A Hidden Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

was lying even as she spoke. She had no intention of telling Margie where she was. Let her look after Poppy for the night as they’d arranged. Lou wanted the time to think about what had happened at Milthorpe House.
    She went into the tiny kitchen – okay, kitchenette – switched on the kettle and stared out at the night. What she saw was other people’s windows: some lit up, some in darkness, curtained and uncurtained, revealing, concealing, enticing. Lou loved the view, even though Mum shuddered every time she came here, which was as seldom as possible. It was thanks to Dad and Mum that this place now resembled something like a habitable space.
    Lou insisted on thinking of it as ‘the flat’. More like a shoe box, with its one bedsitting room, a teeny second room which was Poppy’s bedroom, and a bathroom and kitchen that looked like something from a doll’s house. The street wasn’t up to much either. When Dad and Mum came to see it, there had been a mattress in the front garden of one of the houses across the street and she could feel her mother shuddering and making a noble effort to say nothing. Thewallpaper was grim, there was no washing machine and nowhere to dry clothes.
    â€˜You can’t live here with a small baby,’ Mum had cried.
    â€˜Of course I can. Lots of people live in places that are far worse,’ Lou said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
    â€˜You
will
be fine,’ Dad announced, ‘but only because we’ll fix it up and make it okay. We’ll get it painted, and put in a washing machine and hang some decent curtains and you’ll be all right here, for a while anyway.’
    In the end, she’d done all the decorating, with Margie’s help, and money had done the rest. Lou sighed. Money. Mum and Dad had always helped her, so how real was the narrative she’d made for herself of how she was managing on her own, being independent, doing her own thing? How could she justify working three days a week and paying someone else to look after Poppy while she struggled along reading scripts for Cinnamon Hill Productions and reporting on them for £50 a throw? By allowing her parents to help her. They paid for all the extra things that she would never have been able to afford, most importantly, Poppy’s nursery fees, but Lou paid the rent and bought the food. She glanced at the small pile of papers on the left-hand side of her desk and reflected that she could certainly get more money as a temp, but she liked her work, she liked being involved with movies, even down among the helots, and felt, maybe wrongly, that it gave her at least a tiny chance of making her dreams come true.
    She’d told no one about these, though her parents, if they’d thought about it for ten seconds, would have realized that their daughter might have had ambitions to be something other than a part-time script reader for a small film company. Didn’t they remember all those exercise books she’d filled with stories, poems, sketches and, above all, plays when she was a child? Didn’t they know how much she’d always adored the movies? Had they forgotten how she and Grandad used to spend hours and hours on the sofa at Milthorpe House gazing at flickery black and white films in the afternoon? Evidently her parents hadn’t put two and two together. What she wanted more than anything else was to write screenplays. She’d never told anyone but Grandad about this. He’d understood. He knew what it wouldbe like to see her words spoken by actors, her ideas made visible on the screen, reaching out across the dark to everyone watching and lodging in their minds the way the films she’d seen as a kid were still within her, part of her mental furniture.
    Constance’s voice rang in her imagination:
You haven’t got time for silly dreams. You shouldn’t have had a child if you didn’t intend to look after her. No one