It better be, thought Sasha, and smiled a dazzling smile.
‘So how was the casting? Who was it again? Vogue?’
Carole Sinclair was sitting waiting for her daughter at a corner table in Harrods restaurant. In town for last-minute Christmas shopping, she had insisted on meeting Sasha after her casting and ‘treating’ her to afternoon tea. This annoyed Sasha; as a failed ex-model herself, her mother knew full well that she couldn’t actually eat anything.
At forty-eight, Sasha’s mother looked ten years younger. She had perfectly blow-dried hair and her skin was lightly tanned from a recent tennis holiday in the Algarve. Around her feet were an assortment of green and gold Harrods carrier bags. Sasha had overheard her father say that they should ‘pull our belts in this Christmas’ but Carole clearly hadn’t been paying attention.
‘No,’ said Sasha, air-kissing her mother and sitting down. ‘It was an ad agency. They’re casting for the Venus chocolate girl.’
‘So have you got it?’ Carole asked with a note of disapproval.
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Maybe if you didn’t wear jeans for your appointments you might be a bit more successful,’ she said, looking at Sasha’s skin-tight Levis.
Sasha rolled her eyes. ‘What do you want me to wear, Mum? Couture?’
>
Carole picked a piece of imaginary lint from her tailored trousers. ‘I just think you might do better if you made yourself look a bit prettier. In my day we got dressed up when we went to see clients.’
‘And look what good it did you.’
Carole Sinclair gave her daughter a tart glance. ‘I only want the best for you, darling.’
The best for yourself, thought Sasha. At school, Sasha had spent so many years describing her father as the CFO of a multinational company that she had almost come to believe it herself, but the truth was a little less glamorous. Gerald Sinclair was the in-house accountant for a small shipping company and brought home £50,000 a year. A good salary, but not enough to keep Carole in the manner she desired. A townhouse in Belgravia and a chauffeur-driven Roller would have suited her mother’s ambitions; instead she had a four-bedroom semi in Esher and a three-year-old BMW.
‘Aren’t you going to eat that sandwich?’
Sasha shook her head and glared at her mother. Before she’d even had her first casting, the agency had baldly told her that she needed to lose at least a stone, so she had spent the last six months of her life hungry.
‘Fair enough. We don’t want you putting on too much weight over Christmas, do we?’
Christmas, thought Sasha. Perhaps now would be a good time to bring up the loan. She’d tried asking her father, but every time she mentioned it, he politely changed the conversation. Well, if you can’t ask during the season of giving... she thought.
‘Did you and Dad think any more about lending me the deposit for a flat?’
Carole put down her Earl Grey tea. ‘I fail to see why you need to move to town when you have a perfectly good bedroom in Esher.’
‘Come on, Mum. What about when I go out? It’s thirty pounds in a taxi from the King’s Road.’
‘Why do you need to be going to nightclubs all the time?’
‘You know I need to go out,’ said Sasha, exasperated. ‘I need to meet people, make contacts. It was the same in your day.’
Carole shrugged and looked away.‘What about Caroline’s house?’ she asked.
Sasha cast her eyes to the ceiling. Caroline was a friend from Danehurst who was now working at Pickton House publishers. For the last four months Sasha had had a tacit agreement with her: in return for Sasha getting Caroline and her two housemates into the many clubs and parties which routinely invited models from the agency, Caroline would let Sasha crash in their draughty end-of-terrace in Chelsea’s Flood Street. Not that she got a real bed; she was relegated to a camp bed in a corridor where they kept their bikes and coats. She would wake up with a crick in her neck and Caroline banging on about the fabulous night they’d had. She was beginning to think she had got the rough end of the bargain.
‘How can I look pretty for castings after sleeping on someone’s ratty couch?’
‘Is this about bringing men home?’ said Carole.
Sasha didn’t blush. She and her mother had always had a very open relationship when it came to sex; indeed, Carole had instilled in her daughter the importance of using her looks and body to snare a rich man. ‘Keep him happy in bed,’ she had said, ‘and he’ll keep your bank account full.’
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘But say I do meet a Hollywood film director in Raffles, I can hardly bring him back to my mum and dad’s house, can I?’
Carole sighed. ‘Look, we can probably give you the deposit, but how are you going to pay rent every month? You’re hardly snowed under with work.’