Year show at Wembley. It was the longest four weeks of Billy’s life. When he couldn’t get Janey on the telephone he nearly flew back. He discussed her endlessly with Rupert.
“You know I’m hopeless at playing the field. I want to marry her.”
Rupert looked thunderstruck. “You can’t marry her. You don’t even know her.”
“I’ve spent a whole day with her.”
“You haven’t even screwed her yet?”
“I have, too,” said Billy sulkily, “and it was marvelous.”
Rupert looked even more disapproving. “Then she’s just a whore, going to bed with you on the first date. It wasn’t even a date. She came to interview you, wormed it all out of you. You wait until her piece appears. ‘Billy Lloyd-Foxe is not only a silver medalist, he also gets the gold in the sack.’ ”
“Oh, fuck off,” said Billy furiously. “Why d’you reduce everything to your own disgusting level?”
25
The moment Billy got back he rang the news desk at Janey’s paper, to be told that she was away. Her interview with Jack Nicholson had taken longer than expected — Billy wondered miserably what form it had taken — and she was expected back sometime that week.
Now it was the fifth day of the Horse of the Year show and there was no sign of her. He must have passed the competitors’ board fifty times a day in the hope of a message. Every time he saw a tawny mane of hair in the crowd his stomach disappeared. His fears that she’d been nice to him only because she wanted some good quotes were multiplied when he talked to Joanna Battie and Dudley Diplock.
“Did they know her?” he asked.
“ ’Course I do,” said Joanna. “She’s her paper’s star writer, hang gliding one week, going into battle in a tank the next, interviewing Prince Charles the next. Pretty high-powered stuff.”
“Very pretty,” said Billy.
“Very,” said Dudley with a wolfish laugh. “Puts herself about by all accounts. Fleet Street claims she got to the top on her back.”
“On her front,” said Joanna. “Janey’s much too liberated to accept the missionary position.”
Billy felt quite sick. “Are you sure?”
“Well, let’s say she’s a bloody good journalist and, like most of them, she’s not too particular how she gets her information. They pay her well. I reckon she’s on twenty thou a year, don’t you, Joanna?”
After a sleepless night, Billy talked to Rupert as they exercised the horses. Rupert was reassuringly outraged.
“For God’s sake! Remember the things they’ve said about you and me in the past, even implying we’re a couple of fags. You know it’s all fairy tales. They make it up to excite themselves. Christ, Revenge is sluggish. I’m going to have to nail up his box during the day to stop the public stuffing him with goodies.”
At that moment Humpty Hamilton came waddling past in a pale blue quilted waistcoat. “Hi, Sweet William,” he said, and waddled on, roaring with laughter.
Next to come by was Driffield. “Hello, great lover,” he sneered. “Seen the paper?”
Finally, as Billy was handing The Bull back to Tracey, Lavinia rode into the practice ring. “Hello, Sweet William,” she said, an acid note creeping into her voice. “You
Heart thumping, Billy ran to the newsstand.
“Hi, Sweet William,” said the man behind the counter, handing him a newspaper. “You’ve boosted my sales so much this morning you can have it for free.”
Billy retired behind a pillar. Janey’s piece was in the middle, opposite the leader page, with a huge heading “Sweet Sweet William” and a picture of Billy taken from an extremely flattering angle.
“When I went to see Billy Lloyd-Foxe,” Janey had written, “I took him a bunch of freesias. They should have been sweet Williams, since he is easily the nicest man I have ever met.” Then there was a lot of guff about his Jean-Paul Belmondo looks, and his clinching the team silver and winning the King’s Cup. Then it ended:
“We all know of his sympathy with animals, his brilliant horsemanship, and his ability to smile even in the bitterest defeat. Last year he admits he was heartbroken when his long-standing girlfriend, Lavinia Greenslade, married French hearthrob Guy de la Tour. Since then the only female in Billy’s life has been Mavis, his blond mongrel, who follows him everywhere, bestowing a slit-eyed expression of marked disapproval on any lady intruder.
“Billy lives with Helen and Rupert Campbell-Black, and his soothing, easygoing presence must be a great help in sustaining a somewhat volatile marriage. But Billy, with characteristic modesty, says he owes everything to Rupert (including money, he adds with a smile). He also has the highest praise for his chef d’equipe, martinet Malise Gordon, and of course The Bull — who eats the fruit out of the Pimm’s jug — with whom he jumped a final clear in the team event to clinch the silver for Britain. He may only have got a silver, but he’s got a heart of gold. I haven’t heard a bad word about him on the circuit. After seven hours in his company, all I can say is please give me back my heart, Billy. Our offices are open to accept parcels twenty-four hours a day.”
Billy read it incredulously over and over and over again. It was a love letter. He rushed to the telephone. There was still no answer at Janey’s flat. The Features desk said she’d got back last night and was racing to finish the Nicholson piece and had probably switched off her telephone. Billy couldn’t bear it. He had to see her. He told Rupert he was going into London for a couple of hours.
“Well, don’t be too long,” said Rupert, grinning. “You’re obviously better in the sack than I thought. And what’s this about my ‘somewhat volatile marriage’? What does ‘volatile’ mean — that I’m always out on the tiles?”
Billy took a taxi to Janey’s flat. It was a long time before she answered. Compared with her glamorously tawny appearance before, she looked pale and black under the eyes and rather unadorned like a sitting room the day after the Christmas cards are taken down.
“Billy,” she said, “how lovely to see you.” She didn’t sound as though it was at all.
“I’m sorry to barge in, but I’ve missed you like hell.”
She backed away nervously. “Darling, I’m terribly sorry, I can’t stop. The office want Jack Nicholson by tomorrow lunchtime, so I’ll have to work all night.”
“Surely you can stop for five minutes.”
“I can’t, honestly. I’ve got complete brain freeze, I’ve just got to crack it.”
“The piece you wrote about me, it was so kind, and ludicrously flattering.”
She smiled, looking suddenly more like the Janey who’d come down to Penscombe. “Did they run it today? They must have held it back for the Horse of the Year. I filed the copy weeks ago.”
And perhaps she feels quite differently about me now, thought Billy. He was dying to ask about Jack Nicholson. Instead he said, “It’s the last night tomorrow. Will you have dinner with me afterwards?”
“I don’t know. I’m supposed to be dining with some MP as a preliminary interview. What time d’you finish?”
“About eleven, but I’m off to Washington, New York, and Toronto on Monday, and I must see you.”
“You must go now, but I really will try and make it tomorrow.”
“I’ll leave a ticket at the gate. Janey, I love…”
But she’d shut the door on him. Billy was filled with black despair. She hadn’t seemed pleased to see him, dismayed in fact, and rather guilty and not looking him in the eye. If she’d filed that copy weeks ago, she was bound to have met someone else in America.
Back in her flat, Janey Henderson felt equally suicidal. Her vanity wouldn’t allow her to explain to Billy that she’d already been home for forty-eight hours on a crash diet, in order to look ravishing for him on Saturday night. He’d caught her at the worst possible moment — she’d been writing and hadn’t got dressed or had a bath or used deodorant for two days. Her body had that rank smell of fear and sweat that always drenched her when she was
