The Queen of New Beginnings (26 page)

“You know who that is, don’t you?”

Clayton casually tipped his head to see whom Glen was referring to. It was the third time during their lunch that his attention had been drawn to the occupants of another table in the smart restaurant which, according to Glen, was now his favourite watering hole in Soho. Although at the laughable price being charged for a bottle of highly carbonated water, a glass of it was the last thing any sensible person would consider drinking here. Presumably it was from the foothills of the Andes and sanctified by the Vatican.

“Got me again, Glen,” he said. “Who am I supposed to have spotted this time?”

“It’s one of the Cheeky Girls.”

“You’re kidding me? A Cheeky Girl here? Why didn’t you say? Point her out to me.”

Glen rolled his eyes. “Facetiousness is not an attractive trait, Clay.”

“Nor is fawning over a half-starved Eastern European bird.”

“You’ve got to admit she is attractive. I mean, look at those legs. They go all the way up.”

“Eyes on me, Glen. Come on, concentrate. Keep the focus. You can do it.”

“You know what your trouble is?”

“Surprise me.”

“You’ve been out of civilized society for too long.”

“Wrong, my friend. I’ve been out of
un
civilized society and am all the better for it. You should give it a try.”

“Whatever. Oh, and over there, two o’clock; it’s that girl from Babe-a-Rama.”

“Babe-a-Rama? Don’t tell me; a porn site you visit on a regular basis?”

“Oh, please, don’t you know anything? Babe-a-Rama’s the latest red-hot girl band and she’s just started dating a rap star from the States. You know the guy, the one with all the gold teeth.”

“Rapping the hippety-hop is hardly my thing, Glen. And it shouldn’t be yours either; you’re way too old.”

Glen tore off a piece of focaccia bread and dipped it into a ceramic pot of olive oil; the oil was a rich golden colour and reminded Clayton of that old Castrol motor oil advert back in the seventies. The one with the spanner. Or was it later than the seventies? He tried to remember what music had been used for the advertisement. It had been something big and stirring. Something noble and magnificent that made you want to rush out and do the decent thing and pamper your car by changing its engine oil.

Noble and magnificent—those were two words he couldn’t apply to himself. Two and a half months had passed since he had left Derbyshire—two and a half months since he had last seen Alice. Their parting had not been a theatrical, tearful, door-slamming event, which had made it seem so very much worse. After Alice had finished saying exactly how she felt about him, she had calmly explained that she was going to spend the night with George, leaving him at Dragonfly Cottage on his own. “When I return tomorrow, I want you gone,” she had said. “Along with every sign that you were ever here.”

He couldn’t blame her for reacting in the way she had. He had treated her appallingly. He had done everything she had accused him of. And a whole lot more. Oh, so much more. The worst was yet to come, he was sure of it.

At eight o’clock on Boxing Day morning, he had found a taxi firm willing to take him to the station and after a two-hour wait on a freezing cold platform, he had caught the only train to London that day. Never had London appeared more bleak or depressing. Nor had his house ever felt less inviting. It had smelled stale and slightly damp and had been as cold as a morgue—the heating hadn’t been switched on in months—and there was nothing to eat. It had been a stark reminder of his arrival at Cuckoo House. He had trudged wearily to the local shop in the hope that he would find it open. It was and he had gratefully scored himself some supplies. Mrs. Patel had looked at him as if he had three heads when she saw him. “You’re back, then,” she’d said, while a hugely overweight, doughy-faced adolescent tapped in the price of a packet of Jaffa Cakes on the cash register. Bar codes were still a thing of the future for the Patels. In front of the till there had been a coffee mug sporting the princes William and Harry. A piece of paper next to it bore the words: STAFF TIPS FOR XMAS. Yeah, Clayton had thought as he handed over his money to the fat kid, I’ll give you a tip, sunshine: lose some weight! And here’s another, don’t ever abbreviate the word Christmas in my presence again. Xmas was a loathsome word in Clayton’s opinion and he had always had an aversion to it.

“Yes,” he’d pointedly replied to Mrs. Patel’s undeniable statement of fact. “I’m back. Happy Christmas.”

She had stared at him as though he’d uttered some kind of foul obscenity while at the same time exposing himself. But what was one more filthy disapproving look when he’d been on the receiving end of enough to be almost inured to them?

Alice’s parting look would stay with him for a long time yet. He had felt utterly shamed by the intense disappointment in her face. Her expression had cut him to the quick, knowing that he had wilfully hurt the one person he had come to think actually meant something to him.

But the bottom line was, he clearly hadn’t cared enough about her. Had his feelings been strong enough, he would have hit the delete button on his laptop, just as she had requested. But she had given him an impossible task, like asking a mother which of her two children she would save if they were both drowning. How could she have expected him to choose between her or resurrecting his writing career, the one thing that he had craved above all else these last few miserable years? Being able to write again had been akin to a blind man suddenly having his sight restored. Had she really expected him to be capable of throwing that away?

He had considered writing a letter of apology and justification to Alice, but had decided against it when he recalled the letters her father had sent her and which she had never read. Instead he had tried to convince himself that it was Alice who was in the wrong, that she had overreacted and like all reactionaries who go off at the deep end, she needed time to cool down and maybe even come to her senses. OK, that was pushing it, he knew, but a desperate man will think anything he wants to believe in the hope it will save him.

He had even kidded himself that if Alice watched
The Queen of New Beginnings
when it was shown on television, it would help her realize that what he’d written wasn’t exploitative. Those who had been involved in the production process were all saying the same thing—that he had written with great sensitivity, not just when it came to Alice’s character—or rather, Abigail’s character—but in regard to all the other characters who had been a part of her childhood. Well, all of them except for Rufus, aka Lucius. That would have been pushing the bounds of disbelief. Everybody agreed that the two stars of the script were Abigail and her father. Clayton was pleased about that, not only because their relationship was pivotal to the story, but because he had genuinely wanted Alice to be happy with what he’d written and portraying her father, who he’d renamed as Ralph, in an empathetic light had been crucial to gaining her approval.

Once he’d arrived back in London, with no wish to be out and about, he had got his head down and finished the script. He had worked day and night and had it done within a fortnight. Not only had Glen been right about him no longer being of interest to anyone in Tabloid La-La Land, but true to his word, Glen had found a production company eager to take on his script. Things had moved fast and before he knew it, he was on set for most of the filming—poking his oar in as Glen called his input. The bulk of the filming had been done in North Yorkshire. A location scout had found the perfect house double for Cuckoo House—a Gothic pile on a windswept moor called Long View.

The scene that he was most proud of was the one when Alice joins her father in his car and he tries to make her understand the extent of Rufus’s manipulative duplicity. Bill Nighy had agreed to take on the part of Bruce Barrett—miraculously he’d been available at such short notice—and he had played the role and that particular scene brilliantly, capturing every eccentric and affectionate nuance of the character. Clayton had felt the backs of his eyes prickle at the end of the scene. He wasn’t the only one to be moved. A subdued hush had fallen on the set and then as if embarrassed everyone had begun talking at once.

An unknown twenty-two-year-old actress called Anna Burns had been chosen to play Alice as a teenager, and for when she was a young child, a girl who bore an uncanny resemblance to Anna was chosen. While she was terrific when she was being filmed, the moment the camera was off her, she morphed into a precocious bratlet with delusions of starlet grandeur, demanding organic sushi and Jelly Babies with the yellow ones removed. Apparently they brought her bad luck. Everyone had breathed a huge sigh of relief when Abigail’s early years had been filmed and they could wave good-bye to the little monster. The general consensus was that they had all been living in fear that one of them would take the girl by the neck and squeeze very hard, or at least force her to eat her own weight in yellow Jelly Babies.

Whilst Clayton liked to think the green light had been given to his script because it was a work of pure genius and therefore forgiveness had been a natural consequence, he had to accept that a far more important factor had been at work in his being welcomed back into the fold.

Two factors to be precise: Bazza and Stacey.

As Glen had assured him, the public can be replied upon to be fickle, but the merry band of souls who make up the country’s great unbiased press can also be just as fickle. And so it came to pass that the sun began to go down on the Golden Couple. Their mistake, as Glen pointed out to Clayton, was that like so many people before them they had assumed their reign was unassailable. Their PR people wildly miscalculated the public’s appetite for Saint Bazza and Mother Stacey when they let loose a press release announcing that Stacey had just signed a contract to write a book entitled
How to Forgive and Forget
. It had major stinker written all over it. The savagely barbed Christy Rickshaw at the
Mirror—
who had recently had yet another of her novels rejected by every publisher in London—led the attack. Whilst the venting of her spleen might have been intended for those incompetent publishers who didn’t know talent when it was right under their noses, Stacey was the one who copped the searingly vicious invective:

When will it ever end, this obsession amongst publishers to print anything a D-rated celebrity has had ghosted for them? Who gives a stuff for what a nobody like Stacey Cook thinks? And who, by the way, is this woman? Other than being Barry Osbourne’s latest squeeze? Okay, she lost a baby, but millions of women have had a miscarriage. What makes her so special?

Her dander up, Ms. Rickshaw went on to ask whether she was the only one to wonder if Stacey might have lost the baby anyway? That, maybe, Clayton Miller had had nothing to do with bringing on her miscarriage.

The next day a piece appeared in the
Mail
picking up on the theme.

Am I alone in reaching for a sick bag whenever I hear the names Barry Osbourne and Stacey Cook mentioned? If I have to stomach another good cause or publicity stunt that they’ve involved themselves with, I swear I will not be responsible for my actions.

And let’s not beat about the bush: Barry Osbourne used to be defined by his talent as one of our best writers; now he’s defined by his participation in a showbiz relationship that displays all the gravitas of a
High School Musical
plot. Could he have reduced himself to anything more woeful or feeble?

From then on the tide turned and Glen suggested the time was right for Clayton to surface, to tell his side of the story. “Bazza and Stacey’s downfall ensures your reinstatement,” Glen promised him. Clayton agreed that perhaps he could now start to show his face around town, but on the strict understanding that no PR company was involved. “There’s to be zero spin,” he told Glen.

“Tell it as it is,” Glen said, “I hear you.”

Clayton doubted Glen ever heard anything other than the sound of money dropping through his letterbox.

“It’ll give us a brilliant hook for
The Queen of New Beginnings
,” Glen went on.

“It needs a hook?”

“Don’t be naive.”

Three days later, Glen set Clayton up with a journalist from the
Sunday Times
and the paper ran the interview the following Sunday. A few days later Glen received a call for Clayton to appear on the Jonathan Ross show. Glen was delighted. “Couldn’t be a better interview for you to do,” he crowed. “Two much-maligned characters on the screen at the same time. It’ll be TV magic!”

He didn’t know about magic, but Clayton had given it his best shot in getting across his side of the story—how he’d tried to apologize to Stacey and Barry and how it had all gone hopelessly wrong. When he admitted how shocked he’d been at the size of the heads as they’d emerged from the truck, expecting them to be cute and adorable and no bigger than a garden gnome, whereas they’d proved to be practically Tyrannosaurus in scale, the audience had laughed and he’d known then that the worst was over.

Over for that particular cock-up maybe. Given his track record, he was an odds-on favourite for another cock-up before too long. But then as he’d always believed, one crisis at a time.

“Are you listening to a word I’m saying, or would I be better off trying my luck on the Cheeky Girl’s table?”

Snapping to, Clayton said, “Knowing her name might stand you in better stead.”

“Really? I’ve never bothered with names before.”

To say that Glen treated women as sex objects was overstating his commitment. “So what was I missing? What pearls of wisdom were you offering up?”

“I was paying you a compliment, if you must know.”

“Good God! I missed the event of the century. Re-run it for me.”

“It wasn’t much. Just that I knew you’d come good for me in the end.”

“I expect it sounded better first time round.”

“Ungrateful sod. I’m bearing my heart and soul here and you’re making fun of me.”