I pull away, and plaster on a smile as we all settle at our table. There are two bottles of wine – one white and one red to cover all eventualities – and I pour myself a glass, splashing a red stain onto the tablecloth as my hands shake. Zack has sparkling water, I notice, which probably means he’s driving.
“So,” says Marcy, leaning her elbows on the table, “tell us – how do you two know each other, then?”
Sophie looks just as curious, but also a touch concerned. She knows me well enough to spot the signs of nerves.
“Ah,” says Zack, running his hands through his hair as he talks, “well, that’s a funny story. Basically, I was going to make Connie a star.”
Sophie’s eyebrows shoot up, and she stares at me in surprise.
“A star?” she says, frowning. “I thought you were a chef?”
“I was,” I reply quickly, just in case she’s starting to think I had a whole secret life. Which I suppose I kind of did. “I was a chef, but I was also… maybe a borderline celeb?”
“What?” she answers, looking impossibly befuddled. I suppose the idea of your yellow dungaree wearing, hug-obsessed café-running mum being a celeb, borderline or not, must be weird. If she’d ever googled me under my maiden name, she’d have found a few things – not as many as you would now but the internet certainly existed that long ago. I guess she’s never done it, and why would she? Kids always seem to assume their parents are dull, and anything of note about their lives only started when they were born. As I basically said exactly that to her just minutes earlier, I can’t blame her for it.
“A celeb?” she repeats, when I only shrug. “What kind? Like, theBig Brotherkind, or the posh party inHello!magazine kind?”
“It started with newspaper and magazine articles,” I say. “Reviews for the restaurant, which was one of those places that proper famous people liked to dine out at, so there were often mentions in the gossip columns, that kind of thing. And that developed into profiles, because I was so young.”
“Your mum was one of the youngest head chefs in London,” Zack adds, filling up my glass for me. “She attracted a buzzy crowd. It wasn’t just the food, it was her – she was fun and gorgeous and a party girl. When she walked into the restaurant to chat to guests, everyone was watching her, even if GeorgeClooney was in the house. She was like the supermodel of the restaurant world.”
I cringe as he says these things, because I recognise at least some of it from the way my agent Sal used to pitch me.
“That was a long time ago,” I say. “I was a different person then.”
A person who was maybe half the size she is now, I think, suddenly aware of my age and my weight in a way that doesn’t feel good. I wasn’t happy then, I remind myself, and I am now. It doesn’t matter what I look like. I am a middle-aged mother of three, not the skinny adrenaline-fuelled wraith that I was back then.
“Were you, like, on the telly?” Sophie asks, wide-eyed, still clearly bursting with questions.
“Yeah. A few times. Interviews, and guest appearances – stuff to promote the restaurant and the recipe book I was writing.”
“You had a book deal?”
“I did, but it came to nothing. Like I told you earlier, Sophie, that was a different life. Not one I even remember especially clearly, or especially fondly. It was… thin. It was unsubstantial. It was built on shadows.”
This concept obviously goes over her head, because the next thing she says is: “But you were famous! That’s really weird! So how did you know Marcy’s dad?”
‘Marcy’s dad’, I note, not Zack – strange how children do this. They see us only as those roles for most of their lives, not even giving us names. I have lived for a long time as ‘Sophie’s mum’, or ‘Dan’s mum’, or ‘James’s mum’, and I’ve been content with that. I am not really enjoying the trip down memory lane back to a time when I was just me – at least the me that I was back then.
“I was head of content for a TV production company,” he explains, “a couple of years before I started my own. We wantedConnie for one of our shows. A cookery show where amateur chefs competed for a job in a top London restaurant.”
There have, of course, been many similarly themed shows since then – but I’ve never watched them. They hit a little too close to home, and even watchingBake Offcan make me tense. I feel too sad for the contestants when their showstoppers collapse when they’re taken out of the oven.
I have seen Zack’s name pop up at the end of a programme occasionally, over the decades, but it never inspired anything other than a slight shiver at the memory of what might have been. I genuinely suspect that if I hadn’t run away that day – if I hadn’t crash-landed into the embrace of both Simon and Starshine Cove – that I wouldn’t be sitting here now. I think being burned out would have led to something darker, something more destructive. I might not be a star – but I am very much alive.
“And that’s what you ran away from?” Sophie says, shaking her head. “Fame, fortune, success? You swapped it all for raising a family in a village in the middle of nowhere?”
When I’d talked to her briefly about this earlier, she’d seemed to understand – but I guess a girl of her age will always be swayed by the allure of fame. This is theLove Islandgeneration, and their motto seems to be I Am On Screen, Therefore I Am.
“It wasn’t that simple, Soph. To put it into food terms?—”
“Which you always do.”
“Yes, which I always do – to put it into food terms, my old life was junk food. My new life has been superfood. I… I don’t regret it. No matter what happened later.”
Her eyes meet mine, and we share a look. She knows exactly what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about her dad. The thought of Simon floors me, and I feel raw with yearning. For his smile, for his humour, for his calm and steadying presence inmy life. It’s hard enough keeping my balance without him back home – here, in an alien place and being mugged by memories, it is even harder.
A waiter appears asking if we’re ready to order, and I realise I haven’t even looked at the menu.
