Rivals

during late-night sittings. It had never looked more seductive. If he had an hour’s kip, he might work better. He had another six o’clock start in the morning. The telephone ringing made him jump.

‘Rupert, it’s Cameron.’

Christ, he’d completely forgotten to ring her back.

‘Angel! You got home safely?’

‘Well, I’m not lying in a pile of wreckage at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay.’ All the insecurity and truculence had returned to her voice. It must have cost her a lot to ring.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t ring back. It’s been frantic, and I didn’t want to tread on Tony’s bunions. When am I going to see you?’ He suppressed a yawn.

‘Christ knows,’ snapped Cameron. ‘Tony’s taking me away for the weekend.’

‘To Buckingham Palace?’

Cameron didn’t laugh. ‘To LA, to close a couple of deals over Easter. Then we fly straight to Cannes to meet with our various co-production partners and firm up existing relationships. I won’t be back till Monday week.’

Rupert glanced at the calendar. Monday week was 22nd April. He’d be away until the 26th and the franchises had to be in on the 29th. That would give him hardly any time after she got back to persuade her to join Venturer. He ought to establish interim ascendancy over Tony by seeing her this evening.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘At home.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll drive down.’

‘Are you crazy? D’you know what time it is?’ But it was impossible for her to keep the elation out of her voice.

‘I’ve got at least an hour’s work,’ said Rupert. ‘The drive at this time of night should take an hour and a half. I can’t afford to get done for speeding. I’ll be with you about two.’

Thank God, he’d had a shower and changed at Penscombe earlier in the evening; it seemed a thousand years ago. He trusted Sydney, but not entirely, so he dismissed him and took the Ferrari, which was parked outside his Westminster flat. Torrential rain on the motorway gave way to moonlight as he reached the outskirts of Cotchester. The cathedral clock was tolling the hour; the shadow of the spire lay thick and black across the watermeadows. He was so tired he’d never be able to get it up.

Cameron, however, opened the front door with nothing on.

‘I might have been the milkman,’ said Rupert reprovingly.

‘You’re not that late,’ she whispered.

As her warm, oiled and scented body twined round him, she was obviously so delighted to see him that miraculously Rupert woke up.

Bounding upstairs after her, he decided this was one relationship he would have absolutely no difficulty firming up.

29

Although Cameron was kept ludicrously busy selling herself and Corinium’s programmes, she was shattered by how much she missed Rupert. LA was bad enough, but Cannes seemed so tantalizingly near. Every minute on the Corinium stand or on the front, or at the numerous parties, or in her hotel bedroom, conveniently next to Tony’s, she expected Rupert to appear grinning like a Cheshire cat.

On her second Thursday away from him, however, her black mood was caused by rage rather than longing. One of Tony’s myriad subsidiary companies, Falconry Films Inc., had made a lousy mini-series called ‘Stowaway’, about an aristocratic orphan who disguised herself as a cabin boy on a clipper ship and got off with the pirate captain. And now Tony had actually sailed a real clipper ship, at vast expense, into Cannes Harbour as a publicity stunt and was holding a huge bash on board. Sourly watching all the fatcat international buyers and their bikinied bimbos stuffing their faces with champagne and caviare, Cameron felt they were guzzling all the profits she’d made Corinium from ‘Four Men went to Mow’.

The Mediterranean suited Tony; his olive skin had already turned mahogany. As he purred round the clipper ship in his dark glasses and discreetly coroneted black shirt, clinching deals and pinching bottoms, he looked more like a pirate king than ever.

Cameron had had plenty of time to compare Tony with Rupert while she was away. Both were reputed to be absolute shits. But, while Tony was coldly sensual, utterly venal, eaten up with envy and sadistically dedicated to putting people down, Rupert, Cameron felt, was only sharp-tongued because he was arrogant and easily bored. Apart from the day they went to Toledo, when he’d been reminded too much of Helen (which showed he was capable of deep feeling), he had been angelic and really interested not only in her as a woman, but in her career, and her programmes. She had been so touched that he’d driven all the way down to Cotchester on that last night, and that after he’d made love to her he hadn’t fallen asleep as most men would, but stayed awake pestering her with questions about what she and Tony would be doing and selling in LA and Cannes.

It was a relief too that he couldn’t call her, so she didn’t go through the roof with expectation every time the telephone rang. Instead, at grave risk, she’d rung him twice from LA and every day from Cannes.

There was no doubt, too, that she was the flavour of the month at the festival. The third series of ‘Four Men went to Mow’ had already been pre-sold world wide. The Corinium publicity department had taken a full page advertisement in Broadcast that week, with a stunning photograph of Cameron holding a baby lamb, with the caption: ‘Cameron Cook works for Corinium, meet her on stand 329’, then listing all the prizes she’d won in the last year. Everyone wanted to congratulate her and offer her work.

Back at The Priory, Declan was still working on the Venturer application, only pausing occasionally to pick up the binoculars on the window seat to check on some newly-arrived migrant bird; swallows, housemartins, whitethroats were all winging in now. Last night he had even heard the first nightingale in the wood.

‘Our duty,’ wrote Declan, ‘is to tell the truth, to be relevant, entertaining and interesting, to monitor power and expose its abuse, to be nobody’s mouthpiece.’

Christ, it was difficult not to use cliches, to be concise: To bring the balloon of the mind that bellies and drags in the wind, as Yeats had so perfectly put it, into its narrow shed.

‘We will give the area a nationally recognized television identity,’ he wrote. ‘This we feel Corinium has failed to do. In their last application they promised to provide a new studio, a new youth orchestra, a trust fund for the arts and sciences, adequate training schemes and worker participation at board level. This they have failed to do.

‘They also promised that fifty per cent of their profits after tax would go to shareholders, and the rest would be ploughed back into making programmes. This they have also failed to do.’

He was about to tackle Venturer’s programme plans, when Gertrude leapt barking off the sofa, scattering papers, as Rupert and Freddie walked in.

‘Christ, you’re a slut, Declan,’ said Rupert, looking round at the files, tapes, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays that covered every available inch of space. ‘Why don’t you let Taggie tidy up a bit?’

‘I’m superstitious,’ grumbled Declan. ‘I never tidy up between books in case I throw pages away.’

Rupert threw a copy of Broadcast, open at Cameron’s advertisement, down on Declan’s desk. ‘We must have her for Venturer.’

‘She’s riding far too high to be interested in us,’ said Declan quickly.

‘She’s not. She’s really pissed off,’ said Rupert. ‘She was on to me from Cannes only half an hour ago grumbling that Tony’d blued forty-five grand hiring a boat to promote some crappy mini series not even made by Corinium.’