Rivals Read online

  ‘It’ll wait,’ said Rupert, and, gathering up his keys, started to drag her towards the lift. As the doors closed, like curtains coming down on the first act of a play, Tony could see the two of them glued together in a passionate embrace.

  A deeply competitive man, Tony had felt dizzy with jealousy. He had seldom, particularly since he had inherited the title and become Chief Executive of Corinium, had any difficulty attracting women, but he’d never attracted anything so wantonly desirable and desiring as that grubby, vaguely familiar blonde.

  ‘More coffee, Lord Baddingham?’ One of the beautiful attendants in the Concorde Lounge interrupted Tony’s brooding. He shook his head, comforted by the obvious admiration in her voice.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be boarding?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll be a few minutes late. There was a slight engineering problem. They’re just doing a last-minute check.’

  Tony glanced round the departure lounge, filled with businessmen and American tourists, and noticed a pale, redheaded young man in a grey pinstripe suit, who had stopped his steady flow of writing notes on a foolscap pad and was looking apprehensively at his watch.

  Boarding the plane twenty minutes later, Tony found himself sitting up at the front on an inside seat with a Jap immersed in a portable computer on his right. Across the gangway next to the window sat the young man in the pinstripe suit. He was even paler now and looking distinctly put out.

  ‘Good morning, Lord Baddingham,’ said a stewardess, handing Tony that day’s newly-flown-in copy of the Wall Street Journal.

  ‘Engineering fault sorted out?’ asked Tony, as the engines started revving up.

  Not quite meeting his eyes, the girl nodded brightly; then, looking out of the window, she seemed to relax as a black car raced across the tarmac. Next there was a commotion, as a light, flat, familiar drawl could be heard down the gangway:

  ‘Frightfully sorry to hold you all up; traffic was diabolical.’

  All the stewardesses seemed to converge on the new arrival, fighting to carry his newspaper and put his hand luggage up in the locker.

  ‘Won’t you be needing your briefcase, Minister?’ asked a male steward, shimmying down the gangway.

  Rupert Campbell-Black shook his head. ‘No thanks, sweetheart.’

  ‘Have a nice zizz then,’ said the male steward, going crimson with pleasure at the endearment.

  As the doors slammed shut, Rupert collapsed into the seat across the gangway from Tony. Wearing a crumpled cream suit, a blue striped shirt, dark glasses and with an eighth of an inch of stubble on his chin, he looked more like a rock star than one of Her Majesty’s ministers.

  ‘Terribly sorry, Gerald,’ he murmured to the pale young man in the pinstripe suit. ‘There was a terrible pile-up on the M4.’

  Smiling thinly, Gerald removed a blonde hair from Rupert’s lapel.

  ‘I really must buy you an alarm clock for Christmas, Minister. If you’d missed that lunchtime speech, we’d have been in real stück. Good of them to hold the plane.’

  ‘Thank Christ they did.’ Looking round, Rupert saw Tony Baddingham and grinned. ‘Why, it’s the big Baddingham wolf.’

  ‘Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t you?’ said Tony disapprovingly.

  Both men required each other’s goodwill. Rupert, as an MP within Tony’s television company’s territory, needed the coverage, whereas Tony needed Rupert’s recommendation to the Government that he was running a respectable company. But it didn’t make either like the other any better.

  ‘Bloody good results you had this morning,’ said Rupert, fastening his seat belt. ‘I’d better buy some Corinium shares.’

  Slightly mollified, Tony congratulated Rupert on his recent appointment as Tory Minister for Sport.

  Rupert shrugged. ‘The PM’s shit-scared about football hooliganism – seems to think I can come up with some magic formula.’

  ‘Setting a Yobbo to catch a Yobbo perhaps,’ said Tony nastily, then regretted it.

  ‘I was at Thames Television yesterday,’ said Rupert icily, as the plane taxied towards the runway. ‘After the programme I had a drink with the Home Secretary and the Chairman of the IBA. They were both saying that you’d better watch out. If you don’t spend a bit more of that bloody fortune you’re coining from advertising on making some decent programmes, you’re going to lose your franchise.’

  As Rupert leant forward so Tony could hear him over the engines, Tony caught a whiff of the scent the girl had been wearing in the Post House foyer earlier.

  ‘And you ought to spend some time in the area. How the hell can you run a television company in the Cotswolds, if you spend all your time in London, hawking your ass round the advertising companies?’

  ‘The shareholders wouldn’t be very pleased if I didn’t,’ said Tony, thoroughly nettled. ‘Look at our results.’

  Rupert shrugged again. ‘You’re also supposed to make good programmes. As your local MP I’m just passing on what’s being said.’

  ‘As one of your more influential constituents,’ said Tony, furiously, ‘I don’t think you should be checking into the Post House with bimbos half your age.’

  Rupert laughed. ‘That was no bimbo, that was Beattie Johnson.’

  Of course! Instantly Tony remembered the girl. Beattie Johnson was one of the most scurrilous and successful women columnists – dubbed by Private Eye ‘the First not-quite-a-lady of Fleet Street’.

  ‘She’s ghosting my memoirs,’ added Rupert. ‘We were doing research. I always believe in laying one’s ghost.’

  Below the blank stare of the dark glasses, his curved smiling mouth seemed even more insolent. As the plane revved up, both men turned to look out of the window, and Tony found himself trembling with rage. But not even the splendid, striped-silk-shirted bosom of the air hostess, which rose and fell as she showed passengers how to inflate their life jackets, could keep Rupert’s eyes open. By the time they were airborne, he was asleep.

  Tony accepted a glass of champagne and tried to concentrate on the Wall Street Journal. He didn’t know which he resented most – Rupert’s habitual contempt, his ability to sleep anywhere, his effortless acquisition of women, or the obvious devotion of the palely efficient Gerald, who was now sipping Perrier and polishing the speech Rupert was to deliver to the International Olympic Committee at lunchtime.

  There had hardly been a husband in Gloucestershire, indeed in the world, Tony reflected, who hadn’t cheered four years ago when Rupert’s beautiful wife, Helen, had walked out on him in the middle of the Los Angeles Olympics, running off with another rider and causing Rupert the maximum humiliation.

  But, infuriatingly, Rupert had appeared outwardly unaffected and had risen to the occasion by winning a show-jumping gold medal despite a trapped shoulder nerve, and going on two years later to win the World Championship, the only prize hitherto to elude him. Then, giving up show jumping at the pinnacle of his fame, he had moved effortlessly into politics, winning the Tory seat of Chalford and Bisley with ease. Even worse, he had turned out a surprisingly good MP, being very quick on his feet, totally unfazed by the Opposition or the Prime Minister, and prepared to fight very hard for his constituency.

  Although scandal had threatened eighteen months ago, when Rupert’s then mistress, Amanda Hamilton, wife of the Foreign Secretary, had withdrawn her patronage on finding out that Rupert was also sleeping with her teenage daughter, by this time, in the eyes of a doting Prime Minister, Rupert could do no wrong. Now, as Minister for Sport, with Gerald Middleton as an exceptional private secretary to do all the donkey work, Rupert was free to roam round exuding glamour, raising money for the Olympic team here, defusing a riot against a South African athlete there. Responsibility, however, hadn’t cleaned up his private life at all. Divorced from Helen, he could behave as he chose, hence his cavorting with Beattie Johnson in the Post House that morning.

  Glancing at Rupert, sprawled out on the pale-grey leather seat, taking up most of Gerald’s leg room, beautiful des
pite the emergent stubble, Tony felt a further stab of jealousy. He couldn’t remember a time in his forty-four years when he hadn’t envied the Campbell-Blacks. For all their outlandish behaviour, they had always been looked up to in Gloucestershire. They had lived in the same beautiful house in Penscombe for generations, while Tony was brought up behind net curtains in a boring semi in the suburbs of Cheltenham. Tony also had a chip because he only went to a grammar school, where he’d been teased for being fat and short, and because his conventional colourless father (although subsequently ennobled for his work in the war) had been considered far too valuable as a munitions manufacturer to be allowed to go off and fight, unlike Rupert’s father, Eddie, who’d had a dazzling war in the Blues.

  Even when Tony’s father had been given his peerage, Eddie Campbell-Black and his cronies had laughed, always referring to him dismissively as Lord Pop-Pop, as they blasted away slaughtering wild life with one of his products on their large estates.

  Growing up near the Campbell-Blacks, Tony had longed to be invited to Penscombe and drawn into that rackety, exciting set. But the privilege had been bestowed on his brother Basil, who was ten years younger and who, because Tony’s father had made his pile by then, had been given a pony to ride and sent to Harrow instead of a grammar school, and had there become a friend of Rupert’s.

  As a result of such imagined early deprivation, Tony had grown up indelibly competitive – not just at work, but also socially, sexually, and at all games. Spurning the family firm when he left school, he’d gone straight into advertising and specialized in buying television air time. Having learnt the form, from there he moved to the advertising side of television. A brilliant entrepreneur, who felt he was slipping unless he had a dozen calls from Tokyo and New York during Christmas dinner, by changing jobs repeatedly he had gained the plum post of Chief Executive at Corinium Television eight years ago.

  Having shot up to five feet ten and lost his puppy fat in his twenties, Tony had in middle age grown very attractive in a brutal sort of way; although with his Roman nose, heavy-lidded charcoal-grey eyes, coarsely modelled mouth and springy close-cropped dark hair, he looked more like a Sicilian wide boy than an English peer. He chose to proclaim the latter, however, by wearing coronets on absolutely everything. And on the little finger on his left hand gleamed a massive gold signet ring, sporting the Baddingham crest of wrestling rams, above the motto chosen by Lord Pop-Pop: Peaceful is the country that is strongly armed.

  Considerably adding to Tony’s sex appeal was a hunky bull-necked body, kept in shape by self-control and ruthless exercise, and a voice deliberately deep and smooth to eradicate any trace of a Gloucestershire accent. This only slipped when he went into one of his terrifying rages, which flattened the Corinium Television staff against the cream-hessianed walls of his vast office.

  In fact, it irritated the hell out of Tony that, despite his success, his fortune and his immense power, Rupert still refused to take him seriously. He would not have been so upset by Rupert’s sniping if it had not echoed a warning last night from Charles Crawford, the rotund and retiring Chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (or IBA as they were known). The IBA’s job was to grant franchises to the fifteen independent television companies every eight years or so, monitor their programmes and generally beat them with a big stick if they stepped out of line.

  After his programme with Rupert and the Home Secretary at Thames Television yesterday, Charles Crawford had gone on to the Garrick to dine with Tony.

  ‘As an old friend,’ said Charles, greedily pouring the cream Tony had rejected together with his own supply over his strawberries, ‘I don’t see what else we can do but give you a stinking mid-term report. You promised us Corinium would provide at least ten hours’ drama a year for the network, and all you’ve produced is one lousy cops-and-robbers two-parter, totally targeted at the American market. Why can’t you provide some decent programmes, like Patrick Dromgoole does at HTV?’

  For a second Tony gritted his teeth. He was fed up with having Patrick Dromgoole and HTV held up to him as models of perfection. Then pulling himself together he filled up Charles Crawford’s glass with priceless Barsac.

  ‘Things are going to change,’ he said soothingly. ‘I’ve just poached Simon Harris from the BBC as Programme Controller. He’s very hot on drama, and has dreamed up a terrific idea for a thirteen-parter, a cross between James Herriot and “Animal House”.’

  ‘Well that’s a start,’ grumbled Charles, ‘but your regional programmes are quite awful too. Your territory – which you conveniently seem to have forgotten – stretches from Oxford to Wales, and from Southampton to Stratford. And you’re supposed to cover the whole area. That’s why we gave you the franchise.

  ‘We also know you’ve been spending Corinium advertising profits, which should have been spent improving your programmes, buying up . . .’ Charles ticked the list off with his fat fingers, ‘a film production company, a publishing firm, a travel agency, a cinema chain, a film library, and a safari park, and what’s this I hear about plans to buy an American distribution company? American, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘That’s fallen through,’ lied Tony. ‘It was only an idea.’

  ‘Well, keep it that way. Finally you’ve got to spend more time in your area. Many of your staff have absolutely no idea what you look like. I could understand if you had to live in the middle of Birmingham or even Manchester, but Cotchester must be the most delightfully civilized town in the country. We awarded you the franchise to reflect the region responsibly, and we’ve given you a very easy ride up till now.’

  And I’ve given you some bloody good dinners, thought Tony sourly, as Charles sniffed appreciatively at a passing plate of welsh rarebit.

  ‘But when Lady Gosling takes over from me in the autumn, ’ went on Charles, spooning up the last drop of pink cream, ‘you’re all going to feel the chill cloud of higher education across the industry. Lady G believes in quality programmes and lots of women at the helm. Go on producing your usual crap, and you’ll be out on your ear.’

  Having brooded on this conversation and on Rupert Campbell-Black’s contumely the entire flight, the only thing that managed to cheer Tony up was when the limousine that met him at Kennedy turned out to be at least three feet longer than Rupert’s and twice as plush.

  RIVALS

  2

  Tony’s rule, once he got to America, was never to check what time it was in England. To compensate for such an unsatisfactory start to the day, he spent the next few hours in a heady spate of wheeling and dealing, selling the format of two sit-coms and a game show for such a large sum that it wouldn’t matter even if they bombed. It was only when he got back to the Waldorf and found three messages to ring his very demanding mistress, Alicia, and, checking the time, realized that he couldn’t because it was long after midnight and she’d be tucked up in bed with her husband, that he suddenly felt tired.

  He kicked himself for agreeing to dine with Ronnie Havegal, Head of Co-Productions at NBS, particularly as Ronnie had asked if he could bring some producer called Cameron Cook.

  ‘Cameron’s a good friend of mine,’ Ronnie had said in his Harvard drawl. ‘Very bright, just done a documentary on debutantes, up for a Peabody award, real class; they like that sort of thing in England.’

  With his royal-blue blazers, butterscotch tan, and streaked hair, Tony had often wondered about Ronnie’s sexual preferences. He didn’t want to spend an evening avoiding buying some lousy programme from one of Ronnie’s fag friends. Yanks always got class wrong anyway.

  Christ, he was tired. Unable to master the taps in the shower, he shot boiling lava straight into his eyes. Then, forgetting to put the shower curtain inside the bath, he drenched the floor and his only pair of black shoes.

  Tony spent a lot of money on his clothes and ever since he’d seen Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls as a teenager tended to wear dark shirts with light ties. The new dark-blue silk shirt Alicia had given him for his
birthday would be wasted on two fags. He would keep it for lunch with Ali MacGraw tomorrow. Dressed, he fortified himself with a large whisky and put the presentation booklet of ‘Four Men went to Mow’, Simon Harris’s new idea for a thirteen-part series, on the glass table, together with a video of possible exteriors and interiors to give the Americans a taste of the ravishing Cotswold countryside.

  He was woken by Ronnie ringing up from downstairs. But when Ronnie came through the door, Tony suddenly didn’t feel tired any more, for with him was the sexiest, most truculent-looking girl Tony had ever seen. Around twenty-six, she was wearing a straight linen dress, the colour of a New York taxi, and earrings like mini satellite dishes. She had a lean, wonderfully rapacious body, long legs, very short dark hair sleeked back from her thin face, and a clear olive skin. With her straight black brows, angry, slightly protruding amber eyes, beaky nose and predatory mouth, she reminded him of a bird of prey – beautiful, intensely ferocious and tameable only by the few. She gave out an appalling sexual energy.

  She was also so rude to Ronnie, who was very much her senior, that at first Tony assumed they must be sleeping together. He soon realized she was rude to everyone.

  ‘This is Cameron Cook,’ said Ronnie.

  Nodding angrily in Tony’s direction, Cameron set off prowling round the huge suite, looking at the large blue urn in the centre of the living-room holding agapanthus as big as footballs, the leather sofas and arm chairs, the vast double bed next door, and the six telephones (with one even in the shower).

  ‘Shit!’ Her voice was low and rasping. ‘This place is bigger than Buckingham Palace; no wonder you Brits need American co-production money.’

  Tony, who was opening a bottle of Dom Perignon, ignored the jibe, and asked Cameron where she came from.

  ‘Cincinnati.’

  ‘City of the seven hills,’ said Tony smoothly. ‘But you must have bought those legs in New York.’

  Cameron didn’t smile.