Simply Divine by Wendy Holden Page A

unimaginably wonderful things to her. She clenched her fists and screwed up her eyes. She wanted Tom, desperately. But she had no number, no idea where he was. They'd been ships that passed in the night. That had been the point of the encounter. Then.
    If she couldn't have Tom, she'd have to make do with Gordon, Jane decided, reaching for the bottle. This called
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    for extreme measures in every sense of the word. Anaesthetising. Comforting. The deep, deep peace of the double gin.
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    Chapter 6

    One of the bitterest pills to swallow, Jane considered, was not just that her love-life and work life were on the kind of downward trend not seen since the Wall Street Crash. Much worse was the fact that Champagne seemed set on an endless upward trajectory. For, if the first Champagne Moments column had been a sensation, the second almost caused riots. Within hours of Gorgeous appearing on the news-stands, it had sold out. People, it seemed, simply couldn't get enough of her. Champagnes combination of stunning beauty and astounding vacuousness seemed to have struck some kind of chord with public and media alike. The Lost Chord, a despairing Jane supposed.
    Champagne, naturally, was well aware of her popularity. 'If there's no beginning to her talents,' Jane sighed to Valentine, 'there's certainly no end to her demands.' Only yesterday Champagne had called insisting Gorgeous hire a Learjet to fly her to a polo match, a request that followed hard on the Blahnik heels of a recent demand for a helicopter to take her to a shooting weekend.
    'Doesn't she ever use roads?' Jane had marvelled aloud.
    'Well, you always said she was an airhead,' Valentine reminded her. Josh then amazed them both by revealing he had promised Champagne a company car as a
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    compromise, which left Jane wondering who was compromised, exactly. Josh had then played his trump card by saying he'd thrown in a chauffeur too.
    'She's worth it,' Josh said shortly. 'Our circulation is on the up.' But it wasn't just her own magazine that Champagne dominated. International heavy-hitters from American Vogue to Russian Tatler were rushing to profile her. Her increasingly frequent appearances on TV translated straight into column inches in the tabloids. When she appeared on Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop, after asking Champagne how she kept her figure, had been rendered unprecedentedly speechless when Champagne had said she worked out 370 days a year. The press had gone wild.
    'What would you say to those who call you an egomaniac?' Bob Mortimer had asked her on Shooting Stan. 'Oh, they're completely wrong,' Champagne had replied. 'I absolutely loathe eggs.' This became Quote of the Week in every paper from the Daily Mail to the Motherwell Advertiser.
    Most notorious of all was Champagne's appearance on Newsnight when Jeremy Paxman asked her whether it was true she spent each and every night out partying. 'Absolutely not,' Champagne had replied, apparently deeply affronted. 'As a matter of fact, I spent last night finishing a jigsaw puzzle.'
    'A jigsaw puzzle?' Paxman had asked sardonically, raising one of his famously quizzical eyebrows.
    'Yah, and I'm bloody proud of myself,' Champagne had declared. 'It's only taken me ninety-four days.'
    'Ninety-four days? Surely that's rather a long time for a jigsaw,' Paxman bemusedly replied.
    'Well, it said three to four years on the box,' said Champagne triumphantly.
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    On the strength of this performance, negotiations to give Champagne her own chat show were well advanced.
    It was odd, Jane thought, that a public, not to mention a press, that had already endured years of Caprice, Tamara, Tara, Normandie and Beverley could possibly have the stomach for yet another pouting party girl, but stomach it most certainly had. Perhaps it was, Jane mused, because Champagne seemed somehow to combine all of them. She had Caprice's looks, Tara's class, Tamara's chutzpah, Beverley s shopping obsession, and probably now close to Normandie's