‘I’m truly sorry,’ he muttered. ‘It hurts loving you, that’s all. Look, I’ll do anything. I’ll chuck Trinity, get a job. It’ll be easy with Pa’s connections.’

‘Always fall back on Daddy, don’t you?’ taunted Cameron. ‘You bitch about his philistine programme, but you’ll bleed him white when it suits you. Well I’m not having you bleeding me white. Can’t you get it into your Neanderthal skull that I don’t want you around?’

Guilt at the way she’d treated him made her even more brutal.

‘I can’t help myself,’ said Patrick, going towards the door. ‘La Belle Dame sans merci has me totally in thrall.’

He went to the nearest pub and drank until long after closing time. The landlady felt sorry for the beautiful, obviously desolate young man sitting there quietly gazing into space.

At midnight Patrick parked his car four houses down from Cameron’s and got out. It was a punishingly cold night. Cotchester slumbered beneath her eiderdown of snow. In a sky russet from the streetlamps huge stars flickered. Icicles glittered from Cameron’s gutters. In front of the house beside Cameron’s green Lotus was parked Tony’s bloody great dark-red Rolls Royce with the Corinium ram on the bonnet. There was a light on in the top of the house — Cameron’s bedroom, guessed Patrick. He imagined Tony brutally clambering over her lovely body. The Sunday before last she’d lain in his arms, pliant as a child. He wanted to plunge one of the icicles into Tony’s heart.

Wearing only a jersey and an old pair of cords, he was shivering violently now. Then he noticed that Tony’s car keys were still in the dashboard. Trying the car door he found it open. The lecherous bugger had obviously been in such a hurry to get at Cameron he’d forgotten to lock it.

Easing open the door, pulling out the keys, Patrick chucked them into a nearby flower bed. They landed deep in a lavender bush, hardly scattering the snow.

At four o’clock in the morning Tony looked at his watch. ‘I must go.’

Cameron didn’t dissuade him. She was utterly shattered. To eradicate any memory of Patrick, Tony had recently insisted on indulging in sexual marathons. Four times that night, he thought smugly; no one could accuse him of losing his touch. Cameron daren’t complain. She was also twitchy that Patrick might do something insane to rock the boat.

Hearing Tony let himself out, she was just falling asleep when she heard a key turn in the door. It was a sound that always unnerved her, reminding her of Mike. For a wild moment of dread and longing she thought it might be Patrick.

‘Did I leave my keys here?’ shouted Tony.

By the time they’d upended the entire house, the car and the drive, screamed at each other and nearly frozen to death, the lights had come on in the houses opposite and curtains were twitching in the houses on either side. There was no way Tony could start the Rolls, or get someone to help push it out of the way. If he rang Percy, his chauffeur, it would be round the entire network in a flash, so he spent the next three hours frantically and abortively ringing round the country, trying to find another set of keys.

In the end he had to order a taxi from the station. His temper was not improved by the driver recognizing him and slyly my Lording him all the way home.

Arriving at The Falconry, he had to provide Monica with a ridiculously convoluted explanation that he’d decided to come home that night, but that his car had gone into a skid on the motorway and he’d had to abandon it. He then had to keep her in bed in the morning, so she wouldn’t drive into Cotchester and see his car parked outside Cameron’s house.

As it was, poor, loyal Cyril Peacock tracked down a key and removed the Rolls by midday, but by then almost the entire Corinium staff had seen the car on their way in to work and had had a good laugh. That afternoon, Cameron passed the staff noticeboard. Beneath the card announcing her appointment as Acting Controller of Programmes, someone had added the words: ‘and Mistress of the Rolls’.

Later that day, Patrick rang Cameron from Birmingham Airport to say goodbye.

‘Did you steal Tony’s keys?’ she shouted.

‘Tell him to look under the lavender on the left of the front door.’

Cameron let Patrick have it. ‘You stupid asshole. If Monica had come by and seen the car, you’d have landed Tony in a divorce court.’

‘I thought that’s what you wanted.’

‘Don’t be so fucking infantile.’

‘I couldn’t help it.’ Patrick’s voice faltered. ‘I can’t bear to think of that great toad in bed with you.’

‘Get out of my life,’ screamed Cameron. ‘You don’t know the rules.’

‘I love you.’ Patrick was almost crying.

‘Well, I don’t love you. You’re a fucking nuisance. Piss off and try and do something worthwhile with your life.’

She was dead scared of telling Tony about the keys, but was amazed to find that he was grimly pleased.

‘What a very silly little boy to put such a very large nail in his father’s coffin.’


20


At the end of January the IBA formally asked for applications for the new franchises. These applications, which had to be provided not only by the fifteen incumbent independent companies, but also by any rival consortium who sought to oust them, often ran to hundreds of beautifully bound pages, giving details of finance, staffing policies, plans for future programmes and proposed boards of management.

After the applications were handed in in early May, the IBA would study them and then conduct a series of public meetings around the country, attempting to find out whether the public felt well-served by their particular local television company. After private meetings between the IBA and all the individual contenders in October and November, the franchises would be finally awarded in December.

Anticipating a long year full of lobbying and hustling, Tony Baddingham’s immediate task in the New Year was to strengthen the Corinium Board. Knowing the IBA and particularly Lady Gosling’s penchant for women, he intended to make Cameron a director. But he wanted to punish her as long as possible for stepping out of line with Patrick, and, as the staff were still in a state of mutiny over her appointment, he didn’t want a strike on his hands in franchise year. The staff, however, had short memories. Cameron had found Simon Harris’s affairs in such a shambles that Tony had quite enough excuses to dispense with his services when he came out of hospital, but that would have to be done discreetly too. Then he could appoint Cameron to the Board just before the applications went in.

Tony also had his lunch with Freddie Jones, who, heavily pressured by Valerie, was poised to join the Corinium Board. His only reservation was whether, with his electronics empire and his race horses and his hunting, he would have sufficient time. If he were a director, he wanted to do some directing.

As an added incentive to Valerie, however, Tony invited Freddie shooting the last Saturday in January, and asked some extremely grand people to shoot as well. Never having shot with Freddie before, Tony issued a warning to the other guns beforehand.

‘Freddie Jones is a bit of a rough diamond, but exceptionally able. He’s going to be very useful on our board, if you know what I mean. But I’m not sure how good a shot he is, so bring your tin hat.’

In the master bedroom at Green Lawns Freddie Jones lay beside his wife in the vast suede oval bed, covered with dials for quadraphonic stereo, radio, dimmer switches, razors and vibrators which Valerie used to massage her neck. They had to leave for Tony’s about nine. It was now only six forty-five, which left plenty of time for sex, thought Freddie hopefully. They had already drunk two cups of tea from the Teasmade. Reaching across, Freddie put his hand on Valerie’s bush, fingering her clitoris from time to time as a door-to-door salesman, not very hopeful of entrance, might press a doorbell.

Valerie sighed. She knew no wife should deny her husband his conjugal rights, but one of the joys of Freddie getting up early to go hunting every Saturday meant that she could pretend to be asleep as she did every weekday when he left for work at six-thirty.

Valerie did everything to avoid sex. She had already taken back to Jolly’s of Bath the absurdly sexy black lingerie an ever-hopeful Freddie had bought her for Christmas and replaced it with some peach satin sheets for the guest bedroom. She always wore woollen nightgowns buttoned up to the neck. If only she could sew up the bottom as well! The pressing finger was getting more insistent.

‘D’you want to come, Fred-Fred?’

‘Do you?’

‘Not really. I want to be fresh for Tony and Monica.’

‘Will you help me then?’

Valerie sighed again. Kneeling, she raised the red woollen nightgown, so Freddie could admire her candy pink nipples and her neatly clipped bush. She loathed watching him, but at least it stopped her getting messy.

‘You’re so beautiful,’ sighed Freddie. ‘You’ve got the body of a little girl.’

‘Here’s some tissues. Don’t waste a clean towel, Fred-Fred.’

He had barely finished his lonely act before Valerie had reached up to press another switch on the bedhead which instantly sent boiling water gushing out of the 22-carat-gold mixer taps into the vast onyx and sepia marble double bath next door. Then, remembering she didn’t want a flushed face, Valerie twiddled another knob to lower the temperature.

Snowdrops spread in a milk-white blur on either side of Tony Baddingham’s drive. The guns, in their dung-coloured clothes, gathered outside The Falconry, pulling on gumboots and bellowing at excited dogs that whisked about lifting their legs on Monica’s aconites.