A Hidden Life (29 page)

‘Nessa.' Mickey's mouth on her ear. Nessa thought she would faint. ‘I want to touch you all over. Can I? Can I touch you all over?'

Nessa couldn't speak; didn't want to say anything. Saying something would be dangerous. She'd have to admit how this was making her feel: as though she were melting. Her body like a lit candle, parts of her liquefying, on fire, singing at the touch of Mickey's fingers. The fingers – they were hard and soft at the same time – how could that be? How did she do that? The hands touched and touched till Nessa's whole body was inflamed, and throbbing and then Mickey peeled back the covers and went to crouch between Nessa's legs and
all at once there was a sound erupting from her throat that was a shout and a sob and she was electric all over, struck by lightning, and then limp and wet and crying properly now, clinging to Mickey, who lay with her head on Nessa's shoulder, her naked body intertwined with hers.

‘Nessa?'

‘Mmm.' Nessa had no idea what she ought to say. No clue what she was supposed to do now. She didn't even want to open her eyes because she didn't know where to look, so she lay with her them firmly closed.

‘Look at me, Nessa.'

‘Must I?'

‘Don't you want to?'

Nessa said, ‘I don't know what … I'm not sure …'

‘You should look at me. Speak to me.'

Nessa opened her eyes. ‘Oh, Mickey …' she said.

Mickey brought her mouth close to Nessa's ear and whispered, ‘Are you embarrassed?'

Nessa nodded. ‘A bit. I've never – I didn't know …'

‘You're going to say you've always been straight, never been attracted to a woman before, don't know what came over you, it was the wine talking. Stuff like that, right?'

‘I
have
always been straight but …'

‘But what?'

‘Oh, Mickey that was so good. I felt – I don't think I've ever felt – and you, you're so dear to me, Mickey. You're my very best friend, you've been that for ages. It's so confusing. I'm confused. I don't know what to think or what I feel, but it was so lovely, Mickey. I thought I was going to die of bliss.'

‘Don't think too much, Nessa. Not now. It's late – time to go to sleep.'

‘You're not going back to your room, are you?' Suddenly Nessa found she was dreading the thought of being all alone in bed again.

‘D'you want me to?'

Nessa shook her head.

‘I love you, Nessa,' Mickey whispered.

‘Don't say that, Mickey. Please don't say that!'

‘Why not? It's true – I do. I'm not afraid to admit it. I fell in love with you the very first time I saw you. But you were married and straight and I wasn't about to … Well, we were good friends and I've had to let that be enough. But tonight – I couldn't help it, Nessa. I've been wanting you so much for so long. It's been awful.'

‘You should have said.' Nessa turned so that she was lying alongside Mickey, staring into her blue, blue eyes.

‘You'd have run a mile. I bet you still think there's something disgraceful about being with a woman. Admit it.'

‘I do, a bit. I feel as though I'm being extra specially wicked – it makes it more exciting, though, in a funny way. It's like having butterflies, a bit. In my stomach.'

‘I'm going to kiss you now, Nessa. Have you ever kissed a woman before?'

‘No,' Nessa breathed. Their mouths were very close together. She could feel the breath coming from between Mickey's lips, fluttering on her own skin. She closed her eyes and felt a hand on her neck, pulling her gently till their two mouths were touching, softly. Nessa opened her lips, and let herself be absorbed into the kiss. She could taste Mickey. Feel her. It was nothing,
nothing
like being kissed by a man. Mickey smelled of herself: a combination of skin and soap and the perfume she always wore: Vivienne Westwood's Boudoir. Her flesh was soft, and her slim body smooth and her hair was silky when Nessa touched it. That's what I'm doing, she thought. I'm touching her hair. I am. She was hugging Mickey tightly, wanting to fuse their two bodies, wanting to be swallowed up herself and then suddenly wanting, oh, wanting overwhelmingly,
so, so
much, to be the one who touched; the one who did the caressing. Nessa moved her mouth to Mickey's breast and began to lick it, and it was Mickey's turn to moan and sigh and Nessa felt powerful and loving and went on touching and touching and stroking and caressing till Mickey shivered into her own orgasm and lay back against the sheet, smiling.

‘Now,' Nessa whispered, leaning over to kiss Mickey lightly on the mouth. ‘Now's when I could murder some Pringles. And there's still a bit of wine left, too.'

The blossoms on the tree outside the library window had fallen from the branches and for a while had lain on the ground below like a scattering of confetti. Lou was trying to concentrate on the book in front of her, making an effort not to look at the pale green mist of leaves pressing against the glass. She blinked. It didn't matter how many times you read about it, or saw it in movies and TV series as different as
Empire of the Sun
and
Tenko,
the realities of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps were so horrendous that it was hard to take them in. As if the crushing heat, the lack of food and water, the unhygienic sanitary arrangements, the insects, the inadequate shelter and bedding, the dirt and mud when it rained were not enough, on top of all that, there were the guards. The pleasanter ones were rigid, stubborn and unreasonable. The worst ones were horrifically cruel. The commanders of some camps gloried in the humiliation of their charges, giving out the most sadistic of punishments for tiny little infringements of the rules. Everyone knew about this on some level and Lou, though she wanted to make sure that the background details were exact, was quite certain she didn't want her screenplay to be simply another catalogue of atrocities.

It's about Peter, she said to herself. His life there, his problems, the people he's dealing with. It's a human story. That's what I'm interested in and that's what the movie's about. People. There would be some extras needed, of course, but Lou had limited her main cast list to nine people: Peter, Annette, Dulcie, Derek and Nigel, two more boys with speaking parts, and two other women in the camp,
called Marjorie and Shirley. All the names were from Grandad's book, which solved one problem for Lou.

The smaller the cast, she knew, the cheaper it would be to make. It would only need one set: the camp, and that, she imagined, could be reconstructed almost anywhere. For a while, she'd seriously considered flashbacks, both to the colony in the days before they were ‘in the bag' as they used to say: imprisoned. Or perhaps to France, now that she knew more about where Grandad's real mother came from. She'd decided against it in the end, not only for economic reasons (more than one set, possible location shooting) but also because she was going to be using some voice-over and having both wouldn't be a good idea. She sighed and closed the book and looked at her watch. Only another half hour and she'd have to go and pick up Poppy from nursery.

Lou had gone to fetch her from her parents' house the weekend before their proposed visit to Paris, but that hadn't happened in the end because Dad had to do something urgent at work. They still hadn't been to see Mme Franchard and neither had she, but they all still intended to go, she knew. Poppy had now been with her for three weeks, and Lou had to admit that in so many ways it was lovely to have her home. Who am I kidding? Lou thought, and felt guilty at once. Of course she'd been thrilled to have her daughter safe in her cot at night, and there all the time to cuddle and chat to and take care of, but it was all so – so relentless. So unending. So every-day-with-no-time-off-for-good-behaviour. She wasn't cut out for motherhood. That, at any rate, was what she thought when she had to get up in the middle of the night. Bathtimes, mealtimes, cuddling times were fine and fun and there was, thank heaven, the three-hour space every morning when Lou's time was her own.

That was how she'd managed to finish the screenplay. She'd done it. Typing in THE END was fantastic. She'd felt out of breath, elated, and wanted to go out into the corridor and yell the news at the closed doors of the other flats. Because she'd kept the writing so secret, there was now no one she could phone. Not one of her friends knew about it, nor did her family. She told Poppy in the end.

‘I've finished, finished, finished,' she sang, blowing raspberries into
her baby's soft stomach while she was dressing her. ‘I'm a screenwriter, I am. A proper writer. I've finished, finished, finished.'

Poppy, caught up in the excitement, started saying: ‘Fish, fish, fish …' which was quite close, considering how young she was.

The elation lasted one whole day and then that night, when Lou opened up the laptop, dread washed over her for no good reason she could see. What if it's awful? What if I only
think
it's good and it isn't? Everyone will say it's mawkish. Sensational. Plain old bad. She took a deep breath and started reading it. She'd gone through it about ten times since that night and now she was almost as convinced it was good as she had been on the day she'd finished it.

There came a time when you had to stop re-reading. She'd now done the final, final edit, making it as good as it could be, she'd taken it to be printed out, and had re-read it on paper, where somehow it looked different. Next week, she was going to do something which made her feel faint with fear whenever she thought about it: she'd decided to take it round to Ciaran Donnelly's house and pretend that Harry had sent it in for the great man to look at. She'd been wondering for ages what to do with the screenplay once it was written. She wanted a sympathetic reader, but not one who knew her and whose opinion might be swayed by their opinion of her. Harry was the obvious person to show it to, but she worked for him, apart from anything else. Having him assess her screenplay was a no-no. She wasn't about to put him on the spot.

Taking it round to Ciaran Donnelly had occurred to her in the middle of the night, but there were problems with that, too. If he hated it, he'd get back to Harry and say
hey, how come you took the trouble to send me over such a crappy screenplay?
and Harry would say
what screenplay?
Her deception would be uncovered. What would the consequences be? What if Harry never forgave her for not going to him first? For not trusting him with her secret? For not allowing that he might be in a position to vet what she'd written before she went thrusting it under the nose of a top Hollywood producer? She'd have to plead girly foolishness, not thinking properly, etc., etc., but she'd be so contrite that he'd forgive her, she was sure. He wasn't the kind of person to be angry for a long time and upsetting him was a risk she was prepared to take.

Why had Harry chosen this particular time to go off to the States for a month just when things had started to go so well? Never mind, he'd be back soon and meanwhile there were the emails. They wrote to one another every couple of days. Lou's instinct was to answer his messages by return, but she'd forced herself not to. It wasn't exactly like
You've Got Mail
(a ridiculously soppy and romantic movie which she'd never have admitted she liked), but sort of the same, because for the last couple of weeks she looked forward to opening her laptop every single morning. Harry's messages were typical of him: short, quite funny, and with no hint of the sort of vibes she'd been getting from him the last couple of times she'd seen him, when he seemed to her to be working up to the point of actually making it clear he was interested in her in a more than just friendly way.

Lou had almost asked him to go to Paris with her, but her nerve failed her at the last moment and then he'd flown off to what he called, Hollywood-style, ‘the coast'. That had allowed her to invite him by email and she'd spent almost as long on composing that message as she had on writing certain parts of
Blind Moon.
She knew it by heart:

I'm thinking of going to visit Mme Franchard in Paris soon – would you like to come with me?

Lou smiled when she thought of the variations on those few words she'd worked through before she was ready to press ‘send'. So many of them contained words that could be
double entendres:
‘come', ‘coming', ‘fancy', even ‘being with you'. It was exhausting and reminded her of being a schoolgirl again. In those days, she used to spend hours analysing every single note, phone call, word, that some boy she liked had said to her, or sent her. Nothing had changed. She rejected:
How about you come with me? What about making a weekend of it? How'd you fancy coming? It'll be so much more fun if you're there. Fancy coming with me? I fancy you
 … She'd actually written that at one point and then stared at it for ages before deleting it. Even after it had disappeared for ever, it hung around in her head. Do I fancy him? she asked herself and came to the conclusion that yes, she did, and if he fancied her, she wasn't going to put up a struggle. Harry would never hurt her, she was sure he wouldn't, and since she'd started working at Cinnamon Hill, she found herself thinking about Ray less and less.
Sometimes, in the dark hours, when she was trying hard to get to sleep because she was going to have to get up properly in a couple of hours and it was really, really important not to stay awake, nasty little ideas popped into her mind. Ray was lovely to begin with. He was lovely for a long time. He only became violent and horrible later. Harry might be like that. No, he's not, he's not. He's really gentle. No one says a bad word about him in the office.

She'd sent the message in the end, and he'd replied. What he'd written in the subject line of the email made her laugh, because it was so typical and so sweet:
We'll always have Paris.
Harry and herself: Bogart and Bergman in
Casablanca
— nothing to choose between them! She'd printed out the message and pinned it to the noticeboard in the kitchen where it made her feel happy every day:
Sure thing, kid. Anytime: Can't wait. Harry x.