Take Two

CHAPTER 30

Carolyn was surprised at how much she had enjoyed the charity event. Seb’s table was a good mix — there was a young American actor who had a major role in Quentin Tarantino’s new movie and his very pretty girlfriend, a girl singer who had recently appeared on some TV reality show or another who had come with her father, a middle-aged guy who was chief executive of some computer supply company and his trophy wife, a TV chef and his wife, and two representatives of the charity that was benefiting from the evening.

The actor was hilarious and regaled them with tales of working on the American soap The Young And the Restless, and it turned out the father of the girl singer had once walked to the South Pole, pulling a sled. There was a half-hour performance of highlights of Les Miserables that was stunning. The food was surprisingly good and the organisers had laid on some very good wines, so by the time the auction came around Carolyn was feeling very relaxed. There were ten dates up for auction, including a Member of Parliament, a Radio One DJ, a former topless model who had married a well-known footballer, and a tennis player who had promised a lesson instead of lunch.

The tennis player fetched eight thousand pounds with the winning bid coming from an overweight woman in her forties who, from the look in her eyes, was hoping for more than coaching. The lowest was the MP, with just a thousand pounds offered, and that bid had come from the MP’s own table.

Eventually the comedian who was handling the auction pointed over at Carolyn’s table and a spotlight swung around to illuminate them. ‘And the big prize of the night, lunch with two of the biggest stars on television, Carolyn Castle and Sebastian Lawton. Let’s have a big hand for them, shall we?’

The audience burst into applause. Carolyn and Seb stood up and waved.

‘Let’s get them up on the stage, shall we, folks? Let the dogs see the rabbits!’

Carolyn and Seb threaded their way through the tables and joined the comedian on the stage. The lunch with Seb was auctioned first, and won by a silver-haired woman in a too-tight Versace suit who blew Seb a stream of kisses as the bidding went higher and higher. Her winning bid was just over twelve thousand pounds.

Seb went back to his table as the comedian started the bidding for lunch with Carolyn. The opening was a thousand pounds, from a bald-headed man in a shiny suit. It went up quickly in multiples of a hundred pounds, then five hundred pounds, and within a minute they had passed Seb’s figure. The audience went crazy when the bidding went past fifteen thousand pounds.

There seemed to be three main bidders. To Carolyn’s right was a forty-something woman with flame-red hair and a thick gold chain around her neck, to her left was a chubby square-jawed man with a sovereign ring who kept dabbing at his perspiring forehead with a napkin, and at the back was a dark-haired man in a black suit.

The bidding kept going up with all three waving their hands in the air. The woman dropped out when the price reached twenty thousand pounds and the comedian announced bids would then be accepted only in multiples of a thousand. Bidding was soon up to twenty-five thousand pounds. There were lights shining in Carolyn’s face and she shielded her eyes as she tried to get a better look at the second bidder from the back of the room.