As soon as he got to Freddie’s, Rupert took Cameron aside.
‘Thank you for turning up, sweetheart. You were absolutely marvellous.’
Cameron shrugged. ‘If you can get a gold with a dislocated shoulder, I can talk too much with a broken heart.’
‘Christ, I admire you.’
‘I’d so much rather you’d loved me,’ said Cameron sadly.
For a second Rupert lowered her dark glasses, and winced to see how red and swollen from crying her eyes were.
‘I’m so sorry, angel. You know you can stay on at Penscombe as long as you like. I won’t be there for the next few weeks.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Cameron, suddenly frantic.
‘America, this afternoon. The only hope is to get the hell out of England until the dust settles.’
‘So you won’t be back for Christmas?’
Rupert shook his head wearily. ‘What Christmas?’
‘Or for the IBA verdict on the 15th?’
‘The result’s a foregone conclusion. Couldn’t you feel the tidal waves of disapproval and distaste emanating from those tweed bosoms throughout the interview? We haven’t a hope.’
‘Probably not,’ said Cameron, glancing at Declan who was now slumped in a chair, shivering uncontrollably with an untouched glass of whisky in his hand. ‘But Declan’s going to need a lot of support in the next few days.’
‘Not from me,’ said Rupert bitterly. ‘The best thing for all the O’Haras would be to have me out of their hair.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better be off.’
‘Can I ask you just one favour?’ said Cameron. ‘Could I possibly keep Blue?’
The doorbell rang and they both jumped thinking it might be Taggie. Freddie’s secretary answered it and the next moment a man marched into the room. For a second Cameron thought she was hallucinating, for it seemed as if the old Declan, the forceful, confident, aggressive, clear-eyed, suntanned Declan, whom she remembered so clearly that first day he arrived at Corinium, had just walked through the door. Then she realized it was Patrick, thickened out, weathered and bronzed from five months working on a sheep farm. He’d obviously come straight from the airport, and being Patrick, even in a family crisis, had bothered to buy duty free whisky and cigarettes. He’d need them both over the next few days.
Near to tears, Declan rose to his feet. Ignoring everyone else in the room, Patrick went over and put his arms round him.
‘It’s all right, Pa,’ he said gently, ‘I rang home first. Taggie told me about Mum. It was a terrible thing for her to do, but she had reasons. It’ll be all right. It’s you she loves. She’ll come back.’
He was like the father comforting the child.
‘She sabotaged the franchise,’ groaned Declan, ‘and it was all my fault.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Patrick. ‘The responsibility for that lies elsewhere.’
He let go of Declan and turned towards Rupert, his face hardening. ‘You deliberately set out to seduce Cameron because you wanted her on Venturer’s side, didn’t you? Well that’s for fucking her up.’ The next moment he’d smashed his fist into Rupert’s right jaw and, as Rupert reeled sideways, caught totally by surprise, Patrick hit him again on the right eye with his other fist. ‘And that’s for fucking up Taggie,’ he added, as Rupert crashed to the ground.
In the press over the weekend there was endless speculation as to which of the wronged husbands named in Rupert’s bonk-statement (as the memoirs were now known), had given Rupert the black eye.
51
The next two weeks were terrible for Venturer. Deeply guilty that his utter failure to pull himself together at the meeting had finally cost them the franchise, Declan went home to Penscombe. Taggie and Patrick made sure he was never alone, as he seemed to sink deeper and deeper into depression, constantly vacillating between loathing Maud for betraying him and longing to have her back. There was no word from her; she seemed to have totally vanished.
Patrick, displaying patience and understanding way beyond his years, spent hours talking to his father: ‘Taggie said Mum was absolutely gibbering with terror before The Merry Widow. It was such a colossal distance from obscurity back to the limelight. A little amateur production perhaps to you, but to her it wasn’t just an extra step to cross the Frogsmore, but a vast leap over a five-hundred-foot-deep ravine. She needed you so desperately to witness her triumph or catch her if she fell.’
‘I know,’ groaned Declan. ‘Because I always had to fight so hard to keep her, I never realized how much she needed me.’
‘And you know she lives any part she plays. In her head she’s now become poor bullied Nora in A Doll’s House, marching out with a slammed door on an insensitive tyrannical husband. She wanted to hit back, to slam the door on your figures.
‘And finally you mustn’t underestimate the influence of Tony Baddingham. I know the effect he had on Cameron. He is pure Iago. He only had to point out how brilliant, beautiful and sexually voracious Cameron was; how you were spending more and more time with her; how could the two of you not be having an affair? You know what an imagination Mum has. This was even more immediate than P. D. James. Imagine, too, the appalling things he must have said about you, and finally the escape from poverty he offered her: new dresses, new jewels, furs, no more brown envelopes, or creditors at the gate, even warmth.’ Patrick shivered. After the Australian summer The Priory central heating left a great deal to be desired. ‘And he was around all the time, and you were away, or preoccupied with the franchise or Yeats, and Mum was probably turned on because the whole thing was so utterly verboten. All he had to do was to switch on his electric carving knife, dip it in washing-up machine powder and turn it in the wound.’
Declan winced: ‘I can understand all that, but deliberately to hand over all our secrets.’
‘She may not have done,’ said Patrick. ‘Taggie was out a lot cooking. Tony probably came to the house. The plans were on your desk. Your writing isn’t that indecipherable.’
‘D’you think I should go round to The Falconry and kill him?’
Patrick gave a wintry smile. ‘I wouldn’t. You know how Lady Gosling abhors violence.’
Taggie, who was kept enormously busy cooking for parties and filling up people’s deep freezes for Christmas, made heroic attempts to be cheerful, but she worried Patrick far more than Declan. Never one to grumble, she refused to discuss Rupert, but Patrick knew she was bleeding to death inside.
Outside, the weather was frantically warmer, the snow thawed in patches, leaving fantastic shapes, a sea horse there, a camel here. All down the valley the streams that tumbled into the Frogsmore were still frozen into dirty grey glaciers. Wandering numbly through the fields with the dogs, Taggie only noticed the flattened tufts of thick tawny grass sticking up through the snow, like the heads of a thousand Ruperts slain in battle.
‘Too long a sacrifice,’ quoted Patrick bitterly, thinking too of his own situation, ‘can make a stone of the heart.’
Cameron, mercifully, was still very busy editing Yeats (Declan had lost all interest in the project), and setting up the programme on stepmothers which Channel Four had commissioned. She popped over on several occasions to cheer Declan up, but managed to avoid times when Patrick was at home. Patrick didn’t know if she’d gone back to Tony, or whether Tony was looking after his mother. He and Taggie decided it would be better to do nothing until after the franchise results were announced.
Sunday, 15th December was D-Day. The form was that from nine o’clock onwards, in an atmosphere of high drama and secrecy, the existing managing directors of all the commercial television companies would roll up at the IBA in their limos at quarter of an hour intervals. Driving past the battalions of reporters, photographers and camera crews, they would be ushered once again into the building from the underground car park and be whizzed up in the lift to yet another empty office. Here, not unlike the suitors in The Merchant of Venice, they would be handed a sealed envelope from Lady Gosling and then be left alone to open it and learn if they had held onto their franchise, or whether, as in some instances, they had to merge with their rivals. Allowed a few minutes to digest this information, they would then be summoned to Lady Gosling’s office for a brief word of congratulation or commiseration. Afterwards they would leave the building by the back door or by the front, having sworn not to reveal a word of the results to the press. After all the existing contractors had been seen, the contenders, who hoped to depose them, would come in one by one after lunch and endure the same procedure.