by Lewis Orde
Katherine supposed Saxon was right. She was sick and tired of the whole damned business. It had cost her too much. In the loss of friends, and in the loss of faith.
“Would you be happier with Derek and Heather working for you at ‘Fightback’?” Saxon asked.
“I think so. We always got along very well at the Eagle.”
“Then do what you have to do: grab them!”
*
Jeffrey Dillard’s final “Fightback” was shown on the first Thursday of December. Dillard bowed out with the pomp and ceremony of a royal investiture. After formally announcing his retirement as host, and Katherine’s succession, he presented her with a gleaming crown, “befitting the queen of the British consumer,” and a shining theatrical sword, “with which you shall slay the dragons of greed and hypocrisy.” It was pure ham, and the studio audience loved it. Katherine, wearing the crown and holding the sword, wished that color television had not yet been invented; on black-and-white, her blush would be nowhere near as conspicuous!
Instead of hurrying home after the show, Katherine attended an intimate dinner party at Dillard’s Mayfair club. Shirley Dillard was there, tall and thin with carefully coiffed silver hair. So was Paul Hyde, producer of “Fightback” for the many years Dillard had been with the show.
“Made any plans for Jeffrey now that he’ll be home all the time?” Katherine asked Shirley. “Are you going to get him trimming hedges, weeding, and mowing the lawn?”
Shirley laughed. “I’ve never seen Jeffrey as the gardening type. He says he loves the smell of fresh-mown grass, but he’ll be damned if he’ll go out and mow it.”
Paul Hyde leaned across the table. “He won’t even have the time to smell it. He’ll be too busy helping me at ‘Fightback.’”
“I beg your pardon?” Katherine looked at Dillard, who moved uncomfortably on his seat.
“Jeffrey’s staying on as executive producer,” Hyde revealed. “A consultant. Going to be my right-hand man.”
“We’ve never had an executive producer before,” Katherine pointed out. “Why do we need one now?”
Dillard raised a hand, like the pope giving a blessing. Even his first words were Latin. “Mea culpa. My fault entirely, Katherine, but after so many years in television the old ego finds it a trifle hard to walk away completely. Paul here, bless him, understood my predicament. He invented a position for me. Nothing more than a gofer, really, but it’ll keep me in touch with the show.” He looked fondly at his wife. “Keep me out of Shirley’s hair as well.”
Shirley and Paul Hyde laughed, but Katherine did not. It was the old boys’ network in operation. In his late fifties, Hyde had been in television for almost as long as Dillard. The two men were close, professionally and socially. If it had been anyone but Dillard with an ego problem, Hyde would have just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Too bad.” Because it was his close friend, Hyde had made room for him.
It was not the old boys’ network, though, which concerned Katherine. It was the possible erosion of her authority. “Jeffrey, I love you very dearly, and there’s nothing I’d like more than for us to continue our professional association. But I’m also a little worried that I won’t have complete control of what appears in my own show.”
Dillard’s face wore shock that Katherine could think such an unkind thought about him. Hyde was instantly conciliatory. “Katherine, I created the position of executive producer to keep an old friend from vegetating in retirement. Rest assured, the responsibility for the content of the show will be yours, and yours alone. If that were not the case, do you seriously believe I would have made room for Heather Harvey and Derek Simon, whom you asked to bring in from the Daily Eagle?”
Hyde’s words, Katherine told herself, made perfectly logical sense. So why did she not fully believe him? And why did she feel that, no matter how much she liked, admired, and respected Jeffrey Dillard, she would never be truly free of his specter on the show?
*
Not only was Jeffrey Dillard true to his word, acting as a personal assistant to Paul Hyde, but Katherine was thankful for his presence in the background as executive producer. Dillard kept a tactful distance from Katherine as she finalized her first “Fightback,” but when she needed advice he was more than happy to step forward and help.
“See?” he told her. “I’m a consultant. If you hit a snag, consult me.”
Grateful, and just a little ashamed of herself for ever thinking that Dillard would try to butt in, Katherine kissed him on the cheek. “There’s your consultancy fee. Don’t forget to declare it to the taxman.”
The first show, at the beginning of January, was a smash. Using Derek and Heather in a chatty question-and-answer format, Katherine exposed an expensive modeling school that, in three years of promising glamorous careers for its graduates, had failed to place even one. She followed that with a bogus clairvoyant who preyed on recently bereaved men and women, taking vast sums of money to put them in touch with the spirits of their departed loved ones. For that case, Katherine played a young widow, a role that came very naturally. And she felt more than professional pride when police initiated fraud proceedings against the alleged clairvoyant.
Two days later, on the first Saturday of the year, Katherine celebrated with a catered dinner party at Kate’s Haven. The three dozen guests comprised a cross-section of her life. Family, friends, colleagues from the newspaper and from “Fightback,” plus a handful of John Saxon’s friends whom she had met at his home. Saxon, himself, was the very first to arrive. He entered the house staggering under an enormous box. Katherine assumed it was a gift for her. She was wrong. The box contained toboggans for Henry and Joanne to use over Hampstead Heath. It was all Katherine could do to stop the children from rushing outside to try the toboggans on the snow-covered back lawn.
“You have just been elected,” Katherine told Saxon, “as the man who takes them over the heath on snowy days.”
“Why do you think I chose such a gift?”
“You’re a very lovely man. Thank you.”
Katherine made no objection when Saxon established himself as host. As other guests arrived, he was on hand with her to welcome them. Barely anyone, Katherine noticed, appeared surprised at Saxon’s forthrightness. Certainly not her father and Sally. Roland, after kissing Katherine, shook Saxon’s hand warmly, as though he had already approved of the property developer as a future son-in-law. Erica Bentley, who had driven with her husband, Cliff, from their farm, gave Katherine a broad wink. A few minutes later, when Erica had Katherine alone, she asked, “How well does John get on with your children?”
“The same way he gets on with everyone — amazingly well.”
“And your father?”
“Again, a hit.”
“Then what are you waiting for, Katherine? Marry the man! Call a minister and tie the knot tonight. Do it right here, right now, and save yourself the expense and bother of having another party.”
As more guests arrived, Katherine observed that cliques began to form. The Eagle people — Sally, the Bentleys, and Gerald Waller — formed one small group. Katherine thought that Waller looked tired. His face had a gaunt appearance, and his eyes seemed sunken. She found out that his temper was sharp, though, when he quietly but firmly reprimanded her for stealing two members of his staff.
“If my father didn’t complain about me taking Derek and Heather for ‘Fightback,’ why should you?”
“Your father doesn’t have to complain — he’s not the one with the headache of getting the paper out each day.”
Another clique was formed by the “Fightback” crew — Jeffrey and Shirley Dillard, Paul Hyde, and the two young reporters about whom Waller was so upset. Both Derek and Heather studiously avoided meeting Waller’s gaze, and Katherine wondered if inviting them all had been such a tactful idea.
She pulled Sally aside. “Is it me, or is Gerry overreacting about my poaching Derek and Heather?”
“He’s overreacted about a lot of things
during the past couple of weeks,” Sally answered. “Perhaps it has to do with his quitting smoking.”
“I didn’t know he had,” Katherine said quickly, before realizing that tonight was the first time she had ever seen Waller without a cigarette in his hand.
“He has, and that’s what everyone in editorial claims is the reason for his change in behavior. He’s hauled the subs over the coals a few times, and poor Lawrie Stimkin’s been yelled at more than once because the Eagle didn’t carry some inconsequential story that one of the other papers had.”
Once, that news would have delighted Katherine, but since seeing the other, more sympathetic side of the Scottish-born news editor, she felt sorry for him. “Poor Lawrie,” she said. “He must be looking gloomier than ever.”
Saxon entered the room, looking for Katherine. With him was a couple in their sixties; the face of the man was disfigured by a wide scar down the right side. “Who,” whispered Sally, “is that?”
“Sir Donald Leslie and his wife. They’re John’s friends. Come and meet them. Interesting people, even if Sir Donald does believe Maggie Thatcher’s a dangerous left-winger.”
The last guest to arrive was Raymond Barnhill. Katherine had told him that the party was black tie, and when she opened the front door, she was more than a little relieved to see he had remembered. Under his Burberry raincoat, he wore a tuxedo.
“Surprised to see me in a monkey suit?” he asked.
“No more surprised than you obviously are to be wearing one. Did you hire it from Moss Bros?”
“I went one better . . . I borrowed it from a guy I work with.” He held out a carefully wrapped package. “A very American gift. Use it with good luck.”
Katherine peeled off the wrapping to find a box containing a foot-high battery-operated slot machine. Delighted by the gift, she removed it from the box and set it on the hall table. “Where did you buy this?”
“A colleague of mine was in New York over Christmas. I asked him to bring it back for me.”
“How does it work?”
“Put in a dime. Ten cents . . .”
“We’re in London, Raymond. Where do I find ten cents?”
“There’s a roll of dimes in the box.”
Katherine pulled out the roll of money. She fed a coin into the machine, pressed the button, and watched the wheels spin.
“Two lemons and a cherry. What do I win?”
“Nothing. Check the payout chart.”
She tried again, and again. On the fifth attempt, she hit three bells. To a loud peal of music, the machine churned out the five dimes Katherine had invested. She banged her fist on the table. “Cheat! It’s supposed to pay out ten coins.”
Barnhill was laughing. “Before you start tapping the reservoir, you have to fill it.”
The noise of the machine paying out, and Katherine’s cry of protest, drew people into the hall. Roland, his interest instantly piqued, studied the machine. “May I try my luck?” He took a coin from the pile of dimes. Three lemons clicked into place. He passed a coin to Sally, who met a similar fate.
John Saxon looked over Sally’s shoulder. “I dare say that machine is quite illegal.”
Barnhill, remembering Saxon from Franz’s funeral, gave the property developer a frosty smile. “It only takes American dimes. To be illegal, I imagine it would first have to accept British currency. And as a visitor to this country, I’d be the very last person to break its laws.”
“Come along, Katherine.” Saxon touched her arm. “The hostess has to circulate. It’s poor etiquette for her to lock herself away with a slot machine.”
“Sally and I will keep it warm for you,” Roland called after his daughter.
Barnhill bowed sarcastically as Saxon led Katherine back to the other guests. “I think I’ll stay with you as well. I feel most comfortable around newspaper people.”
Barnhill remained with newspaper people for the rest of the evening. At dinner, he sat between Sally and Erica Bentley, relating anecdotes about his service as an information officer in Vietnam. After dinner, he became more serious, telling Sally and Gerald Waller why he believed British papers, with just a couple of exceptions, were inferior to their American counterparts.
“How can you,” he demanded, “call something like the Sun a newspaper? Bare boobs on page three — that belongs in Playboy, not a daily newspaper.”
“Look who owns the Sun,” Sally answered acidly, “and then you can understand the bad taste.”
“Rupert Murdoch owns the New York Post as well,” Barnhill countered. “That’s sensational journalism, yes, but there are no bare breasts on page three.”
“Yet,” Waller argued.
“Never. Even in lousy newspapers, the American public’s got better taste than the British public.”
Overhearing the conversation, Katherine stopped to listen in. While Barnhill and Sally went at it for all they were worth, Waller remained on the periphery, as though he had something else on his mind. After a minute, she remembered Saxon’s advice: she was the hostess; she had to circulate.
She approached Jeffrey Dillard, who was talking to Paul Hyde and Sir Donald Leslie, and drew him off to one side. “I never did make a proper apology to you, Jeffrey.”
“How’s that?”
“For my behavior when I heard you were going to remain with ‘Fightback.’ I was wrong to think and say what I did.”
Dillard dismissed the apology with a wave of the hand. “In your place, I would probably have harbored the same suspicions.”
When Katherine and Dillard rejoined the group, Sir Donald Leslie wanted to know who Barnhill was. “Heard snatches of his conversation over dinner, about Vietnam. Was he there?”
“He was an officer with the American army.”
“Really? Perhaps he can answer a question that’s always puzzled me — why the Yanks didn’t use similar strategy to what we employed in Malaya. Fighting the same enemy, you know. Excuse me.” As Sir Donald marched away in Barnhill’s direction, Katherine could swear that his scar was glowing.
She heard the sound of metal striking glass. Saxon was standing on a chair. A knife was in one hand, a champagne flute in the other. Waiters walked among the guests, passing out Dom Pérignon. Only Barnhill refused, drinking, instead, soda.
“A toast!” Saxon called out. “A toast to Katherine and ‘Fightback.’ Health and success!”
Roland materialized beside his daughter. “I’d say that John had put his stamp on the evening rather thoroughly. You might still not be ready to make any kind of a commitment, Kathy, but he most certainly is. And he isn’t embarrassed about letting everyone else know.
“I can handle him, Daddy.”
As the evening petered out, and guests said good-bye, two people made completely unsolicited remarks to Katherine about Raymond Barnhill. The first comment came from Sally Roberts, who, having spent much of the evening talking with Barnhill, had formed a very favorable impression of the American. “Raymond’s too bright and talented to be working for an agency. He should be on a newspaper, where his byline could become well known. Why don’t you try to persuade him to join us, Katherine?”
“Us? If you want Raymond on the Eagle, you’ll have to persuade him yourself. I’m television, Sally, not Fleet Street.”
“Now, maybe, but you’ll be back.”
The second comment came from John Saxon, who having spent barely five seconds with Barnhill, disliked him intensely. “Why are you friends with a jackass like that in a cheap hired suit?”
“He didn’t hire the suit — he borrowed it. And what business is it of yours who my friends are?”
“I just think you deserve better, Katherine.”
Having seen Saxon take over the evening, and having allowed him to do so, Katherine decided it was time to take some wind out of his sails. “Thank you for your concern, but I’m quite old enough to think for myself. You’re happy with your Tory friends, and I’m just as happy with my borrowed-suit friends.”
“We do, John. But what we have does not give you the right to criticize people with whom I wish to be friendly.”
Saxon was wise enough to know when to change a subject. “If the snow’s still around tomorrow afternoon, may I take Henry and Joanne over the heath?”
Having castigated Saxon, Katherine felt it was time to forgive him. “Just as long as you bring them back in one piece.”
*
On Tuesday afternoon, just three days after the party at Kate’s Haven, a tired-looking Gerald Waller walked into Sally Roberts’s office on the executive floor of the Eagle building, dropped heavily into a chair, and shocked the smile of greeting right off the editorial director’s face.
“I have to go into hospital, Sally.”
“What for?”
Waller gave the crooked grin of a man trying to be brave in front of a firing squad. “I prescribed the proper treatment for myself. Unfortunately, I wrote the prescription more than thirty years too late.”
“Gerry, what are you talking about?”
“Throwing away my cigarettes and lighter, that’s what. Stopping smoking a fortnight ago was too little, too late, Sally. I’ve got cancer.”
Sally sucked in her breath. She was the same age as Waller, and for a moment she caught a whiff of her own mortality. “Cancer’s not the killer it used to be. Doctors can work miracles these days.”
“If they catch it in time, they can. They’ll need to be miracle workers with the job I’m giving them.” Waller told Sally of a physical he had taken two weeks earlier. “For months it’s been painful to cough, absolute bloody murder even to breathe. Knowing, I guess, what was wrong turned me into an even bigger coward than normal. Finally, I worked up enough courage to make an appointment. I quit smoking the same day, thought I could fool the doctor if my breath didn’t smell like a dirty ashtray. As it turns out, I needn’t have bothered. I got the results yesterday, and they want me in.”