Acquired Tastes (23 page)

To Philip's relief, a waiter began to clear the table before another one arrived with their second course.

'This looks absolutely delicious,' he said with an effort, as he cut into his venison steak and it oozed blood. 'This place is certainly living up to its reviews, don't you think?'

As he chewed he tried to think how he could rescue a situation which was fast heading for disaster. The antagonism between Gabriella and Vanessa hung about the table like an uninvited guest. Philip felt a burning sensation in his gut and cursed the glass of champagne yet again, it didn't seem to be agreeing with the rich venison steak.

'Are you quite all right, Philip darling?' Gabriella asked looking solicitous. 'You've gone a little pale. Perhaps we ought to order a tisane to act as a
digestif
for your tummy.' She pronounced 'tisane' and
'digestif
with a French accent.

'I'm fine, really I am,' Philip insisted.

'Are you sure, Philip darling?' Not to be outdone in solicitude, Vanessa put her hand on his arm. 'You do look a little odd.'

A cold sweat broke out on Philip's face. He mopped it with his napkin. 'Will you excuse me for a few minutes?' he said struggling to his feet and heading in the direction of what he hoped were the toilets.

A waiter came forward and guided him around a large clump of ferns.

Philip could feel the acid indigestion closing like a steel band around his chest. He always suffered when he got agitated and that was beginning to happen a lot lately.

The toilets were thankfully empty, and he stood looking in the mirror, holding the edge of the washbasin as the nausea made his head whirl. His normally healthy, pink skin had an unhealthy green pallor. Philip felt inside his pocket for his tablets, which he carried in a small enamelled box that normally snapped open with just a little pressure.

This time it didn't.

In his frustration, Philip banged it hard on the marble topped washbasin causing it to spring open, spilling all his pills on to the floor.

Clutching his chest with one hand, Philip went down on his knees and felt around with his other hand. It was difficult to see the pills on the elaborately patterned, tiled floor, and Philip was too vain to admit that he needed glasses.

As he was scrabbling around, the door behind him opened.

'What the dickens …?' boomed a loud voice.

With some difficulty, as any movement made the pain worse, Philip swivelled round on his knees and found himself looking at a pair of highly polished, cap toe Oxford shoes topped by the turn-ups of a black, pin-striped suit. His gaze continued to travel upwards, following the knife-crease in one trouser leg, then over an expansive stomach only just held in check by a waistcoat straining to remain buttoned-up, until it finally met the slightly bloodshot, bulging eyes of Sir Norman Fluck, the newly appointed chairman of the Committee for Media Morality.

Until recently, the committee had been a little known. Set up to vet television programmes for political balance, taste and decency, it had provided an innocuous sinecure for retired senior civil servants, failed former politicians and other assorted minor luminaries, for whom service on a public committee guaranteed an appearance on the honours list.

But the appointment of Sir Norman had changed all that.

For most of his twenty-five years in parliament, Sir Norman had been a back-bench MP, distinguished only by his rigid adherence to the party line and the fact that nobody - not even most of his constituents - had ever heard of him.

Aside from his maiden speech, in which he had called for the Union Jack to be raised and the national anthem to be sung at school assemblies, Hansard had not recorded a single further contribution to parliamentary debate. When it announced his retirement, even his constituency newspaper had found it hard to find much to say about his political achievements, other than to praise his record of solid and sturdy support for the Conservative cause. It was assumed by one and all, that in retirement, he would disappear into the obscurity from which he had never emerged. But they had been proved wrong.

One of the requirements for being chairman of the committee was that Sir Norman watch television, something he had never done before. According to him, it was bad enough having to leave his estate and go up to damn London in order to vote occasionally without wasting further time sitting in front of a bloody box.

So when duty finally forced him to sit down and watch television, the shock of what Sir Norman saw fired him with a missionary zeal that, on his past record, few would have believed possible. He became a man with a mission, not only to cleanse the nation's television screens, but also to purge the television industry itself.

'The television industry is a hot-bed of left-wing sympathisers, alcoholics, fornicators and drug abusers,' he had thundered in his first speech. 'If we are to trust the innocent, unformed minds of our children to these people, we must expect them to adhere to decent, god-fearing moral standards off screen as well as on. I intend to root any malefactors out by their toes.'

This speech - and the many others he had made since discovering he had a voice for the instantly quotable phrase - had earned Sir Norman the tabloid sobriquet ‘the Sleaze-finder General’. Now, as he gazed distastefully down at Philip, his expression suggested he was considering a particularly unpleasant punishment to inflict on him.

'In… indigestion pills,' Philip stuttered lamely, shaking his pill box like a collecting plate. 'I rather overdid it at lunch.'

Too late he realised that this, too, could be misconstrued and hastily added: 'But only with food.'

Sir Norman's bushy eyebrows nearly touched his receding hairline.

Feeling that he was somewhat at a disadvantage talking to Sir Norman's knees, Philip put a hand on the washbasin and painfully pulled himself to his feet. As he did so, a large ball of wind which had been trapped in his stomach, rose inexorably up and forced itself out of his mouth in a long, loud belch.

'Well,
really
,' barked Sir Norman, now confirmed in his earlier suspicion that he was face-to-face with a drug-taking drunk. He turned on his heel with military precision, and marched out of the door.

Tears of frustration pricking hotly behind his eyes, Philip belatedly put his hand over his mouth. His indigestion had gone, and along with it the pain, but it was too late. Of all the people in all the world, why had he disgraced himself in front of Sir Norman?

He looked in the mirror again and saw a balding, middle-aged man with panic in his eyes looking back at him.

Why, oh why, had he left the BBC?

Jeremy slept clutching the bed covers with the desperation of a small child clutching its security blanket. Alicia lay beside him, her eyes wide open.

She sighed. She was at last accustomed to the constant night and day rumble of traffic in London, but she still found the murky orange glow which passed for night disturbing. It seemed to insinuate itself around, under and even through the balding pile of Zelda's red velvet curtains, no matter how tightly she drew them across the windows.

Alicia leaned over and squinted at the faint green numbers of the radio clock on the bedside table. It was 2.34 a.m. She lay back on the pillow and screwed her eyes tightly shut. Then willing herself to relax, she counted slowly backwards from one hundred. Usually it was an infallible way of falling to sleep, but at nineteen, she gave up and opened her eyes.

A sudden, bloodcurdling yowl from the garden made her heart skip a beat. The sound hung throbbing in the air for what felt like an age before it finally died away, only to be replaced by the vicious sounds of two cats locked in close combat. It seemed to Alicia that, even if the cats did not disturb Jeremy, the sound of her still-thudding heart must, but when she looked over at him, his eyes remained closed and his breathing deep and regular.

With a loud sigh she turned over on to her side and curled her knees up. She had always been such a sound sleeper, but since Jeremy moved in, she found that even when she did eventually fall into a fitful doze, she was troubled by unfamiliar and vaguely disagreeable dreams that left her feeling bad-tempered and heavy-headed when she woke. Seeing Jeremy's freshly-minted countenance first thing in the morning did not help either. With another deep sigh, Alicia turned over yet again, this time onto her stomach.

She hadn't intended they share a bed when she suggested Jeremy come and stay for a while. She had just been so horrified after visiting the dingy room he rented in Hackney a week ago, that she felt she couldn’t bear to think of him staying there a moment longer. The room had been bad enough, but when she saw the squalid state of the kitchen he shared with two others, it had been enough to put anyone off their food.

Jeremy had needed no encouragement. He packed his suitcase there and then and they caught a taxi back to Zelda's flat. Alicia had intended to go out the next day and buy some sort of put-you up for him to sleep on. But when she went into the bedroom, she found his striped pyjamas folded neatly on the pillow next to her winceyette night-dress.

The intimacy of the two sets of nightclothes so close together had brought a blush to her cheeks, but Jeremy had not said anything to suggest he thought of her as other than a friend, or at least she didn't think he had. It was
so
difficult to tell. She certainly liked him much more than just a friend, but hadn't dared say anything, at least not without first knowing what he felt. She had no intention of making a fool of herself with yet another man.

Yet at times Jeremy seemed more like a little boy lost than a man. When she picked up his pyjamas they were bobbly and rough to the touch. He obviously didn't know about using a fabric conditioner in his laundry. Alicia felt a rush of pity at his helplessness and resolved to make sure his clothes were properly washed and aired in the future.

This decision helped her to make up her mind. Jeremy had been having such a hard time of late, it would be churlish for her to suggest he sleep on the floor in the other room when Zelda's king-sized bed was so large and comfortable. She had plumped up the pillows and replaced the two sets of nightclothes side by side. If anything happened, she was a mature woman and could deal with it.

But seven nights had passed and nothing
had
happened, except that she was beginning to feel the effects of sleep deprivation.

Alicia raised herself on one elbow and studied Jeremy's sleeping profile. After a week of her cooking, his cheeks were beginning to fill out again and his skin had lost its unhealthy pallor. She stretched over and gently pushed his hair back off his forehead.

Jeremy's long eyelashes fluttered, and she hastily pulled her hand away, but his eyes remained firmly closed, and with a grunt he turned over, pulling most of the bedclothes with him.

Alicia lay back on her pillow, and once again studied the cracks in the plaster ceiling which she had come to know so well. She could have gone to confession without blushing for all that had happened between her and Jeremy. Almost by telepathy, they had both adopted a Morse code of discreet coughs outside doors to avoid the embarrassment of seeing each other undressed, and after a chaste goodnight peck on the cheek, they retreated to opposite sides of the bed, with their backs turned to each other. A tear suddenly tried to escape from the corner of Alicia’s eye. Stifling a sniff, she hastily wiped it away. Was she so ugly? She had shared a bed with a man for nearly a week, and all he had done was kiss her on the cheek. This time she didn't even have the excuse that he was gay, like Donald. She could almost hear the echo of Vanessa's mocking laughter.

Angry with herself, Alicia sat up and scrubbed hard at her eyes. It was no good, sleep was impossible when she felt like this. She gazed resentfully down at Jeremy's slumbering form. How could he possibly sleep at a time like this? She eased herself out of the bed and felt for her slippers with her toes. Then she padded into the living room, closing the door softly behind her.

Jeremy heard the door closing and opened his eyes. His heart was thudding against his ribcage, and his forehead still burned from the touch of Alicia's fingers. He let out a long sigh. He couldn't carry on like this for much longer; he was beginning to find it almost unbearable to be near Alicia.

The flowery scent of her body remained in the air like a whisper, even when she wasn't in the room, but when she came so tantalisingly close to him as she had just a moment ago, it threatened to overwhelm him.

He had even taken to waiting until he was alone in the flat so that he could go through the drawers where Alicia kept her underwear. It lay in soft white layers, scented with sweet-smelling sachets of lavender and chastely trimmed with broderie anglaise and pink rosebuds. When he leant down and buried his face in the drawer, it reminded him of being back in the nursery with Nanny Greig. When Vanessa had worn any underwear at all, it had been silly little scraps of black silk.

He groaned softly and gathered Alicia's pillow up into his arms, hugging it to his body. Vanessa had been right. He was an abject failure when it came to women. He never knew what he was meant to say or do. It was like trying to speak a foreign language or worse - trying to explain cricket to a foreigner. He had never succeeded in either.

Still holding Alicia's pillow, he lay on his side and closed his eyes. The jolly thing about Alicia was that she made him feel so secure. It was so nice just to be able to
be
with her and not feel that he was under pressure to well,
perform
. She wasn't the least like Vanessa who had wanted sex all the time. In fact she had given absolutely no sign of wanting sex at all.

A happy little smile flitted across Jeremy's lips as he drifted back to sleep. You knew where you were with Alicia - just like Nanny Greig.

In the kitchenette, Alicia whipped the milk for her cocoa with more than her usual vigour. She was determined to put all thoughts of Jeremy out of her head. He had made it quite clear that he was not interested in her, so she had to stop acting like a lovelorn, fourteen-year-old adolescent. It was time to be sensible and accept the fact that she was going to be, what Fergus had so scathingly called, an academic spinster.