Christmas at Tiffany's Read Free Page B

incredible. Anouk had plaited her muddy-blonde hair in Grecian style across the front, leaving the rest to fall in heavy ripples down her back, and Suzy had made up her huge round blue eyes with gold and bronze shadows and put a matt stain on her wide, ever-smiling mouth.
    Her friends had stood back and admired her like a work of art they had produced. She bore no resemblance to the woman who’d been digging in thirty raspberry bushes in the garden in floral dungarees and one of her husband’s moth-eaten lambswool sweaters at two o’clock that afternoon. She knew she looked good, but what worked at a fashion show in Paris or at a cocktail party in Manhattan wasn’t what cut it with the Scottish shooting set. Gil was ten years older than she was, and all his friends older still. Did she look . . . appropriate ? She scanned the room anxiously, hoping to find Wiz’s eyes before Gil’s.
    Cassie couldn’t see either of them, but there was no doubt that everyone else thought the dress was a hit. As they reached the ground floor, a cloud of guests and perfume enveloped her and she quickly became separated from the girls.
    ‘Hello . . . How lovely to see you . . . Oh, you are kind . . . Hello . . . Are you well? . . . So pleased you could make it . . . Oh, do you think so? . . . You look radiant too . . . I know, divine weather, isn’t it? . . . Hello . . . Thank you for coming . . .’
    But there’s only so much revolution one party can take, and as a glass was placed in her hand by a man who’d matched his sporran to his beard, the conversation returned to the dull but familiar territory of the abomination of the wind farms on the Earl of Luss’s neighbouring estate.
    Discreetly, she let her eyes graze the room. A string quartet was playing in the minstrels’ gallery, the men were dressed in trews or kilts, some with sashes and flamboyant horsehair sporrans that fell to their hemlines. The women were equally grand in full-length gowns with heirloom jewels. They looked stately and impressive, but as her eyes flickered between them and her modish urban friends in cascading coral silk-plissé ruffles (Anouk), intricate ethnic gold beading (Suzy) and laser-cut jet satin (Kelly), it occurred to her that the grandes dames looked exactly the same as they always did at these events.
    Just like the house, she thought. They were hemmed in, curtailed, by tradition. The hall looked imposing as usual – even a bunch of daisies in a teapot would be imbued with gravitas in these baronial surroundings – but it looked the same as it probably had at every party that had been thrown here in the last two hundred years. The antler-framed chandeliers flickered with as-yet-unseen candlelight, thick swags of ivy were draped around the austere family portraits, slightly fraying faded ceremonial flags hung from brass holsters in the walls, and the enormous stone fireplace had been filled with a profusion of garden flowers and thistles – it was too warm for a fire tonight. Only the bright red balloons tied to the banisters at every other tread and shouting ‘We Are 10’ showed that it was Cassie who was the mistress of the house, not her scary mother-in-law, nor indeed any of the women who glared grimly down from the walls.
    Across the room, she could see that the girls – who were sticking together like barnacles – had nabbed Wiz first. More formally known as Lady Louisa Arbuthnott, Wiz was the prized daughter of the most senior judge in the country, Lord Valentine, and as well as being Cassie’s best friend, was one of the best-connected women in Edinburgh. She did events like these in her sleep. Wind farms, poor grouse stocks, declining peat bogs in the central belt – she could extrapolate and amuse on every topic. Nothing fazed her. No one bored her. Everyone adored her.
    Dressed in an elegant olive-coloured silk column dress with black pearls at her throat, her reddish-auburn hair wound up into a chignon, she was the only other