Cause Celeb (38 page)

“I've got a job to do.”

“Rosie, I am asking you to come back with me.”

“No.”

“I've done this thing, and we've saved the situation and now I AM ASKING YOU.”

“Of course I'm not sodding coming back with you,” I burst out. “You've seen what's going on up there.”

“You love O'Rourke,” he said, “don't you?”

“Oh, puh-
lease
, Oliver.” Corinna appeared out of the darkness. “Can't you see the girl's got more on her mind than bloody men? Here you are, little one, I've brought you a sandwich.”

“I'm going back to the fire,” said Oliver.

“Oliver,” I said, catching his arm, “thank you.”

“Do you know,” said Corinna when he had gone, “I think we have all gained more than we've given, here. I think we will all be profoundly altered by this.”

I said nothing.

“Don't you think so? Weren't you completely altered when you first came out here?”

“In some ways,” I said. “But in some ways I think people always stay the same.”

We could see the taillights of the departing convoy, long after we had ceased to hear the sound. Betty, Henry, Debbie and I stood watching them, not knowing quite what to do now. I was trying to imagine what life was going to be like in Safila without Muhammad. He had decided to go with them.

“Dears, I must tell you the most marvelous news,” said Betty.

There was a pause while we tried to lift ourselves out of our thoughts.

“What's that, Bets old thing?” said Henry, after slightly too long. “Don't tell me, you're going to adopt the twins as well?”

“No, silly,” said Betty coyly. “Well. Roy. You know Roy the sound engineer?”

“What, the one you were talking with behind the caravan before he left?” said Debbie.

“Charming fellow,” said Henry. “Bit of a Crispin Crashingbore at times, but by and large, absolute charmer.”

“He's asked me to marry him.”

“That's wonderful,” I said.

“Don't like to throw a dampener on the proceedings,” said Henry. “Bloody marvelous, couldn't be more delighted. But aren't you already married, old sock?”

“Oh, yes, of course I know. But when all this trouble with the famine's sorted out here, and Dr. O'Rourke takes over I'm going back to England and start divorce proceedings, and start again with Roy.”

“What's that?” said Henry. Ahead of us a white djellaba was just visible, approaching with a limp.

“Is that you, Muhammad?” I called.

“No, it is an apparition,” came his voice.

“I thought you were going to London to speak for your people.”

He swung towards us on the stick. “I decided it was better to stay with my people here,” he said, breathing heavily. “We must fight from within, we must insist that we may cultivate, we must demand that food be kept in storage in our highlands, so that when disaster strikes again we need not leave our homes.”

“Bloody hell, Muhammad,” said Henry. “Turned into a bloody saint-style person. Throw up your chance of fame and fortune to insist on the right to grow tomatoes.”

“The shallow and flippant nature of your character never ceases to appall me,” said Muhammad, joining us where we stood and leaning an arm on Henry's shoulder.

The others set off back to the camp, and I drove back to pick up O'Rourke. As I reached the end of the rocky corridor and emerged onto the plain, the moon was coming up over the mountains, throwing a white light onto the scene. On the rising ground to my left, the dead were still being carried to the burial ground, the bodies were still being laid out and the graves still being dug. I could see the lamp still lit, over in O'Rourke's clinic, where he was working. I walked over to him.

“Have you nearly finished?”

“Finished?” He could hardly keep his eyes open.

“Come on. You'd better get some sleep. You've got to start again tomorrow.”

I left him to finish off, and walked over to check on the feeding centers. When I came back he was packing up his equipment into boxes. I helped him load them into the jeep.

As we drove out of the rocky corridor and down to the main road, the lights of the convoy were just visible in the distance heading for El Daman.

“I feel like five kinds of shit driving away and leaving this,” said O'Rourke.

“At least you're coming back in the morning.”

“It worked then, did it, your broadcast?” he said, with the quick smile.

“Yes,” I said. “Bit late, but it worked.”

After the broadcast there were three months of hard labor for us. The population of the camp doubled and there were journalists and cameras constantly at large. There were frequent rumors that Fergie was coming out on a mercy dash to bring royal jelly and ginseng,
that Elizabeth Taylor was coming with Michael Jackson and a mini–fun fair, or that Ronnie and Nancy Reagan were planning to spend Christmas with us. Most of them proved to be false alarms, but still it was unsettling and nerve-racking for staff and refugees alike.

All the publicity, time-consuming as it was, meant that questions were asked publicly. The European and American governments and the UN came in for a lot of flack. Even we had completely underestimated the sheer magnitude of the disaster in the highlands: for two months people continued to pour down in unimaginable numbers. The scene we had witnessed at Dowit was reenacted time and time again along the length of the border.

Safila was better off than most of the camps because of the food from Charitable Acts and because we had raised our profile right from the start. The journalists always came to us first. We were in the center of the media spotlight and the big shots could not afford to let the situation get too bad for us. Elsewhere it was appalling.

Safila played host to all sorts of political dignitaries and discussions about how to stop disaster happening again. The latest plan is that there are to be grain stores positioned and kept stocked all the way along the border, and an agreement with Abouti that the aid agencies can take food into Kefti if ever the harvest is threatened again. As Muhammad put it, “If ever that comes to pass then I will both marry Kate Fortune and become her hairdresser.” Stranger things have been known, of course.

Betty stayed on for a couple of months to see us through the worst of it, then departed for a desk job in London and Roy the soundman. Parcels of candied peel and decomposing date and walnut loaf have started arriving with touching regularity. Linda asked to be sent back to Chad and left about six weeks ago. Henry became very serious and adult for about a month but is now once again preoccupied with the contents of Fenella Fridge and Sian's Boris Bra.

And O'Rourke: he's asleep now, actually, in my bed under the mosquito net. I keep glancing up from the desk, watching him, in the glow from the hurricane lamp. He snores a bit, but I'm getting used to it.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com

Also by Helen Fielding
*

B
RIDGET
J
ONES
: T
HE
E
DGE OF
R
EASON

B
RIDGET
J
ONES
'
S
D
IARY

h
elen
f
ielding

*

c
ause
c
eleb

Viking

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First American edition
Published in 2001 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

13579108642

Copyright © Helen Fielding, 1994 All rights reserved

PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Fielding, Helen, date.
Cause celeb / Helen Fielding.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-670-89450-8
1. British—Africa, North—Fiction. 2. Africa, North—Fiction. 3. Food relief—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6056.I4588 C38 2001
823'.914—dc21 00-043367

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America Set in Bembo

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

For my father, Michael Fielding

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With thanks to Gillon Aitken, Dr. John Collee, Richard Coles, Adrienne Connors, Will Day of Comic Relief, Nellie Fielding and family, Paula, Piers and Sam Fletcher, Dr. Osma Galal, Georgia Garrett, Kathrin Grunig of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, Roger Hutchings, Mick Imlah, Tina Jenkins, Paul Lariviere of UNHCR, John Lloyd, John Ma-grath of Oxfam, Judith Marshall of the Natural History Museum's Department of Entomology, Harry Ritchie, Dr. John Seaman of Save the Children Fund, Jane Tewson of Comic Relief, Sarah Wallace, Jane Wellesley for help, advice, expertise and much kindness; and to Comic Relief, Médecin sans Frontières, Oxfam, the Red Cross, the Save the Children Fund and the Sudanese Commission of Refugees.

With appreciation of Peter Gill's
A Year in the Death of Africa
(Paladin), John Rowley's
Grasshoppers and Locusts: The Plague of the Sahel
(Panos), Ben Jackson's
Poverty and the Planet
(Penguin) and Nigel Twose's
Cultivating Hunger
(Oxfam).

And with special thanks to Richard Curtis.

c
ause
c
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CHAPTER
One

I
t used to seem extraordinary to me that someone like Henry could actually exist, extraordinary that a person could be transported into an environment so alien to his own, and remain so utterly unaffected by his surroundings. It was as if he had been coated with a very strong sealant, the sort of thing they use to paint on oceangoing yachts.

Henry was spreading thick cut luxury marmalade from a Fort-num and Mason's jar on a piece of Nambulan unleavened bread.

“Got up this morning, didn't Boris Believe it—family of eight outside my hut wanting to move their tent nearer the river. I said to the chap, ‘I thought this was a bloody refugee camp, not a holiday camp, but you go ahead, mate, by all means. Never mind the old malnutrition—you go for the view.'”

Breakfast was taken in Safila, just after dawn. It was a quiet time, the hour before the heat became intolerable, with the silence broken only by the rooster and Henry, who was incapable of shutting up except when he was asleep. I was particularly annoyed by Henry that morning, because I suspected he had started an affair with one of our more emotionally fragile nurses, Sian. She was sitting next to him now, giving him a look you could have spread on a piece of toast. Sian was a sweet-natured girl who had joined us two months ago, after returning early from night shift to find her husband of
eighteen months in bed with a Turkish minicab driver. Her therapy was being continued via correspondence.

Betty was talking about food as usual. “Do you know, what I could
really
eat now is a pudding. Mind you, I say that. Bread-and-butter pudding. Oooh, lovely, with raisins and a bit of nutmeg. I wonder if Kamal could do us a bread-and-butter pudding if we made that biscuit tin into an oven?”

It was five-thirty in the morning. I got up from the table, walked outside and sighed. How the tiny irritations of life filled the mind out here, keeping the big horrors at bay. I dipped a cup into the water pot, and walked to the edge of the hill to brush my teeth.

Our compound was behind me, with its round mud huts, showers, latrines and the cabana where we took our meals. Before me was the sandy basin which housed Safila camp, a great scar in the desert. The light was very soft at that time, the sun pale, just clearing the horizon. Clustered over a pattern of hummocks and paths, leading down to the point where the two blue rivers met, were the huts which housed the refugees. Five years ago, during the great mid-eighties famine, there were sixty thousand of them, and a hundred a day were dying. Now twenty thousand remained. The rest had gone back over the border to Kefti, to the mountains and the war.

A gust of hot wind made the dry grasses rustle. I was bothered by more than Henry that morning. A rumor was circulating in the camp about a locust plague back in Kefti, which was threatening the harvest. There were often scare stories in the camp of one kind or another: it was hard to know what to believe. We'd heard talk of a new influx of refugees on their way to us again, maybe thousands.

Sounds were beginning to rise from the camp now, goats being herded, laughter, children playing, contented sounds. Once, the great swathe of cries which rose to us here were those which went with starvation and death. I bit the side of my thumb, and tried not to remember. I couldn't think back to that time again. Footsteps were coming from the cabana. Henry was sauntering across the compound and back to his hut. He was wearing his favorite T-shirt, which featured a motif set out like a multiple choice questionnaire for relief workers.

(a) Missionary?

(b) Mercenary?

(c) Misfit?

(d) Broken heart?

 

Henry had ticked (b), which was a joke since his family owned half of northeast England. Me? I was a c/d hybrid and soft in the head to boot.

*

In London in the summer of 1985 I was afflicted by a crush, which is a terrible thing to happen to a woman. I met Oliver, the object of my rampant imaginings, at a gala performance of Vivaldi's
Gloria
at the Royal Albert Hall. I was what was known as a puffette: a publicist in a publishing company, Ginsberg and Fink. I wiggled around in short skirts, legs in sheer black tights crossing and uncrossing in meetings, then kept going on and on about people not being interested in my mind. Funny how at twenty-five you worry about not being taken seriously and take being a sex object for granted. Later you take being taken seriously for granted, and worry about not being a sex object.

Our company chairman, Sir William Ginsberg, liked to put together little gatherings of the arty and the talented from all walks of life, not revealing to the guests in advance who the other guests would be. For all the ill-informed like me these gatherings were a total nightmare. You feared to ask anyone what they did lest they turned out to be the author of
Love in the Time of Cholera,
or one of the Beach Boys.

I had been to three dinner parties at Sir William's house. I wasn't sure he remembered quite who I was. He employed several young girls and always used to invite one or two of us along because of our fine minds, presumably. I spent the evenings in a state of awed nervousness, saying very little. But I liked meeting these creative interesting people. I wanted to fit in. This was the first time I had been invited to a large-scale party, and I was most excited.

Sir William had organized a little soirée before the concert:
drinks for a hundred in one of the Hall's hospitality suites; fifteen boxes hired on the company; then a sit-down dinner for a chosen dozen and the rest of us could piss off.

I arrived deliberately late at the Albert Hall, inspected my reflection in the ladies' powder room, and made my way along the deep red corridor to the Elgar Room. A uniformed attendant checked my name on a list and swung open the dark wooden door into a burst of light. The room was golden and all-a-glitter, the black-tied guests spilling down an ornamental staircase in the center of the room, and leaning on the gilt balustrades of the higher level. It was bizarre being in a room full of celebrities—you felt as if you knew everyone, but nobody knew you. I set off towards the table where drinks were being served, catching snatches of conversation as I squeezed my way along.

“Frankly, I have to say, it's not coming off the page . . .”

“You see the trouble with Melvyn . . .”

“Jerome, have you got the mobile?”

I felt a hand on my elbow.

“
Mmmmm!
The most gorgeous girl in the world. Oh, dear heaven, you look absolutely divine. My heart's going to go this time, I swear it. Absolutely convinced of it. Give me a kiss, my darling, do.”

It was Dinsdale Warburton, one of my major authors, and an ancient giant of the English stage. Dinsdale had recently written his memoirs for us. He had a worried face, was queer as a coot, and unfailingly kind.

“But, my darling!” Dinsdale's brows were almost meeting in horror. “You do not have a drrink. But let us get you one! Let us get you one at once!”

Then his eyes were caught by something over my shoulder. “Oh! The most gorgeous man in the world. Dear boy, dear boy. You look absolutely divine. You know, I did love your whatever it was you did the other night. You looked so
exquisitely
clever and pretty.”

Oliver Marchant was the editor and presenter of a successful and right-on arts program called
Soft Focus.
His reputation as the thinking-woman's man preceded him, but I had no idea he was going to be quite so devastating. Dinsdale was speaking to me: “Have
you met this gorgeous man, my darling. Do you know Oliver Marchant?”

I panicked. How were you supposed to answer this question with famous people? Yes, I've seen you on the telly? No . . . in other words, I've never heard of you. “Yes, I mean . . . no. Sorry . . . pathetic.”

Oliver took my hand. “And this is?”

“Ah. The most gorgeous girl in the world, dear boy, absolute goddess.”

“Yes, but what is her
name,
Dinsdale?” said Oliver.

Dinsdale looked flummoxed for a moment. I absolutely couldn't believe he'd forgotten my name. I'd been working very closely with him for two months.

“I'm Rosie Richardson,” I said apologetically.

“Pleased to meet you . . . Rosie Richardson,” said Oliver.

He was long, lean and dark in a navy suit with an ordinary tie, not a bow tie, loosened at the neck. I noticed very precisely the way his black hair fell against his collar, the half shadow on his chin.

“Rosie, my darling, I'm off to get you a drink this second. On my way. You must be
fainting
with thirst,” said Dinsdale and hurried off looking sheepish.

I turned to Oliver, to find he was now talking to a gray-haired newsreader. The newsreader had his teenage daughter with him.

“How's it going, mate?” said the newsreader, clapping Oliver on the shoulder.

“Oh, same old shit, you know. How are you, Sarah?”

Oliver spoke charmingly to the girl, who was getting even more flustered than I was. He glanced across and smiled at me as if to say, “Hang on.”

“Bye-bye, Sarah,” said Oliver sweetly, as the girl and her father prepared to move off. “Good luck with those exams.” He gave her a little wave. “Dirty
bitch,
” he said to me in an undertone, looking at the departing teenager. “Dying for it.” I laughed. “So,” he said, “are you having a lovely time?”

“Well, I find it very odd, to be honest,” I said. “I've never been in a room with so many famous people before. They all seem to know each other. It's like a club.
Do
they all know each other?”