Читать книгу Homecoming - Cathy Kelly - Страница 7

Being able to boil an egg means you’ll never go hungry. Duck eggs make the most wonderful breakfasts. When you crack open the fragile shell and peer into that golden yolk, the colour and consistency of honey, and breathe in the scent of the land, your heart sings.

The problem is the ducks. We always had a couple in the yard, Muscovy ducks, with black and white feathers and red bills, and Lord, those birds could fight. They were like a warring family. In the end, I kept them in separate pens in the coop. It was the only way.

Some people are like that too, by the way. No matter what you do, they’ll fight. That’s their business, love. You can’t stop them fighting. Might as well let them at it, but don’t get involved.

You might wonder why I’m telling you this, Eleanor, but you see, I don’t want you to grow up without learning all these things, the way I did. It wasn’t my mother’s fault, mind. It was mine. I was a sickly child, although you wouldn’t think it to look at me now. As I sit at the table with my writing paper, I’m a few months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday and I’ve never felt better. But as a little one, I spent a lot of time in bed with fevers and coughs. My mother dosed me with a drink made of carragheen moss and lemon juice. A weak chest, was what the doctor said, although we didn’t go in much for doctoring. They were hard years, then, at the start of the century and there wasn’t money for doctors for the likes of us.

My mother once took me to visit an old man who lived way over the other side of one of the islands, to a house on the edge of the cliff, because he had the curefor a bad chest. Someone said his cure was mare’s milk and some herbs and a bit of the mare’s tail – it had to be a white mare, mind you – but whatever, it didn’t work on me.

The long and the short of it is that I didn’t learn how to cook alongside my mother. Most girls learned from watching their mother at the fire. I was wrapped up in the bed in the back room with only a few books for company. Agnes brought home books from Mrs Fitzmaurice’s house, and I read them all: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tom Jones, even.

And then one day I just grew out of the bad chest. My mother wanted me to go to school because I’d been there so rarely. Again, I had my head in the books and never so much as peeled an onion. Then Mam became ill and suddenly I was the woman of the house. Agnes was gone all week and back on Sundays, the lads were out working on the land, and the only person left to cook and clean was the one person who didn’t know how to do any of it.

But I learned, Eleanor, I learned. The hard way, I might add.

That’s what I want to tell you. About the joy of cooking and feeding the people you love. About the skill of making dinner for ten from a few scraps. There’s magic in cooking. It’s like prayer, you know. All those heads bent, hearts joined together. That’s why it works. It’s because of people coming together. Cooking’s the same.

The man in seat 3C sneaked a look at the young woman sitting beside him on the Heathrow to Dublin plane. She was small, fine-boned and wearing one of those funny scarves wound around her head, the way old ladies used to wear turbans years ago. He couldn’t understand it himself. Why would a pretty girl do that to herself, like she wanted to look ridiculous? A bit of blonde hair had escaped the scarf: it was old-style blonde, platinum, actually. Otherwise, she was very un-done-up, as his wife might say. No make-up, wearing jeans, a grey marl sweatshirt and trendy rectangular glasses. Yet despite all that, there was something special about her. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

‘Are you eating with us today?’ asked an airline steward. The male passenger looked up.

The steward was definitely talking to him but his eyes were on the woman in the window seat, consuming her, as if he hadn’t had a good look yet and wanted his fill.

‘Er, yes,’ said the passenger. He liked airline food, couldn’t understand why other people didn’t. Food was food. ‘What is it?’

‘Choice of beef stew or chicken with pasta,’ said the steward, deftly putting a tray down on the man’s fold-out table.

‘Beef,’ said Liam, thinking he might as well eat a proper meal as it would be at least nine before he got home.

‘Anything to drink?’ the steward murmured as he set a small tinfoil-covered package on the tray.

‘Red wine.’ Liam unveiled his dinner with anticipation. It was pasta.

‘Sorry,’ he said to the steward, ‘I wanted beef.’

But the steward had already put a small bottle of red wine on his tray and his gaze was now fixed on the girl in 3A.

‘I wanted beef?’ said Liam plaintively, but it was no good. The caravan had moved on.

Megan knew the cabin crew had worked out who she was, even though she always flew under her real name, which was Megan Flynn, and not Megan Bouchier, the name the world knew her by. Bouchier was her paternal grandmother’s family name, and all those years ago at stage school she’d seen the sense of dropping the prosaic Flynn in favour of the more memorable Bouchier.

She’d hoped the Flynn would give her some protection now, along with the blue silk scarf hiding her trademark platinum curls and the little Prada glasses with clear lenses, but it hadn’t worked.

When you’d spent the best part of six years appearing on television and cinema screens, and in magazines and newspapers, your face burned on to people’s minds the way the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list never seemed to do. Murderers and master criminals might go unrecognised, but land a starring role in a series of mediocre television shows and one standout British movie, and your face suddenly became as recognisable as the queen’s.

The dinner trolley was locked beside her row and at least three members of the crew were looking at her while pretending not to look at her, which was a difficult trick to pull off. Airline staff were good at that: charmingly treating world-famous people with polite nonchalance.

Today’s crew were reacting to her differently, though. Perhaps it was because she was no longer the adored young actress who’d been listed in Empire magazine as one of the ‘ten most promising actors of the year’ not that long ago. Instead she was the marriage-breaker pictured on the pages of every redtop in London alongside a photo of another actress, an older woman whose husband Megan was accused of stealing.

Megan had not wanted to see the papers when the story had broken. She’d tried not to look but she couldn’t avoid the headline that jumped out at her from a newsstand outside a Tube station.

‘Devastated!’ it screamed above a picture of Katharine Hartnell, her famous, Oscar-winning face drawn, cheekbones prominent, dark circles under her eyes. Apart from her Oscar, Katharine Hartnell had been famous for being fifty but not looking it. And she was famous for being in love with her movie-star husband after twenty years of marriage – light years in movie-star terms. Megan had seen many photos in magazines of Katharine and her husband looking very much in love. In the newspaper picture, she looked more than fifty and definitely devastated.

‘The other woman,’ was Megan’s caption, with a picture of herself she hated, showing her emerging, laughing, from a night club, her long hair askew, someone else’s fur coat thrown over her shoulders and a man on each side, one waving a bottle of champagne. She was wearing a silver sequinned dress that had sunk further down her cleavage as the night had gone on and by the time the photographer – who must have made a fortune from that one picture – had snapped her, the neckline was millimetres away from her left nipple.

The small, heart-shaped face that numerous photographers had described as ‘exquisite’ was creased up into a huge tipsy smile and her almond-shaped eyes, the kohl smudged, glittered with the excitement of being the ‘it’ actress of the day. All in all, the photo was like a dictionary illustration of the word hedonism.

The story and that iconic picture meant Megan had entered the terrible world of the media’s ‘most hated woman on the planet’. Suddenly, people she’d never met talked about her over their skinny lattes and their newspapers, condemning her as a husband-stealer. Opinion articles were written on whether women like her put the cause of feminism back thirty years.

Megan had grown used to being loved, to having designers sending her handbags, to having magazines print admiring articles under photos of her gracing the latest premiere.

And now this. Megan the Mantrapper.

She’d fallen from grace faster than any archangel and the result was cold, hard hatred. Where once she’d been loved, now she was loathed. It was incredibly painful. Almost as painful as having her heart broken.

‘Would you like dinner? A drink?’ said the steward. Somebody else’s husband? were the unspoken words Megan heard.

‘No thank you,’ she said with all the dignity she could muster. She’d have liked a bottle of water but couldn’t face the actual transaction, having to look at the cabin crew and see what was written on their faces: pity, contempt, abject fascination. Instead, she turned to look out the window as if there was something to be seen out there instead of cloudy darkness.

Her sister Pippa had told her that escaping to Ireland was a good plan, and she trusted Pippa with her life. Once upon a time, Pippa might have run away with her but now her running-away days were over: she was the mother of two small children, with a real life in Wales and a husband. Megan would have gone to stay with them, but the press had already been sniffing around their home, making a nuisance of themselves. Besides, it wasn’t Pippa’s job to protect her little sister any more. That hurt too.

‘Megan, love, you’ve got to get out of London,’ Pippa had urged her. Megan’s agent had been saying the same thing, but with much less kindness.

Carole Baird was not one of the ‘tell them they’re fabulous, no matter what’ agents. Her motto was ‘tell them like it is – with knobs on’. Megan’s behaviour might lose her film roles and impact on her career – and therefore, on Carole’s bottom line. Twenty per cent of nothing was nothing. Carole’s concern wasn’t moral, it was financial.

‘You should go to Aunt Nora’s – Kim!’ Pippa shouted. ‘Put that down! Sorry, Megan, she’s at the dishwasher again. We just made a cake and she wants to lick the bowl and spoon again. No, Kim. Dirty, no!’

Aunt Nora’s home in Dublin was where the sisters had spent the normal part of their childhood years. As different from their mother as chalk was from cheese, Aunt Nora had toned down all Marguerite’s wilder suggestions when the girls were growing up. Aunt Nora said that the French school on the Caribbean island where Marguerite was living at the time probably wasn’t the best place for two kids who didn’t have much education behind them, and couldn’t speak French. Aunt Nora enrolled them in the Sacred Heart Convent just off Golden Square and took care of them until Marguerite’s latest love affair had gone sour and she went back to London.

Aunt Nora had always been there. Solid, dependable, as unstarry a person as you could find.

Which was why Megan didn’t want to have to talk to her about what had happened. Her mother hadn’t judged Megan because she didn’t know what judgement was. Marguerite had made too many disastrous romantic choices in her life to comment on anyone else’s, but Nora – a single woman who went to weekly Mass – might.

‘What about Australia?’ Megan had wondered when she’d spoken to Carole. It seemed far enough away to hide from the photographers who had been camped outside her flat in London for the past ten days.

‘You need family,’ her agent said sagely.

I’d be out of your control in Australia, Megan thought grimly.

‘Who knows what you’d get up to in Australia,’ Carole said, on cue. ‘Too many gorgeous men.’

Megan had to laugh, although it was one of those painful laughs. ‘You don’t trust me,’ she said.

‘Why should I?’ said Carole. ‘You’re screwing up your career and mine too. Let’s put all the cards on the table, Megan. It’s not doing the agency any good being linked to someone who’s wrecking her career so successfully. People are wondering why I didn’t stop it. As if I damn well knew about it. You’re not a pop star. People practically expect that from music industry stars, but it’s not good if you’re trying to make a name for yourself as a serious actress. Nobody’s going to cast an actress who’s just broken up what’s been held up as one of the rare long-lasting Hollywood marriages. Producers and directors want a reasonably blank canvas or at least someone who can play innocent – what they don’t want is a PR nightmare. All moviegoers will see now on the screen is Megan the homewrecker. This stunt has thrown away years of hard work. I’m not sure what you can do to ride out the storm, but you need to keep your head down for at least six months. And I mean down. No partying, no going to fashion shows and getting papped having fun. You need to look sorry.’

‘I am sorry,’ Megan said bitterly.

‘Nobody wants to hear empty words, Megan,’ Carole said. ‘Only an idiot would say they weren’t sorry. Sorry isn’t the issue. People want your head on a platter. That’s the downside of fame. The public get to give it and they get to take it away.’

Megan stilled. For a few moments, she’d considered telling Carole what she really felt. That she’d loved Rob Hartnell. That she’d never have gone with him otherwise. Now she was glad she hadn’t.

Carole had a very simple view of the whole episode: Megan had had a badly judged fling with a happily married movie star. They’d been caught and instead of the movie star standing by Megan’s side, he’d run away. Three lives were wrecked, the sympathy was with Katharine, and Megan was portrayed as a femme fatale who’d chiselled Rob away from his wife.

Rob, very sensibly, had not hung about for the fall-out. He had simply disappeared, the way only the very famous or the very rich can disappear. Since that day in Prague – was it only just before Christmas? – when a photographer had caught Rob and Megan cuddling up in a tiny bar near their hotel, Rob Hartnell hadn’t been seen. Megan was left to face the storm alone. ‘I’m devastated, too,’ she wanted to cry. But it was no use. No one, not even her agent, cared what she felt.

‘The whole thing is career suicide,’ Carole said, almost to herself. ‘What were you thinking?’

Megan felt the rawness inside her and was glad she’d kept her feelings to herself. Thinking had had nothing do to with it, but it was better that Carole didn’t know that. She would rather no one knew it. Public hatred might be painful, but it was marginally better than pity.

‘Time is the only healer now, at least in the media,’ Carole went on.

And what about my heart, how is that meant to heal? Megan thought, but instead she said, ‘If my sister can’t have me, I could go to my Aunt Nora’s in Dublin.’

Nobody would expect her to go there when she had many jet-setting friends with yachts and islands and Manhattan apartments, although the friends seemed to have made themselves scarce. Katharine Hartnell was too powerful for anyone in the industry to risk offending. Only a few of the people Megan had thought of as friends were phoning up now, and more for prurience’ sake than out of friendship.

Still, Ireland was the last place anybody would expect her to go.

It was also the last place she wanted to go. Aunt Nora would not throw her arms around Megan and say ‘poor diddums’. She’d probably ask ‘What the heck were you doing?’

But it was a home, and one the press were unlikely to know about. Her peripatetic childhood on exotic islands had been widely reported; interviewers had always been much more interested in her recollections of Martinique and Formentera than Dublin Bay.

Ireland and Aunt Nora would do, but really she wanted to hide with Pippa: lie on the bed in her big sister’s attic spare room reading novels, hidden from prying telephoto lenses by rolling Welsh hills. But she couldn’t compromise Pippa’s family in that way.

When they’d been younger, the gorgeous Flynn sisters had set London, and occasionally LA, on fire. It seemed nothing could stop them. But that, like everything else, had changed. Now Pippa had taken herself out of the rat race and, much as she loved her sister, she had other loyalties to consider.

A couple of days earlier, on one of her sneaked forays from the London flat to get groceries, Megan had treated herself to a fashion magazine – one which had featured her in their ‘in the closet’ series a year ago. She’d opened it to find a big article by a leading female journalist on the evils of predatory women, and there she was, Megan Bouchier, vilified as the worst offender. Horrified, she’d thrown the magazine in the bin, but it carried on taunting her, even from underneath the wet teabags.

‘Who are these people who hate me so much?’ Megan had sobbed on the phone to Pippa. ‘It’s cruel, the stuff these newspaper columnists write – the women are the worst. How can they be so vicious?’

For once, there was quiet from Pippa’s end. Normally, their calls would be punctuated by an endless chorus of ‘Mummy, I want…’ or the dogs barking or someone laughing or crying – Megan had become used, although it had been hard initially, to the constant demands of her sister’s life. Kim, four, and Toby, twenty months, came first now.

‘I don’t know,’ Pippa said after a while. She sounded as if she was too tired to even answer the question at the end of a long day chasing after her small children. ‘I suppose it’s like the pack instinct, isn’t it? Women feel threatened and blame the other woman. It’s easier to see her as the snake charmer, the evil seductress, than to blame your own man for straying. You know, it’s not his fault, therefore you can still trust him. It’s other women you can’t trust.’

It was Megan’s turn to be silent. When the news had first broken, Pippa had been her greatest ally. ‘He seduced you, he told you their marriage was over, it’s his fault,’ she’d said back then.

Even when the press had arrived at Pippa’s farmhouse, scaring the chickens so much that two had run off and never returned, she’d been on Megan’s side. Now suddenly she wasn’t. She was fed up with it all and the effect it was having on her life. Attuned to every nuance of Pippa’s voice, Megan could tell that her sister had had enough of the Rob and Megan saga.

Worse, Pippa was looking at the story from a distance, thinking about how other women would view her beloved sister, instead of standing beside her in the trenches.

It was hard to know what was the most painful: Rob vanishing, her subsequent crucifixion in the press, or the knowledge that the whole scandal had somehow severed her bond with her older sister.

How, Megan thought bleakly, could a love so glorious have brought such pain?

She could see the lights of the curving arms of Dublin Bay through the plane window. Her throat felt tight at the sight. Home. It was home in lots of ways. Since their father had died when Megan was ten and Pippa thirteen, they’d lived in many different houses with their free-spirited mother. Sometimes the houses of their mother’s boyfriends, sometimes houses they rented. The one in Peckham was the one they’d lived in the longest, and that had been for two years, when Megan was starting out acting. She’d done her best never to say where she lived. Peckham didn’t sound cool enough. There had been an awful problem with damp. It was a three-bedroomed house and each bedroom reeked of damp. Pippa had had to throw out her favourite brown leather jacket because of the mould on it.

Nora’s house in Golden Square was the only home which had remained constant in all that time. Not as fancy as the villa in Martinique, or as cool as the top-floor apartment in Madrid, which had only lasted six months anyhow, because Pablo had been a bit of a perv and had clearly fancied both Marguerite’s daughters, so they’d left there sharpish.

Golden Square wasn’t cosmopolitan, smart or trendy. It had seemed like the most boring place on the planet to fourteen-year-old Megan in the two years she’d lived there and attended the Sacred Heart Convent. The only reasonable shops in the area were the book shop and the vintage clothes shop, Mesopotamia, where Megan had once found a tattered Pucci scarf for a fiver. Granted, a lot of the clothes there were tragic, but if you rummaged, you could get bargains.

Golden Square was both homely and home. Everybody knew Aunt Nora and liked her, respected her. If Nora forgot her purse when she went to The Nook convenience store, the owner would happily wave her away and tell her to pay another time. Megan couldn’t think of anywhere in the world where she knew people in the same way.

The plane banked over the city, lower all the time. Like Megan’s spirits.

It was horrible, feeling that she’d entirely messed up her life almost before it had begun. She had wanted to do everything right, to be the best she could be, to be wise and kind, and yet somehow she’d ended up in a world where it was easier to go to night clubs ‘til dawn, easier to hang around as part of some rock star’s entourage, easier to do the wrong thing. And all the while it was as if her life was a film; she was just playing a role, just pretending she was real. It felt as though one of her choices actually meant anything because tomorrow she’d wake up and be a different character.

Except it wasn’t a film and the choices she’d made had been real. So were the consequences.

Overnight her fairytale world had turned very real and very ugly.

She didn’t know whether Nora or the comfort of Golden Square would solve any of that. All she knew was that she would give anything to be able to go back and start again.

Nora Flynn saw the last client off the premises and locked the practice door with relief. The heavy curtain she pulled over the door was a sign to regulars that Golden Square Chiropody Clinic was closed for the day. It had been a long one; seven clients ending with a very difficult woman at six who wanted something done about a fungal nail infection but did it mean her nail polish would have to come off?

‘What?’

‘I don’t want my pedicure ruined, I’ve just had it done,’ the woman said.

‘You are kidding, aren’t you?’ said Nora.

The woman gazed at Nora, who had poker-straight undyed grey hair and not a shred of make-up on her face.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Probably not.’

Nora could be endlessly patient. But when the woman had finally left, moaning about her messed-up pedicure, Nora had felt like shrieking, And a plague on you too! after her. Hell was definitely other people.

She checked her watch. Half six. Megan would be on the plane now.

‘Get a taxi,’ Nora had told her on the phone. ‘No point me trekking through evening traffic to the airport.’

‘OK,’ Megan stammered, clearly taken aback but trying not to show it.

‘Shall I make dinner or will you eat on the plane?’ Nora went on briskly, noting Megan’s surprise and moving on.

‘Don’t bother with dinner,’ Megan said, and she sounded more like the old Megan, less like the grand movie star who’d insisted fame wouldn’t change her and yet had been changed all the same.

It would do her good to be back in Golden Square, Nora thought. Nobody would be running round after her here. There was only Nora and Nora didn’t do running around. Not with her knees. She was glad she didn’t have to cook tonight, either. Nora knew her limits and cooking was one of them. A bit of salmon in the microwave and some plain rice would do her nicely.

The practice occupied the ground floor of the house. Normally, she’d have been sharing the space with Kevin, who was a wonderful chiropodist, but he had a week off.

‘Surfing,’ Kevin had said when he booked his holidays.

‘Whatever floats your boat,’ said Nora. ‘It’s supposed to be hard.’

‘Not for me,’ said Kevin, with the innocence of a child, and Nora thought he was probably right. For all Kev’s innocence, he was very competent.

She turned off the lights and opened the door on to the stairs leading to the rest of the house. She lived on the two upper floors.

The basement was a flat let out to a pair of girls who used to work in the bank, and now worked in a bar, making far more money in tips than they’d ever made when they were changing euros into rands and yen on the foreign exchange. The agreement was one party every two months, and so far, they’d kept their side of the bargain. Nora generally got invited to the parties, went for an hour to show that she wasn’t the sour-faced old bag from upstairs, and then retreated to bed with a cup of cocoa, her double-strength wax earplugs and her silk mask.

They all shared the garden at the back, although on weekend mornings, Nora wasn’t bothered by the girls because, like vampires, they rarely rose before noon. Even then, they looked quite undead.

This evening, Nora thought she might sit by the window overlooking the garden and drink a glass of wine to set her up for Megan’s arrival. Nora didn’t like to rely on anything unnatural for relaxation but it had been a stressful day, and she wasn’t entirely looking forward to her niece’s arrival. Megan thought nobody in Golden Square knew what had happened, as if Ireland were some provincial backwater without newspapers or the internet. Like all young people, she thought the current city she was in was the centre of the universe, and everyone who didn’t live there was to be pitied.

But Nora knew it all. And if she hadn’t, Prudence Maguire from the other side of the square had nearly burst a gut to tell her a few days before.

‘Your Megan is in a bit of trouble, is seems. Got herself involved with a married man, broken up the marriage, or so it says in the papers. Just in case you hadn’t heard,’ Prudence had added, smiling like a cobra as they stood in the queue in The Nook with their groceries.

On that particular day, Nora had some soya milk, lemons for her tea and a tin of dolphin-friendly tuna in her basket. Prudence had a half-price chocolate cheese cake and a litre of lambrusco hidden under a copy of the Irish Times. Nora knew because she’d seen Prudence put them there.

Not that she’d say anything, any more than she’d say a reproving word to the girls in the basement flat who drank two weeks’ worth of alcohol units on a Friday night. Nora didn’t tell other people what to do. Didn’t believe in it. Everyone had their own path to follow, was her motto. If Prudence wanted to be a bitch extraordinaire, destroy her arteries with cholesterol and turn into an old soak at home on her own, far be it from Nora to say anything.

‘Thank you for telling me, Prudence,’ Nora had replied calmly, adjusting her spectacles so as to get a clear view of Prudence’s face with its delighted smile. ‘Great day, wasn’t it? Nice to have a bit of heat in your bones with the really freezing weather gone.’

Prudence’s smile faltered at this. She was entirely unaccustomed to people receiving her carefully aimed gossip with politeness. Normally, the recipient would look stunned or hurt or on the verge of needing a restraining order. Nora Flynn just looked as calm as ever, round face serene. Even her smoothly tied-back long grey hair had a serenity about it. Silly cow. Probably growing magic mushrooms in her back garden, Prudence thought crossly. Stupid old bag. Nora had to be at least sixty-five, and didn’t look a day over fifty. And she was still going strong. Had to be drugs, had to be. Those alternative health people were all growing marijuana plants in their sheds and insisting it was for their health.

It was easier to have Prudence come out and say it, Nora knew. The news would be all round the square at high speed, and this way everyone would be over the embarrassment should they bump into Megan. Even Kevin, who wasn’t much of a reader, had seen it in the paper.

‘Poor Megan. It’s a bummer, isn’t it?’ he’d said.

‘Yes, a bummer,’ Nora agreed.

Another reason why she loved Kevin. There would be no sly glances from him, betraying the unspoken judgement that her actress niece had really screwed up this time. No, Kevin knew that things happened to people and you got on with life. Shit happens, he liked to say. It was a comforting philosophy, although not necessarily one you’d want embroidered on a cushion.

When she opened the door to her apartment, Leonardo and Cici, her two dogs, were waiting inside, tails wagging furiously. Leonardo, who was part-greyhound and very shivery, danced his quivering dance, while Cici, who was mainly shih tzu, all dictator, bounced up and down like a dog who hadn’t been petted for at least three hours and was on the verge of phoning the animal rescue people in outrage.

‘You had a walk at lunchtime,’ Nora said, hugging them both. ‘And this morning. You are shameless.’

She pulled on a cardigan and her duffel coat.

Nora didn’t bother much with fashion. Flat shoes, comfortable trousers and shirts worn untucked was her style. She varied the colours and the fabric, but generally, she looked the same no matter what. The hair that had gone grey in her twenties, like her mother’s, was tied back or sometimes plaited. She wore suncream in summer, moisturiser in winter, and clear salve instead of lip gloss. When Megan and Pippa had stayed with her as teenagers, they’d moaned that she had no cosmetics for them to practise on.

Bien dans sa peau, as Pippa would say now. Comfortable in her skin.

Pippa understood it, but poor Megan still didn’t. Megan worked in a world where the emphasis on the outside was so total and all-consuming that there wasn’t any time for the inside. When Megan had first said she wanted to go to acting school, Nora had got an anxious feeling in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t approve of acting or actresses. Of course, they were all ‘actors’ now, men and women. Another bit of tomfoolery. It wasn’t a steady trade. Only a few lucky ones made a living out of it, and the rest struggled endlessly, hoping for a break. Nora had known that Megan’s head would be turned by that glittery surface world, and she’d been right.

The dogs’ excited barking made her hurry to open the door and as they walked out into the dark she admired, as she often did, the beauty of the lights all around the square. Golden Square’s residents could be split into two groups: the people who owned whole houses, had two cars, and employed someone else to cut their grass, and those whose families had lived there for donkeys’ years and who couldn’t have afforded to buy one now even with the state of the market, but who were holding on for the next property boom. They cut their own grass, occasionally rented out bits of the houses to tenants, and looked enviously at their neighbours’ double glazing.

Nora was one of the latter type. Her parents had inherited the house and had moved in anxiously in the 1940s, fresh from a tiny flat above a gentlemen’s draper’s shop in Camden Street, terrified they’d never be able to heat or redecorate this comparatively enormous residence.

They’d been so proud of their new home, but always anxious about living somewhere so grand. As if they didn’t really belong.

Nobody’s windows were so clean or their garden so weedfree as the Flynns’. It was as if they felt keeping the place spotless made up for the fact that they had to repaint it all themselves. It was years before they could afford to have a roofer fix the tiles. When it rained heavily, Nora’s mother used to trail round the house nervously, waiting for the arrival of the next spot of damp. Unaccustomed to the whole notion of a garden, they’d kept the lawn shorn and attempted little else.

One of the biggest worries had been the behaviour of the various basement tenants over the years. Nora could remember her mother’s prayers that the next lot of new people would be quiet.

‘I’ll say a novena to St Jude,’ she’d say. Sometimes the novenas worked and sometimes they didn’t. Nora’s parents never wondered why, they just accepted it. God’s choice was not theirs to question.

If they could see her now, Nora thought sadly. They’d have told her to keep the dogs on the lead and her father would have been following at a crouch, plastic bag in hand, waiting for the inevitable poop.

Dogs were supposed to be kept on the lead in the square, but it was easy enough to work out which animals were there and whether it was safe to let her pair off. It was safe this evening. Nora unclipped the leads and let the dogs race off under the gentle lamplight. She sat down on her favourite bench, stretched out her legs and let the strains of the day slough off her. There were only a couple of other people about. Nora liked all the doggie people in the square. Having dogs did something to people. Made them softer, gentler.

Prudence Maguire didn’t have a dog; no surprise there. Rumour had it that her daughter had once had a hamster, but it had escaped, and Prudence had refused permission to have the couch ripped apart to find it. Nora imagined a ghostly hamster still rattling round inside the Maguire family couch, making little eldritch squeaks of distress that Prudence would totally ignore.

She glanced at her watch. Ten to seven. Megan would have landed. She’d be in the taxi soon, on her way. Nora closed her eyes and wished for the first time ever that her niece wasn’t coming. Nora had tried hard to be a steadying influence in her nieces’ lives. Her brother Fionn would have wanted his big sister to take care of his daughters when he died. But it hadn’t been easy. Marguerite, their mother, was the exact opposite of Nora: a woman who lived in a state of constant, almost child-like happiness, she was prone to both wild adventures and falling passionately in love.

She was the type who clearly needed a man around and, although she’d adored Fionn, he wasn’t long dead before she was anxiously looking for another strong male to take care of her.

She also had strange views on how to bring up her daughters.

When the carrots the children had planted hadn’t grown in Nora’s bit of garden, Marguerite stuck shop-bought ones into the earth instead and pretended to dig them up.

‘That’s appalling,’ Nora had said, unable to stop herself. ‘How can they learn about real life when you fake it for them like that?’

‘They’re only a few carrots,’ Marguerite had laughed. ‘Don’t be so serious, Nora.’

And now Marguerite was sunning herself in Ibiza with her latest hunk and didn’t appear to be treating Megan’s situation as worrying.

‘Darling, it’ll all blow over,’ Marguerite had reportedly said to Pippa when her elder daughter had phoned with the news.

Nora hadn’t spoken to Marguerite in years. It wasn’t possible to kill someone over the phone but Nora didn’t want to take any chances.

So Nora was left to pick up the pieces. But how could she? Megan still didn’t know that huge, clean carrots didn’t magically appear a couple of weeks after you planted seeds.

The cassette player in the taxi had been blasting out Moroccan music all the way from the airport and the driver, a very slender, dark-skinned man with long, artistic fingers that tapped the steering wheel in time to the beat, hadn’t spoken at all since Megan had got into the cab.

‘Very good,’ was all he’d said when she gave him the address.

‘This is it,’ she said, sitting forward in the seat at the taxi slowed down in Golden Square.

‘Very good,’ he said again, applying the brakes with a firm foot.

Megan shot forward in the back seat and banged her head on the headrest of the passenger seat. The taxi driver looked around in alarm.

‘It’s fine,’ Megan said quickly, holding a hand up in the international ‘all fine’ gesture.

He still looked alarmed.

‘Really fine,’ she said. ‘I’m OK, honestly.’

She handed him the money plus a generous tip. When you didn’t want to communicate, Megan had learned it was best to hand out big tips. It was like saying, ‘I’m not a rude bitch because I’m famous, really, but here’s a large tip, just to make sure you like me.’

‘Very good,’ the driver said.

It was clearly the only English he spoke. Poor man. He wasn’t at home here either, she thought, hauling her stuff out and shivering in the chilly night air.

Megan couldn’t actually remember the first time she and Pippa had come to stay with Nora. Their aunt and her narrow, quirky house in Golden Square had always been a part of their lives, it seemed. Yet she knew it wasn’t always so. It was only when Dad died that they’d begun to stay with their aunt for long periods of time. It was clear, though nobody had ever said as much, that Mum hadn’t coped well with her husband’s death, hence Nora had stepped in to take care of her little nieces.

Golden Square, with its endless cycle of interesting tenants downstairs, and various motley dogs, cats and even once, a parakeet, had filled the gap left by Megan’s father. Yet everyone appeared to forget that it was Nora’s brother who’d died. She had every right to be as devastated as Mum, yet she never said anything about her own grief. She’d simply moved into their lives, being there when she was needed, for summer holidays, for Christmases, her pain on hold while she did her duty.

Nora must have been watching out for Megan now because the front door opened and Nora appeared silhouetted in the hall light, trying to restrain two barking dogs.

‘Hello,’ called Megan, hauling her wheeled hold-all along the narrow garden path. The taxi driver had barely accelerated off with a roar of tyres, before the tears started rolling down her cheeks.

Nora gave up holding back Cici and Leonardo, opened the door wide and welcomed Megan into her arms, the dogs jumping eagerly around them.

‘You’re here now,’ Nora said softly. ‘It’ll be all right, Meg, you’ll see.’

Hearing the diminutive name she’d preferred when she was a kid made Megan feel even sadder. She’d had such plans for her life and what had they come to? ‘Oh, Nora, everything’s a disaster. I’ve ruined it all,’ she said.

‘Nonsense,’ Nora replied, deciding that now wasn’t the time for the lecture. She pulled the hold-all the rest of the way inside, called the dogs in and shut the front door. ‘You made a mistake, people do. You feel terrible right now, but you will feel better soon.’

Despite her tears, Megan felt familiar anger prick. Nora still talked to her as though she were a child. This was the destruction of both her life and her career, not a schoolgirl escapade. She was twenty-six, not a kid.

‘Come on upstairs. I’ve just made myself some lemon and chamomile tea, there’s plenty in the pot for two. And Bondi Vet is on later. They’re all repeats; tonight it’s the one about the parrot on Prozac, you’ll love it.’

Nora adored animal shows, everything from wild animals being secretly filmed in the bush to domestic cats being rescued from mad people who didn’t feed them: she watched them all.

Megan thought of how she’d hoped that tonight she could talk to someone who loved her and would understand. Perhaps she could finally unburden herself and tell Nora everything. But no, they were going to watch animal programmes. Still, it was better than having Nora lecture her.

‘Great,’ she said, with an enthusiasm she didn’t feel. What she’d really like was a cool glass of white wine and a hot bath, but neither seemed to be on the menu.

The dogs split the loving between them, with Cici appointing herself carer of Megan and sitting on her lap waiting to be adored. Leonardo, shaking with the excitement of the evening, lay on the couch beside Nora, his velvety grey head on her knee.

Nobody could resist a double bill of Bondi Vet and with Cici there to hug, Nora could see her niece visibly relax. Megan kicked off her shoes and folded her feet up under her on the big armchair, rearranging Cici so she was snuggled close to her. Pretending to watch the television, Nora secretly watched Megan.

Her beauty had come as a surprise. Marguerite was pretty in a blonde, girlish way, and Pippa took after her. Fionn himself had been tall, attractive and had an air of great strength about him, but he was no matinee idol. And yet along had come Megan, a genuine beauty even when she was a child. There had been no teenage anxieties for her about her looks, no acne or teeth problems, nothing. She’d grown from a slight fairy of a child with cool blonde hair and enquiring dark olive green eyes into a slight fairy of a woman, with a sheen to her skin, an inner glow that marked her out. People had stared at her when Nora took the two girls out; nobody had ever assumed Nora was their mother, which might have been hurtful except that Nora had no problems with her own lack of beauty. It was like the length of your legs: there was nothing whatsoever to do about it.

It had been no surprise that film and television people had been enamoured of Megan. Even as a child playing a little gangster in a stage version of Bugsy Malone, she was luminous.

But not so luminous now, Nora thought. Megan was wearing what all young women seemed to wear these days: those loose, boyish jeans, flat little lace-up runners and an enormous grey sweatshirt that dwarfed her. Her skin had a greyish tinge, she looked skinny and, without any make-up, the ultra-blonde hair looked cheap and, Nora hated to even think it, tarty.

Nora had read the single interview given by someone close to Katharine Hartnell in a newspaper a client had left at the surgery. Devoid of most of the usual celebrity cover-up, it had sounded heartfelt and terribly sad. There was no blithe dismissal of a lowly actress trying to infiltrate a solid movie-star marriage. Just the assertion that this had split the Hartnells up and that her husband’s betrayal had shaken Katharine to the core.

No, Nora decided. She wouldn’t say anything to Megan tonight. What could she say, anyway? She wasn’t equipped to counsel Megan over this. It was so far outside Nora’s comfort zone that she wouldn’t have known where to start.

But she felt, as her eyes stared unseeing at the Sydney vets trying to save a dog bitten by a snake, that she’d let her brother down. This wasn’t what he would have wanted for one of his beloved daughters.