Friends & Rivals

by Tilly Bagshawe

  The sit-down dinner was supposed to start at eight-thirty, but by eight-forty-five the guest of honour had still not arrived.

  ‘Where’s Frankie?’ Lex cornered Jack at the bar, refilling Jay Monroe’s glass. ‘He hasn’t chickened out, has he?’

  ‘No,’ said Jack, automatically smiling as an LA news photographer approached with a camera. ‘He called me from the car; he’s on his way. I guess some old habits really do die hard. Frankie used to show up days late for meetings in the old days, looped out of his mind. By his standards, he’s early.’

  Eventually the man himself showed up, looking diffident in a white Zegna suit at least two sizes too big for him and a matching trilby with the word ‘JESUS’ embossed in gold lettering around the brim. Flashbulbs popped dutifully as he posed with Jack and Lex, the head of his new record company, various other JSM acts and a posse of senior execs from MTV. After that it was dinner, a delicious smorgasbord of dishes prepared by The Four Seasons’ Michelin-starred chef and his team, followed by a toast to Saved, and a short-but-sweet speech by Jack Messenger.

  ‘We’re here to celebrate Frankie B’s remarkable achievement with his wonderful comeback album,’ he began. ‘Frankie is a personal friend. We all know this success has been hard earned, and I can’t think of anyone working in this business today who deserves the recognition of a Grammy nomination more than he does.’

  Wild applause. Frankie, smiling now, stood up and thanked the Lord.

  ‘But Frankie’s is not the only comeback we’re giving thanks for tonight. Two years ago, as most of you know, I was down and out in this business.’

  Lex wondered nervously where Jack was going with this. One of Hollywood’s few taboos was failure, even past failure. Alluding to it, especially at an event like this, was the equivalent of talking about divorce statistics at a wedding, or farting in the middle of the national anthem. Happily, Jack quickly got back on-message.

  ‘In the past eighteen months, I’m proud to say that JSM has enjoyed success beyond all of our expectations. I happen to believe this is because we represent the best names in the business today.’ He name-checked a few, to a ripple of applause. ‘And because of the efforts of my partner and friend, the talented Mr Lex Abrahams.’ More applause, this time led enthusiastically by Leila.

  ‘Tonight marks the beginning of a new phase in the life of JSM, a phase that I believe will see us rise to even greater heights of achievement, both commercially and artistically as an agency. As the great Frank Sinatra once said, “The best revenge is massive success.” Tonight is the beginning of a journey that will see us achieve that success.’

  The last words: and our revenge, were left unsaid. But as Jack Messenger raised his glass, Lex caught the look of fierce determination beneath his perfect smile. The media lapped Jack up as music’s Mr Nice Guy, and in many ways he was. But there was a toughness there too, a desire not just to win but to beat Ivan Charles and Jester, to leave his enemies trailing in JSM’s dust.

  ‘To Saved!’ said Jack. ‘To JSM.’

  And to vengeance, thought Lex. Clasping Leila’s hand, he wished he didn’t feel quite so uneasy.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Catriona Charles sat at the Victorian mahogany desk in her tiny study and looked critically at the photographs in front of her. As portraits, they were distinctly average. The first little boy had a sullen, spoiled look on his face completely at odds with the cute head cocked to one side pose and whimsically clutched teddy bear. The three-year-old girl from Oxford looked fat. (Then again, she was fat; there was only so much one could achieve, even with clever lighting.) And her elder sister’s forced smile made her look as if she were in the early stages of rigor mortis.

  If she did the sittings again in her own studio, Catriona was sure she could do better. But then she’d end up out of pocket and, as Ned Williams kept telling her, this was supposed to be a business. Grimly she placed each of the shots in separate brown envelopes, scribbled the parents’ names on the front and sealed them. She couldn’t afford artistic integrity, at least not this month.

  Sighing, she looked out of the window into the cobbled passageway below. Known in Oxfordshire as ‘twittens’, these narrow, hidden paths that wound between medieval workers’ cottages were a feature of the backstreets of Burford. Catriona loved them, almost as much as she loved the narrow strips of cottage garden planted along their edges, crammed to bursting with old English flowers like pink hollyhocks, weeping white dog roses and imperial purple foxgloves. It had been a wrench leaving The Rookery. According to Ivan and the divorce lawyers, selling the house in Widford was a financial necessity, and at the time Catriona had been too emotionally and physically wrecked to argue with them. But as time passed she’d grown very fond of her new village house, a modest four-bedroom Georgian home, originally built for the town doctor. Part of what she liked about it was that it was her house. Having married so young, and given up work as soon as Rosie was born, Catriona had never owned property of her own before. It was a nice feeling, a secure feeling. These days Catriona Charles didn’t get too many of those.

  There were days when being divorced from Ivan still felt like a shock. When she would wake up with a strange, sinking feeling, as if something were wrong or lost or missing but she couldn’t remember what it was. And then it would hit her. The marriage to which she’d devoted her entire adult life and which, despite its flaws and rocky patches, she had truly believed would last a lifetime, was over.

  The pain was still there, but what had begun as sharp, unbearable agony had faded into a dull, constant ache of loss and regret. A lot of that was down to the house. With its small, unruly walled garden, crumbling sash windows, and ugly, early Eighties decor, it was crying out for some love and attention. Catriona, who desperately needed a project to distract her from the pain, devoted every spare minute – when she wasn’t running around after the children or scrambling around for money to pay last winter’s oil bill – to restoring the property room by room and inch by inch, transforming it into her own, idyllic safe haven. First she ripped up the depressing green carpets to reveal exquisite three-hundred-year-old flagstones. With the help of Ned Williams’s trusty sledgehammer, she and Hector had had one of their happiest days in years, knocking through plasterboard to unearth no less than five original Georgian fireplaces. After that there were wooden boards to be sanded, wallpaper to be stripped and walls painted in off-white and grey and cheerful duck-egg blue, light fixtures and furniture to be picked up from local country-house auctions and antiques markets. And finally, once spring arrived, there was the joy of getting to grips with the garden, clearing weeds and pruning back creepers, planting a few of her own favourites like Sweet Williams and scented stocks, and digging out a miniature kitchen garden that she filled with herbs and artichokes and tomato plants, each one a symbol of new life and hope for the future.

  But if Catriona’s new home brought her pleasure, most of her day-to-day life was still a huge struggle. Ivan’s TV show, Talent Quest, was now in its second series and phenomenally successful. The first season, in which Ivan had managed to transform himself from a wooden, awkward figure of fun to an acerbically funny judge who both appalled and delighted the British public, had already made him a household name. This year, thanks to his championing of an adorably shy young contestant from Yorkshire by the name of Ava Bentley, Ivan was more popular than ever. Ava was the nation’s new sweetheart, and Ivan revelled in his role as her mentor. But, despite Talent Quest’s soaring ratings, Ivan continued to claim he was ‘tapped out’ financially, and his maintenance payments to Catriona, such as they were, had become increasingly erratic. The problem appeared to lie with Jester. The agency’s acts continued to thrive, but Ivan seemed to have established a fee structure so low it had landed the business in an acute cash-flow crisis. With Talent Quest taking up so much of his time, and with Jack Messenger and the LA office gone, Ivan had had to take on more and more staff, so his overheads were rising just as Jester’s income
took a dip. Or something like that. In any event, short of taking him to court, something for which Catriona had neither the resources nor the energy, there was nothing she could do but cut back herself and attempt, for the first time in her life, to earn an income of her own.

  It was one of the mother’s at Rosie’s school who’d suggested the photography business, after seeing some shots of Catriona’s in the school magazine. ‘You could start with my children. I’ll pay you a hundred quid plus expenses for a decent portrait of them all together, looking half-human. If you can pull that off with my three terrors, believe me, you’ll be beating off new business with a stick.’

  While that hadn’t quite turned out to be true, Catriona was gratified and amazed to discover that there really was a market for what she had always enjoyed as a hobby. So far she was only making pin money, paying for the weekly shop at Morrisons and the children’s after-school clubs. But if she really organized herself, took out an ad in the local paper, put fliers up in surrounding villages and local schools, she was sure she could turn the thing into a proper going concern.

  The problem, besides her ongoing battle with artistic integrity, was time. Officially Ivan was supposed to have the children every other weekend and for at least a few weeks in the school holidays. In reality, his work schedule meant that he could take Rosie for a night once a month at best – Hector still refused point-blank to see his father – and the last two holidays had been a write-off. Rosie had gone with Ivan and Kendall to Cape Town last New Year and apparently had a great time. But with Hector still at home, and his behaviour wildly erratic and attention-seeking, this was no break for Catriona.

  Hector’s evident unhappiness, and her own utter inability to get through to him, frequently brought Catriona to the brink of despair. She’d gained weight, largely due to a hefty reliance on gin and tonic in the evenings after another long day of battles with her son. His private school, St Austin’s, had finally thrown in the towel a year ago and kicked him out. Since then, he’d burned his way through two more establishments before Ivan decided enough was enough, he wasn’t throwing good money after bad and the boy could damn well go to the local comprehensive. For a few wonderful weeks, this worked well. Hector seemed to enjoy the relative freedom of Burford High. But eventually it dawned on Catriona that the spring in his step wasn’t because he was revelling in choosing his upcoming GCSE courses, but because he wasn’t going to school at all but hopping off the bus at the top of the high street and hitching lifts into Witney, where he spent the majority of his afternoons hanging around McDonald’s or watching matinees at the Odeon.

  In a rare show of parental solidarity, Ivan had actually torn himself away from his fabulous new life in London and driven down to Burford to confront the boy with Catriona, face to face. It was the first time Catriona had seen Ivan in more than six months, a prospect that frankly terrified her, but she put her own anxieties aside for Hector’s sake and made a titanic effort to appear normal and relaxed in Ivan’s company. Unfortunately, the meeting was a disaster. Despite both parents’ best efforts it descended into a screaming match, with Hector hurling abuse at Ivan and Catriona helpless to placate either of them, or even get a word in edgeways. Poor Rosie had been terribly upset, and that night Catriona leaned more heavily on her green bottled therapist, Dr Gordon’s, than ever, waking up the next morning with a hangover that could have raised the dead.

  Now, picking up her three brown envelopes she went downstairs, grabbing her handbag from the kitchen table, and ventured out into the village. It was a sunny, early June day, not yet really hot but with all the promise of summer hanging heavy in the honeysuckled air. As usual, the steep hill of Burford High Street was busy with traffic, but the village still looked ravishing with its mellow stone terraces, spectacular Gothic church and ancient stone bridges crossing the rippling Windrush. Catriona stopped at the post office first, stamping the sub-par portraits and slipping them into the scarlet pillar box with a guilty conscience. To cheer herself up she crossed the road to Huffkins tea shop, treating herself to an enormous slice of carrot cake and picking up two sugar mice for Rosie and Hector, a childish treat that both of them still secretly loved to find on their pillows. Leaving the tea shop, having successfully replaced one guilt with another (had she really just wolfed down all that cake?), she was startled to discover her mobile ringing. She only kept it on so that the children or even Ivan could reach her in an emergency. After a long marriage spent mostly at home raising children, followed by a divorce from a much more glamorous and high-profile husband, Catriona had learned quickly and brutally just how few real friends she had left. Days, even weeks, could pass without her phone ringing at all. When it did, more often than not it was some stranger trying to sell her something.

  Perhaps it was a client, someone wanting to give her a new commission? She kept forgetting she was a businesswoman now. Brightening, she put on her capable, professional voice. ‘Hello? Catriona Charles speaking?’

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Charles. This is PC Scott of Oxford Police. It’s about your son, Hector.’

  Catriona froze. Oh God. He’d been killed. He’d been hit by a car or a train or … she clutched at a dry-stone wall for support.

  ‘He’s been arrested and charged with vandalism and breaching the peace.’

  Relief flooded through Catriona’s body, swiftly followed by anger. Bloody stupid child! What did he hope to gain by this nonsense?

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You can come down and pick him up if you like. Otherwise we can keep him overnight in the cells. Either way, he’ll have to appear before the magistrates’ court tomorrow morning at eleven.’

  Suddenly Catriona felt overwhelmingly tired. She knew she ought to ask what he had done exactly, where it had happened and why. But she hadn’t the energy to put any of it into words.

  Taking her silence for shock, PC Scott continued kindly, ‘As a juvenile and a first offence, they’ll let him off with a caution. But if you want to give him a scare, you might want to let him sweat it out with us for the night. Take him home after court in the morning.’

  A million thoughts raced through Catriona’s mind, the most unpleasant of which was that she was going to have to tell Ivan, who would no doubt blame her for not being firm enough with Hector, even though it was clearly his abandonment that had pushed the boy off the deep end in the first place. Hector was still only thirteen, and a young thirteen at that. The thought of him spending the night in jail, alone and frightened, tugged at all her maternal heart strings. At the same time, she knew that the more she rode to his rescue, the more he’d keep screwing up.

  At last she said, ‘Thank you, PC Scott. He can stay there for the night. I’ll see him at court in the morning.’

  Then she hung up, pressed her hands to her eyes, and burst into tears.

  Ivan leaned in close to his dressing-room mirror, intently studying the results of his latest round of Botox injections. The crow’s feet around his eyes were gratifyingly absent, and the deep grooves that ran down from the corners of his nose to either side of his lips looked noticeably fainter. It was a good result, but ever since a snide television critic in the Evening Standard had described him as ‘the waxen-faced Mr Charles’, Ivan had become anxious to the point of paranoia about his looks.

  Even Kendall had learned not to tease him about the fillers, or the fortnightly trips to John Frieda to get his hair dye touched up.

  ‘It’s part of the job in television,’ he insisted defensively. ‘Showing up with grey hair would be considered grossly unprofessional. I wouldn’t bother otherwise.’

  Bitchy reviews aside, the reality was that Ivan did look good. Terrified of looking like an old man next to his beautiful young girlfriend, he worked out obsessively and was far more cautious about his diet than he had ever been with Catriona. Sometimes – often, if he were honest – he missed the carefree, calorie-filled family suppers of the old days. Cat’s sticky toffee pudding with homemade butterscotch sauce stil
l haunted his dreams on a regular basis. But his new life required energy, and energy, at his age, required discipline.

  There were days when his levels of exhaustion actually scared him. Apart from the gruelling business of being a key player in a hit TV show, he still had an immense workload at Jester, which was losing money at an alarming rate. No matter how many new agents he hired, some at extortionate salaries, the big clients still wanted Ivan’s personal attention. And none more so than Kendall, who was almost as demanding professionally as she was in bed. Only last night, bucking and writhing on top of him, frantically in pursuit of her third orgasm of the night, she suddenly stopped and began grilling him on the marketing campaign for her second UK album. Her first release, Girl Reborn, had performed solidly but had not been the spectacular, ball-out-of-the-park smash that both she and Polydor had been hoping for. Kendall blamed this roundly on poor marketing, which she in turn blamed on Ivan.

  ‘You’d better not take your eye off the ball this time,’ she warned him, arching her back and clenching her muscles around Ivan’s already wilting dick. How the hell was he supposed to maintain a hard-on while she nagged him mid-shag? He felt like an old horse being ridden into the glue factory. ‘I’m tired of hearing about bloody Talent Quest. You’re supposed to be my manager, and my boyfriend. This album should be your number one priority. Ivan? Are you listening to me? What the hell happened to your erection?’

  Secretly, Ivan had started turning to Viagra to help him keep up with Kendall’s needs. Not that sleeping with her was any kind of chore. Sex, in fact, just got better and better, a drug he needed every bit as badly as she did. But if the spirit was willing, the forty-two-year-old flesh was weak. Between the stress of his home and work lives, as well as the lingering guilt over Catriona and the children, especially Hector, he felt as if he were being pulled apart. Piled on top of all that was the financial pressure of running two households, paying school fees and maintenance, and trying to keep pace with Kendall’s wildly profligate spending. He’d wanted fame and excitement and he’d got them. But once the adrenaline rush faded, Ivan felt more tired than he ever had in his life.