‘Sure, I guess it was wrong, but she was so sweet, I really cared for her. I know I screwed her, but I don’t figure I screwed her up. She’s very happily married with a baby now.’
‘How d’you get on in prison?’
Johnny’s eyes were cavernous again. ‘It’s not a very nice place to be. But if you’re a famous movie star you’re trapped anyway; going to gaol is just exchanging one kind of captivity for another. And I learnt a lot. I could burglarize your place tonight, while you were in it. And I’m shit-hot at insider trading.’
Declan stretched out his legs.
‘Extraordinary coloured socks,’ said the girl from the Mail on Sunday, pouring herself another gin.
‘Did they give you a hard time inside?’ Declan asked Johnny.
‘Not really. One guy who couldn’t count — he thought the girl was four not fourteen — worked me over a bit, but I made some good friends.’
‘Have you never fancied older women?’
Johnny thought for a minute, then he smiled wickedly.
‘No, they have droopy asses. Droopy asses are so cold in bed.’
The telephone rang in the control room.
‘For Christ’s sake, get him off sex,’ yelled Tony. ‘The lawyers are going to take us to the cleaners, and Fergus Penney’s having a coronary. We’ll lose the franchise if you don’t shut him up.’
‘It’s a fucking good programme,’ said Cameron, and hung up.
Then she took the telephone off the hook.
‘Five seconds to the cue dot,’ intoned Daysee. ‘Five, four, three, two, one.’ She flicked the cue switch to warn people all over the network to get ready in sixty seconds to roll in the commercials, which were, after all, the life-blood of the station.
As the End-of-Part-One caption came up, Johnny shot out of the studio, saying he must have a leak.
‘You stay here,’ Cameron screamed at Daysee. ‘Well done, Declan.’
Johnny may not have been able to have Daysee in the break, but he had certainly taken something. In the second half he was even more outrageous, but utterly relaxed. Declan, in his wizard’s chair, had only to prompt him here, jog his memory there, and curb his amazing honesty when he looked like going over the top.
The floor manager thrust the back of his hand with splayed-out fingers towards Declan to indicate five minutes more.
‘I was on location in Texas,’ Johnny was saying as he waved his cigarette around. ‘Staying in my hotel was this glorious German girl. She gave me her room number, told me to come up in half an hour. I must have been looped. When I hotfooted upstairs later and banged on her door, someone let me in, but the room was in darkness.’
‘Oh Christ,’ thought Cameron. ‘What’s he going to say?’
‘Well, I undressed and got into bed, and I reached out, and I felt a boob, like a wrinkled fig. I figured this was odd. Then moving down I found I could play Grieg’s Piano Concerto on her ribs, so I groped for the light, and there were her teeth grinning at me from a glass beside the bed. I don’t know which of us screamed the louder. I mean, she must have been ninety, if she was a day. I mean, under-age girls are one thing, gerontophilia’s quite another.’ Johnny smiled helplessly.
‘Disgusting,’ spluttered the Prebendary and Valerie Jones in unison.
‘Anyway I shot down the bed as the security men broke in, and the old sweetie didn’t give me away. I sent her a whole roomful of flowers the next morning, and,’ Johnny paused wickedly — Oh Christ, thought Tony, as the Prebendary turned even more purple — ‘she still sends me Christmas cards.’
The floor manager was waving a couple of fingers at Declan for two minutes more.
‘Now you’re going to play Hamlet, have you got any ambitions left?’
‘I guess I’d like to make a happy marriage,’ said Johnny seriously. ‘I went to see my grandma the other day, she’s been married sixty years. Now that is achievement — like building a cathedral brick by brick, a real life’s work. I guess I won’t achieve it, but that’s what I’d like.’
‘Aaaaah,’ said Daysee Butler, so moved that she flicked the cue switch too early.
Now Declan was smiling and thanking Johnny for coming on the programme.
On came Schubert, jauntier than ever, up rolled the credits, but alas because of Daysee’s early cue, just as Cameron Cook’s name was about to come up at the end, the screen went royal blue and the Corinium television logo appeared, with the little red ram seeming to hold his horned head even higher than usual. A second later they were into the commercials.
Another great roar went up in the bar and the board room. Even the crew broke into rare spontaneous applause and crowded round Declan and Johnny. Upstairs, the press raced for the telephones.
‘I must talk to Declan about those yellow socks. I’m definitely going to do a fashion piece,’ said the girl from the Mail on Sunday, pouring herself another gin.
‘Great,’ said Freddie Jones, ‘really great. Congratulations.’
The lawyers came up and pumped Tony’s hand. ‘We were shitting bricks at the end, but Johnny came across great, a really nice guy, an attractive guy.’
Valerie Jones was nose to nose with the Prebendary.
‘Disgraceful,’ she was saying. ‘My daughter Sharon is only fourteen and when one thinks. .’
‘Screw the Prebendary,’ said Tony five minutes later, as he came off the telephone in his office. ‘Lady Gosling thought it was terrific.’
‘It was,’ said Miss Madden. ‘Declan wants a word.’
‘That was a terrific programme. Well done,’ said Tony, picking up another telephone.
‘Thanks,’ said Declan. ‘D’you mind if we don’t come up? Johnny doesn’t want to see anyone. He’s reached a stage when he might go right over the top. I’m taking him home for a quiet dinner.’
Through the door Tony could see the press and even the lawyers getting drunk. The Prebendary was still nose to nose with Valerie. Corinium had walked a tightrope that evening and got away with it.
‘Understood,’ said Tony. ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, but congratulations anyway.’
As Cameron went into the board room, everyone cheered. Tony even forgot himself sufficiently to march over and hug her. His eyes were blazing with triumph.
‘Lady Gosling rang to say how much she liked it. She sent special congratulations to you.’
But Cameron felt utterly drained and despairing. Not just because of her lost credit, but because she had produced and directed a programme in which she’d had no part. It had lived and fortunately not died with Declan.
13
Declan’s first programmes for Corinium were a colossal success. The press agreed that Johnny Friedlander was the best interview he’d ever done, that the ones with Jackie Kennedy and the Princess were even better, and the ones with Mick Jagger and Harold Pinter even better than that. The programmes sold everywhere abroad, and there was even talk at the Network meetings of moving the series to seven-thirty on Thursday in an attempt to knock out ‘EastEnders’. Declan sweat shirts, mugs and posters were selling faster than bikinis in June and Schubert must have looked down from heaven and been surprised but delighted to see his Fifth Symphony galloping up the charts.
Once the first programme was over Declan was much less aggressive and uptight and even drank in the bar with the crew, but he was no less intransigent about wanting his own way. Cameron smouldered and bided her time. Tony was besotted with Declan at the moment, but, knowing the nature of the two men, Cameron realized it wouldn’t last.
Meanwhile, although the flood of resignations at Corinium had been arrested by Declan’s arrival, Simon Harris was getting nearer his nervous breakdown and the staff were muttering even more mutinously into their glasses of Sancerre at the Bar Sinister that Cameron was about to be put on the Board.