Neurotica (10 page)

Brenda bit her bottom lip and then began to cry loud,
red-faced
sobs full of saliva and snot. Anna got up from the
table and put both
arms round her. She rocked her back and
forth the way she rocked
Josh and Amy when life in the school playground got too much and
their lives seemed utterly wretched.

It turned out the “miserable git” was Giles Hardacre, the
Tory MP for Lymeswold, who was also the Opposition front-bench
spokesman on agriculture. Brenda explained that one of her clients
who spent a fortune at Sweet FA every year had invited her to her
house in Wiltshire for the weekend. Brenda had thought it was going
to be just her, the client and the client's husband, but it turned
out to be a full-blown house party full of chinless uppers. Brenda
had been bored witless. To relieve the tedium she got completely
smashed over dinner and then somehow ended up in bed with Hardacre,
who had, conveniently, come to the party wifeless.

“And condomless, by the sounds of it.”

“Anna, don't start. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I never
imagined that I'd get pregnant. It took nearly a year with
Alfie.”

Anna tried to think of something helpful to say.

“So, is he good-looking, then, this right horrible
gentleman?” She knew she must have seen Hardacre on TV, but she
couldn't for the life of her remember what he looked like.

“I guess so, in a sort of nobby, foppish, Michael Heseltine
kinda way.”

Anna said this didn't really help, as it probably described at
least half of the Tory party.

“Anyway,” Brenda went on, slowly rubbing her finger round
the rim of her glass, “I left doing a pregnancy test until
Saturday. I'd had my suspicions for a couple of months, but I suppose
I was trying to put it to the back of my mind. Once I found out I
thought it best to tell him, just out of politeness really. I
assumed he wouldn't want anything to do with the baby, but I didn't
see that as a problem. I'm not exactly skint and I'm used to being
a single parent. When I told him, he was furious and went on and on
about 'is reputation being destroyed and 'aving to resign from the
shadow cabinet if it leaked out. He insisted I get rid of it.

“But I couldn't even consider an abortion. As soon as I'd got
over the shock I couldn't wait to tell Alfie he was going to have a
baby brother or sister. I told Giles I was keeping it. I didn't
hear a word from him all through Sunday and Monday. Then this
morning he phones. The stupid bleeder has only been and told 'is
wife. He said he couldn't live with the guilt of it all, or the
thought that she might read about it in the papers if I started
kicking up, demanding maintenance for the baby. Now she's turfed
'im out, says she'll name me in the divorce. And if that isn't
enough, she's threatening to sell her story.”

Brenda put down her glass and wiped her nose on a hard ball of
scrunched-up kitchen paper.

“Look, I know I should be feeling sorry for the cow. If I
were in her shoes, I'd probably do the same, but if Lavender
Hardacre goes to the papers my reputation will be down the can.
Half of what I sell goes to rich Tory women like her, and the point
is, they all know each other. The moment she accuses me publicly of
being a husband-stealing slapper, every Caroline in London will come
out in sympathy and the first thing they'll do is stop buying my
clothes. Anna, she has the power to organize a virtual boycott of
Sweet FA. I stand to lose a fucking packet.”

Anna reached into her bag. Down among the dead ballpoints and
furry, crisp-covered tampons, she found a cleanish handkerchief.
She handed it to Brenda.

“Brenda, please, please don't panic. I'll talk to Dan. We'll
work something out. I promise.”

Anna had absolutely no idea what Dan could do. What was more,
she couldn't bring herself to mention borrowing a dress for the
dinner party. She'd have to buy something and Dan would be
furious.

Bugger him, she thought. She had bigger things on her mind
just now than the price of a goddamned dress. Dan would just have
to get unfurious again.

C H A P T E R     N I N E

W
ITH A FORCE JUST A FRACTION greater than good manners
required, Anna stabbed her fork into another piece of
olive-paste-covered bruscetta. For the last ten minutes some boorish
South African architect, too used, thought Anna, to bossing black
servants around, had been setting everybody straight on the reasons
for the spread of AIDS in Africa. It was one of those intellectually
competitive Hampstead dinner parties at which Dan excelled, but
which Anna feared because they always made her feel she should have
taken the previous week off work to mug up on the latest opera crits,
the works of Pliny and heaps of hard vocab.

During the predinner drinks, while Dan had been on the other
side of the room chatting to a couple of people from the
Observer,
Anna, wearing the new black Ghost dress Dan was
still livid with her for buying, found herself collared by a chap
who, she thought, had to be in his late sixties.

He had come and sat beside her on the sofa. His gray hair was
cut into a trendy crop so that his head looked almost as if it had
been shaved. He was wearing a high-buttoned burlap waistcoat, a
collarless white shirt and tiny oblong steel-rimmed specs. Anna
wasn't in the least bit surprised to discover he was a shrink.
Taking Anna's eyes in his, he declared he only had to look at a
person for a minute before he understood almost everything about
their psyche. Sensing that she could cope with him because he was
obviously nothing more than a randy old goat, Anna began to relax.
It was only when he asked her whether she agreed that Eric Cantona,
on the evidence of the latest film he had directed, was the new
Claude Berri that she began to panic. In an instant her palms were
soaked in sweat and she lost her grip on her champagne flute. This
fell onto the coffee table and smashed into tiny pieces. Red-faced
and flustered, she began dabbing ineffectually at the mess with a
tissue. She gave the shrink a feeble smile and mumbled something
about never being at her best among the shattering glasses.

The dinner party was being given by Rebecca Jameson, the
social affairs correspondent at the
Vanguard,
and her
husband, Bill Hutchinson, who was the London bureau chief of
Lifenews Magazine.
Anna hadn't met Bill before, but she'd
spoken to Rebecca a few times at various
Vanguard
drinks
do's. She was in her mid-forties, fearsomely bright and
confrontational, and according to Dan behaved in conference like a
cross between some intellectual Rottweiler and a boot-camp leader.
If she thought somebody had said something stupid she would rip
them apart for minutes at a time, until, in the end, she almost had
them volunteering to make amends by doing one-armed press-ups on
the floor.

Anna was expecting Bill to be a stooped, ineffectual, balding
American with a beard and no mustache, but in fact he was a
clean-shaven Ivy League American with thick blond hair and he
stood remarkably upright. When Dan and Anna arrived he was in
the middle of sounding off at Rebecca, in front of several guests,
that her understanding of the ramifications of the introduction of the Euro in the U.K. were positively junior high. She simply stood there gazing
at him the way Julie Andrews looks at Christopher Plummer in the
gazebo scene in
The Sound of Music
when he asks her to
marry him.

Anna had gradually become less intimidated by Rebecca and had
even grown to like her once she realized the woman lacked any
humor of her own and that it was pitifully easy to make her laugh.
Rebecca had also become less threatening the moment Anna noticed
she had a bosom which looked as if it would benefit no end from the
cantilever properties of a decent underwired bra.

H
aving dealt with aids to his own enormous satisfaction, the South African architect paused to swallow a mouthful of the chilled
coriander and lemongrass vichyssoise, then led seamlessly into a
monologue on suburban design. Anna was thinking of asking whether Le
Corbusier had actually invented brandy too, but thought better of
it.

“What everybody needs to understand,” he insisted in his
curt, imperious tone, “about the hierophancy—if you
will—of the patio door in the British outer suburbs is that it
has its roots in a thesis promulgated in the early twenties by Alvar
Aalto. It was Aalto who said that man, even from within his
brick-built shelter, needs to preserve his contact with living
nature if he is to safeguard his physical and mental well-being.
Of course, given our climate and countryside, that's something we
have been aware of in South Africa for many, many years.”

“Particularly when it came to constructing shelters in black
townships,” Anna murmured through a stiff ventriloquist's smile.
Dan, who was sitting opposite Anna, had been watching her fidget and
sigh as she became increasingly bored and irritated by the South
African. He hadn't caught the precise contents of her murmur,
but he knew Anna well enough to be concerned that they might
represent the beginning of an increasingly violent continuum which
could end with her suddenly producing a brick from her cleavage.
Casually Dan leaned back in his chair, slid his bottom to the edge
of the seat and just managed to reach her shin under the table and
kick it.

Anna didn't flinch. He'd only managed to tap her. She gave him
a childish, mischievous grin, but at the same time decided that her
best bet would be to keep any more contentious thoughts to herself
until home time.

A
s the South African continued to sound off
like some polysyllablic pedant on
Kaleidoscope,
Anna allowed her
mind to wander. Inevitably, her thoughts drifted towards Charlie,
and in particular to their slightly bizarre final meeting.

This had taken place a couple of days after their rendezvous
at the Park Royal. Assuming that Dan had left for work, Charlie had
phoned her early that morning to check if she was free for a late
lunch around one-thirty.

At the moment the phone rang Anna was sitting at her desk in a
pair of Dan's tatty old pajamas, alternating between picking at her
cuticles until they bled and peering into the tiny antique mirror she
kept on the desk to squeeze the blackheads round her nose. She
looked and felt completely drained.

For a start, she'd had Campbell McKee on the phone just after
eight and had ended up having to grovel to him. He had called, full
of excitement, to give her the news about Mavis de Mornay still
being alive and her death being nothing but a fiendishly elaborate
stunt within a stunt to get publicity for her latest book,
They Parted at the Altar.
Anna had kicked herself for not
having realized what the old bag was up to. Subconsciously she had
known there was something dodgy about the entire de Mornay
escapade.

For a start, she had looked nothing like Anna's vision of an
old person on the verge of death. She had expected to see her looking
thin and wasted, her taut white skin stretched over a skeletal face,
as she struggled for every breath.

Instead, lying on her priceless carved oak four-poster
deathbed, Mavis de Mornay had looked like an aged tart taking a rest
between clients. She was wearing a ginger Mary Quant wig, and her
sagging features were plastered in thick foundation in an almost
identical shade of ginger. Her trademark Cleopatra eye makeup and
purple frosted lipstick were as vividly applied as ever, and she was
breathing easily as if she were in a deep sleep.

What was more, shortly before the “end,” she had suddenly
opened her eyes, slipped her hand out from under the
tea-rose-pink counterpane and produced a hardback copy of
They
Parted at the Altar.
Looking as if she were summoning her very
last ounce of strength, she had held it shakily towards the cameras.
Anna had been convinced she'd seen a satisfied smile form briefly
on the old lady's lips. After a few seconds de Mornay's hand had
flopped down onto the bed, and she was, supposedly, gone, the
Cleopatra eyes still staring beseechingly into the cameras.

The reason she hadn't seen through the performance, she
consoled herself, was that she had still been in a bit of a daze
after seeing Charlie. How on earth the other hacks had been
hoodwinked she had no idea. But for her part, Anna felt the need to
apologize for not being more on the ball.

“No, angel, it wasn't your fault, just one o' them things,”
he said magnanimously. He went on to explain triumphantly that de
Mornay had been caught out by pure chance. A few hours after
rigor mortis should have set in, she and India, her PA, were
photographed boarding a Concorde flight to New York by some
freelance photographer who had been sent to Heathrow by one of
the tabloids to get a run-of-the-mill “Liz Hurley Flies Out”
snap.

The
Globe on Sunday
had paid a fortune for the
exclusive rights to the Mavis de Mornay airport pictures. Campbell
was beside himself with what a blinding joke it was that the dailies
had made complete tossers of themselves by filling their pages with
masses of melodramatic hype describing de Mornay's final moments.
The
Globe
would now humiliate the lot of them by appearing
on Sunday with what Campbell referred to as “the real badger.”

“So, what we're talking about in terms of your piece,
angel,” Campbell concluded, “is a slight shift in spin, if you get
my drift. But don't worry about it. I'll tweak it up a bit.”

Anna blanched at the thought of what would appear under her
byline: when it actually came to tabloid writing, Campbell, like a
lot of posh boys slumming it, was dreadful. Indeed, he may well
have been the worst writer since McGonagall. But she was immensely
grateful to Campbell for relieving her of at least some of the
pressure she was feeling.

Despite Dan's continuing chirpiness, she was still being
plagued by wave after wave of guilt about cheating on a possibly
dying husband. She knew she ought to come straight out with it and
ask him if he really was ill, but she kept chickening out. While
there was an element of doubt, she reasoned, it was just about OK
for her to carry on doing her “research” for the Rachel Stern
piece. The moment she was certain he had some dreadful disease, her
sense of decency would have to kick in and that would mean an end to
any more extracurricular sex.

Then there was the question of what to do about the Brenda
situation. Anna reckoned it could only be a matter of days before
Brenda had fifty hacks camping on her doorstep. She'd discussed
it with Dan several times. At first she was cross with him for
being so dismissive, but ended up being forced to agree with him.
He was right; in a free country there was no legal way of preventing
Giles Hardacre's wife from going to the papers. Brenda might be
able to sue for libel if the paper printed anything which wasn't
true, but by then she would have been named and the damage done. As
the days went by Brenda seemed to be getting herself into even more
of a stew. She wasn't eating properly or going to work. Anna
couldn't countenance breaking her promise to her best mate. She had
to come up with something. It occurred to her that maybe there was
some illegal scheme they might consider to put the frighteners on
Lavender Hardacre. It didn't have to be very illegal, thought Anna,
just slightly immoral, if necessary.

Another thing troubling her was that she'd barely glanced at
the copy of
The Clitoris-Centered Woman
she had hidden
from Dan in her sweater drawer. Alison O'Farrell had biked it over
soon after their lunch at the Harpo. In her naiveté, Anna
had been expecting a reasonably slim book. After all, Rachel Stern's
thesis on why women should commit adultery wasn't exactly
Wittgenstein. But being both American and an academic, Stern had
managed to produce a thousand-page, close-typed treatise, packed
with overblown rhetoric and impenetrable mazes of meandering
sociological argument. Like most journos Anna was a past master at
skimming a book in an hour and lifting all the relevant bits, but
even skimming this lot was going to take forever.

She knew virtually all her stress was of her own selfish
making. She knew too that she could put an end to it in two phone
calls—one to Charlie and the other to Alison O'Farrell.
Maybe it was time to tell both of them she was having second
thoughts. She decided to go back to bed with some Night Nurse, which
always knocked her out, and sleep on it. Then suddenly there was
Charlie on the line asking her to lunch, his voice sounding as if
she could pour it over profiteroles. Miraculously the color returned
to her cheeks, her energy level soared and she had no doubt that as
soon as she got up out of her chair, there would be a spring in her
step.

“Are we talking lunch with food,” she said, chuckling, “or
naked lunch?”

“Well, I thought maybe proper lunch with clothes on would be
nice for a change. Then afterwards we can make up our minds how to
spend the afternoon.”

Anna's insides turned several glorious anticipatory
somersaults.

“I think it might be the last opportunity we get for a
while,” he went on. “The airline has been brilliant about
extending my leave. I've caught up with all the family over here I
wanted to. But I really do have to get back. They've put me on the
rota for the Dublin–LA run beginning next week.”

A
nna hadn't felt up to going through the rigmarole of getting
dressed up for lunch in the hotel restaurant, so she
suggested a small French place round the corner. They chatted away
easily about nothing in particular: Dublin, films, Charlie's cure
for jet lag. Anna entertained him with the tale of Amy and Josh's
latest head-lice infestation which had got so bad she reckoned
the lice were wearing T-shirts with “Bloomfields 2003” written
across them.