‘Believe me, that’s painfully evident,’ David said, and his transformation back to sneering, supercilious legal eagle was complete. ‘Having a temper tantrum won’t get us anywhere. Let’s sit down and talk about how we’re going to move forward like calm, rational adults.’
‘I don’t feel very calm and rational right now,’ Ellie ground out, searching around the room with wild eyes. ‘You want to compartmentalise? Well, compartmentalise this!’ She snatched up his brogues and threw them over the low wall where they hit something on the floor below, which crashed with the sound of breaking glass. Ellie didn’t even dare look to assess the damage.
Still David didn’t lose his temper. ‘That doesn’t even make sense,’ he told Ellie, who didn’t lose her temper either, not ever, except she’d been losing her temper a lot over the last week and always because of David Gold.
‘You want sense, then I’ll give you sense. I want you to get the fuck out of here right now because I never want to see you again.’
Chapter Thirty
There was no horde of snapping, snarling photographers waiting at St Pancras, just Chester standing at the ticket barriers, with a smile that lit up his whole face as he saw Ellie suddenly emerge from the far side of the platform. She was trying to be incognito, which was hard when you had as much luggage as she did.
‘Hello, princess,’ he said, and wrapped Ellie up in a very gentle bear hug, like he thought she might break if he was too enthusiastic.
Ellie thought she might break too. She was still trying to process the half-brother adored by the same half-family that had never even bothered to send her a birthday card. The hour she’d spent crying in the train toilet hadn’t helped either. Or banished the memory of David following her instructions, stuffing his things into an M&S carrier bag and getting the fuck out of the apartment. He hadn’t said a word but his lips were compressed into such a tight thin line that Ellie didn’t think he was physically capable of speaking.
But when she’d stood by the door so she could slam it shut after he’d gone, he tried to touch her face. ‘This is ridiculous, Ellie. I know you’ve had a terrible shock this morning but don’t you think you’re overly melodramatic?’
‘No, I think my melodrama is perfectly justified in this case,’ she’d told him and he’d had the nerve to smile as if she’d just cracked a joke.
‘I’m not going to say goodbye because this isn’t over,’ he’d said, and Ellie didn’t know if he was talking personally or professionally, and that was always going to be the issue for them. Not their biggest issue, which was that David was a hard-hearted, cold-blooded bastard, but a problem nevertheless.
Now Chester relieved Ellie of her heaviest bags as they walked to where he’d parked. Then he kept up a stream of idle chatter, mostly about the weather and how it had been the longest gap between rainfalls since records began, as they edged out into the late Sunday afternoon traffic.
Chester didn’t stop talking until they joined a long queue of cars waiting for the lights to turn green by Chalk Farm tube station.
‘So, shall I put on the radio or shall we hook up your iPod?’ he enquired cheerfully, but Ellie wasn’t so immersed in her own unhappiness that she couldn’t hear the strain in his voice or see it in the deep grooves at the side of his mouth.
‘Have you and Mum made up yet?’
‘No,’ Chester said flatly.
‘We had a dreadful row this morning,’ Ellie admitted, and it was hard to know what she should be prioritising in terms of grief when she was currently spoiled for choice. ‘I said some vile things to her and I know I should apologise but the thing is that I’m still angry with her. Secretly, I’ve been angry with her about Billy Kay for years, and I just let it fester and then it all came pouring out.’
‘Oh, Ellie.’ Chester sighed. ‘You and Ari will be all right.’
‘I hope so.’ Ellie wasn’t sure. She and Ari had always made it through the hard times, but then it had always been Ellie and Ari against the world and not Ellie and Ari pitted against each other. Billy Kay’s shadowy presence spoiled everything. Everything that had happened was because …
‘I’ve met someone!’ Chester suddenly burst out like the words couldn’t be contained any longer. ‘A woman.’
If he’d wanted to pull the plug on Ellie’s pity party, then he’d certainly succeeded. ‘What? Since when? Were you in Benidorm with a woman?’ Ellie didn’t mean to sound quite so accusatory but she hadn’t thought that Chester was like that; that he had those kinds of feelings towards women who weren’t Ari.
‘Not exactly. I was in Benidorm with a bunch of mates and one of them is a girl called Claire. Well, she’s not a girl. She’s thirty-eight.’ Chester glanced over at her. Ellie tried not to look quite so devastated at the thought that Chester’s world didn’t revolve around Ari … and her. ‘I’ve known her for years. And, yeah, there’s always been something flirty between us, but the thing is, Ell, I always thought that eventually me and Ari would end up together. I mean, we were together, weren’t we? Apart from the whole …’
Ellie was grateful that Chester didn’t actually spell it out. ‘You were like an old married couple,’ she said. ‘Everyone thought so.’
Apparently, after Ari had told Chester to stay in Benidorm and he’d been moping about the beach and the dancefloor, Claire had decided to deliver some much-needed home truths, then kiss Chester into the middle of the next week.
‘It’s not all about Claire,’ Chester explained haltingly, but he looked dazed and happy at the memory of her kiss. ‘She’s a lovely girl but we’ve only been on two proper dates. But she’s right: it’s time I faced up to the fact that despite everything I’ve done for your mum – that I’d do anything for her – she’s never going to love me like she loved Billy Kay. No matter how much she tries to deny it, she still loves him, and on some level she reckons they’ll be together again one day. And I just can’t put up with it any longer. You don’t know what he’s like, Ell. I’m not even going to tell you ‘cause he is your dad, after all, but he treated Ari like shit and all this time she’s been waiting for him to come back to her.’
‘Well, I think it’s more like she never got over him because he broke her heart.’ Ellie wasn’t absolutely sure about that because Ari had always withheld on the topic. But now Ellie wondered if it had simply been too painful for Ari to talk about Billy Kay. Generally, the amount that someone could hurt you was governed by how much you’d loved them. Or thought you might grow to love them, if you’d had a chance to be with them for longer than one weekend in Paris.
‘I’m done, Ellie,’ Chester said with a note of finality. ‘I’ve wasted more than half my life loving a woman who’s always going to be in love with someone else. This summer has brought it all back. I’m nearly fifty and I’ve left it too late to have a family of my own, to have kids …’
The world didn’t revolve around Ellie; it carried on spinning regardless of her wishes, but she couldn’t bear the agony of losing someone else. ‘Oh, Chester! Please … I know I’m meant to be strong and independent, but I can’t do without you.’ She reached for the tissue box stashed under the dashboard and blew her nose, then Chester’s hand was covering her hand, snotty tissue and all.
‘You’ll never have to manage without me, Ellie,’ Chester said, squeezing her fingers so tight that she wanted to protest that he was hurting her. ‘I know my timing’s lousy, but I didn’t want you finding out from anyone else.’
‘But do you promise me that whatever happens, even if you and Ari never speak again, you and me are still rock solid?’
‘For ever and always, princess.’ If Chester cried, then Ellie would too. He swallowed manfully instead. ‘It would destroy me if I lost you. End of.’
It wasn’t quite end of as far as Ellie was concerned. Some things had to be spelled out very clearly. ‘Look, I’ll admit that I used to think about what it would be like to have some kind of relationship with Billy Kay, but I always wanted you to b
e my dad. Not a faux dad but my proper dad. You do know that, don’t you, Chester? Like, if I ever get married, you are so walking me down the aisle, OK?’
Chester sniffed and they sat there in silence for a few long moments, both of them struggling to keep the tears at bay. Ellie was still biting down hard on her bottom lip when Chester breathed out, then gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. ‘I don’t think you get walked down the aisle at a Jewish wedding, but yeah, I’d like that.’
‘But I’m not getting married right away,’ Ellie reminded him. ‘Maybe not ever, because apart from you and Grandpa, and Tom, most men are horrible, conflicted scumbags.’
‘Are we talking about Richey or have you got a new ex-boyfriend that you want me to have a word with?’ Chester nudged her. He suddenly looked a lot happier, as if Ellie’s chequered relationship history was a cause for celebration, a safer subject to talk about. ‘Well, do you?’
Ellie still wasn’t sure that the threat of tears had passed but she nudged him back. Hard. ‘Weren’t you saying something about putting the radio on?’
The house of Sadie’s best friend, Bernice Koenig, was at the other end of Hampstead Garden Suburb from where David’s parents lived and looked just as Arts and Craftsy from the outside. Inside it was chintz as far as the eye could see. Anything that wasn’t chintz was gold-plated.
As well as loving a bit of glitz, Bernice loved Sadie’s progeny as if they were her own, because ‘me and my Larry, God rest his soul, were never blessed with children’. She gathered both Ellie and Chester to her bosom, then led them into the dining room, where a buffet had been laid out, and through the open patio doors into the garden where a lot of familiar-looking people were congregated.
Bernice hadn’t known the correct social etiquette for having a tabloid star to stay, even when she’d changed that tabloid star’s nappies back in the day, so she’d thrown a party. Filling their plates and perched on garden furniture were Ellie’s grandparents, aunts and uncles, various cousins and assorted children of cousins. Tess and Lola were on their way over and Chester was exhorted to stay and ‘eat something! It’s not healthy for someone to be so thin.’ Bernice, who was five foot ten in her stockinged feet and built like a fishing rod, thought anyone under fifteen stone needed fattening up.
After the horrors and revelations that the day had heaped upon Ellie, it was soothing to sit in Bernice’s back garden surrounded by her real family. Even Aunt Carol, who’d never been her greatest fan, got pinch-faced with annoyance as she brandished a copy of the Mail on Sunday, which had run an opinion piece dubbing Ellie the poster girl of what they called the FBAs, which stood for Fame By Association or ‘the desperate wannabes who aren’t famous for being famous but famous for knowing someone who’s famous’.
‘Do you have to read the whole thing out?’ Ellie asked as she nibbled on a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, but there was no stopping Auntie Carol, who had Ellie cornered on a sun lounger so there was no escape.
‘They’ve quoted some so-called psychologist who says your pathological need for attention is because you never had a paternal signifier,’ Carol read out with just a smidgen of sadistic glee. ‘Grandpa has always been there for you, hasn’t he?’
‘He has.’ Ellie nodded. ‘Always.’
‘Sometimes to the exclusion of his other grandchildren, but I suppose they do all have fathers … fathers that are married to their mothers.’
It was kind of comforting that Auntie Carol had reverted to type and was being her usual undermining, bitchy self, but Ellie still gave a grateful yelp as she saw Tess and Lola come through the patio doors, each clutching a laden paper plate and a glass of orange squash.
There were a few moments of awkward plate and glass redeployment, then Lola opened her arms wide and drawled, ‘Come on, ladies, let’s hug it out,’ and five minutes later, the three of them were sharing a sun lounger, which sagged dangerously under their combined weight, and combing the rest of the Sunday papers, even though assorted aunts, uncles, grandparents, honorary grandparents and Chester all assured Ellie that she was better off not knowing.
The girl portrayed in the papers would forever be a girl clutching an alcoholic beverage and showing too much skin. She was Billy Kay’s bastard daughter, as if that was all anyone needed to know about Ellie, when a few weeks ago, that was the one thing no one had known about her.
‘It’s so unfair,’ Ellie sighed. ‘Everyone gets to stick the knife in me. Even Billy Kay. He might not have spoken to the press but whenever they say “a source close to Sir Billy”, it’s obvious it came from his publicist. Mum tried to warn me about her and it turned out she was right and she was double-crossing me the whole time. They all were.’
Tess looked up from the Sunday Mirror‘s charming photo essay called ‘Like Mother, Like Daughter’, which charted key fashion moments when Ari and Ellie had worn vaguely similar outfits. Ari in a leopard-print coat at a Pulp gig fifteen years ago, Ellie at a charity auction last winter in aid of the World Wildlife Fund wearing a little black dress and a pair of leopard-print pumps from Office. Ari with her hair swept up in a quiffed ponytail; the bloody photo of Ellie being flung over the head of a quiffed Rockabilly, and to round things off a picture each of the honourable Olivia and Miranda, the erstwhile model, both looking refined and elegant.
‘Are you still maintaining a dignified silence?’ Tess asked. ‘I’m not angling to get you on TV, by the way. I’m just enquiring as a concerned friend.’
‘I know that,’ Ellie assured her, though she was already stiffening in suspicion because it was hard to trust anyone any more. ‘I don’t know how I’m meant to be reacting. Jesus wept, when is this going to be over?
‘Let’s face it, Ellie, this is never going to be over. Not now your new baby bro has rocked up,’ Lola announced, putting down the Sun on Sunday, which had an obviously photoshopped picture of Charlie bookended by Lara and Rose on its front cover and an exclusive interview with the sisters. ‘And not while these two trolls are guaranteed column inches so they can bang on about how you’ve given them an attack of the sads. As for Billy Kay – I bet you any money that in less than a month he’ll be releasing a new record and doing a tour. I bet you fifty quid!’
‘You are so cynical,’ Tess told her.
‘I can’t help it. I was born cynical,’ Lola said, and Tess rolled her eyes but it was good-natured eye-rolling so they’d obviously made up since falling out over Come Dine With Me. ‘Look, Ellie, you need to be proactive about this shit. Make it happen, instead of having it happen to you.’
‘But the tabloids will twist everything I say,’ Ellie protested, not that she had any intention of talking to them, though maybe she did need to do something to take control of her public image. But what?
‘Maybe an interview with a broadsheet?’ Tess suggested. ‘Call one of your mates on the arts desks and pitch a piece about emerging Scandinavian artists, but really it would be about how you’re not the chavvy tart that the tabs say you are.’
‘Or what about YouTube, like that bird from that TV talent show whose ex posted that video online of her noshing him off …’
‘Lola, don’t use the word “nosh” in that context when there are elderly Jewish people about.’
Lola grinned at Ellie. ‘Whatevs. One minute everyone hates that girl for sending home that lady who worked in Sainsbury’s and having really bad fashion sense, and the next, she’s become a feminist icon. And she got to put her point across without it being spun by anyone else.’
Tess looked as if she was in a thousand agonies. ‘I’m not saying anything,’ she said with a pious air. ‘Not even that I’m a freelance researcher for a TV show that goes out live every morning to five million people and has two really lovely presenters who were voted “the people we’d most like to have a coffee with” by Mumsnet. I’m not saying that.’
‘Except you totally have just said that,’ Ellie pointed out. An idea was forming in her head. ‘So, if it goes o
ut live that means I can’t be edited, right? I get to say exactly what I want to say. Hypothetically speaking. I’m just curious.’
‘Well, within reason. No swears. Nothing libellous and you don’t get question approval before the show.’ Tess wrinkled her nose. ‘If you did choose to go on, then it has to be your decision. I’m not pressurising you in any way.’
‘But you do know that they’re not renewing all the researchers’ contracts and Tess is too bossy to suck up to anyone and she’s not knobbing a cameraman, so she needs a bit of leverage,’ Lola said. ‘And she is your best mate, apart from me, and it would be helpful if she could pay, like, her share of the rent.’
They both looked at Ellie pleadingly. She stared down at the bagel that she’d barely made a dent in. Maintaining a dignified silence hadn’t made the media circus pack up its tents and move on to the next town. Meanwhile, everyone else, from Billy Kay’s other daughters to leader writers for the tabs, got to weigh in with an opinion on Ellie, even though they had no idea who she really was.
Even Ellie had lost sight of who she really was, or who she tried to be, but she knew what she didn’t want to be. For as long as she could remember, taped to Ari’s bathroom mirror, then transferred to her own bathroom mirror was a Nora Ephron quote: ‘Be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.’
She’d been playing the victim too much these last few weeks; being rescued, when she was more than capable of rescuing herself. It was time to write her own script.
‘The presenters of On The Sofa – they’re not at all controversial. It will just be a nice chat, right?’ Ellie widened her eyes and tilted her head. ‘“Oh Ellie, we’d love to know about the real you, rather than all these dreadful stories in the papers. How have you been holding up?”’
‘Right, right.’ Tess was nodding so frantically that Ellie thought her neck might snap. ‘Jeff and Angie do what they’re told. He’s obsessed with the camera getting his left side and Angie is sweet but as dumb as a bucket of mud.’