Homecoming (48 page)

There was something faintly hypnotic about watching someone cooking in front of you. Even the ingredients were soothing. Crushed garlic, giant lumps of butter tossed to fizzle in a hot frying pan. Why had nobody come up with smell-o-vision yet?

Not that Katharine cooked or even ate much. She was an actress. Thin was where it was at.

It was too early for cooking shows. She watched a couple of bronzed girls with toned bodies try to sell a sit-up machine, but the sight of their taut abdomens was too much. Her own abdomen needed more than a contraption to help her do situps. She’d made a movie once where she’d had an ex-Israeli army guy train her. The workouts were agonising. She’d been in the best physical shape of her life for that film, but of course, it wasn’t sustainable for a normal human being. Within six months, the tone was gone.

Irritated, she got out of bed and went down three flights of stairs into the basement to make a cup of tea.

Once she’d made it, she climbed back into bed and began to plan her day.

That itself was a major improvement. When Rob had left, she hadn’t been able to so much as speak, never mind plan a day which involved rehearsals for a play and dinner with the director.

It was too early to phone her assistant, Tiggy. She’d have been lost without Tiggy for the past six months.

It was she who’d been there the day the news broke. They’d been going through Katharine’s diary at the time. She had charity functions to attend, fittings to set up for a children’s movie where she was playing an eccentric aunt and the opening night of a small production of
Lear
where an old pal from RADA was playing Regan.

‘There’s almost no money in it, but at least I’m working,’ the old friend, Anne, had said on the phone to Katharine. ‘You’ll come for moral support, please? And bring Rob, if he’s around.’

Bring Rob. Code for:
It will do my standing no end of good if I can get Rob Hartnell to my opening night.

‘Yes,’ Katharine said automatically. ‘If he’s around.’

Rob wouldn’t be around, as it turned out. He was still filming in Romania. Katharine sat with Tiggy and wished she was the sort of person who could make up an excuse and not

go to the opening night. She wasn’t the person Anne really wanted there. She wanted Rob, exuding glamour and Hollywood movie money.

‘About the costume fitting,’ said Tiggy, running a Frenchmanicured nail down her list. Tiggy was not the beguiling Home Counties girl her name suggested. She was chic, wore little grey suits she sourced in Paris, and kept her glossy dark hair in a swinging bob. She was efficient and polite but never scary like some of the assistants Katharine knew. Many stars liked a scary assistant as the contrast was so favourable and the assistant made a useful fall guy.

‘It’s not me being difficult, it’s my people’ was the standard line for any outrageous demands.

Katharine never made outrageous demands. The very notion of such a thing offended her.

‘What about next Thursday? We have that photo on Tuesday, so you can rest on Wednesday, and the costume fitting won’t be too bad. You said you wanted to pop into Armani to pick up some things. We can fit that in too. I’ll phone to tell them you’re coming.’

A date for the fitting for the movie was set up. Katharine liked working with designers and wardrobe people. Clothes helped her fit into a role. They didn’t for Rob. He just transformed himself into it, like a speeded-up caterpillar becoming a butterfly in five seconds. She’d seen him walk on to a set as Rob Hartnell, and become another person in the steps it took to reach his mark.

‘It does sound like fun,’ Tiggy said, reading the email from the costume designer about the director’s vision: ‘“Aunt Astrid is a colourful woman with a velvet coat with a fur collar that’s actually her pet, a real live mink.” Oh, it says here: “We’ll be using computer generated images and live action – you won’t be acting with the real mink.” Pity,’ Tiggy said, grinning, ‘it might be fun to act with a mink.’

‘Cute but slow,’ said Katharine, who’d once worked on a film with several dogs. ‘Every time you get it right, the animal gets it wrong. It takes hours. I knitted an entire sweater on that doggie movie.’

‘I didn’t know you could knit,’ Tiggy had said with interest.

Katharine suddenly felt very old. Tiggy was a marvellous assistant and had been working with her for two years, but she was so young. Twenty-nine. Compared to Alice, solid dependable Alice who’d been Katharine’s assistant for the previous fifteen years and had seen her through all her successes and failures, Tiggy was a child. Doubtless, she’d do another year with Katharine before running off to become head of a major studio or something, but still, she was a child now.

Alice had seen Katharine knit, do tapestry, paint watercolours and practice Tai Chi.

‘I preferred the tapestry,’ Alice had remarked wryly when Katharine had taken up knitting. ‘You are the most awful knitter.’

‘That’s not the point.’ Katharine had laughed loudly. ‘I’m not asking anyone to wear any of these things.’ She held up a scarf. ‘It’s therapeutic.’

Why did Alice have to retire?

‘I can’t stay attached to your side forever, Katharine,’ she’d said.

And Katharine had had Rob by her side then.
Had.

She and Tiggy had still been in the study that day when Tiggy’s BlackBerry rang.

Tiggy answered, listened and went pale.

‘It’s Rob, isn’t it?’ Katharine had stayed in her chair but it felt as if all the blood in her body had drained into the floor. She felt cold with fear. ‘He’s had an accident–’

‘No,’ Tiggy interrupted. ‘It’s David Shultz, the producer. Rob has been photographed in Prague with his co-star, Megan Bouchier.’

For a moment, Katharine thought she might laugh.
Megan
Bouchier,
she wanted to say.
That girl? Who next? The papers all want gossip and what’s better than pretending that a pair of actors onset are actually doing for real what they’re being paid to do on film.

Tiggy was back on the phone, listening carefully. ‘OK,’ she said at intervals. ‘OK.’

She took the phone away from her ear. ‘Do you want to talk to him?’ she asked.

The confidence began to slide away from Katharine. There had been pictures over the years and none of them had meant a thing. Rob had never cheated on her. But she’d never received a phone call from one of her husband’s producers before. David Shultz was one of the good ones. A successful, charming man. A busy man who didn’t have time to be the one phoning her assistant to mention that some tabloid had photos of Rob and his co-star.

‘David, hello,’ she said cautiously.

‘Katharine,’ he said, and his voice was full of the regret of a man who has awful news to deliver. ‘There are these photos –’

‘There have been lots of photos, David,’ she said, still managing to sound calm. ‘Why are you phoning over these ones?’

‘Because this time, it looks as if it’s –’ He halted, then took the plunge: ‘As if these aren’t set-up pictures. They’re real. Megan’s phoned her agent in distress. They were in a hotel in Prague. I can’t get hold of Rob. He’s not answering his phone.’

‘But you’re filming in Prague,’ Katharine said, confused.

‘No, we’re not. Rob and Megan had the weekend off.’

Katharine breathed out slowly. Rob had lied to her. He’d said they were shooting night scenes and he mightn’t phone in case he woke her up.

‘No night scenes, then?’ she asked, and was instantly sorry she’d spoken. The lied-to wife.

‘No, no night scenes.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘I got the call this morning.’

‘Does Charles know?’

Charles LeBoyer was Rob’s agent, a Hollywood super agent who only slept when his two personal assistants were handling his calls.

‘He does,’ said David formally.

There was nothing more for him to say. Katharine had worked it all out. Charles knew everything. Rob used to say that when one of Charles’s clients sneezed in Ulan Bator, Charles knew about it in Los Angeles. It was why he was such a good agent. He missed nothing.

She realised that Charles must have known about this all along. He wasn’t shocked at Rob being photographed with Megan Bouchier. And he was in Rob’s camp, obviously, rather than in Katharine’s.

Katharine was the wife of a client, not one herself. Which was like being the third violin in an orchestra. If Rob had moved on, Charles would be four steps ahead of him.

‘Thank you for calling, David,’ she said. ‘I appreciate your kindness.’

‘For my money, he’s crazy,’ David replied quickly. ‘Really crazy.’

Katharine felt a tear slip down her cheek.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and hung up.

Prague had been one of her favourite places in the world. The cupolas with their candied almond colours and the sense that the whole city was a magical film set waiting for the child catcher in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

She’d said she might come to Romania for the end of filming.

‘Not a good idea, darling,’ Rob had said. His voice was part Welsh gravel, part molten steel. Instantly recognisable. When he phoned restaurants asking for a reservation, the person on the other end of the line always hesitated. As if the voice that had graced so many films couldn’t actually do anything so mundane as book a table.

Not that he’d phoned anywhere himself for years. He had an assistant to do that for him. Or Katharine.

There was always one person in a famous couple who deferred to the other. On the outside, they were the Hartnells, dually famous and successful. But in reality, Rob was the one who got the mega-budget Hollywood movies, while Katharine got quirkier, character parts in thoughtful films. She did theatre while American Express asked Rob to do commercials.

She had a line of BAFTAs, but Rob had the power. He wasn’t the sort of man who could come second to anyone. Katharine had understood that.

Now she got out of bed and went into her huge dressing room to prepare for her busy day.

A wardrobe expert had set it all up for her. With money, one could pay people to do absolutely everything. From organising what to wear to what to eat. And yet it wasn’t possible to pay a person to live your life. You still had to do that yourself, and when it went wrong, nobody but you felt the pain.

‘Pain helps us grow,’ insisted Anders Frolichsen. ‘You must embrace pain, Katharine, my love. Pain is what we are about. Pain and love.’

‘Anders, you say the most wonderfully crazy things, darling,’ she used to say affectionately. ‘Wait till you’re older. You won’t say that. You’ll say, “No more pain, bring me vodka and happiness!”’

Anders was the young playwright who’d written a play specially for her. A dark drama about an older woman’s affair with her son’s best friend, it was beautifully written and a joy for any actress. A passionate Swede, he was twenty years her junior and she was having a marvellous time with him.

She didn’t love him, not the way she’d loved Rob. She might never love anyone like that again, with that naked, pure love that laid a person open to being hurt.

But she adored being with Anders. He was funny, warm, kind and mad about her. It didn’t hurt that he had the body of an athlete and a definite resemblance to Viggo Mortensen.

She’d grinned when the first photos of her and Anders appeared in the tabloids.

Katharine gets over grief with younger man
screamed the headlines.

The pictures were a thrill after the horrific photos of her after Rob had vanished.

Her CV had been reduced to one hideous photo of her leaving her house with no make-up. The picture of tragedy.

The shots with Anders rather made up for that. She hoped Rob had seen them too.

He’d contacted her only once: a drunken phone call on a crackly line from somewhere in the Caribbean. LeBoyer’s tentacles stretched wide. There would be plenty of wealthy people with nice private islands willing to let Rob Hartnell stay for a few months. Imagine the cocktail-party gossip among the super-rich: ‘I got a super yacht.’ ‘I bought a football club.’ ‘I let Rob Hartnell have the house on the island for two months. We’re close friends, you know.’

Katharine had been watching
Sunset Boulevard
for the nth time one evening when she picked up the call. Normally, she let the answering machine handle it after six rings, but tonight, she didn’t think and picked it up. Nobody spoke. She knew it was him, though. She could sense his breathing, even that was memorable.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Katharine.’

He’d been drinking: it was obvious in his voice. Not to many people, but obvious to her. The clipped RADA-esque syllables, although he’d never been to RADA and was bitter about it, were slurred just a fraction.

‘Is that what you phoned to tell me?’ she said, unable to hide the bitterness in her own voice. This wasn’t how she’d intended to play it. She’d planned to be coolly magnanimous, not the shrewish woman scorned. But in her mental fantasies, she’d always had time to prepare. Now, late in the evening and unprepared, she was raw and bitter. The real Katharine.

‘Yes, I had to say sorry,’ he said. He was using his humble voice.

‘Why?’ she asked.

More silence.

‘I don’t know.’ He wasn’t being Rob the actor any more, he was being Rob the man. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve broken what we had,’ she said. ‘It’s over. There’s no going back. But you know that,’ she added, ‘else you wouldn’t have run away.’

‘Charles said I should disappear.’

‘Thank you, Charles,’ she said acidly. ‘Is he listening in?’

Charles listened in on many of Rob’s calls, especially the potentially difficult ones.

‘He’s not here.’

‘Is
she
with you?’

Katharine didn’t want to say Megan Bouchier’s name. Naming her gave her a dignity.

‘No, it ended there and then. She’s disappeared.’

‘Waiting to appear naked in
Playboy
and tell all, I daresay,’ Katharine snapped, and then was sorry. She’d sounded so bitter. ‘That was beneath me,’ she said. ‘I better go, Rob. I’ve got company.’