Prima Donna (26 page)

She slipped her feet into her size-seven pair –Ava’s looked like children’s shoes by comparison – and they were a perfect fit. She twisted her foot first one way then the
other, checking the profile from the side, then behind, the shape of her instep, the curve of the heel . . .

‘See what you’ve done now?’ she said sardonically to Ava. ‘You’ve made me love them!’ She looked up at the assistant reluctantly. ‘Give me the bad news!
How much are they?’

‘Four—’

‘It’s irrelevant,’ Ava said, cutting in. ‘You’re having them anyway. I’m getting them for you.’

Sophie gasped. ‘No, Ava! I can’t possibly let you—’

‘You have to. It’s my birthday.’

‘Precisely. I should be getting them for you. I’ve not even got you a card yet.’

Ava put the shoes back in the boxes and handed them to the assistant. ‘Ring them up, please.’ She looked back at Sophie. ‘Let me. I want to. You’re my only friend here,
the only person who’s shown me any kindness. Everyone else hates me and I don’t know what I would have done without you these past few weeks.’

Sophie smiled, touched by the recognition of their friendship – Pia had barely ever acknowledged her presence. It felt good. There was balance in this relationship. They both drew
something from it, not least a solace from being foreigners together in a big city.

She watched as Ava signed a couple of autographs for some ten-year-old girls, and an idea suddenly came to her. If she and Ava really were such good friends, could she – dare she –
use their friendship to make a more direct plea? If she could get Ava to try to see how hard Adam was trying to make their partnership work . . . His neck was on the chopping block now, awaiting
Baudrand’s verdict, and Sophie had no doubt that if he was dropped from
The Songbird
production he’d leave the company. His pride wouldn’t allow him to stay and the
thought of that was more than she could bear. She may not be sleeping in his bed, but at least she got to drink him in during rehearsals. It went against her instincts to lay herself down on the
line, but the very idea of not seeing him every day appalled her. Maybe, if she told Ava how she felt about him, Ava would try harder to make it work, for
her
sake.

They walked out of the boutique with the matching glossy shell-pink carrier bags tied with exuberant black bows. Pia would never have done this, she thought, as they swung them along, arms
linked.

Porto Bello’s was so busy that for other patrons there was a forty-minute wait at the bar, but they were ushered to their usual table immediately. They arranged the bags by their feet as
their customary bottle of champagne was opened.

Sophie gulped down her first glass. She felt nervous at the prospect of opening up, but she had to help Adam. She couldn’t let him be kicked out.

‘Are you okay?’ Ava asked, noticing her pinched cheeks.

Sophie took a deep breath. ‘Well, actually . . . there is something I wanted to talk to you about,’ she began.

Ava smiled, resting her elbows on the table. ‘Oh yes?’ she said, interested.

‘It’s about Adam . . .’

Pia popped her head round the kitchen door and smiled.
The Archers
was on at full blast and Mrs Bremar was standing beside the window, basting the chicken.

Pia watched her for a minute. The Sunday Roast was an English tradition faithfully observed in the manor house, and Pia had fallen in love with it readily. This house was beautiful and
impressive, but it was also cold and too quiet. Only the kitchen, which was out of Will’s domain, had any warmth or spirit, Mrs Bremar bustling about it with a homely mirth, and Pia had
fallen into the habit of passing time in there with her. It had given her the closest feeling she’d had to a sense of home in years.

She had grown increasingly fond of the older woman as the weeks had worn on. Mrs Bremar always had a bath drawn and the towels warmed when Pia came back, sweaty and exhausted, from her long days
in the studio with Evie; she had managed to get hold of a recipe for Pia’s favourite dish –
moqueca de camarao –
and insisted on serving it up once a week, despite the
fact that Will said it looked like ‘a parked cat’ and he’d rather eat a Pot Noodle.

Besides, he was rarely around, confident that the gala meant Pia wouldn’t cut and run as soon as his back was turned. And he was right – Pia wouldn’t have had the energy to
leave, even if she’d wanted to. Evie was working her hard, the morning physio sessions getting longer and more strenuous each day, and she was always sent back up to the house with strict
instructions to do ‘absolutely nothing’ in the afternoons.

Pia, who was never good with just her own company and unaccustomed to prolonged rest periods, had started reading prolifically, often burning through a book a day, and she was fast becoming
expert at the Sudoku section in the daily papers. But more than anything, she had found she enjoyed sitting in the kitchen, her hands clasped around a steaming mug of black coffee, while Mrs Bremar
chopped and cooked and cleaned, and chatted about Ireland.

Pia was rapt. Ireland sounded so different to her own homeland, and yet it held a particular fascination for her: it belonged to her too. Her father was Irish, and before the drink had almost
entirely soaked him he had shared a few memories about how his mother would hang the meat in the chimney to smoke it, and the time he’d thrown his school bag in the field with the bull and
his mother had made him go in to get it . . .

Her green eyes were the only testament to her heritage there – or indeed her relationship with her father – and she made a point of keeping quiet about it in interviews. She made
sure her entire persona was built around her Brazilian nationality – her shape, her passion, her temper, her training, her name – and she would never allow him any opportunity to share
in her limelight, not after what he’d done and what it had led to.

She hated him with murderous intensity, and yet she was irresistibly drawn to Ireland and the Irish. The cruel irony never failed to astonish her. It was no coincidence that she’d hired
Sophie. She was clumsy, perpetually late and her coffees were terrible. But she had a beautiful Irish brogue that several years in London had done nothing to temper, and when she’d turned up
for the interview she’d had Pia, quite literally, at ‘Hello’.

‘Hi, B,’ she smiled, hobbling into the kitchen.

‘Oh Pia, I was just about to put the kettle on,’ Mrs Bremar smiled, putting down the spoons and wiping her hands on her apron.

‘I’ll do it,’ Pia said, filling it up and getting the cups out. Mrs Bremar opened the oven door and slid the chicken back into the range. Pia hopped onto a bar stool, her legs
dangling daintily in black footless tights and one white leather ballet shoe. She had thrown on a yellow bandeau bikini and her hair was pulled back – unbrushed as usual – into a messy
bun. Mrs Bremar flicked her eyes up and smiled adoringly at today’s ensemble. She didn’t ‘get’ Pia’s dance get-ups, but she still thought she looked exquisite. A peach
of a girl.

‘That was a short session. Are you going back down again today?’ she asked, as Pia unpeeled a banana.

Pia shrugged. ‘No. Evie says I’m to stay out of the studio for the rest of the day. It is Sunday. It’s supposed to be a day of rest, after all.’ She took a huge bite.
‘What time’s Will coming back?’ she asked, barely comprehensible with her mouth full.

Mrs Bremar tipped her head to the side and pursed her lips. ‘You’ll not eat your lunch if you fill up on that,’ she tutted, matron-like. She looked suspiciously at Pia’s
frame, which, even though she was curled forward and bursting out of her top, registered barely a ripple on her bare stomach. God knows, she could do with feeding up. She glanced at the clock.
‘They should be back by two.’

Damn. That was another three hours yet, and Pia felt bored and restless. She handed Mrs Bremar the tea – strong and sweet, the way they both liked it – and pondered.

‘I think I’ll go into the village, then.’

‘The village? What d’you want to go there for?’ the older woman asked, unfolding an ironing board.

Pia shrugged. ‘Why not? I’ve been here – what, six weeks? – and I’ve not been there yet,’ Pia said. ‘In fact, the only time I’ve left the estate
has been to go to hospital and that horrid ball.’ She shook her head, amazed that she – the renowned international globetrotter – had endured such a confinement.

‘I don’t know, Pia,’ Mrs Bremar said, a note of concern in her voice. ‘Mr Silk won’t be happy about it.’

‘Well, what’s it got to do with him, whether I go to the village or not?’ Pia demanded petulantly. ‘He’s not my jailer. I can come or go as I please. I’ll go
to India tomorrow if I fancy it.’

Mrs Bremar’s eyebrows shot up as she filled the iron with rosewater.

‘Which I don’t,’ she grinned.

The housekeeper chuckled. ‘Well, how are you going to get into town? It’s not like you can drive,’ she said, jerking her chin towards Pia’s cast. She grabbed a sheet from
the laundry basket.

Pia shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s not like I can drive, full stop. I never learnt to drive. I’ve always just had . . . drivers.’

‘Well, John’s obviously taken Mr Silk into London today, but I’ll ask one of the men to drive you in.’

‘No, no. I don’t want someone to drive me,’ Pia protested.

‘But the village is three miles away, Pia.’ Mrs Bremar held the sheet to her chest and looked at Pia. Ever since Pia had been fitted with the new weight-bearing cast a fortnight ago,
she had been taking baby steps back towards independence, back to freedom, to a life away from Will. ‘I’ll call you a taxi.’

‘No.’

‘Devil’s child! How d’you think you’re going to get there, then?
Pirouette
your way in?’

Pia smiled at her. ‘I’ll take the bus.’

‘The bus?’ Mrs Bremar shrieked, bursting out laughing. She couldn’t for the life of her imagine a creature like Pia Soto on the bus.

‘What’s so funny?’ Pia frowned. She took planes like they were buses. Why not the bus like it was a bus?

‘For a start, dear, there’s only one service a day and that’s . . .’ She checked the clock. ‘Oh my goodness. Well, that’s in eighteen minutes.’

‘Good, I’ll just make it, then,’ Pia said, hopping off the stool and grabbing her tea, to take it upstairs with her.

‘You won’t, dear,’ Mrs Bremar called out. ‘The bus stop’s outside the gates and they’re nearly a ten-minute walk away, as it is.’

‘Get one of the men to drive me to the bus stop, then,’ she shouted back.

‘But just look at you – you’re not fit to go out dressed like that.’ She couldn’t understand how that tiny bikini had stayed on during rehearsals. It looked as
though it might pop off at any moment.

Pia stood on the bottom step and winked. ‘If there’s one thing performing taught me, B, it’s the art of the quick change.’

Twenty minutes later, dressed in one Ugg, chocolate-brown leggings (she still couldn’t get jeans on over her cast), a chestnut 8-ply cashmere roll neck sweater and a
tweed flat cap of Will’s that she’d grabbed from the boot room, Pia rested her head against the thick glass and watched the unfamiliar English countryside of ancient oaks and wheat
fields rumble past her. In the near distance she could see a fine steeple, ever so slightly off plumb, protruding through the copper beeches and silver birches.

She was sitting in an old air-force-blue 1940s bus, which had maroon leather bench seats and a tug bell. There were only four other passengers on board. Pia was so unused to British currency
that the driver had had to help her with the fare. She squeezed the small leather purse, which Mrs Bremar used for her housekeeping and had handed to her, along with a short shopping list, as
she’d streamed out of the door. The coins jangled intermittently as the elderly driver hit potholes and occasional squirrels, and she realized it had not only been months since she’d
left Plumbridge House; it had been months since she had spent any money at all – even on a tiddly little bus fare. Her bank manager would be pleased of course, but something inside her
– her old independence, her survival instinct – bristled. As much as she kept telling herself, reminding herself, that Will was being hospitable, it still felt like control.

As they came into the village of Plumbridge the hedgerows were replaced by mossy walls, the limed pointing bright against the ivy that crept and clung to them. The roads were so narrow they were
one-way-only, and the bus had to perform an arthritic three-point turn to get round some of the corners.

Pia tinged the bell to get off. The market square couldn’t be far from here, but she wanted to do some exploring around the labyrinthine streets. The bus ambled away.

‘Oh wait!’ she called, remembering suddenly that she hadn’t asked the time of his return trip. But the driver couldn’t hear her without his hearing aid or over the
jocular engine, and he headed out of sight, managing to negotiate the next turn with both ease and grace.

Never mind, she could enquire at the village shop. She looked around her in amazement. She had never seen anywhere so unremittingly
old
before. She was used to visiting grand cities and
performing in historic opera houses of course – the Kirov in St Petersburg, the State Opera in Prague, the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome – but they all commemorated times past on an
epic scale. Here, where every single building was tiny and rickety, with four-foot-high doors and thatched roofs you could reach up and touch, you could almost imagine the people who had built and
lived in them five hundred years ago. Window boxes were planted with vivid geraniums and pansies, stone water troughs were dotted up and down the street, and there were posters stuck up with
Blu-tack in various front-room windows, advertising the primary school’s Easter fete and the Easter Egg Hunt in the churchyard. She stopped to read one about the point-to-point next weekend
at Ellison, the neighbouring village, before she realized she was looking straight in on a man sitting in front of his telly in his armchair, wearing just his Y-fronts. Hastily, Pia clapped a hand
over her mouth to keep from laughing and hobbled off around the corner.