glad you think so.’ He sticks an arm out into the road to hail a black cab that’s just trundling by, opens the door and jerks his head for me to climb in. ‘Hop in, then, Fire Girl. Your tuna baguette awaits.’
We haven’t come to a sandwich bar, and we aren’t eating tuna baguettes. Or Wotsits, for that matter. And there’s not a can of Fanta in sight.
We’re in a posh hamburger joint in Clerkenwell, in the cosiest, most private booth available, eating huge and absurdly delicious hamburgers with perfect crunchy fries, and drinking – as you do with hamburgers, apparently, in Dillon World – a bottle of perfectly chilled Sauvignon.
And the best bit of all is that Dillon is flirting with me.
Of course, this sounds slightly more exciting than the reality, because in actual fact, he seems incapable of not flirting. He’s flirted with every single female we’ve encountered since we got out of the taxi: a pretty blonde walking her tiny dog past us on the street; the gorgeous redhead who greeted us as we entered the diner; the curvy Brazilian waitress who keeps finding excuses to come to our table and refill Dillon’s water glass, or offer more condiments, or find out if the burgers/fries/side salads/blobs of coleslaw have been prepared to our satisfaction.
And he’s only flirting in a ponytail-pulling sort of way. I’m not imagining that I’m about to become his One True Love, or anything. Or even one of his Many True Lusts, nice though this would be.
‘You see?’ he’s saying now, reaching over and swiping the largest and crunchiest-looking of the fries off my plate. ‘I told you I needed your protection from the slavering hordes so I could eat my lunch in peace. And look,’ he waves a chip-holding hand around the almost-empty restaurant, ‘nobody has bothered us.’
‘That’s because it’s gone three o’clock and everyone has finished their lunch already and gone home.’
‘Don’t underestimate yourself, Fire Girl.’ He swipes another chip, and waggles it at me before popping it into his mouth. ‘I’ve been in empty restaurants in the past and, before you know it, word gets out, there’s a Twitter alert and people come running. But something about you is clearly keeping the peace.’ He sits back, folds his arms, and studies me intently for a moment. ‘You’ve got a sort of … air about you.’
‘Air?’
‘Mm. Cool. Elegant.’
I snort wine out of my nose.
‘Less so when you’re doing that, obviously,’ he adds.
I grab my napkin and attempt to dab away the worst of the wine in a ladylike fashion, just like Audrey Hepburn would do in the infinitesimally small likelihood that she ever did this herself. (And I don’t count the whole spilling-wine-over-Cary-Grant thing. Spilling is delightfully kooky; snorting is … well, not.)
But the compliment has knocked me for six. Because I’m not sure that anybody, in the history of the entire world, has ever called me either cool or elegant before.
‘Admittedly it also helps when you’re not running around with flames leaping out of your head.’ Dillon picks up the Sauvignon bottle. ‘More wine?’
‘God, yes. I mean, yes,’ I say, trying to sound cool and elegant instead of borderline alcoholic. ‘That would be lovely.’
He pours the dregs of the bottle into my glass (Christ, we got through that quickly) and turns round to grab the waitress’s attention. ‘Could you bring us another of the same, darling?’
Oh, dear. A light haze of alcohol is one thing, but if I plough into a second bottle, I risk getting giggly and silly, which isn’t going to do very much for this air of cool elegance that Dillon has mistakenly identified about me.
‘I’d better not,’ I say. ‘I don’t normally drink at lunchtime.’
‘Then I recommend that you start. It improves the afternoon no end. Now, isn’t this nicer,’ he says, settling back into the depths of his half of the booth and sending a dazzling smile across the table, ‘than that miserable tuna baguette you wanted for lunch?’
‘Weren’t you the one promising tuna baguettes?’
‘No, no, my dear Libby, that can’t have been me. When I take a lady out to lunch, I take her in style.’
Just for a moment, I remember that the lady he was hoping to take out to lunch today is Rhea Haverstock-Harley.
And I think he remembers, too, because he frowns for a moment and grabs the bottle of wine the Brazilian waitress has just brought over without bothering to smile flirtatiously up at her and say thank you.
‘So,’ he says, grabbing my glass and sloshing some wine into it before doing the same with his own, ‘tell me. What’s the plan, Libby?’
‘Plan?’
‘For you. Now that you’re freed from that piffling little job on … sorry, what’s the show called again?’
‘The Time Guardians. Seriously,’ I add, made bold by the Sauvignon, ‘don’t you think you should try to watch an episode or two before someone asks you about it in an interview, or something?’
It’s his turn to snort, though less unattractively. ‘That’ll be the day. All anybody ever wants to know when they interview me is who I’m shagging.’ He drains his glass and sloshes in some more wine. ‘Anyway, we were talking about you, weren’t we? About your big plans to set the acting world ablaze. No pun intended.’
‘But – er – I don’t have any plans to set the acting world ablaze.’
‘Oh, come on. Aren’t all you actresses consumed with ambition? Happy to stab your own grandmother in the back as long as it gets you the big part you want?’
I blame Big Blond Willi for the image that the words ‘big part’ have just conjured up in my head. Well, that and the Sauvignon. Well, that and the fact that it’s difficult to sit opposite Dillon and not have pretty much all your thoughts turn into naughty, bedroom-related ones. I shove in a couple more chips – at the very least, I can try to absorb some of the Sauvignon – and try, again, to summon up some more of that cool elegance Dillon mentioned earlier. All I have to do, really, is emulate my hallucination of Audrey from last night; it’s probably a good idea to stop shovelling these chips into my mouth, then, come to think of it.
‘The thing is,’ I say, ‘I’m not really an actress.’
‘If you’re not really an actress, darling, then what were you doing covered in zit-covered latex on the set of a TV show?’
‘No, I mean, I’ve just sort of … fallen into it.’ This sounds, I realize, a bit like I’m talking about a heap of dung. Though, come to think of it, a heap of dung isn’t a bad description of my entire acting career. ‘My sister is the real actress. Oh, shit!’ I clap a hand to my mouth. ‘Her nail polish! Her dry cleaning!’
‘Oh,
