Just Between Us

‘Quiet children!’ boomed a voice and the noise miraculously ceased. Mrs Sanders, the headmistress, had a commanding presence and when she spoke, people hopped to do her bidding. Suddenly, the angels were whisked away into a classroom for a final wing inspection, the shepherds were sent to the cloakrooms for one last pre-show visit, and the parents were told that everything was under control and would they please take their seats.

The hall was almost as noisy as the lobby had been, full of chattering parents and screaming little brothers and sisters who wanted to rush around and fight with other children. Hazel and Stella squeezed into seats halfway down and waited.

‘I wonder does Gwyneth Paltrow’s mother feel as nervous as this before a show?’ Stella said, twisting her handbag strap between shaky fingers.

‘Probably not. Don’t worry, they’re going to be fine,’ Hazel said. ‘They’re all word perfect. My only worry is that Becky will have a row with someone and hit them over the head with her tambourine. She’s so headstrong.’

‘It’s just a phase she’s going through,’ Stella tried to sound comforting.

‘She’s been going through that phase since she was a toddler,’ Hazel sighed. ‘If she’s like this at seven, imagine what she’ll be like when she’s a teenager. You do not know how lucky you are with Amelia; that child is so good. She puts Becky to shame.’

‘Shove up and make room, girls.’ It was Ivan, shivering from the cold.

Stella moved up a seat and tried to take her mind off her nerves by looking around.

She wasn’t the only single parent there, which was a relief, although there seemed to be more couples than normal. There were quite a few lone parents with children in Amelia’s class but, as it was Christmas, huge efforts had been made and people who usually only screamed at each other over the phone now sat side by side in icy silence for the sake of their children. Stella didn’t miss Glenn for her own sake but on occasions like this, she wondered how much Amelia’s heart ached for her dad.

‘OK?’ asked Hazel, giving her arm a squeeze. ‘You’re not getting the divorced Mummy guilts again, I hope?’

Dear Hazel. She was so perceptive, Stella thought fondly. She shook her head. ‘I’m fine, honestly.’

With a fanfare of trumpets from the school’s CD player, the performance began. It started with the babies of the school who trailed on nervously and all started to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ loudly and in different keys. With the school piano banging out tunes, and the various teachers in the wings urging their pupils on, the performers sang, giggled, sobbed and in one case, screamed their little hearts out. There was one dangerous moment when it looked as if the stable might collapse on top of the Baby Jesus, played by Tiny Tears in an elderly christening robe, but Mrs Sanders leapt onstage in time and pulled the stable backwards, averting the crisis. From halfway down the hall, it was hard to see. Parents kept hopping up and down in their seats to take photos and video footage and Stella was afraid she’d miss seeing Amelia. But when the angels crowded onto the stage, she immediately saw her daughter standing nervously between the beaming twins, and stood up and waved wildly at her. Please see me, she prayed silently as she waved.

‘Sit down,’ hissed someone behind her but Stella ignored the voice and kept waving.

Under her angel halo, Amelia’s expression was tense as she stared out at the unfamiliar sea of faces, the lights shining so brightly on the stage that she couldn’t see anything properly…and then suddenly she saw her mother’s frantic waving and everything was all right. Mummy was watching, Mummy was there. A huge smile lit up her little face. She looked at Miss Dennis who was at the front of the stage, ready to encourage her class to sing.

‘Ready children?’ said Miss Dennis.

Class 5 nodded earnestly and waited, eyes wide with anticipation, for their music to begin before launching into ‘Silent Night’ as they’d never sung it before.

All around the hall, parents went ‘aah’ and clutched each other’s hands with pride.

Stella felt the tears clouding her eyes as she watched Amelia singing her little heart out. With her big eyes shining like candles, Amelia was the picture of a Botticelli angel. Stella knew she wasn’t being biased – Amelia was the prettiest child there, for sure. And the most wonderful.

‘Aren’t they fantastic, Hazel,’ she said tearfully to her friend.

‘And the dog hasn’t peed on the stage yet,’ Hazel remarked.

Stella giggled but never took her eyes off Amelia. She was so very lucky. This mother-love, this was real love. The other sort of love, for a man, just couldn’t compete.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_fbf8d39e-2bcb-5ef7-964f-2f3d55a116e5)

Four days later, Stella’s sister, Tara Miller, deeply in love with her husband of six months and deeply nervous about the awards ceremony she was attending, stood in the ladies’ room of the ultra posh Manon Hotel and hoisted up her dress for about the tenth time that evening. The problem with wearing a strapless evening gown and boob-enhancing plastic falsies – ‘chicken fillets’ to the initiated – meant that only industrial adhesive could keep everything in place. Toupee tape didn’t have a hope. The ladies’ cloakroom at the National Television & Radio Awards was full of famous TV stars, and was not the ideal place for major body repairs; however, Tara had no option but to reach down the front of her silver dress and manhandle each fillet up. ‘Built-in bra, my backside,’ she muttered at her reflection as she wriggled, hoping everything would fall into place in a vaguely booblike shape.

‘Ooh, Tara,’ cooed Sherry DaVinci, floating into view from one of the cubicles, ‘that dress is lovely.’

‘Thanks,’ said Tara faintly, as Sherry squeezed in beside her and unpacked half the Mac range from her Louis Vuitton evening purse. Tara could see why the casting director had been so keen to get Sherry DaVinci to play a sexpot hospital receptionist in the hit television soap opera, National Hospital. And it was nothing to do with Sherry’s acting ability.

Shoehorned into a clinging, gold, sequinned mini dress, Sherry was a porn-fan’s dream, her ample breasts sitting perkily under her chin like two tanned melon halves that threatened to escape at any moment. She didn’t need chicken fillets, Tara thought ruefully, comparing Sherry’s buxomness with her own flat chest.

‘Hi, Sherry,’ said a fellow soap beauty, smiling at Sherry in passing and ignoring Tara.

Feeling invisible, Tara wondered why the beautiful people weren’t given their own loos at glitzy events, so that ordinary, non-beautiful people didn’t have to face the perfection of the ‘talent’ when they were fixing their tights, rearranging falsies and painting gloss on thin lips. Not, Tara reflected, that Sherry was what you’d call talented. But she pulled in the viewers and she was a sweet girl. Her limitations only became obvious when you were a script writer trying to write lines she wouldn’t screw up. As a storyline editor and one of the team of contributing writers on National Hospital, Tara spent a lot of time writing lines which Sherry then delivered with all the élan of the postman delivering a credit card bill. Which all went to prove that looks weren’t everything, as Isadora, Tara’s colleague, muttered bitchily every time Sherry fluffed her lines.

Feeling as if she’d better make an effort, Tara investigated the contents of her handbag (black satin, borrowed, no visible logo). Underneath her mobile phone and a notebook and pen in case she had any brilliant ideas for the love triangle storyline she was working on, was a red lipstick, a very elderly concealer and her glasses case.

There had been a pair of tights in there for emergencies but she’d had to break them out after the smoked salmon starter when her watch had twanged a thread on her existing pair.

‘Do you want a lend of anything?’ asked Sherry, concentrating on applying eyeliner with a professional’s touch. She was expertly using a tiny angled brush, Tara saw.

‘Er, no thanks,’ Tara said. She slicked on a speedy coat of lipstick, and looked critically at herself to inspect the effect. Standing beside Sherry was a mistake. Tara was straight as an ironing board while Sherry was all glowing curves with sparkling gold dust on her silken skin.

Sometimes Tara wondered, in an idle sort of way, what it would be like to be beautiful rather than clever. Her mother, Rose, was beautiful, still beautiful, even in her late fifties. The family teased her about how the Kinvarra postman was besotted with her and how he nearly crashed the post van whenever she appeared. And Stella, her elder sister, was stunning too, with melting dark eyes and a serene, smiling face that made people gravitate towards her. And Holly, who had more hang-ups about her looks than a catwalk full of teenage models, was incredibly pretty in an arrestingly luminous way. But the beauty gene had clearly skipped out when it had come to Tara.

Not that she minded, really. Tara knew she’d been given a gift that made up for not being a head-turner – a brain as sharp as a stiletto and a talent for putting words together. A gift that had brought her here tonight.

She grinned as she thought of her Aunt Adele’s mantra at Miller family get-togethers: ‘Thank the Lord that Tara’s so clever.’ Tara knew that this was shorthand for ‘It’s lucky that Tara doesn’t have to rely on her looks.’ Her mother used to glare at Aunt Adele whenever Adele said this but it had no effect. Her aunt was one of those people who thought honesty and tactlessness were pretty close to Godliness in the hierarchy of virtue, and felt that speaking her mind was not just important, but compulsory.

But Tara, after a few pointless years of secretly longing to be a beauty, was perfectly content with the way she looked. She’d never be pretty but instead was a combination of quirky and unusual looking, with a sharp little chin, a mischievous full mouth, and a long nose which might have dominated her face were it not for deep-set hazel eyes that glittered with amusement and brilliance. Even beside a raft of golden-haired lovelies, people always noticed Tara’s clever, vibrant face. And once they got talking to her, they loved her because she was witty and funny into the bargain.

By the time she’d got to college, Tara had worked out a clever and eccentric look which involved very trendy clothes, short, almost masculine hair and fire-engine red lipstick. It helped that she was tall, so masculine clothes and hair worked on her. Now, at the grand old age of thirty-two and thanks to the confidence that came from having a career she loved, Tara was utterly at home with her looks. Her dark hair was expertly cut and its exquisitely tweaked style owed much to the salon wax she scrunched through the ends each morning. Trendy, dark-rimmed glasses gave definition to her eyes and drew attention away from her nose. She’d toyed with the idea of rhinoplasty for years but Finn had told her she didn’t need it.

‘I love your nose the way it is,’ he’d say, running his finger down it lovingly.

Tara’s face softened as she thought of her husband of six months. Darling Finn. Theirs had been the ultimate whirlwind courtship. They’d met a year ago at a party, fell madly in love and got married within six months, confidently telling astonished friends that once you met your soul mate, you knew instantly. Finn was everything Tara wanted in a man: funny, sexy, kind, clever – and drop-dead gorgeous. A rangy man with sleepy, fun-filled eyes, tousled dirty blonde hair and an air of languid sexuality, Finn was genuinely movie-star stunning. People told her he could have been Brad Pitt’s stand-in, but a proud Tara retorted that Finn was infinitely better looking.

Even his voice was sexy, automatically reminding her of making slow languorous love even when he was just asking her how much milk she wanted in her coffee.

It would have been lovely to stroll into the ballroom with him on her arm. He looked good in a dinner jacket; but then he’d look good in a sack.

At their wedding, Aunt Adele hadn’t failed the Miller family and had pointedly said, at least five times, that she couldn’t get over how Tara had netted such a good-looking boy. As if Tara had gone out with a huge fishing rod and reeled in the first gorgeous specimen she saw.

‘Your aunt keeps looking at me and shaking her head,’ said Finn at the reception. ‘Is she shocked that a creative genius like you has married a stupid computer salesman?’

Tara laughed. ‘On the contrary, she thinks I’ve won the lottery. Aunt Adele has been preparing me for spinsterhood for years by reminding me I’m not a great beauty, so she’s astonished I nabbed a hunk like yourself and actually got you to marry me within six months of meeting you. And you’re anything but stupid.’

Finn pulled her close for another kiss. He couldn’t seem to get enough of her. ‘Well,’ he conceded, his lips brushing her cheek tenderly, ‘maybe not that stupid. After all, I’ve just married a brilliant wife. And a beautiful one, too.’

If only he were here, Tara thought now with a fresh pang of longing. Finn knew how tense she was about things like awards ceremonies, and knew just how important this one was to her. The exact opposite of her; he was laid-back about everything and would have calmed her nerves better than a pint of Rescue Remedy. But tickets to the National Television & Radio Awards were like gold dust and not even all the show’s writers had been able to get one. There was no way Tara could have brought Finn with her. She’d phone him quickly, just to say hi, that she missed him. Switching her phone on, Tara dialled rapidly. The phone in the apartment rang out without being answered. She smiled at the thought of Finn rushing across the road to the twenty-four-hour garage to buy something, forgetting to turn the answering machine on. She loved the little things he forgot. They were so endearing. She tried his mobile but it was off too. Idiot. But she was smiling.

‘Perfume?’ asked Sherry, spraying the contents of a tiny bottle of Gucci Envy down her cleavage.

‘Yes please,’ said Tara, sorry that she hadn’t thought to bring the Coco Mademoiselle that Finn had given her for her birthday. The ballroom was murderously hot and the combination of a spicy main course and too much red wine meant that everyone had red, flushed faces. None of which would look good on television. Tara had a sudden horrified vision of her shiny, lobster-pink face being all that people remembered when the nominations for the soap awards came up.

She took the proffered vial of perfume, sprayed it liberally down her front and gave a final blast to her wrists. ‘Sherry, I’ve changed my mind. Can I borrow some make-up? I think I need it.’

Five minutes later, Tara was expertly revamped. In those few moments in the ladies’ she felt as if she’d learned more about Sherry than she had over several months of work. Sherry chatted away about how her mother had helped her shop for the dress she was nearly wearing, and how her whole family were going to meet up the next night when the awards were broadcast in case they spotted Sherry. They never missed an episode of the show, either. They were so proud of her.