Chain Reaction (11 page)

‘Suit yourself…’ he started to say.

‘Now I don’t want you coming on strong afterwards and backing out and saying you knew nothing about it and it was all my idea.’

Jacy stares at her warily. The silence between them stretches taut and hums like a live wire. ‘But it is your idea, Belle, nothing to do with me.’

She is only just back from the launderette, a good six miles there and back, biting her lips all the way in case the bright red Jeep, the only vehicle they have left, failed to get her there and back, and in no mood to put up with his sulks. Of course there is a large industrial machine in the basement but that doesn’t work and nobody seems to be willing to mend it. It is obsolete, apparently, gone out of production since Jacy bought it. And what’s he been doing while she’s been away? There is one simple answer to that—nothing! Or drinking wine.

Belle turns on Jacy, the golden ringlets piled up on her head bobbing about with righteous rage. Before she speaks she makes an attempt to control her voice. She’d love to slap that smirk off his face because there’s nothing that suits Jacy more these days than riling Belle, and she knows it.

‘You’re a middle-aged man, dammit, going grey, with the start of a paunch and you behave like a bloody great spoilt kid and wonder why everyone laughs at you…’

‘You’re sick.’

But Belle can’t stop. She has reached breaking point. ‘There’s not a madly excited market out there ready to pay the kinds of prices you’re expecting, dickhead. We’ll be lucky if this solicitor guy follows through on behalf of his mysterious clients who seem so interested in this…’

‘I thought you understood my needs.’

Her voice, so carefully modulated for so long, rises to a manic scream. ‘Your needs, Jacy!
Your boring needs!
Don’t talk to me about your needs, I’m up to here with them, I’ve had years of them and they’re boring,
BORING,
BORING! I am sick of hearing you pouring out your anguish, blaming everyone else for your own miserable plight, waiting for some belated apology from a world that isn’t even out there any more! You’re a broken has-been, Jacy. Since you, life has moved on!’

‘For God’s sake, Belle.’ His voice is thick and urgent and his mouth twists in a sour grimace.

All she ever wanted to do was get married and live happily ever after. Is that too much to ask? She could have had anyone and yet she hung around waiting for this pitiful bastard. All those years. Belle begins to shake, like her voice, hardly coherent. ‘OK, you went to all the great parties and head waiters called you by name. Money grew on trees, then—you only had to click your fingers and women prostrated themselves at your feet. But you messed up, didn’t you, Jacy, and how! And it’s a real downer. Real life is hell, it’s bloody hell for most of us but we don’t just sit on our arses boozing ourselves to death, you gutless bastard!’

‘You hysterical slag! Get out!’

‘Make me!’

He has to silence her somehow, or break down at her feet and cry. Short and quick, Jacy charges forwards and grabs hold of her shoulders hard so her neck whips back. His eyes are bulging, his lips drawn thin and white when he slaps her across the face with the bony back of his hand. She takes the full force of the blow and falls against the wall. Belle tastes blood. Disbelief, fear and anger chase each other across her face; she cannot believe he is capable of this! She crouches down on the floor, crawling crab-like towards the door.

‘Get out, you
whore! Before I kill you!’

‘You’re mad!’
she whispers so he can only just hear her. ‘My God, Jacy, you have finally lost your mind completely!’

With his eyes fixed firmly on her he approaches maliciously once again and his grin is horrible. Reduced to all fours now, Belle scuttles across the slippery wooden floor in the hall. His voice is a snarl between his teeth. ‘If it hadn’t been for you…’

‘For me?’ Even in her red-hot pain Belle can feel astonishment. She can hardly recognise his face any more it is so transfixed with rage.
‘For me?’

‘Yes—
you!
You resented the fact that I was the star, making millions while all you could do was strip in sordid basements for grubby magazines.’

‘But Jacy…’

‘Oh, don’t think I didn’t know!’ He hates to hurt her, he hates to hurt her. He shakes his head like an animal attacked, as if attempting to clear some buzzing sounds from his ears. ‘Don’t think I wasn’t aware of your nasty little game! Screwing with everyone else, you bitch! Between you all you pulled me down, you deliberately conspired to bring me to this!’

She stumbles and almost falls at the door. ‘But I’ve never even kissed another man…’

‘Get out, get out!’ Oh God forgive me!

Later, when he comes to find her and she cuddles in close, she can feel the shudder where his sobs have been. He does need her.
He really does!

A
PRINCESS-IN-WAITING.
The silver choker round her slender neck makes her look almost regal.

‘Jamie doesn’t know about any of this, be honest with me, does he? It’s Them who are doing this to me, isn’t it—sending me off into exile?’

So Dougal Rathbone protests, ‘I’m afraid that Jamie
does
know, Arabella, and is a hundred per cent behind the course we are taking. “They”, as you refer to them, don’t know a thing about it.’

‘Well, I won’t believe that till I see Jamie and he tells me himself.’

Dougal shakes his head dubiously. Powerful behind the wheel of his gold Mercedes convertible, he has finally persuaded Arabella to accompany him to the wilds of Lancashire to view the property in question. The bribe, if you like. He knows what he would do if he was offered such a property—he’d jump at it. The potential of the place is enormous. The girl beside him is pretty and sweet-smelling like an English rose, dressed quite simply in dainty florals. Her silver-blonde hair, drawn back from her peachy face with two combs, curls naturally to her shoulders. Even if Dougal were straight it would be hard to view her in a sexual way because of the innocence about her. During the journey this sophisticated and worldly young man is stunned to realise exactly how naive this mother-to-be appears. She started off in her childish voice by relating her morning’s horoscope: ‘Keep your counsel today, it will pay you off in the end for it is to and from this day that all future rivers will flow.’ She turned to Dougal. ‘Weird! Really spooky. So what do you think about that?’

‘You believe that sort of rubbish?’

She is glad to leave the hot grey dust of London behind her. ‘Naturally,’ she says, drawing clean air into her lungs. ‘I thought everyone did, at heart. They might pretend they don’t but they do really.’

And another shock to the system came when she suddenly exclaimed, clasping her bangled hands together, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was just allowed to love each other?’

Oh God! Barbara Cartland. Dougal stared intently at the road and found himself unable to answer. Was she subnormal or what? He must have a long and realistic discussion with this young lady tonight.

Peaches has been over-protected. Mummy and Daddy live in a gorgeous Georgian house fronting the road in Epping. Apparently Arabella has no relatives up north, has never been there and seems to regard it in the context of the historical romances she reads, all moorlands and russet skies, revolting rabbles in clogs and braces and broken factories peeping out from sooty, cobblestoned towns.

‘Well, you are going to be pleasantly surprised,’ Dougal reassures her, searching for a decent hotel where they can have a leisurely lunch, and if he can get a fair quantity of wine down her pretty little throat perhaps her perceptions will be lightened further. Tonight they are staying in a country hotel before attempting the return journey in the morning.

Dougal is a nice kind man, thinks Arabella, the sort of person she imagines Jamie might be close to, not the loud assortment of young men he was with when they were first introduced. He is the sort of brotherly type she feels she could confide in, but his attitude surprises her. Perhaps the fun-loving Jamie is playing some game, luring her to a secret love-nest to surprise her on her arrival. She wouldn’t put anything past him, knowing him as she does. He’s a joker. Posing as a motorbike freak on his precious Harley Davidson, that’s how he always approached his Little Venice hideaway, his neighbours on the river never saw him without his helmet and goggles. It is perfectly ghastly how her sweet, sensitive young lover is misrepresented by the press. Anyone would think they were conducting a private vendetta against him. But he’s so brave, he merely laughs and says they know no better. If they attacked Arabella like that, following her round, quizzing her friends, setting her up with their intrusive lenses, if they treated her as meanly as that she would be completely destroyed.

But look at her now. She has to admit that all this is rather exciting. Arabella Brightly-Smythe had lived a quiet and protected life carefully monitored by a loving family until she started sharing the flat in Queensway with her two school chums, Charlie and Mags. ‘You will be all right now, darling, won’t you,’ asked Mummy, kissing her goodbye and looking worried. Arabella was launched into the big wide world on the day she unpacked her bags and laid her old brown teddy bear, Beppo, on the frilly pillow in her room. At first she couldn’t quite believe it, all the excitement, the glamour, the places to go, the friends they knew. She felt a sense of rebirth. She went a little bit dotty at first, she supposes, but then she met Jamie and has never looked back.

She hasn’t seen him for two weeks now and there’s no point going to the houseboat. It’s kept locked and chained with a watch on it at all times. Oh, the overwhelming pain of this love and the terrible joy of it.

‘Perhaps I ought to be swathed in veils,’ she says to Dougal lightly, ‘like poor Mrs Simpson.’

She daren’t tell Mummy and Daddy about the baby, not until she has at least an engagement ring on her finger; they would be so disappointed in their only daughter. Nor dare she confess to Charlie or Mags. They would be on Jamie’s side and try to persuade her to have an abortion. Neither of her flatmates sees Jamie through her own loving eyes; both of them have tried hard to warn her against him. They don’t try any more because the only result is that poor Arabella flies weeping to her bedroom and refuses to come out.

‘I wish you wouldn’t say these terrible unkind things, not when you don’t know him!’

She has to admit that Jamie disappointed her with his response to her pregnancy, something that filled her with joy and delight, a condition she has looked forward to since childhood, to be a mother and a wife. But when he saw how disturbed she was he became his old gentle self again. ‘Come on, old thing, dry your eyes. If you want the baby of course you should have it, only it is going to be frightfully tricky in the circs.’

‘In the circs?’

‘Bearing in mind who I am, silly.’

‘But you are my Prince and you love me, don’t you?’

Jamie gave a half-smile. He ruffled her hair and climbed out of the messy bed. She couldn’t see his expression, or hear what he was saying to himself over the noise of the shower in the bathroom. She thought he was probably singing. The fact that they met on his sacred houseboat said something about how important she had become to him.

‘I do hope it’s a girl,’ she called. ‘Mummy is going to be terribly thrilled.’

He can’t have heard her because he didn’t shout back a reply.

He came back smelling of an exotic manhood. Expensive. Sultry, of deserts and temples. His chest was broad and shiny with a few blond hairs wisping out of the centre in a sweet soft line that led down to his pubes. He was clean, golden and soft-spoken; his towel-damp curls hung over his forehead forcing him to peer through with his soft brown amber-flecked eyes. With a gesture both lordly and casual he flicked it back and kissed her.

She wanted to be one with him, man and wife made flesh.

He stroked her forehead with his finger, moving it meticulously around her face and over her eyelids so she felt hypnotised by the sensation. ‘Fact of the matter is, old fruit, that it’s not going to be quite as straightforward as you seem to think.’

‘Love will conquer all,’ moaned Arabella softly, ‘and I really believe that, Jamie, don’t you? Isn’t it a miracle that we found one another out of all the millions and billions of people in the world, isn’t it wonderful?’ And she stretched out in all her nakedness, flooded with perfect happiness.

Some people would say that Arabella has led a charmed life and she would have to agree with them. I mean, Mr and Mrs Brightly-Smythe are still together, not even separated like most of the middle-aged people she knows. Her two young brothers, Garth and Cedric, are bright and healthy and doing well at school, specially at games. Both sets of grandparents are still alive. Sometimes she worries that it’s all been rather too charming and that one day something really awful will happen, someone will die or get ill, or they’ll lose all their money or the house might burn down and take all their magical childhood things with it. But then she reassures herself, because although you are always reading about the terrible things that happen, they do tend to happen to other people,
a certain type of person,
and in her heart of hearts she wonders whether some people don’t actually attract these disasters.

‘I suppose they have someone special lined up for you already,’ Arabella joked to Jamie as he sat admiring her on the side of the bed.

‘That would seem to be the case, yes.’

‘Oh Jamie! You are a fool! Even I know that whoever you are these days, you are allowed to choose your own partner. It’s no longer the Dark Ages. You’re not poor Princess Margaret. Nor are you first in line to the throne and your parents seem to be frightfully nice…’

Jamie’s laughter interrupted her gregarious flow. ‘How the hell would you know?’

‘Well, of course I know, silly. I can read, can’t I? I watch television. I was even invited to a garden party once, with Mummy. You should have seen our marvellous hats. But I must admit I didn’t see Her, although we were told She was there.’