Lotus Eaters

'The gate clanged - I looked up. A woman was coming down the faded pink steps, humming in the white core of the sun. She set down each foot slowly, with a kind of pleasure, her skin melted white, like a candle, and her sunglasses burned. Her figure was a Forties siren's, crammed into a straining white cotton dress. She radiated a kind of joyful, don't-care sensuality: you wanted to know her - you wanted to be like her. She gave off a tantalising endurance, too, as if she might put up with things you couldn't imagine. I stood up. 'Patty Bell? I'm Lottie.' In Beverley Hills in 1998, British celebrity interviewer Lottie meets Patty Belle, a minor Hollywood actress, also English. In the scorching heat, as she drinks her Virgin Mary and her companion sips champagne, Lottie immediately recognises her magnetic appeal - wants to understand the levels of experience she senses in her, even wants to be her. But they are fated not to meet again until many months later back in London, when they become flatmates. Patty is in love with being in love. Strikingly beautiful, she both knows, and at some level is entirely unaware of, the impact she has on men. As she falls for one after another of Lottie's male friends, destroying relationships and marriages, her line is simply 'We just couldn't help ourselves'. Eventually Patty manages to destroy even her friendship with Lottie and indeed with everyone else she has ever been close to, except those most damaging to her. A Marilyn for London in the 1990's, she is lovable, frustrating, and slightly mad.