The Birthday Party (20 page)

There wasn’t a newspaper or magazine that hadn’t followed his meteoric rise. There wasn’t a person who didn’t know the jangling,
stomach-wrenching power ballad with a twist – the twist of a knife – that had been such a huge underground hit last summer.
The song had become the most downloaded track that year, and now Louis was a star. He played it right down. He wouldn’t do
stadiums. He wanted to see people’s eyes when he sang. So tickets to his gigs were like gold-dust, allocated through his website
via a complicated system of loyalty points that his followers could collect – basically by downloading other stuff his record
company wanted to shift. He couldn’t get away with it for ever. Everyone knew that big tours were where the big money was,
so Louis was going to have to bite the bullet eventually.

Of course Raf knew all this. And none of it interested him – he was media savvy. He knew all about creating myths and manufacturing
stardom, reinvention, disinformation. What he was interested in was Louis’ past. Why was there nothing about that in the papers?

‘Welsh.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I spent years studying dialect. I can hear Welsh in your voice. Even though you’ve got the generic rock ’n’ roll art college
accent.’

‘Very good.’ Louis nodded, indicating that Raf’s hunch was correct. ‘I never go back there.’

Louis made it pretty clear the subject of Wales was closed.

Raf could tell this conversation was going nowhere. Unless he tied Louis up and applied nipple clamps to his balls, he wasn’t
going to get anything out of him.

‘Louis – the last thing I want to do is patronise you. The
only thing that matters to me is that Tyger is happy. I’m willing to support you as long as I think you are genuine and you
aren’t messing her around. Which at the moment I do. So don’t ever be afraid to come to me – for advice, or guidance. On anything.
You probably know that my copybook isn’t exactly unblemished, so I’m not going to judge. And I understand temptation, of every
kind.’

‘Thank you.’ Louis felt the sudden urge to call him ‘sir’.

Raf stretched out his hand to shake. Louis took it in a grip that was reassuringly firm.

Half of him felt secure and happy that he’d passed some sort of test. The other half was absolutely terrified that he was
going to be found out, and it would all come crashing down around his ears.

B
y seven o’clock that evening, the party had started to break up.

‘I need to learn my lines for next week,’ Coco said. ‘Does anyone need a lift back into town?’

Both Dickie and Genevieve accepted her offer eagerly.

In the orangery, Tyger had kicked off her shoes and put her feet in Louis’ lap. Raf was nursing a coffee. Tony and Delilah
had gone into the office.

‘So – whose place are we going to live in?’ Tyger demanded. ‘You realise you haven’t even seen my flat yet? I bet you’ve got
no proper cooking stuff in yours, have you?’

‘Nope,’ Louis admitted. ‘But there’s a great Chinese down the road.’

Tyger wrinkled her nose.

‘I suppose we should think about selling and getting a place together. A little mews house – I’ve always wanted a mews house.’

Raf raised an eyebrow. He hoped they would wait a bit and see how things worked out before they did anything too drastic,
but he didn’t say anything. Tyger would go mad if he started pouring cold water on her ideas.

Tyger scooped up Doug the Pug and plonked him in her lap.

‘Then I can have you living with me, can’t I, my darling?’ She picked up his front paws and waggled them.

‘Yes,’ said Raf meaningfully. ‘It was only supposed to be a temporary stay.’

‘Don’t say that. You love him.’

‘Of course we do. But he is your responsibility.’

‘Is he yours, then?’ asked Louis.

‘Tyger went to open a Rescue Centre in Surrey. She came back with Doug. The Rescue Centre were delighted. They got loads of
publicity. But Tyger had forgotten her flat doesn’t allow pets.’ Raf’s tone was dry. ‘So guess where he ended up?’

‘Poor darling. He’d been totally neglected. His coat was covered in sores. We soon put him right, didn’t we?’ She ruffled
the little dog’s ears.

‘We … ?’ interjected Raf.

‘I spent hundreds of pounds on stuff from the vet!’

‘Who feeds him? Who walks him?’

‘OK, OK. As soon as we have a place …’ She lifted Doug up and put him on Louis’ lap. ‘Say hello to your new daddy.’

Louis put out a tentative hand and stroked him. It was obvious Doug wasn’t sure.

‘He’ll get used to you,’ Tyger assured him.

Louis scratched him behind the ears. ‘At least you don’t dress him up. Or keep him in your handbag.’

Raf snorted. Tyger looked bolshy.

‘He has got the coolest Christian Audigier skull tee. But Mum won’t let me put it on him while he’s living here.’

‘Quite right,’ said Louis. ‘Not while he’s living under my roof either.’

Raf smothered a smile. He was warming to his son-in-law more and more by the minute.

Tony came back in. He fell into a chair and poured himself a coffee.

‘You look knackered,’ observed Tyger.

Tony shot her a filthy look. ‘Do you ever think about the consequences of what you do?’

‘If I stayed in all the time and didn’t put a foot wrong,’ replied Tyger sweetly, ‘you’d be out of a job.’

Tony lobbed two sugar-lumps into his cup.

‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with your people,’ he told Louis. ‘I expect they’ll want some say in how we handle this.
I
don’t suppose they’ll be too pleased you’ve gone and got yourself married. It doesn’t exactly go with the image.’

Louis shrugged. ‘It’s my life.’

‘Ah, but it isn’t, is it?’ Tony pointed out. ‘In this game, you’re the last person who gets a say in what happens.’

Once they were in town, Dickie got Coco to drop him at the tube station, so he could get the District line round to his flat.
He had spent the journey clinging on to the passenger strap in the back of the car. He was a nervous passenger at the best
of times, and Coco drove like a maniac, with little regard for the speed limit, cheerfully cutting people up and roaring off
at traffic lights. And all the time she was chattering away to Genevieve in the front seat. He felt much safer once he was
in the bowels of the underground.

He got back home just as the light was starting to fade. A first-floor flat with a balcony in a period conversion in Paddington,
it was Dickie’s only real possession, apart from his MacBook. He didn’t go in for stuff in a big way. He didn’t have a car,
or even a watch. The furnishings were minimal, scrounged from parents and friends, a mismatched assortment of unwanted sofas
and chairs he had purloined. The floor was covered with scripts, the pages torn out and laid into different piles. The walls
were covered in Post-It notes, copies of face-shots taken from
Spotlight
, the actors’ directory, estate agent’s details and
photos of locations. As well as this were images torn from magazines. All of these together were Dickie’s fragmented vision
of his film.

Dickie didn’t really have a life outside whichever film he had in progress. Going out today had been unusual, but it had been
important to him to see Raf and Genevieve together. And now he had, he felt inspired. He wanted to get back to his script
and work in all the ideas he’d had. He was pleased that they had seemed of a similar age, and believable as a couple. Sometimes
when you got a man and a woman together they just didn’t gel.

This was a momentous project for him. He had a huge
emotional investment in the script. He had written the treatment himself, and then commissioned one of his favourite screenwriters
to flesh it out and add sparkling dialogue, and he was still finding ways to improve it. As far as he was concerned, a script
was always a work in progress and could alter right up to the very last minute.

As well as emotional investment, however, he had put a good chunk of his own money into the project – extended the mortgage
on his flat by quite a bit, in fact. It was the only way he could guarantee getting the cast he wanted. It just wouldn’t work
without the best – the script was good, but it was light, and he needed class actors to give it weight. He knew that once
they got together, once they got to work, they would bring it to life, add colour and depth and breadth and nuance.

He was sure it was going to be a hit. He was sure it was going to be a sleeper, one of those low-budget films that grossed
high. Just to prove that you didn’t need CGI and multi-million-pound special effects to make a memorable film. That story
and character were what mattered.

If it bombed – which it wouldn’t, it simply couldn’t – Dickie was going to be in big trouble. He would be in hock to the tune
of half a million quid, with no hope of picking up any new work. People didn’t tend to employ directors responsible for turkeys.
So he was using all his mental energy thinking up ways to make the film wittier, more stylish, more moving, more memorable.
Feeding in all the little quirks that would make it stand out from the next romantic comedy. Making it accessible to a wide
age range – the big stars were middle-aged, so he had to make sure it appealed to a younger audience as well, which meant
great clothes and even greater music. Soundtracks were vitally important to the success of a film. His iPod was crammed with
possible tracks to include. He’d already decided on the theme tune: ‘You’re Having My Baby’ by Paul Anka. A big blast of nostalgia
always did the trick.

He picked up his script. He didn’t even bother to go into the kitchen to fix a drink. The sink was piled high with two or
three days’ washing-up, and there was bound to be no milk. He’d had enough to eat today to keep him going for a while, anyway.
Food wasn’t high on Dickie’s list of priorities. Nor was sleep. Or any of the usual things that preoccupied anyone normal
on a daily basis. In fact, given Dickie’s lack of interest in anything that motivated the average human being, it was astonishing
that he made films that touched people and made them walk out of the cinema with smiles on their faces.

Making people happy. That’s what made him happy.

‘Listen,’ said Violet, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but I need to go home. Sort stuff out. Sort my head out. I need to
be on my own.’

She and Justine were waiting in the hall for a taxi.

Justine was surprised at how disappointed she felt. She was being given the brush-off. Violet didn’t want to know. She’d decided
last night had been a mistake. A bit of fun. An experiment. Or maybe she did this sort of thing all the time, and Justine
hadn’t been her first after all? Maybe she was just a one-night stand.

Bugger. That was her plan blown. Although actually, it wasn’t so much that she now wasn’t going to have a bargaining tool
with Benedict. She’d been looking forward to seeing where this encounter was going to lead. She’d been looking forward to
spending the evening with Violet. But if Violet wasn’t into it …

‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Thanks for a lovely day.’

‘Hey, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to be with you. I’m just … used to my own space. It’s how I am.’ Violet wrapped her arms
around the other girl. Justine breathed in her perfume. ‘Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow. I’ll call you.’

‘OK …’ Justine was hardly going to beg. That wasn’t how she worked. If Violet called, she called. If she didn’t, then they’d
had fun. When the cabdriver rang the buzzer, she gathered up her bag, put on a smile and said goodbye. Then left the house
without a backward glance.

Well, one backward glance. Violet was still in the doorway, waving. She blew her a kiss. Justine shut her eyes and imagined
catching it, as light and soft as a dandelion clock. Then wondered what on earth had got into her. Kisses like dandelion clocks?
Until now, she hadn’t had a romantic bone in her body. This was the girl who’d started reading Harold Robbins at the age of
ten. She’d never had a Mills and Boon moment. Ever.

‘Where to, love?’

She gave him the address in Little Venice. Impressed, the taxi driver pulled away, thinking his passenger could look a bit
happier, considering she’d just left one mansion and was heading off to another. Some people didn’t know they were born.

As the taxi pulled up outside the gracious white Georgian house she shared with her father, Justine saw his car was there,
and there were lights on inside. She wasn’t surprised. Benedict rarely went out on a Saturday night. His socialising was mostly
business, conducted during the week. Saturday was his night off. The housekeeper would leave him his favourite dinner, and
he would re-run all the TV shows he had missed during the week on SkyPlus, reading the weekend papers at the same time: the
FT, The Times
, and the
Mail
, which together told him the mood and the economic state of the world and the nation. She realised
she hadn’t seen him since their disagreement the day before. It felt like a lifetime ago.

She walked across the gravel drive and up the stone steps, pausing for a moment before she opened the door. Until this evening,
she had known exactly who she was. She had never been one for self-examination, because she had self-belief. Now, everything
had been thrown to the winds. Tough, smart, wise, unbreakable Justine Amador-Fox had turned to putty in another woman’s hands.
Why? Had this helpless, vulnerable creature been lurking inside all along? Who the hell was she?