by Wendy Holden
Drugs again. Vanessa had not appreciated how prevalent narcotics were in the childcare business. "I can't believe it. What sort of a nanny would do that?"
Totty did not answer. But she thought of the wrap of cocaine in her handbag at this minute and her yellow eyes gleamed. It was possible, just possible, that she could speed the process along a little. Given the right opportunity. "Perhaps," she smiled, "you should show me the nanny's room. Let me see where I'll be living."
Vanessa stood up hurriedly. She was eager to seal the deal before Totty changed her mind.
Belle was triumphant. The audition had gone better than she had ever imagined it could; the director had actually looked impressed as she had parroted the few lines Niall had taught her. Then she had whipped off her dress for a grand finale. The director had looked even more impressed. He had hired her on the spot. She had yet to hear as what, exactly, but what did it matter? She'd play a dormouse if she had to. The point was she had a part in a proper play in London. Her career was saved.
Niall, too, had made an impression.
"The director was really taken with your joyous and loose interpretation of the part," Niall's agent now called to say.
"Jesus," said Niall. "I should go into auditions pissed more often. That's where I've been going wrong."
"What?"
"Oh, nothing. Thanks for letting me know," Niall yelped. "Ooof," he gasped.
"What's the matter? You sound as if you've hurt yourself."
Hardly, thought Niall, looking down at Belle, on her knees in the limo's footwell, busy about his fly zip with her wonderfully flexible tongue.
Jacintha was sitting in front of the penthouse widescreen television as Morning snored in his cot, when Belle and Niall burst in, shrieking with laughter. They were obviously drunk and had equally obviously just practically raped each other in the lift. Belle's dress was undone, leaving nothing to the imagination apart from to wonder what she would look like with more flesh and fewer implants. The man, whoever he was, meanwhile, was tugging up his fly zip. It was the final straw for Jacintha.
"I'm leaving," said Jacintha, her hands folded calmly over the silver buckle of her uniform belt. She turned on her heel and exited the room. As she packed her bags and wrote her letter of resignation, she was able to hear the noisy smacking of lips from two rooms away.
Chapter Twenty-two
"Jack Saint's a pretty tricky character," Mitch remarked to Darcy as they drove towards her meeting with the director. She looked, he thought, great. He'd advised her to wear another dress, and this one was fitted and yellow, which went well with the rather bleached landscape. She looked vivid and radiant against it, her black hair richly shining, her pale face now showing the faintest hint of rose.
"Tricky?" she murmured.
"Tricky, yeah. The one thing you musn't do is talk about the film. He hates that. He…"
"Not talk about Galaxia?"
"That's right. Talk about anything but that. He likes to get a feel for your personality, holistic casting, he calls it. Let him ask the questions. He likes to be in charge."
Darcy nodded. Only a third of her was concentrating on the meeting, which, as Mitch kept hammering into her, could change her life. She was wondering about Niall. She had called him many times now, both on his mobile and at the flat in Knightsbridge, but he had not answered.
Mixed with the sense of sickening worry she felt was an equally sickening sense of guilt, almost as if he had been there in the restaurant last night and seen her gawping at Christian Harlow. She crimsoned at the memory. Her face, neck, and chest burned with shame. What had she been thinking of?
Mitch was rattling on happily. "Yeah, holistic casting, kinda unusual, I know, but honey, a man with his track record can do what he damned well likes…"
Mitch hummed as he drove along. He felt unprecedentedly confident. The whole Darcy thing was going as well as he had hoped, possibly better. They had a great platform to build on. The showcase dinner with her at Puccini's had been a success; people had stared, and one or two of the paps had snapped her as they had left—a really good sign.
There had, of course, been the Christian Harlow incident, but there probably really wasn't any danger for Darcy from that department. Harlow was far too self-serving to try and land some obscure British actress, whatever the future for her might hold. And there was no reason to think Harlow knew anything about Darcy and Galaxia. Saint, in line with his controlling reputation, preferred to keep things under wraps until everyone was cast.
Besides, Harlow was, as everyone in town knew, currently squiring—as the euphemism went—a big A-list actress, slightly long in the tooth perhaps, but powerful and well-connected. Not someone whose bed he was likely to leave in a hurry.
No, there was nothing to worry about there, Mitch assured himself happily. Worry, at the moment, seemed a thing of the past in general. Take that incredible business with Belle. Her descent into alcoholism and self-pity in London had spectacularly reversed itself. Out of the blue had come the incredible news that not only had she succeeded in landing a part in a Shakespeare play, but she had found a new man, a rising young British actor too, not some drugged-up loser.
There were photos of Belle and the actor in the American tabloids this morning; he had skimmed them at his desk but planned to take a better look at them while Darcy met Saint. It was a whole new feeling for Mitch to see a newspaper and actually look forward to reading about Belle in it.
But in the back of the car, Darcy still fretted about Niall. Why didn't he answer her calls? Had he hurt himself? She visualised his body sprawled in the flat or knocked off the emphatically rusty, old bicycle he made a point of keeping in the glamorous entrance hall of the building, to the annoyance of many of its residents.
She wished with all her heart that she was back in London. L.A.'s glitter and glamour had conclusively faded. She'd been there, seen it, got the idea, been briefly seduced by it. Now she wanted to go home.
And to add to her other woes, she was hungry. She longed with all her heart for a bacon sandwich, the type in thick white bread that the grease soaked into, that was the speciality of certain London cafes.
"Here we are," Mitch announced, breaking into her bacon sandwich thoughts. "The beginning of the rest of your life!" he added gleefully.
"This is a house?" Darcy exclaimed. The drive they were going up led to a series of low, broad, round concrete pods painted silver and linked together with huge circular windows fronting every link. It spread across the front of the hill it was built on like some fat cartoon caterpillar, throwing a ferocious silver blaze back at the fierce L.A. sun. As they got out of the car, Darcy saw there was no garden, nothing green at all apart from a few dusty cacti and aloe vera plants on the pale, dry, dusty slopes at the side of the house. It all felt very exposed and dry and somehow unfinished.
To Darcy's surprise, her first impressions of the famous director were positive. He was casually dressed and had a neat, wiry figure that seemed to radiate suppressed energy. Shiny white hair had been brushed jauntily up from his tanned brow; he had a trim moustache and a small, pointed beard. His eyes were dark and lively beneath white brows still threaded with determined black.
Mitch billowed forward to salute the great man. "Mr. Saint!" he gasped as he narrowly avoided falling over his own ankles. "May I say what an absolute, unbelievable honour it is to meet you? I've been a fan of yours for many years, you're quite simply…"
Saint nodded briefly at him. It was clear that Mitch was not the one he was interested in. He seized Darcy in a firm handshake, looked closely into her face, ignored Mitch's continued genuflections completely, and swept her away with him into the house.
Mitch, his heart rate pounding, returned to his town car to wait. He pulled the papers on the passenger seat towards him, opened them to the articles about Belle and her new man, and prepared to enjoy himself. This was a great day for him, and he was going to savour every minute.
The room in which
Darcy sat with Jack Saint was a big, light one in the basement of the house. He had taken her down in the lift, and out they had stepped into this spacious, airy rectangle whose exterior walls were glass sliding doors leading out onto a patio with a wide view down over L.A. There it was, this mythic city, its hills studded with houses, crisscrossed by streets, rising and falling all the way to the sea. The view was misty in the morning fog and looked, Darcy thought, rather ethereal. Were she not in the fierce grip of homesickness, she might have been enchanted.
The room was dominated by a pair of big drawing desks covered in highly detailed, fantastical-looking illustrations. Large tables were covered in what looked like toys: little scenes with futuristic, sheersided, vaguely mediaeval buildings or desert-like sandy landscapes on which small human-looking figures were dwarfed by bizarre dinosaur-like monster shapes or contraptions that seemed to combine helicopters with ballistic missiles. Darcy guessed she was looking at prototype sets and characters for Galaxia, but, remembering Mitch's warning, resisted making any remark about them.
Jack Saint was opposite her in a director's chair, which was turned back to front so she could see his name on the back, white letters on black canvas. His legs lounged apart around the chair frame. He leant forward. "Enjoying L.A.?"
Darcy looked at him despairingly. His eyes, black and intent, seemed to drill into her. If she told a lie, he would know it. "No," she said.
Saint laughed at this—a Santa-like ho, she noticed, accompanied by a flash of white enamel. "Where do you like to be, then?" he asked her.
"London," Darcy said, finding it difficult to get the name out without a sob, she wanted to be there so badly.
Saint nodded. "Like acting?" he asked next.
Darcy hesitated. Acting was in her blood, in the sense that both her mother and father had done it. She had been expected to do it. Again the black eyes probed her, demanding complete frankness. "I don't really know," she answered, frowning. "Sometimes I think I'm only doing it because of my parents."
Saint did not seem overly surprised about this. His pleasant expression gave no hint of what he might be thinking. He carried on in measured tones with his questions. "You're not doing it to be famous? Rich? A celebrity?"
Darcy shook her head vehemently. "Can't think of anything I want less."
"Okay. What do you want? To do? With your life?" he asked her next. "Apart from to go home, that is," he added with a smile and a tug of his beard.
Darcy sighed. She had an idea that many people at this point would make speeches about using their art to change lives, easing the suffering of humanity and reversing climate change.
"What do you like?" Saint pressed.
Quite unexpectedly, the vision of the bacon sandwich she had longed for now came rushing back to her. "I like eating," she blurted, flushing the next second with red-hot, heart-beating shame. Of all the stupid answers.
Saint raised a black and white eyebrow and pulled his beard. "That's all," he said, rising to his feet.
Jesus, thought Mitch, examining the newspapers closely. Belle wasn't holding back in any of these pictures. She was pretty much sucking this guy's face off. He was obviously enjoying it though. And he was good-looking, which helped, and looked pretty clean, which helped even more.
…the lucky man is Graham MacDonald, 24, actor son of top Glasgow psychologist Professor Eleanor MacDonald and processed foods tycoon Sir Humphrey MacDonald. He is to act alongside Murphy—star of last years's mega-blockbuster Marie and who recently showed her compassionate side by adopting an African orphan—as she makes her much-anticipated stage debut in the experimental Upside Down Theatre's new production of Titus Andronicus in London…
"Star of last years's blockbuster Marie…showed her compassionate side by adopting an African orphan…" Hey, that was good, Mitch thought. It was straight. None of the usual spiky, snide asides. Anyone reading about Belle for the first time might actually think she was both successful and had a conscience.
As a flash of yellow caught Mitch's eye, a ripple of surprise ran through him. Darcy was out already? Here she came, down the path, the fat, silver caterpillar house shining behind her.
He glanced at the watch on his broad, hairy wrist, trying to suppress his panic. She'd been in there barely fifteen minutes.
Darcy opened the car door, shoved aside the papers, and plonked herself down on the passenger seat. "Take me back to the airport," she said in a low voice, looking straight ahead at the tinted windscreen.
"Whaaa-aat?" Mitch gasped. "What's the matter? What happened? Didn't he like you?"
"No. I don't think he did," Darcy answered quietly.
Something inside Mitch started to scream. Something outside him was screaming too. He realised it was him. He was screaming.
"Tell me," Mitch growled, breathing heavily between words. "Tell me what happened in there. What he said. What you said. Tell me."
"I told him," she began reluctantly, "that I didn't like L.A. or acting, that I didn't want to be rich and famous, but that I liked eating."
Mitch frowned. He couldn't be hearing right. Every word she spoke went into his brain like a triangular-shaped object trying to fit a round hole.
"You said you didn't like L.A.?"
She nodded.
"Or acting?"
"Yes."
"And that you didn't want to be rich or famous?" His voice was a whisper now, scraping, or so it felt, along the side of his throat as he spoke.
"But that you liked eating?"
"Mmmm."
"Oh. My. God."
For a second, everything fizzed and went black.
"Look," Darcy was saying, when his vertical hold returned. "I'm sorry, okay? But I don't want to be a film star. I want to go home to Niall. I'm really worried about him, Mitch. I need to see my boyf…"
She stopped, suddenly. She was, Mitch realised, staring at the newspapers on the car floor. He heard her gasp sharply and watched as, with terrible deliberation, she picked one of them up.
"I don't believe it," Darcy said in a cold, slow voice Mitch had never heard before, not even when she was being her chilliest and most disdainful on the telephone from London.
Slowly she put the paper back down and picked up another. She read this once faster, her breath coming short and sharp now. "It can't be…" she muttered. "It says here he's called Graham and his mother's a psychologist, but no, it's definitely him…that red hair… he was going for Titus…oh, my God."
"The fucking bastard!" Darcy yelled. Mitch wondered if he had ever seen anyone do a mad scene so well. What a loss to acting in L.A. she was going to be.
Chapter Twenty-three
Emma felt she would remember the scene as long as she lived: entering her room on a summons from Vanessa to find her employer standing there with burning eyes, a small fold of white paper on her violently outstretched hand with a scattering of white powder on it. James stood uncomfortably behind her, shifting from foot to foot, his face red and his expression a mixture of tragedy and disbelief.
"And what," Vanessa hissed, pointing at the outstretched hand with her other finger, "is this doing here?"
Emma had stared at it. "I don't know." She guessed it was drugs immediately. But what they were doing in her room she could not imagine. It was the most unexpected possible ending to the triumph that had been Hero's birthday party. She had imagined praise, a raise even. But sacking, never.
Emma was sure that James believed her when she protested that she had been set up. That the cocaine had been planted there by someone. But when Vanessa—with vicious scorn—had demanded who in the world would want to frame some obscure nanny from the north, she had been completely unable to provide an answer. There seemed no explanation whatever, and in the absence of one, she had had to accept that being fired was the only possible thing to do.
"But you must give me a reference," Emma summoned the courage to ask.
Vanessa practically exploded. "Are you joking? You've just been caught with dru
gs in your handbag."
Emma spoke with as steady a voice as she could manage. "I didn't put them there though. And one day, I'll find out who did. But until then, I need a job, and I'll need a reference to get one. I've been a good nanny, and you owe me that at least."
"Owe you? Owe you?" Vanessa blustered.
Here, finally, James stepped in. "I think we should do as she suggests, darling," he had murmured to his wife.
Vanessa rounded on him. "What? You believe her?"
