themselves into bargaining sessions with the red-faced Irish butcher, his bacon suspiciously reasonable.

Here, Hughie was among his people; living the front-line, hand-to-mouth existence of a jobbing actor in NW6, still quite a rough neighbourhood according to his mother, despite the recent boom in house prices.

Spotting the ad, he circled it and leant back, satisfied. In his trade, buying the Stage and circling ads was considered an entire day’s work. He lit a fresh cigarette to celebrate.

He’d only just started smoking; Marlboro Lights. It was a disgusting habit. He’d picked it up from his girlfriend Leticia, who was full of the most delightfully disgusting habits known to man, of which smoking was easily the most socially acceptable. At twenty-three, it made him feel sophisticated. But then Hughie needed all the help he could get, especially as Leticia was a great deal older than him and more sophisticated than he was ever likely to be. Although they’d only been (he was thinking of calling it ‘going out.’ But was it really going out if in fact you never went anywhere or did anything but just met several times a week in strange, dark places to have wild, wordless, pornographic sex? Probably not. The proper social heading was more likely to be ‘seeing one another’, which they’d only been doing for about two weeks), Hughie was already violently in love.

Ah, Leticia!

What was not to love?

Everything about her was perfect – from her glossy, black bob, doe-like brown eyes and soft, pink Cupid’s bow lips, to the way she screamed, ‘Spank harder, you horny little bastard!’ in the alleyway behind the bespoke lingerie shop she ran in Belgravia.

Closing his eyes, he silently thanked the Lord above, as he did many times a day now, for the particular good fortune that forced him to sit down next to her on that crowded number 12 bus. From the first moment he felt her delicate hand creeping up his inner thigh as they passed Marble Arch to the hasty exit they both made at Piccadilly Circus, he’d known that the course of his life was changed for ever. Until that day, God had been little more than a vague concept but afterwards, Hughie concluded that no other force in the universe could’ve so perfectly answered all of his prayers.

Then, taking another drag, he frowned.

Leticia was a real woman, not some fluffy student. Deliciously perverse, she was also popular, ruthless and easily bored. How was he going to keep her? Love alone was not enough. A diet of non-stop delights and amusements was needed to sweep her off her feet.

Having no money was neither delightful nor amusing.

This was the torment he’d been warned about in drama school: the very crux of La Vie Bohème. Here he was, a struggling young actor caught in the maelstrom of artistic integrity versus commercial demands. He imagined an audience observing his silent heroism and, with a gallant gesture, swept his mop of ash-blond hair back from his handsome face.

In fact, everyone he met expected him to be employed. How few people understood the fragile relationship between working in the acting profession and actually being paid!

Hughie took another drag.

Whatever happened to art for art’s sake?

Hughie’s mother and sister, Clara, went on endlessly about how was he going to live, to eat, to be a useful member of society, blah, blah, blah. But they were missing the point. And not for the first time, Hughie felt the familiar, frustrating weight of being a Venables-Smythe.

There was a time when being a Venables-Smythe was a destiny; a passport into the world of the English upper classes. However, by the time Hughie was born into the once-illustrious clan, all that was left to inherit was the name, posh accent and a mildly traumatizing public-school education. His grandfather had sold the family pile, priceless antiques and family portraits included, to an American hotel chain in 1977 for what had seemed an enormous amount of money at the time but in retrospect had been a bargain. Instead, he’d bought a badly converted flat in Chelsea, invested heavily in Betamax, and funded Hughie’s father, Robert Armstrong Venables-Smythe, in his playboy lifestyle. His father, as attractive as Hughie was now, had a taste for Ralph Lauren shirts, Gucci loafers, Italian cars and bubbly, big-breasted blondes. He met Hughie’s mother, Rowena Compton Jakes, a nineteen-year-old, flat-chested brunette, shy to the point of being socially disabled, when she was working in the wedding-list department of Tiffany’s. They were married two years later and Robert set up business as a Fulham estate agent. He knew nothing about the property market. He did, however, have a great deal of charm which he expended on long lunches at San Lorenzo with a series of young secretaries who called him Bobby.

When Hughie was five, his father disappeared in a mysterious deep-sea-fishing accident off the coast of Malta. His mother still claimed it was all a hoax but he never returned and his business went quietly bankrupt. This devastating blow signalled the beginning of Hard Times.

However, Hard Times give rise to great acts of heroism. And so it came to pass that Hughie’s mother showed her true mettle. She painted the living room red, bought a few scatter cushions from Peter Jones and announced that she was now an interior designer of the Jocasta Innes variety. One stiff early-morning drink took the edge off her shyness. She maintained a veneer of social respectability by shopping at designer second-hand shops and, at tremendous personal sacrifice, sending her children to the best schools. Her single obsession was that they should gain not only the kind of financial security that had eluded both their father and their grandfather, but also launch themselves back into the bosom of their class.

And so, Hughie’s older sister Clara diligently won a scholarship to study classics at Cambridge while Hughie, rejected from almost every institution of any note, enrolled in a third-rate drama school in King’s Cross, where he set about studying his craft.

Every once in a while, Hughie tried to imagine his father’s face. (His mother had systematically eliminated all his photographs.) What might he look like now?

Tucking the cigarette into the side of his mouth, Hughie took out the one remaining photo from his wallet. The faded Polaroid showed Hughie at three, holding his father’s hand on a beach in Spain. Robert was bending towards him, his hand pressed into the small of Hughie’s back. He was laughing, tanned, happy.

Hughie had studied the photograph for so many hours, over so many years, that it formed a memory where none existed. Sometimes he imagined he could still feel his father’s reassuring touch, a firm hand guiding him through the unknown, towards a version of himself he would be proud of.

Hughie slipped the photo back into his empty wallet.

The Unknown: here it was again, looming before him.

He was just back from a three-week stint in Edinburgh performing in an improvised musical about homelessness called Waste! He couldn’t sing much beyond ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ but he’d listened to enough Benjamin Britten during his Harrow education to pretend he was obsessed with atonal harmonies. Whenever he hit a sour note, he looked very serious and sang louder. Over time, the rest of the cast came to admire his musical daring. (After the late-night drinking sessions, he’d done a lot more atonal singing than even he’d intended.)

But now he was back in London, living on the sofa in Clara’s front room, and money was officially a problem. Actually, Clara was a problem too.

Clara had taken her mother’s advice: she worked in a large business PR firm in the City. She walked like a man in heels and wore navy-blue suits, hair in a limp, mousy bob – a look that might have been sexy in a Miss Moneypenny kind of way on anyone else but Clara. Her hours and ambition were such that Hughie hardly ever saw her but she left little yellow Post-it notes telling him what to do (or not, as the case might be). Sometimes, Hughie felt sure that she’d come home in the middle of the day to plaster a fresh supply on everything he’d ever touched. ‘This is NOT an ashtray!’ on the eighteenth-century porcelain china planter given to her by her fiancé Malcolm (a china specialist at Sotheby’s who was so obviously gay to everyone else in the world but Clara). ‘Put the seat DOWN!’ on the loo lid, ‘Buy your OWN MILK!’ on the refrigerator and ‘Don’t forget your fucking KEYS again!’ on the back of the door, just as he was about to go out (without his fucking keys). True, he’d only meant to stay a few days but she was being a cow about the whole thing. Nothing had changed between them since he was six and she ten, bossing him around all day like a shorter, fiercer mother, only she was considerably more sober than their mother and therefore more relentlessly eagle-eyed.

Stubbing out his cigarette, he hailed the waitress.

A tiny, auburn-haired girl came over and handed him the bill.

‘You don’t, by any chance, take Amex, do you?’ Hughie smiled. (The Venables-Smythe smile was something to behold – two dazzling rows of even white teeth, punctuated by dimples and a pair of intensely blue eyes.)

‘I, ah …’

‘Look,’ he peered at her name tag, ‘the thing is, Rose, I’m a bit short of change. But I’m a regular – you’ve seen me. I’m here almost every day.’

‘Yes, yes … that’s true,’ she admitted. ‘But this is the third time in a week you’ve been short.’

‘Listen.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t you spot me for one more day and I promise, on my mother’s grave, that tomorrow I’ll come in and make it up to you.’ He smiled wider. She blushed bright scarlet. ‘So do we have a deal?’

‘OK.’

Hughie landed a quick kiss on her cheek. ‘You’re a star, Rose! An absolute star!’ He swung open the door.

‘Wait a minute! What’s your name?’

‘Forgive me! Hughie.’ He offered his hand. ‘Hughie Armstrong Venables-Smythe. Now, don’t give up on me, Rose, will you? I’ll be in first thing in the morning, you have my word.’ And tucking his copy of the Stage under his arm, he left.

Once outside, he picked up a rogue apple rolling just out of sight of the fruit seller on the corner, rubbed it clean on his jeans, took a bite and considered the ad as he strolled home.

Hours irregular. Pay generous. Both sounded just the ticket. But the moral flexibility excited him most. He was uncertain as to the existence of any moral substance in his nature to begin with. How did one know nowadays? What were the criteria? Apart from the most obvious guidelines (would you kill anyone? How do you feel about stealing from old people?), he felt curiously uninformed in this area. It was clear, though, that morally flexible was by far the sexier of the two options.

And Leticia would love him for it.

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