'What the hell was that all about?' Valentine turned to ask her mum, but Sarah was putting on her jacket and doing up her buttons with trembling fingers. 'I've got to go too,' she said, opening her purse and counting out the money for the drinks. 'This should cover the bill.'
'Mum! Tell me.'
'I'm sorry love, I've got to go. I'll call you tomorrow, sorry.' And with that Sarah got up and practically ran out of the bar.
'Am I in a Mike Leigh film?' Valentine asked Lauren. 'Do you have any idea what the hell they were on about? Do you think Lottie has early onset dementia from all the drinking?'
Lauren considered. 'Maybe you're fantastically rich and your mum has been keeping it from you all this time so you don't turn into Paris Hilton.' They drank another round of cocktails, continuing to speculate wildly. The events of the evening had one good effect though, as Valentine realised when she got home: she'd barely given a thought to Finn and she hadn't even checked to see if he had texted. It was a good feeling. Though inevitably it didn't last and like an addict craving her fix she logged on to Facebook. The SGF had uploaded more pictures, nauseatingly entitled The Day After Valentine's Day with my love, of the two of them on Hampstead Health – looking spectacularly loved up and photogenic and, Valentine was glad to see, cold. But wouldn't you like to know what he was up to the night before? Valentine thought. For a fleeting second she thought of emailing her, but no, that really wasn't Valentine's style. She couldn't blame the SGF. She was just in love with Finn as Valentine was. And Valentine was the other woman. She was in the wrong.
She woke up suddenly the following morning to the sound of Lauren knocking on her door and informing her that her mum was there. She got up and found Lauren making a cafetiere of coffee in the kitchen while Sarah sat at the table, looking uncharacteristically tense. Valentine gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and sat down. Her mum looked terrible, as if she hadn't slept at all; there were dark shadows under her eyes and she didn't appear to have brushed her hair before coming out. It was most unlike her.
'So is this about what Lottie said last night?' Valentine asked.
'Lauren, could you spare a cigarette?' Sarah asked, stunning both Lauren and Valentine.
'Mum! You don't bloody smoke!' Valentine exclaimed in outrage. She couldn't have been more surprised if her mum had demanded a line of coke, she was so fervently anti-smoking. It had been the only bone of contention between her mum and Chris, who couldn't do without his roll-ups.
'I need something and it's too early to have a drink.'
Lauren expertly made a roll-up for Sarah and lit the cigarette for her, while Valentine looked on, thinking that she was having some kind of hallucination. Sarah inhaled and spent the next few minutes choking.
'See, it's not big or clever, is it?' Valentine said sarcastically, while Sarah shot her a filthy look and carried on trying to inhale.
'I could quite enjoy this,' Sarah spluttered.
'Well you're not going to get the chance; this is your first and last cigarette, young lady!' Valentine declared, mimicking her mum's exact words when she had caught her having a fag while leaning precariously out of her bedroom window, aged fourteen.
Sarah made a few more attempts to smoke, then reluctantly handed the cigarette back to Lauren, who tactfully said, 'Right, I'll leave you guys to it. I've got a casting.'
Suddenly Valentine felt apprehensive, she clasped her cup of coffee for comfort. What if it was something really awful, like her mum had cancer? She could even feel her eyes filling with tears at the prospect. 'So what's this big thing you have to tell me, Mum?' she asked tentatively. 'You're not ill, are you?'
Sarah shook her head, 'No, no! It's nothing like that. I'm sorry, Valentine, maybe Lottie is right and I should have told you before. I honestly thought I was doing this for the best.'
'Mum, please just tell me!'
Sarah took a deep breath and said quickly, 'OK then, there is no easy way of breaking this to you. This is going to be a real shock.'
She hesitated.
'Mum!'
'Chris wasn't your father.'
'What?' Valentine exclaimed, her mind scrambling to make sense. 'I don't understand.' She suddenly longed for a cigarette herself. She really was in a Mike Leigh film. Either that or Mamma Mia. But her mum didn't look as if she was about to burst into an Abba song – she definitely had more of an anxious Brenda Blethyn expression than a I'm-still-hot-and-I'm-nearly-sixty Meryl Streep look.
'Your father was someone I met before Chris. We had a fling and I fell pregnant with you.'
Valentine was about to say something sarcastic about contraceptives, remembering only too well her mum's lectures on the subject when she was a teenager, but Sarah's serious expression stopped her. 'I was only nineteen but I knew I wanted to keep you. He – your father – moved away before I could tell him. When you were a year and a half I met Chris, fell in love with him and the rest you know.'
Did she? Valentine was reeling from the secret her mum had kept from her for all these years.
'So who's my father then?' Valentine asked. She suddenly felt very wobbly. She thought she knew everything about her background and now it appeared she didn't. Her mum clasped her hands together as if she was praying before she replied. 'He's Piers Hunter, the film director.'
Valentine let out a hysterical laugh; the news just seemed too incredible. Piers Hunter was one of Hollywood's most successful film directors. He'd made a string of blockbusters which had grossed hundreds of millions at the box office. 'Mum! That is just insane! Are you feeling OK?' Oh God, perhaps her mum was going mad – the stress of coping with Chris's death and Valentine's brother Matt's recent drug conviction.
'I met him through Lottie, when he was directing a play she was in. It was purely a physical attraction, to be honest. I knew there wasn't going to be any future in it, but he was very good looking and charming. Our fling or whatever only lasted a couple of weeks.'
'I just don't understand why you didn't tell me before,' Valentine said. It seemed very out of character for her mum not to be completely honest.
Sarah fiddled with the sleeve of her jumper, clearly not finding this conversation at all easy. 'You were just a baby when I married Chris; he was to all intents and purposes your dad. He was the one who brought you up, who loved you like his own.'
'So he – Piers – knows about me then?' Valentine asked slowly, trying to piece together the jigsaw of her life, which suddenly felt wildly mixed up.
'I don't know. Chris thought that we should tell him about you so when you were five, I wrote him a letter, but heard nothing, but I wrote again when you were ten, then fifteen, and finally when you were eighteen, but there was no reply. I suppose I took his silence as his answer; that actually he didn't want to know you. Don't be too angry with me, V.'
'I'm not angry, Mum,' Valentine said, getting up and hunting down Lauren's Rizlas and tobacco and quickly rolling herself a cigarette. This definitely counted as an emergency. 'Just completely and utterly shell-shocked.' She lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. 'Does Matt know?'
Sarah shook her head, 'Of course not!'
'So now I've got a father I never knew and my brother is my half-brother and the man I thought was my dad wasn't.' She felt on the verge of hysteria, but then looked at her watch and sighed. She desperately needed time to take in the news and work out her feelings, but in half an hour her first rehearsal started; she couldn't be late.
She felt in a daze all the way to the theatre. She had never even suspected that Chris might not be her real dad. It was like being told that after all the world was square. True, she and Chris had absolutely nothing in common. He had never understood her driving ambition to be an actress and at times that had been difficult, but that wasn't such an unusual scenario between father and daughter. And in all other respects he'd been a great dad, easy going and warm. Valentine had been devastated when he had died three years ago from a heart attack. And now she had a famous dad. A famous dad who ap
parently didn't want to know. Suddenly she understood exactly why her mum hadn't wanted to tell her, as an insidious feeling of rejection washed over her. She tried to summon Lauren's core of steel, but found herself silently crying. First Finn had rejected her and then she'd found out that her real dad didn't want her either. She was so lost in her thoughts that she completely missed her stop. She ended up having to run to the theatre, late again.
4
Fairy Queen
She walked into the theatre to discover the actors sitting in a circle on the floor with Vince standing up in the middle as if to emphasise his superior status. Shit! She was hardly going to be able to creep in unobserved. She hesitated at the doorway. Vince was in full flow. Suddenly he noticed her. 'Ah, Titania! We were wondering what had happened to you.'
'I was drugged by a fairy and then fell in love with a donkey; you know, the usual scenario,' Valentine said, walking towards the circle, aware of twenty pairs of eyes on her and feeling like a naughty schoolgirl being ticked off. Vince didn't crack his face.
'Sorry, the bus was late,' she mumbled, sitting down next to an actress called Kitty, whom she'd worked with before. She could hardly give the real reason: sorry, I've just found out that my real dad is an internationally famous film director. Emotionally I'm a bit shaken up right now.
'Well, if you could try to be on time, Valentine,' Vince said a little tersely. 'The rehearsal period is tight, with just four weeks.' It was only to be expected. It was very rare for companies to have a longer rehearsal period, especially in off-West End productions where the actors were getting paid a pittance.
'Sorry,' Valentine repeated, and looking up saw Jack sitting opposite her, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He grinned broadly when he caught her eye. Suddenly she remembered the text he'd sent and the kiss that had led to the text. She was surprised how disconcerted she felt. Get a grip, woman! It was just a kiss in an improvisation!
'Anyway, now we finally have our Titania we can do the introductions,' Vince continued. 'You all know of course that I'm Vince Powell-Lancaster.' Or VPL, Valentine thought and fought the urge to giggle. 'So now over to you. It's crucial that we bond quickly as a company given that the play is going to be pushing the boundaries and contain scenes of nudity.' Valentine noted that none of the cast looked thrilled by that last comment; she obviously wasn't alone in dreading it. 'So can we go round the circle, tell us your role and three significant things about yourself.'
'Cringe alert,' Kitty muttered.
'So who wants to start?' Vince demanded. There was a pause, during which Valentine lowered her eyes and made a thorough investigation of her shoe; please don't let it be her! She hated doing this kind of thing.
'OK, I'll go first.' It was Jack. Valentine looked up. 'I'm Jack Hart,' he said confidently. 'I'm playing Bottom. I'm Gemini. I hate bullies and my favourite film is The English Patient.'
Valentine almost did a double take; that was her all-time favourite film. She had been bitterly disappointed when Finn had told her it was one of the most boring films he had ever seen. She looked at Jack with a new feeling of respect and again he caught her eye and smiled. He really was very good-looking. Though possibly he was too testosterone-charged for Valentine, who liked pretty boys, and a little too hairy judging from the chest hair visible from the v of his black shirt. She had one of those repulsion/attraction moments as she tried to imagine the extent of the body hair. Would he, horror of horrors, have a hairy back? Like a beast? Like a sexy beast, it had to be admitted. Finn had hardly any hair on his chest. In fact Valentine sometimes worried that she was hairier than he was and a phone call from him inviting her over would always trigger a frantic deforestation of body hair by razor, which was frankly annoying as she preferred to wax.
Sexy, hairy Jack had broken the ice for everyone and they all followed suit, giving their star sign, a pet hate and their favourite film. Vince, or VPL as he would for ever now be known to Valentine, probably wanted them to say far more meaningful things – like when I read Chekhov my life changed and the Stanislavsky acting method is the only one to follow blah blah blah, but he couldn't expect to get trust right away. Valentine tried to work out what the actors were going to be like from their comments – Toby, in his mid-thirties, was playing Theseus the duke and Oberon, and sounded a sweetie. He disliked liquorice and his favourite film was Some Like It Hot; Alexander, (or Xander as he wanted to be called) the actor playing Demetrius, one of the young lovers, sounded a bit of a tosser. He hated the congestion charge and his favourite film was Top Gun. Would he turn out to be the wanker in the cast? Every company had one; it was practically the law and was usually someone with a super-sized ego who thought they were a much better actor than they really were. Xander, Valentine thought, it could be you . . . Or then again it could be Emily, the ravishingly pretty girl sitting next to Jack. She was playing Helena, one of the leads, and was straight out of Oxford; she hadn't bothered with drama school. Valentine suddenly realised why she looked familiar; she was the daughter of Tilly Wilson, a very successful actress who was in practically every single costume drama on the BBC. Doubtless Emily would not be doing off-West End for long with those connections. On top of that she sounded way too pretentious: her favourite film was Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (not exactly a barrel of laughs); Kitty, who was playing Hermia, hated Starbucks and her favourite film was Pulp Fiction – she even had the same stylish black bob as Uma Thurman's character, but hopefully not the same heroin addiction; Rufus, a boyishly good looking black actor whom Valentine had met at a very unfortunate casting for a music video, which gave both of them carpet burns – enough said – hated four-by-fours and his favourite film was Reservoir Dogs. He and Kitty were bound to get along.
And that left Valentine. 'I'm Valentine, I'm Aquarius,' she hesitated, trying to think what to say next. She could hardly say that she hated red roses and Italian food – she would sound like a total mentalist. 'I hate paying bills and my favourite film . . .' – another hesitation, 'I'm really not copying you Jack, but it would have to be The English Patient.'
'It really is,' Kitty put in. 'She's watched it over twenty times, haven't you?'
Now she really did sound like a mentalist. She caught Jack's eye and he smiled at her again. Cue another attraction/repulsion moment.
More input from Vince followed, inviting contributions from the actors, but only every now and then. Vince liked the sound of his own voice. A lot. Valentine still wasn't wild about Vince's vision of the wood as a giant nightclub and the fairies, herself included, as decadent, pleasure-seeking nymphos. But Shakespeare was such a genius that even if directors like Vince did go off on one, the language and drama always shone through. Well, that was the thought she would hang on to, she told herself. And every now and then when Valentine found herself looking in Jack's direction, he would grin conspiratorially or roll his eyes if Vince was sounding particularly wanky – which was quite frequently. Valentine arched her eyebrow back in return, a gesture she was very proud of having perfected. She decided that she knew exactly the kind of man Jack was. There was always an actor like him in a company as well as 'the wanker' – a charming good-looker whom everyone lusted after. Well, good luck to him and to the other women in the cast – especially Emily, who could barely drag her eyes away from him, and indeed to the men – Toby seemed pretty smitten also. Jack was not Valentine's type and that was that. She was here to work and she needed the part to go well. She was not going to be distracted by a man, however gorgeous, even if he did love her all-time favourite film and had liked the way she kissed.
At one they broke for lunch, to Valentine's relief, as she was freezing and had a numb bum from sitting on the floor. Everyone headed off to the nearest pub, of the traditional seen-better-days variety. Valentine found herself next to Jack. He clearly did not believe in small talk. 'So did your boyfriend take you out on a romantic Valentine/birthday dinner?' A question guaranteed to warm Valentine's heart – not.
'No,' sh
e mumbled, 'I haven't got a boyfriend.' Just an ex who calls me for sex, whom I can't stop loving. 'What about your girlfriend?' she asked, wanting to deflect his attention. 'Nope,' he shook his head emphatically. 'Don't have one. So did you get my text?' He looked at her, his deep brown eyes serious, searching and very lovely she had to admit. 'I meant what I said.'
'Meant what?' Valentine asked, deciding for once in her life to play it cool. 'Oh, the kiss! I'd completely forgotten to be honest.'
A sceptical look from Jack, 'Well I'm glad you got the part, even if you seem to have selective amnesia. I just hope you're OK at learning your lines.'
'Ha fucking ha,' Valentine shot back. 'And I'm looking forward to seeing you in a donkey mask. And by the look of the hairs on your chest . . .' she reached out and peaked inside Jack's shirt, which was very forward but she couldn't resist being cheeky, 'they could always be used to make the donkey fur, given that the costume budget is bound to be tiny.'
'What's the matter with you, Valentine? Never seen a real man before?' Jack asked, doing up one of the buttons on his shirt and laughing at her. 'I didn't have you down as batting for the other side.'
Valentine curled her lip at the expression. 'Oh please, what public school did you go to?'
Jack shook his head. 'Didn't. And anyway you should be gentle with me, sweet Titania; this is only my second role out of drama school. I may have seemed all cocky last week but actually I was shitting it.'
'I'd never have known,' she replied slightly grudgingly, remembering how he had oozed, yes bloody oozed confidence and remembering her own dishevelled entrance. 'So how come you're only just out of drama school, given that you're no spring chicken?' She was aware that she was doing that thing of being rude to someone when actually you quite like them, but was enjoying herself too much to stop.
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