Read Online A Hidden Life by Adèle Geras - Free Book Online

with me and Phyl for a while.’
    â€˜Both of them? A baby in the house, at your age? You’d have to do the looking after, I promise you. Lou won’t want to stop work, will she?’
    Matt sighed. ‘It’s not me, it’s Phyl. She’s got a bee in her bonnet. Lou’s work is only reading scripts and writing reports about them. She could do that equally well here.’ A vision of his daughter in London, sitting crouched over that too-small and rather rickety desk with his granddaughter in the little box room that was her nursery, made him sad and he shook his head to dispel the mood. ‘I don’t know what I think any longer.’
    â€˜Then don’t. I’ve nearly finished my coffee. Let’s get another and pretend we’re young and foolish again.’
    Was Ellie flirting with him? Matt went back to the counter, thinking about the implications of this, wondering how he ought to respond, and at the same time, imagining what Phyl would say if she knew. She’d always been jealous of Ellie and when he left the house this morning, he would have pooh-poohed the possibility of anything at all happening between himself and Ellie. But now … Pull yourself together, man, he told himself as he approached the table with the coffee. It’s just the way Ellie is, and always has been. It doesn’t mean a thing.
    *
    Cinnamon Hill Productions had its offices on two floors of a rather tall, thin house in one of the seedier streets behind Tottenham Court Road. Even so, Lou always started walking more quickly as she approached this rather unprepossessing place. She loved going to the office. She only did so when she had a script to discuss with Harry Lang, and wished she could go there every day to escape her four walls and sit in someone else’s space. Going to the office meant more to her than to most other people, she realized. It was a sign of many things. It showed, for instance, that she was a grown-up. This was something she had trouble believing and, okay, part of it was her age. She was only twenty-three, for God’s sake, which seemed to her not a bit grown-up and certainly far too young to be a mother.
    She’d had fifteen months to get used to Poppy, but even now she felt a sickening plunge of pure fear when she reflected that she was in sole charge of a young child. From the moment her daughter was born, she’d been on a dizzying seesaw that moved between terror and elation. That had got a bit better, after the first few weeks. Nowadays, she knew how to bath, dress, feed and comfort her baby, but still, Poppy was often an enigma and Lou was constantly aware that she could spring surprises; that occasions could arise when she, Lou, would be at a complete loss and need to ask for help; when all the experts with their users’ manuals for mothers were worse than useless and she was left feeling hysterical and more often than not in tears.
    I’m always so relieved when I drop her off at nursery on the three days she goes there – that must mean something, she told herself. It must mean I’m glad to be without her. How unnatural is that? She’d discussed this rush of pleasure with Margie, who pronounced it perfectly normal and assured her that everything would get a whole lot easier and better when Poppy could talk. Lou hoped she was right.
    Working at Cinnamon Hill Productions also gave her a link, however tenuous, to the film industry. She was a part of it, even if only a tiny one. Films were Lou’s passion. It was difficult for her to go to the movies very often these days. The price of tickets and a babysitter was simply too much for her, but she hadn’t been able to say no to her father’s present of a DVD player and she would have gone without food in order to pay for her Amazon rentals.
    The office was up a couple of flights of stairs that badly needed sweeping. The first thing you saw when you came in was a small,