The Actor: Celebrity Romance based on a True Story PREVIEW

Chapter 1

[This is a preview of my new Celebrity Romance, which will initially be available exclusively on Amazon and in the Kindle Unlimited programme - from 31st December 2019].

London, New Year's Eve, 1998

I first met the Actor when I was fifteen.

I was staying in London with my Aunt Rosa and Uncle Gerard, while my parents were overseas. They were very different from my parents. Aunt Rosa ran a fashionable art gallery and was terribly stylish. Many of her friends were connected to the theatre or the world of fashion, and her life was a whirl of social activity which was all part of her business as well.

Uncle Gerard was quieter, though he was in fact the greater celebrity. He was a renowned composer, at least that was the epithet always used by the newspapers. This was because he was famous, as he had written the scores for a couple of popular West End musicals, but also because he was respected for having composed classic symphonies as well. The snobbery over this was ridiculous, Aunt Rosa always said, because the musicals made squillions more than the symphonies. But somehow, people felt it was acceptable to look askance at the lower brow forms of music, while enjoying the very luxurious hospitality they bought.

Aunt Rosa didn't care. She was the kind of woman who enjoyed life and people and had no problem being generous towards those I felt were utter hypocrites. "Let them sneer!" she said.

"But don't you mind?" I asked. There had been a particularly spiteful review of Uncle Gerard's latest musical in one of the newspapers that morning, written by a critic whom I knew that my aunt and uncle had had to dinner many times.

"Goodness no, darling. Water off a duck's back. It's column inches, nothing more."

I was sure Uncle Gerard must mind, though admittedly he never showed it if he did. Most of their friends, the inner circle, were decent people at least. Not spiteful, anyway.

Aunt Rosa and Uncle Gerard had no children. Whether by choice or circumstance I had no idea, but it made Aunt Rosa delighted to dote on me - "my favourite niece!" - when I was deposited with her every other year or so. I was her only niece. If she treated me more like an exotic pet or an accessory than a child, I didn't mind.

But now I was fifteen. So far as Aunt Rosa was concerned, I was suddenly a young woman. She was having one of her parties, on New Year's Eve, and saw no reason why I shouldn't come.

"There'll be some amusing people. Perhaps no one quite your age, but you won't mind that, will you?"

I wasn't sure whether I would mind or not. I doubted it. I felt as though I were finally getting a set of keys to their glamorous world. Instead of peeking down through the bannisters at the tinkling and chinking of laughter and wine glasses in the crowd clustered below, I would be among them.

My parents, I was quite sure, would not approve. But they had lost any moral high ground, I felt, by deserting me the day after Boxing Day. My father, a chemical engineer, had a research conference in Berne. Why the Swiss insisted on having conferences when everyone else was enjoying the Christmas and New Year party season, I had no idea. But my mother was travelling with him, and they planned to make a trip of it and visit some old friends. It would be deadly dull for me, so they thought, whereas in London I could visit museums and be taken to Uncle Gerard's latest show.

They had no notion that Aunt Rosa would include me in her adult festivities. Nor that she would take me shopping for a completely unsuitable outfit.

"I'm not sure what I have to wear," I had told her, and I honestly wasn't fishing. Her guests were always very slinky and sparkling, and I had no party dresses with me.