Rivals

5

James Vereker drove home in his Porsche, warmly aware that ‘my programme’, as he always referred to it, had gone well. James Vereker’s outstanding qualities, apart from his dazzling good looks, were his total egotism and chronic insecurity. In order not to miss himself on television, he had even been known to take a portable television into a restaurant. A huge local celebrity, much of whose time was spent opening fêtes and PAs’ legs, he disliked going to London, or even worse abroad, because no one recognized him. When he’d worked in radio, he used to dread some crisis blowing up in Southern Europe or the Middle East in case he couldn’t pronounce it.

Aware that he was dismissed as a popinjay by the editors, journalists and researchers who got ‘Cotswold Round-Up’ on air, and who were jealous of his inflated salary and his celebrity status, he was given to little tantrums, yet couldn’t resist seeking constant reassurance. Cameron Cook had even suggested the parrot used in Corinium’s Christmas production of Treasure Island should be given a permanent squawk-on part, telling James he was wonderful after every programme. He kept his job because he was quite good at it and because he always won the fight for viewers from the BBC.

Back at James’s house, Birgitta, the children’s curvaceous nanny, had just lovingly finished ironing both James’s white and turquoise evening shirts, and was scenting herself and putting on make-up for James’s return.

I wish Birgitta would spend slightly more time putting the children to bed, thought James’s wife, Lizzie, as they swarmed into her study demanding attention. Lizzie had had two novels published and well reviewed. A third was on the way, but it was causing a great deal of morning sickness.

She and James had been married eight years, and Lizzie had supported James on her publishing salary in the early days when he was trying to break into television. Once very pretty (she had the bright eyes and long questing nose of a vole, and the shaggy light brown hair of a clematis montana clambering over an old apple tree in winter), she had recently put on too much weight.

The Verekers lived in a large messy house with a large messy garden two miles down the valley from Rupert Campbell-Black, where the Frogsmore stream hurtled into a large reed-fringed lake. They had bought Lake House, as it was called, five years ago, just after James had got the job at Corinium, when it had seemed ridiculously cheap. Viewing it in high summer, they had only seen its romantic aspect, not realizing that for at least five months of the year it was so low in the valley that it never saw the sun and would be quite inaccessible when the snows came in winter.

This mattered little to James because he spent so much time at Corinium. When the house got snowed up, he simply didn’t come home for several days. But it was not good for Lizzie, who wrote there all day, eating too many biscuits to keep out the cold, or for the children who caught one cold after another, or for the nannies who found it dank and depressing, except when James was at home.

For Lizzie life turned on the children not getting ill, and nannies not leaving so that she had time to write. Unfortunately James couldn’t resist pulling the prettier nannies, who invariably walked out, when he moved on to someone else. Lizzie always found out the score by reading the nannies’ diaries when they were shopping in Cotchester or nearby Stroud. Birgitta, the current nanny, wrote her diary in Swedish, which Lizzie couldn’t understand. But with the aid of a Swedish dictionary she was beginning to crack the code, and the word ‘James’ appeared rather too often. In fact you only had to see the way Birgitta perked up when James came through the door. Lizzie was used to his infidelity. She realized he needed little adventures to boost his ego, but they still upset her. She would have liked an admirer herself, but felt she was too fat to attract anyone.

Lizzie nearly had a fit when she heard James banging the front door. She’d stopped writing far too late, wrestling to get at least a draft of the first chapter down on paper. Still struggling mentally with her plot, she’d spent too long washing her hair and in the bath. Then she discovered that the long low-cut black silk ball dress which she’d decided to wear was far too tight. Not even shoe horns or the disdainful tugging of Birgitta could get her into it, so she had to wear another dress, dark red velvet to match her distraught face, and calf-length so it wouldn’t conceal her ankles which had swelled up in the bath.

Finally, because she couldn’t see out, she’d cut her fringe with the kitchen scissors, not realizing that Birgitta had just used them to cut rind off the children’s bacon, so now her fringe stuck together and reeked of bacon. She was about to wash it again when James arrived. He hadn’t been home so early in months; usually he hung around the Corinium bar mopping up adulation.

‘Have a bath, darling,’ shouted Lizzie, desperately trying to tone down her face with green foundation.

‘I had a shower at the studios,’ said James, ‘so I’ve only got to change. We ought to leave in five minutes. How did you think my programme went?’

‘Wonderful,’ lied Lizzie, who hadn’t watched it, starting to panic. As it was dark outside, she couldn’t even make up in the car.

‘I’ll read you an extra story tomorrow, darlings,’ she told the children as they clung whining to her on the landing. ‘Or perhaps, Birgitta,’ she raised her voice hopefully, ‘will read you one before you go to bed.’

But Birgitta was watching James, who had decided on the white shirt after all, putting a pink carnation in his buttonhole. Poor Mr Vereker, she thought, looking so handsome in his dinner jacket, going out with such a frump. How much better would she, Birgitta, be in Lizzie’s place. James, however, hardly noticed his wife’s appearance. His was the one that mattered.

‘You look absolutely lovely, James,’ said Lizzie dutifully.

Low sepia clouds obscured the moon. As the headlamps lit up grey stone walls, acid green tree trunks and long blonde grasses, Lizzie tried abortively to apply eye liner as James described every little triumph of the planning meeting and his programme afterwards.

‘Anyone interesting in our party tonight?’ asked Lizzie as he paused for breath.

‘Rupert Campbell-Black, Beattie Johnson his mistress, Freddie Jones.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Don’t you ever read the papers?’ said James, appalled. ‘Mr Electronics.’

Oh God, sighed Lizzie to herself. I daren’t ask what electronics are, and I bet I’m sitting next to him at dinner.

‘And Paul Stratton and his new wife.’

‘Oooh,’ squeaked Lizzie. ‘That’s exciting.’

Three years ago, just after the Conservatives won the last election, Paul Stratton, the Tory MP for Cotchester and the very upright Minister for Home Affairs, with a special brief to investigate sex education in schools, had rocked his constituency and the entire nation by walking out on Winifred, his solid dependable boot of a wife, and running off with his secretary half his age.

Not that his constituents were prudish (having Rupert Campbell-Black in the next door constituency, they were used to the erotic junketing of MPs), but as Paul Stratton had not only used his political career to feather his nest financially, but also set himself up as a pillar of respectability and uxoriousness, constantly inveighing against pornography, homosexuality, easier divorce and the general laxity of the nation’s morals, they had found it hard to stomach his hypocrisy.

‘Evidently, they’ve bought a place in Chalford,’ said James, ‘and Paul and Sarah, I think she’s called, are planning to spend weekends down here, re-establishing themselves with the local community.’

‘I suppose Tony inviting them this evening heralds the official return of the prodigal son,’ said Lizzie. ‘I wonder if she’s as beautiful as her photographs. I bet Rupert makes a pass at her. He’s always enjoyed bugging Paul.’

‘Don’t be fatuous, they’re only just back from their honeymoon,’ snapped James, steering round a sharp bend and bringing the conversation neatly back to himself.

‘I’ve got a gut feeling tonight is going to mark a turning-point in my career,’ he said importantly. ‘Tony’s been exceptionally nice to me recently. And when I popped into Madden’s office later this evening to find out exactly who was in the party, there was a confidential memo on Tony’s desk about the Autumn schedules, which I managed to read upside-down. It appears Corinium are committed to a series of prime time interviews for the Network. I didn’t dare read any more, in case Madden got suspicious, but I suspect Tony’s got me in mind, and that’s why he’s asked us this evening.’

Tony Baddingham soaked in a boiling Floris-scented bath, admiring his flat stomach. For once the cordless telephone was mute, giving him the chance to savour the prospect of the evening ahead. One of the joys of becoming hugely successful was that it gave you the opportunity to patronize those who, in the past, had patronized you. Paul Stratton, for example. It was going to be so amusing tonight extending the hand of friendship to Paul and his bimbo wife. How grateful and subservient they’d be.

Then there was Rupert. Tony was not given to fantasy, but more than anything else in the world he longed to be in a position when an abject, penitent, penniless Rupert, who’d somehow lost all his looks, was seeking Tony’s favour and friendship. The only reason Tony really wanted Rupert on his Board was in order to dazzle him with his brilliant business acumen.

In wilder fantasy, Tony dreamt of flaunting an undeniably sexy mistress, who would be impervious to Rupert’s charms.

‘Can’t you bloody understand,’ he imagined Cameron screaming at Rupert, ‘that Tony’s the only man there’ll ever be in my life?’

Tony added more boiling water to his bath to steel himself against the arctic climate of the rest of the house. There was a running battle between Tony who liked the heat, and whose office, according to Charles Fairburn, provided an excellent dress rehearsal, both physically and mentally, for hell fires, and Monica, his wife, who regarded central heating as a wanton extravagance which ate into one’s capital.

‘I still feel dreadfully guilty not telling Winifred about Paul and Sarah coming tonight,’ said Monica, when later, fully dressed, Tony went into his wife’s bedroom and found her sitting at her dressing table vigorously brushing her short fair hair. She was wearing the same emerald-green taffeta she’d worn for the last four hunt balls, which went beautifully with Tony’s diamonds, but did nothing to play down the red veins that mapped her cheeks, as a result of gardening and striding large labradors across the Gloucestershire valleys in all weathers. Yet, in a way, her rather masculine beauty, splendid on the prow of a ship or as a model for a Victorian bust of Duty, needed no enhancement.

Monica had once been head girl of her boarding school and had remained so all her life. Winifred Stratton, Paul’s ex-wife, had been her senior prefect. Together they had run the school firmly and wisely, diverting the headmistress’s attention away from a plume of cigarette smoke rising from the shrubbery, but gently reproaching the errant smoker afterwards. All the lower fourths had had crushes on Monica. Sometimes, even today, unheard by Tony who slept in a separate room, she cried, ‘Don’t talk in the passage,’ in her sleep.

Known locally as Monica of the Glen because of her noble appearance and total lack of humour, she was the only woman to whom Tony was always polite, and also a little afraid. In the icy, high-ceilinged bedroom, opera and gardening books crowded the tables on either side of the ancient crimson-curtained four-poster which Tony visited perhaps once a week. But even after eighteen years of marriage, these visits gave him an incredible sexual frisson.

On the chest of drawers, which contained no new clothes, were silver-framed photographs of their three children. With her sense of fairness, Monica would never let the other two know that she loved her elder son Archie, sixteen last week, the best. Nor that she loved her two yellow labradors, and her great passions, opera and gardening, often a great deal more than her husband.

Running Tony’s life with effortful efficiency, she never had enough time for these two passions, but if she was disappointed by the hand life had dealt her, she never showed it. She was not looking forward to this evening, which would involve talking until three o’clock in the morning to all those people Tony considered so important, but she would treat them with the same impersonal kindness whether they were Lords-Lieutenant or electronics millionaires. Always anxious to help humanity collectively (she did a huge amount for charity), Monica was not interested in people individually, or what made them tick or leap into bed with one another, but she was worried about Winifred. Even after she’d married Tony, and Winifred had married the much more brilliant, handsome and ambitious Paul Stratton, they had remained friends and gone to the opera and old school reunions together.

When Paul had run off with his secretary, in a scandal that rocked Gloucestershire almost as much as Helen Campbell-Black walking out on Rupert, Winifred had been utterly devastated, but like a building sapped by dry rot, one couldn’t initially see the damage from outside. After Winifred had moved to Spain with her two daughters in a desperate attempt to rebuild her life, Monica missed her friendship desperately, and now, to crown it, Tony had asked Paul and Sarah to join the party tonight, and she, Monica, was expected to smooth over Sarah’s first public outing in Gloucestershire.

‘I just feel it’s revoltingly disloyal to Winifred,’ repeated Monica.

She had applied Pond’s vanishing cream and face powder, and a dash of bright-red lipstick, which was the extent of her daytime make-up, and was now adding her night make-up: brown block mascara put on with a little brush.

‘I swore to Winifred I’d never have that little tramp’ — Monica spat on her mascara — ‘over the threshold.’

Tony’s brows drew together like two black caterpillars.

‘Paul is still our local MP, even if he has been booted out of the Cabinet,’ he said patiently. ‘With the franchise coming up next year, I have to entertain whatever wife he chooses. At least I waited until after they were married.’

As Tony moved forward to do up the clasp of her diamond necklace, Monica caught sight of her husband’s reflection. The red tailcoat with dove-grey facings made him look taller and thinner, and gave a distinction to his somewhat heavy good looks, but Monica hardly noticed.

‘I still ought to telephone Winifred and tell her.’

‘She’s in Spain. Let it rest. I’d better go down; they’ll be here in a minute.’

Monica glanced at her diamond watch. Lohengrin was about to start on Radio 3. If only she could stay at home and listen to it, she thought wistfully. As she slotted a three-hour blank tape into her radio cassette and pressed the record button, she called after Tony, ‘Can you tell Victor to up the proportion of orange juice in the Buck’s Fizz. We don’t want everyone arriving at the town hall plastered like last year.’