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Lexi pulled down several books from the shelves and stacked them in front of Mark.

‘There are as many different types of biography as there are authors. By their nature each one is unique and special, and should be matched to the personality of the person they are celebrating. Light or serious, respectful or challenging. It depends on what you want to say and how you want to say it. Which one of these do you like best?’

Mark exhaled loudly. ‘I had no idea this would be so difficult. Or so complex.’

Lexi picked up a large hardback book with a photograph of a distinguished theatre actor on the cover and passed it to Mark.

She sighed as Mark flicked through the pages of small, tightly written type with very little white space. ‘They can also be terribly dry, because the person writing is trying their hardest to be respectful while being as comprehensive as possible. There are only so many times an actor can play Hamlet and make each performance different. Lists of who did what, when and where are brilliant for an appendix to the book—but they don’t tell you about the person, about their soul.’

‘Do you know I actually met this actor a couple of times at my mother’s New Year parties?’ Mark waved the book at Lexi before dropping it back to the table with a loud thump. ‘For a man who had spent fifty years in the theatre he was actually very shy. He much preferred one-to-one conversations to holding centre stage like some of his fellow actors did.’

‘Exactly!’ Lexi leant forward, animated. ‘That’s what a biographer should be telling us about. How did this shy man become an international award-winning actor who got stage fright every single night in his dressing room but still went out there and gave the performance of his life for the audience? That’s what we want to know. That’s how you do justice to the memory of the remarkable person you are writing about. By sharing real and very personal memories that might have nothing to do with the public persona at all but can tell the reader everything about who that person truly was and what it meant to have them in your life. That’s the gold dust.’

Mark frowned. ‘So it all has to be private revelations?’

‘Not all revelations. But there has to be an intimacy, a connection between reader and subject—not just lists of dry facts and dates.’ Lexi shrugged. ‘It’s the only way to be true to the person you’re writing about. And that’s why you should be excited that you have this opportunity to make your mother come alive to a reader through your book. Plus, your publisher will love you for it.’

‘Excited? That’s not quite the word I was thinking of.’

She rubbed her hands together and narrowed her eyes. ‘I think it’s time for you to show me what you’ve done so far. Then we can talk about your memories and personal stories which will make this book better than you ever thought possible.’

Lexi sat down at the table, her eyes totally focused on the photographs and yellowing newspaper clippings spilling out of an old leather suitcase.

Mark strolled towards her, cradling his coffee cup, but as she looked up towards him her top slipped down a fraction and he was so entranced by the tiny tattoo of a blue butterfly on her shoulder that he forgot what he was about to say.

‘Now, I’m going to take a leap here, but would it be fair to say that you haven’t actually made much progress on the biography itself? Actual words on paper? Am I right?’

‘Not quite,’ Mark replied, stepping away to escape the tantalisingly smooth creaminess of Lexi’s bare shoulder and elegant neck. ‘My mother started working on a book last summer when she was staying here, and she wrote several chapters about her earlier life as well as pulling together those bundles of papers over there. But that’s about it. And her handwriting was always pretty difficult to decipher.’

‘Oh, that’s fine.’

‘Fine?’ he replied, lifting his chin. ‘How can it possibly be fine? I have two weeks to get this biography into shape, or I miss the deadline and leave it to some hack to spill the usual tired old lies and make more money out of my mother’s death.’ Mark picked up a photograph of Crystal Leighton, the movie star, at the height of her career. ‘Have you any idea how angry that makes me? They think they know her because of the movies she worked on. They haven’t got a clue.’

He shook his head and shuffled the photograph back into the same position, straightening the edges so that each of the clippings and photographs were exactly aligned in a neat column down one side. ‘I don’t expect you to understand how important this biography is to me, but she is not here to defend herself any more. Now that’s my job.’

Lexi stared at Mark in silence for a moment, the air between them bristling with tension and anxiety.

How could she make him understand that she knew exactly what it was like to live two lives? People envied her her celebrity lifestyle, the constant travel, the vibrancy and excitement of her work. They had no clue whatsoever that under the happy, chatty exterior was a girl doing everything she could to fight off the despair of her life. Her desperate need to have children and a family of her own, and the sure knowledge that it was looking less and less likely ever to happen. Adam had been her best chance. And now he was gone … Oh, yes, she knew about acting a part.

‘You think I don’t understand? Oh, Mark, how very wrong you are. I know only too well how hard it is to learn to live with that kind of pain.’

She watched as he inhaled deeply before replying. ‘How stupid and selfish of me,’ he said eventually in a low voice. ‘I sometimes forget that other people have lost family members and survived. It was especially insensitive after what you’ve just been telling me about your father.’

‘Oh, it happens in the very best of families,’ she said with a sad smile. ‘Your mother died a few months ago, while I’ve had almost twenty years to work through the fact that my father abandoned us. And that pain does not go away.’

‘You sound very resigned—almost forgiving. I’m not sure I could be.’

‘Then I’m a very good actress. I’ve never forgiven him and I don’t know if I ever can. A girl has to know her limitations, and this is one of mine. Not going to happen. Can we move on?’

Lexi looked up into Mark’s eyes as she asked the question, just as he looked into hers. And in the few seconds of complete silence that followed something clicked across the electrically charged space between them.

‘And just when I thought you were perfection,’ he whispered, in a voice which was so rich and low and seductive that the tingles went into overdrive.

Lexi casually formed the fingers of both her hands into a tent shape, raised an eyebrow and stared at him through the triangular gap between her fingers.

‘There you have it. I have flaws, after all. You must be incredibly disappointed that a respectable agency sent you a defective ghost writer. You should ask for a discount immediately. And I shall officially hand back my halo and declare myself human and fallible.’

Mark smiled. ‘I rather like the idea. Perhaps there is hope for the rest of us?’

‘Really? In that case,’ she breathed in a low, hoarse voice, ‘let’s talk about your baby photos.’

And Mark immediately swallowed the wrong way and sprayed coffee all over his school reports.

They had hardly stopped for over three hours. He had made coffee. Lexi had made suggestions, dodging back and forth to the kitchen to bring snacks.

And, together, somehow they had sorted out the huge suitcase bursting with various pieces of paper and photographs that he had brought with him from London into two stacks, roughly labelled as either ‘career’ or ‘home life.’ A cardboard box was placed in the middle for anything which had to be sorted out later.

And his head was bursting with frustration, unease and unbridled admiration.

Lexi was not only dedicated and enthusiastic, but she possessed such a natural delight and genuine passion for discovering each new aspect of his mother’s life and experience that it was infectious. It was as though every single scrap of trivia was a precious item of buried treasure—an ancient artefact that deserved to be handled with the ultimate care and pored over in meticulous detail.

It had been Lexi’s idea to start sorting the career stack first, so she knew the scope and complexity of the project right from the start.

Just standing next to her, trying to organise newspaper clippings and press releases into date order, made him feel that they might just be able to create some order out of the magpie’s nest of thirty years’ worth of memorabilia.

He couldn’t remember most of the movie events that his mother had attended when he was a boy, so photographs from the red carpet were excellent markers—and yet, for him, they felt totally repetitive. Another pretty dress. Another handsome male lead. Yet another interview with the same newspaper. Saying the same things over and over again.

But Lexi saw each image in a completely different way. Every time she picked a photograph up she seemed to give a tiny gasp of delight. Every snippet of gossip about the actors and their lives, or the background to each story, was new and fresh and exciting in her eyes. Each line provided a new insight into the character of the woman who’d been a leading lady in the USA and in the British movie and TV world for so many years that she had practically become an institution.