Jilly Cooper: Rivals

Not by a flicker did Tony’s swarthy face betray his surprise.

‘Why? D’you think afterwards I might not want to offer you the job?’

Cameron smiled for the first time that evening. ‘No, I might not want to take it.’

Even in the bedroom she didn’t stop fighting, promptly switching on the television.

‘God is love,’ a lady in a shirtwaister, with very long royal blue eyelashes, was saying, ‘not a guy with a stick; He wants us all to enjoy ourselves.’

‘And so say all of us,’ said Cameron.

Tony turned off the television and, with remarkably steady hands, removed her huge earrings, and massaged the reddened lobes.

‘D’you get a good satellite picture from these?’

There wasn’t much else to take off. Just the yellow dress and a pair of yellow pants. Tony never dreamed that anyone with such a sinewy, well-muscled body could have such a smooth skin.

‘Those Y-fronts went out with the ark,’ said Cameron, throwing them in the wastepaper basket. ‘I’m going to buy you some boxer shorts.’

Bearing in mind that it was eight o’clock in the morning in England, Tony thought he acquitted himself with honours.

‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,’ sang Cameron as she finally climbed off him.

‘Still fighting the American War of Independence,’ murmured Tony into her shoulder.

But just as he was falling asleep, he realized she was rigid and shuddering beside him. Reaching down, he found her hand in her bush.

‘I thought you’d come as well,’ he said, outraged.

‘If you figured that, Buster, you’ve got a lot to learn.’

‘Come here, you bitch.’

Tugging away her hand, he knelt over her, kissing her navel, then very slowly progressing downwards. Lying on the floor, tangled in each other’s arms, they were interrupted much later by the telephone.

It was Corinium’s sales director, Georgie Baines.

‘I thought you’d like the monthly revenue figures, Tony. I didn’t wake you?’

‘I’ve been up for hours.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Cameron, wriggling out from under him.

‘They’re up four million on last year,’ said Georgie jubilantly. For five minutes they discussed business, then Georgie said that Percy, Tony’s chauffeur, would like a word.

‘Good morning, my Lord,’ said Percy. ‘We won the Test match by four wickets.’

Tony was almost more delighted by that than by the advertising figures. Hearing water running in the shower, he was about to jump on Cameron once more, when the telephone rang again. After that it kept ringing, ending up with a call from Alicia, Tony’s beautiful and demanding mistress.

‘Do you spend all your life on the telephone?’ she screamed.

There was a knock on the door. Tony hung up and, wrapping a towel round his waist, went to answer it. It was the breakfast he’d ordered before going out last night.

Having signed the bill, he found Cameron in the bathroom, drying her pants with the hair dryer. She was wearing Tony’s dark-blue silk birthday shirt, with one of his red paisley ties wound round her waist. Her hair was wet from the shower; she looked sensational.

‘Come back to bed.’

‘Can’t. I’ve got a breakfast meeting. Got to get there early to check the room isn’t bugged.’

The telephone rang again.

‘You answer it,’ said Tony evilly.

Cameron picked it up.

‘Someone called Alicia,’ she said.

‘Say I’m in the shower.’

‘She didn’t sound very pleased,’ said Cameron, putting down the receiver.

Scooping up the mini-bottles of shampoo, conditioner, bath gel, and cologne, she dropped them into her bag. Then, peeling the shoulder pads out of her yellow dress, she fixed them into the shoulders of Tony’s dark-blue shirt. As she went into the bedroom, she removed a strawberry as big as a cricket ball from the grapefruit on Tony’s breakfast tray.

‘What are your plans?’ asked Tony.

‘I’m in the studios from ten o’clock onwards. I should be through around eight. And you?’

‘I’ve got people to see. I’m lunching with Ali MacGraw — more my age group, sweetie.’ He kissed Cameron on the forehead. ‘And I want that shirt back.’

‘You can wear my yellow dress. If I wear it, Ronnie’ll know I haven’t been home.’ Taking a mirror from her bag, she winced at her reflection in the bright sunlight. ‘He’ll know it anyway.’

‘I’ll call you later,’ said Tony.

The moment she’d gone, he showered, dressed and, having summoned one of the secretaries from Corinium’s American office on 5th Avenue, dictated a completely new treatment for ‘Four Men went to Mow’.

In the middle, Alicia rang and demanded who had answered the telephone.

‘Your successor,’ said Tony, without a trace of compassion, and hung up.

By midday he had a new and beautifully bound presentation booklet for ‘Four Men went to Mow’, containing a character analysis of the new hero, who was now the working-class boy and not the peer’s son (who had become a lord), plus a new list of possible stars, suggested locations, story lines, and a couple of pages of simplified dialogue, all based entirely on Cameron’s recommendations.

Ronnie called up as Tony was reading it through.

‘How d’you like Cameron?’

‘Like wasn’t the operative word. What’s bugging her?’

‘More enfant than terrible,’ said Ronnie, who wanted to do business with Tony very badly, ‘but she’s too ambitious for her own good, and too upfront. There’s a streak of idealism which makes her scream and shout till she gets what she wants; and if you’re as sexy as she is you antagonize not only women but also the men who don’t get to pull you.

‘Don’t tell anyone I told you, but the programme controller’s going to axe her last documentary, and she’s been so rude to Bella Wakefield she’s being taken off the series. But she’s bright,’ Ronnie sighed. ‘Sadly they don’t give a shit about talent here any more. But that’s off the record.’

‘We haven’t spoken,’ said Tony.

‘As a quid pro quo, can we be the first people to see “Four Men went to Mow?”’ asked Ronnie. ‘I know Cameron carved it up, but it looked great to me.’

‘Of course,’ said Tony smoothly.

After an exceptionally affable lunch with Ali MacGraw, who was an old friend, to discuss a long-term project, Tony strolled down to see USBC, the deadly rivals of NBS.

At the plaza of the Seagram building tourists and office workers sat on the walls, eating sandwiches and pizza, trying to woo the blazing sun down between the office blocks on to their bare arms and legs. The flowers in the centre strip of Park Avenue wilted in the heat as Tony sauntered past General Motors and the Pan Am building with their thousand glittering windows, admiring the coloured awnings outside the houses and the beautiful, loping New York girls with their briefcases, who looked back at him with flattering interest. Maybe Cameron was right about the paucity of real New York men.

The Head of Co-Production at USBC and the Daytime Programme Controller were enchanted by the video of the honey-coloured houses and the Cotswold countryside.

‘This series,’ Tony told them, his deep, beautiful voice flowing on like vintage port glugging out of a priceless decanter, ‘will be a cross between James Herriot and “Animal House”, but in a way it’s much, much more. We intend to explore real friendship between real men; not homosexuality, but that Victorian virtue, comradeship. The hero, a poor boy from a deprived background, doesn’t inherit the earth or the girl, but he finds his integrity. The story, despite its depths, is simple enough to appeal to a Mexican peasant or to an Alabama black.’