She pushed open a door at the back of the stand and there, to be sure, was the rest-room, exactly as she’d described it, right down to the easy chairs, and the fleece of an acrylic sheep on the floor.
‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Very cosy. How thoughtful.’
‘A marvellous idea,’ concurred Kostaki enthusiastically over my shoulder, and as I turned and caught his eye I knew, without a shadow of doubt, what he had in mind.
When I eventually hobbled back on to the plane after two and a half days at the Buchfest, I was quite disproportionately pleased to see Ricky, Denzil, Julian and Gary waiting for me in the first-class cabin with hot cloths poised and canapés a-sizzle. They were exactly what the doctor (proverbial rather than actual) ordered—personable, solicitous, soothing and, most importantly, gay. I gave myself up like some weary old dog to the titbits and the gentle fussing, snoozing and waking as required, not at all the fractious subject I had been on the journey out.
I had never, I calculated, worked so hard, nor slept so little. My eyes felt like pissholes in the snow, my head like a bucket, my feet like raw steak and my cunt like Damon’s shammy leather after a hard day on the downstairs windows. When I’d first invited Kostaki to join me in Fartenwald I had never in my wildest dreams anticipated such an intense period of sustained and imaginative fucking. The missionary position was to him what the tin-opener is to haute cuisine—beneath contempt. I had been spun round, upended, sucked, bitten, straddled and pummelled, often in quick succession and nearly always under the riskiest possible circumstances. And in between I had done my bit for Era Books like a good ’ un, though God knows it had not been easy extolling the merits of LDG and TRT to earnest young Americans while Kostaki loitered nearby with a gleam in his eye and a lump in his trousers.
I functioned, book-wise, on automatic pilot. I smiled bleakly when Tristan and Vanessa congratulated me on my unflappable good nature. What did they expect? I was shagged to a ravelling. I was as likely to lose my temper as I was to win the Booker Prize. I acted laid back because I was laid back (and usually had been, not long before). There had been no respite between hyping and humping.
Constantine had left Fartenwald on an earlier flight, having already run his afternoon surgery extremely close, and not wanting to arouse suspicion among my Eran minders. To the last he had looked elegant and entirely composed, even to the extent of giving us a breakdown of the fictitious seminar on pre-conception care which he had supposedly attended for a few hours on both days. I realised that I was observing my first genuine, twenty-four-carat dual personality. No one would have guessed from Kostaki’s outward appearance of conservative doctorly decorum the boudoir decathlete that lurked, grinning and grabbing, just beneath the surface. Vanessa had even been prompted to remark, with ill-concealed pique: ‘Same old story. The really pretty ones are never interested. And he never even managed to grill you about the The Remembrance Tree!’
It was the closest I came to spilling the beans and ramming them down my editor’s skinny throat. But I restrained myself, and took comfort from the fact that the rest-room sofa on which she now perched with one lanky leg tucked beneath her was the same upon which Kostaki and I had scaled dizzy heights of erotic pleasure not two hours since while she and Tristan addressed a confused contingent of Malaysian publishers on the stand outside.
Sitting in the plane in a trance of exhaustion I had the not unpleasant sensation of having been burned at both ends. In spite of my extracurricular activities I had done Era proud. I had impressed Clarion Paperbacks, New York, of my basically serious literary intent, while reassuring them that there would be no watering-down of love scenes; I had stormed the language barrier to coax a smile from sullen Henni Lundquist of Finland, and had dutifully consumed macrobiotic salads and mineral water with Vince Priddoe while acting heartbroken over my inability to get to Australia this year; I had let slip tantalising and carefully worded hints all over the overseas hall about TRT, and I had endlessly struck the difficult balance between optimistic confidence and graceful modesty. I had, in short, been a model author: two-faced, freeloading and mendacious. And Era were well pleased with me.
It was late afternoon when I drove back into Basset Magna from the station. A sunny afternoon, with summer rising, and I was in the best possible spirits. The new Harriet Blair had emerged, with a vengeance, in all her carnal glory, sex-drive in top gear and cruising and Dame Conscience well and truly put in her place. With my return came faint, wraithlike thoughts of George, but everything was so neatly compartmentalised in my head that they did not fully impinge on my consciousness. Until, that is, I opened the front door and found a letter from my husband on the mat.
I picked it up and took it to the kitchen table where someone had thoughtfully placed the rest of my mail. It was all bills and village circulars apart from one other, forwarded by Era.
I sat down. The house was extremely quiet. There was a smell of detergent and furniture polish; everything was unnaturally tidy. In fact my home had an air of wary and rebellious subjugation like an urchin scrubbed up for a party and told to sit still and in silence until it was time to go. Of course, Damon had been, and Brenda was probably retaining my children until she saw I had returned and had time to recover from my exertions.
Trepidatiously, I opened the letter from George. It was mostly news of unexceptionable tedium, full of longuers about on-site conferences and labour difficulties. He had left the interesting bit till last.
‘… You know,’ he wrote, ‘I said I should try and get back for a few days in the near future? Unfortunately that may not be on now, as I have to spend a few weeks in the Med on a small job for the bosses in London. Obviously my Arab masters won’t be too pleased if I then take leave as well! I’m so sorry, darling, but it can’t be helped. Please enjoy yourself, I should hate to think of you sitting at home every night watching ‘Dallas’ with the children. I’ll keep in touch, and let you know if there’s a chance I can get away. Hope the writing goes well, and you have a good time in Germany at the book fair. Much love as ever, George.’
I put the letter back in its envelope. A few weeks in the Med? Poor George, my heart bled for him, how awfully tough to be sent to the Med, where the wine, women and song were not just legal but obligatory. But I wasn’t jealous, far from it. He had not only extended my period of freedom, but had as good as given me a licence for loose living, which I should assiduously make use of. I might, perhaps, have a party.
I was enormously chuffed with this idea, and whisked through the bills and circulars without a care in the world. I then opened the letter forwarded by Era. It was from one Torquil Bannister of Mercia TV. He explained that he was instigating a new programme on the arts entitled, craftily, ‘Imitating Life’. He puffed it to the full, with much talk of bold and unorthodox new approaches, of critical perceptions and popular lenses, but in spite of being sceptical about the programme itself I was still hugely gratified to be invited to appear. They wanted me (Torquil Bannister wrote) to be spokesperson for popular fiction, and they were hoping to find someone from ‘the other side’, as he rather menacingly phrased it, to promulgate debate. But it was all intended to be ‘relaxed and entertaining’ rather than ‘confrontational’, he assured me. And they would, of course, pay me a performance fee, plus expenses.
I needed no persuading. Telly—the hypers’ holy grail! I opened the french window and went into the garden. Everywhere there was evidence of Declan’s ministrations with mower, strimmer and hoe. The lawn—it actually looked like a lawn—might almost have been hoovered, it was so smooth and clipped and litter-free.
I got a deckchair out of the summerhouse and sat down, facing the sun, basking in the heat and my general sense of well-being. Fluffy leapt over the fence, bushy-tailed from whatever nefarious doings he’d been engaged in in my absence, and sprang on to my lap, purring energetically like a furry vibrator.
‘Cooee, stranger!’
I turned my head and there was Brenda Tunnel, coming ro
und the side of the house with Gareth, Clara, Jason and Michelle.
‘Hallo, Brenda.’
‘I saw your car in the front,’ she explained, coming over to where I sat and studying me with an expectant smile as if I might have had myself elaborately tattooed while at the Buchfest. ‘ So I gave you a little breathing space and then brought them back to you!’
‘Hallo, kids,’ I said, getting up and embracing them. Their pleasure in my return was qualified, I could tell, by slight resentment; they kissed me dutifully but were aloof.
‘Come on, Jase,’ said Gareth, ‘fancy a frame?’
‘I don’t think Harriet wants the whole house overrun the moment she’s got back!’ cried Brenda gaily.
‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘Might as well get straight back to normal.’
‘Do you want to see my Badness stickers, Michelle?’ asked Clara. ‘They’re really suave.’
Within minutes the snooker table was set up, and the two girls had appeared in the window of Clara’s room and pulled the blind down.
‘Sit down for a minute,’ I said to Brenda, fetching another deckchair. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Oh, no thanks, I won’t. Have you had a smashing time?’
‘Yes, very enjoyable—very busy, of course,’ I said, poor put-upon thing that I was. ‘But I really can’t thank you enough for having the kids. Were they all right?’
‘I didn’t know I had them, honestly,’ said Brenda. She went on to tell me of how much they’d eaten, what they’d said, and how much of a tonic they’d been generally. As she talked and I watched and listened I concluded that they must have been a tonic of sorts, for Brenda was certainly in cracking form, billowing in a becoming ethnic print, and with some new reddish colour on her hair. I warmed to her. She was a good sport.
‘I’m thinking of having a party, Brenda,’ I said. ‘ Would you and Trevor come?’
‘You bet, what fun!’ was her reply.
I ventured on to more sensitive territory. ‘How are things … I mean between you and Trevor, these days?’
‘Oh!’ she beamed, and wriggled her shoulders inside the ethnic tent, ‘oh, ever so much better, thanks.’
That was it, of course. I realised in that moment what it was that was different about Brenda. It wasn’t just the dress, or the hair; her boiler was stoked and lit. She was incandescent. All twelve and a half stone of nutty slack had the almost luminous glow of the well-laid woman. And perhaps it had been the presence of my children at Trevenda which had done it, by creating the necessary curb to marital conflict.
‘I’m so pleased,’ I said. ‘That is good news.’
When the Tunnels had gone, and the children and I had eaten cheese on toast, I announced my intention of driving into Barford to collect Spot from 55 Tennis Court Road. Gareth claimed to have pressing engagements, but Clara agreed to come along for the ride. She rather admired Bernice, who doubtless struck her as a sort of Naughtiest Girl in the School writ large.
In the car on the way I pressed her about the Tunnels. ‘Was it really all right? No disasters?’
‘Not if you don’t count her cooking.’
‘It’s okay, isn’t it? What was the matter with it?’
Clara shrugged. ‘It isn’t like yours.’
This constituted a pretty fulsome compliment. ‘Never mind, darling,’ I said indulgently, ‘you’re home now. And,’ I added, ‘I’m thinking of having a party.’
‘What, without Dad?’ asked Clara, the voice of conventional morality.
‘Why ever not? It will be a very good opportunity for me to ask all sorts of people Dad doesn’t care for, that I owe hospitality to.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well … people from my publishers for a start, to repay all the lunches and things I’ve had off them. I thought of making it a lunchtime party.’
Clara considered this, her face a mask of mistrust. ‘ Do they have children?’
‘Who?’
‘Publishers.’ She seemed to be asking about generic capability rather than specific fact. I realised I hadn’t a clue about even the marital, let alone the parental status of the Erans. To me, they were life’s eternal freewheelers, creatures of wine bar and restaurant, of boardroom and conference centre, of taxi, telex and media-launch. It was hard to imagine these darting, highly coloured gadflys staggering up to empty potties in the small hours, or bawling at pre-pubes to tidy their rooms. As for spouses, if spouses there were, I could not flesh them out into anything more than pin-people scurrying hither and thither, feeding the voracious egos of the Erans.
‘I haven’t a clue,’ I said. ‘ But I shouldn’t invite them anyway.’
‘Good,’ said Clara, ‘so Gareth and me can invite friends?’
‘I suppose so. A few.’
‘What about music? Damon could do that for you.’
‘No!’ I practically clipped a traffic island in my perturbation. ‘No, no, no!’
‘Groo,’ said Clara. ‘Sounds really, really dull.’
‘That sounds absolutely spifferoo!’ cried Bernice, when I told her. ‘I shall come, of course, and I might even persuade the Venerable Bede to accompany me.’
‘Good heavens.’ I was suitably astonished.
‘Oh yes.’ Bernice tapped the side of her nose with her forefinger. ‘Ways and means. The way to an academic’s heart is via his amour-propre. I shall tell him it’s his chance to meet some genuine schlock publishers.’
‘But won’t that put him off at once?’
‘Absolutely not, he’s all afire with the spirit of conversion. You know that TV that was in the offing when you came up a few weeks ago—well, it’s definitely on.’
‘Oh really, what is it?’
‘Some horrid trendy arts thing that Mercia TV are putting out—’
‘Not “Imitating Life”?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘What date?’
‘Can’t remember—but it’s the first one.’
I played my trump card. ‘I’m on that one too.’
‘Hell’s teeth,’ said Bernice in awe. ‘Be gentle with him, won’t you?’
We were sitting on Bernice’s patio, a sort of concrete jetty around which foamed an impenetrable mass of unkempt vegetation. Clara sat on the rusty swing-seat, drinking something gaseous and fluorescent called Zzip!, and Spot lay prostrate before us. He had put on weight under Bernice’s regime of goulash and inertia, and I reflected that both of us could do with some jogging.
‘You never said you were going on telly,’ said Clara accusingly.
‘Well, I am.’
‘What, with Mr Potter?’
‘More like against, I should think.’
‘How embarrassing,’ said my daughter. ‘You can’t even argue properly in real life, what on earth will you be like in front of a camera? It’ll be a massacre.’
‘For goodness sake, Clara,’ said Bernice loftily, ‘it’s only a discussion about books.’ I loved my friend, but with that one sentence she demonstrated her total ignorance of the world of publishing, both popular and otherwise.
The vegetation in front of us shuddered and rustled and finally disgorged Barty. He looked quite presentable, wearing a Barford University sweatshirt, and with his teeth in, but had spoiled the effect by wearing open sandals over stained nylon socks.
‘Hallo, Barty,’ said Clara. Oddly, she was not disgusted by Barty. Or at least, her disgust was mixed with respect for someone in whom disgustingness had found its apotheosis, and in adulthood too.
‘Hallo, darling,’ said Barty. ‘Hallo, Harriet love. Fancy a game of darts, darling?’
‘Okay,’ agreed Clara. I watched doubtfully as Barty shuffled off with his arm round my daughter. Bernice at once turned to me with an expression of lascivious expectation.
‘Well? How was it?’
I glanced round furtively. ‘Where’s Arundel?’
‘At the library. What happened?’ I told her, in graphic detail and not forgetting the m
atron episode. ‘Stroll on, as hairy as that, eh?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You do see life, Harriet,’ said Bernice happily. ‘And how do you feel about all this, now that the show’s on the road? Guilty? Ashamed? Soiled?’
I pondered my reply for a full three seconds. ‘No. Bucked.’
‘Wa-hay!’ Bernice lifted her clasped hands in the air. ‘That’s my girl!’ She pulled out the front of her T-shirt and glanced down. ‘I’m getting freckles. So what now?’
‘I don’t know. I was thinking I might write to George, and—’
‘And what? Don’t for God’s sake do anything hasty.’
‘I know, but I can’t possibly carry on with this once he gets back.’
‘Probably not. But it will have done both of you the power of good. Let the Greek keep charging your battery for as long as possible, and then pass the benefits on to George.’
I considered this option. It had a lot going for it, most of all commonsense and expediency. But there was one crucial flaw.
‘I don’t think I can give him up.’
Bernice gave me a look of affectionate contempt. ‘You took him on, you can give him up. George has a perfectly serviceable tool as well, you know.’
‘I know, I know … but I am hooked on Kostaki.’
‘Then George will prevent you getting withdrawal symptoms. Literally.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Look, missis,’ said Bernice, wagging an admonitory finger at me. ‘Make your mind up. If you think Kildare’s worth a divorce, that’s your funeral.’
‘That sounds a bit drastic—’
‘Well, it’s what you were implying, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know that I was—’
‘—implying anything, oh no, of course not.’ Bernice sighed despairingly.
I felt I had failed her. ‘What should I do?’ I asked humbly.
‘Eat your Greek and have him too, of course! All the benefits of marriage plus bonuses.’
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