Score!

By which time the first round would have been bought, and Alpheus, who had read somewhere that the Royal Family never carry money, would get away with not buying a drink all evening.

‘The least often heard words in the English language’, grumbled Ogborne, ‘are “Thank you, Alpheus.”’

‘The next least heard words are Alpheus saying, “It’s my round,”’ said Sylvestre.

Next day, Dame Hermione flew back from New York, but wanting to rest, and refusing to film in the morning, she made Howie ring in to say her throat was still playing up. Rather than waste a tropically heated hall, Tristan therefore shot a little shove-and-grunt scene between Alpheus and Chloe, which, having had plenty of practice, they did quite beautifully.

Once again in seconds, as Oscar ordered his team to rearrange their lights to cast a more diffused, romantic glow, the Great Hall was absolutely packed out. Sexton materialized from nowhere. Meredith was whisking around rearranging pieces of Sèvres on a table beside the bed on which Chloe was now lying on her back, the picture of abandonment. The fact that she had to wear an eye-patch to play the traditionally one-eyed Princess Eboli, somehow made her look even more sexy.

‘Don’t feedle with those ornaments, please, Meredith,’ begged Simone, consulting her Polaroids. ‘There were only two vases last time, not that anyone’s going to notice.’ She sighed.

The trouble with such a hot room was flat nipples. Lucy had to keep darting forward with ice-cubes.

‘Sometimes we use Blu-tack,’ she told Chloe.

‘Do you think my penis is too large?’ asked Alpheus seriously.

‘Not when Howie’s taken off his twenty per cent,’ replied Tristan.

Wolfie got the giggles.

‘Chloe’s chewed off all her lippy,’ bellowed an excited Griselda.

‘No-one’s going to notice that either,’ said Oscar, who for once had stayed awake. ‘God, look at the light on those pubes.’

‘She’s like a little Bonnard,’ sighed Simone.

‘I’ve certainly got a Bonnard-on,’ confessed Sexton, whose red-rimmed spectacles had quite steamed up.

‘Hush, or I’ll put ice down your trousers,’ chided a returning Lucy.

‘My mum wouldn’t let me do nudes,’ pouted Pushy Galore, who was dying to take her clothes off.

‘Quiet, please, everyone,’ brayed Bernard, whose face had gone an even darker shade of magenta.

‘God, this is sensational, Oscar. Dramatize the neck un peu, chérie,’ murmured Tristan, as Philip’s aria poured out of the speakers.

As Chloe raised her head, thrusting out her breasts so that the light caught her rouged, now upright nipples, an approaching Alpheus whipped off his pink and purple dressing-gown.

‘Action,’ shouted Tristan.

25

Claiming that his bronchitis had turned into pneumonia, Mikhail finally arrived and was overwhelmed by the beauty of Valhalla. A touch of rain had sent the green flames of the wild garlic sweeping over the woodland floor like a forest fire. Even Rannaldini’s lowering maze of dark yew had a blond rinse of lemon-yellow flowers.

‘You pay me for vorking in such vonderful place?’ Mikhail asked in amazement.

No-one, however, could quite work out whether he really had been ill or just moonlighting. He had turned up wearing a black Pavarotti smock, with large pockets for amassing loot. Maria, in the canteen, soon found her cutlery disappearing.

Then Mikhail started complaining that he missed Baby. Alpheus was no fun and far too expensive to drink with, and he missed his wife, Lara, even more, and kept hinting that Liberty Productions might pay for a plane ticket so she, too, could admire the ‘vonders’ of Valhalla. From New York, Rannaldini put his foot down. There was no way he was having Lara and Mikhail stripping Valhalla of his lovely new pickings.

Less welcome an arrival was Granny’s hunky black-haired boyfriend, Giuseppe, who wasn’t needed to play the ghost of Charles V for several weeks but who’d rocked up to ogle Tristan’s boys and enjoy free booze on the budget.

‘His mausoleum’s going to smell worse than the Pearly Gates,’ grumbled Ogborne.

Meanwhile, the digging up of the skeletons seemed to have disrupted the household ghosts. The night after Mikhail and Giuseppe arrived, the occupants of the north wing were woken by bloodcurdling shrieks. When a terrified Lucy, a for once quite pale-in-the-face Bernard and an unfazed Ogborne, who was eating a banana, emerged from their cell-like rooms, they found hunky Giuseppe in hysterics. Having slipped Granny a Mogadon, he was just returning from an unspecified location, when he’d seen his own part, the ghost of Charles V, stealing out of a bedroom and creeping away down the corridor.

‘He was all in white, weeth a hood over ’ees face,’ gibbered Giuseppe.

As Giuseppe’s breath rivalled Bacchus’s after an all-night bash, everyone assumed he was plastered. Having calmed him down, Lucy tucked him up in bed beside a snoring Granny.