Beautiful People (21 page)

    "Whaaa-aat?" Mitch gasped. "What's the matter? What happened? Didn't he like you?"

    "No. I don't think he did," Darcy answered quietly.

    Something inside Mitch started to scream. Something outside him was screaming too. He realised it was him. He was screaming.

    "Tell me," Mitch growled, breathing heavily between words. "Tell me what happened in there. What he said. What you said. Tell me."

    "I told him," she began reluctantly, "that I didn't like L.A. or acting, that I didn't want to be rich and famous, but that I liked eating."

    Mitch frowned. He couldn't be hearing right. Every word she spoke went into his brain like a triangular-shaped object trying to fit a round hole.

    "You said you didn't like L.A.?"

    She nodded.

    "Or acting?"

    "Yes."

    "And that you didn't want to be rich or famous?" His voice was a whisper now, scraping, or so it felt, along the side of his throat as he spoke.

    "But that you liked eating?"

    "Mmmm."

    "Oh. My. God."

    For a second, everything fizzed and went black.

    "Look," Darcy was saying, when his vertical hold returned. "I'm sorry, okay? But I don't want to be a film star. I want to go home to Niall. I'm really worried about him, Mitch. I need to see my boyf…"

    She stopped, suddenly. She was, Mitch realised, staring at the newspapers on the car floor. He heard her gasp sharply and watched as, with terrible deliberation, she picked one of them up.

    "I don't believe it," Darcy said in a cold, slow voice Mitch had never heard before, not even when she was being her chilliest and most disdainful on the telephone from London.

    Slowly she put the paper back down and picked up another. She read this once faster, her breath coming short and sharp now. "It can't be…" she muttered. "It says here he's called Graham and his mother's a psychologist, but no, it's definitely him…that red hair… he was going for
Titus
…oh, my God."

    "The fucking bastard!" Darcy yelled. Mitch wondered if he had ever seen anyone do a mad scene so well. What a loss to acting in L.A. she was going to be.

Emma felt she would remember the scene as long as she lived: entering her room on a summons from Vanessa to find her employer standing there with burning eyes, a small fold of white paper on her violently outstretched hand with a scattering of white powder on it. James stood uncomfortably behind her, shifting from foot to foot, his face red and his expression a mixture of tragedy and disbelief.

    "And what," Vanessa hissed, pointing at the outstretched hand with her other finger, "is this doing here?"

    Emma had stared at it. "I don't know." She guessed it was drugs immediately. But what they were doing in her room she could not imagine. It was the most unexpected possible ending to the triumph that had been Hero's birthday party. She had imagined praise, a raise even. But sacking, never.

    Emma was sure that James believed her when she protested that she had been set up. That the cocaine had been planted there by someone. But when Vanessa—with vicious scorn—had demanded who in the world would want to frame some obscure nanny from the north, she had been completely unable to provide an answer. There seemed no explanation whatever, and in the absence of one, she had had to accept that being fired was the only possible thing to do.

    "But you must give me a reference," Emma summoned the courage to ask.

    Vanessa practically exploded. "Are you joking? You've just been caught with drugs in your handbag."

    Emma spoke with as steady a voice as she could manage. "I didn't put them there though. And one day, I'll find out who did. But until then, I need a job, and I'll need a reference to get one. I've been a good nanny, and you owe me that at least."

    "Owe you? Owe you?" Vanessa blustered.

    Here, finally, James stepped in. "I think we should do as she suggests, darling," he had murmured to his wife.

    Vanessa rounded on him. "What? You believe her?"

    James sighed and pushed up the glasses that were forever slipping down his nose. "I'm not sure what I believe," he had said quietly. "The law, after all, is that people are innocent until proven guilty."

    "Court?" Vanessa exclaimed. "I don't want the police getting involved in this. The publicity would be dreadful. After all, I'm quite famous…"

    Emma felt a tug of fear. She was, she realised, in agreement. Making the matter public would not only endanger her own future, but also increase the risk of her parents finding out about what had happened. No one in the family had been involved in anything like this before.

    "But it's a criminal offence," James protested. "By someone," he added hastily. He turned his bewildered, bespectacled, above all, disappointed glance on Emma. "Personally, I would like to believe that she was innocent."

    "Innocent!" screeched his wife. Her chest was heaving violently up and down.

    "Yes," James said firmly. "And if Emma believes she can clear her name, I'd be delighted." His face fell then, however, and the flame within Emma died proportionately down. "But until such a time, I agree: in the absence of evidence that she isn't responsible, she has to go."

    Emma had no idea how she could clear her name. Where the drugs had come from and who put them there was still a mystery, a horrible mystery. Could it have been someone at the children's party? But who and why?

    Pushing at the back of Emma's mind was the possibility that Vanessa herself had put the piece of paper with its explosive contents in her handbag. But something—Emma hardly knew what it was—made her hesitate to blame her boss. Nasty and cruel Vanessa could certainly be, but once or twice Emma felt she had glimpsed something beneath the surface, something rather lost, helpless, and vulnerable, something touching, almost, that made her doubt, at the last minute, that it was her.

    And so she tried not to think about the injustice of it all, about Vanessa's poisonousness, about James, who she could not help feeling slightly let down by whilst recognising there was little else he could have done.

    And especially she tried not to think about Hero and Cosmo, who she had loved so much and yet who, from the moment the drugs had been discovered, she had not been allowed to see. But whose eyes, round with horror and red with weeping, she had seen briefly through their bedroom windows and felt following her down the street as she walked away from the house for the last time.

After driving back with Mitch following the meeting with Jack Saint, Darcy had headed straight to her meringue burrow of a hotel bedroom and stayed there. Having completely lost her appetite—the mere thought of food made her feel queasy—she had ordered nothing from room service. When she was thirsty—if she noticed she was thirsty—she simply put her mouth under one of the gold taps in the vast marble-lined bathroom. Otherwise, she merely cried and raged.

    It all felt like a house collapsing. Niall had left her for the type of Hollywood bimbo he most affected to despise. He was a lying hypocrite of the first order. He had tried to prevent her going to L.A., but only because, it appeared, he wanted to go there himself. His high principles had been jealousy, nothing more.

    She had believed in Niall, his principles and his art, even more than her own. Far more than her own. But he had left her for Belle Murphy, a woman whose only interest in art, given her veneered teeth and obviously artificial breasts, was that of the plastic surgeon and cosmetic dentist. She had never suspected, never ever dreamt, that what Niall wanted was a woman like Belle.

    Never had she dreamt, either, that he was anything other than working class and gritty. His interpretation of the angry Glaswegian butcher's boy had been practically Method. Perhaps that was why he had never landed a leading role—he had put so much of his acting energy into the part he played for her every day that there was nothing left for anyone else.

    Had he ever really loved her? But she had loved him. Hadn't she? As well as being good-looking, he had been the image of everything she wanted to believe in most.

    Were she and Niall, after all, both as bad as each other? Flitting across Darcy's mind now came the possibility that she too might have loved what Niall stood for more than the man himself. Otherwise, might she have not looked closer beneath the surface?

    Only—and it was a big only—she had not two-timed him with some screen bimbo while he was away. Well, not exactly. With a surge of acid guilt, she remembered seeing Christian Harlow in the restaurant.

    But that had been a moment's lapse; she had been drunk, tired, jet-lagged. And the moment Christian had gone, she had come to her senses, which, to judge from the pictures in the papers, it didn't look as if Niall was ever likely to do.

    Anger rose within her again. Authenticity, art—he could stuff it. Although, of course, he had stuffed it. More so than his father had ever stuffed a chicken or rolled up a loin of lamb. She'd quite like to roll up Niall's loins, come to that, butcher-style with very tight string.

Emma's savings meant that a long-term stay in the bed and breakfast she found near King's Cross station was out of the question, even if she had wanted to, which she didn't. Her room, all the same, was small and clean with a wardrobe to hang her one good suit. And the nearby library proved a warm place to write applications. It might be full of smelly tramps reading the papers, but it had a computer she could use if she booked times with the front desk.

    Here Emma copied down details of nanny agencies all over London. Off went letters to Servants' Hall, Mrs. Poppins, Domestic Bliss, and You Rang, Madam? Emma felt both relieved and vindicated when, some ten days later, a reply arrived in a thick cream envelope.

    "Looks posh, that," commented Mrs. Cupper as she handed it over. "Most o' the letters we get for folks 'ere are in brown window envelopes from the DSS. Or else white from the police," she added darkly.

    The letter, on thick cream paper, contained the longed-for news that Mrs. Theodora Connelly-Carew of Domestic Bliss, office address 24 Sloane Mews SW1, would like to see her for an interview the following day.

    What had made him agree to represent this guy, Mitch wondered. It had been a moment of madness. But then, his entire career seemed to consist of moments of madness, all linked together. His life was one long moment of madness.

    Perhaps the maddest moment of all had been believing Darcy could land the part with Jack Saint. Although it hadn't seemed mad at the time; the whole thing, in fact, had seemed as near to a certainty as anything he had ever been certain about. Perhaps that should have told him something, Mitch sighed. Nothing was certain in L.A. Apart from sunshine, plastic surgery, and cosmetic dentistry. And things not working out, particularly for him. Mitch stared at the grey carpet tiles and wondered if he was sitting on some particularly inauspicious ley line. It was incredible, the bad luck he had.