by Isabel Wolff
‘He’s a big-shot at the Sunday Semaphore, isn’t he?’
‘He is,’ she said acidly as Hans curled herself up in her lap. ‘He’s the chairman.’
‘But then why didn’t Darren recognize you if you know his father so well?’
‘Because Darren and I have never met. But I’ve seen many photographs of him. My relationship with his father was…unofficial. I was his…’
Oh. ‘Friend…?’ I suggested.
‘Mistress. I won’t mince words. I was his mistress, Laura—for twenty-five years.’
‘That’s a long time,’ I breathed.
‘Don’t I know it?’ she said wearily. She passed me a chintzpatterned china teacup. ‘But in many ways I couldn’t complain. I had a lovely flat, in Hans Place. I had a generous monthly allowance, and an account at Harrods. I used to go to Marrakech and St Bart’s. I sat in the stalls at the Opera House. I dined at the Ritz; I wore couture…’ So that explained the elegant clothes. ‘Of course I longed to be John’s wife,’ she went on. ‘But I told myself that I was his real wife. His soul mate.’ Her voice had caught. ‘That’s what he said I was. He said he couldn’t do without me.’ She ran her hands over the cat to try and calm herself.
‘How did you meet him?’
‘At the royal premiere of The Spy Who Loved Me in ‘77. I was 36, and John was ten years older, a handsome, powerful man; he’d been a journalist for twenty years, but through clever manoeuvring had managed to get on the board of a number of media companies, including the one which had financed the film. I fell catastrophically in love with him despite—and I am not proud of this—knowing that he was married. But he said that his marriage was loveless and that his wife totally neglected him for their children. Darren, the youngest, was a baby. I suppose that doesn’t say much for John does it?’ she added with a bitter sigh.
I thought of Tom. ‘I don’t think it does.’
‘Time went on, and John remained with his wife. Whenever I became upset about it he would claim that it was because she was ill, and a divorce might kill her; sometimes he’d say he was waiting until the children were older. It was the old, old story.’ She fumbled in the cuff of her silk shirt for a tissue.
‘I see. So he never left her then?’
Cynthia looked away while she struggled with her emotions.
‘Oh no,’ she said bitterly. ‘He did. That was what was so awful. He did finally leave her.’ Her mouth quivered again. ‘But not for me!’
‘Oh…I’m sorry.’ Hans was purring loudly, quite oblivious to Cynthia’s distress. So much for inter-species communication.
Cynthia wiped her eyes, then took a deep breath.
‘A little over a year ago, John told me that he was going to leave Mary. I was so happy to think that my years of living in the shadows were coming to an end. He came to the flat and I cooked him supper, and he told me that she had agreed to a divorce and that the flat in Hans Place would have to be sold. So I asked him where we would live. But he didn’t reply.’ She fiddled with her crystal beads. ‘Then he explained that Mary would get the house in Mayfair, and that he would move to Hampstead. So I said that Hampstead would be wonderful—I didn’t mind where we lived, as long as we were together. Then he dropped his bombshell. He said he was sorry, but that he’d fallen in love with someone else—a woman I’d never even heard of.’
‘Who was she?’
‘Some American journalist called Deborah, thirty years his junior, a hard-faced creature, with legs like toothpicks, huge feet and—’ she lifted her left hand to her generous décolletage—‘no breasts.’
I vaguely remembered now seeing Sir John Farquhar in one of the gossip columns with an anorectic, beady-eyed brunette.
‘I’ve seen pictures of her,’ she went on tearfully. ‘She’s not even pretty. Not in the way that I had been…’ I glanced at the photo again.
‘You were beautiful Cynthia. You still are. Age has not withered you,’ I added consolingly.
‘I did play Cleopatra once,’ she said regretfully. ‘I was too young. But my God, I could play her now. But…John ended our relationship.’ Her eyes welled up again. ‘He told me that I had three months to find somewhere else to live before the lease on Hans Place expired.’
‘Didn’t he help you, financially?’
‘He said he couldn’t because his divorce was going to ruin him. It was a lie of course. And I had been with him for so long—twenty-five years. I had given up my career because he was so jealous of me being with other men.’ So that’s why she hadn’t wanted to talk about her later film roles. There hadn’t been any. ‘I had also given up…’ her eyes had filled again…’a respectable family life; the chance of children.‘
‘Did you want them?’
‘Yes. Very much. But in those days unmarried motherhood was still very much frowned on, plus I wanted to keep the life I had. So it’s my own fault.’ She shrugged. ‘I know that. For allowing myself to be…kept, and for believing that I would ultimately be rewarded for my patient devotion. Instead I was flung out like an old dog.’
‘How terrible for you.’
‘It was—in every way. It still is. I had no pension, foolishly thinking that I’d be with John for the rest of my life. We had been together so long that I couldn’t imagine it ever ending. So there I was, at the age of sixty-three, faced with the prospect of no longer having John, and having to make my own living—while he started an entirely new life with a younger woman. Not that I believe it’ll last,’ she added bitterly.
‘But didn’t he help you? At least to try and cushion the blow a bit?’
‘He gave me a cheque for twenty-five thousand pounds. I wanted to tear it up—it was so insulting—but I knew I’d need it; he also said I could keep what was in the flat. The furniture’s very good although it’s had a lot of wear, as you can see. But I had quite a lot of jewellery that he’d given me over the years, so I sold that, and put the proceeds towards the deposit on this place. But I still had to take out a mortgage, which is why I became a psychic. I realized it was the only way I could make any money.’
So that had been the ‘major turning point’ in her life that she’d referred to when we’d met.
‘Did you consider taking legal action? To try and get more money out of him, or some…I don’t know…settlement?’
‘Oh no.’ She looked appalled. ‘So undignified. So…mercenary. I resolved that, however hard it might be, I’d at least keep my pride. But it has been very, very difficult, Laura, enduring both the loss of my relationship, and my “security”, as I foolishly saw it.’
‘So, in a funny sort of way, you must be grateful that you had that accident on the cliff top that day?’ There was a silence. ‘Otherwise you might not have become a psychic.’
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she said quietly. ‘The drop was a good twenty-five feet, so I hoped I’d die. But then, when I regained consciousness, and found myself at real risk of dying, I realized how much I wanted to live. That no man was worth losing my life over.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘That every day we have on this earth—however hard—is precious. That life is all we’ve got. It’s not something to be thrown away in a moment of depression, or discouragement, or fear of the future.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘But since then I have been struggling to adjust to a lifestyle utterly different from the one I had been used to while he…he…‘ Her eyes were shimmering again. ‘The injustice of it…’ Her hands sprang to her face. Now I understood her loathing of ‘mendacious, misleading, and morally-bankrupt’ journalists. ‘But this Darren,’ she went on, as she wiped her eyes, ‘is a most unpleasant young man.’
I felt my stomach clench. ‘He seemed okay.’
‘He isn’t. He does nothing in a meritorious way. He got into Eton on family connections, then strings were pulled to get him into Oxford. But he was thrown out for failing his first year law exams; he’d wanted to change to art history but the college refused because they
simply didn’t like him. So then he went into banking and flunked at that; then he tried venture capital and failed dismally there. I remember how his father despaired. Then, eighteen months ago, not long before John left me, Darren decided he’d try journalism. But his father made him start right at the bottom, first selling advertising space, then as a junior sub-editor on the sports desk, so he’s impatient to make his name. He will not be kind to you in this interview Laura. Let me warn you. He will not be kind because he is a complete and utter…a complete and utter…‘
‘Fucker?’ I said dismally.
‘Yes.’
TWELVE
The following morning I spoke to the Channel Four press officer, Sue. She looked up Darren’s byline and found a number of short pieces by him about horse racing but said that he was not on her list of journalists who mustn’t be approached without a string of garlic and a Bible. She told me that she would talk to the Semaphore, and phoned me back within the hour to say that she had been told that the interview would not be appearing for two weeks.
‘If there is anything negative, there’ll be plenty of time to deal with it,’ she said. ‘So let’s not worry until we see what he’s written, but I hope you didn’t say anything that could possibly be used against you.’
‘No, I didn’t. We were both quite clear about what was on the record and what was off it, and I was very careful how I expressed things. There were one or two awkward questions, which I half expected, but I kept my replies short and gave nothing away.’
‘Well we’ll wait to see the advance copy, but I think it’ll be fine.’
On Sunday morning I bought the Semaphore so that I could get some idea of how Darren wrote. I looked at the sports section first and saw that he’d done a small piece about golf. Now I glanced at the review section, where he’d said his interview with me would appear, and got distracted by an article about the Royal Ballet. Then I idly flicked through the main news section. And froze…
MY REMORSE was blazoned across the top of page five. Beneath was a huge photo of me, looking mournful.
LAURA QUICK CONFESSES GUILT AT HUSBAND’S DISAPPEARANCE.
It was as though I’d been pushed off a cliff.
An enlarged ‘quote’ had been placed centre page, in bold: I treated him badly…I hurt him…I drove him away.
Heart pounding, my eyes raked the page.
Troubled TV presenter Laura Quick has spoken exclusively to the Sunday Semaphore about her husband, Nick Little’s, disappearance. In this candid interview she reveals that she believes she caused the ‘unhappiness’ and ‘confusion’ that led him to go missing three years ago. Interview: Darren Sillitoe.
My hands were shaking and my face was aflame. The piece had gone in immediately, not as a ‘soft’ feature, but as a hard news piece, as though it was a ‘scoop’. Worse, I had been completely stitched up.
The ‘off-the-record’ preamble had been used on the record, and in the most negative way possible, through ruthlessly selective quotation and crude editorializing. My comments about Dunchurch Road, for example, were evidence, apparently, of my ‘intolerant streak’.
Quick says that if she could, she would leave Ladbroke Grove ‘like a shot’, describing it, with a patronizing roll of the eye, as ‘marvellously cosmopolitan’. She dislikes the quiet, pleasant little street in which she lives, and is disdainful of her ‘curtain-twitching’ neighbours who have nothing better to do than ‘gossip’ about her.
Significantly, her split-level flat contains no reminders of her husband, despite the fact that they were married for six years, because, by her own admission, she ‘couldn’t stand seeing his stuff any longer—it was holding me back.’ Quick goes on to confess that expunging his things was ‘liberating’ if, admittedly, ‘ruthless’.
The piece wasn’t so much a hatchet job as a chainsaw job. All qualifying or balancing remarks had been excised to fit a pre-determined portrait of me that was grotesque. Sillitoe had said—what was it?—that he would interview me ‘very sensitively and then carefully report’ what I said. ‘Carefully.’ That was the word he’d used, I now realized—not accurately. He’d done it carefully all right, filleting my quotes with a boning knife, then plunging it into my back.
As for her relationship with old flame Luke North, Quick claims that his wife had left him ‘ten months’ before she met him again… I didn’t ‘claim’ that he had. I stated that he had, because it was a factual truth. The word ‘claim’ was intended to sow doubt.
We begin to talk about Whadda Ya Know?!! To my astonishment, Quick is soon happily dissing rival quiz presenters. Anne Robinson, for example, is dismissed as ‘low grade’; Jeremy Paxman is ‘overbearing and impatient’; as for poor Robert Robinson, affable presenter of Brain of Britain, Quick finds him so ‘grim’ that she claims to be unable to listen to the popular Radio 4 quiz in case she has to ‘chuck the radio out of the window’. She may be a newcomer, but it soon becomes clear that Laura Quick is not one to mince her words about more established talents.
Now I remembered, with a sick, sick feeling, how nice Darren had seemed, and how concerned, touchingly, that I should come across well. But his agenda had clearly been to effect the opposite. Even my struggle not to cry had been made to look like a lack of feeling. When it comes to discussing the day her husband disappeared, Quick remains curiously dry-eyed. I expect the tears to flow, and they don’t.
I had been worried that Darren would make me look like a victim; but he’d done the opposite—he’d portrayed me as a heartless bitch; one, moreover, with a fragile conscience. This was clearly the point of the piece.
When I ask Quick—who admits to being ‘difficult and demanding’—why her husband might have felt compelled to leave, Quick bridles. The famous inquisitor may cope with having the tables turned on her on Whadda Ya Know?!! but, in real life, she clearly objects. Her repeated, clumsy assertions that her husband’s departure was not her fault smack of the lady protesting too much. And so it seems. For, finally, under gentle but persistent questioning, she breaks down. ‘Yes…I do feel guilty,’ she confesses tearfully. ‘Very. Of course I do…I treated him badly…I hurt him…I drove him away…I feel just awful…absolutely devastated…’
I got to the end, my stomach dry-heaving with speechless outrage, my mouth as dry as dust. Sillitoe had planned it all along. Even the unsmiling picture of me had been premeditated. He’d told the photographer that he wanted me to look serious. But it wasn’t ‘gravitas’ he was after, but ‘guilt’. He had manipulated me into making unguarded comments, off the record, which he had fully intended to use. Not only had he used them, he had wilfully distorted them. The fact that it was in my ‘own words’ made it so much worse.
I banged on Cynthia’s door.
‘The. Little. Shit,‘ she breathed as she read it. She pursed her mouth, then lowered her reading glasses. ‘Now do you see what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ I croaked. ‘But why did he do this? What have I ever done to him?’
‘Nothing. But that’s not the point.’
‘Then what is?’
‘The point is that he’s desperate to make a name for himself. This is so nasty that he knows it will get him talked about and make him appear “controversial”—rather than dull and insignificant. As he hasn’t the talent to do it honestly, he has to go about it in an underhand way.’
I soon discovered how underhand he’d been. On Monday the head of the Channel Four press office complained to the Semaphore‘s editor but I decided I’d speak to Darren myself. The staff on Sunday newspapers get Mondays off, so the next morning I called his direct line.
‘Darren Sillitoe speaking.’ He sounded nauseatingly pleased with himself. I imagined the spring in his step as he’d gone in to work, smugly anticipating congratulatory comments from his colleagues.
‘This is Laura Quick.’ There was a tiny hesitation.
‘What can I do for you?’ he enquired impertinently.
‘I’ll tell you what you can do, Dar
ren. First, you can explain why your piece went in two weeks early.’
‘Well…a…news piece got pulled at the last minute, and as I’d already written up your interview they used it to plug the gap.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he said indolently.
‘Then why didn’t you fax me the quotes?’
‘Well, in the circumstances I’m afraid there wasn’t time.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You’re not calling me a liar, are you?’
‘Yes. I am. Because you planned to run the piece when you did. That’s why you’d already written it up. You planned to run it as a news piece, not a feature. And you were never going to read me the quotes. That’s all obvious to me now.’
‘You can believe what you like—I don’t care.’
‘Well I care that you wrote such mendacious, malice-filled crap! I care that you lied to me, and about me.‘
‘I made nothing up. You did say those things.’
‘But you know I didn’t say them like that! You hacked the quotes about to make them mean the opposite of what you knew I’d intended.‘
‘It was a matter of…interpretation. I was reading between the lines.’
‘So I was left reading between your lies. I mean, who would describe themselves as “difficult and demanding”? No-one would, and I didn’t.’
‘Well you’re certainly being difficult now.’
‘No, I’m not being “difficult”—I’m being justifiably angry. I don’t even know where you got that quote. I never said to you, “I am difficult and demanding”.’
‘Yes you did. You used those very words.’
‘When?’
‘When we first spoke. On the phone.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Yes you did. I have it on tape.’
‘You what?’
‘I have it on tape,’ he repeated calmly.
It was like a punch to the solar plexus. ‘You were recording me?’
‘Yes.’
‘From the moment I picked up the phone?’
‘Correct,’ he said shamelessly.