Oh Baby!

By Marina Oliver

An apparently harmless loss of a contraceptive chemical turns out to be a disaster affecting not only the coalition government and the civil service, who have to cope, but most of the population. It also gives the press unprecedented opportunities for scoops, and for some people who will always find ways to profit. People view the future with varying degrees of horror, delight or panic. Jennifer Joy, the civil servant controlling Randy Jolliphant, the Minister for Leisure and Pleasure, who becomes responsible, relishes the task until she discovers her own plans are going to be affected by the consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Belgrave House
• Release date: Sep 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781947812628

Marina Oliver

Most writers can't help themselves! It's a compulsion. Getting published, though, is something really special, and having been so fortunate myself I now try to help aspiring writers by handing on tips it took me years to work out. I've published over 60 titles, including four in the How To Books' Successful Writing Series, and Writing Historical Fiction for Studymates.I have judged short story competitions, been a final judge for the Harry Bowling Prize and was an adviser to the 3rd edition of Twentieth Century Romance and Historical Writers 1994. If you want to find out more about your favourite authors, consult this book. I once wrote an article on writing romantic fiction for the BBC's web page, for Valentine's day.I have given talks and workshops for the Arts Council and at most of the major Writing Conferences, and helped establish the Romantic Novelists' Association's annual conference. I was Chairman of the RNA 1991-3, ran their New Writers' Scheme and edited their newsletter. I am now a Vice-President.As well as writing I have edited books for Transita, featuring women 'of a certain age', and for Choc Lit where gorgeous heros are the norm.I was asked to write A Century of Achievement, a 290 page history of my old school, Queen Mary's High School, Walsall, and commissioned to write a book on Castles and Corvedale to accompany a new circular walk in the area.Most of my Regencies written under the pseudonym Sally James are now published in ebook format as well as many others of my out of print novels which my husband is putting into ebook format. Our daughter Debbie is helping with designing the covers. For details of all my books and my many pseudonyms see my website.

Book preview

Day 1.1

His Majesty's Secretary of State for Leisure and Pleasure uttered a lugubrious sigh, heaved himself off his Deputy Undersecretary, and rolled off the bed to land with an 'Oooff' of surprise on the plushly carpeted floor.

'Dammit,' he puffed, as the air oozed back into his lungs. 'I always forget you and Evadne sleep on different sides of the bed.'

The Deputy Undersecretary stifled a sharp retort that after three months in the job it was about time he remembered. Then she grinned slightly to herself. His bad memory frequently enabled her to do things she wanted to, while convincing him he had authorised it.

'Here, Randy, you'll need these,' she said and watched as he pushed himself up on all fours, his pink and pendulous flesh drooping miserably. He blinked in surprise at the hand stretched down towards him, and the gilt-framed spectacles dangling an inch or so away from his nose.

'Thanks,' he muttered, grabbing them and pushing them on. 'Where are my clothes?' he asked, looking round vaguely.

Jennifer Joy pointed wearily, stifling another retort. Where did he expect them to be? Hanging from the chandeliers? Their passion was hardly of the first careless rapture stage where clothes were ripped off and flung aside as they groped their way to bed.

The Minister espied these essentials a few feet away, folded neatly on the ottoman at the end of the bed. He blinked and regarded them for a moment with squint-eyed concentration. This, Jennifer had learned during his first few days in the Department, signified to the initiated complicated thought processes going on. He finally concluded with a satisfied nod that it would be an unjustifiable expenditure of effort rising to his feet to traverse the distance.

As he crawled slowly towards his Y-fronts his remote control watch played the introductory bars of Now is the Hour followed by Three Blind Mice. Randy glared disbelievingly at it.

'Oh hell! They've put on a three-line whip again! What is it tonight?'

'The proposal to move the Eurocrats to Athens,' she replied wearily.

'Why the hell can't they stay put? Interfering with my life all the time. I've no time for a shower. Evadne will smell your perfume. I'll only just make it to the House for the Adjournment,' he gabbled as he dragged on his trousers, stuffed one half of his shirt inside, and struggled into his jacket. He stroked down what was left of his hair with one hand, wiped a bland Ministerial smile over his face with the other, in case he met a pressman or a constituent, and switched his expensively trained political mind to the next item on the agenda.

Day 1.2

Aiming a hasty farewell kiss in the approximate direction of his Deputy Undersecretary's ear he took himself off, still fidgeting with his recalcitrant tie, obstinately refusing to sit down over a shirt whose buttonholes had leapfrogged the top button.

As he hurried along to the House he tried to recall which way he was supposed to vote. Then he realised that if he could recognise any member of the governing coalition he could just follow him into the right lobby. He sighed. Would he know? It had been so much simpler in his father's day, when there were only two big parties, with a few minor parties it had been easy to ignore. Now, when coalitions were the norm, containing up to half a dozen parties, and the composition of them changed frequently, he could not be sure who was friend or foe. Not only that, they changed the Departments almost as frequently. No longer did they have a Home Office, and Foreign Office, and so on. The Treasury seemed to be the only one that stayed the same, and it grew ever more powerful since most of the Civil Servants, like Jennifer Joy, kept moving around and forgetting which Department they were supposed to be working for.

Jennifer, though, was not like the others. While not at the top of the tree she nevertheless ran the Department, leaving her superiors to do the publicity, smooching with other top mandarins and visiting politicians. She encouraged them to indulge in lengthy business lunches and trips abroad, while she told him what to do and say. Without her, he would be lost. And there was, of course, the side benefit of occasions such as he had just enjoyed. He grinned. Some of his colleagues envied him. But he must remember to take a shower in the basement House of Commons Health Spa before he went home to his wife.

Hurrying through the central Lobby into the Commons chamber, he looked anxiously for someone he could be sure was still in the coalition, and breathed a sigh of relief as he spotted Shaun O'Donnelly. He grabbed at his arm, and clung on with grim determination as he was dragged into the Ayes lobby. He sniffed. That was an unusual aftershave Shaun was wearing. It reminded him of his wife's favourite perfume.

'Did you want something?' Shaun asked, trying to brush Randy's hand from his arm.

'Eh? Oh, no. Just wanted to be sure of going into the right lobby. I never know, these days, what the devil we're voting for.'

Shaun grinned, and Randy felt a shiver of apprehension. There was something in the man's face he did not like.

'You lot are still in the coalition?' he asked.

'Sure we are, man. Jennifer would know, sooner than we would, if that had changed.'

Randy smothered his glare, and tried to look puzzled.

'Oh, yes, and she'd have phoned or sent me a text,' he said, striving for an air of nonchalance.

Shaun laughed, and moved away, leaving Randy staring after him with a puzzled frown. Surely the man didn't know? They were so very careful. He sighed. Maybe they should meet less frequently. But then, how would he know what to do? What to say in Cabinet?

Day 1.3

Jennifer lay rigid, smiling obediently at the seductively dimmed table lamp until the sound of the front door slamming informed her she was alone. Then she relieved her tense feelings by thumping the pillows heartily and cursing the fatuous Parliamentary hours that restricted her sex life – at least that part of it which she shared with politicians – to before twenty-one-thirty and after twenty-three hours. A pity that experiment of earlier hours hadn't worked. Most MPs had soon grown bored with getting home in time to bath the kids and spend their evenings with their spouses. They much preferred the bars of the Commons or the beds of their mistresses and lovers.

Indeed, she reflected gloomily, with the present spate of late night sittings her sex life, and with it the unrivaled opportunities of influencing politicians, was often restricted to so long after midnight it consisted of early morning layings which were a feeble waste of time, with achievements in no way commensurate with the effort. Any time and motion consultant worth his fee would have doubled said fee on the spot, declaring the problem insoluble unless he applied the latest, most expensive and intricate techniques.

She was restless and anyway it was far too early to go to sleep. There was no knowing when, or indeed if, Randolph would return. A silent frown marred the normally determined smoothness of her brow. Jennifer was uncharacteristically dissatisfied with life, and was well aware it stemmed from the check her career had suffered since Randy had been promoted from the junior ranks. His predecessor at the Department had been decidely more satisfactory than Randy Jolliphant in many ways until, with a speed that left the gossip columnists gasping and wondering what they'd missed, he'd accepted the post of Governor of Desert Rock, an isolated island in mid-Pacific with only three inhabitants apart from his staff of ten and their families.

She rose from the bed, kicked aside Randy's thermal vest, which he donned unfailingly on October the first, but had forgotten in his haste to respond to the siren call of the whips, and draped a filmy negligée about her tall elegant form. She wandered into the kitchen intent on brewing some reviving coffee.

As she waited for the filter machine, she idly flicked buttons on the tele-computer remote control, surfing the windows of the new multi-channel screen until she picked up a news bulletin on the seventeenth channel's Hearmoorfax.

Another unsuccessful coup thwarted in a minor African state. They had a far lower success rate than the South Americans, despite the higher incidence of attempts, Jennifer mused idly. Then came news that the Pineapple Producers' Pact had imposed an embargo on the export of pineapples to Europe after the uncensored publication of a biography of William IV which had referred unflatteringly to the shape of his head.

Jennifer mentally reviewed the consequences for her Department: controls on soft drink prices; a ban on pineapples as prizes in competitions; licences for hotels and other catering establishments which continued using tinned pineapples.

Regretfully she decided that supervising the release of the stockpile and ordering an advertising campaign for the European peach mountain must be left to other Departments, but it was an ordinary problem and could be left to one of the middle grade civil servants. There was no need to activate crisis measures.

She heard the concluding information from the obviously bored newscaster of another hitch in the latest round of Chino-Pakistan nuclear non-proliferation talks, and repeated with him the American considered view that neither country was being open with the other and therefore extra vigilence must be sustained by the West.

About to switch off the set she paused, struck by the sudden glimmer of interest which appeared on the newscaster's bland face.

'News is just coming in of an explosion at the National Chemical Board's Research Laboratory at Land's End,' the man was saying. 'It's reported to be a minor one, however, although a fire is blazing. The Fire Service Publicity Office reports everything well under control. We will bring you further flashes as we receive them. Finally, the weather forecast for the next twenty-four hours is for rather milder conditions than in the last few days, moderate south-westerly winds, no rain, and slightly higher than average temperatures.'

Jennifer pressed the replay button, poured her coffee and sat down thoughtfully, watching the playback of the news report. Mentally she concluded that although the Separatist MPs for Cornwall would make the usual fuss they were not at the moment in the Coalition and need not be considered. Since Cornwall had insisted on the universal use of Cornish in the Duchy, even by visitors, it was no longer an important tourist area and her Department need be concerned with the accident only in the manner of the television presentation.

The newscaster had obviously gained considerable satisfaction from his announcement, but Jennifer regarded it as politically unsound to encourage pleasure at the thought of even so slight a disaster as this appeared to be. It could upset several pressure groups and have important political manifestations, even leading to a reshuffle of the coalition. Then heaven knew what front bencher she'd be burdened with as the new Secretary of State. Unsatisfactory as Randy was in many ways, she could think of several worse fates amongst the up and coming politicians.

She picked up her digi-dictator and sent a reminder to the Broadcasting Advisory Division to issue a recommendation to the television people. They must in future stress the pleasure felt when so few were killed or hurt in disasters, and the leisure aspect that so little reconstruction work was necessary, probably being completed with the issuing of very few reduced-leisure permits.

Day 1.4

At the scene of the disaster Mr Freddy Men, the Chief Chemist, tall and cadaverous, paced gloomily around the complex of laboratories, storage huts and offices, tripping over hoses and getting in the way of the firemen until one of them took him by the arm and walked him over to the main driveway.

'Stay there, out of danger, mate,' he said in Cornish.

Freddy stared gloomily around. His laboratory was close to the fire, but there was nothing he could do but hope it would be spared. He saw a small helicopter land in the almost empty car park, and two men leap out carrying cameras and microphones, but gave no thought as to whether the news of the disaster was even now being broadcast to the rest of the world.

As yet he had spared few thoughts on the cause of the fire, being more concerned with whether it would affect his own domain. He watched as the firemen attempted to halt its rapid spread from the original outbreak along a row of laboratories and storerooms that stretched towards the edge of the cliffs.

A large car glided smoothly to a halt just behind Freddy, and the Chief Fireman came across to speak to the occupants.

'Fortunate the wind didn't take it the other way, sir,' Freddy heard him say, and Freddy turned to see a portly, disconsolate looking elderly man garbed in canary yellow pyjama trousers, a thick sweater, one bedroom slipper, one gardening boot, and a golfing cap. His thin grey locks were protruding in disorderly spikes from beneath the latter and he was absently stroking his meagre moustache with a toothbrush. Why couldn't his boss have stayed in bed? He'd only make matters worse.

Mr Petroc Pendennis glanced irritably at the fireman then stared at the conflagration. He and Freddy watched as the roaring flames were transformed into multi-coloured belching plumes and straggling streamers of smoke. Mr Pendennis shivered. He'd had time to realise his nether regions were unduly exposed to the night breezes. These had inconsiderately not taken advantage of their proximity to the flames to raise their temperature, and he was muttering peevishly that you'd have thought such a blaze would have warmed up the air around it instead of making it chillier.

He heaved a disgruntled sigh. 'It's bad enough,' he snapped.

The fireman nodded tolerantly and turned away as one of his minions ran up to report. 'Poor man,' he said. 'He may be Chief Executive here, but he's not as accustomed to these disasters as we are, he's taking it hard.'

He nodded to Freddy and moved away just as Mr Pendennis's immaculately groomed and attired chauffeur appeared, bearing aloft with the air of presenting a laurel wreath, an exquisitely folded car rug.

'If you wrap this round your waist, sir, and tuck it up under the sweater, I believe it will remain in position,' he suggested suavely.

'Can't imagine why you dragged me out in such a confounded hurry,' Mr Pendennis grunted ungratefully as he struggled to follow the man's instructions and encircle with the rug that bloated part of his anatomy rather euphemistically described as a waist. He shuffled peevishly away from the helping hands stretched towards him, and after a last strenuous effort contrived to tuck two corners of the rug in position.

'No, sir,