A Desirable Residence (16 page)

Leave the boy alone, he thought grimly. Leave him alone. But try saying that to Anthea, and he’d regret it. Try saying anything to Anthea, these days, and he’d probably regret it.

Piers gave an enormous, self-conscious yawn, looked out of the window, and tried to stop a huge smile from spreading across his face. He was sitting, alone briefly, in the office of Alan Tinker, the producer of
Summer Street
. The phone had rung a couple of minutes ago, and Alan had grimaced to Piers as he picked up the receiver.

‘Bugger,’ he said as he put it down again. ‘That bastard McKenna. Look, Piers, you won’t mind if I pop out for a few moments?’ He gestured around the office. ‘Make yourself some more coffee if you want to; do what you like. Watch some telly!’ He’d flashed a conspirator’s grin at Piers, and disappeared out of the room, leaving Piers alone to sit as calmly as he could, and try to ignore his growing sense of elation.

The meeting was going well. By any standards, it was going well. Alan Tinker had met Piers in reception himself, had taken him casually into the main canteen for a cup of coffee, had introduced him to a number of people. A number of really quite important people. And although he hadn’t actually said, ‘This is Piers who’s taking over from Ian’—the way he was talking, it seemed as though . . .

Piers forced himself to break his train of thought. He’d been here before; too often to allow himself the self-indulgence of assuming everything was OK. He had only met the guy, for God’s sake. It wasn’t as if he’d even done an audition yet. There was really nothing to get excited about. And yet, as he stared deliberately blankly round the room, taking in the bank of four television screens mounted on the wall, the framed awards, the rows of books and magazines, the piles of folders and papers and scripts, he felt his heart thudding with an incipient exhilaration. Alan Tinker was an important man. He was a head producer. If he liked someone, he had the power to make them big. If he liked them.

‘We know you can act,’ had been almost his first words. Piers stared down at the pale blue carpet of the office and allowed a secret, painful thrill to run through him. Alan Tinker knew he could act. Alan Tinker had
told
him he knew he could act.

‘But all of this isn’t just about whether you can act or not,’ Alan had added impressively. Piers nodded intelligently.

‘Of course not,’ he murmured, then wondered if it was a mistake to say anything.

‘What we really want is commitment,’ said Alan. Piers looked straight back at him, trying to adopt his most committed expression. ‘We don’t want someone who’s going to disappear after six months to do, I don’t know . . .’ Alan waved his arms airily ‘. . . a juicy part in the West End.’

‘Of course not,’ said Piers again. Some fucking chance, he thought bitterly.

‘You’ve been doing a lot of stage work recently, haven’t you, Piers?’ Alan gave him a penetrating look.

‘Yes,’ said Piers. He thought desperately. ‘But I’m very committed to working in television as a long-term aim.’

‘Is that so?’ Alan raised his eyebrows at Piers, who remembered, too late, the announcement in the latest edition of
The Stage
that Alan Tinker was setting up his own theatre company. Fuck it. He just couldn’t win. But Alan relented. ‘Good, good,’ he said encouragingly, and leant forward. ‘Now, Piers, we on
Summer Street
like to think of everyone, cast and crew alike, as part of a team. A family. If you’re working as hard as we do, there’s no time for not getting along with this person, or thinking yourself better than that person. You’re just a part of the machine. A cog. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Piers, trying to sound as convincing as he could. ‘Everyone working towards the same goal.’ What was he saying? The guy would think he was taking the piss.

‘Many actors,’ Alan continued, ‘consider themselves too important to blend in with a lot of others. After all, you have to be pretty self-centred to be an actor in the first place.’ Piers wondered whether to dispute that. Was this some elaborate test to see whether he had any character; whether he could stand up for himself? He eyed Alan’s face. But Alan looked in deadly earnest. And he’d always heard that the guy had some weird ideas.

‘So what we like to do,’ said Alan, ‘as well as, obviously, a screen test, is to let each contender for a part come into the studio for a couple of hours, and rehearse a few scenes with the rest of the cast. That way, if anyone is obviously not going to get on with the others, isn’t going to blend in easily, then we realize it straight away.’

‘Good idea,’ Piers had said heartily. ‘That really makes sense.’

Now, left alone, he rose to his feet, too keyed up to sit still. He paced over to the window, allowing his eyes to skim the papers on Alan’s desk for anything interesting, then adopted a relaxed but elegant pose by the side of the window. Rupert, the character he would be playing in
Summer Street
, was, if not exactly camp, then certainly not hearty—and it would do no harm to try to show Alan that he could look the part.

The door opened, and Piers turned his head unhurriedly. There in the doorway was a woman dressed in a pair of crushed-velvet leggings and suede boots up to her thighs.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but Alan asked me to tell you that he’s been held up. He’ll be in touch later this week.’ Piers stared at her, blankly, stupidly, for a moment, and then realized what she was saying.

‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘So I’ll go now, shall I?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ said the woman, in tones that weren’t quite sarcastic. ‘Alan did ask me to apologize. But he’s terribly busy at the moment.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Piers, hurriedly. ‘That’s fine. We’d finished our meeting, anyway.’ The woman didn’t look convinced.

‘I’ll show you out,’ she said.

Piers followed as she marched along the carpeted corridors, nodding to people as she passed but neither looking at Piers nor speaking to him. By the time they reached the entrance, he felt rather deflated.

‘Well, goodbye,’ he said, trying to summon up some cheer. ‘Thanks for showing me the way.’

The woman didn’t smile, but said, ‘Could you give back your visitor’s pass please,’ and Piers handed over the white card feeling as though he’d been found infiltrating the building under false pretences. He pushed open the swing door, and threw his head back to a blast of chill winter wind. Who gives a fuck anyway? he thought to himself. They can keep their crappy little part.

But by the time he was on the train to Silchester, his initial excitement had returned. So what if some secretary had made him feel stupid. It was Alan Tinker who counted. And Alan Tinker had said he knew he could act. Now Piers sat staring out of the train window, running down the list of cast members in his mind. The characters of
Summer Street
were mainly young, laid back, his kind of people. He would get on with them fine. He’d bloody well have to.

It was dark when the train arrived, and even colder than before. Hurrying along the streets, Piers wondered idly if it might snow. He was not normally one to rejoice at snow; Ginny’s inevitable raptures at the sight of even one snowflake usually amused and sometimes irritated him. But even he had to admit that a snowy Silchester might be quite pretty. And it was certainly cold enough. Bloody freezing. As he strode along, he pictured in his mind the comforting image of a roaring, crackling, log fire. A glass or two of mulled wine. Perhaps even some mince pies. It wasn’t quite December, but Christmas had been apparent in Silchester’s shops for quite a while. He should be able to get hold of them. He looked at his watch. Half-past four. He would take Duncan along with him to the supermarket. Duncan would know what to put in mulled wine.

But as he neared twelve Russell Street, he saw that the windows were darkened, and a sense of disappointment came over him. He was in a mood for people and noise and celebration; the house would be cold and dark and empty. He was almost tempted to head back for the bustle of the town centre.

Then he saw a pair of feet poking out from the doorstep. His first thought was that it must be Ginny or Duncan, locked out, and he began to hurry towards the house. Ginny, in particular, was not good in the cold; if she had been sitting there for long, her fingers would be blue and she would be miserably snappy. He began to wonder if the water was on; if he would be able to run her a bath straight away and get a fire going downstairs. As he neared the gate, however, he saw that the legs were skinny and clad in thick tights, and that the feet were shod in incongruously large boots. It couldn’t be Ginny. Of course. It was the kid. Alice.

He opened the gate, and she looked up, with a pale, startled face. She was sitting wedged up against the door, with her shoulders hunched up in her jacket and a pair of earphones on her head.

‘Hello there,’ he said cheerfully. ‘No one home?’

‘No,’ she said hesitantly. She reached inside her jacket pocket and turned off her Walkman. ‘I wasn’t going to wait long. I just thought I’d see if anyone came.’

‘And a good thing you did,’ said Piers heartily. In principle, he thought they were seeing a bit too much of this kid. She seemed to appear nearly every day, awkwardly popping her head round the kitchen door, or arriving in the front garden, waving at them through the sitting-room window. She never rang the bell; sometimes he wondered whether there were times when she’d failed to catch anyone’s attention and had simply gone quietly away again. ‘Now you can help me,’ he continued. ‘I need someone to come shopping with me to buy stuff for mulled wine. You know what to get for mulled wine, don’t you?’ Alice thought frantically. It was spices. She didn’t know what sort. But she couldn’t say no.

‘Yes,’ she said breathlessly.

‘Good,’ said Piers. He put his key in the lock. ‘Now, come in for a sec. I want to get out of this jacket and put on something warmer.’ He looked at her suspiciously. ‘You look freezing. Do you want to borrow one of Ginny’s sweaters?’

‘No, no,’ said Alice, ‘thanks.’ She blushed, but Piers was opening the door, and didn’t see.

‘Right,’ he said, bounding up the stairs. ‘Won’t be long.’

Alice hovered in the hallway and hugged herself, half from cold, half from an unspecified nervousness. Even though she’d been coming round to see Ginny and Piers and Duncan quite a lot, she hadn’t really ever spent any time with Piers. He unnerved her slightly; his voice was so loud, and sometimes she wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not.

Ginny and Duncan were much easier to get along with. They always seemed pleased to see her, and made her cups of tea, and asked what had happened at school. Which was, in a way, Alice admitted to herself, just what her parents did—but with them it was completely different. When she told Ginny and Duncan about things, it all suddenly seemed far more interesting than before. Duncan always listened really intently, and made loud exclamations all the time, and called it the Unfolding Saga of St Catherine’s. And Ginny always knew what she meant and understood why things were important, not like her mother, who always said things like,
But if you’ve got a free period, why can’t you spend it getting some of your homework done?

Sometimes Ginny would tell her to come upstairs, and show her some clothes she’d bought, or some perfume, or make-up. Once, she’d made Alice up to look really glamorous, and another time she’d actually given her a brown jumper which she said she couldn’t wear and would look stunning on Alice. Sometimes she brought stuff home from work and asked Alice to give her a hand, folding up press releases and putting them in envelopes, or labelling photographs of big country houses. She’d promised that when Alice had to do work experience for school, she could come and work in her office, and actually go on a press trip with real journalists.

Duncan didn’t ever seem to do any work, but he always had funny stories about what he’d done during the day and about what he called the Good Burghers of Silchester. At first Alice thought he meant Burger King and McDonald’s, but then she’d realized he actually meant all the people he met in the town centre. He seemed to go into town nearly every day, and he always saw something exciting or weird or revolting, or had a long conversation with a complete stranger. He never seemed to do normal things.

Sometimes Alice wondered whether she went round to see them all too much. Once or twice, when she’d arrived, Ginny had said kindly, ‘Actually, Alice, this isn’t a great time,’ and Alice always felt like running away and never ever going back. But then Ginny always said something like, ‘But how about tea on Saturday?’ or ‘You will come back tomorrow, won’t you?’ And so she always did.

And, really, she couldn’t bear to keep away. When she was with them, everything seemed exciting and glossy and fun. It made home seem even more drab and boring. Once, Ginny suggested that they should invite Alice’s parents round for a drink, to meet them properly.

‘They’re very trusting,’ she said, ‘letting you spend all this time with a bunch of people they hardly know. Why don’t you bring them round sometime?’ Alice wriggled uncomfortably on her chair, and said her parents were very busy, and never went out, and they didn’t mind where she went, honestly. In fact, that wasn’t quite true. When she’d eventually told Liz and Jonathan where she was spending all this time after school, Liz had immediately suggested that Ginny and Piers come round for supper. Alice gasped in horror.

‘They’re really busy,’ she said, ‘and they never know when they’re going to be free. But I’ll ask them,’ she added hurriedly, as she saw her mother opening her mouth to protest. ‘I’ll ask them.’

Ask them! Alice shuddered at the thought of it; of leading Ginny and Piers and Duncan through the empty passages and classrooms of the tutorial college; of taking them up the narrow stairs to the tiny flat, of expecting them to sit down and eat shepherd’s pie and talk to her awful parents. Her mother would pretend to be really hip, as if she knew all about acting, and her father would say things like, ‘Which one is
Summer Street
? Is it the one in Australia?’