On Your Doorstep: Perfect for those who loved Close to Home

‘Will do.’ Raine leaned forward and patted Carla’s stomach. ‘Night night, little one. Lay off the football for tonight and give your mum a chance to sleep. She’s had a busy day.’

Across the lounge, Sue Sheehan had settled awkwardly into a deep armchair beside a slight woman with glasses. Carla felt a fleeting sympathy as she imagined her difficulty when the time came to get up again. All she seemed to notice nowadays were women at the same advanced stage as herself.

Outside the hotel, she hailed a taxi. Lizzy Carr, in jeans and a puffa jacket, all traces of her Goth persona removed, waved as she ran down the hotel steps. She was followed by two other models, who were also heading to Sheen’s on the Green. For an instant Carla was tempted to follow but then a taxi driver pulled up and she stepped into the taxi’s dark interior.

In the company of models, Carla moved in an assured world where she did not have to apologise for being tall. No more cramped knees from bending to listen to others. No more enduring jokes about giraffe necks or being asked if it was cold up there. Her face, attractive but not beautiful, could be moulded to define a mood, an emotion, an atmosphere. The perfect face, declared the scout who had approached her on Grafton Street when she was sixteen and persuaded her to consider the catwalk for a career. She had acquired the poise and confidence to stand aloof from conversations and discovered that such indifference made people strain upwards so that they could hear what she had to say. But with Robert Gardner, everything was mouth to mouth, eye level to eye level.

He was waiting for her when she arrived home.

‘So, how did it go?’ he asked and drew her down on his knee. He smelled of soap and shampoo. Nothing about his appearance suggested that he had spent his day working on the grim and secretive side of the city streets.

‘The wedding dress was the highlight. I wanted to get married all over again.’

‘That could be arranged,’ Robert said. ‘Only one stipulation. No change of groom.’

‘As if I would.’ She kissed him but was unable to prevent a yawn escaping.

‘So much for my sex appeal.’ Robert eased her to the floor. ‘Come on. It’s way past your bedtime.’

She leaned heavily on his arm as they left the living room. She was glad of his height, his strong arms. During the last week, she had become aware of a slight listing movement when she walked. They would have a tall child. No problem if it was a boy but for a girl, Carla thought, remembering her own lanky teenage years, maybe not so good.

In bed, they spooned against each other and drifted towards sleep. One of them, or perhaps both, stirred with lazy desire and Robert’s arms tightened around her. Their lovemaking was passionate but gentle. She moaned softly into the pillow and their baby moved. Robert felt the rippling sensation beneath his fingers and, suddenly nervous, held back until, responding to her touch, he entered her slowly from behind. She clenched him tightly inside her, her energy carrying them swiftly over the edge of desire.

Afterwards, still in the same coiled position, she tried to sleep. Her leg cramped and the baby’s elbows seemed wedged under her ribcage. Robert turned, slapped the pillow without waking, and sank his head deeper into it. The room was cold, the central heating off. She pulled on a towelling dressing gown and tied the belt below her stomach. She paused before a full-length mirror and smiled at her bearlike appearance. If the photographers could see her now, there would be a very different photograph on the front of the tabloids tomorrow.

Downstairs, she entered her compact office. Once, rooms such as these had served as dens for husbands who smoked pipes in comfort and isolated themselves from the daily domestic routine. She sifted through the latest batch of letters, answered a few and chose the ones she would use in her column. Shortly before meeting Robert, she had enrolled in a media studies course, fitting her lectures around her modelling assignments. She now had her degree and a regular column in Weekend Flair, a Sunday newspaper supplement magazine. Carla was under no illusions that the reason she had been approached by the editor had more to do with her Anticipation profile than her media degree. But the number of letters kept rising from women seeking advice on morning sickness and weird hunger urges. Some letters amused her, others were so filled with pain and frustration that she shrank from answering them in her column, aware of her own inexperience. In such instances she passed them on to Alyssa Faye.

She was also beginning to receive commissions from other magazines. The feature in Pizzazz was excellent. She picked up the celebrity magazine from her desk and flicked through the pages until she came to the ‘before and after’ feature she had written about the refurbishment of their end-of-terrace Georgian house. When the alterations had first begun, she had taken photographs of the resulting chaos and these photographs had been juxtaposed against a photoshoot of the finished results. So far, she had not shown the magazine to Robert; the memory of the row that followed her decision to write the feature in the first place was still fresh in her mind.

‘Absolutely no way,’ he had declared when he heard that a photographer intended photographing each room in their house. ‘I’ve no intention of allowing our lives to feature in some cheap, pretentious magazine.’

‘Cheap?’ Carla, used to having the camera trained on her, had been astonished by his reaction. ‘There’s nothing cheap about Pizzazz.’

‘The title says it all,’ he declared. ‘“Pizzazz”. How could you possibly want us to feature in such a vacuous publication?’

‘It’s not vacuous and everyone wants to feature in it.’

‘Everyone?’ He scoffed. ‘Who the hell is everyone?’

‘It’s for Raine’s sake.’ She had changed direction, aware of how shallow she sounded, or rather, she thought, how shallow he had made her sound. ‘She’s invested everything in her publicity campaign. This is another opportunity to promote Anticipation.’

‘Not at my expense,’ he had argued. ‘I insist you cancel the arrangement.’

‘Insist?’ Carla was outraged by his arrogance.

‘You used to protect my anonymity,’ he retorted. ‘Now you want to splatter my private life everywhere.’

‘What’s to splatter?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t expect you to appear in the photographs. I’m not that stupid.’

‘I never said you were stupid. But you need to slow down on the exposure you get. It’s different now. You have to think of others besides yourself.’

‘Come off it, Robert,’ she retorted. ‘The average junkie is hardly likely to have Pizzazz on his reading list.’

When he paid no attention to her arguments, she cried. Her tears were genuine but under control. She had a modelling assignment the following day and could not afford a ravaged face. Robert had never seen her cry. His anger was immediately replaced by concern and, eventually, by capitulation.

‘I want our privacy to be respected, especially when our baby comes along,’ he had warned her. ‘This is the last time anyone from the media sets foot in our house.’

Looking at the glossy photographs, Carla wondered if he had been right to object. Seen through the lens of the camera, their house looked larger, more luxurious and dramatic than it really was. There was something invasive about the photographs, particularly those taken in the nursery.

Initially, when Colin Moore, the photographer, had entered the nursery, she had moved forward to stop him, then changed her mind. This was a room waiting in anticipation. Somehow, it seemed appropriate to photograph it.

She had painted the nursery herself, a pale yellow shade that gleamed like gold when the sun struck the walls. Before returning to bed, she entered the room and trailed her fingers over the cradle. It had been an extravagant purchase, a replica of a Victorian cradle with a canopy of white gauze. She had bought it at a craft fair, along with the mobile of stained glass seahorses that now hung above it. She sat in a wicker rocking chair and swayed slowly back and forth. Her baby moved, a hard defiant kick that advised her to savour her tranquil moments. They would be gone soon enough. She cradled her stomach as she watched the city drift asleep and tried to imagine herself and Robert as parents.

They had so little in common, or so their friends had claimed when they first met. Bets had been laid on how long their relationship would last. Carla smiled, remembering that first meeting when Raine, in the aftermath of another fashion show, shouted their names across the table in Sheens on the Green to introduce them. Robert had lifted his eyebrows and smiled ruefully at the noise dividing them. Under normal circumstances, he told her later, he would have refused point blank to attend a fashion show. He had never shown any interest in the glitter and glamour associated with his sister’s career but this was a charity event to raise funds for breast cancer research. Gillian, his mother, had insisted he support it – not just financially, but physically, by accompanying her.

Gillian, frail but defiant in a red bandana, had the translucent pallor of someone who had stepped close to death. Carla noticed how attentively her son listened when she spoke, as if he appreciated the second chance he had been given to cherish her. She studied their faces, seeking similarities, and found them in their intense blue eyes and the generous width of their mouths. They shared the same bone structure. Cragginess would come to him with age but his features would never sag. The restaurant lights glinted off his black hair. Gillian’s lips would have been voluptuous before illness drained their fullness and her son had inherited that same lush curve. A mouth made to be kissed, Carla thought, and Robert, as if attuned to her thoughts, reached out and held her in his gaze. In that single glance, something indefinable passed between them. Carla would later acknowledge it as love and he would agree, his expression still bemused by the suddenness of their attraction. Love at first sight – as romantic as it was ridiculous. If any of her friends had described the sensation, Carla would have laughed and called it a chemical hit. But it had carried them into marriage and would soon carry them into parenthood.

The night-time traffic had slowed. Only an occasional car passed, casting brief, surging shadows across the walls. The mobile tinkled above the cradle and the circle of seahorses, translucent mauves and luminous greens, flashed and danced lightly, as if they sensed her intrusion.

Chapter Four (#ulink_46f00d48-5575-573d-b3e7-91016668505d)

Susanne

‘Why seahorses,’ I asked Miriam when I travelled to Maoltrán for the first time to be interviewed for the position of marketing manager.

‘Why not seahorses?’ She had sounded amused. ‘The female of the species is intelligent enough to enjoy the delights of courtship and the male gallant enough to carry the consequences.’

She picked a seahorse from a plinth and held it up for me to admire. The shade was a delicate coral that gleamed like mother-of-pearl and deepened to a glistening salmon when the spotlights caught the glass and played with it. She smiled and stroked her index finger over the protruding belly. ‘Would that our men were so obliging,’ she added, and we laughed together, the kind of conspiratorial laughter women share when we discuss our men.

She handed the seahorse to me. I tapped it with my nail. The tinkling sound was as pitched as a tuning fork. I imagined a shoal of pregnant males, their slender exclamation-mark spines camouflaged against wavering sea grasses, their taut, tight bellies pulsing with life.

Her seahorses have names and personalities. Some are exquisitely etched and encrusted with gems. Others have a more practical design and can be used as bookends, framed on walls or attached to bathroom mirrors. The mobile is one of the most popular items in her collection.

Carla Kelly has one hanging in her nursery. I saw it in Pizzazz. That magazine may be devoid of intelligent content but old habits are hard to break and I buy it every month. I used to check it regularly to see which of my clients had been included when I worked for Carter & Kay. Sometimes they didn’t make it. Not prestigious or interesting enough. The editor was ruthless when it came to deciding who should feature on her pages. Carla Kelly now obviously fits this profile.

She wrote a ‘before and after’ feature about the house in Ranelagh where she and her husband live. The before shots look horrendous but the after photography is pure Pizzazz and allows her to do what she does best. Her face leaps from the pages and dominates them to such a degree that the furnishings and décor are insignificant props in the background.

That night at the fashion show, she shuddered when I mentioned Edward Carter’s name. She covered it up but I watched her composure slip for that instant and I knew she was back there again, with him, intent on destroying what they had so wantonly and carelessly created. I wonder if her husband knows. Probably not. There’s something hard and unforgiving about his eyes.

No sign of him in the Pizzazz shoot. It’s not his kind of magazine. Gloss and dross. Back in those days, apart from the advertisements, Carla Kelly never appeared in her own right. She was just another face, another model climbing on the backs of the older ones, juggling for space in the tabloids. Titbits and gossip, she loved the camera and it loved her. Then she got her lucky break with the lingerie campaign. She’s changed now, of course. Pregnancy has given her credibility. Celebrity and credibility, an unbeatable combination.

She painted the walls yellow for her baby, a neutral colour to suit either gender. A white cradle sat in the centre of the room, muslin curtains trailed the floor. She sat by the window in a white wicker chair, her hands resting below her stomach, her face in profile. Outside the window, a tree was visible, bronze leaves beginning to turn. Her expression was serene, her head bent slightly so that the light streamed through the blonde tendrils. The eternal Eve. I almost expected a serpent to coil from the branches behind her. Signs and omens, they keep appearing.

The whispering voices awaken me at night and insist that I listen to the tinkling call of the seahorses that Miriam fuses in the raging heat of her furnace room; the molten globs are suspended, swelling, mutating. It has to be more than a coincidence.

Chapter Five (#ulink_c7311a42-d7b1-5bda-83b1-1ed59564b282)

Carla