Authors: Joanna Rees
Romy picked up Banjo and opened the door.
‘Am I late?’ Simona asked, in her rasping drawl.
‘A bit. Or early. Depending on your view,’ Romy said, hugging her.
‘What happened in here?’ Simona said, stepping over the threshold. ‘I thought this was supposed to be your chic new apartment.’
‘Shhh,’ Romy said. ‘You’ll wake everyone up. Come on. Why don’t we go out for coffee? I have to take Banjo out anyway.’
They wandered together through the local streets and Romy breathed in the fresh morning air, still amazed that she had stayed up all night, her mind reeling from just how crazy the party had
been. She was quite glad to be out of the apartment and leave the carnage to Nico. She had no idea how much he’d joined in, or how much he’d seen, but she suspected she might be in a
lot of trouble with him – and the neighbours.
Soon they passed a small park, where a guy who’d been sleeping rough held out a crumpled polystyrene cup. Romy delved in her pocket, pulled out a ten-franc note and popped it in the cup.
The guy’s eyes widened, then he muttered ‘
Merci, merci
.’
‘That was a bit generous,’ Simona said.
Romy shrugged. She didn’t tell Simona, but she’d never forgotten the girl who had given her money at the Tube station, that night she’d arrived in London all those years ago.
Ever since, whenever Romy had seen someone begging, she’d always given them money. You never knew what difference it might make.
‘Let’s go to the flea-market,’ Simona said, heading off towards the Left Bank. ‘My favourite handbag of all time is from there,’ she said. ‘But that is a
fashion secret.
D’accord?
’
‘OK,’ Romy agreed, holding on to Simona, glad to have her cashmere-clad arm for support. Romy was wearing her Birkenstocks, but her feet were aching from all the dancing last night.
Maybe she should have listened to Nico after all, about her shoes. Banjo yanked at the lead, sniffing all the trees.
Suddenly a flashback of her and Anna dancing on the podium in the club made Romy bite her smile. She’d never behaved so outrageously. God only knew what were in those pills Anna had given
her. Even with her shades on, the colours seemed so bright, as if all her senses were still altered, like they had been last night. The old-fashioned Metro sign and the rubbery smell coming up from
the ventilation shafts; the plane trees with their dappled trunks and leafy canopy; the rippled surface of the river and the pigeons pecking the pavement – all of it seemed so vivid.
A cafe owner was sweeping up the pavement, the tan wicker chairs piled up on round tables. He was whistling tunefully, but stopped and smiled at Simona and Romy to let them pass.
‘Like mother, like daughter,’ he said. ‘A fine sight.’
Romy laughed. She liked the idea of people thinking Simona was her mother, and hugged her arm tighter. Was this what it would be like to have a real mother? she wondered. She’d never
really thought about it before. She’d got so used to being on her own, so used to the fact that she was an orphan. But now she was starting to have an inkling of what she might have been
missing.
A church bell rang out in the clear morning, and Romy breathed in a deep lungful of fresh air. This really couldn’t be more different from the smoky club she’d been in just a few
hours ago.
But Romy didn’t have time to dwell on it any longer, because they were going down the steps towards the flea-market. There were African vendors with bootleg tapes, and Moroccans with
leather handbags. But mostly it was Parisians, with stalls of bric-a-brac stretching in every direction. Old gramophone players, sewing machines, oil paintings and saucepans, kettles, dolls,
machinery of all sorts. As they wandered through the aisles, Romy couldn’t get over how much stuff was here and how many people were bartering for it all.
Soon they came to the clothes stalls. Simona was rifling through the items, like a professional, feeling the fabric and looking at bags, and soon Romy joined her, searching through the piles of
clothes. She put Banjo in her shoulder bag to stop him running off and he panted, looking at all the people from his elevated position.
Romy stopped at one stall, looking at the T-shirts piled high. Then a voice speaking in an unmistakable Germanic accent made her look up.
‘Is it you?’
The voice cut through Romy’s hungover haze.
Romy looked up slowly, directly at the woman behind the stall, her fingerless gloves wrapped around a mug of steaming tea, which was paused halfway to her mouth. But there was no doubt who it
was.
Ursula.
Romy froze, her heart pounding, her mouth suddenly dry.
Ursula was staring right at her, trying to see beyond the dark lenses of Romy’s sunglasses. Time had etched lines across her forehead, her bright-red hair had lost some of its bouncy frizz
and her curves had filled out, but it was Ursula all right.
And yet in that split second that followed, when Romy ought to have taken off her sunglasses and embraced her old friend – the very person responsible for her freedom – she
hesitated.
To acknowledge Ursula would make Romy beholden to her. Responsible for her. Embrace Ursula, and she had to embrace the past and make it all come back. She would have to come clean and explain it
all to Simona. She’d have to relive those dark days. Reclaim the person she’d left behind.
Worse, if Ursula knew where she lived, then Franz might too. Ursula was a link in the chain to her past that she thought she’d broken. And at the end of that chain was Ulrich, Lemcke . . .
people who wanted her dead.
And of course they could find her more easily now that they could travel. Now that the Wall had come down. Of course Ursula would have come to the West to Paris. Like she’d always dreamt
of. And now here she was.
How long would it be before Ulrich or the others showed up here too?
In a second Romy had replaced the T-shirt and had moved away from the stall. She didn’t stop.
Simona eventually caught up with her as she was running out of the flea-market, up the old stone steps.
‘What is it, Romy? Where are you going?’ Simona asked.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she told Simona, hurrying on, her head down, tears seeping from below her sunglasses.
She dared not look back. She dared not see the look of hurt in Ursula’s eyes. She felt utterly torn. Torn with guilt; torn that her better life had not made her a better person.
Simona grabbed her arm and stopped her. Then she gently lifted up Romy’s glasses.
‘Oh God. What’s the matter, Romy? You look like someone walked over your grave.’
Simona Fiore felt a glimmer of understanding for the first time. Something back there – someone had scared the hell out of Romy. Whatever, or whoever, it was had obliterated Romy’s
buoyant after-party mood. She’d been shocked to see the girl so high when she’d arrived. Thank God she had. After her conversation with Perez Vadim, Simona had hot-footed it straight to
Paris. Opportunities like the one he wanted to give Romy came once in a career. Simona was here to make sure Romy took it.
But she hadn’t expected this, and now she wondered whether Romy would finally open up. Because whatever it was she was hiding, Simona knew it would always be there, until she confessed to
someone.
‘You don’t get to be like you are, Romy, without a past,’ she said carefully. She took Romy’s arm and walked on with her. ‘Everyone successful has a past
they’ve left behind. But it’s OK, because there comes a point when nobody can touch you,’ Simona explained. ‘All you have to do is work hard and get there. Then you’ll
be safe. Untouchable.’
‘You really think so?’
‘I know so. Dry your eyes. I have a plan, but it’s going to need all your commitment, all your passion.’
Romy nodded eagerly, soaking up her words, clearly keen to hear more.
‘Do you know what a muse is?’ she asked.
‘Sort of.’
‘Perez Vadim needs a muse.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that Vadim will possess you.’
‘You mean . . .’ Romy didn’t like the sound of that at all.
Simona laughed. ‘No, nothing sexual. He’ll possess you in the fashion world. You need to share all your ideas with him. Generate a creative flow. If you do that, my darling, you
really will be untouchable.’
‘You think so?’ Romy asked, sniffing.
‘I know so,’ Simona said, patting her arm, feeling a sense of great satisfaction. So Romy had an Achilles heel after all. Her past. Simona knew that she had to make Romy successful
enough, and rich enough, for her past never to cloud her future again.
August 1995
Usually it was the bin men at the end of the smart Belgravia mews that woke Thea. But this morning she’d already been awake for an hour, the light seeping around the
corners of the handmade blinds. Yet the uplifting shade of blue she’d chosen was doing nothing to stop the fat tear plopping out of her eye across the bridge of her nose to join the others on
the soft cotton pillow.
She stared at the brown bottle of pills on the bedside table, feeling the fuzzy, dull ache in her head that the pills were supposed to take away. But Thea knew this was a pain that
couldn’t be reached by pills, no matter what the doctor said.
Of course he’d referred her to a shrink when he’d prescribed them, but Thea had refused to go. What was the point? She didn’t need a doctor to tell her why she was
depressed.
She knew it was useless torturing herself, but she couldn’t help it. Just as surely as she couldn’t help herself working out the dates that were etched in her mind. Which is why she
knew that it would have been two years old by now.
It.
Her baby.
The baby that might have been Tom’s, but might also have been Brett’s.
A son. The baby would have been a little boy. She was sure of it. She felt the familiar wrench of remorse and guilt, like a twist in the guts.
What would have happened if she hadn’t booked herself into that Harley Street clinic, she wondered now? What if she’d taken a different path – kept the child, abandoned her
career? Would she be happier now, with someone to love? Someone of her own?
But what child could love a mother who couldn’t even say for sure who their father was? What child could cope with a mother who had been raped by her own brother? What kind of child could
respect a mother who had allowed that to happen?
Which is why Thea had taken the decision to terminate the pregnancy. She’d insisted on a local anaesthetic so that she could leave the clinic as quickly as possible. Which meant that
she’d met the abortioner with the butcher’s hands. She’d watched him scraping out the contents of her womb, lifting out the bloody instrument as her insides contracted in labour
pains.
Unable to bear the memory, she sat up in bed, reaching out to stunt the alarm clock before it went off. Then she tipped the pills from the bottle into her hand and stared at them.
How easy it would be to take them all, she thought. To swallow them all down and to forget. But then
he
would have won, she remembered, tipping the pills back into the bottle, except for
one. Then she swept the bottle into the drawer in the small bedside table, but the lid wasn’t on properly and they spilled.
Cursing, she sat up and opened the drawer fully, collecting the pills. At the back of the drawer she saw a photograph in a small frame and pulled it out now. It was one she’d always kept,
of her and Michael outside the stables at Little Elms when they were kids.
Where had that happy, grinning little girl gone? Thea wondered, rubbing the dust away with her fingertip. That was probably the last time she’d been conscience-free. When everything was
shining and pure in her world. Just her and Michael, and her horse, when that had been all she’d really needed.
With a sigh she got out of bed and went into the shower, letting the water pummel her into numbness, remembering the similar shower she’d taken after Brett had raped her in Switzerland on
her twenty-first birthday. When all she’d been able to think about was how lucky she’d been to get away, how satisfied she’d been that she’d locked him in the sauna, wedging
the door shut and turning off the alarm.
She’d had every intention of leaving him there to die of heat exhaustion. Such was her loathing, her fury, her shame. Which is why she’d stayed in the shower, ignoring the banging on
the sauna door and Brett’s muffled shouts.
But then he’d gone quiet. When she’d turned off the shower, the terrible silence had attacked Thea’s conscience. And at the crucial moment, when she should have gone to get
Tom, she’d gone back and opened the door of the sauna and saved Brett.
She remembered now the blur of paramedics, Storm freaking out. Griffin Maddox staring at Brett’s body on the stretcher. Through his parched lips, Brett had managed to speak to Thea.
‘You breathe a word of what happened and I’ll get you for attempted murder.’
‘The next time you touch me, I
will
kill you,’ she’d replied. And she’d meant it.
Tom had woken up as the helicopter was leaving to take Brett to hospital. Unaware of the drama that had happened, he’d tried to apologize for his behaviour, keen – despite his
hangover – to make Thea’s birthday special. He’d even gone as far as producing the diamond ring he’d brought for her, but Thea had just looked at the slushy snow on the
ground and told him that it was over between them.
She’d loved him then, more than ever. But she couldn’t be with him, because she’d known that she could never tell him the truth. Even though she knew it hadn’t been
Tom’s fault, she knew that if he’d been there in the sauna – with her – then she and Brett would never have ended up alone. Tom would never be able to truly protect her.
She’d been a fool to think he could.
So she’d told him she’d made a mistake. That he wasn’t the right person for her. As the words had come out of her mouth, she’d been unemotional, hard, as if her heart was
locked away somewhere that she couldn’t access. As if she was watching herself from above. Watching his aghast face, as fat snowflakes settled in his hair, like ash.