Read Started Early, Took My Dog for Free Online Page A

move until a small, warm, sticky hand found its way into hers.
    ‘Where did Tracy go?’ Grant asked, scanning the bank of monitors. ‘She just disappeared.’
    Leslie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Keep an eye on that drunk outside Boots, will you?’

     
    ‘Someone should do something.’ Tilly was surprised to find herself speaking out loud. And so loud too. Resolutely middle-class. Resonate! She could hear her old voice coach at drama college exclaiming, Resonate! Your chest is a bell, Matilda! Franny Anderson. Miss Anderson , you would never call her anything more familiar. Spine like a ramrod, spoke Morningside English. Tilly still did the voice exercises Miss Anderson had taught them – ar-aw-oo-ar-ay-ee-ar – every morning, first thing, before she even had a cup of tea. The flat she lived in, in Fulham, had walls like paper, the neighbours must think she was mad. Over half a century since Tilly was a drama student. Everyone thought life began in the sixties but London in the fifties had been thrilling for a naïve eighteen-year-old girl from Hull, straight out of grammar school. Eighteen then was younger than it was now.
    Tilly had shared a little place in Soho with Phoebe March, Dame Phoebe now of course – hell to pay if you forget the title. She’d been Helena to Phoebe’s Hermia at Stratford, oh God, decades ago now. Started off on an equal footing, you see, and now Phoebe was forever playing English queens and wearing frocks and tiaras. She had Oscars (supporting) and Baftas coming out of her ears, while Tilly was stuffed into a pinafore apron and slippers pretending to be Vince Collier’s mother. Hey-ho.
    Not really an equal footing. Tilly’s father had owned a wet fish shop in the Land of Green Ginger – a street more romantic in name than in reality – whilst Phoebe, although she called herself a ‘northern girl’, was really from the landowning classes – house designed by John Carr of York near Malton – and she was the niece of a cousin of the old king, huge house on Eaton Square that she could repair to if things got tricky in Soho. The stories Tilly could tell about Phoebe – Dame Phoebe – would make your hair curl.
    Miss Anderson would be long dead now, of course. She wasn’t the kind to rot messily in the grave either. Tilly imagined she would have become a parched mummy, eyeless and shrivelled, and as weightless as dead bracken. But still with perfect diction.
    Tilly knew her outrage was impotent, she wasn’t going to be the one to tackle the fearsome tattooed woman. Too old, too fat, too slow. Too frightened. But someone should, someone braver. A man . Men weren’t what they used to be. If they ever had been. Agitated, she glanced around the shopping centre. Dear God, this was an awful place. She would never have come back but she had to pick up her new specs from Rayners’. She wouldn’t have come here at all but a production assistant, nice girl, Padma – Indian, all the nice girls were Asian now – had made the appointment for her. There you go, Miss Squires, anything else I can do to help? What a sweetheart. Tilly had sat on her old specs. Easy thing to do. Blind as a bat without them. Difficult driving the old jalopy when you couldn’t see a thing.
    And after all this time buried in the country she had fancied being in a city. But perhaps not this one. Guildford or Henley perhaps, somewhere civilized.
    They had her holed up in the middle of nowhere for the duration of her filming. Guest appearance on Collier , twelve-month contract, her character killed off at the end of it, not that she knew that when she took it on. Oh, darling, you must , all her theatre friends said. It’ll be amusing – and think of the money! You bet she was thinking of the money! She was more or less living hand-to-mouth these days. Nothing in the theatre for three years now. Scripts were tricky, the old memory not what it was. She had awful trouble learning her lines. Never used to have a