perfectly happy to compile that piece about attitudes to marriage,’ I said stiffly. ‘Why on earth would anyone think I’d mind?’ They all shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
‘OK, then,’ said Jack, ‘do it, and we’ll run it tomorrow. But don’t forget Citronella Pratt.’ Damn! Citronella Pratt! I’d forgotten. Quelle horreur – and on my first day back.
‘Do I have to?’ I said, backtracking. ‘I’d rather chew tinfoil.’
‘I’m afraid you do,’ said Jack. ‘You know how it is.’
Yes, I do. You see there’s one thing I don’t like about working in commercial radio and that’s the constant concessions we have to make to our sponsors and advertisers. For example, Mazota cars advertise regularly on London FM and, believe it or not, this affects our news priorities. Balkan massacres, Middle Eastern airstrikes and catastrophic earthquakes are wiped off the bulletins if there’s anything about road pricing, or taxation on company cars. It’s sickening, and I suppose it’s corrupt; but we just have to live with it and remember that old adage about the piper and the tune. And Citronella Pratt, a right-wing housewife with a column in the Sunday Semaphore, falls into this category too. We often interview her for our programmes. Not because we admire her brain, which is mediocre, or her views, which are venomous, but because her husband is the chairman of Happy Bot, the nappy manufacturer which sponsors our weather reports. So to keep Mr Happy Bot happy, we have to interview his wife. And she would know if we used anyone else, because she listens to us all the time.
‘Sorry about that, Minty,’ said Jack, as the meeting broke up. ‘Just a quick Citronella soundbite will do.’
I went over to my desk, which had been borrowed during my absence and left in a terrible mess. I began to clear up, then realised that someone was standing over me. It was Wesley and he looked distraught.
‘Minty, I’d just like to say –’
‘What?’ I said, as I took my portable tape-recorder out of the top drawer.
‘I don’t know how he could do that,’ he went on miserably, shaking his balding head. ‘How could anyone do that to you?’
‘How could anyone do that to anyone?’ I said quietly, as I slotted in a clean cassette.
Wesley stood a little closer. ‘You’re so wonderful Minty,’ he whispered.
Oh God, no. No, not this.
‘You’re so attractive …’
Please. No. I’d forgotten that my newly single status meant that I’d be fighting off boring old Wesley again. When I was with Dominic he’d at least had the decency to stop.
‘I know you rejected me before,’ he went on, with a martyred air, ‘but I just want you to know that I’m still here for you.’
‘Thanks, Wesley,’ I said disinterestedly, as I plugged in the microphone. ‘Testing, one, two, three, four, five. Hey, who’s been using my tape-recorder? The batteries are almost flat!’
Wesley had now perched on the edge of my desk as I did my best to ignore him.
‘Dominic wasn’t right for you, Minty,’ I heard him say as I put in four new Ever-Readys. ‘And look how he’s let you down.’
‘I’m not discussing it,’ I said, rather sharply. ‘Anyway, I’ve got far more pressing things on my mind, like this feature, which I have a day to prepare.’ I got out my contacts book and turned to ‘M’ for marriage. Wesley glanced round the office to make sure he couldn’t be heard.
‘I’d do anything for you, Minty,’ he murmured, ‘you know that.’
‘Then please let me get on with my work,’ I replied. But he didn’t seem to hear.
‘I’d even leave Deirdre for you.’ Oh no. Not that again.
‘I don’t think you should,’ I said with uncharacteristic firmness as I picked up the phone. ‘In fact, Wesley, I strongly advise you against any such course of action!’ Wesley looked a bit shocked at my spiky tone of voice, and, to be honest, it surprised me too. I wouldn’t normally have been so sharp, I realised, as I began to dial.
‘Deirdre’s just not very …exciting,’ I heard Wesley say. This was true. They were a perfect match. ‘But you’re wonderful, Minty,’ he droned. ‘You’re so clever, you’re such fun –’
‘Leave me alone please, Wesley.’
‘You’ve always been the girl of my dreams, Minty,’ he whined, with a wounded air. ‘Why won’t you give me a chance?’
‘Because – Oh, hello, is Citronella Pratt there? – because I’ll never give anyone a chance, ever again.’
In the long run I was grateful to Jack for making me come back to work. I had very little time to think about Dominic as I rushed round London that first day, collecting material for my feature. I interviewed two couples who preferred to cohabit; a divorcee who refused to remarry; a woman who was happily single, and a spokesperson from the marriage charity, It Takes Two.
Then, with a sinking heart, I went to interview Citronella Pratt. I’d left her until the end, so that I could truthfully say I was short of time. I always sit there, like a prisoner, an expression of polite interest Grip-fixed to my face, while she drones on about the success of Mr Happy Bot, or the new car they’re buying, or the wonderful villa they’re doing up in Provence, or the prodigious progress of the infant Sienna.
A pretty girl, who I knew to be the nanny, opened the door of the Pratt homestead in Hampstead, a rambling Victorian house in a road leading up to the Heath. ‘Leave us, please, Françoise!’ said Citronella, as though the girl were a lady’s maid. And this surprised me, because Citronella often fills up her column with guff about her ‘miracle nanny, Françoise’, and how she’s better than anyone else’s nanny, and about the lavish gifts she bestows on her as an inducement to stay. Last week she bragged that she’d given Françoise a top-of-the-range BMW – there was no sign of this, however, in the drive.
We went through the toy-strewn hallway to the ‘study’, which resembled the childcare section of my local Waterstones. Books on child psychology, baby care and pregnancy lined the walls from floor to ceiling. This, they seemed to declare, with territorial emphasis, was Citronella’s field of expertise. I glanced at her as I unravelled my microphone lead, and wondered yet again at the gap between her photo-byline and the reality confronting me now. The girlish image in the photo, chin resting beguilingly on steepled hands, bore little resemblance to the pneumatic, late thirty-something woman with grey-blonde hair and beaky nose who sat before me now. I also found myself reflecting on the power of patronage. Citronella had never been a journalist, and had nothing very edifying to say; but her views on women chimed with those of her reactionary editor, Tim Lawton. They had met at a dinner party six months before, and so impressed was he with her poisonous opinions about her own sex, that he had taken out his cheque book and signed her up on the spot. And so Citronella had become Goebbels to his Hitler in the war he was waging against women. Her pieces should have been headlined ‘Fifth Column’, I always thought, as week after week she set out to demoralise successful, single females. She wrote of boats leaving port, and of women left ‘on the shelf’. She wrote of the ‘impossibility of having it all’. Men, she had once
