Chapter One
Claudia
The day before shooting begins
It’s been a long time since I was last in Yorkshire.
I was born here though, not three miles from Doverley, on my grandparents’ kitchen floor.
I haven’t told anyone in publicity about that.
I don’t want them using it in one of their campaigns.
But it’s that start to my life I think about as, clearing security, Nick and I drive through Doverley’s iron gates and on into lush, dripping woodland, heading for the house.
I’ve been thinking about it for most of our drive up from London, and especially since we swapped the monotony of the motorway for the maze of stone-walled country lanes that have brought us here.
It’s all felt eerily familiar. I wasn’t expecting it to.
I’m not really sure what I was expecting, coming back here after thirty years away; a whisper of déjà vu, maybe, at the very most. Definitely not this overwhelming sense of my forgotten past, all around me.
And it is forgotten. I remember very little of the four years I spent here with my grandparents, before they died.
They were the ones who looked after me back then.
My father wasn’t on the scene – no one knows what happened to him – and Mum was away a lot in London, finishing university, then starting work.
I wish I’d held on to more of Nan and Grandad, but all I have left are snapshots: Nan chipping potatoes at the sink; Grandad coming through the front door, smiling up at me on the stairs; both of them in a park, watching me play.
And Nan’s hand in mine at the door of a woman called Mrs Ellen, who Mum claims I’ve fabricated, but who I swear to god existed.
She had a Newton’s cradle that I played with, and a porcelain jar that was always full of Rich Tea Biscuits, the taste of which, to this day, gives me the strangest tug in my heart.
‘You expect me to believe you still eat biscuits?’ Mum would doubtless say, if I told her about that tug – which I won’t, because her insistence that I’ve made Mrs Ellen up really, really annoys me, almost as much as it perplexes me.
Mum brought me to live in London after Nan and Grandad went. We never returned to Yorkshire after that. Not even to put flowers on their graves.
If Mum had had her way, I wouldn’t be here now.
She does not want me to do this movie.
‘You’re running yourself ragged,’ she said, just yesterday, the two of us up on Parliament Hill, walking her whippet, Stewart.
(Stewart. Honestly. The only thing that makes me feel more ridiculous than yelling out that name, sprinting to catch up with his skinny grey form, is getting tagged on the inevitable videos of me doing it afterwards.) ‘I’m worried you’re going to end up having some kind of breakdown. You look exhausted … ’
‘I’m jetlagged.’
‘And far too thin.’
‘God, Mum.’
‘Don’t Mum me. Phil agrees.’
‘Phil always agrees with you.’ Phil’s my stepdad, and harassed father to my two teenage sisters. ‘It’s how he survives.’
‘He’s concerned, Claude.’
I yanked Stewart’s lead, restraining him from taking on an Alsatian twice his size. (‘Oh my god,’ said its owner, unlocking her phone. ‘Claudia Baxter.’)
‘You’re barely back from Sicily,’ Mum continued. ‘Before that, it was South Africa. Before that—’
‘I know,’ I interrupted, cutting her off before she could get to what happened before South Africa. ‘I do know, Mum.’
‘All right,’ she said, more softly. ‘But now Yorkshire, Claude? With Nick.’
‘You want me to give up a role because of him?’
‘No, my darling. I want you to give it up because of you.’
I set my teeth, not responding, because it was a pointless discussion, and one we’d already had too many times to bear repeating.
I was over explaining to Mum the manifold reasons why I couldn’t simply abandon a movie at this stage in the game – rehearsals, done; costume fittings, done; make-up tests, done; jitterbugging lessons, done – and she knew full well anyway that I’d be sued.
Plus, I don’t actually want to abandon The Bomber Boys.
God knows I probably should. It certainly hasn’t been going well.
Rehearsals were a disaster – I just couldn’t get inside Iris’s head, or forget that I was in an impersonal overly air-conditioned room, reading from a stack of paper, and was so stilted, I threw everyone else off with me.
I know the director, Ana, is worried. I’m worried.
Beside myself, in actual matter, at how badly I’ve been screwing it all up.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve been tempted to do as Mum says, risk litigation and give up on playing Iris.
I haven’t. Not once. I might not have found her, not yet.
But she’s waiting for me. I can feel it.
I’ve been feeling it from the moment I first picked up Imogen Hale’s novel.
‘It would kill me to give up Iris now,’ I told Mum. ‘It turns me cold, even thinking about it.’
‘It turns me cold, hearing you say that. She’s another escape route for you, nothing more.
A fresh golden ticket to a different mind, a different world, when what you really need is to face up to this one you’re in.
’ She shook her head. ‘You and Nick have barely been in the same country for months … ’
‘We’ve been working.’
‘Running away, more like. Grief doesn’t disappear just because you ignore it, you know.’
‘Mum, please … ’
‘The two of you scare each other, that’s your problem.’
‘Is it?’ I said, wearily.
‘Yes. You remind each other of what you lost.’
‘I don’t need reminding of that.’
‘No, you don’t want reminding. That’s a very different thing.’ She gave me a pained frown. ‘Have you considered how you and Nick are even going to cope together on this shoot?’
‘It’s crossed my mind.’
‘An entire month together, acting out someone else’s love story … ’
‘We’ll get through it.’
‘Will you?’
‘We will, Mum.’
‘Have you talked about it?’
‘We don’t need to. We know what we’re doing.’
Her frown deepened. ‘I hope you’re right.’
So do I, I thought.
So do I, I think again now, looking sideways at Nick as he turns the wheel, negotiating a rut in Doverley’s driveway.
Mum wasn’t exaggerating when she said we’ve barely seen one another lately.
Until now, other than for the fortnight we spent rehearsing in September, we haven’t been together since May, when I got home from my shoot in South Africa.
Even then, I was only in LA for a few days before I left again for Sicily, where Felix Jade, not Nick, played my love interest on a steamy HBO series that ran well over schedule, obligingly consuming my every waking moment for all of June, then July, and a good chunk of August, too.
(Mum’s wrong: you absolutely can run from grief.) Nick, meanwhile, spent the summer doing some running of his own, going full kelter on preparation for this movie: travelling back and forth to this estate, dressing every day in uniform, eating from an RAF canteen menu, drinking warm beer.
He’s even learnt to fly a Lancaster, for God’s sake.
The tabloids have been all over his exploits, and our long separation, too, speculating as to whether we’re on, or off, and reprinting all their gut-wrenching paparazzi shots of me at the start of the year, before South Africa, with red circles drawn around my curved stomach.
Was I ever pregnant, they’ve demanded. (Yes, I was.
Twenty weeks, in fact.) Badly bloated? (Possibly that, too.) Can I even have children?
(Apparently not any more, no.) They ran plenty of other photos, besides: of Nick, whenever he hit a bar, reliving his twenties, surrounded by crowds of gorgeous women; then just as many of me, in a bikini in Sicily, entangled with Felix – filming, but what does that matter to them?
And have Nick and I talked about those photos?
Yes, we actually have. I’ve tried to convince him that there was nothing in the Sicily shots, just like he’s tried to convince me that he never gave a second look to any of those women he was pictured with.
Surely you believe that. I haven’t known what to believe.
I’m not sure Nick has either. For the first time in our three-year relationship, I’ve lost faith in the trust between us, and I hate it.
I let out a sigh.
Nick hears. I see that, from the way his eyes flick towards me.
He doesn’t ask me what’s wrong though. He hasn’t said much the entire way up from London, and we’ve been driving for almost four hours.
He stayed over at Mum and Phil’s in Highgate last night.
I wasn’t planning to see him. He’s been holed up here again this past week, immersing.
But Phil suggested I invite him down, he’s probably just waiting for you to, and in fairness, Nick did agree to come pretty much instantly when I called him.
He took Phil and my sisters out flying yesterday afternoon whilst Mum and I were up on Parliament Hill.
Lisa, fifteen and painfully shy, was sick, but Hannah, eighteen and loudly loving life, adored it.
Phil did too. They were buzzing when Mum and I got back to the house.
We found them in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine, whilst poor Lisa was hiding in her bedroom, mortified because she’d vomited in front of Nick Turner.
‘You don’t always have to use his surname when you talk about him, you know,’ I said, when I took her up some tea.
‘It’s impossible not to,’ she said. Then, peeking out from beneath her duvet, ‘Did he tell you I got sick on his shoe?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘And he’s had worse, believe me.’
In the end, Nick came up too, and was the one to cajole Lisa into resurfacing, fabricating a story about how sick he’d been on his first flight, all over the instructor. It really made Lisa laugh.