by Lewis Orde
*
A week after the election, Raymond Barnhill telephoned Katherine. The call came when Katherine was asleep. She snapped awake instantly, and snatched the receiver from the bedside telephone before the ringing could wake the entire household.
“How about the wild election result? Talk about the reincarnation of Boadicea . . .”
“Why are you calling me at three o’clock in the blasted morning, Raymond?”
“I really wanted to talk to you, and it’s only ten o’clock over here.” Katherine could feel his embarrassment. “I forgot all about the stupid time difference; can you believe that?”
“Aren’t you in London?”
“No, I’m in New York. Did I disturb you?”
Katherine could not resist sarcasm. “Of course not. I’m always up this time of night, waiting for the phone to ring.”
“Hey, I’m really sorry. Look, I’m booked on a flight to London tomorrow night, gets in eight-thirty Saturday morning. I wanted to call and find out if you’d see me when I got back. If you’d let me do a little bit of explaining, and one hell of a lot of apologizing.”
“How did your work go?”
“Great. I locked myself away in a friend’s apartment and hammered out the revisions the publisher wanted. While I was doing that, the agent was putting together a deal for the next two books.”
“When do you think the first book will be published?” She tried to stifle a yawn, but failed.
“Fall of next year. I’m robbing you of your beauty sleep. I’ll give you a shout when I get back to London.”
“Just make sure that it’s not at three o’clock in the morning,” she said, and hung up.
Barnhill telephoned next at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, the moment he reached home from Heathrow Airport. “May I see you?” he asked.
“At Dolphin Square?”
“I don’t think so. This place looks like a bomb hit it.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Yes, well . . . I’d kind of forgotten the mess I’d left it in. Now that it’s all coming back to me, I’m a bit surprised that I even made it out of here to catch my flight.”
“I wondered if you had. After the way I left you, I told myself I didn’t care, but I’m glad you did. I’m also glad you came back.”
“Why?”
“Fleet Street has too many bombastic Brits. It needs at least one slightly touched colonial.”
“I’ll pretend you meant that as a compliment.”
They met that afternoon in Regent’s Park, shaking hands as two friends might do. Barnhill suggested hiring one of the rowboats that drifted around the lake. Katherine climbed in, grateful that she had chosen to wear cords tucked into boots instead of a skirt. She sat on the narrow bench seat and rested her hands on the sides of the small boat as Barnhill worked the oars to take them away from the bank.
“You look a lot better than the last time I saw you,” she told him. “Color in your face, a shine in your eyes.”
“I’d rather you forgot the last time you saw me. What I remember of that night makes me feel ashamed.”
“Why?”
“I was drunk. I was as crude as all hell, pawing you like you were come cheap date. And I said some very unfair things. You told me the truth about my lack of faith in myself. It hurt. So I came right back by trying to hurt you. What I said about you being born with a silver tea service in your mouth . . . well, I’d give anything to be able to take that back.”
“It’s been said many times before,” Katherine admitted. “From the moment I set foot in the Eagle building, I had to work twice as hard as anyone else to prove that I was half as good.”
Barnhill shipped the oars, allowing the boat to drift. “That night before I left, that was the first time in ages that I’d hit the bottle. The first time since I came to this country. I thought I had it beat, and then . . . ah, you saw what happened.”
“Tell me something, Raymond. If I’d had dinner with you that night, to celebrate selling your book, would you still have gone out and bought the vodka?”
“I don’t know,” Barnhill answered, and Katherine was grateful for his kindness.
“When did you start drinking?”
“Vietnam. There was nothing else to do. Liquor was cheap, readily available, and socially acceptable. Before that, I’d never touched a drop.”
“Never?” Katherine found that hard to believe.
“I never saw it in the house when I was growing up. One, we lived in a dry county, so it required a conscious effort if you wanted a drink. Secondly, my parents were Baptists, people who believed that every evil in the world stemmed from liquor. That background kept me off it, right through college, even during the couple of years I spent working on the State in Columbia before the draft board caught up with me. When I first tried drinking in Vietnam, I didn’t like the taste of the damned stuff, but it gave me a lift. For a few minutes, for a few hours, it got me the hell out of Vietnam. And in those days, you couldn’t ask for more.”
“What you told me about your wife . . . about Mary . . . was that true? That she carried on while you were away?”
Barnhill nodded. “I’d heard things, and she knew I’d heard them. Both of us worked damned hard on getting that marriage straight once I got home. It worked fine, and I stayed clean. I’d beaten it; that’s what I told myself. I’d seen all those career-soldier alcoholics in Vietnam, and I’d had this terrifying fear of turning out just like that. But once I got back, I thought about them and laughed. I laughed until I got the job in New York, and that was when my world fell apart. Mary didn’t like New York. The more miserable Mary became, the more I drank. When I caught her with someone else, I knew fifty percent of the blame was mine. I had the choice — either make something of my life, or quit. I tried to salvage myself by coming here.”
“And you were doing so well . . .” Katherine leaned forward on the narrow bench and patted Barnhill’s arm. “Going on a bender once every eighteen months or so isn’t bad.”
“Wrong. It’s once too often.”
They sat silently on the gently rocking boat until Barnhill said, “I brought you back a souvenir of New York. It’s meant in a humorous vein, so don’t kick me over the side of the boat.”
Katherine accepted the slim box Barnhill pulled from the pocket of his brown corduroy jacket. She opened it, tore aside white tissue paper, and then started to laugh. It was a silver spoon, with a tiny enameled print of the Statue of Liberty fixed to the end of the handle.
“Thank you.”
“Friends again?” Barnhill asked.
“Friends again.” She leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. The boat rocked unnervingly, and she dropped back onto the bench. “Any time I’m feeling low, I’ll stick this spoon in my mouth to remind myself how privileged I am. And any time you’re feeling low, call on me.”
“If you’re not there?”
“Keep on trying. You’re too nice and too talented to waste yourself on a bottle.”
*
Raymond Barnhill’s return to London constituted a wonderful surprise for Katherine. After their explosive parting, she had not expected to see him again, and she’d told herself she didn’t care. She’d been wrong on both counts, and she was happy to see him back.
She had one more surprise coming. On the morning of the last Thursday in May, she sat down with Jeffrey Dillard to make the final decisions regarding that night’s “Fightback.” They were finished by noon.
“Nothing to do until tonight,” Dillard said. “Fancy a drink and some lunch?”
“Sounds like a wonderful idea.”
They went to a private Mayfair club, of which Dillard was a member. Katherine was ready, when Dillard asked, to order a dry sherry. Dillard did not ask. Nor did he order anything. He simply sat back, smiling, as an ice bucket containing a bottle of Taittinger was set beside the table. A wine steward uncorked the bottle with barely a pop, and poured champagne into two glasses. Katherin
e lifted her glass to mouth level, and gazed across the bubbles at Dillard.
“Are we celebrating anything in particular, Jeffrey?”
“We’ve already celebrated my thirtieth anniversary in television,” Dillard answered, “so I don’t suppose we can commemorate it again. So why don’t we celebrate my turning sixty-six later this year?”
“Couldn’t we have waited until your birthday?”
“All right, then let’s celebrate my retirement at the end of this year. And while we’re at it — and before the bubbly goes as flat as the proverbial pancake — let us also drink a toast to the continuation of ‘Fightback’ after my retirement, with you as my successor.”
Katherine set down the glass. “Do you mean it? You retiring, and me succeeding you?”
“You sound genuinely surprised. Didn’t John Saxon ever mention anything to you? He was fully aware that I intended to retire soon, you know.”
“That first night, when you came by the restaurant where we were having dinner . . . John wanted me to take Elaine Cowdrey’s position, and when he saw I wasn’t convinced, he mentioned that you’d be leaving soon as well. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I thought he might be trying to sway me into taking the job.” She lifted the glass. “To your retirement, Jeffrey, may it be long and happy.”
“Thank you. And to your continuing triumph at ‘Fightback.’”
“I’m going to miss you, Jeffrey. ‘Fightback,’ and the entire television industry, won’t be the same without you.”
“I’ll be watching every Thursday night, my dear, and if I think you’re letting down the side, you’ll hear from me pretty quickly.” Before Katherine could ask if he was serious, Dillard quickly added, “But I really don’t think I’ll have to bother.”
Chapter Nineteen
ROLAND EAGLES’S DECLARATION of war against the British Patriotic League began, like all well-planned campaigns, with intelligence gathering. Katherine’s former assistants, Derek Simon and Heather Harvey, were assigned by Gerald Waller to find out everything they could about the League’s three-man executive committee.
The two reporters backtracked through the lives of Alan Venables, Trevor Burns, and Neville Sharpe, interviewing people who had worked with the three men. After a month, they had compiled an impressive dossier. Over dinner at Roland’s home one night, Sally Roberts brought Katherine up to date.
“This much you know already. Venables lectured on government and politics. Burns was a free-lance journalist, and Neville Sharpe was an accountant. Venables was highly regarded at the college by faculty members. Editors who had commissioned work from Burns all agreed he was very professional, very reliable. And the accountancy firm which employed Sharpe said the same thing. Sharpe, incidentally, was even in line for a partnership. Each man was exceptionally bright, good at his job, and respected. All three had solid futures — Venables in the educational system, Sharpe with his firm of accountants, and Burns as a journalist. And all three of them gave everything up in May 1977. Venables walked out of the college. Sharpe gave a month’s notice, and Burns notified the magazines and newspapers he worked for that he was no longer accepting assignments.”
“Just like that, they quit?” Katherine asked. “What about their families. How on earth did they exist?”
“There are no families,” Sally answered. “Venables was divorced three years ago, and has no children. Burns and Sharpe were never married.”
“They still needed money to survive,” Roland pointed out. “Unless they’d put by a tidy sum in readiness for the day that they decided to form the British Patriotic League.”
“On the contrary. From what Derek and Heather learned, none of the men ever gave any sign of being wealthy.” Sally paused, while Arthur Parsons cleared dessert plates from the table. Roland took the opportunity to light a Davidoff. “Venables, in fact, was quite poor. He was living in a furnished room after having given his ex-wife the house they’d shared. He didn’t seem to be in any shape to do without regular income.”
“Does Venables still live in the furnished room?”
“No. He’s in a house in East London, Leytonstone. A receptive, blue-collar area for his kind of politics. He bought the house for cash, no mortgage, nothing outstanding. Burns and Sharpe aren’t short of anything, either.”
“They all quit work together,” Katherine mused, “and instead of being destitute, they seem to be reasonably well off. Had they known each other before?”
“There’s no evidence of that. It’s as though they suddenly came together for the sole purpose of forming an extremist political party.”
Katherine recalled the previous year’s May Day rally, when the League had made its first public appearance. As she’d listened to Venables spout his hatred, she’d asked herself a question. Now she posed it to Sally. “Did Venables ever have any colored or Asian students in the classes he taught?”
“I was waiting for you to ask that. He had quite a few.”
“How did he behave towards them?”
“In exemplary fashion. He never once gave any clue that he was racist. In fact, he even wrote glowing letters of reference for a number of Indian and Pakistani students. On top of that, he was quite friendly with colored members of the faculty. The ones Derek and Heather interviewed confessed to being very puzzled by the direction Venables has taken.”
Roland studied the glowing tip of his cigar. “The same, I assume, holds true for Burns and Sharpe.”
“Exactly. Not one of the men ever demonstrated any sign of being particularly bigoted.”
Intrigued, Katherine stored the facts away in her memory. The following day, she met Raymond Barnhill for lunch at the Cheshire Cheese, where she told him of the previous night’s discussion. “Doesn’t that strike you as strange, how all three of the executive committee suddenly saw the light, as it were?”
Barnhill responded with a question of his own. “Ever hear of George Lincoln Rockwell?”
“The American Nazi leader?”
“That’s him; he was shot and killed by one of his own men in 1967. When I was in Vietnam, I knew a navy captain who’d served with Rockwell in Iceland in the early fifties. This captain said that in those days, Rockwell was the greatest guy you could wish to meet, nothing like he turned out to be later on.”
“What changed him?”
“The Icelanders were in the Nazi league when it came to racial purity. Apparently, Rockwell married an Icelandic woman, and the navy captain claimed she may have messed up his mind for him.” Barnhill grinned. “So all you’ve got to do now is find out who, or what, played around with the minds of Alan Venables, Trevor Burns, and Neville Sharpe.”
“Thank you, Raymond. I’ll make sure someone checks into their backgrounds for a hidden Icelandic wife.”
*
Katherine took off all of August, reasoning that it would be the last such break she’d be able to take for a long time. Once she assumed control of “Fightback” from Jeffrey Dillard in the new year, her time would no longer be her own.
She went with Henry and Joanne on two separate vacations. A traditional sand-and-sea vacation first, at Marbella, followed by a transatlantic flight to California and a never-to-be-forgotten visit to Disneyland.
John Saxon collected Katherine and the children at Heathrow Airport when they returned from California. He laughed when he saw the big-eared Mickey Mouse hat they’d brought back for him. At Joanne’s insistence, he wore it for the entire journey home.
Once they were at Kate’s Haven, and Edna had taken charge of the children, Saxon took Katherine aside. “What would you do if I said I’d missed you like mad?”
She’d missed him, too. She’d asked him to come away with them, first to Marbella, then to Disneyland. Both times Saxon had found a business reason to remain in England, and Katherine had reluctantly recalled Deidre Chalfont’s statement about Saxon being in love with his work. “What would you like me to do if you said you’d missed me like mad?”
“And then?”
Saxon just winked.
“Let me get some sleep first. I’m suffering from a deadly combination of excitement and jet lag.”
They ate at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. Replete, they returned to Marble Arch to satisfy another kind of appetite, making love on Saxon’s four-poster bed. Afterward, lying securely in Saxon’s embrace, Katherine talked about the impending change in her career.
“In just three months, Jeffrey won’t be around for me to lean on. It’s a little scary, John.”
“Surely not. There are no problems, are there?”
“A couple of minor sticking points, that’s all. I have to make up my mind whether to stay with the research staff Jeffrey used, or bring in my own.”
“Who would you bring in?”
“I was thinking of poaching the two reporters I worked with on the Eagle. Derek Simon and Heather Harvey.”
“Would they be interested? What are they doing now?”
“Working on a special assignment — trying to dig up dirt on the leaders of the British Patriotic League.”
Saxon made a face. “Good God, hasn’t the Eagle had its bellyful of that mob yet?”
“My father doesn’t think so. He was appalled that they achieved what they did in the election. Plus, he feels that Eagle Newspapers owes a debt to the memories of Archie Waters and his grandson.”
“Katherine, I am not without feeling in this matter. They were my tenants, and I was quite fond of the old man. He was a soldier who had spent his life doing his duty for his country. But there was nothing to connect the League to Brian’s death.”
“What about Ginger . . . Michael Edwards . . .?”
“If it were this Ginger who killed Brian, it was a personal thing. A vendetta. Twice, Brian had gotten the better of him. On the soccer special, when he’d made Ginger give up the seat to you, and the time he beat the living daylights out of him. And even if Ginger were responsible, he’s been paid back in full. It’s over, can’t you see that? The only result your father will achieve with a continuing campaign against the British Patriotic League is the obvious result: he’ll bring their existence to the attention of more maniacs, and he’ll attract a few hundred more followers to their bigoted cause.”
