Beautiful People by Wendy Holden

Orlando had started at prep school and his education had started to dominate the budget.
        To what end, Richard was not sure. His only son had never been academic, a fact that had emerged early. Personally, Richard had been all for Orlando going to the local state primary, which had a good reputation. But Georgie had had other ideas. "Contacts!" she would insist. "He has to make contacts. Good contacts will get him through life."
        Of course, Richard mused, household expenses could easily go up again if Orlando went to university, as his mother was determined he should. Personally, Richard rather hoped that he wouldn't. Better the boy should leave and do something useful with his life, although goodness knew what. Not politics, obviously; too many family resources had been sacrificed to that already.
        "Oh, by the way," Georgie added, as she clacked off across the kitchen tiles in her high heels, "I've asked the Faughs for dinner next week."
        "Oh, my God," was her husband's response. He looked as if he were about to be sick.
        "Richard!" Georgie's eyes bore into him. "Hugh's one of your closest friends!"
        "That's stretching it," Richard muttered, sensing again that resistance was useless.
        Hugh Faugh. Why on earth did Georgie persist in believing he was a close friend? They had never been close friends, even though their lives had, at one stage, run quite closely together. They had entered Parliament the same year, young Conservative MPs still wet behind the ears, or as wet as Hugh's ears ever got considering, or so Richard always suspected, he blow-dried his thick, black, shiny hair to give it that characteristic full, upward-sweeping look.
        "Hair gets votes," Hugh had once told him in that booming, confident, maddening way in which he said everything. He had swept an unimpressed look over Richard's even-then-thinning, greying scalp and his pale, dry, nondescript face with its monkish features, and raised one of the virile, black eyebrows marking his own highly coloured, handsome, if rather heavy, face.
        Had his underperforming follicles, Richard occasionally wondered since, stood in the way of Parliamentary favour? Would a more thickly populated pate have ensured election to the great offices of state?
        But he knew in his heart that it wasn't killer hair he lacked. It was killer instinct. Certainly, soon after entering Parliament, his and Hugh's careers had dramatically diverged. Hugh, the more forceful and swashbuckling of the pair, had immediately disappeared into a cloud of glory with never a backward glance, gaining promotion after promotion, while Richard Fitzmaurice, bar the odd Commons committee, had never really moved off the backbenches. He had contented himself with being a well-thought-of constituency MP, which was, as he reminded himself many times through the years, what he had, after all, been elected for. That this wasn't well thought of by Georgie was just one of those things.
        Great friends with Hugh, Richard thought with uncharacteristic sourness. Oh, absolutely. Great friends to the extent that Hugh, recently promoted to the Shadow Cabinet, had taken to stalking past him in Westminster corridors without even acknowledging him. But Georgie had been beside herself in delight to find that her husband's former university friend was now so elevated, and this, Richard suspected, was one of the reasons she had invited him for dinner.
        Of course, Hugh would have accepted with alacrity. Not the least cause of Richard's disquiet was the fact that Hugh, or "Freebie Faugh," as he was known in the corridors of power, was notorious for his interest in all things complimentary. He was famous, in particular, for the zest with which he proved there absolutely was such a thing as a free lunch—and a free dinner as well.
        Thank God, the summer recess was coming soon, Richard thought. Time for a change of scene. Time for