She peered at the page over his shoulder. ‘” The arboretum planted by C E Crisp, President of the National Horticultural Society, with thirty-five different rare species of tree.” So – that poor old yew could have been two hundred years old.’
‘They’re a size, aren’t they, those trees. What are they, thirty feet? Fifty? You don’t often see a tree that size.’
‘I wonder if there was a ginkgo. They always had a ginkgo, when they planted an arboretum. The oldest tree we know.’ For a while they said nothing further, turning the pages together, scanning the old photographs of working horses pulling carts down Church Vale, barges loading at Helford Wharves, and Wilde himself in a frock coat posed with his building gang in bowler hats and waistcoats. ‘Would you like to live somewhere like that?’ Stewart asked her finally, in the emphatically matter-of-fact tone he reserved for questions on which he had extremely strong opinions.
‘We couldn’t possibly afford it.’ She tried to keep this as a statement, but it veered towards a question.
‘Not now. Maybe in a few years. See how things go, eh?’
As things went, it was a year later when Allie called her to say a house was for sale in New Farm Rise at an unexpectedly low price. A family moving abroad, she had hinted; Stephanie recalled the conversation in the bitter clarity of hindsight. By then she had transformed I the Parsons’back yard with a ravishing if slightly vulgar all-white planting scheme and dog-proof containers for a I rank of spiral box trees, each one costing, as Allie put it, enough for a pair of new tits. Allie at least spent the money with enthusiasm, after falling into, a wary silence over the drawings and giving Stephanie the outfoxed look which pledged revenge for an offence unspecified.
The scheme lasted less than a season. The box trees, never watered, immediately died. Tactfully, Stephanie sympathised and said nothing when Allie had the dead topiary replaced by common laurels. When the right moment came, she suggested a maintenance contract, thus inviting Derek and Dave into her life. They reported that Mrs Parsons screamed at her children a great deal and was never around on pay day. By then the Parsons were neighbours, and Stephanie considered that spreading gossip was bad for the community, so she received that information and chose not to transmit it further.
In this parish of distinguished horticultural connections, she had expected to find kindred souls. Naturally the people who chose to live in leafy Westwick would have a special empathy with the vegetable kingdom. Instead she found only women like Allie and Belinda, quite oblivious of the ugliness of their own gardens and superstitiously envious of the beauty of hers. They rolled uneasy eyes over her rose arbour and her homage-to-Sissinghurst silver border and were emphatically silent. Stephanie saw that it was correct to admire material possessions, for the boys to envy Josh Carman’s Mercedes, the girls to sigh over Lauren Pike’s Coalport dinner service, but there was a problem with her garden, which was a creation not a purchase.
‘You can’t create around here,’ Gemma proposed, spreading out her hands flat on the table top. ‘That’s another thing that Mamma don’t allow. No politics, no ethics, no creation.’
‘What are you going to do with that letter?’ asked Rod, pointing at the fruit basket where Gemma had tucked the missive between the fingers of a bunch of bananas.
‘What do you think I’m going to do with it? Frame it? I’m sending it to his wife, aren’t I? The Madonna of Morning TV, the mother of our neighbourhood rapist and the wife of another. She likes reading her viewers’letters out on air, doesn’t she? She likes a nice human tragedy for breakfast, doesn’t she? She should thank me.’ And so should Ted, she added mentally, because the truth will make him free.
17. Regular Dances
In the mind of Allie Parsons, such as it was, what was said had no importance. Thus she might babble sentimentally of friendship to Stephanie and the other wives of Westwick regardless of the fact that she did not consider them to be her friends. Her concept of friendship did not extend to people who were merely useful, only to those who were actually powerful. Most of her conversation included such adjustments of meaning. Obviously, the purpose of talking was to get what you wanted. What you actually said was irrelevant, the result was what counted. Obviously, therefore, it was right to say whatever was necessary for people to give you what you wanted, regardless of whether what you said would pass any kind of reality check.
Allie considered that she had been right to invite the Sands to buy their doomed house in New Farm Rise because Ted was going to cut Stewart in on the Oak Hill deal and make them very rich, definitely rich enough to join them in Maple Grove. Getting the Sands to buy the house had saved the rest of the New Farm area from waking up to their impending danger. It had been a nasty moment when the house went up for sale; Ted had talked about delaying the Oak Hill planning application until the sale was completed, at which Chester had seen red. Then Allie had saved the day by fixing up the whole deal quickly and privately. Besides, she needed Stephanie.
To Allie, Stephanie was an invaluable resource: she had whatever it was the Channel Ten viewers thought a woman ought to have, some rare essence of femininity. Allie lacked this, and so needed her. Tying her in had been tricky because the woman was obtusely immune to media glamour, although in the end a perfect sucker for the Westwick thing.
Allie considered she was right to live in Westwick, because the whole place stank of family values and added the ideal backdrop to her life to date. She was right to have married Ted, whose earnings had underwritten her TV breakthrough and who, with the children, completed the middle ground of her career picture. She felt she was right to be looking beyond Westwick, marriage and family now, to the primetime, mainstream, big-bucks phase to come. She was also right to anticipate the colossal cash fallout of the Oak Hill development because frankly it was the only real benefit of the marriage with Ted which was left to be garnered. Or so she had evaluated him, until she opened the thickish envelope exuberantly addressed in green marker with ‘Personal and Confidential’underlined twice.
‘It’s OK,’ her secretary assured her with a little embarrassment. ‘I made security put it through X-ray. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it but it was hand-delivered, so maybe it could be someone you know?’
Westwick being a closed world, a Shangri-La sealed from the outside behind a mountainous range of money, none of the women there whom Allie idly termed friends ever realised that a two-tier value system was in operation. In Stephanie’s case, she was further blinded by her pure heart. For dear friends Allie would be witty and taking, she sent flowers, she dashed off charming notes of thanks, had her secretary enter their birthdays in the diary, entertained prodigally in restaurants and showered down the bounty of Family First freebies. For people called friends in Westwick she broke promises, forgot dates, never showed at parties and sent each a bottle of Magno fragranced bath oil at Christmas. All with the assumption that they would appreciate that they deserved no better.
You had lunch with dear friends, and to the others you said, ‘we must have lunch.’ You might even make the lunch date, but then you broke it. It was the way of the world, the others accepted it. ‘Just locals. Local people,’ Allie dismissed them. ‘They won’t mind. People you have to know, you know? Not really important but you have to know them so you might as well get along.’
Allie Parsons considered that a friend, a real friend, a dear friend, was essentially a person who could advance her career. Thus The Boss was a dear friend, and Chester Pike was a dear friend of Ted’s. Stephanie was not a dear friend, especially since her husband had fallen out with Ted. The DeSouzas were not dear friends, but merited exceptional treatment while Ted and Adam were associates. And John Redfern, editor of Hey! (Your Number One for Celebrity Gossip – Real People, Real Heartbreak, Real Homes), was a dear friend also, and after she read the contents of the envelope, she telephoned him.
‘John, darling …’ she snuffled enticingly down the phone. ‘Can you do lunch? I so need to talk to a friend
. I can’t tell you the dreadful thing that’s happened.’
For such a promising prospect, John Redfern immediately made himself available. They met at the first and most dignified of the city’s shrines to a celebrity chef, a place to which socialites herded to toast their divorces, a breathless rotunda where triple tablecloths flounced to the floor and carved gothic rood-screens, plundered from old churches, concealed the bench where waiters made sure the tottering little pagodas of food were not actually so precarious that they collapsed before the moment of presentation.
‘He’s been having an affair,’ Allie confided as soon as the orders were placed.
‘Your husband.’ Redfern had forgotten the name. It happened with husbands all the time. Besides, everybody knew Parsons was bonking The Boss and women’s sense of ownership was curious when it came to men.
‘Ted. I’m distraught,’ she announced, pertly poised on the edge of her chair, the rolling turquoise eyes running a third celebrity check on the other diners. Important to know you were in a first-XI venue. Very important to judge the moment a restaurant started to slide and move on. Those little signs, rubbernecks, musos, people paying in cash, men romancing their afternoon pussy. She noted Tina Brown and relaxed.
‘Of course, poor lamb.’ John was completing his own assessment of the clientele. Three bankers, on the house table. The chef must be branching out. ‘How did you find out?’
‘This.’ She pulled the letter from her bag and dropped it in front of him. ‘In the studio mail. I mean, she sent it, of course. The other woman. This has destroyed my life.’ John was in delight, he was bouncing in his chair; the sample dialogue was going great.
‘You know her?’ He picked up the letter with a decent show of distaste and scanned the lines, thinking how truly pathetic heterosexuals could be, how pitifully vulnerable in these degrading attacks of erotomania, how absurdly unable to cast their sexual relationships in the proper recreational mould.
‘Not really. Her kids were at school with Damon.’
‘Uh huh. And what’s she like?’
‘Gross. I mean, really fat, you know. Messy. And obvious. The kind men like, tits everywhere.’
‘Attractive?’
‘John, she’s fat.’
‘Right, right. So – and does she do anything?’
‘Some ridiculous poxy run-down garden place in Westwick.’
‘How many kids?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Her memory suggested a picture of Gemma mountainous at the centre of a mob of snornosed filthy infants. ‘A lot.’
John was seeing a blurred newsprint picture next to a 24-point headline; the protocol for photographing the mistress in these stories was something dishevelled and unposed, possibly indicative of the fatal charms but fundamentally unflattering. There would be plenty of time for the fully styled portraits if the romance ever came to anything. Right now the proper thing would be something rather rough-hewn featuring breasts, flowers and some cheeky-grinning spawn of sin who might perhaps clean up into decent Norman Rockwell types. ‘Good;’ he confirmed. ‘Good. So what do you want to do?’
‘I’m heartbroken,’ Allie told him with emphasis. ‘I’m devastated.’ Few women had ever looked less devastated. She was as bright as laser, as up as a name in lights, as trim as a tender off Saint Tropez. Her suit was in zingy tamarillo, of the new one-button, super-short style. Whatever surgical procedure had taken place over the summer had given her the cheekbones she had never had before. ‘It was such a shock,’ she continued. ‘I thought we had the ideal marriage. Ted was a wonderful husband, a great father. I thought we loved each other.’
The waiter bustled over with garnished plates. The staff were swathed from waist to floor in tight spotless white aprons which revealed a tantalising triangle of bum cleft at the rear and caused them to walk geisha-like with many tiny steps, delicately wiggling the pelvis.
‘Why don’t you forgive him?’ John suggested.
‘Isn’t that a bit … fragrant?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to be put in the box with all those politicians’wives and Kennedy women. I can’t be a role model for the women of the twenty-first century if I just kind of wallow around forgiving all the time. I hate that, that downtrodden “Stand By Your Man” thing, it’s sort of demeaning, don’t you think?’
‘Family values,’ he proposed. ‘People love ’em, don’t ask me why.’
‘Yes, they do, don’t they?’ Her plump lips, glistening with balm, corrugated in perplexity. The Family First audiences actually went ‘aah’over family values, like they did over kittens or puppies.
‘How would it work out, a divorce?’
‘Oh, OK, I suppose.’ Her little forehead, nerves paralysed with cattle virus to preserve the carefree serenity of youth, registered nothing, but the eyes triangled as she thought of the riches of Oak Hill. ‘Men are so devious, aren’t they? I made him put everything in joint names of course but they always find ways to hide things. Besides, I don’t want a divorce; I want our lovely life back. I want things to be like they were. I love Ted, after all, and I’m sure he loves me.’
‘So this woman, would she talk, d’ya think?’
‘Her?’ Allie demanded indignantly, affronted that even crumbs of public attention might be gathered up by her antagonist. ‘Why should she?’
‘Well, she sent you that letter. She’s looking for trouble, isn’t she?’
‘Not that kind of trouble …’
‘If her place is run down she’d be grateful for the cash. Some PR smartie gets hold of her, she could rake it in.’
This was not at all the scenario Allie had envisaged. The notion that some ungroomed flesh-mountain might command the tabloids, and on top be handsomely paid for it, pained her deeply. A paparazzi stakeout down on Alder Reach was a dire blasphemy against the natural order of the world. As the waiter removed their plates she gazed into the middle-distance in aggrieved silence, forcing some water into her eyes, letting her lips quiver. It was possible to see the effect in a chip of the mirror set artfully behind the carved tracery of the rood-screen.
Another course was flourished before them, pats of fish like white baby’s palms balanced on little hills of pulped vegetable with rills of sauce dribbled around and two chives crossed on top.
‘What I’m thinking,’ Redfern hastened to bring comfort, ‘is that you should keep control of this. Nobody elseknows about this woman, right?’ He tented his fingers. Analysis, that was what was going on here, just analysis.
‘Nobody who counts,’ she confirmed, recalling that of late she had seen Stephanie Sands in the shadow of the flesh-mountain, sinking to her own level indeed.
‘Well then,’ – he drew his chair closer and leaned over his poised stack of food, indicating that none should earwig on the master plan – ‘the way to do this, it seems to me, is for you to leave him …’
‘Leave Ted?’ She recoiled, wondering how the audience would take the news. ‘Isn’t that a bit … radical?’
‘Sure, sure. But that’s who you are, isn’t it? You’re assertive, in control, a shit-kicking woman of the nineties. Your husband strays – you don’t collapse in a heap. You move out. Move out to a secret address. Issue a statement through somebody – your agent, if you like that you’re deeply wounded by this discovery, you love your husband but you need time to think, yeah?’
‘Y-e-s-s,’ Allie assented, beginning to get the picture in focus.
‘We keep it low key, maybe a couple of paras down-column in the TV news. No names, no pack-drill. Let the tabloids run with it if they choose, it’ll take’em a day to get the name, minimum. Meanwhile hubby comes crawling around on the forgiveness trip and, in due time, you move back. That’s where we come in – the double spread, overcoming the troubles in your marriage, more together than ever. When’s your show airing again?’
‘A month:’
‘Perfect. Can you get the bedroom redecorated?’
‘F-a-a-a-b,’ Allie said slowly, mentally running thro
ugh the timing. She reached over and pinched his hand between her fingers, the furthest she could go in conveying affection. ‘Utterly f-a-a-a-b. John, I love you. You are a dear friend.’
‘I’m going to leave you,’ Allie informed Ted at 9.10 am the next morning. ‘You’ve been having an affair and I can’t stand to be under the same roof a minute longer.’
The denial was on the tip of Ted’s tongue but he bit down on it. She was leaving him. Why spoil a good thing?
‘I’ve read that disgusting letter you wrote,’
‘What letter?’ he asked, knowing full well but not daring to believe it.
‘The letter you wrote that Lieberman bitch,’ she snapped, groping for the correctly wounded tone. ‘Or are there several women you’ve been pestering with love letters?’
‘No, just the one,’ he confirmed in haste, trying for a hang-dog look. If, heaven knew how, Gemma ever got the idea that he had even looked at another woman this bounty would be wasted. He was no cliché, no pussy-whipped harasser trying to escape from his suburban sex desert, but a man of rare taste and intellect paying loyally for a youthful error of judgment, viz, his marriage. Gemma must understand that, or she would never have let his letter reach his wife. Hope, there was hope at last.
‘Don’t try to find me. I need time to think.’ Allie swept out of the door to the car where the driver had already stowed her bag.
He stared joyfully at the closed door. There is a God, he thought, smacking right fist into left palm. Then he jumped into the Discovery and sped away to Sun Wharf. An Audi Quattro had shunted an old Ford halfway in on the 31, which was the end of the joyous impulse to tear down the road to freedom, but he had Ultimate Opera II in the CD player and he picked out tracks 2, 10, 17, 23 and 29, all the Mozart, plus the Rossini, 21; and tapped his fingers happily on the windowsill. In the circumstances, his progress was exceptional, because his ear-to-ear grin spooked the other drivers who changed lanes to get away from the maniac. Normal drivers never smiled in a tailback on the 31.
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