only ever seemed to recognise her and want to waylay her for an autograph—or a chat about their latest baking disaster—when she was in a rush, chronically late or on a collision course with her daughter Lizzie’s prodigious temper. As all three defcon positions were currently in countdown mode, she absolutely could not risk it.
Darting past the YO! Sushi on her left and the ticket office on her right, she narrowly avoided a young mum with a pushchair while circumnavigating a group of backpack-toting foreign students going at a pace that would make a geriatric snail look like Usain Bolt.
She sucked in a couple of extra breaths, feeling winded as she hit the main thoroughfare.
Note to self: Get that bloody cross-trainer in the basement out of mothballs.
Raising her head to check her direction, she made eye contact with a sharply dressed office worker who sent her a don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere smile. Halle returned it while shooting past on full steam before the woman figured out the answer.
She hated to be impolite or abrupt with people who recognised her. And up until two years ago, she had always been more than willing to stop and chat about collapsing soufflés or how to make the perfect choux pastry, because she’d gotten a major rush out of any kind of acknowledgement. She was still both humbled and chuffed to bits at any sign that people enjoyed and appreciated her Domestic Diva brand. But in the past twenty-four months, ever since The Best of Everything had moved from a morning slot on cable TV to an early evening slot on BBC Two and her third book—The Best on a Budget—had hit the bestseller charts, the attention had begun to interfere more and more with even Magnifico-Multitask Mum’s ability to keep all the plates in her life spinning.
Hence being a tiny bit tardy to collect her daughter from the Eurostar terminal after Lizzie’s four-day trip to Paris to visit her father. The production meeting had overrun, as it always did. But Halle thought she’d programmed in more than enough time to get from Soho to King’s Cross. And if it hadn’t been for that plonker trying to do a right turn in a no-right-turn zone outside the British Library, she so would have made it here in time. She mentally tucked her frustration away, pasting on what she hoped was her most competent and unflustered smile as she spotted her daughter, slumped glumly on one of the benches by the Eurostar exit, with her boots perched on her suitcase, her iPod earbuds in and her smartphone out as she texted furiously—probably about what an arsewipe her mum was to all her friends on Facebook.
Halle slowed, as love and relief barrelled into her chest and combined with her breathlessness to make her light-headed. Given she was already several crucial nanoseconds late, she might as well take a moment to admire her eighteen-year-old daughter before facing the full force of Lizzie’s disgust.
Long-limbed and slim—but not too slim any more, thank goodness—Lizzie had what Halle had always craved, a coltish elegance that was natural and unaffected and didn’t require the help of a personal trainer and/or industrial-strength Spanx. The soft tangle of strawberry blonde hair hanging down her back, which had fizzed around her head as a baby and made her look like a cherubic dandelion, was equally arresting. Sometime in the past two years, after what Halle had panicked might be an eating disorder, Lizzie had lost that pudgy tomboyish quality that Halle had always adored and grown into this beautiful if sullen and secretive swan.
Halle shook off the thought to stop the guilt from constricting around her stomach like a freakishly large anaconda. No need to go there, again. Somewhere along the line, Lizzie had stopped being that happy-go-lucky tomboy who had been open and eager about everything and an absolute marvel with her little brother, Aldo, and become a volatile teenager with a quick-fire temper who resented her mother’s success and thought the now ten-year-old Aldo was the spawn of Satan.
To be fair, given Aldo’s genius for making everyone’s life hell, including his own, Halle did secretly sympathise with her daughter on that score. And really the only thing for Halle to remember in the face of her daughter’s derision was what the family counsellor had told her.
That teenage rebellion was normal, that it was much better for Halle to have to deal with Lizzie’s temper than having her daughter internalise everything and that while Halle’s family set-up wasn’t completely the norm, very few people’s were these days. In fact, the norm these days was pretty much the anti-norm. And, if nothing else, Halle’s family—which included a ten-year-old son who didn’t have a father, and an eighteen-year-old daughter who saw her father, whose name Halle couldn’t say without flinching, only six weeks a year—fitted perfectly into the anti-norm mould.
The truth was, there was nothing Halle could do about Aldo’s lack of a father—except hire a wonderful au pair like Trey Carson to take some of the slack. And nothing she needed to do about Lizzie’s dickhead of a dad, Luke Best, except remember every time she got the urge to flinch that she only had to deal with Luke’s bullshit by proxy these days.
No, all Halle needed to focus on now was one simple truth.
That Lizzie wasn’t colourful, durable Tupperware any more, who would bounce if Halle dropped her—as she had so often when her children were small and she’d been juggling two menial jobs, ad hoc childcare and her fledgling party-cake baking business in a Stoke Newington council flat all on her own. Somehow or other, while Halle hadn’t been paying the proper attention, because she’d been focused on making her career happen, her daughter had become china. Fragile, delicate, brittle china that had the potential to shatter if Halle let it fall off its perch. But as long as Halle knew that and remained vigilant, ready to handle any potential wobbles, everything would be absolutely fine.
Which meant finding the time to collect Lizzie in person from the Eurostar terminal, especially as she’d just celebrated a milestone birthday in Paris, instead of arranging for a car and driver to do it instead. But the occasional hiccup—like some tosser thinking he could turn right when the sign clearly said he could not—was not Halle’s fault, and she must not beat herself up about it. Especially as Lizzie was now perfectly capable of doing that for her.
Pushing the anaconda the rest of the way back down her throat, Halle waved her hand in front of Lizzie’s face and smiled as her daughter’s head bobbed up and she tugged out her earbuds.
‘About time. Where have you been? I’ve been waiting here forever.’
‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ Halle said, knowing ‘forever’ had been a maximum of ten minutes. ‘Did the train arrive early?’
‘No, you were late. As always.’ Lizzie scowled. ‘Dad’s never late picking me up at the other end, you know.’
Yes, Halle did know, because Lizzie had never missed an opportunity to point out all the things her dad did right and Halle did wrong.
‘Well, at least I’m here now,’ Halle replied, keeping her beatific smile firmly in place and nobly resisting the urge to list all the things Lizzie’s father had done wrong once upon a time. Apart from the fact that would take months, Halle had made a decision sixteen years ago, when she had negotiated Luke’s request for visitation rights through the duty solicitor at the Citizens Advice Bureau in Hackney, that never having to talk to Luke again was worth the price of not slagging him off to his daughter.
Her silence on the subject of Luke’s betrayal, his selfishness and his numerous character flaws had been agony to maintain when Lizzie was little, and the pain of what he’d done was still fresh, still raw, still all-consuming. But she’d managed it, by keeping three things front and centre in her mind: Lizzie idolised her dad; the less Lizzie knew about her parents’ broken relationship, the less likely it was to become a point of conflict between them; and, for all his many faults, which were legion, Luke did love his daughter—unlike Aldo’s father, Claudio,
