‘That’s the one! Click on that one to make it larger so we can see you as well, oh my God, Jayne, this is unbelievable!’ The picture zoomed out and it showed a grinning Will flanked by the picture-perfect husband and wife. The photo ended at the actress, her right arm out of shot.
‘Click on another one, you’re not in that one. Look, there are loads of variations of that picture. I’m looking slightly away in that one – what about that one?’ Jayne clicked through the picture gallery, seeing more than fifty slightly different versions of the same pose. In one the musician was obviously talking, another the actress had dipped her head slightly. Will had thrown his head back laughing in another.
The only thing they all had in common was that Jayne had been cut out of all of them.
She’d only moved from the bed once in over two hours, and that was just to get the iPad charger and plug it into the socket where her bedside lamp usually went. She was like a woman possessed, tapping and flicking and scrolling and uncovering this life of Will’s that neither of them really knew existed. Of course she knew that his YouTube videos had been watched millions of times, and it was the success of that which had led to his television career taking off, but she had never really thought beyond that. Now she realised how utterly naïve she’d been not to grasp that simmering underneath the surface was this ever-expanding online presence.
The internet had a life of its own, and if you existed in a technology-less bubble, like she usually did, you would have no idea what was smouldering all over it. She was part of the generation that had snuck in just before every activity demanded a computer to help you do it. Handwriting essays in college, visiting the library and using the Dewey decimal system to locate the right book were all second nature to her – most of the kids she taught now wouldn’t know how to find the actual library, let alone be able to pinpoint the appropriate book.
She could whizz up a document in Word, do an Excel spreadsheet if her life depended on it, although she couldn’t imagine any situations where that would be the case, and used the internet to read The Telegraph, check emails, occasionally Facebook and to find flights and cheap holidays. To suddenly discover that Will, her Will, occupied a fairly substantial chunk of the web was confusing, disturbing and downright weird.
The internet was not a tangible thing, they had no control over it, and no input in it either. She always knew when he was appearing in a magazine because he would say to her, ‘Today I’m doing an interview for Waitrose,’ and she would say, ‘that’s lovely darling, have fun.’ In the same way that she would tell him that she had a departmental meeting about the latest Ofsted report, and he would wish her luck and send her on her way with a hot thermos and a clingfilmed pack of sandwiches.
It’s not as though she’s stupid, she kept telling herself, so how did she not know that this would happen? That people they had never met were creating Wikipedia pages about her boyfriend? How the hell did they know that he was born on the 14th July? And that he won prizes for sculpture in junior school? She didn’t even know that!
There were blogs set up about him, with stills from every TV appearance he’d made, from his segments on Good Morning to the chat shows, to the rare paparazzi photos that have been taken of him at parties. And his notoriety wasn’t limited to England either. Something called The Aardvark from New Zealand had run a piece about him, same as The Times of India. Scores of global sites had referenced him, some of them from the angle of his food, printing the recipes alongside a short clip, most of them, though, seemed to completely ignore his culinary skills and concentrate instead on how he looked. In the last twelve hours since that fateful shot with one of America’s most famed exports, his online presence had been given a healthy shot of adrenaline.
For over two hours Jayne felt as if she’d been holding her breath. Will had looked through the sites with her for a while before shaking his head slightly and saying, ‘it’s insane, isn’t it?’ and then showering and popping down to the deli to speak to Bernard and Sylvia about a new range of fresh pastas he was wanting to trial. It wasn’t that he wasn’t as overwhelmed as she was. Jayne could tell the whole thing terrified him, but he’d just prefer not to know about things that didn’t directly impact him. She wished that she were more like that. If she were, maybe she wouldn’t now be feeling so sick.
‘Are you still looking at that?’ Will said, walking across the room and pulling the curtains open. The sharp burst of sunlight rebounded off the screen. ‘Put it away, have a shower and then come for a walk with me, the sun is shining, it’s the perfect weather to walk a dog.’
‘We don’t have a dog.’
‘I know, but it’s that kind of weather. Come on, let’s go out for some air, and then grab breakfast down by the river. Come on!’ Will grabbed the end of the duvet and pulled it off onto the floor. Jayne put the iPad on top of where her pants should be if Will hadn’t ripped them off with his teeth when they’d stumbled through the door last night.
‘Oh, so you’re being all shy now? Bit late for that. Get up! I wrote a song, it’s called ‘Get Up’, it goes a little like this,’ he started singing in a dramatic deep baritone, ‘Get up, get up, you lazy, lazy lady, get up, get up and get ready.’
‘Lady doesn’t rhyme with ready,’ Jayne retorted, pretending to be grumpy, but Will’s good mood was annoyingly infectious. ‘Are you not in the slightest bit bothered about all this?’
‘You know I’ve never bought into the whole celebrity thing, it’s a pile of nonsense – everyone’s shit stinks. Seriously don’t waste your time reading it.’
‘You won a prize for sculpture and never told me.’
‘I did what?’
‘You won a prize for doing a sculpture when you were nine and you didn’t tell me.’ Jayne realised, saying it out loud for the second time, how utterly ridiculous she sounded.
‘Firstly, how the heck did you know that, and secondly, would it have made a difference to you saying yes to going out with me?’
She allowed herself a small smile, ‘Your Wikipedia page told me and, yes, I may have thought twice about dating you. Most artists are mad as fruit bats.’ They were interrupted by his phone. He looked down at the screen and started backing out of the room, ‘I have to get this, it’s Michaela, get washed and dressed you slovenly slattern.’
As she lathered her hair with the stupidly expensive miracle mask conditioner Rachel had gifted her for Christmas, saying, as she’d handed it over, ‘I got you this because your hair is starting to take on a life of its own,’ she couldn’t stop thinking about being photo-shopped out of the pictures. There was just one of her that she could see that slipped into one random photo gallery, and even then it was only a side profile of her face, so you could just see one eye and a nose sticking out behind a mass of curls.
Of course, she could understand the fact that she wasn’t going to sell magazines. She was an English teacher from the West Country, for goodness sake, but to not even have one journalist or one blogger even asking what her name was made her feel a little bit, well, invisible. Even the caption under the one solitary picture of her read Handsome TV Chef Will Scarlet and friend. And friend. Friend. Not even girlfriend. She’d been demoted to the status of Duncan. Not that she wanted people to follow her around the way they did Will, peering around the end of supermarket aisles giggling, taking pictures of him on their phones. She was much too private for that, but it would have been nice to feel a little bit part of this whirlwind that was happening around him, not to just be standing on the periphery of it watching with everyone else.
Chapter 15
On the cover?’
‘Yep.’
‘Of Esquire?’
‘Yep.’
‘On the cover?’
‘Yep. I know.’
‘Jeez. That’s massive.’
‘I know.’
They both sat side by side on the only bench in the playground watching in silence as a group of sixteen-year-old girls started jostling eac
h other. Hormone-ravaged chests bumping and screams of ‘she said you said she said you said’ rising above the jeers and shouts from the small group of teenagers forming a circle around them.
‘Looks like a fight,’ Abi said.
‘Yep. We should stop it.’
Neither woman moved. ‘On the cover?’ Abi asked again. ‘That is amazing, isn’t it, that’s going to catapult him to super- stardom. I mean, he’s kind of on his way there now, but to be on the cover of one of the world’s top men’s magazines is brilliant. ‘Cos up ‘til now, he’s only really had coverage from all the women’s titles. This shows that now the men want to get involved too. That’s big. Oh bugger, looks like it’s going to kick off over there. Jayne, you should really stop it.’
‘Why me? I’m enjoying the sun.’ Jayne tilted her head back and closed her eyes. The shouts increased. ‘Five bucks says Michelle Whittaker’s involved.’
‘You know I love a flutter as much as the next man, but odds-on bets aren’t my thing.’
A sudden ear-piercing scream audible above the general braying made Jayne’s eyes spring open. ‘Fine. You know I can’t just sit here while they batter each other to death. Thanks for helping.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Abi said to Jayne’s back as she watched her friend burrowing through the jeering crowd to prise the two scrappers apart before sending them off to see the head in the main building.
‘No one tells you at teacher-training college about spending your break-time duty breaking up fights, do they? Especially between girls! They always say that boys scrap and girls are just catty, but now they’re worse than the boys most of the time!’ Jayne huffed as she sat back down on the bench. ‘That’s the third fight this week I’ve had to referee. I have half a mind to just let natural Darwinism take over: survival of the fittest and all that.’
‘There speaks a teacher who should maybe look at changing careers,’ yawned Abi. ‘Are you up to anything nice this half term? Will around?’
‘Actually, yes, we’re going away. We’re going to this little hotel in the Cotswolds and he’s picking me up after school this afternoon, bags are already packed and we’re shutting the door on the world for two glorious nights and two fabulous days.’ Jayne sighed and smiled, ‘It was completely his idea. I think he realises that I’ve been finding it all a bit difficult having people fawning over him all the time, and all the press sniffing around him, and so he wanted us to just get away from it all. It’s really sweet, actually.’
It had been three or four months since Will had received the phone call that had changed the rules of the game again. She had come through to Will directly, which Jayne knew would have annoyed Michaela immensely. Jayne still didn’t know how she had got hold of his number when he had become fastidious with his privacy settings. But then, in the same way that the uber-famous can command the city’s top tables at a moment’s notice while mere mortals have to make do with being added to a very long waiting list, celebrities have ways of getting round pesky logistics.
He’d been in the pub with Duncan when she’d called; her sultry Californian accent ringing quiet bells of recognition with Will, but it wasn’t until she’d mentioned meeting him at the television awards that the penny had completely dropped. ‘I would love you to cater my birthday party for a few friends’, was how she’d pitched it, using a tone that wasn’t used to replies of a negative nature. After a few blustered attempts at batting away the commission, Will had heard himself agree to an initial meeting at their Kensington townhouse.
‘A few friends’ had turned out to be a woefully conservative understatement. On the night, Will had found himself cooking for the great and good of the silver screen, many of whom had flown over the Atlantic just for the evening. He’d said, with more than a dollop of incredulity, that a constant stream of instantly recognisable faces had glided through the kitchen door to commend him on his food and ask for a card.
To date, he’d catered over twenty of these events, even being flown by helicopter to a remote Scottish castle to host a private cooking class for one young starlet and her friends. He’d regaled a stony-faced Jayne on his return with accounts of flirty banter and barely-disguised propositions. She’d suggested that he should save the rest of the story for Duncan, as she possibly wasn’t an appropriate target audience, to which he’d laughed and mocked her for being unnecessarily jealous.
The starlet had uploaded pictures of herself onto Instagram, wearing an apron and little else, sitting on Will’s lap, which he’d laughed off as ‘a bit of fun for the camera’. Jayne hadn’t wanted to make too much of a fuss about what was clearly nothing more than a gratuitous photo opportunity, but it had hurt like a stab wound at the time.
A crowd of boys chasing a runaway basketball ran past their bench as Abi shook her head, ‘I still can’t quite believe that you’re still leading a normal life while he’s become England’s darling.’
‘Do you know what? It’s kind of surprised me too,’ Jayne shrugged. ‘I think everyone just assumes he’s single and so even when we go out together and there are photographers there, no one really bothers with me, which is great, so no one actually knows we’re together. It’s funny thinking that most of these kids and their parents know who he is, and yet have no idea that their English teacher lives with him. It’s kind of cool.’
‘I’d want to shout it out from the rooftops, though,’ Abi pinched her nose, ‘This is a public service announcement – you know that gorgeous fella you’re all lusting over, well guess what, people, he’s with me.’
Abi had this way of making Jayne relax with a little quip or silly voice, or even just some good old-fashioned common sense. Maybe it came from growing up in such a large family; there was simply no room for pretensions or affectations with so many brothers and sisters to sit on you until you became genuine again. She didn’t treat Will-Scarlet-the-TV-personality any differently to Will-her-best-friend’s-boyfriend-who-owned- a-shop. Unlike Marco, who tripped over his tongue every time he was in the same room as Will, which seemed to be a lot more often than before.
Helen was another one completely unaffected by his fame. She’d come up to London the month before and she saw first hand just how crazy Will’s life had become. They’d gone to afternoon tea at the Ritz, which, in hindsight, maybe wasn’t the best choice as there was permanently a paparazzi or two loitering on the pavement opposite, not even bothering to try to conceal themselves behind trees or white vans like they did in movies. But it was Helen’s eighty-fifth birthday and so her granddaughters and Will thought it would be a nice surprise. Again, probably through complete naivety, they hadn’t anticipated the two photographers who had snapped their entrance to the hotel multiplying into ten by the time they emerged a couple of hours and four trays of petits fours later.
‘It’s like being in a circus, isn’t it?’ Helen had remarked after being manhandled into a taxi. ‘Don’t these people have jobs to go to?’
‘This is their job,’ Rachel had replied.
‘What? Taking pictures of people leaving restaurants? What a bore.’
Since the National Television Awards, Will had also branched out into presenting his own food show on a Saturday morning on ITV. He still did two cookery slots on Good Morning during the week, but now his main focus was the hour-long show that was taped during the week, to be aired at the weekend. Most of it was based in the studio cooking and chatting with guests, but there were a couple of segments that were filmed on location. Will would travel to a different part of the country each week unearthing their local delicacies – real Bakewell tart from Derbyshire, Welsh cakes from, well, Wales – that sort of thing.
It was on one of these trips to discover the origins of Gloucester cheese that Will had found a gorgeous little hotel housed in a Georgian manor house in the heart of the Cotswolds. Surrounded by little villages whose high streets had dolls-house shops sitting alongside clothing stores selling nothing but Barbour jackets and wellies, the hotel was as far removed from
the frantic pace of London life as it was possible to be, without being at sea.
Thankfully the extra cash that Will was now bringing in meant they could afford to hire a car for this trip, rather than borrow Duncan’s Ford again. Arriving at a posh country estate covered in dog hair and bits of old Quavers was not the look Jayne was necessarily going for, so being in an almost-brand- new BMW was quite the treat. A white-gloved valet opened her car door, bowing slightly as he welcomed ‘madam’ before collecting their bags from the boot. If any of the staff recognised Will they didn’t give anything away, treating both of them with the polite, yet distant, courteousness the English used to be famed for.
‘It’s huge!’ Jayne exclaimed after a butler in tails had shown them to their suite. ‘Oh my God, Will, it’s got a claw-foot bath! I love this! We are so having a bath together!’
‘Now you’re talking.’ He dropped his satchel onto the bed and pulled Jayne in for a kiss. ‘Isn’t this great? It’s so peaceful. Which reminds me. Where’s your phone? Okay, and here’s mine. We’re turning them off and we’re not turning them back on again until we get back to London on Monday. Now turn the taps on, you’re filthy and I need to scrub you down …’
Jayne rested her head against Will’s chest, lying in between his legs, which were slippery with the water and the ylang ylang-scented bath oil he’d upended under the running tap.
They were both content to just lie there in the water; he making patterns along her upper arm with the oil, swirling his finger like a figure-skater while she started toying with the few bits of chest hair that covered his left nipple. It was dusk outside and the shadows from the flickering flames of the tea lights they’d scattered around the bathroom were dancing on the walls.
‘Baby, can you pass me that little pot at the end of the bath? I think there might be some soap in it. Can you look?’ Jayne shifted position to reach the small ceramic pot and lifted up the lid. In it was a little turquoise-blue box, tied with a neat white-satin ribbon.
Me, You and Tiramisu Page 16
