‘A screening,’ she says. ‘She’s doing a screening.’
Seb doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t push it. Instead, his eyes darken, and he rubs his beard with the heel of one hand. ‘When?’
Before they can answer, Noémie has returned, and she’s kissing Seb gently on the cheek, asking if everything is alright. He’s saved by the waiters emerging from the kitchen. The smile comes back to Viraj’s face. The food smells even better than he’d hoped.
the moderator
Despite what the movies might tell you, London doesn’t usually get snow in December. It rarely ever snows in the south of England, and everything goes into meltdown as soon as it does. Flights don’t take off. The roads don’t get gritted. People don’t get where they need to go. Snow is falling on Soho now, faster and faster. What does it mean for their event? Aimi knows that Clara Cowan can be unreliable, elusive, perhaps a little hard to pin down. All the smartest people are. Will she be there, tonight?
Aimi walks quick-step towards Regent Street, past the garish festive displays in the windows, the Christmas lights blazing down over the frigid skeleton of the old Oxford Street Topshop. Her hands are going numb. She takes a shortcut through Golden Square, eyes down, scanning for rogue patches of ice. She knows everything is fluid, that this snow will eventually stop, and will eventually melt. But for now it keeps coming, so for now she keeps worrying about the screening. More nervous that it will happen than it won’t. The London debut of Cowan’s first movie in four years. Aimi is a film journalist by trade. She’s planned pages of questions, watched the screener overand over, brushed up on Cowan’s old work. All for nothing, if the woman herself isn’t here.
Aimi arrives under an enormous tree in the cinema lobby, its grapefruit-sized glass baubles filled with glitter in the shape of snowflakes. Shortly, she’s ushered through a side door and towards the green room, fancy bottled water and piles of individually wrapped biscuits balancing on a flimsy-looking trestle table. Beside it, already here, is Clara Cowan.
Aimi stops in her tracks. Something is wrong.
‘This is a nightmare,’ Cowan is saying, fist clenched and pounding her forehead. She’s on the phone. ‘This is not what I need.’
She looks shorter in person. But then, all famous people do. She has her daughter with her, and Aimi knows already that the little girl’s name is Nora. But Nora looks like she’s not supposed to be here, standing in the green room in a puffer jacket and a pair of pyjamas, rubbing her eyes with one hand, the other clinging to the tailored trousers of her mother. Cowan sounds increasingly frantic as she reels off names down the phone. Cee, handling a snow-driven staffing crisis at the restaurant. Augie, grounded in a different country. Maisie, who she’s speaking to, all the way up in Leicester.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
When she’s off the phone, the handler from the cinema staff tries to find a solution. Could they find a babysitter, at this time, in the snowy Soho streets? Aimi hangs back. The little girl is starting to cry now, and she looks like she’s not going to stop. Could you leave her with us, backstage? He crouchesdown, attempts a smile. The girl clings harder to her mother, snot streaming from her nose.
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Cowan says, looking like she might cry herself. ‘You don’t know my daughter.’
‘Five minutes,’ someone else says, through the crack in the door.
‘Could you just take her out on stage with you?’ the handler asks.
‘Absolutely not,’ Cowan says. Aimi has heard she’s spiky. ‘She didn’t ask for any of this.’
Clara shakes her head, scoops up her daughter, leaves the room. The handler follows. For some reason, Aimi follows, too. Now they’re backstage, behind the heavy curtains, looking out over an auditorium filling with guests, all of them soon to be disappointed when the famous director they’ve come to see doesn’t show up for the pre-film Q&A. Cowan looks guilty, unbelievably stressed. Then, suddenly, she looks neither of these things. Her bearing changes entirely. Her back stiffens beneath her shirt, as if seized by a sudden chill. And her hand, the one with all the rings, grips even more tightly on to the curtain than her daughter grips on to her.
‘It can’t be,’ she says.
She’s seen someone in the crowd. Aimi peers out from behind her, tries to work out who it is that’s taken Clara Cowan’s breath away. He isn’t hard to spot, with a seat somewhere near dead-centre, with the fact that he’s a whole head taller than the mostly female guests around him. He’s got a dark beard, a shaved head, and he’s perfectly placed under a spotlight as if the theatre is filling up backwards, as if they’reall supposed to be looking at him. Cowan is, at least. She’s forgotten about films, about childcare, about the fact that she only has five, no, four minutes until she’s supposed to be on stage. She holds on to the curtain like she’s afraid of falling.
‘He’s here,’ she says.
The handler looks from her to the tall man, gets the wrong message. He nods resolutely. ‘Leave it with me.’
‘No,’ Cowan says, with alarm. ‘No. Wait.’
But the handler is already gone. Cowan groans and clutches her head. Nora starts crying again, so Cowan bundles them back to the green room. Aimi, unsure what she’s supposed to do in a situation like this, follows once again, more obedient lemming than handsomely paid moderator. She finds Cowan in the small, brightly lit room, pacing from end to end, running her fingers through her loose curls. There’s no one else in there, so Aimi seizes her moment.
‘Sorry,’ she says. Then: ‘Hi. I’m Aimi. I’m doing the—’ She holds up her notecards. ‘The thing tonight. The questions.’
Cowan throws on a sudden, apologetic smile. She doesn’t have a free hand with which to shake Aimi’s.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘Clara.’ She nods down. ‘Nora.’ She exhales. ‘I’m not usually this much of a state, I swear.’
Nora watches Aimi suspiciously. She has her mother’s large, pale blue eyes, but the ginger hair that spirals off in all directions is someone else’s.
‘Anything you don’t want to be asked?’ Aimi asks.
‘Just the obvious,’ Clara says, glancing towards the door. Aimi knows exactly what she means. ‘I’m an open book. Half open. Some pages torn out.’
A quick smile. Nora is trying to climb down from her mother, and Clara is doing her best to help her, while making small talk with Aimi, while glancing over and over again at the door through which she seems to think someone might appear. The little girl is hiding behind Clara’s legs, now, pulling again and again at the back of her shirt. Clara looks frantic, frazzled.
