Chapter 12
THE HORRIBLE THING was that she’d begun to fancy Jims. Really to fancy him, a different matter altogether from the feeling she’d had when they were both teenagers. In those days it had been just an itch, coupled with resentment that here was one boy among all those she knew who wasn’t attracted to her. That in itself was enough to make her try to seduce him. But now things had changed.
Paradoxically, as she started to want to go to bed with him, so she liked him less. When they’d just been seeing each other every few weeks, having a drink together, talking over old times, Zillah would have said Jims was her best friend. Sharing a home with him made a huge difference. His peevishness was apparent, his selfishness, and, when there was no one else present, his absolute indifference as to whether she was there or not. If anyone called, one of his parliamentary pals, for instance, he was all over her, holding hands, looking into her eyes, calling her darling, pausing as he passed the back of her chair to drop a kiss on the nape of her neck. Alone with her he barely spoke. But this coldness, along with his appearance, his grace, his dark slenderness, and those large, dark eyes, fringed with black lashes like a girl’s, contributed to his appeal. Every day, it seemed, she sank deeper into wanting him very much.
In the Maldives it was worse. They shared a suite in which there were two bedrooms and two bathrooms, but Jims was seldom there, spending his nights in suite 2004, where Leonardo was. Ever cautious, he would sometimes return at eight in the morning, to be sitting opposite her at the glass table on the balcony, both in their white toweling robes, when the waiter brought their breakfast at nine.
“I wonder why you bother,” she said.
“Because you never know who else may be staying here. How do you know that redheaded woman we saw on the beach yesterday isn’t a journalist? Or that the very youthful couple, the topless girl and her boyfriend, aren’t media people? Of course you don’t. I have to be ever vigilant.”
Most women would be overjoyed, she thought, if their husbands could talk about a young girl going topless without a flicker of lust in their eyes, without the least deepening of their tone. In the mornings Jims lay on a sun lounger on the silver sands and Leonardo lay on another sun lounger beside him. But Zillah was there too on a third one. When she protested, saying she’d rather go in the pool or take a look at the village, such as it was, he reminded her of his reason for marrying her. And for giving her two homes, almost unlimited spending money, a new car, clothes, and security. He’d also, he said, become a father to her children. Zillah was beginning to understand that she’d taken on a job rather than a husband, while in exchange for all those worldly goods she’d abandoned her freedom.
Leonardo worked for a stockbroker in the City and was a high flyer at twenty-seven. From a family that, on the father’s side, had been staunch active Conservatives for the past hundred and fifty years, he was as mad about politics as Jims and the two talked Conservative party history, House of Commons procedure and personalities all day long, swapping anecdotes about Margaret Thatcher or Alan Clark. Leonardo was enthralled by John Major’s autobiography and constantly read bits out of it aloud to Jims. Zillah thought bitterly how unlike their dialogue was to the received opinion among the party mandarins she’d met as to the style in which gay men conversed.
She was worried as well. As to his vaunted role as Eugenie and Jordan’s father, so much for his saying he loved children. He’d barely spoken to either of them since their return from Bournemouth. When she’d mentioned this, he said he supposed Eugenie would be off to boarding school in a few months’ time. Then they’d get a live-in nanny for Jordan and he’d have the fourth bedroom converted into a nursery. She hadn’t said a word to him about Jerry. How could she? They were supposed never to have been married and he to have no rights over the children at all. Suppose Jerry did try to get the children? Suppose he renewed his threat to expose her as a woman who’d married one man while still married to another? Oh, it was so unfair! He’d utterly deceived her, sending her that letter saying he was dead.
And now, just to crown everything, she’d succumbed to Jims’s charms. In the dining room last evening, for the benefit of the other diners, he’d put his arm round her while they were waiting to be shown to their table and, once there, when he’d pulled out her chair for her, given her a soft little kiss on the lips. She’d actually heard some old woman nearby whisper to her companion how nice it was to see a couple so much in love. That kiss nearly finished Zillah off. She’d have liked to go upstairs and have a cold shower, but she had to sit here with Jims looking into her eyes and holding her hand across the table. Leonardo always took his dinner in his suite while watching, Zillah suspected, pornographic movies. Or maybe only videos of some Tory by-election coup.
The Daily Telegraph Magazine, the one with her interview in it, hadn’t yet come out. Unless it had on Easter Saturday. Zillah’s mother had strict instructions to look out for it and keep it if it appeared while she was away. The day before they left, she’d written to Jerry at the Hampstead address he’d given her, only it wasn’t Hampstead proper but West Hampstead, as she could tell by the postcode. Obscurely, this discovery made her feel a little better.
Zillah wasn’t accustomed to writing letters; she couldn’t remember when she’d written the last one. It had probably been to thank her god-mother for sending her a five-pound note when she was twelve. The first effort she made looked very threatening when she read it over, so she started again. This time she threw herself on Jerry’s mercy, appealing to him not to expose her as a criminal, to remember what she’d been through, how he’d left her alone to fend for herself. That wouldn’t do either. She tore it up and finally wrote simply that he’d frightened her. She hadn’t meant to keep the children from their father. He could have access and visiting rights and anything he wanted if only he wouldn’t tell anyone she’d done what he knew she’d done. Without actually writing “bigamist” in case the letter fell into the wrong hands, she asked him please not to use “that word” anymore. It was cruel and unfair. This she sent.
The trouble with the Maldives was that beautiful though the island was, it was really only the sort of place you went to with someone you were having a big, sexy, and romantic affair with and wanted to make love to all the time. Like Jims and Leonardo. For anyone else it was just a yawn. She read paperbacks she’d bought at the airport, she had a massage, and got her hair done three times, and because Jims, sustaining his role of devoted husband, took photographs of her, she took some of him and a few times included Leonardo. But it was a relief to be going home on Sunday.
The newspapers that were brought round in midair were yesterday’s, thick Saturday papers stuffed with supplements. Zillah took the Mail while Jims opted for the Telegraph. She was reading a very interesting piece about fingernail extensions when a choking sound from Jims made her look round. He had gone dark red in the face, a change which made him a lot less attractive.
“What’s the matter?”
“Read it for yourself.”
He screwed up the newspaper, tossed the magazine at her, and got up, turning right down the aisle and making for where Leonardo was sitting in the back row.
The article about her filled nearly three pages, the text liberally interspersed with photographs. At first Zillah concentrated on the pictures; they were so beautiful. The Telegraph had done her proud. What was Jims making a fuss about? The big glamour shot really did make her look like Catherine Zeta-Jones. Zillah had been contemplating breast implants now she could afford it; she’d always felt herself lacking in this area, but this photograph showed her with a deep cleavage overflowing out of the bustier.
The big headline didn’t present her in a light she much liked: GYPSY SCATTERBRAIN, it read, and underneath that, A New Breed of Tory Bride. Then she began to read the text, her heart gradually sinking and sweat breaking out all over her face and neck.
Gypsy, scatterbrain, and firebrand, Carmen to the life, Zillah Melcombe-Smith belongs to the new kind of trophy wife politicians are increasingly acquiring. At 28, she looks like a model, talks like a teenager, and suffers, it seems, from various neuroses. Her dark good looks and fiery eyes support her assertion of having Romany blood, as so maybe do her wild statements. We had been in her Westminster flat (suitably close to the Houses of Parliament) for no more than ten minutes when she was threatening to sue us for libel. And why? Because we had dared question her astonishing left-wing beliefs, not to say double standards. Zillah bitterly opposes Tory opinion on homosexuality, that it isn’t equal to heterosexuality and is a matter of choice, yet calling someone gay is an insult she looks capable of dueling about.
Odd when you remember that Zillah’s husband “Jims” Melcombe-Smith had attracted recent speculation as to his possible sexual orientation. All that, of course, has been proved wide of the mark by his marriage to the gorgeous Zillah. But if his past is no longer a mystery, hers may be. The new Mrs. Melcombe-Smith had apparently lived the first 27 years of her life in total seclusion and isolation in a Dorset village, an existence she made sound like being walled up in a convent. No job? No training? No former boyfriends? Apparently not. Strangely, Zillah forgot to mention a few small interruptions to this cloistered existence, her ex-husband, Jeffrey, and their two children, Eugenie, 7, and Jordan, 3. True, there were no children about when we visited on a sunny spring day. Where has Mrs. Melcombe-Smith hidden them? Or has their father custody? If so, this would be a highly exceptional decision on the part of the divorce court. Custody is only given to a father if the mother proves unfit to care for them, which high-spirited, handsome Zillah very obviously is not.
Zillah read to the end, by now feeling sick. Natalie Reckman devoted two long paragraphs to describing her clothes and jewelry, suggesting that Jims ought to be able to afford real stones if she had to adorn herself in the daytime, not the kind of thing you could pick up from the souk in downtown Aqaba. Everyone wore high heels with trousers these days but not stilt heels with leggings. Reckman had a successful technique of insulting her subject by leveling at her hurtful abuse and immediately following it up with a sweetly gentle compliment. So she described Zillah’s outfit as more suitable for hanging about King’s Cross station, but added that even soliciting gear couldn’t spoil her lovely face, enviably slim figure, and mane of raven hair.
By this time Zillah was crying. She threw the magazine on the floor and sobbed in the manner of her son, Jordan. The stewardess came up to her and asked if there was anything she could do. A glass of water? An aspirin? Zillah said she’d like a brandy.
While she was waiting for it, Jims came back, his expression stormy. “A fine mess you’ve made of things.”
“I didn’t mean to. I was doing my best.”
“If that’s your best,” said Jims, “I wouldn’t care to see your worst.”
The brandy made her feel a little better. Jims sat there, austerely drinking sparkling water. “It makes you look all kinds of a fool,” he continued, “and by extension, since you’re my wife, me as well. What on earth did you mean by threatening to sue for libel? Who do you think you are? Mohamed Fayed? Jeffrey Archer? How did she know your—er, Jerry’s name?”
“I don’t know, Jims. I didn’t tell her.”
“You must have. How did she know the children’s names?”
“I really didn’t tell her. I swear I didn’t.”
“What the devil am I going to say to the chief whip?”
Jeff Leigh, alias Jock Lewis, once Jeffrey Leach, read the Telegraph Magazine by chance. Someone had left it on the bus he was taking back from reconnaissance in Westminster. He only looked at it because a line in white letters on the cover told him that one of his ex-fiancées was writing inside, Natalie Reckman Meets a Modern Carmen. He still had a soft spot for Natalie. She’d kept him without complaint or resentment for nearly a year, got engaged without expecting a ring, and parted from him with no hard feelings.
She’d been tough on Zillah and serve her right. Why was she keeping the children’s existence dark? During the past week he’d twice been back to Abbey Gardens Mansions, but there had been no one there. The second rime the porter told him Mr. and Mrs. Melcombe-Smith were away but he had no idea where the children were. Jeff tried to press him but he must have become suspicious because he wouldn’t even say if there were any children living in apartment seven. Could Natalie be right when she implied Zillah had somehow disposed of them? Yet that hysterical letter she’d written him—he’d picked it up off the doormat in the nick of time before Fiona got there—said he could have access, see them when he wanted. The way, of course, to settle all this would be for him to write to Jims and simply tell him that Zillah’s husband was alive and well, and still married to her. Or even write to that old bat Nora Watling. But Jeff was reluctant to do this. He was aware of how much Jims disliked him, a feeling that was mutual, and this antipathy was shared by Zillah’s mother. They might simply disregard his letters. And if they didn’t and everything came out into the open, Fiona would very probably find out.
For all his wedding plans, organizing the ceremony and reception, talking happily about the forthcoming event, Jeff hoped not to have to marry Fiona while still married to Zillah. He vaguely planned putting off the wedding, finding a reason for postponing it till next year. And although he wanted to know that his children were safe and, come to that, happy, he shied away from having them to live with him. That would be too extreme a step. If he exposed Zillah as a bigamist and Jims abandoned her, as he surely would, the powers-that-be—police? Social Services? the court?—might well take the children from her. The obvious place for them to go would be their father’s home. Especially with a broody future stepmother pining to look after them.
Jeff remembered the ridiculous promise he’d made to Fiona, while light-headed on chardonnay, that he’d be a house husband, stay at home and look after their baby. That could mean looking after Eugenie and Jordan too. Closing his eyes for a moment, he pictured his life, shopping in West End Lane with a baby in a buggy, holding Jordan’s hand, hastening to be in time to fetch Eugenie from school. Jordan’s constant tears. Eugenie’s didactic speeches and general disapproval of everything. Getting their tea. Never going out in the evenings. Changing nappies. No, having the children wasn’t feasible. He would have to think of a reason for continuing to live with Fiona without marrying her. Was it too late to say he was Catholic and couldn’t be divorced? But Fiona thought he was divorced already . . .
He got off the bus and walked slowly down Holmdale Road. In all his six-year-long quest to find a woman who was young yet rich, a home owner, out at work all day, good-looking, sexy and loving, willing without demur to keep him, he’d never come across one who satisfied the criteria as well as Fiona. Sometimes, especially when he’d had a drink, he even felt romantic about her. So how was he going to juggle the three slippery balls of keeping her in love with him, obtaining access to his children, and avoiding marrying her?
He let himself into the house and found her watching Matthew Jarvey’s television show. He kissed her affectionately and asked after her parents, whom she’d been visiting while he was out. On the screen Matthew, looking like a famine victim, was gently interviewing a Weight Watchers woman who’d lost twenty pounds in six months.
“Must be nuts, that guy,” said Jeff. “Why doesn’t he just get himself together and eat?”
“Darling, I hope it doesn’t upset you, but did you know there’s a big piece in the Telegraph Magazine about your ex-wife?”
“Really?” This would solve his dilemma of whether to tell her or not.
“Mummy kept it for me. She thought it terribly naff—I mean, the people who write this stuff. What kind of a woman would be such a bitch?”
For some obscure reason, this innocent attack on Natalie Reckman made Jeff angry, but he didn’t show it. “Have you got it, darling?”
“You won’t let it upset you, will you?”
Fiona handed him the magazine and returned to watching Matthew chatting to a man who failed to put on weight no matter how heartily he ate. On rereading, the bits about Zillah’s clothes and her souk jewelry restored his good temper and made him want to laugh. He assumed a gloomy expression. “I admit I’m anxious about my children,” he said quite truthfully when the program ended and Fiona switched off the set.
“Perhaps you should consult a solicitor. Mine’s very good. A woman, of course, and young. High-powered, doing very well for herself financially. Shall I give her a ring?”
Fleetingly, Jeff considered it. Not because he had any intention of involving the law—nothing could be more dangerous—but he liked the sound of this woman: young, high-powered, rich. Good-looking? Richer than Fiona? He could hardly ask. Regretfully, he said, “Better not, at this stage. I’ll fix up a meeting with Zillah first. What shall we do this evening?”
“I thought we might stay in, have a quiet time at home.” She edged closer to him on the sofa.
Zillah also had a quiet time at home. Jims had dumped the suitcases in her bedroom and gone off to spend the night with Leonardo. A note by the phone informed her that her mother had removed the children to Bournemouth, being unable to stay in London because Zillah’s father had had a heart attack and was in the hospital there. Zillah picked up the phone and, as soon as it was answered, got a mouthful of abuse from Nora Watling. How dare she go off without leaving the phone number of the hotel she and Jims were staying in? And never to call once from the Maldives! Had she no concern at all for her children?
“How’s Dad?” asked Zillah in a small, wretched voice.
“Better. He’s home. He might be dead for all you care. I may as well tell you here and now that I never in my life read anything so disgusting as that article in the Telegraph. I haven’t kept it for you. I burnt it. More or less calling you a prostitute! A Gypsy! When you know perfectly well your father and I come from good West Country stock for generations back. And that picture! As good as topless you were. And calling poor James a pervert!”
Zillah held the receiver at a distance until the cackling ceased. “I don’t suppose you’ll feel like bringing the children back?”
“You ought to be ashamed to ask. I’m worn out with nursing your father. And I don’t know what to do about Jordan’s crying. It’s not natural a child of three crying at the least little thing. You’ll have to fetch them yourself. Tomorrow. What do you have a car for? I’ll tell you something, Sarah, I didn’t know my luck all that time we barely had any contact. Since you went to London, I haven’t had a moment’s peace.”
In Glebe Terrace, in Leonardo’s tiny but extremely smart Gothic house, he and Jims were reclining on the huge bed that filled Leonardo’s bedroom but for a few inches between it and the walls, listening to The Westminster Hour on the radio. They had eaten their dinner (gravlax, quails with quails’ eggs, biscotti, a bottle of pinot grigio) in that bed and made some inventive love afterward. Now they were relaxing in their favorite way, Leonardo having comforted Jims by telling him not to worry about the Telegraph. There was nothing offensive about him in it, rather the reverse. It was Zillah who got all the stick.
A couple who had been spending the evening in a similar way were Fiona and Jeff. Their lovemaking had also been inventive and satisfying, but their dinner had consisted of papaya, cold chicken, and ice cream with a bottle of Chilean chardonnay. Fiona was now asleep while Jeff sat up in bed rereading Natalie Reckman’s piece. After a while he got up and, treading softly, went downstairs to find the address book he kept in an inside pocket of his black leather jacket. Fiona, as she’d no hesitation in telling him, was far too honorable ever to look in jacket pockets.
There it was: Reckman, Natalie, 128 Lynette Road, Islington, N1. She might have moved, but it was worth a try. Why not give her a ring for old times’ sake?