radio contract. It’s worked. Don’t be greedy. The press might well turn against you if you carry on.’
‘Just one more,’ I pleaded. ‘You have a list of clients as long as your arm who could use my help. I have credibility and you need that.’
‘Are you doing this for yourself or for me?’ he laughed, giving in. Why did he suddenly keep reminding me of Bill?
My cottage was being made-over by a woman’s magazine, so I stayed in London and gave away the endless roses Vizza sent me to local hospitals. By the end of the week, the wards of UCH looked like marquees at Chelsea Flower Show and the papers went into overdrive as I was spotted coming out of The Ivy with new young pop heat throb, Mac Savage. I strongly suspected that Al had only paired us up because Smack and Mac looked great linked in print. He was getting dangerously cynical.
Mac was sweet. Young, excited, hampered by a huge crush but far too shy to try it on. Best of all, he was a huge fan of Bill’s. He even sat up yawning in my hotel suite, drinking Sprite from the mini-bar as he watched Loved Up on NBC and agreed that Bill had got his old spirit back. But then he blew it by asking me to seduce him.
‘Bill was mad to dump you for that fake monster. You’re so beautiful.’
I cried for hours. Poor Mac tried to understand, doling out tissues and joking that he’d been using Kleenex himself all week, but to mop up something far less delicate than my tears. He even said he loved me. Shit, I felt bad about that one.
Al was livid.
‘You weren’t supposed to sleep with him!’ he complained when the papers were full of long-lens photographs of Mac leaving my hotel at dawn, looking rumpled and stubbly and devastatingly handsome.
‘I didn’t. We watched television,’ I sighed. ‘I thought this was precisely the sort of press you wanted. This is what you hired me for.’
‘I didn’t hire you,’ he sighed. ‘You employed me. I used to be quite good. And I don’t want to make you look cheap. This story just makes you look cheap, Sadie.’
‘I am cheap,’ I muttered. ‘Now it’s out in the open.’
You see, the press had finally turned against me big time on this one. ‘Sadie the Heartbreaker’ ran the bylines, ‘Was Roth Right To Leave Her?’ ‘Mac and Smack the Bitch Uptown.’ Sympathy for Bill was creeping into the alliterative, double-entendre prose. Rumours abounded that I had always been a serial tart, that Bill Roth had been at the end of his tether when he left me, that I was the reason his shows had started to suffer in the UK. The public was ready to forgive Bill at last; they wanted their big, loud, angry star back on home turf. It had done Mac no harm either, although Al was lampooned.
‘You’ve totally discredited my work,’ he fumed. ‘My name’s all over this.’ It was true. The Mac thing was one set-up too much for the press and the long-prepared features about the Alchemist ran side-by-side with the latest Smack story. To say I’d blown his cover was an understatement – I’d napalmed his roof.
‘You knew what you were letting yourself in for when you agreed to help me,’ I said quietly, wishing it didn’t make me feel quite so bad.
Darling Mac had sent a box of chocolates around to the hotel that morning with the note: Mine’s a soft centre, but please take it because you’re eating me up already. I looked at it for a long time, listening to Al’s breathing on the other end of the phone.
‘I know why you’ve done this, Sadie,’ he said finally. ‘And I hope it works, because you’ve not only burned my boats, you’ve burned your own too, and it takes a hell of a long time to swim to a desert island.’
I closed my eyes. He’d guessed at that first ever lunch. That’s why he’d been so reluctant to agree to do this stupid dating thing. I still had no idea why he’d said yes.
‘I think,’ his voice shook, ‘that we can help each other out here.’
‘I’m sorry, Al,’ I sighed. ‘If I do employ you, then I’m afraid you’re fired.’
‘Wait! I have to ask you something,’ he pleaded.
‘Forget it,’ I hung up on him, wishing I cared less, that the Alchemist had been a vulture after all, not the wise owl I’d grown to like.
I cried all the way home on the train, hours and hours of sliding past blurred green fields. My heart was hanging like a small corpse in my chest, wrenched from its strings. I wrote a letter to Mac to apologize for my behaviour. I knew his soft centre would harden up and go stale sooner or later – they all did – but I hoped that he got lucky.
Despite the dark glasses, I was still recognized constantly, which almost finished me off. I was sure my tear-stained autographs would make a mint in years to come if I finally committed the ultimate publicity stunt by committing suicide. I guessed that was what A1 would want. It would make great press; at least three of his clients would have more column inches than the Coliseum in coming weeks and the posthumous biography would sell shed-loads, so Sly would be happy too. He’d always wanted to write and he was the only person besides Bill who knew the entire truth.
Back at my made-over, disgustingly twee cottage, I ignored the Al’s increasingly irate answer phone messages and cuddled Carrot to my chest as I counted.
Seventy-eight sleeping pills. More than enough. But I knew I couldn’t do it. Not while Bill’s future lay in my hands.
Al turned up on my doorstep the next morning, armed with his slimline briefcase, like an estate agent arriving for a valuation. His wild curls had been slicked back and his blue eyes burnt with furious determination.
‘I’ve brought you a file in the hope that you will consider one last job,’ he handed it over and looked around. ‘Nice place.’
It looked disgusting, Colefax and Fowlered to within one inch of its sixteenth-century life with swags, stipples, indoor water features, distressed furniture and a distraught owner looking like sin from a sleepless night. It only took a moment for AI’s professional cool to crack. Underneath, he was jumpy and nervous.
‘OK, it’s awful,’ he admitted. ‘I’m sorry. The magazine promised the best interior designers. We’ll sue.’
‘Thanks, but I have no interest in designer libels. And I appreciate you bringing this, but I told you, you’re fired.’ I threw the file on the dresser and waited for him to leave.
‘I drove all the way from London,’ he stayed put in my doorway. ‘I brought you this too.’ He fished a slimline orchid out of the case, looking embarrassed. ‘It reminded me of you,’ he cleared his throat. ‘Fragile and rare, and desired by too many people for its own safety.’
I looked at it for a long time and felt the sun flooding through the open front door on to my face. It gave Al an ill-deserved halo as he stood in front of me.
‘I understand all your cuttings now,’ he said, his face a dark silhouetted shadow. ‘What interviewers meant when they wrote about your old-fashioned star quality, about how dangerous you are, how irresistible.’ He looked at me curiously. ‘I hope Bill knows how lucky he is.’
‘What do you mean?’ Cornered, I pretended not to understand.
‘You hate the limelight, don’t you?’ his shadow moved, blinding me with sun. ‘That’s why you seemed so reluctant to go back into the public eye when I first met you, why you insisted on taking the fast-track to feature-spreads. You were doing it for love. Not revenge, nor self-glory. Love. Call Bill now,’ he offered me his mobile. ‘Call him. Tell him it’s worked. That it’s time to come home.’
‘No,’ I turned the flower around in my hands, voice choked.
He waited until a tear splashed on the cellophane before he spoke. ‘Your relationship hasn’t ended at all, has it, Sadie? It’s simply on hold until Bill’s career picks up. He