by Sue Margolis
Almost as soon as the first penny had dropped, a second followed as Dan suddenly realized that Mavis de Mornay and his shrink shared virtually the same address. Today, of all days, the coincidence was unspeakably cruel.
Dan began to tremble. Virginia Livermead's flat was in one of the houses a bit farther down the road. To get to it he had no choice but to walk past the press group and, in particular, his wife, and risk being recognized. Anna would ask questions, he would cave in and tell the truth and the promise he had made himself not to tell her he was seeing a shrink would be broken.
It wasn't going to make any difference if he crossed the road because the group had spread to the pavement opposite. His only solution, he realized, was some form of instant disguise. He toyed briefly with the idea of making a mad dash to Peter Jones to see if, by any chance, they sold deerstalkers and false mustaches. Then he remembered. As he got out of the taxi he had noticed a red-and-white hat lying on the dashboard. He swung around. The cab was still there. Dan dashed back and motioned the driver to open his window.
“How much do you want for the hat? I'll give you absolutely anything.” The driver's eyelids remained unbatted. He was used to nutters, although in twenty-five years he had never had one make an offer for his clothes. “You're welcome to it, mate,” he smiled. “The wife got it for me in one of those souvenir shops on the front at Blackpool. Can't wear it now 'cos when I take it off it takes me syrup off too.” He handed the hat to Dan. It had a turned-down brim and was shaped like a cricket hat. Dan put it on. It was slightly too big.
He thanked the driver profusely, pulled up his jacket collar, hunched his shoulders and lowered his head. Then he walked briskly past the group of journalists, who didn't look up from their pizzas. Two minutes later he was waiting outside the shrink's flat.
As she opened the door, Virginia Livermead saw standing in front of her a tall, slightly hesitant young man. He was carrying a briefcase and wearing an expensive gray business suit, a sparkling white shirt and a silk tie. She couldn't see much of his face as it was obscured by the brim of a cheap fairground hat across which was written in large black letters: “Kiss me quick. Fuck me slow.”
By six-thirty, there was still no sign of Mavis de Mornay's children. The posse of journalists gathered outside the de Mornay house decided to call it a day. A few of them had started to get calls on their mobiles from agitated news editors ringing to remind them that unless they got their fucking arses in gear the story would be too late to make the Guernsey and Outer Hebrides editions.
As people offered each other lifts or headed off to the main road to hail taxis, Anna stood trying to decide if she wanted to go home or for a swift drink with a couple of people from the Sunday Times. As they were all working for Sundays they could file as late as Friday or Saturday.
In the end, she decided to pop round to Brenda's. Her nanny was off sick so she would be at home, probably cooking supper for Alfie. What Anna fancied, she decided, was a girlie chat over a glass of wine, during which she could pick at the remains of Alfie's Tesco pizza and give Brenda a blow-by–blow job account of her blissful couple of hours with Charlie. Plus, she had a posh dinner party to go to the following week and she wanted to cadge something to wear from the sample rail Brenda always kept in her bedroom.
Anna arrived at Brenda's to find her alone. Alfie was staying at her mother's in Peckham for a few days. Anna was about to say wasn't that odd as it was term time, but as Brenda seemed a bit tense she thought it best not to pry until they'd loosened up over a couple of drinks. Anna followed Brenda into the kitchen and Brenda pulled out a bottle of a fashionable new Brazilian Soave from the wine rack.
“So,” she said, pushing down the chrome arms on the corkscrew man, “ 'ow's it going with this pilot geezer you met at the funeral? S'pose you've been and done it, you daft mare?” Anna thought Brenda sounded a bit more cheery.
“Yes, I have. Today, as it happens. Yes, it was brilliant. Yes, it was the best sex I've had in years, probably ever in fact. And no, I'm not going to fall in love with him.” Anna wasn't about to give Brenda the upper hand by confessing that the affair was being slightly marred by her worrying herself sick over whether Dan was terminally ill. Instead she went even more on the attack.
“Look, Brenda, I know you don't approve, but I'm not prepared to carry on living with little or no sex for the next ten years, until I wake up one dark menopausal morning and discover it's too late to have any fun because my genitals have shriveled up, packed their bags and booked themselves into sheltered accommodation in Eastbourne.”
Brenda finished pouring wine into Anna's glass and poured herself a glass of Perrier. She had barely smiled at Anna's facetious outburst.
“Bren', what the bloody hell is going on? You look and sound completely knackered, your hair's got enough grease on it to take the lead in a fifties musical, your son is staying at your mother's and you appear to be on the wagon.”
Brenda pushed her face into her hands. When she released them it took a few seconds for her features to rearrange themselves.
“I'm up the spout.”
“What, you mean the business is bankrupt?”
“No, not yet—although the way things are going that could be on the cards pretty soon. . . . No, it's me. I'm pregnant. Some miserable git went and knocked me up at a party.”
Brenda bit her bottom lip and then began to cry loud, red-faced sobs full of saliva and snot. Anna got up from the table and put both arms round her. She rocked her back and forth the way she rocked Josh and Amy when life in the school playground got too much and their lives seemed utterly wretched.
It turned out the “miserable git” was Giles Hardacre, the Tory MP for Lymeswold, who was also the Opposition front-bench spokesman on agriculture. Brenda explained that one of her clients who spent a fortune at Sweet FA every year had invited her to her house in Wiltshire for the weekend. Brenda had thought it was going to be just her, the client and the client's husband, but it turned out to be a full-blown house party full of chinless uppers. Brenda had been bored witless. To relieve the tedium she got completely smashed over dinner and then somehow ended up in bed with Hardacre, who had, conveniently, come to the party wifeless.
“And condomless, by the sounds of it.”
“Anna, don't start. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I never imagined that I'd get pregnant. It took nearly a year with Alfie.”
Anna tried to think of something helpful to say.
“So, is he good-looking, then, this right horrible gentleman?” She knew she must have seen Hardacre on TV, but she couldn't for the life of her remember what he looked like.
“I guess so, in a sort of nobby, foppish, Michael Heseltine kinda way.”
Anna said this didn't really help, as it probably described at least half of the Tory party.
“Anyway,” Brenda went on, slowly rubbing her finger round the rim of her glass, “I left doing a pregnancy test until Saturday. I'd had my suspicions for a couple of months, but I suppose I was trying to put it to the back of my mind. Once I found out I thought it best to tell him, just out of politeness really. I assumed he wouldn't want anything to do with the baby, but I didn't see that as a problem. I'm not exactly skint and I'm used to being a single parent. When I told him, he was furious and went on and on about 'is reputation being destroyed and 'aving to resign from the shadow cabinet if it leaked out. He insisted I get rid of it.
“But I couldn't even consider an abortion. As soon as I'd got over the shock I couldn't wait to tell Alfie he was going to have a baby brother or sister. I told Giles I was keeping it. I didn't hear a word from him all through Sunday and Monday. Then this morning he phones. The stupid bleeder has only been and told 'is wife. He said he couldn't live with the guilt of it all, or the thought that she might read about it in the papers if I started kicking up, demanding maintenance for the baby. Now she's turfed 'im out, says she'll name me in the divorce. And if that isn't enough, she's threatening to sell her story.”
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Brenda put down her glass and wiped her nose on a hard ball of scrunched-up kitchen paper.
“Look, I know I should be feeling sorry for the cow. If I were in her shoes, I'd probably do the same, but if Lavender Hardacre goes to the papers my reputation will be down the can. Half of what I sell goes to rich Tory women like her, and the point is, they all know each other. The moment she accuses me publicly of being a husband-stealing slapper, every Caroline in London will come out in sympathy and the first thing they'll do is stop buying my clothes. Anna, she has the power to organize a virtual boycott of Sweet FA. I stand to lose a fucking packet.”
Anna reached into her bag. Down among the dead ballpoints and furry, crisp-covered tampons, she found a cleanish handkerchief. She handed it to Brenda.
“Brenda, please, please don't panic. I'll talk to Dan. We'll work something out. I promise.”
Anna had absolutely no idea what Dan could do. What was more, she couldn't bring herself to mention borrowing a dress for the dinner party. She'd have to buy something and Dan would be furious.
Bugger him, she thought. She had bigger things on her mind just now than the price of a goddamned dress. Dan would just have to get unfurious again.
C H A P T E R N I N E
WITH A FORCE JUST A FRACTION greater than good manners required, Anna stabbed her fork into another piece of olive-paste-covered bruscetta. For the last ten minutes some boorish South African architect, too used, thought Anna, to bossing black servants around, had been setting everybody straight on the reasons for the spread of AIDS in Africa. It was one of those intellectually competitive Hampstead dinner parties at which Dan excelled, but which Anna feared because they always made her feel she should have taken the previous week off work to mug up on the latest opera crits, the works of Pliny and heaps of hard vocab.
During the predinner drinks, while Dan had been on the other side of the room chatting to a couple of people from the Observer, Anna, wearing the new black Ghost dress Dan was still livid with her for buying, found herself collared by a chap who, she thought, had to be in his late sixties.
He had come and sat beside her on the sofa. His gray hair was cut into a trendy crop so that his head looked almost as if it had been shaved. He was wearing a high-buttoned burlap waistcoat, a collarless white shirt and tiny oblong steel-rimmed specs. Anna wasn't in the least bit surprised to discover he was a shrink. Taking Anna's eyes in his, he declared he only had to look at a person for a minute before he understood almost everything about their psyche. Sensing that she could cope with him because he was obviously nothing more than a randy old goat, Anna began to relax. It was only when he asked her whether she agreed that Eric Cantona, on the evidence of the latest film he had directed, was the new Claude Berri that she began to panic. In an instant her palms were soaked in sweat and she lost her grip on her champagne flute. This fell onto the coffee table and smashed into tiny pieces. Red-faced and flustered, she began dabbing ineffectually at the mess with a tissue. She gave the shrink a feeble smile and mumbled something about never being at her best among the shattering glasses.
The dinner party was being given by Rebecca Jameson, the social affairs correspondent at the Vanguard, and her husband, Bill Hutchinson, who was the London bureau chief of Lifenews Magazine. Anna hadn't met Bill before, but she'd spoken to Rebecca a few times at various Vanguard drinks do's. She was in her mid-forties, fearsomely bright and confrontational, and according to Dan behaved in conference like a cross between some intellectual Rottweiler and a boot-camp leader. If she thought somebody had said something stupid she would rip them apart for minutes at a time, until, in the end, she almost had them volunteering to make amends by doing one-armed press-ups on the floor.
Anna was expecting Bill to be a stooped, ineffectual, balding American with a beard and no mustache, but in fact he was a clean-shaven Ivy League American with thick blond hair and he stood remarkably upright. When Dan and Anna arrived he was in the middle of sounding off at Rebecca, in front of several guests, that her understanding of the ramifications of the introduction of the Euro in the U.K. were positively junior high. She simply stood there gazing at him the way Julie Andrews looks at Christopher Plummer in the gazebo scene in The Sound of Music when he asks her to marry him.
Anna had gradually become less intimidated by Rebecca and had even grown to like her once she realized the woman lacked any humor of her own and that it was pitifully easy to make her laugh. Rebecca had also become less threatening the moment Anna noticed she had a bosom which looked as if it would benefit no end from the cantilever properties of a decent underwired bra.
Having dealt with aids to his own enormous satisfaction, the South African architect paused to swallow a mouthful of the chilled coriander and lemongrass vichyssoise, then led seamlessly into a monologue on suburban design. Anna was thinking of asking whether Le Corbusier had actually invented brandy too, but thought better of it.
“What everybody needs to understand,” he insisted in his curt, imperious tone, “about the hierophancy—if you will—of the patio door in the British outer suburbs is that it has its roots in a thesis promulgated in the early twenties by Alvar Aalto. It was Aalto who said that man, even from within his brick-built shelter, needs to preserve his contact with living nature if he is to safeguard his physical and mental well-being. Of course, given our climate and countryside, that's something we have been aware of in South Africa for many, many years.”
“Particularly when it came to constructing shelters in black townships,” Anna murmured through a stiff ventriloquist's smile. Dan, who was sitting opposite Anna, had been watching her fidget and sigh as she became increasingly bored and irritated by the South African. He hadn't caught the precise contents of her murmur, but he knew Anna well enough to be concerned that they might represent the beginning of an increasingly violent continuum which could end with her suddenly producing a brick from her cleavage. Casually Dan leaned back in his chair, slid his bottom to the edge of the seat and just managed to reach her shin under the table and kick it.
Anna didn't flinch. He'd only managed to tap her. She gave him a childish, mischievous grin, but at the same time decided that her best bet would be to keep any more contentious thoughts to herself until home time.
As the South African continued to sound off like some polysyllablic pedant on Kaleidoscope, Anna allowed her mind to wander. Inevitably, her thoughts drifted towards Charlie, and in particular to their slightly bizarre final meeting.
This had taken place a couple of days after their rendezvous at the Park Royal. Assuming that Dan had left for work, Charlie had phoned her early that morning to check if she was free for a late lunch around one-thirty.
At the moment the phone rang Anna was sitting at her desk in a pair of Dan's tatty old pajamas, alternating between picking at her cuticles until they bled and peering into the tiny antique mirror she kept on the desk to squeeze the blackheads round her nose. She looked and felt completely drained.
For a start, she'd had Campbell McKee on the phone just after eight and had ended up having to grovel to him. He had called, full of excitement, to give her the news about Mavis de Mornay still being alive and her death being nothing but a fiendishly elaborate stunt within a stunt to get publicity for her latest book, They Parted at the Altar. Anna had kicked herself for not having realized what the old bag was up to. Subconsciously she had known there was something dodgy about the entire de Mornay escapade.
For a start, she had looked nothing like Anna's vision of an old person on the verge of death. She had expected to see her looking thin and wasted, her taut white skin stretched over a skeletal face, as she struggled for every breath.
Instead, lying on her priceless carved oak four-poster deathbed, Mavis de Mornay had looked like an aged tart taking a rest between clients. She was wearing a ginger Mary Quant wig, and her sagging features were plastered in thick foundation in an almost identical shade of ginger. Her trademark Cleopatra eye makeup and purple frosted lipst
ick were as vividly applied as ever, and she was breathing easily as if she were in a deep sleep.
What was more, shortly before the “end,” she had suddenly opened her eyes, slipped her hand out from under the tea-rose-pink counterpane and produced a hardback copy of They Parted at the Altar. Looking as if she were summoning her very last ounce of strength, she had held it shakily towards the cameras. Anna had been convinced she'd seen a satisfied smile form briefly on the old lady's lips. After a few seconds de Mornay's hand had flopped down onto the bed, and she was, supposedly, gone, the Cleopatra eyes still staring beseechingly into the cameras.
The reason she hadn't seen through the performance, she consoled herself, was that she had still been in a bit of a daze after seeing Charlie. How on earth the other hacks had been hoodwinked she had no idea. But for her part, Anna felt the need to apologize for not being more on the ball.
“No, angel, it wasn't your fault, just one o' them things,” he said magnanimously. He went on to explain triumphantly that de Mornay had been caught out by pure chance. A few hours after rigor mortis should have set in, she and India, her PA, were photographed boarding a Concorde flight to New York by some freelance photographer who had been sent to Heathrow by one of the tabloids to get a run-of-the-mill “Liz Hurley Flies Out” snap.
The Globe on Sunday had paid a fortune for the exclusive rights to the Mavis de Mornay airport pictures. Campbell was beside himself with what a blinding joke it was that the dailies had made complete tossers of themselves by filling their pages with masses of melodramatic hype describing de Mornay's final moments. The Globe would now humiliate the lot of them by appearing on Sunday with what Campbell referred to as “the real badger.”
