The simpering smile died on Chrissie’s lips. ‘Me?’ she hissed. ‘What about you? What kind of friend sleeps with someone’s wife behind their back? Not to mention your cruelty to poor Sabrina. You don’t care who you hurt, so don’t you
dare
presume to judge me.’
‘Leave Sabrina out of it,’ said Vio, angry because he knew Chrissie’s accusations were justified. ‘And you know what, leave
me
out of it too. If you want to know how Dorian is, ask him yourself. Goodbye, Chrissie.’
He stormed out of the store. This time he didn’t look back.
Tish knelt down and held out her arms as the little boy staggered unsteadily towards her.
‘Bravo!’ she smiled encouragingly. ‘Bravo, Sile!’
The two-year-old beamed. He’d been born with clubbed feet, and had undergone a series of painful operations to correct them. This morning, after months of physio, he was walking unaided for the first time across the brightly carpeted playroom at Curcubeu, toddling proudly into Tish’s arms as the other children looked on, clapping and cheering.
‘You
did
it!’ Tish hugged him, holding him up in the air and tickling him till he could hardly breathe for laughter. It was moments like these that made it all worthwhile.
I have to remember that
, she told herself.
I have to remember why I’m here.
It wasn’t easy to keep one’s spirits up in Oradea in February. The cold was so bitter, so biting, one’s limbs seemed to be constantly aching, the same ache that shot through your skull when you bit into a too-cold ice cream. And although the snow undoubtedly made the drab concrete streets of the city more picturesque, covering the communist bleakness with a blanket of dazzling white, it also clogged up the roads, froze the pipes and mounted up in endless drifts outside Curcubeu, drifts which had to be shovelled away by hand on an almost hourly basis. The central heating at Tish’s children’s home had broken down twice since Christmas, and in her apartment she, Abi and Lydia spent their evenings huddled around two fan heaters and went to sleep in bedsocks and fingerless gloves.
The freezing weather was not the only thing bringing Tish down. Like the rest of the world, she had followed the ‘Curse of
Wuthering Heights
’ drama on television and in the papers, from the movie’s out-of-the-blue Oscar nominations, to Sabrina and Viorel’s shocking split, and of course Sabrina’s suicide scare. Although they’d never seen eye to eye, Tish felt awful for Sabrina. She’d had a small taste of heartbreak herself last year, over Michel, and could imagine the anguish the poor girl must have felt to do something so terrible. Part of her wanted to call when she heard the news, to send her good wishes at least. But since she’d moved back to Romania, Tish had had no contact at all with any of the LA contingent, not even Dorian, who’d been hounding her with calls at Loxley. That period in her life, last summer and the filming back in England, almost felt like a dream now. And though at times she felt wistful or nostalgic for it, she told herself that the severing of those ties was for the best. Particularly for Abel, whose fondness for Viorel Hudson had begun to reach dangerous proportions. The last thing Tish’s son needed was any more disruption in his life, in the form of an unreliable, on/off father figure. No. It was time to move on. Clearly Viorel thought so too, or he would not have stopped calling.
Despite the radio silence, or perhaps because of it, Tish often found herself wondering about Viorel, and how he was dealing with all the horrible comments written about him in the press, after Sabrina’s highly public overdose. Badly, she suspected. Viorel bucked against criticism, even when he knew it was fair. Blaming him for Sabrina’s suicide attempt, Tish suspected, was unfair, or at the very least grossly oversimplified. She remembered well her last conversation with Vio on the phone at Loxley, when he’d accused her of selfishness for bringing Abel back to Romania. Sometimes, seeing her son’s cold breath hanging in the air as he tried to do his homework in their freezing apartment, his words came back to her. It troubled her. The truth was, everything about Viorel Hudson troubled her. She’d be glad when the Oscars were over and the stories about him and Sabrina ran out of steam. Perhaps then she would finally escape him, and draw a line under that part of her life for good?
Once she’d handed Sile back to his carer and finished her rounds checking on the other children, Tish got into her trusty (
or should that be ‘rusty’?)
Fiat and headed back into the city. More in hope than expectation, she turned the fan heater up to full blast as she bumped along the dirt roads out of Tinka. A faint whisper of heat seeped through the ventilation slats, accompanied by a noise like a plane taking off. Shivering, Tish reached across to the passenger seat and pulled a dirty green fleece blanket over her knees. By the time she arrived at the children’s hospital, she was so cold the tips of her fingers were blue and her nose glowed red like an old drunk’s.
‘I thought you weren’t coming.’ Michel Henri met her at the fourth-floor elevator. In jeans and an open-necked cornflower blue shirt – it was arctic outside but inside the hospital the wards were kept on perma-roast – he looked as handsome and unruffled as ever, but Tish no longer felt her pulse quicken painfully at the sight of him. She couldn’t pinpoint when, exactly, her feelings for Michel had changed. But she was hugely relieved that they had.
The only thing more satisfying than falling in love
, she reflected,
is falling out of it.
‘Sorry,’ she panted, peeling off the top three layers of her clothing. ‘The roads were lethal.’
‘Your car’s lethal,’ chided Michel. He worried about her. Not just about her physical safety, but about her unhappiness, the distance that he’d seen in her eyes ever since she came back from England. Tish wasn’t happy in Romania any more, not the way she used to be. ‘Couldn’t you have used some of your movie money to buy something with a few more mod cons? Like a functioning engine, for example?’
Tish laughed. ‘Sadly, no. That money was spent before it was earned.’
‘On your brother’s house.’
‘On the
family
house,’ Tish corrected. ‘Besides, I like my car.’
‘It’s a deathtrap,’ said Michel. ‘You should ask your friend Viorel Hudson to buy you a new one. He probably has dry-cleaning bills bigger than the cost of a new Punto.’
‘My car’s fine,’ said Tish, suddenly keen to change the subject. They strode down the corridor towards the Critical Care unit. ‘How’s Fleur? Any cravings yet?’
Michel grinned. ‘Other than for me, you mean?
Non
.’
His fiancée, the gorgeous Canal Plus reporter, was four months pregnant, and Michel couldn’t hide his delight. Tish was delighted for him.
‘She’s moody though, my
God
,’ Michel complained. ‘Last weekend my flight into Paris landed twenty minutes late. She practically clawed my eyes out when I got back to the apartment.’
‘You
would
be late for your own funeral,’ Tish teased him.
‘Yes, but this wasn’t my fault!’ said Michel. ‘Plus, she refuses to even discuss the wedding. She thinks she looks fat.’ Pulling out his mobile phone, he showed Tish a picture of a slender, smiling woman in tight jeans pointing at a barely perceptible rounding of her belly.
‘She’s stunning,’ said Tish, truthfully.
‘I know. I’ve told her a hundred times. I get a bigger gut than that after a couple of beers, but she won’t listen. What is it with you women?’ He threw his hands up in the air dramatically. ‘Crazy, all of you.’
Tish’s phone rang. Vivianna’s number flashed up on the screen.
Not now, mother.
She switched it off. Ever since the
Wuthering Heights
drama became front-page news, Vivianna had taken to calling her daughter regularly, ‘just for a chat, darling’, fishing for inside information on Vio or Sabrina with which to impress her vacuous ex-pat girlfriends in Rome. The fact that Tish knew nothing, and had told her nothing, did not seem to have put her off. Another reason to look forward to the end of the Oscars season.
Tish spent the rest of the afternoon with Michel and the children, playing and talking with them and making notes of complaints to pass on to child services. It wasn’t until much later, after she’d got home and put Abi to bed that she remembered to switch her phone back on.
‘You have six missed calls,’ an automated voice told her. ‘First missed call, received today …’ Tish scrolled through the numbers. Four of the six calls were from her mother. Two were from Loxley Hall.
Another of Jago’s dramas
, thought Tish wearily.
I wonder what the problem is now? His morning caviar wasn’t sufficiently aged? He found a wrinkle in his cashmere sock, and Mummy wants me to fly over and iron it for him?
She called the house and was relieved when Mrs Drummond answered.
‘Hullo, Mrs D,’ she said, automatically smiling at the sound of the housekeeper’s voice. ‘What’s going on? I had a hundred and one messages from Mummy, so I can only assume it’s some nonsense about Jago.’
‘Oh, Letitia. You don’t know.’ The quiver in the old woman’s voice sent a tingle down Tish’s spine. This was no joke.
‘Know what?’ asked Tish, praying that Jago hadn’t hurt or killed himself or something awful, and already regretting her earlier snide thoughts about caviar. ‘Is he OK? Is Mummy …?’
‘He’s fine,’ said Mrs Drummond bitterly. ‘Your brother and mother are both quite well.’
‘Oh. Then what …?’
‘It’s Loxley Hall. I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this, my darling. But Jago’s sold the estate.’
For three hundred and sixty four days a year, the Kodak Theatre, at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, is just another routine stop on the LA tourist trail. Part of a large complex of restaurants and stores at Hollywood and Highland, it is best known as the venue where
American Idol
is filmed, although it also hosts various concerts and stage shows throughout the year, playing second fiddle to the larger, more prestigious Nokia Theatre. But for one night in March, the Kodak shines, not just as the brightest star in Hollywood, but as the guiding light of the entire global entertainment industry. A mecca for stars great and small, for one, magical night hundreds of millions of pairs of eyes are drawn to its famous, curved façade and the red carpet leading up to its grand entry. On Oscar night, the Kodak Theatre becomes the center of the world.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the Academy, for short – actually rents the theatre weeks in advance of Oscar night. From security arrangements to lighting, acoustics to plumbing issues, everything must be checked and double checked, tinkered with, polished and improved, so that on the night itself the fantasy remains fantastic, unsullied by mortal imperfections, a true gathering of the gods. As with the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the toil and sweat of countless lowly, unseen hands are in fact responsible for the miracle that seems to unfold effortlessly out of nothing. Work starts early and finishes late. Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles becomes gripped with a sort of fever, a frenzy of anticipation so widespread and sweeping that it transcends the industry itself. A light, fairy dust of excitement falls over everyone, from bank tellers to waitresses, drug dealers to cops. In this most disparate and heartless of towns – as Dorothy Parker famously put it, ‘Fifty-two suburbs looking for a city’ – for one night in March, everybody’s heart beats as one. They call it Oscar Magic, and it is bottled at the Kodak.
Every year there is one big story, the compelling narrative of Oscar week around which all lesser dramas revolve. Heath Ledger’s death was one such story. The birth of Brangelina’s romance was another, Mel Gibson’s drunken rant against the Jews a third. This year, at the Eighty-Fifth Academy Awards, industry insiders were focused on the Best Director/Best Picture battle between Harry Greene and Dorian Rasmirez. But, for the world at large, the big story was Sabrina Leon and Viorel Hudson. Neither had been seen in public together since before Sabrina’s suicide attempt. And so the question on everybody’s lips was:
Would Viorel Hudson show up?
No one doubted Sabrina’s attendance. As odds-on favorite to win Best Actress, and with public love and affection for her running at an all-time high, this year’s Oscars were set to be Sabrina Leon’s ultimate comeback.
No pressure, then
, thought Sabrina, flipping through the five couture dresses her stylist had laid out on the bed. She was staying at The Peninsula, in a vast penthouse suite. Right now her bedroom resembled a bustling corporate office, full of scurrying minions all looking harassed and with cellphones glued to their ears.
The gowns on Sabrina’s bed were the final five. She’d been offered, and rejected, scores of outfits by every designer under the sun, Marchesa, Lanvin, Carolina Herrera, Jason Wu, Marc Jacobs, and had thought she’d settled on a silver sequined Armani gown; but then this morning one of the make-up girls said she thought it washed her out, plunging Sabrina back into a frenzy of indecision.
‘Forget the short ones.’ Katrina, the bossy British stylist Ed Steiner had foisted on Sabrina the day she was nominated (‘
You’re a nominee now, sweetie. Best Actresses do not dress themselves
’), picked up two exquisitely embellished Versace cocktail dresses and flung them unceremoniously onto the pile on the floor. ‘That leaves the Gucci, the Lanvin and the Victoria Beckham.’ At the mention of this last name, Katrina crossed herself. She’d always sworn it would be a cold day in hell before she dressed one of her clients in something dreamed up by a footballer’s wife from Essex, but even she had to admit that the clinging, wine-red silk column with its subtle draping across the collar bones and sensual, deep V in the back was utterly ravishing.
Sabrina looked at the dresses again, picturing herself on the podium at the Kodak, the same fantasy she had had every day for the last seven years, since she first stepped on stage at Sammy Levine’s theatre in Fresno. Except today, it wasn’t a fantasy. Today, it was happening for real. And she had no idea which Sabrina she wanted to be. The Lanvin was virginal, white and pretty and feminine, perfect for the innocent, wronged Sabrina that the press seemed so eager for her to be. The Gucci was more mature, more businesslike, a beautifully cut gunmetal grey satin that would announce to the world she had finally grown up, thrown off her demons and evolved into the great actress she was always meant to be. But the Beckham dress was an enigma. Sexy without being slutty, dangerous yet controlled, dark and tempting and complicated.