Just when you thought the Cotswolds must have peaked as a fictional setting, a new rom-com from the author of Bergdorf Blondes floats like cherry blossom onto a chalk stream. Plum Sykes has chosen a rich (as in minted) target, and she is well-equipped to take aim. As a former contributing editor of American Vogue, she might be considered part of the trans-atlantic glossy posse, but at heart she’s still an Oxford-educated Sykes – with a certain diplomatic heritage. The family seat is the magnificent Sledmere in Yorkshire, which has its own blue-tiled Turkish Room. So Plum is not your common-or-garden mag hag. But she now lives in the ’wolds, and when it comes to the lifestyles of the UHNWs (ultra-high-net-worths) of Poshtershire, she knows. And she certainly can write.
The setting of Wives Like Us is ‘the country’ (which is how people like Sykes refer to anywhere outside London), and although sex and horses feature, we are far from Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire. This is an unabashedly high-end, high-spend scenario in which helicopters are Ubers, Daylesford is a corner shop and Estelle Manor a canteen. There is ruthless competition over houses, horses, staff, outfits, children and more, until the reader longs for someone to admit how joyless the extravagant lifestyle of country princesses is – but nobody does. That’s because it’s all for Instagram. It’s life as a social media spectacular, all stiffies for ‘kitchen sups’ and tablescapes at dawn. Every night there’s a £500-a-head ‘impromptu’ birthday dinner. By day there’s a Ladies’ Hack, with wives riding out in designer equestrian onesies to a pitstop at a Marie Antoinette-style hameau where uniformed staff serve sloe gin cocktails and drones film it overhead.
Sykes is smart, and conveys the important truth about this entertainment Olympics, which is the main plot-driver: that keeping up with the neighbours, let alone in somewhere as poncy and show-pony as the Cotswolds, is tiring. Fun is more work than work (and, as I always add, work is more fun than fun). The effort and expense involved in just organising a children’s picnic makes me want to lie down in a dark room and never go out again – let alone to Sykes’s invented Cotswold village, The Bottoms.
I can tell you some more about what happens. It’s a bit Pride and Prejudice: a dark, brooding widower called Vere Osborne may be in want of a wife. Centre stage is an estranged couple – Tata (not as in steel) and Bryan – who are nouveaux riches arrivistes. There’s a American divorcée; a ghastly Tory MP and his wife; an oligarch, and local toffs. But I’d hesitate to say all human life is here. At the heart of the book is Tata’s impeccable ‘executive butler’ Ian, a maestro orchestrating everything in a Charvet tie. Which brings us to the outfits. Some novels make one’s mouth water because descriptions of food saturate their pages like butter-soaked muslin. Here it’s clothes. Designer clothes. Every garment and label is a signifier, and you begin to realise just how much the too rich and too thin communicate daily via what they wear.
The book needs a proper villain to spice up the action; but it’s cleverly structured, very well-written and has a delicious, knowing ending. I’d hazard a guess that its intended audience is not, say, my husband, who hasn’t read a novel (let alone one written by a woman) since university – but who cares?
Some might long to send Sykes’s clotheshorses straight to the glue factory – but I gobbled the sugar lumps and am leading them to the winners’ enclosure.
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