by Jill Mansell
Eddie grimaced and shook his head. “It was a nightmare. I gave up on it in the end. How’s everyone at home?”
“All good.” Lily had kept him updated with all the goings-on in Stanton Langley. “Oh, I know what I meant to tell you! In the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard three different people talking about things that have happened in the village, and each of them used you as a time reference. It was all ‘When Eddie was here’ or ‘Just after Eddie left.’ It’s like you’re a memorable date on the calendar, like Christmas.”
He looked pleased. “That’s quite an accolade.”
“You’re the only VIP we’ve ever had in the village. You never know,” Lily said. “We might end up with a giant statue of you on a plinth outside the pub.”
Dan emerged from the office. “Everything’s sorted out. All ready to go?”
“Absolutely.” Eddie was already holding his passport, phone, and wallet; there was nothing else he needed. Pointing to the parking lot, he said to Lily, “My driver’s waiting to take you over to the movie set. Mira’s going to look after you. We’ll be back by five thirty.”
“I’ll be fine.” Lily was looking forward to seeing Mira Knowles again. “I can’t wait to watch the filming.”
“Oh”—Eddie turned back as he and Dan headed across the tarmac to the little plane—“and there’s something I want you to take a look at too. It’s in the car.”
“What is it?”
His smile was enigmatic. “Something.”
Something to look at. “A photograph?” Lily asked.
“No.”
“A boa constrictor?”
“Not a boa constrictor either, amazingly.”
“Will I like it?”
“No idea. I hope so.” As he followed Dan to the plane, Eddie called over his shoulder, “You can tell me when I get back.”
The car was an elongated black Mercedes. The driver waiting to open the rear door for her wore a stylish gray suit and tie. It was a long way from lanky Dave in his jeans and holey sweaters who ran Dave’s Cabs in Stanton Langley and regarded a day without pickled onion potato chips as a day wasted.
But that was real life. This, today, was the fantasy one Lily found fun to visit but still undeniably weird to experience. She paused to watch as the plane containing Dan and Eddie left the ground and rose into the duck-egg-blue sky, bound for Paris.
Then she climbed into the back of the limo and saw the manila envelope waiting on the seat with her name on it.
Inside was a handwritten note from Eddie:
That last screenplay you kept asking me about? It was awful, and I gave up on it weeks ago. Wrote this instead. Have a read, and let me know what you think. Be honest.
E xx
P.S. Yes, I know, you’re always honest!
The note was attached to the title page of a printed-out screenplay. Lily did a metaphorical double take when she saw what it was called, because it was how he’d always jokily referred to his initial stay in Stanton Langley:
Five Days Away.
* * *
They’d arrived at the movie set. It had taken forty minutes to get there from the airfield, but Lily had barely noticed the journey, so engrossed had she been in the movie script. Having struggled so badly with the last one, Eddie had evidently taken to heart the age-old advice to write what you know. She raced through it, half dreading what the ending might be. When she saw what he’d written, she closed her eyes and rested her head back against the cream leather upholstery. To her huge surprise, a tear spilled out of each eye and slid down either side of her neck.
It wasn’t real life, obviously. Not real real life, because that would never allow such a neat story line with all the loose ends tied up. But enough of it was real to make it instantly recognizable. In the opening scene, Eddie finds himself holed up inside a central London hotel, besieged by paparazzi and at the end of his tether. His manager and his publicist are giving him grief and he needs to escape.
Cut to: In the dead of the night, he’s secretly bundled into a tiny Cotswold cottage belonging to someone he’s never met. The woman promises on her life not to tell a soul he’s hiding there.
Cut to: Eddie is alone in the cottage when someone starts trying to break in by picking the lock of the front door. He comes face-to-face with Lily, who lives in the village and is already having a pretty eventful day of her own. It’s her twenty-fifth birthday, and she’s just read a life-changing letter written to her by her mother, who died when she was eight—
Lily’s eyes snapped open as the window slid down and she heard a familiar voice saying, “What’s she doing? Is she fast asleep? Lily, it’s me! Wake up!”
To be fair, the voice would probably be familiar to a large percentage of people on this planet.
“I’m not asleep… Oh, good grief.” Lily hastily brushed away the tears. “He didn’t warn me you were going to look like that.”
Mira grinned. She was wearing a nun’s habit, a huge prosthetic nose, and a fake whiskery wart on her cheek. Well, hopefully a fake whiskery wart.
“Sorry! Isn’t it brilliant, though? I can go out like this and nobody gives me a second look.”
Lily raised her eyebrows. “Really?”
“Oh well, not in the habit. But if I change into jeans and a sweater, I can walk around St. Carys and no one even knows it’s me. So cool. Anyhow, how are you?” Mira enveloped Lily in an enthusiastic embrace. “Try not to knock my wart off!”
For the next hour, Lily was shown around the location where they were filming and introduced to the rest of the cast and crew. The action was taking place in and around a cliff-top hotel overlooking a surfing bay on the north Cornwall coast. The movie was an action comedy-drama featuring a billion-dollar heist engineered by a seventy-five-year-old grandmother and her niece, played by Mira masquerading as a nun. Eddie’s role was that of the detective aiming to foil their dastardly plot.
Lily watched from the cliff top as Mira was filmed scrambling down the steep path to the beach in her nun’s habit and a pair of Union Jack Wellingtons; she then had to race across the beach and throw herself down on the sand behind a faded-blue rowboat.
It all took ages. The director wanted endless retakes, and each one meant Mira having to be rigorously desanded and sent back up the path before setting off again.
“I’m exhausted just watching it,” Lily said to the girl next to her. The girl’s name was Sophie, and she was married to the owner-manager of the hotel on whose grounds they were standing.
Sophie, who’d been taking photos of the filming with an impressive-looking Nikon, said, “And it’s easy to slip too. I once tried to stop a stroller that was rolling down that path.” She pulled a face. “It’s steeper than it looks from up here.”
“Did you manage to stop it?”
“Just about. Wasn’t a soft landing, though. I was pretty battered and bruised.”
“Ouch.” Lily winced in sympathy and nodded at Sophie’s front. “Were you…?”
“Oh no, thank goodness.” Sophie’s eyes danced as she briefly rested her free hand on the watermelon-size bump beneath her sweatshirt. “That was two years ago, way before this happened. I take a bit more care getting down that path now that I’m pregnant.”
By three o’clock, the shooting had moved on to involve other actors, and Mira’s work was done for the day. Having changed out of her habit and peeled off her wart, she retired with Lily to a quiet corner of the hotel terrace for coffee and cake.
“So have you noticed how wonderfully patient I’ve been?” Mira finished a slender slice of lemon torte and licked her fingers with relish. “All afternoon I’ve been dying to ask you, and I haven’t!”
Lily kept a straight face, because Mira was as transparent as a child. “You want to play Word Squares?”
“Well, obviously I want to play Word Squares. I lo
ve Word Squares. But right now, I want to know what you think about Eddie’s screenplay.”
“Have you read it?”
“Of course I’ve read it!”
“And?” Lily asked. “What’s your verdict?”
“Well, I think it’s completely amazing. But I want to know what you think.”
Lily dropped another spoonful of sugar into her coffee cup and looked thoughtfully across the table at Mira. “I think…you haven’t read it.”
Mira looked confused. “What? Why do you say that?”
“I’m very clever.”
“Well, you’re not, because you’re wrong.”
“OK, then,” Lily said. “Because Eddie wrote a message for me on one of the pages. It said: ‘By the way, don’t talk to Mira about this before I get back. She’s bursting to know what it’s about, but I refused to let her read it. I wanted you to be the first.’ Sorry.” Lily grinned at the look of indignation on Mira’s face.
“Honestly. What a sneaky bastard.”
“Quite funny, though.” Lily was consoling. “He knows you so well.”
“That man drives me nuts. Seriously, he’s the most annoying person in the world. OK, can you give me any clues? I just want to know what it’s like!”
“Can’t tell you. He wants to discuss it with me when he gets back.”
Mira gave her a piteous look. “Oh, please. Just the teeny, tiniest hint.”
“Still no.”
“Is it good, though?”
Lily paused, then nodded. “Yes, it’s good. And that’s all you’re getting. We’re changing the subject now.”
“Fine, fine.” Reaching into her emerald-green leather shoulder bag, Mira whipped out a notepad and two ballpoint pens. “In that case, please can we play Squares?”
Chapter 51
“Well?” Eddie said.
The driver had picked Lily up from St. Carys at five o’clock and brought her back to the airfield just as he and Dan were coming in to land. During the forty-minute journey, she’d leafed through the screenplay again and thought about what Eddie had written.
Now they were sitting facing each other, drinking hideous cups of tea from the vending machine. The screenplay lay closed on the red Formica table between them.
“You sound like Mira,” Lily said.
“Ha. Did she try to trick you?”
“Of course she tried to trick me.”
“And did you tell her anything?”
“I did not. But you’ll have to when you get back to that hotel, or she really will burst. Like an egg in a microwave.”
“And now you’re doing exactly the same thing to me,” Eddie said.
“What would you do if I said I hated it?”
“I’d destroy it,” he replied without hesitation. “Delete everything from the computer. No one else has seen a single word of it. If you aren’t completely happy with what I’ve written, no one else ever will.”
Luckily, she didn’t need to make him do that.
“I think it’s amazing,” she said and saw the relief on his face, the relaxation of tension in his jaw.
“Really?”
“God, yes. I mean, I’m no expert, but the way you’ve done it…everything about it… Well, do you think it’s good?”
A faint smile lifted the corners of Eddie’s mouth. “Modesty aside, I’m pretty sure it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”
“Wow. And how does that feel?”
“A damn sight better now I know I don’t have to delete it.” He sat back on his gray, molded-plastic chair and exhaled with relief. “So you’re fine for me to show it to a few people, then?”
Lily nodded. “I think you should.”
“There’s still no guarantee it’ll get made, of course.” Having forgotten how awful it was, Eddie took a sip of the vending-machine tea and grimaced. “Other people have to like it too.”
“I know. But I bet they will.”
“God, this is disgusting.” He gave up and pushed the plastic cup to one side. “Anyway. Are you OK with the way it ends?”
Lily’s stomach contracted, because she’d been waiting for him to get to this bit. “Yes, why not? It’s fictionalized, isn’t it? You’ve based the story on what happened to us, but you have to give it a proper conclusion. That’s what people want when they go to see a movie. You can’t just leave them wondering what happens to everyone.”
Eddie said, “I used poetic license.”
“Exactly.” Lily nodded vigorously in agreement. “You couldn’t have a boring, old, real-life ending, could you? That’d be a complete letdown. And Dan won’t mind, either. He’ll think it’s hilarious.”
Silence. Eddie was watching her. “What if it isn’t poetic license?” he asked finally.
Lily’s heart began to race. “But it isn’t real, is it? Because it hasn’t happened. You just wrote it that way.” In the screenplay, Eddie’s character made his peace with the idea of fame and returned to work with fond memories of the girl who had helped him during his five days away. And Lily’s character ended up getting a romantic happy ending with the long-term friend whose bad-boy, lady-killing ways had only been a cover, a way of concealing his true feelings for her.
Eddie’s gaze was unwavering. “What if I wrote it that way because it could be true?”
“It couldn’t, though. In a movie, maybe. But not in real life.” Her palms were prickling with embarrassment now, because she was practically coming out and admitting it. Oh God.
“Then again, you never know, do you? Not until you give it a try.” He shrugged. “Just putting it out there.”
He knew. She didn’t know how he knew, but he did. Abandoning all pretense, she said, “When I told you I’d kissed someone else, you never asked me who it was.”
This time Eddie gave her one of those famous movie-star smiles of his, the kind that had turned a million girls’ knees to mush and helped to propel him to stardom. “Oh, Lily, there wasn’t any need to ask. I already knew.”
* * *
The drone of the aircraft’s engine was comfortingly steady as they flew through the night sky back to Oxfordshire. Cocooned in inky darkness, Lily peered at the silver stars above them, the almost-full moon over to their right, and the snaking lines of golden dots from the car headlights, streetlamps, and illuminated buildings on the ground far below.
At least Dan, piloting the little plane, didn’t know what was going on inside her head. Eddie had promised her that much.
“By the way”—Dan broke the silence between them—“when Eddie told you he hadn’t said anything to me, he was lying.”
Lily’s stomach abruptly plummeted as if they’d hit an air pocket. Unable to look at him, she stared directly ahead. “Said anything to you about what?”
“Everything. All of it.” His voice was steady. “The whole lot.”
And he’d chosen this moment to announce it. Terrific. Lily cleared her throat and adjusted her headset. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I have to. And I thought it might be easier up here. Can you do something for me?”
“Like what?” Jump out of this plane right now, with no parachute? Easily.
“Close your eyes,” Dan instructed, “and listen to me while I tell you a story.”
Was this the voice of doom? Was he about to let her down gently, to explain to her that of course he hoped they’d always be friends, good friends, but there couldn’t possibly ever be anything more than that?
It was, after all, exactly what she had done to Eddie.
Talk about karma.
“What kind of story?” Lily asked.
“A true one. Go on, keep your eyes closed. And I know this won’t be easy, but if you could also manage to keep quiet and not interrupt, that would be great.”
Lily’s n
ails were digging into her palms. Her mouth was dry and she felt sick.
“Right. Are you sitting comfortably?” Dan paused. When she’d nodded, he said, “Then I’ll begin. There was once a boy who liked to torment a girl. When they were young, he did it all the time, and it was practically the highlight of his life. Then as the years went by and they got older, he realized he liked her in a whole different way. But the girl didn’t feel the same about him, so nothing ever changed.
“To make himself feel better, the boy did everything he could to find someone else he liked more, but that turned out to be pretty much impossible, because that person simply didn’t exist. So he kept being just good friends with the girl he wished he could be more than just good friends with. And although he always hoped that one day she’d change her mind about him, he’d pretty much given up on it ever actually happening.”
Lily’s eyes were still closed. Dan’s voice was low and intimate, seeping through her headset and into her brain.
“So anyway, that’s the story part over,” he continued. “Now we’ll move on to the screenplay thing. Eddie talked to me about it on our way over to Paris. I didn’t know you’d told him about that kiss…at the lake. He said when he heard about it, that was when he knew for sure. Then he asked me if he was right. And I said yes. Then he said, didn’t I think it was about time I did something about it and told you the truth? And he was right, of course.
“But it turns out I’m a coward when it comes to saying stuff like that, which is why I’m doing it now, up here where you can’t run away. I love you, Lily. I have always loved you, and I always will. But if you don’t want to hear this, all you have to do is ignore me, and we’ll pretend it never happened.
“OK, we can’t pretend it didn’t happen,” Dan amended, “but we can never mention it again. If that’s what you’d prefer, all you have to do is open your eyes and change the subject… Point out of the window and say something like ‘Ooh, is that a UFO over there?’ And then I’ll know.”
Lily opened her eyes, her throat so choked with emotion she couldn’t speak. The next moment she spotted a small but intensely bright ball of red light rising up through the night sky, heading toward them. Letting out a muffled shriek, she pointed and yelped, “Oh my God, it’s a—”
