Homecoming

‘What about Australia?’ Megan had wondered when she’d spoken to Carole. It seemed far enough away to hide from the photographers who had been camped outside her flat in London for the past ten days.

‘You need family,’ her agent said sagely.

I’d be out of your control in Australia, Megan thought grimly.

‘Who knows what you’d get up to in Australia,’ Carole said, on cue. ‘Too many gorgeous men.’

Megan had to laugh, although it was one of those painful laughs. ‘You don’t trust me,’ she said.

‘Why should I?’ said Carole. ‘You’re screwing up your career and mine too. Let’s put all the cards on the table, Megan. It’s not doing the agency any good being linked to someone who’s wrecking her career so successfully. People are wondering why I didn’t stop it. As if I damn well knew about it. You’re not a pop star. People practically expect that from music industry stars, but it’s not good if you’re trying to make a name for yourself as a serious actress. Nobody’s going to cast an actress who’s just broken up what’s been held up as one of the rare long-lasting Hollywood marriages. Producers and directors want a reasonably blank canvas or at least someone who can play innocent – what they don’t want is a PR nightmare. All moviegoers will see now on the screen is Megan the homewrecker. This stunt has thrown away years of hard work. I’m not sure what you can do to ride out the storm, but you need to keep your head down for at least six months. And I mean down. No partying, no going to fashion shows and getting papped having fun. You need to look sorry.’

‘I am sorry,’ Megan said bitterly.

‘Nobody wants to hear empty words, Megan,’ Carole said. ‘Only an idiot would say they weren’t sorry. Sorry isn’t the issue. People want your head on a platter. That’s the downside of fame. The public get to give it and they get to take it away.’

Megan stilled. For a few moments, she’d considered telling Carole what she really felt. That she’d loved Rob Hartnell. That she’d never have gone with him otherwise. Now she was glad she hadn’t.

Carole had a very simple view of the whole episode: Megan had had a badly judged fling with a happily married movie star. They’d been caught and instead of the movie star standing by Megan’s side, he’d run away. Three lives were wrecked, the sympathy was with Katharine, and Megan was portrayed as a femme fatale who’d chiselled Rob away from his wife.

Rob, very sensibly, had not hung about for the fall-out. He had simply disappeared, the way only the very famous or the very rich can disappear. Since that day in Prague – was it only just before Christmas? – when a photographer had caught Rob and Megan cuddling up in a tiny bar near their hotel, Rob Hartnell hadn’t been seen. Megan was left to face the storm alone. ‘I’m devastated, too,’ she wanted to cry. But it was no use. No one, not even her agent, cared what she felt.

‘The whole thing is career suicide,’ Carole said, almost to herself. ‘What were you thinking?’

Megan felt the rawness inside her and was glad she’d kept her feelings to herself. Thinking had had nothing do to with it, but it was better that Carole didn’t know that. She would rather no one knew it. Public hatred might be painful, but it was marginally better than pity.

‘Time is the only healer now, at least in the media,’ Carole went on.

And what about my heart, how is that meant to heal? Megan thought, but instead she said, ‘If my sister can’t have me, I could go to my Aunt Nora’s in Dublin.’

Nobody would expect her to go there when she had many jet-setting friends with yachts and islands and Manhattan apartments, although the friends seemed to have made themselves scarce. Katharine Hartnell was too powerful for anyone in the industry to risk offending. Only a few of the people Megan had thought of as friends were phoning up now, and more for prurience’ sake than out of friendship.

Still, Ireland was the last place anybody would expect her to go.

It was also the last place she wanted to go. Aunt Nora would not throw her arms around Megan and say ‘poor diddums’. She’d probably ask ‘What the heck were you doing?’

But it was a home, and one the press were unlikely to know about. Her peripatetic childhood on exotic islands had been widely reported; interviewers had always been much more interested in her recollections of Martinique and Formentera than Dublin Bay.

Ireland and Aunt Nora would do, but really she wanted to hide with Pippa: lie on the bed in her big sister’s attic spare room reading novels, hidden from prying telephoto lenses by rolling Welsh hills. But she couldn’t compromise Pippa’s family in that way.

When they’d been younger, the gorgeous Flynn sisters had set London, and occasionally LA, on fire. It seemed nothing could stop them. But that, like everything else, had changed. Now Pippa had taken herself out of the rat race and, much as she loved her sister, she had other loyalties to consider.

A couple of days earlier, on one of her sneaked forays from the London flat to get groceries, Megan had treated herself to a fashion magazine – one which had featured her in their ‘in the closet’ series a year ago. She’d opened it to find a big article by a leading female journalist on the evils of predatory women, and there she was, Megan Bouchier, vilified as the worst offender. Horrified, she’d thrown the magazine in the bin, but it carried on taunting her, even from underneath the wet teabags.

‘Who are these people who hate me so much?’ Megan had sobbed on the phone to Pippa. ‘It’s cruel, the stuff these newspaper columnists write – the women are the worst. How can they be so vicious?’

For once, there was quiet from Pippa’s end. Normally, their calls would be punctuated by an endless chorus of ‘Mummy, I want…’ or the dogs barking or someone laughing or crying – Megan had become used, although it had been hard initially, to the constant demands of her sister’s life. Kim, four, and Toby, twenty months, came first now.

‘I don’t know,’ Pippa said after a while. She sounded as if she was too tired to even answer the question at the end of a long day chasing after her small children. ‘I suppose it’s like the pack instinct, isn’t it? Women feel threatened and blame the other woman. It’s easier to see her as the snake charmer, the evil seductress, than to blame your own man for straying. You know, it’s not his fault, therefore you can still trust him. It’s other women you can’t trust.’

It was Megan’s turn to be silent. When the news had first broken, Pippa had been her greatest ally. ‘He seduced you, he told you their marriage was over, it’s his fault,’ she’d said back then.

Even when the press had arrived at Pippa’s farmhouse, scaring the chickens so much that two had run off and never returned, she’d been on Megan’s side. Now suddenly she wasn’t. She was fed up with it all and the effect it was having on her life. Attuned to every nuance of Pippa’s voice, Megan could tell that her sister had had enough of the Rob and Megan saga.

Worse, Pippa was looking at the story from a distance, thinking about how other women would view her beloved sister, instead of standing beside her in the trenches.

It was hard to know what was the most painful: Rob vanishing, her subsequent crucifixion in the press, or the knowledge that the whole scandal had somehow severed her bond with her older sister.

How, Megan thought bleakly, could a love so glorious have brought such pain?

She could see the lights of the curving arms of Dublin Bay through the plane window. Her throat felt tight at the sight. Home. It was home in lots of ways. Since their father had died when Megan was ten and Pippa thirteen, they’d lived in many different houses with their free-spirited mother. Sometimes the houses of their mother’s boyfriends, sometimes houses they rented. The one in Peckham was the one they’d lived in the longest, and that had been for two years, when Megan was starting out acting. She’d done her best never to say where she lived. Peckham didn’t sound cool enough. There had been an awful problem with damp. It was a three-bedroomed house and each bedroom reeked of damp. Pippa had had to throw out her favourite brown leather jacket because of the mould on it.

Nora’s house in Golden Square was the only home which had remained constant in all that time. Not as fancy as the villa in Martinique, or as cool as the top-floor apartment in Madrid, which had only lasted six months anyhow, because Pablo had been a bit of a perv and had clearly fancied both Marguerite’s daughters, so they’d left there sharpish.

Golden Square wasn’t cosmopolitan, smart or trendy. It had seemed like the most boring place on the planet to fourteen-year-old Megan in the two years she’d lived there and attended the Sacred Heart Convent. The only reasonable shops in the area were the book shop and the vintage clothes shop, Mesopotamia, where Megan had once found a tattered Pucci scarf for a fiver. Granted, a lot of the clothes there were tragic, but if you rummaged, you could get bargains.

Golden Square was both homely and home. Everybody knew Aunt Nora and liked her, respected her. If Nora forgot her purse when she went to The Nook convenience store, the owner would happily wave her away and tell her to pay another time. Megan couldn’t think of anywhere in the world where she knew people in the same way.

The plane banked over the city, lower all the time. Like Megan’s spirits.

It was horrible, feeling that she’d entirely messed up her life almost before it had begun. She had wanted to do everything right, to be the best she could be, to be wise and kind, and yet somehow she’d ended up in a world where it was easier to go to night clubs ‘til dawn, easier to hang around as part of some rock star’s entourage, easier to do the wrong thing. And all the while it was as if her life was a film; she was just playing a role, just pretending she was real. It felt as though one of her choices actually meant anything because tomorrow she’d wake up and be a different character.

Except it wasn’t a film and the choices she’d made had been real. So were the consequences.

Overnight her fairytale world had turned very real and very ugly.

She didn’t know whether Nora or the comfort of Golden Square would solve any of that. All she knew was that she would give anything to be able to go back and start again.

Nora Flynn saw the last client off the premises and locked the practice door with relief. The heavy curtain she pulled over the door was a sign to regulars that Golden Square Chiropody Clinic was closed for the day. It had been a long one; seven clients ending with a very difficult woman at six who wanted something done about a fungal nail infection but did it mean her nail polish would have to come off?

‘What?’

‘I don’t want my pedicure ruined, I’ve just had it done,’ the woman said.

‘You are kidding, aren’t you?’ said Nora.

The woman gazed at Nora, who had poker-straight undyed grey hair and not a shred of make-up on her face.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Probably not.’

Nora could be endlessly patient. But when the woman had finally left, moaning about her messed-up pedicure, Nora had felt like shrieking, And a plague on you too! after her. Hell was definitely other people.

She checked her watch. Half six. Megan would be on the plane now.

‘Get a taxi,’ Nora had told her on the phone. ‘No point me trekking through evening traffic to the airport.’

‘OK,’ Megan stammered, clearly taken aback but trying not to show it.