It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Thirty-three




Tess wasn’t back in ten minutes and Ellie had nothing to do but mull over her first and last TV appearance, because she was never doing that again. Not even if BBC4 begged her to present her own series on Modernist Art.

She’d wanted to appear dignified, but she’d used her ‘bitch, please’ voice, badmouthed Billy Kay, even though she’d been adamant she wasn’t going to stoop that low, and she’d cried. It might only have been one tear, two at the most, but crying on television … she was never going to live it down.

It was more than that. The secret place inside her heart that was reserved for just a handful of people had been exposed to the entire nation. You always had to hold something back, but Ellie had given it all away and she felt hollow now. Empty. As if while she’d perched on that stool, in front of the harsh lights and the all-seeing cameras, her soul had been scooped out like the flesh from an over-ripe avocado.

‘Car’s here,’ said a cheerful voice, and Ellie looked up at a woman who wasn’t Tess, who had just opened the door.

Ellie was reunited with garment bag, vanity case and handbag, and on reaching Reception was also presented with a huge bouquet of pink roses and lilac hydrangeas ‘From all your friends at On The Sofa. We’d love to have you back. Any time,’ said the woman who wasn’t Tess. Ellie wanted to say she’d rather eat her own spleen but mumbled that she’d love to before she was shown into a people carrier.

There was no driver, not that Ellie minded. She was already retrieving her phone and scrolling through a multitude of messages from people who she wouldn’t have believed watched daytime TV. Most were cheer-leading variations on the theme of You rocked it, babe, and your hair looked fantastic, apart from Lola who wanted to know: Did U get a look at Jeff Jenkins’ knob? Bigger than a baguette?

It felt good to giggle though it swiftly became a gasp of fear when Ellie saw she had a text from Vaughn. Vaughn didn’t usually do texts, but he’d also sent an email and left a caustic voicemail message requesting Ellie’s presence in his office ‘before end of business today. By which time I might not be quite so angry with you, but don’t count on it, Cohen.’

She’d been half inclined to ask the missing driver to drop her at the gallery, but now Ellie wasn’t sure. She could go home because she hadn’t been home in weeks, but technically she always thought of Ari’s tiny, cluttered flat as home. Ari, however, was the one person who hadn’t left any messages, even though she was the one person that Ellie most wanted to talk to.

She was angry with Ari for withholding and Ari had to be angry with her for raking up the past, but whatever they’d both said had to be unsaid because Ari was her mother and her best friend and they belonged together. They had to get through this latest, gut-churning upset and Ellie wasn’t going to let the day finish without making up. After all, Sadie insisted that it was bad form to let the sun set on a quarrel, though Ari always pointed out that Sadie was physically incapable of apologising to anyone for anything.

Ellie was just wondering if Ari was at work today and might be persuaded to take a long lunch when she heard the boot slam shut. Then both passenger doors opened and two people got in on either side of her so Ellie was forced to slide to the middle of the seat.


‘Sorry. Could you budge up just a little more? You’re sitting on my seatbelt,’ squeaked a voice to her left. Ellie stared in horror at Rose Kay, who was suddenly sitting next to her.

‘For f*ck’s sake!’ Lara Kay was on Ellie’s other side. ‘Now you’re trying to take our Addison Lee car as well.’

‘I was here first,’ Ellie said icily. ‘Why don’t you get out of my car?’

‘Three to Clerkenwell,’ the driver clarified as he started the engine.

‘I’m not going to Clerkenwell,’ Ellie insisted, as Lara tutted and made a big show of shifting so that no part of her or her gorgeously soft and squashy Chloe hobo bag was anywhere near Ellie. ‘There’s been a mistake.’

‘Three to Clerkenwell,’ the driver repeated. ‘Velvet, Rose and Tara.’

There was a predictable explosion on Ellie’s right. ‘It’s Lara with an L! Lara!’

‘She gets that all the time,’ Rose told Ellie. ‘Tara or Sara. Even Cara and Mara.’

‘Shut up!’ Lara snapped. She was the most foul-tempered person that Ellie had ever met. ‘Don’t talk to her.’

The three of them settled back in silence. The nagging pain from before was now hovering around Ellie’s temples. She didn’t have the energy to argue with the driver. She pressed her fingertips to her forehead and was grateful when Lara demanded that the driver turn up the air conditioning.

‘I tried to find you on Facebook loads of times but I didn’t know you called yourself Ellie now,’ Rose said, smiling timidly as Ellie looked at her in surprise.

‘You knew about me before? You knew about me?’

Rose nodded. ‘When we were little and we were being naughty, Mummy used to say, “I bet Velvet isn’t so badly behaved.” Then she’d pretend to ring you up and ask if you wanted to come and live with her after she’d sent us to a home for naughty girls.’

Ellie could only stare in disbelief at Rose, whose eyes were fixed resolutely on her face. ‘Really? Wow.’ She couldn’t even begin to take in this information or that the Honourable and chilly-looking Olivia had a sense of humour.

‘It’s all a bit surreal, isn’t it?’ Rose was so close now, she was almost in Ellie’s lap. ‘You’ve got our old nose.’

‘If you don’t shut up, I’m going to slap you,’ warned her elder sister. She gave Ellie a cursory glance. ‘Mummy made sure our noses were fixed as soon as we were sixteen. They used to be big and bent like yours.’

When it came to body defects, all Ellie’s energy was taken up with minimising the effects of small tits and frizzy hair. The slight kink in her perfectly average-sized nose barely even registered, so she failed to rise to the bait. She had a feeling that getting people to rise to the bait was Lara’s raison d’être.

That wasn’t important right now, though. ‘You’ve known about me for years, but you still didn’t have a problem spouting all those lies in the press.’ Words failed Ellie for a moment and she could do nothing but twitch her limbs in sheer, restless rage. ‘You sat in that studio and looked me in the eye and banged on, once again, about how you’d been torn in two by the revelations that you suddenly had a half-sister. Oh, I’m sorry. My mistake. An alleged half-sister.’

There had been a time in the not too distant past when Ellie had always kept a firm grip on her emotions. Now she actually had Rose Kay gingerly patting her arm in an attempt to calm her down. ‘Look, Ellie … do you mind if I call you Ellie? It’s weird ’cause in my head I always think of you as Velvet …’

‘Oh, call her what you like,’ Lara sighed, like it was her lot in life to be the older, meaner sister. This time, though, the look she gave Ellie was more curious than cursory. ‘You don’t look like a Velvet.’

‘Nobody does. It’s a ridiculous name. That’s why, as soon as I could talk, I insisted on being called Ellie.’ Ellie turned back to Rose. ‘So, you were just about to explain your part in my downfall.’

‘It was nothing personal,’ Rose assured her, her pretty face drooping downwards in dismay. ‘When your ex started hawking his story round, it was just really good timing because the Chronicle had found out about Charlie and were going to run with that story. Charlie’s only nineteen and he’s really shy and he hates a fuss. It would have been torture for him.’

Lucky Charlie. He had the entire Kay clan, and all their minions, working tirelessly to protect his precious privacy, so Ellie couldn’t really find it in her heart to have much sympathy for him. Especially when she’d been sacrificed to keep him safe. Still, at least the Kays cared about something other than making money.

‘And Billy was putting the finishing touches to his greatest hits,’ Rose continued, blithely unaware that she’d just disproved Ellie’s theory that the Kays weren’t all bad.

‘It’s a retrospective of his career.’ Lara begged to differ. ‘There’s even going to be a collection of his most iconic photographs at the National Portrait Gallery.’

‘And he’s going to do his first stadium tour in years. It’s very exciting,’ Rose added as if she expected Ellie to feel the same unconfined joy as she did. ‘Billy swore he wouldn’t do a greatest hits …’

‘God give me strength.’

‘… or a stadium tour, but he has a massive tax bill. It is beyond massive.’ Rose held her hands apart to indicate the enormity of just how much her father owed Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. ‘And, well, I know it sounds a bit … um, what’s the word I’m looking for?’

‘Evil? Exploitative? Despicable?’ Rose seemed sweet, and if the circumstances had been different … But they weren’t different. Rose and her sister were not good people. Good people didn’t lie and cheat and cash in on other people’s misfortune. ‘Any of those words suitable, or should I keep going? Bad enough that my ex-boyfriend shops a completely bogus kiss-and-tell to the papers, but the pair of you, your family, your publicist, your f*cking lawyer, have made it a million times worse. You’ve just about buried me and I’ve barely been able to claw my way out.’

‘I think you’re overreacting a little bit,’ Rose said hurriedly, snaking out a hand like she was going to pat Ellie’s arm again, then snatching it back when Ellie bared her teeth. ‘We didn’t know you, and we just figured … Georgie said that you’d make some money from selling your story and doing modelling jobs or some reality TV so it was win-win. How were we to know that you weren’t that sort of girl?’

She wasn’t that sort of girl, and when they’d realised that, then they’d thought they could play her for a total fool.

‘You couldn’t understand,’ Lara said coolly. ‘You haven’t grown up in the public eye. You don’t know how these things work. Billy is an artiste. He’s an icon, he can’t be held to account. Normal rules don’t apply when you’re a creative genius.’

She said it with a completely straight face as if she’d drunk the Kool-Aid. It was like trying to reason with a Scientologist, ‘Billy? Don’t you call him Dad, then?’


The two Kay sisters laughed. ‘As if! How weird would that be?’ Lara looked much friendlier when she smiled, not that she was anyone Ellie wanted to be pals with.

‘He says that anyone can have a dad, but only we’re lucky enough to have Billy Kay as a father,’ Rose explained and before Ellie could make gagging noises, Rose suddenly burst into tears.

‘Oh, for f*ck’s sake, don’t do that.’ Lara reached round Ellie to slap her younger sister on the arm. ‘What the hell are you crying for?’

‘Don’t slap her!’ Ellie stroked the red mark on Rose’s arm and it suddenly struck her that she was touching her own flesh and blood, someone who shared the DNA in her that wasn’t Cohen DNA. It was one of those big moments that she’d remember for the rest of her life, like her first kiss, or the time that one of Ari’s friends fixed it for her and Tess to meet Shane from Westlife, or the look on David’s face when she’d told him to f*ck off. So it made no sense that Ellie felt nothing more than slight concern that someone sitting next to her was crying. It was entirely unsettling, because family was family and she loved hers; grandparents, cousins, even maybe Aunt Carol, but Rose, and especially Lara, made her feel nothing more than a nagging unease. Maybe that was only to be expected after the latest round of revelations. ‘Your sister’s right. There’s nothing to cry about.’

‘But you’re my sister too and now the three of us are together for the first time,’ Rose said, leaning towards Ellie as if they needed to hug.

Fortunately, the car had come to a stop and the moment was gone.

Rose and Lara scrambled out. Ellie sat there for one confused moment because they were outside the offices of Wyndham, Pryce and Lewis. Then she got out too.

After she’d collected her bags from the boot, she turned to Lara and Rose, who were hunting for a tissue. Ellie opened the side pocket of her Mulberry, and presented Rose with a pack of pocket wipes. ‘I’m not going to say it’s been good to meet you because it’s actually been incredibly upsetting.’

‘Oh, come on, it wasn’t that bad,’ Lara grudgingly conceded. ‘But it’s not like we’re going to be friends, is it?’

‘No, it’s not.’ Ellie didn’t feel any regret about this mutual decision, but Rose, who was still sniffing and hiccuping, wrung her hands in protest.

‘But we said we were sorry …’

‘No, you didn’t …’

‘Well, we are, and we could start by being Facebook friends,’ she protested snottily, as if she was working up to weeping again. ‘We hardly have any family.’

‘What about Charlie? What’s he like?’ Ellie asked, because how could she not?

Rose frowned as she considered Ellie’s question. ‘He’s lovely but he’s very quiet. It’s really hard to know what he’s thinking.’ She went almost cross-eyed as she tried to think of something else to give Ellie. ‘But he can be really silly sometimes. He loves watching You’ve Been Framed and he makes a really good chilli.’

There was a painful twinge in Ellie’s heart as she processed this handful of facts. Made a tiny space in there for a half-brother that hadn’t existed forty-eight hours ago. ‘He sounds really nice,’ she said to Rose.

Lara folded her arms and sighed. ‘Charlie looks a lot like Billy, and Billy loves that. It means Charlie gets a free pass and that’s why sometimes he behaves like a spoiled little shit.’

Coming from Lara Kay that was quite the ringing endorsement. ‘But you must have grandparents and cousins and—’

‘Not really. Billy doesn’t speak to his family, and so—’

‘Rosie! Stop over-sharing!’ Lara hit Rose with her bag. ‘Don’t start crying again.’ She turned to Ellie, who was watching this display of sisterly love with a bemused expression. ‘This is why we went with the heartbroken angle. She can cry on cue. She cries all the f*cking time.’

‘I don’t.’ Rosie scrunched up her face. ‘I do, but I can’t help it if I’m sensitive. Why can’t we be friends on Facebook?’

It was going to be easier to give in, Ellie decided. Then she could toddle off into the sunset. Not that there was any sun left. The sky was leached of all colour and appeared closer than normal, as if it was pressing down on the tall city buildings. It was still bloody hot, though. Ellie tugged at the bodice of her dress, which was sticking to her, and looked at Rose, then at Lara. ‘Facebook friends, but limited profile. That’s all I’m prepared to offer, and even that’s pushing it. OK?’

They nodded.

Lara gestured at the offices behind them. ‘We’d better go in.’

Ellie should go and make up with Ari, then persuade Vaughn to reinstate her with immediate effect.

First, though, she couldn’t help but stare at the shiny gold plaque that said Wyndham, Pryce and Lewis. David would have looked at the plaque that morning as he pushed open the heavy wooden door; eyes shadowed, lips tight because he was still sore about what had happened in Paris. Maybe he regretted what had happened in Paris, but then David didn’t do sentimentality, Ellie thought bitterly to herself. Still she choked on her next breath when the door suddenly opened.

Her shoulders sagged as a young man in his early twenties, wearing a suit that was slightly too big for him as though he was hoping to grow into it, hurried down the steps. ‘I have to go,’ she said to Lara and Rose, who were repairing the damage done by Rose’s crying jag with the aid of spit-slicked tissues. ‘I’ll see you around.’

‘Everyone’s waiting in the conference room,’ the young man said, and Ellie was grateful he was interrupting what might have been a slow and torturous goodbye.

There wasn’t time for kisses or hugs, which was a relief, just half-hearted waves. Lara and Rose turned in one direction, Ellie the other, but the young man touched her lightly on the arm.

‘Miss Cohen? Are you not coming in with us?’ he asked with some surprise.

Ellie was equally surprised. ‘Was I meant to?’

He nodded. ‘It was why we asked the car to bring all three of you from the TV studios. Oh, sorry, was that awkward?’

‘A little bit,’ Ellie said, playing for time as she tried to decide if she did want to go inside. Inevitably, there’d be lawyers who’d threaten her with all sorts of dire legal stuff for saying what she’d said on telly. Then again, David was behind that door.

Ellie imagined the rest of her life would be spent replaying the handful of memories that were all she had to remember David by, until those memories would be so threadbare that she wouldn’t be able to trace the warp and weft of them any more. Seeing him again would hurt, but missing the chance to see him would hurt even more, so Ellie followed Ben Wyndham, a direct descendent of the original Mr Wyndham, into the elegant Georgian townhouse, up an ornately carved wooden staircase and down a panelled corridor. Ellie wanted to hang back, turn back, but instead she forced herself to smile at Ben Wyndham as he held a door open for her and she walked into a room.

Ari was sitting on an ancient leather sofa, which was something of an anticlimax.

‘You all right, hot stuff?’ Ari asked, as if they’d spoken only a couple of hours earlier. ‘Thanks for making me sound much, much cooler than I really am when you went on the telly. That was a bit of a bunfight, wasn’t it? Are you OK?’


‘Don’t ask. How are you? Are you OK?’ Ellie asked as she heard a muttered apology from behind her, then the door closing. ‘And what about us? Are we OK?’

‘We are always OK,’ Ari said stoutly. ‘But I have to say, Ellie, even though I hate fighting with you, will you believe me when I say that the things I didn’t tell you were for your own good? Trust me on that. Please.’

Ari glanced up at Ellie, who was still hovering by the door, and smiled. It was a poor excuse for a smile. Though she had on full warpaint: flicky eyeliner and trademark red lipstick, hair pinned in an elaborate series of waves and coils, Ari had looked better. With dark circles under red-rimmed eyes that even heavy foundation couldn’t conceal, for once she was showing every one of her forty-eight years, and Ellie hated seeing her like that; hated Ari’s forced, shamed smile as if she expected her to start shouting at her. Ellie had tensed when Ari, once again, shied away from the dark truths of her past, but suddenly that didn’t seem as important as sitting down on the sofa next to her mother and taking her hand.

Ari’s hand was freezing, though the temperature on the old-fashioned thermometer on the far wall was in the high eighties. ‘Everything will be all right,’ Ellie said. She wasn’t sure how to make it all right, but statistically speaking it would be all right sooner or later. Ellie squeezed Ari’s hand instead. Ari returned the pressure. ‘Anyway, Mum, what are you even doing here?’





Clerkenwell, London, Present Day

Only for Ellie would Ari be sitting in a tiny anteroom in the offices of Wyndham, Pryce and Lewis after getting a phone call from some lawyer who pleaded with Ari to be there ‘for your daughter’s sake’.

Even though Ari was angry with Ellie for trying to prise out secrets that might destroy the pair of them, it was the kind of anger that walked hand in hand with fear. Ari’s been looking out for Ellie her whole life, protecting her from harm, shielding her from evil, so there is absolutely no way she is going to let Ellie walk into the offices of Wyndham, Pryce and Lewis on her own.

As it is, Ellie has got her own stuff going on right now. She’s been on television and she’s been crying, and when she talks about Chester, her pretty face crumples again and again. She looks up at the ceiling, takes a deep breath, and tries yet again. ‘I always hoped you and Chester would get together one day, and I know it’s not going to happen now, but you have to make things right with him, Mum.’

‘I will,’ Ari says, and she means it. She feels the loss of Chester right at the centre of her being but it still doesn’t compare to the time she lost Billy Kay.

Ari’s been thinking about the time that she lost Billy Kay quite a bit over the last few days.

‘All I ever wanted was Chester as a dad,’ Ellie says. Her chest heaves and usually Ari vows to avenge whoever’s hurt her daughter, but this time she’s the one to blame.

Ari smooths back Ellie’s hair. Her beautiful curls are kicking back in but she won’t share that with Ellie, it always makes Ellie cross and makes Ari sound like Sadie. ‘We don’t always get what we want, sweetie,’ she tells her instead. ‘In fact, sometimes, what we want won’t do us any good.’

‘Chester said that he’s missed out on so much by loving you,’ Ellie says and she shrugs apologetically, because there’s no nice way to say what comes next. ‘And so have you, Mum, by still being in love with Billy Kay. You could have let yourself love someone else, if you hadn’t been waiting for him. He wasn’t waiting for you – wasn’t waiting for us – was he?’

‘He wasn’t,’ Ari says, but she hasn’t been waiting for Billy all these years. Not in the way people think. Ever since she saw pictures in the paper of this Miranda, and her son, who looks like a tenth-generation copy of the real thing, she’s slowly been coming to terms with the fact that some time over the last twenty-six years, she stopped loving Billy. The weird thing is that she doesn’t really hate him either. There was another reason why she’d been so driven. ‘You have to understand that ever since he left, I’ve always measured my happiness, my success, against whether I could bear to see Billy again,’ she tells Ellie. ‘I was always sure that one day we would see each other again. Still am. We have unfinished business.’

Ellie points at herself. ‘Yeah, sitting right here.’

‘No, not you, my little narcissist. It’s not always about you.’

‘Then what?’

There are some things that Ellie doesn’t need to know. Christ, Ari goes hot and cold and feels as if a platoon of ghosts have walked over her grave at the thought of some truths coming out.Truths that she and Ellie might not be able to come back from. But there are other truths that Ellie is probably old enough to deal with. ‘Music things,’ Ari says vaguely. ‘Copyright issues. Won’t bore you with the details.’

‘Does he owe you money?’ Ellie’s eyes narrow. ‘Did you write some of his songs on that first album? You know, Tom always says—’

Ari knows what Tom and Tabitha and Chester and, God, even her brother-in-law Sidney say about the songs, about how many millions are hers by rights, but they could never understand that when they eventually met again, Ari had wanted to face Billy as his equal.

‘What I wish is that I hadn’t spent years chasing this elusive dream that I was going to make it,’ she says to her daughter. ‘That I’d become famous and fêted and my songs would mean something to generations upon generations so I could show Billy that I didn’t need him, that I was better off without him.’

‘Well, that’s crap,’ Ellie says sharply enough that Ari looks at her in surprise because there’s a new edge to her daughter that Ari hasn’t seen before. ‘The fact that you never gave up on your dreams, that you never settled, is amazing. It’s inspired me my whole life. You’ve inspired me.’

It’s all getting too saccharine sweet. Any moment, Ellie might break into the chorus from ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. Ari nudges her. ‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t so inspiring when you were a kid and I was trying to soundcheck at some dive in God knows where, and you wouldn’t stop nagging me for a bottle of Coke and a bag of crisps.’

Ellie nudges her back. ‘OK, just so you know, it’s not so inspiring either when you insist on climbing up on a speaker stack and I’m terrified that you’ll break a hip.’

‘You little bitch!’

Ellie looks at her with those dark eyes that technically she inherited from Billy, except Ellie’s are always warm, always twinkling, full of love, except now when they’re swollen and glassy with unshed tears. ‘Do you regret having me?’ she asks baldly. ‘Your life would have been different if I hadn’t been in it. I mean, you could have really focused on your music. You could have been famous …’

‘No!’ It might be Ari’s turn to cry. ‘No! Don’t you get it, Ellie? You are the love of my life. Sometimes I wish things had turned out differently, but I don’t even want to think what my life would be like if you hadn’t been in it.’

‘But …’ Ellie gestures at nothing. ‘Your dreams might have come true if you hadn’t had me.’


‘They were just dreams. But you’re real.’ Ari takes Ellie’s hands and places them over her heart. They don’t often have chats like this, talk about their feelings, but it’s important that Ellie knows this before it’s too late. Before she confronts whatever’s waiting for them in these offices. ‘I’m not the best mother in the world, I know that. There were lots of things I should have done, should have given you, but you’ve always been loved, Ellie. You don’t even know how much you’re loved.’

‘I do,’ Ellie says, and she does burst into tears then, and Ari cuddles her and promises her that everything will be all right.

After a while Ari makes Ellie blow her nose, tells her to do something about her make-up and she wonders if she shouldn’t just hustle her daughter the hell away from here, but then some grey-faced, grey-suited lawyer comes in and says that they’re ready for them in the conference room.