Past Secrets Page 31

  Her dreams of it had been about her and Karl being happy together. The problem was, there was no togetherness. Here, Amber was even more alone than she had been before she met Karl, when she’d only been dreaming about what love might be. And now she had the guilt to carry for hurting her mother too.

  Finally, she went out to the pool herself and lay there with a book, peeping over the corners of it, watching what was going on.

  Eventually, the heat of the sun got to her and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

  ‘So this is where you are,’ said a voice. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

  It was Karl, except he didn’t look as if he’d had a wild night out in clubs. He looked like he’d had a very good night’s sleep. There was that faint hint of stubble on his jaw, his hair was tousled. The look in his eyes gave it away though. It was a look Amber had come to recognise when he walked offstage: a look of triumph, of sheer, almost sexual, pleasure. The look said: I’ve just stood in front of all these people and they all wanted me.

  ‘You can’t have been looking too hard for me,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I’ve been here all day and all last night,’ she added pointedly. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Out,’ he said, his gaze raking over her, as if he didn’t like what he saw.

  ‘Out?’ demanded Amber, feeling her temper rise. ‘Out with whom?’ she added for effect.

  ‘With Michael, doing what we came to LA to do, Amber, remember? Hook up with a big producer, make our names, you know. We’re here to do more than just lie around the pool all day and work on our tans.’

  ‘I’m only working on my tan because I have no money and I can’t go anywhere and because I was waiting for you to come home,’ she snapped back, stung. ‘And I was worried, anything could have happened to you, anything.’

  She could see his face soften at the thought that she’d been worried about him, and he smiled at her, became the old Karl again.

  ‘Oh, baby, you shouldn’t worry about me. Last night was so amazing, such a blast, talking about music all night long with someone like Michael.’

  He sat down on the sun lounger beside her, leaned forward, his face boyishly excited.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the people he’s worked with, the bands, the names, people whose albums I have and he knows them, he’s worked with them. Jesus, it’s incredible. I can’t believe we’re here.’

  ‘So that was it?’ Amber asked hesitantly.

  ‘That was it. Sorry, you’re right, I should have called. I stayed over with Michael, he’s got the most amazing house in the hills, you should see it, all glass and beautiful. Rebuilt after the mud slides, totally incredible. He said it was an amazing house before but now it’s doubly amazing.’

  ‘Somebody said he had lots of art as well, didn’t they?’ Amber asked. ‘He’s a collector.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Karl. ‘There were paintings and stuff, you know me, I’m not into that, I didn’t really notice, but yeah, sure, lots of fantastic stuff. You’ll see it. Listen, why don’t you and me go out to dinner, just on our own, not the gang, somewhere nice?’

  ‘How can we afford it?’

  ‘It’s OK, Michael’s given us an advance against the advance, if you know what I mean.’ Karl grinned. ‘Money, we’ve got money, baby.’

  ‘Somewhere casual,’ said Amber hopefully, ‘because I still don’t really have anything to wear, except what I was wearing last night.’

  ‘What was that you were wearing?’ Karl said, furrowing his brow.

  ‘The green dress?’ Amber said. ‘Remember, you took it off because you thought it looked so nice.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, yeah. Wear that, it’ll be cool.’

  The concierge recommended a little crab restaurant out in Venice, and they got a cab, sitting in the back, holding hands like teenagers, pointing out the sights and looking at people, admiring this place that was so different from home. The cute little restaurant looked like a shack but with non-shack prices, Amber realised. That was the problem with staying in really cool hotels. When you told the concierge you wanted to go somewhere cheap and nice, he sent you to the cheapest place rich people went.

  ‘This is so expensive, we better not have starters,’ Amber whispered, scanning the menu.

  ‘Hey, no problem, baby,’ said Karl. ‘I’ve got money, remember?’

  It was lovely, Amber thought, to have some cash finally. At last she could buy some more clothes because her stuff from home wasn’t suitable. Her flowery chain-store bikini, which looked really nice at home, looked sort of ordinary among all the little designer pieces the girls wore here.

  ‘You’ll have to give me some cash too,’ she said, thinking of what she’d buy. ‘For clothes and things.’

  ‘Sure, should have thought of it before. Sorry.’

  He took out his wallet, a new wallet, Amber realised, made of very soft suede leather. When had he been shopping? There was a nice fat wad of green notes in it, and Karl pulled out a few and handed them across to her at the precise moment that their waiter reappeared to take their order.

  Amber grabbed the money and stuffed it into her purse, feeling hideously embarrassed. It was like she was a hooker and being paid in a restaurant. But neither Karl, nor the charming waiter, appeared to have thought so. The only person dying with embarrassment was Amber. Despite her happiness that things were working out for the band and that running away from home hadn’t been in vain, and despite her joy that her relationship with Karl seemed to be back on track—even though he was a little different, and LA was working some magic on him—despite all the things she should have been grateful for, Amber was suddenly aware that something was wrong. She, Amber Reid, raised by her mother to believe in personal power and a woman’s right to independence, had no job, no qualifications and was being handed ‘pin money’ by her boyfriend. That’s what was wrong.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Maggie always laughed when people imagined there was any faint glamour to the world of academia.

  Nobody in academia ever had any money and the only glamour resided in the feverish dreams of brilliant students who longed to star on University Challenge.

  However, she got caught in precisely the same trap when it came to politics, assuming that politicians worked in a corporate world of money and style. It took just one visit to a city councillor to realise that politics was as much a glamour-free zone as college.

  The knowledge hit her as she and her mother waited in the office of Liz Glebe, their local councillor, who was having her afternoon surgery. The only person there before them, an elderly man who kept anxiously scanning a well-thumbed piece of paper, had gone in to see Ms Glebe, so they were alone. The waiting room and the office reminded Maggie of an old shop where someone had ripped out the shelf units, painted the walls a sickly yellow and stuffed political pamphlets and posters everywhere, claiming better futures, better Irelands, better everything.

  ‘Pity they don’t have better chairs,’ muttered Una, as she shifted to get comfortable on the plastic chair.

  Liz Glebe was the first politician Maggie had contacted and when they finally got in to see her, she looked nothing like the glamorous, heavily made-up woman in the election posters that hung in her waiting room.

  She still had short blonde hair and a wide smile but there were dark bags under her eyes, and her very conservative jacket and shirt looked as if they’d been to the dry-cleaner’s too many times.

  ‘Now, what’s the problem?’ she said, barely looking up at them while she shifted through sheets of paper on her desk. ‘Summer Street pavilion, right? I know the background, shouldn’t have happened, I voted against it. I have young kids myself and I hate to see the community being ripped apart, but I was in the minority, I’m afraid. It’s pretty straightforward—the pavilion was never a part of the park proper. It’s officially council property. I’m not sure what you can do at this point.’

  ‘Don’t the people who actually use the park get any choice in t
he matter?’ demanded Una irritably.

  ‘Well, the concept of politics is that you elect us in, and we make the decisions,’ Liz said, the mask of politeness slipping.

  ‘Ridiculous idea,’ Una snapped.

  Maggie shot her mother a warning look.

  ‘I’m on your side about the park,’ Liz said.

  ‘That’s what everybody says come election time,’ Una said, eyes narrowed.

  ‘If you’re on our side,’ Maggie interrupted gently, ‘perhaps you’d give us some advice on what we should do.’

  Liz Glebe looked from mother to daughter and sighed.

  ‘Go to see Harrison Mitchell. He’s the Green Party councillor for the area and he’s made his name preserving old buildings. If there’s any history at all to your pavilion, he’s your man. And he likes hopeless cases—he loves appearing in the papers as the champion of the underdog.’

  ‘Meaning he loves appearing in the papers or meaning he likes being the champion of the underdog?’ Maggie inquired sharply.

  ‘Think media whore and you won’t go far wrong,’ Liz said. ‘Good luck.’

  Harrison Mitchell wasn’t keen on meeting the members of the Save Our Pavilion campaign because he was busy fighting for a medieval castle that the government were trying to build a motorway over. In terms of column inches, fighting the government and the motorway was a much more interesting story than fighting over the fate of a little park on Summer Street.

  ‘He’s very busy at the moment,’ said his constituency secretary on the third occasion Maggie phoned. ‘I have put your proposal to him but I just don’t think he has the time.’

  Something in Maggie snapped. The night before, she and her dad had walked around Summer Street park, talking about life, the universe and everything, admiring the flowers and ruefully thinking that if the campaign wasn’t successful it might all look so different in a few months. Maggie had decided there and then that she was not going to lose this fight. She had lost so many fights in her life. Things were going to change.

  She’d got a book from the library on self-confidence and had read it twice. Practising affirmations in front of the mirror in the morning felt a bit silly at first, but it seemed to work. After all, if you said, ‘I feel useless’, it had an effect, so surely the opposite was also true.

  Start believing in yourself and stop knocking yourself, the book said. So simple and so true. And it was working.

  ‘Fine,’ Maggie said to the constituency secretary in pleasant tones. She knew exactly what to say, having practised this argument in front of the mirror earlier. ‘You can tell Mr Mitchell that I’m giving a newspaper interview tomorrow and one of the main points I will be bringing up is his complete lack of interest in our pavilion. I’m going to point out that Mr Mitchell is obviously only interested in projects that get his name in the paper and that he has refused to see us on three separate occasions.’

  ‘Now there’s no need to be like this,’ interrupted the secretary.

  ‘Oh, there’s every need,’ said Maggie. ‘Watch me.’ She hung up.

  Within fifteen minutes, she had an appointment to see Mr Mitchell the next afternoon.

  ‘I can’t go with you,’ wailed Una. ‘I’ve a doctor’s appointment. You really need someone to go with you. You can’t go and see someone like that on your own.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Maggie, feeling a certain amount of renewed vigour. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  Harrison Mitchell’s office was much grander than Liz Glebe’s and was in the basement of his imposing Georgian three-storey terraced house. Handy to be a councillor when you were independently rich, thought Maggie, as she went down the steps into the basement, admiring topiary box trees sitting in giant stone troughs with just the correct amount of lichen on them. The effect was very beautiful and very grand.

  She doubted that Mr Mitchell’s waiting room would be covered with awful, sick yellow paint. She was right. It was a tasteful light blue with white cornices and a flower arrangement on a stand in an alcove.

  ‘Sorry about the delay in seeing you,’ said a man opening the door to her. It was Councillor Mitchell himself. Maggie recognised him from the newspapers. He was tall, good-looking, charming, and the product of an expensive education that gave in-built confidence. Maggie drew herself up to her full height and gave him a half-smile.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s taken us so long too,’ she said coolly. Start as you mean to go on.

  Politely, charmingly, Harrison Mitchell did his best to get out of helping with the Summer Street park campaign.

  ‘I think that local people working together on something they really believe in is very powerful,’ he said finally, after half an hour of discussing vague plans for what the protesters could do for their cause.

  Maggie had had enough.

  ‘You’re a bit of a snob when it comes to conservation, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You like projects with historical connections or fabulous architectural proportions and to hell with anything that’s of use to the community but doesn’t fit your criteria.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ he snapped.

  ‘Yes it is,’ said Maggie, listing the last five projects he’d been involved in. Every one of them was a historical site, despite his political literature claiming he was interested in saving community landmarks irrespective of their age or architectural beauty. ‘I work in the library,’ Maggie went on. ‘And research is my specialist subject. We need your help. We’ve a lot of press planned,’ she said, which was more or less true. Lots of newspapers and radio stations had been contacted but nobody was very interested yet. ‘This could be a wonderful campaign for you. At least it would stop critics from saying you’re only interested in getting your name in the papers,’ she added, thinking that a month ago she’d never have had the courage to say something that ballsy.

  Mitchell narrowed his eyes and looked at the telegenic redhead before him. She’d be stunning in front of any sort of camera and she had chutzpah too.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But let me deal with the press.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Maggie calmly, ‘we’ll deal with it together. This is our campaign, remember.’

  She saw a flicker of respect in his eyes.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s your campaign, Ms Maguire. You’re the boss.’

  Yes, thought Maggie proudly, I’m the boss.

  It was nearly half past seven when she walked up Summer Street from the park end, still running over the meeting in her mind. She was so engrossed in her triumph that she almost didn’t notice the man getting out of a car outside her house.

  ‘Coming home from your car maintenance class?’ said a low, deep voice behind her. Maggie knew it instantly. Big bear of a man with absolutely no social skills, greasy overalls and dirt under his fingernails. The man with the petrol sucker-outer.

  She turned and stared at him. She might have walked in her gate without recognising him if it hadn’t been for that voice. The overalls were gone and he was dressed casually in jeans and a cotton jumper that stretched slightly across his huge shoulders.

  He cleaned up well, she conceded. Without the patina of garage grease, he was really rather attractive with those sparkling dark eyes. Not her type obviously; she didn’t go in for those big men who looked like they never went to the gym, just heaved trucks around the garage to keep their muscles in shape.

  ‘No, I’ve given up car maintenance. I’m in training for the space programme,’ she said gravely. ‘We’re working on a plan to ship mankind off Earth and leave womankind behind.’

  ‘All men? Or just ones who work in garages and make stupid jokes?’

  ‘All men,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Where are we being sent?’ he asked. He really was tall. Beside him, she felt positively fragile, which was something Maggie wasn’t used to feeling.

  ‘Somewhere with no oxygen.’

  She tried to glare at him, but it was hard, because he was smiling at her, a relaxed smile as if he felt utterly comfor
table.

  ‘I don’t suppose you can tell me when we’re being shipped off: mankind, I mean,’ he said, and it even sounded as if he was smiling. Honestly, what was the point of trying to be clever with someone who glinted sexy eyes back at you and looked wildly amused. ‘Except I came to apologise. Sorry, I should have done it the day afterwards but I thought you might be too angry to listen to me. I wanted to invite you out to say sorry. By the way, how much time has mankind left before being shipped off to this unoxygenated planet?’

  ‘You came to apologise and ask me out?’ Maggie repeated, wondering if this was another joke.

  ‘Unless NASA has a non-fraternisation policy,’ he added, ‘and you can’t. For reasons of international security.’

  He was teasing her, but it was gentle and Maggie found she quite liked it.

  ‘Only intelligent life forms are considered a threat to national security,’ she pointed out with a hint of sarcasm, leaving him in no doubt that she figured he was in the non-intelligent life-form quotient.

  ‘Well, then it’ll be fine for you to go out with me,’ he said evenly. ‘Next Saturday at two. It’s my cousin’s wedding.’

  ‘A wedding? You don’t ask someone you’ve just met to a wedding,’ she said suspiciously. ‘I barely know you. I can’t remember your name.’

  ‘Ivan Gregory,’ he said. ‘We met at my garage.’

  ‘I know where we met,’ she said hastily. ‘So, why are you here asking me out? Did your girlfriend dump you because of your awful practical jokes?’ Even as she said it, she knew it was bitchy and not worthy of either her or poor Ivan. But he took it well.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘she dumped me because of the body odour. Every Christmas I got deodorant, aftershave, washing powder. I think finally she realised the message wasn’t getting through.’