Someone has got hold of a picture of Becky, Sharon, Emilia and Matthew eating together at the window table of the restaurant, laughing and joking.
Hadn’t Matthew talked about a private room? Instead, they’d been led to a table at the front of the restaurant.
The female employee and newly minted producer, the maverick female director with impeccable feminist credentials, and the celebrated young actress making waves in highbrow cinema. Sitting with Matthew. Unwittingly vouching for him, every time they laugh and pass food to one another.
Chapter 16
‘Ads … I need to talk to you.’ Becky’s hand rests on the door latch, having let the last of their guests out of the house. But she hasn’t yet committed to her words and they are quiet and slight and she thinks they might go unheard. And perhaps that would be for the best.
‘Happy Birthday to me,’ sings Adam, making a small drunken pilgrimage from table to sink with a single plate – sauce and fork teetering on its edge. It’s painful to watch, mostly because she is stone-cold sober, but also because it will take them ages to clear up his way. She watches him drop the plate into a large pan of water.
‘Oops,’ he says, as brown foam splashes over the edge. The pan had been soaking after he’d drunkenly promised to make everyone caramels for pudding. He’d poured half a bag of sugar and some water into her best pan, put it on a high heat and turned the contents into a shining gold gloop. In the moments he was performing his victory dance, much to the amusement of the crowd, the caramel had stuck blackly and viciously to the bottom of the pan. The pan was unsalvageable really but Becky had thrown it quickly under the tap, like treating a burn on human skin, stifling her frustration and the urge to say anything because, along with most other items in that kitchen (and now Maisie’s new trainers) Adam had sweetly and generously paid for it. It would have been churlish to say anything at the time, churlish even to say anything now, on a night when he is happy and humming contentedly, basking in the glow of having spent an evening surrounded by his oldest friends.
And so she’d let her annoyance dissolve. Besides, the pan had been a good, momentary distraction from her worry that their guests would ask her about Matthew. But they live and work in different worlds and it didn’t come up. Maybe, she thinks, it’s not really a story outside the industry? And as they all talked about haircuts and politics and that time they went camping (Becky wasn’t there, she’d been caring for Maisie after she had her tonsils out), she was working out when and how to share the burden with Adam after everyone else had gone home to their beds.
She needs to talk to someone, and he is her someone.
As she watches Adam take on the portering of the next plate, she has got as far as planning her apology for not saying anything sooner, and how she feels ashamed for that, but that also no one can be sure of what really happened.
Please just let me talk.
He’ll want to protect her. He’ll tell her to exit and leave her film behind. She’ll end up talking about how hard it is to get a film like that made, a film that you actually care about deeply. Something that might even matter.
She doesn’t need that conversation. She knows all that.
She also wants to tell him about how she is longing to visit Scott to get the answers she needs, and to that one he will certainly say absolutely not, that it risks Maisie finding out, risks chaos and destabilization for all of them.
‘Did you want to talk to me?’ He zigzags his way back toward the sink and his phone dings a text message. He pulls it out of his back pocket and narrows his eyes to focus on the screen. His hair is ruffled, his shirt loosened at the waist, his eyes are still and bright: Becky doesn’t think she’s seen him look so happy. ‘It’s Zee. She’s on her way home,’ he says. ‘Lazy Maisie, she never ever pays me, for the waaaays, I plaaaaays, the bassoooooooon!’ Adam turns and grins at Becky. ‘Fuck I’m drunk.’
‘Good. Birthday achieved.’ Becky checks her own phone, expecting the same words. Finds nothing.
His phone dings again before he’s had a chance to put it away and his face creases up in laughter when he looks at the screen.
‘What?’
‘Jules bought her a Viking hat. Look.’
She glances at his phone, finding no amusement in the foam confection balanced on her daughter’s head. This is why she is the less fun one, the nagging one. Because she wants information and Adam wants jokes, so Adam gets both and she gets nothing. Her mood has soured with envy and she can’t help herself when she says, ‘You shouldn’t have bought her those trainers, it was my—’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, all eyes and regret. ‘I only want her to be happy.’
‘But I was trying to teach her the value of working hard to earn what you want,’ she says more softly, chastened by his quick apology. ‘Not just getting it all when you click your fingers.’
‘Because we all know the world doesn’t work like that.’ He smiles but there is an edge to what he’s saying. ‘She can’t be all cynicism, Becks. The world can also be a good and generous place. It can drop things in your lap when you’re least expecting it and it’s good for the soul to know that. Right?’
She’s not sure whether she’s more bothered by the removal of an opportunity to teach her daughter something, or the feeling that she’s been undermined by him. She should pursue these grievances really, to avoid it all happening again and yet she runs out of steam at the sight of his broad and warm smile. Then
