Going Loco (6 page)

Belinda spent the morning writing an imaginary riding-in-Ireland piece for Jago’s paper, and wondering what had happened to Neville. He was not his usual bouncy self. Even when the phone rang and it was her mother (eek!) there was only a twitch or scuttle from Los Rodentos. Someone phoned up to ask Belinda to appear on radio (she declined, but felt agitated); she remembered Stefan’s birthday was next week; the usual pressures most certainly applied. But no trampolining by small furry bodies. The rats were on a go-slow. Ever since she’d decided to hire Linda, she’d felt like the proverbial sinking ship. ‘Psst, Neville,’ she whispered. ‘Are you all right?’ Not a scuttle; not a squeak. Life was odd without his wheeling
and bouncing. She pictured him with little round spectacles, like John Lennon. But no matter how much she hummed ‘Imagine’ to encourage him, he simply wasn’t interested.

Belinda always had a marvellous time alone with her imagination. Having invented quite a good travel piece, if she said so herself (‘Wind and soft rain whipped the ponies’ fetlocks; my hat was too tight, like an iron band’) she was now plotting the next Verity novel,
Atta Girl, Verity!,
in which Verity’s impoverished mum would break the terrible news that she couldn’t afford to stable Goldenboy at the Manor House any more – or not unless Verity took a backbreaking after-school job pulling weeds in Camilla’s mummy’s seven-acre garden.

How she enjoyed visiting pain and anguish on Verity, these days. She beamed as she considered Verity’s fate. Ho hum. By the rules of such fiction, Verity must, of course, come back from a perfect hack on Goldenboy, and be rubbing him down with fresh-smelling straw when in the distance, eek! splash!, Camilla falls into the ornamental fishpond! Run to the rescue, Verity! Don’t care if your plaits get wet! Recover Camilla unconscious, apply life-saving techniques, and after a feverish period awaiting Camilla’s recovery, receive as reward (wait for it) free stabling for the rest of your life! And not forgetting double oats for good old Goldenboy!

The children’s book world was mainly supplied these days with grim stuff about discarded hypodermics, but Belinda knew her own smug little readers would lap up the free stabling plot all right, mainly because they had already proved themselves stupid with no imagination. How easy they were to manipulate, these little princesses. Psychoanalysis might never have been invented. ‘Camilla cuts off Verity’s plaits,’ she wrote now, mischievously. ‘Verity caught cheating in the handy-pony. Shame increases when V investigated by RSPCA; maltreatment of G Boy exposed on national
TV by Rolf H. V’s mother seeks consolation in lethal cocktail of booze and horse pills, and is shot by vet. Camilla wins Hickstead.’

Just then a key turned in the front door. Mrs Holdsworth? Belinda felt stricken. She’d been so busy torturing Verity! What was the etiquette for sacking a cleaning lady? Did you let her do the cleaning first, or what?

‘Only me,’ called Mrs H, coughing as she slammed the front door, and struggled out of wellingtons.

Belinda stayed paralysed at her desk, panicking. ‘Hello!’ she called, and waited.

‘“Come into the garden, Maud,”’ sang Mrs H, coughing between words. ‘“For the black bat night has—”’ Here a great explosion of phlegm-shifting, culminating in ‘God almighty, Jesus wept.’

She popped her grey head round the study door, fag in mouth. Here goes, thought Belinda, then noticed that Mrs H’s left arm was suspended in a rather grubby sling.

‘Don’t fucking ask,’ said Mrs Holdsworth gloomily. ‘Doctor says six months. I tell you what for nothing. My fucking brass-polishing days are over.’

‘That’s awful,’ sympathized Belinda. ‘And when they’d hardly begun. What a shame. I’m sorry.’

‘So am I. No grip, you see.’

‘I’ve been thinking—’ Belinda began.

‘Fucking stairs are the worst, of course.’

Mrs H scratched her knee through her overall, using her one good arm. Recollecting that there were three floors to her house (plus attic), Belinda didn’t see how an injured wrist stopped you from going upstairs, but she said nothing. Asking Mrs Holdsworth to elaborate on an intriguing statement was a mistake she’d regretted on too many occasions, and she now had a policy of restricting herself to a noncommittal ‘Mm’ wherever possible.

‘Mm,’ she said now, with as much of a funny-old-world tone as she could manage.

Mrs H continued to stand in the doorway. It always grieved her to spend less than half of her allotted three hours telling people how long it was since she bought a scarf. She tried again. ‘Bleeding great ’urricane on the way, apparently.’

‘Mm.’

‘That Salman Rushdie was in the butcher’s again. I said to him, “Very good, mate. Disguising yourself as a pork chop, are you? That’s fucking original.”’

‘Mm.’ Belinda pretended to be deeply engrossed in her notes.

‘My boy says he’s written a new book called
Buddha Was a Cunt.
Is that true?’

In the café, Maggie read last week’s
Stage
from cover to cover, filling time before her therapy appointment at two p.m. Maggie had run the gamut of therapy over the years. She’d done Freudian twice and Jungian three times, but had so far avoided Kleinian because Belinda had once said, ‘What, like Patsy Cline?’ which had somehow ruined it. Belinda had an awful way of belittling things that were important to you, by saying the first thing that came into her head. Kleinian therapy would now only involve singing maudlin I-fall-to-pieces country songs, which was what Maggie did at home anyway without paying.

Nowadays Maggie was working with a new therapist, Julia, who was the best she’d ever had. The idea was to work on isolated problems, and correct the thinking that led to inappropriate behaviour or beliefs. For example, Maggie had a problem about other people being late. ‘So does everyone,’ pooh-poohed Belinda. ‘Not like me,’ said Maggie. And it was
true. Maggie not only got angry and worried as the minutes ticked by, but after a while she started to imagine that the other person was not late at all. He had actually arrived on time, and was standing at the bar or something –
but that she had completely forgotten what he looked like.

‘But he’d recognize you?’ Belinda objected. ‘So you’d still meet up.’

No, said Maggie. Because it was worse than that.
He’d forgotten what she looked like, too.

‘That’s mad,’ Belinda had said, helpfully. ‘You should never have become an actress if you can’t handle the odd identity shift, Mags.’

Luckily, the therapist took a more constructive approach.

‘Now, since this non-recognition event has never occurred in reality,’ said Julia, ‘we must uncover the roots of your irrational anxiety, which I’m afraid to say, Margaret, is your sense of total unlovability. It’s not your fault. Not at all. Your needs were never met by your parents, you see.’

‘You’re right.’

‘You were made to feel invisible by those terrible selfish people, who should never have had children.’

Maggie sniffed. ‘I was.’

‘They looked right through you.’

Tears pricked Maggie’s eyes. ‘They did.’

‘Did they tell you to stop dancing in front of the television, perhaps?’

It was a lucky guess.

‘Yes!’

And so Maggie had wept and signed up for six months, figuring that she had very little else to do, and Julia was local (in Tooting). Besides which, she couldn’t keep sitting stock-still with panic in theatre foyers with a sign pinned on her chest: ‘It’s really me! Is that really you?’

Professionally, things were a bit bleak for Maggie, and this
didn’t help matters. Her total unlovability was being confirmed in all quarters. The Pinter had been good experience, though incredibly badly paid. She’d had a job on
Casualty,
classified in the script as ‘Bus crash scene – a woman moans’. But all the while her ambition to rejoin the Royal Shakespeare Company was coming to nothing. For the time being she must comfort herself with memories of two years ago, when she’d peaked in Stratford as the Lady Olivia in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night,
getting a review that singled her out as ‘quite extraordinary’ and ‘probably quite good-looking’.

She had really loved that production, which was very loyal of her because it was generally reviled. Playing to paltry houses who sometimes booed, it did not transfer to London. But Maggie loved her Olivia. Never one to argue with a director’s concept, she even loved her Olivia’s Mongolian peasant costume and comical clog dancing. (‘Nobility is relative,’ their director Jeff told them.) Jeff, whom the
Financial Times
described as ‘an idiot’, had bucketfuls of bold ideas, including the unprecedented notion of casting as Viola and Sebastian (identical twins) two actors who looked absolutely nothing like each other. ‘Most wonderful!’ Olivia would say each night in the last scene, doing a hilarious double-take through bottle-glass specs. Even the critics liked that bit. She wished now she hadn’t slept with Jeff, especially as he was married to the famous TV actress who had played Viola. But he’d done her a great service with that casting of asymmetricals. No one usually finds Olivia’s final-act confusion the least bit funny.

Leon pushed open the steamy door, and wiped his shoes. Oh God. He looked slightly less enormous than she’d remembered, and had washed his hair. Maggie fiddled with her teaspoon in the sugar, glancing up occasionally. But though he looked round carefully, he evidently failed to spot her, so she carried on reading the
Stage
– or pretended to, having read it all already.

She heard Leon order a cup of herbal tea and braced herself. He brushed past her (‘Sorry’), and sat at a nearby table with
Time Out,
studying the ballet listings. She stared at him until finally he looked up. ‘Well, hello,’ she said pointedly.

He frowned.

‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Penelope Pitstop. You must be Muttley.’

He took a sip of tea, and looked behind him. ‘Sorry, were you sitting here?’ he suggested, at last.

‘What?’

‘Were you sitting here?’

His voice sounded funny. But it was definitely him.

‘No.’

He tried to look away again, but couldn’t. She was staring at him, and clearly getting angry with him, too.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Do I know you? I’m afraid I’m terrible at forgetting people. I meet such a lot of people in my work, you see.’

At which point, the door opened again, and a blonde woman came in, smiling directly at Leon. It was Julia, Maggie’s therapist.

‘Ah, there you are, Julia,’ said Leon, with relief. ‘Perhaps…’ and he gestured awkwardly towards Maggie, evidently hoping his wife could identify her.

‘Margaret?’ she began, but in a second Maggie had pushed past her, left the café and was outside.

Verity, high on crack cocaine, was just being bundled into a police van (they were manhandling her plaits) when Belinda wondered whether it might be time to ease up a bit.

‘Phew,’ she said, shaking her head proudly as she perused the last two pages of notes, and wishing she smoked cheroots. ‘What a scorcher.’

The phone rang. It was Viv. ‘Am I interrupting something?’

‘Only a drug bust. So I see you’re still talking to me? She’s only a cleaning lady, Viv.’

‘It’s about you and me,’ Viv said. ‘I was wrong, you were right.’

Belinda paused to take this in. ‘And who is this impersonating Viv, please?’

‘Belinda, listen. I was wrong to interfere in your life. If you want to be bad at things and disorganized and never tidy up, you can do that. You’re nearly forty, after all.’

‘I’m thirty-six, the same as you.’

‘You see, Linda isn’t what you think. I know I’ve always said she was Mary Poppins and all that, but the truth is I’ve been covering up for her.’

‘Viv!’

‘No, it’s true. She’s got a terrible self-esteem problem. You have to bolster her all the time. And you end up—’

‘Viv, I can’t believe you’d stoop so low.’

‘You haven’t sacked Mrs Holdsworth?’

‘That’s a point. Hang on.’

Alerted to the telltale sound of vacuum cleaning in the hall, Belinda popped her head round the door and found Mrs H pushing the Hoover back and forth on the same spot, apparently lost in thought. ‘Fucking disgusting!’ she yelled to Belinda, over the din of the Hoover.

Belinda gave her a thumbs-up and went back to the phone.

‘Not yet. I thought if I gave her a month’s money—’

‘Leave things as they are, Bea.’

Belinda harumphed grandly. Nobody harumphed as grandly as Belinda.

The doorbell rang.

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘If it’s Linda—’

‘I’ll ring you later. God, you’re so
interfering.
Why do you always think you’re responsible for other people’s lives?’

‘Perhaps because I’m a bloody anaesthetist, in case you’ve forgotten!’

Belinda pursed her lips.

The doorbell rang again.

‘If it’s Linda—’ Viv began.

‘I’ve got to go.’

Belinda felt rather good about standing up to Viv. Letting Verity’s behaviour go haywire had obviously given her a boost.

‘Atta girl, Belinda,’ she said to herself on the way to the door, stepping over Mrs H’s wellingtons – and opening it found, in a pool of afternoon light, carrying a very thoughtful bunch of chrysanthemums, the woman who was going to change her life.

Mid-afternoon, Jago rang Laurie Spink again. Spink was now body and soul the property of the Effort, because it was easier to give him an extremely well-paid regular column than think of someone else to write for the supplement. And now that Jago had his number, he could expect the usual Jago call.

‘I need some geneticists.’

‘I’ve got a tutorial.’

‘I need them this minute.’

So Spink had reeled off a few names, some of them with phone numbers. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he added. ‘Copy by Friday, yes?’

‘Just one more thing. What do you know about Stefan Johansson’s work? He hasn’t done anything on monstrous boobs that he’s keeping quiet about?’

‘Oh, a lot of his notes were lost, unfortunately.’

Jago had been doodling. He stopped. ‘Lost when?’

‘When he died.’

‘Stefan Johansson
died?
Since this morning?’