Harry and Beattie Gilchrist’s House – A village in Suffolk

Menu:

The Wine Society’s Fino Sherry

Jellied Borscht

Chicken in Gin, mixed vegetables

Sussex Pond Pudding with Bird’s custard

The Wine Society’s French Full Red, Vins de Pays des Côtes Catalanes

A Women’s Institute fruit cake.

James and Katie sat in his parent’s dimly lit and darkly wallpapered dining room, staring rather glumly at the dark red jellylike substance that sat in thick slices in front of them.

‘Do you remember, we used to call this ‘blood clot Borscht’?’ Lucy whispered to them from the other side of the polished mahogany table.

‘How could I forget?’ said James, poking at his slice.  ‘It was always either this or the prawn and avocado cheesecake.’

Katie made a face.

‘Made with unripe avocados,’ Lucy interjected.

‘Mm.  And a thick layer of bright pink sauce.’

Beattie Gilchrist came in to the dining room wheeling a hostess trolley in front of her.  She had made no sartorial concession to her husband’s birthday, and wore her usual slightly doggy padded body warmer.

‘Come al-ong, Harry, the young want to start.  They’re starving, poor things.’

‘Coming,’ boomed Harry from the hallway, and then lumbered into view, taking his place at the head of the table.

‘I was going to make prawn and avocado cheesecake,’ Beattie said, ‘it was always your favourite, Lucy, wasn’t it?  But – I’m watching my weight.’

Lucy glared at her mother.  Beattie had never had to watch her weight in her life – it was Lucy’s waistline she was keeping an eye on.

‘Is Granny eating with us?’ Katie asked, cutting her starter in two and prodding it with her fork.  It quivered gently.  She began to try and extricate a frond of cabbage from it.

‘No, she’s had a bit of a turn,’ Beattie said.

‘Doesn’t like other people’s birthdays,’ Harry corrected.  ‘Not enough attention on her.’

Beattie sighed.  James recognised the moment for him to do his usual duty, and raised his glass, wondering for a second as he did so why it was always him who made the toast, and whether he was going to spend the next fifty odd years doing so at one event or another.  The thought was mildly depressing.

‘Speaking of which, Happy Birthday, Dad,’ he said.  ‘Hope you enjoy the – present.’

He realised as he was speaking that he had no idea what they had given his father.  He glanced at Katie, with a half raised eyebrow.

She gave him a look.  Oh God.  He was going to get it in the neck for that later.  As if getting into the cold, slightly damp sheets of too small double bed that sagged in the middle wasn’t enough, he was going to be doing so alongside a cold shoulder.

‘Hurm,’ his father said.  ‘Which one of you gave me the whisky?’

‘That was from us,’ Katie said.

‘Jolly good show.  We’ll have a wee dram after dinner, son.’

James nodded.

‘The clock was from me, Dad,’ said Lucy.  ‘It’s a different birdsong every hour.  I thought it was a lovely idea.’

‘Better make sure I don’t shoot it by accident, eh?’ her father laughed.  Lucy tried not to look disappointed.

‘Not finishing that, Katie?’ Beattie called from her end of the table, looking pointedly at Katie’s plate.

‘Sorry, Beattie.  I’m feeling a bit under the weather, actually.’

‘Not pregnant again, are you?’ Beattie asked.  Katie’s mother-in-law had grown up on a farm, and had no time for beating around the bush when it came to such matters.

‘God, no.’ Katie said, a little too quickly.

‘Shame,’ Harry said.  ‘Wouldn’t mind another grandson, you know.  Got two pairs of bloody good guns.  Be nice to pass them both down to a couple of boys.’

‘Maybe Edie would like to learn to shoot,’ said James, at the same time as Lucy said, ‘Maybe I’ll have a son one day.’

There was a pause as Harry looked between his two children, and then burst out laughing, and clapped James on the shoulder.

‘Ha!  Good one, old boy.’

The three members of the younger generation gazed at each other in faint despair as Beattie put plates of chicken thighs submerged in a pallid greyish sauce down in front of them, and a large tureen of mixed vegetables.

Why was the thought of a girl learning to shoot so hilarious to her father-in-law, Katie wondered, and did James feel the same way?  Katie couldn’t decide which was more objectionable – the idea of Edie killing animals for fun, or the idea that she might be banned from doing so because she was a girl.

Why did everyone find it so impossible to imagine a scenario whereby she might provide the Gilchrist’s with another grandchild, Lucy wondered, and she pondered once again the possibility that everyone thought she was a lesbian.

And, as he forced down a forkful of tough chicken in creamy gin sauce, his wife’s displeasure emanating in wave from her seat at his right elbow and the only warmth in the room coming from the gently farting dog that was sitting on his feet, James wondered why was it that, ever since he could remember, they had lived in the depths of the countryside, and his mother still insisted on serving frozen vegetables.

Max and Ella’s House

Menu:

Wasabi peas, edamame beans

Tuna, salmon and yellow tail sashimi

Tuna, scallop, salmon, and squid nigiri

Soft shell crab and avocado maki

Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc, NV

‘I can’t help feeling a bit bad about Clementine,’ Lucy whispered to Ella in the kitchen, as Ella poured soy sauce into bowls and dug around in the back of the drawer for chopsticks.  ‘I mean all the boys are out and we’re all here, and she’s – well, wherever she is.’

‘I know,’ said Ella, ‘but I couldn’t exactly have her and Laura sitting around the kitchen table together, could I?’

‘I suppose not.  Laura’s going to have to get used to it eventually though.’

‘You want to tell her that, do you?’

Lucy winced.  ‘

‘Exactly.  We’re just going to have to wait it out.  She’ll be alright.  Here, have a wasabi pea.’

‘No, they make my nose hurt.’

‘They’re meant to.  Where’s Katie, anyway?  Not like her to be so late.’

‘No.  Well, it never used to be.’

Ella raised an eyebrow and munched on a handful of bright green peas.  ‘Oho.  Come on, what’s the gossip?  Laura said Nancy had told her things weren’t great?’

‘Pfft, typical.  Nancy never could keep her mouth shut after a couple of drinks.’

‘Anything in it though?’

Lucy bristled a little and tugged her heather coloured Brora cardigan down over the waistband of her jeans.

‘I’m sure everything’s fine.  All couples go through their tricky patches, don’t they?’

Ella gazed at her, and nodded slightly.  ‘Mm.’

‘Or so I’m told, anyhow!’ Lucy added, the faux jollity of her tone fooling neither of them. Lucy’s eternal singledom had stopped being funny some time ago.

*

Laura opened the door to Katie, who was standing huddled in the porch looking cold.

‘Everything ok?’ she asked as she stepped back to let Katie wipe her boots on the Union Jack doormat.

‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’ Katie huffed.

‘Erm, you’re almost an hour late.  Just wondering if you’d had a drama or something.’

‘Oh.  No, no, I just left late.’  Katie’s forehead was set in a slight frown.  Laura shrugged; she wasn’t going to push it.

‘Come and have a glass of wine.’  The two women headed into the kitchen where Lucy was sitting at the table flicking through a copy of a glossy interiors magazine.  ‘Ella’s just settling Viking back down.’

‘God, when will that child start sleeping through?  Hi Lucy…’ Katie leant over and kissed her sister-in-law’s cheek.  ‘Honestly if she’d just used my Gi…’

Katie trailed off when she saw Laura’s eyes flick towards the kitchen door, and she turned to see Ella, a sleepy and sulky looking Viking in her arms.

‘Hi, Els.’

‘God, you’re not going to start banging on about that fascist woman who runs your life again, are you?’  Ella’s tone was light but there was a sudden crackle of tension in the air.

‘She does not ‘run my life’.  It’s just a common sense approach that helps everything run more smoothly.’  Katie’s voice trembled.  Lucy and Laura kept quiet.  They had heard this discussion before.

Ella rocked Viking back and forth on her lap.  ‘Well, as long as you’re happy,’ she said.

Katie stared at her, and her eyes suddenly filled up with tears.

‘I’m not happy,’ she said.  ‘Of course I’m not happy.  James hasn’t had a job for almost a year now and he doesn’t seem that bothered about getting one, I’ve got no career and nothing to talk about apart from stupid childcare routines that no one’s interested in and why would they be? I’ve done nothing apart from have children and you’ve all got these amazing jobs and look stunning all the time and I can’t even be happy for you I just criticise and I think James is having an affair.  And I don’t even blame him.’

The three women were silent for a moment, and then Ella stood up, hitched Viking onto one hip and pulled Katie in for a hug with her free arm, and holding her while she sobbed snottily on her shoulder.

*

When Katie had stopped crying, and had been settled into the battered leather sofa with a plate of sushi and a big glass of wine, and Viking had been put back to bed, Laura took the bull by the horns.

‘Look, the rest of it we can deal with later – job stuff, you know, it’s not always that great having a high fliying career, especially when you’ve been dumped for some perfect little young thing…’

‘Or when your home life’s total chaos pretty much all of the time…’ added Ella.

‘Or when your love life consists of you and your cat watching endless Friends reruns…’ interjected Lucy.

‘Well, quite,’ Laura said.  ‘But Katie, I’ve got to ask – why do you think James is having an affair?’

Katie sighed.  ‘Ok.  It all started last year…’

I was recently interviewed for a piece in The Telegraph which will appear in the review section on 13th February.

Luxury is doing well and I have been really pleased to have such fantastic feedback from reviewers and readers.  Thanks to everyone who has been buying it and getting in touch to tell me your thoughts.  It was recently reviewed on Angela and Friends, alongside Jackie Collins, Immodesty Blaize and Jacqueline Susanne in a round up of ‘bonkbuster’ fiction – here’s a link to the video clip.

Come for Dinner and meet a group of characters who you will grow to love – peer through the French windows of their kitchens, and eavesdrop over the pre-dinner drinks, sit down at their tables and gasp at the revelations that follow…

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I am enjoying writing it.

I’m also the featured author on the BookRabbit site, with an audio interview and a chance to win a copy of Luxury.

Next week, there’ll be another chance to win a copy on the Headline advent calendar, and some exciting news about a new project I’m working on…

Here’s the piece.

“What I really want to read is a proper, old-fashioned blockbuster like they used to do. You know?” a friend said to me a couple of years ago. And I did know. I knew exactly the sort of book she was talking about. That conversation planted the seed of the idea which became my first novel, Luxury, which is just that – an old-fashioned blockbuster, brought bang up to date.

When I started writing Luxury, I did a lot of thinking about what makes a novel a blockbuster, as opposed to a saga, or chick lit. While the traditional definition of a blockbuster is simply a mega-seller, like their cinematic counterparts, to call a book a blockbuster implies something more than simply selling in droves – although of course one always hopes they will do that as well.

I did a lot of reading around the subject, devouring reams of exotic locations and deliciously deviant behaviour. I read Shirley Conran, Irvin Shaw, Tom Wolfe, Jackie Collins, Sally Beauman. I started making lots of lists, of the “essential ingredients” of a blockbuster.

Blockbusters are, invariably, long. There is no such thing as a slim blockbuster. They make their presence felt on the bookshelf with their heft and, frequently, the raised metallic lettering on their spines. Luxury is, if anything, at the svelter end of the scale, at around 550 pages; they can easily run into four figures.

These are big books not just physically, but in every way. The lives of the characters in a blockbuster happen on a grand scale. Poverty is extreme, the frequently chronicled rise to stratospheric wealth even more so. There is little in the way of middle ground. Addiction devastates, ambition turbo-charges, passion fuels an inferno. Whether it is the sexily scandalous Hollywood excesses of Jackie Collins, or the catastrophic meltdown of Atlantan titan of business Charlie Croker in A Man in Full, these are lives lived in technicolour.

Blockbusters often span both decades and continents, skipping through years and countries with ease. There is usually a major city involved, often counterpointed by a country escape, or a remote and exotic location. In Luxury this role is played by an elite and ultra-exclusive private island hotel which caters to the every whim of its pampered and famous guests; in Conran’s Savages, one of the greatest blockbusters ever, almost all of the action takes place on the desert island where the characters are marooned, their city lifestyles a distant memory.

People very often aren’t nice in blockbusters. These are not the sympathetic characters of chick lit, the sweet girls searching for love. Instead, here are characters who can walk into a room and ask, “Which one of you bitches is my mother?” (in Shirley Conran’s Lace) or who, like my own Nicolo Flores, are so consumed by envy and the addictive desire for revenge that they spend most of their lives trying to bring down the friend who betrayed them.

Blockbusters teem with detail: great chorus lines of supporting characters, colourful backdrops, jewels and glamour and sex. They are page-turners, where story comes first – though this doesn’t mean they can’t be literary as well – Irvin Shaw’s Rich Man, Poor Man, is a perfect example, and there’s plenty of Dickens that would, if it were written today, fall neatly into the blockbuster category.

They are the literary version of the cinematic epic, of a huge sandwich loaded up with all of your favourite things, of a box set of Dynasty. A shameless guilty pleasure.