The Actor

Chapter 1 London, New Year’s Eve, 1998 I first met the Actor when I was fifteen. I was staying in London with my Aunt Rosa and Uncle Gerard, while my parents were overseas. They were very different from my parents. Aunt Rosa ran a fashionable art gallery and was terribly stylish. Many of her friends were connected to the theatre or the world of fashion, and her life was a whirl of social activity which was all part of her business as well. Uncle Gerard was quieter, though he was in fact the greater celebrity. He was a renowned composer, at least that was the epithet always used by the newspapers. This was because he was famous, as he had written the scores for a couple of popular West End musicals, but also because he was respected for having composed classic symphonies as well. The snobbery over this was ridiculous, Aunt Rosa always said, because the musicals made squillions more than the symphonies. But somehow, people felt it was acceptable to look askance at the lower brow forms of music, while enjoying the very luxurious hospitality they bought. Aunt Rosa didn’t care. She was the kind of woman who enjoyed life and people and had no problem being generous towards those I felt were utter hypocrites. "Let them sneer!" she said. "But don’t you mind?" I asked. There had been a particularly spiteful review of Uncle Gerard’s latest musical in one of the newspapers that morning, written by a critic whom I knew that my aunt and uncle had had to dinner many times. "Goodness no, darling. Water off a duck’s back. It’s column inches, nothing more." I was sure Uncle Gerard must mind, though admittedly he never showed it if he did. Most of their friends, the inner circle, were decent people at least. Not spiteful, anyway. Aunt Rosa and Uncle Gerard had no children. Whether by choice or circumstance I had no idea, but it made Aunt Rosa delighted to dote on me - "my favourite niece!" - when I was deposited with her every other year or so. I was her only niece. If she treated me more like an exotic pet or an accessory than a child, I didn’t mind. But now I was fifteen. So far as Aunt Rosa was concerned, I was suddenly a young woman. She was having one of her parties, on New Year’s Eve, and saw no reason why I shouldn’t come. "There’ll be some amusing people. Perhaps no one quite your age, but you won’t mind that, will you?" I wasn’t sure whether I would mind or not. I doubted it. I felt as though I were finally getting a set of keys to their glamorous world. Instead of peeking down through the bannisters at the tinkling and c******g of laughter and wine glasses in the crowd clustered below, I would be among them. My parents, I was quite sure, would not approve. But they had lost any moral high ground, I felt, by deserting me the day after Boxing Day. My father, a chemical engineer, had a research conference in Berne. Why the Swiss insisted on having conferences when everyone else was enjoying the Christmas and New Year party season, I had no idea. But my mother was travelling with him, and they planned to make a trip of it and visit some old friends. It would be deadly dull for me, so they thought, whereas in London I could visit museums and be taken to Uncle Gerard’s latest show. They had no notion that Aunt Rosa would include me in her adult festivities. Nor that she would take me shopping for a completely unsuitable outfit. "I’m not sure what I have to wear," I had told her, and I honestly wasn’t fishing. Her guests were always very slinky and sparkling, and I had no party dresses with me. "We’ll go shopping. All the sales are on, but I’m sure we’ll find you something." Anyone else would regard the sales as an opportunity to buy. For Aunt Rosa, it meant nothing much was left in the shops except last season’s fashion. Which was ironic, since she herself frequently wore vintage couture. "Oh no, it’s alright, honestly." My mother would kill me if she thought I was inveigling Aunt Rosa into buying me clothes. "It’ll be fun. We’ll make an afternoon of it." This was how I ended up with a ridiculously expensive Gucci dress that was far too sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old. My parents would have died had they seen me in it; my friends would have died with envy. It was the sort of dress that fashionable London girls wore to nightclubs. Girls who dated pop stars and were photographed in the tabloids. Girls whose antics we read about, far away in the provinces, whom we secretly longed to be like even though we pretended to disapprove of them. I would happily have worn the new frock with my Doc Martens, for that was what we all did back then. Skirt or jeans or minidress, the DMs were uniform footwear. But Aunt Rosa bought me some heels, not overly high, but high enough that I was sure I must look at least eighteen. So there was me, dressed up to the nines, sipping a cocktail and hoping that no one would guess I was a schoolgirl and this was my first grown up party. The smell of cigarette smoke and perfume infused the room, now crowded with people in their winter party season finest. I was hoping to see at least a few famous faces so I could brag to friends back home. And then I saw the Actor. I had a vague notion he was going to be there, for Aunt Rosa had mentioned his name to someone on the phone a day before. He was on the younger end of the guests, and he was satisfyingly famous, a proper household name. Theatre and television and a few films, Merchant Ivory and costume drama type things. He was also incredibly handsome, at least in photographs. At the start of the party I had been stuck in the conservatory talking to some old friends of my aunt and uncle whom I had met before. Not many people had arrived yet, and the caterers were still getting things ready. Aunt Rosa always had her parties catered. "Otherwise it’s not a party, is it?" she said. It was true. There wasn’t much point having all your friends over if you spent the entire time in an apron getting canapés out of the oven, like June and Tracey, the two women employed to do so, were doing. Hermione, a former opera singer, wearing a very low-cut emerald green dress, wanted to know all about my A-levels and university applications because she had a daughter a year younger than me, at some expensive London private school. "You don’t mind if I pick your brains, do you? Lolly has no idea what she wants to do, and Rosa always tells us what a clever girl you are." I didn’t actually start my A-levels until the following year, but I already had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do and what courses at which universities I would eventually apply to. I was thinking of History or English Literature. So I told her what I could, and then I listened politely to a long list of Lolly’s many talents and how she had been selected to play Lady Capulet in her school production of Romeo and Juliet, which was of course a much more mature role than Juliet, and Lolly really was the only girl in the fifth form with the emotional range to play it convincingly, and how Lolly absolutely adored Shakespeare and had been studying A Winter’s Tale for her English exam. Short of humming Mrs Worthington, I could only nod and smile. I was glad to be released when more interesting guests began arriving and Hermione drifted off to converse with more important people than her hostess’s teenage niece. In turn, I armed myself with a cocktail from a tray, which was my second already. It was some mysterious concoction of Uncle Gerard’s that had gin in it, though I wasn’t sure what else. I wandered through the drawing room to see if I could recognise anyone in the throng. And so I saw the actor, and he caught my eye. I probably gave a nervous smile back, I can’t honestly remember. I do remember that he smiled at me and half raised his eyebrows. He was incredibly good looking, with dark blond hair, grey eyes and perfectly chiselled features. The smile was more than good enough. I would tell all my friends that he eyed me up. They might not believe me, but I would claim it nonetheless. Claire Bennett had claimed a county cricketer had given her the eye when she spotted him in a restaurant the previous summer, and I was determined to one-up her on that. Much of the party was a bit of a blur. Mainly because I drank more than I should have, so I was tipsy. I probably heard tonnes of interesting gossip that I couldn’t remember the next day. I remember a very long and dull conversation about art, which I knew nothing about, despite Aunt Rosa’s gallery. There was an impromptu musical interlude where Uncle Gerard was persuaded to the piano and Hermione trilled something or other. I spent half an hour talking with an old lady in purple about her younger years dancing in Paris, which was one of the most interesting conversations of the night. A chinless couple of men who probably weren’t much past thirty tried chatting me up, but I didn’t find them attractive or interesting. Midnight was drawing near and I really didn’t want to get stuck with either of them anywhere near the mistletoe which Aunt Rosa had dangled from every chandelier. So I made my excuses and went back to the conservatory, and that was when I finally met the Actor. "Hello," he said. "You’re Rose and Gerry’s niece, aren’t you?" "I am." "I was wondering why you were stuck here with all of us. Wouldn’t they let you out for some fun?" I wasn’t sure what to respond to this. I didn’t know anyone in London except for my aunt and uncle, so I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t want to say this, though. "Aunt Rosa’s parties are always interesting," I told him. "Not for someone of your years, I shouldn’t think." I also didn’t want to get onto the subject of my years, for I had spent the night in the hope that everyone thought I was at least nineteen, if not twenty-one, which seemed a very sophisticated age. I glanced at the wall-clock, an ornate object with carved, gilded vine leaves around it. "It’s nearly midnight," I said. Then the chimes started going, and I could hear from the kitchen that someone had turned on the radio or television and Big Ben was sounding. As the countdown was being chanted, he leaned in, and I leaned in, and suddenly he was kissing me. My stomach lurched. For months and months afterwards, I only had to recall it all and my stomach would lurch yet again at the memory. I had been kissed before, but not by an actual man. Let alone someone famous. His lips were closed on mine at first, and then they parted. Then I realised he was actually kissing me properly, with tongues, and I was scared but even more excited. My mind was racing. He tasted of alcohol, which I probably did too, but in a good way. I didn’t really know what I was doing but letting him lead seemed to do the trick. I don’t know how long we kissed for, because when the final bong went and all the cheering and Auld Lang Syne started, he was still kissing me. At some point his arms had gone around me. Then finally he broke off and said "Happy New Year" but I was too stunned to say anything. Initially, anyway. Just as I found the words to say "Happy New Year" back, we were interrupted by people coming in and shaking hands and kissing and knocking glasses and wishing everyone a wonderful next twelve months and so on. The party broke up not long after that, and I had got pulled aside by someone else, and the Actor had vanished, and I never got to say goodbye.