Beautiful People by Wendy Holden Read Free Book Online Page B

into the underpants beneath, Orlando suspected—they wore merchant banker striped or checked shirts, open at the collar to expose a gold chain and with double cuffs and cufflinks. Tied around the twins' shoulders had been cashmere pullovers, jade for Ivo and ginger for Jago.
        "And, of course, they're so clever," Georgie reminded him now. "Both at Cambridge."
        Behind the curtains of his hair, Orlando grimaced. Cambridge was a word that struck fear into him. He had been dragged to the town several times over the past year by his mother, positioned in front of various spiry college entrances, and instructed to admire them.
        "Wouldn't you just love to go there?" Georgie had demanded, eyes blazing with ambition. Orlando had taken one look at what seemed an endless stream of self-satisfied geeks coming out of the front entrance of King's and thought that no, actually, he wouldn't. Even if, given his academic record, there was a hope in hell of him going to Cambridge as anything other than one of the tourists that seemed to throng outside the innumerable tea shops, he wanted to go there about as much as he wanted to go to Italy. At the age of eighteen. With his parents.

    Downstairs, Orlando's father Richard was thinking about the Italian holiday too. He felt uneasy.
        Georgie often made him feel uneasy. She was his childhood sweetheart and wife of nearly thirty years. But while he loved her devotedly, she had never been happy with his rank-and-file MP status. Georgie had always nursed ambitions for him beyond anything he had wanted.
        These had never been fulfilled, however. He had remained a backbencher and would, Richard suspected, always remain one. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that he would never be a power in the land, but he was aware that Georgie hadn't.
        "He's thrilled!" Richard heard Georgie trilling. She was back downstairs from breaking the holiday news to Orlando.
        Richard felt a clutch of panic. "But darling, it's awfully expensive."
        Georgie's expression was defiant and defensive. "I had to act fast. We haven't got anywhere else lined up. Have we?"
        Her husband flinched at this full-frontal attack on his lack of social influence. For all his twenty years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, he had failed just as spectacularly as his son to bond with anyone who might have a suitable holiday home. Like Orlando, he had not tried, because, like Orlando, Richard had a built-in aversion to the types of people who swaggered about bragging about their wealth and influence. The fellow members of Parliament that Richard liked best were just like him: hardworking backbenchers struggling to maintain a place in London, as well as a constituency one.
        Some MPs, of course, lived in their constituency and used cheap hotels when staying in London, but this option was not open to Richard. He represented a particularly unfashionable swath of Hertfordshire—albeit with one or two smart villages—in which Georgie flatly refused to live. Which was why Richard was now struggling to maintain a large, if battered, Highgate terrace house. Given their financial circumstances, hanging on to it sometimes felt like hanging on to a balloon in a Force 10 gale.
        There was also the upkeep of a small flat in the constituency. Richard wished he had suggested to Georgie that they holiday there. It might be on the High Street and above a Chinese takeaway, but at least it was free.
        He looked dumbly at his wife now. It didn't really matter what he thought about the villa; it was a fait accompli anyway. And given that their household outgoings were no longer as enormous as they had been, the expense was more bearable. There would, for example, be no more school fees for Orlando; he had taken his A levels this summer, and they could afford a little financial leeway. It would, in fact, be their first real treat holiday for fourteen years, since