Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (7 page)

“Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!” Willow said.

“Not to worry.” The woman, surprisingly nimble, righted it again in one fluid movement. “It wasn’t your fault, you remember that.”

“Okay, right, I will. Thanks again!” Willow waved awkwardly, suddenly very keen to be gone, dragging her unwanted fur coat and collection of books across Bleeding Heart Yard, passed the wan little willow tree and back down Portal Run, out into the noise and chaos of Carnaby Street. Autumnal rain needling her cheeks, she stopped, slipped off her old shoes and put on her new ones, immediately feeling elated with that particular kind of high that comes from buying something. But it was more than that: as Willow finally started back to the office, she felt lighter, brighter. She didn’t care that she’d been gone for over an hour or that Victoria would be threatening to have her guts for garters. For the fourteen minutes it took her to navigate her way back to Golden Square, Willow Briars felt curiously invincible.

Chapter
          Four

“W
here have you been?” Lucy asked her, wide-eyed, as Willow dragged her bin liner into the office like the carcass of a mouldering beast, which in many ways it was. “And what on earth is that stink!”

It had not become apparent until the lift doors closed on Willow that the coat actually smelled quite badly of mothballs and mold and very, very faintly of someone else’s perfume haunting its musty folds and creases. Really, Willow thought, as she wondered where she could put it without contravening health and safety regulations, she should have just dumped it with the other piles of bin liners that collected around the bottom of the streetlamps outside the office, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The old lady had wanted her to have the coat, and, for reasons that Willow couldn’t put her finger on, she felt she ought to keep it, despite the stench, even if only for a night.

“It’s a fur coat,” Willow said, with an insouciant shrug, as if it was perfectly normal.

“A fur coat? Meat is murder, you know, lol!” Lucy giggled between bites of a bacon double cheeseburger that ordinarily Willow would have complained about her eating at her desk, but as she herself had trumped the stink with a virtual corpse, she decided to let it pass.

“Hmmm, not quite the same thing, but I respect your views, such as they are.” Willow’s smile snapped on and off again. “Have I missed anything?”

“Well, it’s all cloak-and-dagger in there.” Lucy nodded at Victoria’s office. “What’s going on, Will? Why is India Torrance in there in a hat and shades? Nose job? Nervous exhaustion?” Lucy made air quotation marks around the last two words. Everybody knew, even Lucy, that nervous exhaustion was the international celebrity code for drug problem.

“Remember that watertight confidentiality agreement that you signed when you got this job? The one that, if you break it, means that Victoria can legally have you consigned to the bowels of hell for all eternity? Or worse, temping?”

“Yes?” Lucy’s eyes widened.

“Don’t ask then. Unless Victoria tells us to, we see nothing, we hear nothing, we do nothing, we know nothing, which in your case is more true than usual.”

“Well,
you
must know something,” Lucy said, slightly offended. “She wants
you
in there asap.”

“Lucy. Asap is not a word, it’s an acronym. Like lol.” Lucy blinked at her, not one iota of understanding registering on her face. “So they’re in Victoria’s office then?” Willow asked.

“Yes, have been for ages, and you are to go in right away and . . .” Lucy cocked her head to one side and examined Willow in a way that made her want to wipe her nose and check her teeth with her tongue.

“There’s something different about you,” Lucy muttered. “What have you done to yourself since you went out, is it your hair? Did you have cheeky spray tan? I swear you look like you’ve lost weight since this morning, lol! Maybe I’ve got a brain tumor.”

Willow eyed Victoria’s closed office door, refusing to be irritated by Lucy’s assertion that she’d have to have a fatal
growth in order to look good. Victoria’s wrath versus showing off new shoes . . . A few more seconds wouldn’t make any difference.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, nonchalantly edging up the hem of her trousers to reveal more shoe. “It might be . . . these!” Willow pointed her toe with a flourish, gratified to see Lucy’s eyes widen in delight.

“Oh my God, they are lovely. I need some of those! Where did you get them?”

“One-off, a vintage pair,” Willow told her, delighted by the dismay on Lucy’s face. “You won’t find another pair like them anywhere in the world. Laugh out loud!”

“Can I try them on, please?” Lucy begged, and at that moment Willow wouldn’t have been surprised if her colleague had thrown herself around her leg. It was a wonderful moment of power that Willow wasn’t especially proud of herself for enjoying, but enjoy it she did.

“No, they’re mine, and I have to go now for a very important secret meeting.” Willow paused for one moment more, enjoying the naked envy on Lucy’s face. “You can try on my fur coat, if you like. You might have to kill it first, though.”

Willow, when she was quite young, thought that life was a test of endurance, punctuated here and there with exquisite little bubbles of happiness that burst too quickly, usually as a result of her own clumsiness. Contentment was an elusive concept, one she had difficulty understanding. She only knew that almost as soon as she allowed herself to be happy, she was beset by fear and a quiet but resolute certainty that it would not last. It meant that Willow almost preferred her life the way it was, a flat, empty, featureless landscape, with no mountain peaks or deep valleys for disappointment or regret to lurk in. She had no idea how her enforced relationship with India Torrance
would go, but there was very little she could do to avoid it now. It was one of those things to be got on with.

As Willow put her hand on the door she thought of Daniel, dancing her around the bandstand in St. James’s Park at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and then “making” her stay awake and drink espressos with him in Soho, until he could escort her to work, still in her sequined dress and ripped tights. Bubbles, tiny bubbles, she thought, that burst too soon. But as she’d always told herself, you have to have the bad stuff to deserve the good.

“There you are,” Victoria said, eyeing Willow over the brow of the rim of the glasses that she did not need and wore only when she felt the situation required extra gravitas.

“I know, I am so sorry.” Willow advanced, chocolates first. “I just, well . . .” She turned to India Torrance, who was curled up in Victoria’s armchair, wearing an outsize pair of Chanel sunglasses that made her look like she’d been in her mum’s dress-up box and a baseball cap drawn down over her face. “Chocolate?”

“India’s in quite a bad way, aren’t you, darling?” Victoria gestured to Willow to take a seat. “As I told you earlier, Hugh’s basically pissed all over her in a bid to save his career and a bankrupting divorce settlement. He’s telling the press she set out to seduce him from day one, and that he is weak and fallible and an idiot, that he loves his wife and children and India is a coldhearted temptress who is basically trying to sleep her way to the top.”

A sob rose from the armchair, and India buried her head in her arms. Victoria looked at Willow, who discerned from what might have been a slight pursing of her artificially enhanced lips that she was expecting Willow to say something comforting.

“I’m . . . I’m so sorry,” Willow offered, leaning toward the
younger woman. “I’ve been through a divorce and I know what it’s like to—”

“Have your husband whisked away by a slut?” India’s head whipped up and her sunglasses slid down her damp nose to reveal swollen, red, raw eyes.

“That’s not what I’m saying, it’s just this is painful. Losing someone you love. I know how that feels. It hurts but it does . . .” Willow wanted to say “get better” but she wasn’t entirely sure that was strictly accurate. “It eases, after a while.”

“Darling, don’t waste your tears on that asshole,” Victoria cut in impatiently, with a flourish of her scarlet nail extensions. “Honestly, if you’d chosen to fuck anyone else on that set it would have been fine. Why, Indi, why, darling? If you’d have called me I’d have said, don’t touch that sleazebag with a barge pole! Sleep with the director, that makes much more sense. Even one of the writers in a pinch . . . needy but often useful, writers.”

India raised her head, taking her glasses off to reveal a tear-streaked face.

“It wasn’t about the sex, it was so much more than that,” India said on a ragged breath. “He listened to me, he understood what it’s like to be me, and that’s so, so rare.”

“He manipulated and used you,” Victoria retorted, just about keeping in check her anger at the curveball she’d been dealt. She took a breath, reaching into her bag for something, mostly likely Valium-based, which she popped discreetly into her mouth and swallowed with a gulp of coffee. “It’s not your fault you’re green, wet behind the ears, of course you fell for his bullshit.”

India’s bottom lip trembled perilously.

“Perhaps now’s not the time to do the postmortem thing,” Willow suggested, but Victoria was in full flow.

“What about the teen makeup line, the English Rose
contract; they tend not to sign up slutty adulteresses as role models, you know.”

“Victoria,” Willow attempted to intervene again, her tone a fraction firmer. Victoria took her glasses off and tossed them on the table so that they slid over the polished wood like a glass of whiskey across a bar in a Western saloon.

“I’m sorry, Willow, but one of the reasons I’m the best in this business is because I’m not afraid to tell it like it is. I don’t do brownnosing.”

“I know!” Willow said, pulling her chair closer to India’s. “I know you don’t, but look at her, despite all the fame, she’s barely an adult and this is her first real heartbreak. You and I both know you’ll find a way to spin it so her career isn’t wrecked. You always do. And if I know you, you’ll make money doing it. But for now can we just see the young brokenhearted woman sitting here who needs a shoulder to cry on and stop dwelling on the more . . . commercial elements?”

Victoria paused, something akin to confusion settling on her faultless brow, as she pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Stunned as I am to admit it, Willow is right. We’re agreed that you won’t be groveling to the tabloids over this. You have the weekend to indulge yourself in Blakes, to take stock, get things into perspective, to start to
mend,
darling. And then when the story breaks on Sunday, we’ll need to squirrel you away for a bit. Willow’s agreed to let you stay with her, it really is the best option.” Willow watched with mild horror as her boss, in a move that was so out of character yet was pure Victoria, got up, walked around her desk, knelt at India’s feet and put her arms around her, pressing the young girl’s cheek into her silk-clad bosom. “Don’t you worry about a thing, you leave it all to Victoria, darling, I’ll look after you. And when we’ve moved you out of Blakes, Willow will feed you up, let you watch as much telly as you like, give you plenty of girly chats, won’t you, Will?”

“Yes,” Willow said, inwardly screaming as she watched Victoria’s talons stroke India’s head. “Of course. Or alternatively give you lots and lots and lots of . . . space. And time. To be . . . alone?”

“I don’t think I can bear to be alone, when I’m alone that’s when I start to think and . . .” Victoria smothered India’s building sob with her bosom.

“Shush, now, my darling, shush.” She rolled her eyes at Willow and released India’s head abruptly. “So we’re agreed, I’ll keep the vultures at bay for now and when the shit’s hit the fan you’ll lie low at Will’s place until the storm’s passed. It’s not the Ritz, darling, but I promise you no one will think to look for you there.” Victoria clicked her fingers at Willow, who stooped to help her up.

India looked up at Willow, dragging her hat off and running her finger through the tumble of brown hair that tangled round her shoulders. She sniffed and mustered a weak smile. “Thank you for having me,” she said, like a well-schooled child.

“My pleasure. I’ve got chocolate.” Willow offered a box to India, who took it and hugged it to her chest.

“Right, well. Tell you what, you go and freshen up, and Willow, you can take the rest of the day off, get India back to Blakes, make sure she’s settled. I’ll get my car sent around the back in twenty minutes. Do you want Willow to come with you, darling?”

“No, I’m fine,” India said dragging herself out of the chair, pulling her cap back down low over her eyes as she left the room.

“Any sharp objects in the ladies’, shoelaces, bleach, anything that might prove a bit fatal?” Victoria asked the moment India departed.

“Not that I know of,” Willow said uneasily.

“Do you know”—Victoria put her hands on her hips and
looked Willow up and down—“you look marvelous. What’s changed since this morning? It’s me putting my faith in you, isn’t it? You feel honored, I can tell.”

“Are you saying I looked terrible this morning?” Willow countered.