Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

And if I do find you, and want to talk to you, you look at me as if I’m dirt!” It was as if a great chain had snapped inside her. She hated to be seen thus, and she tried to shake the demeaning misery away, but she could not stop her sobs. She found her handbag, took out a packet of cigarettes, but only succeeded in fumbling them across the carpet. She cursed, picked one up, and lit it. “I swore I’d give up bloody cigarettes,” she said, “but how can I with bastards like you around? And Tony.”

“What’s wrong with Bannister?”

“He’s frightened of you! That’s what’s wrong with him. He won’t tell you what’s expected of you, so I have to do it. Always me! He’s so God-damned bloody lazy and you’re so God-damned bloody obstructive, and I’m so bloody tired!” She shook with great racking sobs. “I’m so bloody tired.”

I limped towards her. “Is it such a good film?”

“Yes.” She wailed the word. “God damn you, you bloody man, but it is! It’s even an honest film, though you’re so full of shit that you won’t see it!”

“God damn me.” I trod on her spilt cigarettes. “But I didn’t know.” I put my hands on her shoulders, turned her, and held her against me. She did not resist. I took the burning cigarette from her fingers and flicked it into the swimming pool. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m sorry, too.” She sobbed the words into my dirty sweater.

“Hell,” she said, “I didn’t want this to happen.” But she did not pull away from me.

“I did,” I said. From the very first I’d wanted it to happen, and now, on a rainy afternoon, and to confuse everything, it did.

It rained all afternoon, all evening. For all I knew or noticed, all night too.

We talked.

Angela told me about her childhood in the Midlands, about her Baptist minister father and oh-so-respectable mother, and about the redbrick university where she had marched to abolish nuclear weapons and save the whales and legalise marijuana. “It was all very normal,” she said wistfully.

“Did your father think so?”

“He was all for saving the whales.” She smiled. “Poor Daddy.”

“Poor?”

“He’d have liked me to have been a Sunday School teacher. Married by now, of course, with two children.” Instead she had met a glib and older man who claimed to run a summer radio station for English tourists in the Mediterranean.

She’d abandoned university in her last year, and flown south, only to find that the radio station had gone bankrupt. “He didn’t want me for that, anyway.”

“What did he want you for?”

She rolled her head to look at me. “What do you think?”

“Your retiring and gentle nature?”

She blew smoke at the ceiling. “He always said it was my legs.”

“They’re excellent legs.”

She lifted one off the bed and examined it critically. “They’re not bad.”

“They’ll do,” I said.

So then she had used the letterheaded stationery of the defunct radio station to land herself a job with a real radio station in Australia. “It was cheeky, really,” she said, “because I didn’t know the first thing about radio. I got away with it, though.”

“Legs again?”

She nodded. “Legs again. God knows what would have happened if I’d been ugly.” She thought about that for a time, then frowned.

“I’ve always resented the looks, in a way. I mean, you’re never sure whether they want you for your looks or abilities. Do you know what I mean?”

“It’s a problem I have all the time,” I said, and she laughed, but I was thinking that her passionate drive to make a good film must have been part of her answer to that question. She desperately wanted to prove that her abilities could match those of a clever and ugly person.

Not that Angela had ever been coy about using her good looks.

She’d moved from the radio station to its parent TV company, and it was there that she had met Anthony Bannister who had been filming in Australia. He had promised her a job on his programme if she should ever return to England. “So I came back.”

“Just for him?”

She shrugged. “I wanted to work in English television. I wanted to come home.”

“And Bannister was the price?”

She looked at me. “I like him, Nick. Truly.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” She stubbed out the cigarette then rolled on to my left arm. I held her against me and she crooked her left leg over mine. “He’s like me, in some ways.”

“He’s got good legs?” I asked in astonishment.

“He’s so vulnerable. He’s very good at his job, but he doesn’t have any confidence outside of it. Have you noticed that? So he wears his success like a mask.”

“He’s weak,” I said.

“It’s easy for you to say that. You’re strong.”

“You should see me in telephone boxes. There’s nothing but a blur, then I reappear with my underpants outside my trousers.” She laughed softly. “Tony doesn’t think anyone likes him. That’s why he tries to be nice to everyone. People think he’s so successful and confident, but all the time he’s frightened and he’ll always agree with what any opinionated person says because he thinks that will make them like him. That’s what makes him good on the telly, I think. He draws people out, you see. And he’s very good-looking.” She added the last in a rather defensive voice.

“He’s spreading round the waist,” I said idly.

“He won’t exercise. He’s always buying the equipment, but he never uses it.”

“Was he married when you met?”

She nodded, but said nothing more.

We lay quietly for a while, listening to the rain. I pulled a strand of her long hair across my chest. “Will you marry him?” I asked.

“If he wants me to, yes.”

“Will he?”

“I think so.” She fingered the scar on my shoulder. She had very long thin fingers. “He’d prefer someone like Melissa, someone with social acceptance, but he may settle for me. I’m efficient, you see, which is good for his career. I think he’s frightened he might lose me to a rival programme.”

“Do you love him?”

She appeared to think about it, then shook her head.

“Then why marry him?”

“Because…” She fell silent again.

“Why?” I insisted.

“Because he can be good company.” She spoke very slowly, like a child rehearsing a difficult lesson. “Because he’s very successful.

Because I can give him confidence when he meets people who he thinks despise him. He thinks you despise him.”

“Maybe that’s because he’s despicable?”

She pulled a hair out of my chest in punishment. “He’s not despicable. He’s insecure and he’s only confident when the television cameras are pointing at him.”

“You’ll have a wonderful marriage,” I said sourly, “with the bloody cameras following you around.”

“And perhaps I can change him,” she said. “He’d like to be more like you.”

“Poor?”

“He envies you. He wishes he’d been a soldier.”

“Good God.” I lay in great contentment, my left hand stroking her naked back.

“That’s why he likes Fanny, I think,” Angela said. “Fanny’s tough.”

“That’s true.”

“And if tough people respect him, Tony feels tough himself.” She shrugged. “Perhaps, in time, and if enough people offer him acceptance, he will become strong?”

It seemed a rum recipe to me. “You’re strong,” I said.

“I don’t cry very often,” she said, “and I don’t like it when I do.” She lay silent for a few moments. Gulls were calling harshly on the river. “There’s something else about Tony,” she went on. “He doesn’t have close friends. He’d like to have one really close friend.