His drive down to Dorset was uneventful. All the roadworks had been completed and the cones and speed limit signs taken away. He reached Casterbridge in time to have a reconciliation lunch with Ivo Carew. Ivo’s sister Kate joined them for a drink and had a good laugh over a little bit of help the two of them, with Kevin Jebb, had given Jims on the previous day. Jims spent the afternoon visiting a retirement home, housed in a neo-Gothic mansion, where elderly gentlefolks of his own political persuasion ended their days in luxury suites. There, he talked to each resident in turn, toured the library and the film theater, and made a little speech-not to encourage them to vote Conservative, which exhortation would be unnecessary, but to vote at all, and he assured them of the comfortable transport available to take them to the polls. Before they sat down to their four-course dinner, he drove to Casterbridge station on the Great Western line, where he picked up Leonardo off the London train.
This was indiscreet. He’d never done it before, but he told himself no one could possibly find out. Of course they wouldn’t dine out together. Jims had brought a cold chicken, a game pie, some asparagus, and a livarot with him. Fredington Crucis House was always plentifully stocked with drink. By the time he got home the cheese was stinking up the car, for it had been a warm day, but this only served to make them laugh companionably. On the following afternoon, after Jims’s appointments were over, they thought they might drive down to Lyme, where Leonardo, a Janeite, wanted to renew his acquaintance with the spot from which Louisa Musgrove jumped off the Cobb.
There was no need to be in Toneborough the next morning until ten-thirty, so they stayed in bed till nine and would have stayed later still but for sounds from outside which alerted Jims. Leonardo slept on. He was accustomed to hearing traffic noise from his bedroom, to voices shouting, taxi engines pulsing, and lorry drivers applying squeaky brakes. So was Jims but not here, not in the grounds of Fredington Crucis House where, if anything awakened him, it would be birdsong. He sat up and listened. Mrs. Vincey’s radio? But no. He’d expressly told his cleaner not to come. Besides, the noise was coming from outside. It was a mingling of voices with a crunching on the gravel drive. A car door slammed. Jims got up, put on a dressing gown and went to a window. The floor-length curtains were drawn but there was a gap perhaps half an inch wide between them. He put his eye to the gap and leaped back with an exclamation. “Oh, my God.”
Leonardo stirred, turned over, muttered sleepily, “What is it?”
Without replying, Jims threw off his dressing gown, pulled on the jeans he’d changed into the night before and a dark sweatshirt. He went upstairs to the second floor where, at these smaller windows, the curtains remained undrawn. Jims knew that, unless you are staring purposefully, it is almost impossible to see anything from a distance through a window with no light behind it. He advanced on all fours and pushed his head above the sill, up to the level of his nose.
About fifty men and women were outside, some wielding cameras, others with notebooks and recording devices. Their cars were there too and they were leaning against them or sitting inside them with the doors open. A woman, accompanied by two others and a young man, was pouring something from a flask into plastic cups. All were chattering and laughing. Even from this distance Jims could see his drive was already littered with cigarette ends.
It was a dull morning but by no means dark. These small rooms up here had once been servants’ bedrooms and were always rather dim. Still, there was no excuse for what Leonardo did. Entering the room behind him, dressed only in boxer shorts and exclaiming, “What the hell are you doing, crawling about like a dog?” he switched the overhead light on.
A roar went up from the crowd, bulbs flashed and the whole mob surged forward as one, toward the front steps.
The newspaper which had bought Natalie’s story was not one that was normally delivered to 7 Abbey Gardens Mansions. Zillah had put in a special order for it. She woke up very early on Saturday morning, about two hours earlier than usual, happily anticipating the arrival of the papers. On the previous afternoon, having checked that her generous monthly allowance from Jims had been paid into her bank account, she had phoned Moon and Stars Television. They would send a car for her first thing on Monday morning so that she could appear on A Bite of Breakfast. Mrs. Peacock having dismissed herself, Zillah had made an arrangement with the young Iranian girl who cleaned at number nine to stay over Sunday night and be there for Eugenie and Jordan in the morning. At the same time, putting her house entirely in order, she’d fixed an appointment with a child psychiatrist.
Thinking about Jims being stricken by disaster brought her a lot of pleasure. She knew for a fact he had no morning papers delivered to Fredington Crucis House and wouldn’t, in any case, have seen this one, which he habitually referred to as a “backstreet rag.” The likelihood was that he’d be ten minutes into his appointments before he found out. Some hard-done-by citizen of Toneborough, anxious about his council tax, his hound puppy-walking, or his incapacity benefit, would be bound to bring a copy of the rag with him. She hadn’t felt so happy since she walked up the aisle to marry him at St. Mary Undercroft.
Just as the newspaper dropped onto the doormat at seven o’clock, Jordan woke up and started crying. Zillah picked him up, stuck him in his high chair-surely he shouldn’t still be in a high chair?-gave him orange juice and what he ought not to have, what would rot his teeth and set him on the path to obesity, a chocolate bar. Then she lay on the sofa and looked at the paper.
The front page almost frightened her. A very large headline read: THE GAY MP, TWO WEDDINGS, AND A FUNERAL. The picture of her was one she hadn’t seen before. It must have been taken in those halcyon days when she was being photographed all the time and had perhaps been previously rejected because it was unflattering. For once, Zillah didn’t mind. She looked distraught, as if she hardly knew which way to turn. Her face was half covered by one hand and stray locks of hair, greasy-looking, protruded between the splayed fingers. That was the day, she remembered now, when she hadn’t been expecting the photographer. To the left of it, in a kind of before and after arrangement, was the pre-first wedding picture of her and Jims, both of them smiling, relaxed, happy.
There was virtually no text. For that she had to turn to page three. There, too, was one of her own Maldives shots, Jims unmistakably Jims, his hand on the bare thigh of an unrecognizable young man with his face half turned away and in shadow. The trickle of fear returned. What would he do when he read it? What would he do to her? Was he reading it now or was he still blissfully asleep at Fredington Crucis House, unaware of what awaited him? She read her own words: “I honestly thought I was free to remarry. Poor Jeff”-she’d never called him that in all their life together-
“told me we were legally divorced. Then when he was killed and I found out my mistake I realized I was-tragically-freed by his death. Our marriage had not been a happy one, down to his frequent affairs with other women. Just the same, his murder was a devastating blow, as was discovering the other side to James’s nature. That happened when he brought his lover on our honeymoon…”
Mrs. Melcombe-Smith cries a lot these days. She was once more in tears when I asked her what she thought the future held for her and the MP for South Wessex. “All this has been horrendous but I will stand by him,” she said. “I don’t care what he’s done. I love him and I truly believe that in his heart he loves me.”
There was a good deal more but that line about standing by Jims, words she had certainly uttered to Natalie Reckman, she now reread with new eyes. When she said them she hadn’t given much thought to what she meant. It was just what wives in her sort of position traditionally said. She’d read it repeated in newspapers many times over the years. But now she thought of the reality. She rather liked the idea of seeing herself in the role of devoted and supportive wife, a woman who has been bitterly ill-used but who forgives and pours out renewed love. Not that this new part she contemplated playing would deflect her from appearing on A Bite of Breakfast. She wasn’t bound to forgive immediately…