‘Oh, have you spoken to her?’
‘We still Skype every week. Lucy’s orders.’ Cesca rolled her eyes.
‘Good old Lucy, she has you all under control. That’s what oldest sisters are for, isn’t it?’ He smiled gently.
‘It’s like a military operation,’ she agreed. ‘With Kitty in LA and Juliet in Maryland, Lucy and I are the only two in the same time zone. Trying to get us all on the call at the same time is like herding cats.’ And even then, Lucy was three hundred miles away in Edinburgh. The Shakespeare sisters were like flowers scattered in the wind.
Hugh placed the tray on the polished coffee table, leaning over to pour Earl Grey from the ornate Chinese teapot into the cups. Passing one to Cesca, he took the other with him to the winged chair by the fireplace. Closing his eyes, he inhaled the aroma before taking a tiny sip. ‘Ah, bliss.’
Cesca took a drink of her own tea, appreciating the mild, flowery perfume. Like so many other things, it was Hugh who had introduced her to the intricacies of tea, forcing her to learn the many variations of leaves at a time when her friends were downing cans of Coke. From those first few tastings she’d developed a love of the hot drink, appreciating the luxury of a well-brewed leaf, able to tell the difference between a lapsang souchong and a da hong pao with her eyes shut. For Hugh, tea was a ritual, something to be savoured. He winced every time he saw somebody simply dunking a bag in a mug filled with hot water and milk.
Placing her cup down, Cesca sat back on the sofa, curling her feet beneath her. ‘You’d think that if I love tea this much, working in a café would be simple.’
‘Two completely different things, my dear,’ Hugh told her. ‘It’s like enjoying a good steak and then comparing it to working in an abattoir.’
‘That might be my next job,’ Cesca said grimly. ‘Except they probably wouldn’t even give me a chance. Not with my history.’
She sat back and took a look around Hugh’s beautiful apartment. The red brick building in Mayfair couldn’t be further from Cesca’s dismal flat, although only a few miles separated them. In lifestyle, though, they were oceans apart. Hugh came from old money, and his late mother had willed this apartment to him when he was in his twenties. The furnishings inside were family heirlooms. The chairs ranged from the Regency to the Victorian period, and despite their age all the tables looked almost new, their wood polished and shiny. Even the walls held evidence of his ancestry, with his long-dead great-great-grandfather staring down at them from a painting above the fireplace.
‘This has to stop. You know that, don’t you?’
She whipped her head around to look at Hugh. ‘What do you mean?’
He looked pained, but resolved. ‘You know exactly what I mean. I’ve watched you hop from job to job for too long. It’s not right. I promised your mother I’d look after you. I hate breaking promises.’
‘You do look after me,’ Cesca told him. ‘By being here, by listening to me moan. Most people would have given up on me.’
Hugh topped up their cups, holding the china pot carefully. ‘You need help, poppet, not a listening ear. If I were an American I’d have staged an intervention by now.’
For the first time since she’d walked into his apartment, Cesca smiled. ‘You’d hate an intervention. All that talking about feelings and making me cry. The only thing you like staging is a play at the theatre.’
He looked up and caught her eye, and Cesca realised she wasn’t going to get out of this conversation easily. ‘That’s the only thing you should be thinking about, too. You have the theatre in your blood, yet you’ve been running away from it for six years.’
She felt her chest constrict. ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’
‘And I thought I was the one with a stiff upper lip. That’s your whole problem, don’t you see? Maybe if you talked about it, and really worked things through, you’d have got over it by now. Instead here you are getting sacked from dead-end jobs, and squandering your talent.’
Her mouth felt dry, in spite of the tea. ‘Shit happens, and it happened to me. I had my chance and I’m not good enough for it to happen again.’
Hugh slammed his cup down, causing tea to spill over the sides. ‘I don’t want to hear you say that! You were eighteen years old; the world was at your feet. And yes, “shit happened”, as you so elegantly describe it. But that doesn’t make you any less talented.’
‘My play bombed.’ It still hurt to say it, even after all these years. ‘They closed it down after a week. The producers lost all that money.’
‘Damn it, Cesca, it wasn’t your fault. The play was good, you know that.’
‘It doesn’t matter. If nobody wants to come to see it, if everybody returns their tickets, then I may as well not have bothered.’
‘They returned the tickets because the leading man disappeared. And that wasn’t your fault either.’
No, it wasn’t her fault at all. It was Sam Carlton’s fault, the good-looking, talented bastard. ‘I should’ve known it was all too good to be true. I mean, what kind of man leaves town after press night? Before the play even opens?’
Hugh shrugged. ‘I know he left at the wrong moment, but it wasn’t personal.’
She slammed her hand on the table next to her. ‘Of course it was personal.’ Tears stung her eyes. ‘Everything about that play was personal. I bled those words out. And he just left, Hugh, without saying a word. He left us all in the lurch the day before we were supposed to open. So don’t tell me it wasn’t personal, because it was.’
‘You’re being irrational.’
She took a deep breath. ‘I know I am. You must think I’m an idiot. And I know it’s not his fault the understudy sucked, or that the play closed. But look at him, he’s disgustingly successful, and I’m . . . well, I’m me.’