Troubled Gaby Mortimer has resigned from the TV show that made her name.
“I’d rather not do the program at all,” the forty-two-year-old presenter told close friends. “It’s the wrong type of publicity.”
Colleagues say she has been behaving in an increasingly erratic manner since she stumbled on the dead body of Polish nanny Ania Dudek on Wandsworth Common a fortnight ago.
“Yes, we do feel left in the lurch,” says a representative at
Mornin’ All,
“but Gaby knows we are here if she needs us.”
Pictures of me on my doorstep and of that bruise, of Stan the Man—head on one side, handsome and concerned. I haven’t seen that photograph before. It’s newly taken: vain bastard. A head shot of India, “my replacement.” An old one, from
Spotlight
probably.
I hear the clunk of the car door and the scrunch of someone getting into the passenger seat. My head is on the steering wheel. He puts his hand on my shoulder.
I lean back. He takes his arm away quickly before I squash it.
“Did you know?” I say. “Yesterday? Had you read the papers? Is it in all of them?”
He nods.
“Why didn’t you
say
?”
“I was waiting for you to mention it, or to tell me you’d resigned. Then, when it became apparent that you didn’t know anything about it, and you hadn’t even seen the papers, that you were stuffing them under the sofa, well, it didn’t seem up to me. I thought somebody else would have told you.”
Did Philip know? Was that behind his forced jollity? Was he feigning ignorance as a defense mechanism, in case I burst into tears and made him come home? Or perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps he is just in his own bubble, hedge-funded in, not reading the UK papers, or watching TV, or even opening texts. But Clara’s missed call—she was probably ringing about this. And Robin knew. The solicitude in her voice, the talk of yums, the way she tried to urge
me to come and stay. And those people in the pub yesterday: the way they looked at me.
“It’s all lies,” I say. “I haven’t resigned. They’ve taken my words out of context. I told Stan I’d rather not do the program at all if it meant using Ania. And ‘wrong type of publicity,’ I meant
me. I
was giving the
show
the wrong kind of publicity.”
“I’m sure.”
“Is this their way of firing me?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He puts his hand on mine. It’s obviously one of those things he does.
We sit for a minute. “Do you still want the interview?” I ask after a bit.
“Yeah! The rehabilitation of Gaby Mortimer. I like a challenge.”
“Thank you,” I say dubiously.
He looks at his watch. “Look, I’m on a bit of a tight schedule. Is there anyone you can be with today? I ought to get on. We need to talk more about this. And Christa . . . Lots to say there. But later, yeah? Or tomorrow?”
“Of course. Do you want a lift?” I turn the key in the ignition. “Where do you need to get to?”
“Tottenham.”
“Oh. Not sure . . .”
“Any Tube station will do.”
I drive. I put my foot on the clutch and the car into gear. I click on the radio and check the mirror and keep my eye out for cars and for lights. But all the time I’m thinking, they’ve stitched me up. They’ve fed the papers all this stuff. How
could
they. After everything I’ve given them, all those years of soap stars and EC regulations and bloody bent bananas. Stan, the big cheeses, ambitious India: I don’t care about them. But
Terri
. I thought she was my friend.
Jack is talking, but I’m not listening. He’s trying to take my mind
off things. He’s saying something about today’s commission, how he’s hoping the piece will make the magazine cover.
I pause at the lights. “What did you say it’s about again?” I manage to ask, to show I’m grateful.
“The father of the teenage boy from Tottenham killed in that hotel bomb a few months ago on the Red Sea. Do you remember? There’s an appeal: British families are awarded compensation if loved ones are lost in terrorist attacks on home ground, but not abroad. He wants to change things.”
“Poor man,” I say, chastened—what’s a job to this? “Losing a child, the worst thing.” Ania’s parents in Lodz. “Unimaginable.”
“Bit of a tough assignment,” he says, with a little edge of self-importance.
“I always feel—
felt
—guilty interviewing people who have suffered appalling trauma. They want to talk—that’s why they’ve agreed; it’s a sort of therapy, I suppose. As a journalist, though, you know you should get the quotes, the story . . .”
“You have to disassociate,” he says shortly. “Be who you need to be. Play a kind of game. Chop a bit of yourself off.”
“Poor you. Poor him.” I check my mirror and turn left onto the A3, speeding into the middle lane of the highway.
A police car is parked up some way ahead at an angle, with its lights turning. Two policemen are standing next it, one of them holding out his arm. I slow down. A white van almost jackknifes across the lanes in front of me and skids to a halt on the hard shoulder.
I drive past slowly. In the rearview mirror, I see the policeman approach the van. I close my eyes, fleetingly, shake my head. It takes a few minutes for my nerves to steady. Are the police going to spook me now for the rest of my life?
At the roundabout ahead, Jack lets out a laugh. “You are a terrible driver. I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you really are.”
“What?”
“An extraordinary combination: simultaneously bullish and insecure.”
“Am I? I’m not. I am not a terrible driver! Am I?”
“You are. The way you cut up that Chrysler just then, pulled in front of them and then slowed right down.” He’s having another playful go at me, trying this out as a means of distraction.
I turn onto West Hill. “I’m not sure I will take you to a Tube station now. I’ll just dump you here, and it’s a very long walk.”
“Sorry. I won’t say another word. In fact, I’ll close my eyes.”
And he does close his eyes. He actually does. He makes himself comfortable and leans back in the seat.
This
is distracting. He has pushed the hair away from his face, and I can tell by the slight movement of his head that he is listening to the radio. The song is one Philip doesn’t like, catchy with rude lyrics—Millie hums it all the time. If Philip were here, he would have changed the station and I would have felt a tiny bit judged. It is shocking how on edge I have been with Philip recently, how I have imagined every gesture held up against some distant ideal and found wanting. How much easier it is to have been, temporarily, cut loose from that.
I have reached the Tube and pull into the bus lane to stop.
“Have a nice day, then,” I say, imagining for a moment I am a Somerset housewife—the one, if things had been different, I might have turned into—dropping her husband at a rural station, before going home to an armful of kids.
Jack opens his eyes and looks at me. His mouth moves softly. “Don’t worry about your job,” he says. “It’ll be fine. It’s just a blip, a misunderstanding. You’re too valuable to them. You’ll sort it.”
He steps out, bag over his shoulder, and gives the roof a little double bang.
• • •
I scoop the newspapers out from under the sofa when I get home, yesterday’s and today’s: I read the lot. The broadsheets are the worst: their prurient disapproval, like a high-court judge sneaking a peek under a lavatory door. They use the passive voice like tweezers. “Sources close to the troubled presenter . . . ,” “Doubts have been raised . . .” Am I really that interesting? If I were a producer of a midmorning current affairs show, would I put myself forward as a subject? I suppose I would. Murder and celebrity: it’s a delicious cocktail.
One of today’s tabloids has a photograph of me in the pub, “enjoying a drink with a mystery male companion.” Someone clever took it with their phone. I didn’t even notice. More dangers of the modern world. You’re never alone with a Samsung Galaxy.
I can’t put it off any longer. I know I shouldn’t. It’s like going down into the basement. There’ll be a madwoman with a knife. But the compulsion is too strong. I go into the kitchen. If I hadn’t found the remote control, I’d have put the television on with my teeth.
Sky Plus. Thursday, Friday, and today’s episodes are lined up neatly in the series link. I choose today’s.
At first, I think it’ll all be okay: I’ll survive. When he does his introductory blurb to camera—a group interview with the cast of
Made in Chelsea,
an item on the rise of eyebrow threading—Stan looks diminished. A bad shirt, too short in the sleeve. Too much body hair. He needs ballast. He needs
me
. It’s our relationship that gives him his youthful edge. I’m Mrs. Robinson to his Benjamin Braddock, Francesca Annis to his Ralph Fiennes. Without me, well, he looks sordid, grubby, a bit old. As for India? She’s nervous. She’s perching on the sofa, her hands wildly gesticulating, in the way they always tell you not to. She’s got a habit, too, of swallowing in the middle of a sentence, almost a gulp, as if she’s got so much to ask, so much to tell me—
me,
the viewer—she can’t get the words out.
I’m not sure when it dawns. It’s like a thought I can’t quite
pinpoint, fluttering lightly like a moth in my mind. They’ve got a catchphrase going. Stan says, “Top news . . . top views . . .” and India finishes with, “Top gossip.” It’s a first, he’s giving
her
the punch line. Stan, legs crossed, is subdued, avuncular, oddly sweet, and India is slightly leaning into him. Her hair has been pulled back. No, chopped. I detect Annie’s magic touch, the kind of shocking, deliciously flattering cut that will set a trend. Binky from
Made in Chelsea
can’t take her eyes off it.
The Tory backbencher doing Pick of the Papers is so charmed by India’s girlishness he slips up. He refers to the prime minister as “an Eton mess.” It will have been Tweeted. It’ll already have been propagated by
The World at One
. Perfect publicity. That’s all Terri ever wants: to get people talking. Stan shakes his head at the MP, more in sorrow than anger. “Top news . . . top views . . .” he says, and India says, “Top gossip.”
I know what it is. It’s chemistry. It’s what Stan is always banging on about.
I switch off the television, groan into the silence of the kitchen. A terrifying realization. This isn’t about publicity, good or bad. Accusations, true or false. This is no blip, no
misunderstanding
. This is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for. This is their way of nudging me out. I’ll never get back now, whatever happens with this case. Not after this. India’s triumph. I’m old news, past it. If I’m honest with myself, I know they’ve been trying to get rid of me for months.
“Good bits and bad bits,” I told Jack. I think about them. And it’s Steve, my driver, who comes into my head. Steve’s face, his chatter, his tact, the updates on his wife and daughter. If this is the end, I won’t find out what happened about the polyp. The
polyps
! Or whether Sammy got an interview. And it’s thinking about Steve that finally makes me cry.
Upstairs in the bathroom, I splash water on my face. It is a face that has seen too much and done too much. It’s a face that’s been
around too long. Frown lines and smile lines, and a little crack across one of my front teeth. Secret hairs that need plucking, violet shadows that need more concealer by the day. I’m costing them too much in Touche Éclat. My hair, too: ridiculous. Nail scissors poke out of the toothbrush pot, and I start hacking at it angrily, watch the coils spiral into the basin, clog up the drainage holes. I keep going. Once, my mother, in one of her spurts of exuberant extravagance, decided to prune our patch of garden. She came back from the shops with clippers, loppers, and pruning shears, and I watched from the house as, arms scratched and flailing, she slashed at the hedge of rambling roses, tugged and swore. She didn’t seem to know when to stop. She just kept cutting and cutting until the beautiful bushes were reduced to a few black stubby branches.
Afterward, I study the hair in the sink. It looks like a dead animal. I study my face again. All those comments, I believed them, but I don’t look like Ania, not without makeup. It was just the hair, the same length of reddish hair, nothing more. People have no imagination. Christa, who knew her well, who saw the expressions of her face shift and change, didn’t even notice.
I bundle the hair into a bag and take it downstairs. For a moment, as I hold it above the bin, I wonder if I could sell it. We live beyond our means—school fees, holidays, tennis club, a ridiculous mortgage. And if I have lost my job, and if Philip is planning . . . well, I’m not going to think about that now. Disassociation: Jack is right. Images flock and throng if you let them; better to lay them flat like photographs, let them fade, slip them into dark, undisturbed corners, into books and under stones.
Life will be different, I tell myself, when this is over. I start by ringing up the Harbor Club to cancel our membership. I can feel the sneer of their surprise. Philip will be furious. I don’t care! And then I collect a roll of black bin bags from the drawer in the kitchen and go through my wardrobe. It’s a purge. Three identical brown
V-necked sweaters, four wrap dresses, several pairs of heels that weren’t to be trusted on the slippery studio floor, silk scarves, silk shirts, kitten-heeled boots, and smart black trousers with crease marks down the legs: they all get bagged up. Then I start on clothes I
do
wear and bag up most of them too.
Nora comes in while I am in the middle of this. I make her a cup of tea and tell her to take what she wants. “Oh, okay,” she says happily. She decides on the trousers—Agnès B. and Joseph—and all the scarves and dresses. She tries on the heels, which are far too big, and shows interest in a pair of Juicy Couture tracksuit bottoms, which have lost their elastic. I mend them for her—doing that trick with a safety pin, when you pin it to the end of the elastic and wrinkle it through the seam.
She lives in Burgess Hill, she tells me, with two friends. “Long, long way.” Her little girl, back home in Manila, is twelve.