A Minor Indiscretion Read online

  “That’s nice,” he said for lack of anything more inspirational.

  “It’s also confidential.” Orla put her glass and seemingly her cards on the table. “They’re young, funky, going places. We have some great British scripts that we have backing for.”

  Ed nodded. “Good.”

  “I want you to come with me.”

  “Me?” He laughed.

  “I mean it.”

  He checked the back of the sofa for Trevor again. Any minute now he was going to jump out with a camera, going, “Ha, ha, got you!” He didn’t. Ed frowned. “I have no doubt, but why me?”

  “You have a good, all-round knowledge of this business. I think I could put that to good use. British directors and producers are hot stuff in the States now. Look at Sam Mendes.”

  “Look at Sam Mendes indeed!” Ed was tempted to say, “But I get women in itsy-bitsy teeny weeny bikinis to drill holes in wood,” and then he realized that false modesty was not a quality recognized by Hollywood either.

  “You run a very eclectic but efficient organization with precious little in the way of assets or support from your management. You’re a great motivator.”

  Only of other people, he added mentally.

  For a moment he saw himself driving down Rodeo Drive in some racy, top-of-the-range convertible, sun shining, Beach Boys on the radio. “Ali would never go for it.” He shook his head. “She’s not a great fan of America. She’s the only person I know who doesn’t like Frasier.”

  “You’ve been married a long time?”

  “A very long time.”

  “Then what Ali thinks is important.”

  “Yes.” Ed sighed heavily and wished he’d ordered the scotch. “This is no slur on your fellow countrymen, believe me. I love America. I would move there tomorrow. But Ali thinks Ronald McDonald is the Antichrist.”

  Orla laughed.

  “I think she would rather our children were brought up somewhere really, really awful than in Los Angeles.”

  “Like where?”

  “Like… Like… Budleigh Salterton.”

  “I have no idea where Budleigh Salterton is,” she said with a smile.

  “Neither have I,” Ed confessed.

  “It sounds pretty.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe nicer than L.A.”

  “Maybe.”

  “We should go there one day. Together.”

  The hairs on the back of Ed’s neck all stood to attention. “Maybe.” He finished his beer. “The District line calls,” Ed said ruefully.

  “Think about this, Ed. I don’t need an answer right away,” Orla said as she stood up and smoothed a wayward curl from her forehead.

  Think about it! It was going to occupy his every waking moment and probably most of his sleeping ones too. It was the opportunity he had longed for, dreamed of. A chance to get his foot jammed back in the door of real filmmaking. Get his career riding on the fast-track once again rather than shunted in some sleepy siding. No one else would give him a second look on his current CV, he knew that. It had taken someone inside, close to him, to realize that he could still make the grade.

  Orla picked up her perpetually bulging briefcase. “But I won’t wait for you forever,” she warned.

  “Of course not,” Ed agreed, and realized his tongue had gone dry and he was desperately in need of another drink.

  “We can talk about this some more.” Orla headed to the door and he followed in her wake.

  Oh, he could sit here all night and talk about this! He might even be persuaded to share his Harrison Ford stories, given the right moment. But the person he needed to talk about it with most was Ali.

  “Maybe over dinner one night?” Orla suggested casually.

  “Yes. Yes. Great idea,” Ed agreed readily. “Dinner. Dinner.”

  Would Ali be prepared to pack up and go halfway round the world to satisfy his ambition? Would she realize how long he had waited to hear the sorts of things that Orla was saying? Would Ali, whose ambition stretched only as far as putting seven vaguely edible meals on the table each week, understand how much this ache had been suppressed in him? Until he’d heard that there might be a way out, he hadn’t even realized how much himself.

  Ed glanced at his watch. They had closed the Venetian blinds and switched on the lights at the club, giving it a softer, more intimate feel. The inside of the much-vaunted Groucho might be disappointing, but there was a strange comfort in knowing that. At least there was one place where he didn’t feel he was on the outside looking in.

  The alternative comedians were sinking deeper into the sofas, and even the brash boys were heading for home. It was late. He had said he’d be back ages ago. Ali would be worried. His dinner would be dried up or in the microwave or in the dog, if they’d had one. Perhaps he should have suggested supper to Orla tonight and phoned Ali to say he had an unexpected meeting. But then he ought to do the groundwork with his wife first. There was no point discussing the niceties when Ali might flatly refuse to consider it. They must sit down with a nice glass of wine and talk. He could rehearse his speech all the way home on the Tube to make sure he got it right.

  He and Orla pushed out of the door and stood on the pavement. Before he had a chance to behave like a gentleman, Orla had hailed a cab. It pulled up next to her. “Good night, Ed.”

  He held the door open. “Good night, Orla.” Ed stood there feeling ridiculously grateful. He wanted to hug her and kiss her and whoop enthusiastically and generally give some sort of emotional demonstration to show her how much her throwing a life-line to his drowning film career meant. Instead, he stood there like a statue, being tongue-tied and British and fiddling with his hands. In the end, all he managed was, “And thanks.”

  She smiled out through the open window and waved her hand dismissively. The cab drove off, leaving him alone on Dean Street. There was a chill in the night air that felt more autumnal than springlike, more reminiscent of closing, ending, rather than of beginning. Ed shivered and wished he’d worn a thicker coat. At the same time he wondered what the temperature would be in Los Angeles.

  Yes, he and Ali must talk. Tonight. But he wasn’t entirely sure that she would want to listen when she found out what he had to say.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Oh, Daddy! How could you!” Tanya is tearful and possibly premenstrual, which at this age is a frightening condition that turns her into a hormonal psychopath. I’m sure I was never like this at fifteen. I was always so good.

  Ed has just walked through the door. He is desperately late and is looking extremely bemused. “What?”

  He looks to me for support, but I have my hands on my hips and am in no mood to placate anyone, as I’ve had to listen to three hours of how Tanya doesn’t concentrate in lessons (any of them, apparently) and how, if she doesn’t stop yapping to her friends and eyeing up the boys and start doing some serious work pretty damn soon, then she’s going to end up working on a checkout in some shabby supermarket. Not exactly the teacher’s words, but I’m paraphrasing and it amounted to the same thing anyway.

  Ed looks at Tanya. “Well—what?”

  “You have missed my parents’ evening,” she wails, and crashes upstairs, managing to knock all the Gustav Klimt prints askew for maximum effect. “You don’t care about me at all,” she shouts down over the banister rail. What she really means is that she’s had to listen to me moaning at her for the last hour, telling her how she is going to be grounded for three whole weeks while she catches up with her homework, and how she probably won’t get any pocket money until the same year she starts drawing her pension and that “Daddy, how could you!” would probably have smoothed it all over for her.

  Ed turns to me, looking vaguely mortified. “I completely and utterly forgot,” he says.

  “Oh, Ed! How could you!” I say, taking up my daughter’s refrain.

  “I got caught in a meeting.”

  “Yes. I can smell it on your breath.”

&
nbsp; “I had one,” he insists. “At the Groucho. A quick one.”

  I glance at the clock to make a point.

  “Oh, Daddy! How could you!” Elliott is in his best striped pajamas and is holding Barney, the chipper purple dinosaur, by his one remaining ear. His eyes roll round his sockets and he pouts petulantly. Clearly, my youngest child, when he has finished his extortionately priced schooling, is heading straight for a career on the stage. We both try not to smile at him. “You’ve missed Tanya’s parents’ evening. And all her schoolwork is really, really bad,” he says triumphantly.

  “I hate you too, Elliott, you little snitch,” Tanya shouts over the banister.

  “Tanya!” I’m the one who shouts in this house.

  Elliott rolls his eyes some more. “Women,” he says with a campy flick of the wrist and flounces upstairs to bed.

  “Elliott. Wee and clean your teeth. I’ll be up in a minute.”

  I march through to the kitchen because I want to shout at Ed too and I don’t think you should ever row in front of your children. He puts his briefcase down and shrugs out of his coat in a weary way, and somehow, instead of making me feel soft toward him, it incenses me even more. With drooping shoulders, he follows me through to the kitchen.

  “I forgot,” he repeats before I can launch into him.

  “It was the last thing I said to you when you left the house this morning.”

  “I have dealt with a million things since then, Ali. It slipped clean away. I didn’t do this on purpose.”

  “Sometimes I wonder whether you care at all. They are your children too. Next year is Tanya’s exam year. This is important to her.”

  “It’s important to me too….”

  “Is it?”

  “You know it is.”

  “I have been trying to ring you for hours, and your phone is switched off.”

  “The battery was low. I was trying to save it.”

  “A fat lot of good that is to me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I know that you can’t use mobile phones in the Groucho without threat of expulsion for such a hideous flaunting of the rules, and this makes me cross because it bothers Ed more than his daughter’s entire future. But I can’t stay angry, I’m too exhausted. What I really want is a big cuddle and for Ed to tell me that my daughter isn’t going to end up as a juvenile delinquent and a single-parent family. I’m so upset that she can’t see the opportunities she has to make a great life for herself and is, instead, content to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and spend her days at school goofing off. Am I such an awful role model for her? Where have I gone wrong that she doesn’t want to be a geneticist or a corporate lawyer or a Shakespearean actress? Why does she have no ambition beyond how many times she can get one ear pierced?

  I pretend that all I want in life is her happiness. But it is lip service. I don’t. I want her to work hard and earn lots of money and be able to make informed choices about her future and have a great job that I can boast about to other mothers with less successful daughters. I don’t want her to be pregnant at sixteen and be saddled with looking after her baby while she tries to claw back some of her childhood. I want her to travel the world and break some hearts while not having hers broken in return, then I want her to meet a wonderful, financially secure, emotionally stable Ben Affleck look-alike when she’s twenty-nine and then think about having babies. Am I being unreasonable? I don’t think so. And I wish I could share this—with Tanya, with Ed, with anyone. But I can’t. No one understands me. Ed would laugh and say that I’m getting it all out of proportion just because some tight-arsed lesbian teacher who’s never had a proper job thinks it’s unusual for a fifteen-year-old to have the attention span of a flea. It’s all right for him. He was hopeless at school, did badly in all of his exams and has carved out a great career for himself in a job which he loves, through sheer determination. I worked really hard and achieved zip—unless you count a relief map of the Andes in stretch marks on my stomach.

  I crash about and put the kettle on. “Your dinner is all dried up.” I sniff. “It looks disgusting.” It looked disgusting before it dried up and it tasted fairly awful too, but I won’t tell Ed that. I’ll let him discover it for himself. He’ll eat it without complaint, because despite the fact that he has a memory like a particularly leaky sieve, he’s not a bad man.

  I watch him lift his dinner from the depths of the oven with something approaching horror. He lays it gingerly on the table. “What is it?” he says.

  “I can’t remember.” I put a cup of tea down next to him. “Something from Marks & Spencer. Mexican, I think. It looked okay three hours ago.”

  “It looks very nice now,” he says, and my cruel, upset heart melts. “Thanks.”

  I sit down at the table opposite him. “You need to go and talk to Tanya. She’s doing really badly at school. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

  “Can’t you do it?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “You’re so much better at it than me.” Ed is whining and I dig my heels into the kitchen floor.

  “You’re the one that’s upset her.”

  “I’ll go up in a minute,” he promises. I hear the sigh hidden in his voice. “I’ll see to Elliott too. Where’s Thomas?”

  “In bed with Harry Potter, where else?”

  Ed smiles tiredly. “Two drama queens and a pervert. We’re doing a great job.”

  “No one said it would be easy.”

  He puts his fork down for a moment, and I fear he is about to abandon whatever it is I cooked for him. “No one said it would be this hard either, did they?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  Sometimes I would like to stop being a parent and just walk out of the front door without thinking about anyone else. The last time I did that I was about twenty. I wonder if Ed ever feels the same? He picks up his fork again and stabs it into his food determinedly.

  “What was your meeting about?”

  Ed keeps his head over his food and takes a long time before he answers.

  “It was with Orla. She’s setting up a new company.”

  I vaguely remember who Orla is and “Mmm” my interest.

  “Ali.” Ed looks up, and his eyes are deep and distant and I can’t see what’s behind them at all. “Would you ever consider moving to the States?”

  I’m taken aback. “America?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  Ed puts down his fork and pushes his plate away. “I thought not.” He gets up from the table. “I’ll speak to Tanya.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Kath Brown comes into the office. When I say office, it’s really a glorified cupboard filled with bulging files and bits of fabric and colorful storyboards to give people a sneak preview of how their house will look when they recklessly abandon their magnolia walls to Kath’s flowery clutches. It’s always the same. Whoever the client. They start off tentatively with the first room—a little change here and a swag or a tail or two there—and then they get bolder with each room. Their confidence grows as they progress through the house—a touch of gilt here, a bit of glitz there, more plasterwork, perhaps a bit of handcrafted something—and the suppliers become steadily more exclusive. Perhaps that’s why having a name like Kath Brown works. It’s a name you can depend on. You’re never going to get ripped off by a Kath Brown, are you?

  I am typing invoices. Like the choice of fabrics, they also grow a little bolder with each room. I am in ultra-efficient mode and my fingers are positively smoking over the keyboard. This cupboard-cum-office may look like utter chaos to the untrained eye, but I can lay my fingers on anything I need within a millisecond. Kath, on the other hand, cannot. I look up at her and smile benevolently. She needs me more than I need her.

  Looking very worried, she slides her glasses down to the end of her nose and peers over them at me. “There’s a boy in the shop,” she says hesitantly. I stop the flurry with my fingers. “A young boy. He says he knows you. He
’s asked to see you.”

  I can’t even kid myself. I know exactly who it is. And so do you. Only Kath Brown is in the dark. I frown as if to say, “How intriguing!” while I try and think of something to say to her. I stand up and my knees are shaky and I wonder if I’ve gone as white as I feel.

  “You’d better go through,” Kath says when it’s clear I’m not about to offer an explanation. And what could I tell her? “He’s waiting.”

  “I won’t be a minute,” I promise her, and in the three steps it takes me to cross the office, I mentally check out how I must look. I’m wearing a black trouser suit, which is great because it’s quite trendy and makes me feel younger and everyone was very civilized at breakfast this morning so it hasn’t got any puke or jam or tea stains on it. A major plus when you want to look good, I think you’ll agree. And, I know it’s stupid, but I do want to look good. I don’t possess a pair of Jimmy Choo kitten heels in which to skip lightly across the floor, but these ones are from Marks & Spencer’s Particularly Expensive Range, or something, and do the job just fine.

  In the shop, Christian looks vaguely uncomfortable. It must have been quite an effort for him to come here. I pause at the doorway to watch him. He is fingering some of the fabrics—the ones that are £180 per meter—and if he were Elliott, I’d tell him off. I hope he hasn’t got charcoaly hands.

  “Hi,” I say, and Christian spins round. Just his smile is enough to do very weird things to me. This is ridiculous! I am old. I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a sensible suburban woman. How can he do this to me?

  “Sorry,” he whispers. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I whisper back, even though he’s as much as told me he knows that. I wonder if Kath Brown has a glass pressed to the wall. I would, in her situation.

  “I was missing you,” he says, as if that’s explanation enough.

  “Christian!”