Katy Carter Wants a Hero Read Free Page A

bunch of bankers.’
    ‘Please! I’m a desperate woman.’
    Ollie drains his pint. ‘Why do you have to impress these idiots? If they don’t like you as yourself then sod ’em.’
    ‘I can’t be myself,’ I say miserably. ‘I’ll be a total embarrassment to James.’
    Ollie plucks a note out of his wallet. ‘In that case, Katy, why does he want to marry you?’
    And leaving me to ponder this very valid point, he weaves his way through the Friday-night crowd. I stare sadly into my wine glass. How can James love me as I am? I’m not all elegance and grace like Millandra or blonde and skinny like Nina. I’m short and ginger and frequently say the wrong thing. I can’t cook, I wear the wrong clothes and I’m a total disappointment to his mother. I’ve tried really hard to support his career and improve my image, but I never seem to get it right.
    I’ve known James even longer than I’ve known Ollie, because he used to live next door to my godmother, Auntie Jewell, in Hampstead. In fact we practically grew up together, because my sister Holly and I used to spend our school holidays with Auntie Jewell while our parents trekked to Marrakesh or Morocco or basically anywhere else where they could smoke dope all day and forget about their children.
    Not that I’m bitter or anything. It just
might
have been nice to have had normal parents who cared about my homework and who actually fed me on a regular basis. Reading tarot cards before breakfast is all very well, and of course I’m glad I know how to cleanse my chakras, but when you’re seven, a bowl of Frosties and a packed lunch is slightly more useful, isn’t it?
    Anyway, I’m digressing.
    Auntie Jewell isn’t really my auntie at all; I think we only have the most tenuous of family ties, something really vague like cousins eight times removed. I do know that she was great friends with my grandmother and our families have remained close ever since. The story goes that Auntie’s parents, in total despair at ever getting their wayward daughter off their hands, paid for a London season and launched her on the unsuspecting cream of polite society. I’ve seen the debutante pictures and she was stunningly beautiful, if unrecognisable without her long silver hair and obligatory mini zoo of pets. She pissed off her peers, hardly surprisingly, by receiving a proposal from the extremely eligible Rupert Reynard, Duke of Westchester. Their wedding was the social event of the year, attended by royalty, and after honeymooning in Cannes they settled down to married life in Rupert’s ancestral home. At this point the story varies depending upon who you talk to. Our version is that Jewell finally had enough of her husband’s womanising and ran away with the under-gardener. No doubt Rupert Reynard saw things very differently. Jewell has never breathed a word about her reasons for leaving her husband, but relations between the two families have been strained ever since, not least because Rupert left her penniless.
    ‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ Jewell always shrugs whenever anyone points out the unfairness of her situation. ‘Besides,’ she’ll add cheerfully, ‘I did all right in the end.’
    Which is true. She became a model and spent the early Sixties as the muse of famous pervy artist Gustav Greer. His blobby pink pictures of a naked Jewell grace galleries from the Tate Modern to the Saatchi. ‘Dreadful things,’ Jewell likes to shudder. ‘The poor man couldn’t afford to pay me so I used to take sketches and pictures instead of cash.’
    Just as well she did. For some inexplicable reason the art world decided that Greer’s nausea-inducing pictures of Jewell’s boobs were actually fantastic works of art and worth a fortune. Gustav fuelled the frenzy for his work by conveniently suffocating on fumes when he tried to paint his own body. Suddenly Jewell found herself possessed of a very desirable collection of modern art, which she promptly swapped