Beautiful People (8 page)

    At home, the kitchen seemed permanently full of people with impassioned eyes thumping the big wooden table, and, throughout her childhood, Darcy had rarely came home from school without wondering what ANC activist or Soviet defector would require her to give up her bedroom this time. Although some, admittedly, had seemed to prefer that she remained in it, an even less inviting prospect.

    Darcy had detected from an early age the fact that neither her mother, Angharad, nor her father, Caractacus, held her grandmother in particularly high esteem. Anna de Blank, Angharad's mother, had been a very successful light film actress of the forties and fifties, starring in Ealing comedies and Disney films. She had made the family fortune, although no one, it seemed to Darcy, was terribly grateful.

    Personally, she and the chain-smoking, purple-haired old lady, who drank at least half a bottle of champagne a day, had always got on tremendously well, although performing her grandmother's old song-and-dance routines at home was, Darcy had quickly discovered, frowned on.

    Theatre at Granny's may be fun and frivolous, but that at home was terribly serious and important. Both her parents had impressed upon her the fact that they were political artists and that she should be, too. "The theatre is the only thing," Angharad would declare in her trademark dramatic, husky voice, and Darcy would agree—as indeed she believed—that it was.

    Nonetheless, there were times, such as now, when the weight of ancestral expectation pressed heavy on Darcy's slim shoulders. Playing Cordelia had meant seventy-hour weeks during the rehearsals, of which she had never missed one, and now that the show had started, she worked six nights a week plus matinees on Friday and Saturday.

    Eventually the night bus came. Whenever her fellow actors asked her where she lived, Darcy always said West London, as if it were Shepherd's Bush or Hammersmith, and not, as it actually was, a penthouse in Queens Gate, a mere smoked-salmon-sandwich's toss from the gates of Hyde Park and with a fine view of Kensington Palace and the Round Pond from the roof garden. Turn around, and you could almost shake the hands of the classic-figure reliefs circling the great dome of the Albert Hall.

    Alighting at Kensington Gore, Darcy went down Queen's Gate. Despite the traditional, white-porticoed appearance of the entrance, you got in by using the electronic keypad beside the front door, or at least you did if you were Darcy and the occupiers of the two luxury flats below the penthouse. If you were Florrie, the nightclubbing German princess on the first floor, you forgot it almost every time, and, irrespective of the invariably late hour, simply hammered on the door and shouted until someone—usually the long-suffering Brazilian plastic surgeon on the ground floor— got up and let you in.

    A sweeping, red-carpeted staircase with mahogany banisters rose up the entire six floors of the building, but Darcy, who lived in the penthouse, took the old-fashioned cage-style lift at this time of night. Pressing the lift button and hearing the doors clang shut somewhere above, Darcy allowed herself to luxuriate in the cosseting feeling of home.

    But what made this impressive place home to her had nothing to do with the fact that flats here were expensive and sought after. To Darcy, the apartment had for years simply meant her beloved grandmother. Anna de Blank had lived to the age of eighty-five and left it to her favourite—and for that matter only—granddaughter upon her death two years earlier. Whereupon Darcy, resisting heroically her mother's pressure to sell the place and donate the proceeds to one of her causes, had lost no time moving in.

    Inside the flat, Darcy glanced at the answerphone on the small Florentine table by the door. The green light winked steadily back. No one had called during the evening.

    All was quiet and still and glowing with lamps whose pink shades were fitted with pink bulbs. Anna had been a reluctantly ageing beauty who believed rosy light was the most flattering for the face.

    Darcy smiled, as she always did, at the enormous portrait of her grandmother in the entrance hall, resplendent in lemon-yellow chiffon, smiling faintly and beautifully, and holding a plate of her favourite indulgences, macaroons.

    From her earliest childhood, macaroons and her grandmother had been associated in Darcy's mind. There had always been a white card box of them in the refrigerator, beribboned and stamped with the address of a smart baker in flowing gold letters. Darcy had been entranced with the colours of these strange, exotic confections, half cake and half biscuit, that came in exquisite, old-fashioned colours.

    But Anna, even as she sank her small, white teeth into them and rolled her eyes in delight, would exclaim that even these, baked as they were by the best confectioner in London, were not to be compared with those she had tasted in France.

    "But you know, my darling," she would say, "they are the hardest thing in the world to get exactly right, and no one makes them like they do in Paris."

    Anna had travelled widely as an actress, and her stories of the great European cities, Paris and Rome especially, as they had been in the 1950s, entranced her granddaughter, but not as much as the macaroons did with their intense sweetness and intoxicating lightness. She could not imagine anyone making a better job of them.

    She loved the fact that her grandmother had taken her passion for macaroons as the guiding inspiration for her apartment's decorative scheme. Each room was painted in a different pastel colour: lemon in the study, pink in the master bedroom, pistachio green in the dining room, lilac in the sitting room, and pale orange in the hall. It was one of the whimsical jokes that Darcy felt were entirely typical of her grandmother.

    Darcy had kept the décor exactly as Anna had left it. It was as ornate and feminine as she remembered it from her childhood, all florals, silks, and delicate furniture with oval backs and slender gold legs. Small, round tables still held Anna's collection of bibelots and small antiques. In the master bedroom, muslin and toile de Jouy curtains still swept up into a crowned half-tester above the big, white, flounced bed Darcy remembered bouncing on. The rosy light on the white, oval-mirrored dressing table made small decorative boxes and silver-backed brushes glitter just as Darcy, as a child, remembered them glittering.

    There was still a big, old-fashioned roll-top bath in the ornate bathroom, which was entered through a pair of white double doors picked out in gilt. Here the bather could lie back and contemplate under a pink Murano glass chandelier, although, these days, without the glass of champagne that Anna had always enjoyed whilst abluting and to which she unhesitatingly attributed her longevity. Darcy felt her own life was quite indulgent enough, and Niall, who scorned self-indulgence and any form of pretension, would have been dead against it too.

    Darcy felt the whole place remained so redolent of her grandmother that it was almost as if the old lady, with her impish smile, twinkling eyes, and immaculate blue hair, might come tripping daintily in at any moment. But she was aware that Niall, who had never known Anna, felt rather differently about it. "Camper than a Boy Scout Jamboree" was how he had put it in his no-nonsense Scottish way.

    When he had moved in some months ago, Niall had not only suggested giving the entire place a coat of white paint but had offered to do it. He had, he pointed out, trained as a builder, still had a part-time job on a construction site, and, therefore, possessed all the requisite skills. But Darcy had been appalled at the idea. She had been yet more horrified at Niall's next suggestion, that they sell it and move to more fashionably edgy Shoreditch. Accepting defeat, Niall had laughed good-naturedly, shrugged his broad shoulders, and never mentioned it again.

    As she passed the hall mirror now, Darcy paused. Her wide face was pale with exhaustion. Two large dark eyes with purple shadows, their full-lashed lids dipping downwards, squinted tiredly back from beneath thick, straight brows.

    The full, raspberry mouth was drawn downwards with tiredness, and her head lolled unsteadily on her slender neck. A few tendrils of long, dark hair had escaped from the bunch into which she had hastily shoved it before leaving the theatre. It needed a wash, Darcy realised. But not now. The only thing now was bed.

    Darcy tiptoed through the sitting room. The lamps cast soft pink shadows on the lilac walls; Niall had left them on. The slither of newspapers on the lilac, cushion-scattered sofa, and the various remotes for the television scattered over the thick carpet, also lilac, gave the impression that her boyfriend had only just gone to bed. Rather regretting the fact he hadn't waited up for her, Darcy bent forward to inspect the papers on the sofa. As she had suspected, one was a book; a small, paperback copy of
Hamlet
left upside down with "To be or not to be" pressing against the petit-point cushions.

    Preparing for a crucial audition, Niall had been studying the part for weeks, as well as videos (Anna's old TV lacked a DVD setting) of classic performances of the role. Video boxes, their contents spilt, were piled before the television. Niall admired Sir Alec Guinness's most, Darcy knew, and had not spared her with his opinion that he thought Sacheverell Prince's the worst. Darcy had not minded however. Niall's unflinching honesty was one of the things she loved about him most. He was authentic. Down to earth. Real.

    She found it both admirable and intimidating that Niall had grown up on an estate in Glasgow, that his father was a butcher and his mother a cleaner. That he worked as a builder for several years before putting himself through drama school and, therefore, despite being the same age as her, had had a real—not to say a hard—life before entering the rarified world of acting.

    And he was a wonderful actor too, as serious about the profession as she was. More so, if anything.

    They had especially bonded over the importance of Shakespeare. He venerated her parents—if not her grandparents—as great actors, and they, in turn, had been excited and enchanted by his councilestate provenance.

    "A butcher!" Angharad had breathed in delight when he had told her about his father's business. "A cleaner!" she had murmured ecstatically, when the subject of his mother came up.

    And she had positively purred when he had finished telling her how he had walked round Muswell Hill all night, unable to speak, after seeing her performance on DVD as Nora in a celebrated seventies production of
A Doll's House
transposed to an S&M Amsterdam brothel.

    "It said everything about the condition of women," he had told Angharad hotly, and she had pushed back her still-beautiful-butgreying wild, black hair from her still-exquisite high-cheekboned face and gazed at Niall with dark-eyed rapture.

    Niall would get there, Darcy felt certain. He was just taking some time to break through, that was all. His Scottish looks, coupled with the fact he actually was Scottish, meant that TV drama offers of Scottish policemen, Scottish drug-dealers, Scottish pimps, Scottish alcoholics, Scottish wifebeaters, and, on one occasion, a Scottish corpse, regularly came his way. But these were hardly the parts he was looking for, and he was determined not to be pigeonholed. Or "Macpigeonholed," as he put it. Hopefully the Hamlet audition tomorrow—or today, Darcy realised, it being one in the morning— would bring him what he deserved.

    Darcy now tiptoed into the bedroom where Niall lay sleeping. She smiled at how incongruously rugged and masculine he looked in Anna's enormous, rather princessy bed.

    Absorbedly, Darcy stretched out a hand over the thick, dark-red curls that, when he was standing, flowed almost to Niall's shoulders and lightly touched the reddish-brown brow. She traced the jutting nose with its rounded end and brushed the red-gold stubble on the determined cleft chin. She half-wanted him to wake, to open the big, pale-blue eyes that she had, when they had first met, laughingly told him were the colour of boxes from Tiffany's. "Are they?" he had replied in his Glaswegian growl. "I wouldn't know."

    But Niall slept on, his left arm bent under his head, his hand only just visible beneath the hair. Darcy smiled as she saw the scrolled silver tops of the Celtic rings he wore on every finger of this hand like a Caledonian knuckle-duster. The white-blonde lashes, each one tipped with a fleck of brownish-red, remained pressed against his white and freckled cheek. Even when she skimmed the flat of her hand over his pale, broad chest with its red-gold hair, he did not wake. Noticing the shiny, purple hollows just south of his closed eyelids, she decided to leave him alone. Working on the building site was, she knew, exhausting, and he had had
Hamlet
to learn on top of it.

    He was sleeping in a particularly horrid and ancient T-shirt, she noticed indulgently, a dirty, white one with a St. Andrew's flag on it that she had nagged him many times to get rid of. But she loved the fact Niall utterly lacked vanity. Unlike some men she had known, he never blow-dried his hair, used fake tan, or visited a salon for any reason other than to meet her.

    In a corner of the bedroom, Anna's little white-and-gold telephone suddenly shrilled. One in the morning, Darcy realised, glancing at the ornate ormolu clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. Who on earth could this be?

    Had something happened to her mother? Her father? Panic seized Darcy's throat as she answered.

    "We haven't spoken," came the booming voice of Mitch Masterson. "But I'm the agent representing you in Hollywood, and I'm calling with some very good news."