The Love of My Life(38)

He must be wrong. Emma has never met Rothschild. She speaks about him the same way she’d speak about Justin Webb or Mishal Husain, the other Today presenters – she enjoys him slaughtering politicians, doesn’t rate his wife as an actress and that’s that. Unless – ? No. No.

I stare at the wet tarmac beneath my feet, trying to make sense of what he’s saying.

‘The only reason I’m telling you,’ he says, ‘is that she was always upset after his visits. Like, exhausted, blotchy face, as if she hadn’t slept all night. I don’t know what they were talking about, but it worried me. Especially the time I saw them in that cafe in London; Rothschild looked quite angry. Emma had only just found out she had cancer; she had a lot on her plate. I was concerned.’

I can’t speak.

‘I’ve sometimes wondered if it was Janice Rothschild who got Emma sacked. She was a big BBC name, she’d definitely have had the clout. She’s been one of their stars forever.’

His face changes: he’s worried he’s said too much. ‘Look, you mustn’t say this came from me,’ he begins, before I cut him off.

‘I won’t. I promise I won’t. But Robbie, I need to know more. Why would Janice get Emma sacked? What was going on with Emma and Jeremy Rothschild?’

He shrugs again, helplessly. ‘I really, truly don’t know. I guess Janice might have got wind of their meetings, and . . . ?’

‘I see.’

I don’t see. Emma and Jeremy Rothschild at a table together doesn’t even begin to make sense.

‘I’m only telling you because the whole thing worried me at the time. I had a nasty feeling about their relationship – whatever was going on between them, it wasn’t good for Emma at all. And now with Janice going missing, I really don’t like it. I know the police have said Jeremy Rothschild isn’t a suspect in his wife’s disappearance . . . But you can’t help wondering, can you?’

A thin line of anxiety rises in me. This hadn’t crossed my mind.

‘He knocked out a pap once, a few years back,’ Rosen says. ‘Did you know that?’

‘I did.’ Robbie can’t have been much older than ten when it happened.

‘At the time everyone was, like, Jeremy was seriously provoked, yada yada, but if all of us lashed out when things got hard, the world would be a pretty violent place, wouldn’t it? I think he’s got a dark side.’

‘Food for thought,’ I say, forcing a smile. Then: ‘Look, thank you. I appreciate your honesty. Especially when I’ve been so dishonest with you.’

Rosen shrugs. The rain starts again.

‘One final thing. You wrote Emma a note – just a line about not wanting to miss out on saying goodbye to her – but she’s gone out of her way to keep it safe. Why do you think that is?’

I see a flash of pride, amid the unease.

‘She had a huge amount to deal with on that series,’ he says. ‘Cancer, IVF, pregnancy, whatever was going on with Jeremy Rothschild. She told me I’d been her rock. I guess she just wanted to keep hold of something good from that time?’

This, at least, makes sense. Emma finds it hard let go of anything. We have an entire house of her stuff to prove it.

‘There’s nothing else,’ he says. ‘I’d tell you if there was. And maybe it was all just a storm in a teacup.’ He makes a temporary hood out of the back of his jumper, which is soaked in seconds. ‘Look, I’d better . . .’ He points back inside with a thumb. I nod, and stand there in the rain, trying to decide what to do.

My phone rings again.

After a while, the taxi drives off.





Chapter Twenty-One


LEO


A few years ago I dreamed my mother was a Venus fly trap. I told Emma the next morning and we laughed, because, as metaphors went, it was gold. It’s nearly 9 p.m. now and Mum is hugging me on the doorstep of the house in which I grew up, hugging and hugging and telling me it’s been too long, she doesn’t see enough of me. ‘. . . Must have been at least fifteen months, because of course you decided not to come for Christmas, and . . .’ With each complaint her arms tighten resentfully, and I allow it. Anything to stave off the lethal undertow of my thoughts.

I flew from Glasgow to Luton after meeting Robbie Rosen. As my plane climbed through somnolent clouds I tried to envisage an innocent place for Jeremy Rothschild in Emma’s life – a place I could accept, that wouldn’t harm the fabric of us, but I couldn’t come up with a single thing. Innocent stories are never kept secret, my journalist’s brain whispered.

The thing is, my ‘journalist’s brain’, if that’s what you call it, isn’t always to be trusted. Far too many times it has decided that some man or other is in love with Emma. The current suspects are Kelvin and Dr Moru, neither of whom I’m concerned about, but there have been others.

It started when she’d been presenting This Land, and I’d found a chat forum full of men talking about her. I’ve always known Emma’s sensational, but it was something else to hear other men talking about her in that way.

When I told her about it she went large on my ‘adoption issues’. Apparently I’d had a terror of being abandoned from the moment I lost my birth mother, and now – according to Dr Emma Bigelow – I was projecting the very same abandonment fear onto her. ‘I am not going to leave you,’ she kept saying, as if I’d told her I feared she would.