How to Find Love in a Book Shop(57)

She’d seen Mick Gillespie’s book previewed in the Sunday Times. She simultaneously longed to and dreaded reading it.

She’d tried to forget him. Time had betrayed her. It hadn’t been a great healer at all. It had made no difference. She had tried a million different distractions. Other men. Drink. Drugs, once or twice (it had been the sixties, after all). Charity work. Australia. Then, eventually, a kind of release. Two husbands. And motherhood. That had helped her heal. But her boys were off and gone, though they would be back eventually when they’d found wives and had children. The cottage would come into its own then.

The memories were still there, vivid. It had started as a dream come true: a silly competition, to become the ‘legs’ of an exciting new brand of tights – a necessity as hemlines grew shorter and shorter. Little June Agnew had won and convinced herself she was going to be propelled into a lucrative modelling career, hurled from oblivion in Twickenham to a giddy life of glamour. Through it she had got an agent, Milton, (who appeared from nowhere, but was extremely kind and helpful) who had changed her name from June to Juno and told her she was going to be a star.

With her white-blonde hair and huge eyes and skinny, endless legs, Juno was the queen of mini skirts and kinky boots and white plastic macs, all sugar-pink lipstick and spidery false lashes. There was money (to her it seemed a fortune, but now she knew that other people had been creaming it off and just giving her the bare minimum), a Chelsea flat-share, parties, cameras, late nights – and then a screen test. Everyone had gone into ecstasies. She was, it seemed, a natural. And she had to admit it came easy to her. She memorised the lines they gave her, and pretended. It seemed that was how easy acting was. She could sense Milton’s excitement and the stakes getting higher. She was told to watch her weight and her behaviour, and had to have her hair done every morning before she left the flat.

Milton told her to be patient. The big jobs would come. But she had to do the small ones first. He got her a job on a sweepingly lush romantic film set on the west coast of Ireland, about a young girl who gets pregnant by the local aristocrat and wreaks her revenge. The script was by an acclaimed playwright and the director was renowned for savagely beautiful productions. Mick Gillespie was the star. Juno was to play the barmaid in the local pub. She had two lines.

Juno had devoured the script and loved it. She dreamed about the actress playing the heroine getting pneumonia, and them casting Juno, because they’d spotted her talent. The actress remained robustly healthy throughout. But Mick Gillespie noticed her. He noticed her all right.

In Ireland, she’d never known rain like it. It was there all the time. Yet it was soft. It was like having your skin kissed endlessly.

‘Does it ever stop?’ she asked him and he laughed.

‘Not in my lifetime.’

And the smell. She loved the smell of the burning peat that sharpened the damp. And the colours, smudgy and muted, everything in soft focus, as if you’d forgotten your glasses.

He lent her his cream Aran sweater. It swamped her, but in it she felt safe and loved and special. She wore it to the pub with jeans, her hair tousled and not a scrap of make-up, and they sat by the fire with glasses of Guinness and she thought she had never been happier. She wanted time to stop.

And then, on the last day, her dream was ripped apart. She had been so sure of them that it came as a huge shock. She had assumed they would carry on. There had been no indication this was temporary.

He was standing behind her on the cliff, his arms wrapped around her. She fitted just under his chin. The wind was buffeting at them, but he was strong and sure, so she didn’t fear falling. Everything was grey: the clouds, the sky, the rocks. As grey as Donegal tweed, apart from the white-tipped waves, which were as skittish and playful as overfed horses, chasing each other into shore, kicking up their tails.

‘Well,’ said Mick. ‘It’s been fun, all right.’

‘It has,’ she replied, thinking he meant the shoot.

‘Ah well.’ His voice was tinged with regret; a fifth-glass-of-Guinness melancholy though he hadn’t had his first yet.

‘We can always come back another time.’ She put her hands over his. ‘Mrs Malone would always make us welcome, I’m sure.’

Mrs Malone was the landlady of the guest house they’d been billeted in.

She felt him tense as she leant further into him. Every muscle in his body.

‘Darling,’ he said, and she felt her heart plummet. ‘There won’t be another time. This is it.’

She whirled round to face him.

‘What?’

He had a strange smile on his face. ‘You must understand. You know the rules. Didn’t anyone tell you, when you signed up for the film?’

‘Tell me what?’ She was confused.

‘This is just a …’ He searched for the words. He found one, but he could sense she wouldn’t like it. ‘You know.’

‘A you know?’

He shrugged. ‘Fling?’

She stepped back. He reached out to pull her back. They were very near the cliff edge.

‘Fling.’ She could barely say the word.

‘You knew that!’ His eyes were screwed up in consternation.

She shook her head.

‘What did you think this was?’

She could hardly breathe. She took in gulps of air to quell her panic. She clutched her middle. It felt as if a surgeon had gone in with a knife and was cutting out her vital organs. No anaesthetic. The pain burned in her gullet.