She hesitated, waiting for the jeers to die down. ‘And to illustrate that—’ she said, and faltered. ‘…To illustrate that,’ she began again. Messy had been facing hostility on radio phone-in shows all week, but this was different. Looking around at the angry faces in front of her, and the smug unhelpful expressions of her Very Important fellow guests, she realised she had forgotten what she was going to say. Completely. She tried another tack: ‘For example, I would like to know how many fatties here tonight…How many fatties in the audience—’ What was she meant to say next? She had no idea. ‘How many fatties…’ She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember any words at all. All she could do was repeat herself. And every time she repeated herself, she repeated the word ‘fatty’, and every time she said ‘fatty’ the audience grew more enraged.
It reached a point where one of her Very Important fellow panellists decided to step in.
The eternally marvellous Maurice Morrison, twice married and divorced and also, as it happened, a furtive (but busy) preferrer of teenage boys; multi-millionaire entrepreneur, ex-Marlborough pupil and the government’s brand new Minister for Kindness; slim, attractive, concerned, with a full head of salty blond hair and an Armani-clad well-exercised torso, held up his suntanned, elegantly masculine hand and called calmly for hush.
‘OK, look, come on, guys,’ he said, ‘I think we should appreciate that Messy is entitled to her opinion, and since she’s come on the show to tell us about it, we should at least have the courtesy to listen, yeah? Even if we don’t agree. Becuz, basically—For me, that’s one of the beautiful things about this country. It’s one of the things we’re fighting for right now, over in Kabul! Becuz – here in Britain, OK – we can stand up and say “Listen, guys. You may not agree with me, but this is actually an issue I believe in!”’
By God, it brought the house down.
Messy glowered at him as he peeped across, smiling with encouragement and warmth and a lovely little smattering of diffidence. She didn’t need Maurice Morrison – the last thing she needed was patronising, good-looking Maurice Morrison trawling for admirers off the back of her humiliation. She was furious. Gradually the cheers faded to silence and everyone waited to hear how she would respond.
She could have said so many things. If she’d been even an eighth as efficient at crowd control as Mr Morrison was, she could have turned the whole situation to her advantage. But she wasn’t. She had barely emerged from four years in hiding, she was still battered by a broken heart and the cruel transformation in her looks and general fortune, and the lights were beaming down on her and making her very hot. The whole world, or so it felt, was looking on. She said: ‘Get lost, you phony little creep.’
And that was the end of Messy. Really, she was lucky she wasn’t lynched.
The performance boosted her book sales, but it also set her up as a national target for mockery and general abuse. Over the next two days a lot of inane and cruel things were written about her. One paper found a nutritionist to express revulsion at a picture of sweet, chubby little Chloe sucking on a lollipop. Another paper dedicated a whole page to what they imagined Messy Monroe needed to eat each day in order to maintain her great bulk. Several papers ran Before and After photographs, alongside pseudo serious articles about the stresses of early fame/sex appeal/faded stardom/single motherhood…It was pretty standard stuff, the usual newspaper fodder. It certainly wasn’t an enormous story, what with everything else that was going on.
But it was big enough to catch the eyes of the tabloid scanners at Fiddleford Manor.
‘There’s a bloody great cow here,’ said Grey McShane, slowly lifting his large feet off the kitchen table and laying his paper down in front of him, ‘who lost her rag on the telly a couple o’ nights ago. Have you seen the size of her?’
‘Yes, I noticed her,’ mumbled the General, without looking up. Dressed smartly, as always, in a tweed jacket and old regiment tie, he was sitting in his preferred position for this time in the mid-morning, bolt upright in the worn leather armchair beside the Aga, and surrounded by a sea of downmarket newspapers and magazines. ‘I thought she was rather comely.’
‘No!’ Grey examined the photograph more closely, this time trying to overlook her most obvious weakness. And it was true, she had beautiful long dark shiny hair…and an attractive mouth which curled up slightly at the edges…and round, intelligent, bright blue eyes… ‘But she’s a bloody whale!’
‘Modern girls are too thin, McShane. I thought we’d agreed on that.’
‘Well I know…But there’s a limit.’
Just then Jo came in, waddling efficiently as she tended to these days, now that she was tense and working again, with her large but very neat seven-and-a-half-month bump in front of her and her notorious contacts book resting open in her hands. ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Are you discussing Messy Monroe? That’s just who I wanted to talk about.’
‘Aye. Apparently she really hates thin people.’
‘She actually did a couple of P.A.s for us a few years ago. Ha! When she was thin herself. And she was great. Very professional…Because there was that phase when an M.M. P.A. pretty much guaranteed a show in the red tops, wasn’t there? She could charge whatever she liked…Do you remember?’ Grey and the General looked at each other in weary incomprehension, as they often did when Jo started talking shop. ‘Anyway it doesn’t matter,’ she continued blithely. ‘The point is somehow or other I’ve got her number. And that’s what counts. I think we should invite her to come down.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ bellowed Grey. ‘Have you seen the size of her? She won’t fit through the front door!’
‘Well. Short of inviting Osama Bin Laden to stay with us—’
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ snapped the General.
‘…she’s about the only person left anybody can be bothered to hate anymore.’
‘I don’t hate her,’ said the General mildly. ‘As a matter of fact I think she looks delightful…In a largish sort of way.’
‘Well, good. Because I’m about to persuade her to come and see us. She’s going to be our first celebrity refugee. What do you think about that?’
Grey sat back with amusement to observe the General’s reaction to this new autocratic management style. He was amazed, actually, that Jo had managed to prevent herself from adopting it from the beginning. The house had been unofficially ready to receive people for a fortnight now and so far the ‘Guest Selection Board Meetings’, as Jo, back in full professional mode, now insisted on calling the Fiddleford Four’s rather goofy and extremely argumentative confabs, had not been a great success. There had been five meetings altogether, each one angrily and prematurely disbanded because three of the four board members could never agree. On anything. At the last meeting even Charlie, the most tolerant of men, had walked out before the end.
‘What’s that?’ said the General stiffly. ‘The adorable little fat lady? Invited here? Don’t you think we should have some sort of conference about this before you take the law into your own hands?’
Grey McShane chuckled.
‘The meetings,’ said Jo, using her most reasonable voice (also unfortunately the one most guaranteed to infuriate her father-in-law) ‘don’t seem to be getting us anywhere. And the fact is – the fact is – they’re not going to increase our overdraft again. Unless we do something pretty soon, we are seriously going to have to start selling pieces of furniture—’
‘I’m aware of that,’ interrupted the General haughtily and then, uncertain how to continue the argument in the face of such appalling news, repeated himself, before turning lamely towards Grey for help.
Grey shrugged. ‘She’s right,