by Jessica Hart
There was a moment of appalled silence as they stared at each other.
‘I see,’ said Stella, blue eyes blazing. ‘So that’s how it is! I warned Simon about you, but did he listen?’
‘What? No!’ Clara came abruptly awake. ‘Wait!’ she said, realising too late what Stella had assumed. ‘Wait, Simon’s not here!’
But Stella was already stalking back to her room next door and, by the time Clara had tripped over the cover and disentangled herself, the door had slammed.
That was the end of Clara’s sleep that night.
Stella woke Roland and screamed at him down the phone. Roland rang Clara and screamed at her.
‘What the hell are you doing sleeping with Simon Valentine?’
In vain did Clara try and explain that she and Simon had just swapped rooms. At two in the morning Stella insisted on being found another equally luxurious hotel. ‘I’m not staying here to be humiliated another moment, and if you think I’m taking part in your pathetic programme, you can forget it!’
Ted, on his way back to bed, returned to the hotel in time to see Stella flouncing out, and the realisation that his programme had just lost one of its stars.
‘I’m going to call Simon,’ he said, when he’d heard the story from a desperate Clara. ‘Perhaps he can talk some sense into Stella.’
Only Simon could be woken at two in the morning and look as crisp and capable as ever. Clara had an absurd desire to burst into tears when he walked into Roland’s room, where they had gathered.
Still buttoning his cuffs, his gaze swept around the room. Incandescent with fury, Roland was pacing in a magnificent dressing gown, while Ted hunched on a chair, his head in his hands. Clara was still wrapped in the coverlet, and her expression must have been desperate for Simon’s brows snapped together.
‘What in God’s name is going on?’
In the end, it was Ted who explained the situation, with unhelpful interruptions from Roland, who blamed Clara for everything.
‘What were you thinking, changing rooms, anyway?’ he bellowed. ‘Simon was supposed to be in that room! Of course Stella was going to think you were sleeping with him!’
‘It was my idea,’ said Simon levelly. ‘It’s not Clara’s fault. And it’s not as if it’s the end of the world, anyway.’
With an effort, Roland clamped down on the obvious retort, which was that it was Simon’s fault for not letting himself be seduced by Stella.
‘Easy for you to say! You haven’t spent half your budget on a programme that’s not going to happen!’
‘You can make the programme without Stella, can’t you?’
‘Not really,’ said Ted. ‘We sold it on the basis of the two of you.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider going after Stella, maybe tomorrow when she’s calmed down a bit?’ he asked hopefully.
‘You suppose right,’ said Simon. ‘If you ask me, you’re better off without her. It’s unprofessional to have a tantrum over something so silly. I didn’t think she had anything of interest to say in any case.’
‘The whole point of the programme was the contrast between two points of view,’ Roland said tightly. ‘It’s not going to work with one presenter, and we can’t afford to get anyone else out here, even if we could arrange it at short notice.’
The three of them started worrying away at the problem, putting forward increasingly wild suggestions that the other two would shoot down as impractical.
Simon listened in increasing exasperation. The solution seemed obvious to him.
‘Why can’t Clara do it?’
They all stopped and stared at him. ‘What?’
‘Clara could take Stella’s place.’
‘Clara?’ echoed Roland with unflattering incredulity. ‘Are you mad?’ He had evidently forgotten that he was talking to his only remaining presenter. ‘Clara couldn’t do it!’
‘Why not?’
‘For a start, she doesn’t have any experience.’
Simon turned to Clara. ‘You told me you’d done some acting.’
‘Well, yes, a little, but—’
‘We’re not looking for a song and dance routine,’ Roland interrupted. ‘What we need is glamour and, not to put too fine a point on it, Clara doesn’t have the looks.’
‘At least she’s here, and hasn’t stormed off in a huff,’ said Simon, who was feeling guilty, and then cross with himself for feeling that way. No one had told him he was expected to take Stella to bed to keep her sweet! He’d done his best at dinner, hadn’t he?
But Clara looked so devastated, and he remembered how important this wretched programme was to her. It wasn’t her fault that Stella couldn’t take a hint.
‘You know, it might work,’ said Ted.
‘How?’ Roland was too angry to be tactful. ‘Look at her! Does she look like a presenter to you?’
Clara shifted under the gaze of the three men, and tucked the coverlet more tightly round her. ‘I dare say she can put some decent clothes on,’ said Simon, distracted by the creaminess of her bare shoulders.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Clara lifted her chin and made a brave attempt at a recovery. ‘Coverlets are bang on trend this year.’
Roland ignored that. ‘And what about that stupid cast on her arm?’
‘We could shoot round her,’ said Ted eagerly. ‘It’ll be much easier for Simon if he’s got someone to talk to on camera. Clara can put the pro-romance point of view so they’re having a conversation. We’ve got two cameras, so we can shoot both of them, but we can always edit Clara out if necessary later.’
‘Great,’ said Clara. ‘I’ve always wanted to be edited out!’
But Roland seemed to be considering the matter at least. He rubbed his nose. ‘But what am I going to say to Channel 16? They’re expecting Stella, or someone with a similar profile at least.’
‘Tough,’ said Simon in a flat voice. ‘It’s Clara or no one if you want me involved. You can have me, or you can grovel to Stella, in which case I’ll be the one flouncing off. I’m not working with that woman again!’
‘This is the best option, Roland,’ said Ted.
‘Don’t you think you’d better ask Clara if she’s prepared to do it?’ Simon interrupted.
‘Of course I’ll do it,’ said Clara as they turned to look expectantly at her. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to save the programme. You can cut me out later.’
* * *
‘You’re looking tense.’
‘Of course I’m tense,’ snapped Clara. ‘I’ve put the entire programme in jeopardy! I’ll be lucky if Roland lets me keep my job, and if I make a mess of today, I’ll be lucky if there’s a job to keep.’
On top of which, her eyes felt as if they were bulging with lack of sleep, her wrist was aching, and Roland’s remarks about her unimpressive appearance had stung more than Clara wanted to admit. She had done her best to brush up that morning but, short of a fairy godmother to wave a wand, there wasn’t that much she could do to transform herself into a glamorous Stella lookalike.
All in all, her confidence was down in her unglamorous boots. Now she was expected to sparkle in front of the camera—and Simon wondered why she was tense!
They were standing in one
of the semi-circular embrasures on the Pont Neuf, looking down onto the Seine, while Peter manoeuvred a boom over their heads and Ted and Steve discussed camera angles. Having thrown off the rain overnight, Paris had confounded them with a beautiful day. It was still cold, but the sky was a bright, brilliant blue and the city seemed to be preening itself in the winter sunshine.
Clara was in no mood to appreciate it, though. Roland never got involved in the practicalities of filming and, anyway, he was still too angry to speak to her. Even if MediaOchre Productions survived this debacle, he would sack her as soon as they got back to London, Clara was miserably sure.
‘He can hardly sack you because I didn’t want to sleep with Stella,’ said Simon when she told him that, but Clara wouldn’t be comforted.
‘I shouldn’t have upset her by being in your room.’ She hugged her arms together fretfully. ‘I just feel so guilty about spoiling everything…’
‘Don’t you think you’re overreacting?’ said Simon, crisp as ever. ‘I don’t see why you’re beating yourself up. None of this is your fault.’
But Clara wasn’t convinced. ‘The whole future of MediaOchre hangs on this programme, and it’s not going to work without Stella. You heard what Roland said. I’m too ordinary to be in front of the camera.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Simon shortly. ‘I’ve never met anyone less ordinary.’
He studied her. She was wearing jeans today. Since there was no way she was going to rival Stella’s sophisticated look, Ted had decided as director that Clara should look casual, but not scruffy. Her red jumper made her look too bulky, he said, so she only had a long-sleeved T-shirt on under her jacket. Ted wouldn’t let her have her scarf either.
‘What does it matter what I wear?’ she had grumbled. ‘I thought you were going to edit me out.’
‘We’ll see,’ was all Ted would commit himself to. ‘We can’t do much about the cast, but it would be good to get in some shots of you as well so Simon doesn’t look as if he’s talking to himself the whole time.’
So Clara was shivering on the bridge. The sun might be shining, but it was still February. ‘I’m freezing,’ she said.
‘Here.’ Simon took off his jacket. ‘Put this on until the cameras are rolling.’
‘But now you’ll be cold,’ Clara objected, even as she hugged his jacket gratefully around her shoulders.
‘I don’t feel the cold.’
The heaviness of the jacket felt very intimate somehow. ‘Like you don’t dance, and you don’t let go?’
Simon glanced at her, and then away. ‘Yes, like that.’
There was a tiny silence. Peter was shouting something to Ted about the boom, and a party of tourists eyed them curiously, momentarily distracted from their admiration of Paris’s oldest bridge, but for a moment it felt to Clara as if she and Simon were quite alone.
‘Look, there’s no point in fretting about Stella,’ said Simon, watching a pleasure boat slide beneath them, the guide’s commentary echoing out over the water. ‘You can’t do anything about it now. You just have to deal with the situation as it is, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do just as good a job as Stella would have done.’
Clara hunched her shoulders. ‘I hate it when people are reasonable.’
‘That’s a very unreasonable thing to say,’ he said, but she thought she saw a smile hovering around his mouth.
‘Well, there you are, all ready to enjoy a good old moan, and then someone like you comes along and spoils it by pointing out that things aren’t that bad…’ Clara sniffed, and that suspicion of a smile became almost a certainty.
‘They’re not. You’ll do fine as a presenter.’
‘If I don’t freeze to death first—and don’t tell me I’m highly unlikely to freeze in the middle of a city in this temperature!’
‘You were very eloquent about romance yesterday. Now you just have to do that again, but on camera. Just pretend you’re under that umbrella and it’s pouring with rain.’
Clara wished he hadn’t mentioned the umbrella. Suddenly the memory of the kiss they had shared was throbbing right there between them on the Pont Neuf. Simon could feel it too, she knew he could. Their gazes glanced, jarred, skidded away from each other, and the silence tightened. Her heart was banging against her ribs as she tried to think of a way to break it but, in the end, it was Simon who spoke first.
‘Anyway,’ he said. Was it her imagination, or did he sound huskier than usual? He stopped and cleared his throat. ‘You told me you wanted to be a star,’ he reminded her. ‘Now’s your chance.’
‘Getting ready to be edited out of a documentary wasn’t quite what I had in mind,’ said Clara, gloomy again. She leant back against the old stones, almost able to convince herself now that the sticky moment when the kiss had shimmered between them hadn’t really happened. ‘I was thinking more a spangled costume and lots of singing and dancing.’
‘If you can even think of dancing in a spangled costume, you can do this,’ said Simon. ‘Come on, there must be some inspiring song in your repertoire of musicals!’
‘I suppose so.’ Clara liked the idea. She mulled over it for a while. ‘I could be like Julie Andrews. Remember when she set off to be a governess in The Sound of Music?’
‘You have to remember that I don’t have your encyclopaedic knowledge of musicals,’ he said with asperity.
She straightened, clutching the jacket around her, her face vivid with new enthusiasm. ‘You must remember! She was nervous about taking on a Captain and seven children.’
‘I imagine she would be.’
‘And she sings herself into feeling confident.’
Simon was just congratulating himself on having restored the brightness to her face when she launched into the song—some nonsense about having confidence in sunshine and rain—and, being Clara, she didn’t hum it under her breath the way anyone else would have done. No, she belted it out as if the Pont Neuf were her stage, and the passers-by her audience. One or two smiled, but most averted their eyes and hurried past.
Simon was tempted to do the same. ‘Clara…I didn’t want a demonstration. I just wanted you to feel more confident.’
‘It worked!’ said Clara, arms outstretched, feet tapping.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Ted, can we get on before she makes even more of an exhibition of herself?’
But Ted already had the camera pointing their way. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Shut up, Clara. Let’s start.’
Clara gave Simon back his jacket. ‘Did you know that the Pont Neuf is one of the top ten places to make a marriage proposal? It’s what makes Paris one of the most romantic cities in the world.’
‘A romantic city is just a myth manufactured by marketing teams,’ Simon said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with relationships, and everything to do with what tourism contributes to the economy. In the case of Paris, that’s a lot.’
And they were off, arguing backwards and forwards about whether or not romance was real or not. Clara was so absorbed in their discussion that she forgot about Peter dangling the mike from an eight-foot pole over their heads. She forgot about the cameras, and her nervousness and even the whole fiasco with Stella. There was just Simon, stubbornly refusing to accept that l
ove could change everything, and that there was magic in the most ordinary things if you cared to look for it.
From the Pont Neuf, they wandered around the Ile de la Cité. They paused to admire Notre Dame, climbed the Eiffel Tower, and strolled down the Champs-élysées. Clara was still acting as production assistant, so ran backwards and forwards, checking permissions and equipment and making notes for Ted, then rushing back to Simon, waiting imperturbably in front of the camera, and picking up the argument where they had left off. Every now and then, Ted would make them back up and start the discussion again, and Clara soon lost track of whether the cameras were filming them or not.
They broke at lunch, and Clara was glad to go back to the hotel and crash for a few hours. She felt better after a nap and a shower and, by the time they were back at the restaurant in Montmartre, she was much more herself again.
Simon had raised his brows when she turned up in exactly the same outfit as the night before, but as she pointed out, she didn’t have an extensive wardrobe to choose from. ‘I wasn’t expecting to be in front of the camera,’ she told him. ‘This is as smart as I can get.’
Madame welcomed them back to the restaurant and had kept them a secluded table as arranged. Clara handed out clearance forms to all the other diners, making sure they wouldn’t object if their image was glimpsed on screen, and with Ted ordered a meal that would be easy to eat on camera.
‘No spaghetti,’ she told Simon as she slid into the banquette opposite him. ‘We vetoed snails, mussels and crayfish as well. Too messy.’
‘I’m glad to see Ted’s allowed us some wine,’ he said, pouring her a glass from the bottle that had arrived compliments of the house. ‘Are we allowed to start?’
‘I think so. They’ll be ages yet.’
Simon glanced across the restaurant to where Ted and Steve had their heads together. ‘What are they doing?’
