Waiting Game. Diana Hamilton

       CHAPTER TWO

      ‘I’M SORRY, you probably wanted to join Ackerman’s party,’ Fenella mumbled unhappily as the taxi sped towards Hampstead. Alex hadn’t said a word since they’d left the restaurant and, in view of her rudeness in refusing to accept his boss’s invitation, was probably deeply regretting ever having let Jean talk him into this.

      ‘About as much as a sharp kick up the backside!’ Alex sighed gloomily, giving her hand a gently reassuring pat. ‘We were both brilliant, all evening, but I doubt if we could have actually sat down with them and socialised without giving the game away. We need a whole load more confidence for that.’

      ‘I expect you’re right,’ she conceded, sagging back against the upholstery and closing her eyes. But she didn’t feel any less miserable. Alex didn’t know what had been said out in the corridor and she didn’t know how she was going to tell him.

      ‘We achieved what we set out to do—one of the sleazier tabloids will pick up on the “scandal” and splash it all over the front page. And I’ll be famous—or rather, notorious—for all of five minutes. And Ackerman himself saw us together. So the old has-been who once pulled record-breaking female audiences with his sex-appeal will be judged to have regained some of his touch,’ he said, sounding tired and uncharacteristically cynical. ‘As they say, even bad publicity is good publicity. I thought Jean was mad when she came up with the idea but I think we were even crazier to go along with it.’

      Fenella couldn’t argue with that so she said nothing. But as soon as they were back in the flat her aunt Jean had bought with a minor part of her inheritance from her father she drew the curtains in the long living-room, poured her uncle a large slug of whisky and pointed him at the telephone.

      ‘Phone her now; she’ll be dying to know how everything went. I’ll lay a penny to a pound she’s sitting up in Edinburgh quite convinced we didn’t have the bottle to go through with it because she wasn’t around to make sure we did.’

      Easing her feet out of her ridiculous shoes, she said goodnight and left him to it, confident that a nice long natter with his wife would cheer him up. She hated to see him so depressed. She thought the world of both of them; in some ways they meant more to her than her own parents. Which was why she’d agreed to go along with the crazy scheme in the first placemuch against her better judgement.

      The guest bedroom was furnished with Jean’s unmistakable stamp of elegant style and home-fromhome comfort. Six years ago, when her uncle had been signed up for the hour-long, prime-time Evening With Alex—a combination of his light-hearted interviews with celebrities from the entertainment world, plus a couple of comedy sketches and, naturally, half a dozen of his own songs performed in his own inimitable style—the couple had bought a house on the outskirts of Tavistock to be near the main studios in Plymouth.

      But Alex had missed London and when Jean had received her inheritance she had immediately bought this flat, which they used when he wasn’t recording his show.

      They were a devoted couple, and it showed. And that, Jean had stated, was half the problem. The viewing public saw him as a middle-aged pipe, slippers and comfortable old cardigan man, never seen anywhere without his equally middle-aged and unspectacular wife. Now, if they could see him as a bit of a dog, some lovely young thing on his arm as they emerged from some rackety night-spot or other, then people might sit up and take notice, and his female audience might again tune in to his show and realise he hadn’t lost all the sex-appeal that had drawn them in adoring droves in the first place!

      And it might have worked, too, if she hadn’t wrecked everything by the way she’d reacted to Saul Ackerman, she thought wearily, padding out of the en-suite bathroom packaged in an old towelling robe as she heard a light knock on her bedroom door.

      ‘She’s put us to the top of the class!’ Alex was smiling now. He looked relaxed and a good ten years younger. He and Jean had never spent a night apart in the whole of the thirty years of their marriage and he was missing her.

      When Jean had stated firmly that she would visit her aged mother in Edinburgh—alone—leaving the field clear for him to ‘misbehave’ at home he had almost vetoed the whole idea, she remembered, forcing herself to return his smile.

      ‘Good. How is her mother?’ She had only met the old lady once, years ago, and remembered her as being quite alarming, and she couldn’t have changed much because Alex pulled a face as he told her,

      ‘As intractable as ever. She still stubbornly refuses to make her home with us and insists that “Young Elspeth” can look after her. “Young Elspeth” must be knocking eighty!’ He puffed out his cheeks in exasperation. ‘Talk about the blind leading the blind! But never mind that; Jean’s given me a whole list of things we have to do, places we have to be seen at. Shall we chew them over now, with a nice mug of drinking chocolate, or would you rather we left them to the morning?’

      ‘They’ll keep,’ Fenella told him with a sick smile. Before they worked out tactics for the coming two weeks she would have to confess that they would be a complete waste of time. After her outburst to Saul Ackerman earlier this evening Alex’s programme would be trashed—no matter what happened! No need to depress him tonight. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

      ‘We did it, sweetheart!’ Alex bounced into the kitchen, his arms full of newspapers. ‘This one’s a blinder!’ He dropped a folded tabloid on the table in front of her. ‘Any coffee left in that pot?’

      ‘Plenty.’ Fenella made a gulping sound in her throat. When she’d crawled out of bed half an hour ago the flat had been silent. Believing her uncle to be safely asleep, she’d sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and trying to decide exactly how she would tell him of her run-in with his boss.

      It wasn’t going to be easy, especially as he was looking so pleased with himself, delighted now because the plan to kick him back into the public eye seemed to be working.

      ‘Well—aren’t you going to read it?’ He had pulled out a chair opposite her, cradling his coffee-cup, his eager grin and boyishly rumpled blond-streaked grey hair reminding her of how attractive to women audiences he had been in his heyday.

      Feeling sick inside, she unfolded the paper and ran her fingers over the newsprint. Foreign wars, the balance of payments deficit and the latest cowardly IRA bomb attack had been relegated to a few square inches of print, the majority of the front page sporting the moment when the cameras had caught her hiding her mischievous smile in Alex’s jacket. It came over as a snuggling embrace, Alex’s arms curved protectively around her slinkily clad body and the huge caption read: “Has-Been Has-Got?”

      ‘Don’t look so shattered!’ Alex grinned, swinging the paper round on the table-top, and read out the article, with plenty of hysterical expression.

      Alex Fairbourne, whose top-spot TV