The Men and the Girls Read online

  Hugh was brought up very differently. His father, an asthmatic, throve commercially during the War – black market dealings, Hugh always suspected – and died in 1948, the year Hugh went up to Cambridge, leaving just enough money to pay his debts, and to pay off, in the shape of a passage to Australia and a small capital sum, a hitherto unsuspected mistress and eight-year-old child. Hugh’s mother, a brassy woman of unquestionable courage, sold the family house, gave half the proceeds to Hugh, and took his sister to live in a flat in her home town of Huddersfield. A dressmaker by training, she set up a tiny business, which grew to be a bigger business and then to be a significant shop. When she died, she left most of her money to her daughter, who had inherited her father’s asthma and was too frail to do more than part-time work, and two hundred thousand pounds to Hugh. With it, he and Julia had bought and entirely renovated Church Cottage.

  At Cambridge, James was as haunted by not wanting to be a schoolmaster as Hugh was fired by longing to be an actor. He was a member of the dramatic company and after his degree (a third) he joined a touring company, as a student ASM for twenty-five shillings a week, which rose after six months to the basic Equity wage of six pounds and ten shillings. His mother disapproved violently; in her view, the theatre was full of nancy boys and show-offs. In all his three years in rep, she never came to see a performance, and when his delicate, breathless sister came, she had to pretend she had gone somewhere else. ‘It wouldn’t be worth the row,’ she’d say in her soft Yorkshire voice, holding out a food parcel to Hugh. ‘She can keep a row going two weeks or more. I’m not stopping coming, but I’m not confessing either.’ When independent television was born, in the fifties, and Hugh got his first contract with one of the major companies, his mother said without enthusiasm that that was more like it. She’d wanted him to be a lawyer, after Cambridge, she’d wanted him to better himself.

  Hugh Hunter and television adored one another and he was made front man for one of the first national news and views programmes. He was known as Double H, by his colleagues and by the public; in due course, his programme was successfully rechristened Double H Time and won awards. He had a flat near the studios, an MG and a series of lovely sixties girlfriends with enormous painted eyes, and sometimes, at a weekend, he would put the current girl into the MG and drive her down to the old Oxfordshire rectory on the Windrush River, where James lived, with his wife.

  His wife was much older than James. She was also quite wealthy. She had bought the house on the Windrush, and she paid most of its expenses, so that James was quite free to please himself as to what he did. He tried several things, opening a bookshop, writing a thriller, beekeeping to a commercial standard, but they did not satisfy him. He recognized that his dependence upon his wife probably accounted for his dissatisfaction, but he never blamed her for it. He was deeply fond of her; she had been a parent at the school where his stepfather was bursar and she had, in the truest sense, rescued him from Mallow expectations and tyrannies. They lived in great harmony in their riverside house, only disagreeing over one thing, which was Hugh Hunter. In the end, to keep the peace, Hugh stopped coming down to Oxfordshire, and James met him in London. When James’s wife died, of a brain tumour, when James was thirty-two, Hugh was the first person to come to comfort him.

  James’s wife left him enough money to buy a modest house – the rest went to her children – and a letter in which she said she was afraid her wealth had done him no service, and that she wished him a fulfilled life from now on, and a very happy second marriage. On Hugh’s free days from the studios, he and James prowled Oxford for houses, since James said he’d moulder if he lived in the country any longer. It took them four months to find Richmond Villa. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ Hugh said. ‘You can’t live in a horror like that.’ But James loved it at first sight.

  The house had brought him luck. He found, to his chagrin, that he liked teaching, and got himself a job at one of the city’s many tutorial colleges. He also found that, even if he couldn’t write fiction, he could write. He wrote some experimental social and political pieces for national journals and newspapers and had them accepted. He altered Richmond Villa a little to make it more comfortable; he rather vaguely made a garden, he made friends. He developed, in a peaceable, random manner, a way of living which gave him, he came to realize, the first real freedom he had ever known. This freedom became very precious to him and so, although he embarked on a series of romantic and sexual adventures (he did not seem able to combine the two in any one woman), he felt no desire whatsoever to share Richmond Villa with anyone. Hugh scoffed at him; he said he was turning into an old armchair of a bachelor, that he had soup stains on his mind as well as on his tie. James, looking at Hugh’s sun-lamped tan and ever younger girlfriends, said equably that, whatever he was, it was better than being a fossilized middle-aged trendy.

  They took to meeting every week. In the early seventies – Hugh’s heyday – Double H Time went out on most independent channels early on Thursday evenings, giving Hugh a weekend of Fridays and Saturdays. He invariably saw James each Saturday, driving down to Oxford because he said it took James a week to drive anywhere. Sometimes he went to Richmond Villa, but mostly, out of respect for their early days together at Cambridge, they went to the pub. Afterwards, James would walk Hugh around Jericho, or along the Oxford Canal, revelling in Hugh’s horror that anyone could actually choose to live among low bleak brick streets within earshot of the railway line. James said, ‘I love hearing the trains.’

  Hugh was honest with James. He never tried to pretend, with James, as he did with everyone else, that he had known Richard Dimbleby – with whom he had in truth once had lunch in a party of ten – very well. He did not try, either, to hide his anxiety when Double H Time was switched to Mondays, then cut from forty-five minutes to thirty, then dropped altogether. After the age of forty, he grew palpably afraid of getting old, and would turn to James for reassurance. He always looked younger than James, younger and fitter and better cared for, but his growing anxieties made him tense in public, inclined to overact. He began to talk of London-based television as played out, of the provincial companies as the places to look to, for a future. James understood him very well.

  It was a terrible shock to Hugh when James met Kate. He was unable to appreciate either her, or her beneficial effect on James, because his own sense of loss and betrayal obscured his vision. He stayed away from Oxford, and endured several alarming months in London, alarming because he was perfectly certain that both his professional and his personal life had ended in a yawning black hole. Then the telephone rang. It was an offer, the offer of presenting a similar kind of programme to Double H Time on Midland Television, whose chairman, Maurice Hirshfeld, had been a friend and colleague in those first happy independent television days in the late fifties and early sixties. ‘We’ve come a long way,’ Maurice said. ‘We started in a converted cinema. Remember?’ Hugh was offered a two-year renewable contract.

  His production assistant on the new programme, The Midlands Matter, was a girl called Julia Ferguson. She was quite unlike the girls Hugh had used to tear down the motorway with, a cool, collected girl with smooth hair drawn back, and huge pale spectacles. She wore suits, and very little jewellery; she could speak French and Spanish and she read Latin American novels; she turned Hugh hot and cold by alternately seeming oblivious of him, and seriously asking for his advice and acting upon it. Within a year, they were married without having once properly discussed the discrepancy in their ages; Hugh because he was afraid to, Julia because she didn’t need to.

  Hugh’s mother died two months after the wedding, of which she disapproved. She said Julia was a cold fish. With her legacy, they set about finding a house half-way between the Midland Studios and Oxford, because Julia intended that there should be children who would need educating in Oxford. They found Church Cottage standing in its acre of orchard and garden, a sixties conversion of a seventeeth-century cottage in which some dated echoes remained, the odd
wall of hessian wallpaper, or a stray abandoned curtain after a design by William Morris.

  Julia was orderly, a planner. The house was reorganized to eighties standards with a careful nod to its seventeenth-century origins, in two years. Once that was done, Julia stopped swallowing the pill and became pregnant. Two days after Hugh’s fifty-seventh birthday, Edward and George were born in the John Radcliffe Hospital and, two days after that, Hugh’s contract was once again renewed. On his first programme after the twins’ arrival, Hugh made an impromptu, emotional and very successful speech to the viewers about each of us having, once in our lives, an unexpected annus mirabilis, and the true, and dare he say it, almost religious thankfulness this inspired. He got sackfuls of letter after it, and the management of Midland Television, which had been sharply divided as to the wisdom of renewing his contract, relaxed a little.

  James wrote to Hugh when the twins were born, and the friendship fell back into its old ways with relief. Kate and Julia, it was assumed, would get on. Each was, for different reasons, slightly disconcerted by the other, but it was not in Kate’s nature to dislike. In any case, there were the twins. Fair, square and cheerful, the twins had, without the least effort, collected a fan club which even included Joss Bain.

  ‘Are you jealous?’ James had asked Kate, anxious for her. ‘Are you jealous of Julia?’

  ‘I’m not jealous of her for having babies,’ Kate said. ‘But I’m jealous of her for having the twins. You’d have to be made of stone not to be.’

  As far as the twins were concerned, Hugh was made of putty, or butter. Julia was the one who administered discipline, vitamin supplements and early reading practice; Hugh administered play and adoration. If he was worried, or irritable or in need of distraction, he would either go and find the twins, or think about them. His office at the Studios was full of photographs of them; the whole staff sent them birthday cards and at Christmas they came to the first half-hour of the Studios’ party and were handed about like puppies. They were tremendously good-natured about this, as they were about everything, as long as they remained in sight of one another. Sometimes, simply thinking about them when he was in one room at Church Cottage, and they were only in another, could cause Hugh to want to weep.

  They were, of course, Hugh’s solution to the present evening. A glimpse of them under their blue-and-white striped duvets, turned towards one another across the space between their beds, would soothe and mollify him. At the thought, Hugh repented of his sulks. He put his plates and cutlery docilely into the dishwasher, replaced the butter in the fridge, ran hot soapy water into the Provençal pot, wiped away the dried trail of the red-wine snake and shut his cigarettes firmly into a drawer which he would not open again, he said sternly, until an emergency. Then he lowered the lights – all the lights at Church Cottage were harnessed to dimmer switches – and went upstairs. He would, he decided, wash his hands and brush his teeth before he went to look at his sons.

  His sons. They lay as he had pictured them, George’s cheek on a knitted pig, Edward’s deep in his pillow. Julia disapproved of pillows, but Hugh had fought for them, on the grounds of psychological comfort.

  ‘They don’t need that. They aren’t like single people. They’re twins.’

  ‘Even so,’ Hugh said, ‘they’re still individuals, they need their own territory, and personal comforts, whatever they are, are part of that territory.’

  He stooped over them. They were still young enough to smell of babyhood, rather than of the rankness of boy. Julia kept them perfectly, clean and trimmed in bright, soft clothes. They always looked brand-new from their gleaming fair heads to their polished leather boots; Julia would not allow them trainers, but bought French boots for them in scarlet and navy-blue.

  ‘Oh twins,’ Hugh breathed, gazing down on them.

  George stirred. His eyes opened. He looked at his father. ‘No pig,’ said George and flung the knitted pig to the floor. He was asleep again immediately, shutting Hugh out. From downstairs – Julia always unplugged the upstairs one in the evening – the telephone rang.

  Hugh went down without enthusiasm. ‘Over fifty,’ he often said to Julia, ‘you learn to dread the brute.’ He didn’t go into the kitchen but into the sitting-room, the calm and elegant sitting-room, floored in pale sisal matting and hung with kelims.

  ‘Yes?’ Hugh said. ‘Hugh Hunter.’

  ‘Hugh. It’s Maurice.’

  Hugh felt in his trouser pocket for his cigarettes. They were in the kitchen drawer.

  ‘Sorry to ring you so late, I wanted to tell you personally—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The good news,’ Maurice Hirshfeld said loudly. ‘The good news.’

  Hugh swallowed. He tried not to think about his cigarettes. ‘Which is?’

  ‘We’ve got him. He’s agreed. He signed tonight.’

  Hugh sat down in the cream calico armchair beside the telephone.

  ‘Kevin McKinley.’

  ‘Yes. It’s wonderful. As I’ve said to you often, having a man like Kevin as our Managing Director can only raise our image.’

  Hugh said, ‘He’s made one series, one series, Maurice, that’s been a huge success, that’s all—’

  ‘He’s the right age, he’s got the right contacts, he’s worked in America—’

  ‘And I expect he sees Midland as a stepping stone to the BBC, to being Director General. What sort of a deal has he got?’

  Maurice said, ‘You only get monkeys if you pay peanuts.’

  Hugh said nothing.

  Maurice went on. ‘We’ll all benefit, Hugh. We’ve got the franchise renewed, and now we’ve got Kevin.’

  Hugh took a huge breath and closed his eyes. His long acquaintanceship with Maurice was his strongest card at Midland Television and Maurice would – he hardly dared think about it – be retiring in two years, two years before Hugh, had he been an accountant or a solicitor, would have been retiring too. He must, for his own sake, betray nothing.

  ‘Jolly good,’ Hugh said, filled with fear. ‘So pleased. Great news.’

  ‘Knew you’d be pleased. That’s why I wanted to tell you myself.’

  Lies, lies, the whole conversation lies.

  ‘He wants to meet all the key people next week. Can you make Tuesday?’

  ‘Of course—’

  ‘Excellent,’ Maurice said. The relief that the call was almost over lent warmth to his voice. ‘See you Tuesday. Have a good weekend.’ He suddenly remembered. ‘Boys well?’

  ‘Blooming.’

  ‘Good. Well done. Jolly good.’

  Hugh put the telephone down and went into the kitchen. He opened the drawer and found his cigarettes, and then he retrieved his glass from the dishwasher and filled it again. He sat down with both on the bar stool. He could picture it all, Kevin McKinley naming his own salary, huge holidays, a chauffeur-driven car, Kevin McKinley saying, ‘And you’ll pay my full pension.’ The Kevin McKinleys of this world, Hugh thought, were not disposed to look kindly upon presenters of over sixty, even presenters who looked well under sixty (and unconsciously took two or three years off their ages when asked to state it) and whom the public liked. ‘They do like me,’ Hugh said, staring down into his wineglass. ‘They do. They write and tell me so.’

  Car tyres crunched softly over the gravel outside the window. Julia. Hugh was not sure he was ready to face Julia, he felt – he felt – what did he feel? Distressed, that’s what he felt, unhappy and afraid and shaken. He didn’t like Julia to see him like that, even though inevitably, in seven years, she sometimes had. With a life as precarious as his, how could it be otherwise? It couldn’t, but that didn’t stop him disliking it. He sat on his bar stool and ground out his cigarette and waited for her quick light step from the garage.

  ‘Oh Hugh,’ said Julia coming in, bright-eyed. ‘How forlorn you look.’

  He held his arms out to her. ‘No good at evenings on my own—’

  She clicked her tongue but she allowed him to hold her for a mom
ent. He said, ‘Did it go well?’

  She nodded. ‘I went out with a fire engine. It was fascinating.’ She turned her head away and said modestly, ‘They said I was fine.’

  ‘You mean they said you were bloody marvellous.’

  She removed herself from his embrace. ‘I’ll have to get contact lenses. I can’t go on wearing these goggles.’

  ‘I love your goggles.’

  ‘You’re not a television camera. How are the boys?’

  ‘Dead to the world.’

  She took the kettle over to the sink to fill it.

  ‘Was supper all right?’

  ‘Delicious.’

  He watched her. She hadn’t taken off her narrow, dark-blue overcoat and her pale hair – the twins’ hair – hung down the back of it, its edge cut as levelly as a curtain’s.

  ‘It was such a revolting night. I had to stand under an umbrella and I’m sure my nose was red. They’ve decided to call the series Night Life. Next week, it’s a travelling soup kitchen in Oxford.’

  ‘Better tell Kate. Derelicts are her speciality, she’d know where to find them.’

  ‘I think,’ Julia said quietly, plugging in the kettle, ‘I’d rather find my own. Tea?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Maurice rang,’ Hugh said.

  Julia took off her coat and folded it over the back of one of the wooden armchairs. She wore a polo-necked jersey and a short skirt and her admirable legs were clad in narrow suede boots. She came over to Hugh and put her arms round him.

  ‘Oh Hugh. It’s Kevin McKinley, isn’t it?’