‘Would anything force them?’
‘Like money, you mean?’
‘I didn’t say that. But –’
‘Richard, you should never do that. Ever. You pay people for information, and then when the lawyers get going, they say you paid them, and the whole thing goes down the pan. Besides, these people aren’t like that. I told you. They’re good.’
The editor of the Daily News was in a very bad temper. The purchase of the serial rights of The Tinsel Underneath, which he had seen as a big boost to his circulation in the summer, normally such a dud time, was not apparently so neatly in the bag as he had thought. ‘I’m sorry, George,’ said the features editor, Colin Firth, at the end of morning conference, ‘but they’ve just phoned and said publication may have to be postponed.’ He stood by the door, and looked uncertainly at George Jerome, who was turning the dark purplish red that only serious irritation could produce. He had not personally brought this phenomenon about before; he was fairly new to the job and very nervous, and had already incurred George Jerome’s wrath in telling him that the series of exclusive interviews their star columnist had set up with what George called the Female Fuck-ups – the Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan brigade – didn’t seem to be coming together, largely because the women had got wind of the fact that their views were likely to be ridiculed rather than revered. ‘I really didn’t expect anything like this.’
‘Well, I should hope you didn’t, otherwise you’d no bloody business wasting the paper’s time and money buying the sodding thing. For Christ’s sake why is it being postponed? They just brought it forward. Those people don’t know their arseholes from their elbows. Tell them we’re not interested, whenever publication date is. I’m not paying fifty grand to be fucked about.’
‘George, it’s only postponed. For a month or so.’
‘I don’t care if it’s postponed for a minute or so. I’m fed up with it. Tell them what I said.’
‘Yes, OK,’ said Colin Firth.
He went to phone Richard Beauman’s rights editor, which resulted in a few choice exchanges, and then went to meet his old friend, Joe Payton, with whom he had worked at the Sunday Express, and although he knew he shouldn’t, relayed in some detail the various miseries of his morning.
Chloe drove to Stratford to tell Piers; she wanted to see his face. His reaction was disappointing. ‘Fine,’ he said, eating the eggs Florentine that were his preferred food after a show, and which he never apparently got tired of. ‘Good.’
‘Piers, I thought you’d be over the moon. I don’t understand.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a little late really. Isn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Chloe.
‘Chloe, it is. There’s been all this gossip. My reputation is badly damaged. I’ve lost the knighthood. I’m sorry, but I just can’t pretend I’m over the moon. But thank you for all you’ve done.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Chloe, and walked straight out of the hotel and drove herself home again.
‘Now that really is good news,’ said Caroline to Joe, who had called her to tell her. ‘I hadn’t realized how worried I was until you told me. I’m coming up to London tomorrow, Joe, to do some shopping. Why don’t I buy you lunch? For old times’ sake. And to celebrate.’
‘That would be very nice,’ said Joe. ‘Thank you.’
He was slightly puzzled that Caroline should be coming to London to shop; she always swore it was the activity she most hated. He decided to honour the occasion by buying a new shirt. She might want to go somewhere smart. You never knew with Caroline.
‘This is wonderful news, my darling,’ said Ludovic. ‘The end must surely now be in sight. It seems to me you can now leave Piers, and marry me, very very soon, without more ado. Can’t you?’
‘I think I can, yes,’ said Chloe.
‘I love you, Chloe. Very much.’
‘I love you too, Ludovic. I really really do.’
‘You don’t sound absolutely sure.’
‘Ludovic, of course I’m sure.’
‘Do you think,’ said Chloe, ‘that there might be a chance, even at this eleventh hour, that Piers might get the knighthood? Now the book is off, now that it’s all dying down?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Joe nervously. ‘I suppose it might. But it’s very late in the day.’
‘Could you ask your wonderful mole?’
‘I’ll ask my wonderful mole. I don’t want you to get your hopes up, poppet.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Do you realize,’ said Richard Beauman, ‘how much this is going to cost me? Withdrawing this book? We’ve already lost the deal with the News. Lost credibility.’
‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘Yes, I think I do. Henry has spent most of the morning telling me.’
‘Good.’
‘Look, Richard, I’m sorry. I can’t help it. What do the lawyers actually say?’
‘They’re thinking about it. We may decide to risk it after all. You seem pretty confident.’
‘Richard, I’m completely confident. This is a totally unnecessary storm in a teacup.’
‘Yes, yes, I know, but if we’re sued –’
‘Do you really think that you’d be sued for more than you’d lose by withdrawing, though?’ said Henry Chancellor. ‘It seems to me that’s the big question.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Beauman fretfully. ‘I don’t know what I think. I really don’t.’
‘I’m afraid my mole doesn’t think there’s a hope in hell. Not now,’ said Joe.
‘Oh well,’ said Chloe. ‘It was worth a try.’
She was in the Ritz when she saw Magnus Phillips. Her mother had invited her along to a celebration lunch she was buying Joe. The three of them had had a very nice time; Joe seemed happier than she had seen him for ages. He was also looking rather smart.
‘Joe,’ she said, ‘a suit. My goodness.’
‘Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it?’ he said, looking down at himself in some surprise. ‘I bought it a long time ago. For a lunch, as a matter of fact, with Tabitha Levine. I can still remember it.’
‘Oh really?’ said Caroline tartly. ‘You never bought a suit to have lunch with me.’
‘You never wanted to go out for smart lunches,’ said Joe.
‘Joe, we met over a smart lunch. And you were in jeans and a half-unravelled jumper.’
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling at her, his most lopsided smile, ‘yes, Caroline, I remember.’
Chloe looked at him, and then at her mother; she was smiling back, half embarrassed, half surprisingly gentle. God, that would be nice, if they were together again.
‘Yes, well,’ said Caroline briskly, ‘that was a lifetime ago. Everything has changed. And Joe is in a suit. Now, shall we have another coffee, and then I must get the bill.’
‘I must go to the loo,’ said Chloe. ‘Excuse me.’
And while she was walking to the loo, there he was, coming through the lobby, looking sleek, smiling at her like a large, well-fed cat.
‘Mrs Windsor,’ he said, with a half bow. ‘How nice to see you.’
Chloe’s manners were impeccable, she had never been anything other than perfectly and gently polite in her entire life. But now she looked at him very directly, and said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t possibly say it’s at all nice to see you, Mr Phillips.’
He sighed, smiled at her gently. ‘No. I don’t suppose it is. And are you better now?’
‘I wasn’t ill,’ said Chloe coldly.
‘Oh? I heard you were. A car crash and a miscarriage. That must have been a terrible shock for you.’ His eyes moved over her, settled back on her face. ‘But you seem to be recovered. I’m so glad.’
He went on, and Chloe went and sat on one of the frilled stools that
the Ritz deemed suitable for their Ladies and felt terribly, dreadfully sick. So he knew about the baby; and he had known about Ludovic; was that to appear in this filthy book of his as well? Quite possibly. God, would the power to hurt them that Magnus Phillips possessed ever end?
Much later that afternoon, her phone rang. It was Magnus Phillips. He sounded awkward, almost nervous.
‘Chloe, don’t ring off. I just wanted to say something. You seemed alarmed by my queries about your miscarriage. Please don’t be. It was a purely personal enquiry. Nothing sinister about it whatsoever. I assure you that I see your private life as absolutely no business of mine.’
Chloe slammed the phone down, and then spent the rest of the afternoon thinking what an extraordinary man he was, to be so ruthlessly exposing her husband’s life and past, and to be at the same time so clearly concerned about her fears for her own.
Joe had also seen Magnus Phillips at the Ritz that day: as he walked through the lobby towards the cloakroom, he saw him drinking a glass of champagne on the Terrace, his swarthy, rather ferocious face softened with laughter as he raised the glass to his companion, a very pretty, expensively dressed blonde. Joe thought of another woman glasses of champagne had undoubtedly also been raised to, by Magnus Phillips, a tall, beautiful red-headed woman, the great, the only love of his life, lost to him it seemed for ever, and felt briefly so ill with jealousy he thought he might throw up, there and then, on the Ritz’s lushly carpeted corridor. Throw up or hit Magnus Phillips again; in the event he did neither but hurried out and away and walked down towards St James’s Park where he wandered miserably for over an hour, kicking empty Coke cans and swearing most uncharacteristically at anyone who bumped into him. When he finally got home, there was a message on his answering machine from Caroline: could he ring her?
Because he knew he would be incapable of being anything but hostile towards her, Joe ignored the message; when she rang next day to thank him for coming and for wearing a suit, he was distantly polite.
It was a long time later that he realized it was, for Caroline, a very slender pretext for making a phone call.
What she needed, Fleur decided, was a major distraction. A major one. She wasn’t just miserable, she was depressed. Deep down, long-term low. It wasn’t just Magnus – although the searing pain she had felt hearing Rose’s voice on his phone had still not even begun to ease. It was that she was lonely, remorseful about Reuben – Poppy, who was horribly cold towards her, had said he was still absolutely devastated – and filled with an awful foreboding about everything to do with Tinsel, what it might reveal about her father, what might happen to her. Always in the past she had distracted herself from her life by work; but a few freelance commissions, offers of old jobs back, had a staleness about them, a lack of intrigue.
She was lying in bed awake one particularly long night, wondering what on earth she could do with herself (short of casting herself into the Hudson, or going on a round-the-world hike), when she heard her own voice, very clearly, talking to Mick diMaggio.
‘Not FitzPatrick and anything. Just FitzPatrick. That’s what I want. That’s what I’m going to have.’
And that’s what I need, she thought, sitting up straight, her mind homing in on what was so clearly an impossibility she knew she had to accomplish it. I’ll go solo.
She got up, made herself some coffee and sat down at her desk in the window; light was just drifting over the park; it looked ghostly, grey, enchanted, the trees in 3-D like some theatrical backdrop. God, she loved New York. How could people call it hostile: it was to her family, friend, ally. She loved everything about it, even the dirt, the danger, the noise, the drunks, the muggers, the foul-mouthed yellow cab drivers. They all contributed to it, all made it work, made the adrenaline flow. How could she have even thought of leaving it? For a man?
She made a list. The list read premises, clients, colleagues, money. She ticked off the first three: they were easy, there for the taking. She knew it. Money wasn’t. How did she get money?
When Tina came in she was still sitting there; Tina tutted.
‘You still not sleeping, Miss Fitz?’
‘No, Tina,’ said Fleur briefly, and then before Tina could tell her a man would make her sleep, she said, ‘I have to make a few phone calls, Tina. Could you hold off on the vacuuming till then?’
Just over an hour later, dressed in a ruinously expensive and very sexy beige T-shirt dress by Halston which managed to combine a certain businesslike cool with a tendency to cling to her nipples every time she moved, her hair brushed free, her eyes made up very dark, very large, her mouth glossy dark plum, she set out for an appointment with a banker she had met at a party with Julian Morell and Mick diMaggio a few days earlier, when they were still both trying to persuade her back into their fold.
He was about the best-looking man she had ever seen in her life, this banker: not her type, but still quite astonishing, very tall, very big, with blond hair and blue eyes and a smile that lit up not just the room, but the whole building, the whole street. He was the heir to the family business, it specialized in the media, he was looking to build up his own area within it, and he had an appalling reputation with women. His name was Baby Praeger.
‘Well naturally, Miss FitzPatrick, I would need all kinds of information before I could go any further.’ Baby Praeger gave her the smile. ‘Cash-flow predictions, letters of intent from possible clients, references, business, professional, all that sort of thing. But if that looked good – well, let’s say we could talk. I normally don’t invest in something as small as this might be. I’d want guarantees of course. And possibly a share in the equity. But – well, it’s our area. And I like the look of it. I like it very much.’
What you mean, you charming bastard, thought Fleur, is you like the look of me. Well, that was all right. A little sexual frisson never did business any harm.
‘I’ll get all that together for you,’ she said, smiling, standing up, aware of his eyes on the clinging jersey, the nipples (the room was cold, he probably did it on purpose, to get all the nipples standing up). ‘I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you so early in the procedure. But I remembered what you said the other night and –’
‘Miss FitzPatrick, I never mind women coming to see me,’ said Baby Praeger. ‘At any point in any procedure. When you’re ready call me. And we’ll maybe have lunch.’
‘That’d be good,’ said Fleur.
Nigel Silk was amused, slightly tetchy, intrigued.
‘Well, it’s an interesting idea,’ he said. ‘It’s what the Saatchis are doing in London of course. Merging creative with account management.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Fleur.
‘It’ll never work. It can’t. Not long-term. The two philosophies have to be side by side. But not one. You’d lose all sorts of things.’
‘Like?’
‘Well, what creative person could ever think sales? Marketing strategy?’ said Nigel.
‘I could,’ said Fleur firmly. ‘Mick does.’
‘Mick does no such thing. Mick thinks creative. I pull him around.’
‘Yes, and he pulls you around. It’s a two-way traffic. And I think it’d be fine. I know I could do it.’
Nigel looked at her. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘well, I think for a while you possibly could. At least until your outfit got bigger. You were after all trained at the feet of a master.’
He smiled at her. Fleur smiled back.
‘So will you tell Baby Praeger you think I’m worth investing in?’
‘I might. On one condition.’
‘Oh God,’ said Fleur.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, Fleur. No, on condition you in no way under any pretext try to poach Julian Morell away from us.’
‘Nigel!’ said Fleur. ‘As if I w
ould. Haven’t you heard of honour amongst thieves?’
She left him, feeling very cheerful, and made for the next person on her list. Sol Morton.
Sol Morton bawled her out. He told her she had a nerve and a half, coming to him asking for a reference; he told her Sylvia was still terribly upset about the wedding; he told her she needn’t think she was getting any of the Morton’s business; he told her she was heartless and ruthless and unworthy of her sex. Then he took her out to lunch, put his hand on her thigh, told her he missed her in more ways than one, and that sure, he’d talk to Baby Praeger about her, and he might even put a very small slice of business her way.
‘But you want to watch Baby,’ he said, ‘he has a terrible reputation with women.’
‘Goodness me,’ said Fleur, smiling at him sweetly, moving his hand gently from the top of her thigh back down towards her knee. ‘And me an innocent, unsullied girl fresh up from Brooklyn. I was wondering, Sol. Do you think Sylvia would like to get involved in this project? Because I’m going to need a really brilliant PA and her organizational ability seems to me absolutely outstanding.’
Sol said he thought Sylvia just might.
‘I think,’ said Roger Bannerman, ‘I’d like you to see someone else about that chest of yours, Piers. I know Winters gave it the all-clear, but you still seem very wheezy to me. How are you doing on the fags?’
‘Practically cracked it,’ said Piers, ‘and when Othello’s over, I’ll give up for good. I swear.’
‘Good man. Now I think you should see Alan Faraday.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Piers, ‘doesn’t he at times attend the royal household?’
‘He does indeed. Many connections in high places. But he still manages to be an excellent doctor.’
‘Good.’
‘Are you really worried about Piers?’ said Chloe to Bannerman. ‘I mean seriously?’
AN Outrageous Affair Page 84
