Collected Short Stories

by Jeffrey Archer

Sally smiled. “I don’t think Tony would like that.”

  Simon decided against making another tactless remark.

  Sally spent that evening with Tony at his home in Chelsea. He seemed a little distracted, but she blamed herself—she was unable to hide her disappointment at Simon’s estimate of how few of her pictures might be sold. After they had made love, Sally tried to raise the topic of what would happen to them once the exhibition was over, but Tony deftly changed the subject back to how much he was looking forward to the opening.

  That night Sally went home on the last train from Charing Cross.

  The following morning she woke up with a terrible feeling of anticlimax. Her room was bereft of canvases, and all she could do now was wait. Her mood wasn’t helped by the fact that Tony had told her he would be out of London on business until the day of her opening. She lay in the bath thinking about him.

  “But I’ll be your first customer on the night,” he had promised. “Don’t forget, I still want to buy The Sleeping Cat That Never Moved.”

  The phone was ringing, but someone answered it before Sally could get out of the bath.

  “It’s for you,” shouted her mother from the bottom of the stairs.

  Sally wrapped a towel around her and grabbed the phone, hoping it would be Tony.

  “Hi, Sally, it’s Simon. I’ve got some good news. Mike Sallis has just called from the P.A. He’s coming around to the gallery at midday tomorrow. All the pictures should be framed by then, and he’ll be the first person from the press to see them. They all want to be first. I’m trying to think up some wheeze to convince him that it’s an exclusive. By the way, the catalogs have arrived, and they look fantastic.”

  Sally thanked him, and was about to call Tony to suggest that she stay overnight with him, so that they could go to the gallery together the following day, when she remembered that he was out of town. She spent the day pacing anxiously around the house, occasionally talking to her most compliant model, the sleeping cat that never moved.

  The following morning Sally caught an early commuter train from Sevenoaks, so she could spend a little time checking the pictures against their catalog entries. When she walked into the gallery, her eyes lit up: Half a dozen of the paintings had already been hung, and she actually felt, for the first time, that they really weren’t bad. She glanced in the direction of the office, and saw that Simon was occupied on the phone. He smiled and waved to indicate that he would be with her in a moment.

  She had another look at the pictures, and then spotted a copy of the catalog lying on the table. The cover read “The Summers Exhibition,” above a picture of an interior looking from her parents’ living room through an open window and out onto a garden overgrown with weeds. A black cat lay asleep on the windowsill, ignoring the rain.

  Sally opened the catalog and read the introduction on the first page.

  Sometimes judges feel it necessary to say: It’s been hard to pick this year’s winner. But from the moment one set eyes on Sally Summers’s work, the task was made easy. Real talent is obvious for all to see, and Sally has achieved the rare feat of winning both the Slade’s major prizes, for oils and for drawing, in the same year. I much look forward to watching her career develop over the coming years.

  It was an extract from Sir Roger de Grey’s speech when he had presented Sally with the Mary Rischgitz and the Henry Tonks Prizes at the Slade two years before.

  Sally turned the pages, seeing her works reproduced in color for the first time. Simon’s attention to detail and layout was evident on every page.

  She looked back toward the office and saw that Simon was still on the phone. She decided to go downstairs and check on the rest of her pictures, now that they had all been framed. The lower gallery was a mass of color, and the newly framed paintings were so skillfully hung that even Sally saw them in a new light.

  Once she had circled the room Sally suppressed a smile of satisfaction before turning to make her way back upstairs. As she passed a table in the center of the gallery, she noticed a folder with the initials N.K. printed on it. She idly lifted the cover, to discover a pile of undistinguished watercolors.

  As she leafed through her rival’s never-to-be-exhibited efforts, Sally had to admit that the nude self-portraits didn’t do Natasha justice. She was just about to close the folder and join Simon upstairs when she came to a sudden halt.

  Although it was clumsily executed, there was no doubt who the man was that the half-clad Natasha was clinging to.

  Sally felt sick. She slammed the folder shut, walked quickly across the room, and back up the stairs to the ground floor. In the corner of the large gallery Simon was chatting to a man who had several cameras slung over his shoulder.

  “Sally,” he said, coming toward her, “this is Mike—”

  But Sally ignored them both and started running toward the open door, tears flooding down her cheeks. She turned right into St. James’s, determined to get as far away from the gallery as possible. But then she came to an abrupt halt. Tony and Natasha were walking toward her, arm in arm.

  Sally stepped off the pavement and began to cross the road, hoping to reach the other side before they spotted her.

  The screech of tires and the sudden swerve of the van came just a moment too late, and she was thrown headlong into the middle of the street.

  When Sally came to, she felt awful. She blinked her eyes, and thought she could hear voices. She blinked again, but it was several moments before she was able to focus on anything.

  She was lying in a bed, but it was not her own. Her right leg was covered in plaster and was raised high in the air, suspended from a pulley. Her other leg was under the sheet, and it felt all right. She wiggled the toes of her left foot: Yes, they were fine. Then she began to try to move her arms. A nurse came up to the side of the bed.

  “Welcome back to the world, Sally.”

  “How long have I been like this?” she asked.

  “A couple of days,” said the nurse, checking Sally’s pulse. “But you’re making a remarkably quick recovery. Before you ask, it’s only a broken leg, and the black eyes will have gone long before we let you out. By the way,” she added, as she moved on to the next patient, “I loved that picture of you in the morning papers. And what about those flattering remarks your friend made? So what’s it like to be famous?”

  Sally wanted to ask what she was talking about, but the nurse was already taking the pulse of the person in the next bed.

  “Come back,” Sally wanted to say, but a second nurse had appeared by her bedside with a mug of orange juice, which she thrust into her hand.

  “Let’s get you started on this,” she said. Sally obeyed, and tried to suck the liquid through a bent plastic straw.

  “You’ve got a visitor,” the nurse told her once she’d emptied the contents of the mug. “He’s been waiting for some time. Do you think you’re up to seeing him?”

  “Sure,” said Sally, not particularly wanting to face Tony, but desperate to find out what had happened.

  She looked toward the swing doors at the end of the ward, but had to wait for some time before Simon came bouncing through them. He walked straight up to her bed, clutching what might just about have been described as a bunch of flowers. He gave her plaster cast a big kiss.

  “I’m so sorry, Simon,” Sally said, before he had even said hello. “I know just how much trouble and expense you’ve been to on my behalf. And now I’ve let you down so badly.”

  “You certainly have,” said Simon. “It’s always a letdown when you sell everything off the walls on the first night. Then you haven’t got anything left for your old customers, and they start grumbling.”

  Sally’s mouth opened wide.

  “Mind you, it was a rather good photo of Natasha, even if it was an awful one of you.”

  “What are you talking about, Simon?”

  “Mike Sallis got his exclusive, and you got your break,” he said, patting her suspended leg. “When Natasha bent over
your body in the street, Mike began clicking away for dear life. And I couldn’t have scripted her quotes better myself: ‘The most outstanding young artist of our generation. If the world were to lose such a talent …’”

  Sally laughed at Simon’s wicked imitation of Natasha’s Russian accent.

  “You hit most of the next morning’s front pages,” he continued. BRUSH WITH DEATH in the Mail; STILL LIFE IN ST. JAMES’S in the Express. And you even managed SPLAT! in The Sun. The punters flocked into the gallery that evening. Natasha was wearing a black see-through dress and proceeded to give the press sound bite after sound bite about your genius. Not that it made any difference. We’d already sold every canvas long before their second editions hit the street. But, more important, the serious critics in the broadsheets are already acknowledging that you might actually have some talent.”

  Sally smiled. “I may have failed to have an affair with Prince Charles, but at least it seems I got something right.”

  “Well, not exactly,” said Simon.

  “What do you mean?” asked Sally, suddenly anxious. “You said all the pictures have been sold.”

  “True, but if you’d arranged to have the accident a few days earlier, I could have jacked up the prices by at least fifty percent. Still, there’s always next time.”

  “Did Tony buy The Sleeping Cat That Never Moved?” Sally asked quietly.

  “No, he was late as usual, I’m afraid. It was snapped up in the first half hour, by a serious collector. Which reminds me,” Simon added, as Sally’s parents came through the swing doors into the ward, “I’ll need another forty canvases if we’re going to hold your second show in the spring. So you’d better get back to work right away.”

  “But look at me, you silly ’n,” Sally said, laughing. “How do you expect me to—”

  “Don’t be so feeble,” said Simon, tapping her plaster cast. “It’s your leg that’s out of action, not your arm.”

  Sally grinned and looked up to see her parents standing at the end of the bed.

  “Is this Tony?” her mother asked.

  “Good heavens no, Mother,” laughed Sally. “This is Simon. He’s far more important. Mind you,” she confessed, “I made the same mistake the first time I met him.”

  ONE-NIGHT STAND

  The two men had first met at the age of five when they were placed side by side at school, for no more compelling reason than that their names, Thompson and Townsend, came one after each other on the class register. They soon became best friends, a tie which at that age is more binding than any marriage. After passing their eleven-plus examination they proceeded to the local grammar school with no Timpsons, Tooleys, or Tomlinsons to divide them and, having completed seven years in that academic institution, reached an age when one either has to go to work or to the university. They opted for the latter on the grounds that work should be put off until the last possible moment. Happily, they both possessed enough brains and native wit to earn themselves places at Durham University to major in English.

  Undergraduate life turned out to be as sociable as at primary school. They both enjoyed English, tennis, cricket, good food, and girls. Luckily, in the last of these predilections they differed only on points of detail. Michael, who was six feet two, willowy, with dark curly hair, preferred tall, bosomy blonds with blue eyes and long legs. Adrian, a stocky man of five feet-ten, with straight, sandy hair, always fell for small, slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed girls. So whenever Adrian came across a girl that Michael took an interest in or vice versa, whether she was an undergraduate or a barmaid, the one would happily exaggerate his friend’s virtues. Thus they spent three idyllic years in unison at Durham, gaining considerably more than a bachelor of arts degree. As neither of them had impressed the examiners enough to waste a further two years expounding their theories for a Ph.D., they could no longer avoid the real world.

  Twin Dick Whittingtons, they set off for London, where Michael joined the BBC as a trainee while Adrian was signed up by Benton & Bowles, the international advertising agency, as an accounts assistant. They acquired a small flat in the Earls Court Road which they painted orange and brown, and proceeded to live the life of two young blades, for that is undoubtedly how they saw themselves.

  Both men spent a further five years in this blissful bachelor state, until they each fell for a girl who fulfilled their particular requirements. They were married within weeks of each other: Michael to a tall, blue-eyed blond whom he met while playing tennis at the Hurlingham Club; Adrian to a slim, dark-eyed, dark-haired executive in charge of the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes account. Each officiated as the other’s best man, and each proceeded to sire three children at yearly intervals, and in that again they differed, but as before only on points of detail, Michael having two sons and a daughter, Adrian two daughters and a son. Each became godfather to the other’s first-born son.

  Marriage hardly separated them in anything as they continued to follow much of their old routine, playing cricket together on weekends in the summer and football in the winter, not to mention regular luncheons during the week.

  After the celebration of his tenth wedding anniversary, Michael, now a senior producer with Thames Television, admitted rather coyly to Adrian that he had had his first affair: he had been unable to resist a tall, well-built blond from the typing pool who was offering more than shorthand at seventy words a minute. Only a few weeks later, Adrian, now a senior account manager with Pearl and Dean, also went under, selecting a journalist from Fleet Street who was seeking some inside information on one of the companies he represented. She became a tax-deductible item. After that the two men quickly fell back into their old routine. Any help they could give each other was provided unstintingly, creating no conflict of interests because of their different tastes. Their married lives were not suffering—or so they convinced each other—and at thirty-five, having come through the swinging sixties unscathed, they began to make the most of the seventies.

  Early in that decade, Thames Television decided to send Michael off to the United States to edit an ABC film about living in New York, for consumption by British viewers. Adrian, who had always wanted to see the eastern seaboard, did not find it hard to arrange a trip at the same time as he claimed it was necessary for him to carry out some more than usually spurious research for an Anglo-American tobacco company. The two men enjoyed a lively week together in New York, the highlight of which was a party held by ABC on the final evening to view the edited edition of Michael’s film on New York, An Englishman’s View of the Big Apple.

  When Michael and Adrian arrived at the ABC studios they found the party was already well under way, and both entered the room together, looking forward to a few drinks and an early night before their journey back to England the next day.

  They spotted her at exactly the same moment.

  She was of medium height and build, with soft green eyes and auburn hair—a striking combination of both men’s fantasies. Without another thought each knew exactly where he desired to end up that particular night, and, two minds with but a single idea, they advanced purposefully upon her.

  “Hello, my name is Michael Thompson.”

  “Hello,” she replied. “I’m Debbie Kendall.”

  “And I’m Adrian Townsend.”

  She offered her hand and both tried to grab it. When the party had come to an end, they had, between them, discovered that Debbie Kendall was an ABC floor producer on the evening news. She was divorced and had two children who lived with her in New York. But neither man was any nearer to impressing her, if only because each worked so hard to outdo the other; they both showed off abominably and even squabbled over fetching their new companion her food and drink. In the other’s absence each found himself running down his closest friend in a subtle but damning way.

  “Adrian’s a nice chap if it weren’t for his drinking,” said Michael.

  “Super fellow Michael, such a lovely wife, and you should see his three adorable children,” added Adrian.
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br />   They both escorted Debbie home and reluctantly left her on the doorstep of her Sixty-eighth Street apartment. She kissed the two of them perfunctorily on the cheek, thanked them and said goodnight. They walked back to their hotel in silence.

  When they reached their room on the nineteenth floor of the Plaza, it was Michael who spoke first.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I made a bloody fool of myself.”

  “I was every bit as bad,” said Adrian, “we shouldn’t fight over a woman. We never have in the past.”

  “Agreed,” said Michael. “So why not an honorable compromise?”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Since we both return to London tomorrow morning, let’s agree whichever one of us comes back first …”

  “Perfect,” said Adrian and they shook hands to seal the bargain, as if they were both back at school playing a cricket match and had to decide on who should bat first. The deal made, they climbed into their respective beds and slept soundly.

  Once back in London both men did everything in their power to find an excuse for returning to New York. Neither contacted Debbie Kendall by phone or letter, since it would have broken their gentleman’s agreement, but when the weeks grew to be months, both became despondent, and it seemed that neither was going to be given the opportunity to return. Then Adrian was invited to Los Angeles to address a media conference. He remained unbearably smug about the whole trip, confident he would be able to drop into New York on the way to London. It was Michael who discovered that British Airways was offering cheap tickets for wives who accompanied their husbands on a business trip: Adrian was therefore unable to return via New York. Michael breathed a sigh of relief, which turned to triumph when he was selected to go to Washington and cover the president’s State of the Union address. He suggested to the head of Outside Broadcasts that it would be wise to drop into New York on the way home and strengthen the contacts he had previously made with ABC. The head of Outside Broadcasts agreed, but told Michael he must be back the following day to cover the opening of Parliament.