LITMIR.BIZ

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in the Sacred Heart Convent just off Golden Square and took care of them until Marguerite’s latest love affair had gone sour and she went back to London.

      Aunt Nora had always been there. Solid, dependable, as unstarry a person as you could find.

      Which was why Megan didn’t want to have to talk to her about what had happened. Her mother hadn’t judged Megan because she didn’t know what judgement was. Marguerite had made too many disastrous romantic choices in her life to comment on anyone else’s, but Nora – a single woman who went to weekly Mass – might.

      ‘What about Australia?’ Megan had wondered when she’d spoken to Carole. It seemed far enough away to hide from the photographers who had been camped outside her flat in London for the past ten days.

      ‘You need family,’ her agent said sagely.

      I’d be out of your control in Australia, Megan thought grimly.

      ‘Who knows what you’d get up to in Australia,’ Carole said, on cue. ‘Too many gorgeous men.’

      Megan had to laugh, although it was one of those painful laughs. ‘You don’t trust me,’ she said.

      ‘Why should I?’ said Carole. ‘You’re screwing up your career and mine too. Let’s put all the cards on the table, Megan. It’s not doing the agency any good being linked to someone who’s wrecking her career so successfully. People are wondering why I didn’t stop it. As if I damn well knew about it. You’re not a pop star. People practically expect that from music industry stars, but it’s not good if you’re trying to make a name for yourself as a serious actress. Nobody’s going to cast an actress who’s just broken up what’s been held up as one of the rare long-lasting Hollywood marriages. Producers and directors want a reasonably blank canvas or at least someone who can play innocent – what they don’t want is a PR nightmare. All moviegoers will see now on the screen is Megan the homewrecker. This stunt has thrown away years of hard work. I’m not sure what you can do to ride out the storm, but you need to keep your head down for at least six months. And I mean down. No partying, no going to fashion shows and getting papped having fun. You need to look sorry.’

      ‘I am sorry,’ Megan said bitterly.

      ‘Nobody wants to hear empty words, Megan,’ Carole said. ‘Only an idiot would say they weren’t sorry. Sorry isn’t the issue. People want your head on a platter. That’s the downside of fame. The public get to give it and they get to take it away.’

      Megan stilled. For a few moments, she’d considered telling Carole what she really felt. That she’d loved Rob Hartnell. That she’d never have gone with him otherwise. Now she was glad she hadn’t.

      Carole had a very simple view of the whole episode: Megan had had a badly judged fling with a happily married movie star. They’d been caught and instead of the movie star standing by Megan’s side, he’d run away. Three lives were wrecked, the sympathy was with Katharine, and Megan was portrayed as a femme fatale who’d chiselled Rob away from his wife.

      Rob, very sensibly, had not hung about for the fall-out. He had simply disappeared, the way only the very famous or the very rich can disappear. Since that day in Prague – was it only just before Christmas? – when a photographer had caught Rob and Megan cuddling up in a tiny bar near their hotel, Rob Hartnell hadn’t been seen. Megan was left to face the storm alone. ‘I’m devastated, too,’ she wanted to cry. But it was no use. No one, not even her agent, cared what she felt.

      ‘The whole thing is career suicide,’ Carole said, almost to herself. ‘What were you thinking?’

      Megan felt the rawness inside her and was glad she’d kept her feelings to herself. Thinking had had nothing do to with it, but it was better that Carole didn’t know that. She would rather no one knew it. Public hatred might be painful, but it was marginally better than pity.

      ‘Time is the only healer now, at least in the media,’ Carole went on.

      And what about my heart, how is that meant to heal? Megan thought, but instead she said, ‘If my sister can’t have me, I could go to my Aunt Nora’s in Dublin.’

      Nobody would expect her to go there when she had many jet-setting friends with yachts and islands and Manhattan apartments, although the friends seemed to have made themselves scarce. Katharine Hartnell was too powerful for anyone in the industry to risk offending. Only a few of the people Megan had thought of as friends were phoning up now, and more for prurience’ sake than out of friendship.

      Still, Ireland was the last place anybody would expect her to go.

      It was also the last place she wanted to go. Aunt Nora would not throw her arms around Megan and say ‘poor diddums’. She’d probably ask ‘What the heck were you doing?’

      But it was a home, and one the press were unlikely to know about. Her peripatetic childhood on exotic islands had been widely reported; interviewers had always been much more interested in her recollections of Martinique and Formentera than Dublin Bay.

      Ireland and Aunt Nora would do, but really she wanted to hide with Pippa: lie on the bed in her big sister’s attic spare room reading novels, hidden from prying telephoto lenses by rolling Welsh hills. But she couldn’t compromise Pippa’s family in that way.

      When they’d been younger, the gorgeous Flynn sisters had set London, and occasionally LA, on fire. It seemed nothing could stop them. But that, like everything else, had changed. Now Pippa had taken herself out of the rat race and, much as she loved her sister, she had other loyalties to consider.

      A couple of days earlier, on one of her sneaked forays from the London flat to get groceries, Megan had treated herself to a fashion magazine – one which had featured her in their ‘in the closet’ series a year ago. She’d opened it to find a big article by a leading female journalist on the evils of predatory women, and there she was, Megan Bouchier, vilified as the worst offender. Horrified, she’d thrown the magazine in the bin, but it carried on taunting her, even from underneath the wet teabags.

      ‘Who are these people who hate me so much?’ Megan had sobbed on the phone to Pippa. ‘It’s cruel, the stuff these newspaper columnists write – the women are the worst. How can they be so vicious?’

      For once, there was quiet from Pippa’s end. Normally, their calls would be punctuated by an endless chorus of ‘Mummy, I want…’ or the dogs barking or someone laughing or crying – Megan had become used, although it had been hard initially, to the constant demands of her sister’s life. Kim, four, and Toby, twenty months, came first now.

      ‘I don’t know,’ Pippa said after a while. She sounded as if she was too tired to even answer the question at the end of a long day chasing after her small children. ‘I suppose it’s like the pack instinct, isn’t it? Women feel threatened and blame the other woman. It’s easier to see her as the snake charmer, the evil seductress, than to blame your own man for straying. You know, it’s not his fault, therefore you can still trust him. It’s other women you can’t trust.’

      It was Megan’s turn to be silent. When the news had first broken, Pippa had been her greatest ally. ‘He seduced you, he told you their marriage was over, it’s his fault,’ she’d said back then.

      Even when the press had arrived at Pippa’s farmhouse, scaring the chickens so much that two had run off and never returned, she’d been on Megan’s side. Now suddenly she wasn’t. She was fed up with it all and the effect it was having on her life. Attuned to every nuance of Pippa’s voice, Megan could tell that her sister had had enough of the Rob and Megan saga.

      Worse, Pippa was looking at the story from a distance, thinking about how other women would view her beloved sister, instead of standing beside her in the trenches.

      It was hard to know what was the most painful: Rob vanishing, her subsequent crucifixion in the press, or the knowledge that the whole scandal had somehow severed her bond with her older sister.

      How, Megan thought bleakly, could a love so glorious have brought such pain?

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