Page 43 of Just for December

‘They hold the purse strings.’ He shrugs. ‘And when you control the money, you control everything else on the movie too – both for making it, and marketing it. A great movie that doesn’t get marketed won’t get seen, or you can be really clever with marketing and get a mediocre movie a good return. And as studio head, you’re the one everyone is answerable to, so you’re the one with the most agency.’

‘I’d have thought that was directors,’ Evie offers, as their main courses arrive.

‘They certainlyactlike they’re the puppeteers,’ says Daphne. ‘I mean, not always. Sometimes. The men more so, to be honest.’

Duke shrugs. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘For my people.’

‘Here’s to that,’ Magda says, raising a glass. They clink glasses and drink.

‘I wouldn’t mind trying it, though,’ Daphne adds. ‘Directing. Maybe once I’ve established my own production company.’

‘God, ambition is hot.’ Magda winks. ‘Good for you.’

They eat, drink, and generally get merry at dinner, and by pudding Magda is trying to convince everyone to go to a local bar for a nightcap.

‘Come on,’ she says, happily drumming her fingers on the table. ‘Just one,’ she says. ‘Just one!’

Duke is almost tempted. He’s been having such a great time – just chatting, hanging out, being around people and doing something as normal as having a meal in a public place has been so refreshing. And Magda was right: nobody has recognised them. Or, if they have, they’ve left them well alone, which is wonderful. Duke thinks the people of Augsburg areverycool.

‘Oh, look,’ Magda suddenly interrupts herself then. ‘Sorry,’ she announces to the table. ‘I made friends with that woman at the airport. She gave me a Kleenex in the arrivals hall after I spilled my drink on myself. She was the one who told me about this place, actually. Let me just go and say hi.’

Duke carries on chatting as she goes, telling Daphne and Evie that he’s going to have to call it a night.

‘Do you mind? Or do you prefer to go out in the presence of a big burly man?’

‘Actually yes.’ Evie giggles. ‘Do you know one?’

It’s only as he’s rolling his eyes that he shifts his gaze from the table, and then, even though he’s telling himself there’s no way she can be here, not here, in Germany, in this restaurant with these people, he knows she is. He doesn’t know how, or why, just that it is so. She’s gesticulating with her hands and tipping her head back laughing as Magda points to their table and she looks over and their eyes lock. She looks brighter than normal, more functional, and there’s a man with her. An unremarkable man – he has eyes and a nose and a mouth and a jumper and trousers and a coat. She says something to him then, and Magda looks across and then Duke stands up.

‘Hello,’ she says to him as she approaches the table.

He blinks. He might be on the verge of crying. He might be crying already.

He swallows. ‘Hello, Mum.’

It transpires that the unremarkable man is Roger, her new boyfriend.

‘We met in AA, pet,’ she tells him, as they settle into the same corner Magda and Evie gossiped in earlier today. Alreadythat feels like a year ago. The past twenty minutes – paying at the restaurant, deciding to get back to the privacy of the hotel, taking off their coats – has felt like a week. His mother is here? In Germany? To see him?

‘He’s ever so kind to me. Really patient. Got two kids himself, though he’s out of touch with one of them. I told him I know what that’s like.’

If it’s an attempt at bonding, it falls flat for Duke. He’s doing what he has practised with Phoebe so many times: breathing, saving his response until he knows what he wants it to be, picking out the facts that he knows to be concretely true, not hysterical manufactured worries from his imagination.

This is his mother. She is here. She is not drunk. She has a boyfriend.

His mum looks at him expectantly. For a while he called her by her first name, Anna, as a way to articulate that she’s no mother to him. Never to her face, but privately, in sessions or to friends. But it felt forced, like he was trying to be madder than he was. Mostly he’s just always felt sad about her. Sad and lost and hurt.

‘I’m just struggling to connect some dots here, Mum,’ he says, when she sighs contentedly, like she’s over the moon to be here, with him, together. Roger has excused himself to go to the bathroom, but he’s been gone ages already. Maybe he’s giving them some space. ‘How did you know I was here? How did you evengethere? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’

She nods along, like she gets why he’d be confused.

‘Uh-huh,’ she says. ‘Well … You’ve been in the papers a lot, you see, and they said you were filming in Germany.When I googled it, there was a fan site that speculated on what locations you might use – is it adapted from a book? Some websites used clues from a book? And you don’t answer the phone when I call anymore, and I know why that is. I know I haven’t been a very good mum to you, pet, I do. But I’m in AA. I’m almost three hundred days sober. And I’ve come to say sorry. I used the money you sent. I don’t normally spend it – everything you send is in an account, ready to pay you back. I don’t need your money, not anymore. Everything is different now.’

Duke nods. He’s played this conversation in his head thousands of times: the fantasy of hearing I’m sorry. Except, in his imagination he leaps up, at this point, and they hug and say they’ll never fall out again, and his mum swears she’ll be everything she should already have been, and Duke says yes, okay, he’d like that very much. But here, confronted with the reality of it, he doesn’t feel like saying any of those things. He doesn’t feel like saying anything at all.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asks her, and she fishes out the card to a three-star hotel a few miles away. ‘Here,’ she says, handing it to him. ‘This is us.’

Duke nods.

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