Rivals (61 page)

A story was duly leaked and appeared in the
Mail
the next day that Cameron Cook had changed sides, moved in with Rupert and that Tony was devastated to lose his star producer. No reference was made to Cameron being Tony’s mistress, or of her being beaten up by him.

Rumour, however, was rife and by Wednesday Corinium had leaked a counter-story accusing Venturer of poaching and cold-blooded enticement, and putting the blame firmly on Rupert.

‘A lonely, single woman nearing thirty, worried about missing the marital boat, is in a particularly vulnerable position,’ Tony was quoted as saying.

Rupert was furious. ‘All we have to do is give a photograph of Cameron’s bruises to the press.’

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ said Declan crushingly. ‘You’ve no proof Tony did it and not you. It isn’t as though you’ve exactly got a blameless reputation when it comes to beating up.’

Tony, once he had cooled down, was absolutely shattered by Cameron’s defection. He’d had no idea how much both he and Corinium had come to depend on her, both as an inspiration and a sparring partner.

Discovering through his spies that Rupert would be in London opening a new sports stadium on Thursday, Tony drove over to Penscombe to see her. Surrounded by Rupert’s pack of dogs, with Mrs Bodkin in the kitchen and Mr Bodkin strimming the long grass round the lake, Cameron felt safe to let him in. Dressed in an orange bikini, she still looked as though she’d just done fifteen rounds with Barry McGuigan.

Tony followed her out to the pool, which sparkled brilliant turquoise in the sunshine and was no longer filled with leaves. It killed him to see her in this beautiful opulent setting, stretched out oiled on one of Rupert’s reclining chairs, guarded by Rupert’s lurcher Blue, who lay by her feet panting, but growling every time Tony approached.

Immediately Tony begged her to come back, telling her for the first time how much he loved her and, when that had no effect, offering to leave Monica and marry her. He didn’t even lose his temper when she told him to bugger off.

‘Your job’s open for you to come back whenever you want it, and here are the keys to Hamilton Terrace.’ He threw them on to the table. ‘The house may belong to Corinium, but it’s still yours when you need it. Come and get your clothes whenever you want to. I shouldn’t have beaten you up, but I love you and I just saw red.’

‘Just like you did the last time I came home late after spending the day with Patrick,’ said Cameron. ‘Get out.’

Tony, predictably, couldn’t remain nice for long. ‘You know it’s only a matter of time until Rupert ditches you,’ was his parting shot. ‘Five days, five weeks; he may even keep you five months until Venturer finally don’t get the franchise; then he’ll kick you out like all the rest and you’ll come running back to me.’

Cameron didn’t believe Tony would leave Monica, particularly during the franchise year, but at least it now meant she could pick up her clothes, her books, and, much more important, her tapes and prizes from Hamilton Terrace. She also felt privately that it was nice to have Tony as a bolthole in case Rupert started playing her up.

Rupert, in fact, couldn’t have been more angelic those first few days, fussing over her, seeing she didn’t get too tired, ensuring Mrs Bodkin made her delicious food (which Cameron privately thought contained far too much seasoning and fats), making love to her with surprising gentleness and subtlety, so he didn’t crush her bruised ribs or her battered face.

The weather was beautiful too – long hot days, followed by short sweet nights. Cameron was happy to sleep and read and sunbathe and explore Rupert’s woods and fields with the dogs. Gradually, as the black eye and the swelling on her lips disappeared, she felt she was healing inside and out.

The only drawback was Mr and Mrs Bodkin, shadowy, polite, running Rupert’s life like clockwork, but always there in the background. Cameron wanted Rupert on her own, she was not used to servants. She wanted to wander round the house naked and make love in the kitchen if she felt like it. She was also inclined to treat Mr and Mrs Bodkin like Corinium minions, rapping out orders, snapping at slowness and even more at ignorance.

Even Rupert, famous for his caprice and short fuse with staff, had to pull her up repeatedly: ‘Taggie O’Hara increases her vocabulary by learning a new word every day. You could start off with: please and thank you.’

Any reference to Taggie sent Cameron through the roof, so, the second week after she moved in, determined to prove to Rupert that she could cook and run a house much better than Taggie, she persuaded Rupert to give Mr and Mrs Bodkin a few days off.

‘I’m better,’ she insisted. ‘I want to look after you. I’m going to cook you some decent food. You’re getting far too much cholesterol.’

‘Do I look as though it’s harming me?’ said Rupert, who was eating white bread and dripping sprinkled with salt as he sat immersed in the
Scorpion.

‘No, but it’s futile to abuse a magnificent constitution. It’ll catch up with you. And why don’t you try to read the
Guardian
occasionally instead of that trash?’

‘Because it uses much too long words and makes snide remarks about my party,’ said Rupert.

‘But objective criticism’s valuable, for Chrissake.’

‘Not to me. I only like people who think I’m perfect. I’d better get Mr and Mrs Bodkin back for the weekend. The children are coming on Saturday. They make a hell of a lot of work.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ said Cameron, suddenly excited. ‘Let’s look after them ourselves. We’ll have picnics and barbecues and all muck in. It’ll be so much fun.’

Like many insecure people, Cameron was much easier to live with when she was down. After she’d been beaten up, it was her intense vulnerability that had appealed to Rupert. Wanting to protect her, he’d asked her to move in. But as she got better, her natural aggression and stridency started to reassert itself.

The day before the children were due, Cameron decided to make a big paella for dinner; the rest could be heated up for them the following day. Discovering in the middle she’d forgotten to get any saffron or squid, she dispatched Rupert to the village shop.

‘I’m sure they won’t stock them,’ grumbled Rupert, who wanted to read
Horse and Hound.

The kitchen wireless was blaring out Dame Enid’s latest tone poem; the
New Statesman
and the
Times Literary Supplement
lay on the kitchen table all giving Rupert an unpleasant feeling of
déjà vu.
It was too much like Helen all over again.

‘Well, drive into Stroud then,’ snapped Cameron.

She’d forgotten what a rat race paella was to make, but she was determined to cook better than Taggie.

‘And get some Parmesan as well,’ she shouted after him.

The village shop had recently been converted into a tiny supermarket with shelves all round the walls, and a partition, also with shelves on both sides, running parallel to the counter. If the ubiquitous Mrs Makepiece, who did for Lizzie and Valerie and one morning a week for Maud now, hadn’t been holding forth so noisily and indignantly at the head of the queue, Rupert would never have slid into the shop unobserved. Picking up a red wire basket, he chucked in some Jaffa cakes because the children liked them, and a tin of corned beef because he liked it; he couldn’t find any squid, but he supposed a tin of pilchards in tomato sauce would do as well – a squid pro quo.

As he moved round to the spice shelf, Mrs Makepiece, encouraged by a chorus of clicking tongues, raised her voice. ‘Declan and ‘er ladyship have pushed off on some second honeymoon in the Lake District, leaving her all on her own.’

Rupert stiffened, gazing unseeingly at rows of paprika, dill and cayenne.

‘All alone in that ‘uge ‘ouse,’ went on Mrs Makepiece, ‘and we all know it’s ‘aunted. Well, ‘alf the lights fused, so Taggie went to the fuse box and read the instructions all wrong – she’s disconnected, you know, the poor lamb, and she blew all the fuses, and had to shiver all night in the dark, with only Gertrude, that’s her little dog, for company.’

Despite the baking heat of the day, Rupert had gone absolutely cold. Taggie might have killed herself fiddling about with that fuse box.

‘She was crying her heart out this morning when I come in,’ said Mrs Makepiece, egged on by the row of shocked faces. ‘At first she wouldn’t tell me what was the matter. Then I made us a nice cup of tea and it came out – they’d all forgotten her birthday.’

Rupert was so enraged he dropped the basket and walked straight out of the shop with the pilchards, which he had forgotten to chalk up.

The moment he got home he rang Ursula. ‘Where the fuck are Maud and Declan?’

‘Windermere.’

‘Give me their number.’

‘I promised not to; they don’t want to be disturbed. This is a patch-up operation. Declan’s been devoting too much time to his biography.’

‘They forgot Taggie’s birthday.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘And you should have bloody well reminded them. Give me the number.’

Declan and Maud were out when he rang. He left a message for Declan to ring him, saying it was about the franchise and very urgent.

Then he rang Taggie. ‘Happy birthday, darling. Cameron and I are going to take you out to dinner. No, I don’t want any “buts”. We’ll pick you up about eight.’

He was still sweating with horror at the thought of the poor little duck all alone in that big house in the dark with all those winding stairs and long passages.

‘Bloody Maud and Declan,’ he howled as he went into the kitchen.

‘What on earth have they done now? Don’t turn it off, it’s Vivaldi,’ protested Cameron. ‘Did you get the squid?’ Then, as Rupert handed her the pilchards, ‘These won’t do, dumbass. And where’s the Parmesan and the saffron?’

‘They forgot Taggie’s birthday,’ said Rupert bleakly.

‘Well, that’s not such a big thing.’ Then, seeing the rage on Rupert’s face, ‘Haven’t you forgotten your kids’ birthdays?’

‘No – yes, I suppose so, but Helen always remembers.’

When he told Cameron what had happened, and that they were taking Taggie out to dinner, she hit the roof. ‘But it was our last night on our own. This was to be a celebration I was cooking specially for us.’

‘There’ll be plenty of time for that in the future.’

The telephone rang. It was Declan. Fuelled by indignation, and also because Declan had been so censorious about him and Cameron, Rupert let him have it. ‘You fucking hypocrite, always banging on about tyranny and exploitation. The worst case I’ve seen is going on under your roof.’

‘What the fock are you talking about?’

‘Taggie. She works like a slave for the bloody lot of you, and all you can do is leave her alone in a huge house, with the fuses blown, and then forget her birthday.’

‘Oh, my Christ,’ said Declan, appalled. ‘Have we really?’

‘You get on the telephone the moment I ring off and say how sorry you are.’

‘We ought to come back.’

‘No. Cameron and I’ll look after her tonight. You come home first thing tomorrow and bring her a decent present, not a crappy book of Wordsworth’s poems she can’t read.’

‘God, I feel terrible,’ said Declan. ‘Now, what was this urgent thing about the franchise?’

‘That was it,’ said Rupert furiously. ‘If she hadn’t worked her ass off trailing around the area, rounding up names for your bloody franchise, we wouldn’t be ahead in the race now.’

Crashing down the telephone, he poured himself a huge whisky. He was absolutely shaking with rage.

‘Well, well, well,’ said Cameron, chucking the wooden spoon on to the drying rice and switching off the hot plate. ‘What gives with Taggie O’Hara?’

‘She doesn’t deserve parents like that. She’s only a baby.’

‘Nineteen today, to be exact. Well beyond the age of consent.’

She knew it was madness to bitch, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘You’ve got a very soft spot – or is it a hard spot – for her, haven’t you? Are you nurturing some secret passion? What I want to know is where does that put me?’

Rupert looked her up and down. There wasn’t a trace of tenderness in his face now.

‘You’re living here, aren’t you?’

‘At the moment.’

‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said softly. ‘If you want to go on living here, stop being such a fucking bitch.’

Draining his whisky, he picked up his car keys. ‘I’m going to get her a present. You can ring up the White Elephant in Painswick and book a table for three at nine o’clock.’

Henry Hampshire’s Springer spaniel had recently had six puppies. They’d all gone to new homes except the runt whose paw, broken when someone stepped on it, was still in plaster. The puppy had a freckled face, a bright pink mouth, crossed eyes that looked as though he’d been on the booze all night, and a stumpy tail which agitated his whole body.

‘He’s a great character,’ said Henry. ‘You can have him for a hundred pounds.’

‘With a broken paw? Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Plaster comes off next week. Then he’ll be as right as rain. Won’t stop him going all day in the field.’

‘Fifty,’ said Rupert.

‘You’ve got to be joking. The others went for two hundred and fifty each. Mother was best of breed at Crufts, father won every field trial in the country.’

‘Fifty,’ said Rupert. ‘He’ll always be slightly lame.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Henry. ‘I had lunch with Daysee Butler today.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t,’ snapped Rupert. ‘You’re bound to give away trade secrets.’

‘Well, you still haven’t laid on Joanna Lumley,’ grumbled Henry. ‘Daysee said Tony’s flown to LA to search for a new Programme Controller.’

When Rupert got back to Penscombe, Cameron had washed her hair, and changed into the clinging kingfisher-blue dress she’d worn to get her award in Madrid; it had slits to sunburnt mid-thigh on both sides. She looked apprehensive, very beautiful, and came straight up and put her arms round Rupert’s neck.