Forever Hold Your Peace - Chapter One

Be careful who you trust, because secrets have a way of becoming exposed.

Chapter One - Old Friends

June 2022 - Monday

The producer's words in Gwen’s ears signalled that the end of the show was approaching. She fixed a professional smile on her face and faced the camera, like she did every morning.

‘Camera two for final countdown, five, four, three, two, one.’

‘This is Gwen Morris for Morning News Live from the BBC. Thank you for choosing to watch us, and I’ll see you tomorrow, bright and early at six. Goodbye.’

‘That’s a wrap,’ said Eric, the studio producer. ‘Good job, Gwen, darling. By the way, great interview with Sir Mark…’

Gwen snatched the earphones from her ears before he had a chance to finish his sentence and left them on the desk. Her assistant ran onto the set to pick them up and help untangle all the wires from the back of her shirt, as she stood up, pushing her chair behind her.

She was sick to death of hearing his voice parroting in her ears. She didn’t need to be told she had done a great interview. Of course, she had done a great job; she had been doing interviews for over ten years, and everyone knew she was one of the best in the business.  She had heard enough from Eric for one day, the patronising creep. And if he called her darling one more time, she would shove the microphone so far up his arse, he’d be eating it for dinner. Charles was the only one who was permitted to call her darling.

It seemed to take forever to release her from all the wires, but at last she was free.

‘Good job, Gwen!’ repeated Eric, appearing on the studio floor and shouting after her as she marched towards her dressing room. ‘When you have a minute, I need a word about the…’

‘Just give me five, Eric!’ shouted Gwen over her shoulder. ‘Toilet break.’

Gwen thankfully reached her dressing room without further interruption and closed the door behind her. It had been a crazy morning;  argumentative politicians were a day-to-day occurrence, but today, because of the local election results, she had dealt with one from each of the three main parties, together with a very defensive ex-glamour model and an aggressive environmental activist. She was emotionally drained and needed to take a break before she strangled someone. Eric, the producer, was at the top of her list of possible victims. It wasn’t his fault. He was harmless really, but he had the knack of grating on her very last nerve.

The break would have to be quick, just a few minutes to herself, that’s all she needed. She didn’t want to be late for the team debrief. She prided herself on being the ultimate professional and couldn’t for one moment allow the production team to see that she was struggling. There was no room for any emotion or personal crisis of any kind in journalism, she knew that. She would need to sort her head out and get back out there as quickly as possible, with the biggest smile she could manifest. A glimmer of any weakness meant that she was on the chopping block, plain and simple. She knew she was lucky to have kept hold of this prestigious job for so long. There was a long line of young and ambitious journalists waiting to take her place, which she had no intention of giving up for a long time.

She set a reminder in the Alexa app on her phone to order some brownies and have them delivered to the team in the morning. It wouldn’t do any harm to keep them sweet, including Eric, no matter how much he irritated her.

‘Gwen,’ said a voice at the door, ‘I’ve brought you a coffee.’ There was a gentle knock, and the door was pushed open. ‘I thought you might need one.’

Zara, her make-up artist, hairdresser, and close friend, stood in the corridor, holding out a black coffee, which she took gratefully.

‘That’s so kind,’ she said, wiping at a stray tear that was threatening to reveal how she was really feeling. It was annoying how acts of kindness brought tears more often than they brought smiles.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Zara.

The women had worked together and been friends for many years. Gwen knew there was no point in pretending; Zara knew when something was wrong.

‘I will be,’ she said. ‘Thanks for this.’ She took a sip of her coffee.

Zara gave her a quick hug. ‘We can talk later. I’ll take Eric a coffee too and get him talking, to delay him a little. Just come out when you’re ready.’

‘Thanks. I’ll be two minutes, that’s all.’ 

What the bloody hell is wrong with me? she thought, as she closed the door and checked her make-up in the mirror. I need to get a grip. Nobody can know I’ve been crying.

But she knew what was wrong with her. The stomach cramps were telling her she wasn’t pregnant, again. She was another month further away from getting the baby she prayed for every night. And she was another month closer to being forty. Her phone, still on silent, lit up and buzzed on her dressing table. It was a text message from her GP surgery.

Your cervical smear test is overdue. Please telephone the surgery and make an appointment to see a practice nurse as soon as possible.

The tears fell freely now. She didn’t want to see the bloody practice nurse. At her age, she should be seeing a midwife! She wanted to lie on the bed while someone listened to the tiny beating heart inside her and told her that everything would be fine and that her baby was fit and well. She wanted to shop for maternity dresses and wear flat shoes. She wanted to decline the offer of a glass of champagne at Zara’s wedding next week. She wanted to choose the orange juice instead and drink it ostentatiously, happy to explain to anyone who asked how many weeks pregnant she was, with a protective hand on her stomach. She even wanted puffy ankles and indigestion. Everything.

But you don’t always get what you want.

***

Audrina looked at her watch and calculated how many hours it was until the children’s bedtime. But it was only nine o’clock in the morning; she shouldn’t even be thinking like that. She was a terrible mother; she knew it. Every day she tried to be better, she really wanted to be the perfect mother, happy to stay at home with her children and play with them and read to them and be amazed at the wonderful and ordinary things they did. But every night when she went to bed, she knew she had failed to meet her own exacting standards. She had lost her patience. She had lost her temper. Some days it felt as though she had lost her mind.

She could hear the children running around from room to room, up and down the stairs, shouting, ‘Goodbye bedroom, goodbye bathroom, goodbye stairs, goodbye kitchen.’ Today, they were all saying goodbye to their perfectly good house and moving five miles down the road into a bigger one. While they were occupied in their salutations, Audrina tried to steal another few minutes on her own in her dressing room, pretending to be busy, slowly putting on her makeup and cherishing the time to herself. The children knew the rule - if mummy’s door is closed, she doesn’t want to be disturbed.

Audrina’s black French father and her white English mother between them had gifted her the most stunning bright green eyes, jet-black hair, and beautiful light brown skin. For as long as she could remember, she had always known she was beautiful; her parents had told her often, and the evidence was right there for her to see every time she looked in the mirror. At least it used to be. Lately, she had discovered a few wrinkles around her eyes, which she obsessively patted every day with expensive eye cream. It was probably too late now. Prevention was better than cure. She should have started with the cream years ago.  More importantly, she should never have taken her beauty for granted and gone to bed with makeup on. Stupid woman! It’s no wonder her work was drying up recently, she thought as she stared at herself in the mirror.

She had been spotted by a scout from Choice Modelling and Talent Agency (the most prestigious agency in the UK) when she was just sixteen years old. One Saturday afternoon, she was having lunch with her mother at a pavement cafe in Covent Garden when a man approached their table and introduced himself. He told her she had everything his model agency was looking for - the long flowing hair, the high cheekbones, the striking eyes, the glowing skin. He asked if she had ever thought of a career as a model. Of course, she had. Her friends and all of the boys she had ever met had all told her she could be a model. She wasn’t sure, she told him. She was shy, she didn’t know whether she could do it, she said. But in all honesty, she had no clue what else she wanted to do. She envied her friends who knew that they wanted to be lawyers, teachers, or social workers. They could have their goal in mind when they revised for exams and chose their A’level subjects. He said he would like to find out if the camera loved her. If it did, they could take it from there. She was under no pressure.

He gave his business card to her mother, who zipped it into her purse, along with a list of maternal reservations, and asked her to call the office to arrange an appointment for a shoot, as soon as possible. Not without a sense of unease, her mother had arranged the appointment, where they all discovered what they already knew, which was, of course, the camera loved her. And Audrina loved the camera. Her shyness melted away. She enjoyed every minute, from the moment she entered the studio.

One month before her seventeenth birthday, she appeared on the catwalk for a small French design house at the Paris Fashion Week. Afterwards, offers of work came in thick and fast and within eighteen months, she had appeared regularly on the covers of the best fashion magazines, including Elle and Vogue and had worked at the fashion shows in London, Milan and New York. 

The following few years were a whirl of photo shoots and catwalks with intermittent studying. Her mother had sagely warned her that beauty wasn’t forever and urged her to go to university. Something to fall back on, her mother told her. Her Plan B.  Lucky for her, she had never needed a Plan B. She scraped through her A’Levels with enough points to get her into university, and when she eventually decided to drop out, she told her agency she was willing to take on as much work as they wanted to give her. She knew the life of a model was short, and she wanted to be as busy as possible, while she could.  The agency was thrilled. Even Audrina’s parents had come to the conclusion that a career as a model wasn’t so bad after all.

Most of the models she met told her they loved their work, but they hated travelling so much. They hated living in hotel rooms, being away from their families for so long. They hated sleeping in strange beds night after night. But Audrina loved that aspect of the job. Throughout her life, she had travelled often between Paris and London, visiting her dad’s family two or three times a year, so she was used to it. To her, travel meant independence, freedom and adventure.

At the end of an exhausting day of work, when her feet were throbbing and her legs were aching from standing for hours, she always found the energy to go for a walk around whichever city she was in before bedtime. She would put on flat shoes and enjoy a little time to herself, getting lost amongst the crowds. She walked the familiar streets of Paris quickly, more for exercise than relaxation.  She loved to walk down one side of the Champs Élysées, all the way to the Arc de Triomphe, cross the road and walk back down the other side and back to her hotel. In New York, the crowds along Seventh Avenue and Forty-Second Street slowed her down, but she loved being a part of it. She slowed her pace to match that of the ambling tourists and allowed herself to become completely captivated by the city.  The sirens of the passing police vehicles, the honking of the horns from the ubiquitous yellow cabs, and the cacophony of voices were soothing to her soul. But her favourite city, by far, was London. Her home town. Even when it rained, which it did often, she still loved to walk. She loved how the wet pavements reflected the coloured lights from the bars and restaurants of Soho and Leicester Square, like dark skies, speckled with multi-coloured stars.

It was after the London Fashion Week twelve years ago when she met Devon, the rising star of Manchester United football team. She was almost twenty-seven, and he had just turned twenty-three. He knew who she was; her face was becoming more and more famous, especially following the recent makeup advert she had done - she was beginning to get recognised when she went out. He had followed her on Instagram for over a year and had seen her face on billboards all over the place. But she didn’t know who he was. She didn’t follow football.

That night, when his team piled into the hotel cocktail bar in Mayfair the night before a match, Audrina was talking to her parents on the phone while she waited for her friend, Isla. Devon spotted her immediately and waited for her to look his way, so he could give her the killer smile he knew usually worked like a charm. But Audrina kept her eyes firmly fixed on the window and her concentration firmly fixed on the conversation with her parents. When Isla arrived a couple of minutes later, Devon asked the barman to send over a bottle of Veuve Clicquot with his compliments. He expected an invitation to join them, but Audrina merely accepted the bottle graciously and said thank you.  No invitation was forthcoming. Devon and his teammates watched open-mouthed as the two beautiful women sipped the champagne between them, not once looking their way.

That night, there were dozens of other beautiful women in the hotel bar. Devon could have had his pick of any of them. He was a good-looking man, and he was wealthy, which seemed to be the only attributes some women were searching for in a husband. As a footballer, he was never short of offers, but that night he turned them all down. He didn’t want a one-night stand; he didn’t want somebody who only wanted him for his money.  He wanted Audrina. When their manager called the curfew and told the players to get an early night in readiness for tomorrow’s game, Devon was gutted he hadn’t managed to get Audrina’s number. She had been polite to him when he went to speak to her, but she made it clear she wasn’t interested in a relationship, or a date, or anything else. She told him she was flattered but she was busy with her work and didn’t have time.  All he could do was send her a message on Instagram and hope for the best.

Devon’s persistence finally paid off. After dozens of messages and a huge bunch of flowers sent to her via her agent’s office, Audrina agreed to go on a date. By this time, three months had passed. She was back in Paris on a photo shoot, but Devon flew to meet her and took her to dinner. They ate scallops followed by steak, accompanied by the best Chateauneuf-du-Pape the restaurant had in its cellar. Devon was out to impress. Their first kiss was on the banks of the River Seine. As much as Audrina told herself she was too busy for a relationship, especially a long-distance one, within weeks, she was in love.

Twelve years later, her life couldn’t be more different. Although she still worked occasionally, it wasn’t as often as she wanted. She was at home more often than she travelled. Her essential beauty sleep was now interrupted by at least one of the children. Every night. Devon maintained he was a heavy sleeper. He didn’t hear the children when they woke up. Of course, his earplugs helped.

Now, when the doorbell indicated the arrival of the removal company. Audrina braced herself for a long day.

Copyright© Caroline Blake 2022

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First published November 2022