by Jemma Harvey
‘I don’t think we need that,’ Georgie said hurriedly. ‘It looks as though we’re trying too hard.’
‘When I went to a reception in Downing Street—’
‘They have to be formal,’ Georgie said coaxingly. ‘We don’t. Much better to appear casual. We know this is the best party of the season; we don’t have to ram it down anyone’s throat.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Jerry conceded, with a flicker of the mouth which might have passed for a smile.
‘If the old religions are right,’ I remarked in an aside to Georgie, while Jerry was diverted by the telephone, ‘and people go to Purgatory for a single lie, you’re going to be there for one hell of a long time.’
‘Purgatory,’ Georgie shuddered, ‘is part of my job.’
Surprisingly – once he had realised she was undergoing trial by tabloid – Jerry was extremely, even embarrassingly, nice to Lin. In his view, they were kindred spirits, wrongfully targeted by the gutter press, and as such ranged on the same side. (At other times, he also felt he was a kindred spirit with Frank Bruno, Russell Crowe, Tony Blair and the late Princess Diana.) He kept making jollying remarks to her – ‘Don’t let the swine get to you’ – ‘Right is always right, even if a howling mob calls it wrong’ – patting her on the shoulder, oozing sympathy. When she said she might not manage to come to the party, he became bracing and military again: ‘We have to stand together. I know you won’t let the team down.’
‘I’m not on his team,’ Lin objected pitifully, once he was out of the room. ‘I don’t think I can take much more of this.’
‘I know,’ Georgie said. ‘There’s a downside to being hounded by the press that you just don’t expect. It puts you in such very bad company.’
‘Publishing puts you in bad company,’ I said. ‘And they told me it was a respectable job.’
‘When you consider what books are about,’ Georgie retorted, ‘you can’t really expect publishing them to be respectable.’
With Jerry metaphorically laying out a party map and moving flags around we hadn’t had another chance to search the bathroom. Lin, driven to breaking point by his sympathetic manner, declared he was capable of any crime and she would be only too happy to prove it – thus uniting with Georgie and me on our quest for his hidden loot. Against my better judgement, I was still eager to vindicate my theory about the cache under the bath. Call it sheer female curiosity, if you like. Yes, I know that’s a sexist statement, but actually curiosity is one of the (many) qualities that make women superior. Listen to any conversation between a man and a woman: the woman will be asking questions, the man talking, usually about himself. (Most heterosexual relationships are based on this simple fact.) Men affect to despise us for being ‘nosy’, ‘minding other people’s business’, but in fact they thrive on our spirit of inquiry. And curiosity leads to progress – you can bet it was a Stone Age woman who stuck a haunch of mammoth in the fire to see what would happen, and thereby invented cooking. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the great discoveries of history were made, not by the accredited males, but by their wives, overlooked because of their gender. Mrs Newton probably had to drop the apple on Isaac’s head a good few times before he cottoned on. And one of the main things that’s wrong with our police force is that the CID still consists predominantly of men. Yet women are natural detectives (Agatha Christie knew all about that) and much better at it than Sherlock Holmes.
Which brings me back to Jerry’s bathroom. I wanted to see what was behind the faux-marble panel, Georgie had her back to the wall with financial hassle, and Lin, driven to the edge of a precipice, was horrified to find Jerry Beauman dangling from the same rope. We weren’t really planning to steal the money – I don’t think so, anyway – we just wanted to know if it was there. We weren’t planning to inform the Serious Fraud Office. We weren’t planning anything. It just gave us something to be curious about – a distraction from broken hearts and hopeless love, from private rejection and public humiliation and guilty fantasy. It made us feel like Charlie’s Angels again, swashbuckling adventuresses on the trail of a supervillain. Of course, Jerry wasn’t plotting world domination, but from the way he organised the party it was clear he was exactly the kind of obsessive control freak who might be. Besides, he was the nearest we could get.
‘We’ll have to search under cover of the launch,’ Georgie said. ‘Guests are supposed to use the other bathrooms; that one’s off limits, so we should be okay. When Jerry’s preoccupied with critics and journos we can sneak off quietly.’
Unexpectedly, Lin agreed. ‘That’s what Farrah Fawcett would do.’
Georgie nodded at me. ‘You’ll need a new dress,’ she reiterated. ‘That red one’s too noticeable. You can’t sneak anywhere in that.’
‘I wasn’t going to wear the red one! As it happens, I’m never—’
‘You want something dark. Black is good.’
So it was decided.
In the end, it was Laurence who was delegated to babysit Lin’s children. As Jerry’s rejected editor, he was the one person at Ransome who had no intention of going to the party. ‘As long as Sean doesn’t find out,’ Lin confided. ‘He thinks being gay is practically the same as being a paedophile. I only hope the twins haven’t picked up any ideas from him.’
‘Kids learn their prejudices at school, not from absentee dads,’ Georgie said wisely. ‘Which is probably worse. Still, it doesn’t matter. How would they know Laurence is gay?’
‘Hector’s coming with me,’ Laurence announced later. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Um . . . yes . . .’
‘He feels we need to bond at every opportunity these days . . . after the problems we’ve been having.’
‘Fine . . .’
Lin wasn’t happy – she was on a permanent maternal guilt trip since the revelations about Ivor – but Georgie and I quashed her objections ruthlessly. We arranged to tart up in Publicity (as usual) and get a taxi round to Berkeley Square for half-past five. Jerry had specifically commanded our early arrival; Georgie said he probably wanted to make a speech. ‘Something stirring and bellicose,’ she said. ‘For Queen and country and all that. I’ll bet you a tenner.’
‘No takers,’ I said.
As far as possible, I cleared my desk (An editor’s desk is never cleared: Ancient Literary Proverb), mostly by sweeping things into piles and putting them on top of other piles, thus creating an illusion of space in the middle. I was enjoying the unaccustomed feeling of achievement when the phone rang.
‘Hello? Is that Cookie?’
‘Yes?’ I recognised the voice without being able to identify it.
‘Andy Pearmain. Look, I hope you don’t mind my calling like this—’
‘Not at all.’
‘– but I can’t get hold of Lin. Her home phone doesn’t seem to be working, her mobile’s always off, and the switchboard has refused to put me through to her, so I asked for you.’ Reception were faithfully filtering out all calls for Lin, since most of them were from journalists. ‘I’ve been abroad for a couple of weeks. I don’t know if you heard, but we called off the wedding—’
‘I heard,’ I said, but Andy wasn’t paying attention to my side of the conversation.
‘– three days before the event. It was a bit chaotic. I did what I could to protect poor Cat from the flak – her parents were pretty devastated, I think I was their dream son-in-law, presumably because our families are such old friends—’
Of course, the money wasn’t a factor.
‘It was a brave decision of hers, but I think she was right. Maybe I’m just not cut out for marriage. Every time I get within a mile of it, something goes wrong.’
‘D’you think that Cat was really your type?’ I asked tentatively.
‘She was until you and Georgie got your hands on her,’ Andy said ruefully. ‘Then suddenly she was telling me that this was the real her – complete with navel stud and leather mini-skirt.’ I couldn’t recall a leather mi
ni, but I let it pass. ‘Anyway, I decided to go away for a while – clear my head.’
‘Did it work?’
‘I’ve been trying to contact Lin since I got back – I just want to know she’s all right. I won’t intrude on her if she doesn’t want me – I realise she wasn’t keen on telling me about Ivor – but I must know—’
‘She’s not all right,’ I said bluntly. ‘Order back copies of all the newspapers you’ve missed.’ As succinctly as I could, I told him what had happened.
There was a long silence, punctuated by assorted oaths. Fairly moderate ones: Andy wasn’t much given to obscenity, even under pressure. ‘Some of these newspaper proprietors are going to be sorry,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve lent money to them.’
‘Do they still owe you?’ I asked, hopefully.
‘You bet they do.’
There are pluses to knowing an influential banker which hadn’t occurred to me before.
‘Give ’em hell,’ I said.
In Georgie’s office, I didn’t get around to mentioning the call. We were too busy barricading the door against intruders so we could wriggle into posh dresses and apply our makeup in Georgie’s illuminated mirror. Lin was wearing the inevitable ethnic embroidery effect, this time on panne velvet, with a little mascara, a pale lipstick, and some daring blue pencil eyeliner which was fortunately too faint to be noticeable. Georgie had gone for the Little Black Dress – one I’d seen before, showing she was still at too low an ebb for shopping – ruched around the hips and displaying what seemed to be less cleavage than in the past. ‘I’ve lost weight,’ she explained, tersely. Georgie’s weight was normally fairly stable: unhappiness had evidently eroded her appetite.
As the only one in something new, I felt blatantly extravagant. But I really hadn’t wanted to wear the red dress again, and my other party clothes pre-dated my diet, so I’d been able to justify the expenditure to myself in the way women do when we’ve decided to spend the money anyway. My dress was also velvet – velvet is one of the good things about winter – but soft and slightly stretchy instead of panne, clinging in the right places but not plunging, its colour a sort of dark purplish-brown which suited me better than black. (I don’t know the technical name: possibly aubergine.) With Georgie’s assistance I put my hair up, twizzling the leftover dangly bits into ringlets, which, with the aid of high heels, made me feel tall even if I didn’t look it. We left the office on a heartening wave of appreciation from fellow workers and piled into the taxi.
‘Well,’ Georgie said, ‘here we go. The Three Musketeers. All for one and one for all.’
‘Charlie’s Angels,’ said Lin.
‘The Weird Sisters,’ I concluded. ‘Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The Fates who spun the threads of men’s lives – and snipped them off at the end.’ There’s nothing like pretending you’re in control, especially when you’re not.
‘Just because you went to Oxford that doesn’t mean you can go all intellectual on us . . .’
At the flat, as predicted, Jerry made a speech. It wasn’t quite Henry V but the intention was much the same, if you substituted the tabloids for the French and bore in mind that the enemy had numbers on his side. ‘At Agincourt,’ Georgie muttered, ‘as far as I can remember, the British longbows decided the issue. Do we have longbows?’
‘Nope.’
‘Any equivalent?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘We’re doomed. We’re all doomed . . .’
Jerry opened a bottle of champagne so we could toast his success, and Georgie was just persuading him to let us leave our coats and bags in the master bedroom, out of the way of the guests’ things, when his girlfriend arrived. She was smothered in some endangered species and had a name which sounded like Ly Chee, though I’m sure it wasn’t. We all availed ourselves of Jerry’s bedroom to shed our outer layers. Meanwhile, the apartment started filling up, mainly with waiters and waitresses, coat-carrying maids, the staff of Ransome, and Jerry’s chauffeur and minder MacMurdo, standing around surveying the room like a CIA agent at a presidential reception.
Around six-thirty, the after-work crowd began to arrive, first in a trickle, then a flood. Georgie’s policy of inviting everyone in London had clearly paid off. There were no A-list celebs but a good few C-list ones – the kind who were eager for any exposure, no matter how dubious – and a score of low-profile glitterati who knew they weren’t famous enough to attract attention and could therefore come out of curiosity and the natural human desire to witness what might be a débâcle. And then there were the hacks, pretending to be literary journalists, and the literary journalists, doubling as hacks. There were diarists, columnists, pundits, an investigative team specialising in City scandals, even a wine writer. There was a fading rock star too far gone to know what party he was attending, and a minor It girl who said large-mindedly that she didn’t care about a person’s past, some of her best friends had been to prison, and any man who was rich enough was entitled to a second chance (or words to that effect). Cal turned up late, at a guess after a visit to the pub, and fell into her manicured clutches. God knows what he told her, since he wouldn’t be her line of country at all, but I saw him appropriating a bottle of Bolly while she gushed and sparkled at him like a fountain in overdrive. Georgie, catching sight of them, promptly began to flirt with someone who turned out to be the ex-TV presenter from her misspent youth. Lin was clinging to a colleague from Ransome by way of a shield, but none of the hacks had noticed her yet. They were intent on other prey. An official photographer roamed the throng; unofficial ones were being firmly discouraged by MacMurdo. Jerry, who had a notoriously short fuse with journalists, remained – for the moment – scrupulously polite, sweeping the crowd with a lighthouse beam of improbable charm.
‘If numbers count,’ I thought without satisfaction, ‘it’s a success. So far.’
Jerry didn’t think so. ‘Where are the Hamiltons?’ he muttered in a tight-lipped aside to Georgie. ‘I always gave him my wholehearted support, and this is how he repays me. And Rod – we used to go drinking together . . . Peter – the money I’ve spent in his club . . . The Viscount – God, I once paid his bail . . .’
‘The press are all here,’ Georgie pointed out. ‘They’re the ones who’ll give us the coverage. And two actors from EastEnders and one from Emmerdale, and a blonde from one of those property shows, and the latest guy to be fired from children’s TV for a sex-and-drugs scandal. And there’s – good God – Todd Jarman . . .’
‘I don’t recall inviting him. I hardly . . . Of course, he’s a terrific writer. Top-notch thrillers. In some ways, we’re two of a kind, though he hasn’t quite achieved my status yet. I must go and have a word with him.’
I’d seen Todd almost the moment he arrived, and to my horror my heart leaped, or at least jolted. I was in mid-conversational flow with a reviewer who was telling me he’d been agreeably surprised by Jerry’s new book (‘Really quite well-written . . . derivative, of course, but a page-turner . . . I must say, Jerry’s books always are . . .’) and suddenly I found I’d lost the thread. My mind was jerked off course – I floundered in a sea of meaningless chatter.
Todd, approached by Jerry, was looking particularly sardonic and, I thought, vaguely uncomfortable; Helen Aucham, on his arm, had the air of someone with a bad smell under her nose who’s trying very hard not to inhale. I found myself wondering how on earth Alistair had been able to persuade them to come. Of the other writers asked, only one had put in an appearance, a plump, pretty authoress of darkly convoluted mysteries who was, I suspected, only here for the murder. I forgot to feel gratified by the reviewer’s unwitting praise for my efforts, and began to sidle casually through the crowd towards Todd. The party currents tugged me this way and that but I persisted, striking out against the tide. When I was within a couple of yards, I saw Helen had become unlatched from Todd’s arm and had allowed herself to be drawn into an adjacent group which included a well-known face of some sort, though I couldn’t recall whose it
was. Over three or four intervening people, Todd smiled at me. Bugger – I was remembering the way he’d looked that night on the sofa when we . . . I started to blush, and had to pause for a quick chat with whoever came to hand to give the blush time to burn itself out. The exchange might have been in Latvian for all I knew. And then somehow – I don’t know if he moved or I did – I was talking to Todd.
‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded, in a tone that came out more accusatory than I’d intended.
‘I was invited.’
‘I know that. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – I just didn’t expect you to come. This isn’t exactly a cool place to be seen, is it? And Helen didn’t look too thrilled . . .’
‘She wasn’t. Still, for an uncool party it seems to be fairly popular. Plenty of people here.’ He hadn’t answered the question.
‘It’s mostly press and C-list padding,’ I said. ‘Oh – and anyone too nosy to stay away.’
‘Which category do you think I belong in?’
I began to blush again, this time from embarrassment. ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘That’s just it. Did – did Alistair twist your arm somehow?’
‘My arm isn’t easily twisted. Call me nosy, if you like. I was so staggered to get the invitation I couldn’t bring myself to turn it down. Besides, I had nothing else to do.’ I didn’t believe him, but I let it rest. For now. ‘You’re Jerry’s editor, aren’t you?’
‘They give me all the dirty jobs.’ I spoke without thinking.
Todd laughed.
‘Oh shit. Sorry . . . sorry . . .’ I gave up trying to apologise. After all, it wasn’t the first time I’d been rude to him. ‘It’s a tough life being an editor.’