Chain Reaction (17 page)

For as long as he can remember, he has alternated between an almost unbearable impatience and a demoralising panic. Since then every single rejection has felt like a lash across the face of a very hungry man.

Only Jacy knows this, and he would never share this information with another soul, least of all Belle who might use it against him. Even when he was at the top he expected people to see through his bluff and laugh at him. He did, honestly. He feared mockery more than death. No amount of success took his terrors away or made him feel more secure. He always believed that he was somehow putting something over on everybody underneath all that acclaim and worship.

An expert con man. Unlike Jip who really knows about music.

Not for the first time he wonders what his life might have been like if nothing had ever happened to him, if he’d stayed stuck at home, that gloomy semi full of bric-a-brac, embroidered Biblical texts and odd pieces of furniture. He used to hear from his family now and again, mostly hinting broadly for money or warning him about sin among the savage peoples of the earth. He did not reply—well, he was too busy on the road to fame and fortune to write letters or spend hours on the telephone sympathising with his mother’s stomach condition. And she is a commonplace little woman with a bag of mending on her lap and a bag of second-hand morals stuffed in her head. Luckily his enemies in the tabloids never dug her up. Jeez, that would have been ghastly. She has never abandoned her peasant respect for gentility and money, while new riches are sinful and, as an atonement, ought to be shared. A real pain.
Mam. Mam.
He says the familiar word in his mind but it means nothing. Jacy feels a tightness in his throat. They probably all still live around Swansea, he supposes…

Beep,
goes the metal detector. Jacy pauses in his tracks, and it is Belle who squats down with the trowel to do the dirty work for him.

If Jacy did find a fortune down there in this hard stony ground, would he share it with Belle, as she is now proposing to share all her worldly goods with him? He doubts it. He never has shared his wealth with her, but only because she always insisted on paying her own way. ‘I don’t want that hurled back in my face one day,’ she used to say, knowing him so well,
and accepting him
with his childish swiftly changing moods and his broken attachments. But my God, every single thing he does in future he is going to insure by iron-clad contracts that are quite impossible to wriggle out of.

If Jacy or Belle could be spotted from a distance, nobody would assume that either of them were the owners of a grand house like The Grange. They are both in shabby jeans and T-shirts, more like gardeners than gentry. ‘Nothing,’ says Belle, getting up off her knees, wiping off an old bit of glass. Nothing but litter. ‘Come on. Carry on.’

Jacy dreams on while making the necessary circular movements, just about all the expendable energy he can muster these days. He’d been frightened of his little fierce father, a short and pot-bellied man, not that he was unkind or a bully, just that he was vain, full of dreams for himself and moody and peevish when anxieties beset him. Tee-total, of course. He was master of the house, a man of ideas and fixed opinions, a part-time preacher and his talents were wasted in Wales. Jacy must have inherited all his ambitions from him.

‘Here they come… car’s not bad.’

Jacy shades his eyes and glares. The gold Mercedes looks in keeping as it rolls sedately up the drive among the deep blue-headed rhododendrons and azaleas, dead on time. Spurts of golden gravel fly up behind the heavy wheels. Behind them comes the Range Rover probably bearing the legal beagle, though what a solicitor from Sheffield has to do with the sale of The Grange is impossible to fathom. Still, the agents seemed to accept the rather odd situation.

The resonant upper-class voice of the driver echoes a greeting across the still summer air and the two men shake hands.

‘It’s all so mysterious. I wonder who they are,’ muses Belle. ‘I wonder if they are local.’

‘She’s a bit of all right,’ says Jacy predictably, but to his chagrin he knows that this remark won’t bother Belle. Since she was a baby she has always been pretty and therefore takes her looks for granted. She never considers another woman as a threat, that is the size of her confidence. She rarely flirts with anyone. Even when he was into screwing every bird he could lay his hands on, Belle turned a blind eye or pretended to do so, he is still not quite sure which, and time has not yet nibbled away at her looks. In her trade they know how to take care of themselves. Jacy says, ‘That interfering bag Julia Farquhar is bound to find out, we’ll hear about it on the grapevine soon enough. You can’t fart around here without that old sow knowing about it.’

‘I doubt we’ll hear a thing,’ says Belle, ‘seeing as nobody round here speaks to us any more.’

‘Swine,’ grunts Jacy, a natural response to almost everyone these days.

‘There’s money about,’ says Belle, still staring at the car.

‘There used to be money about here.’

‘Yes, until you went and threw it all away.’

‘Touché,’
says Jacy. But his thoughts are bitter.

After being ushered from the car, the female passenger stands oddly motionless in the drive, inhaling and exhaling deep breaths that Jacy and Belle can see from here. What is she doing, staring around with one hand on her hat as if she’d expected to be met, or photographed? And eventually the posh little party of three disappear through the front door.

‘Wow,’ jokes Belle, ‘what an entrance! What a couple of swells!’

‘No better than you and me,’ snaps Jacy, swinging the silent machine over the barren earth till it meets with a bush and damages it.

Suddenly—

‘Tusker!’
screams the elegant stranger. ‘My God. Tusker! Is that really you?’

Belle starts, taken aback, far too engrossed in her digging to have noticed the little party of three moving in their direction.

‘Peaches!’
Belle screams back eventually, having focused her eyes on the approaching blonde and recognising that unmistakable face, those eyes, that absurdly wiggling walk, the image of Goldie Hawn.

Belle hardly hears the alarmed
pssst
which shoots from between Jacy’s snarling lips as he stands half-hiding behind her.
‘Get them away from here, they’ll recognise me in a minute… get them away, Belle, go on, quick.

So just as old Peaches is about to raise an enquiring eyebrow in Jacy’s direction, Belle flings her arms round her old chum and hurries her in the opposite direction.

‘Darling Tusker, what on earth are you doing here?’

‘I live here,’ says Belle, amused to hear that old nickname rising from the fathoms of the past like a shipwrecked relic washed up from the sea.

‘But why are you hiding away down here?’

‘We’re not hiding actually, we are metal-detecting. Searching for treasure.’

Peaches looks fresh and appealing as ever. She has not lost that adorable lisp that everyone once tried to copy. ‘Oh, how absolutely wonderful! You always were so exciting. And who is the Adonis?’

‘Just a friend.’

‘Ah. So we’re not going to be introduced?’

‘No, actually,’ says Belle with a wink. ‘Come on, come indoors and have a drink. Normally we can’t bear to be in the house when there’s viewers round, but of course this is totally different.’

Peaches peers forward and stares, bringing her velvet skin disconcertingly right up to Belle’s own. She lowers her voice to a husky whisper.
‘The brace worked, then?’

For a moment Belle can’t figure it out but then she remembers and displays her teeth with great pride. ‘Yep, after all those painful years of looking like Jaws, my incisors have gone back into place and as you see, I am no longer a tusker but a perfect example of what the best dental surgery can do!’

‘They were never that bad, darling,’ giggles Peaches. Even her laugh is as frivolous as ever, it’s hard to take her seriously. ‘We were terribly cruel to give you that nickname. I think it was because you were so horribly perfect everywhere else.’

‘It’s better than some I can think of.’

‘How true. I see your pictures wherever I go these days, Tusker, half-naked down in the Tube, sometimes a leg, sometimes a boob. You must be doing incredibly well for yourself—no wonder you’ve got a dream pad like this, quite marvellous, and look at the daisies.’

The two are so excited by this incredible meeting that they seem to have forgotten there are others about. ‘Excuse me,’ says the authoritative young man at Peaches’ side. ‘Might I be permitted to butt in here?’

‘Oh, sorry, so sorry, Dougal darling,’ and Peaches is all ruffled up like the petticoat that shows just an inch under her pretty-as-a picture floral dress. ‘This is Tusker, an old, old friend.
Do you see any of the old gang?
I would love to hear. There’s so much to catch up on…’

‘I think we ought to be going, Arabella, really,’ smiles the amazingly groomed and attractive young man, long and slight and superior. But he seems unaccountably nervous. ‘Much as I hate to interrupt this highly emotional meeting.’

‘Are you married, Arabella? Is Dougal your—’

She blushes sweetly, just like the old days. ‘Oh, no. Nothing like that.’

‘Arabella and I are hoping to become engaged soon,’ says Dougal with quite unnecessary forcefulness. Poor Arabella looks quite startled. And no wonder, thinks Belle. Doesn’t she know he’s as queer as a coot? My God, the poor thing is in for a shock unless Belle has all her messages wrong. What on earth is all this about? ‘And we have a pressing appointment later this evening.’

‘No, we do not, Dougal,’ says Arabella airily. ‘We’re booked into an hotel and we don’t have to be there till we want to. You told me that, I remember.’

Dougal looks even more uneasy. ‘I think you are forgetting, my dear…’

There’s a tension now that Peaches, of course, is too thick to notice, but Belle, who lives with tension every minute of her day, picks up on it straight away. She decides to speak for her friend. ‘Well, if you can’t come in now, perhaps we could make arrangements. I mean, I want to know why you are interested in The Grange, what is going on in your life, what has been happening since I last saw you. Honestly Peaches, I’m so excited…’

‘We liked the house very much, didn’t we, Arabella?’ Her young man seems to be trying to persuade her.

‘I think you can leave that side of everything to me,’ puts in the white-haired solicitor from Sheffield whose old-fashioned gentlemanly ways remind Belle of her own father.

‘So you’re going to confirm the offer?’ Belle knows she has to ask. It will be the first thing Jacy wants to know. He has disappeared completely now, slunk like a ferret into the undergrowth leaving nothing tangible or visible behind. And Peaches has done this, all on her own. She has magicked him away!

‘Of course we are, especially now that I know it is you,’ laughs Peaches, always so naive and trusting but not half as empty-headed as she likes to make out. Once a temporary teacher told Arabella she had a stagnant mind. She cried for a week and the whole school went on strike. ‘Oh, my God, my God. Just
wait
until I tell Charlie and Mags who I’ve seen.’

This is incredible.
The best thing that’s happened all year. ‘You’re still in touch with them?’

‘I share a flat with them!’

Oh, how wonderful!
‘Next time I’m in London…’

‘You must, Tusker. Oh, you absolutely must! I have so much to tell you, so many wonderful secrets. Here,’ and Peaches fumbles in her hopeless bag, more like a G-string dotted with pearls. ‘Here’s my address. Mummy had these cards specially printed and this is the first chance I’ve had to use them. It’s quite embarrassing. I mean, who uses cards these days?’

Belle stands at the doorway of The Grange and watches as the small cavalcade disappears up the drive. After the shrieking of Peaches everything is suddenly very silent round here. She feels shaken. The visit has left her cold and lonely like waking up from a dream and the duvet has slipped off the bed. She certainly didn’t approve of the way poor Peaches seemed to be manipulated by that aloof young man, almost as if she wasn’t sure where she was supposed to be going—far worse than her normal bewildered, dizzy self. She was so easily squashed, her sweet nature so often taken for granted. And what on earth was that relationship meant to be all about? There must be some simple explanation. It’s such a relief for Belle to discover an outside world actually still exists, together with a past that excludes the all-pervasive Jacy… So there
was
another life, once—playful and affectionate. It might seem like a dreamtime now, but there was one, and a happy one it had been, too.

Funny how you fall into things—relationships, situations. Nothing that matters is ever planned but then it’s the same trying to grope your way out. Sometimes you’re stuck fast like a cow in a mire and you have to wait for someone to free you.

‘Who the hell was that?’ asks Jacy, sliding back into view, smoking nervously.

‘Nobody much,’ Belle assures him, aware that he will dig at her if she seems too thrilled by the meeting. His is a perverse kind of jealousy which she’s never been able to fathom. She plays it down. ‘Just an old schoolfriend we were all very fond of.’

‘She certainly seemed to adore you!’ says Jacy with contempt in his voice. ‘Didn’t want to go, by the look of it. Highly emotional, hysterical, from where I stood. The old alma mater must specialise in those sorts of types.’

Belle turns round and looks him straight in the eye. ‘From where you stand, Jacy, I’m afraid you can’t see anything at all except for your own
bum.’

‘I
T IS BEGINNING TO
look as if the Clitheroe project is becoming too I perilous to proceed with any further.’

If so, it’s a damn shame. The Grange makes an ideal retreat stuck up there among the native hordes, surrounded by security, and even the floozie herself is gracious enough to give her approval—although not, it would seem, to live there without her Prince.