might be time to take one of the classic cars parked outside the house for a quick spin. Driving hell-for-leather through his Sussex estate, hood down on the car, the precision engine muffled by the wind in his ears was the only time he really felt happy these days. Certainly bombing through the grounds at top speed was far preferable to the pointless socializing he was about to subject himself to that evening.
For years Oswald had been the Great Entertainer, throwing open his doors for huge Christmas balls or shooting weekends – kings, dukes and celebrities had all visited Huntsford during those glittering decades. But of late playing host had been far more inconvenient than enjoyable for Oswald, not to mention expensive. His friend Philip Watchorn in particular had impeccable and gluttonous taste in wine, and Oswald knew that by Sunday his reserves of Dom Pérignon, Châteauneuf du Pape ′58 and vintage Rothschild would be gone.
He caught sight of himself in the long looking glass above the fire and allowed himself a smile. He was sixty-five but looked fifty. Still a handsome man, he thought, adjusting the collar of his Ede and Ravenscroft dinner shirt. His tall frame was still strong and wiry from years of competitive polo, his eyebrows were thick and grey but distinguished, framing bright blue eyes that, in his glory days, had frozen enemies and melted admirers.
Thoughts of the old days reminded Oswald of the profile piece the Telegraph had run on him last month and he frowned, swilling his Scotch around in its tumbler. What Oswald had thought was going to be a glowing piece about his life in politics had turned into a hatchet job describing him as ‘the robber baron who frittered away the family fortune on harebrained schemes, gluttony and excess.’ He had briefly considered legal action before he realized he really didn’t want certain details of his life being dredged up in court. But what had annoyed him more was the way the piece had dwelt so much on his daughters. He could still remember one particularly galling sentence: ‘Queens of the scene, the Balcon Girls are Huntsford’s crown jewels and saviours of the Balcon legacy.’
It was a raw nerve for Oswald. He still hadn’t pinpointed the exact moment when his daughters had become a national obsession. There had always been some interest in the Balcon family, of course. His wife Margaret had been a beautiful model and a sixties’ icon – an aristocratic foil to Twiggy’s East End quirks. Wealthier than Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey, better-looking than John Paul and Talitha Getty, Oswald and Maggie Balcon had been society’s power couple. But Maggie’s death, shortly after Serena’s birth, had dulled some of the Balcon glamour. It wasn’t until Serena’s career took off that the media began to take an interest again, especially when they realized that Serena was one of four beautiful, successful sisters.
As if those ungrateful wenches had done anything except spend his money.
The whoop of a helicopter’s blades snapped Oswald from his thoughts and he peered out through the long windows to see Philip Watchorn’s ink-black helicopter settling on the lawns. Typical of Watchorn to arrive in such a vulgar fashion, he thought. He’d better not scratch my cars with his damn rotors. Flash bloody Jew.
‘Philip. Jennifer. So glad you could make it.’ Oswald embraced Watchorn at the door and gave Philip’s wife the benefit of his broadest smile. A fellow homme du monde during the sixties and seventies, Oswald had met Philip Watchorn on their first day at work at a city stockbroker’s. The two men had been close friends throughout those heady years, cutting a swathe through the miniskirts of the ‘swinging’ nightclub scene before Oswald inherited his title and Philip disappeared to become one of the most formidable corporate raiders of the eighties.
‘We’ve brought Elizabeth with us for the evening, hope you don’t mind,’ said Philip as a short redhead in a velvet suit bustled through the door. Oswald groaned inwardly. The Watchorns had a terrible habit of bringing Jennifer’s younger sister with them to social occasions, apparently under some deluded matchmaking pretext. It wasn’t that he resented the sentiment; after Margaret had passed away, he had been more than open to the possibility of marrying again, but in his mind there were two types of women that circled in the top flight of society – beautiful, well-off girls of one’s own station whom one could marry and who might well be useful in terms of money or land. And then there were the cheap, gold-digging sluts who wanted to marry you and take you for every penny. Elizabeth was very much in the latter category. Just like Philip’s wife, Jennifer, in fact: a former air-hostess turned society wife. Cheap whores, the pair of them.
‘Dear Elizabeth, how wonderful to see you again,’ gushed Oswald, taking the woman’s brown leather suitcase and handing it to Collins the butler.
‘You ladies go and settle in. Collins will show you where you’re sleeping and I’ll see you for a drink in a minute.’
Philip put an arm around Oswald’s shoulders and led him towards the drawing room. ‘So, tell me. Who’s up this weekend?’
‘Charlesworth, Portia, Venetia, Jonathon. Camilla and her chap Nathaniel Montague. I think you know his father? Eleven, including myself and Catherine,’ said Oswald, as Collins appeared at their side with a silver tray bearing two generous Scotches.
‘Eleven? Not like you, Oz. What happened to “the more the merrier”?’
The more the merrier! Did Watchorn think he was made of money? Besides, Oswald was keen to keep numbers down after the Telegraph piece. He didn’t want people accepting his hospitality and sniggering at him behind their dessert spoons.
‘Just a select group tonight, old boy,’ said Oswald, slapping Philip on the back a little too hard. ‘Speaking of which, where the bloody hell are my children …?’
Venetia Balcon pulled up outside Huntsford Castle in her BMW four-by-four. She was in a very bad mood. Her husband Jonathon hadn’t said one word since she’d scraped the car’s wing mirror against a stationary truck twenty miles back, and she knew better than to force conversation when he was in this frame of mind. Cate had been no help either, sitting sullenly in the back seat for the entire ninety-mile journey. And they were late. Venetia hated being late for anything, especially one of her father’s soirées – she knew she’d get blamed for their tardiness, even though she’d sacrificed having an eyebrow wax and an Alpha Beta peel to be early.
Walking into the family dwelling only served to depress her further. To most eyes, Huntsford would be an incredible place to call home. From the outside it was a rambling, honey-coloured stone wedding-cake of a building, with romantic castellated turrets, long mullioned glass windows and a vast oak front door approached by a sweeping arc of gravel drive. On either side of the building sprawled hundreds of acres of grounds, from woodland studded with foxgloves to open fields of lush grass – but inside the castle it was a different story. Despite the Old Masters that lined the panelled walls, and the hand-painted frescoes and chandeliers that decorated the ceilings, Huntsford just made Venetia shudder. As one of the country’s most successful interior designers, she saw the house as gloomy and tired and getting more faded by the visit. The once-lustrous walnut panels were cracked and mottled like old leather, the plasterwork was crumbling, the French crystal chandeliers hung unpolished and dull. Huntsford had become a shabby shadow of the immaculate palace it had once been. Venetia, whose career had been built on the sympathetic renovation of old family houses, had made countless offers to redesign her beloved home but, so far, her father was resistant to any modification of the place, apparently content to let it slip quietly into decay.
As she stood looking around the room, Oswald appeared at her side and placed a chilly hand on her shoulder. Venetia flinched at his touch, turning away to disguise her discomfort. ‘So you’ve finally decided to make it,’ he said tartly.
‘Sorry we’re late,’ she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. ‘Jonathon didn’t finish till six. Then we had to pick Cate up from home. The traffic was terrible.’
‘It would have helped if she hadn’t almost crashed the car on the way over,’ muttered Jonathon.
Oswald immediately sided with his son-in-law. ‘Yes, Jonathon, that can’t have helped, can it?’
The chilling disapproval of a childhood scolding flashed before Venetia.
‘And