Chain Reaction (42 page)

You’d think she’d be out here watching, in her element, loving all this!

Life, intolerable last week, is now an ecstasy. Filled with an easy flowing energy Jacy leaps the stairs three at a time and almost rips his pants. Belle is upstairs in the bedroom, hiding. She creeps out when she hears him calling. ‘You rotten beast! Why didn’t you say? I’ve done nothing but answer the door since I’ve been back and they had to tell me what was happening. I didn’t have a clue what to say. They have taken over the whole place and there’s nowhere private inside or out. Peaches is in a terrible state…’

Thus she dampens the white light of exultation filling his head. ‘Who the hell is Peaches?’

‘Jacy, wake up! Haven’t you looked at the papers since you’ve been gone? How could you have missed them?’

Jacy, who hasn’t had time to look at anything except the music magazines, and that only fleetingly in between sessions, is taken aback by this mixed reception. He’d imagined it otherwise. He had imagined a chastened Belle, proved wrong yet again, running into his arms with a beautiful worship in her eyes. In his heart he had seen them acting out a Cathy-cum-Heathcliffe scene, the lovers reuniting, together again against all the odds, and he the strong, proud one, she the adoring fool. That would have looked good in front of the army of workers outside. But no, as usual she lets him down; as usual it is him who has to come and find her.

‘When the Siege of Swallowbridge isn’t grabbing the headlines, it’s Peaches and the Prince—where’ve you been? The whole world is reading about it. And we come creeping back here to find the biggest publicity campaign in living memory being acted out on our own doorstep.’

‘My doorstep,’ Jacy reminds her, irritated beyond endurance to be faced, at this psychologically crucial stage of his come-back, with a contender for Belle’s attention.

‘Poor Peaches is a nervous wreck.’

Peaches? He vaguely remembers now. Wasn’t she some old schoolfriend of Belle’s, suffering from some sort of breakdown?

‘She is pregnant,’ Belle is angrily forced to explain. ‘She is pregnant by that ass, that stuck-up oaf Prince James. We are only just back from the most gruelling experience imaginable. But everyone’s after her story, so we thought we’d be safe back here. As it was I had to rescue her from the hospital at dead of night and ever since she’s been holed up here. It was only a matter of time before the press ran us to earth, despite the Palace attempts to distract them, and the police have been very helpful, but now, dear God, the Lord only knows who is loose in the grounds. You’re not even safe going to the lav.’

Jacy taps his steel-capped toe, he folds impatient arms. ‘Aren’t you even slightly interested to know what’s been happening to us?’

Belle is so distressed and uneasy she can hardly bother to reassure him. He always behaves so like a spoilt child. ‘Of course I am,
of course,
but this is a dire emergency!’

‘I don’t see why,’ Jacy sulks. ‘She can stay up here, can’t she? Nobody’s going to come up here.’

‘If they discover where she is they will probably pull her to pieces in their efforts to reach her. Jacy—this is the biggest story ever! And bang in the middle of the Silly Season, too. This is likely to rock the Crown at its roots. The press have employed hundreds of extra reporters to find her.’ She thrusts a newspaper in front of his face. ‘Read that! Look at those pictures! That’s poor Arabella, chained to the church door with a bicycle lock, that’s the Prince’s shocked face when he eventually came out of the church, that’s the black look the Queen gave the flashing cameras and those are the guns which were actually pointed at us!
Guns,
Jacy, imagine it!’ Belle is actually sobbing with fright. She gestures towards the windows and all the activity going on outside. ‘We’ve been through hell and now this!’

Jacy hands the newspaper back. ‘She’s a stupid fool to try this on,’ he sneers, totally without sympathy.

‘Of course she’s a fool. Everyone has always known Arabella was a fool.’

‘Why did you play any part in it?’

Tension stalks like a presence in the room. ‘Because she is my friend, and she was in trouble. If I hadn’t gone with her she’d have gone alone, and God knows what might have happened to her. They were about to abort the child, anyway—some sinister mandarins from some obscure Palace department. Jacy, you just wouldn’t believe what’s been happening!’

Aggrievement rankles within him. Jacy says quietly and slowly, ‘You’re not suggesting, surely, that we turn all these people away?’

Belle scratches her messy, bird’s nest hair. The normally beautifully coiffured ringlets spiral hysterically anywhere. ‘Turn them away? I suppose not. I just wish I’d been given some warning, that’s all, so that me and Peaches could have gone somewhere else. Now Peaches says she daren’t leave the house. Poor thing. She spends most of the time in your dressing room where there aren’t any windows.’

‘Look! I need you here, Belle. These are our wedding preparations.’

‘Don’t you think I know that, Jacy? I’ve been told by total strangers enough times!’

‘So you couldn’t go off with Peaches. I’m the one who needs you now.’

‘Oh hell, what a mess!’

‘Of your own making.’

‘Huh! You’re a fine one to talk.’

Resentment storms in Jacy’s head. ‘And you can cancel that miserable little house in that godforsaken Close for a start.’

Belle stands her ground, too exhausted to budge. ‘No way, Jacy. No way. If you want to stay here, you damn well can. I’ve had enough, I’m going. And if you don’t want to buy that house then I will.’

‘You’ve no confidence in me, have you? Even now! You think this is a flash in the pan, you don’t think I’ve got the guts to make it. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Belle?
And you’d rather I stayed a failure.
You really hope this doesn’t work out, don’t you? Be honest—why don’t you tell me the truth?’ And Jacy’s eyes are aflame with rage.

‘Jacy! Why do you never listen to me? I’ve got quite a lot else on my mind just now, although you would never be able to understand concepts like loyalty and caring and responsibility…’

Jacy stalks from the room and heads for the whisky locked in the library.

A feeble voice from the dressing room. ‘Oh God help me. What are we going to do?’

‘It’s OK, Peaches, it’s OK.’

‘What if he did come to see me as I demanded, and I wasn’t there?’

‘Peaches, please, I’m begging you now, listen to me! There is no way he would come. Not with the hospital swarming with photographers and a reporter lurking round every corner. We were incredibly lucky to smuggle you out, and that’s only because that Sister agreed to help and show us all those underground passages along by the morgue and the Path. Lab. Dear God,’ and Belle shivers, ‘we even travelled down in the lift with a corpse.’

‘But the Queen knows now—the very situation poor James was so keen to avoid. He’ll hate me so much for causing all this trouble. All I wanted was to speak to him!’

‘I know, I know, please try to stop crying, Peaches. Your skin’s gone all blotchy and your eyes…’

‘Why should I care what I look like?’ Her voice is hardly above a whisper. ‘I only want to die.’

What can you say to that? Well, nothing really, nothing that will do any good. Belle spreads her hands and sighs. Peaches sits silent for hours, staring at nothing with hopeless sorrow in her eyes. Her beautiful memories are poisoned and slain and surely there can be no experience so awful as this destruction of the past. The muscles of Peaches’ face are tautened with the pain of it and her head is made of wood that aches. All she needs now is for the man-hunting press to get hold of her.

And all the while Belle is supposed to be concentrating on her own marriage. The marriage she has yearned for, for so many years, has come, at last, to fruition. Typical that it should turn out to be a wedding like this, done for publicity, done to promote the group, Haze, with none of her friends in attendance, only useful people in the media and the music world. She hasn’t even been proposed to properly. Jacy just always rightly assumed she’d say yes and jump at the chance.

But Peaches’ sad and doomed infatuation has opened Belle’s eyes. She would never have compared herself to her foolish friend. Even weeks ago she would have sworn she was a fiercely independent woman, needful of no one, but happy to be with Jacy for as long as he needed her. But just like Peaches, she thought she needed this man to be father to her children. Husband equals hearth, home and happiness, which is what Belle truly wants, although she would find this political incorrectness embarrassing to admit to her friends.

And what about the house in the Close? Why would she want to spend her savings on an ordinary Victorian family house in a place so unglamorous, so far from the buzz of the capital? Perhaps Penmore House is a statement of her hopes and dreams: solid, ordinary, homely, dependable, an untidy old place with interesting corridors and corners and attics and fireplaces that would burn red in the winter.

Or horror of horrors, could this be a description of the kind of man she subconsciously wants? Not Jacy at all?

Does she want to cook cakes and stews? Could it be time to remove the rings from her nose, her navel and the other place?

But how can she possibly, at this late and essential stage, let Jacy down?

She can’t.

And she loves him.

A few days ago all was hope, now all is horror.
Exposure.
The newspapers running round with the news and everyone knowing—her friends, her parents, her little brothers doing so well at school, both sets of grannies and grandpas… but she cannot bear to contact them yet, she wants to be alone. Peaches has now been publicly spurned, vilified, and is branded, mostly by other women of course, as a vicious bitch out for any revenge she can get. This, as we know, couldn’t be further from the truth. She did what she did in the honest belief that if her Royal lover was outed, he might opt to do the decent thing and return to the person he really loved. And they would live happily ever after.

So, she was wrong. She was dim. Peaches is used to being loved, not hated.

But if only that was the end of the matter. If only she could be left alone with her sickness.

She reads the papers, she listens to the news, she bites her nails to the quick, but she dare not leave the bedroom.

The world now makes it its business to heap all its spite and self-righteousness upon the head of the Queen’s third son.
DEGENERATE. DEBAUCHED, DOWNRIGHT DISGUSTING.
She might well be a money-grabbing little hussy but James should not have discarded her like an old polo shirt. He has his responsibilities like any other young man. There are too many unmarried mothers in this country today, parasites on the rest of us. These men must be made to take the consequences, and pay for their indiscretions for the rest of their lives.

What does his mother say about this?

‘The Palace has no comment to make.’

But the hordes are restless, grumbling on street corners. Decency and common humanity have jetted out of the window, when a little old lady is forced to barricade herself in her humble home, when a rapist is allowed to escape to go and kill an innocent person, and when a foolish young woman is reduced to chaining herself to a church, go begging, cap in hand, to her privileged and supercilious lover.

‘An offer was made,’ states the Palace eventually, with tremendous caution, like feeding a morsel of meat to a lion.

‘Bought off,’ growls the predictable response. And never has public support for the Crown been so low.

‘I forgive him,’ goes Lady Frances Loughborough from her island retreat. The original statement was too foul-mouthed to reveal. ‘We all make mistakes, after all. We’re none of us perfect.’

Chuck ’em out,
goes the
Sun
with contempt.

Leave ’em alone. They’re human and we love ’em,
goes the
Telegraph
reverently.

A dazzling mist of words.

But what is happening out there now?

Downstairs, in the gardens of The Grange, preparations are in hand for the biggest publicity stunt ever mounted, while timidly hiding in the windowless dressing room upstairs sits the world’s most wanted woman, weeping for her lost love, wondering where she went wrong, and rocking her unborn child.

H
UBBLE BUBBLE, TOIL AND
trouble. Revolution? Civil unrest? Something must be done to raise the positive profile of The Family, and soon. The mutterings and grumblings up and down the streets of the land are growing into marches and meetings, and fanatical people are appearing on the TV ranting and raving about Republics and saying it is high time Great Britain grew up.

Vive la république
is a favourite theme on student T-shirts, and flutters of serious articles appear in the national press.

Only ten people turn up to watch Prince George open the new visitors’ centre in Aviemore, and they are all female and over sixty with hats on. Dangerous times. Worst of all, it looks as if Sir Hugh Mountjoy and Dougal Rathbone are going to have to carry the can. They might even go down in the record books as the pair who finally pulled the plug on centuries of venerable Royal history.

O me miserum.

It is no good denying the whole ghastly mess and endeavouring to label Arabella as a silly little infatuated fool driven to revenge by lost love. Because of the public nature of her protest, because the whole hellish incident was captured by two dozen cameras, the follow-up took a natural course and Sir Hugh was compelled to watch the whole charade unfolding with his hands tied behind his back. She had posed no serious threat to The Family, a search had revealed nothing more dangerous than a charm bracelet on her wrist, all she could be accused of was disturbing the peace, and if they made too much of that, as the Monarch’s Private Secretary pointed out with a sneer, they would only make matters worse. ‘If that is possible,’ he added. The main thing, of course, was that it was blatantly obvious that Arabella Brightly-Smythe had a grievance as old as time. Hussy or not, she was quite justified in making a fuss.