The Right Man (17 page)

In this
game anything is not only possible but preferable. Well, almost anything. Child
pornography is obviously out, in fact all kinds of pornography are out,
although nowadays one has to be quite flexible about definitions.

For
example — neat little anecdote, this — I had an enquiry call for Annie
Schuster, a brilliant voice artist, ex-client of mine. An American woman on the
end of the line wanted to know if Annie was available for filming immediately
on a daily-rate basis. I said yes, depending on the rate of course. It was very
good, so we proceeded. Then she explained the work might involve nudity, I said
a tentative yes but asked for a little more information.

‘Well,’
said the woman, ‘it involves a certain amount of
action.’
This word said
with emphasis. But the daily rate would obviously go up, the more action Annie
was willing to provide.

I took
her number and said I would check with Annie first. Thank God. Because as I
punched up Annie’s number, it took only a second to realize it was the same
one. Annie had been doing Rory Bremner on me. Agents beware. Annie’s not the
most in-demand voice artist in the biz for nothing. She was just having a laugh
and testing me out at the same time, to see what kind of a company she was
working for. Luckily I passed the test and she stayed with me for several years
before leaving to marry an Italian record producer and have children in the
Tuscan hills.

So I
had to think positively about this new Neil in front of me, this bearded
apparition in 1950s Doris Day casual wear. It was just a question of
adaptation, flexibility, inventiveness. Obviously he was no longer in the running
for a nice eight o’clock slot sitcom. Nor appearances on daytime telly or any
of the more ‘civilized’ fairways of entertainment.

I would
have to think again. Find some niche, some artistic bunker in which he could
hole up, be happy and earn us all a living.

A
one-man show perhaps? Edinburgh in drag? Maybe he’d like to direct? In the
early days he’d been so eager to please. He’d let me help him with his image,
his hair, clothes, audition technique, and his attitude to authority — always
an important one, that. Now he had developed a wilfulness and a rather alarming
bluffness.

We sat
in the pub in silence for a few minutes, me feeling awkward and flimsy in my
linen jacket and tie, Neil with a creased brow, glaring at the beer mats on the
table.

‘Can I
have one of them?’ I asked him as he lit a third Silk Cut.

‘You
don’t smoke,’ he said.

‘I
know, but I feel like one right now.’ I had to find some way of crossing the
bridge between us.

A man
with a sheepish grin came over to our table and hovered a moment over Neil.

‘It is
you, isn’t it?’ He loomed, recognizing Neil from
Every Other Weekend.

‘No, I’m
his bad twin brother,’ said Neil. I smiled nicely at the guy.

‘What?
You haven’t got the kids this weekend, then?’ said the guy, as if he was making
the most original and hilarious joke in the history of comedy.

‘It’s
not real. It was a television programme, you know. Fiction. Stories. I don’t
actually have any kids.’

The guy
laughed as if Neil’s reply had been equally hilarious.

‘You
lot. It’s just a job to you, isn’t it?’ he said, with smug reverence. ‘So, you
got anything else coming up? Or just resting?’ Why does the word ‘resting’
cause such amusement to members of the Great British Public?

I
thought it appropriate, at this point, to slide into the conversation, if you
can call it that.

‘They
may be repeating the second series of
Every Other Weekend
on UK Gold
this autumn, if you get that?’

The guy
ignored me completely.

‘What’s
the beard for then, getting ready for a new role, are you?’

‘No.
This is the real me,’ said Neil, and at last managed a sort of half-smile. He
jiggled his earrings. It was enough at any rate to satisfy the guy, who
wandered back proudly to where his friends were, at the bar. They all turned
and smiled across the room at us, nodding and thumbs-upping at us.

‘Didn’t
even offer to get us a drink,’ said Neil. I started to inhale the ciggie. What
the hell.

‘So how’s
the writing going?’ I dared to venture.

‘I’ve
had to start again from the beginning,’ said Neil.

‘Oh,
shit.’

‘You
were right, it was all bollocks, so I chucked it all away.’ Oh, God.

‘Oh,
that’s not quite fair, I didn’t say it was
all
bollocks. I think there
was an awful lot of really good stuff in there. It just maybe needed a little
bit of reworking,’ I squirmed.

‘Too
late now, I’ve binned it all and started again,’ said Neil. ‘I want to write
something about the difference between men and women, more like a sort of
self-help thing.’ Oh, no. RFA. Double RFA. Sound the submerge hooter! Men in
orange overalls slide down fireman poles! Neil helping people! Abandon ship!

‘Maybe
you need a break from it, Neil,’ I said. ‘Think about something else for a
month or so and then get back to it with a fresh brain?’

‘No,’
said Neil. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

A woman
from the gang at the bar came over to our table.

‘I’m
sorry, but would you mind signing this for my daughter?’ she asked, putting a
beer mat and a biro on the table.

Neil
obliged automatically, and while he was writing, she added, ‘Could you put, “Get
to bed
now
or else …!”‘ The nearest thing Neil had to a catchphrase in
EOW
.

He did,
and handed the mat and pen back to her.

‘You
can say you’ve been recognized now,’ she said, as if offering Neil charity, and
returned to the group at the bar, who nodded and thumbs-upped us again.

‘I’ve
got about five thousand words but I can’t work at home, the phone keeps
ringing. Karen’s got patients coming in and out all day long and her teenage
son is coming back from university next week. If I had the money, I’d get a
room somewhere and just write.’

Before
Grace, I would have instantly offered him my own flat during the day. Now, not
possible. We had more drinks and I smoked another cigarette.

But I
didn’t leave without telling him what I thought, however tactfully I may have
put it.

On the
way back to Soho I made a note to ring Bill Burdett-Coutts about a possible
Edinburgh booking for Neil. I felt sure that, if the gig was there, he’d rise
to the occasion, he’d have to.

All the
phone conversations I had at work the next day seemed to be happening in a place
other than my head. I could participate and function perfectly well, listening,
responding, thinking even, but the old aeroplane was on automatic and
air-traffic control had gone AWOL. Inside my head there was a dank, dead
acoustic, like the ‘thunk’ a spoon makes on the side of a bowl of whipped
cream. It was as if I was underwater and Guy Muffin was up there above the
surface, gabbing on and on in some untranslatable patois. I made it through the
day like this. And I made it over to Susan Planter’s in Chiswick, where I’d
been invited for dinner à
deux
and a chinwag about the evils of Jeremy.

‘And
how’s Liz?’ Susan asked.

‘Oh,
she’s very well. Very well indeed.’

‘And
Grace?’

‘She’s
fine. Fine. Starts big school in September.’

In fact
I hadn’t seen Grace for six whole days. The longest time ever. She could have
grown a shoe size or forgotten all about me by now for all I knew.

‘Liz
picked the right man in you, Guy.’ Susan Planter ran her hand through her hair
and refilled her wine glass. I took the pasta off and asked her where the
strainer was. I was meant to be talking to her while she cooked us supper, but
it was turning out to be the other way round. She was looking considerably the
worse for wear. Poor love.

‘You’re
so dependable, Guy. I still can’t get used to you smoking, though. It doesn’t
look right somehow.’

Her
complexion was in revolt at the stress of the last fortnight and she had
unsuccessfully tried to plaster over the bumps with a thick base. A translucent
pre-foundation would have done the trick more effectively but it would have
been wrong for me to mention it. She was wearing an old sweatshirt and cardigan
—comfort clothes — the sort of stuff you pad around the house in after getting
over ‘flu, or when your husband has just gone off with another woman.

Polly
came to the kitchen door in her Paddington Bear pyjamas.

‘He’s
pushing my bed, Mummy, and I can’t go to sleep.’

‘Tell
him to stop,’ said Susan, and then shouted up the stairs, ‘Dave! Stop pushing
Polly’s bed.’

‘I didn’t.
She left my computer things on the floor.’

I
poured a glass of water and gave it to Polly. Susan gave her a peck and she
went back upstairs.

‘I have
always thought of you and Liz as the perfect couple,’ said Susan, getting in my
way as I stirred in the pesto sauce from a jar.

‘Here.
Why don’t you put all this on the table?’ I loaded her up with the salad bowl
and things. I had to get her out of her kitchen, or this meal would never
arrive. I did manage to get her sat down, though, and bringing the pasta in, we
started to eat at last.

‘So
what’s she like, this Arabella?’ It didn’t look as though Susan was actually
going to eat much tonight. She poured herself another glass of wine. Luckily, I’d
brought a couple of bottles. Since I was eating, I could measure my reply
through mouthfuls.

‘She’s
sort of ordinary,’ I said. ‘Not too bright — but I see what you mean, she seems
to have got her hooks in.’ I had to be careful neither to build up the other
woman too much nor talk her down unrealistically. Susan told me another story
of some misdeed of Jeremy’s. How he’d once forgotten her birthday, or one of
the kids’. Then another: the time he’d left her stranded at a BBC do and taken
the taxi home without her.

It was
as if she was sorting back through her diary of memories, setting in cement all
the ones in which Jeremy had been a bastard so that she could now justify to
herself all her feelings of loathing towards him. It wasn’t making her any
happier, though, and her words were beginning to run into one another. I opened
a third bottle, for myself more than for her. She was beginning to berate all
things male. I didn’t like to see her turning into another ‘what’s wrong with
men’ bore, so I tried to steer us back to the here and now.

‘He
doesn’t care about the kids., how could he, so why should he get to see them
now?’ she slurred.

‘Do
they ask for him?’ I said, and lit a Dunhill. The machine in the pub next door
where I’d gone for a quick drink so as not to be too early had run out of Silk
Cut.

‘Dave
does but he’ll have to grow out of it,’ she said.

I found
it hard to imagine the Susan I knew sneaking around in the night to squeeze
Superglue into .the locks of Jeremy’s car, as Arabella had told me she had.

‘Arabella
Planter.’ With disgust, Susan rolled the name around her tongue with the wine,
which was acrid and cheap. ‘Mrs Arabella Planter.’

‘They’re
not intending to get married, I don’t think,’ I said.

‘Ha!’
she said. ‘Not and have clothes to stand in.’

‘You
are being careful who you talk to, though? I mean, in the press, aren’t you?’ I
said, clearing away the plates. She’d hardly touched her food.

‘Why
should I be?’ Susan followed me back into the kitchen, where she took an opened
family-sized bar of chocolate out of the cupboard. She offered me some but I
was stuck into the wine now.

‘You
can’t trust any of them, you know that. Did they offer to pay you for that
interview you did the week before last? Because once they’ve paid, they can say
what they like, you know.’

‘How
much do you think it’s worth?’ she asked, and laughed.

Publicity
and the press isn’t really my bag. I’m not that good at it and I find it tacky,
but I said, ‘Two or three thousand at this stage, possibly a couple more if you
can hung in a sexual perversion or two.’ We both laughed.

‘I
suppose I could invent something, but the trouble with Jeremy was, he was
useless in bed, after the first two months, that is,’ she said, gobbling the
chocolate.

It was
important for her, at this stage, to have him locked in the drawer marked ‘Cad’,
and he’d been a cad, no doubt about that. She should have known, though. Didn’t
her parents tell her? ‘Have fun with the cads, but marry a dad.’

‘I just
think you should try and keep it under control, that’s all,’ I said. ‘For
everyone’s sake. For Dave and Polly’s sake.’

‘What
if I did an interview for money? You’d take ten per cent of that, would you?’

‘Look,
I’m not Max Clifford. This isn’t my scene. I don’t want either of you to get
hurt any more than is inevitable. It’s difficult for me, I like you both.’