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‘Jackie, I’m really sorry,’ Anna cut her off. ‘God, it’s just insufferably hot.’ She pulled her top away from her stomach, ‘I’m not going to do it. It’s just a definite no.’
‘Could you just think about it? We’d pay you?’
‘No.’ She shook her head again, reaching for the sing-along song sheet to fan herself with. ‘All the money in the world and I wouldn’t do it.’
‘Well, that’s not strictly true,’ she heard Seb add and shot him a look. ‘Actually,’ he said, sitting back with a grin on his face, ‘You’d be bloody awful teaching kids.’
She narrowed her eyes. He raised a brow. While half of her could sniff out his attempts at reverse psychology in an instant, the other half felt like he was deliberately being mean. Like this was almost her punishment ‒ for hating Nettleton, for spending all their money, for not trying hard enough.
‘It’s OK.’ Jackie shook her head, picking up her gin and tonic and taking a sip. ‘I just thought I’d ask.’
Anna rubbed her forehead and felt the heat prickle over her body. Jackie looked away, pretending to glance at the menu chalked up on the blackboard. The fan whirred on above the din of chat in the bar, a low hum beating out the seconds of their silence. Anna watched a fruit fly land in a spilt drop of her white wine and was about to lift her glass to squash it when Seb almost leapt from his seat.
‘Holy shit!’ he shouted.
‘What?’ Both Jackie and Anna said at the same time, equally desperate for some distraction after the dance snub.
‘It’s Smelly Doug.’
Jackie pulled the screen her way. ‘God, it is as well. And look, he has a Porsche, he’s photographed himself leaning against it. Oh no.’
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’ Anna said, confused.
Jackie took another sip of her drink. ‘You know, Smelly Doug. Never washed his hair, trousers too short, huge rucksack...?’
Anna only had a vague recollection. ‘Was he in the year below us?’ Everything to do with school, pre-London, pre-The English Ballet Company School, was a bit of a blur. All she could remember was coming back for a few summers to stay with her dad and despising every minute of it.
‘This is fascinating,’ Seb said, as he clicked to look at more photos. ‘There’s one of him in Egypt. Doing that point at the top of the Pyramids.’
‘You should go on a date with him, Jackie.’ Seb nodded at her over the rim of his pint.
‘No way.’ Jackie shook her head.
‘Go on. It’d be a social experiment. Catch up, see what he’s up to. Find out how he could afford a Porsche. It’s a fact-finding mission. I’m putting him in your Yeses.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ Jackie laughed. Anna watched them, feeling stupid for feeling left out.
‘Too late.’ Seb sat back, smug, and Jackie snatched the phone back, incredulous.
As Seb went to take a final gulp of his drink, his eyes dancing with triumph, Anna toyed with a coaster, pretending not to envy their laughter.
Then a shadow fell across the table. And Anna heard a familiar voice drawl, ‘Seb, darling, I thought you were going to pop round as soon as you arrived.’ Hilary, Seb’s mother, was standing at the end of their table, feigning her disgruntlement with a dramatic wave of her hand. But when she then pressed her palm over her creped cleavage, the pearls looped round her neck bunched up and caught on the buttons of her cream silk blouse, causing her to turn to Seb’s father, Roger, for help disentangling herself.
Seb glanced between the two of them, ‘Sorry, Mum, yes we were going to pop round. Arrived late last night though.’
‘Hi, Hilary. Hi, Roger.’ Anna stood up as much as the table would allow against her legs.
‘Hello, Anne.’ Hilary said, not looking up from her tangled pearls.
Anna rolled her eyes internally; she knew she called her the wrong name deliberately. Every time she met Seb’s parents, they made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for their son. Like he’d trailed his hand in the Nettleton mud one day and pulled out Anna. The list of problems was endless. Her parents’ divorce, their messy break-up, her father’s job, her mother being Spanish, like her immigrant blood would pollute the famous Davenport gene pool. They must rue the day their lost, London-shell-shocked son had bumped into Anna Whitehall on her lunch break in Covent Garden. They must look back and wonder why they didn’t do their weekend orienteering round London rather than the Hampshire countryside. That way Seb would have been savvy and street-wise, not like a lame duck ready and waiting for her fox-like claws to swipe him away. And now, of course, despite getting their precious youngest son back under Nettleton lock and key, the reason behind it had been her fault. Her inability to keep her job. Her fault he left his position at the elite Whitechapel Boys’ School. Nothing to do with him hating fucking Whitechapel, all the boys who just put their iPhone headphones in during lessons and said things like, ‘My father pays your salary, Sir. Which kind of means he owns you, doesn’t it? He paid for that suit you’re wearing.’
‘So what’s happening with this wedding, then? It’s very unusual, this limbo,’ Hilary sighed. ‘Postponed? Everyone’s been ringing me up, asking what it means. People like to be able to make plans, Anne. They have to book hotels. You must understand.’
Anna nodded. ‘We are sorting it, Hilary.’
‘Well that’s all very well for you to say, but it doesn’t look like you are. As far as I can see, you have a dress and a hotel that’s gone into receivership. And when people ask me what’s going on I simply don’t know. I know you’ve lost money, but what about what we gave you?’
Anna could feel herself getting hotter again. Wanting to shoo Jackie away so she didn’t witness her humiliation at the hands of Hilary and Roger.
When she’d told Seb how much she’d paid and, as a result, how much she’d lost, the main point he’d kept repeating was: just don’t let my mum and dad know.
‘It’s young people and the value of money, Hilly.’ Roger mused. ‘I just can’t believe you didn’t pay for it on a credit card. Everyone knows you pay on credit cards. Instant insurance.’
Anna swallowed. The credit cards she’d kept free to pay off the rest of it, month by month, to syphon off from the salary that she no longer had. ‘I’ve applied to the administrator, I’m doing everything I can.’
Roger snorted. ‘As if that will do anything at all. You won’t see a penny. You’re just a generation who thought they could have, have, have. I blame Labour. All you Guardian readers thinking that the world owes you another pair of shoes. What’s that woman in that ghastly programme?’
‘Sexy in the City,’ Hilary sighed.
‘Yes, just like that. Well, it’s come back to bite you.’ Roger tapped a cigarette out of a silver case that he always carried in the top pocket of his shirt, put it between his lips but didn’t light it, just sucked on the raw tobacco.
Jackie at least had the decency to absorb herself in her phone, Anna noticed, as Hilary leant a hand on the table and said, ‘You need to sort it, Anne. Can’t fail at your first job as a wife. That wouldn’t do at all.’
Tell them to stop, Seb, she thought as they carried on. Tell them to stop.
But he said nothing, just looked at his glass.
The conversation swirled on around her until she heard Jackie say, ‘I know, I’ve been trying to persuade her to put her phenomenal talent to use back here in Nettleton. Razzmatazz are heading towards a big Britain’s Got Talent audition.’
‘And Anna‒’ Hilary frowned, ‘You’re not doing it?’
‘I just‒’ Anna made a face, glanced at Jackie and thought, you sly cow.
‘You really should, Anna. I would have thought you’d jump at the chance of extra money. Seb, what do you think?’
Tell them that you think it’s a terrible idea. Tell them something because you know, more than anything, I don’t want to dance.
Seb licked his lower lip and said, ‘I think it’s Anna’s decision.’
Chapter Four (#ulink_3e8e7b9d-a98e-5f8a-b5de-48511e0ee53f)
Anna’s ballet teacher pulled her mother aside when she was eight and told her she had talent. Real, proper talent. Talent that she couldn’t really do justice with her own teaching. Anna’s mother had wanted to whisk her off to London there and then, but it had been her father who’d said no. Who’d said a child should enjoy their childhood. So the compromise had been Summer, Easter and Christmas holidays spent at The Yellow House, a precursor to The English Ballet Company School.
But the second her father had been caught in bed with Molly, the local auctioneer, he forfeited, in her mother’s opinion, any rights to Anna’s future. And, quick as a flash, they were speeding down the M3 to London, towards an audition for a full-time placement at The English Ballet Company School.
As the sun edged its way over the Hammersmith flyover, her mother had said, I should have done this years ago. In fact, no, I should have just gone back. I should have gone straight back to Sevilla. What is there keeping me here? There’s nothing, nothing for me here.
The feelings of the springs in the back of the car seat jutting into her back and whether she’d ever see their cat again were Anna’s predominant memories of the trip. Which distracted her from the fear of her audition and the possibility that she wasn’t quite good enough. That everyone else there had started when they were six, and weren’t chastised every lesson at summer school for their lack of flexibility. That if she did get in she’d suffer the humiliation of being in classes with younger kids, that she’d be described as a ‘late bloomer’.
You, her mother had looked over from the road, the sleeves of her black fur coat flopping down over her hands on the steering wheel, and said, You’re the only thing keeping me here, darling. You. You’re going to be a star. I can just see it. You’re going to be a star and we’ll wear Chanel and we’ll go back to that bloody village and we’ll show them that we’re better. We’re better, Anna.
Anna was lying in the bath when Seb popped his head round the door to say that he was going out with his brothers, then added an eye-roll, as if it was just something that had to be done.
Anna laughed involuntarily. She knew that meant he’d be forced to drink shots and go to some hideous club on an industrial estate out of town that they’d gone to when they were sixteen. An image of his siblings with their middle-aged One Direction haircuts made her wince. She knew they called her a stuck-up cow and blamed her for the loss of Seb’s apparent sense of fun.
As he leant over and kissed her on the top of the head, Anna found herself saying, before she could stop herself, ‘Why didn’t you stand up for me in the pub the other day?’
Seb turned and leant against the sink. ‘I don’t know what you mean?’
She looked at the bleeding cuts on the backs of her hand where she’d been lugging boxes around all day, her chipped nails with dirt underneath them, her bruised legs. ‘It just feels a bit like you’re punishing me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He shook his head. ‘Anna, I was unhappy in London. I’m not ashamed to admit it. We both made mistakes, we both lived outside our means, the wedding was just the icing on the cake. I promise, I’m not punishing you. By no means am I punishing you. I suppose I just want you to try.’ He paused, his fingers thrumming on the edge of the porcelain basin, ‘Also, I wonder if maybe you weren’t as happy as you think you were.’
Anna guffawed. ‘I was happy!’
Seb shrugged and nodded, then turned and opened the bathroom cabinet, fishing about for some aftershave. ‘I saw the vicar today,’ he said after a moment.
Anna paused, popped a bubble in her bath.
‘He said we were welcome to use the church for the service. Said that it would be nice you know, to go full circle, since I was christened there. I thought that was nice. You know, a nice thing to say. He didn’t have to say anything, did he? But I thought that was nice.’
‘You’re rambling.’
‘It’s because I’m nervous about telling you this. Nervous of what your reaction is going to be.’
‘If you know my reaction, why are you telling me?’ She suddenly wanted to be out of the bath, dry and dressed and having this conversation at eye-level.
‘Because I think it could solve quite a lot of problems. And if we use the village hall it’ll be one hundred pounds. That’s it, Anna. One hundred pounds. That’s nothing.’
‘The hall I did Brownies in and ballet lessons and choir practice and sat with my dad at the antiques fairs? That hall, you mean?’
Seb nodded again, a little less vigorously.
‘The hall where all the old people have their weekly bridge sessions and that smells of cabbage and boiled potatoes afterwards?’
‘That’s the one.’
Anna nodded.
Seb bit his lip and seemed to close his eyes for slightly longer than a blink.
‘And the vicar who counselled my mum to stay with my dad even though he’d been having an affair for two years? That one? Still the same one?’
Seb did a really small nod, almost imperceptible.
‘That it was her duty to stay with him even though he had no intention of giving his mistress up? That the sanctity of marriage meant turning a blind eye.’
‘I had actually forgotten that bit‒’ Seb swallowed.
Anna breathed in through her nose and slowly exhaled like they used to do at her Bikram yoga class that she couldn’t go to any more because there was only one in the next village and it was twenty pounds a class. She was lucky if there was Pilates in Nettleton, and Zumba…Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The bubbles on her fingers glistened in the drooping sun, pearlised pinks and blues like sequins. Twinkling on white, reminding her of the first costume hand-stitched just for her. The individual silver sequins flickering on netting under the heat of the strip-lighting in the shabby costume department. The material as it was ruched and pinned, the corset as it was nipped and tucked, the patterns traced with tiny seed beads and embroidery against her chest and up over her shoulders in trails on fine gauze.
The flat that her mother had rented just off the Charing Cross road was horrible. A dingy little place that lit up bright blue when ambulances and fire engines screamed past at all hours of the night.
They’d had nothing but a couple of suitcases of clothes, some pots and pans and a massive heap of bitterness. There was one bedroom, which Anna slept in, where a lamp in the shape of a white horse sat on a stack of old Hello! Magazines left behind by the previous tenant, flickering from a dodgy connection in the plug. And it was cold. The kind of cold that made the blankets damp and kept toes frozen. That first night Anna had lain staring at the ceiling doing everything she could not to cry and, as if her mum could sense it, she came in from her own make-shift bed on the sofa, a red crocheted blanket wrapped round her and snuggled up next to Anna. She had stroked her hair away from her face and said, We’ll be ok. You, you’ll be fabulous!
Then she had leant over and grabbed a Hello! from the pile. When I was a child we used to make scrap books, she’d said as she’d started flicking through the glossy pages. We’d stick in pictures and postcards of places we wanted to go or people we wanted to be. I had a big picture of the ceiling of the David H. Koch theatre at the Lincoln Center. It’s paved with gold. Did you know that? A gold ceiling. That’s the best you can get, isn’t it? And then I had a picture of Buckingham Palace, can you believe it! Still, we’ve never been. As she talked, she let her finger trace the outline of the big chandeliers, the Caribbean super-yachts, the million-pound stallions in stately home stables, and Anna watched silently as the moisture collected in the corner of her eyes. I stuck in all the things I’d ever wanted and dreamt of.
From that night they sat up together in bed and went through the Hellos!, one by one, staring at pictures of Princess Grace of Monaco, Ivana Trump, Joan Rivers’ daughter’s wedding extravaganza. Caroline Bassette-Kennedy on the arm of John Jnr, Princess Diana photographed by Mario Testino, Darcey Bussell in Swan Lake, Claudia, Naomi, Cindy and Kate draped on the arm of Vivienne Westwood or Jean Paul Gaultier. Houses that dripped in gold, taps shaped like dolphins with emeralds as the eyes, satin sheets and heart-shaped beds, wardrobes that cantilevered to reveal rows and rows of shoes like coloured candy, chandeliers that hung like beetles glinting in the camera flashlight, oriental rugs as wide as ballrooms and mirrors trimmed with gold and giant porcelain figurines. This was a world of faces turned a fraction to the left, a tilt of a smile, a waft of arrogance and confidence. This was a world that made her mum smile when she looked at the pictures, that would forever remind Anna of being tucked up together in that cold, damp bed.
That’s who I’m going to be, Anna had thought as the light flickered in her bare bedroom and the noise of an ambulance howled past along the street below. In this enchanted world they have everything.
The next day she had started her own book, one that until a week or so ago was crammed with scraps of every picture, article, photograph, postcard, ripped-out catalogue page she’d seen over the last however many years.
The book that went everywhere with her. The book that housed pages and pages of her dreams. The book that, when they had packed up their beautiful Bermondsey flat, she had left in the bin on top of her old ballet pointes.
‘The thing is, Seb. ’ Anna said, ‘I think I’d rather not get married than get married in Nettleton Village Hall and be married by that man.’
Seb ran his tongue along his bottom lip and then said, ‘Isn’t it about us, Anna? I understand about the vicar, but isn’t it about us, rather than where it is?’
She looked from her bubbles back to him, she thought about her book, about the stupid, simple promises she’d made to herself all those years ago. ‘It’s not enough for me.’
‘Christ.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to do then. We don’t have the money for more. I don’t have the money. I honestly don’t know what to do.’
She leant over the bath, her movements languid still by nature, arms crossed gracefully on the rim, water dripping from her skin. ‘We’ll work something out,’ she said, then nodded furiously to try and convince him and made her eyes go all big and persuasive.
He shook his head and she saw him start to smile, then he pushed away from the sink and took the few steps over to her and kissed the top of her head. ‘Maybe.’
As she heard the sound of the front gate clicking shut through the open window she had a sudden flash of Seb’s phone ringing as she was cutting up her credit cards in their London living room. It was a call to offer him a place at Nettleton High. Fuck, no way! Anna had sneered. But Seb had shrugged and said, I’m not sure we have any other options. What we have here, Anna, it’s not real.
At the time, they had both assumed he was talking lifestyle.
Chapter Five (#ulink_4871a5b0-b6ed-546a-8862-162a91f4cf08)
The next day was another spent in the sweatshop stockroom but Anna, fed up with destroyed skin and dusty hair, was slightly more prepared. She had a green Hennes headscarf to protect her hair, that she had given a little snip that morning to try and maintain the Trevor Sorbie cut as long as possible, and her fuchsia leather gloves, so that however much her hands might sweat, they would protect her nails.
‘You’re not handling priceless antiques, you know,’ Mrs Beedle noted as she clocked the gloves while ambling in to make the tea.
‘Oh I’m well aware of that,’ Anna replied, staring scathingly at the mound of junk before her.
‘Mind your mouth, young lady. I know your trick, do as little as possible and still get paid. Well if you’re not careful, I’ll start paying you by the square foot you clear. That’d get you moving, wouldn’t it?’
Anna glanced at what she’d done so far and realised if that became the case she’d have earned about £2.99.
Mrs Beedle pushed her glasses up her nose and watched as Anna upped her pace a touch. ‘Have you been to see your dad yet, young lady?’
Anna paused, then turned round with a box of novelty teaspoons in her hand. ‘Where should I put these? With the silver or do they warrant a space all of their own?’
