“Well.” I’m doubtful. “Maybe if we got back in the afternoon I could do some work later on.”
“Good,” he says, closing the bathroom door. “That sounds perfect. I’m just going to take a shower. Won’t be long.”
The phone rings as I’m lying dreamily on the bed, going over every inch of Brad’s body in my mind. I don’t normally pick up the phone here, it still feels a bit strange, answering the phone in a house that isn’t yours, but Brad’s in the shower, and there seems little point in letting the machine pick up. It might be important.
All I hear is a long groan then, “JJ, it’s me, Lauren. Just tell me, are you feeling as disgusting as me?”
I laugh. “No, not even a fraction as disgusting as you. You had far more than me to drink, remember?”
Lauren groans again. “I wish I could remember. I can’t remember a bloody thing. How did we get home?”
I tell her about our ride home in the taxi, about her leaning out of the window and singing old Abba songs at the top of her voice, about her very nearly throwing up in the backseat.
“I really disgraced myself didn’t I?” she says.
“Absolutely!”
“Really?” Lauren’s voice picks up. “Tell me, tell me. Did I give out my phone number to any gorgeous men?”
“Actually, you did. You screamed it from one side of the restaurant to the other for the bartender, but I think every man in the place was writing it down.”
“Oh my God! It’s coming back to me. The bartender, I remember the bartender! Was he as handsome as I think he was?”
“You are a complete nightmare!” I laugh. “Yes, he was as handsome as you remember. You scored better than me.”
“You weren’t out to score. You’ve got the gorgeous Brad. So was he tucked up in bed wondering what you were up to?”
“No, he wasn’t.” I don’t know whether to tell Lauren or not, because I’ve got a sneaky feeling I know what she’d say, which would, in fact, probably be the same thing Geraldine would say. In other words, they’d both tell me to be careful, not to accept things at face value, not to believe him, and, stupid as this may sound, I don’t want to hear this right now, I want to believe everything’s fine, that he was telling the truth.
I listen to check the water’s still running, Brad’s in the shower so he won’t be able to hear, and then I tell a tiny white lie. “He wasn’t in when I got back, his meeting ran on, but he came home when I was in bed.” Not quite a lie, I just omitted the fact that it happened to be this morning.
“Hmm,” says Lauren. “How late was he?”
“Not very. Everything’s fine. I’m not worried so why should you be?”
“Okay. If everything’s fine with you then it’s fine with me. So what are you up to today? How about lunch?”
“I can’t today, Brad’s taken the day off work and we’re going out.”
“Sounds like a guilty man to me.” Now that’s exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
“Sounds like a man in love to me,” I say with a false ring of confidence, hoping to convince her, hoping to convince myself.
“Well, have a good day,” says Lauren. “Don’t worry about me, all by myself.”
“Come with!” I say, trying to sound as if I mean it, because even though I think Lauren’s fantastic, I’m so looking forward to spending a whole day with Brad, just the two of us, on our own, I don’t mean it at all. “I’d love you to come with and Brad won’t mind, he’d love to meet you!” Which isn’t exactly true, because Brad has shown surprisingly little interest in what I do or who I meet when I’m not with him.
“Yes,” says Lauren, with a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “Because I really love playing third wheel.”
“You wouldn’t be.” Even I can hear that I don’t sound sincere. “Brad and I aren’t like that.”
“Brad and I. There you go. That’s a sure sign if ever there was one.”
“So you’re not coming?” I think I’ve just about managed to hide the relief.
“Nope. But thanks, JJ, it’s really nice of you to ask me.”
“Will you be okay? What are you going to do?”
“I might catch a movie this afternoon. Oh, hang on, my call waiting’s going.”
I sit on the phone and wait. And wait. And wait. I hate this, I hate people who leave you hanging on the line for hours. Just as I’m about to put the phone down Lauren comes back.
“JJ? Oh my God! I’m so sorry, but that was him! He called!”
“Who?”
“Bill! The bartender!”
“And?”
“And I now have plans for today. We’re meeting for lunch.”
“Just behave yourself,” I laugh. “We don’t want you getting into trouble.”
“I will. Behave, that is. I don’t plan on getting into trouble just yet.”
We both laugh and say goodbye as Brad walks out of the bathroom.
“Who was that?”
“Lauren.”
“Who’s Lauren?” Typical. That’s how much attention Brad has been paying to my life.
“Brad!” I hit him playfully. “You know exactly who Lauren is. She’s my new friend, the one I met at the Broadway Deli, the one I was out with last night.”
“I totally forgot you went out with her last night. Where did you go?” Brad’s toweling his hair as he talks.
“We went to that new restaurant on Main Street.”
Brad stops toweling for a second then starts again, but slower, more thoughtfully. “Which restaurant?” he asks, his voice sounding slightly strained.
“The Pepper,” I tell him. “It was fantastic.”
“Oh,” says Brad, picking up speed.
“Have you been there?” I ask.
“Is this a trick question?” Brad asks, putting down the towel, and maybe I’m going crazy but I could swear he’s paled underneath his golden tan.
“What on earth do you mean?” I ask, trying to work out whether he has gone pale, and if he has, why.
“You know I’ve been there,” he says carefully.
“No, I don’t,” I say, completely bewildered, I mean, what is going on here?
“I thought I told you I went there.”
“No, silly,” I laugh, relieved that I must have been imagining it, that there’s nothing sinister going on. “You didn’t.”
“Oh, I thought I did,” Brad says, adding, “I went on the opening night.”
“Nope, you didn’t tell me that. Fabulous isn’t it?” I say, sitting down at the dressing table and picking up a hairbrush.
“Mmmm,” says Brad, as he crosses the room, takes the hairbrush from my hand and stands behind me, watching me in the mirror as he brushes my hair.
“That feels so nice,” I murmur, as I close my eyes.
“It’s supposed to,” says Brad, as a thump down the hall makes us both start.
“Mail,” he says, putting down the brush, and a few seconds later he calls out, “JJ, there’s something here for you.”
“For me?” What could have come for me? I feel a buzz of excitement as I run down the hall to the front door, where Brad hands me a letter addressed in Geraldine’s distinctive handwriting.
“It’s from my friend Geraldine in London,” I tell Brad, who’s not really listening, and I smile as I rip open the envelope and draw out these newspaper pages. I read the compliments slip and laugh, thinking that Geraldine never changes, and wondering how she’s getting on with the Top Tips column, and then I open the pages that are clipped on to the slip, wondering what they are.
“Jesus Christ!” My hand starts shaking and I have to put my hand over my heart to stop it pounding.
“What’s the matter?” Brad looks at me in alarm.
“Nothing, nothing.”
Brad walks over and looks at what’s written on the pages. “Who’s Ben Williams?” he says.
“Just someone I used to work with.” I can’t take my eyes off the page, I scan all the pictures, read
the headlines, go back to the pictures. It’s Ben. My beloved Ben. Oh my God, I’m not supposed to feel like this. I look at Brad in alarm, but his back’s turned to me, he doesn’t see the expression on my face. So I stand there and I start to read, with my heart tumbling around at the sight of the man I thought I’d forgotten about or, at the very least, put firmly in my past.
“Sure he’s not some old boyfriend of yours?” Brad’s smiling, but I don’t return the smile, I can’t look up from the pictures of Ben, and I don’t say anything at all, I just walk into the bedroom and collapse on to the bed, trying to stop the pages trembling as I devour every single word.
I’m not entirely sure how I manage to calm down, but I do, and I even resist the urge to pick up the phone and call Geraldine. I’m not sure how I feel. Confused might be the best description. I really thought I was over Ben, I really thought that I’d finally found happiness with Brad, and that I’d always think Ben was good-looking but that it would be in an objective way, that it wouldn’t actually affect me personally.
And I’m confused because I can’t believe that the mere sight of him, simply reading about a man whom I know, a man I thought I once loved, can make me feel like the Jemima Jones of old, the Jemima Jones I thought I’d said goodbye to.
But Ben’s not here, I tell myself, and even if he were there would be no guarantees. Okay, so I look completely different, but he was never interested in the past, he probably wouldn’t be interested now.
And I look at Brad, at this huge, golden lion of a man, and I know that he could have his pick of women, but he has chosen me, which must mean I’m very lucky. And okay, sometimes I worry that maybe we don’t have as much in common as perhaps we should, and occasionally I do find myself comparing him to Ben and, apart from the looks front, he seems to fail pretty miserably, which is why I try not to do it all that often, and we may not have the same sort of teasing friendship I had with Ben, but then Ben never wanted me and Brad does.
And he is good to me, he treats me well. Okay, so last night he slipped up, but work is work, and I have to try and understand that side of his life. I am lucky. I must be. I mean, look at him.
Oh yes. One more thing. The sex, of course, is amazing.
And we do have a blissful day. We go for a long, leisurely walk right up to the end of the Santa Monica pier, where we sit on a bench facing the ocean, and Brad tries to persuade me to ride on the Ferris wheel, but I decline because I’d feel too much like a tourist and right now I’m trying to feel like a native, like Brad’s wife, and, considering it’s only been four and a half weeks, I think I’m doing a pretty good job.
We walk back along the pier, hand in hand, and I smile to myself as I watch the other women watching Brad, and Brad makes me laugh when he points out one bizarrely dressed woman and whispers, “Would you look at that? What is she wearing? God, cowboy boots with those awful legs and that dreadful miniskirt.”
And I try very hard to shove Ben to the very back of my mind, I try to keep reminding myself how lucky I am to have a man like Brad.
We kick around in the ocean like a couple of kids, yelling and screaming as we splash one another with water, and then, after smooching in the sand to yells of encouragement from a group of boys sitting around a boom box, we continue walking until we hit Shutters on the Beach, according to Brad the best hotel in the area.
We walk through the lobby and it is beautiful. The polished wooden floors, the overstuffed white damask sofas, the beautiful bowls of fresh roses that sit on the antique furniture, and we walk through to sit on the terrace overlooking the water, feasting on delicious food, feasting on one another.
And after lunch we go back home, pick up the car, and Brad drives me up to the Pacific Palisades, where we park the car and take a two-hour hike into the mountains. Now this, breathing in the clean, fresh air and striding alongside my gorgeous man, is what life should be about.
And when we get back we share a bath, and naturally one thing leads to another and we end up having frantic wet, soapy foreplay in the bathtub, when the phone rings.
“Leave it,” I murmur, just on the brink of orgasm.
“I can’t,” moans Brad, standing up and going to the phone in the bedroom, as I groan and roll over. “Hello?” I hear him say. “Oh, hi.” There’s a silence for a bit, while I assume he’s listening to someone and I pull a towel off the rail and wrap it around myself, still basking in the delicious glow of afterlove, and wondering how on earth I could have missed out on this incredible feeling for so many years. And then, I know this is crazy, but I’m sure I hear Brad whispering.
Eventually he puts the phone down, but he doesn’t come back to the bathroom, he goes to the kitchen, so I follow him in there wondering whether I’m going mad.
“Who was on the phone?” I say, trying to make it sound like a casual inquiry.
“The phone? Oh, just work.”
“Why were you whispering?”
He looks at me as if I am crazy. “What are you talking about?” he says. “I wasn’t whispering.” And I believe him.
We would have thought this strange. Actually, we probably would have thought it a hell of a lot more than strange, but Jemima doesn’t think like this. Jemima refuses to think like this, and when Brad leaves, half an hour later, to sort out a problem at work, he tells her he loves her and she believes it.
And when she eventually sits down at Brad’s desk to do some work of her own, she reads the piece about Ben Williams again. Ben was a fantasy, she thinks. Brad’s a reality. I’m much happier with Brad than I could ever have been with Ben, and with that she opens the Hollywood Reporter and starts scouring the page for stories.
Chapter 26
Ben meant to call Jemima, really he did, but when you’re a celebrity and you have a work schedule that means you’re working pretty much all the time, and when you’re not working you’re going to launches or opening supermarkets or giving interviews to the press, it’s very easy to forget to do things like call old friends.
It’s even easier to forget to call them when you’re good-looking and single and you’ve slept with your boss, which seems to have caused the two of you to have entirely different reactions. You think it’s the biggest mistake of your life and you’re trying to forget about it, but your boss is spending all her time trying to figure out how to orchestrate a repeat experience.
For the last three months one of the producers on the show, Simon, has been trying to arrange an interview with Alexia Aldridge, the hottest actress in Hollywood. The producer and his team of researchers have made hundreds of phone calls to her agent, her publicist, her assistant. They’ve sent hundreds of faxes, promising her huge amounts of airtime, promising to pay for her flight, her accommodation, if only they can have an exclusive interview when her new film opens in London.
The agent said yes, it was a good idea, could they put it on a fax, which they did. They never heard from him again, despite sending numerous additional faxes. The publicist for the film said yes, it was a good idea, could they put it on a fax, which they did. They never heard from her again. The assistant said yes, it was a good idea, the best person to talk to was the publicist. The publicist, when they finally managed to get hold of her, apologized for not getting back and said she’d spoken to Alexia, who would love to do it, it’s just that things were a bit busy at the moment, and perhaps they should talk to the film publicist nearer the time. This time the film publicist said yes, it was a good idea, and thousands of faxes later they had agreed on a time, a date, and a place, not mutually convenient, merely convenient for Ms. Aldridge.
There was just one problem, and this problem was becoming Diana Macpherson’s problem. Alexia had been in London recently, and she happened to have watched London Nights. There was only one person she’d allow to interview her. Ben Williams. Who else?
Under normal circumstances, the production team at London Nights would have told Alexia Aldridge that the interview was going to be done by their showbiz reporter
—funnily enough, the job that Ben was doing when she spotted him—and that it would be impossible for the main presenter to do it.
But Alexia Aldridge rarely gives interviews. Not quite in the same league, or the same age, as Streisand, nevertheless she is something of an enigma, and that she has agreed to talk at all makes it something of a worldwide scoop, irrespective of what she may or may not actually reveal.
And Diana Macpherson, who should be over the moon at this brilliant coup, is actually not very happy. Not happy at all. Usually she would be buying champagne for the whole crew, but just recently she has started to think more about her personal life. She’s started watching mothers in the park, and once or twice she’s even stopped to coo at particularly attractive babies. Diana Macpherson has never thought of herself as a woman, more of a working machine, but for some strange reason she’s started fantasizing of late about relationships, marriage, babies.
Not sex. That’s always available when you’re as powerful as her, but Diana wants more than just sex now, and, despite initially targeting Ben as a new shag, Diana now sees him in a completely different light. Diana now thinks that Ben might just be the man she’s been looking for. And think what beautiful babies he’d make. She does. Frequently.
And she was convinced that she pulled it off the other night. Ben may have been trying to avoid her ever since—or is that her imagination—but it must have meant something to him, and anyway, she forgives him because after all, he is young, he doesn’t yet know what’s good for him. And Diana Macpherson would be very good for him. In every way.
The last thing she wants is to send Ben to Los Angeles, but it looks as if, this time, she really has no other choice.
So now we can understand why she’s not happy. Plus, of course, there’s the additional problem of finding someone to replace Ben while he spends the better part of a week in America. Plus there is the cost of sending an entire film crew to the other side of the world. Plus she could be left with egg all over her face if Alexia Aldridge changes her mind, or decides to clam up on film. And Alexia Aldridge is young, single, and tremendously beautiful. But no, Diana tells herself, she might want Ben to interview her, but she’d never bother getting involved with someone as lowly as a television presenter from England.