Teaser #2: The dining room must have taken up a large part of the superstructure of the ship. If there were tables and chairs they’d been magicked away, leaving an open space in which to mingle. She had no head for measurements but thought it would have taken her fifty paces to reach the furthest side and almost the same to cross from one lateral side to the other. These sides were not sides at all, but were made of sheer glass, a massive curving panorama that seemed to have no struts, no supports, no pillars to strengthen or provide anchoring – it was like a wrap-around windscreen, giving views over Cannes, over the sunset-hued harbour, over the deepening-blue Mediterranean itself. Behind her as she walked into the room she saw a wide and fully-equipped bar occupying the fourth wall, shelves gleaming with full bottles of liqueurs, spirits, aguas, and rows of obscure drinks mentioned only, she supposed, in mediaeval treatises and now lovingly manufactured by monks in inaccessible mountain fastnesses. Two stewards in evening gear of black tee-shirts and white pants served these concoctions on request, while elsewhere female stewardesses in the same get-up glided professionally through the crowd, tray-handed. The crowd. Its chief feature was skin tanned the colour of her mother’s oak floorboards, its age ranging, she guessed, from a model-young 17 to a wizened-financier-old 75. The noise it created was multi-lingual and a mixture of baritone and tenor, rising to screeching soprano from time to time. She saw a film director she recognized and a crazily-tall Brazilian supermodel. [... ] In the middle of the room there was an American actor she knew from a popular TV crime series, who looked like he intended to get seriously drunk, and in the furthest corner the imposing bulk of Stevie Day, panel-show host and arch Twitterer with over four million followers for his bon mots, aperçus and other words of humorous wisdom. There were faces she knew but none whom she’d met, faces she’d met but didn’t know who they were ... and the remainder was, she supposed, part of the global cartel of international hangers-on: Russian nouveau riche oil barons, French newspaper proprietors, German industrialists, Arabian princes in European mufti, ingenue models slash wannabes, the occasional wheedling politician and, perhaps, a media owner of some stripe.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:13:50 +0000
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