Rivals

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘The ghastly thing about having brilliant famous parents,’ Caitlin went on, ‘is you never feel the centre of the universe, because they’re so obsessed with their own lives. And if you do brilliantly at school, everyone nods sagely and says Declan’s daughter, it’s in the genes; and if you do badly like poor Tag, they just assume you’re lazy or bloody-minded. Tag’s self-confidence was in tatters when she left school.’

  ‘But she’s so beautiful,’ protested Lizzie.

  ‘I know, but she doesn’t realize it. She’s madly in love with Ralphie Henriques, one of Patrick’s even more brilliant friends. After months of pestering, he seduced Tag at a May Ball at Trinity this year. God, look at those blackberries!’ Caitlin started tearing them off the bushes with both hands and cramming them into her mouth.

  ‘I hoped Tag would tell me exactly what it was like. One can’t obtain one’s entire sexual education from the pages of Jackie Collins, but she just clammed up, and he never rang her again. Just one postcard from Cork, and nothing since. Can you imagine doing that to Tag? That’s why she waits for every post and jumps on every telephone. Patrick says Ralphie’s got someone else, some pert little blonde who reads Sophocles in the original. Poor Tag can’t even read English in the original.’

  ‘What about Patrick?’ asked Lizzie. ‘Does he like Trinity?’

  ‘He feels right there. He thinks my father has betrayed his roots working in England, and he also rather despises Daddy for being in television. God, these blackberries are good. Perhaps Rupert smiled at them.’

  ‘But your father’s a genius,’ said Lizzie, shocked. ‘Those interviews are works of art. ‘

  ‘I know, but Patrick thinks Daddy ought to write books. He’s been working on a biography of Yeats for years, and he used to write wonderful plays.’

  ‘What’s Patrick going to do when he leaves Trinity?’

  ‘He’ll write. He’s much more together than Daddy. I know Daddy makes pots of money, but it all gets spent, and he’s always having frightful rows at work. Patrick’s calmer. He’s a prose version of Daddy, really. And for someone with such high principles, he thinks nothing of running up the most enormous debts, which of course Mummy settles out of Daddy’s despised television earnings.’

  ‘Jolly easy to have principles when someone else picks up the bill,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Right,’ said Caitlin. ‘Patrick’s also a bit smug because he attracts the opposite sex so effortlessly. Do you think Gertrude will get lonely in the country? Should we get her a dog friend?’

  They had crossed the stream now, to the same side as Rupert’s house. Despite the lack of wind, thistledown was drifting everywhere as though a pillow had just burst. Panting up the slope, and turning in their tracks, they could just see the creepered battlements and turrets of The Priory above its ruff of beech trees, now warmed by the late afternoon sun. Climbing had also given Caitlin’s pale freckled face a tinge of colour.

  ‘Think of all those nuns living there in the middle ages,’ she sighed ecstatically, ‘gazing across the valley, yearning for Rupert Campbell-Black’s ancestors.’

  Lizzie decided not to spoil such a romantic concept by pointing out that Rupert’s house hadn’t been built until the seventeenth century.

  ‘It is a romantic house, isn’t it?’ said Caitlin, still gazing at The Priory. ‘Exciting things must happen to us all – even Tag – in a place like that.’

  ‘I’m sure they will,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘I’d better go home now,’ said Caitlin. ‘Can I come and see you next time I’m back for the weekend?’

  Lizzie floated home. What richness, what a fascinating afternoon. The prospect of new friends excited her these days almost as much as new boyfriends had when she was young. She was still bubbling over when James got home later than usual.

  ‘What did you think of my programme?’ he asked.

  Lizzie had to confess she’d forgotten to watch it, because she’d dropped in and had a drink with the O’Haras.

  ‘Did Declan say anything about me or the programme?’ demanded James.

  ‘No,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Didn’t you tell them you were married to me?’ said James, utterly scandalized.

  ‘I forgot,’ said Lizzie. ‘I’m awfully sorry, but there was so much going on, and the O’Haras are just so glamorous.’

  RIVALS

  9

  Declan O’Hara had two obsessions in life: his work, and, rare in a profession that tends to regard a broken marriage as the only essential qualification, his wife.

  He was born in a thatched cottage on a green hillside in the Wicklow mountains, where his father scratched a living from the land. When Declan was ten, his father broke his back falling from a tractor when drunk, and was thus rendered useless for heavy work, so the family moved back to Cork, his Protestant mother’s home town. Here his mother proceeded to bring up Declan and his three brothers by taking endless cleaning and secretarial jobs, aided by occasional handouts from her parents. Her one joy in an exhausting life was Declan, who fulfilled his promise at school by winning a history scholarship to Trinity, Dublin. Soon he was writing poetry and plays, working freelance for the Irish Times and sending money home.

  One evening in his second year at Trinity, he dropped into the theatre to see The Playboy of the Western World. Maud, with her red hair and her amazing green eyes, was the toast of Dublin as Pegeen Mike. Declan went round in a daze for three days afterwards, then sat down, wrote a play for her in a month, and posted it off. Impressed by the play, Maud asked him backstage and was even more impressed by this roaring black-eyed boy with his volcanic moods and his gift for words. The theatre put on the play for a three-month run. It was an instant success, with Maud’s extra radiance being noted by all the critics. By the sixth week she was pregnant and married Declan as soon as the play came off. Although stunned with amazement and joy that this glorious creature was his, Declan soon realized there was no way he could support her and a baby by writing plays, so he junked his academic career and got a full-time job, doing profiles on the Irish Times.

  There was talk of Maud returning to the stage when Patrick grew older, but then Taggie came along, and then Caitlin. Habitually strapped for cash, Declan moved to television, where, although his family in Cork thought he was joining the circus, he soon became a star. Snapped up by the BBC in London, that milker of Irish talent, in a year he was writing and fronting his own programmes, culminating in a series of interviews which had promptly climbed to the top of the ratings and remained there for two years.

  For not only was Declan the most natural thing ever seen on television, but, unlike other presenters and chat show hosts, he never showed off or talked about himself, and he always did his homework. To get public figures, as a result of this quiet, sympathetic, utterly relentless probing, to reveal facets of their character never seen before made for spellbinding television.

  These revelations, however, did not always please the BBC who got rattled if a Sinn Fein leader appeared too attractive or a politician too unpleasant. Known as the terror of Lime Grove because of his black glooms and his sporadic bouts of heavy drinking, Declan bitterly resented interference from above. He finally walked out because the Governors, heavily leant on by the Home Secretary, pulled his interview with Ian Paisley, and because Tony Baddingham offered to triple his salary and Declan couldn’t see any other way of paying his tax bill or ever clearing his overdraft.

  After his early childhood in Wicklow, too, Declan had always yearned to live in the country. He truly believed it would be cheaper than London, that he would have more time to spend with his family, particularly Maud, and to finish his biography of Yeats.

  Maud herself was lazy, egotistical and selfish. She idled her time away reading novels, and token scripts, spending money and talking. Playing second fiddle, on the other hand, is not an easy part. When she married Declan, she had been the star, pursued by half the men in Dublin, and the mistress of the Director. Then she had to wa
tch Declan rise to international fame, while her career dwindled away through lethargy and terror of failure, on the excuse that she was always too busy with the children. Underneath, she was desperately jealous of Declan’s success, and one reason he had never become spoilt was because Maud showed no interest in his career and was constantly mobbing him up.

  There was a tremendously strong erotic pull between them, but, even after twenty-one years, Declan still felt he hadn’t really won her. He was also in a Catch-22 situation. In order to support Maud’s wanton extravagance he was forced to work all hours, which meant she got bored and spent more, and, to goad him, toyed with other men. Another reason Declan had moved to the country was that last year one of her toyings had got out of hand.

  A week after the O’Haras moved into The Priory, Declan started work at Corinium. He didn’t sleep at all the night before. It was a long time since February, when he’d accepted the job, but Maud had immediately started spending in the expectation of riches, culminating in a vast Farewell to Fulham party. Christ knew how he was to pay for that, or for all Maud’s re-decorating schemes.

  Nor had his friends at the BBC been backward in telling him that Tony Baddingham was a shit, or that ITV, notoriously more reactionary and restrictive than the Beeb, would be far harder to work for. In the end, too, as he had been desolate to leave Ireland, he was sad to leave the BBC, particularly as so many of the staff had come out on strike when his programme on Paisley had been axed. They had then held a succession of riotous and tearful leaving parties, finally clubbing together to give him the Complete Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But all his life Declan had walked away from the safe thing – that was his instinct.

  As he lay in the huge double bed, smoking one cigarette after another, watching dawn creep through the curtainless windows, Maud slept peacefully beside him. Her red hair spilled over the rose-pink pillow case, the whole of the dark-blue duvet was wrapped round her hips, and her breasts fell sideways on to a pale-green bottom sheet. Nothing ever matched in their house, reflected Declan.

  He longed to make love to her to ease the panic and tension, but there was no way she’d wake before ten o’clock. She was as obsessive about sleep as he was about work. Tony had told him to roll up at eleven, but knowing work was the only way out of his black panic, Declan decided to go in early. He was expecting a pile of Johnny Friedlander’s cuttings from America.

  Thank God for Taggie, he thought, as he put on a beautifully ironed black and green checked shirt. Grace the housekeeper, who also never rose before ten, had an ability to singe or iron buttons off everything she touched.

  As he went into the kitchen to pick up his car keys, Taggie came barefoot and hollow-eyed down the back stairs in her nightgown.

  ‘Daddy, you shouldn’t be up yet.’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep. Thought I might as well go in.’

  ‘You must have some breakfast, or at least a cup of coffee.’

  When he shook his head, she put her arms round him.

  ‘It’ll be OK, I know it will. Remember you’re the best in the world.’

  Declan reached the Corinium Television building at a quarter to eight, just as the night security man on the car park was about to go off. Seeing a pair of vaguely familiar eyes looking over the half-open window of the absolutely filthy Mini, he raised the horizontal pole, and, having waved Declan through, went back to enjoying Page Three of the Sun.

  Walking through the revolving front door, absolutely sick with nerves, Declan found the place deserted except for a cleaner down the passage morosely pushing a mop, and a young man in pink trousers arranging roses on the marble-topped reception desk.

  Aware that every other girl who worked in the building was at home washing her hair, putting on her prettiest clothes, and emptying scent bottles over herself in anticipation of Declan’s arrival, the receptionist had just nipped down to Make-up to re-do her eyes before the hordes started arriving at nine.

  Declan therefore waited a few minutes, admired the framed awards on the wall, which seemed all to have been won by Cameron Cook, then, still finding no one at Reception, took a lift to the fifth floor, where he eventually discovered a coffee machine and an office with his name on it at the end of the passage.

  It was a splendid office with a thick blue carpet, a huge bare desk with empty drawers, two empty filing cabinets, a radio cassette, two television sets, a video machine and a large bunch of red roses, which had obviously been arranged by the pink-trousered youth. Out of the window was a marvellous view of the close, and the water meadows still white with dew. But even more marvellous on the virgin sheet of pink blotting paper lay a pile of mail including two fat airmail envelopes. Lighting a cigarette, sitting down at his desk, Declan was soon totally immersed in Johnny Friedlander’s cuttings – most of them highly speculative and fictitious because Johnny never gave interviews.

  The great bell of Cotchester Cathedral had tolled the hour three times when suddenly a red-faced middle-aged lady, reeking of Devon Violets, and with tightly permed hair, barged into his office, gave a squawk of amazed relief and shot out again, shrieking down the passage, ‘He’s here, Lord B, he’s here.’

  Next minute Tony Baddingham erupted into the room, absolutely purple with rage. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

  Declan sat back in his chair. ‘Sitting here, since about eight o’clock.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell anyone?’

  ‘There was no one here to tell.’

  With a colossal effort Tony gained control of himself and shook Declan’s hand. ‘Well, welcome anyway. Look, I’ve got most of the national press outside waiting to witness your arrival. We nearly had the police out.’

  ‘They said you’d left home at seven-thirty,’ said the lady reeking of Devon Violets, who was Tony’s secretary, Miss Madden. ‘We thought you might have had a car crash.’

  ‘Or second thoughts,’ said Charles Fairburn, Head of Religious Programmes, shimmying in and giving Declan a great kiss on both cheeks. ‘You’re not to be bloody to him on his first day, Tony. First days in an office are like birthdays. No one’s allowed to be bloody to you.’

  ‘Fuck off, Charles,’ snarled Tony.

  ‘See you later, darling,’ said Charles, whisking out again, nearly colliding with an ashen Cyril Peacock.

  ‘They’re getting awfully fed up, Tony. Where the hell can the stupid fucker have got to?’

  ‘He’s been here all the time,’ said Tony nastily. ‘You just didn’t look, Cyril. Another classical Peacock-up.’

  ‘Oh, hello Declan. Welcome to Corinium,’ said Cyril, his false teeth rattling even more violently with nerves. ‘Marvellous to see you. They’re all waiting for you in the car park, getting very hot.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ Declan shook his head, looking mutinous. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to them.’

  ‘Well for a start you might like to refute that piece in the Guardian claiming you joined Corinium merely to clear your overdraft and not as a vocational choice,’ said Tony with a cold smile.

  ‘I interview people, I don’t give interviews,’ said Declan, not budging. ‘The press made enough fuss when we arrived at Penscombe, staking us out all bloody night.’

  Tony tried a different tack. ‘It’ll be such a thrill for all the staff,’ he said suavely. ‘All we want is pictures of you driving into the car park for the first time and having a glass of champagne in the board room afterwards, and then we can all get down to work.’

  Declan suddenly decided he needed a drink.

  ‘All right, I’ll go and get my car.’

  ‘You can’t do that. They’ll see you,’ said Tony.

  ‘Give Cyril your keys. He’ll drive it round to the front, then you can drive in again.’

  ‘It’s a Mini, parked in the far corner,’ said Declan.

  As Declan drove his absolutely filthy Mini into the parking slot with his name on, which was between Tony’s maroon Rolls Royce with the silver Corinium ram on the bonnet, an
d Cameron’s green Lotus, there was absolutely no reaction from the crowd of reporters and cameramen. The next minute, however, there was a furious banging on the roof. Declan wound down the window half an inch. He could see a beaky nose, and a predatory mouth.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘You can’t park here, asshole,’ said an enraged female voice.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Can’t you read, you fucking dumbass? This slot’s reserved for Declan O’Hara.’

  ‘Is it indeed?’ said Declan softly. ‘Then I’ve come to the right place.’

  Winding up the window, he got out, towering over Cameron Cook, who gasped and stepped back as she instantly recognized the tousled black curls, the brooding dark eyes and the familiar face as battered as the Irish coastline. Shock made her even more hostile.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been? You should have been here at eleven. It’s nearly twenty past.’

  ‘So I was, crosspatch, in my office. Nobody thought to look.’

  There was a shout as the press recognized Declan and surged forward, their cameras clicking away like weaving looms, hugely enjoying the contrast between Declan’s rusty banger and Tony’s gleaming Rolls. From every window female staff, their clean hair flopping, screamed and cheered with excitement. Declan grinned up at them and waved.

  In the Gent’s, James lowered the Venetian blind a quarter of an inch and was delighted to see how old Declan was looking and that he was not even wearing a suit or a tie. Tony would not like that at all.

  Outside there was almost a punch-up, as the Corinium camera crew battled to get the press out of the way, so they could get their own cameras in and film Declan’s arrival for the lunchtime news bulletin.

  Inside the building everyone surged forward to say hullo to Declan. The corridor was swarming with Midsummer Night’s Dream fairies coming back from their mid-morning coffee-break. As Declan fought his way through them, shaking hands, Bottom took off his ass’s head to have a better look. Next minute, Titania struggled to Declan’s side, her crown askew, and kissed him on both cheeks.