It’s not him, it’s me, sounds like a cliché, doesn’t it?
He hasn’t done anything bad, there’s no harm in finding a woman attractive and nothing he said outside the door was in the least disrespectful.
Mum and Horrible Howard think my looks are the key to a good marriage, but every boyfriend has only wanted me because of my looks. Elegant, rich, successful young men who work in finance or management and a girlfriend to make their mates envious. My last boyfriend kept braggingMy girlfriend is going to be starring as the bride inParis Weddingwith Jim Sturgess. He told everyone at a work party and never noticed me squirming beside him. What I had, in fact, told him as we drove to the party, was that my part didn’t even have a single line of dialogue.Paris Weddingis about a man who falls in love with his best friend and runs off with her on his wedding day. The bride, played by me, is just the pretty blonde in the veil who stands in the church waiting.
My acting jobs are all stuck in the same stereotypes. How I admire actors who dare to turn their backs on easy money and reinvent themselves as something other than pretty faces. Matthew McConaughey shaved his head, Dan Stevens grew a villain’s goatee, and George Clooney went grey and unshaven. If I shaved my heir a la Sinead O’Connor, would men treat me better?
I feel very ashamed suddenly.
Haneen beside me must sense my tension because as soon as the meal is over she stops me trying to help with the washing up.
“Meredith will help me,” she points to girl with curly dark hair who’s already up clearing the table. “You’ve had a long day, why don’t you go up to your room.”
“Already?” Alex says coming to take plates from my hands. “You’ll miss the professor. He should be here soon.”
Even more reason to go up to my room and try to collect my thoughts.
Chapter Eight
Close to Midnight
After my busy day which started at 5am, the long drive and the manual labour of room cleaning and furniture moving, I should fall into a coma. So why am I still awake?
The window in my new room looks down on the clearing in front of the house. There’s my own Fiat, parked next to half a dozen other cars. I play a game with myself: a kind of who’s who of cars.
The Toyota 4x4 looks like a family car, and even from my first-floor window I can see a jumbo pack of children’s wet wipes on the dashboard. At the other end is a BMW plugged into an electric charger. Something tells me this is Llewellyn. The nice-looking guy in a quiet introvert kind of way is every inch a computer geek. He would have a hybrid.
Alex’s car must be the classic Mazda in British racing green. That is the car of an antiques and mosaics guy who is clearly a bit of ladies’ man – in the nicest possible way. Which leaves the small orange Aygo and the large black Vauxhall for the gardener Watson. He alone was absent from the dinner table.He alwayseats out.Wyn had leant over and whispered to me. Somehow, I can’t imagine a gardener driving an Aygo. It’s a woman’s car.
This game takes fifteen minutes. The time crawls towards midnight so slowly, it’s like an elderly tortoise with heavy shopping.
Every sound makes me jump. What will this father of mine look like? And why the hell am I waiting up? It’s not as if I’m going to run down and meet him as he walks through the front door. No, of course not. In fact, my room here means I can take a few days to observe him before introducing myself. Yet, I can’t go to sleep until I’ve had at least a glimpse of this man.
What makes it harder is the lurking guilt about Dad. My dad. Stephen Henderson, the dad who loved me and brought me up and championed me every day of my life. It feels like a betrayal that I’m so anxious to meet his replacement. No one could ever take his place. But he’s gone now and I have no family left. Mum – I do love her because you can’t help loving your mother – she isn’t really family. She loves me, but her time and attention belong to Horrible Howard. She will only believe in me when I make it big in the movies. Or marry a hedge-fund manager with a property portfolio and a Chase Sapphire Reserve Visa card. Not now while I’m still slogging it in regional theatres.
By 11:35 I’m too jittery to sit. I just stand at my window, arms folded on the sill, scanning the hills like a mother with a missing child.
This is stupid. I make myself go to my bed and get under the covers, lay my head on the pillow and do my breathing relaxation techniques.
A sudden sound makes me jump out of bed, but it’s only rain hitting the window.
Five minutes to midnight, a set of headlights come snaking over the hill, down along the edge of the wood, and finally through the gates into Kendric House. My heart beats so fast, I can feel it in my throat. Gravel crunching under wheels, a hatchback slows to a stop in front of the house, right next to my own car. The headlights go out and almost immediately the interior lights come on. The position of my window, the angle of my line of vision, makes it impossible to see much inside the car. A part of steering wheel, a dashboard with a box of Kleenex on it, a suitcase on the passenger seat. Then the door opens, and a man steps out; in the spill of light from inside the car, he looks tall and thin. He slams the door shut and walks away, swallowed by the darkness.
Unlike London where it’s never completely dark, the night here is inky black; all I have to go on is the sound of fast footsteps. I’d like to say they sounded determined and confident, but he could just as likely be hurrying to get out of the light drizzle. The footsteps take him farther away down to the side entrance. A door shuts not loudly, so he’s a considerate man who doesn’t slam doors at midnight.
That’s all.
Except for one other small detail. Before the headlights went out, they showed the car’s badge on the front grill and I caught a fleeting glimpse of a red cross on white background next to a snake.
Alpha Romeo.
Like me, he drives an Italian car.
The rest of my family have always driven Japanese cars. Mum has a Nissan. Dad always had a Honda. Every six or seven years he’d take it to the dealer and exchange it for a newermodel. Only once did he depart from this and bought a Vauxhall; he complained about everything from the gears to the placement of the door handles. One week later, he drove it back to the dealer and came home in a Honda Civic.“Why experiment when you’ve found what makes you happy?”he said.
Darling Dad. Please don’t be sad that I’m here. No one in the world could take your place. But it’s been two years without you and I feel alone. So alone.
In a month I’ll be touring with a new company. Christmas panto runs right up to December 24ththen picks up again on Boxing Day. Which leaves Christmas Day itself. This year will be my second since Dad passed away. The first time I have no one to spend it with, because the fires of hell would have to turn to ice cubes before I watch Howard get drunk yet again and toast the fact he can spend Christmas with Mum now that Dad is finally dead.
