by Brigid Coady
But there was nowhere to run.
They all stood up, Louisa running past Angelique to get the door.
And then she heard his voice. Blood rushed from her head and pooled in her knees.
That voice – she’d listened to it whisper Donne in the darkest parts of the night. She had made it groan her name; she’d heard it laugh at her jokes.
‘Hi.’ And there he was.
Bloody hell, Austen Wentworth was in the same room as her. Again.
He’d always been ‘head-turning’ attractive. His presence as much as his looks had made you look at him twice, but now? Somehow he’d become honed to be ‘oxygen-depriving’ devastating.
He walked into the room and the air was sucked out as everyone took a breath.
That included Annie; she couldn’t help herself. Even if she knew that he used to pick his toenails.
She gripped the back of her chair for support.
No falling down. Not now.
She couldn’t feel her toes. Would anyone notice if she stamped her feet?
After the collective gasp that caused the vacuum, Austen stood in the doorway hunching his shoulders and then looking up through his eyebrows. Yes, there were the green eyes she’d been dreaming about for years.
Then the occupants of the room rushed towards him like a tsunami.
Annie clung to the chair, her little piece of flotsam.
Bugger, he was looking round as he shook Charlie’s hand and as he was covered in a flurry of cheek kisses by Louisa, Henrietta, and Marie.
And for the first time in eight years she was the centre of his attention.
It felt like she had stuck a knife in a toaster.
Her back straightened and goosebumps went up and down her arms.
Her heart stopped.
It was as if it had only been yesterday, seeing him looking at her. But it was also in a different lifetime.
His smile froze and slipped slightly. His brows tightened into a frown.
For Annie it was as if for that brief instant there were two Austens in the room. There was the younger less polished boyish man who’d loved her all that time ago and then this older, harder, hewn man. And then the two images clipped together, became congruent. As if the older had swallowed the younger.
Her heart started again.
It had been both a microsecond and an aeon.
Of course no one’s heart stops in reality – just like the way it was thundering in her chest didn’t mean she was having a heart attack. It was adrenaline: physiology driving psychology.
Even though there had hardly been a pause as they’d made eye contact, it had focused everyone back on her.
Great.
She wished Marie had bought less flimsy kitchen chairs. She felt as if she was about to reduce this one to kindling.
‘You remember my sister, Annie.’ Marie was actually simpering. As if she hadn’t grown up around famous people her whole life.
‘Yes, hi, Annie. Good to see you again.’ Annie. He’d never called her Annie; it was Anne or a silly name.
‘Hi, Austen.’ Her voice pushed past the obstruction in her throat. No RADA or LAMDA trained vocals from her – just a small, strangulated burst of noise.
There was a brief silence as if everyone was expecting something more.
Annie wanted to shout at them all to look away.
‘So,’ Austen said breaking the tension, ‘I didn’t want to interrupt a family breakfast. Maybe I should go?’
She wished he would, leave her be, but when he said family all she could think was that this could’ve been his family too.
She watched as Austen smiled down at Louisa and Henrietta with appreciation.
It was like her heart was a sponge in his fist and everything was being wrung out of it.
Of course, it could still be his family …
A fork clattered to the floor.
Hector started to cry.
She swooped down and picked him up, glad for his chubby body to cover the defects the T-shirt didn’t.
‘Oh, no it’s fine,’ said Charlie, all puffed up, his eyes shining with the light of a new bromance.
‘Why don’t I take you out for coffee?’ Austen said it generally, but Annie knew she wasn’t included.
‘You all go. I’ll hang on here.’ Annie buried her face in Hector’s hair. Not wanting to see the relief that was probably painted all over Austen’s face.
‘You are a doll,’ Louisa said, her smile swift and conspiratorial.
‘Thanks.’ Henrietta’s face was shining with happiness.
‘Are you sure?’ Charlie looked worried, biting his lip.
‘Of course she is,’ Marie answered for her. ‘She is the best person to stay. She had Hector all night.’
Annie couldn’t help but look up at that and almost without thinking the first person she looked to was Austen.
His lips thinned and he frowned at Marie before looking up to catch Annie watching.
Ah, that was what had been missing from this touching reunion, flaming red cheeks. Was she going to add to her indignity by spontaneously combusting?
For a brief second they looked at each other. Was that contempt or pity she thought she saw on his face?
Contempt was preferable.
Being pitied was … She looked away. Was she really pitiable?
Yeah, she was some kick-ass career woman who still couldn’t say ‘no’ to her family. She was in the exact same place where he’d left her, whilst he …
‘See you later,’ said Louisa as she grasped Austen’s hand and pulled him along with her. With various goodbyes from everyone, suddenly the kitchen was empty of all but her, Hector, and Angelique.
‘You should’ve gone,’ Angelique said, her arms crossed and looking at Annie fiercely.
‘It’s okay.’ Annie shifted Hector back into his seat. He’d lost interest in making a scene as soon as there was no audience. He’d inherited a fair set of the Elliot genes.
‘Humph,’ Angelique said and pulled a face. ‘I can look after Hector. You can still follow them.’
And she’d be like a puppy begging for attention.
‘No, it’s okay. I’ll settle Hector.’
***
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Annie cringed as Cassie shouted from her office. For such a small person she could produce a hell of a noise.
After Louisa had come back in swooning over Austen and Marie had preened about things he had supposedly said about her TV career, Annie had felt as if she was being suffocated. She thought she’d rather take her chances with Cassie than the burn in her chest, which she was realizing wasn’t heartburn from too much black coffee but regret.
Then Charlie spoke about how he and Austen were going to see a Premier League match. Annie had made her excuses and fled. Sod what Cassie would say.
It was as if she had stepped into an alternate universe where she had slept for eight years and woken up to find Austen was part of her family.
Only in this universe he wasn’t her Austen.
Annie had hoped to slink into the office and look like she had been at her desk for a while.
‘I was at Marie’s …’ she said quietly.
‘When will you tell your stupid family where to stick it? They have a housekeeper, Anne Elliot,’ Cassie interrupted as she came into Annie’s office glaring. ‘This was a big thing for you and for the agency. This wasn’t some two-bit party. This is your career. I need you to focus on this. This is the big break we need. This is all you’ve talked about for years. Years, Annie. If you can’t stand up to your family then we have a big problem. Big.’ Cassie flailed her hands around emphasizing exactly how big a problem they had.
‘Look, I’m sorry but I’m no good at those big parties. I wouldn’t have made a good impression,’ Annie lied. Because when she wasn’t around her family she could hold her own with most anyone. ‘I’ll meet the rest of the cast at the run-through next week. It will be best that way; I’ll be work
ing rather than just being a hanger-on.’ She tried to placate Cassie.
‘Jesus, Annie, when are you going to figure out that you aren’t a hanger-on?’ Cassie was standing in front of Annie’s desk, waving her hands around. Annie was worried that she would knock down the files from the shelves that were attached to the walls of the tiny office. ‘You’re stepping up and taking over as a producer on this movie. You. Not your dad, not either of your sisters, not even Lily. You. That is who Eric Cowell and Les Dalrymple have hired.
‘What will it take to get it through your thick head? I swear to God I could strangle you sometimes.’ And on that dramatic declaration, Cassie stormed out of Annie’s office; taking one step to cross the hall and enter her own office.
‘I’d be slamming my door if I had one,’ she shouted.
Annie smiled.
‘And we’re meeting the producers for drinks so don’t even think of backing out.’
Cassie was right. She needed to get with the programme. This was her job, her career. She hadn’t been hired to babysit her family, no matter what they thought. She was the producer.
***
Annie’s plain black dress wasn’t too crumpled for being in a bag overnight. She smoothed one long crease as she followed Cassie’s bouncing curls into Shoreditch House. During the trip across London, Cassie had been silent in the car Eric had sent for them.
This wasn’t good.
She needed to pull out all the stops.
Professional Anne Elliot.
‘Cassie.’ A booming North-London-accented voice reverberated round the upper floor bar, half empty in the early evening. ‘Great to see you again.’ The man it came from was only a bit taller than Cassie. Annie wasn’t sure how that amount of body could produce that volume of voice.
‘And you’re Anne Elliot.’ He shook her hand and looked her up and down. ‘You don’t look much like your sisters.’ Annie concentrated on the slight American twang in Eric’s voice rather than the words.
She counted to three.
‘I’m the changeling,’ she said with a smile.
‘She’s the one who keeps them on the straight and narrow,’ Cassie interrupted with a quick squeeze on Annie’s arm in apology. It acted like a balm on Eric’s thoughtless comparison. ‘And that makes her priceless.’
They all sank into squishy brown suede winged chairs. Music softly piped from speakers round the room.
‘Annie, I’m sorry you couldn’t meet the rest of the cast last night. But it is good we can have this talk here.’ Eric leaned forward, his feet not quite touching the ground. Annie tried not to giggle as he swung his legs, looking like a child playing at being an adult.
‘Les and I are really excited to have you on board. We’ve heard such great things about the Northanger Agency.’
The worried, heavy feeling in Annie’s chest warmed and loosened, even as she could feel herself blush at the compliment.
‘Well I mean, Cassie is also …’
‘No, I know Cassie is just as talented, but I wanted you. This is a tough job balancing the usual accountancy work with what will be my person on the ground, troubleshooting anything that needs it.
‘I’ve been asking around about you, Annie, and I like what I hear. Doesn’t take nonsense, goes the extra mile. In fact from what I can gather you have been doing a producer role on your last few productions.’
Where was the waitress? Annie needed someone to distract him from the love fest.
‘If this goes well, I have some options based in the States that could do with your sort of touch.’ Eric touched his finger to his nose and winked.
‘Thank you,’ Annie breathed, looking over to Cassie incredulously. The silent, judging Cassie of earlier was gone and replaced by a grinning, happy Cass.
‘I’ll be watching you, kid,’ Eric said and then turned to the now-hovering waitress. ‘We’ll take a bottle of champagne – my private collection.’
Was this her life now? And she’d done it all by herself, no matter who Eric didn’t think she looked like.
Would someone pinch her so she could see if she was dreaming?
After the champagne was poured and she clinked glasses with Eric and Cassie, Annie made a promise.
She was telling Dad and Immy about the house rental as soon as possible. If she wanted to show Eric what she could then she needed to put in place some ground rules with her family, and fast. Maybe by the time it got to production they would stick.
Chapter Six
House on rental listing. Tick.
Annie sat at the battered and scratched kitchen table blowing on the M&S lasagne she’d reheated, her work notebook opened to the back page. Her personal to-do list was scrawled there.
She chewed on a mouthful of food, not really tasting it.
As soon as she’d floated home from Shoreditch House, Annie had emailed Shepherd and Kellynch and the next morning got them to put the house up for rent.
That had been a week ago.
She wasn’t sure how they managed to get prospective tenants through the house for viewings without either Immy or Dad noticing. There had been one close call when the couple had been leaving with the estate agent when Dad came back from a meeting.
Annie promised she’d buy a ‘Tablet’ from the next Jehovah’s Witness who came calling as an apology for using their name in vain.
Although God couldn’t have been too upset, the fake Jehovah’s Witnesses had taken the house and the moving date was in three weeks.
Three weeks.
But they didn’t start on location for another two months.
Place to live was the second bullet point. Annie added an ‘s’ to the end of the first word. It felt almost like a bigger act of rebellion than the day she showed Dad her acceptance into university to study History, not even a drama subsid.
So, places to live, pack up the house, all while starting a new job.
Annie screwed up her face. Doable, she thought, and looked at the next bullet point.
It was underlined so heavily the pen strokes had almost torn the paper.
Tell Dad and Immy.
Now this was the real problem.
Currently Annie was going with the Lily Russell School of dealing with difficult situations: do it and ask for forgiveness afterwards. Or run away and hide.
That only worked up to the point the new tenants moved in.
Even Dad would realize that Jehovah’s Witnesses, whilst extremely dedicated to their faith, would draw the line at moving into someone’s house.
But how did she tell them?
She scraped up another piece of the lasagne from her plate. At least she’d done an inventory of the house over the weekend. Admittedly creeping in and out of her dad and Immy’s rooms when they’d been out had been somewhat underhand but needs must.
Now she had to work out what needed to go into storage, what was getting dumped, and what they would take with them. When she presented it as a fait accompli then they couldn’t back out could they?
‘It will be fine,’ she lied around her full mouth of food.
This was the start. The beginning of Annie’s fight back. She did this every day at work and was rewarded for it; she was merely making sure that she got the same from her family.
If she could stand her ground here, stand by her decisions, then maybe she could start clawing back some respect.
She shuddered.
She could do this.
She had to.
Annie moved her notebook out of the way and pulled out the spreadsheet she’d printed out at the office. It ran on for twenty pages, portrait and double-sided.
The house really did have a lot of stuff in it.
They were definitely not taking the full-length portrait of Granddad Elliot with them – that was for sure. It was going into storage. No rental place any of them moved into would be big enough for it and she wasn’t leaving it for the tenants. They had kids.
Annie could feel her shoulders tighten even though
the painting in question was a floor above her. She’d been scared of the painting when she’d been a child. Nothing like a painting of your grandfather carrying a skull and looking gloomy to give you the heebie-jeebies and a complex against powdered wigs.
But supposedly Sir Walter Elliot had been the foremost Shakespearean actor of his day and that meant he’d hired some gullible artist to paint his portrait. Full length. In costume. Family legend had it that the artist had never painted again. Dad said it was because he’d reached the pinnacle of his success, more like he’d been scarred for life.
God, Annie wanted to sell it. Whisk it away and everything it represented: the vanity and the ego of the Elliots. Why couldn’t they have fuzzy unposed photos on the walls like normal families?
But she wouldn’t sell it. That wouldn’t get respect from her family; that would be a declaration of war and she wasn’t at that point with them.
A small voice in her head added ‘Yet’.
No. She’d made a promise to Mum. Her job was to keep the family together, although maybe not geographically. And to do that meant keeping them financially solvent or die trying.
Annie put down her fork, picked up a pen, and scribbled an instruction to wrap the painting tightly next to its entry for the packers. She paused and tapped the pen on her lip. Maybe she could somehow get them to mislabel it and perhaps lose it. The warehouse the storage place used in Thurrock was massive. When she’d toured it on Monday all she’d seen were packing cases for what looked like miles. It would be hard to find.
She sighed and put down the pen. She’d never get that lucky.
Picking up her fork again, Annie found that she had finished her dinner without realizing. Should she have the second portion of lasagne? The package had been a meal for two. She could’ve bought a single portion but, well, it was never quite enough.
A flash of Louisa’s sleek figure crossed her mind. The whole of the production would be spent with people whose only spare tyre was in the boot of their car.
Annie pushed the plate from her and pulled the list closer.
The library would also have to be packed up. She dreaded having to explain that one. Suddenly the extra lasagne felt like a comforting idea. It wasn’t as if her dad read any of the books, but a library gave weight to his image that he was some kind of actor manager from another century.