by Lucy Parker
“You still need to file a police report for your insurance company.” Sarah nodded to the anxiously hovering Mary, who immediately went in search of Constable Porter, last spotted browsing the book stall.
Insurance! Of course he would have insurance. Stress was doing odd things to her intellect. Lainie could have twirled with relief. She hadn’t fancied the prospect of eating baked beans and Marmite toast for dinner for the next six months.
Richard drew in a sharp breath through his nose and also glanced at the waiting photographer. The pap was looking a bit chagrined at such continued and unusual reticence from a man who had been known to blow his top over spilled tea.
“You do have insurance, don’t you?” she asked quickly, trying to divert him. Her fingers pressed a warning into his arm.
He seemed to take in her presence for the first time, and he scowled at her. “Of course I have insurance,” he snapped, pointedly picking her hand off and returning it to her. “That’s hardly the point, is it?”
From the perspective of her wallet, it was very much the point. But she appreciated that his pride was more outraged than his finances. It was actually a relief that he had returned to grumping and glaring at her. It made it considerably more difficult to feel warming, sympathetic, dangerous things toward him. Richard was a less disturbing element when she could keep him tucked firmly in her mental box of grievances. Just pulling him out now and then to touch up the doodled fangs and devil’s horns.
Mary returned with the police constable, and Richard continued to disappoint most of the crowd by not raising his voice or stamping his feet, either metaphorically or literally. He did mutter something about a clod-footed fool, but it was under his breath and not within PC Porter’s hearing, so Lainie chalked that up to a win for public relations. She rubbed her finger over the car door to see how deep the gouges went, and he reacted like a fussy hen that didn’t want people touching her eggs.
At some point in their association, her eyes were just going to roll right out of her head and bounce along the floor like a cartoon.
Fortunately for his health, as she would have made creative use of the prizewinning pumpkin if he’d been rude, he was quite polite and gracious with her niece Emily, although clearly uncomfortable with—well, humans, really. His reserve with strangers was not limited to the youth. Emily seemed unimpressed by his efforts, but then Richard was over thirty. He also bathed regularly and covered his entire backside with his trousers, so he couldn’t really be any less cool to a thirteen-year-old.
While Richard filled in his police report and Emily resumed her distant ogling of Johnny, Lainie and Sarah helped with packing up the tea tent and the baking stall. There were only a handful of items left unsold on the table. Unsurprisingly, the stuffed celery sticks had proved less popular than the chocolate brownies and toffee apples. There was a time and place to push the five-plus a day mantra and it was not at a charity carb fest.
Sarah was almost wriggling with her need to offer further commentary on the Richard situation, but was restricted by the presence of the WI. Lainie made a mental note to screen her calls for a day or two.
Once Johnny had left to catch his train back to London, Emily became impatient to return to her natural habitat. She tugged at her mother’s sleeve with one hand, texted a friend with the other and whined. Teenage multitasking at its best.
Sarah allowed herself to be dragged away, still glancing mischievously from Lainie to where Richard stood, putting out stroppy vibes and making PC Porter visibly uncomfortable. Lainie emphatically waved her relatives off and went to thank Mary and the other women for their hard work. They promised to put through a transfer to the Shining Lights account as soon as the cash tally had been finalised.
They left just after one o’clock, with enough time to get to the theatre by four, barring a flat tyre, car accident or roadworks. Richard was a simmering, brooding presence behind the wheel, tapping the indicator impatiently whenever they were stalled in the flow of traffic. Lainie wished she was driving, so she would feel comfortable turning on the radio to break the silence. It always seemed rude to do it in someone else’s car, like a tacit acknowledgment you weren’t being entertained or would rather not speak to them.
True in both instances here. She was bored, and she also didn’t want another squabble. They appeared to be incapable of having a conversation without it deteriorating into a spat. There was something about their personalities that rubbed and ground into sparks.
Perhaps best to avoid verbs like rubbing and grinding. They conjured certain images.
She watched the progress of the tic in his left eye. It was probably a good thing she couldn’t read his mind. Her fragile ego might not be able to take the strain. “I’m sorry about what happened to your car,” she ventured at last. Because she was sorry. And she had manners.
His fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “It’s fine,” he said, as if it hurt to open his jaw more than a centimetre.
“No, it’s horrible, actually.”
“I said it’s fine.”
Message and warning tone received.
With a sound that was meant to be a quiet sigh, but which came out as a nose-blast of exasperation, Lainie stretched out her calf muscles and flexed her ankles. She still thought it was obscene that his car cost more than most people’s mortgage, but she wasn’t denying it scored well on leg room. The seat was comfortable too. She wiggled her bottom from side to side, enjoying the pliable cushion. A little bounce or two, to test the suspension. Not bad.
The silence suddenly became more pointed, and she looked up into Richard’s aggravated, long-suffering stare.
“I see why you aren’t supposed to transport the infantry without a car seat,” he said, annoyed, and lightly grabbed hold of her knee when she bounced again. “Why can’t you just sit still like a normal person? It’s like being trapped in a small box with Tigger.”
“Speaking of behaving like a sane person,” Lainie retorted, her eyes fixed on his restraining hand, “congratulations on not going off like a Catherine wheel at the fête. Why so civil, mon ami? The little grey cells want to know.”
The skin of her knee was prickling under his fingers. She delicately lifted them away digit by digit, and couldn’t resist an admiring stroke of his fingernails. Hers were never that neat and smooth. Too many applications of polish over the years. His facial skin looked in better shape than hers too, which was a bit depressing when he had greasepaint slathered on it as often as she did and could give her at least six years.
“I don’t know, Tig.” He returned his hand to the wheel and his gaze out the windscreen. “It must be your soothing influence.”
She didn’t bother to respond to that.
They made it to work by ten to four, and already a few people were waiting outside the side doors of the theatre. Lainie stopped to pose for photos and sign a few tickets. It was still surreal every time someone stopped her in the street to ask for a signature, and she doubted if she would ever feel blasé about the compliment. Richard, on the other hand, cut a striding path through the hopeful group without looking at anyone and went straight inside. Apparently the limits of his civility had been reached. A small child started crying when the door banged shut behind him, most likely from fright at the sudden noise, but it seemed to underline Lainie’s embarrassment. She felt she had to linger for an extra five minutes as some sort of poor compensation.
An elderly woman said to her loudly, “Personally, dear, I think you can do better than both of them.”
She was quite chuffed about that as she made her way inside.
Backstage was crowded with cast and crew. Footsteps and voices echoed loudly from the catwalk above the stage, as lighting adjustments were made in the midst of strong disagreement. The acoustics in the Metronome were so good that the resulting profanities would be crystal clear in the cheapest seats.
A grip walked past, laden with equipment, just as Chloe decided to have a costume refitting ou
tside the privacy of her dressing room. The crewman’s concentration naturally faltered when his eyes almost bugged out of his head, and Lainie had to duck to avoid a head collision with the boom.
Ignoring the chaos she had caused with her corsets, Chloe looked up and waved at Lainie. “Hello!” she called, through a mouthful of sandwich. “I hear you’ve been larking about in the Cotswolds with Richard. That must have been fun.”
From anyone but Chloe, that would unquestionably be sarcasm.
“That’s one word for it.” Lainie walked over and held a loose flap of silk for Chloe’s dresser, Theresa, who looked as if she needed about three extra hands. Women had swaddled themselves in a lot of fabric in the olden days. Lainie quite enjoyed the palaver of walking and sitting in her own costume. She had literally got her bustle stuck in the greenroom door during opening week, and Will had had to get in there with his shoulder and wedge her out like a stuck cork. The corseting, she thought they could have dispensed with. Nobody needed a wasp waist.
Theresa hummed gratefully through a mouthful of pins, and Chloe put her hands on her hips, swishing her gown from one side to the other. It was not the most helpful behaviour when they were attempting to resize her clothing without turning her into a voodoo doll.
“I should take Benji for a day in the country,” Chloe said. “The fresh air would do us both good.”
Lainie had no idea if she was referring to her teenage son or her miniature dachshund, both of whom had been named after Chloe’s grandfather. There was no polite way to ask. She settled for a vague, affirmative “Mmm.”
“And it’s nice about you and Richard,” Chloe added, pausing in her fidgeting to smile at Lainie. “I hadn’t really thought about you as a couple, but it seems to fit, doesn’t it?”
Did it?
Theresa made another sound through her pins, apparently in agreement, and Lainie tried to look less appalled than she felt. Did people really see her as being temperamentally compatible with Richard?
Maybe they both needed to re-evaluate their life choices.
She left Chloe to her dreamy gyrations and cut through the wings, doing her best to ignore the sounds of the understudies’ rehearsal taking place on the stage. It made her uncomfortable, listening to someone else reading her part. She started to nitpick her own performance, which was a bad idea a few hours before curtain.
On her way down the stairs to the principal dressing rooms, she almost walked into Will, who was coming up without looking, his eyes fixed on his phone. Probably sexting with the fangirl, she thought, examining her feelings on the subject. She was relieved to find she wasn’t remotely jealous. She wasn’t even angry anymore. There was merely a certain relief at having dodged a bullet, and an underlying shame that she’d ever entered into such a shallow relationship in the first place.
“Whoops,” she said when she trod on his foot. “Sorry, Will. Excuse me.” She went to move past him, and he glanced up sharply from his phone. His large hand shot out and wrapped around her upper arm, bringing her to a halt so swiftly that her feet skidded off the step. She swayed in his hold like a pendulum dangling from a clock and made a noise best transcribed as “Eek.”
Will shoved his phone into his pocket and returned her to an upright position. She would have thanked him if he hadn’t left his hands on her waist, and if he wasn’t looking at her as if she’d just crawled out of a compost heap.
“What do you think you’re playing at?”
She blinked. “I said sorry.” She fumbled around and located her spine, adding pointedly, “I wasn’t the one gawping down at my dirty text messages instead of looking where I was going.”
A faint flush ruddied his cheeks. Bingo. “That’s what this is about, is it? How things ended between us?”
“Technically, things didn’t ‘end’ between us. Not in the traditional sense of the word, where one person decides they want out of the relationship so they strap on a pair and man up about it. But minor detail.” She raised an eyebrow, wondering if his nostrils had always flared so aggressively when he spoke. “To which ‘this’ do you refer?”
“Cut the crap, Lainie. You know what I’m talking about. You get your knickers in a twist about Crystalle and—what? Decide to revenge-bang Troy?”
“Her real name cannot possibly be Crystalle. Have you seen her driver’s license? I bet you a fiver it’s something like Joan.”
“Richard-sodding-Troy.”
“Or Mabel.”
“Would you shut up about Crystalle!” Will blew out through his mouth and pushed a rough hand through his tumbled black hair.
It was funny, really. On paper, Will and Richard would sound almost interchangeable. Hair—black, eyes—blue, build...distracting. Surprisingly fit, both of them, for men who would rather be seen dead than sweating in public. In person, however, they didn’t look remotely alike. Richard’s hair was curly and his face was far more sculpted. He looked like a carved mask she’d seen in the British Museum. Will was pure Calvin Klein pretty boy. He was aesthetically the more handsome, but Richard was sexier. Women would probably want to tack Will’s two-dimensional face to the wall of their office, but they’d rather have a three-dimensional Richard, mussed and sleepy, against their pillow.
Had she just admitted to finding Richard sexy?
She wondered when to expect the remaining signs of the apocalypse.
By comparison, her mind hastily backtracked. Comparatively speaking, when the alternative was Wee Willy and his revolving bedroom door, Richard was...not unattractive.
She had to go. She clearly needed a power nap and a strong coffee before the show.
“We are no longer personally involved, Will,” she said, narrowly avoiding a slip of the tongue and calling him ‘Willy’ to his face. She dodged around his restraining arm. “It’s none of your business who I get involved with.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” he retorted, following her to the bottom of the stairwell. They stood looking at each other in the dim hallway. A door opened and then closed again somewhere down the passage. Will’s breathing was quick and agitated, a loud rasp in an otherwise quiet stillness.
After a moment, he relaxed the tension of his shoulders, apparently with an effort. “Sorry.” He sounded stiff, the apology dragged out of him. “You’re right. You can do whatever you want.”
“Thank you,” she said dryly. “Now, if you don’t mind...”
“I still think you can do better.” Will’s mouth twisted into a grimace, and she was forced to remember why she’d liked him in the first place. “Than both of us, I suppose.”
“Will...”
“I mean, come on, Lainie. Troy. A city full of single blokes, and you pick the biggest wanker in the West End.”
“It’s a sorely contested title. And we’ve agreed this is none of your business. Now move, please. I need to be caffeinated, and you need to resume typing dodgy little comments in Mabel’s ear.”
Will raised his hands in surrender and stepped away, and she moved around him, reaching into her pocket for the key to her dressing room.
He started back up the stairs, pausing at the top to call down, “And it’s Ethel. I saw her passport when we went to Paris for the day.”
Ethel? The discarded trophy wife and wannabe glamour model, Ethel.
Quelle horreur.
* * *
Pat was almost out the door when she suddenly came to a halt and retreated back into the dressing room.
Richard looked up from the script he’d been reading before her unwelcome interruption. He didn’t bother to mark his place this time. From a promising first act, it had descended into melodramatic, historically improbable crap.
He smothered a yawn. God, he was tired. He’d had about three hours of sleep last night. The extra shot of espresso in his afternoon coffee was ineffective. He checked his watch. If Pat would kindly sod off, he could fit in a thirty-minute power nap. After her latest mandate, making herself scarce was the least she could do. He wondered if Lainie h
ad received the news yet.
“Was there something else?” The question was pointed rather than polite.
Pat was smiling to herself. With one manicured finger, she smoothed back the immaculate blond hair above her temple. “That should put an extra cat among the pigeons.” The observation was both clichéd and obscure. When he merely blinked slowly, uninterested, she added, with a nod toward the door, “Lainie and Will. A rather intense little tête-à-tête in the hallway.” She looked thoughtful. “It might be about time for a statement from that corner. Perhaps I’ll drop a few words in ears.”
Richard had stopped listening to her. He was already on his feet. He wasn’t going along with this farce so Lainie could pull a U-turn and dive back between Farmer’s sheets. As Pat watched with great interest, he yanked open the door and strode out into the hallway. He was just in time to see Farmer’s flat feet clumping up the stairs, probably on his way to the greenroom to sexually harass the catering assistants. It wasn’t going to be necessary to speed him on his way.
It had been a trying day all round.
Lainie was walking toward him, headed for her dressing room farther down the corridor. She looked pleased with herself. A tiny smile tugged at her lips. Her red lipstick was almost the exact shade of her hair. She lifted her head and faltered when she encountered his narrowed gaze.
Richard debated speech, and then simply lifted her by the elbows and transferred her to his own dressing room. She didn’t come quietly.
The stream of protest came to an abrupt halt when she caught sight of Pat. A vivid blush spread up from her neck. She was definitely a natural redhead. Completely unable to maintain a distance between her emotions and her complexion. Given their line of work, she ought to be thankful for the camouflaging qualities of greasepaint.
“Hello, Pat,” she said stiffly, and then shot Richard a nasty look, as if he was responsible for the other woman’s presence.
“Lainie.” Pat smiled at her. “I hear things went well this morning.”
