A Class Act (Beddingfield #1)

Chapter 1

1

I’d first encountered Carrington when chasing the part of a female barrister. Wanting to gen up on how my character might act in real life (and now, knowing the man – in every sense of the word – I’m more convinced than ever that those called to the bar are actors worthy of any Sunday evening TV series) I’d taken myself off one morning and joined the burgeoning queue outside the Central Criminal Court on Newgate Street.

Together with those nervously waiting to support family and friends – as well as others nosily, or downright ghoulishly, hoping to catch some unfolding excitement – once instructed, I followed the uniformed court official and trooped in after him. We all self-consciously kept our eyes and thoughts to ourselves as we were ushered up and into the public gallery, which reminded me of balcony seats in a small provincial theatre.

Having hoped to make notes on, and emulate, a woman barrister, I was disappointed to see the only female in the legal profession present was the judge and immediately wondered how I could extract myself from my seat to try my luck in another court. It was like being at the theatre when you’re suddenly desperate for a pee but don’t dare disturb the whole row, knowing each and every one will have to rise like a Mexican wave, dropping jackets and coats, tutting crossly while doing so.

Making the decision to count to ten before attempting to make my exit, I’d got to nine when I saw him.

‘Fabian Mansfield Carrington KC,’ my neighbour informed me knowingly as I started to rise, before sitting back down, transfixed. ‘One of the youngest – if not the youngest – to become a King’s Counsel.’

‘How on earth do you know that?’ I whispered back, unable to take my eyes from the man in question.

‘Oh, I know everything about my boys,’ she said importantly, exhaling a cloud of minty breath in my direction.

‘Your boys ?’

‘Yes, been coming here for years. Know ’em all,’ she boasted. ‘I’ll often manage to have a chat with them at some point.’

‘Really?’ I stared.

‘Absolutely,’ she whispered again. ‘Fabian down there is set on becoming a top judge one day. Bit of all right, isn’t he?’ she added, surreptitiously offering me a Polo mint as though it were an illegal class A drug. ‘He’s my favourite at the moment; never miss one of his performances if I can help it. So, how do you know the defendant, then? Is he a loved one? Your brother? Boyfriend?’

‘No. No, nothing like that.’ I laughed, to her obvious disappointment: I could see she’d have loved to have been offering a hanky or a sympathetic hand if my ‘loved one’ was about to be sent down for ten years. ‘I don’t know him at all. I’m an actor. Out of work at the moment. Well, no, I do work – at Graphite . On Conduit Street in Mayfair?’ I might not particularly enjoy the shifts I put in there three times a week, but I wasn’t averse to a bit of showing off about the restaurant – it was, after all, listed in Time Out and Esquire as one of London’s top ten restaurants.

‘Fancy.’ Minty Breath sniffed, somewhat disdainfully. I’d bet any money, three hundred years ago she’d have bagged a good seat, knitting in hand, at every public hanging at Tyburn Gallows.

‘Right.’ I dithered, probing with the tip of my tongue the hole in the mint, knowing I really should move to another court to observe a female barrister, but completely entranced by the man now standing in the well of the court. He paused, shuffling papers in front of him, and then bent to speak to a colleague who, catching his arm, was obviously determined to have his full attention. After a few seconds, Carrington turned slightly, his attention moving from those involved in the legal business of the day to those of us in the public gallery, idly surveying the audience to the drama that was about to unfold. As his eyes met mine, I felt myself utter an involuntary gasp: this man was quite devastating, but, after first giving me what could only be described as an incredibly intense stare, he looked away taking no further interest in what he’d seen.

‘Hard luck,’ Minty Breath cackled, nudging me in the ribs. ‘He almost makes love with those incredible eyes of his to hopeful girls who’ve come specially to watch him in action – I’ve seen it. You’re obviously not his type.’

Although what I really needed was to know what footwear a female barrister would have on, what hairdo she could get away with under her judicial wig, I reckoned I could learn at least something from the man now holding court with the twelve good men and women of the jury. I soon began to realise it wasn’t simply a matter of assembling a better narrative than the other side. Presentation was just as, if not more, important and this Fabian Carrington had obviously prepared his role with the same zeal as any method actor.

Carrington stood erect – no slouching shoulders, which might portray indecision or lack of confidence – keeping perfectly still and limiting hand movements to open, relaxed gestures. Everything about him communicated composure, authority and honesty. But it was his tone, his easy delivery and the repetition of phrases to emphasise a particular point that really marked out his professional skill. He moved from gentle solicitude, offering empathy with, and compassion for, his client, to suddenly changing tack and holding forth, with a scornful ennui as to the preposterous, even risible, allegations his client was having to answer to. Just five minutes into his opening speech, Fabian Carrington was already stirring the jury’s emotional responses.

As well as stirring lustful longing in every single little bit of me.

And very probably I’d have left it at that, leaving the Old Bailey not just with ideas and actions to accompany the lines I was learning for the forthcoming audition at the Queen Mary theatre in Paddington, but also with a sense of unfinished business. No doubt Carrington would have remained the object of my fantasies for a couple of days, a few weeks even. Then, with nothing to revive the memory of that dark hair escaping from beneath his wig, that easy melodic voice and those searching brown eyes – as well as having been turned down flat for the role of the female barrister in the TV drama – the image would gradually have faded from my mind.

After leaving school, I’d spent three years at Manchester Met, crossing the Pennines from my native Yorkshire village of Beddingfield where I’d grown up, to work for and gain a somewhat desultory degree in English and drama. I should have quit once I realised that three years in Manchester were going to do absolutely nothing to help me achieve my ambition of performing musical theatre in London, but my father, who only rarely deigned to visit Mum and his three daughters, had told me to hang on in there and graduate to the Manchester School of Theatre, which was, basically, just another department in the same university. When I’d demurred, told Jayden (we’d never called him Dad) that would mean adding to my already eye-watering student debt, he’d simply laughed, peeled off an equally eye-watering roll of fifties and told me to follow my dream. Weren’t Julie Walters and Richard Griffiths both past alumni of Manchester? he’d ventured. And look how they’d turned out. As Mamma Mia! , starring the irrepressible Julie Walters, was one of my absolute favourites, I did as Jayden suggested and remained in Manchester.

I adored every single minute of my latter years there, eking out my student loan and erratic handouts from Jayden by working in numerous bars and restaurants in the city centre. But I knew I never wanted to do anything else with my life but musical theatre. And I also knew that once I’d graduated I’d be fighting off every theatre producer – Andrew Lloyd Webber on my doorstep was a favourite fantasy – in the West End. They’d all be banging on my door, demanding I play the lead in their brand-new productions.

Some of it I got right. Heading to London in my mid-twenties, I found myself not only an agent (of somewhat dubious credentials, I’ll admit, but an agent nonetheless) but also the much-revered Equity card, as well, a particularly damp and noisome flatshare above a Turkish barber (with equally dubious credentials) and doner kebab joint in a badly lit back street of Hammersmith.

Despite my doing everything advised by Leonard, my agent, interviews and actual work were sporadic, if not downright non-existent, and I was more practised in pulling pints and waiting on tables in central London than applying greasepaint and being put through my paces in a chorus line. During my second year in the big city, however, things did finally start to happen and I spent two wonderful months in the chorus of Big , the musical, at the Dominion. I was on my way, loving every minute of being on stage and able, at last, to give up both my part-time waitress and barmaid jobs in Covent Garden. I had enough money – almost – to pay the rent and eat, and I knew this was just the start. And it was. As a consequence of my two-month run in Big , I auditioned and was given the part of Ernestina Money in a revival of Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly! . I was ecstatic, ringing Jayden, who was touring in Germany at the time, as well as Mum and my older sister Jess, both at home in Beddingfield. I was going places, moving up in the world: on the verge of global domination.

Unfortunately, so was Covid.

The show was put on hold before it ever got going and the restaurants and bars – my previous means of survival in London – closed, and in desperation I did what most unemployed twenty-some-year-olds had to do and retreated back home to the small terraced cottage of my childhood: to Mum and to Yorkshire. I’d not lived at home since the age of eighteen, but now found myself sharing my old bedroom with a twelve-year-old sister, the result of yet another of Jayden’s habitual returns to Lisa – my mum – and his family up north.

This reinstatement of a father figure in our lives, when I was thirteen and Jess fifteen s had lasted a couple of months before Jayden was off again – leaving Mum pregnant with Sorrel – touring with yet another band (think UB40 and you’ll get the picture) and, presumably, shacking up with one or more of his other women along the way. Mum had long since stopped questioning Jayden Allen, despite Jess and I having a go at her once we were in our teens and able to judge for ourselves this ridiculous relationship she’d put up with since she was just seventeen.

So, Covid-bound along with the rest of the nation, and having no idea when, or even if, I would ever be able to return to my first love, musical theatre, I made what was probably my first ever grown-up decision and enrolled on a Postgraduate Certificate in Education. It was all done online, and not validated until eighteen months later when I spent twenty-four weeks in various West Yorkshire comprehensives on school placements teaching English, dance and drama. The result of these terrifying placements was the authority to teach in any school in the UK, but also had me vowing never ever to set foot in a classroom again. Ever.

So, here I was, back in London post-Covid, my uncurbed enthusiasm for musical theatre and a life treading the boards brimming over once again. I was now in my late twenties, still broke and sharing a somewhat dubious flat above yet another Turkish doner kebab joint near Berwick Street Market, on the edge of Soho, this time along with two other actors.

Leonard, my agent, had gone into some sort of decline during Covid, retiring to St Anne’s on the chilly Lancashire coast with his long-term boyfriend, but had come up trumps by passing me on to a new, upcoming agent called Dorcas O’Hara. When she’d learned I’d previously had a part in Big, but, more importantly, my father was Jayden Allen, she had immediately taken me on and was forging ahead with trying to get me the theatre work I craved.

I divided my daytime hours between being put through my paces at auditions for the big shows in the West End (I was confidently aiming high), reading for smaller parts in plays in the more provincial theatres (hence the visit to the Old Bailey and my first sight of Fabian Carrington), and earning enough to pay the rent and for own-brand basics from Aldi by waitressing at an upmarket and very on-trend French haute cuisine restaurant called Graphite on Conduit Street.

My tiny room – big enough to fit just a single bed and chest of drawers – horrified even Jayden who, gigging and touring since the age of seventeen with his many reggae bands, was used to dossing down in less than salubrious places. But it was perfectly placed between theatre-land and Graphite at the junction with New Bond Street in Mayfair.

I’d never been afraid of hard work – just terrified of the bolshy adolescents to whom I’d naively attempted an introduction to Shakespeare and Wordsworth as instructed on teaching placements back home in Yorkshire.

Now, those horrible, interminable classroom hours left behind back in the north, I was fighting fit and raring to go, ready to showcase once more just what I was capable of. The long hours on my feet at the restaurant didn’t deter me from spending time, whenever I could, practising routines over and over again in a nearby gym and dance studio owned by an ex-boyfriend, in exchange for teaching a couple of his weekly Zumba classes. I just couldn’t afford the exorbitant London gym memberships I’d have had to take out in order to keep up my fitness. I had to be ready, at the drop of a hat, for any potential auditions with sometimes sanguine, often short-tempered, theatrical directors and this did mean I had to keep on the right side of Xander, the owner of the gym.

Three weeks after the heart-stopping morning spent at the Old Bailey, I walked through the closing of another unusually hot and beautiful May day in central London. Nature seemed intent on unfurling and unfolding before me, the acidic green leaves of the street’s plane trees a sharp contrast to the candyfloss pink cherry blossoms’ playful bobbing on the evening breeze. I breathed in the scents and sounds at the end of Friday’s rush hour: diesel and frustrated hooting of black cabs; warm pavements already dominated by tables, chairs and throngs of newly released office workers, jackets discarded, holding bottles of Sauvignon Blanc aloft while air-kissing new arrivals.

And I didn’t want to be anywhere else but in the centre of this seething, gorgeous throng of humanity.

Well, other than joining the queues snaking patiently along the pavements of each theatre I now walked past on my way to my six-hour shift at Graphite, but a girl has to pay her rent and eat. Knowing I was going to be late yet again, I picked up speed as I weaved haphazardly towards Mayfair.

‘You’re early,’ Bess Bridger, yet another out-of-work actor, managed to say through a mouthful of cake as I headed to the row of lockers in the staff rest room. That was a misnomer for a start – the waiting staff were rarely given any breaks, let alone an actual rest, even less so on Friday and Saturday evenings when the work was hectic. I kept meaning to google how much rest we were legally entitled to, but Miss Muffler, the German-born harridan masquerading as line manager, had little truck with either comfort breaks or anyone having the temerity to demand workers’ rights.

Bess pushed what remained of the Colin the Caterpillar cake in my direction. ‘Stefan’s birthday cake,’ she volunteered, pointing a sponge-, cream- and chocolate-smeared knife towards one of the sous chefs, who responded with a friendly wave of his own, extremely dangerous-looking, cook’s knife. ‘I can’t believe we work in one of the poshest restaurants in London and yet all we get is a sodding kid’s cake to eat.’

‘Hell,’ I said, suddenly ravenously hungry and wishing I’d finished the remains of the sliced loaf and peanut butter I’d left in the kitchen back at the flat. ‘Is that all you lot have left me? Colin’s arse?’

‘If you’d been as late as you usually are, you wouldn’t even have got that. I’d be quick if I were you – Godzilla’s on the warpath.’

Shoving Colin’s last white-chocolate leg into my mouth, I quickly changed into the blue and cream long-sleeved matelot-style T-shirt and cream waistcoat, before tying around my waist, in authentic French bistro fashion, the long cream apron. Damn. In my hurry to be ready when Walburga Muffler arrived for her pre-shift pep talk and inspection I’d got a huge dollop of melted chocolate on my waistcoat.

‘Bugger.’

‘Act your way out of that.’ Bess grinned as our boss appeared and I folded my arms against the offending brown stain.

‘Ah, Robyn, you decided to join us?’ she barked, eyeing me through slightly closed eyes. ‘You have stomach ache?’

‘Stomach ache?’ I stood my ground.

‘You are hanging onto your middle as though you need the appendix whipped out?’

‘Already out, years ago,’ I lied.

‘Well, do stand up straight,’ she ordered, as though I were a recalcitrant nine-year-old. ‘The restaurant is full to capacity this evening. Go. Stand by your station. Head up, shoulders back. Smile.’