Page 63 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
‘Vicky’s brought us some potatoes and more carrots, isn’t that kind?’ he said blandly.
‘Lovely!’ I agreed. ‘You can never have too many carrots. Perhaps I’ll batch bake a lot of carrot cakes tomorrow.’
‘I wish I could eat cake, but I daren’t, because you have to be soooo slim in my business,’ Vicky said, giving me a pitying look, as though I was the size of a minke whale. ‘But of course, it doesn’t matter for you.’
‘When Angel isn’t wearing those big boots, I have to tie her to something to stop her floating away,’ Carey said, and she gave him a puzzled look. I’m not sure she has a sense of humour, or if she has, it’s withered from lack of use.
Fang had been gulping down the last of his dinner as if he suspected Vicky of coming to steal it. Now he’d finished, he began his slow-stalking, lip-lifting and growling routine – and after he’d been so nice to the cleaners, too! I’d started to think that, apart from Ella, he was fine with women, it was just men he hated.
Vicky recoiled. ‘Mum warned me you had a vicious dog. He’s very ugly, too, isn’t he?’
‘Ithink he’s cute,’ I said, picking him up and holding him on my knee, where he continued to vibrate with temper, like an idling engine.
Seeing he was secured, Vicky sat down opposite, uninvited, and cast her big, baby-blue orbs around the room.
‘Gosh, it looks so different in here now!’
‘Of course, you must have been in and out of the house all your life,’ I said.
‘Not really. I was about fourteen when Mr Revell offered Mum and Dad jobs and somewhere to live, and I’d never seen the place till then. He didn’t encourage me to come to the house, either, because he didn’t like teenagers, especially female ones. In fact, Mum said he didn’t really like women, full stop, so how he came to be married twice, I don’t know!’
She gave Carey a melting smile, but he’d gone back to chopping onions and garlic to jazz up the ready-made pasta sauce and missed it.
When he did look up, through slightly watering eyes, he said to her, frowning, ‘You know, the minute I saw you I was sure I’d seen you before somewhere and it’s still puzzling me.’
For a moment, her face went strangely blank, and then she said, ‘Really? But I’m sure you haven’t seen my blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances inCasualtyandCoronation Street, so it must have been in Dulwich Village.’
‘Do you live there?’
‘I did, and I used to catch sight of you cycling around occasionally – and once you were going into Gino’s Café just when I was leaving with some friends. I didn’t think you’d noticed me, though.’
Not for want of trying to catch his attention, I suspected. I bet she’d tried everything bar throwing herself to the ground and clinging to his knees.
‘I suppose that must be where I remember you from,’ he agreed, though still frowning, as if trying to grasp some distant and elusive memory.
‘Of course, I’d no idea you were related to theMossbyRevells until your uncle made a will not long before he died, and told Mum you were his estranged brother’s son and he was leaving everything to you. It was a bit mean of him, I thought, because she’d assumed she was his only relative.’
‘She wasn’t really related to him at all, though, was she?’ I pointed out. ‘She was the daughter of his second wife by her first marriage.’
‘She looked after him like a daughter, anyway,’ Vicky insisted. ‘And when he told her about the will, she was so upset she jumped in the car and drove straight down to my place. Dad had no idea what had happened to her till I rang him to say where she was.’
It was odd to think of Ella, Vicky and Carey all being in Dulwich Village at the same time, though perhaps by then Carey had already had his accident and was in hospital.
‘I’ve sold my flat in Dulwich now,’ Carey said.
‘I’m not there any more either, because I lost my flat share after the other two got married within a month of each other, so I’m back with Mum and Dad for the minute. My agent’s sniffing around, so if any auditions or work come up, I’ll crash on a friend’s sofa till I find something else I can afford. I’m getting more work as an extra these days, though I usually get the roles with a couple of words to say,’ she added.
‘It must be a hard profession to make a living in, unless you’re really lucky,’ I said.
‘Or you know someone useful, who will give you a hand up.’ She directed a languishing glance at Carey, though what she thought he could do to boost her to stardom, goodness knows. He doesn’t have theatre directors or film producers in his back pocket.
‘Mum saysyou’rean old friend of Carey’s, down on your luck and staying here till you’re back on your feet again,’ she said, making me sound like a bag lady that Carey let sleep in the doorway out of charity.
‘No,I’mthe one trying, quite literally, to get back on my feet again,’ Carey said. ‘Angel and I have been friends all our lives and we just happen to need each other’s support at the moment.’
‘Friends from our cradle days, when we threw our rattles at each other,’ I agreed. ‘And I wasn’t so much down on my luck, Vicky, as bereaved – I lost my partner before Christmas.’
‘Oh, really?’ She perked up slightly. That made me practically a grieving widow and so no competition at all. ‘I mean, that’s sooo sad,’ she commiserated.
