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By God, it brought the house down.
Messy glowered at him as he peeped across, smiling with encouragement and warmth and a lovely little smattering of diffidence. She didn’t need Maurice Morrison – the last thing she needed was patronising, good-looking Maurice Morrison trawling for admirers off the back of her humiliation. She was furious. Gradually the cheers faded to silence and everyone waited to hear how she would respond.
She could have said so many things. If she’d been even an eighth as efficient at crowd control as Mr Morrison was, she could have turned the whole situation to her advantage. But she wasn’t. She had barely emerged from four years in hiding, she was still battered by a broken heart and the cruel transformation in her looks and general fortune, and the lights were beaming down on her and making her very hot. The whole world, or so it felt, was looking on. She said: ‘Get lost, you phony little creep.’
And that was the end of Messy. Really, she was lucky she wasn’t lynched.
The performance boosted her book sales, but it also set her up as a national target for mockery and general abuse. Over the next two days a lot of inane and cruel things were written about her. One paper found a nutritionist to express revulsion at a picture of sweet, chubby little Chloe sucking on a lollipop. Another paper dedicated a whole page to what they imagined Messy Monroe needed to eat each day in order to maintain her great bulk. Several papers ran Before and After photographs, alongside pseudo serious articles about the stresses of early fame/sex appeal/faded stardom/single motherhood…It was pretty standard stuff, the usual newspaper fodder. It certainly wasn’t an enormous story, what with everything else that was going on.
But it was big enough to catch the eyes of the tabloid scanners at Fiddleford Manor.
‘There’s a bloody great cow here,’ said Grey McShane, slowly lifting his large feet off the kitchen table and laying his paper down in front of him, ‘who lost her rag on the telly a couple o’ nights ago. Have you seen the size of her?’
‘Yes, I noticed her,’ mumbled the General, without looking up. Dressed smartly, as always, in a tweed jacket and old regiment tie, he was sitting in his preferred position for this time in the mid-morning, bolt upright in the worn leather armchair beside the Aga, and surrounded by a sea of downmarket newspapers and magazines. ‘I thought she was rather comely.’
‘No!’ Grey examined the photograph more closely, this time trying to overlook her most obvious weakness. And it was true, she had beautiful long dark shiny hair…and an attractive mouth which curled up slightly at the edges…and round, intelligent, bright blue eyes… ‘But she’s a bloody whale!’
‘Modern girls are too thin, McShane. I thought we’d agreed on that.’
‘Well I know…But there’s a limit.’
Just then Jo came in, waddling efficiently as she tended to these days, now that she was tense and working again, with her large but very neat seven-and-a-half-month bump in front of her and her notorious contacts book resting open in her hands. ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Are you discussing Messy Monroe? That’s just who I wanted to talk about.’
‘Aye. Apparently she really hates thin people.’
‘She actually did a couple of P.A.s for us a few years ago. Ha! When she was thin herself. And she was great. Very professional…Because there was that phase when an M.M. P.A. pretty much guaranteed a show in the red tops, wasn’t there? She could charge whatever she liked…Do you remember?’ Grey and the General looked at each other in weary incomprehension, as they often did when Jo started talking shop. ‘Anyway it doesn’t matter,’ she continued blithely. ‘The point is somehow or other I’ve got her number. And that’s what counts. I think we should invite her to come down.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ bellowed Grey. ‘Have you seen the size of her? She won’t fit through the front door!’
‘Well. Short of inviting Osama Bin Laden to stay with us—’
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ snapped the General.
‘…she’s about the only person left anybody can be bothered to hate anymore.’
‘I don’t hate her,’ said the General mildly. ‘As a matter of fact I think she looks delightful…In a largish sort of way.’
‘Well, good. Because I’m about to persuade her to come and see us. She’s going to be our first celebrity refugee. What do you think about that?’
Grey sat back with amusement to observe the General’s reaction to this new autocratic management style. He was amazed, actually, that Jo had managed to prevent herself from adopting it from the beginning. The house had been unofficially ready to receive people for a fortnight now and so far the ‘Guest Selection Board Meetings’, as Jo, back in full professional mode, now insisted on calling the Fiddleford Four’s rather goofy and extremely argumentative confabs, had not been a great success. There had been five meetings altogether, each one angrily and prematurely disbanded because three of the four board members could never agree. On anything. At the last meeting even Charlie, the most tolerant of men, had walked out before the end.
‘What’s that?’ said the General stiffly. ‘The adorable little fat lady? Invited here? Don’t you think we should have some sort of conference about this before you take the law into your own hands?’
Grey McShane chuckled.
‘The meetings,’ said Jo, using her most reasonable voice (also unfortunately the one most guaranteed to infuriate her father-in-law) ‘don’t seem to be getting us anywhere. And the fact is – the fact is – they’re not going to increase our overdraft again. Unless we do something pretty soon, we are seriously going to have to start selling pieces of furniture—’
‘I’m aware of that,’ interrupted the General haughtily and then, uncertain how to continue the argument in the face of such appalling news, repeated himself, before turning lamely towards Grey for help.
Grey shrugged. ‘She’s right, you know. These meetings are a bloody waste o’ time.’
‘Fine,’ he snapped. ‘Fine. Have it your own way. Of course I know you will anyway. Don’t consult me. After all it’s no longer my house…’
‘Och, belt up,’ said Grey good-naturedly. The General pretended not to hear. He picked up his newspaper, opened it at a random page, and managed, apparently, to be instantly engrossed.
Jo and her father-in-law’s relationship had not grown any easier over the past months, in spite of their shared trauma at the hands of the government slaughtermen, their pleasure at the coming baby, and even their shared love of Charlie. Jo had employed all her best, most charming tactics to try to win him round but to no avail. She and the General had argued the very first time they met, and it seemed they were incapable of doing anything else.
Jo tended to lay undue emphasis on the retired General’s utterly irrelevant political opinions (which were always unfashionable and occasionally, it has to be said, quite unpleasant). She took offence to almost every opinion he had. The General simply took offence to Jo. Which was unfair because she had enormous warmth and kindness, and occasionally, when her fashionable opinions allowed it, and she was feeling brave enough, she was even capable of being quite funny. But she was too modern, too bossy, too equal, too clever. Altogether too many things that a fading General would be bound to find alarming.
And now she was living in his house, or rather he was living in hers. She was imposing ridiculous new telephone systems on him, and inviting people he didn’t know to come and stay. Because although the dream of opening a refuge had at least partly been his, the reality of having paying strangers in the house was of course quite different. More so for him than for any of them. And if sharing his old home with a kind but bossy daughter-in-law was difficult, then sharing it with incomprehensible new telephone ‘units’ and a lot of ghastly, self-pitying ‘celebrities’ was likely to be more than even the most open-minded of Generals, could be expected to stand.
Jo was by no means oblivious to these complications and not, in spite of his hostility, completely unsympathetic to them either. But it didn’t alter the fact that she intended to get her way. She hesitated, feeling unsure exactly how to proceed. ‘So that’s agreed then, is it?’ she said, to the back of his newspaper. He ignored her. ‘Um…General? [He had never asked her to call him James]…You quite like the idea of having Messy down here? To stay?…I mean she’s only small fry, I know—’
‘Small?’ bellowed Grey.
‘—but it’s a start, isn’t it? I don’t think we should try to charge her too much, do you? We should probably see what sort of a deal we can drum up with one of the mags. Try to squeeze them for a bit of cash, don’t you think? While we cut our teeth, sort of thing.’ She knew they weren’t really listening, and they knew that she was only pretending to consult them. They didn’t bother to reply. ‘Anyway,’ she said, sounding determinedly upbeat. ‘Ha! Here I am, counting my chickens. She may not even want to come!’ And with that Jo hurried out of the room.
‘Officious little minx,’ mumbled the General quickly, while she was still in earshot.
‘Aye,’ muttered Grey. ‘But she’ll be the saving of this place. Saving of all of us I should think. We’re bloody lucky she puts up with having us around.’
Once again, the General didn’t feel tempted to respond.
Messy Monroe had given up answering the telephone by the time Jo summoned the courage to put in her first call. With all the hacks and their editors, and the PR people and the publishers, she and Chloe had lived the last couple of days to a backdrop of answer machine babble. It just so happened that while Jo (having heard nothing and feeling increasingly desperate) was leaving her seventh unanswered message in two hours on Messy’s machine, Messy was alone in the room, and her brain was lying idle. Which meant the odd snippet of welcome information kept seeping through.
‘…keep calling you and I know what a tremendous amount of stress you must be under…worked with a lot of people in your position…even at the rough end of it myself recently…beautiful media-free sanctuary…isolated old manor house…lovely walks…Chloe to play…very very comfortable and guaranteed reporter-free…’
As Jo spoke there was another knock on Messy’s front door. Another creepy reporter, she assumed, carrying a bunch of flowers and pretending to be her friend. (She was wrong in fact. The creepy flowers were from Jo.) Anyway it was the last straw. She lunged for the telephone.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello!’ Jo couldn’t disguise her relief. She started laughing. Messy had taken her call. She would come and stay. She would bring money with her. Everything was going to be OK. ‘Goodness! Ha ha. Goodness! Messy! Oh! Are you there?’
‘What? Of course I am!’
‘Of course you are. Of course you are.’ Jo took a deep breath. ‘No, I meant to say are you OK?’
‘What? I have to tell you, you probably think I’m loaded, but I spent it all. I spent everything. That’s the main reason I wrote the book. So you’re not going to be interested in me anyway.’
Which took Jo by surprise. She had imagined someone much fiercer, but Messy sounded terrified. Poor thing. The realisation gave Jo’s confidence a welcome boost, and within seconds the slick PR-girl spiel was slipping off her tongue as if she’d never taken a break from using it.
Messy’s financial status didn’t matter, Jo said. She explained – and it was one of the few things the Fiddleford Four had all agreed on – that guests’ rates depended on their ability to pay, and on the income she could draw (and split down the middle) from any exclusive interview deals she arranged. ‘I’ve been a senior partner [only a minor exaggeration] in one of the top public relations firms in London for over ten years. In fact we’ve met. We actually worked together on a couple of P.A.s a few years ago…But perhaps you don’t remember.’
‘Oh really?’ said Messy, trying politely to muster some enthusiasm but still sounding miserable, as she always did when people reminded her of her past. ‘Which ones?’
‘Anyway we can talk about that when you get down here,’ said Jo, realising it wasn’t helping. ‘Messy, I expect the last thing you want to think about right now is giving any more interviews—’
‘Ha! You’re right there.’
‘Exactly. And you see the point of your staying here would be twofold. Partly, just to get a break from the madness, so to speak…’
Messy laughed grudgingly. She knew she was being manipulated, possibly even slightly patronised. But for once she didn’t care. She was so tired of making decisions for herself. They were always the wrong ones. And Jo seemed to know exactly what to say and do. She was making Messy feel better than she had in days.
‘—And partly so I can help you turn this publicity around; launch what I always call a damage-limitation counterattack.’ Messy laughed again. ‘Any interviews you do decide to give would be very, very carefully handled. I can negotiate the deal, ensure we have copy approval, sit in on the interview. And so on. I hate to blow my own trumpet, Messy, but I do have a great deal of experience in this area.’
‘I bloody well hope you do. So who else have you had to stay down there?’
‘One of the most essential components of this sanctuary,’ said Jo (she had prepared this one earlier), ‘is secrecy. Obviously…’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
‘So though there’s nothing I’d love to do more than to reel off a long list of names, I can’t. I just can’t. Basically, Messy, all I can say is – if you’re not happy with the service we provide then don’t pay us! Simple as that! This operation has got to work on trust. That’s very important. We’ve got to trust you and you’ve got to trust us…’
‘Hm…’ said Messy, pretending she wasn’t already convinced.
‘We can send a car to come and pick you up right away. We could be there in three or four hours…’
‘Hm…’
‘And we’ve just bought a donkey, which might entertain Chloe.’
The car from Fiddleford arrived at Messy’s door seven and a half hours later. Les, the farm hand, had forgotten to take a map and, for reasons known only to himself, had rejected the offer of Charlie and Jo’s more comfortable car and taken instead the old Land Rover, which was filthy and could never go above forty miles an hour. He’d also, poor fellow, managed to get lost four times on the same stretch of motorway before finally taking the right exit.
Messy gabbled jovially as she and Chloe clambered into the Land Rover, fighting their way between horses’ head collars, bits of bind-a-twine, stray potatoes gone to seed, and piles of empty paper sacks. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘that the state of this car isn’t any sort of indicator of what’s to come!’ The truth was, after such a long wait, she was relieved to see any car at all. ‘You know I hadn’t even taken a number for Fiddlefrom. Fiddleforth. I was beginning to wonder if the whole conversation hadn’t been a dream!’
Les looked at her morosely for a while, only faintly noticing that she had been talking, and certainly not expecting to make a response. Suddenly his face lit up. ‘Well I never!’ he said. ‘But you’re that fat lady off of the TELLY!’
‘Of course I am. Who did you think I was?’
‘I SAW YOU ON TELLY!’
‘Did you watch Question Time?’
‘A few nights back, it was. I don’t know why. A bit like one o’ them quizzie things.’
She’d been without any adult company, brooding solidly, ever since the BBC car had dropped her back at the cottage, and now here was a friendly face. Well, a face. It was all she needed. She couldn’t stop herself. ‘Didn’t you think Morrison was a creep? Or have I lost perspective on this? I mean – honestly, Les. Tell me honestly. Was I being paranoid? Was he exploiting my situation?…I felt so incredibly patronised…’
Les gazed at her long and hard before slowly turning away to start the engine. In the four hours it took to return to Fiddleford he didn’t speak another word. Chloe fell asleep.
It was eleven o’clock by the time they arrived.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Jo nervously, rushing out of the house to greet her. ‘You must be exhausted. Les wasn’t – Les, why didn’t you call? You left the map behind. We’ve been worried to death.’
‘I don’t like maps.’
‘For Heaven’s sake!’ Until she came to Fiddleford Jo hadn’t really believed such stupid people actually existed. She sighed with the usual mixture of boredom and exasperation that overcame her when dealing with Les’s ‘working’ methods. ‘Les, you can’t not like maps. There’s nothing not to like about them.’ She sighed again, and was preparing (professional as always) to deliver an easy-to-understand discourse on the subject, when Grey, Charlie and the General came wandering out to join them. ‘Oh look, here are the others,’ she said with relief. ‘This is Grey…Grey, this is Messy. And Chloe…Who’s actually asleep, poor little mite…’
Grey shook Messy’s free hand without a great deal of interest but then seemed to reconsider, and bent down to scrutinise her more closely. ‘Oh!’ he said, pleasantly surprised. ‘You look much better than you do in the pictures.’
‘Depends which pictures,’ Messy muttered grumpily, but she blushed. It was the nearest thing she’d had to a compliment for a long time. ‘They tend to choose the ugly ones.’ She looked up at him with a smile. ‘You’re not so bad-looking yourself.’
‘Aye,’ he said, relinquishing her hand, gazing at her curiously. ‘It’s been said.’
‘And, er – Messy, this is my husband, Charlie.’
‘Hello, Messy. Welcome to Fiddleford,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re our first guest, as I expect Jo explained. So I hope you won’t be too disappointed if things don’t run perfectly straight away—’
‘And this,’ said Jo quickly, ‘is my father-in-law, General Maxwell McDonald.’
‘Crikey,’ said Messy doubtfully.
The General stepped smartly forward, determined to present a good face, however he might have been feeling. ‘But most people just call me General,’ he said, bowing slightly to avoid eye contact. ‘Well come in, come in, for Heaven’s sake. Somebody get the child to bed and then perhaps Miss Monroe would like a drink?’
They walked together into the hall. Messy looked up at the large gilt chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and then at the magnificent mahogany staircase sweeping up to the landing thirty-five feet above her head.
‘Crikey,’ she said again.
Weighed down by the child and still enormous, even in these vast surroundings, Messy looked very ill at ease standing there. It reminded Jo of the first time she came to Fiddleford, when in spite of all her kneejerk disapproval (of inherited wealth and environmentally unsound houses) this hall had still intimidated her. ‘I know it’s large,’ she whispered apologetically, ‘but we don’t actually heat the rooms we don’t use. And of course,’ (she lied, entirely unnecessarily. But she was nervous) ‘we grow all our own vegetables.’
Messy, who always imagined people were patronising her, buried her face in her daughter’s cheek and pretended not to hear.
‘Chloe’s in the smaller room, next door to you,’ said Charlie as they climbed the stairs together. ‘And there’s a bathroom up at the end. On the left. I’m sorry,’ he turned back to look at her, ‘Jo says it’s absolutely unheard of not to have adjoining bathrooms when you go to hotels these days, but then Fiddleford isn’t exactly a hotel. So I hope you can forgive us.’
‘I must admit,’ said Messy, puffing slightly, not quite keeping up, ‘it’s beautiful. Of course. But it isn’t exactly what I expected.’
‘Oh dear.’ He paused in front of her bedroom door, put down the three large suitcases he had been carrying. ‘What exactly has Jo been telling you?’
Months ago, before they were married, his and Jo’s relationship had nearly ended because of her unnerving inability to distinguish fact from fiction. Charlie knew (to his cost) that when she was working, and she set her sights on something, she was capable of telling any number of lies in order to bring it about. He had watched her in amazement. She lied so automatically sometimes, she didn’t even seem to notice she was doing it.
‘She told me it was a refuge for celebrities.’
‘Oh!’ He sounded relieved. ‘Well it is. Or it will be. But not just for celebrities. Obviously. That would be very unfair. It’s for anyone who’s being attacked, really. For anyone who doesn’t stand a chance to stick up for themselves because whatever they try to do or say it gets drowned out by a sort of mass jeering, or sneering, or general bullying. If that makes any sense. Which I’m sure it does to you, Messy. After your last week.’
‘You don’t need to feel sorry for me,’ she said curtly.
‘No, no. Of course not.’
‘Am I the only guest you’re feeling sorry for at the moment? Or is the tall guy, Grey—’
‘Grey? Oh no. Grey lives here.’
‘He looks very familiar. What’s his second name?’
‘McShane. Grey McShane. You may remember—’
‘The sex offender?’
‘Well, he isn’t actually—’
‘You’ve asked me and Chloe to stay here with a sex offender in the house?’
‘You shouldn’t—’ Charlie made an effort to smile – ‘believe everything you read in the press.’
‘He was convicted. I remember reading about it. He went to prison.’
Charlie shrugged. ‘He has a bad reputation. But that’s the whole point of this place. Who did you think you were going to find here?’ He opened her bedroom door, switched on the light and quickly slid the suitcases inside. He didn’t want to have this conversation. Grey was innocent. If she wanted any more details, she would have to prise them from him – and good luck to her. Because Grey didn’t much like talking about it either. ‘We’ll be up for another half an hour or so, if you want to come down and have a drink,’ he said, backing towards the stairs. ‘You’ll meet Grey. And perhaps you can decide for yourself.’
When she first walked into the room, still carrying her daughter, she was so pleasantly overwhelmed – by the size, the general impression of worn elegance and welcoming, cosy grandeur – she let out an involuntary gasp.
Against the far corner, almost reaching the ceiling and upholstered in the same faded pink flowers as the walls, was a four-poster bed so high off the ground it came with its own set of steps. Jo had put a large bunch of pink and white roses on the table beside the bed, and the room smelled delicious, she noticed: of smoky, polished wood and fresh flowers. There were thick, pale blue velvet curtains already drawn across the two large windows, and to the left of the windows, fifteen or twenty feet from the end of the bed, was an armchair with a little footstool, and in front of the footstool, lit in her honour, a flickering fire crackling in the grate. It was lovely. Like a film set. She didn’t notice the paint splodges, or the damp patch above the bed. It was the loveliest room she had ever seen.
The next-door room, where Chloe was meant to be sleeping, was smaller and more homely than hers, with a two-poster instead of a four, and a large old-fashioned doll’s house in the window bay. ‘Hey-ho, Chloe,’ Messy whispered. ‘It’s not so bad here, is it?’…The little girl slept on. But she would be beside herself when she woke up. She would never want to leave.
After putting the child to bed, changing her own clothes, unpacking their suitcases and finally running out of excuses to delay the moment any longer, Messy braced herself and headed downstairs.
She found everyone in the library, listening with varying degrees of inattention while Jo illustrated some point by reading out loud from a book about natural childbirth. She was sitting in the lotus position, looking flexible, Messy noticed, and exceptionally luminous.
‘“Pregnancy,”’ Jo read, ‘“can be a magical time. Many women feel sensuous, harmonious and naturally creative…These are—” Listen to this, OK, everyone. “These are all primitive expressions of fertility…” That’s what I’m saying, of course. Women are by necessity more in touch with their fundamental life rhythms. Because we have to be. There simply isn’t any choice…’