The Boy Who Fell to Earth (30 page)

My heart stopped with a queer jerk.

‘In Paris,’ she purred, in her honey-buttered accent. ‘I’m shooting a series on French cooking.’

What a waste of exquisite cuisine, I thought. Tawdry was so thin she probably ordered one crouton for dinner – then shared it.

She looked me up and down with pity. ‘Of course he could never take you to France, for fear you’d be arrested at the Gare du Nord by the Chic Police for not being, like, suave enough.’

Ignoring her barb, I allowed the full impact of what she’d said to hit me. ‘You’ve been meeting up in Paris?’ I said, stunned.

‘It’s not like he hasn’t asked me to marry him. He has. A squillion times. But I wanted to seem available to my fans. When he called my bluff like that, well, I realized that my career is secondary to my man.’

‘Yes, how goes your illustrious rise to fame? I’m sure your televisual fellating of various vegetables has been of great importance to men serving life in prison,’ I bitched.

‘… Which is why I’ve finally decided to accept his proposal,’ she continued, as emphatic as her lip liner.
‘Because
we’re soul mates, Jerry and I.’ Emotion contorted her face and her shoulders shook.

I thought of my passionate encounter with Jeremy the night before in his four-poster. I dwelt on all the loving declarations he’d made to me, post coitus. ‘You’re lying.’

Tawdry Hepburn lasered me with eyes that were glistening wet with tears. ‘Listen, sweetie. I’m a TV presenter with two expressions – looking happy and less happy. That’s it. I do not cry on command, believe me,’ she said, thick-throated with sobs. It was then that I glanced down at her breasts. My nemesis is famous for fluffing up her breasts in their cups on a regular basis to ensure that she’s the centre of attention at all times. But there they sat, not even half fluffed but sadly deflated.

‘Rule number one in the How to Keep a Man Interested manual,’ Tawdry enlightened me, ‘is to play hard to get … Well, I did that. I kept right on filming my show … I didn’t change my plans to film in Paris. Rule number two in the How to Keep a Man Interested manual – if that doesn’t work,
hack into his emails
. I knew from the papers that Jerry had announced our split. But I didn’t know till this week that he was,’ she looked me up and down once more, ‘reheating leftovers.’

‘You hacked into his emails? I think you’d better leave now,’ I asserted, frogmarching the fembot to the door. It was my turn to give her a glacial once-over. She reminded me of roses you buy at a service station – beautiful but with absolutely no fragrance. ‘I suspect the French Chic Police have an arrest warrant out for
you
, because despite your rounded vowels you’re nothing more than a tacky, scheming little lowbrow. You probably left your posh little private school without even one O level.’

‘Lowbrow?’ Her cosmetically lifted eyebrow vaulted so high it practically left the stratosphere. ‘Do you know what Jerry liked about me when we met? That I’m a self-made career woman. Do you know what he says about university? That it’s just a place where women go until they can get alimony.’ She sniggered, with sour glee. ‘So, don’t think all your fancy talk of metaphysical poetry or whatever impresses him, sweetie. Jerry maintains that the only way you can get something intelligent to come out of a woman’s mouth is if she stops sucking Einstein’s dick.’

I felt momentarily unable to contribute to the conversation so slammed the door in her perfect, pouting face. I stood there in the hall in a state of disbelief. I told myself she was lying … But a few minutes later I was running for the tube. I thought I’d finally got my life on the right track, but apparently I was tied to it and there was a train coming.

22

Smuggery, Buggery and Skulduggery

EXPERIENCE IS A
wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. This is what I thought as I sprinted up the tube escalator, two steps at a time. Leicester Square was grey and gloomy. In the distance, dark clouds roiled like a blossoming bruise. Jeremy’s PA had told me he was lunching at the Garrick Club, a place for Old Etonians raised on smuggery and buggery and other types who send their shirts out to be stuffed. I stomped up the green-veined marble steps into the cavernous foyer and made a dart towards the grand oak staircase. An epaulette-adorned doorman barred my way.

‘May I help you, madam?’ He glanced with disdain at my jeans. ‘Who are you meeting?’

‘Jeremy Beaufort.’

‘I wasn’t aware he was expecting any lady guests,’ he said, consulting his luncheon list.

‘Well, he’s not exactly expecting me …’

He placed a restraining hand on my elbow. ‘This club is for male members only, madam.’

‘Is that so? Well, I’ve got a lot of testosterone. Not only am I very bossy and self-sufficient,’ I snapped, ‘but I also have a hair growing out of my chin.’ And then I just shoved him aside and bolted up towards the first-floor dining room. Musty, fusty men were rumbling and grumbling over their claret and pork chops. I spotted Jeremy straight away, dining with a bunch of pinstriped people, one or two of whom I vaguely recognized as Cabinet ministers.

‘How can you belong to a club that bans women as members?’ I spat at him. ‘No bloody wonder so few women reach the top judicial and political ranks when they’re excluded from this cosy little enclave of all-male networking. You might not have joined your father’s party but you’ve still turned into him.’

Jeremy looked up, startled. ‘Has something happened?’ he asked, springing to his feet in alarm.

I picked up a knife from the table. ‘Well, I’d say, in a romance scenario, lunging at your lover with a carving knife is not a sign that things are going all that bloody well, wouldn’t you?’

The chrome-domed group of Tory grandees stuffed into leather chairs too small for them gasped in consternation. ‘Sorry to interrupt. But I’ve come to bury my ex-husband,’ I told them. ‘A task made slightly more difficult by the complicating fact that he isn’t
dead yet
.’

The antique doorman was now at my elbow, panting asthmatically. Jeremy excused himself and strong-armed me out into the foyer and then, after a brief aside to the gathering security men, into a secluded, book-lined room which had ‘Empire’ stamped all over it. As Jeremy disarmed me, I now noted that the weapon I’d seized was only a lowly butter
knife.
Oh well, I suppose I could have slathered him to death with margarine or mustard.

‘Lucy, what on earth are you so angry about?’

I recoiled from him as though he were a plutonium-riddled Russian spy. ‘You might think that I sound bitter, but that’s because I am!’ My voice was so shrill it practically shattered the stained-glass windows. A huge mahogany desk now sat massively symbolic between us. ‘So apparently you think that university is just a place where women go until they can get alimony? At least that’s what your girlfriend told me!’

‘My girlfriend?’ He leant his arms on to the desk and loomed across at me. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Lucy?’

‘When you said you were laying all your cards on the table, I should have taken a quick peek up your sleeve – no, your trouser leg. And, oh! What would I have found there, but Audrey.’

‘Audrey?’

‘Yes. She paid me a little visit.’ Over the last couple of months I’d allowed myself to become happy and optimistic again. Now mistrust radiated from me in zigzags that I felt sure were visible to the naked eye. ‘Apparently, the whole time you’ve been declaring your undying love for me and our son you’ve been secretly meeting with her in Paris. It’s a wonder the fire department hasn’t closed down your bedroom due to overcrowding.’

The puzzlement dissolved from my ex-husband’s features. Jeremy smiled at me tolerantly, as if I were a sulky child. ‘And you believed her? Lucy, the woman is delusional. She’s been leaving all kinds of deranged messages for me at the office. Obviously, things didn’t work out with her celebrity-chef
lover
and La Stupenda of the Blender has realized she’s lost her meal ticket.’ He picked up my abandoned butter knife and laughed. ‘No wonder you were tempted to do a little cleaver-wielding of your own.’

He strode around the table and pulled me to him, hugging me hard. I resisted for a moment, like some heroine from a Victorian melodrama, but then the spreading, pleasurable sensation of his equatorial embrace engulfed me. Jeremy was a fire that had never gone out. He just stoked the embers and my feelings for him flared up accordingly.

‘I so want to believe you,’ I said, summoning up all my strength to push him away again. ‘But then why didn’t you let her know you’d come back to us? She said she only found out by reading your emails.’

‘What?’ His eyebrows collided in fury. ‘She’s hacking into my emails? That’s a criminal offence. I’ll have her prosecuted. Oh my God! How was I beguiled by her for so long? It makes me doubt my own judgement.’ His voice was thick with self-loathing. ‘Leaving you for that calculating creature was the biggest mistake of my life,’ he reiterated. ‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. You and Merlin mean everything to me.’

‘Merlin is fragile enough at the moment, Jeremy. The last thing I want is some half-baked, cake-cooking, egg-whisker stalking us.’

‘I’ll take out a restraining order if necessary. I’ll call the police right now. Where is she? Scuttling back on the Eurostar, no doubt, before I can have her arrested.’

I sagged like a day-old soufflé. ‘I’m sorry I overreacted. It’s all the stress about Merlin. I’m so worried about him,’ I confided. ‘His behaviour’s been spiralling downwards since he started this new school. He’s washing his hands
compulsively.
He has all these issues about fate and luck and rituals and lock checking. He has to do things at exactly the same time every day in the same way, measuring, counting, checking … He won’t go near the microwave in case it ignites his brain. He won’t put his knuckles near his ear, in case it makes him go deaf … Getting him to school in the mornings means fortifying myself with so much coffee I end up passing everybody on the road – when I’m not even in a car.’

Jeremy kissed the top of my head with great tenderness. ‘You know what? Why doesn’t Merlin come and stay with me for a few days? If he wants to, that is. And you could go to a spa and de-stress. Take your mother and sister. My treat. My secretary will organize it. You can get a taste of what it will be like to be an LOL … Lady of Leisure,’ he deciphered. ‘I would come too, but I have so much work to do now. Delegation is for second-raters.’ He winked. ‘Let someone else do it.’

I tried to smile at his little joke, but it went crooked, as though it had been hijacked on the way by some unseen emotion. It had been a very topsy-turvy day. Outside the big bay windows a mass of grey and white clouds sloshed across the sky like jumbled washing. It made me think of housework and how much I didn’t want to be doing any right now. A spa sounded so tempting. Single mums can never make a declaration of independence, especially the mother of a kid with special needs. But there’s no reason we couldn’t enjoy the odd bit of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happy Hour.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

23

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happy Hour

I DIDN’T HAVE
to think for long. By early December Merlin’s behaviour had become more and more erratic and disturbing. He developed a preoccupation with his head. He went into a panic that he’d injured his brain because he nearly hit his head on the door. He spent days punishing himself for this near-miss. He begged me for a brain operation. No matter how much I explained the lack of logic in his angst, he remained convinced that
almost
hurting himself meant he had. He drove himself mad by looking in the rear-view mirror of his mind, wishing he’d done or said things differently, going over and over his mistakes then chastising himself for his inadequacies.

The poor kid was constantly apprehensive. I could feel it coming off him in waves. His anxieties were like a Mafia gang of thugs in his head. They waited for his emotions to come strolling down the street, then they’d mug them, hold them hostage and beat the living crap out of them.

One morning, pre-dawn, my distraught son woke me in a panic about which shirt to wear. ‘Short-sleeved shirts will give me bad luck in the cold weather. It’s all about luck,’ he said, gnawing fretfully on the inside of his cheek. When I walked past his room, it was festooned with shirts. He had tried on every single item in his entire wardrobe.

During breakfast he balanced himself on the edge of his chair, ready to leap up at any time, jiggling his knee up and down and wiggling his toes. He drummed his fingers on the table in time to some secret rhythm in his head.

‘What’s the matter, darling?’ I asked nervously, preparing myself for a postcard from a parallel universe.

‘I get worried about glass. I worry about my knuckles going near my ear. I worry about fingernails and toenails. I worry about Archie. Where is he? Was he a paid actor in a script?’

I often thought about Archie too but then reminded myself that it wasn’t just that we weren’t on the same page, we weren’t even in the same library, let alone the same book.

‘I just want to be able to think for my whole life and hear. Clenched fists and closed eyes are also a bad idea. I think I need an ear operation because my knuckles went near my ears.’

My son’s face registered such intense apprehension it was almost parodic. ‘But darling, you know that’s irrational, right? Look, my knuckles are near my ears, I’m banging my ears with my knuckles and I’m not deaf. Am I?’

‘No! No! Don’t,’ Merlin shrieked, catapulting to his feet. ‘Now if you go deaf it will be my fault. I used to think that my brain ruled my body, but then I started to think about what was telling me to think that.’ Merlin lowered his voice, glanced around conspiratorially, then mouthed, ‘My
brain
.’

Whenever I tried to help, he would round on me, aiming with malicious precision at the areas where I felt most vulnerable. ‘Not as young as you used to be, eh? Doctors are wrong. Wrinkles do hurt, don’t they?’ … ‘Thought you’d be a head teacher by now, didn’t you? But no. You’re still only a lowly English teacher. You’ve never quite lived up to your potential, have you? And whatever happened to the Great Novel you were always talking about?’