by Jill Mansell
“I do know,” said Pandora mildly. “It’s OK. You don’t have to remind me.”
“But—”
“Please. Any more excuses and I’ll start putting it down to a guilty conscience. I’m going to stay with Bill and Wendy, that’s all.”
Sean experienced a stab of irrational jealousy. “Who are they then?”
Pandora’s mouth twitched.
“You saw photographs of them once, when you were spying on me.”
Jealousy changed to relief.
“The guy with the glasses, you mean? And the woman with ginger hair?”
“I suppose so.”
“What do they do?”
“Bill’s a bank manager. Wendy teaches chemistry.”
“Riveting,” Sean mocked.
“Yes, well.” Pandora hated the way he so effortlessly made fun of ordinary people. “We can’t all have TV programs made about us. Wendy and Bill are old friends. I’ll be back next Sunday, if you’re interested.” As she zipped her case shut, she gave him a quick sidelong glance. “Or maybe you’ll be too busy entertaining friends of your own.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sean looked wounded.
“It means I saw the photo in yesterday’s paper of you and that actress.” Pandora hadn’t meant to say it; sounding like a nag would do her no favors at all. She felt her cheeks grow warm, fiddled with the zip on the suitcase, and carried on anyway. “Although I was surprised to see her calling herself an actress. I thought all Mindy Charleson had ever done was strip for page three.”
“They printed it in yesterday’s paper? I was going to tell you about that before it came out.”
For once, Sean’s innocence was genuine. The trouble was, how on earth was he supposed to persuade Pandora to believe him?
“Honestly,” he protested as she swung the heavy suitcase down from the bed. “Here, let me do that. I mean it, sweetheart…her agent organized it as a publicity push for her career. I wouldn’t be interested in Mindy Charleson, for God’s sake. The girl’s a tramp. Credit me with some taste, please.”
The look of dismay on Sean’s face was so real, Pandora had to believe him. This time at least, she decided, he had the benefit of the doubt.
Oh, but was it really any wonder he showed interest in other girls anyway, when these days, even she found looking at herself in a mirror hard to bear? The actress’s page-three days might be long gone, but at least she still had a figure that went in and out.
Mine, Pandora reminded herself, just goes out.
And Sean was a red-blooded male. In all honesty, Pandora thought with a rueful sigh, how can I blame him for showing interest in anything with a waist?
* * *
Arriving back at Paddington Station the following Sunday, Pandora was absurdly flattered to find Sean waiting on the platform for her. Since their relationship hadn’t yet become public knowledge, she hung back at a discreet distance while he signed autographs for a group of giggling schoolgirls beneath the arrivals screen. She was almost afraid to be seen with him anyway; with those film-star good looks and that lean, perfect body, he was pretty awe-inspiring even from a distance of twenty feet.
No wonder I can’t say no to him, thought Pandora, glancing down at her own pale-gray sweatshirt and jogging pants. Not that she could jog at present to save her life. Sean, wearing a black cashmere sweater and dark-gray trousers, looked dauntingly glamorous.
She continued to watch him exchange jokes with the schoolgirls, signing their forearms when they ran out of bits of paper. Pandora admired the way his dark, glossy hair fell across his forehead, and the knack he had—when he chose to use it—of making each girl in turn feel special and more important than the rest.
Then, glancing up, Sean spotted Pandora. He broke into a grin, mouthed Hi, and finished signing the arm of a willowy blond whose pert bottom was barely covered by a red wool miniskirt.
“I say,” gasped Pandora when she finally managed to come up for air. Flustered, she realized just how many people were now watching them. The girl in the red mini, in particular, was looking on in disbelief. “Should you be doing this?”
Sean’s arms were still wrapped around her. His mouth brushed the tip of her nose.
“Most definitely.”
“I mean, in public?”
“Why not?” He kissed her again. “I’ve missed you. More than you deserve to be missed too. Buggering off to the back of beyond, just to pay me back for that stupid picture in the paper—”
“It was Bath,” Pandora pointed out, “not the Kalahari Desert. And I wasn’t trying to pay you back for anything. Look at all these people. Do they have to stare like that?”
Sean was used to it.
“Come on. The car’s outside. If it hasn’t been towed away.”
They both heard the words of the girl in the red mini as she turned away in disappointment.
“She can’t really be his girlfriend. It must be some kind of joke.”
Sean, his arm curling protectively around Pandora’s shoulders, swung around and fixed the girl with a cold, unamused stare.
“Why should it be a joke?” he demanded. “Actually, she’s my live-in lover.”
Pandora wished the platform could open and swallow her up. She had never felt more humiliated in her life.
* * *
“Where are we?” asked Pandora when he pulled up outside a Victorian semidetached house halfway along a leafy avenue in Putney.
Sean looked across at her.
“I meant it,” he said. “That bit about the live-in lover.”
“What?” Pandora gazed up at the bedroom windows, framed with ivy and scarlet curtained, as if expecting to see some female standing there waving down at them. “Who?”
“Come on,” Sean protested. “I meant it about missing you too. And I’ve made up my mind. If we’re having this baby, we may as well do it properly, the whole bit.”
Pandora turned to him, her eyes like saucers. “You mean get m—?”
At the sight of the expression on Sean’s face, the rest of the word died on her lips. The dreaded M-word clearly wasn’t what he’d meant at all.
“Well, nearly the whole bit.” Squirming, Sean pointed to the house, which had cost an exorbitant amount to rent. He even had the grace to go a bit pink. “Look, sorry, but I’m pretty allergic to the idea of weddings and stuff. Blame it on my parents if you like…”
This was a shameful cop-out, and they both knew it.
Hurriedly, Pandora said, “No, I’m sorry. It isn’t as if I even want to get married anyway,” which was another big lie. Hanging her head, mortified by her own mistake, she would have kicked herself. If only she could have reached.
All of a sudden, Sean’s gloriously romantic gesture didn’t seem quite so glorious.
“Well, it’s up to you.” He hadn’t meant it to, but it came out sounding huffy. “The house is here. If you want to move in, you can.”
Pandora, who hadn’t interpreted it as huffiness, assumed the words were tinged with boredom and began to panic. Goodness, this was a huge step forward! Just because it wasn’t the giant step her boringly straitlaced brother felt Sean should be taking…well, why should she care what Joel thought anyway? Everyone lived together these days.
And now, Pandora thought joyfully, Sean’s asking me to live with him.
“Of course I want to.” The words tumbled out before he could change his mind. Undoing her seat belt and wishing her enormous stomach wouldn’t keep getting in the way, she leaned clumsily across and hugged him. “It’s what I want more than anything. And this is a beautiful house.”
“I wonder what your brother will have to say.” Sean looked amused. Joel, he knew, wasn’t wild about their relationship. “He should be glad we’re going legit.”
Pandora, who wasn’t so sure, was too happy
to care. “Never mind about him.”
“Still, he can help you move your stuff.” Fishing in his pocket, Sean pulled out a front-door key. “I have to work tonight, but I’m sure you could manage between you. How about that?” He grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. “By the time I get back from the club, you can be all moved in.”
* * *
Pandora had guessed right. For all his outrage over Sean Mandeville’s inability to commit himself, Joel didn’t take at all well to the news that she was moving out. Without even realizing it, he had been looking forward to the idea of having a baby around the house. He had already warned his partner at Henley-Grant Motors that he would be taking a week or two off work when the baby arrived to help Pandora settle into the new routine.
Now, suddenly, his help was no longer needed. She was leaving, moving out just like that.
“It doesn’t suit you, you know.” Joel wasn’t about to refuse to move her things, but that didn’t mean he had to approve of what she was about to do.
Pandora sighed as he loaded up the trunk of the car with her hastily assembled belongings. How many dark, big-brother-knows-best looks was she supposed to put up with, for heaven’s sake?
“What doesn’t suit me?”
“You, jumping whenever Sean Mandeville says jump. What did he do, click his fingers at you and say, ‘Come on. You’re moving in with me’? It just isn’t you,” Joel said crossly. “Where’s your self-esteem? Whatever happened to the independent girl I used to know? The one with a mind of her own?”
She got pregnant, thought Pandora. She glared across the dark-blue roof of the old Bentley at Joel, who couldn’t have the least idea how that felt. So maybe he was half right, and maybe seven months ago, she would have agreed totally with his point of view…but the reality of actually finding herself in this situation had soon put paid to all that.
Pandora knew she’d changed—and probably not for the better—but when you were this pregnant and your self-esteem was this fragile, how else were you supposed to act?
Joel, meanwhile, was shoveling clothes haphazardly back into one of the cases where a zipper had burst open. Pandora knew how it felt.
“Summer dresses?” He glanced across at her, unable to resist the jibe. “Do you think you’ll last that long?”
“Shut up.” Pandora was uncomfortably aware that much the same thought had crossed her mind when she’d packed them. “If it doesn’t work out, then you can say ‘I told you so’ as often as you want.” She gave him a warning look. “But not before then, OK?”
“You mean you’re going to make me wait?” Joel raised his eyebrows in mock horror. “What, the full three weeks?”
Chapter 29
He didn’t stay, just unloaded the cases, piled them in the spacious paneled hallway of Pandora’s new home, showed the minimum of enthusiasm when she gave him a quick guided tour, and left shortly afterward, having planted a perfunctory kiss on her cheek.
When the doorbell rang less than five minutes later, Pandora hurried to answer it, certain it was Joel come back to apologize.
But he hadn’t. Instead, Cass and Cleo stood there, beaming and waving a tissue-wrapped bottle to help celebrate her moving in.
“And another of my babies flies the nest.” Cass heaved a sentimental sigh an hour later as the third glass of Saint-Émilion began to take effect. “There I was, thinking they’d all be with me until I was ninety, and look what’s happening. First Sophie, now Sean…”
“You’ve still got me,” Cleo lovingly declared. “I won’t run away from home.”
“You could meet someone wonderful and fall madly in love,” said Cass. She smiled across at Pandora. “Just like Sean.”
“Ugh.” Cleo pulled a face. “I hate all men, remember? I’m not going to fall in love.” She drained her glass with a flourish. “And if I did, it definitely wouldn’t be with anyone like Sean.”
Cass and Cleo left at ten o’clock. Sean had already warned Pandora not to expect him home from the club before half-past midnight at the earliest. Yawning, she wondered how on earth she was going to stay awake until then.
In the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, she went over in her mind the accusations Joel had levelled at her.
They were only hurtful because they were true. Pandora conceded that much, but she was at a loss to know how she was supposed to go about restoring her own drastically depleted confidence. The Mandevilles were celebrities, each of them famous in their own right, each one breathtakingly glamorous.
And I’m not even a waitress any more, thought Pandora, feeling more diminished by the second. Catching sight of her distorted reflection in the stainless-steel kettle—the Michelin Man looked positively anorexic by comparison—she felt tears of self-pity spring to her eyes. She was grotesque, she had no job, and there was no way in the world she could begin to compete with Sean and his glitzy family.
Unless…
Unless maybe there was something she could do.
Pandora’s heart began to race. Abandoning the kettle, she went out into the hall, knelt down, and began unzipping cases until she found what she was looking for. Of course it was an awesomely long shot, but imagine the thrill of actually managing to pull it off.
She sat back on her heels, smiling to herself as the plan began to take root. There were two months left before the baby arrived. During these last two months, she might not be able to do much—winning Wimbledon was definitely out—but if she put her mind to it, she could do this.
At least, thought Pandora with a surge of elation, I can try.
* * *
She was woken from a deep sleep by the sound of muffled laughter. Confused, dimly aware that she wasn’t in her own bed—or, for that matter, in any bed at all—Pandora kept her eyes closed. The laughter wasn’t the least bit familiar, which was disconcerting. And a strange arm was draped across her forehead.
But did burglars really howl with laughter while they were actually in the process of ransacking one’s home? And why would one of them be resting their arm leadenly on her head?
Pandora opened an experimental eye. The owner of the laugh was a big West Indian male, heavily dreadlocked and clutching a can of Foster’s. In the other extremely large hand, he held a sheet of writing paper. The next moment, Sean appeared in the doorway, waving another sheet and laughing so hard, he couldn’t speak.
“That’s mine,” Pandora said, struggling to sit up and discovering to her humiliation that the heavy arm draped across her face was her own gone-to-sleep one. Lifting the deadened limb with her good right hand, she placed it gingerly at her side before hauling herself upright. The man with the dreadlocks, she now realized, was Donny Mulligan, one of Sean’s great friends from the club.
“You shouldn’t be reading that. It’s private,” Pandora protested, but only mildly. At least they were laughing. She felt it had to be a good sign.
“How can it be private?” Sean gestured with his own can at the remaining pages strewn across the floor next to the sofa, abandoned there by Pandora when she’d fallen asleep. “It was there, waving up at us when we came in.”
“Squealing ‘Read me, read me.’” Donny Mulligan gave her the benefit of his famous gold-and-white grin. He shrugged. “I mean, what else could we do?”
“Hmm.” Pandora massaged her arm, now fizzing with pins and needles, and considered raising the subject of the infamous photographs. The fact that they had been tucked out of sight behind a candlestick on her mantelpiece hadn’t stopped Sean having a good nose then. If she really wanted to keep something from him, maybe she should consider installing a safe.
But she couldn’t be angry with either of them now. They were still reading, still laughing. And they were, Pandora supposed, experts.
Chancing upon a magazine article about TV scriptwriting in the dentist’s waiting room last year was what had drawn Pandora to
Comedy Inc. in the first place. The idea of creating a comedy script for television had instantly appealed, capturing her imagination and resulting in a torrent of ideas that she had enthusiastically committed to paper.
But that fateful first trip to the club in Jelahay Street had had dramatic consequences of its own, and in all the ensuing emotional chaos, the impetus to keep going had been lost. It wasn’t something she had even mentioned to anyone else, mainly because there hadn’t been much to say. But tonight, the idea had come back to her, prompted by those daunting feelings of inadequacy. She had realized that writing was something she could perfectly easily do, no matter how pregnant. It was what had prompted her to dig out the folder of ideas, notes, and half-written trial scripts. One in particular, the one Donny and Sean had seized upon, she privately thought might not be bad at all.
Now for the acid test, thought Pandora, crossing her fingers and trying not to look too terrified. She had to find out if the real funny men liked her ideas.
“Go on then,” she said bravely. “You’ve had a look at it. Tell me honestly what you think.”
“Oh dear.” Sean glanced across at Donny in search of rescue. Donny examined a fraying hole in the knee of his jeans. Briefly at a loss for words, Sean gazed once more at the sheet of paper in his hand.
“You can tell me,” said Pandora.
“OK, it’s crap.”
Across the room, Donny winced.
“Well, I’m sorry.” Two spots of color appeared high up on Sean’s cheeks, the first time Pandora had ever seen him blush. Defensively, he went on, “But it is. What are you trying to do here anyway? Compete?”
“No, no…” Horrified that Sean might think she was trying to jump on the comedy bandwagon on the strength of her relationship with him and at the same time desperate not to let him see how crushed she was by his verdict, Pandora said, “It was just something I had a go at, ages ago. It’s nothing really. Rubbish. I’ll chuck it in the bin—”
“That’s OK then.” Clearly relieved, Sean let the page flutter to the floor. “For a minute there, you had me worried. I mean, I wouldn’t want you to think we were laughing just now because it was funny.”