The Men and the Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘I love hearing the trains.’
    Hugh was honest with James. He never tried to pretend, with James, as he did with everyone else, that he had known Richard Dimbleby – with whom he had in truth once had lunch in a party of ten – very well. He did not try, either, to hide his anxiety when Double H Time was switched to Mondays, then cut from forty-five minutes to thirty, then dropped altogether. After the age of forty, he grew palpably afraid of getting old, and would turn to James for reassurance. He always looked younger than James, younger and fitter and better cared for, but his growing anxieties made him tense in public, inclined to overact. He began to talk of London-based television as played out, of the provincial companies as the places to look to, for a future. James understood him very well.
    It was a terrible shock to Hugh when James met Kate. He was unable to appreciate either her, or her beneficial effect on James, because his own sense of loss and betrayal obscured his vision. He stayed away from Oxford, and endured several alarming months in London, alarming because he was perfectly certain that both his professional and his personal life had ended in a yawning black hole. Then the telephone rang. It was an offer, the offer of presenting a similar kind of programme to Double H Time on Midland Television, whose chairman, Maurice Hirshfeld, had been a friend and colleague in those first happy independent television days in the late fifties and early sixties. ‘We’ve come a long way,’ Maurice said. ‘We started in a converted cinema. Remember?’ Hugh was offered a two-year renewable contract.
    His production assistant on the new programme, The Midlands Matter , was a girl called Julia Ferguson. She was quite unlike the girls Hugh had used to tear down the motorway with, a cool, collected girl with smooth hair drawn back, and huge pale spectacles. She wore suits, and very little jewellery; she could speak French and Spanish and she read Latin American novels; she turned Hugh hot and cold by alternately seeming oblivious of him, and seriously asking for his advice and acting upon it. Within a year, they were married without having once properly discussed the discrepancy in their ages; Hugh because he was afraid to, Julia because she didn’t need to.
    Hugh’s mother died two months after the wedding, of which she disapproved. She said Julia was a cold fish. With her legacy, they set about finding a house half-way between the Midland Studios and Oxford, because Julia intended that there should be children who would need educating in Oxford. They found Church Cottage standing in its acre of orchard and garden, a sixties conversion of a seventeeth-century cottage in which some dated echoes remained, the odd wall of hessian wallpaper, or a stray abandoned curtain after a design by William Morris.
    Julia was orderly, a planner. The house was reorganized to eighties standards with a careful nod to its seventeenth-century origins, in two years. Once that was done, Julia stopped swallowing the pill and became pregnant. Two days after Hugh’s fifty-seventh birthday, Edward and George were born in the John Radcliffe Hospital and, two days after that, Hugh’s contract was once again renewed. On his first programme after the twins’ arrival, Hugh made an impromptu, emotional and very successful speech to the viewers about each of us having, once in our lives, an unexpected annus mirabilis , and the true, and dare he say it, almost religious thankfulness this inspired. He got sackfuls of letter after it, and the management of Midland Television, which had been sharply divided as to the wisdom of renewing his contract, relaxed a little.
    James wrote to Hugh when the twins were born, and the friendship fell back into its old ways with relief. Kate and Julia, it was assumed, would get on. Each was, for different reasons, slightly disconcerted by the other, but it was not in