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  “You doing anything tomorrow night?” he said when she had gone.

  “Why?”

  “Good. We’ll have dinner.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to talk.”

  “What about? Talk now.”

  He sighed, stirring his tea. “I’ve had your Eamonn Salt on the phone, talking about a press launch,” he said.

  “I know. When do you think it should be?”

  He suddenly got to his feet and strode over to the plinth. “Do you pay any attention to what I say?” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “I told you nothing was definite. We have simply been looking into an idea and that is as far as it goes. It’s most unlikely that it will work. The idea of having a press launch at this stage is ridiculous. I never told you this would go ahead.” His mouth was twitching. “I feel harassed. I feel my hand is being forced.”

  I could feel myself breaking out into a sweat. If this failed it was too late to try anything else. I couldn’t believe it. We’d held that meeting, a dozen major celebrities had agreed to take part. We had an office, we had people from Soft Focus starting to gear up. The PA was looking into having a satellite dish sent to Nambula from Nairobi. But it was in his power to stop it. I said nothing. This was how he had always been. One day he’d be talking about spending the rest of his life with me, then the next day he couldn’t even be bothered to phone.

  “So we’ll have dinner tomorrow and talk,” he said.

  He was looking at me very oddly. What was going on now? I said nothing.

  “I am asking you to have dinner with me tomorrow night.”

  I put my head down.

  “ROSIE, I AM ASKING YOU TO HAVE DINNER WITH ME.”

  Unbelievable that we could get back into this, as if it were a dance, a game of computer chess. He would do this, and I would do that and off we went. I did know what I was taking on. But surely he couldn’t behave like this with all his program commissions?

  “What exactly is the problem with the program?” I asked.

  He turned and looked at me blankly.

  “Why is it most unlikely that it will work?”

  “Ah,” he said. “Vernon Briggs.”

  “Vernon Briggs.”

  “Yes. It’s just not his bag—actors, arts, messages about debt. There’s no slack in the budget and we’re gearing up for the franchises. There’s no way he’s going to agree to this.”

  “But he must know it’s happening. You must have talked to him. What did he say?”

  “It’s not his sort of thing.”

  “Have you spoken to him?”

  He said nothing. A little idea popped into my head.

  “Oliver. Have you spoken to Vernon Briggs?”

  He kept his head down.

  “Oliver. I am asking you a question. Have you spoken to Vernon Briggs about Charitable Acts?”

  Silence.

  “Have you?”

  Still nothing.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the switchboard.

  “Vernon Briggs’s office, please.”

  Oliver looked at me, aghast but curiously impotent.

  “Ah. It’s Oliver Marchant’s office here. Could Oliver pop in and have a word?”

  “One moment, please.”

  I waited with my heart thumping. It was awful to have believed it was all going to happen and then have it whipped away.

  “Vernon can see him in ten minutes.”

  “Thank you. And Rosie Richardson will be coming too.”

  I looked at Oliver, sitting with his head down.

  “We’re both nuts, you know,” I said. “If anyone saw this they would lock us up.”

  He looked up and grinned sheepishly. “I know.”

  “Come and sit on my knee,” he said then.

  “Oh, sod off, you revolting old madman.”

  Vernon Briggs heaved himself up from behind the black, gilt-edged desk and came to greet us, clapping his hands together and rubbing them.

  “Hello, playmates!” he said, in the hoarse Yorkshire voice. “Bored to tears up ’ere. Fancy a drink?”

  “No, thanks. You remember Rosie Richardson?” said Oliver.

  “Oh, lawks a’ mercy! The woman who could have been the mother of my child if she’d played her cards right. What a sight for sore eyes. You two getting back together, are you? Come to ask for Uncle Vernon’s blessing? How are you, my love?”

  Vernon Briggs had not improved with time, apart from the addition of a Bavarian-style handlebar mustache.

  “Like it?” said the program controller, fingering the waxed tip. “It’s a cunt tickler.”

  The carpet across which he was proceeding was deep pile and black, with a mock zebra-skin rug in the center. I glanced back at it quickly. I hoped it was mock zebra-skin. “Hello, son,” said Vernon, reaching up to clap Oliver on the shoulder. “Nice to see you. To see you . . . ?”

  Oliver said nothing.

  “Eh, eh. None of that, son. None of your sulky sulks. Not till you’ve done your time, come up through the ranks, shown you know your public-school arse from your Oxbridge elbow. That was a load of old cobblers you came up with the other night. Seen the ratings, have you? Two point four million! Gah! Bums on seats, boy. Bums on seats. That’s what we want, not your pseudo-intellectual twaddle.”

  On the walls were gilt-framed seventies-style prints in shades of pink and purple. They featured long-haired, long-legged girls and pink items: girls getting out of pink sports cars, girls sipping pink cocktails out of triangular glasses, girls leaning on pink cocktail bars, buttocks outlined through tight pink dresses. It was such a shame that Corinna wasn’t at the meeting.

  “Take a pew, take a pew.”

  We sat before him, on black lacquer and gold Chinese-style chairs.

  “Come on now, dicks on the table, what’s up?”

  Oliver sighed. “You and I have been talking about the franchise bids,” he began. I had been very firm with him in the last ten minutes.

  “We have that, son. Quite right. We have that. Ten out of ten,” said Vernon, winking at me. “Sharp as a needle, this boy. Tell you what, son, I’ll let you off your Latin prep tonight for showing promise.”

  Oliver straightened his tie uncomfortably.

  “As you know, with the franchises in mind, I’ve been looking for projects which we can get on the air quickly, showing a commitment to public service broadcasting and obviously worthwhile issues.” I’d never seen him so unconvincing.

  “Eh oop, eh oop. He’s coming on. Starting to learn to do what he’s told at long last.”

  Oliver shifted his long legs in his finely cut suit. “I have, er, a definitive project which could achieve that for us.”

  “Well I never!” Vernon put on a posh voice. “He has hay definitive prowject which will aychieve all that for hus. Give me names, son, names.”

  “Barry Rhys, Dinsdale Warburton, Vicky Spankie . . .” Oliver was saying.

  “Aye aye? Spankie wanky. Keep it in the family.”

  “Julian Alman, Liam Doyle . . .”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. It’s An Arty Farty Knockout?”

  “Kate Fortune . . .”

  “Now yer talking. Ooof.’Scuse me. Just adjusting me kegs. And where does the worthy bit come in, then?”

  “Er, well, Rosie’s just come back from Nambula where she’s been working in a refugee camp. They have seven thousand malnourished refugees about to descend on their camp and no supplies. They need an airlift of food quickly. The idea is that we should do a one-off live performance of a specially written speeded-up Hamlet using all these names, and on either side we do an emergency appeal. It might seem a bit derivative but—”

  “Keep going, lad, keep going.”

  Oliver glanced up at him for a second, nonplussed.

  “The problem is, if it’s going to be worth doing we have to get it on the air in an unfeasible amount of time, actually within the next two or three weeks.”
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br />   “Ah. I’m with you. Bit of a bugger that. Yeah. Bit of bugger. Naah, forget it. Too short notice . . ”

  “It is possible to do it in the time,” I said. “We’ve been offered a sponsored flight to get the food out to Nambula, and Nambulan Airways could give us some free flights if we wanted to take a crew and some artists. It would save thousands of lives, maybe tens of thousands of lives.”

  Oliver was sitting there like a sack of potatoes. I trod on his foot. He jerked upright. “I wondered about putting it in the Soft Focus slot,” he mumbled. “Also there’s a mobile satellite dish sitting in Nairobi at the moment.”

  “If we leave it longer than that it will be too late,” I said. “We’ve got twenty thousand already in the camp, starting to go under because we haven’t enough food, and when the others arrive . . .”

  Vernon’s bloated face grew troubled. “Kiddies in a bad way, are they?”

  “I just wish you could see it.”

  He looked away misty-eyed. The cunt tickler trembled. Vernon sat for a while, fingering it.

  “It always gets to the children first, that’s the worst of it.”

  “We’ll do it,” he said. Then he jumped to his feet. “We’ll do it. Get that dish up there. Get ’em on the phone. It’s only fartarse and fannying about for Global Whatsit.”

  Oliver looked as though he was trying to swallow an oyster which was still in its shell.

  “Get a banner done—THANK YOU CAPITAL DAILY TELEVISION—get the little pickaninnies to hold it up.”

  I opened my mouth to speak and shut it again.

  “Get Kate Fortune out there in a little safari suit. What about Tarby? What about Monkhouse? What we need, boy, is someone with heart.”

  Oliver was rubbing the back of his neck.

  “Forget the Soft Focus spot. That load of old fartpantsbollocks. This is mainstream. Get those kiddies right up against the mid-evening surge, where everyone can see them. Don’t want a dry eye in the house. Might even do it myself, if you’re lucky.”

  He plodded into the center of the zebra-skin. He stood there deliberating, tugging one end of the mustache pensively.

  “Now, that might just be a very good idea. I’ll do it myself. I haven’t been in Africa since nineteen forty-two. I fancy a trip. Might even say a few words while I’m at it.”

  He turned to me. “Don’t you worry, luvvie. I’ll see it right for the kiddies. Right, lad. Get on the phone. Call Ian Parker in OB Ops. Tell him Vernon Briggs told you to call and I want that satellite out of Nairobi and on its way to that camp, with a crew, this time tomorrow. Leave the slot with me, son. You go and get your cast list smartened up. We don’t want any more of this Alas, Poor Yorick brigade. Get me some decent names on board, then we’ll be up and running.”

  Come on, Oliver, I thought. Make a stand. Tell him what we’re trying to say. Tell him it’s not supposed to be a tear-jerking jamboree. But he sat completely mute. It was extraordinary.

  “Cat got your tongue, lad? Come on, step to it.” Vernon opened the door and gestured us out. “I’ll see you same time tomorrow, see how you’re doing. Put your dick back in your pants and get moving.”

  Oliver attempted to saunter out, followed by me.

  “Don’t you worry luvvie, leave it with me,” said Vernon and slapped me on the bottom.

  Halfway down the corridor I burst out laughing. “What are we going to do?” I said, helpless. “It’s great that he’s behind it, but—”

  “I know,” said Oliver, starting to laugh as well. “We can’t have him directing it out in Africa.”

  “Not through his cunt tickler.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll handle him.”

  “But that’s what’s so funny,” I said. “You can’t,” and collapsed again.

  “Come on, let’s go for a drink,” he said, grinning foolishly.

  So we did. We talked, and it was nice. Friendly. Equal.

  When I got home I was very happy. It was all going great. Vernon was behind the broadcast now. Oliver was back to sanity for the time being. The sponsorship was in place. SUSTAIN thought they could get the first lot of food on tick till we raised the money. The scripts were coming in. The celebrities were being helpful. I’d been home for an hour, having a bath, eating cheese on toast in the kitchen. At nine o’clock I went to put the television on and saw a message from Shirley on the mantelpiece.

  CATHERINE KELLY CALLED FROM THE DAILY NEWS.

  Catherine Kelly was Oliver’s contact on the paper. I’d seen her for an interview the day after I first saw Oliver in his office before Charitable Acts existed. I’d told her all the details of the Kefti story, and she’d been very interested, but nothing had appeared.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the News.

  “You want Catherine. Hang on, I’ll just get her. Sorry, she left five minutes ago. Can I give her a message?”

  “Just say Rosie Richardson returned her call.” I left the office number.

  The next morning I rushed to the newsagent’s as usual and leafed through the News excitedly. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Then I opened the center page and nearly dropped the paper. There was a full-page spread with a picture of me in evening dress, together with a cartoon of a giant-fanged insect, superimposed over a photograph of starving African children. The headline was:

  I’LL MAKE THE STARS HELP,

  SAYS JILTED LOCUST HEROINE

  “Actually, can you make that twenty Rothman’s as well.”

  Beneath the locust was a picture of Oliver with his arm round Vicky Spankie and at the bottom of the page tiny pictures of Julian, Liam, Dinsdale and Barry.

  I immediately thought of all the phone calls I’d made to the celebrities the previous morning. Don’t talk to the press, I’d said, don’t steal the thunder before the launch. Oh, no. Where had they got the photo of me? I was wearing the black shepherdess bridesmaid’s dress. It must have been that awards ceremony I went to with Oliver. Oh, shit. Shit. What had happened? I’d told her about Kefti but nothing about the celebrities. There weren’t any celebrities involved at that stage.

  The former live-in lover of TV’s Soft Focus chief Oliver Marchant, 38, flew into London this week in a dramatic mercy dash to save the lives of thousands of refugees threatened by a terrifying locust plague of biblical proportions. Rosie Richardson, 37 [I was not 37, I was 31], was devastated 4 years ago when Marchant refused to marry her and ended their relationship. [Where had they got all this?] Swearing never to return to England, she left to work in a refugee camp in Nambula, East Africa, where she has remained ever since. In recent weeks, though, the camp has been dogged by terrifying swarms of locusts many miles across, blotting out the sun, pancaking down on the refugees and their crops. Frustrated by the inaction of the aid agencies, Richardson left the camp vowing to return to England and extract her pound of flesh from the lover who had spurned her.

  “When I got back I found it terrible trying to adjust to the luxury here compared to the poverty I had come from,” said Richardson.

  (I never said that. Oh dear, maybe I did, but that was only half of what I said, and I was talking about the first time I got back in eighty-five. Also, that wasn’t in the interview. It was when we were just chatting before she left. What else had I said?)

  Still reeling from the trauma of seeing an elderly friend, Libren Aleen, lose 26 children in the famine, Richardson said, “These rich stars have a duty to help.”

  (Maybe I had said celebrities feel they have a duty to help.)

  “They are given so much wealth for their talent. This is their chance to give something back and I’m going to make them do it.” [Never said that.]

  After training as a relief worker in Basingstoke, Richardson became a worker for SUSTAIN, running the 20,000-strong camp in Safila in the East of Nambula . . . refugees displaced from Kefti [fine, fine . . . ] defying death in a perilous lone journey deep into the war. “The UN are completely incompetent,” says Richardson. [Oh, God] . . . furious
with SUSTAIN’s refusal to believe her story and send more food she made her dramatic resignation and caught the next plane to London. “The celebrities and the British public are all we have left to rely on.”

  It got worse.

  At first Marchant, who friends say complained at being “harassed” by Richardson after the relationship ended, refused to help, saying the plan was impractical at such short notice. But Marchant’s current girlfriend, Last Leaves of the Indian Summer star Vicky Spankie, 26 [she was 30 if she was a day], was moved by Richardson’s plight and persuaded Marchant to help.

  Vicky Spankie. It must have been her. They had most of the names of the celebrities, bar Kate Fortune and Corinna. It must have been the wretched Spankie. I peered more closely at the African picture. It wasn’t Nambula or Kefti. It looked as though it might have been Mozambique. There was a quote from the UN at the bottom saying they were still verifying the reports and everything possible was being done. And then another quote.

  SUSTAIN spokesman Eamonn Salt confirmed yesterday that Richardson was no longer employed by the agency. “SUSTAIN personnel are strictly forbidden to enter Kefti for reasons of security and diplomatic relations. Any defiance of this edict by an employee would be treated with the utmost seriousness.” Neither SUSTAIN nor CDT, where TV hotshot Marchant is program controller [Vernon wasn’t going to like that], claimed any knowledge of the Charitable Acts appeal today.

  Friends of Marchant’s expressed concern that Richardson was using the crisis as a means to win Marchant back from TV’s Vicky. “Of course everyone wants to help the starving Africans,” said one, “but sometimes you mistrust people’s motives.” The two stars are expected to marry early next year.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-two

  I lit a Rothman’s and nearly choked. I walked back to the flat in a daze.

  The phone was ringing when I got in. I sat down at the kitchen table and let it ring. It stopped and then started again. Brrr brrrr. Brrr brrrr. Brrr brrrr. Brrr brrrr. I took the little bugger off the hook. A faint noise, like a car burglar alarm, started. Then a voice said, “Please replace your handset.” Dooweedooweee. “Please replace your handset.” I replaced my handset. The phone rang immediately. I bent down and unplugged it, lit another cigarette, choked, put it out, laid my head on my arms and wanted to cry.