Jims was happy with the piece but knew the ways of the media as Zillah didn’t. He could hardly have been in the Commons for seven years without knowing their ways. “Tabloids are often okay until they’ve got their knife into you,” he said to Zillah. “Magazines are fine, magazines are pussycats. It’s national dailies like the Guardian you want to worry about.”
“It might be useful for me to put in a presence,” said Malina, meaning she ought to be there, “when Zillah meets with the print media, especially the quality broadsheets.”
“Good idea,” Jims agreed.
Zillah didn’t like Malina. She hadn’t been told the truth about the marriage but had guessed. Sometimes Zillah thought she’d caught her smiling secretly to herself. She was in and out of the flat in Abbey Gardens Mansions, popping into bedrooms, Zillah suspected, opening drawers and poking her long, slender fingers into desk pigeonholes. Malina had a boyfriend who was a top cardiologist in Harley Street and she was thinner than Zillah, maybe two whole dress sizes thinner.
She didn’t want Malina present when she talked to the Times and the Telegraph. It was bad enough having the photographer there, taking pictures when she was off her guard and had her mouth open or held her head at an awkward angle. Malina’s secretive little smile and way of contemplating with admiration her own hands and silver-painted nails would be, in her own word, “inappropriate.” So Zillah said nothing to her about the forthcoming interview with a freelancer for the Telegraph Magazine. Jims would be absent too, in the Commons Chamber on that day for the local government bill.
She was waiting for the photographer to come, standing in the window looking across toward Dean’s Yard, when she saw a car draw up and park by the curb on a double yellow line. A newspaper photographer ought to know better. They’d tow him away or clamp him. She opened the window, preparing to call out to him not to leave the car there, but instead of getting out, the driver stayed where he was behind the wheel. Zillah couldn’t see very clearly, but in spite of the car being a BMW and a far cry from the ancient Ford Anglia he had driven away in after their last meeting, she was almost sure the man was Jerry.
She put her head out of the window and stared. He was studying something, probably a map or plan. It looked a lot like Jerry, but from this distance she couldn’t be sure. If this photographer and journalist hadn’t been coming she’d have gone down and made sure of his identity and, if it was Jerry, confronted him. If they weren’t coming she wouldn’t have been all dressed up in skintight purple trousers, shoes with three-inch heels, and a black and white bustier. She closed the window. It was too far away to see properly. The man in the car looked up. It was Jerry. Surely it was. And whose was the dark blue BMW? Not his, that was for sure. The doorbell rang.
The photographer had come from the Abbey direction, which was why she hadn’t seen him. He had an assistant with him, the usual teenager, or teenager lookalike, and the two of them started setting up, spreading ice white sheets all over the furniture and opening and shutting a silver-lined umbrella. Zillah went back to the window. A traffic warden was talking to the man in the BMW. She hoped he’d get out so that she could have a proper look at him. He didn’t, but drove off toward Millbank.
Zillah didn’t enjoy the interview. The journalist was once again a woman but serious-looking and austerely dressed in a black trouser suit. She introduced herself as Natalie Reckman. Her features were severely classical and her fair hair was scraped back and fastened by a barrette. She wore no jewelry but a thick, heavy, and curiously sculpted gold ring on her right hand. A businesslike notebook was taken out of her black leather briefcase, as was a recording device. Zillah, who had been feeling glamorously dressed, was suddenly conscious of the ornate Oriental necklace she was wearing, amethysts in tooled silver, the fashionable dozen or so bead bracelets, and the earrings dangling to her shoulders. And the questions put to her were more awkward than usual, more probing.
This woman was the first journalist to say nothing complimentary about her appearance. At first she seemed more interested in Jims than in his new wife. Zillah did her best to talk about him as an ardent young bride might about her new husband. How clever he was, how considerate of her, and what a wise move it was to marry one’s best friend. As to his political career, he was so dutiful that they’d postponed their honeymoon until Easter. They were going to the Maldives. Darling Jims would have preferred Morocco, he was longing to go there, but he’d deferred to her choice of the Maldives. They’d go to Morocco in the winter.
Natalie Reckman yawned. She sat up straight and the interview took a different turn. After trying to find out what Zillah had done for a living before she married and being reluctant to accept her vague description of herself as an “artist,” she asked with some incredulity if she was expected to believe the MP’s new bride had really lived by herself in a Dorset village for seven years without a job, a partner, or any friends. Zillah, who was becoming angry, said she could believe what she liked. Zillah was thinking quickly whether it was too late to mention the children, to bring them into the conversation somehow. But how to account for never before confessing to their existence?
The journalist smiled. She began asking about Jims. How long had they known each other? Twenty-two years? Yet they’d never been seen about together before their marriage nor, apparently, lived under the same roof.
“Not everyone agrees with premarital sex,” said Zillah.
The journalist looked Zillah up and down, from the earrings and the big hair to her stiletto heels. “You’re one of those who don’t?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. That’s fine. I expect you’ve heard your husband used to be grouped with several MPs that a rather censorious person who shall be nameless threatened to “out.” What do you feel about that?”
Zillah was beginning to regret the absence of Malina. “That’s something else I’d prefer not to talk about.”
“Surely you’d like to say there was no truth in the rumor?”
“If you print anything about my husband being gay,” said Zillah, her control going, “I’ll sue you for libel.”
“Now, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith, or Zillah, if I may, that’s a very interesting thing you’ve just said. It seems to show you think it’s an insult to suggest someone is gay. Do you? Is it likely to bring the subject into hatred, ridicule, or contempt? Do you believe being gay is inferior? Or wrong? Is there a moral difference between being straight and being gay?”
“I don’t know,” Zillah shouted. “I don’t want to say any more to you.”
Jims and Malina would have known that by now the interviewer had a wonderful story that she could hardly wait to get down on paper-or a floppy disk. Zillah only wanted her to go and leave her alone. And eventually she did go, not in the least put out by Zillah’s anger and refusal to say another word to her. Zillah felt shaken. It had all been so very different from the previous two interviews. She now regretted concealing the children’s existence. Could she possibly leave them with her parents a little longer? They liked being there, they seemed to prefer it to being at home with their mother, but her parents weren’t, in her mother’s phrase, as young as they used to be, and were growing weary, worn out by Jordan’s night crying. And why had that awful woman asked so many questions about what she’d been doing before her marriage? Zillah acknowledged that she hadn’t adequately prepared herself.