Private Lives (36 page)

‘So where’s Paul Jones now?’ she asked.

‘He lives between London and Sydney.’

Helen looked at Anna. ‘Paul Jones,’ she said. ‘Get everything you can on him. Names, dates, inside leg measurement, I want everything:
everything
.’

‘I’m on it,’ said Anna, with what she hoped sounded like confidence. Helen was already pacing again.

‘Thankfully Paul Jones is a common enough name. If he’s not still on the Balon payroll’ – she looked enquiringly at Jonathon, who shook his head – ‘then maybe the defence team won’t be able to make the connection.’

‘And if they do?’ asked Balon uncomfortably.

‘The fact that you’re a potential mayoral candidate, however vague those ambitions might be, gives
Stateside
a case for publishing the story in the public interest.’

Anna raised her pencil.

‘Provided they knew about it,’ she said, and was relieved when Helen gave her a thin smile of acknowledgement. The magazine could only claim they were reporting in the public interest if they had known about Balon’s political ambitions when they published the article. In which case, why hadn’t they mentioned it in the feature?

‘Precisely,’ said Helen. ‘And that’s what we’re going to spend the next forty-eight hours working on.’

35

Matt sat back in the cream leather passenger seat of Carla’s Range Rover and smiled.

‘Why are these windows tinted?’ he asked, watching as the wide-open moorland outside the car was slowly swallowed by the tall trees of the New Forest. It was Jonas’s birthday, and every year they did something as a family, even after the divorce. Usually it was just a meal at a local burger place or a walk around the park, but today Carla had suggested getting out of the city.

‘Privacy glass,’ said his ex-wife vaguely as she overtook a Porsche, the speedometer hitting eighty. ‘I’m sensitive to the sun and I hate it when people peer into the car as we’re driving. It unsettles Jonas.’

‘Unsettles Jonas?’ teased Matt. ‘It makes me feel like a pimp.’

She took her eyes off the road and looked at him with annoyance.

‘A pimp?’ she huffed, glancing in the rear-view mirror. Thankfully Jonas was watching a DVD and had his headphones on.

‘All right, not a pimp,’ said Matthew, laughing at her reaction. ‘Maybe a rap star.’

‘And I suppose that makes me your ho?’ she replied tartly.

Four years of marriage and Carla had never quite got Matt’s sense of humour. She always took things so literally, he couldn’t help winding her up. In her preppy white jeans, navy T-shirt and a silk scarf tied loosely around her neck, she couldn’t have looked less like a gangster’s moll if she had tried.

She looked particularly beautiful today, he thought glancing at her. Of course he didn’t flatter himself that she had made a special effort for his benefit. In fact these days Carla dressed like she’d just stepped off the catwalk: the cocktail dresses that cost as much as his car, the little fur coats, the cavernous leather handbags, all very Chelsea, darling. But today she looked just like the girl he had met in a bar in Fulham almost ten years earlier, the girl he’d fallen in love with and who he couldn’t quite believe had fallen in love with him.

Obviously feeling his critical gaze, Carla glanced up at him.

‘What are you looking at?’ she said nervously. ‘Is it my hair?’

‘No, nothing,’ chuckled Matthew. ‘Just keep watching the road.’

But his eyes kept being drawn back to her hands, so tanned and elegant on the steering wheel, the milky-white band of skin where her wedding ring had been only a few weeks earlier stirring up a range of emotions he knew he was unwise to dwell on.

‘Dad! Dad! Look, we’re almost there,’ said Jonas, spotting the Beaulieu Motor Museum sign at the side of the road. Carmad, he had been looking forward to the trip for months.

Carla parked up in the Beaulieu grounds and they went into the big hangar that housed one of the most impressive motor collections in Europe. Matt watched with delight as his son darted from one vehicle to the next, spouting impressive trivia on what he had seen.

‘Hey, look, Dad, the James Bond Aston Martin!’ he cried. ‘I think you should buy it.’

‘I don’t think it’s for sale.’ Matt smiled.

‘Well maybe buy one just like it. You’ve only got that silly motorbike.’

‘My bike is cool,’ laughed Matt, leaning over to tickle his son, loving the pure joy of just being with him.

‘The motorbike,’ said Carla with a touch of disdain. ‘And you say you’re not having a mid-life crisis.’

He let her comment pass; he wasn’t going to allow anything to ruin the day, especially as their trip to the New Forest had made such a welcome change from the snatched hour in Pizza Express, which was what had happened on Jonas’s birthday last year.

‘Mum knows all about cars; she can help you choose one,’ said Jonas.

‘You can afford it now,’ said Carla, looking as if she approved of the idea.

‘Think about it, Dad. Please, think about it. It would be so cool if we went out looking for sports cars together.’

‘Maybe,’ said Matt, beginning to feel some discomfort.

They left the exhibition hall and went into the sweet-smelling manicured grounds. Jonas walked between his mother and father, holding hands with each of them, so that they formed a reassuring chain.

‘I’d love a stately home,’ said Carla wistfully, looking at Palace House, home of the aristocratic owners of Beaulieu.

‘Really? All those ghosts and draughts?’

Jonas ran off ahead of them. ‘I’m just going into that exhibition over there,’ he said excitedly. ‘It’s all about spying in the war. They’ve got guns and everything!’

‘Okay, we’ll wait for you here,’ said Matt, but Jonas had already gone, his trainers scuffing on the gravel path.

‘Well I think the birthday boy is enjoying himself,’ he said as they sat on a bench in the shade of a laburnum tree.

‘He just loves seeing you, us. Together like this, I mean,’ said Carla. ‘I think we underestimate how important it is to him. We should have done it more often.’

‘I would have been up for it,’ said Matt. ‘I never got the feeling you . . .’ He left the comment hanging in the air.

‘It was complicated, Matt,’ sighed Carla.

‘How was it complicated? I’m his dad.’

The twenty-four hours a week he had had with his son since the divorce had never been enough. Every weekend had been an exhausting round of the cinema, football and rugby in his effort to show Jonas a good time, fearing that his son might start comparing him to David. Every weekend they did something together, but there was never enough time to do
nothing
together. Walk, talk, watch TV. There was certainly never any opportunity to involve Carla, who always used to drop Jonas off at the flat with a polite wave before disappearing back to her Notting Hill life.

Carla looked embarrassed.

‘David didn’t like it. Didn’t like me spending any time with you. He always felt threatened by you.’

Matt looked at her over the top of his sunglasses.

‘David? Threatened? By me? Does he not remember that you
left
me?’

She laughed. ‘I think he was jealous.’

‘Of what?’

‘About the way you look. Being so good-looking. David’s the first one to admit he’s no oil painting.’

‘
You
saw something in him,’ muttered Matt. He wanted to add, ‘the thirty-million-pound bank balance’, but decided against it.

‘I told him once that the night I first met you, I thought you were the sexiest bloke I’d ever seen.’

Her compliment caught him completely off guard. She’d always made him feel witty and charming. She was good at that. That knack of making you feel like the most important person in the room. He willed himself to deflect the remark.

‘You don’t have to be nice to me just because I’m giving you some free legal advice,’ he said, trying to make light of it. Carla looked embarrassed and turned away.

‘Are you going away this summer?’ she asked after a pause.

‘I doubt it, what with the new job and everything. I feel like I’m running at a hundred miles an hour just to stand still.’

‘So no girlfriend tugging at your sleeves to take her somewhere hot?’ She made the word ‘hot’ sound provocative.

‘No holiday. No girlfriend.’ He wasn’t sure if she was fishing, and if so, to what end. ‘The only woman pulling at my sleeve is Helen Pierce, wanting me back in the office. What about you?’

‘Jonas and I are going to Ibiza in a couple of weeks.’

‘Really? He didn’t mention it.’

‘I only just found out. My friend Sara has a villa and she’s asked us out there. I think it’s a sympathy invite.’

Matthew laughed.

‘I doubt that. She’ll have some handsome single banker waiting for you at the pool, a rose wedged between his Zoom-whitened teeth.’

She giggled.

‘Eww, that’s enough to put you off your mojitos.’ She picked a flower and began pulling off the petals. ‘I’m not looking, anyway,’ she said quietly.

‘I can understand that,’ said Matt.

She nodded, clamping her lips together as if she was afraid they would reveal something.

‘I’m sorry, Matt,’ she said softly. ‘I know what it’s like now. I’m sorry I made you feel like this.’

He looked up at her, just as she turned her face away.

‘Carla . . .’ he said, but just then Jonas came running back towards them, his arms stretched out to the sides like the wings on a fighter plane.

‘Dad, Dad!’ he cried, grabbing Matt’s hand. ‘You’ve got to come and see, there’s a man with a parachute and these bombs they used to hide inside dead rats.’

‘Wow,’ said Matt, grinning. ‘That sounds cool.’

‘Can I have a parachute?’ Jonas asked, dragging Matt towards the house.

‘Ask your mother,’ said Matt, winking at Carla.

Jonas slept all the way back to London. When they pulled up in a side street around the corner from Larry’s Cheyne Walk house, it felt cruel to wake him. Carla switched off the engine and for a few moments they sat in silence. The sun was low in the sky. Across the river they could see the scratchy, inky outline of Battersea Park, and the water looked blue and orange where it rippled. Matt had been pleased when Carla had suggested bringing Jonas to visit his grandfather on his birthday, but then Larry and Carla had always got on. They were the same sort of people. Gregarious social climbers who both appreciated the finer things in life. Matthew could tell Carla was impressed by the tall Georgian house; who wouldn’t be?

‘This place is lovely,’ she said. ‘When did Larry move here?’

‘Not sure. Some point between wives three and four.’

‘Do you remember when we used to walk around here when we were first married, dreaming about having a house on the river?’

Matt had always known that Carla yearned for a smart Chelsea address; it was just the way she was. He supposed he should have realised that she would be looking for a way to move up to the next rung on the ladder.

‘We were happy then, weren’t we?’ she said quietly.

‘Were we?’ he replied. He didn’t mean to sound bitter; it was a genuine question. Looking back, he had never been entirely sure why someone so beautiful and socially adept had chosen to marry him. Throughout their entire relationship he’d been waiting for her to change her mind, realise that she could do so much better. But when he’d asked her to marry him, as they walked across Albert Bridge one evening after a glorious meal in a little bistro on a sleepy Chelsea back street, she’d said yes and he hadn’t thought to ask her if she was absolutely sure.

‘I loved you, Matt,’ she said simply, looking straight into his eyes.

‘You had a funny way of showing it.’

The car filled with an awkward silence until Jonas woke up grumpily.

‘Where are we?’ he mumbled.

‘We’re at Grandad’s,’ said Matt, leaping out of the passenger door, glad to defuse the tension.

Loralee answered the door dressed in a miniskirt, flip-flops and a T-shirt that instructed the world ‘Don’t mess with me’.

‘How are you?’ said Matt, giving her the double kiss. Since their showdown in the hospital, he’d made an effort to keep the peace with Loralee for the sake of his father. She knelt down to look at Jonas.

‘Gosh, and this is your son, Matthew? You’re adorable.’

‘This is Jonas,’ he smiled. ‘Oh, and this is Carla. His mum.’

Matt watched as Loralee gave Carla the up and down. Evidently she passed muster.

‘Hi, Carla,’ she said, offering a limp hand. ‘You look so cute together.’

‘Oh, we’re not . . .’ began Matt, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.

‘Is he in?’ he asked. Loralee shook her head.

‘I’m so sorry, Matthew. He popped out about ten minutes ago. Gone to see a friend. I could give him a ring if you’d like?’

‘No, no. It’s just good to hear he’s out and about now.’

She nodded, her head on one side.

‘Getting stronger every day.’

Matt ruffled Jonas’s hair.

‘Sorry, cowboy, no present today.’

‘It’s my birthday,’ announced Jonas proudly.

‘Oh, happy birthday, sweetheart,’ said Loralee, stepping forward to give him a bear hug.

Matthew watched his son blush. Clearly Loralee’s effect on men started young.

‘I’ll tell him you came by.’

‘Do,’ said Matt as she closed the door.

‘I’d watch that one,’ said Carla tartly as they walked back to the car.

‘Oh, she’s harmless,’ said Matt.

‘You know your trouble, Matt?’ said Carla, getting into the Range Rover. ‘You’re a terrible judge of character.’

Maybe you’re right, thought Matt, looking back up at the house. Maybe you’re right.

36

Despite working in the media for almost a decade, Anna had never seen a printing press. She had imagined a hangar full of hot iron rollers smelling of wood pulp, the wheezing machines churning out the magazines and newspapers one by one to be collected up by inky-fingered paper boys at the end of the conveyor belt. The reality was much slicker and high-tech – everything automated, robotic and gliding on air like footage from a Japanese car plant. And the noise! That had been the biggest shock: even wearing the unflattering yellow ear-defenders, she could barely hear what her host was saying – or rather shouting – to her.