I would happily have barbecued Natalie at that moment, but I had to agree. She wasn’t a monster either. Jeanette was.
‘There you are,’ said Ned. ‘That’s why I’m convinced it was Jeanette and I’ll tell you something else; whoever did it is quite an operator. Shelley – that was the girl I used to go out with from Hot Stuff! – told me at the time that the “contact” had put them in touch with someone on the staff at the hotel who confirmed they had seen you arrive back at the hotel that morning in compromising circumstances with Jay Fisher.
‘So, whoever it was who rang Hot Stuff!,’ he continued, ‘had the story – and a contact that the mag could check out for confirmation – already in place before they made the call, which is pretty professional stuff.’
‘But how did they get the pics?’ I asked, still not quite understanding how it had all come together.
‘That’s the easy bit for a mag like Hot Stuff!, isn’t it? Once they’d had the tip-off from Jeanette – presuming it was her – that Jay Fisher had been seen dancing on the Riviera with the glamorous daughter of a life peer, while he was supposed to be having a fling with Jericho, they just got on to the paparazzi who had been following the whole Jericho party down there to see if they had any pics from the night. And they did.’
I leaned back in my chair with my hands behind my head and sighed deeply. It was exhausting just thinking about it.
‘How come the paps were at that club?’ I wondered. ‘It was nowhere near the hotel we were all staying at.’
‘The club would have tipped them off that Jericho was going to be there that night – or her management would have, for that matter. You know how she loves publicity. And luckily for the whole sleazy lot of them it turned out that while they were waiting for her to arrive, they took those pictures of you and Jay Fisher on the dance floor – just in case. And it paid off for them.’
‘So if Jeanette – or whoever – hadn’t tipped Hot Stuff! off, those pictures of me and Jay Fisher would probably just have been chucked out?’
‘Probably,’ agreed Ned, shrugging. ‘I mean, with a guy like that – a “billion-heir” as they call him – anyone he dances with is going to come under some scrutiny, aren’t they? It’s just that they probably wouldn’t have found out who you were, if they hadn’t been tipped off by our friend here.’
‘I would just have been the “mystery girl”…’ I said, then something else occurred to me. ‘So did Shelley say what name the “contact” used when she rang the magazine?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Ned. ‘I’m glad you asked me that – that’s a good one. She pretended to be you.’
I sank back into my chair and just let it all swirl around in my head. Well, that all fitted perfectly with what I already knew. The reporter at Hot Stuff! had told Jay it was me who had sold them the story, and now it turned out it wasn’t just a line, to fob him off. That was what they had believed.
And why wouldn’t they? There were always people prepared to do things like that to promote themselves and for anyone wanting to boost their personal profile, some intimate pictures with Jay Fisher would be excellent exposure. Especially when he had been recently linked with someone as hugely famous as Jericho. Fame by association and all that.
‘But how come they didn’t call me here to check?’ I wondered.
Ned shrugged. ‘She probably gave them a mobile number that she pretended was yours. You know, bought a cheap pay-as-you-go phone, which she used just for that, put a message on it pretending to be you. People do it all the time.’
He leaned towards me.
‘And anyway Hot Stuff! didn’t care who the story was from. They had the pics, they had the confirmation from the hotel snitch, and they knew it was you in the pictures, just from looking at your byline shot from this paper, so it was more than solid as far as they were concerned – and juicy too.
‘A nightmare superstar who’s famously unlucky in love, a billionaire bachelor playboy and a bit of London posh totty. A jet-set love triangle on the French Riviera – it’s a great story.’
I put my head in my hands, trying to take it all in. It was almost too much to process, but one question kept rising up out of the great swirl of competing thoughts. I looked back at Ned.
‘There’s one thing I don’t understand in all of this,’ I said to him. ‘That all happened way before this new section even came along – so what I want to know is: Why does Jeanette Foster hate me so much?’
Ned looked uncharacteristically serious.
‘That’s what I’m going to find out next,’ he said.
16
That night when I had my regular bedtime conversation with Jay, I told him all about it.
‘OΚ,’ he said, when I’d related the whole story, as figured out by me and Ned. ‘Let me get this straight – you’re telling me it was one of your colleagues at the paper who called the magazine and tipped them off about us? And she’d been given the information by another colleague, who’d been told by one of the other journalists who was at the Jericho thing? Have I got that straight?’
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’
‘OΚ,’ said Jay. ‘So is this normal when you work on a newspaper? I mean, I know what the press do to people like me – but you’re telling me they do it to each other as well?’
He had me there.
‘Well,’ I started. ‘I think this was quite an unusual case, but yeah, it can be pretty bitchy. People get very ambitious – and jealous – and they do try to stitch each other up. It’s very competitive.’
Jay said nothing, he didn’t need to. He’d made his point – this was the marvellous job I loved so much, the job that was keeping us from being together at that very moment.
I sighed. I could see how it looked to him, but his resentment of my work was just about the only thing that irritated me about Jay. I mean, I was pleased that he wanted to be with me so much that my job pissed him off because it was keeping us apart, but I somehow felt he should show it a little more respect. Especially as he had never worked a day in his life, as far as I could tell.
But apart from that, things were as sweet as ever and even though our only contact for the time being was phone calls, texts and emails, it wasn’t showing any signs of wearing thin between us.
I just hoped it would last until he could come back to London again – because I couldn’t see myself taking time off to go to New York anytime soon.
He’d told me he was going straight on to LA from his mother’s place, to catch up with some old friends, and I couldn’t help imagining the kind of women he would meet there – and how pleased they would be to see him.
Although I tried not to fret about it – telling myself that Jay was a free man, just as I was a free woman – I was aware that the longer we were apart, the greater was the likelihood of him meeting someone else. Who perhaps wasn’t quite so irritatingly committed to her day job.
For the time being, though, with him five and a half thousand miles away, my job was still my main focus and despite all Jeanette’s efforts to undermine me, the presentation that Friday morning was a triumph.
Ned’s revelation about the source of the Hot Stuff! story had left me momentarily battle weary, but that soon turned to cold fury – the perfect state of mind to show I would not be beaten by Jeanette and her mean tricks. I’d win out through talent, application and hard work. And I think I was also a little driven by the need to prove something to Jay.
Ned and I did the presentation as a kind of double act, acting out the part of Journal readers, with me as the seasoned and sophisticated luxury shopper and him as the less-experienced but cashed-up younger consumer, both explaining how the various parts of the section we had created appealed to us and served our needs.
From the first slinky lounge beats of the opening soundtrack – Ned’s idea, he’d got a DJ friend to put it together – and the way I had styled the boardroom with ranks of designer carrier bags, our presentation had been smart, funny and clever, an
d it had worked brilliantly.
Between doing my bit of the yackety-yak and keeping on top of the technology – we had the mocked-up dummies of our proposed pages projected on to screens from two laptops, with light pointers and all that malarkey – I hadn’t really been able to take in their reaction while we were doing it. I was concentrating too hard.
But when we’d finished, I looked up to see Peter beaming at me like a proud uncle. That was all the confirmation I needed that it had gone well, but it didn’t hurt to see that Doughnut and the advertising execs looked equally happy – and that Jeanette looked like she had just been forced to eat a plate of cat food. Result.
I looked back at Ned and it was clear he had just clocked her too. He grinned and winked at me.
‘Bravo,’ Doughnut was saying, leading a little spattering of applause, which I could see it was nearly killing Jeanette to join in with. ‘That was superb. I’m feeling quite excited about this section now – I think it’s going to add some real energy to the paper at the end of the week.
‘So, well done, you two, excellent work. Now, take yourselves off for a good lunch on expenses somewhere and don’t come back this afternoon. You can start commissioning all this on Monday.’
Ned and I were so excited that we did a little victory dance around my office when we got back down there, whooping and hollering with glee.
He grabbed me for a spontaneous burst of polka and on one of the giddy turns, I thought I saw a face staring malevolently in at us through the glass wall of my office. It was Jeanette, I realized, but by the time I had broken free from Ned and turned around, it was gone. I shuddered involuntarily and before I could say anything to Ned, Peter appeared in the doorway, clapping.
‘Bravo, bravo,’ he was saying. ‘That was marvellous, quite brilliant. Donald is thrilled, as you may have gathered. And I think you can rest assured that your future here is secure, Ned.’
Ned punched the air in triumph, as Peter walked over to me and put his hands on my shoulders.
‘Oh, did you see the expression on her face?’ he almost sang into my ear. ‘Pure bile – such bliss.’
Then he disappeared off to Gino’s for his customary lunch.
‘So,’ said Ned, turning himself round and round on my chair, like an excited little boy. ‘Where shall we have lunch then? Can you get us into The Ivy? The Wolseley?’
‘Probably,’ I said, laughing. ‘You’ve developed a taste for the high life pretty quickly, matey, I must say, but I’ve got another idea – are you doing anything this weekend?’
‘Getting pissed and sleeping it off probably. Getting laid if I’m lucky.’
‘Have you got a girlfriend at the moment then?’ I asked tentatively. I didn’t want to make the offer I was about to, if he did.
‘No,’ he said, one of his cheeky smiles spreading across his chops. ‘But I’ve got a reputation to keep up.’
I balled up a press release and threw it at his head.
‘Well, I was just wondering if you would like to skip the lunch today and come straight down to my dad’s place with me for the weekend. There’s going to be loads of us down there, it’ll be a bit crazy, I warn you, it always is, but good fun. You could nip home for your kit now and I’ll meet you at Victoria in a couple of hours.’
Ned looked really surprised – but pleased.
‘I’d love to do that, Stella,’ he said. ‘It won’t matter that I’m an uncouth colonial?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I told him. ‘My dad might be a lord by name, but he’s a total savage by inclination and he’s going to love you. You two have a lot in common…’
It only occurred to me as I said it, but it was true. They’d either love each other on sight, or it would be a clash of the testosterone titans. Ned was very much an Alpha Male, in his own particular way.
After he left to get his things, and I gathered up my own bits and pieces to leave the office, I hoped I wouldn’t regret the invitation.
It had been a completely spontaneous impulse to ask him down – I’d almost been surprised to hear the words come out of my mouth as I’d said them – but I knew Ham and Chloe wouldn’t mind, they were always urging me to bring friends there.
In fact, Ham would be delighted – once he had got over his initial disappointment that Ned wasn’t a future son-in-law – to see that I had a friend of any kind.
He was always telling me I could have the whole place for the weekend anytime I wanted to ‘with a crowd of mates’. His face got so sweetly excited whenever he suggested it, because he loved the idea of me having a wild time down there with great gangs of ‘young people’, using the house to its full capacity, but I just didn’t have a crowd of friends in that way.
I had workmates, like Tim, Peter and Ned, who I rarely saw outside the office; I had the people I knew from the luxury circuit, like Amy and Becca; there were a few bods I kept in touch with from school and university; the odd person I had met on holidays over the years; my human handbags; and various ex-boyfriends I was on good terms with, but I saw them all as separate friends, not as a cohesive crowd.
I just didn’t particularly like introducing friends from different compartments in my life to each other. It made me feel uncomfortable and exposed, as though I would somehow be revealed if they could get together and compare notes on me, so I always saw them separately. It’s just the way I was.
Even introducing friends to my family was unusual for me, so this weekend with Ned would be quite a new experience. It had been a spur-of-the-moment idea, inspired by the triumph of our collaboration, but as I walked to the Tube, it did occur to me that having him there that particular weekend would also help to make sure there wouldn’t be any more overly intimate moments with Alex this time.
That last one had been so weird, I really didn’t want to risk it again – and it seemed my subconscious had taken care of that for me.
It turned out to be one of the legendary weekends at Willow Barn. The weather was great – a mini heatwave – the garden was blooming in its June splendour, the strawberries were ripe, and with all his biological children, plus a couple of ex-stepkids, an ex-wife and his new best friend (Ned, they did bond) in residence, Ham was at his most ebullient.
It really was a ‘house party’. Not in the snobby stately-home sense, but because there was such a festive atmosphere spread over the entire place that the house seemed very much a part of the event – just as it was designed to be.
All the windows and doors were permanently open and people were constantly coming and going, in ever-changing combinations. Hordes of kids would come racing in through one door and then disappear out of another, and whichever part of the house or gardens you went into you would come across little knots of people happily engaged in various activities. It was – to use a Henry Montecourt buzzword – completely ‘fluid’.
With all the children in situ – including Archie – I did end up in the guest wing again, but it was fine. Ned and Rose were sleeping there too, as well as me and Alex, and we ended up being quite a tight little unit of our own. Plus it helped that I had a bedroom on the ground floor next to Rose, with the two boys in rooms on the upper floor.
Apart from anything else, it was great to see Rose again. After Chloe, she was my favourite stepmother and she’d been in my life at such a formative stage – from eight to seventeen – that she’d been a huge formative influence on me. She was certainly the reason I couldn’t cook. She never cooked herself, she had very little interest in food and just couldn’t be bothered with it.
What I loved about Ross was that, despite such talent gaps, especially of one so crucial when raising a large family, she was completely unflappable. She was very creative – a brilliant garden designer and a good watercolourist too – but there was none of the neurosis that often goes with that temperament.
She wasn’t a very good housekeeper at all, completely chaotic actually, but it never mattered somehow. She had just always made sure she had a reliable and devote
d team of domestic help to look after things for her.
She was always finding a ‘marvellous little chap in Lewes’ who would cook all the food for a Willow Barn weekend in advance and deliver it, ready to be heated up, and ‘such a sweet girl from the village’ who would clean and organize the house, making sure all the ironing was done and the beds immaculately made.
Really, the ability to find such people and make them slavishly loyal to her, was as much a talent as being able to do it yourself, I had decided.
Ned and I were having a quiet drink on the terrace of the guest wing on the Friday evening when she and Alex arrived.
‘Where’s that darling girl?’ I heard Rose saying as she came in – she was always already talking to the people in a room before she entered – and I sprang up to meet her.
It was a couple of years since I’d last seen her and she hadn’t changed at all. Still as skinny as a teenager, with the same kind of sporty spring to her limbs, and her hair – which now had a lot of grey mixed in with the natural blonde – in the same boyish Christopher Robin cut.
‘Let me look at you,’ she said, holding me at arm’s length. ‘Marvellous. I always knew you were a beauty, even though I was your stepmother during those terrible awkward years girls have. She was quite the ugly duckling, weren’t you, sweetheart?’
She roared with laughter and introduced herself to Ned.
‘Oh, brilliant,’ she said, eyeing his packet of Camels on the table. ‘Another smoker. We can be untouchables together.’
By the time Alex emerged on to the terrace we were having a great time, with Rose and Ned wreathed in smoke, a bottle of white wine well on the go.
‘Alex,’ I said, standing up to kiss him. ‘Great to see you. This is my colleague, Ned Morrissey. We work at the Journal together. We had a bit of a triumph today and so Ned’s come down here to celebrate with me.’
They shook hands and I continued to babble slightly.
‘Ned, this is my ex-stepbrother, Alex. He works in the City. Rose is his mum and she used to be married to my dad.’
Cents and Sensibility Page 24
