About That Night Read online

  ELAINE BEDELL was a BAFTA award-winning TV producer before becoming Controller of Entertainment at the BBC and Director of Entertainment & Comedy at ITV. She has commissioned and produced some of the UK’s most popular entertainment shows, including The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, Take Me Out, Britain’s Got Talent, The One Show, Top Gear and Saturday Night Takeaway. She lives in Hackney and has two children. She is currently Chief Executive of the Southbank Centre. About That Night is her first novel.

  About That Night

  Elaine Bedell

  ONE PLACE MANY STORIES

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

  Copyright © Elaine Bedell 2019

  Elaine Bedell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  E-book Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008297695

  Note to Readers

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  Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008297688

  In memory of my dear dad Bert who should have lived to see it all.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  July 2017

  Elizabeth Place is packing up her life. The protesting screech of duct tape and the thwack and swoosh of folding cardboard corners have been the soundtrack to her day. She’s surrounded by sealed brown boxes. Two muscular men arrived first thing in a white van with its big red boast ‘We’ll Make the Earth Move For You’ and stomped up the stairs to her first-floor flat, Where do you want us, love? Between them they carried a sofa, four chairs, a chest of drawers and her double mattress – up a bit, right a bit, upsy-daisy, there she goes, easy does it – while drinking twelve cups of tea with twenty-four spoonfuls of sugar.

  Now only the boxes to go.

  She sits and surveys her empty flat. She’s very tired and a little bit queasy if she’s honest (although she has an unfortunate inclination not to be honest, especially with herself). Her entire life has been swaddled, stacked and squashed into eleven cartons: thirty-five years of life, love and loss. Elizabeth isn’t much good at maths, but she knows that thirty-five doesn’t go into eleven without some leftover bits. What’s happened to the rest of her life? Those bits and pieces that might have caused her to tick another ten boxes?

  She’s thirty-five and single. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

  She reaches for the last empty box into which she’ll carefully stow the few remaining, very personal items. The things she’s left until last. Her National Television Award, still on the mantelpiece, sparkling bronze: Elizabeth Place, Producer: Best Entertainment Programme, Saturday Bonkers; a framed photo of her dear dad waving proudly at her down the years from the deck of a boat that isn’t his; the engraved card from ‘Matthew, Controller, All Channels’ which read ‘Only you could have got us through that show. Well done! X’; a black and white postcard of Paris, on which Hutch had written out an extract from Shelley’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ along with the words Dear Miss Clumsy, I really miss you bumping into things; Elizabeth and Jamie, framed on their graduation day, carelessly waving their mortar boards in the air. And standing on its spine, propping up the rest, a valuable first edition of Yeats, given to her by Ricky one morning after a terrible night before.

  Elizabeth tucks all these mementoes carefully away in the last box and closes the flaps quickly, like a ventriloquist silencing his troublesome puppets. All apart from the Yeats, which she clutches to her chest. She stands for a moment gazing at the empty spaces, thinking of the life she’s leaving behind. A life she has loved. A seductive life: of glamour, of glory, of giddiness. An addictive, adrenaline-fuelled roller coaster of a life, with all its exhilarating highs and exhausting lows. A dangerous life.

  She’s independent, she’s strong, she says to herself. She’s really good at her job. She’ll do what her bible says and lean in (she hasn’t worked out exactly what this means, but she imagines it’s a bit like the plank, you just have to practice). She’s done with being caught in tangled webs of secrecy and lies. She’ll heed the warning signs, next time.

  Won’t she?

  Elizabeth wanders back into the bedroom, avoiding the bathroom. She’ll deal in a minute with the message in there that might change her life, that’s waiting for her in the cabinet, away from the prying eyes of the heavy lifters.

  Elizabeth shivers slightly and sinking to the bedroom floor opens up the Yeats, carefully turning the precious pages. And there it is, on the title page, in Ricky’s big black sloping writing: ‘Dearest Elizabeth, I have spread my dreams under your feet’. Crazy, comic, complicated Ricky. His story wasn’t meant to end the way it did, one innocently blossoming day in May.

  A Mayday.

  Chapter One

  Two months earlier

  The audience are settling into their seats. They’ve been queueing outside the studio in the May drizzle for an hour and a half, an exercise in patience which might have been more bearable had anyone remotely famous walked by. An Ant. Or a Dec. They weren’t fussy. But one of the regulars, who’d been to recordings of the show at least twice before and had therefore brought a flask of hot chocolate, said that the stars use a secret tunnel entrance at the back of the studio building. Television stars, she explained patiently, don’t use main entrances. ‘Not even the Loose Women?’ asks a girl, shivering in bare legs and high heels. ‘No one,’ says the lady with the flask.

  They’ve been herded like soaking sheep into the pens of the audience seating. Their mobile phones have been confiscated and will be returned to them at the end of the show. The lady with the hot chocolate, knowing the form, hangs back a little, watching as they
fill the back seats first. She manages to get a seat in the third row from the front and surreptitiously opens up a packet of sandwiches. ‘The warm-up won’t be on for at least another half an hour,’ she whispers to the woman next to her. ‘Cheese and pickle?’

  The set is much smaller in reality than it looks on the television. It consists of a shiny steel desk, surrounded by bookshelves laden with leather tomes, and a bright canary yellow velvet sofa. Five wide steps run up to the back of the set which serve as the entrance for the guests of the show. Wrapped around the set are a series of huge screens which display drone-captured scenes of planet earth at night, vast cities pin-pricked with glittering street lights, moonlit oceans and mountain ranges crested by stars.

  ‘Or tuna and cucumber?’

  The audience is mainly female and they’ve come dressed for the occasion, eyeliner and foundation thickly applied, in case, just in case, there’s a fleeting shot of them clapping on camera. They’re hardened, battle-worn fans of the star of the show, the primetime entertainment king, Ricky Clough. They’ve been with him since he was a youthful breakfast DJ, have seen him through his career highs and lows. They’ve grown up through the years of his primetime, live, television show, Saturday Bonkers, watching it faithfully before going out to hit the weekend bars and clubs. But in recent months, Ricky’s audiences have been thinning, along with his hair, and a transplant on both counts has been necessary: he’s now been given his own chat show, The Ricky Clough Show, but not live, not on Saturday nights, and in the graveyard slot of 22.40.

  The warm-up guy bounds on to the set, dressed in a tartan suit. He’s carrying a stick mic. ‘Right, ladies – and you few brave gents – are we ready to get this party going?’ he says. ‘ARE WE READY?’ The studio lights blaze on his entrance; for a brief moment he’s king of the court. He parades up and down the set, relishing the spotlight. The sound guys turn up the volume to DJ Fresh and the audience begin to shift in their seats, itching to get up and dance.

  ‘Okay. Five minutes till we start recording the show! Put your make-up on, ladies! Oh? You already have? Sorry, love. Now then. Take a good look at the person next to you. Is anyone here with someone they shouldn’t be? Because you’re about to be on telly – a television studio’s no place for people having affairs!’

  Elizabeth Place, Ricky Clough’s producer, allows herself a small smile at this. She’s watching the warm-up from the comforting shadows of the black drapes that surround the studio. The entire audience is up on its feet, dancing along to ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now’. Middle-aged women have shed their coats and their inhibitions and are dancing like teenagers. Elizabeth likes to watch them; she loves to hear the pre-show excitement build to a crescendo of hysteria. She thinks they might be in for a good night: Ricky was in a better mood than usual when she checked on him in his dressing room earlier. A bottle of white wine was open, but still full, and he didn’t drink at all while she went through his script with him. (Nonetheless, she had taken the precaution of hiding another unopened bottle under the sofa when he wasn’t looking.)

  She turns to the black-shirted cameraman nearest her, Phil, leaning against his pedestal camera with his arms folded, his back turned firmly away from the disco-dancing divas. ‘How is he this evening?’ he asks her drily with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Very lively,’ says Elizabeth with a smile.

  ‘Think we’re in for a good show?’ Phil asks.

  ‘Actually, yes.’

  She skips up the spiral staircase that leads to the studio gallery, a rectangular box of a room with a long desk facing a bank of television screens, each offering different angles on the studio below. The director, Robin, is sitting in the middle of the desk, with the vision mixer beside him. He’s wearing a silk cravat and a velvet blazer. Elizabeth kisses him lightly on the cheek then takes her seat at the far end, next to the gallery assistant, Lola, who prints all the scripts, does all the timings and entertains the camera crew with stories of her recent breast enlargement procedure. She has platinum blonde hair piled impressively into a beehive on her head and is perfectly made up: heavy kohl eyeliner, white powder, bright red lips (Lola is in a perpetual state of mourning for the 1940s). She’s wearing a tight pencil skirt and a cropped knit sweater which shows off to full advantage her perky new breasts. She has an array of dangerously sharpened pencils in front of her, as well as two stopwatches.

  Elizabeth never feels more alive than when she’s in the gallery, producing a show, sitting side by side with Lola. They’ve worked closely together for seven years, sharing every beat of every nail-biting show. Shoulder to shoulder they’ve somehow kept the show on the road, through all the ups and the downs, and have become firm friends. Elizabeth loves her job and she loves these moments just before a show most of all. She loves the precision of the preparation and the execution, the fact that everyone must move in synchronicity. She loves all the little meaningful rituals and habits which bind them all intimately together, like a professional family. She loves the thrill, the adrenaline, the buzz. She loves the way her heart beats painfully in her chest during a show and the fact that her brain never feels clearer.

  Lola squeezes her hand as she sits and whispers, ‘I saw him in his dressing room. He seems on really good form. I don’t think he’s been drinking or anything.’ Lola’s eyes are shining, she’s happy. Elizabeth smiles and nods. As far as she knows, she’s the only person on the production team who has any clue as to the true nature of Lola’s relationship with Ricky.

  ‘Stand by studio floor, coming to you in two minutes.’

  Elizabeth puts on her headphones and presses the button of the small console in front of her, saying softly into the small microphone, ‘Hello, Ricky. This is me. Just testing talkback. Can you hear me okay?’

  ‘Loud and clear, Mrs T,’ comes back the familiar voice of the star of the show in her ear. She can’t see him yet, but can hear from his breathing that he’s walking quickly down the corridor from his dressing room. She knows that his wardrobe assistant will be running along beside him carrying his jacket, which he never puts on until the very last second.

  ‘They’re a rowdy bunch tonight, can you hear?’

  Elizabeth glances anxiously at the television screens that show her wide shots of the studio audience, up on their feet and dancing to ‘The Macarena’. They’re very pumped. She decides to ignore, as she always does, his reference to Mrs Thatcher. ‘See you on the other side, Ricky.’ She puts a smile into her voice.

  ‘See you on the other side,’ he replies, as he always does. And then, as he reaches the back of the set, before he leaps into the heat and glare of the spotlight, he addresses all the crew. His voice is deep and close into his microphone. ‘Elizabeth? Guys? Let’s make this a show to remember, eh? Let’s rock and roll!’

  ‘Fifty seconds!’ Lola announces loudly in the gallery.

  ‘Are the food props all standing by?’ Elizabeth asks and the clipped vowels of her young Etonian researcher, Zander, return in her ear. ‘Yes, ma’am, they’re under his desk.’

  Elizabeth gathers the pages of her yellow script together and tidies them into a compact tome, her very own War and Peace. She glances at her mobile phone. There’s a thumbs-up emoji from Hutch and a picture of a double bed with a question mark. A shiver of pleasure and anticipation prickles all the way down her spine, but she puts her phone away. She finds her foot is tapping incessantly underneath the desk.

  ‘Twenty seconds,’ says Lola, placing her hand reassuringly on Elizabeth’s arm, but never taking her eyes from her stopwatch.

  ‘Have a good show, everyone!’ Elizabeth says, smiling down the desk at Robin. She gives him a mock military salute, which he solemnly returns. Everyone in the gallery is on the edge of their seats.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ says Lola, with a new warning note of urgency.

  ‘9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3…’

  ‘Roll titles!’ shouts Robin. The central screen, in front of the gallery desk, bursts into life with a cacopho
ny of bright graphics, lurid yellow and blue shapes, which gradually form themselves into a giant head, the silhouette of a man in profile, with longish curly hair and an aquiline nose. The head dissolves into jigsaw pieces which re-assemble themselves into letters and finally words: The Ricky Clough Show.

  In the studio, Ricky bounds down the stairs and runs to the front of the audience, as they whoop and cheer in concert with the warm-up who is conducting them from the sidelines. As he draws his hand across his throat they stop immediately as if they’ve been switched off and they sit back down, a bit disappointed and suspicious that the party might already be over.

  ‘Hello! Good evening and thank you for that warm hand on my entrance. Welcome to my show! Wanna know who’s on my sofa tonight?’ Ricky Clough is wearing his trademark purple suit, Doc Martens and a peacock blue custom-made shirt. His hair has been neatly combed to cover the seam of his transplant, but the curls reach down to his collar. He’s tall and his expanding girth is held in check by a clever combination of belts and expensive tailoring. His face is a light entertainment shade of polished conker. He has that unusual combination of camp and lascivious heterosexuality shared by so many successful performers. He paces restlessly around the set. His fizzing energy is almost electric. He’s an Icarus, Elizabeth thinks, you will burn if you get too close. It’s impossible not to look at him. He smiles brilliantly, revealing startlingly white teeth, as he ad-libs to the audience and cracks a joke at each of his guests’ expense, so that even Elizabeth – who’s seen it all before and knows his every facial tic – feels lost in wonder at his magnetic pull.

  She presses the talkback button and says very quietly, ‘Ricky, Paolo’s ready – let’s bring him on to the sofa now.’ Paolo Culone, a young celebrity chef, is to be the first guest.

  Ricky can hear Elizabeth’s instructions through an earpiece invisible to the audience and he responds smoothly by turning to the autocue camera that discreetly displays his script. He begins to read the words of his introduction. But as he moves towards his desk, he catches his foot on the step and stumbles, his arms momentarily flailing. The audience titter.