Chapter 39
Ludo
Wilhelmina Post: Fabulous review, Ludo. Congratulations! We’ll make a theatre critic out of you yet. W xxxxxx
Sunny Miller: Morning, you clever boy. Awesome to come across your sexy face in the arts section this morning. Read it as soon as my boner went down. Great stuff, babe. I bet Uncle Ben is proud. xx.
Wilhelmina Post: PS. Saw Benny yesterday. Missed you by a couple of hours. Smuggled in the cigs. I’m way ahead of you on brownie points. As I left, a rather dashing male nurse was wheeling him up to the roof for a smoke! The man is an ICON. W xxxxxx
Uncle Ben: Congratulations on your first published review, dear boy!
How does it feel? I read it in the early morning sunshine, in a blissful cloud of smoke, on the hospital roof, with my new friend Theodore, who claims to come from Ghana but I’m convinced is the Farnese Atlas come to life.
Shoulders the size of my head. Hope to leave hospital Wednesday.
May pop a hip so I can hang out with Atlas a little longer.
If I succeed, please bring more cheroots. Much love, etc xxxxx
* * *
I read my review over breakfast. The subs hadn’t cut too much, although one or two of the jokes had been trimmed.
I stared at my photo at the top of my review.
My name had never been so far back in the paper, yet I couldn’t remember feeling so proud to see it in print.
Hands down, it trumped scoring the front page with the nuclear power plant story.
Father breezed through the kitchen with his briefcase in hand.
“Are you coming in with me, or are you catching the Tube?”
Parliament was now in recess for the coronation of King George VII, so I was working from the office in the City rather than the parliamentary bureau in Westminster.
“I’ll bum a lift, if that’s OK?”
I folded the paper and put it on the pile with all the others.
Every front page was dominated by the impending coronation.
No big news was going to happen this week.
Or, if it did, no one was going to be paying any attention to it.
This was good news. It bought Sunny and me time to investigate the nuclear power plant deal.
I threw my work satchel over my shoulder and followed my father out the door.
Five minutes later we both had our faces buried in our phones as the black cab dashed down Haverstock Hill towards central London.
I was replying to texts. Father was doing whatever it was that editors did at eight o’clock in the morning.
Putting the fear of God into one of his reporters, probably.
As we stopped and started through Camden, Father suddenly put his phone down.
“Is it serious with Sunny Miller, then?”
This was new territory for us. I could not have been more shocked if he’d asked me which Jonas brother I thought was the cutest (Joe, obviously). I wasn’t sure how to answer. I wasn’t sure what kind of answer he was looking for.
“I don’t know,” I said, finally.
“I mean it looked reasonably—and I might say, Ludo, rather publicly—like it was quite serious the other night.”
“I know,” I said. “Are you worried about us going head to head—”
“I don’t need to know that kind of detail, Ludo. What you do in the privacy of the summer house is your own business.”
“Father! I mean us covering politics. Competing for the same stories.”
“Your mother and I did it. Plenty of couples have done it. Some political reporters are sleeping with members of the cabinet. They manage it.”
I was not entirely comfortable with this conversation. Normally I appreciated my father taking an interest in my life, but the caveat to that, I now realised, was—not my love life.
That’s when Father said the big, awful thing.
“Should I offer him a job?”
I stared at him while I processed what he’d just said. The silence dragged on, and Father felt the need to fill it.
“He’s extremely talented. He has a bright future ahead of him. He could be genuinely outstanding if the right people took him under their wing—”
“No,” I said. It came out more firmly than I had intended.
I apologised. “Sorry, I just don’t think that’s a good idea.
” Father looked at me, eyebrows raised in anticipation of further explanation.
“If he joins the Sentinel and it all goes tits up, I’ll still have to work with him every day. I don’t think I could stand it.”
“Fair enough,” Father said. “But I’m telling you now, Ludo, I’ve got my eyes on that young fellow.
If he ever suggests he wants to move to the respectable end of Fleet Street, you let me know.
I won’t miss out on one of the most promising young reporters of your generation, just to spare your blushes. ”
It’s a bit of a gut punch to hear your father openly put work before his own son.
In the past, Father prioritising work over me had come in the form of missed ballet recitals and skipped parents’ evenings at Petersham College.
They were heartaches at the time, but I could take it.
Those parts of my heart had formed calluses.
This was the first time my heart itself was a pawn in my father’s plans.
The taxi sailed through the lights at King’s Cross Station and turned down Farringdon Road towards the Smithfield meat markets. It seemed fitting, given my morning’s high had just been butchered like a side of old mutton.