‘Won’t you be needing your briefcase, Minister?’ asked a male steward, shimmying down the gangway.
Rupert Campbell-Black shook his head. ‘No thanks, sweetheart.’
‘Have a nice zizz then,’ said the male steward, going crimson with pleasure at the endearment.
As the doors slammed shut, Rupert collapsed into the seat across the gangway from Tony. Wearing a crumpled cream suit, a blue striped shirt, dark glasses and with an eighth of an inch of stubble on his chin, he looked more like a rock star than one of Her Majesty’s ministers.
‘Terribly sorry, Gerald,’ he murmured to the pale young man in the pinstripe suit. ‘There was a terrible pile-up on the M4.’
Smiling thinly, Gerald removed a blonde hair from Rupert’s lapel.
‘I really must buy you an alarm clock for Christmas, Minister. If you’d missed that lunchtime speech, we’d have been in real stuck. Good of them to hold the plane.’
‘Thank Christ they did.’ Looking round, Rupert saw Tony Baddingham and grinned. ‘Why, it’s the big Baddingham wolf.’
‘Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t you?’ said Tony disapprovingly.
Both men required each other’s goodwill. Rupert, as an MP within Tony’s television company’s territory, needed the coverage, whereas Tony needed Rupert’s recommendation to the Government that he was running a respectable company. But it didn’t make either like the other any better.
‘Bloody good results you had this morning,’ said Rupert, fastening his seat belt. ‘I’d better buy some Corinium shares.’
Slightly mollified, Tony congratulated Rupert on his recent appointment as Tory Minister for Sport.
Rupert shrugged. ‘The PM’s shit-scared about football hooliganism — seems to think I can come up with some magic formula.’
‘Setting a Yobbo to catch a Yobbo perhaps,’ said Tony nastily, then regretted it.
‘I was at Thames Television yesterday,’ said Rupert icily, as the plane taxied towards the runway. ‘After the programme I had a drink with the Home Secretary and the Chairman of the IBA. They were both saying that you’d better watch out. If you don’t spend a bit more of that bloody fortune you’re coining from advertising on making some decent programmes, you’re going to lose your franchise.’
As Rupert leant forward so Tony could hear him over the engines, Tony caught a whiff of the scent the girl had been wearing in the Post House foyer earlier.
‘And you ought to spend some time in the area. How the hell can you run a television company in the Cotswolds, if you spend all your time in London, hawking your ass round the advertising companies?’
‘The shareholders wouldn’t be very pleased if I didn’t,’ said Tony, thoroughly nettled. ‘Look at our results.’
Rupert shrugged again. ‘You’re also supposed to make good programmes. As your local MP I’m just passing on what’s being said.’
‘As one of your more influential constituents,’ said Tony, furiously, ‘I don’t think you should be checking into the Post House with bimbos half your age.’
Rupert laughed. ‘That was no bimbo, that was Beattie Johnson.’
Of course! Instantly Tony remembered the girl. Beattie Johnson was one of the most scurrilous and successful women columnists — dubbed by
‘She’s ghosting my memoirs,’ added Rupert. ‘We were doing research. I always believe in laying one’s ghost.’
Below the blank stare of the dark glasses, his curved smiling mouth seemed even more insolent. As the plane revved up, both men turned to look out of the window, and Tony found himself trembling with rage. But not even the splendid, striped-silk-shirted bosom of the air hostess, which rose and fell as she showed passengers how to inflate their life jackets, could keep Rupert’s eyes open. By the time they were airborne, he was asleep.
Tony accepted a glass of champagne and tried to concentrate on the
There had hardly been a husband in Gloucestershire, indeed in the world, Tony reflected, who hadn’t cheered four years ago when Rupert’s beautiful wife, Helen, had walked out on him in the middle of the Los Angeles Olympics, running off with another rider and causing Rupert the maximum humiliation.
But, infuriatingly, Rupert had appeared outwardly unaffected and had risen to the occasion by winning a show-jumping gold medal despite a trapped shoulder nerve, and going on two years later to win the World Championship, the only prize hitherto to elude him. Then, giving up show jumping at the pinnacle of his fame, he had moved effortlessly into politics, winning the Tory seat of Chalford and Bisley with ease. Even worse, he had turned out a surprisingly good MP, being very quick on his feet, totally unfazed by the Opposition or the Prime Minister, and prepared to fight very hard for his constituency.
Although scandal had threatened eighteen months ago, when Rupert’s then mistress, Amanda Hamilton, wife of the Foreign Secretary, had withdrawn her patronage on finding out that Rupert was also sleeping with her teenage daughter, by this time, in the eyes of a doting Prime Minister, Rupert could do no wrong. Now, as Minister for Sport, with Gerald Middleton as an exceptional private secretary to do all the donkey work, Rupert was free to roam round exuding glamour, raising money for the Olympic team here, defusing a riot against a South African athlete there. Responsibility, however, hadn’t cleaned up his private life at all. Divorced from Helen, he could behave as he chose, hence his cavorting with Beattie Johnson in the Post House that morning.
Glancing at Rupert, sprawled out on the pale-grey leather seat, taking up most of Gerald’s leg room, beautiful despite the emergent stubble, Tony felt a further stab of jealousy. He couldn’t remember a time in his forty-four years when he hadn’t envied the Campbell-Blacks. For all their outlandish behaviour, they had always been looked up to in Gloucestershire. They had lived in the same beautiful house in Penscombe for generations, while Tony was brought up behind net curtains in a boring semi in the suburbs of Cheltenham. Tony also had a chip because he only went to a grammar school, where he’d been teased for being fat and short, and because his conventional colourless father (although subsequently ennobled for his work in the war) had been considered far too valuable as a munitions manufacturer to be allowed to go off and fight, unlike Rupert’s father, Eddie, who’d had a dazzling war in the Blues.
Even when Tony’s father had been given his peerage, Eddie Campbell-Black and his cronies had laughed, always referring to him dismissively as Lord Pop-Pop, as they blasted away slaughtering wild life with one of his products on their large estates.
Growing up near the Campbell-Blacks, Tony had longed to be invited to Penscombe and drawn into that rackety, exciting set. But the privilege had been bestowed on his brother Basil, who was ten years younger and who, because Tony’s father had made his pile by then, had been given a pony to ride and sent to Harrow instead of a grammar school, and had there become a friend of Rupert’s.
As a result of such imagined early deprivation, Tony had grown up indelibly competitive — not just at work, but also socially, sexually, and at all games. Spurning the family firm when he left school, he’d gone straight into advertising and specialized in buying television air time. Having learnt the form, from there he moved to the advertising side of television. A brilliant entrepreneur, who felt he was slipping unless he had a dozen calls from Tokyo and New York during Christmas dinner, by changing jobs repeatedly he had gained the plum post of Chief Executive at Corinium Television eight years ago.
Having shot up to five feet ten and lost his puppy fat in his twenties, Tony had in middle age grown very attractive in a brutal sort of way; although with his Roman nose, heavy-lidded charcoal-grey eyes, coarsely modelled mouth and springy close-cropped dark hair, he looked more like a Sicilian wide boy than an English peer. He chose to proclaim the latter, however, by wearing coronets on absolutely everything. And on the little finger on his left hand gleamed a massive gold signet ring, sporting the Baddingham crest of wrestling rams, above the motto chosen by Lord Pop-Pop: Peaceful is the country that is strongly armed.
Considerably adding to Tony’s sex appeal was a hunky bull-necked body, kept in shape by self-control and ruthless exercise, and a voice deliberately deep and smooth to eradicate any trace of a Gloucestershire accent. This only slipped when he went into one of his terrifying rages, which flattened the Corinium Television staff against the
