‘Damn it, Spink,’ he bellowed now down the phone. ‘If I’d wanted a piece about free will and predestination in the scientific age, I’d have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury. In fact, hang on a minute.’ He tapped his keyboard and studied his screen. ‘I did ask the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ He tapped some more. ‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed. ‘Have you any idea the money that man gets? I could get God for less. Listen, Spink. I want this again in thirty-five minutes or I rewrite it myself.’
‘I’ve got a tutorial,’ Spink objected.
‘You’ve always got a tutorial.’
Jago slammed down the phone, and dialled Dermot, the Archbishop’s literary representative. He loved playing tough-talking newspaperman like this. Sometimes he opened his desk drawer to gaze for a few seconds at a little picture of Edward G. Robinson, to fire him up sufficiently.
‘Dermot, it’s Jago. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
A lengthy pause at the other end, while Dermot fought panic. It had to happen one day that Jago would discover the affair. Sweat formed on his brow.
‘Dermot?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m talking to you. This so-called Primate of All England of yours. Who exactly does this guy think he is?’
Stefan ate his third nut cookie of the morning and put down his Teach Yourself English Slang. He had felt better about himself since his late-night confession to Linda. He wished sometimes he could drop the Swedish act, but he was right about Belinda’s attraction to him as a Swede. Belinda could never love a man called George; she’d admitted as much. When they saw a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in the early days of their relationship, he tested her afterwards.
‘You don’t mean to say that you couldn’t love me if my name wasn’t Stefan?’
‘But your name is Stefan.’
‘Personally, darling, to speak quite candidly’ – he did his Wildean dialogue pretty well – ‘I don’t much care about the name of Stefan. I think there are lots of other much nicer names. George is a charming name.’
But true to Oscar Wilde, Belinda said that George had no music and didn’t thrill, and that she pitied anybody married to a person called George, and that she could never love a George, and so on. They were laughing, of course. It wasn’t serious. But Stefan already loved Belinda so much that he couldn’t take the risk. What always amazed him was that she didn’t penetrate his phoney Swede act anyway. True, he’d lived in Stockholm for twenty years, but when his wife asked him (for example) who was the Swedish Alfred Hitchcock, or the Swedish Jack the Ripper, or the Swedish Kenneth Williams, it was surely obvious he was making up the answers.
‘Bo Söderberg,’ he told her recently, with great authority, when she asked who the Swedish Enid Blyton was.
‘Didn’t you say Bo Söderberg was the Swedish John Travolta? I’m sure you did.’
‘No, that was his brother Nils,’ Stefan had replied, thinking quickly. ‘Nils Söderberg. Brother of Bo. Marvellous clan, the Söderbergs. All blond and extremely clever. Kerstin Söderberg is the Swedish Barbara Woodhouse, while Jonas Söderberg won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1958.’
Luckily, his wife trusted him. She did not ask for an invitation to Stockholm, to meet the Magnificent Söderbergs. And luckily he also loved researching idiom. Throwing back his head now in the Habitat café, all the better to concentrate and memorize, he resolved to work into casual conversation today codswallop, cold feet and colour of your money. A load of cock, he discovered, was ‘less polite than cobblers’. How interesting to consider either of these terms by their degree of politeness. And which of these two excellent turns of phrase would Stefan authentically choose? Or would he (as it were) cock a snook at both?
‘No bald-headed boy, these days,’ he remarked to the girl selling coffee. It was true. A month had passed since Tanner had appeared. Stefan felt free to breathe again.
She smiled, uncertainly. ‘The one who kept watching you and making notes?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Gone to Sweden,’ she said.
Stefan blenched. ‘What?’
‘He rang just now from a place called Marmite, and asked me to let him know if you’d done anything remotely interesting in the last four weeks. Those were his exact words. I wrote it down, look. I said no, by the way. What a nerve.’
‘Marmite?’
‘Sorry.’ She consulted her notes. ‘Malmö. He mentioned two dots.’ She looked at him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No.’ Stefan had swung his scarf around his neck. ‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘Tanner.’
‘Right. Tanner.’
‘Of the Effort.’
Stefan stopped in his tracks. ‘The newspaper?’
‘I suppose so.’
The boy was from Jago’s paper!
‘Oh God in heaven,’ he said.
Dermot put down the phone from Jago and took a deep, steadying breath. Life was certainly teaching him a lesson – not to have sex with your clients’ wives. Not because it was morally scummy, or anything, but when the husband rang you in a flying rage about something else entirely you needed to lie on the floor to recover.
Dermot felt very uneasy about Jago. He could handle feelings of disloyalty, of course; and he was actually deeply fond of lying. What he hated most about the present situation was having to keep from his best newspaper contact Viv’s phenomenal secret. A potentially lethal criminal fraud had been perpetrated by Jago’s wife, and he couldn’t tell anybody. Viv had exonerated her conspiracy with Linda, if memory served, by invoking the beauty of the resulting soft furnishings. He wondered whether even the Calvinists in their heyday had ever considered such a belief system. Justification by Tie-back, they would have had to call it. Expiation by Kapok.
Right now, he was supposed to be calling the Archbishop with the Effort’s demands, so he got up off the floor, put his feet up and started to count to 500 instead. This was his usual practice. He would just wait a few minutes and then phone Jago back, saying the Archbishop was a tough nut with titanic financial commitments who refused to bend over for the Effort, not now, not ever. He knew Jago would capitulate when met by superior rhetorical force: Jago liked to impersonate Edward G. Robinson, but it was all an act. Come back at him as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he rolled over like a puppy.
‘Archbish says no dice,’ he snarled realistically, after making and drinking a nice cup of peppermint tea. ‘You made one primate very, very angry, my friend. He said he’d personally excommunicate you.’
‘Shit,’ said Jago. ‘Really?’
‘Just back off. OK?’
‘OK.’
Dermot took a deep breath. He had to say something about what he’d learnt of Linda.
‘Listen, I hear your friend Belinda’s on Late Review, these days. She’s a big hit.’
‘So?’
‘So I hear she’s looking like Kylie Minogue. You should snap her up for the Effort.’
‘Kylie Minogue? Belinda?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Belinda looks like George Orwell.’
This was unkind, but not entirely untrue.
‘Well, I’m just tipping you a wink.’
‘You’re doing what?’
‘Tipping a wink.’
‘Oh.’ Jago wrinkled his nose. He had no idea what to make of this. He couldn’t relate to anything cryptic. That Linda was impersonating Belinda he already knew, because at home Viv spoke of nothing else.
‘OK. See you. Oh, name some flowers, I’m in a spot.’
‘Aster, rose, daisy, clematis, camellia.’
Jago made tapping noises at the other end, and put the phone down.
Dermot looked at the dead receiver and shrugged. By his own meagre ethical standards, he had certainly done his best.
Four bad weeks had passed for Maggie since she threw Leon out of her house. Her therapy had intensified to such a degree that now it had more of a life than she did herself. She
was therapy’s tool, nothing more. As she sat at home with the cats in the evenings, she was a mere husk, stroking the fluffy racing car, watching mindless television and snivelling.
The trouble was, the well-intentioned Julia had a no-nonsense hard-hat approach to therapy. Demolish the person, inspect the foundations, and then rebuild to a new and better spec, using a selection of the original materials. No matter that a shower unit and a bit of cosmetic crack-papering might actually suffice. Instead, methodical and painstaking, she dismantled Maggie’s personality brick by brick, examining the mortar, preserving bits of cornice, and making careful notes of the archaeological layers in the wallpaper. The only problem was that, while the process was ongoing, Maggie felt exactly like an abandoned human building site, with wind rustling her tarpaulins. No roof; no walls; no floors; fireplace and toilet exposed for all to see. It was no wonder, really, in these conditions, that a squatter quickly got in.
Because although Noel had been banned from Julia’s programme of therapy – lookalike role-playing was absolutely ruled out after the first experiment – Maggie slept with him anyway. She didn’t mean to. It just happened. He kept phoning to tell her he cared about her, and that she was lovely and talented, and that she didn’t deserve to be exploited by married men who stayed only an hour. And then, one day, he brought a thoughtful cat-toy for Miranda, which broke down Maggie’s weakened defences. Noel now came to see her twice a week, each time for fifty-five minutes. And it was awful. Not knowing how much it upset her, he brought her extremely cheap presents, such as a copy of the Big Issue, or a paper bag with two oranges in it. Presumably he hoped to repeat the effect of the cat-toy, but instead she felt demeaned. ‘He thinks I’ll do it for a bag of Bombay mix,’ she said miserably to herself, as she put her hand down his trousers. ‘And if I’m doing this, I suppose he’s right.’ These days, when Maggie looked in a mirror she was reminded of a line in a Restoration comedy she did at college: ‘I’m like an old peeled wall.’
As she prepared to meet Linda for coffee at the Adelphi, she wondered how much of this to tell her. None of it was very flattering, after all.
‘Obviously, if I’m sleeping with you, I must leave Julia,’ she said to Noel, after his second visit. He was putting his coat on and consulting his watch. Having washed his hands twice, he was still sniffing his fingers with a quizzical expression, as if he couldn’t identify the smell.
‘You can’t do that,’ he exclaimed, with panic behind his eyes. He took her by the shoulders, his hands heavy against her neck. ‘I mean, she’ll want to know why, and you can’t tell her. I hope you’re not that selfish, Maggie? To hurt Julia? After all she’s done for you?’
‘No, no. But—’
‘Besides, you must never curtail therapy unnaturally. It’s incredibly dangerous, psychologically.’
‘I know.’
The problems of leaving therapists had plagued Maggie for the past ten years; she was an expert on its double-binds. ‘This isn’t working,’ you say. To which they reply, ‘We must discuss this urgently. Is Tuesday afternoon still good?’ ‘You’re not very bright,’ you object. And they look at you pityingly and say, ‘But it’s exactly this kind of judgementalism that is blighting your life, don’t you see that?’
‘Sometimes I think Julia will never let me go.’
Noel laughed. ‘Join the club.’
‘But I’m not married to her!’
He assumed his solemn expression again, and she knew she was in for a lecture. As a member of the therapists’ union, Noel had sworn on a stack of Freuds never to let such heresy pass unchecked. ‘What you could have with Julia is better than marriage, Margaret. If you would only accept it, only open yourself up! You refuse to experience transference! But if you did, you’d see that Julia is completely on your side.’
‘Is she?’ Maggie sniffed.
‘Of course. Shame you’re shagging her husband, really.’
As she remembered this scene, Maggie felt tears of shame roll down her face. And what had she said to him next?
‘What I need, Noel, is to have a man completely on my side.’
‘Pay me thirty quid an hour and you might get one.’
‘I wish we could talk.’
Noel kissed her forehead lightly. ‘Talk to Julia,’ he said. ‘Gotta go.’
There was a time when Belinda had never really heard of Malmö. A Söderberg might be a crispbread. But now her beloved Stefan was going back on a sudden visit, and she had to bite her lip and be brave while he packed for his journey.
‘Is it Ingrid?’ she whispered. ‘Is she – worse?’
Stefan took her hands and held them warmly in his own. ‘Not possible,’ he said, gravely.
‘Oh, Stefan. I can’t help feeling guilty about her. We’re so happy and she’s so—’
‘I know. Don’t say it.’
He threw some warm clothes in a suitcase, and checked his watch. He was catching a flight to Copenhagen in two hours from Heathrow.
‘Oh, Miss Patch, I love you. You do know that? I must come clean. You give me collywobbles.’
She grinned bravely. Of course she knew that. She really appreciated it, too, when he remembered to call her Miss Patch. Even if Audrey Hepburn never weighed thirteen stone, smelt a bit, and got dizzy standing up.
‘I wish I could come,’ she lied.
‘No, no. Listen, Belinda. You have fears that you will cease to be before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain. This is what you tell me. I respect this. It is not codswallop, I think?’
‘I hope not.’
‘So don’t get cold feet. I know what you think, Belinda. But your book will not be common or garden. Or cobblers.’
‘OK.’
He stood in the doorway, gazing at her. He really didn’t want to leave. Not only did he have genuine affection for his strangely ballooning wife, but he had found no way of incorporating ‘a load of cock’ into the conversation.
Jago couldn’t believe it. He was having a very bad phone day. Tanner had been in Malmö just two hours, and already Stefan had discovered what was going on.
‘Who is Tanner of the Effort, please, Yago?’ Stefan demanded, without preamble. In the background to the phone call were giveaway airport noises. ‘And why is he in Malmö?’
‘Oooh,’ stalled Jago, whose mediocre skill at lying was rightly famous. ‘Tanner? Tanner. No, I can’t think. How’s that lovely wife of yours, incidentally? I hear she’s quite foxy these days.’
‘He has a bald head, like a footballer.’
‘Bald head, bald head, bald head. Oh, I know! Fashion! That’s right. Couldn’t think who you meant. Yes, Tanner’s our great young style guru. Must be in Malmö for – er, Scandinavian Fashion Week. Snoods are back, apparently. Is there a problem?’
‘Well, yes, Yago. This bald-headed Tanner fellow has been following me. And I don’t think it’s because he studies my outfits.’
‘He follows you? What for?’
‘He spooks me, Yago. In fact, between you, me and the doorpost, I think this Scandinavian Fashion Week story may be a load of old cock.’
‘No!’
‘Can you call him off, please?’
‘I’ll try. But why?’
‘I must go, Yago. But please, help me! I helped you many times. Please. I don’t know if I am coming or going!’
‘Which way are you going, by the way?’ Jago tried to make it sound like a pleasantry.
‘What?’
‘Are you coming or going, Stefan? Are you in Malmö?’
The line went dead, and Jago buzzed his secretary. ‘Get me a flight to Malmö, quick! And name me some flowers while you’re about it!’
‘You’ve got to get out of this Noel–Julia situation, Maggie,’ said Linda, firmly. She poured milk into her coffee, and took another cake from the plate. What a shame Belinda never came out these days. She’d have liked the Adelphi. Linda sometimes felt she knew Belinda’s preferences better than Belinda knew them herself.
&nbs
p; ‘It’s the first rule of survival,’ she added, brushing icing sugar from her fingers. ‘Never have anything to do with people who drain the life out of you.’
‘But they each have my best interests at heart.’
‘Is that what they told you?’
‘Of course.’
‘So you feel really great, do you?’
‘No, I feel terrible.’
Maggie felt rather awkward talking to a stranger in this way. But it was odd. This woman was far more supportive than Belinda was. She had the knack of applying herself to somebody else’s situation. She seemed to think loyalty the principal virtue of mankind. She said Maggie had enormous potential as an actress. Already, in fact, Maggie was ready to call her the best friend she’d ever had.
‘Can I ask your advice, too, perhaps?’ asked Linda. ‘I would love to know what you think about something.’
‘Who, me?’
Maggie brightened for the first time that day. Her advice was never sought by Belinda. Even when freely offered, Maggie’s bitter, sour-grapes opinions were consistently ignored by all her friends.
‘It’s just that you’ve known Belinda for years. Do you think she secretly wants children?’
Maggie barked with laughter at the thought of it. ‘No.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because she’s incredibly selfish.’
‘But Stefan would make such a lovely father. Strange that a geneticist would waste such genes.’
‘Oh Lord, you’re right there. When I was Olivia in Twelfth Night, do you know the part I couldn’t cope with? It was when Viola said to me, “Oh, lady, you are the cruellest she alive, if you will lead these graces to the grave, and leave the world no copy.”’ Maggie swallowed. ‘It used to make me cry.’
‘That must have been very effective on stage.’
‘Oh, yes. Except that it’s more of a comical moment, really.’
‘Oh.’
Maggie pulled herself together. ‘But that’s what you mean about Stefan? He’s bound by sheer good taste to reproduce?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you’re absolutely right.’
Jago phoned Tanner on his mobile, and heard strange sports-hall echoes in the background, like a ball bouncing and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes, an organ playing, and lots of cheers.