Lifesaver (26 page)

Then I remembered our hug again, and the way he’d looked at me, and thought, yeah, right, pigs might fly, right off the back of the Snap cards…

What I
actually
meant to say was: ‘it was kind of you to ask, and I’ve really enjoyed our chat, but I’m involved with someone.’ ‘When and where, then?’ I found myself saying instead.

‘How about the Chinese in Crane Street.
A Taste Of the Orient
, it’s called. I could book us a table for next Monday, at eight o’clock?’

‘Great. Well, I’ll see you on Saturday anyway, but I’ll look forward to Monday too. Thanks for the chat.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ he replied formally, but still with the smile in his voice. ‘Thank
you.
’

And I
was
grateful for the chat, I realized. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d enjoyed talking to anyone as much. About real subjects, too, not just about what was going on in
Coronation Street
, or what Ken was doing at work I hung up feeling more cheerful than I’d felt in ages, and wondered if I’d be able to get an appointment to have my hair trimmed and blow-dried before the big night.

Just as I was lifting the receiver to call my hairdresser, the phone rang again. It was Josh, the baby-faced estate agent.

‘I wondered if you’d made any decisions yet,’ he mewed. ‘Only there’s another party very interested in the flat in Wealton you liked so much.’

I didn’t believe him for a moment; he sounded so piteously needy and unconvincing. But I thought again of the flat, its bright windows overlooking the village green; the duckpond reflecting the quiet blue expanse of open sky.

‘Why not?’ I said, as much to myself as to him. ‘It’s available right away, isn’t it? I’ll call in first thing tomorrow to sign the contract and sort out the deposit.’

The mosaic project dinner in Gillingsbury that Saturday night was a first for me, on many levels. My first social engagement as Anna Valentine; tenant of a small chintzy one bedroom flat next to Wealton’s absurdly picturesque duck pond. My first few days away from home; my putative first week on my new job. It had all been much easier than I could have anticipated, too. The trials of my current existence which I’d so bitterly bemoaned—the row with Vicky, Ken’s work-related travelling, my inability to find an acting job—all transformed themselves from negatives to positives, turning themselves inside out and giving me a surprisingly glorious feeling of liberation. I’d really done it! And it was going to be fine. If Ken ever found out, I decided I could explain it away as a deep desire for change in my life, which I hadn’t wanted to undertake at the expense of any inconvenience or worry to him. Heaven knows he worried about me enough as it was.

I had ‘moved in’ on the Thursday, a day after Ken flew to Singapore. He knew he could reach me on the mobile, so he hadn’t even asked for my new address, although I’d told him that I’d found digs on the outskirts of Bristol. Easy. The flat was furnished, thankfully inoffensively, so I didn’t need to take much, and I didn’t take anything which Ken would have missed; just some old crockery and cutlery, spare bedlinen, towels, toiletries, and a suitcase of my clothes.

The only thing which marred my enjoyment of the process was not having anybody with whom to share it—Lil had been the obvious candidate, since Vicky was clearly unavailable, but, although I’d seen her (Lil) the day I first looked at flats, and wanted to tell her the truth then, I had instead trotted out my cable soap story. In the end I’d decided that it was better if absolutely nobody knew. It was the only way I could be sure that the secret remained under my control, and besides, I had an uncomfortable feeling that she wouldn’t have condoned such a deep level of subterfuge.

By Saturday morning, I felt really at home. I drove the two miles into Gillingsbury and went to the market, where I was entranced by bargains such as ten large waxy oranges for a pound, a bunch of astonishingly fragrant pink roses for four pounds, and a whole slew of cleaning materials for less than a fiver. I made conversation with at least six Gillingsbury residents, all wearing - despite the warm early-September morning - anoraks of varying decrepitude and sludgy nylon colours, and who all said ‘Oooh, Wealton? It’s lovely out there,’ or ‘An actress? Have you been on the telly?’

Finally I treated myself to a cut and blow-dry in the local hairdresser’s, since my regular London hairdresser hadn’t been able to fit me in at such short notice. The stylist, Denise, somehow managed to give me a bit of a beehive, but it was nothing that putting my hair up in a ponytail for the rest of the afternoon hadn’t remedied.

Then I drove home again, arranged the oranges in a fruit bowl, the roses in a vase in the window, and made myself a large avocado and tomato sandwich from the still-warm bread I’d purchased. I felt very pleased with myself. So pleased, in fact, that I kept laughing out loud at the sheer outrageousness of what I was doing. My downstairs neighbour met me as I was coming in chuckling to myself, and clearly thought I was somewhat deranged. She was an elderly lady called Dora, with a tiny head perched on a large ungainly frame, and she walked with her neck stretched forwards all the time which, in combination with her permanent smile, made her remind me of the
Bear in the Big Blue House
, a benign grizzly character off one of Pat’s favourite TV shows.

Still, I later realised,
she
had been in no position to say anything about anti-social behaviour. Her two huge dogs barked and howled like the hounds of the Baskervilles every morning until she took them out—it was probably why my rent had been so reasonable. It shattered the calm of the village green for ten minutes a day and scared the ducks rigid, but I found that I didn’t really mind. Ten minutes wasn’t the end of the world, and I wasn’t there all the time anyway.

By Saturday afternoon, I’d had a call on my mobile from Ken, who promised to send me a postcard from the Raffles Hotel if he got the chance to go there, and grunted that he had no idea whether Singapore was nice or not since he’d spent the entire time in a conference room. Oh, apart from one afternoon on the golf course. He had asked how rehearsals were going, and seemed perfectly satisfied when I replied that it was all fine, the digs were great, my landlady was called Dora and had two large smelly dogs which barked a lot; the cast were lovely except one frosty old battle-axe called…alerie (I fished the name out of nowhere)… who thought she had the lead role even though she only had a bit part as my character’s senile grandmother.

Whilst Ken and I had been talking, I ripped the cellophane off a packet of index cards I’d bought in the Gillingsbury WHSmiths, and wrote on the top one:
DORA-BIG DOGS—LANDLADY
; and on the one underneath:
VALERIE—FROSTY-BATTLE-AXE - THINKS SHE’S THE DOG’S BOLLOCKS, PLAYS MY GRANDMA.
I loved index cards. Sometimes I wished my whole life could have been mapped out by terse commands on index cards; they just seemed so authoritative. The modern equivalent of injunctions carved on stone tablets…or perhaps not. But I did find them so reassuring.

Ken hadn’t quizzed me further, other than to ask if I had a lot of lines, and did it feel good to be working again—both questions which were easily dealt with. Largely because I got the impression that he wasn’t really even listening to the answers.

Still, it had made a refreshing change from when he usually rang me from business trips. For once I hadn’t experienced that crushing sense of envy and stale frustration, because he’d been calling me from Sydney Harbour/ a pyramid in Mexico a golf course in Buenos Aires, whilst I was usually still in my pyjamas at home sitting on an unmade bed with my finger up my nose (metaphorically speaking, of course). I felt positively gleeful after he’d hung up, and far less guilty than I’d been up to that point.

At four o’clock I rang Adam to double-check the arrangements for that evening. It had taken a colossal effort on my part not to call him sooner, but I’d been determined to get myself settled before I did so. And, although it felt strange to admit and I didn’t understand precisely why, I was playing hard to get. I wanted him to be really pleased to hear from me again.

He had been
really
pleased to hear from me. Touchingly pleased, but in such an utterly disingenuous way that, actually, my heart kind of skipped when I heard his voice. ‘Anna! Brilliant to hear from you, I was wondering what you were up to. How’s the job going?’

‘Fine, thanks,’ I said with my fingers crossed. ‘I’ve done my first four days’ filming - I was in Bristol most of last week.’ Unsurprisingly, lying to Adam was a lot easier than it had been to Ken. In a way that was good, I thought, because I could tell things to Adam first, as a sort of rehearsal before I told Ken.

‘Wow, congratulations. I can’t believe that I know a real TV star. Max will be so impressed. When will we see you on television? Soon?’

‘Fraid not,’ I said, thrilled at his—misplaced—pride. ‘It’s only on cable, in Devon and Cornwall, I think, and maybe parts of Wales.’

‘Oh, well, we’ll have to wait until next summer. Max and I usually go down to Devon to stay with a friend of mine for a couple of weeks. I’ll make sure we catch it then!’

Shit. I tried to take a deep breath, feeling my face heating up, but it appeared that a large brick had lodged itself in my windpipe. Keep calm, Anna, I thought. It’s not an insurmountable problem. You just have to find the name of a real west country cable soap, then whenever anyone says they saw it but didn’t spot you, you pretend that you weren’t in it that month; you were on holiday or something.

Besides, who knew what would be going on by the following summer. I could always pretend that the series had been axed, or else that my character had been killed off in a freak tree-pruning accident. I decided that it was best not to think too much about possible ways to trip up, or it would start to worry me to the point of not being able to keep the charade going at all.

‘Anyway, I just rang to check that we’re still on for tonight,’ I said, changing the subject.

‘Definitely,’ he replied. ‘You’re still coming, aren’t you? Fantastic. We’re meeting at seven thirty in the restaurant—it’s Emandels in Bridge Street, near the clock tower. Do you know it?’

‘I can find it. Who’s going to be there?’

I heard paper flapping. ‘Here’s my list… Let’s see: Serena, Mitch, Margie, Ralph, possibly Pamela, maybe Mary if she can get a babysitter for Orlando, you, and me, of course.’

I’d been hoping that Ralph and Mitch would be washing their hair that night, but no such luck. ‘Is Pamela the pregnant lady?’ I asked.

‘No. That was Paula. She isn’t coming, her baby’s due at any minute. She said she can’t get out of her armchair without a winch, and her ankles are the size of salamis.’

Lucky Paula, I thought with such vehement envy that I felt queasy. ‘I don’t remember Pamela,’ was all I said though. ‘She wasn’t one of the regulars, was she?’

‘No, Pamela didn’t work on the project. She’s the art department administrator at the college—you probably spoke to her on the phone. She babysits for me too sometimes.’

Of course! Love-struck broad-beamed Pamela. How could I have forgotten? ‘Oh yes. I met her, when I came to try and enrol.’

‘Are you still interested in joining a class, by the way? People always drop out after the first few weeks, so it’s worth putting your name on the reserve list if you are.’

‘Oh right. Yes, you know, I might. I’ll have another look at the prospectus and see what I fancy. What would you recommend?’

‘Totally depends on what you like to do. I teach life drawing, and that’s usually a good group. But wasn’t it you who wanted to make a mosaic tabletop?’

Oh yes, so it had been. I’d forgotten about that. ‘Definitely. Maybe I’ll sign up for both, and see which I get a place on first.’

‘Well, I’d better go. Max is round at a friend’s, and I need to go and collect him in a minute.’

‘How is he?’

‘Fine, thanks. He’s great. He’s been asking about you, actually.’

‘He has?’ I hoped that my voice didn’t betray the joy which oozed out of me, coating me with sticky euphoria.

‘Mmm. You made quite an impression.’

‘So did he. I’d love to see him again.’

‘Well, we must arrange to get together. Maybe next weekend.’

I liked the fact that Adam always seemed one date ahead—making plans for something else before we’d done the last thing. We still had our Chinese
a deux
to come. But I needed to see Ken the following weekend. ‘I’m working, unfortunately. Script read-throughs. How about one day after school, if he’s not too tired?’

‘Yes, perhaps. Although he gets quite booked up, going to mates’ houses, football, that sort of thing.’

It felt like a knockback, but I tried to put a brave face on it. ‘And if you ever need a babysitter, I’d be happy to help out, when I’m not working myself, obviously.’

Then I thought how needy that sounded and, it seemed, so did Adam. ‘I think we’re all right in that department, with Pamela. But thanks anyway.’

In one fell swoop all my confidence and ebullience melted away. I felt like a teenager who’d plucked up courage to ask out her crush, only to be told that he didn’t fancy her. After his initial pleasure on hearing from me, Adam had seemed much cooler than in our last phone conversation. Perhaps he’d decided it was time to Play It Cool—the complicated dance of courtship felt so unfamiliar to me, like a foxtrot or a two-step for which everyone except me knew the moves. Of course it didn’t entirely make sense that Adam would have known either, since he too was—technically - married, but I just got the feeling that while I was fiddling with fans and dance cards and tripping over my feet, he was elegantly waltzing around the room, swooping forwards and backing off in time to the music…Perhaps he’d dated lots of women since Marilyn left. He was certainly attractive enough, once you got to know him.

There was a commotion outside my window, and I looked down to see one of Dora’s dogs running full pelt into the pond, causing the ducks to take flight and flap away in abject panic, with the dog crashing through the shallow water after them. Dora herself stood on the bank, restraining the other one which, although practically throttled by her tight grip on his leash, was still managing to bark itself hysterical in high, strangulated tones.