This Honourable House (17 page)

Gail sighed. They were so obviously synthetic, not least because of the underlying assumption that the
inquirer had a free choice and some degree of influence over the outcome. Real life was not like that. In any case they did not lend themselves to discursive answers. ‘No’, ‘Yes’, ‘You must be joking’ and ‘Tell him to be thankful for what he’s got’ were probably not what Tina had in mind.

She fetched a notepad and pen and opened the first genuine envelope. The letter had a sour smell and brown stains on the back as if it had been written in a patch of spilt coffee.

‘Shown appalling taste in men,’ Gail muttered. ‘But that’s not a crime. Lord, what a pickle. Selfish bastard. At least I didn’t have children to worry about. Maybe the best answer would be to see a solicitor and screw some money out of him. Though that would have been easier if you’d been married to begin with.’ She chewed the end of her biro. Such remarks would sound callous on the printed page. The column had to make a favourable impression; she could hardly ask for public sympathy if she showed none herself. The next one was typed, more or less neatly, on blue notepaper.

‘Keep your big mouth shut, ducky,’ Gail said aloud. Honestly, what fools these women were. They seemed to have precious little idea of loyalty, or of guile. Keeping a marriage going needed both in substantial quantities. Not that this girl was married. In fact none of them seemed to be married. Had it gone out of fashion completely?

Nobody seemed to understand commitment any more. These stupid women who were so upset and muddled that they felt compelled to write to a stranger for advice: did they seriously expect simple answers? Marriage was hard. She could tell them that. But worthwhile, mostly. Except that they hadn’t even taken the step of getting married. Odd, how they could spawn children and yet find it so hard to lead a man to the altar. For her, it had been the exact opposite. Yet the outcome had been no happier.

Why didn’t any of the letters say, ‘My husband abandoned me after twenty-five years of marriage and now seems to regard me as a nuisance. He’s been trying to get rid of me, and if I were to be entirely honest, I’m not only lonely and miserable, I’m scared. It’d suit him if I disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be seen again’? And that, as far as erstwhile friends and family were concerned, was precisely what had occurred.

Suddenly Gail felt a great sense of hopelessness. She was in no position to give anyone else advice on emotional matters, not even half in jest for the manufactured items in Tina’s note. She put down her pen and tried to avoid revisiting the slashed tyres, the hate mail. But on the table, under the envelopes, lurked the demand from the credit-card company. Their nastiness could be defeated with a cheque, but she had to earn the money.

It was as she was sitting there, nibbling the pen and her thumbnail alternately and turning over
the letters, that the phone rang. The sound made her jump.

‘Mrs Bridges?’ A man’s voice, polite and emollient.

‘Who wants her?’

‘James Betts of the
Globe.
I’m so sorry to bother you like this. I was recommended to you by your PR adviser. He said you might be ready to give an interview. Could I come round so we can discuss it?’

Gail racked her brains. Which newspapers, which columnists, had nice Mr Clifford Maxwell suggested to her? She could not remember. He had not wanted to put too much on paper. He had told her to call him if she had any problems.

‘Mrs Bridges, my editor wants me to write a piece that is entirely sympathetic. Otherwise it won’t be printed. You can see it before it goes in, if you prefer, to check. Would that help?’

Editorial control, that was called. Mr Clifford Maxwell had said that was rare. ‘Can you guarantee that?’ Gail asked.

‘Of course, Mrs Bridges. Whatever you want.’

Gail hesitated. Another opportunity to have her say, to get it off her chest, would be welcome. But the
Globe
did not have the cleanest reputation. Her eyes strayed to the table where the demand from the credit card company seemed to have grown larger, the letters for the agony column smaller but more numerous and less comprehensible. The voice came again, wheedling and hopeful. ‘And, naturally, we can ensure that there will be a substantial fee.’

What choice was there? Refusal, and a nasty tussle with the bank which she could not win. Acceptance, and her monetary worries would be kept at bay for some while longer. It was hardly a Faustian pact: she wasn’t selling her soul, provided she told the truth. But still she felt uneasy. A vestige remained of the old, shy Gail, who had avoided publicity like the plague, who had deplored the humiliation to which public men and women were exposed: that Gail had found the whole business utterly distasteful.

‘Two thousand, Mrs Bridges. In cash if you want it,’ came the voice.

Twenty minutes later the street bell rang and the same tones floated through the intercom. Gail pressed the entry button. In a few moments James Betts was in the room, removing his mackintosh and accepting a cup of instant coffee.

The écru jacket lay neglected and crumpled on the floor of the inner office. Diane glared across the table. ‘Edward, it’s no good looking at me like that. You may be ecstatic. I am not.’

Edward leaned forward, his brow puckered, his expression that of an earnest and loyal sheepdog. ‘It is a victory. You should definitely treat it that way.’

‘Huh. You’re the second person who’s tried to placate me with that today. The other was the Boss, and he didn’t make a much better fist of it than you’re doing.’

Edward tapped the fax. ‘They’re going to withdraw the article, every word. They will apologise to you in the newspaper, on the main comment page. They will pay you substantial damages and every penny of your costs. If you went to court and won, you wouldn’t get that, only a proportion of what you’d spent. So what more could you ask?’

‘Stop being a bloody lawyer! I want my day in court. I want them to grovel for what they said about me. It wasn’t merely the horrible remarks, deplorable though they were. It was the sheer hatred of women they revealed. Our sex is not capable, in the author’s view, of holding high office. If they’re normal, in a settled partnership with kids or whatever, they should be at home serving their husbands like nice women do. And if they don’t have such distractions, they aren’t normal and couldn’t possibly be trusted with a top job. Misogyny rules, okay? Even in this new century. Makes me sick.’

Edward pondered whether to humour her, but realised suddenly that Diane was not fighting but seeking an honourable way out. She was under instructions.

‘You could still have your day in court,’ he suggested. ‘Ask for the apology to be made by counsel before a judge. It’d be at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. Everything said is agreed in advance. You’d still have them grovelling in print too. You wouldn’t have to pay for the QC, they would. They have to agree the wording in any eventuality. That’s what this fax is about.’

‘Bloody lawyers. Bloodsuckers and creeps.’ Diane let herself pull faces as she had done as a child when thwarted. Then she smiled sweetly, showing her teeth. ‘Oh, sorry, Edward, darling, you’re one of them. I’d forgotten.’

‘I hadn’t.’ Edward’s courage was growing. ‘We’ll tip off the media and they’ll be there in force. You can be present too. Then every one of the following day’s papers, not only the
Globe
, will have your delighted face on the front page. And you’d be on TV too. The winner! It won’t simply feel like a victory, it’ll
be
one.’

The ministerial clock ticked quietly as Diane reread the ten-page fax. ‘It’d give me a reason to wear my new outfit, I suppose. What do I say about damages, Edward?’

He was noncommittal. ‘You will be asked what you’re planning to do with them. You should decide the line now.’

‘Can’t say I need the money. I’ve no chance to spend any. The most precious commodity in this game is time. An extra day a week would be bliss, but that’s not on offer. So d’you recommend I take the cash and give it to charity?’

‘By all means.’ Edward recognised in his use of the phrase everything about oily legal practitioners he had most despised. He smiled. ‘Damages are tax-free. Take the money, put it in a separate account, then give it to some worthy causes as they occur to you. That should cover any impertinence.’

‘But not quite the lot,’ Diane responded, with a laugh. ‘We’ll use some to have a party. For everyone who helped put me where I am. And for those who are assisting in keeping me there, a much harder task given my total unsuitability and crassness and dreadful taste in clothes. And that includes you, dear, sweet, adorable Edward. Will you come?’

‘Oh, no. He was a decent husband. I wouldn’t say he was a rogue, not really. If he’d been a rogue, I would never have married him. Or stayed as long as I did.’

Gail was tired. Over an hour had passed and the ferrety journalist from the
Globe
, whose name she could not now remember, was still firing questions at her relentlessly. They had long passed over the state of her car, the unpleasant threat in the mail, which she could not show him as the police had it in their files, and the unhappy circumstances in which she was forced to live. Her penury had been touched on several times. It was taking a considerable amount of effort to concentrate, word for word, on both his inquiries and her responses. The problem was that the questions, of course, were never quite what they seemed.

For example: if asked whether Frank had been a bad husband by anyone else, she would have retorted, ‘Yes. Why do you think he was playing around? Isn’t that the definition of a bad husband?’ But to say it to the press would elicit the headline, ‘Frank Bridges: Rogue and Serial Philanderer,’ with hints that it was her unsympathetic behaviour (worse, frigidity) that had set him off. In this man’s world of double standards, the woman would be landed with the blame, it stood to reason. And this journalist was a man.

He did not seem interested in her fears about her own safety, or the reluctance of the police to interrogate or arrest her husband. It had been on the tip of her tongue to say tartly that they’d have jumped to it had Frank insisted, but of course Frank as instigator could not do that. Gail was sufficiently experienced in dealing with the press from the days when she had protected Frank (or pushed him forward) to note that Betts’s eyes lit up only when she referred to their earlier life. What he was after was her version of it, with details as shocking and intimate as possible.

‘But would you have him back?’ Betts composed his expression into one of unctuous empathy.

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Gail answered guardedly. ‘Anyway, that’s daft. We’re divorced and he’s got a new wife. Crossed that bridge a long time ago.’

Betts bent his head and wrote a short phrase. Upside down, Gail could not decipher it. She hoped it would not translate as ‘Bitter ex-wife shows she still loves erring husband. “I would have him back if I could, but he has abandoned me for ever,” she sobbed.’ Gail had read enough reams of human interest stories in papers like the
Globe
to guess precisely how such a statement of the obvious could be twisted.

It occurred to her that such queasy tittle-tattle masquerading as serious reporting frequently appeared in the women’s section of the paper. That was a puzzle. Surely women readers would admire and empathise with others who had been through the mill, so why did the slant seem so negative and hostile?

Her own adverse reactions to the agony column letters flooded back to her. She, too, had been critical of other people’s misfortune, not least – in fact, rather more – since they were also women. Perhaps the same was true with the
Globe’s
lady readers. Snug in their cosy homes, they turned over the pages on the kitchen table among the remains of the morning’s breakfast, drinking tea, discarding the business section and getting marmalade on the cartoons. They believed, if they considered it for a moment, that anybody in the mess she was in must be the architect of their own fate: that they had merited it in some way.

‘I don’t deserve this,’ Gail said. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Betts. ‘So tell me, Mrs Bridges, these days Frank has quite a reputation on the sexual front. A philanderer. It appears he was forever chasing women. Several have contacted the paper and are keen to sell us their stories.’

Gail’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Several? How many? Will you be interviewing them as well?’