Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle

by Cathy Kelly

Megan wondered if there was an actual Titania? The motherly woman who ran the place was called Rae, so perhaps she’d just liked the name.

  Megan had watched Rae a few times when she’d been there and it was obvious why the place was such a success with her running it. She appeared to know everyone, and had a smile and a word for them all. It wasn’t like a coffee shop: it was like being welcomed into someone’s house.

  Megan had seen Patsy from the hair salon in there too. Patsy’s hair was a darker, more vibrant red this week. She had a way of nodding hello that said she’d totally understand if you wanted to be alone, but she was there, if you felt like talking.

  Rae and Patsy weren’t there today, but the place was jammed with the lunchtime crowd. Megan kept her baseball hat low on her head, and snagged a two-seater window table when a couple of people got up to leave.

  She put their dishes on one side of the small table, and settled herself on the other side.

  Conversations flowed all around her.

  ‘…She’s useless around the office. Can’t type for peanuts because she has gel nails. The filing system’s shot to hell, and when the boss comes back from his holidays, who’s going to be to blame? Not her, oh no. She’ll say it’s all my fault…’

  ‘…three stone. Imagine losing that much weight! They deliver food to your door and you can only eat that. It’s expensive, she told me, but it’s worth it…’

  ‘…I don’t know what to buy him. Would cufflinks be special enough? I want it to be special…’

  The gentle ebb and flow of conversation was interrupted by a woman’s voice: ‘Do you mind if I sit here? There’s nowhere else.’

  A tall woman with a cloud of beautiful dark brown hair stood at the other seat. She was muffled up in a big coat and held a tray bearing a toasted sandwich, a frothy coffee and one of Titania’s enormous lemon-and-poppyseed muffins.

  In London, Megan would have said no. Here, things were different.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and began to move the previous occupants’ dishes into the middle of the table.

  ‘Normally, I wouldn’t interrupt, but I can’t stand at the counter. I need to sit. I’ve just had flu,’ the woman explained. ‘It’s OK,’ she added quickly, ‘I’m not toxic any more. I met the doctor at the counter and he said not to cough my guts up on to anyone, but I should be fine. I love GPs, don’t you? They’re so laid back. Unless your leg is hanging off, they tell you to take an aspirin and call in the morning. Wouldn’t you love to be that relaxed?’

  ‘Er…yeah,’ said Megan.

  She’d thought she was giving a seat to another solitary diner. It appeared she’d said yes to a companion.

  The woman wriggled out of her ginormous coat. She was late thirties, Megan reckoned, and from her clothes to her unpainted nails, was clearly the very opposite of high maintenance. Even though her round face was shiny and make-up free, there was a wonderful vitality to her. And she had such smiling brown eyes.

  Megan used to be impressed by high-achieving thinness and Botox undetectable to all but the most knowing eye. Nowadays, she found she liked people who smiled at her without recognition.

  ‘You’re probably relaxed anyhow,’ the woman went on, unloading her tray. ‘Young people are. My sister’s always telling me that my generation are going to drop dead with clogged arteries by the time we’re fifty. It’s all the worry, all the stress.’

  She sliced open her sandwich and gazed at it happily.

  ‘Buddhism’s very good for stress, they say. I’ve always liked the sound of Buddhism,’ Connie went on. ‘But there’s a lot of work to it. If only you could get it inserted or something. A painless operation and you’d wake up with inner peace and the ability to remember a mantra.’

  Megan laughed.

  Connie bit into her sandwich and moaned in pleasure. ‘Bliss, I love these.’

  She was glad she’d chosen to sit here. She’d seen the pretty dark-haired girl walking those dogs and the poor thing always looked so lonely. Besides, Connie hadn’t felt up to talking for three days, and now she wanted human company.

  There was silence as Connie ate and Megan decided it would seem rude if she now stared out the window again. The conversational tennis ball was in her court. She’d almost forgotten how to do idle chitchat.

  ‘Do you live around here?’ she asked finally.

  ‘Across the square,’ Connie said. ‘With my sister, in the first-floor flat of that pale green house.’

  Megan peered through the trees. ‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘I live over there with my aunt. The redbrick one on the end. I’m staying with her for a while,’ she added.

  ‘The chiropodist,’ exclaimed Connie delightedly. ‘I’d love to see her professionally, but my feet are terrible. You’d need an industrial sander to get close to them and I’d be so embarrassed. It’s like pedicures. I’ve never had one.’

  ‘Yeah,’ nodded Megan, who’d had pedicures in some of the world’s most glamorous spas and had never worried for so much as a second as to the state of her toes.

  ‘You’re not a chiropodist too, are you? I didn’t mean that you’d use industrial sanders, it’s just that, for hard skin…’

  Megan shook her head. ‘Lord, no. I’m not a chiropodist. Can’t stand feet.’

  ‘I had someone massage my feet a few times,’ Connie said thoughtfully. Her eyes glazed over and Megan could swear she saw tears appearing.

  Thinking of Keith massaging her feet always made Connie think of pregnant women. ‘Put your feet up, love,’ the prospective daddy would say, gently massaging his pregnant partner’s feet. The idea always made her cry. She even hated looking at foot spas.

  ‘Goodness, that old flu makes you weepy at the oddest things,’ Connie said brightly.

  But Megan, who never normally noticed other people’s pain, had the strangest sense of seeing through the fake chirpiness. Suddenly, she felt a sense of kinship with this woman. She’d been hurt too. The man who’d massaged her feet was in the past, there was no doubt about it. Megan wasn’t foolish to have had her heart broken: it happened to other women too.

  In her old life, Megan would have ignored the glint of tears on another woman. In her experience, other women generally ignored her tears. But that was the old life. The old Megan.

  Impulsively, she reached out a hand. ‘I’m Megan Flynn,’ she said.

  ‘Connie O’Callaghan,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t know what came over me. Must be the flu,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with her napkin. ‘It was years ago. The feet-massaging thing.’

  ‘I’m not sure that time matters much when your heart is broken,’ Megan reflected.

  ‘Yes!’ said Connie. ‘You’re right. Nobody else agrees with me. They all think there’s a statute of limitations on love, but there isn’t.’

  ‘How long ago was it?’ Megan asked cautiously, still not confident in her role as female friend.

  ‘A long time ago,’ Connie said. ‘Longer than I care to think about. He’s with someone else now. We share a couple of friends, so I get to hear all about him. I’m beginning to think that’s a mistake,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘How about your guy? Do you still know what he’s up to?’

  Connie had no idea who she was, Megan thought happily. What a relief. ‘He’s gone off someplace,’ she said. ‘I’m not really sure where.’

  Megan thought of the newspaper articles which would doubtless tell her where Rob was supposed to be hiding out. Being a superstar meant people offered you remote holiday islands when you needed to get away and the photographers had to hire boats and use telephoto lenses to get any shots at all.

  ‘We worked together,’ she added, ‘and he was married.’

  She waited for Connie to recoil.

  But Connie merely gave her a rueful smile.

  ‘Don’t tell me: he was your boss, his wife didn’t understand him and if only he could start again with beautiful you, life would be fabulous?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Alt
hough there had been nothing remotely funny about any of it, suddenly Megan saw the humorous side. She’d thought it was so different with her and Rob, except it wasn’t different at all. Connie had summed it up perfectly.

  Megan had felt the familiar pre-film anxiety as she’d packed her suitcases in her small Notting Hill flat to head off to location. She’d just bought the flat. Carole had told her it was a good investment, even though it had taken all her money, a fact which scared her. Small UK movies didn’t pay very well and despite Carole’s assurances that she’d start making decent money once Warrior Queen came out, Megan still wasn’t entirely convinced. They’d been broke her whole childhood, it would take time to get over that.

  She loved the flat, though. It was in an old house, a two-bedroomed flat with high ceilings and a tiny south-facing balcony off the kitchen, where Megan liked to sit outside with coffee. She hadn’t much furniture yet, but she’d had great fun choosing a complicated coffee machine that sat gleaming in her kitchen.

  The one thing she did have lots of were clothes, and packing was difficult. Even though Megan knew she’d need warm clothing to layer over her medieval costumes between takes, she still couldn’t resist putting in some pretty dresses and her current favourite outfit, a pair of pale skinny jeans and a long cashmere cardigan that she wore over a pale pink sequined camisole that made her look about nineteen instead of twenty-six.

  In the peculiar world of filmmaking, the first scenes were on-location ones in a windswept Romanian castle, scenes from the middle of the movie where the princess, Megan, fell in love with her new father-in-law, Rob. The director, Sven, clearly wanted to mix things up by throwing his cast into the hardest scenes first. It was a neat trick to give the film momentum, another plus when location shooting was so expensive and time was money.

  ‘From nought to sixty in a few minutes,’ Megan said on the phone to Pippa. She was standing outside her trailer, huddled up in a down jacket and smoking a last cigarette. Her hair was tied up painfully and she wore a plaited wig as part of her Roman princess garb. It all felt uncomfortable.

  ‘Think of paying off the flat,’ Pippa said comfortingly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Megan, looking down at her hand and realising that it was shaking. She’d had too many cigarettes and too many coffees. No wonder she was shaking. Inside her trailer, Megan gargled with mouthwash to get the nicotine off her breath. Rob didn’t appear to smoke and she was going to have to kiss him, after all. This was a crazy job. Where else did you have to lie on top of and snog the face off a national icon when you’d only met them three days before?

  Rob had been very nice, albeit a bit distant, and polite. So far on set, he’d barely had anything to do: a scene in the castle’s draughty hall that shook when fierce winds rippled down the Carpathian mountains. There had been none of the charisma of the true movie star who could switch on the charm and light up everything. Megan knew he could do it, she’d seen his King Lear at the National Theatre. She wondered if he was here to pay a tax bill, ‘phoning in’ the performance, as some critics described actors who took roles they didn’t care about and might as well not have been there for all the effort they put into it.

  A knock on her trailer told her it was time. Megan breathed deeply.

  She was scared. Her previous acting work had been with people her own age, and her own experience. It had been a giant lark. This was different.

  Perhaps some actors got paid vast sums of money because it was one of the few jobs where you had to be willing to relinquish self totally and do whatever the director demanded. It was like being taken over by aliens: becoming something or someone entirely different. After ten years in the business, since the age of sixteen, she understood totally why so many performers ended up in rehab. Opening up your soul to vitalise a performance was agonising work. When the show was over, and the gaping hole was still open, it was all too tempting to numb it with alcohol, drugs or sex.

  ‘Hi,’ said the national treasure when they met on set.

  ‘Hi,’ said Megan nervously. Use the nerves, her acting coach would have said. Today, the nerves refused to be used and danced merrily inside her, making her feel nauseous. It was hard to look luminous and beautiful when you thought you might throw up at any moment. She’d gone over this scene with the director, talking about what he wanted. She’d have loved to have been able to do the same with Rob, but icons did not show up for read-throughs and didn’t give out their phone numbers for long talks. Not like the cast on her last film. They’d all become pals. Rob Hartnell was not.

  Unlike an astonishing number of big stars who were a disappointment in the flesh, he was tall, rangy, still clearly very fit and still unreasonably gorgeous for a man thirty years her senior. In heavy velvets and brocades, he was regal and golden, his famous hair still rich brown despite sprinklings of grey, his blue eyes undimmed, and his face – untouched by surgeon’s scalpel – though craggy with age, was still redolent of his youthful beauty. He didn’t speak as they waited through the interminable last-minute lighting and camera adjustments. A method man? she wondered. But no, if he was method, he’d have been storming around, eyes blazing because his character was a fierce monarch who specialised in wars. He was not the sort of king who would die peacefully in his bed but one who would perish on the battlefield, fighting to the last.

  As yet another angle was worked out and the long wait continued, Megan sat on her chair and wished she’d learned to knit like so many actresses did. Perhaps she should have tried embroidery; that would have helped her stay in character, perhaps. Did Roman princesses do needlework? She focused her mind. She was a feisty woman meeting the first man she couldn’t control…It didn’t work. She still felt like a very young actress about to play the most important role of her career with an experienced actor, someone who’d been in the theatre, someone who probably hated working with naïve youngsters.

  ‘We’re ready,’ said a voice.

  Sven the director nodded at her.

  Megan stood on her mark, trying to think herself into being a feisty foreign princess alone for the first time with the man who’d had her kidnapped in the hope that by marrying her off to his middle son he could forge an alliance between the two kingdoms.

  She knew her character, had familiarised herself with the look and feel of her, and yet here, on the set, the character had fled. Rob still didn’t even look at her. This was going to be hell, she thought.

  And then, in a flash, Rob was gone and in his place was King Varl, all-powerful, controlling, looking at her with hungry interest. Megan had no idea how he’d done it, but he was someone else, he was the king. Something in her responded but it wasn’t an actor’s response. She felt her legs tremble under the scratchy heavy gown. She stammered out her lines, feeling herself actually blushing as he stared at her. Some purely intellectual part of her brain knew this was all good, powerful stuff. The camera would love it, Sven would wet himself with delight. And the instinctive part of her didn’t really care how good her performance was, all she cared about was having this man’s eyes on her, caressing her, telling her with his eyes what he was going to do with his hands later.

  He had to reach out and touch her cheek, half paternal, half something else entirely. Megan leaned into his wrist, closed her eyes, although that wasn’t how she’d planned to do it. His palm was cool and she wanted nothing more than to have it slip down and nestle against her breast.

  Afterwards, they walked off set together in the direction of their trailers. People handed them anoraks and Megan reached into her pocket for her cigarettes. She lit up as she walked, utterly conscious of Rob nearby, walking with his people who were all chattering to him about phone calls and how brilliant he’d been in the scene.

  ‘Can I have one?’ he said, and Megan turned around, wondering if he was talking to her.

  Someone in his entourage offered a pack of cigarettes, but Rob ignored it, looking pointedly at Megan.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, passing over her packet.<
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  They stopped outside his trailer and she watched him pull the cigarette out, then she tried to hold her hand steady as she flicked on her little silver lighter. It shook and the flame went out.

  Rob covered her hand with his and flicked the lighter into life. Megan inhaled swiftly at his touch.

  Just as quickly, he removed his hand and took a long draw on the cigarette.

  ‘The scene went well,’ he said, in a very normal voice. ‘We should talk about it, how we go forward. Sven would love us to get this right.’

  He waved his entourage away with a hand. ‘I’ll smoke this outside,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to stink up the trailer. Else you’ll all want to smoke inside.’

  They laughed politely.

  ‘Mike, can you come back in fifteen and we can go through the messages?’ This to his assistant, a short guy in glasses.

  Everyone wandered off.

  Megan could barely smoke, she was shaking so much.

  ‘What just happened back there?’ she said suddenly. Had she imagined it?

  Rob looked down at his cigarette, nearly half-smoked, then threw it on the ground impatiently. ‘I haven’t smoked for fifteen years,’ he said. ‘Fifteen years. Katharine would kill me if she saw it.’

  Megan nodded calmly but inside, she was falling apart. She’d made a mistake. A huge one. He’d been acting, not feeling. It hadn’t been real. When he mentioned his wife, that was the hint. What an idiot she’d been to mistake acting for reality.

  ‘You want to come in?’ He held open the door of his trailer.

  ‘Sure.’ She stepped inside, feeling embarrassed, waiting for him to let her down gently and explain that this often happened. Perhaps tell her exactly how often it had happened, offer a litany of other young actresses who’d fallen for him and had mistaken acting for real life. How to apologise for that?

  ‘I just want to say, Rob–’ she said, as he shut the door.

  She got no further.

  He pulled her close, as close as they’d been earlier that day. Megan felt the exact same shiver.