Two

      ‘Oh, you’re far too young to be having a baby, dear,’ Megan’s mother told her. ‘And I’m certainly too young to be a grandmother.’

      Megan estimated that her mother must be sixty-two by now, although officially she had only been in her fifties for the last six years or so.

      In Megan’s surgery she often saw grandmothers from the Sunny View Estate who were the same age as Cat and even Jessica – all those ‘nans’ in their middle and early thirties, who started child-bearing in what Mother Nature, if not the metropolitan middle class, would have considered their child-bearing years. But it was true – Olivia Jewell didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a grandmother. And Megan thought, why should she? She had never really got the hang of being a mother.

      Olivia Jewell still turned heads. Not because of the modest fame that she had once enjoyed – that had evaporated more than twenty years ago – but because of the way she looked. The massed black curls, the Snow White pallor, those huge blue eyes. Like Elizabeth Taylor if she had won her fight against the fat, or Joan Collins if she had never made it to Hollywood. An elderly English rose, wilting now, it was true, but still with a certain lustre.

      ‘They take over your life,’ Olivia said, although her voice softened as she contemplated her youngest daughter. ‘Darling. You don’t want anyone taking over your life, do you?’

      When their parents had met at RADA, it was Olivia who was the catch. Jack was a tall, serviceably handsome young actor, ramrod straight after two years’ National Service in the RAF and moonlighting as a male model (cigarettes, mostly – the young Jack looked good smirking in a blazer with a snout on the go).

      But Olivia was a delicate porcelain beauty, like that other Olivia, Miss de Havilland, already a bit of a throwback in those years of post-war austerity, when large-breasted blondes were suddenly all the rage.

      Olivia was swooned over by her teachers, her classmates and, later, the critics, who loved her as a petulant, foot-stamping Cordelia in Stratford. It was widely predicted that Jack would always work, but that Olivia was destined for true stardom. In the mocking passage of time, it had worked out very differently.

      After a few years where he scuffled around in the background of British films nostalgic for World War Two – playing the pipe-smoking captain in a chunky sweater who goes down with his shipmates, or the knobbly-kneed POW who gets shot in the back by the Hun while attempting to escape, or the RAF squadron leader with the gammy leg anxiously scanning the blue skies of Kent – Jack Jewell stumbled on the role of a lifetime.

      For almost twenty years he played a widowed father in the long-running BBC fishing drama, All the Fish in the Sea – played it for so long that Megan, his youngest child, had little memory of her father being around when she was growing up, he was so busy playing a doting father to his screen children. By the time they reached their teenage years, Jack Jewell’s kindly, knowing face had become one of the cherished icons of the nation, while Olivia’s big starring roles had never materialised.

      ‘Dad would be pleased,’ Megan said, deliberately provoking her. ‘Dad would be happy to be a grandfather.’

      Olivia shot her daughter a look. ‘You didn’t tell him, did you?’

      ‘Of course not. But he would be happy, I bet.’

      Olivia Jewell laughed. ‘That’s because he’s a big soft bastard. And because he doesn’t care what it would do to your life. Not to mention your lovely young body, dear.’

      Megan and her mother were in the café in Regent’s Park, ringed by all the white Nash houses, the most beautiful buildings in London, Megan thought, like architecture made out of ice cream. They were on one of their dates – drinking tea and watching the black swans glide across the lake, smelling freshly cut grass and the animal mustiness of the nearby London Zoo.

      Megan was the only one of her daughters that Olivia saw on a regular basis. Contact with Jessica was sporadic – Jessie was too easily hurt for a sustained relationship with someone as selfish as Olivia – and Cat hadn’t spoken to their mother in years.

      You had to make an effort with her, Megan always thought. That’s what her sisters didn’t get. Their mother was all right if you made the effort.

      ‘In the early sixties there was a darling little Maltese man off Brewer Street who used to take care of girls who got into trouble.’ It still mildly surprised Megan every time she heard her mother’s voice. She had a self-consciously cut-glass accent, the kind of accent that made Megan think of men in Broadcasting House reading the news in their tuxedos. ‘God – what was his bloody name?’

      ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ll be all right,’ Megan said, pushing a napkin halfway across the table. Olivia covered her daughter’s hands with her own, and gently rubbed them, as if to make them warm.

      ‘Well – anything I can do, dear.’

      Megan nodded. ‘Thank you.’

      ‘A woman’s body is never the same after giving birth. I had a body like you when I was young. Not petite like Jessica. Or skinny like Cat. More like you. All curves.’ Olivia squinted at her daughter. ‘Perhaps not quite so plump.’

      ‘Thanks a million.’

      ‘Did you know that Brando once made a pass at me?’

      ‘I think you mentioned it. About ten thousand times.’

      ‘Dear Larry Olivier admired my Cordelia. The dress I wore to the premiere of Carry On, Ginger caused a sensation. I was the Liz Hurley of my day.’

      ‘Then that makes Dad Hugh Grant.’

      ‘Hughie Green more like. That man. I dreamed of Beverly Hills. He gave me Muswell Hill.’

      It was strange, Megan thought. Their mother was the one who walked out. Their mother was the one who shacked up with a second-rate ham in a rented flat. Their mother was the one who left the raising of her children to their father, and whoever he could hire, and to Cat. And yet their mother was the one who acted bitter. Perhaps she could never forgive their father for becoming a bigger name than she would ever be.

      Her career had been a peculiarly English affair. If Olivia Jewell had ever needed a job description,