by Jemma Harvey
‘I won’t. I’m not,’ Lin insisted crossly. ‘Garry and I are as happy as – as anyone can be.’
But Garry wasn’t happy. Happiness probably wasn’t part of his nature: he was born with an inbuilt tendency to gloom. His marital phobia dated back to a miserable childhood and a father who beat both his mother and himself. He was obsessive about cleanliness yet when drunk would wallow in slovenliness, wearing the same filthy sweatshirt on a three-day bender and falling asleep in his own vomit. His latest comic venture, Bannerman, a series in which he played a trendy-left politician whose ideals are corrupted once he gets into Parliament, misfired badly. Possibly it was before its time: it predated Labour’s rise to power in 1997. Several subsequent ideas were turned down. A film won critical acclaim but fizzled at the box office. He was forced to accept a role he didn’t like, in a laddish sitcom stereotyping the multi-racial divide in North London. The Bhindi Boys was an instant hit, and Garry was stuck with it, which depressed him even more. He was continuously evolving new plots which unimaginative producers dismissed as too far off the mainstream. By the third series of The Bhindi Boys his drinking had increased with his fame and he had begun to experiment with hard drugs, though Lin always maintains this was infrequent and never an addiction. One night he came home after bingeing on booze and heroin and passed out on the sofa. Lin couldn’t rouse him, so she made him comfortable on his side – she swears it was on his side – and went upstairs to bed. In the small hours he turned over on his back, threw up, and drowned in his own vomit. According to the doctors, he died without waking up.
Eventually, Lin would get over his death. But she would never get over the guilt.
The Press had a field day. Columnists shelved their own drinking and cocaine habits to pontificate on the decadence of media idols and how role models like Garry were betraying the Youth of Today. It was generally felt that, by dying in such a way, he had set a bad example, particularly to the young working-class blacks who saw him as one of their own – or so various white middle-class hacks maintained. Those same hacks turned up at his memorial service to count celebrity heads and soar into tragic mode before lapsing back into self-righteousness. But the wave of hypocrisy washed over Lin. Her mother had come south to offer support, and she did her best to censor any newspapers which she thought her daughter might read. During that period, the only thing that bound Lin to reality was her children. For them, she made an effort, trying to see beyond the wall of grief into some kind of a future. She didn’t know her troubles were just beginning.
Unfortunately, another of Garry’s many phobias had been the regulation of his finances. A paranoid fear of the taxman combined with a misplaced faith in his own fiscal cunning had disastrous results for Lin. He had never made a will, and the house they were living in turned out – for some inscrutable reason – to be in the name of his mother. She decided to blame Lin for her son’s death, and promptly turfed her out. There was no financial provision for Garry’s partner or child. Lin had to fall back on Sean, whose career had taken a downturn since he had been travelling the same well-worn route, though in his case the main result was that his looks were going and he was having to switch to playing bad guys. When he was in funds he had often missed maintenance payments; now, they hardly ever came at all. Panic jerked Lin out of a state of numb despair into a state of – well, feeling despair. Her mother knew nothing about legal matters, but Andy Pearmain, slipping into his accustomed role of knight errant, produced a lawyer who happened to be his latest girlfriend. A prolonged battle ensued, at the end of which it was decided that Lin could have the house provided she paid Mrs Grimes half its current market value, while at the same time the estate (i.e. the Grimes family) was committed to pay a corresponding sum to her and Meredith. Under law the boys, though Garry had treated them as his own children, didn’t get a look-in. In short, Lin was left with three kids and a place to live, but insufficient money to live on. She decided it was time to go back to work.
Being Lin, she registered at the nearest employment agency. Media friends already shocked by her predicament were even more horrified at such behaviour: you didn’t get a job through an agency, that was for Other People, ordinary people. What happened was your friends made phone calls, and their friends made phone calls, and the right job would materialise without any filling in of forms or vulgar discussion of qualifications. With Lin’s looks and connections, PR was inevitable. While the agency ummed and ahhed (‘You’ve been out of the job market a long time, haven’t you? . . . You don’t seem to have much experience . . . How are your computer skills?’), she found herself pitchforked into the sort of glamorous position that most girls can only dream of, organising film premieres, attending press parties, fuel-injecting the careers of rising stars, repolishing the lustre of fading ones. It took her less than a week to discover she hated it, though she stuck it out for six months.
‘I’m no good,’ she told a girlfriend. ‘I hate having to be pushy, and pester journalists to write about people, and I hate it even more when they pester back. And all these stupid parties! I can’t afford a full-time nanny now; I have to be home with the kids. Besides, I’ve never been much good at the social scene. I can’t think of any small talk. I just start boring on about the twins’ school reports, or my broken washing machine, and people look blank, and I don’t blame them. I wish there was something I could do where I could be polite. And no parties.’
‘There’s publishing,’ said her friend thoughtfully. ‘That’s still fairly polite. On the surface.’
‘What about the parties?’
‘You needn’t go if you don’t want to. Most launches are just given to pretend to the writer you’re doing something: they don’t actually matter. Of course, the writers all think they’re stars, which is a pain, but that doesn’t matter either because no one else thinks so. And the important thing about publishing PR is that nobody expects you to be any good at it. It’s always been the job for Sloanes, particularly those with literary connections. Serious PR types give it a miss.’
‘I’m not a Sloane with literary connections.’
‘Irrelevant. It’s who-you-know, darling.’
‘I don’t know anyone in publishing,’ Lin pointed out.
‘I do.’
And so Lin came to Ransome Harber, sinking into the unglamorous background as into a haven. (On reflection, you shouldn’t sink into a haven. Perhaps she just moored.) Georgie has enough push for the entire department, indeed for several departments, and she quickly learned to make use of Lin’s admin skills. Lin is the sort of person who writes everything down, makes lists of every contact, never forgets an appointment, never loses a file. Nobody minded if she didn’t attend most of the parties. And authors, she discovered, are far less demanding than real stars. They have to live in the everyday world in order to write about it (except for Jerry Beauman); film stars and their ilk can only afford their otherdimensional existence because they don’t write the script. And while Lin settled comfortably into the world of publishing, juggling job and children, inevitably she lost touch with old friends of Garry’s who had only ever considered her in the light of a supporting role and, as such, dispensable. Mind you, Lin’s one of the few people I have ever met who genuinely wants to play supporting roles, and always shies away from the centre stage.
Chapter 2
I never nursed a dear gazelle
To glad me with its dappled hide,
But when it came to know me well
It fell upon the buttered side.
THOMAS HOOD Jr: Muddled Metaphors
Before I move on to Georgie, let’s stand back from them both for a minute. If this were a more serious kind of book, now would be a good moment to make a point about life, and destiny, and everything. If I had, as they say, the pen of George Eliot, instead of the PC of Emma Jane Cook, I’d take the opportunity for a quick moralise. Of course, modern writers don’t do that, moralising is out of fashion: they just throw in another lavatory scene instead. P
ersonally, when I’m on the loo I read Vogue, possibly in the hope that the sight of all those super-thin models might drop a hint to my metabolism. Anyway, I shan’t attempt to moralise, but let’s just take a second for a spot of philosophy. Getting me into practice for the Great Novel I’m going to write one day.
What I’m trying to say is, Lin is the sort of person to whom things just happen. She doesn’t make them happen, she doesn’t necessarily want them to happen, but the current of events picks her up and sweeps her along and she goes with it. Whereas Georgie wants to be the one who does the happening, who jumps in the water and tells the current where she wants to go. So you would think that her life would be pretty different from Lin’s, a controlled sort of life, a life that follows a plan. Fat chance. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of women Which, taken at the flood, leads – God knows where.’ (Byron, not Shakespeare.) The point is, life can’t be controlled. Destiny, or whatever it is, carried Georgie along as helplessly as any of us. She made her own decisions, she jumped into the water instead of being pushed – but when you get it in perspective, her history is basically the same as Lin’s. Life took over and swept her away. In the end, I suppose, we’re all just mayflies who kick a little while the water clogs our wings, and then go under. It takes more than a fly’s strength to swim against the tide.
Well, enough of that. Back to the story. Georgie grew up in the sixties and seventies; she remembers the mini-skirt, and first-time-around flares, Biba, the Beach Boys, John Travolta when he was young. If you ask her what she was doing when Kennedy was shot, she says: ‘Potty training.’ But she isn’t like the generation before, who go all nostalgic and misty-eyed about their youth, as if the sixties were some kind of Golden Age. It was tough being a girl in the seventies, she maintains, because all the boys had very long hair and beards and it was impossible to tell what they really looked like. ‘Of course nowadays, what with shaving and the ravages of time, you don’t usually recognise old boyfriends, and that has to be a plus.’ But despite the hairy condition of the menfolk, Georgie insists she had fun. Georgie could have fun anywhere, any time. Georgie could have fun in prison – especially if it was a men’s prison. Georgie could have fun in Milton Keynes. She has a talent for it.
Anyway, she was bright and teachers thought she should study something serious, like law or medicine, but she decided that was too much like hard work and did English instead. She went to university in Bristol, where – you’ve guessed it – she had fun. She emerged after three years with a drink habit, a drugs habit, and a sex habit, and sailed naturally into PR, since it sounded like – hmm – fun. Not publishing PR but the really glamorous stuff, with models and film stars and parties, parties, parties. It was the eighties, Edina and Patsy were still young, the Bolly ranneth over. Everyone had money. ‘Well, everyone who mattered,’ Georgie amends. ‘Except the poor people, of course. And me. I never had money, I just spent money. It’s always been that way.’ In those days, she spent other people’s money, lots of it, launching everything from board games to blockbuster movies. She lived in a succession of increasingly beautiful flats and had affairs with a succession of increasingly beautiful men, including several celebs. Lin and I know names but I won’t repeat them: Georgie doesn’t want to join the kiss-and-tell brigade. She was living her life the way she wanted, even if it didn’t feel too good the morning after. At the latter end of the decade she took up condoms to forestall AIDS, gave up coke before it eroded her nasal cavity, and moderated her alcohol intake to preserve some liver and brain cells. As far as anyone could be, she was in control. Or so she thought. Then along came Franco.
His full name was Francesco Michelangelo Cavari, Conte di Pappageno, though there were at least a dozen more middle names thrown in with which I won’t bore you. Italian birth certificates used to get so overcrowded that a few years ago the government decided to slap a tax on excess names, ostensibly for the benefit of harassed form-fillers. The Italian system of taxation is highly creative, and would beggar the entire working populace if anyone ever bothered to pay. Anyhow, Franco was dark and handsome, if not actually tall, with the caramel complexion of the Mediterranean, black hair, and a wicked green glint in his eyes. Georgie met him in Venice, where she had gone for the carnival. The setting was a palazzo, lantern-lit, candle-lit, fairy-lit; reflections shimmered in the canal below; somewhere above the stars were keeping their end up. Music fought a running battle with conversation. Georgie wore gold silk in the style of the seventeenth century; Franco was dressed as a pirate. Through the slits in his mask, she saw that green glint. It was fatal. She had never yet completely lost her head over a man, and somewhere at the back of her mind she felt it was long overdue. He fulfilled all the clichés: the looks of a film star, the credentials of a Latin lover, even the title. ‘It was so Mills and Boon,’ Georgie sighs, ‘that was the joke. I never could resist a good joke.’ But the joke was on her.
As soon as she returned from Venice, she booked her next ticket out. By the third trip the ticket was one-way. She shacked up with him in an apartment in Rome and in due course they got married.
I’ve seen the pictures. Georgie’s hair looks darker then, a more golden blonde, and long enough to put up, piled on her head and twined with white flowers and bits of silver leaf. She is wearing that reliable marital standby oyster silk, and a train. The pallor of the material sets off a perfect tan, and the sculpted bodice and skirt show her tiny waist and the slender curve of her hips. She looks unbelievably lovely in a totally different way from Lin, all assurance and warmth and sensuality. Beside her, the groom is wickedly handsome, glint and all, his tan deeper and greener than hers, with that olive tint that you get in southern Europe, his pointy smile and loose curls making him look slightly faun-like.
‘Wasn’t he a Catholic?’ Lin asked.
Georgie made a face. ‘Oh, yes. I was so besotted, I agreed to the whole package. It wasn’t as if I had any religion – nor had he. It was just what you did in Italy. He had the guilt, of course. Fornication was a sin and all that. I expect that’s what made him so good at it.’
‘Do you regret it?’ I inquired.
‘No. I don’t . . . really . . . think I regret anything. What’s the point? I was madly in love, I got married. Some of the time it was magic. Some of the time it was hell. That was all right with me. Living happily ever after would be very boring.’
Georgie’s a lot more down-to-earth than Lin, but in those days she had her romantic streak. She had traded in her glamorous London lifestyle for what she hoped would be the dolce vita in Rome, but it took time to make friends and her determination to get a job unnerved her husband. She didn’t have the contacts for PR there, so she studied Italian and got work as a translator. She found herself drawn into a small community of ex-pat brides, women from colder climes who’d gone the Mills-and-Boon route, falling for heat, bougainvillaea, dark good looks, seductive accents, out-of-date titles. They would gather together and compare notes on their Italian stallions, on the dominant mothers-in-law, the masculine obsession with machismo and bella figura, the best ways of cooking pasta, their frustrated desire to repaint the salone blue, or green, or any colour except the standard creamy-white. They had secret feasts involving Marmite, Branston pickle, rice pudding and curry. Georgie, never at her best with too much female company, shocked both foreigners and natives by cultivating menfriends, not clandestine lovers but admirers and companions: a gay fashion designer, an artist who painted her, an American writer encountered in the course of work. When Franco objected she laughed at him. ‘Jealousy is good,’ she told him. ‘I’m glad you’re jealous. But you must know you have no cause.’ When he tried to assert some authority she was not so much intractable as impervious. It amazed her that he – or any man – would even make the attempt to tell her what to do. But when he gave up she eventually realised that this was worse.
Franco had always been fond of women, gambling and drink, not necessarily in that order. He gave up other women when he married
Georgie – she knew he was occasionally unfaithful but always maintains it was ‘nothing serious’ – but turned increasingly to gambling and drink to reassert his emasculated ego and deaden the smart to his self-esteem. He could not rule his wife; had she chosen to rule him, within the domestic domain, taking over from his mamma whose iron dominion had been curtailed rather than softened by chronic illness, he would have adjusted. But Georgie did not want to rule. It was her independence which defeated him, and when he protested, ranted, fumed, all he saw was that she didn’t take him seriously. His male bravado and lust for mastery was a game to her, a game she won effortlessly, without even noticing the contest. He drank to give himself the courage to challenge her, to numb himself to her laughter and her charm. By the time she had begun to understand, it was too late.
They wanted children but, despite constant groundwork, nothing happened. Georgie went for tests, Franco wouldn’t even consider it. Doctors attributed the problem to ‘psychological barriers’. When she finally learned she was pregnant, after her mother-in-law’s last stroke, she didn’t tell him straight away, in case anything went wrong and the failure of his hopes proved too much for him. He was drinking now to blot out the dread of his mamma’s approaching death, or for any reason, or just for the sake of drinking. He came back late one night barely able to stand; she was trying to help him up the stairs to their flat when he fell against her and sent her sprawling. She tumbled down the rest of the flight and lay still, bleeding copiously. Neighbours called an ambulance; Franco was too drunk to help. The next day, doctors told him she had lost the baby he hadn’t known she was carrying; subsequent tests confirmed damage to the womb which meant she was unlikely to conceive again. He sobbed out his guilt on her hospital bed, promising to give up the drink and saying having children didn’t matter. A week later, he was blaming her for not telling him, and drinking again to drown both his shame and his bitterness that he would never be a father.
