Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

unusual at his age.

I dared to ask, ‘You don’t think it’s time to move on?’

He shook his head and – so like his father – his stubborn look closed down his face. ‘No.’ We were negotiating a barbed-wire fence. Sam pushed down the top strand and I manoeuvred myself over it. ‘You know, I hate to give up.’ A thought struck him. ‘Are you saying you don’t like Alice?’

‘I was just wondering if you’d had enough of feeling miserable about it and if it was time to give yourself a breathing space.’ Sam’s trousers were hooked up on the wire and I bent to free him. ‘Have you spoken to your father?’

‘Dad?’

‘Who else is your father?’

‘He seemed all right. He was just off to Greece, but he was asking about you.’

We slithered down a dry slope to a field at the bottom and filed along the bank of a stream. A clump of chestnuts had thrown their branches across it, and the water was cool and mysteriously dappled. There was the flash of a dragonfly, the undulating flutter of a cabbage white, and clouds of flies swarming over cowpats.

‘I think Dad feels cut in half with guilt, and he worries about you.’ Sam came to a halt on the stone bridge between fields and leant on the parapet.

‘Worries about me? I’m worried about him.’ I stood beside him and observed the dragonflies skimming the water. ‘Sam… it seems wasteful to cause such an upheaval then feel cut up with guilt.’

Sam shot me a look. ‘I went to see them, you know.’ He scratched at a patch of moss on the stone, which made his fingernail black. ‘I can’t help feeling that Dad is busy convincing himself’

‘Don’t.’

He scratched at more moss, and tiny parings slithered down the stone. ‘Sometimes I think I hate her because she has such a hold on me,’ he exploded. ‘Does that make sense?’

He meant Alice. ‘Perfectly,’ I said.

We walked back across the field to the car. ‘Actually, I’m worried about Ianthe and Poppy. Ianthe is so stubborn sometimes, and she won’t tell me what’s going on. Except that the doctor is keeping a weather eye on her.

‘Like mother, like daughter,’ said Sam.

‘As for Poppy… we don’t know anything useful about Richard or why she suddenly decided to get married,’ I said.

Sam bent down to pick a blade a grass and sucked at the pulpy stalk. ‘Poppy always lands on her feet. When’s she due back?’

‘That’s just it. I don’t know’ I bit my lip. ‘I wish I did. I wish I knew how she was.’

Sam’s hand on my shoulder was infinitely comforting.

Just as I was leaving Alice arrived back from her conference. ‘So sorry I wasn’t here,’ she said, and kissed me, ‘but I’ll make Sam invite you more often.’ I was surprised because I thought she meant it. Without pausing, she dumped her bag by the door, carried her laptop into the sitting room and unzipped it. ‘I’m sure you two had a lovely time.’ She flipped up the screen. ‘Sorry, just have to do one thing.’ She looked at me. ‘Have you got a job yet, Rose?’

Back in London, there was a letter waiting from Neil Skinner, who had, as he predicted, been shifted to the arts ministry, asking me if I was at liberty to do a couple of weeks’ research work for him. The PS read, ‘Not terrific pay, I’m afraid.’ I contacted him, and he explained that he wanted some facts and figures, plus a toe-in-the-water assessment of how public opinion would react to raising the rates of the Public Lending Right, which was currently under review.

I spent two exhausting but enjoyable weeks trawling through reports and statistics, and making phone calls to people who were always on holiday. One was to Timon – What the hell? I thought – who, to his credit, came on the line. ‘Ah, Rose,’ he said. ‘A bird told me that you’re looking well. Are you well?’

I informed Timon that, all things considered, I had never been better, and outlined my questions: did he think there would be support in the press for the case? Would he give it space in the paper? Timon did not hesitate. ‘I don’t think anyone, least of all in the press, would care a monkey’s if an author got an extra tenpence on his earnings. Or not. I wouldn’t waste more than a paragraph on it.’

‘So that means the government can do more or less as it likes?’

‘Rose, do you imagine that the press has any effect on what the government thinks?’ We laughed, and he added, ‘It’s not fair that it’s not a sexy subject, but there we are.’

‘That’s what I needed to know. Thank you.’

‘Rose, since we’re talking, was it always your decision as to what the lead title should be each week?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Who else?’

‘Have you been keeping an eye on the pages?’

‘No, I haven’t. Should I? Are they not up to scratch?’

‘I’m not going to answer that. But sometimes experience counts.’

‘Don’t tempt me to say something unwise.’

‘Sounds interesting. Would you like to come and have lunch?’

I was startled. ‘In the office?’

‘Don’t be witless. At a restaurant of your choice.’

‘No, thank you.’

Timon chuckled. ‘See you at the Caprice.’

Neil was pleased with the work I submitted and invited me to the House of Commons for dinner. To my astonishment, I enjoyed listening to political gossip and afterwards he took me down to the bar for a nightcap. ‘There’s someone here you might like to meet. Charles, can I introduce Rose Lloyd? She’s been doing some work for me. Rose, this is Charles Madder.’

‘This is my wife, Rose,’ Nathan used to say, keeping his hand lightly and possessively on my arm. After the children had grown up, that is, and he had decided he could be proud of my job. ‘She’s a literary editor.’

A tall, dark man was propping up the bar. ‘Hallo, Neil.’ He was whippet thin and his face was creased and unutterably sad. It was not the face of a man whom anyone might imagine kept a mistress with exotic tastes. ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ I said.

He examined the contents of his glass. ‘So am I.’

‘I hope the children are… coping.’ He looked at me as if to suggest that we might as well dispense with the anodyne comments because only the truth had any point: the children would not cope for a long time. ‘I’ve thought about your family for a particular reason,’ I continued, ‘because at the time I worked for the Vistemax Group. Many of us felt some responsibility.’

The thin nostrils flared with disdain and weariness. ‘You know that Flora went to them in the first place? That’s how they got on to the story.’

I looked round the bar. It was a masculine place, with puffed leather furniture, large ashtrays and a miasma of smoke. ‘I didn’t know.’

He peered into my face. ‘You look too nice to have worked for Vistemax.’

‘It’s not a question of niceness. There are a lot of nice, right-thinking people who work for it. For any paper.’

‘That’s a free press.’

We were touching on several issues, and here was a man who had been badly hurt in his private and public life. I said gently, ‘It’s a press that relies on personal stories to flesh out its pages. In that respect, they were doing their job.’

Neil touched me on the arm. ‘I’m just going to have a word with someone over there,’ he said. ‘Back soon.’

I said to Charles Madder, ‘I sometimes question if the free press results in exactly the opposite because everyone is too frightened of being exposed to do or say anything honestly. Our honest thoughts don’t bear examination in the press or they become hostages to fortune. Or, the honesty is interpreted so wrongly that it becomes a lie.’