The Banker's Niece 31: The chat show

1990

‘What a tosser,’ said Hugh. ‘Look at him. Hair down to his collar, velvet jacket, lace on his shirt. Who does he think he is? Mr Darcy?’

    Jane paused in her chopping and glanced from her kitchen to the sofa where Hugh currently sprawled in front of the television. To her surprise, Terry Wogan’s twinkly face and large gut filled the screen. She wouldn’t have thought chat-shows were Hugh’s thing at all. He usually watched sport.

    ‘So tell me how it all started,’ said Wogan. ‘What set you on the road to fame and fortune?’

    The interviewee laughed and the blood rushed to Jane’s head. Oh no. Not again.

    ‘I think you know the answer to that,’ said the interviewee.

    He had his arm along the back of Wogan’s sofa, behind some blonde in a leather skirt and six-inch heels.

    ‘Tell us once more,’ said Wogan, ‘for the sake of those of us who mightn’t have heard about you.’

    The audience laughed this time.

    ‘I was on the rebound,’ recited the young man. ‘I had to throw myself into something and I’d always loved music so –’

    ‘You mean to say some woman gave you the push? I can’t believe it,’ interrupted the blonde.

    Jane wasn’t sure whether she was being sarcastic or not.

    ‘Afraid so.’ A shadow passed over the musician’s face. ‘Well sort of.’

    ‘Loser,’ said Hugh.

    Jane tightened her grip on the handle of her knife.

    ‘But you’ve not done too badly since then,’ said the jovial Wogan, ‘with the auld cheek-to-cheek, with the auld ladies . . . ’

    ‘Old and not so old,’ said a voice from the other end of the sofa.

    It was one of those new-style comedians. Jane couldn’t remember his name but she remembered seeing him on ‘Saturday Live’.

    ‘I s’pose not,’ said the musician.

    He sounded tired.

    ‘No wedding bells though,’ persisted Wogan in his teasing way. ‘None of them has ever got you down the aisle.’

    ‘No,’ said the interviewee shortly.

    ‘Oooh,’ said the comedian. ‘There’s a story there.’

    ‘But enough of all that,’ said Wogan, obviously realising he wasn’t achieving anything with that line of questioning. ‘Tell me what the band’s up to these days. Tell me about the new album, Too close to the sun . . .’

    Hugh muted the television and swivelled to look at Jane.

    ‘There you have a classic example of style over substance,’ he said waving the remote control to emphasise his point. ‘That man has no talent whatsoever. All he does is flash his hips and his hair.’

     She’d tried so hard to get it right this time - right background, right education, right amount of money, right height, right age, reasonably good-looking – so why, in that particular minute, did she find Hugh so utterly loathsome? Why did she want to seize his head and batter it against the wall?

    ‘And – what - talent - do - you - have?’ she asked slowly and deliberately, engine racing, foot hard on the brake.

    ‘Me?’ said Hugh, sounding surprised. ‘I have qualifications. I work at something real. I have a good job.’

    ‘As a lawyer in a multinational corporation,’ she exclaimed. ‘What good did that ever do the world?’

    ‘But I earn good money - ’ His face changed. She wondered how she’d ever thought him even reasonably good-looking.  ‘- money which you’re only too happy to let me spend on you.’

    That was it. She released the brake.

    ‘I have my own job,’ she hissed. ‘I pay my way. I’ve never asked you for anything. And whose flat are you in at the moment? Whose sofa are you sitting on? Whose television are you watching? Whose lager are you drinking? Whose food are you about to eat?’

    Hugh stood up, shaking his legs in order to straighten his trousers. ‘Well if that’s how you feel, perhaps I’d better go.’

    ‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘Perhaps you’d better.’

    Bother, she thought, as he slammed the door behind him. There goes another one.

  

31 December 1999

Jane sat on her sofa in her new pink fleece dressing-gown and fluffy pink bedsocks, reporter’s notebook and pencil beside her. Her radio-controlled wall-clock (accurate to the millisecond, an ironic present from a friend who knew about Jane's love-hate relationship with time-keeping) showed two minutes to midnight. Periodic firework bangs as well as loud roars from the streets below reminded her how glad she was that she had elected to spend the occasion at home alone.

    She could have joined in, of course she could. She could have gone out with a group of friends and mingled with the revellers outside. She could have travelled to Sussex and stayed with Lucy and Ollie and their three lovely children (and dog) and celebrated en famille. She could even have gone to Kent and attended one of her parents’ ghastly parties.

    But she hadn’t done any of that.

    It wasn’t that she didn’t like New Year festivities. Usually she welcomed them as a way to stave off the depression that came with the thought that while the year was about to be new she was the same old disaster and another year nearer to death. And it wasn’t that New Year was ‘just a number’ as the Scrooges said. It was far from that, as she well knew from things that had happened to her. And especially so this time round.

    Perhaps she was being masochistic, as was her wont according to some of her friends, but just for once, instead of avoiding the problem, she wanted to have a good hard look at her life, past, present and yet-to-come. This calendrical event was too important to waste.

    Hence the notebook, in which she planned to write down her resolutions for 2000 - a new year, a new century and a new millennium.

Anyway, she loved her flat. She treasured every moment she got to spend in it. Why should she go out?

    When she first returned to London twenty years ago (Oh God, was it really that long?), she stayed with Fee who’d returned from New Zealand resolved not to break up her lover’s family and had hooked up with another businessman – a single one this time. They were in the process of moving to the country ready for the appearance in four months of their first child, so Jane didn’t stay with them for long. As soon as she’d acquired a job, she found somewhere to rent.

    It was horrible. A damp dark basement in a seedy area where gangs of drunken men rampaged past her windows at night.

    Eight years later, her father – obviously resigned at last to the fact that some rich young man was not going to take her off his hands – offered her some money with which to buy a place of her own.   

    By then she’d risen from lowly editorial assistant to lofty commissioning editor with a good salary so she used her father’s money for a deposit and – much to his disapproval – took out a mortgage.

    She only hesitated for a moment before taking the money from her father. She hadn’t asked for it; it had been freely offered. Why shouldn’t she make the most of her advantages? To refuse would have been churlish, and made her relationship with her parents worse than it already was.

    And as soon as she stepped into her new flat, it was nothing to do with her father any more. It was hers.

    On the third floor and created from a former industrial building in the up-and-coming area of Clerkenwell, it was light, spacious, safe and centrally located. The kitchen, compact but well fitted out, opened to a sweeping sitting and dining area with balcony - perfect for entertaining (if she wanted to do any) or for spreading herself of an evening, reading and contemplating the view of London's skyline. She almost felt settled.

    And now here she was eleven years later.

A violent explosion shook the building and Jane looked at the clock again. Midnight. The witching hour. She picked up her pencil.

Resolution number one. She would not get angry with her parents – and then bottle up her feelings because she suspected that in any argument she would come off worst. She would at least try to express her point of view, even if she sounded like a two-year-old in a tantrum.

Resolution number two. (She suspected that this was connected to resolution number one, but had yet to find out.) She would do something about her migraines, even if that something involved the dreaded ‘complementary’ therapies. She had no choice about this as the drugs weren’t working any more and the migraines were starting to intrude.

Resolution number three. She would stop having meaningless relationships with men. Now she was in her mid-forties it was unseemly, and in any case she might finally have realised that she preferred her own company. She was swayed by pressure from friends and family who saw coupledom as normal. She liked the initial stages of relationships, the ‘being in love’ (whatever that meant), when deep down she knew she had no intention of making any of them permanent and that wasn’t kind. Men were an addiction, a habit she had to break.

Resolution number four. This was the one she’d been dreading.  

    She would not search for him in the media. She would not hunt out scraps of news, or the sound of his voice, or the sight of his face. What had started some ten years ago as a way to protect herself from random encounters had become an obsession.

    More than that. She would deliberately avoid all radio and television programmes or print publications in which he was likely to appear, even if that cut her off from a large portion of modern popular culture.

    She had to excise him from her life.

    It was her only hope of a fulfilling future.

Click here for the next chapter