Friends & Rivals (28 page)

He started to stroke her hair, the way a father might pet a child. ‘Why don't I stay here tonight? In the guest room, obviously. I don't like leaving you here alone.'

‘I'm used to being alone,' said Cat, not to make him feel guilty but because it was the truth. ‘Besides, I don't suppose Kendall would be too pleased about it.'

‘Kendall understands,' said Ivan brusquely. He did not want to think about Kendall. Even hearing Catriona say her name felt wrong and uncomfortable. Here, in this house with his wife, the woman he'd spent half his life with, Kendall didn't exist. None of his life in London existed. ‘Anyway it's not just for you, it's for me too. I don't want to be alone. Not tonight.'

He moved closer. For one terrifying, thrilling moment, Catriona thought he might be about to kiss her.
Did she want him to?
Before she had an answer to the question he backed away almost shyly and sat back down at the table. ‘Only if you feel comfortable, of course,' he mumbled, picking up another potato and staring at it intently, avoiding eye contact. ‘I wouldn't want to impose.'

Catriona smiled. It was a long time since she'd seen this side to Ivan. The kindness, but also the neediness, the lost little boy wanting his mother. ‘You're not imposing. Of course you can stay.'

It was a bittersweet evening. Catriona fried up some mince, onions, garlic and home-grown tomatoes and made a delicious scratch shepherd's pie. While she was cooking, Ivan set the table, pouring a glass of red wine for himself and a Diet Coke for Catriona at her request, and chatting about anything and everything other than Hector. Old friends, anecdotes from their Oxford days that had both of them alternately laughing and gasping with horror at what complete idiots they'd been back then. It felt good to be distracted. But every few minutes the laughter would stop, and one or other of them would fall silent, their minds drawn inexorably back to Hector and the hideous uncertainties of the present.

In the end, after supper, Ivan suggested getting out some of the old photo albums and looking at pictures of Hector and Rosie as babies. ‘Are you mad?' said Catriona. ‘I'm barely holding it together as it is.' But to her surprise she found flipping through the pages immensely calming. Anything to push out the image of Hector locked up in some paedophile's cellar somewhere, or lying cold and dead in a ditch.

At eleven o'clock, leaving Cat with the pictures, Ivan went into the kitchen to make them both some hot chocolate. Opening the larder, he found shelves stuffed with chef's ingredients, herbs and spices and an endless bottled array of pickles and chutneys and jams, as well as the usual staples of family life: Coco Pops, Hobnobs, giant multipacks of Mini Cheddars, Hector's favourite. He thought about his and Kendall's kitchen in Cheyne Walk, with its unused chrome appliances and bare cupboards. All they had in the fridge was champagne and Kendall's Essie nail polish. All of a sudden he felt unbearably lonely.

Sloshing milk into a Le Creuset pan and sticking it on the hot ring of the Aga to boil, he filled two mugs with chocolate powder and looked around the room. It was smaller and far less grand than the kitchen at The Rookery, but Cat had managed to make it bright and homely, as warm and welcoming as a womb. Photographs of the children and examples of their childhood artwork were everywhere, as well as some of Catriona's own more recent work. A jug of fading peonies littered petals onto the scratched farmhouse table, and jaunty, mismatched china in a rainbow of colours hung from hooks on the ceiling above Ivan's head.
Hector must have been mad to want to run away from here
, thought Ivan.
I must have been mad.

Through the half-open door he watched Catriona, poring lovingly over the pictures of their children. She'd gained some weight and looked a mess in an old, holey brown cardigan, with her tangled hair sticking out at all angles, the result of running her hands through it so many times. But there was still something luminous about her. Her flushed, youthful skin, soulful blue eyes, but most of all the immense kindness and warmth that seemed to seep out of her pores like sap oozing from a tree. It struck Ivan then like a bolt from the blue.

I still love her.

‘Ivan!' She spun around suddenly. ‘The milk! It's boiling over, I can hear it.'

‘Oh! Shit.' Ivan grabbed the pan, scalding his wrist with bubbling white liquid. ‘Fuck!'

Just then the phone rang. Ivan and Catriona stared at each other for a second in panic – at eleven at night, this wasn't a social call – then Catriona literally dived on the receiver.

‘Hello?'

‘Cat. How are you?' Jack Messenger's voice seemed to come from another world. Languid, happy, relaxed.

It wasn't the police, calling to say they'd found a body.

It wasn't Hector, calling to say he was coming home.

Relief and despair landed a double punch to Catriona's stomach so violent she had to sit down. ‘Jack. Hi.' She shook her head at Ivan, who had a face like fury.
What the fuck was Messenger doing calling at this time of night? How selfish could he possibly be?
‘I'm OK,' lied Catriona. ‘I was just going to bed.'

‘Well before you do,' said Jack, ‘I have someone here who'd like to talk to you.'

There was a crackle on the end of the line. Then Catriona heard the most wonderful, miraculous two words in the world. ‘Hello, Mum.'

‘Oh my God. Oh my GOD. Oh my actual GOD!'

Hector Charles turned fully around to stare at the gold hot-pants-wearing blonde twins rollerblading past him on the Santa Monica bike path. Unfortunately he himself was on a bike at the time and came within a hair's breadth of ploughing into a young mother jogging with her stroller.

‘Moron!' yelled the mother. ‘Look where you're going!'

Jack Messenger pulled his godson aside. ‘They're not worth getting killed for, you know,' he grinned.

‘You wouldn't say that if you lived in Burford,' sighed Hector. ‘This place is amazing. I'm never going home.'

The relief Jack felt when Hector had turned up on his doorstep six days ago was hard to describe. He'd spoken to Catriona almost every day since the boy had gone missing, and though he'd always been supportive and encouraging, privately he'd begun to think that perhaps the worst really
had
happened. So when the familiar freckled, dirty, mischiev-ous face appeared on his front porch, a little older than when Jack had last seen him but otherwise not much changed, he'd been too overjoyed even to be angry.

He had, however, insisted that Hector call his parents immediately. ‘You do realize they've been out of their minds with worry?'

‘Mum has, you mean,' said Hector bitterly.

‘They both have,' said Jack firmly. Much as he hated Ivan, he knew from Cat just how torn up he was about Hector's disappearance. ‘And Rosie. You've had half the British police force out looking for you, you know. Your face is on an Interpol alert.'

‘Cool,' said Hector. It struck Jack what a young thirteen-year-old he was. Almost as if his development had been arrested at age eleven, the year his father walked out.

‘It's not “cool”,' said Jack. ‘You paid for that plane ticket with Ned Williams's credit card, which you
stole
.'

‘I didn't steal it. I borrowed it,' said Hector breezily. ‘Anyway, Ned won't mind. He's famous, he's got loads of money. He didn't even notice I'd used the card, did he?'

This was true, although Jack suspected it owed more to Ned Williams's scatterbrained lifestyle than his groaning bank balance.

‘Call it what you like,' he said firmly, ‘it's still fraud. And what about the cash you nicked from your mother's purse?'

‘What about it?' said Hector defiantly.

His conversation with Catriona was emotional. When Ivan came on the line, Hector vehemently refused to talk to him, then ended up screaming that he refused to come back to England while his father was still living with ‘that bitch' and stormed off into Jack's garden to roll a cigarette.

‘Give him time,' Jack told Catriona when she came back on the line. ‘He's welcome to stay with me for a while until he gets his head together. I'll put him to work at JSM, making the tea or something.'

Ivan had been all for dragging the boy onto the next plane by the scruff of his neck to begin his long round of apologies: to his family, to the police who'd wasted valuable time looking for him, to his school. ‘He needs to learn that actions have consequences. Besides, things are bad enough between Hector and me without bloody Jack sitting on his shoulder pouring poison into his ear, telling him what a shit I am.'

‘Jack wouldn't do that,' said Catriona. ‘He loves Hector.' She wasn't wild on the idea of Hector staying on in LA either. So they'd agreed a compromise. Hector could spend a few days with Jack, then Catriona would fly out alone, talk to him, and bring him back.

That had been almost a week ago. Catriona's plane was due to land at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon, and though Hector was looking forward to seeing her, he was still adamant that he wasn't going to go back to England.

‘How about lunch at Johnny Rockets?' he asked his godfather. ‘It'll be like the condemned men's last meal, before Mum shows up and makes me eat disgusting healthy stuff.'

‘Sorry, mate,' said Jack. ‘I've got to stop by the office. I thought we could go out this evening, though. Land of the Greeks are performing at The Viper Room. I could take you backstage afterwards, meet the guys. Of course, if you've already made other plans …'

‘No!' Hector interrupted hastily. ‘No, no, no. I'd love to go.'

A rock concert! At The Viper Room! With
backstage passes!

It was official. Jack Messenger was the coolest godfather in the world.

On a busy stretch of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, the iconic all-black façade of The Viper Room sat perched like a sleepy crow in the moonlight.

Despite having a music manager for a father, Hector Charles had never been anywhere remotely so cool in his short life. Following Jack into the hallowed, triangular auditorium where River Phoenix famously died of an overdose on Halloween night in 1993, the boy's eyes were on stalks.

‘You wanna hear a cool story?' Jack asked him, strolling behind the closed bar and helping himself to two Diet Cokes.

Hector nodded enthusiastically.

‘You know who Adam Duritz is?'

‘Sure. Lead singer of Counting Crows.'

‘Exactly. After their first album came out, Adam got so sick of the fame and the pressure, he came and worked here as a barman. For six months. Isn't that wild?'

‘Totally,' said Hector, who was rapidly becoming au fait with LA speak.

A geeky twenty-something, in skinny jeans and a faded Labatt's beer T-shirt, tapped Jack on the shoulder. ‘Hey, man. How's it going? Is there a long line out on Sunset yet?'

‘Ben, hi. Yeah, looks like we're gonna be standing room only. This is my godson, Hector, by the way. He wanted to come and see you guys play.'

‘Hey, Hector. You wanna come backstage, meet the guys? I'll bet Jesse'll let you have a go on his guitar if you're nice to him.'

‘You're … you're Ben Braemar,' Hector stammered.

‘Last time I checked,' laughed Ben, winking at Jack and ushering an ecstatic Hector through the ‘Artists Only' door.

Thirty minutes later, Hector and Jack watched from the front row as the Greeks powered through their short, eight-song set. Jack was gratified by how much the group had grown in confidence as live performers since he'd first signed them, but without straining at the choke lead to play ever bigger, more commercial venues. The boys from Detroit had no desire to stray from their indie roots, which made them both exciting to brand and market and a dream to manage versus the fame-hungry, bubble-gum pop acts that had long been Jack's bread and butter.

Shaking his floppy hair to the deafening
boom, boom
of Lionel Scree on the drums, at one with the sweating, pulsing, universally black-clad fans behind him, Hector Charles was like a boy transformed. Jack didn't need to ask him how he felt. The kid was clearly having the time of his life.

Later, on the short drive west back to Brentwood, he barely drew breath about how ‘awesome' it all was. ‘Jesse showed me how to do three chords, and then he and Lionel were playing rock paper scissors and they started fighting with each other, not really serious you know, just fooling around, and they were rolling on the floor laughing and it was
so
cool. And then Ben told them to grow up and they all signed my back in indelible marker, look.' He lifted up his T-shirt proudly. ‘Can you take a photo later, in case it fades before I have to leave? I seriously wish I didn't have to leave.'

Jack smiled. ‘You wanna be in a rock band now, huh? Don't tell your mother I encouraged you.'

‘Oh no,' said Hector. ‘I could never be in a band. I'm crap at music. But I'd love to do what you do. You know. Schmooze.'

Jack burst out laughing. ‘Is that what you think I do for a living? Schmooze?'

Hector shrugged. ‘Kind of. Yeah.'

If you're anything like your father
, thought Jack,
you'll make a world-class schmoozer.

What on earth would poor Catriona do then?

At tea time the next day, Catriona walked through LAX feeling as nervous as a teenager on her first date. Which was perfectly ridiculous, of course. By rights it was Hector who ought to feel nervous, not to mention contrite, at the prospect of seeing her. What could be more pathetic than being afraid of confronting your own child?

It didn't help that she was here, on foreign turf. She tried to remember the last time she'd been to America. It must have been for a Jester thing. Oh yes, one of Ivan's classical acts, a tenor, had done a live show in Madison Square Gardens and Ivan had dragged her along. That must have been over a decade ago, back when he still wanted her to travel with him.
Back when I was slim and pretty and young
, she thought sadly. Although actually, coming through customs at LAX made her feel rather better on the weight front. She'd expected LA to be crawling with improbably proportioned Barbie-doll women with stuck-on silicone tits and hair extensions. In fact, although she'd spotted a few of those, most people seemed to be quite enormously fat, especially the women her age. Europeans looked down on Americans for their obesity, but it seemed to Catriona that Americans had got fatness right. None of the hefty ladies in front of her in the queue looked remotely embarrassed about their extra pounds. Most were married to similarly vast men, and they all seemed perfectly happy, chattering away, the wives reapplying their lipstick with as much confidence as Marilyn Monroe.
Not like me, skulking around like a sad old sack of potatoes
, thought Catriona.