Chapter Twenty-One
Natasha greets Jane at the door of her lovely Chiswick house the following morning with a glamorous blond dachshund under her arm.
“Well,” says Natasha, “you’ve barely changed! You must have one of those portraits in your attic!”
“No,” says Jane, ruffling at the long ears of the dachshund. “Just Botox and a very expensive hairdresser.”
“Oh God, I can’t be bothered with all of that stuff.
Needles.” Natasha shudders. “Yuck.” She leads Jane through her home; it’s neat and warm and tasteful, full of family photos and scented candles, throws and cushions.
It’s a house for a normal person to live in, Jane feels strongly.
The sort of house in which she has never, ever lived.
Natasha makes them cappuccinos, and they take them out onto a lovely back terrace where the morning sun is just starting to spill over a long, manicured lawn.
“Where are your dogs?” Natasha asks.
“Left them at home with a sitter.”
“Oh, you must be missing them.”
“I really am.”
“And hubby?”
“Ex-hubby.” Jane smiles tightly.
“Oh no. I’m sorry to hear that. I liked him very much.”
“Yes,” says Jane. “So did I! And actually, I still do. He’s a lovely man.
But just sadly not the right lovely man for me.
Frankly, I’ve reached the conclusion that no man is the man for me, that I was absolutely mad to think they ever were when everything in my life was screaming at me to keep away from them. For everyone’s sake!”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” says Natasha.
“But I do have fantasies sometimes about me and the dog all alone in a tiny one-bed flat above a shop somewhere, just the two of us, eating crisps for dinner and never having to fold a pair of underpants.” She smiles wryly. “Not really, obviously. But. You know.”
Jane does know. She really does.
“So.” Natasha draws the conversation back. “Jessamine Black. What’s the deal with her?”
“Well.” Jane places her coffee cup on the table to her side; then she explains about finding the white dog in her bluebell woods, the strange man in Hampstead, the missing girl, the sweatshirt from the school in Islington.
“And I googled the address that we took the dog back to and saw that a woman who lived there called Jessamine Black had signed an online petition a few years back, so I googled her and ta-da…”
“You found the IMDb page.”
“Exactly. So, what do you remember about her? Did you stay in touch after filming?”
Natasha nods. “We were friends for a little while, you know, in that weird Londony way of being friends when you’re young.
Very intense. We went clubbing a lot. She was much younger than me, only eighteen, nineteen maybe, highly strung, lots of drama: I was always propping her up, getting her home, listening to her woes.
Boy woes. Constantly. But that’s what it’s like, isn’t it?
Being young? I had a lot more time for needy people then. ”
“Did you ever go to her house?”
“Yes. A few times. She lived in a shared flat, I seem to recall. Somewhere in North London. And she was desperate, just desperate, to get married and have kids. She was always chasing someone. Then I went to Australia for a year with Jacob, and Jessamine and I lost touch. I never saw her again.”
“What did you know about her family?”
“Not much. They lived in Hampstead, I think?” She pauses. “Oh, isn’t that where you said…?”
Jane nods.
“Ah, right. So that must mean that…?”
“Yes, the woman I saw through the door could be Jessamine.”
“What did she look like?”
“Barely got a look at her. But fortyish, I’d say.”
“That sounds about right,” says Natasha. “She was six years younger than me or so. Come on, let me show you the film.”
They go back into the kitchen and Natasha slips a USB stick into the side of her laptop. She clicks on the folder, opens the file, and presses play. The credits roll.
“She was quite good, actually,” says Natasha. “I always thought I might see her in something else. But clearly life took her on a different path. Here.” She presses pause as the first scene opens on the screen. “That’s her.”
A young woman sits curled into the corner of a tatty sofa. She holds a book in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She has mousy blond hair cut into a bob and is wearing a green turtleneck and a brown miniskirt. Natasha presses play again.
On-screen, Jessamine looks up toward the camera and says, “What? What do you want?”
A male voice behind the camera says, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Jessamine says, “Well, now you’ve found me, I suppose.”
She has a neat red mouth, smooth white skin, very wide-set green eyes. She’s beautiful in a way. Not head-turning but quietly striking.
“I got that outfit from an Oxfam shop in Stoke Newington, I recall,” says Natasha. “We wanted her character to be kind of sixties-looking, you know, a bit Marianne Faithfull. I had so much fun shopping for her. And she was a great clotheshorse; everything just looked fantastic on her.”
“Was she nice?”
“Nice?” Natasha pauses and narrows her eyes. “Gosh, no. I wouldn’t say she was nice. But she had something. Something magnetic, you know. You wanted to be around her, even when she was a pain.”
Jane smiles wryly to herself. She is pretty sure that this is exactly what anyone who’d spent time with her in her youth would say if asked.
“Have you ever seen anyone else you made this film with? Since? Anyone you think might still know her?”
Natasha shrugs. “No. Jessamine was the only person I stayed in touch with after making this film. Well, and hubby, too, of course! There!” Her eyes dart back to the screen as a young man appears from the left. “There he is. My Jacob. Wasn’t he beautiful? Gosh, so much hair!”
But Jane can’t take her eyes off Jessamine, those wide-set eyes, that confident glare at the camera, the dips beneath her high cheekbones, the untold story lurking behind her eyes.