James Lovegrove - Provender Gleed

First published 2005, first published as an ebook 2011

ebook from Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX1 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-202-4

ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-203-1

Copyright James Lovegrove 2005

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from thenBritish Library.

Designed and typeset by Rebellion Publishing

PROVENDER GLEED

A Bildungsroman by James Lovegrove

PART I

From Kin! magazine - 'Your Weekly Guide to All That's Hot and All That's Not in the World of the Families':

Provender Turns 25

Provender Gleed hits the quarter century next Tuesday, and ClanFans all across the country will be holding street parties to celebrate.

But Prov himself has no plans for a bombastic birthday beano.

A Gleed Family spokesman commented: 'The young master will treat the day just like any other. He attaches little importance to anniversaries and other such events.'

Of course, with the Gleed summer ball this weekend, Provender will probably be all partied out by the time his personal silver jubilee comes round.

Blue-eyed Prov is very much the dark horse of the Gleed Family, a man of mystery who shuns the media spotlight, unlike the majority of his relatives.

Even at almost 25, he is still unmarried, which is a source of consternation among the Gleeds, with Provender being the firstborn (and only) male child on the Family's primogeniture bloodline.

Insider Gleed sources say that his mother Cynthia is tearing her hair out trying to match him with a suitable bride. But apart from last year's brief dalliance with Adle Fforde-Nevant and a trial date with Inez Lamas, a distant cousin on his mother's side, Provender has not been successfully linked with any potential marriage material, Family or otherwise.

His continuing single status, however, is a ray of hope for countless female ClanFans. Organisations such as One Bride For One Provender and Thicker Blood have dedicated themselves to sourcing the Gleed heir a mate from the ranks of ordinary folk.

Members of The Brides of Provender have gone a step further, taking a vow of chastity that will end only when one of them is wed and bedded by the man himself.

Then there's Beardless, the militant gay pressure group who insist that Provender should not be forced into marriage when it is obviously against his inclination.

And what does Provender make of all this?

As he hardly ever ventures outside the grounds of Dashlands and never gives interviews, it's a moot point. The official Gleed line is: 'No comment.'

Still: happy birthday for Tuesday, Provender!

Next week's Kin! will carry full pictures of the arrivals at the Gleed ball, plus analysis and commentary by Family experts.

From the Court and Social section of the Daily Dynast:

The Gleed Summer Ball will be held at Dashlands, Berkshire, on Saturday June 30th

The theme is Renaissance Venice and guests are expected to attire themselves appropriately.

Start time is 8.30 p.m. for 9.00 p.m. Carriages at dawn.

Entry will be refused without valid invitation.

Unauthorised guests will be shot.

Your invitation to the Gleed Summer Ball, had you one, would have arrived by courier six weeks in advance of the occasion. It would have come in a bonded-vellum envelope, eight inches by six, the flap sealed with a blob of crimson wax bearing the imprint of the Gleed Family seal, which depicts a nutmeg drupe, partially split open to reveal the kernel, and the legend 'In Condimentis Pecunia'. The invitation itself would be printed on card of extraordinary smoothness, with an icing-sugar-like finish which would seem to cry out to be stroked. Holding it close to your nose, you would detect a faint aroma which you would find delicious but hard to identify - sandalwood, cinnamon, ginger, something like that. The card would appear to have been impregnated with a scent redolent of the original source of the Gleed Family fortune, spices.

As for the text on it, this would have been printed in an elegant sans-serif font designed specially for the Gleeds some eighty years ago by none other than Eric Gill. Indeed, in printers' typeface catalogues the font is known by the name 'Gleed'. Its contrasting thick and thin verticals might suggest to you expansiveness coupled with caution, or perhaps, if you were of a more cynical bent, financial satiety gained through the impoverishment and starvation of others.

Be that as it may, you would not be paying much attention to the font, or even to the way the characters project from the card, thermographically raised, shinily black, like flecks of jet. Rather, you would be concentrating on the words themselves, and in particular that all-important opening line: 'You are cordially invited to...'

Now, with this invitation you would be entitled to approach the main gates of Dashlands, the Gleed Family seat, on the appropriate date at the appropriate time. You would doubtless be clutching the invitation tightly as your vehicle turned off the M4 and began to navigate the tortuous labyrinth of country lanes leading, eventually, to those gates. Holding the invitation in your hand would not in any way hamper your driving abilities because you would not, of course, yourself be driving. A chauffeur would be doing that for you. If you did not have a chauffeur, if you were in some sort of automobile that was not a limousine, then you would not be attending the party in the first place. You would have no right to.

At the gates you would encounter the first line of security. Your car would be flagged down by a group of intense-looking, large-torsoed men dressed in jumpsuits and body armour, with sidearms holstered at their waists. They would peer in at you, scrutinise your invitation, check its watermark with a UV light, compare your face against a register of guest names and photographs, frown at you in much the same way that a hungry fox might frown at a hen, and eventually, and with seeming reluctance, wave you through. Meanwhile a mob of paparazzi and TV cameramen would be jockeying behind barriers for a clear shot of your face through the open window of your limo. Flashbulbs would be flickering like lightning. If recognised by this jostling journalistic throng, you would hear your name being called, howled, ululated, in order to get you to turn a certain way. In the unlikely event that you were someone nobody recognised, you would still be photographed but you might be subjected to a few sneers and jeers as well from the press pack. You might even hear such remarks as 'Who are you?', said almost indignantly, and 'You're nobody. Even you don't know who you are.'

Kept further back from the gates than the newshounds, you would spy numerous ClanFans, popping away at your with their little cameras, their Instamatics, their Polaroids. You would not, if you had any sense or self-respect, pay these people any heed.

Past the gates - high gates, towering iron structures topped with gilded spikes, gates that would not disgrace the entrance to heaven - you would cruise along a drive lined with immense cedars. It being the height of summer, the trees would be at their lushest and most frondsome. They would resemble, you might say to yourself, great blue cumulonimbus clouds.

Then, a mile on, you would come to a second line of security, a manned barrier flanked by tank-traps - twists of steel girder wreathed in barbed wire. This second appraisal of your identity and your invitation would be to ensure that no one else had manifested inside your vehicle since you entered Dashlands - no one had emerged, perhaps, from a place of hiding under the seat or in the boot (this has happened in the past). It would also be to ensure that your limo had not, for some reason, left the drive and taken a detour across the grounds, an act which could only be construed as nefarious. In other words, you hadn't tried to smuggle in some gatecrasher and you didn't have some sinister ulterior motive for being on the Gleed estate.