by Hazel Osmond
She shook her head as if she despaired of how stupid he must believe her to be. ‘You really think that’s going to save you, that dumb lie? You hit the jackpot yesterday afternoon and you’re still sitting on the news? I think not. Ring him back—’
‘Please believe me. I haven’t talked to him – I can show you the call register if you like.’ He fumbled with the phone. ‘O’Dowd wasn’t expecting any news till today. He doesn’t even know you’re in the UK, not unless someone else has—’
‘Liar,’ she screamed at him. ‘Coward. You’re just trying to save your skin.’ She came and stood in front of him and he looked at her skirt because he was too ashamed to look at her face. He waited for her to hit him or push him, although her words were violent enough.
‘I should have checked you out,’ she stormed, jabbing her finger towards him. ‘I should have looked after Jen like she’s always looked after me. Too tied up in myself to do it … And to think I was grateful to you. Stupidly grateful because I loved the fact Jen had found someone who made her sound as if she was … back. I thought you were making her brave again, when all you’ve done is teach her if she is brave, she’ll get punished.’
He would not have been surprised if she’d spat at him, such was her anger.
‘Who could blame Jen if she finally decides the world’s too cruel to cope with on her own? And guess who’ll be waiting to carry her off on his bloody white charger?’
His face must have registered shock.
‘Oh, don’t give me that mock concern.’ Cressida clicked her fingers. ‘Safe life, safe man, safe marriage. All down to you. In a few years’ time she won’t even remember what she was capable of.’
As Cressida had been speaking he had struggled to keep control, but that sent him over the edge and he let go, his body bringing up great convulsive sobs that made his ribs ache even more. He should have felt embarrassed, but he felt nothing but hatred for himself and sorrow for Jen.
‘No, no,’ he spluttered, ‘you can’t let that happen. Not with Alex. Please, please believe me. I love her.’ He wiped his nose with his hand. ‘I didn’t want to do this job. Cross my heart, O’Dowd had me right over a barrel—’
‘Shut up,’ Cressida snapped, ‘I don’t give a toss about you.’
‘I don’t give a toss about me either.’ He was almost wailing, rocking himself back and forth on the sofa. ‘I didn’t set out to do this damage. I thought I could just be her friend … I tried not to fall for her, make her fall for me … but …’
Cressida looked down her nose at him as he continued to cry.
‘You’re quite the actor,’ she said at one point, ‘I can see how you pulled this off.’ Without warning she swept down and gave him a mighty slap across the cheek. The shock made him close his eyes, and when he opened them she was running her fingers carefully over the palm of the hand she’d used to slap him.
‘Real tears,’ she said, ‘my, you are good.’ She continued watching him as he sniffed and snivelled before moving to open the door and call for Chuck. He feared she had lost patience and was going to have him beaten up, but she calmly asked Chuck to see if there were any paper towels in the kitchen. When he brought a roll, she threw it into Mack’s lap.
Next time he looked up she was at the window, tweaking the curtain back. Seemingly satisfied with what she saw, she resumed watching him.
As he blew his nose, he just caught her saying, ‘If you don’t stop crying, I will personally rip your tear ducts out myself. I have no idea exactly where they are located, but I was thinking of going in via the groin …’ She moved towards him, and he flinched, but she was heading for the ladder-back chair again.
‘Before I ask you, yet again, to ring O’Dowd back, and yet again you lie and say you haven’t already coughed up your juicy little snippet, I’d like you to tell me one thing.’ Her eyes were as steady and probing as Brenda’s had been that day she had interrogated him on his doorstep. ‘When Jen told you about Rory, you’d got what you wanted. Why still get her up on that stage? You could just have slipped away without being missed.’
‘It was the only thing I could give her. I wanted her to feel like she was flying again. I … I just hoped she’d be able to remember that after everything else I’d had to do to her—’
‘There was no “had to” about it. Don’t try being mealy-mouthed with me, ratboy. You probably tore O’Dowd’s arm off to get this job.’
‘No, he made me do it, I tried to tell you—’
‘Ah yes, and up to now I’ve not been interested, but hey, guess what … take the floor, Mack Stone, let’s hear your explanation.’ She waved her arm at him as if introducing him to an audience.
‘It was my mother … he had some … some dirt on her … I had to do the job or he’d have published it.’ He had addressed the words to the carpet rather than her, knowing what reaction she would have. Sure enough she said sarcastically, ‘And no doubt, you’re going to tell me you can’t divulge what that dirt was? Conveniently.’
‘It’s a horrible secret,’ he said miserably. ‘If I tell you, I wouldn’t blame you for getting your own back and selling it the highest bidder. In the end I had to decide between destroying my family or …’
He knew Cressida would supply the missing words and waited for the vitriol, and possibly another slap.
Confusingly, she said, ‘Interesting body language there, ratboy.’ Before he could think what she meant, she went on, in a weird conversational tone, ‘So, you saw Jennifer act? She’s a good little actress, isn’t she? Not top-flight, but I think she’d have found regular work.’
He heard himself make a strange noise and then he was struggling up from the sofa, not caring about tear ducts or Chuck or cracked ribs. ‘Who are you kidding?’ he shouted at her. ‘She’s a bloody good actress, better than you. She was wonderful on that stage. She was Viola; hundreds of years after she was created, there she was.’
‘Well, you’ve got balls, at least,’ she said frowning, ‘or did you work out that you shouldn’t just agree with me because it would sound better if you defended Jen? I can’t make you out – those things you were doing with your body when you were talking about O’Dowd and your mother … fair bit of anguish there. Hard to fake, even if you were as good an actor as me …’ She pursed her lips and studied him. ‘So … what exactly do we have here?’
Bending forward, she placed both elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. Now she was really scrutinising him and she reminded him of a clothed version of The Thinker. What she was thinking about, though, he didn’t have a clue.
‘Films are so much easier than real life,’ she said, when she slowly unwound herself and sat up straight again. ‘You find someone has wronged you and your family; you hunt them down; do a little speech about retribution, and then –’ she made a little gun shape with her fingers and pointed at him – ‘you blow them away. Real life, however, is more complex.’ The gun was a hand again. ‘I could make some kind of deal with O’Dowd, get Chuck to give you a beating you won’t ever forget. But where does that leave Jen?’
She seemed now to be talking more to herself than him and he got a sense of how quick her brain was and how mercurial her nature, because the next moment she was on her feet, walking round the room again, arms crossed, saying forcefully, ‘But if I could put this right? If this time I could do that?’ When she stopped walking he didn’t like the way she was looking at him.
‘Right, hesitate over the answer to this next question, ratboy, and it’s Chuck time. Tell me exactly what you’d like to happen next?’
‘What?’
‘I told you not to bloody hesitate … Look, if you could make anything in the world happen now, what would it be? Come on, snap to it.’
He eyed her warily, not sure where the Hell this was going. ‘I’d … I’d like to tell Jen why I did it and that I genuinely love her. I’d like to take away all that pain she’s feeling, and then I’d like to get O’Dowd off my back.’
Cress nodde
d slowly. ‘Good answer. Right order.’ She turned and went and looked out of the curtains again and remained there for so long he didn’t know whether he should prompt her to speak.
‘OK,’ she said, turning round and, with a defiant flick of her hair, a smoothing-down of her clothes, Cressida the star was back in the room. She sat opposite him again. ‘We need to get this done quickly. I’ve another private plane waiting to take me north, and if I’m quick, I’ll get there before your friends, not to mention my management team, the studio, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, twig I’m in the UK.’ She gave a ladylike snort. ‘You have no idea how many favours I’ve had to call in for this … Right, I am going to do two incredibly stupid things. I’m doing them for Jen … because I believe, God help me, that underneath all that crap I’m looking at right now …’
She reached across and flicked his nose, using her thumb and middle finger, and it made his eyes water up again.
‘… underneath all that crap is someone who understands that Jen needs to get back to where she was … well, if not back exactly, at least somewhere near. She does not need some monumental bore to lock her in a high tower and throw away the key. I am taking a chance on you, ratboy, and you will not let me down.’
Mack nodded, although what it was in response to, or anticipation of, he didn’t know.
‘All those other things you want to happen,’ she said, ‘they’re up to you … but I wouldn’t hold your breath about Jen ever listening to you again, let alone forgiving you. But. You. Will. Try. And … getting O’Dowd off your back, well, that I can do.’ She laughed. ‘God, that’s the trouble with being in love, you think you can solve everything, make everyone as happy as you are. I may be mad.’
Mack gave no sign that he feared she might be too.
‘So,’ she said, reaching down to her red handbag, ‘despite being very tempted to hand this to a rival paper just to spite you …’ She pulled out a pad and then a pen and chucked them both into his lap in quick succession. ‘Despite that … here we go. Ready?’ She lifted her chin and breathed in the way he had seen Jennifer do just before she walked on the stage.
‘Rumours have been swirling around Cressida Chartwell that she has fallen deeply for Rory Sylvester, her co-star in her new film The Unfeeling. But we can reveal exclusively that the rumours are only partly true. It is a Sylvester who is warming the English rose’s bed, but it’s not Rory, it is his wife Anna Maria. Yes, our Cressida is head over heels in love with the Latin spitfire and Anna Maria has already determined to leave her megastar husband to set up home with her new lover.’
She paused and raised her eyebrows.
‘That enough of an exclusive for you, ratboy?’
Mack did not know what expression he had on his face, but he did know he had stopped writing at the words ‘Anna Maria’.
He closed his mouth and then opened it to ask, ‘How the Hell did you manage to keep that a secret?’
‘Well it was a secret to me and to Anna Maria until a few days ago and, really, who would think I would be looking at another woman with my track record? People see what they want to see.’
Like Jennifer did.
Mack understood now why Cressida hadn’t rushed for an injunction to stop the Rory story. As long as she could keep Jen out of it, she was probably looking forward to seeing O’Dowd get hold of the wrong end of the stick.
‘But you told Jen—’
Cressida momentarily closed her eyes as if some of her ribs were also hurting. ‘Yes, and it’s the first time I’ve ever lied to her, but when she came up with Rory’s name it seemed easier not to put her right over the phone; I could just sort it out when I got here.’ A look of disdain hardened her expression. ‘And, of course, I didn’t know there was some little shit listening in.’
He sat very quietly, looking at his knees, not wanting to stoke that disdain into anger again. Which meant he was not aware that the little coughing noise and the two laboured intakes of breath signalled the moment when she started to cry. He raised his head and saw her reach out for the roll of paper towel.
It was real-life crying, not Hollywood-film crying: the tip of her nose reddened and her beautifully made-up face started to look crumpled and blotchy. When she wiped her eyes, her eyeliner smudged.
‘People will understand,’ he said, moved by her distress, ‘about Anna Maria. They’ll forgive you.’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said, sniffing aggressively. ‘Why would I cry about that; about meeting my soulmate? That’s perfect.’ She screwed up the paper towel and blotted one eye and then the other. ‘I’m crying about what I’ve done to Jen. Yet again, I’ve hurt her. Pure accident this time, not stupidity like last time.’
Last time?
He went back to sitting very still and felt the tension in the room thicken.
There was more blotting and sniffing before Cressida said, sounding weary, ‘So, the second most incredibly stupid thing I’m going to do today: another exclusive. And this one, you mustn’t tell to a soul … if you do, you’re going to Hell in a handcart. If you don’t, well, it might just make Jen trust you again.’
Mack threw the pad and paper on to the sofa, hoping she’d see it as a sign of how sincere he was, but she wasn’t looking at him. He had no idea what her eyes were focusing on, but her body language looked cramped and self-conscious now. She was running one of her hands back and forth along the arm of the chair in what seemed to him to be a fretting motion.
‘You know, I suppose, that I was in the car with Jen when we had the accident?’ she began. ‘I’d been visiting her for the weekend, dodging the press, messing about with disguises. Anyway, the night before the accident I’d misbehaved as usual and ended up in bed with one of Jen’s drama professors. Handsome sod, bit left-wing and scruffy and … the next night he invited us to this party. He and I had a bit too much to drink, I said something stupid and he announces to the whole room that he’d only slept with me so he could say he’d “bagged a star”.’ Mack saw the little hike of her shoulders. ‘I had hysterics, as you can imagine, and Jen got me out of there and into the car. We started to drive to her flat, but as we came off the motorway on to the slip road and Jen slowed the car to take the bend, I decided I wanted to go back and give that bastard a piece of my mind.’ Her hand stilled on the arm of the chair. ‘I undid my seat belt and tried to get the car door open. And … and Jen stopped the car, pulled the door closed and put my belt on again. Which is when we got hit from behind. Rammed into a sign.’
Cressida Chartwell didn’t look like a Hollywood star any more, but a frightened young woman. ‘I caused the accident and it was my fault she went through the windscreen. I remember her undoing her belt to get right across me and close that door.’
Mack was not assessing how huge a story this was; he was imagining Jen again, half in and half out of the car, the glass broken all around her.
‘I wanted to come clean after the accident,’ Cressida said, sounding absolutely wretched, ‘but Jen was adamant she hadn’t done her belt up properly in the first place. She won’t even discuss it. She’s had to put up with all that rubbish about her being drunk.’ Cressida started to gulp again. ‘Pass me another bit of bloody kitchen paper, will you?’
‘I promise on my life, I won’t ever talk about this to anyone,’ he said when he thought she was listening properly. ‘And if I don’t … you’ll … tell Jen?’
She let the screwed-up pieces of paper towel fall to the floor. ‘I will, although whether she’ll want to listen is another thing. But yes, when I think she’s ready to hear it, I’ll tell her.’
He should have shut up then, but the journalist in him was still after answers. ‘Why have you really come clean to me about this? It’s a bloody risky thing to do. At the very least you should have got my secret out of me first – made sure I couldn’t tell yours without you dumping on me in return?’
She made an irritated little swipe with her hand. ‘Maybe I’m hoping you will tell everyone and I can fina
lly stop carrying the weight of what I did around with me. Perhaps it’s that touchy-feely, trite crap: I can’t forgive myself and feel I should be punished.’ Her bottom lip started to waver. ‘All I know is I put Jen where she is now. My self-indulgence and vanity put her there. I’m as bad as you are.’
‘No. You hurt Jen by accident. I set out to do it on purpose.’
‘Same end result though,’ she said and started to cry again.
CHAPTER 37
Expecting a phone call to confirm that Rory Sinclair was their man, O’Dowd had at first reacted with stunned silence when Mack had revealed that Anna Maria was their woman. Next he had asked if it was some kind of joke, until finally Mack had told him about Cressida’s visit and he had become increasingly incoherent with excitement before announcing that Mack was a genius and he’d always known he would come good.
Mack had waited for the inevitable question about whether there were any photos of the two women together – you know, those kinds of photos. He now had a pain in his chest to go with the one in his ribs, and it had been there ever since Cressida’s revelation about the accident. Jen’s refusal to let Cress reveal the truth was humbling. Nothing as good as her was ever going to come his way again, he knew that.
‘This is better than some third-hand gossip,’ O’Dowd crowed, ‘a lesbo, eh? Cunning little witch, fooled the lot of us. We’ll be shifting papers by the boatload. Then there’s the syndication rights.’
‘So. I come into the office: you shred the diaries and photo in front of me. I want a written assurance that no photocopies or digital records remain and that you won’t use this information to elicit further work from me.’
‘Won’t need to, old son, we’ll all be rolling in clover after this. The money will be in your account by the end of the week.’
‘Not soon enough,’ Mack said, drawing on all his anger to make his voice hard and unyielding. ‘I want it all in cash, half couriered over to me tomorrow, the rest by midweek, that’s Wednesday, not Thursday. And don’t give me any crap about not being able to get that kind of cash at short notice. You know you struck a good deal.’
