AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘No,’ said Piers, after the briefest pause, and it seemed to Joe he spoke with particular and enormous care. ‘No, I never met him. Never heard of him, I’m afraid. What a wonderfully typical Hollywood name. Byron Patrick. Good God. What a place that is.’ They were back at the house now, and he was completely relaxed, utterly at ease. ‘Ah, Jolyon, I was just saying to Joe here that when you come to work at my agent’s, you can stay with me in Montpelier Square, if you like. We can keep each other company. Would that appeal?’

  ‘That’d be great,’ said Jolyon. ‘Thank you very much, sir.’

  ‘I think perhaps we should check that with your mother,’ said Joe. ‘Come on, we must get back, I’ve a piece to write tonight.’

  As they drove away, down the winding drive of Stebbings, Joe knew with absolute certainty that Piers had been lying. It was quite impossible, unthinkable even, that anybody living at that time in the extremely small and incestuous town that was Hollywood would not have known about Byron Patrick. Byron Patrick, Hollywood’s First Grand Master of Wine, juvenile lead at ACI, the subject of countless column inches in the gossip columns; Byron Patrick, high-profile plaything of the high-profile Naomi MacNeice; Byron Patrick, centre of what had emerged as one of Hollywood’s many unsavoury small scandals. It was absolutely beyond all reasonable doubt that Piers Windsor would not have known about him; and since he had chosen to lie about it, then it was equally beyond all reasonable doubt that he had something to hide. To hide from any one of a great number of people; but from Joe Payton in particular who had written a few pages in his book about Byron Patrick, and who was pursuing the real reasons behind his death with an ever-increasing interest.

  1968

  One of Joe’s favourite games was What If, in both matters large and small: What if Lincoln had been unwell on 14 April 1865 and not gone to the theatre? What if, he would say, it been raining in Dallas on 22 November 1963 and Jack Kennedy’s car had had to be covered? What if Adolf Hitler had been just a little more talented and had been accepted rather than rejected by the Vienna Academy as an art student? What if (laughing) Michelangelo had suffered from vertigo, or Mozart had been just a little more robust, lived just a little more wisely, and not succumbed to typhus at the age of thirty-four? And what if (more soberly now) Caroline had been out that day, when he had been on Woman’s Hour? How differently everything both large and small would probably have turned out. And what if, as he thought over and over again, in the years to come (keeping this particular version of his game entirely to himself), what if an exceptionally vile woman in ice-blue satin had not come up behind him as he left the Carmel Hotel on Santa Monica Broadway, one of his favourites, being charming and modestly priced without being shabby, and stolen his cab? What if he had not had to wait for another three minutes and he had not therefore arrived at LAX three minutes later as he did? Then so much of his personal history and that of those dearest to him would have been changed, rewritten, redirected. And greatly for the better, perhaps, almost certainly indeed.

  But the vile woman was there, she did take his cab; and he arrived at LAX tired but pleased with the work he had done, the people he had managed to see: a story on Brits making a rather unexpected conquest of the town, most currently and notably Jacqueline Bisset, fresh from her triumph in Bullitt; charming she had been to him, charming and beautiful and unbelievably sexy (although rather regrettably skilful at fielding questions), and now he wanted sharply to get home. As he reached the airport, sitting in his cab in the slow-moving line, the rush-hour traffic edging slowly forward, he saw a man and a girl leaving the airport.

  The man, who was dressed in a beige linen suit, pushing a trolley piled high with what looked like extremely expensive luggage, was very familiar to him: it was Piers Windsor. And the girl, who was laughing up at him, her hand joined with one of his on the trolley, and wearing a pink shift dress that left very little to the imagination, was more familiar still. It was Fleur.

  He just didn’t know what to do. What to think, how to act, how to react. He would have given everything he owned (not a great deal these days, but still) not to have seen her, not to have known; but he had and clearly something had to be done. He thought of Chloe, trustingly at home in London, with her small family, and had it been anyone with Piers, anyone at all, he would have wished to kill them both. The fact that it was Fleur, Chloe’s own sister, wittingly, horribly cheating on her, made it a hundred, a thousand times worse. And what exactly was Fleur doing? Was she simply playing around, amusing herself; or was she having some kind of revenge on the sister she had hated all her life?

  Either way it was intolerable: she had to be stopped. She was mad and bad and sad, he thought to himself, remembering the sorry epitaph on all women coined by – who was it, some psychologist guy? Stopped so that Chloe might be saved, so that Fleur herself might be saved from the worst excesses of herself. As for Piers – Joe closed his mind to Piers. He couldn’t begin to think about Piers. Not yet.

  He sat on the plane, drinking bourbon as if it was going out of style, staring into the growing darkness, feeling progressively more unhappy, more ill, more afraid. And another emotion too. One he did not dare to acknowledge, not even to himself.

  When he got home, back to the blessed sanity of his own flat – thank God, thank dear God he had kept it – he put in a call to Fleur at the agency. She was away, for a week, they told him: on vacation.

  ‘Would you ask her to call me the minute she gets back?’ he said. ‘It’s Joe Payton. I’m in London. Tell her it’s important.’

  He sat and waited for her call, in a mixture of rage and dread.

  ‘Joe? Hi, this is Fleur. Is something wrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he knew his voice, even across the Atlantic, was heavy, filled with rage. ‘There’s something wrong.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘oh, you know what’s wrong, Fleur, as a matter of fact. You know very well.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said and her voice was puzzled, wary. ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘It’s you, Fleur, that’s what’s wrong, and what you’re doing to Chloe, her children and her marriage, her happiness. What are you doing, Fleur, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I – Joe, what are you talking about?’

  ‘For both our sakes, don’t come over innocent with me. I’ve just been in LA, Fleur. I saw you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Fleur, how could you? How could you do such a thing? You are worse than I ever suspected. I knew you were a liar, I feared you were a cheat, I didn’t know you were totally heartless into the bargain. Stop it, Fleur, stop it at once, or I swear to God I shall see that you do.’

  ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘Joe, it isn’t –’

  But he put the phone down. He couldn’t bear to hear any more.

  The whole incident had upset him horribly. He felt physically toxic; sick and aching, day after day. He didn’t know what to do: whether to confront Piers, to write to Fleur; there was no one to talk to, to discuss it with. Caroline sensed there was something wrong, started questioning him about it, and then when he refused to discuss it, as so often happened these days, withdrew from him. They were increasingly distanced: that too upset him, made him feel worse. He tried to concentrate on his work but that seemed impossible; he was sitting at his desk one day, three weeks after he got back from Los Angeles, when the phone rang. It was Magnus Phillips.

  ‘Joe. Hi. How’s things?’

  ‘OK,’ said Joe guardedly. He didn’t trust Phillips: somehow felt (absurdly) that he knew too much about them all.

  ‘Could I buy you a beer?’

  ‘You can buy me a beer,’ said Joe, ‘but I may not be willing or able to give you what you want in return.’

  ‘I don’t want much,’ said Magnus Phillips.

  ‘Well, I’ll drink your beer anyway
,’ said Joe.

  ‘El Vino’s? Lunch-time tomorrow?’

  ‘Fine.’

  El Vino’s was the journalists’ pub almost opposite the law courts. There, and in Poppins, the pub next door, enough beer went down throats worn dry by a morning’s work to float a small craft down Fleet Street. By the end of a long lunchtime or a longer evening a considerably larger craft could follow it, as the dry throats, freshly lubricated, became dry once more with the exchange of gossip, news, conjecture and the recounting of usually long and frequently filthy jokes and needed further lubrication still. Like all quasi clubs El Vino’s had its mores, its unwritten rules, its standards of dress (not generally high); there was a requirement for a strong head, an iron nerve, an ability to watch your back, and a genuine esprit de corps. Women were not allowed to stand at the bar and order drinks, but had to sit in a special section designated to them at the back. Joe, like most jobbing journalists, had spent many of his happiest hours in El Vino’s and, like most of them, was able to remember very few of them with great clarity. He wondered, as he always did as he walked through the door, to be hit by the noise, the heat, the cigarette haze, why he did not go there more often.

  Magnus Phillips was standing at the bar talking to David Farr from the Chronicle.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Joe to Farr, who had just won an award as News Reporter of the Year. ‘Well deserved.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Farr. ‘I’d rather have your job, though, Payton. Chatting up all those starlets all day long.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it has its moments,’ said Joe modestly.

  ‘What’ll you have, Joe?’ said Magnus.

  ‘Pint,’ said Joe, resolving firmly not to have any more. His head at lunch-time was not strong.

  Three pints later, he was sitting in a corner with Magnus and another journalist from the Sketch trying to persuade himself he wasn’t as drunk as he thought.

  ‘Got to go,’ said the Sketch man. ‘Got a briefing on this anti-Vietnam demo in Grosvenor Square tomorrow. Could be nasty.’

  ‘Bloody Yanks,’ said Magnus, slightly surprisingly. ‘What do we care about their bloody war? Using expensive police time, carving up our horses.’

  ‘Oh, it’s got nothing to do with Vietnam,’ said the Sketch man cheerfully. ‘Excuse for some violence, beat up a few coppers. Good copy though. Cheers, Magnus, cheers, Joe.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Joe.

  ‘Right,’ said Magnus. ‘What next?’

  Joe looked at him, slightly surprised. ‘I thought you wanted something.’

  ‘Oh – not really. Have another drink.’

  ‘No thanks. Well – maybe I’ll have a very large tonic. Clear my head.’

  ‘You can’t drink neat tonic water in here,’ said Magnus, ‘it’d be like allowing women at the bar. There’s talk of that. These feminists getting ideas above themselves. Silly cows. Whisky? That’ll clear your head.’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be good,’ said Joe. ‘Then I must go.’

  The whisky looked suspiciously large. He drank it very quickly. He thought it might have less effect that way.

  ‘I met Germaine Greer once,’ he said. ‘She’s very sexy. Very beautiful.’

  ‘Don’t believe it,’ said Magnus.

  ‘You should believe it. You wouldn’t refuse her.’

  ‘I would,’ said Magnus. ‘I can’t stand the thought of any of those dykes.’

  ‘Magnus, she is no dyke. I told you. She’s very sexy.’

  ‘Someone ought to lock ’em up,’ said Magnus firmly. ‘And throw away the key.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Joe equably, ‘that’s a view. Another drink, Magnus? That went down rather well. Shall we sit down for a bit?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll grab that corner.’ He shot an amused look at Joe, who was too drunk to notice. Sitting down was not an activity that went on a lot in El Vino’s: the hollow leg of the journalist tends to work better standing up.

  ‘Just read your book,’ said Magnus, picking up his whisky.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Scandals. Great read. You must have had fun with that.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘The Hollywood stuff was great. I really liked it.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Did you ever actually meet that Patrick guy?’

  The name pierced Joe’s confused brain; he suddenly felt alert, wary, almost excited. ‘No.’

  ‘How’d you hear about it? About that story?’

  ‘I met this lady called Yolande duGrath.’

  ‘Yeah? What does she do?’

  ‘She taught.’

  ‘Uh-huh. What?’

  ‘Drama. She was a drama coach.’

  ‘And full of stories, I bet.’

  ‘Oh full,’ said Joe. He was enjoying this.

  ‘I need someone to talk to over there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh – doing a series on the place. Not unlike your own. Not as good of course.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Joe and grinned.

  ‘Only I’m going deeper into the gutter. Going into the police files.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Expensive,’ said Joe.

  ‘A bit. But the Sketch is still quite a rich paper.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So – do you think your friend Yolande would talk to me?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Joe, a deep sadness in his voice.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Bastard,’ said Magnus Phillips equably. There was a silence. Then he said, ‘Did you ever come across a starlet called Kirstie Fairfax? Or any stories about her?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Joe truthfully. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh – she was mixed up with your Patrick guy.’

  ‘She was?’ said Joe, interest rising in him like a physical force. ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t know. He’d been trying to help her get a screen test. Or so the papers said.’

  ‘Can’t help,’ said Joe, speaking very carefully. He felt he was walking on glass. ‘Sorry. Why was it in the papers? What’s happened to her now?’

  ‘Oh, she’s dead. Long dead. Killed herself. Or so the papers said.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Joe.

  ‘Got any other ideas? People I could talk to?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Joe, raking his mind frantically for some harmless, innocent name he could give Phillips. It looked seriously obstructive, suspicious almost, to say no one. Then he said, slightly – but only slightly – reckless, ‘You could try Naomi MacNeice. Casting director at ACI. Byron Patrick was her plaything. She knew everyone and everything. She’s out at Malibu now, I think. I could check for you.’

  ‘She’s not,’ said Phillips briefly. ‘She’s in what they call a Twilight Home. And she’s totally gaga and she’s dying. I tried.’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ said Joe, ‘I really can’t help. Sorry, Magnus. I must get back now. It’s been great.’

  Later that evening, nursing a hideous hangover, he wondered with immense foreboding what on earth Kirstie Fairfax had had to do with Byron Patrick, what Magnus Phillips was actually up to, and what if anything he could or should do about it.

  Fleur was walking out of the office when she saw Joe. He was standing by the swing doors, watching her intently. It was over a month since she had got back from her trip to LA with Piers; Joe had written to say he was coming to New York, that he had to see her: he had obviously come to find her. She sighed, and went towards him. There was no point doing anything else. This was going to be grim.

  ‘Hallo, Joe.’

  He looked at her, and his eyes were dark with hostility, and a kind of savage rage she would never have believed h
im capable of. His face was very drawn and white. He was looking particularly shabby, in a crumpled, rather dirty raincoat, a navy sweater and faded jeans and shoes which had seen no polish for a very long time. His hair was particularly untidy, and she felt weak with her old half-forgotten longing for him.

  ‘I think,’ he said and his voice was so cold, so bleak she shivered physically. ‘I think we should go back to my hotel and talk. On the other hand, I might be tempted to kill you. So perhaps it had better be somewhere more public.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, looking him up and down rather pointedly, ‘you’re hardly dressed for the Plaza.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said and his gentle face and lazy voice were both distorted, made harsh with anger. ‘Shut up. We’ll go to a bar.’

  ‘No,’ she said, and her own voice was sad, full of pain. ‘We’ll go to your hotel. If you hate me that much and you want to kill me, then I’d rather you did.’

  Joe looked at her and she could see that just for a moment, a brief moment, she had pierced his rage, touched a more tender nerve; then he hardened again.

  He was at the St Regis as usual. He had a cheap room on the mezzanine where he had stayed for years. They went in, sat down in the bar; Joe ordered a beer. ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘I’ll have a beer too. No, I won’t, I’ll have a bourbon.’

  ‘No drink for a lady.’

  ‘I’m no lady. As you know.’

  ‘I do know.’

  They sat in silence for a minute or more, drinking, not looking at one another.

  ‘You are becoming a regular little jet-setter, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You and that guy David Frost.’

  ‘He gets his fare paid,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Not this time, no. But I decided I had to come. Had to talk to you.’ Then he said, ‘Fleur, I cannot tell you how shocked I am.’