“She’s not available.”
Zillah snatched the receiver from her. The woman at the other end wanted to say that they were afraid they couldn’t send a car in the morning after all. Of course she could still come under her own steam if she liked. Zillah, sensing she was no longer the attraction she once had been, thought she did like, though she was longer quite sure. At any rate, she agreed. It would mean getting up at five-thirty in the morning but it would be worth it. She could charm them, she could bewitch her audience. The phone rang again almost immediately. It was the cleaner from number nine to say she couldn’t manage babysitting in the morning after all.
Zillah looked at Jims. He appeared to be signing his letters. She was afraid to ask him. She’d just leave the children in the flat. After all, he’d be there, and with luck no one would wake up until she was back home again. Eugenie wouldn’t leave her brother to scream, would she?
Jims turned on the television news at five thirty-five, sat inscrutably through items about floods in Gujarat, ongoing strife in Zimbabwe, and the murder of an old woman in Kensal Green, before seeing himself scarlet-faced, then sheltering his flush behind his briefcase, as he emerged from the front door of Fredington Crucis House. The children watched it and so did Zillah, occasionally turning her eyes to cast fearful glances in Jims’s direction. He wasn’t blushing now but had become even whiter. The pictures weren’t new, they’d appeared the evening before, but now they were followed by comments from all sorts of Party dignitaries including the chairman of the South Wessex Conservatives who said stoutly that he had complete confidence in Mr. Melcombe-Smith and in his shortly being able to give clear replies to all the questions that still remained unanswered.
“Why is my stepfather on the TV?” asked Eugenie.
No one answered her. The phone rang, Jims answered it, put the receiver back without a word, and pulled out the plug. Unnerved, Zillah went into her bedroom, taking the children with her. Jordan had begun to whimper.
She dressed with great care. If real work came out of this interview, if it led to celebrity and getting her own television show, she wouldn’t have to leave London and go back to Willow Cottage. Jims had said, in a nasty sarcastic tone-on Saturday night, when he’d still had a tongue-that she’d like the cottage very much now, the new decorations made all the difference. “Especially the lovely contemporary fitted kitchen,” he’d added, as if that kind of language were habitual with her. But she wouldn’t like it and wild horses would have to drag her there.
She put on her favorite white suit with a coral red shirt because she’d heard that bright colors do best on television. Would they make her up or expect her to have done it herself? Zillah couldn’t contemplate going out into the street in London without makeup on. Long Fredington was another matter and the very thought of it made her shiver. Once she was back from Moon and Stars and had taken Jordan to the child psychiatrist, she’d find herself a solicitor and see what could be done to force Jims out of the flat. Something must be possible.
It was pouring rain. She’d left the flat on tiptoe, putting her key in the lock to close the door silently. She couldn’t go back for a raincoat or an umbrella. Fearing for her hair and her flimsy shoes, she tried to shelter under an overhanging portico while hailing a taxi but the result of this was that other people got there before her. She had to come out and get wet. The cab driver who finally stopped grinned at her rats’-tail hair.
But Zillah soon discovered that she need not have worried. Another woman going on the program looked, in her tracksuit and unmade-up state, as if she’d just got out of bed. The makeup department dealt with all that, dried Zillah’s hair, cleaned her shoes, redid her face. The other woman told her confidingly that she’d been appearing on shows of this kind for years. She’d go along wearing laddered tights, knowing they’d give her a new pair. Zillah was shocked but delighted to learn these tricks of the trade. She’d begun to feel a lot better.
But when the program began and she was able to watch it, sitting with the other interviewees-to-be in a waiting room, she realized something she must have been told but that hadn’t sunk in. It was live. There would be no rehearsal, no preparation, and no chance to say she hadn’t meant that, cut that, please, or can we go back? The questions were very searching and even the inexperienced could tell they weren’t kind. A young man, who looked very young, put his head round the door and beckoned to the tights woman. She would be the next-Zillah found herself using the word “victim.”
It was a strange feeling watching the screen and seeing her walk onto the set. Zillah suddenly felt naive and rather helpless. The woman, whom she hadn’t recognized, turned out to be a pop singer of the seventies trying to make a comeback. The presenter, an ugly man with a beard and the rasping voice that had made him famous, asked her if she didn’t think she was “a bit over the hill” for what she had in mind. She wasn’t exactly Posh Spice, was she? Maybe she’d like to sing for them now. They’d an accompanist on hand. The singer answered the questions bravely and sang not very well. While she was singing the young man came back and beckoned to the teenage boy who was there because he’d got into Oxford at the age of fifteen. Zillah would be the last.
“They always save the best till last,” said a girl who’d come in to see if she wanted more coffee or orange juice.
After the singer came a woman reading the news, then a weather forecast, then advertising of the programs for the day ahead. She thought the singer might come back but she didn’t. The boy came on and was interviewed by a kindly woman presenter who treated him as if he’d won the Nobel Prize. Zillah had been told that the man with the rasping voice would be talking to her but she found herself hoping that plans had changed and she might get this woman who was now telling the boy that his family must be enormously proud of him. And he wasn’t even very good, but shy and tongue-tied.
Zillah was called. The girl who’d inquired about coffee and orange juice led her along one passage and then another and onto the edge of what seemed like theater-in-the-round, a circular platform, partly screened and curtained, thick with cameramen and soundmen and electricians. The brightly lit area she’d seen on the screen could just be seen in the center.
“When I give you a sign, I’ll lift my finger like this,” whispered the girl, “you walk on from here and sit in that chair opposite Sebastian. Okay?”
“Yes, that’s fine,” said Zillah loudly.
Everyone in her vicinity turned and shushed her, fingers on lips. Such confidence as she had left began to ebb. Her heels were too high, she knew that now. Suppose she tripped? The boy genius came off and so did the kindly woman interviewer. The man called Sebastian told viewers they were now to expect the guest of the day, Zillah Melcombe-Smith, bigamist wife-or was she?-of the disgraced MP James Melcombe-Smith, and widow-or was she?-of the Cinema Slayer’s victim. Zillah suddenly felt very cold. That kind of introduction wasn’t at all what she’d expected. But the girl who’d brought her here was holding up one finger, so she had no option but to set off on what seemed like the longest and slowest walk of her life to the chair opposite Sebastian.
He stared at her as if she were something peculiar in a zoo, an okapi or echidna. “Welcome to A Bite of Breakfast, Zillah,” he said. “Tell us what it feels like to be a widow, a wife, and a bigamist all at once. It can’t happen to many women, d’you think?”
Zillah said, “No,” and, “No, it can’t,” but could think of nothing else.
“Well, let’s start with the bigamy, shall we? Maybe you’re one of those people who don’t approve of divorce. A Catholic, are you?”