Rivals (12 page)

    'Well, I don't want to slag off the company on your first day, dear boy, but things are a shade tense.'

    'Cameron Cook," said Declan, tearing his roll savagely apart.

    'Got it in one.'

    'What's her position in the company?'

    'Usually prostrate. She's Tony's bit of crumpet. Officially she's Head of Drama particularly

    appropriate in the circs as she's always making scenes, but she's also got a finger up to the elbow in every other pie. That's how she talked Tony into letting her produce your programme.'

    'Simon Harris has aged twenty years. He used to be such a whizz-kid.'

    'Well, he's a was-kid now, and totally castrated. He's been threatening to have a nervous breakdown since Cameron arrived. Unfortunately he can't walk out, because he's got a second mortgage on his house, an invalid wife, three young children, and two to support from his first marriage.'

    'Quite a burden.'

    'Makes one feel like Midas by comparison, doesn't it?"

    'Not quite,' said Declan, thinking of his tax bill.

    'Well, Cameron, as you no doubt observed, jackboots all over Simon and every time he or anyone else queries her behaviour she bolts straight to Tony. The food is utterly wonderful here,' Charles went on, smiling at the prettiest waiter. 'I'll have liver and marmalade and radicchio salad. Ta, duckie.'

    Declan, who liked his food plain, ordered steak, chips and some french beans. 'And we'd like a bottle of No. 32, and bring us another

    whisky and a dry Martini while you're about it,' said Charles. 'Hasn't he got a sweet little face?' he added, lowering his

    voice.

    As soon as the waiter had disappeared to the bar, however, Charles returned to the subject of Corinium: 'The entire staff are in a state of revolt. They've all been denied rises, and they're forced to make utterly tedious programmes in order to retain the franchise. James Vereker's ghastly "Round-Up" is just a wank for local councillors and Tony's business chums; and the reason why Midsummer Night's Dream is taking so long is that you can't get a carpenter to build a set they're

    all up at The Falconry building an indoor swimming pool and a conservatory for Tony, when they're not installing a multi-gym and Jacuzzi for Cameron.'

    Declan grinned. Charles, he remembered from the BBC, had always had the ability to make things seem less

    awful.

    'Nor,' added Charles, draining his third dry Martini and beckoning to the pretty waiter to pour out the claret, 'are the staff overjoyed that you've been brought in at a vast salary -yes they all read the Guardian yesterday to

    wow the Gorgeous Georgie Baines, the Sales Director, who's stunning at his job incidentally, and whose expenses are even larger than mine, went straight in and asked Tony for a rise this morning. Tony refused, of course. Said they were paying you the market price. Depends what market you shop in, shouted Georgie, and stormed out.

    'Thank you, duck,' he added as the waiter placed a plate of liver reverently before him.

    Declan stubbed out his cigarette. Suddenly he didn't feel remotely hungry any more.

    'Anyway,' said Charles, cheering up as the Martinis began to take effect, 'the staff like the idea of you, Declan. Christ, this liver is ambrosial. I've told them you're a good egg.' 'Thanks,' said Declan dryly.

    'They all admire your work, and they can't wait to see the fireworks when you tangle with Ms Cook.'

    'I already have,' said Declan, watching the blood run out

    as he plunged the knife into his steak. Tell me about Tony.'

    'Complete shit, but extremely complex. One never knows which way he's going to jump. Believes in deride and rule, plants his spies at all levels, so really we're all spying on each other. But he does have alarming charm, when it suits him. Because he's so irredeemably bloody most of the time, when he's nice it's like a dentist stopping drilling on a raw nerve.'

    'What's the best way to handle him?'

    'Well, he claims to like people who shout back at him like Cameron does; but, unfortunately, after a row, you and I can't make it up with him in bed, which I bet is where he and Cameron are now. Things were so much more peaceful when he spent all his time in London, but the IBA's warning him to spend more time in the area neatly coincided with his falling in love (though that's hardly the word) with Ms Cook, so he's down here making a nuisance of himself most of the time now.'

    Charles suddenly looked contrite.

    'You're not eating a thing, dear boy. Have I upset you?'

    'Yes, but I'd rather know the score.'

    'My budget has been so slashed,' said Charles, pinching one of Declan's chips, 'that I intend to interview two rubber dummies in dog collars on the epilogue tonight. Not that anyone would notice.'

    'Will Tony leave Monica?'

    'I doubt it. Any scandal, even a piece in Private Eye, is the last thing he wants with the franchise coming up. The pity of it, lago, is that Ms Cook is very good at her job, once you dispense with all the crip-crap about checking out on your availability. I've acted as her walker at the odd dinner, when she had to take a man and didn't want to rouse Tony's are. And she can be quite fun when she forgets to be insecure. If she had someone really strong to slap her down, there'd be no stopping her.'

    There doesn't seem much stopping her at the moment,' said Declan gloomily.

    'If she gets on the Board, we're all in trouble,' said Charles, pinching another chip. 'But we have great hopes you're going

    to rout her, Declan; now let's have another bottle and you can tell me all about poor bored Maud, and that ravishing son of yours.'

    Back at Corinium, James Vereker fingered the prettiest secretary from the Newsroom with one hand as he re-read today's fan mail for comfort with the other.

    "I do really think,' he said petulantly, 'Tony might have had the manners to introduce me to Declan.'

10

    A fortnight after Declan started at Corinium his younger daughter, Caitlin, went back to her new boarding school in Oxfordshire, and his elder daughter, Taggie, disgraced herself by being the only member of the family to cry.

    Caitlin's last week at home coincided with her mother Maud discovering the novels of P. D. James. As a result Maud spent her days curled up on the sitting-room sofa, holding P. D. James on top of a pile of games shirts, shorts and navy-blue knickers. When anyone came into the room, she would hastily whip the clothes over her book and pretend assiduously to be sewing on name tapes. The same week Grace, the housekeeper, discovered the local pub.

    As well as getting the house straight, therefore, and feeding everyone, and coping with Grace grumbling about the incessant quiet and imagined ghosts and having to drag dustbins to the end of a long drive, the task of getting Caitlin ready for school fell on Taggie.

    It was not just the gathering of tuck, the buying of lacrosse sticks, laundry bags, and the New English Bible (which Declan hurled out of the window, because it was a literary abomination, and which had to be retrieved from a rose bush) and the packing of trunks which got Taggie down. Worst of all was scurrying from shop to shop in Gloucester, Cheltenham, Cotchester, Stroud and finally Bath, trying to find casual

    shoes and a wool dress for chapel which Caitlin didn't think gross and the school quite unsuitable.

    Caitlin spent the morning of her departure peeling glow stars off her bedroom ceiling, and sticking large photographs of Gertrude the mongrel, Wandering Aengus the cat, Rupert Campbell-Black and smaller ones of her family into a photograph album, and dressing for school. On the first day back, girls were allowed to wear home clothes. By two o'clock she

    was ready.

    'Are you auditioning for Waiting for Godot?' asked Declan, as she walked in wearing slashed jeans and an old dark-blue knitted jersey she'd extracted from Gertrude's basket.

    By two-thirty the car was loaded. Only then did Maud decide to wash her hair and glam herself up to impress the other parents. They finally left at four by which time Caitlin was in a frenzy they were going to be late.

    'Goodbye, my demon lover,' she cried, blowing a kiss to Rupert Campbell-Black's house as the rusty Mini staggered down the drive. 'Keep yourself on ice until I come home

    again.'

    No one spoke on the journey. Declan, with his first interview in a week's time, could think of nothing but Johnny Friedlander. Maud was deep in P. D. James. Taggie and Caitlin sat on the back under a pile of lacrosse sticks, radios, records, teddy bears, with the trunk like a coffin behind

    them.

    After three-quarters of an hour they reached the undulating leafy tunnels of Oxfordshire, and there, high on the hill surrounded by regiments of pine trees, rose the red-brick walls of Upland House, Caitlin's new school.

    'My head ought to be filled with noble Enid Blyton thoughts about comradeship,' grumbled Caitlin to herself, as they were overtaken by gleaming BMWs and Volvos bearing other girls and their belongings, but all she could think was how embarrassing it was to turn up with such famous parents in such a tatty car.

    As they arrived so late, all the beds near the window in Caitlin's dormitory had been bagged, and Caitlin had to be content with the one by the door, which meant she'd be the first to be caught reading with the huge torch that her mother had given her as a going-back present.

    While Taggie, her fingers still sore from sewing on name-tapes, unpacked the trunk, Maud drifted about wafting scent and being admired by passing fathers. Declan sat on Caitlin's bed gazing gloomily at all those glass cubes full of photographs of black labradors, ponies and double-barrelled mothers looking twenty years younger than those in the dormitory. He wondered if he'd been mad to let Maud persuade him to send Caitlin away.

    He also thought how incredibly glamorous the other fourteen-year-olds looked, drifting about with their suntans and their shaggy blonde hair, and how excited they would have made Johnny Friedlander with his penchant for underage girls.

    As they left, with all the girls surreptitiously gazing out of the window to catch a glimpse of Declan, Maud did nothing to endear herself to Caitlin's housemistress by calling out, 'Don't worry, Caitlin darling, you can always leave if you don't like it.'

    "Bye Tag,' said Caitlin cheerfully. 'Don't cry, Duckie. I'll be OK. Keep your eyes skinned for Rupert. I won't look while you drive away. It's unlucky.'

    'She'll be all right, sweetheart,' said Declan, reaching back and patting Taggie's heaving shoulders, until he had to put both hands on the wheel to negotiate the leafy tunnels once more and was soon deep in thought again.

    'Don't be silly, Taggie,' snapped Maud irritably. 'I'm Caitlin's mother. I'm the one who minds most about losing my darling baby, but I'm able to control myself,' and she went back to P. D. James.

    Going to bed that night, Taggie felt even worse. In Caitlin's bedroom, she found a moth bashing against a window pane and the needle stuck in the middle of a Wham record, and she realized there was no one to leave the light on in the passage for any more, to ward off the ghosts and hobgoblins.

    Up in her turret bedroom, which was like sleeping in a

    tree top, and which creaked and leaked and yielded in the high winds like an old ship, she looked across the valley and saw at long last a light on in Rupert's house. Caitlin would have been so excited.

    'Oh please God,' she prayed, 'look after her, and don't let boarding school curb her lovely merry nature.'

    The O'Hara children, having been dragged up by a lot of housekeepers, and frequently neglected by their parents, were as a result absolutely devoted to one another.

    Taggie, in particular, had never enjoyed an easy relationship with her mother, whom she adored but who intimidated her. Ten days late when she was born, Taggie had been a very large baby. Labour had been so long and agonizing, Maud had nearly died. Declan, insane with worry, thanked God he was a Protestant, and not faced with the painful Catholic preference for saving the baby rather than the mother. Both survived, but the doctors thought later that Taggie's dyslexia might be due to slight brain damage sustained at birth.

    Maud, shattered and weakened, never took to Taggie the same way as she had to Patrick who'd been born with such ease. As a child Taggie developed normally except that she walked and spoke very late, and even when she was four was only able to manage single syllables and might have been talking Japanese.

    At school in Dublin, the staff, eagerly awaiting another dazzlingly bright pupil like Patrick, were disappointed to find that Taggie couldn't read or write. She was also very clumsy and hopeless at dressing herself, putting shoes on the wrong foot, clothes back to front, doing up the wrong buttons and quite unable to tie her laces. Because she couldn't tell the time, and had no sense of direction, she always ended in the wrong classroom, bringing the wrong books, and because she was so tall, people automatically assumed she was older than her age, and dismissed her as even more lazy and stupid.

    Patrick, two and a half years older, was constantly fighting her battles, but he couldn't help her in class, when the other children teased her and the teachers shouted at her, nor during those agonizing sessions at home when Maud lost her temper and screamed, but in the end got so bored that she sometimes ended up doing Taggie's homework for her.

    Patrick never forgot those pieces of homework, smudged with tears of frustration, sweaty from effort, and later peppered with red writing and crossings-out from the teachers.

    Early detection of dyslexia and special teaching can quickly put a child within reach or even on a level with the rest of the class. Taggie was left to flounder, constantly losing confidence, until at eleven she came to England with the family and was about to be put in a school for backward children.

    In the end it was Patrick, who got a scholarship to Westminster with ease and who, acquiring a friend there with a dyslexic older sister, persuaded his parents to have Taggie tested by an educational psychologist. He pronounced Taggie severely dyslexic and said she should be sent immediately to a special school.

    Maud now felt even more ambiguous about Taggie. She never told anyone what the psychologist had said to her in that brief bitter exchange after he'd seen Taggie, nor would she ever admit that she felt desperately guilty for not seeking help for the child's problems earlier.

    Nor was there any way, once the condition was diagnosed, that Maud would ever have the patience and routine to spend each evening helping Taggie with her reading and learning of the alphabet. Declan was always too busy. So it was Patrick, and later Caitlin, who came to her rescue.

    Five years of specialist teaching produced dramatic improvements. At sixteen Taggie wrote her first essay. She still wasn't confident in the order of the alphabet, she still read slowly and hesitantly, following the text with her finger. She had never really mastered joined up writing, and punctuation was a closed book. Her spelling was atrocious and she still didn't automatically know her left from her right, and had to think back to the kitchen in Fulham and Patrick saying: 'Window on the right, Tag, Aga on the left.'

    It still took her ages to write letters or recipes, and when

    they moved to The Priory it took her much longer than the others to find her way round all the rooms. She also always double-checked telephone numbers, asking people to repeat them, ever since the nightmarish day when one of Maud's lovers had rung from America and asked if Maud could ring him back. Taggie had taken the number down wrong, and he'd never rung again. Occasionally, when she was drunk, Maud would bring this incident up: how Taggie had lost her the one great love of her life.

    But at the end of her school career, although Taggie only managed O-levels in cooking and needlework, she left with an excellent final report: 'Taggie is a dear girl,' wrote her headmaster. 'Kind, hardworking, responsible; she deserves to do very well in life.'

    Offered a place at a catering college, she preferred to learn the hard way, and worked in a restaurant belonging to a friend of her father's. After two years, coinciding with the family's move to Penscombe, he regretfully told Taggie that although he would do anything to keep her, there was nothing else he could teach her.

    She cooked, he said, by instinct, by pinches, a pinch of this here, a pinch of that there. Given a barrel of self-confidence, he told Declan, Taggie could be another Escoffier.

    Inspired, Taggie was longing to start her own cooking business. There must be hundreds of people in Gloucestershire who needed someone to do dinner parties, or fill up their deep freezes at Christmas or at the beginning of the school holidays. But so much of her time lately had been spent looking after the family, or crying herself to sleep at night over Ralphie Henriques. Maybe now Caitlin had gone back and Patrick was on his way to Trinity, via three weeks in France, she could get started.

    The following morning did little to raise Taggie's spirits. She missed Caitlin and her acid asides dreadfully; the morning post brought no letter from Ralphie, and when Patrick rang from France, where he was staying with Ralphie's family, to

    report he had arrived safely, he made no mention of him. When Taggie finally steeled herself to ask how he was, Patrick had replied that he was fine.

    'Doing a lot of water-skiing and drinking. But honestly, duck, I think you'd do better to cut your losses and find yourself a nice rosy-cheeked Gloucestershire farmer.'

    Taggie was protesting that she didn't want a Gloucestershire farmer when Maud swanned in, enraged that Taggie hadn't told her that it was her beloved Patrick on the line, and seized the telephone.

    As the alternatives that afternoon included picking apples, making green tomato chutney, or getting on Maud's nerves, Taggie decided to take Gertrude for a walk and explore the village. In an attempt to beat her dyslexia she tried to learn a new word every day and use it. Today's word was 'abhorrent'. There was certainly nothing abhorrent about Penscombe that afternoon: the wind that shook her turret bedroom last night had dropped, while the little Beatriz Potter cottages, covered in velvety purple clematis, were white in the afternoon light. A lot of Bovver boys on their motorbikes by the war memorial eyed Taggie with great interest. A nice farmer who lived down the valley asked her how they were all getting on and said they must come and have supper when the long nights began. At the village shop Mrs Banks gave her a mutton bone for Gertrude and the new TV Times with Declan's picture on the front, and an old lady with a blue greyhound stopped outside and exhorted her to look after the badgers who lived in the sets at the top of the Priory wood.

    Cheered up by their friendliness, Taggie set out for home. She could feel the heat of the road through her espadrilles, thistledown drifted idly, and the sky was brilliant blue except for a few little violet clouds on the horizon. If only Ralphie were here with his hand in hers. Turning down the drive of yews, hollies, laurels, which almost hid The Priory from the top road, she remembered her promise to keep her eyes skinned for Rupert. She glanced across the valley, then gasped with horror as she saw a huge mushroom of brown