Cents and Sensibility

Even though it was such a big house – the main living area was often described as ‘cathedralic’ by architecture writers – it was still a very comfortable space to be in on your own.

I slept in my favourite room in the kiddie corridor, had music playing night and day through the whole house, and spent my time reading, napping, walking in the garden and surrounding countryside, and exercising mindlessly.

Jay had taught me how to be busy doing nothing, I thought bitterly to myself, as I pedalled furiously on Ham’s exercise bike, while watching Brief Encounter on cable TV.

The first time I used the pool, I had a strong flashback to the electrifying moment I had seen Ned there, glorious in his manhood, and felt sorry the way I had left things between us.

So when I got back into the house I called him – the sort of light-hearted, hello-how-are-you? do-you-want-to-meet-up-sometime? kind of call that you make to a friend, with no reference to what had happened that weird day – and I felt much better for it when I hung up.

The only thing that disturbed me about our conversation was that while I was kicking around at Willow Barn like I was on a mission to waste time, he was already having job interviews.

‘I’ve been to see four papers, but I think it’s going to be The Observer? he had said excitedly. ‘I had a really good meeting with them this morning and it was the stuff I did on the paper in Melbourne that they really liked – especially my series on youth gangs and organized crime – and it looks like they want to take me on as a junior investigative reporter. So I guess that means I won’t be seeing you at any more key-ring launches, I’m afraid…’

My phone had been ringing too – the word had got round predictably quickly in my claustrophobic little world – but so far nothing had emerged I could even be bothered going up to town to follow up.

Becca had rung to tell me she could get me consulting work with Cartier anytime I wanted, and Tara Ryman had called to ask me if I wanted to join her company as a senior account director, with Huguenot as my major client.

The gossip columns of two mid-market tabloid newspapers had also offered me jobs – but they were clearly more interested in my connections with Jay and his crowd, plus my father’s clients and political associates, than in my writing skills.

I diplomatically declined them all.

Then when Monday morning came around and there was a big report about the Journal resignations in The Guardian media section, I saw that there was a job going in newspapers that I was more than qualified for: Laura Birchwood had left the Post to take up my position on the Journal.

What really surprised me about it was that I didn’t care. I didn’t want my old job – or hers, any more – but I couldn’t get excited about the idea of trying to kick-start a more challenging journalistic career either.

It was hard to admit it to myself, but if The Observer had called up offering me the kind of role they were signing Ned up for, I would have run a mile. Suddenly, it just all seemed too hard.

But as the days passed, in between working out and lazing about, I did have one pursuit to keep me seriously occupied down there. When I wasn’t flicking through Ham’s art books, snoozing through an old movie on cable – even CNN seemed too much effort – or torturing myself by listening to Van Morrison, and all the other music Jay loved, I put a lot of effort into trying to track him down.

At first I had been too shell-shocked even to try, but then something happened that shook me out of my torpor. I was idly flicking through the papers one morning when I came across a feature called ‘From Crack House to Art House’.

It was about a young guy in LA who had been a hopeless crack addict, but who was now making a successful international career as a video artist, after being helped on his way by a charitable foundation which helped young drug addicts through rehab and mentored them into careers in the arts. He was having his first big London show at White Cube and everyone was very excited about him.

The piece went on at some length about the great work the foundation was doing and it was only then that it struck me: it was ‘B & Me’ – the charity Jay had set up in memory of his brother – yet nowhere in the article was he mentioned. He’d said he liked to keep a low profile about his involvement and now I could see he wasn’t kidding.

The article said that the foundation was funded by ‘anonymous benefactors’ and that it was ‘breaking new ground’ in the rehabilitation of drug-addicted young people, with much greater success at keeping them away from substance abuse and the associated criminal lifestyle than most other post-rehab programmes.

I felt sick with shame for what I’d said that day on Sveti Stefan.

I could still see the way Jay had looked at me when I’d called the foundation ‘a money-bunny guilt charity’ and the shame prompted me into action: I had to get hold of him, just to apologize for that, if nothing else. I could still hear myself saying it was a ‘play job’. I shuddered at the memory. How could I have been so nasty?

I also remembered all too well what he’d said about his last word being final – and I knew exactly how stubborn he was – so I didn’t expect him to take me back or anything, but I had to say sorry for those awful things I’d said.

The fact that I no longer had any of his numbers did nothing to deter me. I kept trying his mobile, although I knew he would have changed it, and when I called his home number, there wasn’t even an answering service on that any more either. I emailed him and it bounced back.

I rang international directory enquiries to try and find out his new home number – I had his address after all – but no dice. I knew it was hopeless, but I had to try. There must have been a bit of the dogged newspaper reporter left in me, after all, I realized.

One desperate afternoon I even called Zaria – I had her ‘private’ mobile number, which she had made a great show of giving me while I was in New York with Jay, so we could ‘get together for girly lunches’, as she had put it at the time.

I was quite surprised when she answered – in very friendly tones – it clearly was the really private number.

‘Oh, hi, Zaria,’ I stuttered out. ‘It’s Stella here – Stella Montecourt? Jay’s, er, friend?’

But before I could even ask if she would give me his new mobile number, she had cut me off. I rang straight back – in case it was a transatlantic phone error – and it went straight to message bank. I didn’t leave one. And when I tried the number again, a couple of days later – almost out of curiosity – I wasn’t at all surprised when it just rang out.

But still I didn’t give up. Even in my desperation I baulked at sending an email to the address I found on the Β & Me website, so I wrote him a good old-fashioned letter and sent it off by snail mail to the New York apartment, desperately hoping it would get to him wherever he was and he would call me.

Then another line of enquiry occurred and I rang Amy at Pratler, to see if she had his new mobile number.

‘Stella, darling,’ she said. How great to hear from you – I was going to call you. We were talking about you in an ideas meeting the other day and Katie really wants you to write for the mag. Would you do a piece for us?’

Katie Wilde was the famously bright editor of Pratler, and writing for her was the first offer that had actually interested me. It might have been a society magazine, but it had really good features and was widely read. It could lead on to other interesting freelance work, I thought, maybe even Vanity Fair.

‘That sounds interesting,’ I said, feeling vaguely energized about work for the first time since I’d walked out of the Journal. ‘What sort of thing have they got in mind?’

‘Well,’ said Amy. ‘We want to do a major profile of Zaria Xydis. She won’t give us an interview, but we’ve got hold of some great pictures of her from Town and Country and Katie thought perhaps you could ask her, because you know her so well through Jay Fisher. You saw a lot of her when you were in New York with him, didn’t you?’

It was all I could do not to put the phone down on her, but I knew Amy wasn’t nasty, she wasn’t doing it to torture me, it was just her job. And there was no point denying any of it. Amy was kissy-kissy pals with all the people Jay and I had been hanging out with while I was in New York, she knew exactly what I’d been doing, where, when and with whom.

‘Er, no, I don’t think I really want to do that,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit complicated and actually, Amy, that’s why I rang you – I wondered if you can help me find Jay. I seem to have lost him again. Do you have his latest mobile number by any chance? Because the one I’ve got is kaput and he seems to have changed his home number too. And his email.’

‘Oh, darling,’ she said, sounding sincerely sorry – and more than a little disappointed. ‘That is such a shame, I’d heard you two were quite the little couple, but it is how those boys operate, I’m afraid. Now, let me have a look…’

But the numbers she gave me were the ones I already had. I really had lost him – and that wasn’t the end of it. When I opened the Daily Mail a couple of days later, my very worst fears were confirmed.

There was a picture of him leaving his building in SoHo with ‘stunning Argentinian beef princess Patrizia Fernandez’. Next to it was a story, quoting ‘sources close to Fisher’, who believed she would be the one ‘finally to bag New York’s most eligible bachelor’ and that they were ‘expecting an announcement any day’.

I studied that picture with the intensity of a scholar with a newly discovered medieval manuscript. She was beautiful, there was no denying that, and very chic. I thought back to the picture of me with him in my yoga gear, and cringed.

They weren’t holding hands, that was one blessed relief, I think that would have killed me, but she was smiling, clearly very at ease in his company. I studied Jay’s face. Did he look happy and in love? No, he didn’t. His expression was blank, I couldn’t read it at all. He could have been thinking about what he was going to have for breakfast.

When I felt strong, I told myself that maybe she had an apartment in the same building and they had just happened to be leaving at the same moment – although I’d never seen her there.

Then, if I really wanted to torture myself, I would imagine that they had been on their way round to Café Gitane for strong macchiatos, before heading off to a new exhibition and lunch at MoMA, or maybe a film at the Angelika in the afternoon, followed by dinner at Balthazar and late drinks at Bungalow 8.

Running through a scenario like that could leave me lying on the sofa sobbing for what felt like hours.

It was after one such crying jag that I decided I needed some fresh air. I went out through the back door and wandered around the garden for a while, admiring the last of the summer roses.

Then I strolled through the orchard pulling the seed heads off the long grass and scattering them around, and checking the progress of the fruit. The plums were over, but the apples and pears were coming along nicely. They’d be ready in a couple of weeks or so.

I wouldn’t be there for Ham’s annual apple harvest picnic and barn dance that year, I thought sadly. It was always great fun, but I wasn’t planning on taking part in any of his jolly family events anytime soon. They were just too bogus.

Without even thinking where I was going, I headed for the tree house. Its warm resinous woody smell was a comfort as soon as I climbed inside and I lay on my back on the floor, staring up at the knots in the ceiling planks and reflecting on the chain of events which had led me to be lying there in filthy old track pants and a stained T-shirt, my hair unwashed for days.

It was three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. Had things been different, I reflected, I might just have been leaving a lunch at The Wolseley with the PR for Baume and Mercier, and wondering whether to go back to my desk at the Journal, before a six-thirty drinks party at the Burberry flagship store in Bond Street, to launch a new range of signature plaid iPod covers.

Alternatively, I might have been at the Journal, proofreading the final pages for my brilliantly successful luxury supplement, which would be coming out the next morning. Or just having a laugh in my office with Ned and Peter.

Or, I might have been sitting in Café Gitane with Jay, discussing US intervention in the internal political structures of foreign states, or the latest Ang Lee film. Or we might just have been in bed.

I rolled over on to my side and groaned. I’d fucked it all up, I thought. Even the parts of it that were within my control, I’d totally destroyed it all.

I was so wrapped up in my miserable thoughts, I didn’t hear anyone climbing the steps up to the tree house and nearly died of fright when a face appeared at the door opposite me.

It was Ham.

‘I thought I might find you here,’ he was saying, as he struggled to get his large bulk through the small opening, and once he was inside he just took me in his arms and held me. I was so surprised I didn’t protest. I sank my face into the intoxicatingly familiar smell of his shirt and wept.

‘Oh, my poor baby,’ he was saying. ‘What have I done to you? I’m so sorry, my most beloved duckling. Please forgive me.’

I tried to speak, but I could only hiccup and splutter. It wasn’t the kind of hysterical crying I’d been doing over Jay, it was more sobbing with relief. Because the moment I had seen that huge craggy head of his, I’d realized how very much I’d missed him.

‘Oh, Ham,’ I said, when I could finally speak. He offered me his shirt tail to blow my nose on and I did. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been an idiot. I was furious with you, but I shouldn’t have let it go on so long.’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m the idiot. I’ve been an idiot all your life. I deserved to be told off. I don’t know what I was doing with that woman, you were right, you caught me red-handed, but while I don’t expect to be absolved from that, all I can tell you is that it was the first time I’ve strayed for years, Stella. Please believe me. And I won’t do it again.’

He looked down at his hands for a moment and when he looked back up at me, there was real shame in his eyes.

‘I’ve been looking hell in the face these past few weeks,’ he said. ‘Thinking what I’d do if you told Chloe and I lost her. I’ll never do it again.’

‘Do you promise?’ I said. At least he was being honest about what he’d done at last. It was the pretending I couldn’t stand.

‘I promise. I really really promise. You made me realize what I was risking there. I’m not a young man any more, Stella. I may have small children, but I’m getting on. I think that’s why I did it, really, the last desperate seduction of an ageing lothario, wanting to prove to himself he still has pulling power, but that’s no excuse. Having small kids is all the more reason to behave like an adult myself.’

It was a fair and reasonable declaration and I decided to accept it at face value.

Sitting there with him, the air almost visibly starting to clear between us, I felt like I was able to breathe out again for the first time since I’d seen him on that terrible Friday – but then I remembered what Ned had told me about Jeanette. I had to ask him about it. I needed to know how low he was.

‘Ham,’ I said. ‘Do you know a woman I work with – well, used to work with…’

He started to speak, but I stopped him.

‘I’ll tell you all about what happened at the Journal in a minute, but I need to ask you something first. I used to work with someone there called Jeanette Foster. Do you know her?’

‘It’s ringing a vague bell,’ he said. ‘What does she look like?’

‘Harsh burgundy hair, weird teeth, terrible jewellery…’

‘Oh, GOD,’ said Ham. ‘Not the one that ended up marrying that Lib Dem chap, what’s his name…?’

‘Yes, that’s her,’ I said.

‘Oh, she’s the pits,’ he was saying.

I said nothing, I wanted to see if he had anything to add. He did.

‘Do you know, I had a terrible experience with her once. She used to be a Labour girl, and we were at the party conference in Bournemouth – years ago – and she wouldn’t leave me alone. She kept trying to crack on to me, it got really embarrassing. She’s got a terrible reputation, you know. She’s what they call a Westminster Bicycle – she’ll sleep with anyone with a seat.’

‘Did you sleep with her?’ I asked. I had to know.

Ham pulled a face.

‘Are you mad? Have you seen what she looks like? Give me some credit, Stella, I may have been a shocking old tart in my time, but only with beautiful women.’

I couldn’t help smiling. He was so appalling.

‘But do you know what she did?’ he was continuing. ‘She just wouldn’t give up, and in the middle of the night, after we’d all been at this big piss-up – I was out for the count – she came and knocked on my hotel-room door. I got up to answer it and she was standing there in this ridiculous trench coat, which she pulled open to reveal she was naked beneath, except for some ghastly cheap lingerie – stockings and suspenders, all that caper. I think I was supposed to be maddened with desire, but I’m afraid I just burst out laughing and went back to bed.’

I started to giggle, but he hadn’t finished.

‘And, you see, the thing is, I may have told a few people about it at breakfast the next morning and it rather got round the conference, the way these things do. She wasn’t very pleased. In fact, I think that’s when she went over to the Lib Dems…’

That was it. The laughter burst out of me like a dam breaking. I was howling with it and he joined in, until the two of us were rolling around in that tiny space. I could hardly breathe.

‘Oh, my God, Ham,’ I was spluttering. ‘If you only knew…’

And then I was off again. We laughed until we had tears running down our cheeks and my stomach was aching from it. In the end we had to get out of the tree house, it was getting really claustrophobic in there with our limbs flailing around.

But Ham found it rather difficult to manoeuvre his large bulk in that tiny space, and from my vantage point behind him, with his head out of the door, his massive backside still inside, he reminded me so much of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit’s burrow, I got even more hysterical.

In the end, we pretty much fell out and stumbled back to the house, stopping intermittently to crack up all over again, and by the time we sat down together at the round table, a bottle of champagne in front of us, I felt happier than I had for weeks.

Ham and I talked long into the night. We made dinner together – him cooking, me as a rather useless sous-chef, although Jay had taught me to chop an onion like a pro – ate it, cleared it away, and never stopped talking.

I had a lot to tell him and I realized I was soaking up his wise, inspired, measured responses to all that I had to say, like a downpour on a parched garden.

But, as we talked, I was aware that we were both skirting around what was, for me, the really big topic. In the end, it was Ham who broached it.

‘So,’ he said, finally. ‘How are things between you and Jay Fisher?’

‘They’re not,’ I said bluntly. ‘Didn’t Chloe tell you? It’s all over.’

Ham looked surprised.

‘No, she didn’t tell me. I thought, after I’d seen that picture in the Mail, that you were practically living with him.’

‘I suppose I was,’ I said, the idea sinking in for the first time. Jay and I had been living together to all intents and purposes. I’d never done that before with anyone and I realized how much I’d loved it. That just made it all seem even worse, but I tried to make light of it.

‘What can I say?’ I said, shrugging casually. ‘We broke up. I don’t even know where he is now…’

It was the look on Ham’s face that did it. He didn’t look pleased, as I had expected him to – he looked really sad and sorry. And that’s when the tears came again and, for the second time that day, I wept on my father’s shoulder.

‘Oh, my poor love,’ Ham was saying. ‘The first cut is the deepest and all that, and you’ve fallen in love for the first time so late in your life, it must be even harder for you.’

I just wept a bit more and let him talk. I wasn’t about to remind him that I’d experienced my first love many years before and it had been Alex.

‘I’m sorry about that terrible promise I forced you to make,’ he was saying. ‘I must have been deranged, but I’m afraid that is the effect his hideous family have on me and I just wanted to protect my most precious duckling from being hurt, when in fact, I just made it worse. If I hadn’t interfered, you could have enjoyed your first love and events would have taken their natural course. And I feel terrible, because it’s all my fault that you’ve found it so hard to surrender to those feelings in the first place. I do understand that.’

I blew my nose on his shirt again.

‘Oh, don’t go on about all that any more,’ I said. ‘What’s done is done and at least I know what proper requited love is like now, even if it didn’t last. And it wasn’t your fault Jay and I split up, it was my fault – well, it was a bit his fault too – but if I could only turn back the clock, I’d still be with him. I brought it on myself. I was too attached to my bloody job.’

Ham looked at me, thoughtfully, for a moment.

‘Tell me about him,’ he said, eventually. ‘I do admit that I liked him very much that day he came down here – even apart from that marvellous car, he seemed to be an engaging fellow. Good-looking too. I want to know about him. So tell me about it, right from the start.’

So I did, from the very first moment I had seen him in the garden at the Cap Mimosa. And my father being the man he was, I even told him about Jay’s prodigious sexual appetites, which made him chuckle heartily.

‘I knew he was a proper Alpha Male,’ he said. ‘I can always spot them. Takes one to know one, you know.’

He winked at me and I kicked him, lovingly, on the shin.

‘Shut up, you old perve,’ I said, realizing in that moment just how much I loved him.

I told him the whole story, right up to the very bitter end – rather enjoying Ham’s amazed reaction when he heard what Jay had been studying at UCLA, before his father insisted he dropped out, after his brother’s death.

That was a revelation to him.

‘Well, blow me. I designed that whole bloody course. No wonder he was making such intelligent comments about this house,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘I was very impressed by that.’

‘He’d presented a class paper on it,’ I told him, with slightly spiteful relish. ‘He knows more about it than I do.’

Ham shook his head and sighed.

‘Sorry, duckling,’ he said.

But he wasn’t remotely surprised to hear about Jay’s trials at the hands of his stepmother.

‘Oh, my word, that woman is a hell monster,’ he said, when I got to that part of the tale. ‘She’s even worse than his Uncle Edward, because she’s not just nasty and neurotic, like him, she’s stupid too. Stupid, but cunning, the most dangerous combination of all – and oh, that terrible son of hers. He’s like a suet pudding on legs.’

He snorted with laughter, when I told him Jay called Todd the Hippo.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘she was trying to get that hippo involved in the design of the institute at one point. I had to get Edward to see her off, which he rather enjoyed doing, I must say. I learned how to play them in the end, but they are a rum lot, Stella. How do you think your fellow has come out of it so relatively normal?’

‘His mother, by the sound of it. She sounds really cool.’

Ham squinted at me thoughtfully.

‘Hang on a minute – his mother… Now, something did occur to me about her. Obviously she didn’t have anything to do with the building, and I thought I hadn’t met her, but then after it all blew up I got to thinking that I might have known her once. Does she live in LA?’

‘Used to. Topanga Canyon – like you.’

Ham snapped his fingers.

‘Yes! I can place her now. Celia, that’s her. We knew her back then. We were all part of the same gang up there.’

He glanced at me. He had a funny look on his face.

‘Me and your mother – we knew her. Back in the seventies. Before you were born, of course, and before she met that terrible Robert Fisher. She was a great girl. Stunning-looking too…’

I couldn’t stand it. I slumped down, my head in my hands. It was just too much.

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