by Brigid Coady
As had sending Immy and Dad away for the day.
‘It’s a little poky …’ Auntie Lil’s voice carried from the kitchen.
‘It is only a short-term let, until after production,’ Annie replied as she bent to move another armload of clothes from her suitcase to the wardrobe in the corner of the studio designated as the sleeping area.
She quickly hid the scooped-back black dress in the corner where she wouldn’t see it each day. Just because she knew she had a hard time moving on didn’t mean that she had to be hit over the head with it every day.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come live with me?’ Auntie Lil stepped carefully round the coffee table and boxes. ‘I don’t like the idea of you being on your own. You need someone to look after you.’
Annie raised an eyebrow while she knew Auntie Lil couldn’t see. More like Auntie Lil wanted company and someone to listen to her stories.
‘I’ll be in and out at odd hours,’ Annie lied. ‘I need to work out how to live on my own.’ Because she hadn’t done it before. Even at university it had been in a shared house and then straight back home. And when she was at Lily’s she’d be ‘the goddaughter’, not Annie. Whoever that was.
‘I still don’t understand how having two flats is saving money,’ Auntie Lil muttered.
Annie ignored her, and carried on shoving old band T-shirts into drawers.
‘What does William and Imogen’s flat look like?’ Auntie Lil asked.
Annie smiled at the memory of the two-bedroom flat in Clapham South.
‘It’s great – over two floors so they aren’t on top of each other but you know … it is a flat not a house.’
And it was also in completely the other direction from where Annie had moved.
‘You are doing the right thing,’ Auntie Lil said. ‘Now sit down and tell me all the gossip about Les Dalrymple. I hear that he is a little strange.’
Chapter Eight
‘I know you won’t mind sitting on the funny little stool,’ Marie said as Annie stood on the doorstep later that evening, before turning around and going back through the door into the dining room.
Annie frowned. If Marie was opening her own front door that meant she had Angelique drowning in kitchen prep work.
That meant Marie would be stressed out trying to look like this was a casual dinner that she had ‘just thrown together’. Poor Angelique.
It also meant, Annie realized as she followed her sister, that if she was sitting on the little stool her back would be completely in spasms for the rest of the night. And probably for a good portion of the next week, just in time for rehearsals to start.
Deep joy.
And how many people had been invited over for the ‘impromptu dinner’ that the silly little stool was being used? she thought.
Annie walked into the dining room. Light sparkled off the silverware and the ornate chandelier that hung above the table.
There were people crammed in every corner but all she saw was Austen.
He glowed. Everyone else in the room faded to 2D; he was technicolour 3D hyper-realism.
Whilst she … Annie looked down to see her saggy dress and battered boots. She quickly looked away when she saw that the hem was coming down at the front.
Luckily everyone’s eyes were on Austen.
Now she looked properly she realized it wasn’t as many people as she’d thought. Charlie and Marie, of course, with Louisa and Henrietta flanking Austen, two of Marie’s fellow presenters from her TV show and their husbands plus Robbie.
She was the spare woman. Annie was surprised Marie had allowed such a thing to happen at her dinner party.
The noise in the room was hitting her in the ears like boxing gloves.
It was as if everyone’s voice was a decibel louder and an octave higher. They were fairly quivering with excitement as they sat in their seats like greyhounds waiting for their leashes to slip.
Annie slid onto the dodgy stool; she was squeezed between Charlie and Robbie.
Charlie gave her a distracted smile before he went back to shouting an amusing, at least to him, tale of high finance in Austen’s direction.
Robbie didn’t even look round. He was too busy glaring at Austen and trying to grab Henrietta’s attention. Henry was staring up adoringly at Austen.
They were all talking over each other. Annie grabbed her napkin, smoothing it over her lap hoping to hide the hem. She realized that the only person other than her not talking was Austen.
But no one was ignoring him.
She watched how everyone’s head was angled to look at him; he was the centrepiece, the focal point. And they were all trying in some way to grab his attention and be the one those famous eyes alighted on.
Annie started fiddling with her fork, wondering when she’d get her starter. Everyone else was already served.
‘Tell us how you made it big in Hollywood.’
Trust Marie to manage to shout them all down, she thought uncharitably.
Yes, Annie thought. How did you make it big? And would you have made it this far if we’d been together? All those questions she had suppressed for eight years because asking them was too dangerous.
She dropped the fork and put her hand in her lap, twisting her fingers in the cloth napkin.
‘I went over about eight years ago.’ Austen didn’t need to shout to be heard. Everyone quieted down. It was a hush before the performance.
Annie looked up. How could she not? His voice was weaving its magic around her again. Pulling her in like it was yesterday and not eight years ago. But she looked down quickly, focusing on his hands that were loosely holding his knife and fork, as he gesticulated.
‘I left London having had some minor success with the RSC and wanted to try my luck in LA. I was also pissed off and heartbroken – the kind of aggressive mood that makes you reckless and want to fight the world. I’ll say this: it makes you take chances you never thought you would.’ He laughed self-deprecatingly.
Annie stared hard at his hands, watching as his fingers fluttered slightly then settled.
‘Heartbroken? I bet she regrets letting you go,’ Louisa said, fluttering her eyelashes at him.
Annie couldn’t help it; her eyes flew to Austen’s face. And for a millisecond, a whisper of time, they looked at each other.
Regret? Ha. That was an understatement.
Her heart squeezed hard. What would her life have been like if she’d followed him? Would she now be all golden and gilded like him?
Or would she have been left on the rubbish heap, slinking back to London with her tail between her legs while he became the man he was today?
She wanted to shake her head, rid herself of the questions. There was no point in ‘what ifs’. She’d had to live with her decision, was still living with it. She looked back down at his hands, his knuckles now paler as he clasped his cutlery harder.
‘I don’t know how she feels. Once I thought I did. But all I know is that I wanted to be doing things, to forget about it. She hadn’t had enough faith in us – that I did know. She had a choice, her family or me, and she picked her family.’
Annie ached to reach out and hold him. His tone was even but there was a huskiness to it that spoke to her.
Austen made another of those little half laughs. ‘I realize that it wasn’t fair for any of us to make her choose, but I was young and stupid and hurt. So I did what any self-respecting bloke does at first: I got horrendously drunk. A lot. Not that it solves anything but it blots things out for a bit.
‘But then it turned out that two of my drama school friends were also there. Harry Harville – you know him. You met him and his husband Lewis at the party. Well he also plays Ed Ferrars in our Netflix show. He dragged me out of a bar one night when I’d been on a three-day bender and told me to get it together, that I would be stuck only doing walk-on parts unless I pulled my socks up. I can’t ever thank him enough. He got me the audition for the Jack McQueen part in Ten Peaks and that, as the
y say, was that.’
Austen looked up, taking the table in with a glance; however, his eyes skated over where Annie was crouched on her tiny stool. He said he understood. That now he wouldn’t make her choose but he obviously hadn’t forgiven her. Every one of his words flayed her like a thousand tiny paper cuts; his not meeting her eyes felt as if a lemon had been squeezed over her wounds.
‘And that is the big reason I recommended him to be Wickham in this production. He deserves a big break. He and Lewis – they became my family over there. Then there was John Benwick. He’s going to be Mr Collins. We’re family. John was even going to marry Harry’s sister so that would’ve been proper family. We’re friends; we’re everything to each other.’
His hair fell over his eyes as he looked down at the place setting in front of him and smiled as if he was remembering sweet times.
‘We’ve got each other’s backs …’
There was a collective sigh exhaled from all the women. It was almost hurricane force.
God, she could cry. If he asked her the same question again now, she wasn’t sure she’d have the strength not to go with him.
He’d found friends. She was glad. Proper friends and not the fake ones that she was sure LA was full of. He had made that mistake once with her, hadn’t he?
Except she hadn’t been a fake friend to him or fake at all, she chided herself. With Austen she’d felt like her true self – the only time she wasn’t fake. What she hadn’t had was enough faith.
The silly thing was that she knew it wasn’t that she hadn’t had faith in him. She was overflowing with faith in him. Austen’s own personal cheerleading squad, the first paid-up member of his fan club: the Wentwitches.
Annie hadn’t had faith in herself.
Why had he wanted her? What did she have to offer someone like him? She still didn’t know.
She suppressed an urge to push up off the silly little stool, jab her knife in his direction, and let all of this pour out of her. If her starter arrived now she wouldn’t be able to eat it, wouldn’t be able to swallow past the words backed up in her throat.
Annie had always known he’d be successful. But she couldn’t let herself be swallowed up by yet another person. Not when she didn’t know who she was.
Annie gripped the edge of the table.
But in the eight years that had passed, had she found that out? Accountant, yes. Sister and daughter, yes. Producer, yes at last. Maybe with this job she’d work out who Annie really was.
‘As soon as Harry and John are around for rehearsals we should all get together.’ Austen grinned at Charlie.
She felt the place mat rip beneath her fingers.
Annie couldn’t help but be distracted for the rest of the dinner. It was true. Over eight years what had she learned? Nothing. Not one single thing except how to keep on allowing her family to squeeze and mould her into the gaps in their lives. She hadn’t been living; she had been merely existing.
Putting off taking action in her life.
Crap.
She could blame her family all she liked but she’d let them do this.
She was a coward.
The dinner went on and Annie’s bum got more and more numb as she sat on the stool, pain occasionally shooting its way up her back.
‘I hear you’re in Pimlico? I’d have thought you’d be in Primrose Hill, like us.’
It was Marie’s co-star, Emma Palmer. Annie wasn’t sure she’d had a proper expression since the Noughties due to the amount of cosmetic work she’d had done.
‘There is nothing wrong with Pimlico,’ Marie bristled even though Annie knew she tried to get Charlie to move on average three times a year. But the Musgroves had been in Pimlico for years and Charlie could be stubborn when he wanted to be.
Austen laughed and then looked sheepish.
‘It is a bit of a stupid reason,’ he said as he ducked his head. ‘I’m actually staying in a flat I bought a few years ago but have been renting out.’
‘That isn’t stupid,’ said Louisa.
‘The reason I bought it was.’
He rubbed his head and looked so much like the boy she had fallen in love with that Annie thought the stool had actually given in to time and gravity and become the TARDIS.
‘I … well I love this band, Feckless Rogues, right. And their first album, Regency Bucks, means … meant a lot to me. The photo for the album cover was taken at a greasy spoon on Regency Street, so a few years ago when I knew I should invest money in property I saw that there was a flat on Regency Street available. I saw it as a sign.’
He was torturing her. That was the only way she could explain it. She’d been the one to introduce him to ‘Feckless Rogues’. Playing him the Regency Bucks album as they lay in his small bed, tangled in the sheets. Annie had even bought him tickets to see them at the Borderline for his birthday that year. They had sung along at the tops of their voices, pressed together in the hot and sweaty crowd. His front against her back, his chin on her shoulder, his mouth on her neck. She shivered.
He was taking their past and wielding it like a razor, slicing pieces of her soul, shredding her.
‘That’s the band you love, isn’t it, Annie?’ Charlie said.
And for the first time that evening everyone looked at someone other than Austen.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
She pinched her leg hard as she repeated those words over and over in her mind.
‘Yeah,’ she mumbled and picked up her fork, quickly shoving food in her mouth and chewing it.
When everyone realized that they weren’t going to get anything more from her, they turned back to Austen.
‘So which is your favourite song of theirs?’ Louisa asked with a wink. ‘So I can download it.’
‘It used to be “Swipe Away” and I still have a soft spot for it but …’ He chuffed out a sad chuckle. ‘So now it’s probably “Russian Roulette” or “Shrapnel”.’
The food in Annie’s mouth turned to ash.
‘Swipe Away’ had been their song.
Austen would sing it to her in the shower, doing the swipe away action across her cheeks when he got to that part in the chorus.
She raised her napkin to her mouth and quietly got rid of her mouthful of food; she couldn’t swallow anything past the rock that seemed to be lodged in her throat.
***
‘No.’ Annie tried not to shout so that she didn’t disturb the rehearsal going on in the room beside her, but she knew it still came out louder than it should’ve done. She took it down a touch.
‘No, we paid that last week. Stop telling me that we have an invoice to pay before you’ll deliver the carriages.’
She rubbed her forehead and slumped against the wall. She was standing in the hallway outside the rehearsal room. Her phone was starting to heat up her ear and she wasn’t sure if she could keep calm for much longer.
Why were people such fuckwits?
How hard was it to do their bloody job?
‘Okay, well I’ll look into the invoice but can you confirm that you’ll be delivering the carriages next month as agreed?’
There was silence before she heard a huffed ‘fine’ and the phone being put down.
How was she supposed to do her job when Les expected her to be at rehearsals in what was a glorified church hall with no desk or space? She knocked her head back against the wall; at least the rehearsal rooms were in Kensington and around the corner from the agency’s office. It meant when everyone finished here for the day she could go and do some proper work. Even if it meant long days.
There was a sudden blast of opera as someone opened a door further down the hallway to another rehearsal room.
It was chaos.
‘Annie, Annie.’ She could hear Les calling from inside the rehearsal room.
Sighing she rolled her shoulders. Why did she want to go into production? It was as if Les needed his hand holding one minute or was pushing her away the next. It was all too confusing.
And that was the other problem; she couldn’t relax and concentrate fully because everywhere she looked there was Austen, nagging at her senses.
She’d forget for a moment and be getting on with her job then his voice would suddenly hijack her hormones. And she went from sensible focused Annie Elliot to a soupy mess who remembered being called ‘Annie-matronix’ as he’d kissed her, like it was eight years before and she could taste him on her lips.
She was dreading adding Dad and Immy into the mix during production. She’d be torn in four different ways. Her stomach turned.
How could she cut herself into all the necessary pieces to make everyone happy?
‘Here,’ she said putting her head round the door but staring at her phone screen – anything not to look directly at Austen.
She grimaced as she glanced at her phone screen and realized that it was now more covered in her tinted moisturizer than she was. She surreptitiously wiped it off on the side of her jeans.
‘Annie, I wanted to have a word about the location we’re using for Rosings Park. I’ve been going back over the photos with the location department. We need to change it,’ Les rushed out, knowing that he was about to put a dent in the budget.
What the actual … Annie stopped herself from swearing even in her head. Any soupy hormonal feelings she had drained away and hardened.
‘Les, when we spoke last week you said the locations were all settled. That is why the contracts were signed. You know we’ll have to pay a cancellation fee if we back out. We don’t have any money in the budget for that,’ Annie said. ‘Or time to redo any prep work.’
Why was Les doing this? It was as if he hadn’t directed anything before, she thought.
‘But I don’t like the crenellations on the East Tower; they look twee,’ Les whined. ‘Now if we moved it to here: look at the landscape. That amazing front step.’ Les waved his iPad in her face, the screen showing a blur of photos.