Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (22 page)

But Willow had only wanted to see Chloe laugh, so she didn’t say anything. In fact the three of them had whiled away the weekend in splendid isolation, as if the world outside their door was a universe away and had nothing at all to do with them.

There had been one intrusion from reality, though—a phone call with Victoria.

“How’s the suicide watch going, darling?” was her greeting. Sensing it was best not to have this conversation where India could hear one side and Victoria might hear Chloe, Willow retreated into what had become India’s bedroom, sitting on a bed strewn with tear-soaked tissues.

“Not bad,” Willow said, picking up a fraction of a photo of Hugh that looked like it had been torn out of a magazine and then ripped to shreds. Peals of laughter chimed from the other room—Chloe was no doubt showing India what a spot of back-combing could do for an international superstar. “She seems quite upbeat, actually.”

“Good, perfect.” Victoria inhaled sharply. “I think I’ve cracked it, brokered a deal that means India’s going to come out of this smelling like fucking roses, darling.”

“Really? That’s great news,” Willow replied as she found a man’s sock stuffed under the pillow. She didn’t have to get too close to it to realize it had been worn recently, and not by a fragrant young woman. India’s scratch-and-sniff keepsake of Hugh? Gingerly Willow tucked it back into its hiding place.

“Trouble is it’s going to be hard on her, she’s going to have to tough it out. Be prepared. Long and short of it, I want you to prepare her.”

Willow’s heart sank like a lead weight. What deal with the devil had Victoria made this time?

“Prepare her for what?”

“The others, darling, his other women. A whole string of them waiting to kiss and tell. All much younger, impressionable, in his evil thrall. One of them was somewhat famous for a bit, had that recurring part in
CSI
Whatever. Met Hugh when she was working with him in the West End, where he gave her repeat performances night after night, if you know what I mean.” Victoria morphed into a passable Mae West impersonation.

“Isn’t he a bit impotent?”

“Yes, but not for the purposes of this story. For this story he’s a heartless fucker. Literally heartlessly fucking his way through innocent young women. So I’ve got her, wossername, and also two others for starters. A makeup girl with a four-year-old who let’s just say looks terribly Hugh-like, and another actress who hasn’t worked in years and will say almost anything for a walk-on part on
Casualty
.”

Willow sighed as she realized what she had to prepare India for. Not only were the most intimate details of her personal life about to be discussed in public, she was also going to discover that the special love she thought that Hugh had for her was nothing but a pastiche, a much-thumbed script that he’d read from over and over again. Theirs was not a great love torn apart by circumstance. She’d fallen victim to a dirty old womanizer.

“So India wasn’t his one mistake, the love he couldn’t ignore. She was one in a long line of lovers. That’s going to hurt.”

“I know, but it’s cruel to be kind. These girls sell their stories to the tabloids. The tabloids lay off India, Hugh gets what’s coming to him and India is the victim, the innocent recovering from escaping the grasps of a sex addict. I’ve already got
OK!
and
Hello!
in a bidding frenzy, darling, and I can organize a
horde
of close personal friends to let a few things slip to
Grazia
. Of course she’ll have to go back and finish the film, and so will he. Neither of them can afford the lawsuit if they don’t. But the curiosity of the public will make it a hit and everyone’s happy.” Victoria paused for breath. “What I might do is get her a boyfriend, darling, someone young and wholesome. Maybe the gay one that’s not out yet from—oh, what’s that band called? You know, the fat one? Although, according to his manager he’s not fat, he’s a lazy bulimic. Actually I might call him now. Prepare away, darling. Prepare away.”

Willow sat on the edge of the bed for a moment or two,
listening to Chloe shriek with laughter as India fashioned her a red carpet gown out of some bedsheets and wondered why it always seemed to be her job to do the preparing. What good would it do, she wondered, to tell India now, when she was verging on some loose version of happy, about Hugh’s other women? How would it help her? Surely it would be better to let her spend the rest of the day, and for as long as possible, keeping the cruelty of the world at bay?

Willow thought she had at least another twenty-four hours’ worth of terrible horror films. Factor in some sleeping, eating and a news blackout unwittingly imposed by Chloe, who refused to watch anything “boring,” then she thought she could keep India in her nice little bubble for a good while longer yet. It wasn’t a good idea to disobey Victoria, but perhaps it was having Chloe in her home again, perhaps how fragile India was, but anyway, Willow decided not to prepare her. She had decided to protect her instead.

“All right, love?” A man in fashionably thick-framed glasses winked at her. “You the artist’s model?”

“Me? The artist’s model?”

He nodded at the display of delicately painted female organs.

“Oh!” Willow blushed, hurrying a little farther down the street, where she found a newsagent’s to loiter in. If she left now she could be there in less than a minute. Daniel’s studio was big and cold, but he’d promised her a minimum of four electric heaters. Willow shivered just thinking about it; still, she had to decide.

Maybe if she’d followed Victoria’s orders and prepared India, she would be thinking about this less and just going for it, going for naked time alone with Daniel—it was a bona fide dream come true. It was the textbook situation where boy
kisses girl and girl relents. It was the way it was supposed to happen.

But Willow hadn’t done as Victoria told her and the consequences had led her to realize that perhaps her scattergun approach to life wasn’t always the best plan.

Sam had arrived at ten, earlier that morning, to take Chloe and Willow to Chloe’s first prenatal appointment. Willow had been uncertain where to take her, in the end booking her directly into the local hospital prenatal department, where the receptionist had sounded decidedly bored by Willow’s brief recounting of Chloe’s age and her own lapsed stepparent status. She had texted Sam the details, too afraid to speak to him in person, and he’d arrived in his big black Audi SUV, exactly on time. As Willow settled India in front of another movie, she wondered if he remembered how particular she was about punctuality. A tiny thrill that he might still think of her at all, even in passing, fluttered uncomfortably in her chest as Willow allowed herself to imagine what it might have been like if Sam had been strong enough to love her no matter what and she hadn’t been so hell-bent on proving that he wasn’t. It was impossible to imagine that if things had gone differently she would still be a married woman, stepmother to a cheeky but studious daughter, wife to a strong but softhearted man. Perhaps they’d have children of their own by now, perhaps Willow would have stopped working and joined a gym to while away the hours after dropping the kids off at school. Stopping herself, Willow physically turned her head away from the thought of what life could have been like for her and Sam, if only. There is no if only, she reminded herself fiercely, there is only what is. That’s all there has ever been.

And, Willow thought as she stepped out onto the street to see Sam stoically gripping the steering wheel of his car, it
wasn’t as impossible as she had imagined to see him again. In fact the sight of his face, as angry and remote as it was, was somehow rather soothing—proof perhaps that as much as she had wanted him to be the love of her life, he wasn’t the man for the job.

Chloe clambered into the front seat next to Sam, while Willow rather awkwardly hauled herself up into the back, her fur coat slippery on the cream leather upholstery.

“This is a lot of car,” she said. “Have you taken up farming?”

Sam had ignored her, blowing away the last thrilling flutters of that glimpse into a parallel life in a single, well-placed puff of indifference. Instead, as they pulled into the sluggish traffic, he’d glanced at his daughter, who, a perfect mirror image of her father, was doing her best to ignore him.

“How you been?” he asked her, tentatively.

“Fine,” Chloe said, without tearing her gaze away from the window.

“I tried calling . . .”

“I know.”

Sam shifted slightly in his seat and Willow saw the hurt in his profile. He was trying, she knew him well enough to know that. He was just as desperate and as sad as Chloe to discover this gulf that had opened up between them; it was as if he and Chloe no longer spoke the same language. How could these two, these two people who had been so close, end up this way?

“Have you been looking after yourself, at least?” Sam said rather crossly, his eyes meeting Willow’s briefly in the rear-view mirror. Willow thought about the glass of wine and cigarettes, not to mention the processed sugar and saturated fat they’d all consumed in the last few days, and she prayed that Chloe would put her before her compulsive desire to wind up her father.

“No,” Chloe said. “Willow’s been looking after me. It’s been great. Like old times. Better actually, because you’re not there.”

Willow breathed a sigh of relief that was short-lived as she watched Sam bristle at the mention of old times. Once, on a cold winter’s morning, before the central heating had come on and the air in the room was still chilled with frost, Sam had gathered Willow into his arms, burying his face in her hair and whispered, “I’m over the moon that I love you, loving you is the second best thing that could possibly happen to me.”

“The second best?” Willow had exclaimed, trying to pull away but not struggling very hard when Sam contained her within his embrace.

“The first best is that Chloe loves you too. I couldn’t ask for more, I really couldn’t.”

How long, Willow wondered, how many days was it from that moment to the moment when he threw her out? How long had it taken for her to turn his happiness into anger and resentment that still endured all these years later?

Sam had looked distinctly uncomfortable in the clinic waiting room, his long legs at odds with the rows and rows of chairs upholstered in pastels, his eyes roaming over image after image of pregnant women, diagrams and cross-sections. He sat, his fingers interlocked, one forefinger impatiently tapping the back of the other hand. Chloe had made a point of not sitting down at all, instead choosing to pace up and down, pausing now and then to study leaflets, look at a poster or press all the buttons on the drink-vending machines even though she didn’t have any money. Willow watched her as she scuffed the toes of her UGGs against a beanbag chair, wondering if she was purposefully behaving like a bored child to wind her father up, or if after all that was just exactly what she was.

Willow had wanted to keep her coat on—it felt less like a
coat and more like armor now, and she felt safely ensconced behind it, masked from public view—but they seemed to have turned the heating up to full in the prenatal waiting room; warm, dry air blasted through the vents directly above her head until eventually she could bear it no more and slipped the coat off of her shoulders, arranging it around her like a sort of nest.

Sam eyed her across the aisle, and Willow found herself wishing that she’d put some more time into thinking about what she had put on this morning. She’d still been in weekend mode when she’d gotten dressed, thinking that it didn’t matter if her muffin top billowed over her waistband or that her shirt was a little tight. She’d dressed in a hurry, pulling on a pair of jeans that she’d actually set aside for the charity shop because they hadn’t buttoned up in months. Realizing her mistake only after she had done them up and discovered there was room to run a finger around her waistband, Willow had been so pleased with their miraculous looseness that she elected to keep them on, pulling on a red shirt that had been in the too-tight pile too, without even thinking about it. Now Willow thought that perhaps she didn’t look as good sitting down in the jeans as she had standing up, and that not being able to do the top three buttons up on the shirt might look good from a fashion point of view but three inches of cleavage wasn’t exactly the look she was going for when it came to being the responsible adult-elect. Sensing Sam watching her, Willow looked away. It was strange to feel his eyes on her again. Once he’d looked at her with such love; it was a look that Willow didn’t think she would ever see and one she knew she would probably never see again. Now when he looked at her it was with repressed fury.

The clinic was running late, so they were almost an hour behind time when Chloe was finally called in by a stout, capable-looking midwife in her fifties.

“You can wait out here,” she instructed her father, who half rose from his chair, as the midwife gestured for Chloe to follow her.

“I will not!” Sam protested. “I’m your parent, and you are under . . .” He stopped himself just in time, looking around.

“Ashamed of me, are you?” Chloe said, gesturing around her. “Ashamed of your underage pregnant daughter?”

“No, I . . .” Sam stood up. “Chloe, let me come with you.”