by Ruth Rendell
“Come off it, Jeff.” Fiona’s patience had snapped. “Save it for this baby we’re supposed to be having next year. I’m grown-up.”
Chapter 10
THE ATTENTION SHE was getting was in many ways attractive and flattering. Zillah hadn’t expected all that publicity in the Mail on Sunday, and when she first saw the pictures and read the respectful story about herself and Jims, she’d been entranced. Other people had seen it too and rung up to congratulate her. Only one had asked why Eugenie and Jordan weren’t mentioned and this woman had supplied her own answer: “I suppose you want to protect them from media attention.”
That was exactly right, Zillah had said. She’d had a few days in which to relax and enjoy living in Abbey Gardens Mansions, appreciate the comforts of her new home, so vastly superior even to the Battersea flat, and to decide it was time to fetch the children. They’d been staying with her parents in Bournemouth since two days before the wedding, but she was beginning to miss them and she wanted them back. The publicity was past. She was realizing the truth of what she’d guessed all along, that Jims wasn’t famous, was a mere backbench MP and an opposition MP at that, and that all that had attracted the press were her and Jims’s good looks. And maybe the fact that everyone had thought he was gay and about to be “outed.”
The children could come back, go out for walks with her, be driven about by her in her nice new silver Mercedes, go to school in Westminster, and no one would take a blind bit of notice. So Zillah thought-until the first journalist phoned.
“I’m not disturbing your honeymoon, I hope?”
“We’re not having a honeymoon till Easter,” said Zillah, who wasn’t much looking forward to this sex-free excursion to an island in the Indian Ocean with nothing to do but drink and chat to Jims all day.
“Not even a tiny scrap of one?” the woman asked. She worked for a national daily. “I’m calling to beg for an interview. Our Thursday slot. I expect you know what I mean.”
Zillah forgot all about Jims’s instructions to refer all such requests to Malina Daz. She forgot her fear of journalists. They’d been so kind to her in the Mail. Why shouldn’t she do it? The children weren’t back yet. This would give her a chance to confirm everything that had already appeared in print and maybe get some more glamour shots. “Will you take photographs?”
She must have sounded apprehensive for the journalist misunderstood. “Well, yes, of course. A piece about someone as attractive as you wouldn’t be much without photos, would it?”
Zillah agreed to it. Two hours later the features editor of a glossy magazine was on the phone. They’d left her alone for a few days, but the time had come to have something appear that was more comprehensive than a few lines about her wedding. Zillah mentioned the other journalist.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Ours will be very different, I assure you. You’ll love it. You’re going to receive a great deal of attention, I can tell you, especially with the rumor going around that your husband was going to be outed.”
“There was never anything in that,” Zillah said nervously.
“You cured him, did you? Sorry, that wasn’t very PC of me. Maybe I should say, you brought about a change of heart. How’s that? We’ll say Friday at three, then, shall we? The photographer will come an hour earlier to get set up.”
By the time Zillah got around to telling Jims and, through him, Malina Daz, two more newspapers and another magazine had joined the queue. Malina belonged to the school of thought which holds that all publicity is good publicity. Jims was more cautious, urging Zillah to deny his reputed orientation as vehemently as possible. The night before the first journalist was due, the two of them invented a past girlfriend for Jims, her name, her appearance, her age, and Zillah’s jealousy of her. At the interview Zillah said this woman was now married and living in Hong Kong. For obvious reasons, her present identity couldn’t be disclosed. When she talked to the magazine she forgot the former girlfriend’s age and said she lived in Singapore, but Jims said it wouldn’t matter, as newspapers got everything wrong anyway.
The children were still in Bournemouth. Their grandparents had agreed, though rather grudgingly, to keep them a week longer. Mrs. Watling said on the phone she thought there was something ironical about Eugenie and Jordan staying in Bournemouth “indefinitely” when for the first time in their lives they had a decent home, while she and their grandfather had never seen them from one year’s end to the next when they’d lived in that dump in Dorset. Zillah said to bear with her a while longer-a phrase she’d picked up from Malina Daz-and she and Jims would be down to fetch the children the weekend after next.
The first interview appeared in print on Friday morning. The photographs came out wonderfully well and the feature itself was a chatty piece with nothing in it about Jims’s prospective “outing” and plenty about Zillah’s lovely looks and dress sense. In another Malina phrase, the whole subject had been “treated with sensitivity.” The invented girlfriend was mentioned with a few words about her “long relationship” with Jims. Altogether it was highly satisfactory. Two more articles were “in the pipeline,” said Malina, and several more interviews were to come.
Jims was happy with the piece but knew the ways of the media as Zillah didn’t. He could hardly have been in the Commons for seven years without knowing their ways. “Tabloids are often okay until they’ve got their knife into you,” he said to Zillah. “Magazines are fine, magazines are pussycats. It’s national dailies like the Guardian you want to worry about.”
“It might be useful for me to put in a presence,” said Malina, meaning she ought to be there, “when Zillah meets with the print media, especially the quality broadsheets.”
“Good idea,” Jims agreed.
Zillah didn’t like Malina. She hadn’t been told the truth about the marriage but had guessed. Sometimes Zillah thought she’d caught her smiling secretly to herself. She was in and out of the flat in Abbey Gardens Mansions, popping into bedrooms, Zillah suspected, opening drawers and poking her long, slender fingers into desk pigeonholes. Malina had a boyfriend who was a top cardiologist in Harley Street and she was thinner than Zillah, maybe two whole dress sizes thinner.
She didn’t want Malina present when she talked to the Times and the Telegraph. It was bad enough having the photographer there, taking pictures when she was off her guard and had her mouth open or held her head at an awkward angle. Malina’s secretive little smile and way of contemplating with admiration her own hands and silver-painted nails would be, in her own word, “inappropriate.” So Zillah said nothing to her about the forthcoming interview with a freelancer for the Telegraph Magazine. Jims would be absent too, in the Commons Chamber on that day for the local government bill.
She was waiting for the photographer to come, standing in the window looking across toward Dean’s Yard, when she saw a car draw up and park by the curb on a double yellow line. A newspaper photographer ought to know better. They’d tow him away or clamp him. She opened the window, preparing to call out to him not to leave the car there, but instead of getting out, the driver stayed where he was behind the wheel. Zillah couldn’t see very clearly, but in spite of the car being a BMW and a far cry from the ancient Ford Anglia he had driven away in after their last meeting, she was almost sure the man was Jerry.
She put her head out of the window and stared. He was studying something, probably a map or plan. It looked a lot like Jerry, but from this distance she couldn’t be sure. If this photographer and journalist hadn’t been coming she’d have gone down and made sure of his identity and, if it was Jerry, confronted him. If they weren’t coming she wouldn’t have been all dressed up in skintight purple trousers, shoes with three-inch heels, and a black and white bustier. She closed the window. It was too far away to see properly. The man in the car looked up. It was Jerry. Surely it was. And whose was the dark blue BMW? Not his, that was for sure. The doorbell rang.
The photographer had come from the Abbey direction, which was wh
y she hadn’t seen him. He had an assistant with him, the usual teenager, or teenager lookalike, and the two of them started setting up, spreading ice white sheets all over the furniture and opening and shutting a silver-lined umbrella. Zillah went back to the window. A traffic warden was talking to the man in the BMW. She hoped he’d get out so that she could have a proper look at him. He didn’t, but drove off toward Millbank.
Zillah didn’t enjoy the interview. The journalist was once again a woman but serious-looking and austerely dressed in a black trouser suit. She introduced herself as Natalie Reckman. Her features were severely classical and her fair hair was scraped back and fastened by a barrette. She wore no jewelry but a thick, heavy, and curiously sculpted gold ring on her right hand. A businesslike notebook was taken out of her black leather briefcase, as was a recording device. Zillah, who had been feeling glamorously dressed, was suddenly conscious of the ornate Oriental necklace she was wearing, amethysts in tooled silver, the fashionable dozen or so bead bracelets, and the earrings dangling to her shoulders. And the questions put to her were more awkward than usual, more probing.
This woman was the first journalist to say nothing complimentary about her appearance. At first she seemed more interested in Jims than in his new wife. Zillah did her best to talk about him as an ardent young bride might about her new husband. How clever he was, how considerate of her, and what a wise move it was to marry one’s best friend. As to his political career, he was so dutiful that they’d postponed their honeymoon until Easter. They were going to the Maldives. Darling Jims would have preferred Morocco, he was longing to go there, but he’d deferred to her choice of the Maldives. They’d go to Morocco in the winter.
Natalie Reckman yawned. She sat up straight and the interview took a different turn. After trying to find out what Zillah had done for a living before she married and being reluctant to accept her vague description of herself as an “artist,” she asked with some incredulity if she was expected to believe the MP’s new bride had really lived by herself in a Dorset village for seven years without a job, a partner, or any friends. Zillah, who was becoming angry, said she could believe what she liked. Zillah was thinking quickly whether it was too late to mention the children, to bring them into the conversation somehow. But how to account for never before confessing to their existence?
The journalist smiled. She began asking about Jims. How long had they known each other? Twenty-two years? Yet they’d never been seen about together before their marriage nor, apparently, lived under the same roof.
“Not everyone agrees with premarital sex,” said Zillah.
The journalist looked Zillah up and down, from the earrings and the big hair to her stiletto heels. “You’re one of those who don’t?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. That’s fine. I expect you’ve heard your husband used to be grouped with several MPs that a rather censorious person who shall be nameless threatened to “out.” What do you feel about that?”
Zillah was beginning to regret the absence of Malina. “That’s something else I’d prefer not to talk about.”
“Surely you’d like to say there was no truth in the rumor?”
“If you print anything about my husband being gay,” said Zillah, her control going, “I’ll sue you for libel.”
“Now, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith, or Zillah, if I may, that’s a very interesting thing you’ve just said. It seems to show you think it’s an insult to suggest someone is gay. Do you? Is it likely to bring the subject into hatred, ridicule, or contempt? Do you believe being gay is inferior? Or wrong? Is there a moral difference between being straight and being gay?”
“I don’t know,” Zillah shouted. “I don’t want to say any more to you.”
Jims and Malina would have known that by now the interviewer had a wonderful story that she could hardly wait to get down on paper-or a floppy disk. Zillah only wanted her to go and leave her alone. And eventually she did go, not in the least put out by Zillah’s anger and refusal to say another word to her. Zillah felt shaken. It had all been so very different from the previous two interviews. She now regretted concealing the children’s existence. Could she possibly leave them with her parents a little longer? They liked being there, they seemed to prefer it to being at home with their mother, but her parents weren’t, in her mother’s phrase, as young as they used to be, and were growing weary, worn out by Jordan’s night crying. And why had that awful woman asked so many questions about what she’d been doing before her marriage? Zillah acknowledged that she hadn’t adequately prepared herself.
One consolation was that the Telegraph Magazine wasn’t like newspapers, the article wouldn’t appear for weeks and weeks. Perhaps not even until she and Jims were in the Maldives. And perhaps it wasn’t too late to stop it-if she dared ask Malina to intervene on her behalf. That would take some thinking about. She didn’t say a word to Jims about it when he came home. That wasn’t until 1 A.M., anyway. He’d been in the Commons chamber, but after the seven o’clock vote he’d slipped out and walked a hundred yards along Millbank where he’d taken a cab to visit his new friend in Chelsea.
Zillah was beginning to see that getting oneself into the newspaper might not be all fun and glamour. These journalists were cleverer than she’d expected. Jims could be left out of it for now, but she had to talk to someone. She phoned Malina and the PR woman came round. “I thought maybe you could call the Telegraph Magazine and say I didn’t mean that about libel and I’m sorry I shouted at her.”
Malina was appalled but didn’t show it. “That would be inappropriate, don’t you think? I would have put in a presence if I’d only been notified. But you did give the interview of your own free will, Zillah. No one brought any pressure to bear.”
“I was hoping you could stop it altogether. Suggest I gave her another interview. I’d be more careful next time.”
“No next time would be the preferred option, Zillah.” Malina seemed to have changed her mind about all publicity being good. “But I suppose it’s too late for that.”
“You could call the other papers and just say I don’t want to.”
“They’ll want a reason.”
“Say I’m ill. Say I’ve got-gastroenteritis.”
“They’ll think you’re pregnant. You’re not, are you?”
“Of course I’m not,” Zillah snapped.
“Shame. That would be the answer to all our prayers.”
But Malina canceled three of the projected interviews and would have canceled the fourth, scheduled for the next day, but the journalist she was trying to reach wasn’t answering his mobile, ignored her e-mail and fax, and responded to none of the messages she left. In spite of not liking her, Zillah had such confidence in Malina that she didn’t bother to dress up when the visit from the next broadsheet was due. Malina would have canceled it. When the doorbell rang she thought, Suppose it’s Jerry? She ran to answer it without, for once, bothering to look in the mirror first.
Charles Challis was the sort of man Zillah would in other circumstances have described as “dishy.” But the circumstances were all wrong because she hadn’t been expecting anyone, particularly a man, and she looked a mess. “You weren’t supposed to come,” she said. “We canceled you.”
“Not to my knowledge. Is the photographer here yet?”
Then Zillah did look in the mirror, at her unmade-up face, unwashed hair, and sweater that was a souvenir of six years in Long Fredington and had originally come from the British Home Stores. Numbly she led Charles Challis into the living room. He asked her nothing about Jims’s reputed gayness nor what she did for a living and made no comment on her appearance. He was nice. Zillah decided it wasn’t journalists she disliked but women journalists. She asked the photographer if it would be all right for her to put on some makeup. When she came back Charles, as he’d asked her to call him, edged his questioning on to politics.
This was a subject of which Zillah admitted to herself she knew litt
le. She knew who the prime minister was and she said she thought him “dishy,” but she couldn’t remember the name of the leader of the Opposition. The journalist put to her the burning question of the hour. What was her opinion on Section 28?
She looked blank. Charles explained. Section 28 forbade local authorities to promote homosexuality; the provision proposed in the local government bill was to repeal it. Their contention was that, due to the section, children uncertain of their orientation were confused and made the victims of bullying. What did Zillah think about it?
Zillah didn’t want to get into any more trouble. Recalling what the Reckman woman had implied about homosexuals and heterosexuals being equal with no moral difference between them, she said hotly that Section 28 was obviously wrong. It should be got rid of and quickly. Charles wrote it all down and tested his recorder to check that Zillah’s voice was coming across clearly. How about trial by jury? Was Zillah in favor of shortening court proceedings and thereby saving the taxpayer’s money? The night before, Jims had been complaining at length about the income tax he paid, so Zillah said she was all for economy and people on juries weren’t lawyers, were they, so what did they know?
She felt quite pleased with herself. The photographs wouldn’t be too bad. She often thought the casual look suited her better than formality. Malina phoned after they’d gone and said she’d managed to cancel everything but Charles Challis. How had the interview gone?
“It was marvelous. He was so nice.”
“Good. Well done, you.” Malina didn’t say that the journalist in question was known in the Groucho Club as Poisoned Chalice.
