Born of Woman (24 page)

Jennifer hadn't wanted breakfast. She was still slumped sleepless in their Cobham sitting-room when Matthew phoned at seven o'clock that morning, and invited (ordered) her to meet him at the Ritz for a breakfast interview with Rowan Childs. Her stomach heaved at both the breakfast and the name. She had never met Ms Childs, but had been belaboured in her column. Ms Childs disliked the book and had attacked what she saw as its sentimental sham, with her characteristic mixture of parody and poison. Jennifer had been worsted in the first round and would be trounced in the second.

She hadn't slept at all. She had arrived home late and trembling from the television studio, and found Lyn already in pyjamas, angry and embarrassed that his wife's emotions should be served up to the nation like so much pap. She had sat with him in their denuded sitting-room, surrounded by wooden crates and packing-cases, and tried to calm him down.

It wasn't easy. She was so exhausted and disoriented from her whistle-stop tour of Britain, she needed calming down herself. As the pressure and publicity increased, so also did the problems. The most recent one was the sale of the Cobham house. Matthew had assured them that the offer was too generous to be refused, and since they would soon be looking for their own bigger, better place, the sale had come at a most convenient time.

‘Convenient for who?' stormed Lyn. ‘We've hardly received a penny from Matthew yet, let alone enough to buy a property.'

‘We will,' said Jennifer. ‘Just be patient, darling. Anyway, there's still Hernhope. I don't see why we shouldn't live there, despite what Matthew …'

‘Oh, don't start that again, for God's sake.'

‘I'm sorry.' Jennifer kicked her shoes off. Her own patience was stretched like old elastic. She was annoyed with Matthew herself. Cobham had never been perfect, never even been their own, but at least it had proved a refuge from the glare and roar of the publicity campaign, and she had spent precious time and trouble transforming it into a tiny model Hernhope.

The irony was that the real and larger Hernhope was standing empty while they were doubly homeless. Matthew kept reiterating that they shouldn't presume to live there without proper legal sanction. Molly disagreed. She missed Molly, longed to be her neighbour again, instead of just a distant voice at the other end of a phone.

‘Of
course
you can take the house on,' Molly had boomed down the line, the last time she had rung. ‘Who could stop you anyway? If you ask me, Jenny, Matthew's pulling the wool over your eyes, so he can keep you where he wants you. It suits him, doesn't it, to invent reasons why you mustn't move up here?'

‘Yes, but …' Jennifer's voice tailed off. She had suspected that herself. Matthew had taken a trip to Mepperton nearly a year ago now—the first visit since his boyhood—checking on that mysterious bastard baby. He had also prowled round Hernhope, come back reporting problems. There was trouble with the generator, the water supply was dodgy. Yet when she and Lyn were living there, both power and water were fine, and anyway, things could always be repaired. Lyn was working a ten-hour day in Matthew's office and could hardly commute from a northern wilderness—wasn't
that
the crux? How could she argue, though, when Lyn himself refused to return, hated her to mention Hernhope at all? So she had done her best to compromise, created Hester's empire down at Cobham, on a smaller, humbler scale. But now it would be taken over by careless urban strangers while she and Lyn lived out of packing-cases.

Lyn was swatting his leg with his dressing-gown cord. ‘You're never here, in any case. What's the point of having a home at all, if you spend half your time in television studios and the other half dashing up and down the country?'

‘It was only for a fortnight, Lyn. And it's nearly over now. Things will be back to normal in a week or two.'

‘I'll believe that when I see it. The phone's been ringing non-stop since that wretched programme. Every Vita fan in the country seemed to want to speak to you or dry your tears or send you a box of Kleenex. It'd still be ringing now if I hadn't taken it off the hook.'

‘You shouldn't do that, Lyn. Matthew may be trying to get hold of me or Hartley Davies or even …'

‘See? You're as bad as they are. Can't bear to miss a chance to hog the limelight. Try the ‘‘News At Ten'', next. It gets even higher viewing figures than Vita Sampson, some nights.'

‘Lyn. That's … mean. Horrid.'

‘Forgive me.' He came across and held her, hugged her so hard she could hardly breathe. ‘I
love
you, Jennifer, but I'm not too keen to share you. Can't you understand that? I've hardly seen you these last few weeks and everything's such a mess and …'

In the end, she soothed him off to bed and sat alone downstairs, collapsed on the sofa with a cup of instant soup. Things
were
a mess, all round. She glanced around the room. Even here, she couldn't avoid the book. Copies of it were littered on the sofa, looming on the shelves; press cuttings scattered on every surface, letters from readers, agents, publishers. This was the publication which was meant to have brought them peace and happiness, a new life in the country, an end to money wrangles. Instead, it had set off a tide of disagreements, even with her husband. And now, a whole year on from those first fruitful days at Hernhope, here they were, still tied to Matthew's apron strings—homeless, childless, sleepless.

She had stretched out on the sofa—tried to switch her mind off—only half succeeded when dawn tapped at the window with its squall of birds. At least she was bathed and dressed when Matthew rang with his summons to the Ritz. She had to re-do her face and hair, of course. A quick comb and a dab of lipstick weren't enough for London's leading female journalist. She patted her head to make sure the elaborate coiffure wasn't tumbling from its pins after the shove and jostle of the crowded commuter train.

She was still dithering in the station, trapped in the tide of impatient office workers pushing and pressing past her as she stood staring at the newspaper-rack. She longed to swap with them, to face only an in-tray or a typewriter instead of Rowan Childs. The station seethed and swirled around her, sun shut out of it, air stale and over-breathed. Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She swung round.

‘Excuse me, Miss. You're Jennifer Winterton, aren't you—the girl who cried on the Vita Show last night? You really had her worried.'

‘No, I'm … sorry. You've … er … made a mistake.'

‘Who you kidding? Look, there's your photo in the
Mirror
. Trying to tell me you're her twin or something?'

Jennifer dodged away. Crazy to stand in front of all those newspapers, reflecting her face and pointing their fingers at her. Behind them, in the station Smith's, copies of the book itself were piled high in the bestseller section, shouting out her name. That name had always been a small and private thing before, signed neat on cheques or sitting unobtrusively on birthday cards or letters. Now it had introduced itself to every reader in the land, forced itself on strangers. The book was
part
of her, its ink and pages fashioned from her flesh and blood. Every time she glimpsed it in a book shop, she felt as if a lump of her own dismembered body had been left on the counter for crowds to poke and peer at. She and Hester had swelled and multiplied until they filled the British Isles. More than twenty thousand copies sold already. Twenty thousand people gouging pieces out of her, snapping off her limbs for souvenirs.

Now she'd appeared on television, her pursuers came in
millions
. Ten million viewers panting for her autograph, stopping her in stations. She wasn't worthy of it. Someone else had cut and styled and coiffed the book, doctored and distorted it, woven all the threads together, then thrown it to the masses in a champagne froth of bubbles. She was just the figurehead, mouthing Matthew's opinions, signing her name to a preface she hadn't even written, shining up her smile.

She had assumed that it was over, that now at last she could return to peace and Lyn and anonymity, but one stupid, shameful breakdown had thrust her into another round of being a primped and public person. Lyn
loathed
that public person. The book had forced itself between them like one of those huge bolsters placed between courting couples in medieval times to prevent them having contact. It was as if Hester were alive again—not the gentle, human Hester she had discovered in the diaries, but Lyn's all-powerful Mother, spying, forbidding, terrorising. Hester was angry about the invasion of her privacy, the way her private diaries had been thrown as sob-stuff to the world. The loyal and gentle tribute originally intended, had grown less reverent and more vulgarly commercialised.

Jennifer glanced at the Smith's display stand, where twenty Hesters stared her accusingly in the eye. Matthew had found an old and faded photograph and instructed his art department to retouch and refine it. Yet, for all their pains, it had somehow come out wrong. Hester was strength, force, monument—the guardian spirit of Hernhope, yet they had watered down her vigour, removed her grit and toughness, turned her into a sweet and simple rustic. Hester was iron with a streak of gold trapped in it, not buttercups and muslin.

Her own photo was equally misleading, although smaller and less prominent, tucked away on the back flap of the cover. The hair was false, the smile bogus; eyes and mouth retouched to make them larger, the whole thing posturing and painted. They had been obliged to make her glamorous to match all those glamorous people—journalists and disc jockeys, interviewers and publicity agents, photographers and columnists, all skilled in the art of sham.

Lyn was jealous of the lot of them, especially as he had stayed at home while she swanned about on tour. She had gone instead with Jonathan, Cindy Scott's assistant at Hartley Davies. Jonathan was blond, spruce, smooth and safely homosexual. Lyn distrusted and despised him. Queers made him uneasy. He had been accused too often of being one himself.

At least Jonathan wasn't accompanying her today. Matthew had decided to take on Rowan Childs himself. She had already accused him (in her column) of distorting history and romanticising war. He would be smiling at her now, pouring her tea and sugaring it with charm. She mustn't keep them waiting. She hurried to the exit and joined the queue for taxis, eyes fixed firmly on the pavement. That queue was composed of readers, viewers, listeners, all eager to cross-question her, denounce her as a cry-baby. She had always hated London as an uncaring, anonymous city, but now it was the overtures she dreaded, the tapping on the shoulder, the shaking by her hand.

A taxi swooped mercifully to a halt. She climbed in, slammed the door.

‘Where to?' asked the driver, turning round and staring at her. ‘Ah—the Ritz, is it? Yeah—thought I recognised you. I knocked off early for a change last night and just caught the end of Vita Sampson. She really got you, didn't she? Not that I blame you, love. She's that tough she'd make
me
cry.'

Jennifer mumbled some reply. She didn't want to think about Vita Sampson when it was Rowan Childs she was about to battle with. She peered at her reflection in the taxi window, tugged at the hairpins in her coiled and uneasy bun. She hated it swept up like that, but Matthew insisted that she dress in the spirit of the book. The week before publication, Hartley Davies Publicity had packaged her like another of their products. Television was cruel to curves, they told her, so she had been forced on a rigid diet and squeezed into stern black skirts and throttling high-necked blouses. Once the tour began, she lost half a stone through nerves. Meals became not sustenance, but Sales. Up at six in strange hotels, swotting up her speeches at the breakfast table or spouting them at lunches, lashes stiff and sticky with mascara, excess lipstick bleeding on to coffee cups, five-course dinners hiccoughing into midnight over expansive port and brandy when all she wanted was Horlicks and her bed. Today, it was back to the arena—her real self left at Cobham and only a hollow mask to face the world. She felt her fear heavy like the make-up, sticky like the hair lacquer, holding all that falseness in its place.

Trafalgar Square was choked with rush-hour traffic. It seemed extravagant to dawdle in the snarl-up with the meter ticking over, but if she got out and walked, she was bound to be accosted.

‘Didn't I see you on …?'

‘Wasn't it you who …?'

She wasn't
any
body. She would only disappoint them. They'd expect a historian, an expert, a sparkling girl who could juggle words about, not a tired, jaded bungler who could neither speak nor write. Even the taxi driver was pestering her with questions as he turned into Arlington Street and pulled up outside the Ritz, where a supercilious doorman helped her out. She over-tipped them both. (At least Jonathan had spared her the intricacies of tipping.) She paused a moment at the daunting hotel entrance with its banked flowers and frock-coated lackey standing just inside. A woman in a nylon overall and yellow rubber gloves was scrubbing down the steps. Sixty years ago, she could have been a Hester. Hester had worked in a grand hotel like this, where the rich still battened on a thousand menials who rose at five to lay fires and empty slops, then crawled to bed in their cramped and chilly attic rooms, while the guests were still carousing in the ballrooms. Those were some of the saddest entries in the diaries, the ones Hester had written from her lonely garret as she stared out at the rude and unfamiliar London streets and was stunned by the city's cackle after the velvet-fingered quiet and dark of Fernfield.

Jennifer stopped. How could she swan into a hotel built of gold-dust where a single night could set you back a hundred pounds? That was more than a whole year's wages for a Hester in the 'twenties. She trailed down the steps again, stood on the pavement surrounded by a pile of dustbin bags overflowing with rubbish. Those were the Ritz's faeces, its excrement and phlegm—rotting strawberries grey with cigarette ash, broken bottles bleeding into mouldy bread.