Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (2 page)

Which was why she was trying rather hard not to murder Lucy Palmer.

Many words and phrases have been used to describe thirty-nine-year-old Willow, but not until this very moment would anybody have ever called her murderous.

Efficient and capable was how Willow was often described by her boss, Victoria Kincade, chief executive officer of Victoria Kincade Talent Ltd. Also invaluable, resourceful and a genuine treasure.

Good old Will was how many of her colleagues referred to her. Fun, funny, down-to-earth Willow Briars, always up for a good night out, says-it-how-it-is Will. And Willow knew perfectly well that if any of them were asked to describe her physically, they would dwell on her lovely skin, beautiful blue eyes, shiny hair and great smile, and fantastic taste in beautiful shoes, which made up for her rather limited choice in fashion.

Her identical twin sister, Holly, exactly twenty-six minutes younger, called her her rock, her darling, her soul mate, her other half, and Willow could use all of those words to describe Holly too. Her four-year-old twin nieces, Jo-Jo and Jem, called her cuddly Aunty Pillow, sweet Aunty Will, and, nicest of all, Best Aunty in the World Aunty Will—a compliment with limited range, as Willow was also their only aunt, but still she loved it.

Depending on her mood, her mother called her either the London twin or the disappointing one.

Her ex-husband had started off calling her darling, but after two years of marriage ended up describing her as a waste of space. And for a very brief time his daughter, Chloe, had not minded one little bit if people thought Willow was her mum.

Willow Briars was, is, and had been many things to many people but so far never violent. Not until now, until Lucy Palmer, graduate trainee and the daughter of a family friend of Victoria’s, had joined the agency six weeks ago and Victoria gave her the desk opposite Will, who was instructed to look after the barely twenty-one-year-old ingénue. From that moment on, to Willow’s great surprise, she discovered she would most certainly be capable of bopping another human being over the head with a brick and then feeding the body into a wood chipper.

“Anyway, Will,
you
would have
died
!” Lucy informed Willow eagerly. “I mean, you would not have been able to believe your eyes, it was fully out, under the table, right there in the middle of Nobu!
Lol!”

And that was it, that was the thing about Lucy that brought out Willow’s homicidal tendencies. She ended nearly every sentence with the nonsense word “lol.”

A lesser woman than Willow would have hated Lucy for
her smooth skin, glossy hair, long legs and insistence on sharing every mundane detail of her vacuous life with everyone in one hundred and forty characters or less (Lucy Palmer is eating a sandwich, lol. Lucy Palmer is thinking about lunch, lol. Lucy Palmer has got her period, lol. Lucy Palmer’s boyfriend got his dick out in the middle of a restaurant, lol), but what Willow discovered she could not abide was that Lucy Palmer said “lol” out loud as if it were a word, as if it had any kind of meaning, as if it was actually a socially acceptable substitute for laughing out loud.

“So I told him, I said to him, if you don’t put that away right now, there won’t be any dessert tonight, if you know what I mean, lol.” Lucy stared for a second at Willow, who was doing her best to ignore her.

“I mean blow job,” she clarified. “Lol!”

Willow bit her lip and stared at the Excel spreadsheet that she used to keep a record of Victoria’s expenses, wondering if the company accountant really would allow Victoria’s claim for four nights on a yacht in Cannes with a young male actor-slash-model who to date had not successfully auditioned even once but who was kept on the books anyway by the normally ruthless Victoria, because he was terribly talented in other areas that Lucy would have referred to as “dessert.”

“Entertaining a client, darling,” Victoria had responded to Willow’s raised eyebrow when she handed her the receipt.

“Don’t you mean he was entertaining you?” Will had asked her.

“Well, somebody’s got to,” Victoria had said with a sigh. “There isn’t enough Viagra in the world to get my husband standing to attention.”

“Poor Robert . . . perhaps if you tried being nice to him?” Willow quipped, feeling a bit dangerous.

“Darling, you know perfectly well I married Robert for his
money and the Suffolk house. By the time one gets to one’s third husband, being nice is definitely not on the agenda.”

Unable to debate around Victoria’s particular brand of logic, Willow had shrugged and keyed in the amount under the column headed “Entertaining.” Victoria liked her young men, and she didn’t mind at all paying for them, sometimes in kind and sometimes with cash, but especially on expenses. Despite her own reservations on the matter, Willow couldn’t help but admire Victoria’s determination to get what she wanted from life, even if that meant ordering a young lover in exactly the same way she would order from a menu. She did sometimes wonder what Victoria’s husband thought of it.

“Anyway, he got dessert, all right. In the back of the cab on the way home! Lol!” Willow looked at Lucy for a long moment, hoping that a mere glance would be enough to imprint her seniority and authority on the younger woman and shut her up. It was not.

“So what did you get up to last weekend?” Lucy asked her. “Anything?”

“Oh, you know,” Will said mildly, “the usual.”

“Takeaway?” Lucy fluttered her lashes innocently.

“Orgy.” Willow did not glance up from her screen as she continued to key in figures.

“Wow,” Lucy said, wide-eyed, probably at that moment trying to imagine Willow with her ample thighs wrapped around a man. “Lol.”

Saturday night had in fact been spent on a blind date with Dave Turner, a friend of a friend of her brother-in-law who had recently moved to London and didn’t know anyone. Privately Willow objected to the assumption, often made by married people, that all single people over a certain age were so desperate about their mutual failure to find a life partner equally close to imminent death that they became instantly
compatible, but still she had agreed, because frankly she had nothing else going on. Besides, Holly was only trying to be nice. And whatever else she might get wrong, Willow tried her best not to let her sister down because Holly cared about people. She worried about them, even people she didn’t know, and it made Willow feel like a better person to do things to please her, partly because she’d do anything for Holly, but also because it sometimes felt like Holly was her living, breathing conscience. Holly was the good twin, their mother said so often enough.

Dave Turner turned out to be far too good-looking to be a serious prospect. He was the sort of man who, in a year or two, would end up with a woman ten or fifteen years younger than Willow, one who would giggle at his jokes rather than raise a sardonic eyebrow. Right now, it was obvious that Dave Turner was not looking for anything serious, and he had the look of a man who would soon get tired of all the effort of small talk, find a wife, put on five inches around his middle and spend the rest of his life trying to get them off. He was a confident bachelor, a man about town who was not in need of a friend at all, and Willow realized rather belatedly that Holly was actually trying to expand her own social horizons. He’d been polite enough to flirt with her, though, and he’d seemed interested in her stories.

As the evening wore on and after several glasses of wine, his gaze had begun straying to her cleavage and his sentences were punctuated with much arm and hand touching, and Willow sensed he expected some sort of payoff for the four gin and tonics he had bought her. So they had parted company after several minutes of fevered grappling behind the wheelie bins in the pub car park, David nuzzling, squeezing and kissing Willow, while she considered the neon light of the Chinese takeaway across the road and wondered if it would still be open
by the time he’d done kissing her. To give him his credit, Dave offered to walk Willow home, but she had declined because as drunk as she was, she found the prospect of an awkward and embarrassing Sunday morning, polite lies, and empty number exchanges unbearable.

“Oh,
lol
!” Lucy said to herself, reading something on Twitter no doubt, prompting Willow to get up and pretend to go to the loo, just in case the urge to staple Lucy to the desk and hole-punch her carotid artery came to anything.

“Will, darling?” Victoria hung out of her office door like a glamorous Nosferatu rising from her coffin. “Uno momento, s’il vous plaît.” She was never one to shy away from both misusing and mixing the languages of Europe.

“Marvelous,” Victoria said, gesturing for Will to take a seat in her Dickensian gothic office. The giant antique dark oak desk, scarlet velvet curtains, brass desk lamp and an oil painting of Victoria in a blue silk gown with cleavage evident, which came straight from the artist’s imagination, all seemed a little incongruous in the modern office building. Victoria liked it, however; she said it gave her authenticity. Willow had never really been sure what her boss meant by that, but neither was she really sure exactly how old Victoria was, since her face was held in permanent suspended animation somewhere in her late forties. Perhaps she’d had that desk since it was new.

“Super, darling. Love those.” Victoria nodded at Willow’s heeled mules that peeped out from below her wide-legged trousers. Once Willow had joked that she always wore high heels so that she was the right height for her weight, and everyone had laughed and rolled their eyes, and said things like “Oh, Willow, you
are
funny.”

But Willow had only been half joking. Shoes were the one fashion item that always fitted her no matter what her waistline
was doing. Her feet were long and slender, she could walk into any shoe store in any city and although the staff might look at her askance, they would not discreetly or politely tell her that they did not make plus-size clothing. She couldn’t afford the designer footwear that Victoria regularly put through expenses as office equipment, but when she did splash out, it was on the kind of shoes that would set off a sensible skirt, that would say to any passerby I am not frumpy, I am not past my peak, I am not just fat. Look, I have fantastic shoes that make me interesting and fashionable to show you that there is another side to me.

“What can I do for you?” Willow asked Victoria, who was tapping her finger thoughtfully on her desk.

“Will, darling, I need you to get me something really marvelous. You know, special, exotic . . . really rare and expensive, okay?”

Will enjoyed working for Victoria, since every day presented a different challenge, but her employer did sometimes have the knack of talking entirely in adjectives without ever actually saying anything.

“Can we narrow that down a bit?” Willow asked. “When you say marvelous, exotic, expensive and rare, are you asking me to ring up that escort service again?”

“No . . . no, darling, although . . . No, no time for sex today.” What might have been disappointment flitted across Victoria’s mostly frozen face. “What I
mean
is, you know, something delightful, sumptuous—an explosion of delight in your mouth . . .” Briefly Willow thought of Lucy and her dessert.

“Chocolates, darling, I’m talking about
chocolates
! We need some really top-notch wonderful
chocolat
for this afternoon. India Torrance is coming in, and the poor little lamb needs a lot of cheering up. Apparently she’s ever so fond of the chocolate, although you wouldn’t know it to look at her,
thank God. I can’t make money from a porker.” Victoria eyed Willow, whose affection for confection was burgeoning all too apparently behind her straining buttons. “Normally I’d say something complimentary to make up for the fact that you’re fat, but I haven’t got time for social empathy today. We have only a brief period of calm before all kinds of shit starts to hit the fan. It’s
most
inconvenient.”

“What sort of shit?” Willow asked as she closed the office door behind her and sat down, pulling her shirt over her waistband and folding her hands over her stomach. “Isn’t India supposed to be in Cornwall in a wig and some stays, pining after a man she can never marry?”

India Torrance, twenty-something, had been a relative unknown until she won an Olivier Award for best newcomer at the tender age of eighteen, having taken first Stratford and then the West End by storm. In the following four years she had made a film a year that was both critically and commercially acclaimed and she had become Victoria’s favorite cash cow. Ethereal, beautiful, upper-class but down to earth, India was in demand all over the world, and Victoria was on the verge of signing a string of endorsements for her, including perfume, makeup, a boho clothing line that India would take credit for designing, and all this while she was in the process of making her fifth feature film, a British costume drama that, according to Victoria, had Oscar written all over it.

“Yes she fucking is,” Victoria said mildly. “That’s what she’s supposed to be doing, but she has . . . transgressed, darling . . . there’s been a teensy bit of a hiccup with my plans for her, and a little bit of ‘housekeeping’ will be required.”

“Housekeeping?” Willow’s eyes widened. That was Victoria’s code word for covering up a really massive scandal and turning it to her client’s advantage against all odds. It was
what Victoria was famous for, and most of the reason she was so successful.