Exposure (36 page)

'Writing a letter?' Luke said.

'Yes.'

Feeling he had now adequately dealt with the formalities of arrival, Luke patted his pockets and said,
would
you believe it?, he must have left his cigarettes in the car.

'Oh, darling, you don't need those awful things,' Rosalind said, out of long and fruitless habit.

'I do, Mum. Back in a minute,' he told her—and he watched her turn safely back to her letter before he left the room. He took the litde key off the hook beneath the coat rack, went out of the front door and jogged down the side passage.

Goran and Mila followed him to the annexe. It was a simple building, the size of a small bedroom with a little bathroom attached. The previous owners had apparently referred to it as 'the granny flat' and Luke had always felt sure he could tell that an old lady had died in it. In fact, there was nothing sinister about it. It was painted pale yellow inside and out. The entrance was through a rosy pink door, which was conveniently obscured from the house by a huge tree peony at the end of the passage.

Inside, it smelt damp and the light was dim and greenish, rather magical. It filtered through the ivy and wisteria that grew over the litde windows. The room was full of garden furniture and family history: art projects, his sports cups, Sophie's countless framed music certificates for flute and oboe and piano and violin. There were stacks of board games with grinning, victorious children on the front; there was the boules set they always took on holiday; there were countless old tennis rackets of various sizes. His enormous teddy bear, which, aged seven, he had imaginatively named Bear, was sitting in a deck-chair, under the orange parasol they had bought on a beach in Greece.

Along the left-hand wall, there was a mirror and the old TV (which looked so dated he couldn't believe how proud he had once been to show it to his friends) and, beside it, the ancient pink drawing-room sofa, which Sophie had insisted was of sentimental value to her. Luke suspected she had lost her virginity on it, but he would never have given her the pleasure of imparting this information to him with one of her so-what grins.

With the small camp-bed and the sofa there were two fairly comfortable places for Goran and Mila to sleep.

'Look, I hope that's OK for now. I'll bring you some sheets and pillows later,' he said.

'We are so tired Mila and I can sleep anywhere. I can sleep three days.'

'I'm sure. But I'll come back later with blankets because it might get cold in here at night. I know my mother's going out for a bit this evening, so I'll do it then.'

Luke jogged back down the side passage towards the street. When he reached the end of the path he stopped dead and watched. His friend Jessica was on the front steps of the house, talking to his mother. 'I just thought I'd drop by and see how he was doing,' she was saying.

'That's so thoughtful of you,' Rosalind told her.

Luke knew his mother liked Jessica. This surprised him as Jessica swore all the time and very obviously disliked his sister. Jessica called Sophie 'daahling' and rolled her eyes behind her back.

'I wish I could have come sooner, Mrs Langford. I've been away assisting on a documentary,' she said. 'I've been calling but his phone's been off and it's taken me ages to figure out that he might be here. I've been working hard, to be honest—not much brain power left over.'

'You're doing a film? How exciting. That's what you've always wanted to get into, isn't it, Jessica?'

'That and sculpting—but yes. At least there's a
tiny
bit of money in this.'

'Well, that's not everything. Making money's not everything. Your parents must be thrilled to see you doing something you love.'

'Actually, my parents are both dead, Mrs Langford.'

Rosalind literally stepped backwards. 'I had—I had no idea.'

'Please don't worry. My father died when I was a child, and Mum was over six years ago now.
Please
don't think you've said something terrible.'

'Thank you,' Rosalind said, deeply impressed by this girl's ability to say exactly what she meant. She had always liked Jessica's direct manner. And she had particularly enjoyed seeing her correct Alistair's misquotation of Shakespeare one evening when Luke had first brought her back from university.

Luke stepped over the furthest corner of the low garden wall. Then he walked extra casually along the pavement so it would seem as if he had come from the car.

'Ah, there he is,' said Rosalind.

Jessica turned and they both smiled at him.

'Hey,
Luke,' Jessica said. She put out her arms and hugged him. 'Where have you
been?
You've been missed a lot. I've missed you most, though.'

Rosalind said she was going out to meet Suzannah for a bit so they could have the house to themselves. She said she would be back in time to do supper and Jessica looked away tactfully while Rosalind checked whether Luke would prefer 'a lovely piece of salmon' or his 'favourite creamy chicken and spinach'.

After she had gone upstairs, Luke took Jessica into the kitchen. 'D'you want a coffee?' he said. 'Actually, it's a bit hot, isn't it? Iced tea? Lemonade?'

'Have you got a beer?'

'Good idea,' Luke said, clinking bottles in the fridge. He opened them and gave one to her.

'Let's go outside,' she said. 'I'm guessing there won't be a garden party this year—and your mum makes it all so gorgeous. It's such a shame to miss it.'

'No, you're right,' Luke said, following her.

'Oh! Roses, roses,
roses
!' Jessica held up her hands like an Italian in a traffic jam. 'Just smell that. You were so
spoilt
growing up here. Lucky you. Our place was a little ... well, different.'

They sat on the stone steps down to the lawn.

'So,' Jessica said. She took a long drink.

'So?'

'So, I'm intrigued. What's your
strategy
here?'

Luke stared at her brown-leather boots and her old jeans. There was clay on her jeans and he wondered if she was doing her weird sculptures again. Ludo's father had bought one of them on the single occasion that he had visited Ludo at university. Sandro had told them all Jessica would be famous one day and Ludo and Luke had watched her giggling and making their shepherd's pie and felt a bit frightened.

She put down the frothing beer bottle beside her and took a packet of cigarettes out of her bag.

'My
strategy
?' he said.

She spoke out of the side of her mouth while she lit the cigarette: 'Yup.'

'What do you mean, exactly?'

'Well, with your job, for example. Are you actually
trying
to get sacked or is this, like, a test of their selfless belief in your talent?'

Luke waved his hand, brushing away her remarks as if they were flies. 'Yeah, yeah,' he said. He wished she would go away because he was getting used to exile, to his expat status at home where, with no one but himself to maintain them, the old peer-group standards were ceasing to apply. But he was torn because, conversely, he was intensely relieved to see his intelligent friend because he could trust her sense of proportion, even if he found it brutal at times. She was generally thought to 'take no shit' and he often wondered why this was. How did a person get that way? He had a vague impression of hardship in her childhood—money, possibly violence or alcoholism—and, of course, there was the loss of both her parents by the age of twenty-two. He couldn't begin to imagine what it felt like to have no parents—no
mother.

'Gimme one of those?' he said.

'You can have a cigarette if you
promise
me you won't lose your job:

'What if I don't want my job any more?'

She tossed the cigarette at him anyway. 'Oh, God. Not you too. I heard about bloody Sophie
daahling.'

'What about Sophie?'

'Shit, don't you know? Your parents
must
know.'

'Know what?'

'Sophie handed in her notice at the
Telegraph.'

'What? Why? To do what?'

'Don't know what she's doing. My mate Caroline just said she left. That's all.'

'Caroline?'

'You know Caroline. My friend at uni? She used to come and do her philosophy essays on our kitchen table. This is terrible—you probably can't remember her because she isn't five foot nine and a size ten. Her name's Caroline Selwyn. Very bright. A really interesting person.'

'Oh, sure. Of course. No, I do remember. She had bad skin.'

'God, Luke. Yeah—that's her. Anyway, Caro said it was like the big shock of the month, apparently. I mean, obviously things weren't easy with the whole thing about your dad, but life goes on, doesn't it? And
shit,
Luke, that was a hell of a job to throw in.'

'Yes, it was,' said Luke, feeling frightened for Sophie—and for himself. Were they just a no-good pair? Were they a bad batch of genes?

'I'm just throwing out ideas here, but maybe you should, like,
call
her? You're her brother. It might be friendly. Do you lot communicate at all?'

'I will call her,' he said. 'No, I will.'

'But I didn't come here to talk about
Sophia.
She gets quite enough air-time in my opinion. This is all about
you.
What's up?'

'You know what's up.'

'Arianne?'
She frowned.

Luke nodded and tapped the ash off his cigarette. He glanced at the annexe windows: it was still and dark behind the leaves and glass.

'So what are you feeling? Will you tell me? It might help,' Jessica said. 'Look, it might help
me,
OK, because you've got me dead worried.'

She stroked his hair in the peaceful, maternal way she had and Luke said, 'It's simple, really. I love her and I have to have her back. I just have to. That's all there is to it. It's that or I've missed my chance, Jess. Because what she and I had—well, that was
it,
what everyone's waiting for. She was
it
and I let her go. Not let her, exactly, but sort of lost her. It's complicated.'

Jessica sighed. 'Oh, Luke.'

'What?'

'Why was she
it?
Yes, she was beautiful,
yes,
she had the whole damaged and manipulative Monroe thing going on and, sure, everyone turned to look when she came in. But, really, was that what you actually wanted to
live
with? It was all a fucking performance, Luke. She was your consummate actress. What was real?'

Luke took a drag on his cigarette. He remembered how, at the end, he had wondered if Arianne was faking the seductive little sighs she gave while she slept. In bad moments, after she had stopped wanting to sleep with him, he had been sure she did things to taunt him, to punish him for his global inadequacy. While he attempted to work from home, for example (which he had done more often when he became afraid she might call his supposed friend Joe and ask him over to keep her company), she had begun to give disproportionate attention to the smoothing of moisturizer on to her bare legs—up and down, up and down on the sofa beside him. She had padded about in a rainbow of G-strings, making an X-rated reflection in his computer monitor and, absentmindedly, she had often paused in the kitchen doorway to bite into pieces of fruit, letting juice run from her wrist to her elbow, then chasing it back up again with her tongue.

Or had she just been
eating fruit,
for God's sake? Was it not possible for an individual to be so close to perfect that their fruit-eating, their sighs, were precisely what 'eat' or 'sigh' had always meant in your imagination? Jessica was sceptical about perfection because she had not been exposed to it. He wanted to tell her this, but he was afraid she might call him an idiot and tell him to go back to work.

She was so sharp and clever about people and he knew she would have theories about Arianne, but he did not want to hear them. Jessica saw human nature neon-lit under a microscope and although he could always see she was right when she explained herself, he was glad his mind naturally blurred life a litde and made it softer to look at.

Jessica went on, 'What a girl. No, I'm not surprised she's doing so well really.'

'Is
she?' he said. 'I haven't heard anything about her.'

'Oh, well, I haven't
seen
her either and nor has Ludo, I don't think, but she's been in the press a bit recently. You really have cut yourself off, haven't you? Not even reading the Style section. Good Lord.'

Luke's mouth went dry with fear. Here it was: Arianne's independent life. It was about to crash into him head on. 'In the
press?
Why?' he said.

'She's in that play
Hotel
in the West End. It's being directed by that Hollywood actor, Jack Cane—oh, you know, from that film where the thinly disguised Arab types plot to blow up the White House? He's in loads of stuff'

'She got the part.'

'Yeah, she's replacing the lead actress indefinitely—maybe the whole run. Apparently the real girl was "exhausted". We all know what
that
means,' Jessica said, tapping her nose.

'Wow. That's—that's fantastic.'

'Yeah. All worked out nicely for her. No, she must be pretty talented, actually, if they thought she could learn the whole part in a few weeks like that. Not that she didn't get a little help, of course.'

'Oh?'

'From—oh, you know, Jamie wotsit.'

'Who? From who?' Luke said. 'Why did he help her? Do I know him?'

Jessica stubbed out her cigarette and a drank some beer. 'Oh, it's nothing. He's just some crappy TV actor with floppy black hair.'

'And she's—what? She's friends with him?' Luke said. He felt the garden slope violently away from him. He was almost too weak to breathe.

'I ... I really don't know,' Jessica said, appalled at her tactless-ness. She just found it impossible to believe that Luke genuinely loved that agonized narcissist, no matter how good her legs were, so she had not taken enough care to be discreet.

'You do know,' he said.

'Look, I'm sorry—I really don't. I only know he helped her get the part because his dad's the major backer of the production.'