Red Carpet

Eleven weeks, Luca thought, standing at the top of the red carpet’s slow crawl towards the doors, waiting for the car in front of them to clear the step-and-repeat. Eleven weeks since a private dining room and a contract written by a woman who’d brought her own pen. It felt like considerably longer, and also, watching Hattie check her lipstick in the black glass of the car window rather than a compact, like no time at all.

“You’ve gone quiet,” she said, not looking away from her reflection.

“I’m doing maths.”

“Dangerous hobby for a chef on the night of an awards ceremony.”

“Eleven weeks,” he said. “Since Corvo. Since the contract.”

She turned from the window properly then, and something crossed her face that he recognised, because he’d been feeling its twin for the last mile of traffic: the particular vertigo of a number that didn’t match the size of what had happened inside it.

“That’s not very long,” she said.

“No.”

“It should feel like less than it does.”

“It should,” he agreed, “and it doesn’t, and I’ve stopped trying to work out what that means about either of us,” and then the door opened, and there wasn’t time for anything else, because the carpet wanted them.

The noise hit first, the particular wall of sound a hundred photographers made when they were all shouting the same two names at once, and Luca had learned, across five appearances before tonight, how to walk through it without flinching, chin level, one hand at the small of Hattie’s back, because the contract’s old clause about physical contact “as reasonably required for public credibility” had died in that private dining room in March and nobody had ever replaced it with a rule about where his hand went, only an understanding they’d built themselves, appearance by appearance, that had needed no clause at all.

They stopped at the second marker because Kemi had briefed them to, and a run of shutters went off, and Hattie did the thing she did — the fraction of held warmth, the tilt of her head that made a stranger’s camera believe it had caught something private — except tonight, watching her do it four inches away instead of through a pass hatch, Luca understood that he could no longer tell, and suspected she couldn’t either, which parts of it she was building for the lens and which parts she meant.

That was the whole of it, he thought. Somewhere in eleven weeks the performance and the truth had stopped being two things they were managing side by side, and become the same thing, worn at the same time, in front of the same cameras, and neither of them had noticed the join until it was too late to find it again.

“You’re staring,” she said, under the noise, smiling for the shutters while she said it.

“I’m allowed. It’s on the schedule.”

“Is it.”

“It’s on my schedule,” he said, and the laugh that got out of her then was real enough that three separate photographers caught it, and none of them would ever know it wasn’t for them.

· · ·Scene break

A woman with a headset moved them to the next mark, and a photographer Luca half-recognised — the same unhurried confidence, the same instinct for where the light sat — lowered her camera for a second to actually look at them rather than through the lens.

He placed her then: Southbank, the mackerel stall, the first plate, the first accidental true sentence either of them had been allowed to say out loud in front of a crowd.

“Could you—“ she said, and gestured, the exact gesture from that day, a stall, a plate, a first sentence Luca still thought about more than he’d admitted to anyone. “Look like you mean it.”

He’d heard that instruction a hundred times in two years, from a hundred different photographers who wanted a hundred different versions of a recovered man, and he’d learned to produce it the way he’d learned knife skills, badly and then perfectly, until it cost him nothing to hand over.

It cost him nothing tonight either, which was the entire problem, because what came out of him wasn’t the practised version at all.

“We do,” he said.

The words were out before he’d finished deciding to say them, before he’d checked them for wording the way Hattie checked a clause, before Kemi three feet away could have vetted them for the season’s storyline or Dana Kessler’s shot list or anything at all except the plain fact of standing next to this particular woman in front of a wall of lights and finding that the sentence had arrived whole, true, and entirely unmanaged.

The shutters went off in a run that told him the photographer knew what she’d caught.

Hattie went very still beside him, the particular stillness he’d learned to read as her deciding whether to trust the ground under something before she put her weight on it, and for one long second neither of them moved to correct it, to laugh it off as a joke about the contract, to do any of the small professional repairs either of them had spent eleven weeks perfecting.

“We do,” she repeated, quietly, just for him, testing the weight of the two words the way she tested a line before she let a client keep it.

“I didn’t mean the ceremony,” he said, because someone needed to say it out loud before the moment closed over itself. “I meant—“

“I know what you meant.” She wasn’t looking at the cameras any more, and neither, he realised, was he. “I’ve heard the actual sentence hiding under enough vows to recognise one when a man says it by accident on a red carpet.”

Kemi’s hand found his elbow before either of them said anything else, steering them gently but firmly towards the next mark, murmuring something about the schedule, about Dana’s team, about a hundred small professional considerations that suddenly felt, to Luca, like weather happening to somebody else.

He walked the rest of the carpet on schedule, smiling where the room wanted smiling, and felt Hattie’s hand find his at the last mark before the doors, briefly, deliberately, neither of them checking first whether a camera was close enough to catch it.

· · ·Scene break

Inside, the ceremony ran the way these things always ran, three hours of other people’s categories and other people’s speeches, and Luca sat through most of it with Hattie’s hand resting, unremarked, against his on the arm of the chair, aware of almost nothing else in the room.

“You’ve barely watched a single award go out,” she murmured, at one point, not moving her hand.

“I’ve been watching you not watch them either.”

“I’m working. Occupational hazard. I’m mentally editing three of these speeches already.”

“Which one’s the worst?”

“The sound designer’s. Four minutes, no structure, thanked his dentist.” She said it without looking away from the stage, and he felt the laugh go through her rather than hearing it, which he was starting to prefer to the audible kind. “I’d have cut it to ninety seconds and kept only the dentist joke.”

“You’d have made it better and taken all the credit.”

“I never take the credit. That’s rather the whole of my job.” Something in her voice, saying it, had less of its usual armour than it would have carried a month ago, and neither of them said anything else about it, because the lights were already coming up for the interval, and there wasn’t a version of this conversation that survived being finished in a room full of people.

· · ·Scene break

By the time his phone had started buzzing in his jacket at the after-party, he knew, without looking, what would be waiting on the screen — a clip, a caption, a number climbing the way numbers climbed now whenever the two of them stood still together long enough for someone else’s lens to notice what neither of them had managed to hide.

He didn’t check it. There would be time for that later, in the car, or tomorrow, or never, and none of the versions of tonight that mattered were the ones with a caption attached.

Dana Kessler found them before Kemi did, which told him everything about how fast the clip had already travelled.

“‘We do,’” she said, delighted, holding her own phone up as evidence, as though either of them needed reminding what he’d said. “I’ve had three separate people send me that in the last forty minutes, and none of them know it’s mine to want yet. Tell me that’s usable.”

“It’s not a line, Dana. It wasn’t written for anyone.”

“Everything’s usable if it’s true enough, Luca. That’s rather the whole secret of the job.” She looked between them with the particular satisfaction of a woman who believed she’d just watched her finale write itself early. “I’m not going to pretend I’m not thrilled. I am going to ask, gently, whether this changes anything about June.”

“It changes everything about June,” Hattie said, before Luca could answer, her voice perfectly level, the one she used for delivering bad news to a bride about a cancelled florist. “It means whatever happens at that wedding happens because it’s true, not because it tests well. If that’s not usable for you, that’s not our problem to solve.”

Dana’s smile didn’t move, but something behind it recalculated, visibly, the way Kemi’s had done once in a private dining room in March. “Noted,” she said, and drifted off towards a cluster of executives before either of them had to manage the rest of it.

“Kemi’s going to want a line ready for tomorrow,” Hattie said, finding him by the bar, two glasses of something neither of them had asked for balanced in her hands. “‘We do’ is going to be everywhere by breakfast.”

“Let her have a line. I’m not taking it back.”

“I didn’t ask you to.” She handed him a glass, and didn’t let go of it quite as quickly as the handover required. “I’m just telling you what’s coming, so you’re not surprised by it in the morning.”

“I know what’s coming. I said it on purpose, once I’d said it. I just didn’t plan to say it there.”

“Where would you have planned to say it?”

He thought about that properly, the noise of the party going on around them, a hundred conversations that had nothing to do with either of them, and found that he didn’t have a rehearsed answer, which was, these days, becoming the only kind of answer he trusted.

“Somewhere with no photographer telling me how to look,” he said. “Somewhere it would only have to mean something to you.”

Hattie didn’t say anything to that straight away, and he watched her decide, in the particular way she decided everything, whether to trust the ground under it before she put her weight on it. Whatever she landed on, she kept it, for now, behind the same careful, considering look she’d once used on a contract in a private dining room, eleven weeks and a whole life ago.

“Then you’d better find that somewhere,” she said, “because I meant it too, and I’m getting tired of only saying the true things by accident, in front of cameras, where neither of us can properly hear ourselves say them.”

She left him at the bar to go and rescue Kemi from a producer, and Luca stood there with a drink he hadn’t asked for, two words still hanging in the air behind him that neither of them had taken back.

Across the room, Hattie said something to Kemi that made Kemi laugh properly, for what looked like the first time all night, and then glanced back towards the bar, briefly, checking whether he was still watching. He was. She didn’t look away first, which she’d never once managed at any of the five appearances before tonight, always the one to break a look before it could be read as anything other than professional.

He understood, watching her hold it, that whatever was coming next — a headline, a phone call from Dana, a schedule that would need amending by morning — none of it mattered half as much as the one conversation he now had every intention of finding a room quiet enough to finish.