After Carl May divorced his much-loved wife, Joanna May, for infidelity and had her lover killed, he lived celibate for several years (as did she) concentrating upon his business interests, which were many and various. But nature abhors a vacuum, in particular one to do with sex, and presently a Mr Hughie Scotland, aged forty-five, a TV and newspaper magnate, fleshy, vigorous and wilful, reached for his address book and ran his finger down the M’s. Then he called Carl May on his personal number, not even leaving it to his secretary to do. She was crying anyway. His staff often did: tears dropped into the word processors, doing them no good at all. But Hughie Scotland was rich enough not to worry.
‘Let me be blunt and to the point,’ he said.
‘You always are,’ said Carl.
‘I’m in a fix,’ said Scotland. ‘My wife is screaming at me all hours of the day and night –’
‘I thought she was in Iceland,’ said Carl. Susan Scotland, born in Alabama, had recently been appointed US Lady Ambassador to that chilly, prosperous country.
‘She is,’ said Scotland. ‘I don’t mind her screaming in person, but she screams over the international telephone system, and causes me embarrassment, for nothing is private to a man in communications who has enemies; you have no idea the language she uses. I don’t want it to get about, for her sake.’
‘I have to be at a meeting in ten minutes,’ said Carl, ‘or I’ll have enemies.’
‘I’ll be brief,’ said Scotland. ‘I want you to take this bimbo of mine off my hands. These girls topple presidents and bishops, and I don’t want this one toppling me; she could be on the phone to the gutter press day and night; she’d upset my wife.’
‘Hughie,’ said Carl, ‘you are the gutter press,’ but Hughie took no notice. Susan Scotland’s recent distress had been caused by press photographs of her husband and a young woman named Bethany bathing and sporting naked in the waters of a trout farm: they had been published not only in rival newspapers but throughout his own extensive syndicate. ‘You’ll shit in your own nest for a profit,’ she’d wept down the line from Reykjavik, thus shocking and alarming her husband.
‘Hughie,’ said Carl, ‘I don’t need a bimbo. I am a serious person. I am not like you: I am not in the habit of splashing about naked in trout tanks.’
Hughie said, ‘Carl, those were free-range trout, it was a pool, not a tank, and a hot day, and a man can surely do as he wishes on his own property. You know I’ve diversified into fish farms? If my wife wants to see more of me let her come back from Iceland.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Carl, ‘but no. Pay the girl off. Isn’t that what people do? What’s the worry?’
‘You’re a dry old stick,’ said Hughie, ‘and getting worse since your wife left.’
And Carl went to his meeting. But presently he was tempted out to lunch by Hughie: few people can resist the lure of an inside story. Even Carl May could be affected in this way. Hughie, rather disappointingly, chose an obscure restaurant.
‘I can cope with governments,’ said Hughie, ‘and monstrous taxes and creeping socialism but I cannot cope with women. Take this bimbo off my hands. She keeps crying. Why do women spend so much time in tears?’
‘Why me?’ asked Carl, picking at a lemon sole. He ate little, and drank less. He preferred his fish unfilleted.
‘These girls have to move upwards,’ said Hughie, ‘or they get offended, and that’s when the trouble starts. And you have class. I have style but you have class.’
‘Me?’ asked Carl, surprised. ‘Me? Class?’
‘How many women have you slept with in your life?’ asked Hughie.
‘One,’ said Carl. ‘My wife.’
‘That’s class,’ said Hughie. ‘Why don’t you leave that fish alone? It comes from the North Sea; it will have died of pollution, caused by your outfall.’ Carl May was Chief Executive of Britnuc, a corporation which had become involved with the rehabilitation of the old Magnox nuclear power stations, two of them sited on North Sea shores. ‘Freshwater fish are the meat of the future. Do me a favour, I’ll do you a favour.’
‘What?’ asked Carl.
‘I’ll hold the story on the plutonium leak last March at Britnuc A. No one else has got it.’
‘They haven’t got it,’ said Carl, ‘because there wasn’t one.’
‘The public’s too sanguine about nuclear power,’ said Hughie, (How was he to know Chernobyl was to blow?) ‘They need stirring up. So do you. Bethany’s the girl to do it. Those press photos didn’t do her justice.’
‘I only read the financial papers,’ said Carl.
‘Out of touch,’ said Hughie. ‘You don’t want to lose your touch. What you need, mate, is a bit of pain to stir things up again. You’re slipping.’
It seemed to Carl that he would use less energy obliging Hughie Scotland than disobliging him, and so he agreed to take the girl Bethany on to his personal staff, Scotland paying her wages. The rich stay rich by staying mean. Fish with the bones in cost less than fish with the bones removed.