‘What is wrong with you?’ asked Toni, sounding shocked.
‘I am fed up with nobody listening to me!’ said Lou. ‘And if you’re going to be cancelled, then you need to get home, too. So let’s abandon this crazy road trip and go home.’
She sat back in shock. Where had this come from? She never shouted, not even that time Emily had emptied her entire bottle of rose bath oil down the sink when she was five and she and Simone were ‘making perfume’. Not even last night when her mother had destroyed her memories of a happy childhood with this hideous revelation.
Although she was mildly impressed that her sister was finally finding her voice, Toni wanted to scream with frustration. Lou thought that all Toni needed to do was just snap her fingers and everything would be fine again. Except it wouldn’t. Not now, not this time.
‘I don’t need to be back home because – because it won’t help.’
‘But why—’
Toni exploded. ‘It just won’t.’
‘You don’t have to shout,’ shouted Lou.
‘I do,’ shouted Toni. ‘And you’ve been shouting!’
‘I don’t shout!’ shouted Lou.
The car began to go faster because Toni’s foot was really pressing down on the accelerator, and the sisters sat in fury beside each other. They never fought. What was wrong with them?
Nothing, Lou decided. Shouting was not forbidden by the Nice Woman police. She could shout if she wanted to. She could stand up for herself, the way she should have stood up to Oszkar for a start, and the world wouldn’t implode.
Toni was definitely in trouble, Lou sensed it. Her sister was a machine, for heaven’s sake: she was afraid of nobody. There was something else going on, there had to be.
She was not going to go on a mad search for bloody Angelo. They had to sort out her sister’s career.
‘Why won’t it help if you go home?’ she demanded. ‘And don’t fob me off this time.’
And she was done with being polite.
Toni would have closed her eyes and laid her head back if she hadn’t been driving the car and such a thing was not in the road safety manual. Lou watched her sister try to start a sentence and stop again. It was as if Toni, who had never been at a loss for words in her life, couldn’t speak.
‘The night before your party ...’ she began. ‘Oliver said we needed to talk, and I went home and ...’
She paused, as if unable to continue. Lou had never heard her sister sound like this before, so scared.
‘Toni?’ Lou asked.
‘Oh, Lou,’ Toni said. ‘I’ve spent years trying to control everything and I missed what was under my nose. Everything is ruined.’
Chapter Eleven
Toni had been waiting for Oliver when he got home from rehearsals on Thursday night.
‘We need to talk,’ he’d said on the phone when she and Morag had left Epsilon Radio. She’d known it was serious. Oliver never rang like that.
It was Marissa, she knew it. It had to be. As she waited, she felt her worry levels creep higher and higher, and that made her even angrier. She was not a worrier. She was happy, successful, calm – how dare he put her off course like this! How dare he cheat on her!
Toni toyed with the idea of opening a bottle of wine, but knew that alcohol and what she had to say wouldn’t mix. She wanted stone-cold sobriety when she kicked him out for sleeping with another woman. A younger woman. Marissa. A woman with no age lines on her face, no strange new aches in her body, one who hadn’t had to clamber up the mountain of success with nothing but her own abilities to recommend her.
Toni was sitting at the dining room table when Oliver arrived. She’d made a pot of green tea, drunk half of it and watched it sitting on the table, cooling, as she waited. She never normally waited up if he was late. Toni Cooper did not believe in waiting for other people. She had her own agenda and her own things to do. She had her life and Oliver had his. It was how their marriage worked. She did early mornings and he did late nights. They came together for dinner, talked on the phone, left handwritten messages on the pad beside the fridge because Oliver had never liked texting.
She was still dressed in her elegant suit from earlier, though she’d taken off her heels and her lipstick had long since gone. She was tired and, from the look on his face, her husband was too. He looked rumpled, weary, the dark leonine hair was greasy and he had puffy bags under his eyes. His shirt was unbuttoned and she could see the white T-shirt he wore underneath, a glimpse which added vulnerability to the picture. The strong King Lear, the titan of the stage, was nowhere in sight.
Toni pushed her tea away.
‘Tell me the truth, Oliver,’ she said in the tones that had put the fear of God in many interviewees. ‘What is going on? Is it Marissa? I need to know and there’s no point in lying to me asI will know.’
