‘Jennifer, what have you done?’
‘I’ll tell you at Joe’s. Seven-thirty?’
‘Oh, all right. When I’m divorced can I bring Pandora and come and live at your place?’
‘Only if you change the poor innocent’s name...’
She pushed the ‘end’ button and noticed her hand had stopped shaking. Thank God for Anna. For twenty-five years, through two marriages and countless ups and downs, Anna had always been there. Of course she would come to supper, and not just to pick up on the latest drama. She knew she was needed. And there was never anyone better than Anna in a crisis.
The memory of how she had first met Anna remained quite vivid to Jennifer and never failed to make her smile. Barely into her twenties then, Anna had already managed to appear totally sophisticated, Jennifer recalled.
The two women had both been hired on the same newspaper training scheme. Booked into a hostel on her first night away from home, eighteen-year-old Jennifer had found a nearby cafe and settled down for supper alone.
‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ asked a cool and round-vowelled voice. Anna, a doctor’s daughter, had been brought up in Wimbledon and was conspicuously English middle-class in those days.
‘I do so hate eating alone, don’t you?’ she continued.
Jennifer looked up for the first time into what she came to regard as arguably the most deceptively gentle grey eyes in the world and stammered her agreement.
Later, when they came to share a flat, Anna had arrived with one neat suitcase of extraordinary design which, after a seemingly effortless flick, had sprung miraculously open to reveal her clothes, uncreased, immaculate, and sporting several designer labels, suspended in perfect order from their own hangers.
Jennifer, surrounded at the time by crumpled debris and a selection of tatty carrier bags, had been impressed ever since. And thinking back to those early days with her friend had indeed made her smile.
The original shock reaction to her own behaviour had faded now. Jennifer had a game plan for the rest of the day, and possibly for the rest of her life, and she wanted to get on with it. First a quick dash back to the office car park, then home for a short course in revival — a long bath and several cups of tea. She hailed a taxi.
Back at the Globe, the key card still operated the doors to the car park. That was something. The Porsche continued to give her a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction, although lessened somewhat by the dents and bruises on both sides. She told herself that driving a battered Porsche was a status symbol. The car was as smooth, as tight, and as quick as ever, but it was more than six years old and she had known that next time around she would not get another company motor like it. The days when she had swung the deal which included that car were long gone. Next time around it would be a small family saloon and be thankful. Yuk.
Oh well, she’d probably solved that problem. It was unlikely that the Globe would ever again be providing her with any kind of company car.
She slotted herself behind the wheel, thrust the gear lever forward and roared up the ramp, bouncing over the sleeping policemen. The tyres squealed as she jerked to a stop and prepared to use her key card again.
She looked at her watch. A ladies’ Rolex. She had stormed out of the office at around one-thirty. At least nobody could accuse her of throwing a terminal tantrum after lunch. She was just in time to miss the late afternoon build-up of traffic; she should make it back to her house in Richmond soon after three-thirty. Plenty of time to recharge the batteries before going around to Anna’s. That bath, a knock-your-socks-off shower, a pot of English breakfast tea, a bit of a sleep, an early evening gin-and-tonic, and a little pre-dinner sparring with Dominic. Things were looking up.
Unlike Dominic she was not used to being at home in the middle of a weekday afternoon. As she lay back in a bubbly bath, clutching a steaming mug of tea and listening to a play on Radio Four, she thought she could get to like it. The rest of the afternoon passed peacefully. The phone rang several times. She did not answer it. The word was undoubtedly already getting around and she did not want to talk to anybody yet — except Anna.
She ordered a minicab for seven that evening.
‘You’re early, this must be serious,’ said Anna.
She and Jennifer had always been an odd couple, the one appearing to be everything the other was not, both physically and in personality. Jennifer, striking looking but nothing more, was exceptionally tall and confidently forceful, bordering on brash on a bad day, inclined to toss her mane of thick dark hair when things didn’t suit her. Anna was barely five-foot-one, petite in build, neat of manner, seemingly diffident in behaviour, and quite devastatingly pretty. Her wispy white-blonde hair, falling straight to her shoulders from a central parting, framed a perfectly even-featured elfin face almost always composed into the most pleasant of expressions.
She had an air of fragility about her. Confronted by adversity, Anna would smile in apparent deference and flutter her eyelashes. She really did flutter them. Jennifer thought Anna was the only woman she had ever actually seen do so. Anna was acutely aware of her femininity and had always used it ruthlessly. Even now, well into her forties, she was the kind of woman men referred to as a ‘sweet girl’.
The very thought always made Jennifer smile. Appearances could indeed be deceptive. Anna had handled Fleet Street better than anyone Jennifer knew. One of the secrets of her success was that she was invariably underestimated. Jennifer could not remember her ever failing in anything she had set out to achieve, and joked that she had chosen Anna to be her closest friend because she knew she could never survive with her as an enemy. Anna invariably got her own way without those around her even noticing. Jennifer had always been open-mouthed in admiration of her and quite green with envy. You couldn’t even attempt to play the game the way Anna did when you were nearly six feet tall with the shoulders of a rugby lock forward.
In fact Anna had a brain to die for, plus total confidence in her abilities, and was always quite certain of the various directions in which she wished to take her life. She had been a senior executive in the Murdoch organisation, widely tipped to be the first woman editor of a national daily, when she’d decided she would rather be a mother instead.
She had been almost forty when she met Dominic McDonald, fell wildly in love for probably the first time — in the past it had not been Anna’s role to fall in love with the men in her life, they all fell desperately in love with her while she graciously accepted it — married him and became pregnant within a few months.
When their child was born she announced with her usual certainty that she was going to give her daughter the attention she had previously only given to her career, that she would be quitting ‘The Street’ at least until Pandora came of school age, and that from now on she would be using her married name only.
Astonished pleas from friends and colleagues, and even, quite remarkably, from Murdoch himself, did nothing to shake her from her intentions.
At the time Jennifer thought Anna had gone stark staring mad. Now she wasn’t so sure. But the events had always given an edge to her relationship with her friend’s husband. Jennifer was honest enough to admit to herself that she did not like the power she felt Dominic had over Anna. Meanwhile her friend, sharp and cool as ever, merely accepted that her best friend and her husband were each jealous of the other’s place in her affections, and that was, after all, quite as it should be.