Wishful Thinking Read Online Free PDF Page B

conversation, with the air of someone who was accustomed to using four-syllable words. He had chosen an unremarkable Chinese restaurant because he guessed, quite correctly, that a more glamorous location would have daunted her, but his manner displayed the unobtrusive confidence that goes with wealth. He was gentle, thoughtful, neither coaxing nor pushing, and gradually, stammering at first, then in a rush, Lin poured out the whole story.
    This was the point, of course, when she should have subsided gratefully into his arms and lived happily ever after. It’s like that moment in Sense and Sensibility where Willoughby dumps Marianne to marry money and she is rescued by Colonel Brandon. But real life doesn’t work that way. Andy was elderly and bearded, Lin was still hopelessly in love with Sean, he offered her the sofa in his Covent Garden flat in friendship only, then put her in the bed and slept on the sofa himself. He was kind and chivalrous, Sean was an arsehole. He didn’t stand a chance – even if he had wanted a chance to stand, and there is little evidence that he did. An unhappy relationship with a sophisticated brunette three years his senior had left recent scars, and though he was touched by Lin’s beauty and her plight, that was all. He was a responsible adult helping a desperate child: nothing more.
    So much for romantic cliché.
    Two days later Sean called Lin at Andy’s flat after wheedling the number out of a mutual acquaintance. Evidently, he had had a change of heart. He insisted he had never meant to hurt her, she shouldn’t take everything so seriously, she was so sweet and earnest, it was just that she had dropped a bit of a bombshell and he’d needed time to get used to the idea. He was coming along to fetch her right now.
    A week later, in the full glare of the paparazzi, they got married.
    To call Sean an arsehole isn’t, I suppose, entirely fair. He’s an actor. In some ways, that’s worse. An arsehole is at least consistent: you know where you are with him. You can rely on the fact that under any set of circumstances he is going to lie, cheat, and let you down. But an actor, immersing himself in his current role, tends to take his colour from that, blending into the part like a chameleon. In Mandela Street , Sean had been the charming Irish ne’er-do-well who impregnated other men’s wives and shed girlfriends in alternate episodes. In the new series (I forget what it was called) he played a tough cop torn between the pressures of the job and the pregnant young wife he adored. Inevitably, it went to his head. He adored Lin in a succession of minor interviews, in a piece in the Radio Times to promote the series – by then, the twins had arrived and could be included in his adoration – in a lengthy feature in Hello! After a brief, unremarkable appearance at Stratford-on-Avon he stated his aspirations in serious theatre, and, as a sideline, insisted on calling the babies Lysander and Demetrius. Lin, blinded by reciprocal adoration, acquiesced, despite a private preference for Fingal and Fergus. Lysander Fergus and Demetrius Fingal were non-identical, respectively reddish-fair and dark, silent Scot and sensitive Irish (or Deptford) in temperament. They looked amazingly endearing in all early photographs. By the time they had grown into tiresome toddlers vandalising their Notting Hill house, Dad’s character had lost his wife to a terrorist bomb and was back playing the field, albeit with suitable undertones of brooding and tragedy. Since Lin had failed to meet a premature death, in real life Sean was forced to revert to a less gloomy promiscuity. While Lin was tied to house and family he would go out, returning late or not at all, always indignant if she ventured to object. ‘These people are useful, acushla. I was meeting a producer/director/casting director’ or ‘You know I’m not the stay-at-home type. That isn’t