The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae (ARC)

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘And is she giving you a part?’

  ‘Berowne,’ Seb says, ‘who has the longest speech in all of Shakespeare. We’re going to be busy, you and me.’

  ‘That’s fantastic,’ Ailsa says. ‘Is that what your phone call was about?’ Seb had been on the phone when she got out of the shower; it had sounded businesslike, his spine straight as he stood, looking out of the window as he talked.

  ‘Yeah. Wilkie. He’s not keen.’

  ‘Why not?’ Ailsa has always been under the impression that actors needed work, and there was never enough around. Seb’s agent seems to have a different view.

  ‘He thinks I’m wasting my beautiful years, if I spend them on the stage. There’s plenty of time for Shakespeare when my TV Romeo days are over, according to him.’

  Ailsa thinks, not for the first time, about how miserable life as an actor is. The first day Seb rehearsed his fight scene, he came back pale-faced and blooming blue bruises across his back and on his thigh, and Ailsa felt sick at the thought of all her mother must have felt, watching as she bruised and ached. Rejection, waiting, bruising. At least Ailsa didn’t choose it. When she and her mother are having real conversations again, she’ll mention it. She’s doing her best to build bridges, but until she’s seen her father, it’s not going to be easy to move on.

  ‘Don’t you think – is that not a bit unfair? Being in this play and not knowing that you’re being measured up for something else?’ Seb’s face changes, from serious to a smile, but Ailsa doesn’t think she said anything funny. ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, I thought for a minute you were suggesting someone else’s life was unfair.’

  Ailsa sits back, a sudden, sharp movement. ‘That’s—’

  ‘What? Not fair?’

  Green eyes meet blue for a second: this could go either way. A decision. Ailsa laughs. ‘Bastard.’

  ‘That came out wrong,’ says Seb. ‘It was meant to be – what’s a word for light-hearted that doesn’t have the word heart in it?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Ailsa says. She doesn’t know where the time goes when they’re together. If only her hospital days had passed as swiftly, and this – this joy – would slow down, dissolve softly, instead of fizzing the days away from them.

  He leans back, signals for the bill. ‘You did say you start work at one? Do you want to walk over together?’

  ‘I’m not really like that, am I?’

  Seb looks at her, seriously. ‘No. But you have your moments.’

  Ailsa nods. ‘That is fair.’

  The bill arrives and Seb glances at it, puts thirty pounds to pay for their brunch on the table, and takes his sunglasses from his pocket, ready for the outside world. He hardly ever wears them indoors these days. Before he puts them on he hesitates, reaches for Ailsa’s hand, and looks into her eyes in a way that makes her forget to look for the familiar, well-spaced ‘V’s that show how he is healing.

  ‘You’re all right, you know,’ he says.

  If Ailsa isn’t immediately sure what he means, Apple is, lurching and contracting in her chest. ‘Is that English for something too?’

  Seb slips on his sunglasses, stands, and waits for her to stand and pick up her bag. He kisses the top of her head, a gesture somewhere between tenderness and a promise. ‘You know it is,’ he says, and he leads her out into the sunlight.

  It’s a short enough walk, ten minutes or so, fifteen if you dawdle, and it’s dawdling weather. Seb is wearing his trilby as well as his shades, and maybe he feels disguised or maybe their unspoken public policy has been rewritten, because he wraps his arm around her shoulder and they find a pace that almost matches, hip to hip. Ailsa can take the walk up to the old town without a rest, these days, but she doesn’t have a lot of breath for conversation; Seb is quiet too, looking around, looking up. Anyway, she’s thinking about what he just said. She does know what it means. She’s been telling herself that she’s not ready to love yet/only having a fling. But Apple hasn’t been listening. Ailsa’s chest has an expanding, singing feeling that’s almost enough to blot out how much she’s missing her mother.

  The walk, from North Bridge to Bank Street, is quick but it’s through the busy heart of the city; the Royal Mile is always crowded with sightseers. Bagpipe music is drifting across from a busker; a serious-looking pair of tourists are poring over a map. Seb dodges them, stepping Ailsa onto the road and then back to the pavement.

  ‘I suppose it will be busier,’ he says, ‘when the Fringe starts?’

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ Ailsa says. ‘It’s fun, though.’ Last year, she was staggering from grief for Lennox to admitting that her own heart was failing, and the Fringe had been a sudden burst of colour in her grey world. The weather was beautiful. Her friends had got her out of hospital for a couple of hours here and there: Emily had taken her to some comedy, she and Christa had sat outside the World’s End pub, drinking lemonade and watching the world go by. At the time she had thought these were her last good days.

  When they turn down towards the coffee shop, she hesitates, and he turns back towards her. ‘You’re all right too, you know,’ she says.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he says, and he tilts up her chin and kisses her, lightly, on her temple, the tip of her nose, her cheek, her lips, then holds her close. The last time he kissed her in the street doesn’t bear thinking about: it was the night that they’d been dancing, in London, and she panicked and sent him away. How things change. She presses her cross-kissed face into his jacket, and feels the pressure of his arms around her increase in response.

  ‘Can I come in for a coffee?’ Seb asks. ‘I’ll be good, I promise. I’ll sit quietly in the corner and read Shakespeare.’

  ‘Sure,’ Ailsa says. Now that novelty of Seb has worn off, none of her co-workers remark on him; plus, Full of Beans has become a regular haunt of a couple of novelists and a singer, so the staff is doing its best to take celebrity customers in its stride, trying for a blasé, oh-is-that-Sebastian-Morley-I-didn’t-notice vibe.

  And then she looks through the window and sees her mother, sitting at one of the corner tables, with a pencil in her hand and a folded newspaper in front of her. She’ll be doing a crossword. It’s a long time since they’ve done one together. It’s strange, what you miss.

  ‘My mother is here.’

  Seb puts his hand against the glass, scans the cafe. ‘Oh, I see her. In the corner, right? Yellow scarf? She looks like you. Well, you look like her.’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen her since she told me the whole story about my father.’ They’ve spoken, texted, but neither has suggested a meeting.

  ‘It’s good that she’s here, then?’ says Seb.

  ‘I suppose,’ Ailsa says, takes a breath, and pushes the door open.

  Hayley looks up at the sound of the door and gets to her feet. ‘Ailsa.’ They are standing two feet from each other. It seems they have forgotten how to embrace.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ Ailsa says. ‘I start work in ten minutes. I can’t really –’ She can’t really complete the sentence. ‘I can’t really rerun the blog argument again with you or tell you how upset I am that you didn’t tell me the truth or start to talk about how I miss you.’

  ‘That’s OK, hen,’ Hayley says, and there’s a look on her face that says she understands that Ailsa’s hurt, even as she’s hurting. It’s enough for Ailsa to close the physical gap between them, at least, step into her mother’s arms and feel the comfort of her familiar shape. ‘Tamsin’s over here, seeing a dealer, so I thought I’d come and say hello. I just wanted to see you. See that you’re OK.’ Hayley has stepped back now and Ailsa knows that she’s checking her skin tone for blueness, the shape of her face for weight loss or gain. She ought to mind. She doesn’t. This time next week, she’ll have met her father, and she can call Hayley and they can start over. She ignores Apple’s whispered suggestion that she could change all this right now.

  ‘Seb’s with me,’ she says.

  ‘Pleased
to meet you, Ms Rae.’ Ailsa glances up at him and sees he has the sense not to be wearing his hundred-watt smile. He looks serious, sober.

  ‘Hello,’ Hayley says.

  ‘May I join you?’

  ‘You’re welcome to,’ Hayley says, ‘and you can call me Hayley. But I’ll not be charmed.’

  Seb takes off his shades and pulls out the other chair at the corner table. ‘That’s fine with me. I’ve no intention of charming you.’

  Oh, well played, Seb, Ailsa thinks, and she reaches out to touch his arm, smiles at them both, then goes to put her apron on and start work.

  The Sun

  22nd July 2018

  The Real Romeo and Juliet?

  Sharp-eyed Sun celeb-spotters spied sexy Sebastian Morley in Edinburgh last week, where he’s rehearsing for his role as Romeo. But the lady who’s captured his heart isn’t his co-star, willowy Meredith Katz.

  Seb was seen out and about with the curvy mystery dance partner we spotted him with earlier this year.

  She might have lost a pound or two since then but she hasn’t lost her hold on Seb’s heart. The pair laughed as they left the Northbridge Brasserie with their arms around each other. They were later spotted kissing on a street corner. We’ve always thought Seb was a player – but maybe he’s been looking for a girl who’s larger-than-life.

  Seb was thought to be dating his StarDance partner Fenella Albright before leaving the show last year. But the pair, who had steamy chemistry on the dance floor, haven’t been seen in public together since shortly after his surgery. Could it be that Fenella needs to fatten up if she wants to catch Seb’s eye?

  22 July, 2017

  This Time Last Year

  Ailsa and Hayley go to the Scottish Borders, in the end, the blog vote being 43 per cent south, 23 per cent north and 34 per cent west. Although they had ruled out east because there wasn’t anywhere new before you hit the sea, they still find that they can’t really bear to travel far: it feels reckless, and Ailsa is so very tired that the thought of any journey further than a couple of hours feels unbearable. Tamsin drives them there, Emily will collect them after three days, and Hayley gets a briefing on drips and dressings that she puts up with even though she knows everything there is to know about her daughter’s regime. The duty sister, waving them off the ward, tells them that this time next year they’ll probably be in Tenerife. Ailsa, exhausted by the effort of getting up and dressed, can think of nothing worse. She’d already rather be back in bed.

  But it’s worth it. Oh, it’s worth it. The hotel is a castle; they have a suite, in a turret, the light bright and strong but the curtains thick and heavily lined, so they both sleep better than they have in months.

  They have room service, because they have had enough sympathetic and curious looks to last them a lifetime, even a long one. In the year’s longest days, after slow walks around the grounds and lazy afternoons in the spa, they sit at the dining table in their turret window and eat meals that taste better than anything either of them has eaten in a long time.

  On their last evening, they are looking out over the hills, heathery and muted, dotted with sheep, the roads crawling with slow white caravans as the rest of the world goes on holiday, and even though Ailsa has been determined to keep hoping, and looking forward, now that there’s less and less future, her mind cannot help but go back. Lennox’s death is still a raw bitter edge that catches every time her failing heart beats; she knows that this is what her mother is facing. And as for her –

  ‘I’m frightened, Mum,’ she says. She didn’t realise the words were going to come out until she says them. Sometimes it seems that her heart has already resigned from her body and doesn’t bother telling her things she ought to know.

  ‘I know, hen,’ Hayley says, then, with the sound of put-aside tears in her voice, ‘me too.’

  ‘I don’t know how we can do – this.’ Ailsa isn’t sure whether she means her death, or continuing to live this way. A new heart is feeling more and more hypothetical.

  Hayley sighs, gets up from the table and opens the window, lights a cigarette. There are ‘no smoking’ signs, but the hotel seems to be turning a blind eye. ‘I suppose I just think – look at this. We’re OK now. We’ve got this view and air in our lungs, and we’ve just eaten better food than most of the people in the world will ever get to eat. Right this minute we’re fine, and that will have to do.’

  Ailsa smiles. ‘Right now, we’re fine,’ she says.

  Hayley blows smoke out of the window. ‘Tamsin says I’d make a grand Buddhist.’

  ‘You might have to give up the smoking, though. And the swearing.’

  ‘Fuck that.’

  And Ailsa almost lets the moment go, but she can’t, because at some point she might need to know the answer to the question that fills her every time she looks at her mother. ‘What will you do, Mum? If – if I don’t get a heart in time?’

  Hayley stubs out her cigarette on the stone windowsill, a slow-motion grinding. There’s the smallest of shakes through her shoulders. When she turns back towards Ailsa, there are tears in her eyes. ‘I’ll take it a minute at a time, Ailsa.’

  23 July, 2018

  ‘You’re nervous about this, aren’t you?’ Seb’s looking at her the way he does, sometimes, half scrutiny half love, and she feels more naked than when she’s naked.

  ‘Maybe. Why do you say so?’ It comes out more sharply than she intends, and she touches his arm in apology.

  ‘That’s the third time you’ve got changed this morning. That’s saying something.’

  Ailsa sighs, throws herself down on the sofa next to him. ‘It’s saying your eye’s getting better?’

  He laughs. ‘That’s more like it. But honestly, your blog isn’t cleverer than you are. And you know best.’

  ‘You sound like my mother.’ Just the thought of Hayley still hurts. Ailsa used to think it was anger, at being lied to all of those years. Maybe it was. Maybe she’s missing her. But if she thinks about that now it’ll all come apart.

  ‘Wilkie rang, while you were changing,’ Seb says. ‘Guess what?’

  ‘You’re the next James Bond? You’re doing panto?’

  He laughs. ‘Well, make those into a Venn diagram and you’ve more or less got it. I’m doing StarDance again.’

  ‘Wow. Congratulations!’ And she means it, she really does, because the only way to be here, now, is to deal with future complications later.

  ‘Thanks, BlueHeart,’ he says, and then, ‘it’s funny. When I was first offered it last year, I thought it was all my Christmases come at once. Now I’m more excited about Love’s Labour’s Lost.’

  ‘And Romeo,’ she says.

  ‘No, I’m petrified about that.’

  She has to check his face in case he’s joking, ‘Seriously? You’ve not said. You don’t seem scared.’

  ‘It’s not scared, exactly. It’s – tension. Build-up. I always get it. I used to be sick before the live shows for Wherefore Art Thou?. And StarDance. It’s OK when there isn’t a live audience. If you mess up a recording, you just go again.’

  ‘I always get nervous before the hospital. And the tango.’

  Seb pulls her closer. ‘The hospital, I can see. But the tango? Because of the show, you mean?’

  ‘Not the show,’ Ailsa says, ‘just the dancing. I’m all right once it starts. But the second before, I feel…’ She stops, shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. It seems silly. It’s only dancing. And I love it, once it’s – once it’s happening.’

  Seb squeezes her hand. ‘It’s the unknown. You think you know what’s going to happen. You’ve got the lines, the moves, whatever. But it could still all go wrong.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Ailsa leans her head in to him. It’s frightening/ lovely that he should understand her so well.

  ‘Do you want me to walk you there?’ he asks.

  She laughs. ‘Would you be able to fit on the pavement? Next to my larger-than-life curviness?’

  They’ve bee
n joking about the latest article. Seb’s right, it does get easier – and the fact that he’s here, and they are just the two of them, together, makes the spite and stupidity of yesterday’s newspaper story seem obvious. Not that it doesn’t sting. But it’s so obvious that the Seb in the press is not the Seb in her flat that she can joke about it with. And when she does, he does something like what he does now – grabs her, kisses her, says, ‘You’ve captured my sexy playboy heart, Ailsa Rae.’ She can cope with the tabloids, because what they say is just not true. ‘Seriously, though,’ he asks, ‘will you be OK?’

  ‘Yes.’ And in this moment, she knows that she will be – can be – OK. And it’s nothing to do with Apple, or having to be some kind of walking miracle all the damn time. She just knows that she’s strong enough to meet whatever it is that David brings to her life. And to keep on building the bridge with Hayley that started in Full of Beans two days ago, when she talked to Seb, and hugged Ailsa when she left. Ailsa lets her shoulders relax, and her eyes close, leaning back against him.

  Seb kisses the top of her head and says, ‘I’ve said I don’t want Fenella as a partner.’

  23 July, 2018

  David is unmistakable, because he’s her: the breadth of his forehead, the colour of his eyes. Ailsa recognises the shape of his hand as he shakes her hand, rather awkwardly. She’d wondered if she’d be overcome when she saw him, cry or rush to hug him, but actually, an awkward handshake hits the mark.

  ‘Hello,’ she says. Her voice is steadier than she thinks it will be. Her heart is too, come to think of it. This man, on the other hand – half a head taller than her, broad-shouldered, paunchy, well-dressed – looks like anxiety personified.

  ‘Ailsa.’ He says it with the emphasis on the second syllable, as though she’s a magic spell. ‘Good to meet you.’

  She’d proposed they meet at the floral clock, because everyone knows where that is, and it makes a walk the obvious thing to do. A sightseeing bus passes, and Ailsa can almost see herself and Seb on the back of the top deck. How far she’s come since then, with her job and her career plan, and getting used to her solo home. She puts her hand on her chest, as though that will stop Apple from reaching out for Hayley.