The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

looking down on her from above the open double door frame. She slurps about half her flute of champagne. Her friend Anna Mai (89k followers) is telling a story about this wine-tasting holiday some company #gifted her and her family. Erin wasn’t listening fully but it seemed to be a cautionary tale about checking the travel company’s credentials before agreeing to go on their trips. ‘It wasn’t quite as bad as the Fyre festival, but not far off,’ a phrase she’s fairly sure she’s heard Anna use already tonight.

The French Salon at Claridge’s is the venue for her speech tonight. It’s astoundingly beautiful but its ostentation makes Erin feel sad, mournful almost for a life she hasn’t lived. The bald reality is that she’d imagined spending her life at places like this. When she played Nora in A Doll’s House at university, her director said she’d be a movie star, no doubt about it. An agent who’d come to see her told her to go to drama school, that he’d see her on the other side. She directed herself in a production of The Seagull, not at the university theatre but at the Theatre Royal in town, that caused such a stir that she had university tutors and bigwigs in the regional theatre scene buzzing around her like flies at a butcher’s shop. Drinks parties at Claridge’s were the least she was expecting. But they never materialised, the career she had been promised by teachers at secondary school, by self-aggrandising tutors at her drama school and any man over the age of forty who worked ‘in the industry’, never materialised.

Success was meant to pool around her like molten gold, so she spent years in denial, still believing something would switch and the industry would realise that she’d slipped through the net. So she refused to get a full-time job in case it stopped her auditioning, paid intergalactic rent to live close to the West End, went drinking with her old uni theatre crowd who’d all realised the creative pathway was a torrid and self-immolating one and gone and got jobs in PR and advertising but, ten years later, would still tell her she should keep at it because she was so good in their first-year production of Blood Wedding.

It was Raf who saved her from it all. He saw her playing a too-old Isabella in Measure for Measure above a pub and got talking to her afterwards. She fell quickly for him. He was tall, she’d always had a thing for tall, and so kind. He put her first. She’d never had a boyfriend that had done that before. A nice guy as it were. From very early on he focused his life around hers but there was nothing desperate or clingy about it. He was matter-of-fact about his feelings for her, his desire for her. He wanted to spend time with her more than he wanted to do anything else, it was that black and white for him. There was none of the neuroses of actors or writers she’d been out with. He didn’t put her on the manic pixie dream-girl pedestal like some of the corporate wonks she’d dated. He was remarkably comfortable in his skin, something that Erin hadn’t been for seven or eight years. She was drawn to his stillness, a serenity, the sense that no matter how turbulent the sea was, he’d always stay anchored near the shore and she was delighted to tie herself to his strength, his solidity.

After about eighteen months he said he couldn’t take seeing how low she was as her auditions, the attention from her agent, from her friends dried up. He tried everything to dig her out of the trench of disillusionment she’d dug herself into. He paid off her numerous credit cards to give her a chance to do something different, got her prospectuses for evening classes, but she railed against it, told him he was trying to crush her dream. When he suggested that he thought she seemed especially low after she’d spent time with certain groups of her friends, the actor crowd particularly, she nearly broke things off with him entirely. But then, after the brutal serendipity that led to her being on holiday when a chance to lead a film came up, an actual feature film that would have led to people knowing who she was, knowing her talent, she realised that she’d moored her ambition to something that was based around blind luck and that Raf was right, she didn’t have the temperament for it. And that in still trying to be an actor, she was hanging on to some childish desire, chasing the same feeling of adoration she used to get when she did shows for her mum’s friends.

And she was one of the lucky ones, she had a wonderful man who was offering her a fresh start. She rang her agent and said she was giving it all up. And a few months down the line, when Raf asked her if she wanted to have a baby, it seemed like it could be the right thing to do. The purpose she’d always had, the meaning she’d sought through fame, craft, acclaim, ridiculous abstract nouns that had meant so much to her for so long, had delivered only misery. So although she’d hadn’t been planning to have a baby until much later, when Raf suggested it might be something they could do, the thought of having something concrete, something that was hers, that was known the world over as providing joy, made it seem like a no-brainer.

‘Erin, do you want to come and get ready?’ Philippa, the lady who is ‘looking after’ her this evening taps her on the shoulder. And it’s having a baby, with a little help from her mother’s put-on-a-smile-for-the-world attitude and Erin’s high, photogenic cheekbones, that has brought her here. Here to talk in front of a crowd of amazing, beautiful, inspiring mothers. Acclaim, applause, adoration. What she’s always