‘Ticket sales,’ said Don.
Dorian had the good grace to laugh. ‘OK. Well if anyone springs to mind, you be sure to let me know.’
‘Actually, someone does. How about Sabrina Leon?’
At first, Dorian had assumed his agent was joking. When he realized he wasn’t, he dismissed the idea out of hand. Sabrina was toxic right now, a Hollywood untouchable. Plus she was known to be a majorly disruptive influence on set: demanding, diva-ish, unpredictable. Just associating Sabrina’s name with a project could be enough to kill it before they shot a single take.
‘All true,’ agreed Don. ‘But she’s still a huge star.’
Dorian held firm. ‘No way.’
‘Plus, everyone’s watching to see what her next move will be.’
‘I’m not.’
‘
Plus
, she loves getting naked, on and off set. The kid’s allergic to clothes.’
‘I know Don, but c’mon. I need a serious actress.’
‘She’ll work for free.’
And that was it. Jerry McGuire had Dorothy Boyd at ‘hello’. Don Richards had Dorian Rasmirez at ‘free’.
Stretching his long legs out in front of him, Dorian at last began to relax. If American Airline stewardesses were fans of the story, it clearly couldn’t be
that
highbrow.
It’s gonna be all right
, he told himself. Sabrina Leon had signed on the dotted line. Of course, casting her as Cathy – both Cathys – remained a dangerous, double-edged sword. Dorian would have to keep a tight grip on her behaviour. But Don Richards had convinced him she was a risk worth taking. He’d just have to do the sell of his life to convince distributors that, by the time the movie was due for release, the furore over Sabrina’s Tarik Tyler comments would have died down.
‘Even if it hasn’t, people’ll still come and see the movie,’ said Don.
‘You reckon?’
‘Sure. They like watching her. It’s like slowing down on the freeway to gawk at a car crash.’
Dorian hoped he was right. Because, if he wasn’t, it would be Dorian’s career, life and marriage that would be the car crash. Almost certainly a fatal one.
For Dorian Rasmirez, everything depended on the success of this movie.
Everything.
As Dr Michel Henri lifted the child out of its crib, Letitia Crewe watched his beautifully defined biceps rippling beneath his grey T-shirt and thought:
I have to get a grip. I’m here to play with the children, not ogle Michel like a love-struck puppy.
But it was hard. What business did a paediatrician have being that attractive? There ought to be a law against it.
Tish Crewe had come out to Romania in her year off to spend six months working with orphans in the northern city of Oradea. Five years later and she was still here, visiting hospital wards like this one, rehousing as many abandoned children as she could. It was gruelling work, and distressing at times, but it was also addictive and rewarding. Dr Michel Henri felt the same way. It was one of the things that had first brought him and Tish together, their shared compassion and sense of purpose. That and the fact they both wanted to rip each other’s clothes off the moment they laid eyes on one another. Tish still felt the same way. It was Michel who’d moved on.
Watching him move purposefully from bed to bed, engaging each child with eye contact and talking to them in that deep, gentle voice of his before each examination, Tish calculated that she had been in love with him for a full year now.
Wow. A year of my life.
It felt like twenty.
Michel was so wise. So good. So capable. Tish Crewe was capable herself, very much head-girl material, and she admired this trait in others. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Michel also looked like a younger version of George Clooney, complete with sexy, two-day stubble growth and smouldering coffee-brown eyes. Nor that he was so good in bed, Tish had had to restrict the lovemaking during their brief, six-week affair to Michel’s apartment, afraid that she might make so much noise at home that she would wake up Abel, her adopted five-year-old son, and scare the living daylights out of him.
It wasn’t Michel’s fault. He’d been honest with her from the beginning. ‘I don’t do commitment,’ he told Tish bluntly, the night they first kissed on the bridge over the Crisul Repede in Oradea’s old town. ‘My work is my passion. If you’re looking for something serious, I’m not your man.’
Tish had assured him she was not looking for something serious. After four years of almost total celibacy, living in a city that still looked and felt as dour and grey and lifeless as it had under communism, the idea of some fun, especially the kind of fun that Dr Michel Henri was offering, sounded utterly perfect. Since founding her own children’s home three years earlier, and particularly since adopting her darling Abel, Tish barely had enough time in the days to eat and shower, never mind indulge in a sex life.
I deserve some fun
, she told herself.
Why not?
But of course she’d had to go and spoil it all by falling in love with him.
Fool
, she told herself,
but then how could one not?
When Michel took up with a pretty orthopaedic surgeon from Médecins Sans Frontières a few weeks later, Tish’s heart was crushed like a bug. It had taken every ounce of her self-control to hide the worst of her anguish from Michel himself. But to everyone else who worked with her, it was painfully obvious.
‘He’s not worth it, you know.’ Pete Klein, the head of one of the American NGOs, had been watching Tish gaze longingly after Michel’s retreating back in the hospital car park a few weeks ago.
He is to me
, thought Tish, but she forced a professional smile.
‘Hello, Pete. How are you?’
‘Better for seeing you, my dear.’
A kindly, born-again Christian in his early sixties, Pete Klein had decided to make it his personal mission to find the lovely Miss Crewe a suitable husband. She was, after all, a gorgeous girl. Not gorgeous in an obvious, long-legged, modelly sort of way. No, Tish’s beauty was of an altogether more wholesome variety. Slight and naturally blonde, with a long nose, strong, aristocratic bone structure and a glorious wide, pale pink mouth that Pete had seen express every emotion from compassion to courage to delight, Tish had a natural, make-up-free charm to her that a certain type of man would give his eyeteeth to come home to every night. As Tish’s schoolfriend Katie had once accurately, if tactlessly, put it: ‘You’re Jennifer Aniston, Tishy. Guys like Michel always go for the Angelinas in the end. You’re too nice.’
Pete Klein didn’t believe a person could be ‘too nice’. Nor could he see what on earth wonderful young women like Tish Crewe found attractive in good-for-nothing fly-by-nights like that slimy Frenchman Dr Henri. Forget Doctors Without Borders. Michel Henri was a Doctor Without Scruples, and he’d hurt poor Miss Crewe badly.
‘You should have dinner with my friend Gustav,’ Pete told Tish.
‘Oh, I don’t know, Pete …’
‘Yes, yes, you must,’ Pete insisted. ‘Lovely young man, from a very nice family in Munich. Just started working for us. Brilliant with computers,’ he added, with a wink that made Tish wonder if this was intended as some sort of double entendre. Except that Pete Klein didn’t
do
double entendres. He did earnest and avuncular and kind.
So, ‘too nice’ to say no, Tish dutifully had dinner with ‘lovely young Gustav’, who was indeed brilliant with computers; though not
quite
so brilliant at either conversation or romance, judging by his clumsily attempted lunge in the back of the taxi after dinner, reeking of garlic sausage and cheap aftershave.
‘What are you doing?’ said Tish, squirming away from him.
Gustav looked aggrieved. ‘I thought you were single?’ he accused her.
‘I am,’ stammered Tish.
‘Well, what’s the problem then?’ demanded Gustav. ‘Everyone knows the only reason singles come out on these voluntary do-gooder vacations is for the sex. I mean, come on! We’re not in Romania for the scenery, are we?’
That much, at least, was true. Tish was not in Romania for the scenery. But why
was
she still here, really? Tish was the most English person she knew and she missed home dreadfully. Not a day went by when she didn’t stare unseeingly out of her car window at the bleak Romanian landscape, daydreaming about hedgerows and Marmite and
EastEnders
. It didn’t get any easier. She told herself she was here for the children – both the sixteen she’d been able to permanently rescue from institutions and bring to the bright, cheerful, family-run home she’d built just outside Oradea; and for the hundreds of others she was forced to leave behind, but whom she and her staff visited regularly in their hospitals. But, gazing at Michel’s strong, warm hands now as he changed a little boy’s dressing, remembering the feel of them on her skin, part of her knew that she was also staying for him.
Tish was doing what all the books said you should never do. She was waiting. Hoping, praying that eventually Michel would see the light and realize that the two of them were meant to be together. He’d make a wonderful father for Abel. So noble. So dedicated …
‘Tish!’ Carl, one of her co-workers, was tapping Tish forcefully on the shoulder. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘Hmmm?’ She blushed. ‘Sorry. I was, erm … distracted.’
‘There’s a problem back at Curcubeu, Carl repeated patiently. Curcubeu was the name of Tish’s children’s home. It meant ‘rainbow’ in Romanian. ‘Child services just showed up on the doorstep. They’re saying Sile hasn’t got all his releases signed.’
‘But that’s ridiculous. Of course the releases are signed. I picked up his paperwork myself.’
‘Whatever, they reckon he needs something else. They tried to seize him on the spot.’
‘What?’ Tish placed the sleeping baby back in her crib. Sile was an adorable, curly-haired two-year-old boy, the latest addition to her happy brood at Curcubeu. He’d only been with them a week and already child services were kicking up a fuss, no doubt hoping for yet another backhander. ‘How dare they!’ she seethed. ‘They have no authority.’
‘Yes, well, don’t worry,’ said Carl. ‘Lucio didn’t let them in the door. But they’ll be back in the morning with a warrant. We need to get it sorted, today.’
Damn
, thought Tish. She’d really wanted to talk to Michel today, to get his advice. Yesterday, she’d received a letter, rather a distressing letter, from home. The letter meant that she might need to leave Romania, at least for a while, an idea that filled her with such a conflicting mix of emotions that she’d barely been able to string a sentence together since she read it.
Michel will know what to do
, she thought.
He’s always so level-headed.
But now there’d be no time to consult him. By the time she’d sorted out this bullshit with Sile and child services, she’d have to race home in time to put Abel to bed, and Michel would already have left for Paris. He was flying home for the weekend to attend his sister’s wedding.
Maybe once he sees her in a white dress, making that commitment, sees how happy and glowing she is …
‘Tish?’
‘Yes. Sorry. I’m coming.’ Tish reluctantly switched off the fantasy. ‘Go down and start the car. I’ll explain what’s happened to the nurses and meet you downstairs in five.’
The rest of the day passed in a blur of frenetic activity and stress, with Tish and Carl breaking every speed limit in the book in Tish’s ancient Fiat Punto, tearing from one government agency to the next in an effort to prove their legal guardianship of little Sile. Two bribes, a phone call to the British Consulate and countless vicious screaming matches later – Romanian Child Services did not consider Letitia Crewe to be ‘too nice’; as far as they were concerned, she was a bolshy, strident, harridan who’d been a thorn in their side since the day she set foot in the country – the matter was at last resolved. ‘For now,’ the Child Protection Officer warned Tish sternly.
As if we’re any bloody threat to him
, Tish thought furiously as she finally started the drive back to her flat in the city.
As if anyone on God’s earth gave a crap about that little boy until we took him in.
Sometimes, most of the time, her work was so frustrating it made her want to scream. The Romanian government were like dinosaurs, terrified of change, resentful of any ‘outsider’ who wanted to help. As if any of the foreign NGOs
wanted
to be there.
Don’t you think we’d love it if you sorted out your own bloody country and took care of your own kids, so we could all go home?
Home.
The word had been turning over and over in Tish’s mind all day. She would have to make a decision soon, tomorrow probably, and start making some concrete plans. She’d wanted Michel’s advice today, but deep down she already knew what he would have told her.
Go. Go home and do what you need to do.
There was no other way.
Home for Tish was Loxley Hall, an idyllic Elizabethan pile in the heart of Derbyshire’s glorious Hope Valley. Much smaller than neighbouring Chatsworth, but widely considered more beautiful, Loxley had been the ancestral seat of the Crewe family for over eight generations. Growing up there as a little girl, Tish had never noticed the house’s grandeur, not least because behind the intricately carved, exterior with its stone mullioned windows and fairytale turrets, the family actually lived in a distinctly down-at-heel ‘apartment’ of seven, shabby rooms, and not in the immaculately preserved ballrooms and dining halls that the public saw. What Tish
was
aware of, however, was Loxley’s magic. The beauty of her grounds, with their ancient clipped yew hedges, endless expanses of lawn and deer-covered parkland beyond, punctuated by vast, four-hundred-year-old oaks. At the front of the house, beneath a crumbling medieval stone bridge, the river Derwent burbled sleepily, little more than a stream in the narrow part of the valley. As a child, Tish would sit on the bridge for hours, legs dangling, playing Poohsticks with herself or watching hopefully for an otter to make a thrilling, sleek-headed appearance. Her older brother Jago had never shared her fascination with the river, nor her romantic belief in Loxley Hall as some sort of magical kingdom. Mostly, Tish remembered him as rather distant and aloof (‘sensitive’, their mother called him), always playing inside with his computer games or his older, sophisticated friends from Thaxton House, the local boys’ prep school. Tish’s childhood playmates were her Jack Russell, Harrison, the family housekeeper Mrs Drummond, and on occasions her elderly but much beloved father, Henry.