Exposure (11 page)

Back at Heathrow, the photographers were
circling like vultures in the arrivals lounge. Paula was there with a limo to
whisk us away.

“It’s been quite mad while you’ve been
away,” she said when we all got into the back of the car, luggage safely stowed
in the trunk, the tinted windows guarding us from photographers’ lenses.

“Pure genius getting caught like that. The
requests are coming in from all corners. Everyone wants to talk to you. ”

“That’s good,” Nathan said. “What do you have
lined up for me?”

“Two breakfast shows next week and a spot
on the
Late Comedy Show
.”

“We didn’t do it on purpose you know,” I
said before they got carried away congratulating themselves. The woman was nuts
for publicity and it seemed as if Nathan wasn’t much better.

“No? Well it doesn’t matter how it
happened. It worked like magic. There were more pictures from your honeymoon.
Have you seen them, Nathan?”

She continued talking to Nathan, whatever I
had to say dismissed. I fumed in the back of the limo, and worried about what
else was out there for the world to gossip about.

They prattled on about the press coverage
and various engagements. When Paula said that the honeymoon pictures were
blurry, but we were naked together in the sea and called them “more icing on
the cake,” I’d had enough being quiet.

“Maybe it’s more icing on the cake for
Nathan but not for me. I have a family here, a job. Who knows what effect it
will have?”

Paula turned to me. “I can see you’re upset,”
she said. “But you really just have to suck it up. I’m sorry, but that’s how it
is. You’ll have to get used to it. We need the media to talk about us, the same
as they need us to give them something to talk about. Didn’t you realize what
it would be like when you married Nathan?”

I didn’t answer. I hoped Nathan would leap
to my defense at that point but he didn’t. He held my hand soothingly, but I
wasn’t very soothed. What was this woman sharing our journey home for anyway?
She had been at the wedding. I even started wondering if they had cooked up the
whole idea between them, but surely Nathan wouldn’t have done that to me, would
he? Not when he knew how I felt about publicity. I put it out of my mind.

Paula dropped us off at our door in Oxford.
In all the fuss, I’d forgotten about our new house. There were still a few bits
and pieces to finish off, but it was fine to move into. I’d wanted Nathan to
carry me up the steps to the front door and over the threshold but there was a
knot of cameramen around the entrance. How did they even know our new address?
Anyway, we got inside as quickly as we could with our suitcases, and that was
the end of any idea of starting our married life with that old tradition.

***

The photographers hung around for a couple
of days. We felt like prisoners in our own home. It might have been romantic to
be marooned together in other circumstances, but it didn’t feel like that then.

“I can’t even go out for a pint of milk.
When are they ever going to go away?” I wanted to know.

“I have no idea. They’ll get fed up and
leave us alone soon. Don’t worry.” Nathan wasn’t that amused by it either.

When we showed no signs of providing any
photo opportunities to add fuel to the story, they slunk off to go bother
someone else, and I hoped we’d get some semblance of normality in our lives.

If normality was even possible any more.

I was worried about calling my parents
following all the press coverage, but I had to get it over with sooner or
later.

“Oh Melissa, how could you?” my mother
said. “At your wedding of all places when you knew you’d be on show. I’m
getting a lot of sympathy from the neighbors. Of course, they are secretly
loving it. To them, it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in
Littlehampton for a good long while.”

“I’m sorry. It just happened. It was a spur
of the moment thing. I didn’t think.”

“You’re normally such a sensible girl too.
I’m disappointed in you. Nathan seems to have turned your head.”

Suddenly Nathan was no longer flavor of the
month and might never be again. She didn’t forgive things easily, my mother.

“It’s not his fault. Don’t blame him.”

“Well, whoever it was, we can hardly hold
our heads up in the village. How do you think that makes me feel to see one of
my daughters naked in the newspaper?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Anyway,” she went on. “We’re going to have
to cancel Sunday. They would all just be coming to gawp and gloat anyway. I’ll
say you had another engagement you had to go to.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure you are. Your dad won’t even
speak to you right now. He’s so upset.”

We had to leave it at that. She hadn’t even
asked about my honeymoon. Typical of my mother, she didn’t care how all this
had affected me. I was used to it by now. She was never on my side if anything
I did put her in a bad light.

Appearances were what counted to her, and
to be fair, I had seriously let her down in that department. I didn’t like
being portrayed in the newspapers as a harlot, either.

I knew how much she had been looking
forward to showing us off to her friends and neighbors. I wasn’t sorry to miss
that get-together, but I was sorry to have disappointed my parents so badly. I
hoped my dad would forgive me soon. Maybe she was just saying that to hurt me,
but I was sure he wasn’t happy about what happened either.

“They’re just being narrow-minded,” Nathan
said, when I told him about calling home. “They’ll get over it.”

He was probably right, but he wasn’t having
to deal with his parents’ disappointment. He’d called them up, and they hadn’t
mentioned a thing. The news hadn’t reached the States. Why would it? It wasn’t
really news at all, just the worst kind of gossip, and Nathan wasn’t a big star
over there.

I called Suzanne too, but she was still mad
at me.

“So you’re back, are you?”

“Yes, we got back yesterday but we can’t go
out because of all the photographers outside.”

“You sure Kyle’s not out there hunting you
down?”

“Sorry, I blamed him, Suze, but he just
seemed like the most likely candidate. We still don’t know who did it.”

“It could have been anyone.”

“I know.”

“And you still have only yourselves to
blame...”

“Except you were the one who followed us.”

“So it’s all my fault again, is it?”

“No, sorry. It’s just that it’s all getting
to me.”

“Well, I’m fed up with the whole thing. Everyone
has been going on about nothing else but the wedding for months and now this.
We should all be able to get on with our own fucking lives soon.”

So things were no better with my sister.

At least Hannah was sympathetic when I
called her, and I had a few texts from other friends saying they hoped we
enjoyed our honeymoon and that they’d be in touch soon, but I wasn’t in the
mood to go out much, and I still didn’t know who had taken that picture. It put
a shadow over everything.

And I had work to face the following week.

***

The day before the school term started was
an in-service day before the pupils returned, a chance for the teachers to get
ready for the school session and get everything ready for our new classes. I’d
just caught up with Justine when the school secretary told me the headmistress
wanted to see me in her office.

“Looks like I’ll have to face the music,
now,” I said to Justine. “Wish me luck. She probably had apoplexy when she saw
those articles.”

Nothing passed Miss Naylor by. She ruled
Miss Price’s school with an iron fist and going to see her was a scary prospect
whether you were a teacher or a pupil. Her gray permed hair and steel rimmed glasses
might have looked grandmotherly on another woman with a more kindly expression,
but combined with the way her mouth was set in a straight line most of the
time, they simply made her look severe.

She wasn’t smiling today either. I gulped.
This wasn’t going to be any fun at all. I stood there waiting to hear her out.

“Some parents have expressed concern about
your suitability as a teacher at this school. I have always been happy with
your work, but I too have my doubts given the recent coverage in the press. I’m
going to have to let you go.”

“You’re firing me?” I was horrified. I
loved that job.

“You will receive pay for the term in lieu
of notice, but yes, you are dismissed.”

“You can’t do that. Those newspaper
articles have nothing to do with my teaching ability.”

“Be that as it may, I think you’ll find the
school is perfectly within its rights to dismiss you. This is a private
establishment, and your contract explicitly states that bringing the school
into disrepute is an act of gross misconduct.”

“The newspapers didn’t even mention the
school.”

She ignored me.

“You can appeal to the school governors, of
course, but I discussed the matter with them before talking to you. I think you’ll
find it’s a unanimous decision, I’m afraid. Those articles are not something
our girls should be reading about their teacher.”

I could do nothing about it. I was
dismissed. This was the worst blow. I was devastated. As I gathered my things,
Justine tried to console me, saying how stupid the school was to dismiss a good
teacher, how unfair it was. I gave her a hug. It didn’t really help. I cried
all the way home.

Nathan was sympathetic about me losing my
job, but not as much as I needed him to be. He didn’t seem to understand how
much teaching those girls meant to me. If he had been forced to give up acting,
it would have been a different story.

“How come you got off scot-free with all
this, and I’m the one who had to pay for it?”

“It’s not that bad, Mel. I know you said
you liked teaching, but you were always moaning about it.”

“I didn’t just like it, I loved it. It’s
what I want to do, even if the administration and lesson planning got me down
sometimes.”

“You don’t have to work there. You can find
another job. There are other schools.”

“I don’t think anyone will have me with all
this hanging over me.”

“You know we don’t need the money. You can
take all the time in the world you need to find another job. Don’t sweat it.
You can always go back to teaching when it all dies down. That story is not
going to last forever. Who’s going to remember it in six months? No one.”

It still felt like the end of the world to
me. I’d been looking forward to the new school year as Mrs. Waite. But now I
had no job at all. And no prospect of one.

I made a few half-hearted attempts to apply
for work and heard nothing back. The wedding and house had taken over all my
spare time for months, and suddenly I had nothing to keep me busy. I couldn’t
settle in the new house. It felt bleak and empty when Nathan was working, and
he was away a lot promoting himself on this show and that, laughing off what
had happened whenever he was asked about it.

Though he never said anything, it seemed to
me he was enjoying the buzz all the reports had created. They made him seem
like he was still the bad boy everyone loved despite being married. The
publicity had not had any negative effect on his career at all.

I was the one disowned by my family, the
one who had lost my job. It made me mad to hear him joke about the incident
with TV presenters or to read his “frank interviews” with journalists who had
been the source of so much upset.

Even our love life was affected, because I
was so fed up, and he expected me to be ready to make love whenever he was
home. It was unheard of for me to refuse him before all this happened, but
sometimes I didn’t feel in the mood.

“You’re becoming a real misery, you know,
Melissa,” Nathan said after I told him I was tired and turned away from him in
bed. “You need to snap out of it. Because I don’t need this when I come home.”

I waited until he was asleep and got out of
bed. Creeping downstairs in that big lonely house I wondered how things had
come to this. I sat at the kitchen table and wept. Nathan was right. I had to
get over it all and find something to do, but it didn’t help that he was being
so hard on me when I needed sympathy. I made myself a cup of hot chocolate and
basked in my misery.

But in the end, I knew I couldn’t go on
like that feeling sorry for myself. I couldn’t let what happened destroy me,
destroy everything good we shared. It was up to me to get over it.

Determined we would get through this and
come through it smiling, as happy as we’d ever been, I got back into bed.
Nathan was oblivious to it all as he slept beside me, but I’d reached a turning
point, and I slept more soundly than I had for a few weeks.

But I should have known better, because the
next day the envelope arrived.