‘But Jody, this is never the answer.’
‘Dad. I’ve got to go. I’ll come home if I can. Tell Mum—’
‘Jody, no! They’ll be watching. That’s exactly where they’ll expect you to be.’
‘Or the last place.’
They both lift hands defensively as a way of saying goodbye without touching.
On his way home, trying to decide how to tell his wife—‘it’ll be all right, Babs, it’ll be all right’—Leonard Middleton nervously purchases a newspaper. He opens it with dread in his hands.
FOURTEEN
The Grange, Dunsop, Nr Clitheroe, Lancs
IT’S ALL SUCH A muddled mess. From now and into the foreseeable future, all Jacy’s royalties must go to pay back taxes. After Capital Gains Tax, any profit he might make from the sale of his house must go towards the legal fees he is still paying for a defamation-of-character case which was settled out of court. He called Deek the guitarist ‘a fixer’—not the most startling abuse, and far weaker language than he has used towards his former buddy in friendly banter in happier times. Jacy was referring to Deek’s shady negotiations with the recording company, Elektra, which ended with him being dumped on, and how. The papers took it to mean that Deek was an addict, which he was, but they made such a fuss about it, and the hostile publicity was so intense, that Jacy was forced to pay up and shut up.
And then there is that sorry business when he was done for drunken driving. He is still paying for that.
When the small Lancashire estate is wound up, Jacy will be left owing a little money, a petty sum hardly worth bothering about. However, in order to sort his finances out and to his great humiliation, he was dragged to court with Belle like some loser to explain humbly how he will manage to pay his debts over the next few years.
A wicked blow to his ego.
Belle’s irregular but impressive income, which she will use towards these liabilities, especially after they marry, went a long way to satisfy that uppity judge.
And now it looks as if they might be on the brink of selling The Grange.
‘Time to tie the knot,’ says Belle firmly. ‘Or have you changed your mind since your shockingly violent outbreak?’ She holds that incident over his head like a bucket of cold water. She will not leave it alone.
‘Leave it out,’ pleads Jacy, desperately wondering what marriage might do to his image. It won’t necessarily taint it, especially when you think he is marrying a top model. In fact, the publicity—if they can swing any positive publicity after all the flack they’ve taken from the press—might do his flagging career some good.
But the problem with publicity at the moment is his shameful move to Ribblestone Close. The last thing he wants is for his adoring public, who are still out there somewhere he’s certain, to discover he has sunk so low in the credibility stakes. Any publicity is not good publicity, not in Jacy’s experience. Naturally, there has never been a FOR SALE sign up at The Grange, so there’s still a chance they could call in the press, announce their marriage, and make out they are living together happily in impressive circumstances. That’s if the nosy locals can keep their mouths shut.
Belle is not immediately opposed to his idea—amazing!—but she does worry about the state of the house and how they could get it spruced up in time for any romantic announcement. ‘And then we must consider the real possibility that nobody will be interested…’
‘We could even get married here at The Grange,’ says Jacy with hope in his heart, ignoring her undermining remarks. He colours angrily but says nothing. Sometimes he thinks he’s going crazy with anger and no way to speak it out loud. The last time he tried, Belle ended up with a black eye and he’s never hit a woman before. Believe it—he was as shocked as she was. What is happening to him these days? Where has the old Jacy gone? ‘We could get a licence.’
‘We might,’ says Belle reluctantly, still only half-convinced. ‘It would cost an arm and a leg to get a firm of cleaners in, and then there’s the tatty grounds to think about. We would have to know that people were interested before we coughed up that sort of money.’
Tight as a duck’s arse as ever. Oh dear God. But all is not yet lost, thinks Jacy to himself.
‘Of course the whole idea would work much better around some positive information—say, if you were to start up another group, for instance, or if Deek and you and Rab were reconciled, or if Jip took up religion. All hypotheticals which don’t stand a hope in hell, of course.’
Belle will do anything, go through anything, shell out any amount in order to marry him. This is a dream coming true for her, and Jacy considers that he is doing her a magnanimous favour. It is right and proper that he should get something in return. ‘I wonder if any of the old group could be persuaded to join in a publicity session…’ she muses.
Jacy doesn’t need to think any further. No is the answer to that; no, they would not—and the thought is an uncomfortable one. After all, those three who are making it with the new band don’t need to, and Darcy and Cyd are coke-heads living in squalor in London squats, last time he heard anything. Darcy had been beaten up, mugged if you please and quite seriously injured according to reports, poor guy. There but for the grace of God… And anyway, Jacy would get far more pleasure from publicity created for himself alone. Christ, how his enemies would hate that… the thought of Jacy getting back on his feet again.
In those far-off and balmy days, people who hated him felt impelled to tolerate him. Not any more. Most had taken advantage of his downfall and been quite unnecessarily outspoken. ‘The main trouble with Jacy,’ said his old friend Jip, ‘is that he doesn’t love his work enough not to put money first. Now I can’t help it, but I’m totally different. I don’t happen to be one who regards money as the first and only thing in the world.’
Sanctimonious pig.
Jip love his work? That was the first time Jacy had ever heard him say that. He’d grumbled enough about it at the time.
‘It would work much better if the press thought they had dug something up by themselves,’ he says. ‘If only we could swing it. That way they’d be far more likely to turn up in numbers.’ But what might they dig up? All Jacy’s skeletons were long ago let out of the cupboard and there’s nothing interesting about him left. He does nothing. He goes nowhere. The rake has even turned monogamous and has been for almost six long, boring years. No, there’s nothing about Colin Smedley that anyone out there would want to know.
The idol has been eliminated and left with this hollow feeling of loss.
And it’s all Belle’s fault, with her two-edged love like a sword. But he will not allow his last wisps of hope to be taken away, not by her, dear God. Not by anyone.
They have to hide in the grounds today. For once it isn’t raining; the climate in this godless part of the world is always ten degrees lower than it is down south and it takes some time to adjust.
Some hairy-jacketed jerk came round last week and seemed pretty interested. Apparently he was ‘acting for clients’, or some such ridiculous notion. Today somebody even more important is coming. The agents aren’t showing them round, some solicitor from Sheffield is. It all sounds a mite shady to Jacy, who doesn’t give a damn as long as the offer is confirmed.
Four o’clock they said, so after Belle has finished the Hoovering and washed up the dishes from three days ago, the two of them set off with Jacy’s old metal detector to the quarry which Belle reckons must hide some interesting Roman remains. Jacy is always on the lookout for treasure; this is just about the only outdoor activity which he finds acceptable.
Funny how this battered old thing is still going after so many years when the expensive, luxury goods have mostly packed up and been chucked out. Jacy and his two younger brothers used to spend hours searching the beach at Bishop’s Head when they lived outside Swansea as kids. Never found anything save for the odd loose change. But you always had this burning hope, it was more like a firm belief, that one day you’d come home puffing and struggl
ing over the dunes with a casket full of gold. You were far more likely to step on a mine but kids don’t think that way…
Even in those days Jacy went everywhere with that plastic guitar his mum got him out of her catalogue.
Belle is convinced that his working-class roots make him bitter, most of it directed at her with her ‘prattish’ middle-class background. To annoy him, and only for that reason, she has always gone on about meeting his family. As a child Jacy had struggled to better himself, always been determined to make it. His Mam had ambitions for him, too, and dragged him in front of his first audience when he was twelve years old, some corny seaside competition to discover the entertainer of the year. Being twelve and small for his age helped. He called himself Little Devil because of the peak of dark hair at his forehead. He came tenth out of over 1,000 contestants with an Elvis Presley number and won a racing bike which was too small so he gave it to his brother, Jack.
For as long as he can remember, he has alternated between an almost unbearable impatience and a demoralising panic. Since then every single rejection has felt like a lash across the face of a very hungry man.
Only Jacy knows this, and he would never share this information with another soul, least of all Belle who might use it against him. Even when he was at the top he expected people to see through his bluff and laugh at him. He did, honestly. He feared mockery more than death. No amount of success took his terrors away or made him feel more secure. He always believed that he was somehow putting something over on everybody underneath all that acclaim and worship.
An expert con man. Unlike Jip who really knows about music.
Not for the first time he wonders what his life might have been like if nothing had ever happened to him, if he’d stayed stuck at home, that gloomy semi full of bric-a-brac, embroidered Biblical texts and odd pieces of furniture. He used to hear from his family now and again, mostly hinting broadly for money or warning him about sin among the savage peoples of the earth. He did not reply—well, he was too busy on the road to fame and fortune to write letters or spend hours on the telephone sympathising with his mother’s stomach condition. And she is a commonplace little woman with a bag of mending on her lap and a bag of second-hand morals stuffed in her head. Luckily his enemies in the tabloids never dug her up. Jeez, that would have been ghastly. She has never abandoned her peasant respect for gentility and money, while new riches are sinful and, as an atonement, ought to be shared. A real pain. Mam. Mam. He says the familiar word in his mind but it means nothing. Jacy feels a tightness in his throat. They probably all still live around Swansea, he supposes…
Beep, goes the metal detector. Jacy pauses in his tracks, and it is Belle who squats down with the trowel to do the dirty work for him.
If Jacy did find a fortune down there in this hard stony ground, would he share it with Belle, as she is now proposing to share all her worldly goods with him? He doubts it. He never has shared his wealth with her, but only because she always insisted on paying her own way. ‘I don’t want that hurled back in my face one day,’ she used to say, knowing him so well, and accepting him with his childish swiftly changing moods and his broken attachments. But my God, every single thing he does in future he is going to insure by iron-clad contracts that are quite impossible to wriggle out of.
If Jacy or Belle could be spotted from a distance, nobody would assume that either of them were the owners of a grand house like The Grange. They are both in shabby jeans and T-shirts, more like gardeners than gentry. ‘Nothing,’ says Belle, getting up off her knees, wiping off an old bit of glass. Nothing but litter. ‘Come on. Carry on.’
Jacy dreams on while making the necessary circular movements, just about all the expendable energy he can muster these days. He’d been frightened of his little fierce father, a short and pot-bellied man, not that he was unkind or a bully, just that he was vain, full of dreams for himself and moody and peevish when anxieties beset him. Tee-total, of course. He was master of the house, a man of ideas and fixed opinions, a part-time preacher and his talents were wasted in Wales. Jacy must have inherited all his ambitions from him.
‘Here they come… car’s not bad.’
Jacy shades his eyes and glares. The gold Mercedes looks in keeping as it rolls sedately up the drive among the deep blue-headed rhododendrons and azaleas, dead on time. Spurts of golden gravel fly up behind the heavy wheels. Behind them comes the Range Rover probably bearing the legal beagle, though what a solicitor from Sheffield has to do with the sale of The Grange is impossible to fathom. Still, the agents seemed to accept the rather odd situation.
The resonant upper-class voice of the driver echoes a greeting across the still summer air and the two men shake hands.
‘It’s all so mysterious. I wonder who they are,’ muses Belle. ‘I wonder if they are local.’
‘She’s a bit of all right,’ says Jacy predictably, but to his chagrin he knows that this remark won’t bother Belle. Since she was a baby she has always been pretty and therefore takes her looks for granted. She never considers another woman as a threat, that is the size of her confidence. She rarely flirts with anyone. Even when he was into screwing every bird he could lay his hands on, Belle turned a blind eye or pretended to do so, he is still not quite sure which, and time has not yet nibbled away at her looks. In her trade they know how to take care of themselves. Jacy says, ‘That interfering bag Julia Farquhar is bound to find out, we’ll hear about it on the grapevine soon enough. You can’t fart around here without that old sow knowing about it.’
‘I doubt we’ll hear a thing,’ says Belle, ‘seeing as nobody round here speaks to us any more.’
‘Swine,’ grunts Jacy, a natural response to almost everyone these days.
‘There’s money about,’ says Belle, still staring at the car.
‘There used to be money about here.’
‘Yes, until you went and threw it all away.’
‘Touché,’ says Jacy. But his thoughts are bitter.
After being ushered from the car, the female passenger stands oddly motionless in the drive, inhaling and exhaling deep breaths that Jacy and Belle can see from here. What is she doing, staring around with one hand on her hat as if she’d expected to be met, or photographed? And eventually the posh little party of three disappear through the front door.
‘Wow,’ jokes Belle, ‘what an entrance! What a couple of swells!’
‘No better than you and me,’ snaps Jacy, swinging the silent machine over the barren earth till it meets with a bush and damages it.
Suddenly—
‘Tusker!’ screams the elegant stranger. ‘My God. Tusker! Is that really you?’
Belle starts, taken aback, far too engrossed in her digging to have noticed the little party of three moving in their direction.
‘Peaches!’ Belle screams back eventually, having focused her eyes on the approaching blonde and recognising that unmistakable face, those eyes, that absurdly wiggling walk, the image of Goldie Hawn.
Belle hardly hears the alarmed pssst which shoots from between Jacy’s snarling lips as he stands half-hiding behind her. ‘Get them away from here, they’ll recognise me in a minute… get them away, Belle, go on, quick.
So just as old Peaches is about to raise an enquiring eyebrow in Jacy’s direction, Belle flings her arms round her old chum and hurries her in the opposite direction.
‘Darling Tusker, what on earth are you doing here?’
‘I live here,’ says Belle, amused to hear that old nickname rising from the fathoms of the past like a shipwrecked relic washed up from the sea.
‘But why are you hiding away down here?’
‘We’re not hiding actually, we are metal-detecting. Searching for treasure.’
Peaches looks fresh and appealing as ever. She has not lost that adorable lisp that everyone once tried to copy. ‘Oh, how absolutely wonderful! You always were so exciting. And who is the Adonis?’
‘Just a friend.’
‘Ah. So we’re not g
oing to be introduced?’
‘No, actually,’ says Belle with a wink. ‘Come on, come indoors and have a drink. Normally we can’t bear to be in the house when there’s viewers round, but of course this is totally different.’
Peaches peers forward and stares, bringing her velvet skin disconcertingly right up to Belle’s own. She lowers her voice to a husky whisper. ‘The brace worked, then?’
For a moment Belle can’t figure it out but then she remembers and displays her teeth with great pride. ‘Yep, after all those painful years of looking like Jaws, my incisors have gone back into place and as you see, I am no longer a tusker but a perfect example of what the best dental surgery can do!’
‘They were never that bad, darling,’ giggles Peaches. Even her laugh is as frivolous as ever, it’s hard to take her seriously. ‘We were terribly cruel to give you that nickname. I think it was because you were so horribly perfect everywhere else.’
‘It’s better than some I can think of.’
‘How true. I see your pictures wherever I go these days, Tusker, half-naked down in the Tube, sometimes a leg, sometimes a boob. You must be doing incredibly well for yourself—no wonder you’ve got a dream pad like this, quite marvellous, and look at the daisies.’
The two are so excited by this incredible meeting that they seem to have forgotten there are others about. ‘Excuse me,’ says the authoritative young man at Peaches’ side. ‘Might I be permitted to butt in here?’
‘Oh, sorry, so sorry, Dougal darling,’ and Peaches is all ruffled up like the petticoat that shows just an inch under her pretty-as-a picture floral dress. ‘This is Tusker, an old, old friend. Do you see any of the old gang? I would love to hear. There’s so much to catch up on…’
‘I think we ought to be going, Arabella, really,’ smiles the amazingly groomed and attractive young man, long and slight and superior. But he seems unaccountably nervous. ‘Much as I hate to interrupt this highly emotional meeting.’
‘Are you married, Arabella? Is Dougal your—’
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