Dexter Matthews: In the U.S. of A.

The boardroom at The News Channel had always struck Lord Barrett Homes as a room built by someone who had read about success rather than experienced it. Dark wood panelling lined three walls, hung with photographs of newsreaders whose names nobody under forty could now recall, and the fourth wall was glass, offering a view of the Thames that visiting Americans invariably photographed on their phones before sitting down to discuss money. Lord Homes did not look at the river. He was looking at a single sheet of paper, and the number at the bottom of it, and wondering why a sum that large could still make his stomach feel the way it had done at Ascot in 1987.

"They've attached conditions," he said, without looking up.

Tania Blackwood sat across the table with a glass of white wine that had appeared, as her drinks generally did, without anyone quite seeing it arrive. She wore a charcoal suit cut sharp enough to have its own legal team, and she was reading her copy of the same document with the particular stillness of a woman deciding how much of the truth to share before lunch.

"They've attached conditions the way sharks attach themselves to the hull of a ship, Barrett," she said. "Decoratively, and with teeth."

"Go on, then."

"Continental want the sale announced alongside a promotional tour. Six cities. Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, New York for the finale. They want Dexter in every one of them, on a stage, in front of a live audience, doing whatever it is Dexter does that persuades people he's worth watching."

Lord Homes exhaled slowly, weary of solutions that merely introduced more elaborate problems.

"And they want it filmed," Tania went on. "A documentary crew. Every moment, apparently, because their research people tell them the American public responds to what they're calling 'authentic transatlantic texture'."

"What in God's name is transatlantic texture?"

"I believe it means they want to watch him be annoying in a different time zone."

Lord Homes allowed himself the smallest of smiles, the kind he reserved for moments when the absurdity of the industry briefly outweighed the terror of it. He had built The News Channel from a single rented floor above a defunct printworks in Clerkenwell, back when rolling news had still felt like a dangerous idea rather than a tired one, and over three decades he had watched it become something that could be bought, sold, and apparently exported like a crate of marmalade. He poured himself a brandy from the decanter kept, against every piece of modern office guidance, in the bottom drawer of the boardroom sideboard.

"There's a further condition," Tania said, and here she paused in the manner of someone laying a card face-down before revealing it. "They want Olivia Dowding to introduce him. At every venue. On stage, live, same as she did at the press conference after the Mangier business. Apparently their research found something they liked in the dynamic."

"The dynamic."

"Her exasperation and his obliviousness, Barrett. It tested well."

"Did it occur to anyone at Continental Broadcasting Network that the reason it tested well is that neither of them is acting?"

"I imagine it occurred to several people," Tania said, "and I imagine none of them cared, because thirty-one million dollars doesn't ask to be understood. It only asks to be signed for."

Lord Homes looked again at the number on the page, then at the clause beneath it, printed in the dense legal font that lawyers used specifically to discourage anyone from reading it properly. Six cities. Two late-night chat shows. A joint byline tour with Olivia Dowding attached as a contractual fixture, not a suggestion. He thought of his cottage in the Cotswolds, still unfurnished beyond a sofa and a very good wine rack, waiting for the day he could finally stop having conversations like this one.

"Get Olivia in here," he said. "And brace yourself, because I suspect she is going to say no with a great deal of feeling."

Tania had already picked up the phone before he finished the sentence.

Olivia Dowding arrived eleven minutes later, which for her counted as fast, given that she had come directly from the edit suite with a laptop bag over one shoulder, a tote bag bulging with release forms over the other, and the particular hollow-eyed look of someone who had been awake since five finishing a package on water shortages in Yorkshire. She was twenty-six and looked, on a good day, closer to thirty-four, which she had decided some time ago was simply the tax levied on anyone who worked in television and had opinions about accuracy.

"You wanted me," she said, not quite a question, and dropped into the chair furthest from the brandy, which she had long ago decided was a reliable indicator of how bad a meeting was going to be.

"Olivia," Tania said, in the warm, measured voice she used for announcements she already knew would go badly, "how do you feel about America?"

"I feel that it's very large and that I've already seen the parts of it I need to see on the news."

"Excellent instinct," said Lord Homes. "Ignore it entirely for the next six weeks."

He slid the document across the table. Olivia read it the way she read everything, quickly and with her mouth tightening by degrees, until she reached the paragraph about the introductions and put the page down flat on the table as though it had personally offended her.

"No," she said.

"Olivia—"

"No. I did the Mangier press conference because there was a coup happening and somebody needed to hold a microphone steady while Dexter explained to the world's press that he thought a palace guard was 'local colour'. I did not sign up to spend six weeks being his minder across an entire continent while he complains about the thread count in American hotel sheets."

"It would be a tour," Tania said. "Six cities. A driver, a crew—"

"A driver for him. Not for me. I've seen American motorway distances, Tania. Chicago to Dallas is further than London to Athens."

"You exaggerate."

"I looked it up, actually, on the train once when i was in Canada."

Lord Homes watched the exchange with the quiet amusement of a man who had seen this precise scene play out, in various configurations, perhaps forty times across his career. He gently twirled the amber liquid in his heavy glass, listening to the chime of the crystal and observing the faint clenching of Olivia's jaw, well aware that the trick was never to argue with the initial refusal, but merely to wait for the sentence that followed it.

"There is," Tania said carefully, "a version of this where you come back from America not as the woman who holds the clipboard, but as Head of Independent Factual Commissions. A proper title. An office. A budget line with your name attached to it rather than Dexter's."

Olivia's expression did not change, not immediately, but there was a small, telling pause before she answered.

"You're offering me a job to get me to agree to a different job."

"I'm offering you the job you've deserved for two years," Tania said, "and which, coincidentally, becomes considerably easier to justify to the board once we've closed a deal worth thirty-one million dollars that you personally helped deliver."

"And if the deal falls through."

"Then none of us have jobs, darling, and you can commission whatever you like from your mother's kitchen table."

Olivia looked at the paper again, at the six city names printed in a confident sans-serif font by someone in Los Angeles who had clearly never had to drive between any of them, and she felt the particular, familiar sensation of a trap closing with her own fingerprints all over the mechanism.

"I want it in writing," she said. "Not a verbal promise over a meeting room table. Actual writing, with your signature on it, before I get on a plane."

"You'll have it by Friday."

"And I'm not doing the voice he does when he introduces himself. The one where he pauses after his own name like the audience needs a moment to recover."

"Nobody is asking you to do an impression of him, Olivia."

"Good. Because I couldn't manage the hair."

It was at this precise moment, as though summoned by the mention of it, that Dexter Matthews arrived, and arrived in the way he always arrived, which was to say that the door opened before anyone heard footsteps and he was simply there, filling the frame of it, already mid-complaint.

"The air conditioning in Studio Four," he announced, to the room generally rather than to any individual within it, "has reached a temperature that I can only describe as sub-Arctic. I have asked three times for it to be adjusted and I have been told, by a young man who did not look old enough to operate a kettle, that it is, and I quote, 'on a building-wide system'. A building-wide system, Barrett. As though the comfort of the nation's most trusted face is subject to the same climate as the stationery cupboard."

He was, as always, immaculate in the particular manner of a man who had spent four decades being lit for television and had never quite stopped behaving as though the lights were still on him. His suit was dark navy, double-breasted, cut by a tailor in Savile Row who had worked on Dexter for so long that he now charged what he privately described to colleagues as "the patience surcharge". His hair, a rich and improbable chestnut that had not occurred naturally on any human scalp in living memory, sat with the kind of symmetry that suggested a spirit level had been involved somewhere in its placement. His eyes were a turquoise so bright it belonged more to tropical fish than to a sixty-eight-year-old Englishman, and they settled now on the document in front of Lord Homes with the mild suspicion of a man who had learned, over many years, that paperwork was rarely in his favour.

"What is that," he said, "and why does it look expensive."

"Sit down, Dexter," Lord Homes said. "We've had an offer."

"We have had several offers. I am becoming very selective about which ones I bother to read."

"This one is for thirty-one million dollars."

Dexter sat down.

"Continental Broadcasting Network," Tania said, "want to buy the station. They're prepared to move quickly, Barrett gets his retirement, and the channel gets the kind of money it would otherwise take another decade to generate through advertising alone. There is, however, a condition attached."

"There is always a condition," Dexter said, folding his hands on the table in the manner of a man settling in to be disappointed. "Last time it was a studio refurbishment. The time before that it was a contractual obligation to appear at a children's hospital opening wearing a costume I can only describe as degrading to the office of newsreader."

"They want you to tour America," Tania said. "Six cities. Live appearances. Two national chat shows. All of it filmed, for use in their own promotional material once the deal completes."

There was a silence while Dexter absorbed this, a silence in which Olivia watched his face with the specific wariness of someone who had seen this man process bad news before and knew that the reaction, when it arrived, would be disproportionate in some direction nobody could yet predict.

"America," Dexter said eventually, as though testing the word for sincerity, "is a nation founded by people who left Britain because they found the weather here too interesting. It is a country with no sense of understatement, no proper tea, and a television culture built entirely around shouting. I have been asked, on no fewer than four occasions in my career, to appear on American breakfast programmes, and on every single occasion I have declined, because I have no desire to be interviewed by a man with unnaturally white teeth while being served coffee in a mug the size of a bucket."

"They're prepared to pay thirty-one million dollars, Dexter," Lord Homes said, "which, I should point out, will not happen if the face of this network refuses to leave his own postcode."

"I am not refusing. I am observing. There is a difference." Dexter glanced at Olivia, as though noticing her for the first time, which in fairness was not far from the truth. "Is she coming."

"She's coming," Tania said, before Olivia could answer for herself, which earned her a flat look across the table that Tania pretended not to see. "Continental specifically want the two of you together. The dynamic between you tested well with their audience panels."

"What dynamic."

"Apparently," Olivia said, "it's that you talk and I look like I want to lie down in traffic."

Dexter considered this with the unhurried seriousness of a man weighing a genuine compliment.

"I can see why that would be compelling television," he said.

Lord Homes decided this was the moment to apply the flattery he had been saving, the way a fisherman waits for the exact right ripple on the water before casting. He leaned forward, laced his fingers together, and adopted the tone he used for board meetings when he needed people to agree with him before they had fully understood what they were agreeing to.

"Dexter," he said, "I want you to think about what this actually represents. You've already won a Nobel Peace Prize for a situation you walked into entirely by accident. You've had the highest-rated documentary this network has ever broadcast, about ghosts, of all things, which by any sensible measure ought to have been a disaster and instead made you the most talked-about broadcaster in the country. The Americans have noticed. Continental don't simply want to buy a channel, Dexter. They want you. This tour isn't a chore. It's a coronation. Six cities, each one a fresh audience discovering you for the first time, building toward something that, frankly, could put you on prime-time American television on a scale this country has never produced. International syndication. Your face, your voice, in every city from New York to Los Angeles."

It was, Olivia thought, watching Dexter's expression shift from suspicion to something closer to religious rapture, a masterclass in telling a vain man exactly what he already believed about himself and presenting it as news.

"A coronation," Dexter repeated, savouring the word the way other men savoured wine.

"Precisely."

"I have always felt," Dexter said, "that my talents have been somewhat constrained by the geographical limitations of this country. Britain, for all its charm, is a small island. America is, by any measure, larger."

"Considerably," Lord Homes agreed, with the solemnity of a man discussing a point of grave international significance.

"And the hotels," Dexter went on, warming now, the earlier complaints about studio air conditioning entirely forgotten in the face of a grander and more flattering conversation, "I assume we would be travelling appropriately. First class. I am not boarding one of those economy flights where one's knees meet the seat in front before the plane has even left the runway. And the accommodation. I have standards, Barrett, that I am not prepared to abandon simply because we have crossed an ocean."

"First class flights," Tania said smoothly, "five-star hotels in every city, and a full production crew to handle logistics so you need not concern yourself with anything beyond showing up and being charming."

"You see, Barrett? That is how an agreement is struck," Dexter said, settling back into his chair with triumphant satisfaction. "Firmness, elegance, and refusing to yield on the essentials. They opened with an impossible demand, and I have successfully brought them to heel: first class, five stars, and complete editorial dignity. When one knows one's worth, the Americans are remarkably malleable. It would be churlish to deny them my presence now."

"Marvellous," said Lord Homes, and reached again for the brandy, though this time the pour was considerably more generous.

Olivia had been watching this unfold with the particular numbness of someone who had seen Dexter talked into things before and had learned that resistance, once he had been handed a sufficiently grand version of events, was entirely pointless. She looked at the document still lying on the table between them, at the clause she had read twice already and which neither Lord Homes nor Tania had yet seen fit to mention aloud.

"There's something you haven't told him," she said.

Tania's expression did not so much as flicker. "Is there."

"Page four. Ground transport between venues. It says here, and I quote, 'talent and accompanying production team to travel between cities by road, to facilitate documentary capture of the touring experience'." She looked up. "By road, Barrett. Chicago to Dallas. Dallas to Atlanta. All of it, in a car."

There was a pause.

"A car," Dexter said, as though the word itself required translation.

"A hired people carrier, I'd imagine," Olivia said, "given the budget line next to it, which is, and I want to stress this, considerably smaller than the one marked 'flights' on the previous page, because apparently there isn't one."

"I cannot drive," Dexter said, with the flat finality of a man stating an immutable law of physics.

"I'm aware," Olivia said. "Which presumably means I will be."

"For how long."

"Thousands of miles, by the look of it."

Dexter turned to Lord Homes with an expression of profound betrayal, as though he had just discovered that the brandy in the decanter had been watered down for decades without his knowledge.

"Barrett. You promised me first class."

"First class flights, I believe, were specified for the transatlantic leg," Lord Homes said, consulting the page with the studied vagueness of a man who had, in fact, read this clause already and had hoped very much that nobody else would. "The, ah, internal logistics appear to be somewhat more rustic."

"Rustic."

"A road trip, Dexter," Tania said, with the brisk cheer of someone determined to make the worst possible thing sound like an adventure. "Think of it as seeing the real America. The landscape. The small towns. Authentic texture, as our American friends would say."

"I do not wish to see the real America," Dexter said. "I wish to see the inside of a first-class cabin and then the inside of a five-star hotel, in that order, repeated six times."

"Then I suppose," Olivia said, and there was, for the first time in the meeting, something almost like satisfaction in her voice, "we'll both be disappointed together. Welcome to the tour, Dexter."

He looked at her for a long moment, turquoise eyes narrowing slightly, as though recalculating the terms of an arrangement he had already, moments earlier, considered settled and glorious.

"I shall need a car with proper leg room," he said finally, to nobody in particular. "And I shall require stops. Regular ones. I cannot be expected to remain stationary for unreasonable stretches of time without access to a proper lavatory and a decent cup of tea, neither of which, I am reliably informed, exist in any meaningful quantity between American cities."

"I'll see what I can do," Olivia said, in the tone of someone who had absolutely no intention of promising anything and knew that the promise would be forgotten by teatime regardless.

Lord Homes, sensing that the moment of agreement, however fragile, had been reached and ought to be sealed before anyone had time to reconsider it, rose from his chair and extended a hand across the table, first to Dexter and then, with rather more warmth, to Olivia.

"Then we're decided," he said. "Tania will have the itinerary drawn up within the week. Heathclif will need to prepare contingency kits for the climate, Danny Carter's people will handle the technical side of the filming, and Dick Davies has already been pencilled in for the camera work, assuming he can be persuaded away from whatever pub he's currently occupying."

"He'll come," Tania said. "He always comes. He just likes to be asked twice so it looks like he's doing us a favour."

"Six cities," Dexter said again, turning the number over as though testing its weight, and something in his posture had already begun to shift, the complaint of a moment ago folding itself quietly away beneath the far more comfortable sensation of being, once again, the single most important person in any room he occupied. "Chicago, did you say."

"Chicago first," Tania confirmed, "then Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, and New York to finish."

"I have always felt," Dexter said, with the particular gravity he reserved for pronouncements he intended to be remembered, "that America has been waiting for someone to tell it the truth, in a voice it can trust. Perhaps that someone is me."

Olivia did not reply to this. Instead, she methodically stacked the loose release forms into a neat, square pile, slid them into her canvas folder, and pulled the zip closed with slow, unhurried deliberation. She hoisted the canvas tote over her right shoulder, took her laptop bag in hand, and stood up from the mahogany table. As she reached the door she paused, looking back at the three of them still gathered around the table, Lord Homes already refilling his brandy, Tania making a note on her phone, Dexter examining his own reflection in the glass wall behind them with evident approval.

"For the record," she said, "I want it noted that I said no first."

"Noted," Tania said, without looking up.

"And I want the car to have air conditioning that actually works, because I will not be driving two and a half thousand miles with a man who complains about the temperature of a room that has a working thermostat."

"I shall allow that one concession," Dexter said magnanimously, as though the vehicle, the itinerary, and indeed the entire tour had been arranged for his personal benefit and he was simply dispensing permissions as he saw fit.

Olivia left without another word, closing the door with rather more force than was strictly necessary, and somewhere down the newsroom corridor a junior researcher glanced up from his desk, saw her expression, and quietly decided that whatever had just happened in the boardroom was not a conversation he wished to have any part of.

Behind her, through the glass, Lord Homes was already laughing at something Dexter had said, and Tania was texting the Los Angeles office to confirm that terms, in principle, had been reached. Outside, the Thames moved past the window the way it always did, indifferent to the fortunes of television networks, carrying on toward the sea regardless of who owned the building that overlooked it.