The holiday, p.11
The Holiday, page 11
‘Let me explain it to you,’ says Esme, consulting her sheet. ‘I won just over twenty-five thousand francs at roulette. The room costs twelve hundred and fifty a night unless there’s a supplement for sex in the shower. Twenty nights equals twenty-five thousand francs. That’s without all the little extras I just mentioned, like car parks, sunbeds, drinks and breakfasts. Then there’s the indoor pool in the Health Club upstairs which I would like to use if we could afford it.’
‘You’d better get back to the roulette table,’ says Roger. ‘I don’t want to end this holiday doing the washing up.’
‘We ought to get back in the tent,’ says Esme. ‘We’re living in a fool’s paradise.’
‘Pass me the dishcloth,’ says Roger. ‘I’m never sleeping in that tent again.’
‘In that case we’ll have to make some money. What are you good at?’
‘I never work on holiday,’ says Roger. ‘It’s against my principles.’
‘The tent it is, then,’ decides Esme, ‘or we’ll be on the Plat du Jour for forty-five francs before we’ve finished.’
‘No tent,’ Roger is firm. His poverty infuriates him. When the waiter brings their food he picks at it with less than his usual interest, but the wine disappears quickly. Esme eats, deep in thought, fretting over the money problem that she has created by choosing such an expensive hotel. Suddenly she relaxes.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ she says.
‘We need it,’ says Roger.
‘I was thinking of all that portrait-painting on the Croisette. Suppose I offer to paint Andrew Marner’s portrait? After all, he practically suggested it. He mentioned a gap on the boardroom wall.’
‘What would he pay?’
‘It isn’t a question of what he would pay,’ says Esme. ‘It’s a question of what I would charge.’
Andrew Marner steps on to the terrace of the Carlton Hotel with Kimberley Neal and they are shown to their table for dinner. Overhead, stars have replaced the sun now and lights twinkle on the yachts.
‘This joint’s full of third-world tarts,’ says Andrew, gazing round at his fellow diners. Certainly they have come from all over the world. There are even Moslem wives with covered heads. Others look as if they might well fit Andrew Marner’s description, but Kimberley baulks at the word ‘tarts’: she is conscious of her status.
‘Perhaps they are executive women with high-powered jobs,’ she suggests.
‘Perhaps airborne pigs will provide the evening entertainment,’ says Andrew. ‘Half these women got here on their backs.’
As the waiter brings their menus, printed and carrying today’s date, he spots Frances Kerwin emerge from the hotel and look uncertainly round for a table. She looks terrible. He stands up to beckon her and she walks gratefully in his direction.
‘Will you join us?’ he asks. ‘We haven’t ordered yet. Where’s Bruce?’
‘That’s very kind,’ says Frances. ‘I’d love to. Bruce is not here tonight.’
‘Well, sit down,’ says Andrew Marner, pulling a chair out for her.
‘Hallo,’ says Kimberley Neal.
Another menu is brought. It says: Prix par personne TTC: FF 360. This is not a cheap place to eat, but after trekking up to the police station twice today, Frances is in no mood to embark on another journey in search of one of the cheaper restaurants. The main course is daurade grille. She looks to the translation underneath: it says grilled daurade. Luckily there is an alternative: roasted saddle of lamb with garlic and stuffed local vegetables, and she orders that.
‘How are things?’ asks Kimberley. ‘Are you enjoying Cannes?’
‘It’s wonderful,’ says Frances. ‘I just wish I could afford it.’
Andrew Marner watches her, curious about her husband’s absence. He guesses that there has been some sort of tiff which would make questions from him unwelcome. But Kimberley is a journalist and feels no such inhibitions.
‘Where is your husband?’ she asks. ‘He isn’t working down here, is he?’
‘He’s been detained,’ says Frances.
‘Detained,’ repeats Kimberley, as if this reply is by no means adequate.
‘He’s been detained by the police,’ says Frances. ‘In fact, he’s locked up in a cell.’
‘Good God,’ says Andrew. ‘How exciting. What has he done?’ He wants to add, ‘Nothing trivial, I hope?’ but controls himself. The removal of Bruce Kerwin fills him with hope and pleasure.
‘Apparently he had cannabis in his pocket, which is strange because he has never touched the stuff. He met a man in a bar.’
‘Goodness,’ says Kimberley. ‘I didn’t have him down as a dope-head.’
‘He’s certainly a dope,’ says Frances. ‘It’s his head I’m not sure about. He’s trying to be young again. He’s neurotic.’
‘Neurosis is the absence of self-confidence,’ says Andrew. ‘How old is he?’
‘Forty going on twenty,’ says Frances. ‘I was going to book him into nursery school when we got home but now it doesn’t look as if he will be coming with me. He could get two years, apparently.’
She looks at the others and they wonder if she is going to cry but the waiter intervenes with their food.
‘Champagne,’ Andrew tells him, and then turns to Frances. ‘I realise this isn’t a champagne occasion for you, but we enjoy it with our meals. Will you join us?’
‘I certainly will,’ says Frances. ‘I’ve got to grab my pleasures where I find them.’
‘Exactly,’ says Andrew, smiling.
9
On Friday morning a parcel of magazines arrives from London for Andrew Marner. Like a child with his Christmas toys he takes them off to a corner of the terrace, pausing only to order a coffee from a hovering waiter. As always he brings a certain anxiety to the new issues, fearing that he is about to be confronted by a ghastly mistake, a grotesque libel or just a blank space where an expensive advertisement should have appeared. The business is full of pitfalls and the mistakes are always embarrassingly public.
He glances only fleetingly at the most popular of his magazines; the readers’ tastes are not his. It is World Review that he really wants to see and he pulls it from the bundle and settles back in his seat. Usually he has some inkling about what will be appearing in its pages but because he is away he can come to this issue as a normal reader.
He flips through the pages first, studying the contents. The future of Hong Kong, the nightmare of Iraq, the ten most influential men in the twentieth century. The air fare scandal, the teenage illiteracy scandal, the scandal of innocent men in jail. He makes a mental note to suggest to the editor that one scandal per issue should be sufficient, and reads on. A comprehensive demolition job on modern Britain – ‘with its incompetent politicians, lazy and greedy industrialists, spavined sportsmen and demoralised workforce’ – has the feel of an important piece which will probably be reprinted, at a fee, in one of the Sunday newspapers … but not everything pleases him. Somewhere on the staff is a man, or quite possibly a woman, who is in love with the punning headline. There is one every week and today’s, over an attack on a Midlands MP, is leicester bigot, which strikes him as particularly crass, detracting with its whimsical tone from the intended criticism.
Next he trawls through the pages in search of the errors that he dreads, the mistakes that will prevent the right people from taking his magazine seriously. He is looking here for the screaming literal, the upside-down cartoon, the misplaced headline, or the article that ends abruptly in mid-sentence. But his eyes alight on something much, much worse.
The goblins in the printing industry have managed to part a word in the middle so that a man who should have been described as ‘therapist’ is called ‘the rapist’. Andrew Marner vacates his chair as if he has been sitting on hot coals, and leaves the other guests on the terrace pitching and reeling in a wave of imaginative obscenities.
‘Garnett!’ he shouts into the phone. The hotel’s switchboard has connected him with surprising speed to the fourth-floor office in London where a bald young man sits at a table surrounded by the morning newspapers. Garnett has found the intellectual niche in journalism that he wanted – a quiet, thoughtful existence where quality counts for more than the ill-considered torrent of words that gushes from the daily papers.
‘Andrew,’ he says coolly. ‘Hallo.’
‘Have you seen this bloody cock-up on page twenty-six?’
The angry voice of the proprietor bellowing at him from the South of France disturbs Garnett. This is what happens in proper newspaper offices; it has no place among the urbane courtesies of World Review.
‘I’ve seen it, Andrew. It is much to be regretted.’
‘Regretted?’ shouts Andrew Marner. ‘It looks like half a million pounds’ worth of damages to me. What did The Sun pay Elton John?’
‘Their circulation would have been a factor.’ He explains gently: ‘The Sun sells more copies than we do.’
‘I can’t think of anything worse than calling a man a rapist whatever the circulation,’ says Andrew. ‘The question is: what are you going to do about it?’
‘Naturally we’ll carry an explanation and an apology next week,’ says Garnett smoothly. ‘In the meantime, I’ve phoned him.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He wasn’t available.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He was with his solicitor.’
‘Shit!’ says Andrew. ‘We’re sunk.’
‘Relax,’ says Garnett. ‘It’s a genuine mistake. There’s nothing malicious about it.’ Andrew Marner is so het up that Garnett can’t bring himself to tell him that in the excitement of launching World Review, they have forgotten to get their libel insurance in place.
With the magazines under his arm Andrew heads for the lift. It feels as if steam is coming off him and he tries to calm down in his little air-conditioned box as it hoists him smoothly to the third floor.
Upstairs, Kimberley Neal grabs the magazines from him, extracts her own and turns to the page that carries her column. KIMBERLEY NEAL it says in huge type across the top of the page. Her picture, with only the hint of a smile, is placed between the two names. The sight of the page gives her a warm glow every week, as if she had never seen it before. But today the pride is diluted. This magazine, selling about 90,000 copies doesn’t seem to have been read by anybody she meets. It comes tearing off the presses every week, the final moment in an exhausting schedule, and is rushed to newsagents all over Britain, but nobody has heard of her. Invitations to appear on television don’t arrive on her desk. Not one of the people she has met in Cannes has reacted to her name. She gazes at her page and wonders whether anybody actually reads it. She slaves over her provocative message every week, but is anyone out there receiving it?
She flops down on the bed. Next week’s column lies half-written on the pad beside her.
‘What I ought to write is a book,’ she declares. ‘People read books.’
‘That’s news to me,’ says Andrew, loosening his tie. ‘I thought they watched television. The kids today can’t read, can they? They can’t even find Britain on a map.’
‘I’m not talking about kids,’ says Kimberley. ‘The average adult woman – she reads books: fat novels crammed with filth. They love it. You must have noticed. The bookstalls are full of them.’
Andrew Marner is fetching himself a drink. The libel discovery has created a space inside him that needs to be filled. ‘And that’s what you’re going to write, is it? A fat novel crammed with filth?’
‘Why not?’ shrugs Kimberley. ‘Practically everyone else seems to be doing it. Who’s heard of Kimberley Neal? Now if you were to start a national newspaper, darling, and give me a column in there it would be different. Or if you were to give me an editorship.’
‘Patience, lady,’ says Andrew. ‘One step at a time.’
‘My steps seem to take me backwards,’ says Kimberley. ‘I’ll have to write a book then. Preferably one that makes Jackie Collins look like Jane Austen.’
Andrew Marner takes his whisky to the window. He is barely listening. After today’s news, the idea of Kimberley Neal editing one of his magazines is not one that would help him sleep. If Garnett, with his double first, his prodigious knowledge and his meticulous mind can’t tell therapist from the rapist, what hope would she have of saving him from the greedy demands of lawyers? And where would his knighthood be then?
He gulps back his whisky and puts the glass on the table. He hoped that the libel would recede in his mind, but it grows larger, pushing other matters to one side. He walks restlessly across to one of the pictures on the cream walls. It is the gardens at Versailles, with the grand palace rising in the distance. Luxury on this scale always unsettles him. It seems to be telling him that his pot is not bottomless.
‘It’s all right, Andrew, I didn’t want a drink,’ Kimberley says, opening her pad.
The remark gives him a jolt. Even those who dislike him praise his manners.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says, fetching the bottle. ‘I’ve got a problem on my mind.’
‘No, really. I don’t want one,’ says Kimberley, holding up her hand. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘A little libel. Well, rather a big libel actually.’
But Kimberley is not interested in the minutiae of office life. Tomorrow she has to fax another column and she has much to write. ‘Don’t forget that you’re meeting Monsieur Rocard for lunch,’ she says, picking up her pen.
‘My God, I had,’ says Andrew. ‘I’m coming apart here.’
When he disappears to change, she flips through her stand-by notebooks for likely subjects. If she can get this column done in a couple of hours she can spend the afternoon on the beach thinking about her novel. She sees a note that she has made a week ago, and when Andrew has gone she begins to write in her pad: ‘You can hardly turn on the television news these days without seeing a funeral. Every day coffins are carried across our screen. Sometimes it is the sequel to a terrorist outrage, sometimes a murdered child, sometimes the last farewell to a fallen star. But whatever it is, I am sick of it. It depresses the elderly and bores the young. Of course, it is easy television for the lazy people who put these programmes together. They might not know where the news is going to happen but they always have the date and place of funerals in their diaries. Instant, easy drama. And it’s cheap.’
She puts down the pad, another few inches of her column filled, and turns back to her notebook in search of another idea. She finds a gem. Lancashire men, she reads, make love more than any other men in Britain. They have sexual intercourse seventy-seven times a year. Kimberley frowns at the celibacy of it, but the figures are there in black and white. The national average is seventy-one times a year and bottom of the league table with sixty-seven couplings are the dour men of Yorkshire.
Kimberley studies these figures with incredulity. What on earth are these people doing with their spare time? Even Londoners, those vaunted pioneers of pleasure and gratification, only manage it sixty-nine times, one more than the staid and serious Scots. Here is something that she can really get enthusiastic about, lacing her column with lubricious jokes while at the same time taking a satisfying swing at the boring British male.
‘It isn’t our defeats in the sporting arenas of the world that shame Britain,’ she writes. ‘It’s the leg-over league table.’ Three hundred scornful words appear in half an hour and she reads them through with a satisfied smile. This evening she will type the column and fax it to London.
But when she has gone into the bathroom to prepare for a visit to the beach, she misses the normal satisfaction that arrives with the completion of a column. Again she wonders: who is going to read it?
As she dabs sun cream on her face, her mind turns again to the idea of writing a sexy novel that would reach those millions who have never heard of her little magazine. Perhaps it could be based on the survey she has just read. It could even be called The Leg-Over League Table. It’s a catchy title.
She stands naked before the bathroom mirror, admiring her gently tanning limbs and wonders what her own score would be. She estimates it conservatively at 150, but there have been years that would make that figure look like a vow of chastity. Certainly at twenty, when she kept a record of such things, she had topped two hundred, although that figure was artificially inflated by a rugby team from Bognor Regis.
Her standards are higher today. She is old enough to seek quality rather than quantity. Quality is Andrew Marner, with his position, his money and his power.
She picks up her thong and wonders whether she would be allowed to write pornographic novels if her name was Lady Marner.
For the first time in twenty years, Frances Kerwin wakes up alone. But her initial feeling of dismay, which threatens to develop into a mood that will define her day, is surprisingly shortlived. The bed, not now depressed on one side by a thirteen-stone man, responds buoyantly to her movements. No longer hemmed into one half, she stretches her legs and lies diagonally, discovering coolness and space that she has rarely known. It feels like a kind of luxury and she is reluctant to get up. She extends an arm, finds the remote control by her bedside, and turns on the television. More than fifty channels arrive here from France, Spain, Italy and a dozen spinning satellites that bounce junk back to earth as if, superior beings, they are rejecting it, but eventually she finds the English language with CNN which is showing a long interview with Monica Seles who is recovering from being stabbed on a tennis court. Frances lies in bed listening to this for a while, but when thoughts about her own predicament begin to expand there is no room in her head for those of Monica Seles, and she turns it off.
Yesterday her concern was for Bruce and what she should do for him, but today she finds that her thoughts keep returning to herself. Her problems are more immediate than her husband’s and there is a limit to what she can do for him. He is in a cell for the time being, and maybe for a lot longer. She is abandoned. The thought that she should save money by quitting the hotel and flying home is the first idea to reach her. After all, what sort of holiday was left for her now? But then she sees that she needs to be here to arrange whatever can be arranged on her husband’s behalf and she realises that she must stay.
‘You’d better get back to the roulette table,’ says Roger. ‘I don’t want to end this holiday doing the washing up.’
‘We ought to get back in the tent,’ says Esme. ‘We’re living in a fool’s paradise.’
‘Pass me the dishcloth,’ says Roger. ‘I’m never sleeping in that tent again.’
‘In that case we’ll have to make some money. What are you good at?’
‘I never work on holiday,’ says Roger. ‘It’s against my principles.’
‘The tent it is, then,’ decides Esme, ‘or we’ll be on the Plat du Jour for forty-five francs before we’ve finished.’
‘No tent,’ Roger is firm. His poverty infuriates him. When the waiter brings their food he picks at it with less than his usual interest, but the wine disappears quickly. Esme eats, deep in thought, fretting over the money problem that she has created by choosing such an expensive hotel. Suddenly she relaxes.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ she says.
‘We need it,’ says Roger.
‘I was thinking of all that portrait-painting on the Croisette. Suppose I offer to paint Andrew Marner’s portrait? After all, he practically suggested it. He mentioned a gap on the boardroom wall.’
‘What would he pay?’
‘It isn’t a question of what he would pay,’ says Esme. ‘It’s a question of what I would charge.’
Andrew Marner steps on to the terrace of the Carlton Hotel with Kimberley Neal and they are shown to their table for dinner. Overhead, stars have replaced the sun now and lights twinkle on the yachts.
‘This joint’s full of third-world tarts,’ says Andrew, gazing round at his fellow diners. Certainly they have come from all over the world. There are even Moslem wives with covered heads. Others look as if they might well fit Andrew Marner’s description, but Kimberley baulks at the word ‘tarts’: she is conscious of her status.
‘Perhaps they are executive women with high-powered jobs,’ she suggests.
‘Perhaps airborne pigs will provide the evening entertainment,’ says Andrew. ‘Half these women got here on their backs.’
As the waiter brings their menus, printed and carrying today’s date, he spots Frances Kerwin emerge from the hotel and look uncertainly round for a table. She looks terrible. He stands up to beckon her and she walks gratefully in his direction.
‘Will you join us?’ he asks. ‘We haven’t ordered yet. Where’s Bruce?’
‘That’s very kind,’ says Frances. ‘I’d love to. Bruce is not here tonight.’
‘Well, sit down,’ says Andrew Marner, pulling a chair out for her.
‘Hallo,’ says Kimberley Neal.
Another menu is brought. It says: Prix par personne TTC: FF 360. This is not a cheap place to eat, but after trekking up to the police station twice today, Frances is in no mood to embark on another journey in search of one of the cheaper restaurants. The main course is daurade grille. She looks to the translation underneath: it says grilled daurade. Luckily there is an alternative: roasted saddle of lamb with garlic and stuffed local vegetables, and she orders that.
‘How are things?’ asks Kimberley. ‘Are you enjoying Cannes?’
‘It’s wonderful,’ says Frances. ‘I just wish I could afford it.’
Andrew Marner watches her, curious about her husband’s absence. He guesses that there has been some sort of tiff which would make questions from him unwelcome. But Kimberley is a journalist and feels no such inhibitions.
‘Where is your husband?’ she asks. ‘He isn’t working down here, is he?’
‘He’s been detained,’ says Frances.
‘Detained,’ repeats Kimberley, as if this reply is by no means adequate.
‘He’s been detained by the police,’ says Frances. ‘In fact, he’s locked up in a cell.’
‘Good God,’ says Andrew. ‘How exciting. What has he done?’ He wants to add, ‘Nothing trivial, I hope?’ but controls himself. The removal of Bruce Kerwin fills him with hope and pleasure.
‘Apparently he had cannabis in his pocket, which is strange because he has never touched the stuff. He met a man in a bar.’
‘Goodness,’ says Kimberley. ‘I didn’t have him down as a dope-head.’
‘He’s certainly a dope,’ says Frances. ‘It’s his head I’m not sure about. He’s trying to be young again. He’s neurotic.’
‘Neurosis is the absence of self-confidence,’ says Andrew. ‘How old is he?’
‘Forty going on twenty,’ says Frances. ‘I was going to book him into nursery school when we got home but now it doesn’t look as if he will be coming with me. He could get two years, apparently.’
She looks at the others and they wonder if she is going to cry but the waiter intervenes with their food.
‘Champagne,’ Andrew tells him, and then turns to Frances. ‘I realise this isn’t a champagne occasion for you, but we enjoy it with our meals. Will you join us?’
‘I certainly will,’ says Frances. ‘I’ve got to grab my pleasures where I find them.’
‘Exactly,’ says Andrew, smiling.
9
On Friday morning a parcel of magazines arrives from London for Andrew Marner. Like a child with his Christmas toys he takes them off to a corner of the terrace, pausing only to order a coffee from a hovering waiter. As always he brings a certain anxiety to the new issues, fearing that he is about to be confronted by a ghastly mistake, a grotesque libel or just a blank space where an expensive advertisement should have appeared. The business is full of pitfalls and the mistakes are always embarrassingly public.
He glances only fleetingly at the most popular of his magazines; the readers’ tastes are not his. It is World Review that he really wants to see and he pulls it from the bundle and settles back in his seat. Usually he has some inkling about what will be appearing in its pages but because he is away he can come to this issue as a normal reader.
He flips through the pages first, studying the contents. The future of Hong Kong, the nightmare of Iraq, the ten most influential men in the twentieth century. The air fare scandal, the teenage illiteracy scandal, the scandal of innocent men in jail. He makes a mental note to suggest to the editor that one scandal per issue should be sufficient, and reads on. A comprehensive demolition job on modern Britain – ‘with its incompetent politicians, lazy and greedy industrialists, spavined sportsmen and demoralised workforce’ – has the feel of an important piece which will probably be reprinted, at a fee, in one of the Sunday newspapers … but not everything pleases him. Somewhere on the staff is a man, or quite possibly a woman, who is in love with the punning headline. There is one every week and today’s, over an attack on a Midlands MP, is leicester bigot, which strikes him as particularly crass, detracting with its whimsical tone from the intended criticism.
Next he trawls through the pages in search of the errors that he dreads, the mistakes that will prevent the right people from taking his magazine seriously. He is looking here for the screaming literal, the upside-down cartoon, the misplaced headline, or the article that ends abruptly in mid-sentence. But his eyes alight on something much, much worse.
The goblins in the printing industry have managed to part a word in the middle so that a man who should have been described as ‘therapist’ is called ‘the rapist’. Andrew Marner vacates his chair as if he has been sitting on hot coals, and leaves the other guests on the terrace pitching and reeling in a wave of imaginative obscenities.
‘Garnett!’ he shouts into the phone. The hotel’s switchboard has connected him with surprising speed to the fourth-floor office in London where a bald young man sits at a table surrounded by the morning newspapers. Garnett has found the intellectual niche in journalism that he wanted – a quiet, thoughtful existence where quality counts for more than the ill-considered torrent of words that gushes from the daily papers.
‘Andrew,’ he says coolly. ‘Hallo.’
‘Have you seen this bloody cock-up on page twenty-six?’
The angry voice of the proprietor bellowing at him from the South of France disturbs Garnett. This is what happens in proper newspaper offices; it has no place among the urbane courtesies of World Review.
‘I’ve seen it, Andrew. It is much to be regretted.’
‘Regretted?’ shouts Andrew Marner. ‘It looks like half a million pounds’ worth of damages to me. What did The Sun pay Elton John?’
‘Their circulation would have been a factor.’ He explains gently: ‘The Sun sells more copies than we do.’
‘I can’t think of anything worse than calling a man a rapist whatever the circulation,’ says Andrew. ‘The question is: what are you going to do about it?’
‘Naturally we’ll carry an explanation and an apology next week,’ says Garnett smoothly. ‘In the meantime, I’ve phoned him.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He wasn’t available.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He was with his solicitor.’
‘Shit!’ says Andrew. ‘We’re sunk.’
‘Relax,’ says Garnett. ‘It’s a genuine mistake. There’s nothing malicious about it.’ Andrew Marner is so het up that Garnett can’t bring himself to tell him that in the excitement of launching World Review, they have forgotten to get their libel insurance in place.
With the magazines under his arm Andrew heads for the lift. It feels as if steam is coming off him and he tries to calm down in his little air-conditioned box as it hoists him smoothly to the third floor.
Upstairs, Kimberley Neal grabs the magazines from him, extracts her own and turns to the page that carries her column. KIMBERLEY NEAL it says in huge type across the top of the page. Her picture, with only the hint of a smile, is placed between the two names. The sight of the page gives her a warm glow every week, as if she had never seen it before. But today the pride is diluted. This magazine, selling about 90,000 copies doesn’t seem to have been read by anybody she meets. It comes tearing off the presses every week, the final moment in an exhausting schedule, and is rushed to newsagents all over Britain, but nobody has heard of her. Invitations to appear on television don’t arrive on her desk. Not one of the people she has met in Cannes has reacted to her name. She gazes at her page and wonders whether anybody actually reads it. She slaves over her provocative message every week, but is anyone out there receiving it?
She flops down on the bed. Next week’s column lies half-written on the pad beside her.
‘What I ought to write is a book,’ she declares. ‘People read books.’
‘That’s news to me,’ says Andrew, loosening his tie. ‘I thought they watched television. The kids today can’t read, can they? They can’t even find Britain on a map.’
‘I’m not talking about kids,’ says Kimberley. ‘The average adult woman – she reads books: fat novels crammed with filth. They love it. You must have noticed. The bookstalls are full of them.’
Andrew Marner is fetching himself a drink. The libel discovery has created a space inside him that needs to be filled. ‘And that’s what you’re going to write, is it? A fat novel crammed with filth?’
‘Why not?’ shrugs Kimberley. ‘Practically everyone else seems to be doing it. Who’s heard of Kimberley Neal? Now if you were to start a national newspaper, darling, and give me a column in there it would be different. Or if you were to give me an editorship.’
‘Patience, lady,’ says Andrew. ‘One step at a time.’
‘My steps seem to take me backwards,’ says Kimberley. ‘I’ll have to write a book then. Preferably one that makes Jackie Collins look like Jane Austen.’
Andrew Marner takes his whisky to the window. He is barely listening. After today’s news, the idea of Kimberley Neal editing one of his magazines is not one that would help him sleep. If Garnett, with his double first, his prodigious knowledge and his meticulous mind can’t tell therapist from the rapist, what hope would she have of saving him from the greedy demands of lawyers? And where would his knighthood be then?
He gulps back his whisky and puts the glass on the table. He hoped that the libel would recede in his mind, but it grows larger, pushing other matters to one side. He walks restlessly across to one of the pictures on the cream walls. It is the gardens at Versailles, with the grand palace rising in the distance. Luxury on this scale always unsettles him. It seems to be telling him that his pot is not bottomless.
‘It’s all right, Andrew, I didn’t want a drink,’ Kimberley says, opening her pad.
The remark gives him a jolt. Even those who dislike him praise his manners.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says, fetching the bottle. ‘I’ve got a problem on my mind.’
‘No, really. I don’t want one,’ says Kimberley, holding up her hand. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘A little libel. Well, rather a big libel actually.’
But Kimberley is not interested in the minutiae of office life. Tomorrow she has to fax another column and she has much to write. ‘Don’t forget that you’re meeting Monsieur Rocard for lunch,’ she says, picking up her pen.
‘My God, I had,’ says Andrew. ‘I’m coming apart here.’
When he disappears to change, she flips through her stand-by notebooks for likely subjects. If she can get this column done in a couple of hours she can spend the afternoon on the beach thinking about her novel. She sees a note that she has made a week ago, and when Andrew has gone she begins to write in her pad: ‘You can hardly turn on the television news these days without seeing a funeral. Every day coffins are carried across our screen. Sometimes it is the sequel to a terrorist outrage, sometimes a murdered child, sometimes the last farewell to a fallen star. But whatever it is, I am sick of it. It depresses the elderly and bores the young. Of course, it is easy television for the lazy people who put these programmes together. They might not know where the news is going to happen but they always have the date and place of funerals in their diaries. Instant, easy drama. And it’s cheap.’
She puts down the pad, another few inches of her column filled, and turns back to her notebook in search of another idea. She finds a gem. Lancashire men, she reads, make love more than any other men in Britain. They have sexual intercourse seventy-seven times a year. Kimberley frowns at the celibacy of it, but the figures are there in black and white. The national average is seventy-one times a year and bottom of the league table with sixty-seven couplings are the dour men of Yorkshire.
Kimberley studies these figures with incredulity. What on earth are these people doing with their spare time? Even Londoners, those vaunted pioneers of pleasure and gratification, only manage it sixty-nine times, one more than the staid and serious Scots. Here is something that she can really get enthusiastic about, lacing her column with lubricious jokes while at the same time taking a satisfying swing at the boring British male.
‘It isn’t our defeats in the sporting arenas of the world that shame Britain,’ she writes. ‘It’s the leg-over league table.’ Three hundred scornful words appear in half an hour and she reads them through with a satisfied smile. This evening she will type the column and fax it to London.
But when she has gone into the bathroom to prepare for a visit to the beach, she misses the normal satisfaction that arrives with the completion of a column. Again she wonders: who is going to read it?
As she dabs sun cream on her face, her mind turns again to the idea of writing a sexy novel that would reach those millions who have never heard of her little magazine. Perhaps it could be based on the survey she has just read. It could even be called The Leg-Over League Table. It’s a catchy title.
She stands naked before the bathroom mirror, admiring her gently tanning limbs and wonders what her own score would be. She estimates it conservatively at 150, but there have been years that would make that figure look like a vow of chastity. Certainly at twenty, when she kept a record of such things, she had topped two hundred, although that figure was artificially inflated by a rugby team from Bognor Regis.
Her standards are higher today. She is old enough to seek quality rather than quantity. Quality is Andrew Marner, with his position, his money and his power.
She picks up her thong and wonders whether she would be allowed to write pornographic novels if her name was Lady Marner.
For the first time in twenty years, Frances Kerwin wakes up alone. But her initial feeling of dismay, which threatens to develop into a mood that will define her day, is surprisingly shortlived. The bed, not now depressed on one side by a thirteen-stone man, responds buoyantly to her movements. No longer hemmed into one half, she stretches her legs and lies diagonally, discovering coolness and space that she has rarely known. It feels like a kind of luxury and she is reluctant to get up. She extends an arm, finds the remote control by her bedside, and turns on the television. More than fifty channels arrive here from France, Spain, Italy and a dozen spinning satellites that bounce junk back to earth as if, superior beings, they are rejecting it, but eventually she finds the English language with CNN which is showing a long interview with Monica Seles who is recovering from being stabbed on a tennis court. Frances lies in bed listening to this for a while, but when thoughts about her own predicament begin to expand there is no room in her head for those of Monica Seles, and she turns it off.
Yesterday her concern was for Bruce and what she should do for him, but today she finds that her thoughts keep returning to herself. Her problems are more immediate than her husband’s and there is a limit to what she can do for him. He is in a cell for the time being, and maybe for a lot longer. She is abandoned. The thought that she should save money by quitting the hotel and flying home is the first idea to reach her. After all, what sort of holiday was left for her now? But then she sees that she needs to be here to arrange whatever can be arranged on her husband’s behalf and she realises that she must stay.
