Runaway Actress

To my dear friends, Heather and Margaret. Here’s to our Scottish ancestry!

Table of Contents

Maggie Hamill stared out of the window at the great green hills beyond the loch. The third bedroom really did have the best view from the house and she was glad she’d moved into it. There was only one problem: it was such a gorgeous distraction that it was sometimes hard to get on with her work and she had plenty to be getting on with. Only that morning, she’d received half a dozen letters – all with requests for signed photographs.

Dear Ms Gordon
, the first one began.
I’m a huge fan of your films and think you’re the most beautiful actress in the world. Would it be possible to send me a signed photograph of yourself ? I enclose a cheque for £10 for your Theatre Charity and look forward to hearing from you soon and, if you ever happen to be in Portsmouth, give me a call on the above number, won’t you? I know a fabulous restaurant where we can talk in private.

I bet you do,
Maggie said to herself. Still, it was quite tame as fan letters went and she pulled out a ten by eight glossy photograph from the top drawer of her desk. It was one of her personal favourites – a close-up shot of Connie Gordon with her long red hair cascading over her shoulders. Maggie sighed as she flicked her own dark mane away from her face, wishing she had fine silky, well-behaved sort of hair rather than a sheep’s fleece straggling down her back.

Reaching for her silver pen, she paused, bit her lip and then signed across the bottom right-hand corner.

With love from Connie xx

‘There you are, Mr Forbes from Portsmouth. You’re going to love that!’

She was just about to stuff it into an envelope when the shop bell tinkled. Leaping to her feet, she left the room and ran down the stairs.

‘Ah, good morning, Mrs Wallace,’ Maggie said as Lochnabrae’s biggest gossip entered the shop. She was wearing the yellow raincoat she never left home without and her tight perm had been squashed under a headscarf. ‘You’re bright and early this morning.’

‘Not as early as Euan, though,’ Mrs Wallace said, her formidable bosom rising with pleasure at being able to impart such news. ‘I see he’s been in already.’

Maggie nodded at Mrs Wallace’s comprehensive knowledge of the goings on of Lochnabrae’s inhabitants.

‘Well now, I hope he’s left some tobacco for my Wallace.’

‘There’s plenty left,’ Maggie said, picking up a packet of what she knew to be Mr Wallace’s chosen brand and handing it over the counter.

‘And how’s the fan club going?’ Mrs Wallace asked. ‘Any sign of Connie Gordon yet?’ she asked with a little chuckle, knowing full well what the answer would be.

‘No, Mrs Wallace, I’m afraid not. I don’t think she’ll be gracing our community for a while.’

‘Och well, what would her sort do here, eh?’

Maggie shrugged. She’d often wondered herself. What, indeed, would a Hollywood movie star do in a place like Lochnabrae?

‘I’ve just written to her again,’ Maggie said.

‘Have you now?’

‘Aye.’ Maggie sighed, secretly wondering if Connie ever read the letters. She must have posted dozens over the years of running the fan club. Perhaps they were binned by some personal assistant who was put on stalker alert.

‘And she’s never written back?’

‘No,’ Maggie said. ‘Too busy, I expect. All those films and premieres and things.’

‘That’ll be it,’ Mrs Wallace said. ‘No time for the likes of us,’ she said, nodding towards her usual newspaper.

‘Will that be all today?’ Maggie asked, itching to get back to her correspondence upstairs.

‘Aye. For the time being. Might be popping back this afternoon for some bits if we don’t make it to the proper shops in Strathcorrie.’

‘Right,’ Maggie said. Mrs Wallace was, as ever, the complete embodiment of tact.

‘Their prices are so much better,’ she added.

‘But they’re not on your doorstep, Mrs Wallace, are they?’

Mrs Wallace chose to ignore this last remark.

‘Bye, then,’ Maggie said and, as soon as the shop door was shut, took the stairs two at a time and returned to her other, slightly more glamorous job.

Maggie had been running the Connie Gordon Fan Club for five years now. Set up by Lochnabrae resident, Euan Kennedy, it was to honour the screen presence of one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses whose mother happened to be from their small Highland community. ‘Ah, yes,’ Maggie remembered Euan Kennedy telling everyone one evening in the pub, The Capercaillie Inn, ‘her mother was a great beauty. Vanessa Gordon.’ His eyes had lit up as he’d relived some long ago memory of Vanessa. ‘But she had her sights set on bigger and better things. Hollywood, no less! Aye, she was an ambitious one.’

Vanessa Gordon had never made her mark in Tinsel Town, Maggie remembered Euan saying, but had passed on all her beauty and ambition to her daughter, Connie. There wasn’t a resident in the whole of Lochnabrae who didn’t know of the ‘Connie connection’ and there was always great excitement when a new Connie film was released, with carloads of residents making the short journey to the old cinema in Strathcorrie. It didn’t matter if it was a thriller or a romantic comedy, a leading role or a voice-over in an animated movie, they were there to support their Connie.

‘We really should have our own cinema here,’ Euan had announced one evening.

‘Where?’ Maggie had asked, trying to imagine such a luxury in the main street of the village.

Euan shook his head. ‘I don’t know but we should do something – have some way of acknowledging our Hollywood lassie.’

And that’s when he’d come up with the idea for a fan club.

‘With websites and everything,’ he’d said, waving a great hand in the air as if he knew what he was talking about.

‘Oh, you have a computer now, do you?’ Maggie had asked wryly.

‘Well, no, but you do,’ he’d said.

Maggie had leapt at the chance to run the fan club. She’d always adored movies and this was her chance to be a small part of that magical world, and so she’d got to work, creating a website, updating the pages with new pictures of Connie and all the latest movie news.

Then the fan mail had started to flood in with people asking for signed photos of their beloved actress.

‘What shall I do?’ Maggie had asked Euan. ‘They all expect a reply!’

‘Then send them what they want.’

‘But surely we’ll be done for fraud!’

‘Och! Nobody will ever find out.’

‘But it’ll cost money if we start sending out signed photos and things,’ Maggie said, thinking of the meagre income she had from the shop.

‘Then charge them.’

Maggie had gasped and had taken the problem to the Connie Committee.

‘We could make a
small
charge,’ Hamish – Maggie’s brother – had said. ‘Just to cover costs, you understand.’

‘That’s not unreasonable, is it?’ Euan had said. ‘We can’t have you out of pocket, can we?’

Maggie waited to hear what everyone else thought. ‘Angus?’ she probed.

Angus hurrumped from his corner in the pub. ‘Waste of time. We should have a decent fan club. For westerns.’

Everyone groaned. They were all well aware of Angus’s obsession with the western. He was even wearing cowboy boots just then.

‘Westerns are the thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no time for anything else.’

‘Rubbish!’ Maggie said. ‘I saw those tears in your eyes when we went to see Connie in
Waltz with Me
.’

Angus shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘That was a fly,’ he said. ‘I had a fly in my eye that evening.’

‘Right,’ Maggie said with a grin. ‘Alastair? What do you think we should do?’ she asked, turning to Lochnabrae’s resident playwright for a sensible answer.

‘Well,’ Alastair said, his dark eyebrows hovering over eyes the colour of the loch in summer, ‘the village hall needs some money spent on it.’

‘Aye, that it does,’ Euan agreed.

Maggie frowned. ‘What’s that got to do with the signed photographs?’

‘If we charge for them, any profit could go to the upkeep of the village hall.’

‘But nobody would pay for that!’ Maggie protested.

‘They might if you call it the Theatre Charity.
Make a small donation to our Theatre Charity and we will be happy to send you a signed photograph of Ms Gordon,’
Alastair said.

‘And where do I get all these signed photos from?’ Maggie asked.

‘There’s the newsagents in Strathcorrie. They have one of them big printers now, don’t they?’ Hamish said.

‘Okay,’ Maggie said. ‘But how do I get them signed?’

Everyone looked at Maggie.

‘Use your imagination, lass,’ Euan said.

And so Maggie had. She was really quite good at it too because, as a youngster, she used to daydream about what it would be like to be a film star or – at the very least – a character from a film like the ones Connie Gordon played. How wonderful it must be to be beautiful and adored like Connie Gordon and how very different from the little life that Maggie led working in the village shop in Lochnabrae. She would while away many a happy hour in the shop imagining that she was like a Connie Gordon heroine and that a happy ending of her own was just around the corner. For Maggie, running the fan club was like giving in to her inner film star for a few short hours a week and it didn’t seem like she was doing anything wrong.

During those early days of the fan club, Maggie had found a copy of a signed photo of Connie Gordon online and had printed it out, studying the feminine flourish and practising it over and over again until she felt that the very spirit of Connie Gordon was with her and she’d got it just right. Which was just as well because demand was high even with the charge that they made.

Sitting back down at her desk, Maggie woke up her computer and stared at the image on the screen.

‘Hello, Connie,’ she said with a bright smile. ‘How are you today?’