Acquired Tastes (33 page)

Philip listlessly prodded his fish with his fork, and then reached for the salt cellar. Gabriella wagged an admonitory finger at him. Philip sighed and put his fork down. He had lost his appetite.

Gabriella examined the claw to see if there was any meat left and then dropped it on her plate. She looked across at Philip. 'And what about this other presenter? I don't like working with amateurs. They're worse than animals. At least you know there's a good chance an animal is either going to bite or shit, but you can never tell what an amateur might do.'

'Let's just try him out on the pilot, and if it doesn't work out, then we can lose him. Anyway, I would like you to think of Dr Archibald as our resident expert, someone for you to occasionally address questions to, not your co-presenter. He will also be the perfect foil for your great beauty. A case of beauty and the beast - rather apt imagery for a series about sexual fantasy, don't you think?' Philip chuckled, but there was no answering warmth in the look on Gabriella's face.

'My dearest girl…' He reached across the table for Gabriella's hand.

She picked up her glass.

Philip felt a stab in his chest that wasn't anything to do with his indigestion. In a world in which the old certainties seemed to have gone, he had thought that Gabriella at least would remain constant to their past. But perhaps she was right. Sentiment should take second place to business. He straightened up.

'I have complete faith in your abilities, Gabriella,' he said crisply. 'But Archibald is a psychologist with expertise in these matters, and I anticipate we are going to have a lot of detractors in the current political climate. Having him on the show gives us academic credibility. However, you have my assurance he will not be allowed to interfere in any way.'

Even as he said the words, the vision of Fergus punching Damien on the nose rose up before him. He tried to swallow it along with a little water.

Gabriella looked unconvinced and toyed with a radish. Philip had always been so malleable in the past. One smile from her and he would agree to almost anything. But there was an air of determination tinged with something akin to desperation about him now, and it was not a combination that bode well. She would just have to change Philip's mind for him once they got into the studio, Gabriella decided, as she snapped another claw in half. She could easily make this Archibald man look a complete fool without damaging herself. She smiled. After she had finished with him, Philip wouldn't be able to get rid of Archibald fast enough.

Philip mistook her smile for agreement and smiled back. Gabriella scooped out a fork-load of dark flesh from the crab's body and offered it to him. He waved it away. His digestive system was in no condition to accommodate shellfish.

Gabriella popped the crab into her mouth and then searched around for any further flesh. After two more mouthfuls she was satisfied there was no more to be found and with a sigh of pleasure, pushed her plate away. It was piled high with the shattered remnants of the dismembered corpse. Philip held out a napkin as she dabbled her fingers in the finger bowl. Gabriella smiled as she took it from him and carefully dried her hand.

'Philip darling, I trust you. Haven't I always? I'll do my best with this psychiatrist fellow if you will agree to just one or two teeny weeny little things for me.'

Philip crunched on another pill.

'First of all, I'd like my own make-up artist. Most of the girls these days think they're house painters, but I know this absolute sweetie of a little man - Joan and Britt and Gina all swear by him - and secondly, I'd like all my outfits to come from Cesar. I simply adore his designs, they're so me.'

Philip choked. Gabriella handed him a glass of water. Philip drained it in one gulp.

'Cesar.' Philip's voice was little more than a hoarse croak. The flamboyance of Cesar's clothes was only matched by the extravagance of his prices.

'Cesar,' Gabriella repeated firmly, 'and now if you don't mind darling, I simply must fly. I have another appointment.'

Two waiters rushed forward to hold Gabriella's chair as she prepared to leave. She pecked Philip lightly on the cheek before sweeping out of the restaurant, waving regally to the other tables as she went.

Philip sat motionless for a few moments. The crab's lifeless eyes stared back at him from Gabriella's plate. He signalled to a waiter.

'A large whisky,' he demanded hoarsely.

Outside the restaurant, Gabriella started to hail a taxi and then changed her mind and decided to walk to her hotel. Today she wanted to feel the warmth of the sun on her face and the pavements of London beneath her feet again. As she walked, she felt like singing aloud. London was going to be her town again. She had seen it on the faces of those men in the restaurant. She was on her way back, and she was going to do it on her terms. She had been ignominiously forced to leave England when her debts escalated and nobody returned her calls. When she was back on top, she would remember all those people whose secretaries had told her they were in meetings and would call back later.

Her hotel was just off Piccadilly. It was small, discreet and very smart. She smiled at the thought of what Philip's face would look like when he received the bill. He really had become such an old stick in the mud. He had never been much of a good looker, but he'd had a certain style in the old days, with his long blond hair, dark glasses and battered MG sports car. He drove it open-topped winter and summer, and there had always been a crate of the very best champagne in the boot. He had been such fun then.

She hurried up to her suite to change out of the tailored, charcoal grey suit she had worn for lunch. She wanted to create just the right impression for this interview. Most of the new school of female television presenters looked as though they had been cloned out of the same shop window dummy mould, and a chain store shop window, at that. They were plastic and colourless and so anxious to be taken seriously, they didn't dare be sexy unless you thought Barbie dolls were sexy. She'd never been scared of being a woman, and woe betide the man who hadn't taken her seriously.

After some deliberation, she decided on a black, figure-hugging polo-necked dress with a clever cut-out at the front, which artfully revealed a large expanse of cleavage which she dusted with a little blusher. The dress was trimmed at the neck and cuffs with fake leopard skin. She draped a stole casually over one shoulder, and then perched a Cossack-style hat cheekily on one side of her head to complete her outfit - both matched the fur trim on her dress. In the old days the leopard skin would have been real, she thought regretfully, but a girl had to move with the times.

From her jewellery casket, she selected large diamante earrings in the shape of snarling leopards' heads, and slipped several real diamond rings on her fingers.

She was just retouching her scarlet lipstick when a quiet purr from the phone alerted her to the arrival of her visitors. Gabriella instructed the receptionist to keep them waiting for nine minutes exactly, no less and no more, and then poured a drink from the bottle of pink champagne she had ordered earlier. She replaced the bottle in the ice bucket and drank the champagne down in one.

Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. Gabriella checked her smile in the mirror before opening the door.

'Mr Spittle, I'm delighted to meet you.' She held out her hand to a tall thin man. He looked uncomfortable.

'I'm Eddie,' said a tiny ferret-faced man whom Gabriella hadn't noticed because he barely came up to the other man's elbow. He jerked his head at the thin man. 'This is Sid, my photographer.'

Sid apologetically held up one of the several cameras he had draped around his neck.

Spittle was through the door before Gabriella had recovered enough to invite him in.

'Very nice, very nice,' he said approvingly his small eyes sliding over everything. 'This hotel's got real class. You don't find too many pop stars staying here. It costs a few spandoolies too so you can't be doing all that badly.' He raised an interrogative eyebrow.

'Just because one is not appearing on British television does not mean one is no longer a star, Mr Spittle,' Gabriella said frostily.

'Oh I know, I know,' said Spittle, and without waiting for an invitation, he settled down in an armchair and opened his notebook. Gabriella posed beside the marble fireplace, her head held imperiously high.

'You've been voted top female television personality in Norway, Belgium and Luxembourg according to my research.'

'And
my show regularly tops the ratings in Italy, where I have been voted sexiest woman on television twice in the last five years and been runner-up in the other three,' Gabriella added, her voice now registering a sub-zero temperature.

'That's your show with Cicci, the performing penguin, and the boob of the week spot, where men send in photographs of their wives' and girlfriends' boobs and the audience gets to vote on size and shape, isn't it?' said Spittle, consulting his notebook again. 'Not quite the kind of programme for a woman of your great talent, is it Miss Wolfe, or may I call you Gabriella?'

Spittle's eyes were fixed on her face, greedy for every reaction.

Two bright spots showed on Gabriella's carefully made-up cheeks. Spittle nodded imperceptibly - his carefully aimed barb had hit its target. His voice changed.

'Some of us think our television screens have been a much duller place without you. TV presenters today don’t understand what it means to be a star. I'm speaking for myself here of course, but you filled our lives with colour and glamour which has been much missed. We sorely need what you have to offer Gabriella.'

Gabriella looked mollified. With a gracious sweep of her stole, she artfully arranged herself on the sofa opposite Spittle so that the light was behind her.

Spittle watched, noting where and how she sat and the high neck and long sleeves of her dress. He was sure she wouldn't see fifty again, whatever the newspaper cuttings said. He made a mental note to get his researcher to dig harder for her real date and place of birth.

He always began his interviews by playing the hard man. It invariably provoked his interviewees to anger, because they were used to people fawning over them. Then, when he made the sudden switch into the 'only wanting to set the record straight' mode, they seemed to trust him as not being like all the other show-biz hacks and in doing so, were usually indiscreet. For some reason he had never been able to understand, most celebrities clung to the childlike belief that inside each of them was a fairy-tale character called 'the real me' who was misunderstood by everyone. However, if they thought the public was interested in paying to read how they really led quite ordinary lives, they were mistaken. The public wanted to be entertained, and it was his job to make sure they were.

Gabriella crossed her black-stockinged legs. 'And what
exactly
do you think I have to offer to British television, Mr Spittle?'

'Eddie, please. In three words I would say: class, glamour and sex. I'm not saying that the girls on our screens these days aren't pretty, but they aren't in your league.'

Gabriella graciously inclined her head.

'The angle I want to take in this article is that the glamour has gone out of television in the same way it has gone out of Hollywood. A good analogy don't you think?' Spittle asked.

Gabriella leaned forward and picked up a gold cigarette box from the onyx coffee table. The movement allowed Spittle a full view of her deep cleavage. He ran his tongue over his lips. She might be pushing fifty, but at least that part of her anatomy was in good shape. Not too many wrinkles either, but he'd hold judgement on whether Mother Nature had been benevolent until he had seen a copy of her medical records. Plastic surgeons were getting too clever by half. They went in for injections these days, rather than the knife, and the results were so much harder to detect.

Gabriella placed a cigarette in her cigarette holder and waited.

Spittle snapped his fingers at Sid, who fumbled for some matches before lumbering shyly forward with a proffered light.

They were a great team, Spittle thought. Sid's painfully shy exterior hid a killer instinct to get the right shot. He would wait any length of time, climb over or under any obstacle, subject himself to excruciatingly uncomfortable positions - anything to get a picture of his subject off-guard and defenceless. And in situations like this when they were invited in by their quarry, Sid's seemingly harmless presence helped to make the subject feel more secure.

'Why don't we talk, while Sid here does his bit?' Spittle said, as Gabriella exhaled a long stream of smoke. 'I always find we get more relaxed shots that way.'

Gabriella's hand involuntarily went to her hair. 'I want to know when he's going to take a shot. I don't like being caught off-guard.'

'Leave it to Sid, he's an artist. He's never caught a wrong side yet, have you Sid?'

Sid gave Gabriella a shy smile and then concentrated on assembling his battery of cameras.

Spittle placed a small tape recorder on the onyx table. 'Now tell me about Gabriella the woman,' he began. 'Rumour has it that you've had some of the world's most eligible men at your feet, and yet you've not married. Why not?'

Gabriella blew a languorous smoke ring. 'I like to think of myself in the same mould as that doyenne of Hollywood glamour, Mae West, who said: “It's not the men in my life but the life in my men I care about”,' Gabriella replied in a Mae West drawl.

Spittle dutifully smiled.

'So you see,' Gabriella continued, 'when I was a young girl, I liked older men who could teach me about life. Now I'm a mature woman, I like to teach young men about life. It has a perfect symmetry. Marriage would only have got in the way.'

'So you mean you're into toy boys?' asked Spittle, eagerly leaning forward.

Gabriella exhaled another long stream of smoke before replying, 'Toys need winding up. I like my men to be self-starters.'

Spittle smiled. He could see the headlines already.