Blind Carnival

Valerie

1/2 of today's double update.

Love,

K. xx

***

They both look good. Actually, every time Olivia sees them she notices how good they look. Are real people supposed to look like magazine spreads? Even her characters from Love in Hollywood had less glamour.

Exhibit A: Her Mother. Patricia Orwell. Neé neither Patricia, nor Orwell. Plenty of - very subtle - plastic surgery, and she looks like her younger sister would, if she had one. She doesn't. If not for the common infertility in the women of her family, she probably would have made sure her parents used protection just so that these genes hadn't been transferred to someone younger than her. Russians have an expression that a small dog is forever a puppy, meaning those who are small and have child like features always look young. See Exhibit A. Huge, wide set, mind-blowingly blue eyes, perfect blonde waves, turned up nose, small pink mouth. No one knows whether she'd be grey haired now. The tone of her hair has been perfected over the years, and she makes slight changes to it, depending on what's fad. So, Mother Nature had probably given up by now. She's short, which prevented her from that model career she'd always dreamt about, and made her into more of a Goldie Hawn Laugh-In era that Lauren Hutton. But she didn't despair, and got all she could out of it. Including an - ex - husband who was a rising star then.

Cue Exhibit B. He's grey haired, not completely, and completely perfectly so. There's a wide white stripe in his raven hair, above his forehead, which makes him look very much like Gregory Peck in Omen. It's amazing how a good bone structure and expensive skin care - the jury is out on plastic surgery here - can make a man look nothing like the substance abusing, self-absorbed, sex addiction faking, aging playboy that he is.

The question is why Olivia is internally spitting venom and why her fists are clenched so hard that her nails are biting into her palms. She's a thirty six year old, successful woman. They can't do anything to her anymore.

"Olivia, darling! You're of course late, but I do not blame you." Patricia is elegantly waving her arm elegantly in the air, making sure the whole café is paying attention. "​Young love after all is worth making others wait!"

Olivia takes it back: they have plenty of ways to get to her.

She takes a slow breath in, and then she feels John's hand on her waist, his arm on her back. It's warm and endlessly comforting. Damn all clichés! It is helping!

Her father smiles softly. This smile is called benevolent, and it's as fake as Patricia's upper class pronunciation. And again, why are you still gibing, Olivia?

She knows why, though.

***

She was twenty five. She was unpopular, poor, and ill. And she had just lost her child. If Olivia was writing it into one of her silly novels, she'd probably wait till the very last moment, for the most dramatic and opportune part of the narrative, to reveal it. It would make her readers gasp: when 'he' and 'she' are alone, and she screams it into his face, and he's shocked, and the readers are shocked, and it hits them the most.

That's not how life works, though, does it?

She was seven months pregnant, and then she lost it. Her. Valerie. Allan wasn't sure about the name, but Olivia insisted. She said that was her name, and he just shrugged then. He was busy with his Master's, and if anything, he had always been great at prioritising. So, he let his pregnant wife fantasise, and pick names, and argue with herself while chewing on toast with Marmite. That was Olivia's most favourite snack in those seven months. For dramatic effect in a book, Olivia would point out that she hasn't touched it since then.