by Jill Mansell
“Promise you won’t say anything about Jack being touchy,” Cass begged her. “He really isn’t like that as a rule. I don’t want you to think we’re one of those nightmarish couples who only pretend to be crazy about each other.”
“Please,” Imogen protested. “This is Hi!, remember? You and your husband could be flinging grenades across the sitting room at each other, and we’d still say you had the happiest marriage in London. Apart from anything else,” she added with a widening smile, “you do have one of the happiest marriages in London. You’re famous for it…wonderful husband, terrific kids, brilliant career. Let’s face it, all-around bliss.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to say so.” Cass hesitated, embarrassed by such an accolade. “I suppose I’ve been very lucky…”
“Come on, don’t be modest,” chided Imogen. “It’s a fairy-tale thing, isn’t it? How many women really and truly have it all? And what’s so great, I think, is the fact that people don’t resent you for it. They’re pleased for you because everyone likes you.” She paused, then said, “You give them hope.”
Cass looked amazed. “Hope?”
“Yes! Think of all your fans: the housewives, stuck at home with the kids, listening to your show,” said Imogen eagerly. “The thing is, that’s how you were, once upon a time. And now you’re here, but you haven’t let it go to your head. You’re still wonderfully natural. So they can listen to you and dream of making a success of their lives, just as you did.” She shrugged and concluded brightly, “Well, that’s my theory.”
Laughing, Cass said, “Is that what you’re going to put in the magazine?”
“That kind of thing.” Imogen beamed at her. “The works, really. I mean, I know most of it, but if you could just run through the early days for me, how you got involved with radio in the first place and how it escalated from there. That’s what the readers love most of all, isn’t it? The humble beginnings.”
Chapter 2
Cass’s beginnings hadn’t been that humble, but she knew her break into radio had a fairy-tale tinge to it. Her first meeting with Jack Mandeville, many years earlier, had been equally romantic. Well, as romantic as it was possible for a meeting on bumper cars between teenagers to be.
It was Cass’s fifteenth birthday, and her protective mother had reluctantly allowed her to go to the fair on Wandsworth Common with her friend Annie Murray, provided she didn’t speak to any boys. The moment they were out of sight of the house, both girls shortened their skirts by about a foot by rolling the waistbands over and over like Swiss rolls and plastered each other with strictly forbidden makeup filched from Annie’s older sister. Not surprisingly, upon reaching the common, where the Saturday afternoon fair was in full swing, they found themselves attracting all kinds of attention, in particular the unsubtle interest of a couple of leather-jacketed biker boys from Walthamstow. Pimpled, unwashed, and sorely lacking in the social graces, they weren’t at all what Cass and Annie had in mind. Neither did they take rejection well.
“Stuck-up little bitches,” snarled the taller of the two, who had set his sights on Cass. Her long blond hair, shining eyes, and heavenly legs were right up his alley.
“Yuck! Just ignore them,” shrieked Annie, pushing Cass in the direction of the bumper cars. “Ooh, look at that boy collecting the money! He looks just like Elvis. Quick, you jump into that blue one, and I’ll have the red. See if you can get him talking. He’s dreamy.”
The bikers in their fringed leather jackets had other ideas. Unhappy at being ignored and deciding that the stuck-up bitches needed to be put in their place, they leapt into two more bumper cars and proceeded to batter the living daylights out of Cass’s and Annie’s cars. With each successive collision, they jeered and catcalled. Cass, not finding this at all funny, began to feel afraid, but the Elvis lookalike was forty feet away, chatting up two brunettes. In the meantime, she found herself being hammered slowly but surely into a corner. The bikers, by this time having decided to concentrate their joint attentions on her, were making increasingly nasty threats.
Help was at hand. The moment the ride finished, even as Cass was wondering if her trembling legs would hold her up, she found herself being lifted out of the car in one smooth movement. A strong hand, clasping hers, left her with no alternative other than to follow her rescuer down the steps, away from the bumper cars, and in a fast zigzag through the crowds until they were safely out of sight.
“Oh, thank you,” Cass gasped, panting for breath as she leaned against the chugging side of a hot dog stand. “I was so scared. You don’t think they’ll come after us, do you?”
“Shouldn’t think so.” The boy, whom she had never seen before, glanced over her shoulder. His dark eyelashes flickered. “Well, maybe to be on the safe side…”
Cass, her heart racing, didn’t argue when he led her swiftly up the steps of the ghost train. As he searched in his jeans pocket for the money to pay for two tickets, she covertly studied her rescuer, whom she guessed to be a year or two older than herself.
His hair, so dark it was almost black, was quite long and swept back. He had very clear dark-brown eyes, a lightly freckled nose, and a humorous mouth, the kind that looked as if it was smiling even when it wasn’t. He was tall and thin, which Cass also liked. Her last boyfriend had been an inch shorter than she was, and the effort of endlessly trying to make herself look smaller had been exhausting.
With a start, she realized how presumptuous she was being. Talk about jumping the gun! Her imagination was running riot, and so far, she didn’t even know his name.
It was Jack, she learned once they were safely installed on the train.
“Cass,” said Cass, wondering if she could also discover his surname. Annie was sure to ask, since surnames were vital. Was there, after all, any point in even bothering getting to know someone called Winkle or Shufflebottom? Too embarrassing to go out with, Annie bossily maintained, let alone marry. Cass blushed under the cover of darkness and cleared her throat. “Cass Ashton.”
“Oh, well, if we’re being formal,” said Jack lightly, “John Marius Frederick Rothschild the Third.”
The train chugged along the rickety track and juddered around the first bend. They were enveloped in total blackness, and something that felt like a giant spider’s web slid across Cass’s face.
“Rothschild?” she gasped. “You’re kidding!”
“Please don’t make a big thing of it.” As Jack sighed, an eerie howl echoed in the darkness above their heads. “If you’re scared,” he said matter-of-factly, “you can hang on to me.”
* * *
“Thanks a bunch,” said Annie when they finally emerged, blinking, into the sunlight. She was leaning against the white picket fence surrounding the ride and looked very cross indeed.
“Sorry.” Cass experienced a belated paroxysm of guilt. “I thought they were only pestering me. Are you OK?”
“Well, alive.” Annie wasn’t only cross, she was deeply jealous. Trust Cass to get herself rescued, if not by a knight on a white charger, then by an unfairly good-looking boy in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
“Rothschild!” Annie screeched when Cass proudly introduced him. “Oh, come on! We aren’t all as gullible as Cass.”
“You aren’t as pretty either.” Jack was smiling, but the glint in his dark eyes showed he meant it. “Why do you suppose I rescued her and not you?”
That had been the end of Annie’s friendship with Cass.
“Just as well,” Jack airily declared. “With friends like that, you’d only end up getting a name for yourself. Besides, you don’t need her anymore. You’ve got me.”
It had been a typically intense teenage romance. The only untypical aspect was the fact that it hadn’t ended. Cass adored Jack, even if his name wasn’t really Rothschild, and they spent all their time together. Her mother fretted at first, complaining that Cass should be out having fun instead o
f tying herself down at such a ridiculously young age. Then, hearing what her daughter’s untied school friends were getting up to on wild nights out at the local disco, she shut up. Jack Mandeville was bright, charming, and well-mannered, great fun to have around and highly motivated. How could she complain when he helped naturally lazy Cass through her O levels? As she watched the two of them studying together out on the newly mowed lawn, preparing for the last few exams, Geraldine Ashton realized she had a lot to be grateful for. It was just a shame Jack was only sixteen. As son-in-law material, in ten years’ time, he would be perfect.
She didn’t have to wait that long. Continuing to defy the odds, Jack and Cass remained together through the next two years. A levels came and went, Cass grew blonder, more beautiful, and ever more devoted, and Jack—handsomer than ever—won a coveted place to study economics at Cambridge. Cass, less ambitious and without the faintest idea of what she wanted to do in terms of a career, ended up half-heartedly studying English at the somewhat less prestigious University of the West of England, Bristol. She shared a house with five other students in Clifton, hated her course, and suffered appallingly from homesickness. Or, to be more accurate, Jack-sickness.
Every night, instead of working on essays, Cass wrote long, desolate letters to Jack. Each time he phoned her, she cried so much, she could barely speak. At every available opportunity, she either caught the National Express bus to Cambridge or met him halfway, in London.
“This is hopeless,” said Jack, hugging her to him as she spent the evening of her nineteenth birthday in tears because it would be at least a month before they could see each other again. He missed Cass just as much as she missed him. The two hundred miles separating them were doing neither of them any good at all.
Cass wiped her face on the sleeve of his dark-blue sweater and sniffed loudly. “I hate Bristol. I hate everyone in my course.” She hiccupped miserably. “I’m never going to pass my exams, Jack. I hate it all so much, I can’t think.” With an air of defiance, she added, “And I miss you so much, I don’t care.”
“In that case,” said Jack, “you’d better tell them you’re packing it in.”
“Really?” Cass’s eyes shone. Her knees sagged with relief. She had spent the last six months begging to be allowed to leave, but Jack had always said no, things would get better in time.
“I know what I said.” Jack’s smile was rueful. “But it didn’t work, did it? I think we’d better get married. God, your mother’s going to go wild.”
Cass had never been so happy. Her all-time favorite film was Love Story, where Ali MacGraw fell in love with Ryan O’Neal. Now she and Jack were living it for real. They were happier than the two film characters, they were even more in love, and best of all, she had no intention of dying heartbreakingly of leukemia at the end.
Chapter 3
“So did she?” Imogen, who adored love stories, couldn’t wait to hear the rest. “Your mother, I mean. Did she go wild?”
Cass grinned. “Oh, completely. Although it was more for show than anything. You know, she felt she had to do the ‘you’re too young and inexperienced’ bit. Poor Mum, she kept saying, ‘But what about the sexual revolution? We’re not in the dark ages now!’ She adored Jack, but even at the wedding reception, she kept pointing out gorgeous men and hissing in my ear, ‘See what you’re missing?’”
“But no regrets, obviously.”
“None.” Cass shook her head, her expression dreamy. Then she smiled. “Jack’s the only man I’ve ever slept with or wanted to sleep with. I suppose we’re a bit of a rare breed nowadays.”
“Particularly when you consider the kind of circles you move in.” Imogen nodded, impressed. “Anyway, I’m interrupting. Carry on.”
Cass shrugged. “What can I say? We were poor but nauseatingly happy. I took a waitressing job to help out with the rent and loved it far more than I’d ever loved college. Not that it lasted very long. A couple of weeks after the wedding, we discovered I was pregnant with Sean. Once he arrived, we were poorer than ever, but it didn’t seem to matter. Then, hot on his heels, Cleo turned up, and that was it. I was twenty-one years old, a housewife, mother of two…not at all the kind of glittering career my mother had set her heart on for her only daughter!”
“And in the meantime, Jack was working for his degree, building the basis of his own glittering career,” Imogen observed drily. She tilted her head to one side. “Did you never feel even the tiniest bit of resentment that you were the one who’d had to give everything up?”
“No.” Cass spoke with simple honesty. “It was what I’d wanted. Jack and I were together. And we had our babies. It didn’t even occur to me then that I had given anything up…anything that I might regret at least.”
“Some people are just natural homemakers.” Smiling, Imogen checked that the recording was running smoothly. “It must be lovely. I’m not sure I could do it myself.”
“Ah, you’d be surprised.” Cass spoke with enthusiasm. “People talk about being trapped at home with the kids, but there are so many things you can do, even without heaps of money…well, like getting on local radio when they have their phone-ins.”
Imogen, along with the rest of the country, already knew about this. It was how Cass had achieved her initial break into radio, when, as a supposedly typical young housewife and mother, her sense of humor, irresistible giggle, and unerring ability to say what everyone else wished they could have said captured the attention of all who heard her on air. Cass was down-to-earth. She was fluent and funny and never ever said, “Um…y’know.” The presenter of the show, fed up to the back teeth with his usual depressing roster of calls from weirdos, bores, and people who peppered their every sentence with “um…y’know,” was enchanted by Cass’s delicious, unpretentious, easy manner. Taking the highly unusual step of calling her back after the show, Terry Brannigan urged her to become a “regular.” Before long, he was contacting Cass to ask her what the next day’s topic of discussion should be. When Sean, at nearly three, was admitted to the hospital with measles and Cass missed a whole week of the show, the radio station was inundated with complaints. Terry, realizing he had a potential star on his hands—not to mention a ratings booster—spoke first to his producer, then to Jack and Cass, and hammered out a deal. Cass became his cohost.
Their double act flourished. Together, Terry and Cass were a winning formula. Ratings soared. Terry, a merciless tease, poked fun at Cass and told their listening audience she was a frump in hair rollers and a flowered apron who made Edith Bunker look chic. Cass, unfazed by his dreadful insults, giggled and gave as good as she got. With her husky, beautifully modulated voice, nobody believed for a moment she was as raddled and ghastly as Terry made out. Besides, there was that indefinable chemistry between the two of them to give the game away, the particularly tantalizing chemistry that only ever exists between a man who fancies a woman like mad and the woman who in return treats him like a best friend.
When the time had come to leave Cambridge—Jack had gotten his honors degree and been offered work as a political journalist with one of the better quality national newspapers—Cass simply handed in her notice. Terry went on a bender of titanic proportions and a week later came to the conclusion that he must leave too. He was Abbott without Costello, Ben without Jerry. He had also, without Cass ever becoming aware of it, fallen hopelessly and irretrievably in love.
Terry took his broken heart off to New York where he landed a job on one of the larger stations presenting the suitably melancholy midnight-to-five slot. Each December, he held his breath, praying that this might be the year Cass’s Christmas card didn’t say, “With love from us all—Cass, Jack, Sean, Cleo, and Sophie.” And each year, he was disappointed. Everyone else in the damn world got divorced, it seemed, except Cass and Jack, who went on for bloody ever.
Cass, meanwhile, had gone from strength to strength. Snapped up by one of the capital’s most listene
d-to commercial stations, she was given her own midmorning show. Over the years, she had become an institution, a part of her devoted listeners’ own families. Jack, progressing rather more steadily up through the ranks of political journalism and not yet having made his own break into television, became used to being introduced as “You know, Cass Mandeville’s husband.”
* * *
“And he was never resentful of your success?”
Imogen shook her head in admiration. Cass really did have it all. She was thirty-nine, yet sitting there opposite her, in her T-shirt and Levi’s and with the bright sunlight streaming through the windows turning her long, fair hair almost white-blond, she looked more like twenty-five.
“Are you kidding?” Cass laughed. “He was thrilled. When you’ve been as poor as we were, you don’t care who’s earning the money! No, that’s never been a problem for Jack.”
Behind Cass, propped up against the pine cupboard, was an unframed, curling-at-the-edges snapshot of an alfresco lunch party. Since Sophie wasn’t in it, she was presumably the one who had taken the photograph. But there, sitting around the wrought-iron table out on the sun-bleached terrace, were the glamorous Mandevilles. Jack’s arm rested across the back of Cass’s chair. To the left of them lounged Sean in his Ray-Bans, blowing a kiss to the camera. To the right was Cleo, currently Britain’s fastest-rising star on the modeling circuit, her famously sinuous body almost doubled in two as she roared with laughter at something her father had just said.
“You are so lucky.” Imogen gestured loosely around her at the sunny, cluttered, yellow-and-white kitchen and the sloping gardens beyond. “I know it sounds corny, but I have to say this: I’ve interviewed some celebs in my time, but you really are by far the nicest. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in fostering a twenty-eight-year-old redhead?” She grinned. “Fairly house-trained…”
Cass, in turn, had taken an instinctive liking to the girl who had come to interview her. Now, touched by her openness, she reached impulsively across the scrubbed pine table.
