‘Mmmm…sounds like you’ll have the moral majority on your back tomorrow.’
Raine laughed. ‘Bring them on,’ she said. ‘Are you coming to Sheen’s?’
Carla shook her head. ‘Do you mind if I take a rain check and head straight home? I’m whacked.’
‘Not at all. I’m tired myself but I need to sweet-talk the buyers. Is my bro skulking in dark corners tonight?’
‘He should be home by now. How’s Gillian?’
Raine’s smile faded. ‘She’s good. Not much energy though. That last chemo session was tough.’
‘Tell her I’ll drop in tomorrow.’
‘Will do.’ Raine leaned forward and patted Carla’s stomach. ‘Night night, little one. Lay off the football for tonight and give your mum a chance to sleep. She’s had a busy day.’
Across the lounge, Sue Sheehan had settled awkwardly into a deep armchair beside a slight woman with glasses. Carla felt a fleeting sympathy as she imagined her difficulty when the time came to get up again. All she seemed to notice nowadays were women at the same advanced stage as herself.
Outside the hotel, she hailed a taxi. Lizzy Carr, in jeans and a puffa jacket, all traces of her Goth persona removed, waved as she ran down the hotel steps. She was followed by two other models, who were also heading to Sheen’s on the Green. For an instant Carla was tempted to follow but then a taxi driver pulled up and she stepped into the taxi’s dark interior.
In the company of models, Carla moved in an assured world where she did not have to apologise for being tall. No more cramped knees from bending to listen to others. No more enduring jokes about giraffe necks or being asked if it was cold up there. Her face, attractive but not beautiful, could be moulded to define a mood, an emotion, an atmosphere. The perfect face, declared the scout who had approached her on Grafton Street when she was sixteen and persuaded her to consider the catwalk for a career. She had acquired the poise and confidence to stand aloof from conversations and discovered that such indifference made people strain upwards so that they could hear what she had to say. But with Robert Gardner, everything was mouth to mouth, eye level to eye level.
He was waiting for her when she arrived home.
‘So, how did it go?’ he asked and drew her down on his knee. He smelled of soap and shampoo. Nothing about his appearance suggested that he had spent his day working on the grim and secretive side of the city streets.
‘The wedding dress was the highlight. I wanted to get married all over again.’
‘That could be arranged,’ Robert said. ‘Only one stipulation. No change of groom.’
‘As if I would.’ She kissed him but was unable to prevent a yawn escaping.
‘So much for my sex appeal.’ Robert eased her to the floor. ‘Come on. It’s way past your bedtime.’
She leaned heavily on his arm as they left the living room. She was glad of his height, his strong arms. During the last week, she had become aware of a slight listing movement when she walked. They would have a tall child. No problem if it was a boy but for a girl, Carla thought, remembering her own lanky teenage years, maybe not so good.
In bed, they spooned against each other and drifted towards sleep. One of them, or perhaps both, stirred with lazy desire and Robert’s arms tightened around her. Their lovemaking was passionate but gentle. She moaned softly into the pillow and their baby moved. Robert felt the rippling sensation beneath his fingers and, suddenly nervous, held back until, responding to her touch, he entered her slowly from behind. She clenched him tightly inside her, her energy carrying them swiftly over the edge of desire.
Afterwards, still in the same coiled position, she tried to sleep. Her leg cramped and the baby’s elbows seemed wedged under her ribcage. Robert turned, slapped the pillow without waking, and sank his head deeper into it. The room was cold, the central heating off. She pulled on a towelling dressing gown and tied the belt below her stomach. She paused before a full-length mirror and smiled at her bearlike appearance. If the photographers could see her now, there would be a very different photograph on the front of the tabloids tomorrow.
Downstairs, she entered her compact office. Once, rooms such as these had served as dens for husbands who smoked pipes in comfort and isolated themselves from the daily domestic routine. She sifted through the latest batch of letters, answered a few and chose the ones she would use in her column. Shortly before meeting Robert, she had enrolled in a media studies course, fitting her lectures around her modelling assignments. She now had her degree and a regular column in Weekend Flair, a Sunday newspaper supplement magazine. Carla was under no illusions that the reason she had been approached by the editor had more to do with her Anticipation profile than her media degree. But the number of letters kept rising from women seeking advice on morning sickness and weird hunger urges. Some letters amused her, others were so filled with pain and frustration that she shrank from answering them in her column, aware of her own inexperience. In such instances she passed them on to Alyssa Faye.
She was also beginning to receive commissions from other magazines. The feature in Pizzazz was excellent. She picked up the celebrity magazine from her desk and flicked through the pages until she came to the ‘before and after’ feature she had written about the refurbishment of their end-of-terrace Georgian house. When the alterations had first begun, she had taken photographs of the resulting chaos and these photographs had been juxtaposed against a photoshoot of the finished results. So far, she had not shown the magazine to Robert; the memory of the row that followed her decision to write the feature in the first place was still fresh in her mind.
‘Absolutely no way,’ he had declared when he heard that a photographer intended photographing each room in their house. ‘I’ve no intention of allowing our lives to feature in some cheap, pretentious magazine.’
‘Cheap?’ Carla, used to having the camera trained on her, had been astonished by his reaction. ‘There’s nothing cheap about Pizzazz.’
‘The title says it all,’ he declared. ‘“Pizzazz”. How could you possibly want us to feature in such a vacuous publication?’
‘It’s not vacuous and everyone wants to feature in it.’
‘Everyone?’ He scoffed. ‘Who the hell is everyone?’
‘It’s for Raine’s sake.’ She had changed direction, aware of how shallow she sounded, or rather, she thought, how shallow he had made her sound. ‘She’s invested everything in her publicity campaign. This is another opportunity to promote Anticipation.’
‘Not at my expense,’ he had argued. ‘I insist you cancel the arrangement.’
‘Insist?’ Carla was outraged by his arrogance.
‘You used to protect my anonymity,’ he retorted. ‘Now you want to splatter my private life everywhere.’
‘What’s to splatter?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t expect you to appear in the photographs. I’m not that stupid.’
‘I never said you were stupid. But you need to slow down on the exposure you get. It’s different now. You have to think of others besides yourself.’
‘Come off it, Robert,’ she retorted. ‘The average junkie is hardly likely to have Pizzazz on his reading list.’
When he paid no attention to her arguments, she cried. Her tears were genuine but under control. She had a modelling assignment the following day and could not afford a ravaged face. Robert had never seen her cry. His anger was immediately replaced by concern and, eventually, by capitulation.
‘I want our privacy to be respected, especially when our baby comes along,’ he had warned her. ‘This is the last time anyone from the media sets foot in our house.’
Looking at the glossy photographs,