Chapter Three 1976
Chapter Three
Do you, Astrid Lane, take this man, Callum Blake, to be your protector, best friend, lover, soulmate, and loyal, ever-loving husband?”
Tears of joy prick at her eyes as she pauses to look around, taking in the whitewashed finca in the background, the sun setting over the hills, wild goats faintly braying in the distance.
The air is filled with the smell of pine and rosemary, mixed with the omnipresent hashish.
It is a dream come true—Ibiza, their loved ones, and most of all Callum.
Her Ossie Clark chiffon wedding dress blows around her legs as she notices Vic Roth standing in the back, but she allows her eyes to skim over him. Of course he has to be here, but she will not acknowledge him with anything other than cold politeness.
Her gaze comes back to Callum, who has not taken his eyes from her face. “I do,” she whispers as the crowd cheers, throwing wildflowers into the air.
Suryawan, the priest they befriended on their vacation to Bali last year, who they flew in to officiate their wedding, beams at both of them. “You may kiss the bride.”
As they kiss, “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones starts to play. Astrid knows she will never again be as happy as right now, right here, with the sun setting behind the olive trees, turning the sky an otherworldly shade of orange and pink, with this man.
1998
There is nothing quite so obvious as lipstick on a shirt, nothing that is harder to explain away.
A lacy thong in a pocket, a love note pushed through the letter box, unexplained nights away, all those can be explained.
A lovesick fan, Callum usually said. A nightmare woman at the record label who was obsessed with him.
Even the lipstick on the shirt had an explanation.
The headline in the News of the World, however, with the accompanying evidence, had no explanation.
“Rock Star’s Secret Love Child!” it shouted on that terrible Sunday, the day when Astrid could no longer bury her head in the sand, choose to believe Callum, even when her body—riddled with anxiety and tension—told her she was right and that he was with another woman.
Those nights—so many nights—when she couldn’t join him on tour, she was filled with anxiety, but their daughter needed her.
Astrid could no longer tolerate the exhaustion and discomfort of the tour bus, the endless drugs, the parties that went on all night.
If she ever went, it was mostly to ensure that Callum wasn’t swallowed up by the thousands of women who threw themselves at him, who treated her with disdain, disrespect, derision.
When she stopped going, Astrid made small requests of Callum: a phone call at the end of a concert, but mostly she didn’t hear from him. Or if he somehow remembered to call, her entire body was stiff, waiting for a background giggle, a whisper from a woman urging him to get off the phone.
“It’s just the costume woman who wants to talk to me,” Callum would say, drunk, or high. “Don’t be so sensitive.”
Don’t be so sensitive. How could she not be sensitive when he wouldn’t call, when she’d hear the rumors. She wasn’t stupid. She knew the life of a rock star, but tried to tell herself that he was still hers; she was the woman he came home to when the tour was finally over.
As the years went by, they drifted further and further apart.
Callum lived mostly in California, in a rambling wood house tucked into Laurel Canyon; she, between Latchkey Farm, now gone to the dogs, because she cared more about vodka than about weeding the vegetable garden, and their apartment in Chelsea.
Zara was at Latchkey Farm, where nannies served as her surrogate mother.
Astrid was drunk, lonely, and miserable. But she was Callum Blake’s wife, and nothing would have seen her give that up. It was easier to keep up the pretense, show up for the odd concert or party, looking glamorous, trying to keep the vodka at reasonable levels, at least until she got home.
Until he had a secret baby. Callum Jr. It was the ultimate humiliation, the straw that broke the camel’s back.
She had swept every indignity under the carpet, pretended he was all mouth and no trousers, would flirt but not take it further.
But she could no longer pretend, and no amount of apology from Callum would fix the fact that there was another baby in this world who was his, and not hers; that he would be tied to the groupie baby mother for the rest of his life.