Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

Chapter 10

THE ATTENTION SHE was getting was in many ways attractive and flattering. Zillah hadn’t expected all that publicity in the Mail on Sunday, and when she first saw the pictures and read the respectful story about herself and Jims, she’d been entranced. Other people had seen it too and rung up to congratulate her. Only one had asked why Eugenie and Jordan weren’t mentioned and this woman had supplied her own answer: “I suppose you want to protect them from media attention.”

That was exactly right, Zillah had said. She’d had a few days in which to relax and enjoy living in Abbey Gardens Mansions, appreciate the comforts of her new home, so vastly superior even to the Battersea flat, and to decide it was time to fetch the children. They’d been staying with her parents in Bournemouth since two days before the wedding, but she was beginning to miss them and she wanted them back. The publicity was past. She was realizing the truth of what she’d guessed all along, that Jims wasn’t famous, was a mere backbench MP and an opposition MP at that, and that all that had attracted the press were her and Jims’s good looks. And maybe the fact that everyone had thought he was gay and about to be “outed.”

The children could come back, go out for walks with her, be driven about by her in her nice new silver Mercedes, go to school in Westminster, and no one would take a blind bit of notice. So Zillah thought-until the first journalist phoned.

“I’m not disturbing your honeymoon, I hope?”

“We’re not having a honeymoon till Easter,” said Zillah, who wasn’t much looking forward to this sex-free excursion to an island in the Indian Ocean with nothing to do but drink and chat to Jims all day.

“Not even a tiny scrap of one?” the woman asked. She worked for a national daily. “I’m calling to beg for an interview. Our Thursday slot. I expect you know what I mean.”

Zillah forgot all about Jims’s instructions to refer all such requests to Malina Daz. She forgot her fear of journalists. They’d been so kind to her in the Mail. Why shouldn’t she do it? The children weren’t back yet. This would give her a chance to confirm everything that had already appeared in print and maybe get some more glamour shots. “Will you take photographs?”

She must have sounded apprehensive for the journalist misunderstood. “Well, yes, of course. A piece about someone as attractive as you wouldn’t be much without photos, would it?”

Zillah agreed to it. Two hours later the features editor of a glossy magazine was on the phone. They’d left her alone for a few days, but the time had come to have something appear that was more comprehensive than a few lines about her wedding. Zillah mentioned the other journalist.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Ours will be very different, I assure you. You’ll love it. You’re going to receive a great deal of attention, I can tell you, especially with the rumor going around that your husband was going to be outed.”

“There was never anything in that,” Zillah said nervously.

“You cured him, did you? Sorry, that wasn’t very PC of me. Maybe I should say, you brought about a change of heart. How’s that? We’ll say Friday at three, then, shall we? The photographer will come an hour earlier to get set up.”

By the time Zillah got around to telling Jims and, through him, Malina Daz, two more newspapers and another magazine had joined the queue. Malina belonged to the school of thought which holds that all publicity is good publicity. Jims was more cautious, urging Zillah to deny his reputed orientation as vehemently as possible. The night before the first journalist was due, the two of them invented a past girlfriend for Jims, her name, her appearance, her age, and Zillah’s jealousy of her. At the interview Zillah said this woman was now married and living in Hong Kong. For obvious reasons, her present identity couldn’t be disclosed. When she talked to the magazine she forgot the former girlfriend’s age and said she lived in Singapore, but Jims said it wouldn’t matter, as newspapers got everything wrong anyway.

The children were still in Bournemouth. Their grandparents had agreed, though rather grudgingly, to keep them a week longer. Mrs. Watling said on the phone she thought there was something ironical about Eugenie and Jordan staying in Bournemouth “indefinitely” when for the first time in their lives they had a decent home, while she and their grandfather had never seen them from one year’s end to the next when they’d lived in that dump in Dorset. Zillah said to bear with her a while longer-a phrase she’d picked up from Malina Daz-and she and Jims would be down to fetch the children the weekend after next.

The first interview appeared in print on Friday morning. The photographs came out wonderfully well and the feature itself was a chatty piece with nothing in it about Jims’s prospective “outing” and plenty about Zillah’s lovely looks and dress sense. In another Malina phrase, the whole subject had been “treated with sensitivity.” The invented girlfriend was mentioned with a few words about her “long relationship” with Jims. Altogether it was highly satisfactory. Two more articles were “in the pipeline,” said Malina, and several more interviews were to come.

Jims was happy with the piece but knew the ways of the media as Zillah didn’t. He could hardly have been in the Commons for seven years without knowing their ways. “Tabloids are often okay until they’ve got their knife into you,” he said to Zillah. “Magazines are fine, magazines are pussycats. It’s national dailies like the Guardian you want to worry about.”

“It might be useful for me to put in a presence,” said Malina, meaning she ought to be there, “when Zillah meets with the print media, especially the quality broadsheets.”

“Good idea,” Jims agreed.

Zillah didn’t like Malina. She hadn’t been told the truth about the marriage but had guessed. Sometimes Zillah thought she’d caught her smiling secretly to herself. She was in and out of the flat in Abbey Gardens Mansions, popping into bedrooms, Zillah suspected, opening drawers and poking her long, slender fingers into desk pigeonholes. Malina had a boyfriend who was a top cardiologist in Harley Street and she was thinner than Zillah, maybe two whole dress sizes thinner.

She didn’t want Malina present when she talked to the Times and the Telegraph. It was bad enough having the photographer there, taking pictures when she was off her guard and had her mouth open or held her head at an awkward angle. Malina’s secretive little smile and way of contemplating with admiration her own hands and silver-painted nails would be, in her own word, “inappropriate.” So Zillah said nothing to her about the forthcoming interview with a freelancer for the Telegraph Magazine. Jims would be absent too, in the Commons Chamber on that day for the local government bill.

She was waiting for the photographer to come, standing in the window looking across toward Dean’s Yard, when she saw a car draw up and park by the curb on a double yellow line. A newspaper photographer ought to know better. They’d tow him away or clamp him. She opened the window, preparing to call out to him not to leave the car there, but instead of getting out, the driver stayed where he was behind the wheel. Zillah couldn’t see very clearly, but in spite of the car being a BMW and a far cry from the ancient Ford Anglia he had driven away in after their last meeting, she was almost sure the man was Jerry.

She put her head out of the window and stared. He was studying something, probably a map or plan. It looked a lot like Jerry, but from this distance she couldn’t be sure. If this photographer and journalist hadn’t been coming she’d have gone down and made sure of his identity and, if it was Jerry, confronted him. If they weren’t coming she wouldn’t have been all dressed up in skintight purple trousers, shoes with three-inch heels, and a black and white bustier. She closed the window. It was too far away to see properly. The man in the car looked up. It was Jerry. Surely it was. And whose was the dark blue BMW? Not his, that was for sure. The doorbell rang.

The photographer had come from the Abbey direction, which was why she hadn’t seen him. He had an assistant with him, the usual teenager, or teenager lookalike, and the two of them started setting up, spreading ice white sheets all over the furniture and opening and shutting a silver-lined umbrella. Zillah went back to the window. A traffic warden was talking to the man in the BMW. She hoped he’d get out so that she could have a proper look at him. He didn’t, but drove off toward Millbank.

Zillah didn’t enjoy the interview. The journalist was once again a woman but serious-looking and austerely dressed in a black trouser suit. She introduced herself as Natalie Reckman. Her features were severely classical and her fair hair was scraped back and fastened by a barrette. She wore no jewelry but a thick, heavy, and curiously sculpted gold ring on her right hand. A businesslike notebook was taken out of her black leather briefcase, as was a recording device. Zillah, who had been feeling glamorously dressed, was suddenly conscious of the ornate Oriental necklace she was wearing, amethysts in tooled silver, the fashionable dozen or so bead bracelets, and the earrings dangling to her shoulders. And the questions put to her were more awkward than usual, more probing.

This woman was the first journalist to say nothing complimentary about her appearance. At first she seemed more interested in Jims than in his new wife. Zillah did her best to talk about him as an ardent young bride might about her new husband. How clever he was, how considerate of her, and what a wise move it was to marry one’s best friend. As to his political career, he was so dutiful that they’d postponed their honeymoon until Easter. They were going to the Maldives. Darling Jims would have preferred Morocco, he was longing to go there, but he’d deferred to her choice of the Maldives. They’d go to Morocco in the winter.

Natalie Reckman yawned. She sat up straight and the interview took a different turn. After trying to find out what Zillah had done for a living before she married and being reluctant to accept her vague description of herself as an “artist,” she asked with some incredulity if she was expected to believe the MP’s new bride had really lived by herself in a Dorset village for seven years without a job, a partner, or any friends. Zillah, who was becoming angry, said she could believe what she liked. Zillah was thinking quickly whether it was too late to mention the children, to bring them into the conversation somehow. But how to account for never before confessing to their existence?

The journalist smiled. She began asking about Jims. How long had they known each other? Twenty-two years? Yet they’d never been seen about together before their marriage nor, apparently, lived under the same roof.

“Not everyone agrees with premarital sex,” said Zillah.

The journalist looked Zillah up and down, from the earrings and the big hair to her stiletto heels. “You’re one of those who don’t?”

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay. That’s fine. I expect you’ve heard your husband used to be grouped with several MPs that a rather censorious person who shall be nameless threatened to “out.” What do you feel about that?”

Zillah was beginning to regret the absence of Malina. “That’s something else I’d prefer not to talk about.”

“Surely you’d like to say there was no truth in the rumor?”

“If you print anything about my husband being gay,” said Zillah, her control going, “I’ll sue you for libel.”

“Now, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith, or Zillah, if I may, that’s a very interesting thing you’ve just said. It seems to show you think it’s an insult to suggest someone is gay. Do you? Is it likely to bring the subject into hatred, ridicule, or contempt? Do you believe being gay is inferior? Or wrong? Is there a moral difference between being straight and being gay?”

“I don’t know,” Zillah shouted. “I don’t want to say any more to you.”

Jims and Malina would have known that by now the interviewer had a wonderful story that she could hardly wait to get down on paper-or a floppy disk. Zillah only wanted her to go and leave her alone. And eventually she did go, not in the least put out by Zillah’s anger and refusal to say another word to her. Zillah felt shaken. It had all been so very different from the previous two interviews. She now regretted concealing the children’s existence. Could she possibly leave them with her parents a little longer? They liked being there, they seemed to prefer it to being at home with their mother, but her parents weren’t, in her mother’s phrase, as young as they used to be, and were growing weary, worn out by Jordan’s night crying. And why had that awful woman asked so many questions about what she’d been doing before her marriage? Zillah acknowledged that she hadn’t adequately prepared herself.

One consolation was that the Telegraph Magazine wasn’t like newspapers, the article wouldn’t appear for weeks and weeks. Perhaps not even until she and Jims were in the Maldives. And perhaps it wasn’t too late to stop it-if she dared ask Malina to intervene on her behalf. That would take some thinking about. She didn’t say a word to Jims about it when he came home. That wasn’t until 1 A.M., anyway. He’d been in the Commons chamber, but after the seven o’clock vote he’d slipped out and walked a hundred yards along Millbank where he’d taken a cab to visit his new friend in Chelsea.

Zillah was beginning to see that getting oneself into the newspaper might not be all fun and glamour. These journalists were cleverer than she’d expected. Jims could be left out of it for now, but she had to talk to someone. She phoned Malina and the PR woman came round. “I thought maybe you could call the Telegraph Magazine and say I didn’t mean that about libel and I’m sorry I shouted at her.”

Malina was appalled but didn’t show it. “That would be inappropriate, don’t you think? I would have put in a presence if I’d only been notified. But you did give the interview of your own free will, Zillah. No one brought any pressure to bear.”

“I was hoping you could stop it altogether. Suggest I gave her another interview. I’d be more careful next time.”

“No next time would be the preferred option, Zillah.” Malina seemed to have changed her mind about all publicity being good. “But I suppose it’s too late for that.”

“You could call the other papers and just say I don’t want to.”

“They’ll want a reason.”

“Say I’m ill. Say I’ve got-gastroenteritis.”

“They’ll think you’re pregnant. You’re not, are you?”

“Of course I’m not,” Zillah snapped.

“Shame. That would be the answer to all our prayers.”

But Malina canceled three of the projected interviews and would have canceled the fourth, scheduled for the next day, but the journalist she was trying to reach wasn’t answering his mobile, ignored her e-mail and fax, and responded to none of the messages she left. In spite of not liking her, Zillah had such confidence in Malina that she didn’t bother to dress up when the visit from the next broadsheet was due. Malina would have canceled it. When the doorbell rang she thought, Suppose it’s Jerry? She ran to answer it without, for once, bothering to look in the mirror first.

Charles Challis was the sort of man Zillah would in other circumstances have described as “dishy.” But the circumstances were all wrong because she hadn’t been expecting anyone, particularly a man, and she looked a mess. “You weren’t supposed to come,” she said. “We canceled you.”

“Not to my knowledge. Is the photographer here yet?”

Then Zillah did look in the mirror, at her unmade-up face, unwashed hair, and sweater that was a souvenir of six years in Long Fredington and had originally come from the British Home Stores. Numbly she led Charles Challis into the living room. He asked her nothing about Jims’s reputed gayness nor what she did for a living and made no comment on her appearance. He was nice. Zillah decided it wasn’t journalists she disliked but women journalists. She asked the photographer if it would be all right for her to put on some makeup. When she came back Charles, as he’d asked her to call him, edged his questioning on to politics.

This was a subject of which Zillah admitted to herself she knew little. She knew who the prime minister was and she said she thought him “dishy,” but she couldn’t remember the name of the leader of the Opposition. The journalist put to her the burning question of the hour. What was her opinion on Section 28?

She looked blank. Charles explained. Section 28 forbade local authorities to promote homosexuality; the provision proposed in the local government bill was to repeal it. Their contention was that, due to the section, children uncertain of their orientation were confused and made the victims of bullying. What did Zillah think about it?

Zillah didn’t want to get into any more trouble. Recalling what the Reckman woman had implied about homosexuals and heterosexuals being equal with no moral difference between them, she said hotly that Section 28 was obviously wrong. It should be got rid of and quickly. Charles wrote it all down and tested his recorder to check that Zillah’s voice was coming across clearly. How about trial by jury? Was Zillah in favor of shortening court proceedings and thereby saving the taxpayer’s money? The night before, Jims had been complaining at length about the income tax he paid, so Zillah said she was all for economy and people on juries weren’t lawyers, were they, so what did they know?

She felt quite pleased with herself. The photographs wouldn’t be too bad. She often thought the casual look suited her better than formality. Malina phoned after they’d gone and said she’d managed to cancel everything but Charles Challis. How had the interview gone?

“It was marvelous. He was so nice.”

“Good. Well done, you.” Malina didn’t say that the journalist in question was known in the Groucho Club as Poisoned Chalice.

Zillah put the phone down and looked out of the window. Jerry was standing at the entrance to the underground car park. She rushed out of the flat and down in the lift but when she came out into Great College Street he’d gone. He must have put his car into the car park. She ran down the slope and into the depths. There was no sign of him and no dark blue BMW. Perhaps he’d been on foot because of the difficulties of parking. He could have got on a bus or walked to the tube while she was leaving the flat. What did he want? He could be thinking of blackmailing her. Five hundred a month or I tell all. But as far as she knew Jerry had never descended to blackmail in the past and wouldn’t begin with her. She went back across the road and, because she’d forgotten her key, had to get the porters to let her in.

The interviews over or canceled, it was time to fetch the children. Jims and Zillah drove down to Bournemouth on Saturday. It was a pleasant drive, for once the roads not congested and it wasn’t raining. They stopped for lunch at a smart new restaurant in Casterbridge, down by the river and the millrace, because Jims didn’t want to stay long enough to sample her mother’s cooking. Neither Eugenie nor Jordan seemed pleased to see them.

“Want to stay with Nanna,” said Jordan.

His sister patted him on the head. “We like the seaside. Children need fresh air, you know, not traffic plumes.” She meant “fumes” but no one corrected her.

“I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay a bit longer,” said Jims hopefully.

“I’m afraid there is, James.” Nora Watling was never afraid to speak her mind. “I’m tired. I need some peace. I’ve raised one family and I’m not in the business of raising another at my age.”

“No one wants us,” said Eugenie cheerfully. “It’s not very nice to be an unwanted child, is it, Jordan?”

Jordan didn’t understand but burst into howls just the same. When Jims looked at his watch at three-thirty and said they might as well be going, Nora was deeply offended. The children had had their lunch but she insisted on stuffing them with crisps, ice cream, and Black Forest cake before they left. On the way back to London, Jordan was sick all over Jims’s gray leather upholstery.

But once they were home, Eugenie had started at her new school, and a place in a fashionable “progressive” nursery been found for Jordan, peace reigned. It was possible to leave Abbey Gardens Mansions very discreetly by taking the lift down to the basement car park and driving out by the exit into a turning off Great Peter Street. A journalist would have had to be very vigilant and an early riser to spot Zillah taking the children to school at nine in the morning, the silver Mercedes slipping out by the back way. But there were no journalists. The media seemed to have lost interest. A couple of weeks went by and the newspapers ignored young Mr. and Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. Zillah had expected to be pleased about that if it happened, but now she began wondering what had become of the piece that nice Charles Challis was writing. She and Jims were going on their honeymoon on Easter Saturday. It would be just her luck to be away when it appeared.

“What do you mean, just your luck?” Jims had been unreasonably irritable lately. “I’d say you’ve been pretty lucky up till now.”

“It was just a figure of speech,” said Zillah pacifically.

“A highly inappropriate one, if I may say so. Have you arranged with Mrs. Peacock yet?”

“I’ll do it now.”

But Mrs. Peacock wasn’t able to stay at Abbey Gardens Mansions for the ten days Jims and Zillah would be in the Maldives, or indeed for any part of that time. Zillah, she said, had left it too late. Only the day before she’d fixed up to go on a coach tour of Bruges, Utrecht, and Amsterdam.

“I hope she freezes to death,” said Zillah. “I hope she poisons herself on tulip bulbs.”

“Tulip bulbs aren’t poisonous,” said Jims coldly. “Squirrels prefer them to nuts. Have you never noticed?”

She had to ask her mother. Nora Watling exploded. The children had been in London less than three weeks and now she was expected to have them back again. Hadn’t Zillah understood what she’d said about not wanting to raise a second family?

“You and Daddy could come here. The children are at school all day. You could do some sightseeing, go on the Millennium Wheel.”

“We haven’t been on the wheel,” said Eugenie. “We haven’t even been to the Dome.”

“Nanna will take you,” said Zillah, covering up the mouthpiece. “Nanna will take you anywhere you want to go.”

Of course Nora Watling agreed to come. She could hardly do otherwise. Having remarked scathingly that some people would put their children in a kennel or a cattery if they had the chance, she said she and Zillah’s father would arrive on Good Friday.

“I wish you wouldn’t teach them to call their grandmother Nanna,” said Jims. “It’s highly inappropriate for the stepchild of a Conservative MP.”

“Not a stepchild, not a stepchild,” screamed Jordan. “Want to be a real child.”

On Monday morning, a week later than expected, the Challis interview with Zillah appeared. Or something appeared. There was no photograph and the piece devoted to Zillah was about two inches long. It was part of a two-page feature on MPs’ wives, their views and occupations, and it was written in a breezy, satirical style. She was made to look a combination of feather-headed butterfly and ignoramus.

Zillah, new bride of James Melcombe-Smith, shares her husband’s interest in politics if not his persuasion. Not for her the retention of Section 28 or that ancient bastion of the law, trial by jury. Sweep them away, is her policy. Where have we heard that before? Why, from none other than the Labour Party. “People on juries aren’t lawyers,” she told me, tossing back a lock of raven hair. (Mrs. Melcombe-Smith looks a lot like Catherine Zeta-Jones.) “My husband would like to see an end to this waste of the taxpayers’ money.” He, of course, is the Conservative member for South Wessex, known to his constituents and other pals as “Jims.” They will be fascinated by his wife’s views.

Jims was less angry about this than might have been expected. He muttered a bit and predicted he’d shortly be due for an unpleasant interview with the chief whip. But these were not the sort of slips and revelations he feared, and he doubted whether more than a handful of the landowners and (in his own phrase) peasants read “that rag.” Zillah said she was sorry but she didn’t know anything about politics. Was there a book she could read?

Later that day she saw Jerry again. She was in the car, fetching the children from school, and had just turned out of Millbank when she spotted him outside the Atrium. Her first thought was for the children and the trouble that would ensue if they saw him. But both were looking in the other direction, admiring two orange-colored dogs with curly tails like pigs.

“Can I have a dog, Mummy?” asked Eugenie.

“Only if you look after it yourself.” Zillah’s mother had said the same thing to her when she asked that same question twenty-two years before. She had got the dog and looked after it for three days. Remembering, she went on, “No, of course you can’t have a dog. A dog in a flat?”

“We used to live in a house. It was nice and we had friends. We had Rosalba and Titus and Fabia.”

“Want Titus,” said Jordan, but instead of screaming he began quietly to sob.

As Zillah waited in the middle of the street to turn right into the car park under Abbey Gardens Mansions, she saw Jerry running along the pavement toward her. Without looking to her left she began to turn, causing the van coming from the left to brake violently and the driver, already galvanic with road rage, put his head out of the window and let forth a stream of obscene abuse. Zillah went on down the ramp into the car park.

“Mummy, did you hear the word that man said? Nanna said that if I used that word I’d come to a bad end. Will the man come to a bad end?”

“I hope so,” Zillah said viciously. “Stop crying, Jordan. Do you think you two could manage to call Nanna Granny?”

Eugenie shook her head slowly from side to side. “That would make her into another person, wouldn’t it?”

Zillah didn’t answer. She was confirmed in her belief that her daughter would be called to the Bar at an early age.

There was no more sign of Jerry. Jims again came home very late. In the morning he told her his new friend Leonardo Norton would also be in the Maldives while they were there, staying, in fact, in the same hotel.