The window of Seb and Clara’s room.
The grip knows that Clara slept in that room last night. He also knows that Seb didn’t.
Clara is scrambling to begin another take. The grip can feel sweat running down the back of his neck, seeping into his black T-shirt. He watches Seb turn his eyes from the window and back to Jacob. Then, finally, to Clara. It’s not hard to see the wheels in his head starting to turn. Why would Jacob have been in their room? Seb’s eyes dart this way and that, as if he’s trying to think of some other explanation, as if he doesn’t actually want to know the truth. But Jacob is already stepping towards him, angling his face away from the cameras. It’s hard to make out what he says – unless you’re a grip with a direct feed to the boom mic swaying over their heads.
‘I forgot how loud she is.’
Seb’s face drops.
‘Action!’
The grip had shrunk back into the shadows when he’d heardthem approaching. So, he’d seen it all. Jacob helping Clara to her room, whispering something into Clara’s ear, planting his lips on Clara’s mouth. Clara pushing Jacob against the wall of the corridor, tearing open the buttons of his shirt, then dragging him by the wrist through the door before slamming it shut.
Now it seems that Seb is seeing it, too, playing out behind his glassy, bloodshot eyes. His mouth repeats his lines, but he is somewhere else entirely.
‘Cut!’
The garden is unnervingly quiet, the fountain dormant so as not to interfere with the sound. The grip is watching on the monitor of the B camera, the wide shot, which catches both men as they stay rooted to the spot. Clara is watching footage from the A camera, close on Seb’s face. Seb looks at Jacob. Jacob looks at Clara. Clara looks back at Jacob, then at Seb on the screen, as if she can’t look directly at him.
She relents. She looks up. He’s staring back at her.
‘No,’ Seb says, as if only he and Clara are here, as if he’s begging her to tell him that he’s got it wrong.
Clara simply makes a little choking sound, which is enough of an answer for Seb. As he moves, the triumphant look vanishes from Jacob’s face. He flinches, loses his mark, takes a few fumbling steps backwards. But Seb isn’t aiming for Jacob. He’s passing back through the curtains, through the hall. Up towards that room, those bags.
‘Seb,’ Clara shouts, all professional instinct left behind on the lawn. ‘Wait!’
But nothing can change what’s already happened. Upstairs, a blazing argument echoes out of the flung-open windows. By thetime the taxi arrives, Clara is in floods of tears. The grip stands frozen with the rest of the cast and crew, staring silently from the lawn as Clara pleads for Seb not to go, as Seb throws his things into the boot. He gets into the car. He doesn’t look back.
The taxi disappears towards the wrought-iron gates. Clara steps out on to the gravel driveway to watch it go.
part | two
her sister
Best to start from the beginning. Mise en place comes first. The chopping and sorting of vegetables, getting to the heart of artichokes with an efficiency only she possesses. Cee has always valued order. And while she has staff to shuck these oysters or wrench the ink sacs from these frigid squid, the work itself is the thing. She remembers staging in Copenhagen, the tang of the blood that seeped into buckets from suspended deer carcasses during game season. She remembers the emergency room of therigshospitalet, where they’d stitched the top of her finger back on. She remembers a visit from her sister, getting drunk on overpricedgløggin the tourist bars of Nyhavn. They wouldn’t do that kind of thing now. Cee has her own family. She’s barely seen her sister since Clara burned her whole life to the ground.
Perhaps it’s the curse of the Cowan siblings. Doomed to be unlikeable, each in their own way. Augie is infuriatingly aloof. Clara is as single-minded as a steamroller. And Cee? People – men, mainly – call her cold. Then they leave her out in it. In Copenhagen she was banished to a freezing courtyard to dissect partridge carcasses with numb, trembling fingers.She could see the warm orange glow of the restaurant, diners closing their eyes over plates of the best food in the world. She knew, even then, that she belonged inside. Here she stands, in her own kitchen, in the restaurant that she built, if not with her own hands, then with her own force of will. Those hands are burnt and scarred, nails brutally short and knuckles scrubbed dry. But they’re steady, as she places them on the stainless-steel counter and bows her head to the silence. Reservations have been dwindling. She’s been following the news, and she knows that they may not even be able to open tonight. What will they do with all these ingredients? Her mind begins to tally up the losses, but there is no time to dwell. The harsh sound of a phone vibrating against metal brings her back.
It will be Harry, calling her home to help deal with a crisis. One of the children sick, or injured, or throwing a tantrum too large for a single pair of hands. It still baffles Cee, that she’s a parent, this same Cee whose dinners regularly consist of sriracha piped on to leftover roast potatoes straight from the fridge after a late shift. When she’d finally opened the restaurant, when they’d started trying for a third because Cee couldn’t bear a house filled with only boys, it was Harry who’d packed in his job to become a house-proud househusband.
It tells you a lot about a man, to see his face when he watches a woman eat. Other men were disgusted or intimidated when Cee would prise apart a chicken carcass with her bare hands, slurping bits of cartilage as she went. Not Harry. He was just as hungry as her. He loved that she was fierce. He’d once called her a tiger with a soft belly, tracing his fingers along the seam of her underwear as he’d said it. She said she’d stab him withher chef’s knife if he ever called her belly soft again. But she hadn’t moved his hand. This might surprise someone like Clara, who tends to forget that other people have their own interior lives. She’d never imagine how voracious Cee’s appetite can be.
Cee uses the tip of her knife to flip the phone over. She’s surprised by the name on the screen, puts it down to sibling telepathy. Why else would Clara be on her mind? Cee’s hands are covered in squid ink, so the call goes unanswered. Her sister will be drunk. She won’t have gone to bed yet. Clara’s sleeping habits have always been vampiric, kohl-rimmed eyes like a vampire bat, closing only when the sun comes up. More recently, showing up once every few weeks, coked out of her mind or too drunk to hold a conversation. Cee has always felt a responsibility to care for her younger siblings, a need to be the parent their parents couldn’t be. It makes her angry, when she can’t defend them. When they won’t let her. Their mum is ill again, and Cee knows that even she deserves better. Their mother, never allowed her own bank account, always keeping the music low in case he heard her listening to it. At the hospital, Cee told their father never to speak to any of them again. She had no right to, of course. They’re all grown-ups. But Augie has gone AWOL, and Clara exists mainly in inebriated, incomprehensible messages from unfeeling hotel rooms all over the globe. Cee is the one who remains, holding it all together.
Silence. Cee washes the knife, then her hands. She tightens her ponytail with one elastic band, then another. The phone starts ringing again, and she already knows that he will answer it this time. Clara has no one else.
‘What’s wrong?’ Cee says, on the second ring.
Cee has never been one for going overboard. She values simplicity, clean lines and sharp edges. She’ll subtract one ingredient from every new dish she comes up with, then subtract one ingredient more. You could say the same for siblings, and conversation. There’s meaning in the words that aren’t said.
‘Wait,’ Cee says, in response to Clara’s silence. ‘Is something actually wrong?’
‘Can you come over?’ Clara says. Her voice is croaky.
‘Are you ill?’
‘Just come.’
