‘That’s what drives me nuts about the West Coast, Al,’ said Jennifer, pouring him more wine as the dessert was cleared away. ‘You never say what you think out here, you say what you think you should say. It’s one of the reasons I prefer writing books to screenplays. I call the shots. Writing a movie, you’ve got fifteen different people telling you what to do, all trying to outmanoeuvre the other guy. You’re a pawn, not an author.’
She saw Alex glancing towards the door Melissa had left through.
‘You know, LA is full of very smart people who think they have to play stupid,’ she said quietly.
‘Oh, Melissa’s not stupid.’
‘I gathered that the second I saw her. I take it she’s after the part of Danielle and not Nancy?’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘I’ve seen every trick in the book. People will do anything to get the part.’
‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’d better check where she’s got to,’ he said, pushing his chair back.
He walked out towards the pool, and for a moment he couldn’t see Melissa anywhere. Then he spotted her, hidden away in a corner, sitting on a teak sunlounger, cosied right up next to Justin. Her tea-dress, that had looked so decorous when they had left the house, had risen several inches up her thigh, which was now covered with Justin Coe’s hand.
As they drove back towards Mulholland, snaking their way up through the hills, Melissa was beaming, her cheeks flushed.
‘Great that you were talking to Jennifer back there,’ she said. ‘Good strategy to get in with the wife.’
‘She was actually the only human in the room,’ he said.
‘What’s got into you?’ She frowned.
Alex glanced at her, then looked back towards the road, fuming.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I don’t know why you bothered with this prom-virgin charade tonight if all along you planned on behaving like a . . . like you did back there.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she said defensively.
‘What am I talking about? From the minute we got there to the minute we left, you were flirting with Justin like a bitch on heat.’
‘We were talking about the movie,’ she said.
‘Oh yes? And did he need to put his hand up your skirt while you chatted?’
‘I wasn’t flirting,’ protested Melissa. ‘I was demonstrating chemistry. ’
‘Of course,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘How naïve of me.’
‘Look, Christopher is one of the most powerful directors in the world, but Justin will still have the final say-so on his co-star.’
‘And that makes it OK, does it?’ snapped Alex. ‘Think about how it feels for me, Melissa. Married to “the sexiest woman in the world”. I know you have to network and connect with future co-stars, but you’re married and there’s a line you don’t cross.’
‘And do you think it’s easy for me? You out on tour, surrounded by screaming girls, never home?’
Suddenly Alex had déjà vu so powerful he shivered. He was almost transported back to the Year Zero days and having almost exactly the same conversations with Emma.
‘Have you ever seen any evidence of that? Don’t you think those groupies would sell their stories to the tabloids in a heartbeat? Have you ever seen a pap shot of me out with another woman? Have you ever caught me feeling up Courtney Love?’
Melissa looked out of the dark window, slowly shaking her head. ‘Justin is gay,’ she said quietly.
‘What?’ he said, glancing at her. Was she kidding? He’d heard the gay rumours before, of course – and not just about Justin Coe. If you listened to the gossip, half of Hollywood’s leading men swung the other way. And some of the gossip was true. The ‘commitmentphobe’ heart-throb who was never without a model, starlet or waitress at his side but who actually had a long-term boyfriend he was deeply in love with. Or the happily married action star who had a secret life cruising Sunset Boulevard and taking discreet male lovers. But Justin . . . He just couldn’t believe it.
‘Justin Coe isn’t gay. Isn’t he supposed to be secretly engaged to that bird off that sitcom?’
‘It’s the best-kept secret in Hollywood, but yes, Justin is gay.’
He frowned at her, wanting to believe her, but not sure.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he told me!’ she cried, exasperated.
‘Oh,’ said Alex, feeling his cheeks flare. ‘Really? I have to say I’m surprised.’
He thought for a moment. ‘So why did he have his hand . . .’
‘We were acting, Alex! We’re actors! It’s what we do!’
‘All right, all right, I get the message,’ said Alex. ‘I’m sorry, I just thought . . .’
‘I know what you thought, baby,’ she said, scratching him behind his ear. ‘But I think it’s about time you started trusting me. Justin thinks I’ll be perfect as Danielle, and frankly so do I. I need to be creatively stretched, Alex. I need to reach my potential. I don’t want to be the sexy blonde for the rest of my career. I want to win awards, I want to be Meryl Streep . . .’
He put his foot down on the gas pedal, gunning the engine. He didn’t want to hear the rest.
52
August 2006
After the huge publicity from shooting two of Alex Doyle’s platinum-selling album sleeves, Grace’s photographic career took off like a rocket. She was constantly in demand to shoot magazine covers and for editorial spreads and private commissions. Above all, she loved doing portraiture, not the volumes of celebrity stuff that was regularly sent her way, but what she called ‘real-life people’: farmers in the fields, single mothers on sink estates, scientists at work in their laboratories. She loved capturing the lines on their faces, the expressions in their eyes, hoping her camera could reveal their inner secrets.
Today she was doing a portfolio for Rive magazine called ‘Bright Young Things’, subtitled ‘A snapshot of the new millennium’s gilded youth’. She was about to turn the job down – the Toddington Hall renovations desperately needed her full attention – when she got a call from Olivia saying that she had been chosen to appear in the very same photo story. Although she wasn’t too pleased with her daughter being described as ‘gilded youth’, Grace had thought it wise to oversee her modelling debut, so had agreed to the commission.
‘Let me look. Let me look!’
Olivia came running across the grass of Davidson House, a bucolic Georgian manor on the outskirts of London. In skin-tight jeans, huge wedge platforms and floaty white Chloe top, it was no surprise she had been chosen for the shoot. With her long dark hair and huge green eyes, she was growing into a very beautiful young woman, thought Grace with a sense of pride. She handed Olivia the Polaroid of the shot she had just taken; six Bright Young Things, the twin daughters of a rock star, a handsome eighteen-year-old lord who starred in the latest Abercrombie and Fitch campaign, two pretty actresses and Olivia playing croquet with gold balls on the front lawns.
‘Wow, I look amazing!’ said Olivia. ‘Can you make my boobs a bit bigger when you make up the prints?’ she said hopefully.
‘No I will not,’ said Grace.
‘Please, Mum. I’ve already been in touch with a modelling agency, and they want me to send some photographs in. They’re going to freak when they know I’ve already done a Rive editorial. The work will just pile in.’
Grace took a deep breath. It was clear from Olivia’s school reports that she was not going to be an academic, not through a lack of intelligence but from an absence of interest in anything beyond make-up and fashion magazines.
‘Olivia, we’ve talked about modelling before,’ she said. ‘You’re fourteen years old and I think you should be concentrating on your GCSEs and all the stuff you love at school. What about the tennis team and the film club?’
Olivia rolled her eyes. ‘I haven’t done those things for ages, Mum. They’re so boring.’
‘Well, I think you’re too young to model.
’
‘Julian says loads of models are my age.’
It was just like Olivia to start getting ammunition from Grace’s partner.
‘I don’t care what Julian says. He is not your mother.’
Olivia glanced critically at her. ‘It’s only because you needed a chaperone at my age.’
Grace gasped. ‘Do not talk to me like—’ she began, but she was interrupted by her assistant, Tim.
‘Sorry, Grace,’ he said. ‘Catrina wants you. She wants to know which shot you’re planning on doing next so she can style the models.’
‘I’ll come inside.’ She sighed, watching Olivia run back to the croquet lawn where she slipped her hand around Lord Freddie’s waist, whispering something in his ear. Not for the first time, she wished that her daughter wasn’t away at boarding school. If she had lost touch with Olivia’s interests, she certainly had no idea of her social life. Was she dating Freddie? Grace was realistic enough to know that if her daughter wanted to horse around with boys, or smoke – or even do drugs, she thought with a grimace – nothing could stop her, but she wished she had a better relationship with Olivia, wished her daughter wanted to confide in her.
Perhaps it’s my fault, she thought as she walked towards the house. Three months ago, Gabriel had announced that he was remarrying, which had upset Joseph but hadn’t seemed to bother Olivia. Maybe this rebellion was her way of showing her hurt. Or maybe it was more than that. Olivia was beautiful, charming and bright, but she also had a lazy, expectant streak and a nose for trouble. The real truth was that she was starting to remind Grace of Miles.
The manor’s library had been turned into a makeshift dressing room. Catrina, the magazine’s fashion editor, was fighting her way through a long rail of designer clothes. Grace was going through the next set-up with her, which was to be the rock twins running through the orchard in long sundresses, when they heard an insistent beeping coming from a pile of coats and bags flung on a chaise longue.
‘Where is that bloody noise coming from?’ said Catrina. ‘It’s been beeping for the last ten minutes and it’s driving me crazy.’
Tim rummaged through the pile and lifted up a brown Mulberry satchel that Grace immediately recognised as Olivia’s.
‘That’s my daughter’s,’ said Grace. ‘I’ll take it to her.’
The satchel was heavy, weighed down with shoes, magazines and make-up.
No need to take the whole bag out, she thought, stopping in the hallway and rummaging through it looking for the phone. Then her fingers touched something and she stopped, holding her breath. It was a thin metallic strip of tablets. It was the pill. Looking up, she could hear footsteps.
‘I need a drink,’ said Olivia, running into the house.
Grace stood up. ‘Olivia, can I talk to you for one moment?’
‘Later, Mum,’ she said, trying to dodge around her. ‘Me and Freddie want a Pepsi.’
‘Now,’ said Grace, taking her by the arm and leading her into an empty study. It was a formal space with a walnut writing desk and a captain chair that made Grace feel like a Victorian father.
‘I found these in your bag,’ she said simply, handing her daughter the strip of pills.
Olivia’s green eyes blazed at her. ‘What the hell were you doing going through my bag?’
‘That’s beside the point. I asked you what you’re doing on the pill, Olivia.’
‘I’ve only just got them,’ she said sulkily.
‘How? Why?’ Grace asked, shaking with anger. ‘You’re fourteen years old, you’re still a child.’
Olivia did not look like a child, standing six feet tall in her wedges, her hands on her hips.
‘I’m not a child!’ she spat. ‘It’s about time you realised that, Mother. Freddie and I are having sex and you can’t stop us,’ she added with a note of malice.
Grace quivered with anger, but she knew she wouldn’t get anywhere with Olivia by shouting. God knows she’d tried often enough.
‘I just think you’re too young, darling,’ she said in a softer tone.
‘Too young for modelling, too young for sex,’ said Olivia sarcastically.
‘You need to be responsible . . .’
‘Ha!’ said Olivia. ‘Take a look in the mirror, Mum. Maybe you should have been a bit more responsible yourself.’
Grace gasped at her daughter’s insolence. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I’m not stupid, Mum. I can do the maths. You got pregnant almost as soon as you met Dad. That’s why you went to live in Parador and got married. No wonder it didn’t all work out with him; you shouldn’t have got married in the first place.’
‘How dare you!’ whispered Grace. ‘I loved your father . . .’
‘Love?’ said Olivia cruelly. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’
With a flick of her hair, she stalked out of the room. Grace could only stand there staring at the spot where her daughter had been. Slowly she turned and walked to the window, where she could see Olivia running up to her boyfriend like an eager puppy. How had this happened? In the blink of an eye, her sweet little girl had become a woman, a woman she barely recognised.
Olivia was right, of course: she did still think of her daughter as a child – a baby, even – and she knew she couldn’t hold on for ever. She curled her hand into a fist. She should never have confronted Olivia in that way; she shouldn’t have trotted out the old clichés about waiting and responsibility. No wonder Olivia didn’t want to confide in her. She had certainly played this particular episode badly. But was Olivia also right when she said she had played it all badly? For fourteen years, Grace had tried to do the right thing for her children, putting them first, pushing her own needs to one side to make sure they had the best start they could have. Had she been a bad mother? She could certainly have done things differently, that was true. But should she have done?
‘Grace?’ called Catrina from the doorway. ‘Do you want to look at the outfits for the next shot?’
Grace quickly brushed a tear away.‘Sure, I’ll be there in a minute,’ she said.
Out in the garden, Olivia was sitting next to Lord Freddie, her head resting affectionately on his shoulder.
Just don’t make the mistakes I did, darling, thought Grace, picking up her camera and turning away. It was the best she could hope for.
53
November 2007
Alex Doyle felt without a care in the world. Fregate Island, a private Seychelles atoll thirty miles east of Mahe, was beautiful, remote and the last word in barefoot luxury. A riot of coconut palms, cashew and almond trees perfumed the whole island like a bottle of Melissa’s bespoke scent. For five days that week the lush secluded oasis was especially exclusive as Alex and Melissa had hired out the entire island for a holiday of paparazzi- and people-free luxury. Melissa was just about to go on a twelve-country promo tour for the Christopher Hayes film Next Door But One and Alex had finished a twenty-one-date tour of South American football stadiums; they felt they deserved it.
‘I’m nervous about the movie,’ said Melissa, turning towards her husband. They were lying on wooden sunloungers positioned right at the water’s edge of Anse Parc Beach, a small table between them holding cocktails, their ice slowly melting. Fregate wasn’t entirely deserted, of course. This was a luxury resort for the super-rich and there was an army of waiters, chefs and gofers to make sure their two guests never went without.
‘What are you nervous about, honey?’ said Alex, putting down the book he was reading – a biography of hair metal band Motley Crue – and peering at her over his sunglasses. ‘The early buzz on the film is great. Hayes said he’d work with you again in a heartbeat and you got a six-million-dollar pay packet. Sounds OK to me.’
She frowned, shielding her eyes from the sun. ‘None of that matters, Alex. All that matters is box office and the Academy.’
‘I’m not an expert,’ said Alex, ‘but the two things don’t necessarily go hand in hand. I mean, look at Die Hard. Brilliant movie,
big box office, but where was Bruce Willis’ Oscar? You can’t necessarily have both.’
‘Next Door is not an action movie, Alex,’ she said sourly. ‘All I’m saying is that I want people to enjoy the movie, of course, but I also want recognition from my peers about my craft.’
Alex rolled his eyes at the mention of the craft. Melissa was taking herself very seriously these days. Having acting lessons with a teacher at Lee Strasberg and searching for scripts that involved a physical transformation – her logic being that Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Halle Berry had all won Oscars in roles where they’d had to put on weight, don a prosthetic nose or wear little make-up.
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