Runaway Actress (18 page)

‘You have to respect the hills,’ Maggie told her, ‘and you can’t do that in designer labels – not your kind of designer labels anyway. As beautiful as they are, they’re not going to keep you warm.’

She soon had Connie fitted out with the very best of coats, jumpers, rucksacks and walking boots all in varying shades of grass, mud and rock. On top of that was a neat pair of walking trousers, a warm pair of gloves and a woolly hat of her very own.

‘There!’ Maggie said with great joy. ‘You’ve dressed me and I’ve dressed you. You’re gonna look great on that hike.’

As they left the shop, the first fat raindrops fell from the sky. They ran back towards the car, squealing as the rain became heavier.

‘I should have put that jacket on straightaway!’ Connie yelled as they got into the car, squashing their bags on the back seat.

Maggie started the engine and had just pulled out onto the high street when she sounded her horn. Connie watched as she pulled over at the bus stop.

‘Euan!’ Maggie called as she wound her window down, and Connie recognised the gentleman from the pub. He’d been the least talkative one who had sat in the corner watching her all evening. Connie was used to being watched by men – the leers, the smirks and the smiles – they were all part of being who she was but this man had looked at her differently, as if he was trying to work her out. It had been strange and perplexing and Connie couldn’t help but feel a little anxious in his presence.

‘Would you like a lift?’ Maggie called, wincing as the rain found its way in through the window.

‘You’re going to Lochnabrae?’ Euan called back.

‘Where else would I be going? Get in. Unless you prefer the bus,’ Maggie teased.

Euan shook his head. ‘That ole rattletrap! You must be joking. I only use it when I have to. My car’s being serviced by your Hamish.’ He opened the car door and got in. ‘Connie!’ he suddenly cried. ‘I didn’t see you there.’

‘Hello,’ she said.

He nodded and, as he settled, Maggie and Connie felt the car sink beneath the weight of their new passenger.

‘Is there enough room there, Euan? Sorry about all the bags. We’ve been shopping,’ Maggie said unnecessarily. ‘Connie’s a bad influence on me. She’s trying to turn me into a shopaholic and I might be coming round to the idea.’

‘Good,’ Connie said, ‘because we’re going to do some more online when we get home.’

‘
If
we get home,’ Euan said from the back seat. ‘I don’t know how you put up with this car, Maggie,’ he said as it started to stutter.

‘Och, there’s nothin’ wrong with it.’

‘Nothing that a crusher couldn’t fix.’

Maggie glared at him through the rear-view mirror.

‘Can you no’ get a good deal from your brother’s garage?’

‘You’re kiddin’, aren’t you? There’s nothing I can afford there.’

But Euan’s misgivings about Maggie’s car weren’t completely unfounded as they took the hill after Rossburn Castle and the car went into serious splutter mode.

‘What’s wrong?’ Connie asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Maggie said. ‘Nothing probably.’

‘You’d better pull over,’ Euan advised.

‘You want to get home, don’t you?’

‘I want to get home in one piece,’ Euan said.

By now, the road to Lochnabrae had turned into a river and Maggie – although refusing to stop completely – slowed the car down.

‘This is terrible,’ Connie said.

‘Och, it’s just a wee shower,’ Maggie said.

The sky had darkened to a slate-grey and seemed to be about to crush the earth at any moment.

‘Maggie, stop the car!’ Euan barked from the back seat.

A screech of brakes and a dramatic swerve and they were safely at the side of the road, the rain hammering down on the roof.

‘We could’ve made it, you know,’ Maggie said quietly.

‘So, what do we do now?’ Connie asked. ‘Wait for the bus?’

‘I think you two should stay here,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s just a wee walk to Alastair’s. He’s got a Landy that’ll see us safely home.’

‘You’ll get soaked to the skin, Maggie,’ Connie said.

‘I’ve got my boots and coat. It’s no’ so bad.’

Before Connie could protest further, Maggie had launched herself into the vile weather and disappeared into the white curtain of rain.

It was just Connie and Euan now and, for some inexpli-cable reason, Connie felt nervous. She sat looking down at her hands, which looked pale and felt colder than they’d ever felt in her life. She rubbed them together in an attempt to warm them up.

‘You cold, lass?’

Connie nodded and turned a little to face Euan.

‘Here,’ he said, reaching into his pocket and passing her a pair of enormous gloves.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve just bought a pair of my own but I’m not sure where they are.’ She put on the gloves and they felt wonderfully soft and warm as she stuffed her hands into their voluminous depths. ‘Won’t you be cold?’

Euan shook his head. ‘You get used to the weather up here. This is mild,’ he said. ‘You should stay for the winter.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘A wee bit colder than it is now,’ Euan said.

Connie smiled. She liked the way that everyone always understated everything. It was always a ‘wee’ this or a ‘wee’ that. It was the complete antithesis of LA where everything was always blown out of all proportion.

‘So,’ Euan said from the back seat, ‘how are you finding life here?’

Connie turned around again, her gloved hands now warm in her lap. ‘I’m liking it, very much.’

Euan nodded, as if he expected nothing less. ‘It doesn’t suit everyone,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen a fair few come and go in my time.’

‘But you’ve stayed.’

‘Oh, aye. Nowhere else for me to go.’

‘What do you do? If you don’t mind me asking.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m head ranger over at the Craigross estate.’

‘Oh,’ Connie said. ‘And that’s an outdoor job, right?’

Euan nodded. ‘I couldn’t be sat behind a desk all day.’

‘Me neither,’ Connie said. ‘I’d hate that.’

They were quiet for a moment with just the noise of the rain on the car roof.

‘And you’ve always worked there?’ Connie asked at last.

‘Aye, and my father before me and his before him.’

‘Wow,’ Connie said. ‘I like that. I like the continuity.’

‘It’s what places like this are all about.’

Connie nodded. ‘I’m beginning to see that.’ She unclipped her seat belt and turned to face him properly and that’s when she saw it – the newspaper and one dreaded word in the headline:
Connie
.

Euan immediately saw where she was looking. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to see this. I bought it for the archives. I keep all the clippings, you see.’

Connie looked at him. ‘Can I see it?’

Euan held her gaze and then took the paper out of the carrier bag and handed it to Connie.

It was
Vive!,
one of the more tacky tabloids. Even in the US, Connie was aware of it because she’d had run-ins with
Vive!
before. Like the time she had been filming
Guinevere
in Cornwall and had been snapped by one of their photographers when she’d walked out of the woods with her skirts hitched up around her waist.

‘Connie Caught Short’
the headline had read, which had been a load of nonsense. She’d actually twisted her ankle when she’d fallen due to the ridiculous length of her costume. So, she wasn’t exactly looking forward to the latest headline. She took a deep breath and unfolded the newspaper.

Connie – Missing!

Well, she thought, that was pretty restrained stuff for
Vive!
but it was still infuriating.

She sighed. ‘I thought I’d get more time before I became a missing person.’

‘But at least they don’t know where you are,’ Euan said.

‘Good,’ Connie said, scanning the piece quickly and grimacing when she saw the photo they’d used. It had been taken by paparazzi whilst she’d been on a morning run with her trainer. Her hair was pulled back and she wasn’t wearing a scrap of make-up. She was also wiping her brow after a particularly hard session involving squats. The caption underneath read:
Under pressure
.

‘Bastards,’ she said and then caught Euan’s eye. ‘Sorry.’

‘No need to apologise, lass.’

‘Those paps are like hyenas – they wait for you to be at your weakest and then they strike.’

There was a sudden roll of thunder that made Connie jump. She liked storms about as much as she liked the paparazzi.

‘How long do you think Maggie will be?’

‘Not long,’ Euan said.

Connie returned to the article to try and take her mind off the storm.

Oscar-nominated Hollywood actress, Connie Gordon, has gone missing after she walked off the set of her latest film,
The Pirate’s Wife
, following a huge argument with its director.

‘Liars!’ Connie said. ‘Have you read this?’

‘Well, I tried not to. It’s all lies.’

‘Yet still they print it. God! It makes me so mad! Look!’ Connie said, reading on.

Gordon, who recently broke up with long-term boyfriend, Forrest Greaves, is thought to be mending a broken heart in her hideaway home in Malibu.

‘It’s rubbish! Why do they do that?’

‘Ah, lass, you mustn’t let it get to you.’

‘It’s hard not to sometimes,’ Connie said, throwing the paper back at Euan. ‘It’s pretty much constant, you see. It’s easy to ignore one or two stories from time to time but they come thick and fast and there’s never any truth in them.’

‘They’re not interested in the truth. They’re interested in sales.’

‘But it’s impossible to ignore when even your own mother sides with the press.’

‘What do you mean?’ Euan asked, concern in his voice.

‘I mean, she talks to the journalists and tells them all sorts of things about my life.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s in the papers!’ Connie said in exasperation.

Euan frowned. ‘And you’re sure it’s your mother’s actual words?’

‘Why wouldn’t they be?’

‘Because I thought you were just saying how the papers always manage to twist things and report things that aren’t true.’

Connie bit her lip. ‘No, I’m sure they’re all her own words.’

‘But you haven’t talked to her about this? You don’t know for sure?’

Connie could feel a blush colouring her cheeks.

‘I think you need to talk to her about all this,’ Euan continued from the back seat. ‘You can’t be thinking the worst of your own mother without any proof. She deserves better than that.’

Connie didn’t say anything but his words resonated with her and she knew that things with her mother would have to be resolved at some point. It was eating away at her and she knew that the only way forward would be to talk things through. Connie sank back in her seat. ‘Why is everything so complicated?’ she asked. ‘I hate it all sometimes. It’s too much, you know? I just want to be left alone. Is that so much to ask?’

‘In your line of work, I’m afraid it is.’

Connie sighed. ‘Why did I ever become an actress? I should have just become a secretary. Or a lawyer or something. Why did I have to end up in a job that’s so public?’

‘Sometimes the jobs choose us,’ Euan said.

Connie sat quietly, listening to the hammer of the rain on the car. ‘It wasn’t actually me who chose acting,’ she said at last. ‘It was my mother.’

Euan didn’t say anything and the words hung in the air as if nobody wanted to claim them. Connie blinked. She hadn’t meant to say such a thing. Why had she? And why to this stranger? Perhaps it was the situation they had found themselves in – trapped in a broken-down car by the rain. The car had turned into a confessional and Connie was making full use of it.

She cleared her throat. ‘She was the one who always wanted to act. I thought I just inherited that urge although I often wonder if I really did. Was it inherited or enforced?’ Connie asked. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Does it matter?’ Euan said. ‘If you love it, I mean.’

Connie shrugged. ‘I suppose not. And I do love it – I truly do but I don’t love all the other stuff that goes with it. That’s more tiring than the job itself.’

Euan nodded and Connie felt safe to continue. She told him how much it meant to her to play the parts she chose for herself; how it was an honour, even. She loved the challenge of becoming somebody else. It was, she said, like mental and emotional gymnastics. You got into a different mindset. Becoming someone else meant that you thought how they thought and behaved as they would behave. It was incredibly liberating because it made you forget about yourself. Perhaps that’s why people became actors, Connie reasoned, because they were unhappy with themselves. They didn’t want to live in their own skins. But perhaps that was why she had been working so hard lately – because, when she stopped, she became just Connie Gordon again, and who was she? She had no idea who she was.

She stared out of the window, gazing at the drenched Scottish landscape. The road was still river-like with torrents of water flowing down it, and the sky was dark and marbled. A strong wind had picked up and was buffeting the car. Connie swallowed and her hands curled into fists inside the thick warm gloves Euan had given her.

‘And I can’t seem to find the right man,’ she continued, her mind floating back to her life in Hollywood. ‘Why is that? What’s wrong with me? I keep thinking there’s something wrong with them but what if it’s
me
there’s something wrong with? Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking the last few days – or last few months really, if I’m honest. That’s why I’m here. I had to get away and, I know it’s a cliché, but I needed some space – to find myself. I only hope there’s something here to find.’

Connie stopped, realising that she’d just spilt the entire contents of her heart to a complete stranger. What was going on here? The same thing had happened with Maggie and the warped Oscar-winning speech. What was it about the people of Lochnabrae? Had they the secret to unlocking hearts? She was going to be in big trouble if they couldn’t be trusted and were to sell her secrets to the tabloids.