Leonardo worked for a stockbroker in the City and was a high flyer at twenty-seven. From a family that, on the father’s side, had been staunch active Conservatives for the past hundred and fifty years, he was as mad about politics as Jims and the two talked Conservative party history, House of Commons procedure and personalities all day long, swapping anecdotes about Margaret Thatcher or Alan Clark. Leonardo was enthralled by John Major’s autobiography and constantly read bits out of it aloud to Jims. Zillah thought bitterly how unlike their dialogue was to the received opinion among the party mandarins she’d met as to the style in which gay men conversed.
She was worried as well. As to his vaunted role as Eugenie and Jordan’s father, so much for his saying he loved children. He’d barely spoken to either of them since their return from Bournemouth. When she’d mentioned this, he said he supposed Eugenie would be off to boarding school in a few months’ time. Then they’d get a live-in nanny for Jordan and he’d have the fourth bedroom converted into a nursery. She hadn’t said a word to him about Jerry. How could she? They were supposed never to have been married and he to have no rights over the children at all. Suppose Jerry did try to get the children? Suppose he renewed his threat to expose her as a woman who’d married one man while still married to another? Oh, it was so unfair! He’d utterly deceived her, sending her that letter saying he was dead.
And now, just to crown everything, she’d succumbed to Jims’s charms. In the dining room last evening, for the benefit of the other diners, he’d put his arm round her while they were waiting to be shown to their table and, once there, when he’d pulled out her chair for her, given her a soft little kiss on the lips. She’d actually heard some old woman nearby whisper to her companion how nice it was to see a couple so much in love. That kiss nearly finished Zillah off. She’d have liked to go upstairs and have a cold shower, but she had to sit here with Jims looking into her eyes and holding her hand across the table. Leonardo always took his dinner in his suite while watching, Zillah suspected, pornographic movies. Or maybe only videos of some Tory by-election coup.
The Daily Telegraph Magazine, the one with her interview in it, hadn’t yet come out. Unless it had on Easter Saturday. Zillah’s mother had strict instructions to look out for it and keep it if it appeared while she was away. The day before they left, she’d written to Jerry at the Hampstead address he’d given her, only it wasn’t Hampstead proper but West Hampstead, as she could tell by the postcode. Obscurely, this discovery made her feel a little better.
Zillah wasn’t accustomed to writing letters; she couldn’t remember when she’d written the last one. It had probably been to thank her godmother for sending her a five-pound note when she was twelve. The first effort she made looked very threatening when she read it over, so she started again. This time she threw herself on Jerry’s mercy, appealing to him not to expose her as a criminal, to remember what she’d been through, how he’d left her alone to fend for herself. That wouldn’t do either. She tore it up and finally wrote simply that he’d frightened her. She hadn’t meant to keep the children from their father. He could have access and visiting rights and anything he wanted if only he wouldn’t tell anyone she’d done what he knew she’d done. Without actually writing “bigamist” in case the letter fell into the wrong hands, she asked him please not to use “that word” anymore. It was cruel and unfair. This she sent.
The trouble with the Maldives was that beautiful though the island was, it was really only the sort of place you went to with someone you were having a big, sexy, and romantic affair with and wanted to make love to all the time. Like Jims and Leonardo. For anyone else it was just a yawn. She read paperbacks she’d bought at the airport, she had a massage, and got her hair done three times, and because Jims, sustaining his role of devoted husband, took photographs of her, she took some of him and a few times included Leonardo. But it was a relief to be going home on Sunday.
The newspapers that were brought round in midair were yesterday’s, thick Saturday papers stuffed with supplements. Zillah took the Mail while Jims opted for the Telegraph. She was reading a very interesting piece about fingernail extensions when a choking sound from Jims made her look round. He had gone dark red in the face, a change which made him a lot less attractive.
“What’s the matter?”
“Read it for yourself.”
He screwed up the newspaper, tossed the magazine at her, and got up, turning right down the aisle and making for where Leonardo was sitting in the back row.
The article about her filled nearly three pages, the text liberally interspersed with photographs. At first Zillah concentrated on the pictures; they were so beautiful. The Telegraph had done her proud. What was Jims making a fuss about? The big glamour shot really did make her look like Catherine Zeta-Jones. Zillah had been contemplating breast implants now she could afford it; she’d always felt herself lacking in this area, but this photograph showed her with a deep cleavage overflowing out of the bustier.
The big headline didn’t present her in a light she much liked: GYPSY SCATTERBRAIN, it read, and underneath that, A New Breed of Tory Bride. Then she began to read the text, her heart gradually sinking and sweat breaking out all over her face and neck.
Gypsy, scatterbrain, and firebrand, Carmen to the life, Zillah Melcombe-Smith belongs to the new kind of trophy wife politicians are increasingly acquiring. At 28, she looks like a model, talks like a teenager, and suffers, it seems, from various neuroses. Her dark good looks and fiery eyes support her assertion of having Romany blood, as so maybe do her wild statements. We had been in her Westminster flat (suitably close to the Houses of Parliament) for no more than ten minutes when she was threatening to sue us for libel. And why? Because we had dared question her astonishing left-wing beliefs, not to say double standards. Zillah bitterly opposes Tory opinion on homosexuality, that it isn’t equal to heterosexuality and is a matter of choice, yet calling someone gay is an insult she looks capable of dueling about.
Odd when you remember that Zillah’s husband “Jims” Melcombe-Smith had attracted recent speculation as to his possible sexual orientation. All that, of course, has been proved wide of the mark by his marriage to the gorgeous Zillah. But if his past is no longer a mystery, hers may be. The new Mrs. Melcombe-Smith had apparently lived the first 27 years of her life in total seclusion and isolation in a Dorset village, an existence she made sound like being walled up in a convent. No job? No training? No former boyfriends? Apparently not. Strangely, Zillah forgot to mention a few small interruptions to this cloistered existence, her ex-husband, Jeffrey, and their two children, Eugenie, 7, and Jordan, 3. True, there were no children about when we visited on a sunny spring day. Where has Mrs. Melcombe-Smith hidden them? Or has their father custody? If so, this would be a highly exceptional decision on the part of the divorce court. Custody is only given to a father if the mother proves unfit to care for them, which high-spirited, handsome Zillah very obviously is not.
Zillah read to the end, by now feeling sick. Natalie Reckman devoted two long paragraphs to describing her clothes and jewelry, suggesting that Jims ought to be able to afford real stones if she had to adorn herself in the daytime, not the kind of thing you could pick up from the souk in downtown Aqaba. Everyone wore high heels with trousers these days but not stilt heels with leggings. Reckman had a successful technique of insulting her subject by leveling at her hurtful abuse and immediately following it up with a sweetly gentle compliment. So she described Zillah’s outfit as more suitable for hanging about King’s Cross station, but added that even soliciting gear couldn’t spoil her lovely face, enviably slim figure, and mane of raven hair.