Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (13 page)

“Well, somebody has breached the terms of our agreement,” Victoria said, tight-lipped. “Somebody will have to pay, but I’ll take care of them later. For now we have to do a spot of firefighting. Look at it, it’s ghastly.” She threw open a double-page spread that had printed a series of grainy photos interspersed with type and some phrases like “Ambitious Young Temptress” and “No-Holds-Barred Sex” singled out in bold print. “This has got Cranmer all over it. I think he’s engineered this because he knew that India was considering an interview. These cunts have really gone to town on her, as if Hugh had no say in the affair at all. It’s going to be tricky, Willow. We’ve got to get her out of Blakes Hotel and into your flat today.”

“No!” Willow said compulsively, thinking of Chloe, who’d already made herself at home in her one spare room.

“I beg your pardon?” Victoria whispered.

“I mean, I’m not ready, it’s too soon.”

“It is what it is, darling,” Victoria told her, her voice diamond hard. “Go and get back in a cab and fetch India and take her to your flat. And once you’re there, dig around, interrogate her a bit. There’s got to be something we can pin on him.
Anything, anything at all. If he liked it a bit rough then we’ll say he raped her; if it was the massive age difference that attracted her to him, then we’ll suggest he’s a pedo. He’s messed with the wrong person this time. I’m going to crush him.”

Willow was static, caught with indecision. She thought she had a whole weekend with Chloe, a chance to get to know her again, even if just fleetingly, to perhaps make up, just a little, for leaving her. But if she had to take India back now . . . well, if Victoria knew there was anyone else in the flat, let alone a pregnant teenager, she’d be furious, and she’d tell Willow what she always told everyone. Get rid of her, the job comes first.

Whatever happened, Willow knew she couldn’t let Chloe down, not again.

“You appear to still be here?” Victoria quizzed her.

“Yes, I know. I’m sorry . . .” Willow stalled. “I’m just . . . how best do you think I should handle India? She’s heartbroken, she loves Hugh—with her delicate mental state, I’m wondering the best way to play this.”

“Yes, I remember how first heartbreak feels,” Victoria said, doodling a rather large erect penis emerging from the forehead of a photograph of Hugh Cranmer. “My first real affair, I was seventeen, terribly well-to-do, obviously, and packed off to Cornwall in the summer holiday with friends of the family. I won’t say I was innocent, girls’ school, darling—we practically shagged everything that moved and quite a lot of things that didn’t. But my heart was tender then. Still beating. He worked the fairground, a thoroughly bad lot. Swarthy, dirty, older and obviously giving every girl he met a free ride, if you know what I mean. And then we met and for a few weeks it was so perfect, so romantic. He didn’t look at any other girls, he treated me like a princess, we kissed under the stars, the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks—he’d even sing to me. He had a lovely voice. . . .” Willow sat down, intrigued
by the faraway look in Victoria’s eye that she had never seen before.

“Then what happened?”

“He got stabbed, darling, horribly murdered, and left me alone, pregnant with his little girl . . . but sometimes I got the feeling that he was still there, in spirit, singing to me. . . .”

“Victoria!” Willow impulsively reached across the desk to take her boss’s hand and then snatched it away. “Hang on, isn’t that the plot of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
Carousel
?”

“Is it, darling?” Victoria look unabashed. “Well, it just sounds so much nicer than fucking my dad’s best friend in his summerhouse until his wife found us and I got banished to Switzerland. My point is, I do know how she feels. I do know. We just can’t let her feelings get in the way of her makeup endorsements. Fifteen-to twenty-five-year-old girls don’t buy mascara from a slag. Drug habit, fine, but sleeping around, not okay. Unless she
did
happen to have an out-of-control coke habit . . .”

Willow frowned, catching glimpses of the dark monster that Victoria mostly hid rather well behind the botox and wrinkle filler.

“Victoria, are you saying you want me to encourage her to develop a drug habit?”

“Kill two birds with one stone, make her look cool
and
take her mind off things.”

“I’m just going to pretend that you are joking, for your sake as much as mine,” Willow said.

“Very well.” Victoria attempted an approximation of contrition. “Obviously I was joking. I care about India, that’s why I’ve asked you to look after her. There aren’t many people in this business who have the heart, kindness, wit and wisdom that you do.” Victoria looked a little nauseous. “There, you
made me be nice and you know how much I hate it. I’ll have indigestion for the rest of the day now. It’s going to ruin La Gavroche for me.”

“Right.” Willow stood up and went to the door. “It’s just, I’m the most irresponsible person I know. I always mess up my own personal life, all of the time, without fail. I’m just not sure I will have anything helpful to say to India.”

Victoria flipped open her laptop, her very particular way of telling someone they were dismissed.

“Sorry, darling, are you still talking?”

“Will, I can’t sit near that fur coat,” Lucy whined when Willow told her that Victoria was sending her out for the rest of the day. “When I went home last night I had to have two showers to get the stink out of my hair. Sebastian wouldn’t come near me until I tipped a whole bottle of Coco Mademoiselle over my head. It stinks like a badger, lol!” Willow ignored her as she briefly checked her e-mails.

“So how was your first night chaperoning the latest celebrity slut?” Lucy’s high-pitched voice interrupted both Willow and the activities of several dogs within a five-mile radius.

Willow sat back in her chair and focused on Lucy, her glowing skin, her shining eyes and messed-up hairdo that had probably taken at least half an hour to create. It must be so nice to be Lucy, it must be so nice to be one of those people for whom life is just a breeze, an endless, mirror-smooth surface to glide over. No married men using and abusing you, no frightening pregnancy to deal with, never feeling lost or alone. No one ever threw a curveball at Lucy . . . until now. Willow had had an idea.

“I’m putting you in charge,” she said. “Cover for me, okay?”

“Me? Cover for you? Willow! Have you cleared this with Victoria?”

“No,” Willow said, “but she will be fine about it. All you have to do is answer the phones, try to be coherent, finish this expenses claim, review those contracts, sort out the catering for Victoria’s networking bash on Saturday, go through the publicity requests, and keep Victoria supplied with enough caffeine to keep her heart beating until she can get to some drugs.”

“Willow!” Lucy looked panicked. “I’m not very good at being in charge of things, lol.”

Willow put her hands on her hips, and noticed that in her magic shoes she seemed to have a waist that went all the way round, without losing its way in the mountains and valleys of her belly.

“Don’t be silly, it’s about time you showed Victoria exactly what you’re made of. Lol.”

Willow left dragging her coat behind her, thinking she would have enjoyed her dramatic exit considerably more had she not had been accessorized with a bin liner that smelled like roadkill.

Once outside, Willow snapped open her phone and dialed India’s room. It rang persistently for almost a minute before India picked up.

“Hello?” she said uncertainly.

“It’s Willow. Slight change of plan. I’m coming to get you now.”

“I know they’ve been discussing the affair on
This Morning
. My mum loves that show. On Fridays she goes to a quilting circle—they take it in turns at each other’s houses, quilting and watching
This Morning
.”

“Ouch,” Willow said. “I’m sorry, India, Victoria is livid. Heads will literally roll over this, if that helps. Victoria’s instant-messaging an assassin as we speak.”

“She hasn’t called,” India went on. “Not since I phoned them to warn them what was happening. I haven’t heard a word. What do you think that means? Do you think he hates me? Have you seen the papers, is it bad?”

“It’s not as bad as it could be,” Willow lied. “It’ll be old news by Monday.”

“Monday is when Hugh is going on TV to tell everyone what a terrible mistake he made being led astray by a grasping, gold-digging slut like me. That’s what the presenter on
This Morning
said.”

“Shit.” Willow hesitated outside a dry cleaner’s, half a thought forming in her head. “Pack a bag, I’ll be there soon.”

The young man in the dry cleaner’s looked at her as if she were clinically insane when she dumped the coat on the counter. “Is there anything you can do for this?”

“I think the kindest thing would be to put it out of its misery,” he told her with the air of a person who did not plan to rely on his job in a dry cleaner’s for long. Willow raised a brow. “But there is a special treatment for fur I could try on it,” he added reluctantly. He quoted her an extortionate figure, which, even though she suspected he’d hiked it up to try and get out of the job, she accepted, and climbed into the first cab she saw. Once installed in the taxi, Willow was still haunted by the ghostly aroma of the fur coat, which perfumed the air with the musty scent of the past. Lives already lived, dreams already surrendered, hearts already broken, memories like darkened rooms, curtains drawn in the daytime, shards of daylight piercing the gloom. Willow didn’t dwell on her sudden impulse to clean it and maybe even wear it rather than dump it somewhere. In that moment it had just felt like the right thing to do. Willow sat back in her seat, willing herself to enjoy what would probably be the last few uncomplicated moments of her life for some time. She stretched out her feet
and looked at her shoes, starting to get the distinct feeling that if she just let them, they would take her exactly where she needed to go.

The phone rang.

“So?” Holly asked her.

“So what?” Willow teased her, gently.

“So what? I’ve been waiting since last night to find out what happened to Chloe, how it felt to see Sam again. I’m getting exciting, upsetting, confusing and worrying—am I right?”

“I’m a person, you know, not a glass of fine wine. Yes, you are right.”

“Of course you’re a person, you’re my person. I do wish you’d get more into this twin thing, it would save me a ton on phone bills. It’s there, you know. You’ve just got to open yourself up to it.”

“Yes, and that’s what I’m afraid of,” Willow retorted.

Holly ignored her. “So, have you cleaned the fridge out, now that the scandal over India has broken?”

Willow was about to answer when she caught something in Holly’s voice. Something she wasn’t saying. Perhaps she didn’t have Holly’s uncanny intuitive ability, but she did detect the strain in her sister’s voice, and that usually only meant one thing.

“How’s Mum?” she asked.

Holly was silent.

“Has there been another episode?” Willow asked. The MS could strike at any time, wiping out another part of their mother’s body and brain in one cruel sweep. Imogene was lucky, if it could be called that—she had the version of the disease that struck and then quite often went into remission, but when it did hit, it hit hard, and the older she got, the harder it was for her body to take it.

“Her sight’s gone, not completely but almost,” Holly said, almost guiltily.

“Hols, why didn’t you say anything?” Willow asked her. “I should be there; even if she won’t see me, then at least I could be there for you. I feel terrible; you are always there for me.”

“Don’t, it was a few days ago, and I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to see what the doctors thought first. She’s home now, and I’ve got the nurses coming in, one for day, one for night. But you know what she’s like. She just wants me. Really she deserves me, a relative to take care of her, but I can’t . . . I can’t face it, Willow. She gets so dark, so bitter in that house, of all places . . . I’m not strong enough to manage her on my own. I’m not a good enough person.”

“You are more than good enough, Holly, you cope with it all. I should do more . . . I should do something.”

“There’s no need, really, there are the nurses.” Holly paused. “Look, she’s asking for you, but I don’t think you should come. She’s delicate and you . . . well, you should concentrate on you at the moment.”

“Actually, it’s a relief to be concentrating on someone else for a change,” Willow said, uneasy that Holly was so determined to let her off the hook when it came to their mother.

“So? Tell me, I’m waiting to hear
everything
.”

“Okay, I don’t know who got Chloe pregnant. Seeing Sam was odd and . . . confusing, and all the things you said it was. Oh, and I haven’t cleaned the fridge. But some bacteria’s good for you, isn’t it?”

Willow got India as far as her front door without ever quite managing to break the news to her that Chloe was inside. She was afraid of jinxing herself, afraid that if she went the lengths of explaining the whole complicated situation to India, by the time she got home the complicated situation would have moved out and decided to go back home and make it up with her dad. But as India followed her up the stairs, the overly
loud pounding of Lady Gaga that was certainly not Mrs. Kuresh from downstairs told her that Chloe was still very much there.