Darling Sweetheart often took her up in his plane, up over the house and up over the village. Then the cows were like breadcrumbs and Kilnarush was a toy town, a triangle of grey buildings around the Market Square. From high up, she could see that the Market Square was definitely a triangle and not a square, even though everyone called it a square and the street sign on the corner of McGettigan’s shop said square too. Her school had a flat roof, but she didn’t look at that much. Once, when she’d told Mrs O’Kane that she’d seen the school from high up in Daddy’s aeroplane, Katie Brennan and Hannah Cowen had punched and kicked her at breaktime and called her a spoiled little bitch and told everyone else in the class not to speak to her.
Whin Abbey was so big from above that it seemed like another village, with its higgledy-piggledy roof and its courtyard and barns. She could even see Mr and Mrs Crombie’s little house in the trees. Mr and Mrs Crombie were old. They were nice to her, like a granny and granda, that was if she’d had a real granny and granda. Mr Crombie worked in the fields and in the gardens. Mrs Crombie tidied the house. She said she kept it, which was funny because Darling Sweetheart had bought it for her and her mummy to live in, so how could Mrs Crombie keep it? But every time she asked about that, Mrs Crombie would laugh and promise her rhubarb crumble for tea if she would be a good girl and let her keep the house.
The Crombies grew rhubarb behind their lodge. Mr Crombie scattered ashes from his fireplace on the rhubarb plants with their big rubbery leaves. He said rhubarb liked ashes. Once when Mr Crombie let her pick some, she had broken a piece in half to see if there were ashes inside. There weren’t, but he made her promise never to put raw rhubarb in her mouth, because it was poisonous. But how could something poisonous taste so lovely with custard? And why did it like ashes? And since rhubarb couldn’t speak, how did Mr Crombie know all that? She brought a piece of Mr Crombie’s rhubarb to Darling Sweetheat, so he could make it speak, but he had said he wasn’t in the mood.
His plane had a propeller on the front and was big on the outside but very little on the inside and made an awful racket. She sat beside him on a red seat. He wore things on his ears – headphones – and he couldn’t hear her when the plane flew, even when she shouted. The first time he’d taken her up, she had been terrified and had cried until they came down again. But since then, she’d learned that when he asked her to go in the plane, that meant he wasn’t leaving, because he never took her with him when he went away. So she always made herself say yes.
When Darling Sweetheart was home, he kept the plane in the big field past the meadow. Workmen had built a red shed called a hangar and there was a floppy orange thing on a pole, a wind sock. Mr Crombie always said his most important job was to keep the grass in that field cut very short. He cut it with a blue tractor that pulled a mower, then another thing that looked like a giant roller. Annalise thought that Mr Crombie could have flattened elephants with it – if there’d been elephants at Whin Abbey.
Darling Sweetheart never let Froggy in the plane, because he said if he fell on the floor he could jam a pedal and cause a crash. So Froggy always huffed when she went up and said she could sod off because he didn’t care, but she knew he was jealous because he would wait until bedtime and then ask questions about it. He always wanted to know what she could see from up there, apart from Whin Abbey and Kilnarush – were there other places to explore?
Mummy never went in Darling Sweetheart’s plane because she said it was sodding dangerous.
She woke just as the jet landed. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep – she must be more tired than she imagined. She felt her chin, afraid she might have dribbled. Levine, who had his back to her, seemed to have stolen a nap too. When the jet stopped taxiing and the roar of the engines died, the pilot spoke over the intercom.
‘Welcome to Bristol, Miss Palatine, I hope you enjoyed your flight. As you can see, it’s considerably wetter here than in France and it’s a couple of degrees cooler too. It’s one thirty p.m. local time, so have a pleasant visit and see you for the return trip.’
Levine stood and stretched. He removed his black blazer, revealing a shirt – black, of course – and a brown leather strap across his back. He unbuckled the strap and removed a large, pendulous object from under his armpit that Annalise, after a stunned instant, recognised as a gun in a holster. The pilots took no notice as he placed the whole affair in a cabinet and locked it, pocketing the key.
‘Excuse me, what is that for?’
‘Miss Palatine?’
‘The gun?’
‘Oh, we are licensed to carry weapons in France and on this aircraft, but we didn’t plan on bein’ in Britain for another month so I gotta leave it on board until our permits come through.’
‘No, I meant why would you carry a gun in the first place?’
‘When you as famous as H.E., you get all sortsa people–’
‘Do you, though?’ she interrupted, ‘do you, really?’
‘The world is fulla terrorists, Miss Palatine.’
‘Have you ever met one?’
‘Not personally, but I seen plenty on TV.’
‘And in your boss’s movies?’
He smiled. ‘There’s a car waitin’ to take us into town, so if I could have your passport to show immigration–’
‘A car waiting for us? Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re not coming with me to see my boyfriend, surely?’
‘H.E. told me to adopt a medium-range watchin’ brief.’
‘H.E. can adopt a running bloody jump. You’re probably in much more danger in Bristol than I’ll ever be.’
‘Huh?’
‘You’re a big, tough-looking American, so absolutely everyone will want to pick a fight with you. This is England, Levine, not Beverly Hills.’
‘But–’
‘But nothing! You can drop me at the hotel, then I’ll meet you back here at the plane at midnight. And please, I need to stop at a newsagent’s on the way.’
The front-page photograph wasn’t too dreadful – she didn’t look old, tired or ugly, just surprised. But the headline shocked her silly, because the big black letters seemed to make it true: ‘EMERSON’S ENGLISH ROSE’. She showed it to Levine, who sat beside her in the back seat of the Mercedes.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘You ask me a lotta stuff, Miss Palatine.’
‘Last night – did you know those photographers were waiting?’
‘How could I have known?’ There was a sulkiness in his tone that told her he wasn’t lying.
‘Do you not think there’s something a bit odd about all this?’
‘Newspapers and magazines in the States, they usedta print all sortsa shit about H.E.’
‘Used to?’
‘Sometimes you get a lotta stuff, sometimes it goes quiet. We don’t pay much attention.’
‘What was Donna Wentworth like?’
He smiled. ‘She was before my time.’
‘I thought you said you’d been doing this job for ten years?’
‘I been with H.E. for five. Before that, I worked with other clients.’
‘Oh yeah? Anyone famous?’ He chuckled. The car stopped.
‘The Regency,’ the driver announced.
‘Look, I’ll make my own way back to the plane. Midnight, okay?’
‘Sure thing, Miss.’
‘Stop calling me Miss! Now go and enjoy yourself. If you’re stuck for something to do, get the driver to take you to the Clifton suspension bridge. It’s not far from here.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Think the Golden Gate, only a lot shorter. Or, you could try some scrumpy – Bristol is famous for it.’
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
‘Think apple juice, only a lot more fun.’ She let herself out and was gone.
‘Where to now, Sir?’ the driver asked Levine.
He took a phone from his pocket. ‘Go around the block then pull up where I can see the hotel entrance.’ He dial
led a number. ‘Hello, Miss Frost? Yeah, it’s me. Yeah, the package has just entered the hotel. Don’t you worry, I ain’t goin’ nowhere unless she does.’
She walked through reception. She noticed people looking at her and wondered if there was something wrong. Then she remembered: they recognised her. How quickly she’d grown used to the anonymity of France. Had any of them seen that stupid newspaper? She called a lift. One pinged open, empty. Good. She pressed four. The door was just about to close when a maid with a trolley abruptly pushed her way in. On the fourth floor, Annalise followed the room numbers along the quiet, carpeted corridor… four-ten, four-eleven, four-twelve… she heard a clanking noise; the maid was following her. She rounded a corner: four-eighteen. There was a ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the door.
‘Gosh.’ The maid had stopped too. ‘We seem to be looking for the same place. Do you mind?’ Annalise raised an eyebrow but stepped back to let her go first. The maid knocked.
‘Hello?’ Jimmy’s voice, faint, from within.
‘Room service!’ she announced. ‘Complimentary, from the management!’
‘Uhh… all right, come in.’ Jimmy sounded sleepy.
The maid used her swipe card to unlock the door. Feeling suddenly uneasy, Annalise followed her in. Even though it was lunch-time, the curtains were drawn and the air in the room had that muggy, sour warmth of sleeping breath. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that the king-sized bed was full of people.
‘Annalise!’ Jimmy yelped.
‘Heyyy – whassgoin’on?’ Driscoll. Driscoll was in the bed, too.
‘What time is it?’ Now a young, female voice. ‘Rachel, what fucking time is it?’
Annalise felt her soul leave her body. She walked over to the curtains, pulled a cord and filled the room with wet afternoon light. The maid suppressed a giggle.
‘Heyyy! Not cool!’ Driscoll sat up. ‘Not cool at all!’ His contrived crow’s nest of a hairstyle was even messier than usual; his eyes were slits and his nostrils red from snorting coke.
‘Rachel! What time is it?’ The voice belonged to a pale-skinned, blonde girl who propped herself up on one elbow between Driscoll and Jimmy. Jimmy whispered, ‘Fuckfuckfuck fuck…’
A muffled voice came from under the duvet. ‘How do I know what time it is? Is that breakfast?’
‘My mum’s gonna kill me! We should be at school!’
‘No, she thinks you’re staying at my house, remember?’
‘Yeah! But she’s picking me up from school!’
Driscoll put his hand on the blonde girl’s head and tried to push her under the duvet.
‘Hey! Get off me, grandad! We should be at school! We are in such deep shit!’ She exploded from under the duvet and crawled along it to where Annalise stood. She was naked apart from a bracelet made of little plastic hearts; by the elongated slightness of her body, she was no more than fifteen. Her disturbance of the duvet revealed Rachel. Rachel was a redhead, like Jimmy, and her red head lay on Jimmy’s white stomach. Driscoll scrabbled to pull the duvet up again, whilst on Jimmy’s other side, a little Asian girl with big, dark eyes sat suddenly upright and stared around like some trapped nocturnal creature.
‘Where am I?’ she asked.
‘In deep fucking shit,’ the blonde girl repeated. ‘S’cuse me.’ She scrabbled around Annalise’s feet, snatching clothes from the floor. ‘S’cuse me,’ now she addressed the maid, ‘your trolley is on my jeans.’ With a huge smile, the maid moved the trolley and the girl scurried into the bathroom. Jimmy had covered his eyes. Annalise heard blood, screaming in her ears.
‘How… How old are you?’ she asked the Asian girl.
‘Don’t answer that!’ Driscoll barked. ‘Don’t answer that, Mary!’
‘My name’s Madhuri …’ the girl whimpered. A muffled peal of laughter came from under the duvet. Jimmy jerked suddenly upright, as if reacting to pain.
‘Don’t!’ He slapped his groin area. ‘Forfucksake, not now!’
The laughter came again.
‘How old are you?’ Annalise repeated. Madhuri just stared at her, dazed.
‘Annalise …’ Jimmy began.
She shook her head. ‘How long, Jimmy?’ She could barely get the words out. ‘How long?’
Rachel sniggered from her hiding place. ‘Quite long, actually!’ Jimmy slapped the duvet again.
‘How long have you been screwing underage girls?’
Driscoll tried to look self-important.
‘We don’t need moral lectures from you, baby!’ He fumbled at the bedside cabinet, knocked over a trio of champagne glasses, then triumphantly held up a crumpled tabloid, like a piece of evidence in court. ‘EMERSON’S ENGLISH ROSE.’ A photo of her, climbing out of a car somewhere… where… in France, oh yes, where she was making a film. She felt faint. ‘I came into this room,’ Driscoll blustered, ‘to show my client this newspaper, and these girls… I mean, these women…were just leaving. I don’t know what they’re doing here!’
‘That’s not what you said to me this morning!’ The blonde girl emerged from the bathroom, now wearing clothes.
Driscoll snarled. ‘Shut up, slag!’
‘Fuck you, grandad.’ She rubbed her crotch. ‘Bloody hurt me, you did. And you tried to do me up the bum. Where’s me shoes?’
‘Sorry for interrupting,’ the maid wore a smug expression, ‘but would someone mind signing for room service?’
Annalise ran. She heard Jimmy’s voice calling after her but not his words. By the time she reached the lift, she could barely see for tears. The doors pinged open and she jabbed G. The lift dropped like her heart. The doors opened again. A big, black shape lunged in at her and grabbed her by the arm.
‘Move!’ Levine’s voice, low and rough. ‘Photographers!’ He dragged her bodily out of the lift and away from the lobby. More dark shapes closed in. A flash went off, then another. She was propelled along a corridor, through some double doors and into a busy kitchen. People stopped and gawped, but she was pulled through another door into the rain, past a group of hotel employees smoking cigarettes. Levine hauled her through a car park towards the road and, without waiting for a gap in the traffic, launched them across it to the angry blare of horns. He tore open the door of the waiting Merc and she was in.
‘Airport!’ he barked at the driver. ‘Move!’ They pulled off sharply. Thirty seconds ago, she had been standing in that room. Nothing seemed real. Levine looked through the rear window. ‘What the hell happened in there?’ he demanded. She felt like she’d been caught in an explosion. ‘Miss Palatine! What happened?’
‘I… I… I… my boyfriend was… was…’
‘Goddamn! The press arrived justa coupla minutes after you! They knew you was here!’
‘… it was disgusting…’
‘But how?’
‘… they were all in the bed…’
‘They was sTakin’ out the lobby, they even asked for you by name. But this time, I was ready…’
‘… just kids…’
‘Musta been a tip-off. It musta!’ He jabbed at his phone. ‘Yeah. Miss Frost, Levine here. I just hadda pull the package outta that hotel. The press showed up, they knew she was there!’ He listened, then, ‘I dunno how they knew, but they knew! The airport, we headin’ for the airport. Hold on, lemme ask her.’ He took the phone from his ear. ‘Miss Palatine, Miss Frost says is it okay I take you home, pronto?’
‘Home?’
‘Back to the movie. Back to France.’
‘Take me anywhere that isn’t here.’
‘Confirm,’ he told his phone, ‘we’re on our way. ETA? Say twenty hundred, French time.’ He listened for another moment. ‘Uh, Miss Palatine, Miss Frost wants to know are you all right?’ Annalise turned away. ‘Uhh… I don’t think Miss Palatine wants to talk right now. Somethin’ happened in there, I dunno what. She’s upset. No, I don’t think she’s hurt; she ain’t bleedin’, anyways. Look, I’ll call you when we land, okay? Goodbye.’ He hung up.
As th
e car raced through Bristol, she hid her face in her hands. There was a silence, then a telephone beeped. It was hers, in her bag. She pulled it out: Jimmy. She opened the car window. Rain buffeted her face. She pressed the ‘answer’ button.
‘Annalise!’ His voice – small and distant.
She tossed the handset from the car. Since they were crossing the Clifton suspension bridge, it fell three hundred feet into the mud of the River Avon.
5
By the time he sent for her, she’d stopped calling him ‘Darling Sweetheart’. In fact, she’d stopped calling him anything at all. ‘Dad’ when he phoned, but he hardly ever phoned. He wrote, sometimes every few weeks, then not for months. She’d tried referring to him as ‘David’ around her mother, because she’d thought that made her sound grown-up, but her mother had pulled a face whenever she’d mentioned his name, so she’d resorted to the implied indifference of ‘father’. Or, better still, to not mentioning him at all.
She’d never stopped loving him, with the instinctive, unconditional love that flows from a young heart to an older one. But as the years had rolled in, it had been more like being in love with a foreign penpal. His letters, when they came, had been full of promises: they would do such-and-such together, he would come and see her soon. He had dropped names, stars he had been working with, funny stuff about what they had been really like. He would promise to bring her on his next film; then, there’d be a three-month silence while he had made the film – somewhere glamorous and exciting no doubt – while she had been stuck at Whin Abbey. The extravagant gifts he’d sent her as a child – the pony, her own television and video recorder, the stacks of taped films – these had still arrived, but, every year, they became increasingly extravagant and useless. For her tenth birthday, he’d sent her an antique French cello, which, not being particularly musical, she had never learned to play. Her mother had sold it. On her thirteenth, a dealership in Dublin had delivered a white Toyota sports car to their front door. Her mother had sold that, too.
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