The Other Half Lives

15

‘When did Gemma die?’ I ask.

‘The police wouldn’t tell me much, but from the questions they asked, it must have been Monday night,’ says Mary. ‘They wanted to know my movements.’ She walks over to the window, opens it, flicks ash out. The cows are still moaning in the fields, as if they’re in pain.

Forty-eight hours ago, Gemma was alive.

‘Why did the police speak to you?’

Mary tucks her hair behind her ears. It springs back, like dark thunderclouds enveloping her thin face. ‘I didn’t believe Charlotte Zailer when she told me you were Aidan’s girlfriend. I thought, no. Can’t be. When I had it confirmed by First Call, my heart nearly stopped. Once I’d got myself together, I drove to Aidan’s workshop, waited outside in my car. A bit later, Zailer turned up with another cop I recognised-DC Waterhouse. He’d been round to see me on Saturday, also about Aidan. The two of them went inside.’

‘I was there,’ I tell her.

‘They stayed for a while, then left, except Waterhouse didn’t go far. He sat in his car and waited at the top of the road. A few minutes later, Aidan came out, got into his car and drove away. Waterhouse followed him, and I followed Waterhouse. The three of us drove to London in convoy. To Muswell Hill.’ She watches me for a reaction. ‘I started to have a feeling, then, that I knew where he was going, except it made no sense.’

‘Where?’ I ask, breathless. All those times Aidan was away, when he told me he’d been in Manchester, working for Jeanette Golenya. Lies, every time.

‘I knew Stephen Elton and Gemma Crowther had been paroled. My First Call guy-he’s thorough. He’d given me their new address, details of their new jobs…’

‘What jobs?’

Mary frowns. ‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Stephen Elton works for the Ford dealership in Kilburn. He’s some kind of mechanic. Gemma Crowther works… worked for an alternative health centre in Swiss Cottage called The Healing Rooms. My friend visited her there. She gave him a hot-stone massage.’ She’s talking about the man with the red bobble hat and the dog. Someone I used to know. I’ve hired him before-that’s what she said. Finally, those words filter through. ‘Proud as punch, he was, when he told me that. Said it was a perk of the job-charged me for his treatment, cheeky sod.’

‘Stone,’ I repeat blankly.

Mary opens her mouth, says nothing. It hadn’t occurred to her.

Gemma Crowther, a healer. ‘Stephen was a chemist, a pharmacist, ’ I say. ‘She was a primary school teacher.’

‘Yeah, well, obviously they’d have had difficulty getting similar jobs after what they’d done. And not so much difficulty getting taken on by a garage, or some quack outfit like an alternative healing centre. Some places check out prospective employees’ backgrounds more diligently than others, presumably. ’ Mary throws her cigarette butt out of the window and rubs the small of her back with both hands.

‘Their new address-it was in Muswell Hill?’

She nods. ‘23b Ruskington Road. That’s where Aidan was going on Monday.’

‘But he didn’t know about…’

‘Yes, Ruth. He knew.’

Nothing will make me believe it. Aidan, seeing Stephen and Gemma behind my back? No.

‘When he turned on to Ruskington Road, Waterhouse overshot and carried on down the main road. By the time he’d realised his mistake and come back, Aidan had parked outside number 23. Right outside it, as if the space belonged to him. Waterhouse didn’t see me-and he was too busy concentrating on Aidan, who by this point was walking back to the main road. Neither of them saw me.’

‘Why?’ I blurt out. ‘Why would he park outside the house and then walk away?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ says Mary impatiently. ‘All I know is, Waterhouse followed him.’

‘Did you follow them?’

‘No. On foot, it was too risky. My hair’s hard to miss. Once they were gone, I went for a snoop. The bell for Gemma and Stephen’s flat had their names on it. Surnames only: Crowther and Elton, like the newspapers called them.’

Dong. Their doorbell at Cherub Cottage was called Dong.

Disgust warps Mary’s face. ‘Underneath the names, in tiny writing and in inverted commas, was the word “Woodmansterne”. ’

I clear my throat. ‘They lived on Woodmansterne Lane. In Lincolnshire. You mean…?’

‘If I had to guess, I’d say they decided to call their rented flat after their old street name.’

‘Yes. They’d do that. She would.’

‘I rang the doorbell,’ says Mary. ‘I was bloody amazed at my own nerve. Don’t ask me what I’d have said if someone had answered. I had no idea-it was an impulse thing. No one was in, though.’ She fumbles for another cigarette, lights it. ‘There’s a bay window to the right of the front door. Through it, I saw a framed photo of the happy couple, one of the ones you described in your letter: him kissing her cheek.’

Bile rises in my throat. That picture. Standing in Cherub Cottage’s pristine white sitting room, Stephen trying to kiss me…

‘I knew it was them. First Call had sent me press cuttings from the trial, photos, the works. I recognised their faces. Easy to see why you made it your mission in life to save him from captivity-that little-boy-lost look.’

‘They’re still together. He testified against her, she tried to pin the whole thing on him, and still they’re together, with those pictures on the walls.’ As if I never happened.

‘Tacky studio photos weren’t all they had up on the walls,’ says Mary with venom in her voice. ‘I saw something else go up.’

‘What do you mean?’ She made me write that letter, reliving everything I went through, when she knew. She already knew.

‘I waited, on the street. In my car. I’d gone as far as London-I wasn’t giving up that easily. After a while Simon Waterhouse came back.’

‘Did he see you?’

Mary shakes her head. ‘He was only interested in Crowther and Elton’s house. He had a snoop around, then went to sit in his car. Like me. At about half nine, Gemma Crowther and Aidan Seed walked up the road together.’

I try not to flinch.

‘Aidan opened the boot of his car, took something out, carried it into the house. I couldn’t see what it was-I wasn’t close enough, and there was a big white van parked behind Aidan’s car, blocking my view.’ Mary twists her hair round her hand. ‘The lights went on inside. Gemma closed the curtains. That’s when Waterhouse called it a night.’ Her smile is full of scorn for anyone who could give up so easily.

‘You didn’t?’ I guess.

‘No. There was a small gap in the curtains, but big enough to see through.’

Gemma Crowther and Aidan in a room together.

Mary waits for me to ask. When I don’t-can’t-she says, ‘There was a banging sound. He had a hammer in his hand. He was hanging a picture for her. Guess what picture?’

I freeze. It has to be, otherwise Mary would tell me. She wouldn’t make me guess. She blames me.

‘Yours,’ I say. ‘Abberton.’

‘My painting,’ says Mary, unemotional. ‘Yes. In the home of strangers. In the home of those strangers.’

‘I gave it to Aidan to prove to him that he couldn’t have killed you,’ I try to explain. ‘He kept insisting he had, no matter what I said. Abberton had your name on it, and the date: 2007. He told me he’d killed you years ago.’

‘How did you know I’d signed and dated it?’ Mary turns on me. ‘I hadn’t when I brought it in to Saul’s place last June.’

I tell her, as coherently as I can, about the Access 2 Art fair.

‘My God,’ Mary mutters, chewing her lip until drops of blood appear. When she next takes a drag of her cigarette, it comes away red at the end, as if she’s wearing lipstick.

‘I gave Aidan the picture and never saw it again,’ I tell her. ‘He wouldn’t tell me what he’d done with it. Mary, I’m sorry…’

‘A present’s a present,’ she says in a brittle voice. ‘I gave it to you, you gave it to him, he gave it to her.’

‘What did you do? When you saw it, I mean?’

‘What could I do? I got in my car and drove home. When I left, Gemma Crowther was alive and she was with Aidan Seed. That should tell you everything you need to know about your boyfriend.’

‘Why did the police talk to you?’ Why not me? Maybe they’d tried. I ignored everyone who came to the workshop yesterday; maybe one of those knocks was the police.

‘Some nosey bastard neighbour saw me and came and asked who I was-I should have lied but I didn’t think quickly enough. As it turned out, it was lucky she saw me. She watched me leave, and heard the two gunshots after I’d gone. Waterhouse had gone, I’d gone-the only person still there with Gemma was Aidan. Even the cops should be able to work it out.’

Something hard and huge is welling up inside me. Why do I feel as if I’ve let Mary down? It’s crazy. I owe her no loyalty. Aidan’s the person I love and ought to trust. He’s never intentionally hurt me, and she has.

It hits me then: I’ve forgiven her. If I can forgive Mary, then I can forgive Aidan, whatever he’s done. And after that? Where would I stop?

‘Ruth? What’s the matter?’

‘I’m the one,’ I tell her.

‘What do you mean?’

‘All this time, I’ve had this… this fear. I was scared of not being able to forgive Aidan once I knew the truth-or rather, that’s what I thought it was, but I was wrong. It’s the exact opposite: I’m afraid I’ll forgive him too easily, and not only him-everything and everybody. Aidan, you, even Stephen and Gemma. Once you start to imagine what another person’s pain and terror must have felt like…’ My throat blocks. I can’t speak.

‘How can you stop yourself forgiving them? Is that what you were going to say?’

I’m aware that I’m crying. It doesn’t seem to matter. ‘My parents used to say, “We’re Christians, Ruth. Christians forgive, always,” but I don’t want to forgive anybody!’

‘Why not?’ Mary’s voice is stern.

‘Because then there’d only be me who… who…’

‘You think you’re unforgivable. You don’t want to be the only one.’

Her understanding strikes me as a small miracle. ‘I tried to brainwash Stephen against Gemma. I did everything I could to split them up, all the time thinking I was virtuous and honourable for refusing to have sex with him.’ I wipe my eyes with the palms of my hands. ‘I couldn’t see… Sex is just sex. Or, when it’s not, it’s love. Either way, it’s not toxic, like trying to control someone else’s mind. All the tactics my parents used on me, I used on Stephen. I know there’s no justification for what he and Gemma did to me-doesn’t mean it wasn’t my fault or that I didn’t deserve it.’

‘If you start forgiving everyone, you might get carried away and forgive your parents,’ says Mary. ‘Where would that leave you? They haven’t forgiven you, have they, in spite of their Christians-always-forgive slogans? You sent them an address and they’ve never used it. Quick to give up on you, weren’t they? And these are people who’ve devoted their whole lives to preaching mercy.’

‘Not only preaching it. Practising it too. After what happened to me, when they came to see me in hospital, they told me they’d forgiven Stephen and Gemma. They said I should too. In their whole lives, I’m the only person they haven’t forgiven.’

‘Which makes you the only unforgivable person in the world, right? The worst person in the world.’

‘Yes.’ Now that Mary’s said it, I feel deflated. As if something swollen inside me has been punctured. Is this what I’ve been so afraid of, this realisation? It’s a relief now that the fear’s gone and there’s nothing left except flat, grey exhaustion. My eyes start to close.

Mary taps me on the shoulder. ‘Wrong,’ she says. ‘If you want a unique selling point, how about this? You’re the only person who’s ever laid into them personally. You yelled at them, said some things that were pretty hard for them to take-probably no one else has ever done that. It’s easy to forgive attacks when you yourself aren’t the victim. “Stephen and Gemma? No problem: all they did was nearly kill our daughter. Someone shouting at us and telling us we’re wrong about things? Sorry: unforgivable.” Do you see what I’m trying to say?’

I think I do. If I can bring myself to forgive Stephen and Gemma, I’ll be better than my parents, more Christian than they are, even though I’m not a Christian and don’t believe in God. Aidan, Mary, Stephen, Gemma, Mum, Dad, me. I can maybe forgive us all.

‘My point is,’ says Mary, ‘your parents are two great big stonking pieces of shit. Fuck them.’

I manage a weak smile. ‘Tell me about Aidan and Martha,’ I say.

Instantly, the gleam in Mary’s eyes starts to fade, as if she’s been cut off from her energy supply. ‘On one condition,’ she says. ‘This is my story, so I get to be judge, jury and executioner. If you’re tempted to exonerate anybody, do it in the privacy of your own head. I’m not as enlightened as you.’

I nod. Mary is freer than I am. She doesn’t worry about balancing the blame books. She takes her unhappiness and does what she wants with it. Could I be like her from now on, or will I always feel as if there’s some kind of external moral arbitrator watching every move I make, unseen and infallible?

Mary lights a cigarette. ‘Martha and Aidan met at a job interview. Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts, Trinity College, Cambridge. Aidan got it, Martha didn’t. She put a brave face on it, went on until everyone was sick to death of her about how she didn’t get it because she wasn’t common enough.’ She smiles. ‘We had a student teacher once who asked us how many television sets our families owned. Martha had the most: seven. The teacher was shocked. She was a bit of a luddite grow-your-own-vegetables type. She asked Martha what rooms the tellies were in, and Martha listed six: one of the lounges, the kitchen, her bedroom, her parents’ bedroom, her den, the summer house. The teacher was waiting to hear about the seventh, and Martha must have realised how it would sound, so she clammed up. The teacher asked her outright. Martha turned as red as a tomato, and had to admit that it was on the jet.’

‘A private jet?’

‘She was the only Villiers girl at the time whose parents had one. Loads of families had helicopters, but their own jet? They’ve probably all got them now. Anyway, Martha’s privileged background had nothing to do with her not getting the job at Trinity. Aidan was a better painter than she was a writer, and she knew it.’

The room closes in on me. ‘Aidan was a painter?’

‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No.’

‘You never saw him painting? Never saw any of his work?’

‘He didn’t… he doesn’t paint.’ I am listening to a story about a stranger, trying to match the details to someone I thought I knew. ‘I’d know if he did. He…’ I shouldn’t want to tell her, but I do. There’s no reason not to. ‘When I met him, he was living in one room behind his workshop. There were empty frames all over the walls, frames he’d made-they’re still there, but there’s nothing in them.’

‘So he stopped,’ Mary says softly, rocking back and forth. ‘Good.’

‘Why would he do that? Why would he frame nothing?’ Why didn’t he tell me he knew about Gemma and Stephen? How did he know?

‘How many empty frames?’

‘I… I don’t know. I’ve never counted them.’

‘More than ten?’

‘Yes.’

‘As many as a hundred?’

‘No, nowhere near that. I don’t know, maybe fifteen, twenty.’

‘I know how many. Count them when you next get the chance-you’ll see I’m right.’

Everyone but me knows things they can’t possibly know. I don’t know even the things I could so easily have known. Should have known. Was Aidan’s family poor? Was he common, to use Mary’s word? I try to collect together in my mind everything he’s told me about his childhood: he loved animals, would have liked a cat as a pet but wasn’t allowed one. He never had his own bedroom, and wanted that more than anything: privacy. His brother and sister were much older than him, as remote as strangers.

‘There are eighteen,’ says Mary. ‘Eighteen empty frames.’

The Times, 23 December 1999

FUTURE FAMOUS FIVE

You might not know these names yet, but you soon will. From novelists and painters to actors, from singers to comedians, Senga McAllister talks fame and fortune with the young British talent heading your way.

Today I’m at Hoxton Street Studios to meet five unbelievably talented people. They’re doing a photo-shoot for a double-page spread in Vogue as part of its New Talent, New Style promotion, but they kindly spared a few minutes each, in between having their hair sprayed and their eyebrows plucked, to chat to me about how it feels to scale the dizzy heights of success.

Aidan Seed, 32, painter. Aidan is a precocious talent. Artist in residence at London’s National Portrait Gallery, before that he spent two years enjoying the enviable title of Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. Aidan tells me this post was open to writers, artists and composers, so it wasn’t only other painters he had to beat off in order to get it. He laughs. ‘There was no beating involved. I doubt I was the most talented artist who applied that year-I got lucky, that’s all. Someone liked my stuff.’ Self-deprecation aside, the art world is buzzing with hype about Aidan’s immense talent. Next February he has his first one-man show at London’s prestigious TiqTaq Gallery. Owner and art dealer Jan Garner describes him as ‘astonishingly gifted’. I ask him what being a Fellow Commoner involved. Aidan tells me, ‘Trinity’s got its strongest reputation as a sciences college, and the post I held is its way of supporting the arts. Literally, being a patron of the arts in the old-fashioned sense. They didn’t expect me to do anything apart from paint, and they paid me a salary. It was a dream job.’ So why ‘Commoner’? ‘It means I’m not a scholar,’ says Aidan. ‘They didn’t give me the post because of any academic achievements.’ He smiles. ‘It doesn’t mean they thought I was common, though I am.’

Aidan is proud of his working-class background. His mother, Pauline, who died when he was twelve, was a cleaner, and he grew up on a council estate in the Culver Valley. ‘I didn’t have a toothbrush until I was eleven,’ he tells me. ‘As soon as I had one, I used it to mix paint.’ Pauline, a single parent, was too poor to buy him paints or canvas; he was forced to steal what materials he could from school. ‘I knew stealing was wrong, but painting was a compulsion for me-I had to do it, no matter what.’ His family would have discouraged any artistic interests, so Aidan stashed all his early work at his friend Jim’s house. ‘Jim’s parents were from a different world to mine,’ Aidan tells me. ‘They always encouraged me to paint.’ As a child and young adult, Aidan painted on any surface he could find: cardboard boxes, cigarette packets. When he left school at sixteen, he got a job in a meat-packing factory where he worked for long enough to save the money he needed to fund his art degree. ‘The years at the factory were hard,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad I did it. I had a brilliant art teacher at college who said to me, “Aidan, if you want to be a painter, you have to have a life.” I think that’s really true.’

Although obviously gifted, the most extraordinary thing about Aidan is that he has never sold a painting, despite many offers from eager prospective buyers. He paints over canvases he isn’t entirely satisfied with, of which there have been many throughout the years. He works slowly and laboriously, and won’t part with work until he thinks it’s perfect. I have the impression that he’s a hard man to please when it comes to his own output. ‘I’m working on a number of paintings concurrently. They’re all ones that have been evolving for some time now, the only ones I’ve ever done that I think are truly worthwhile, fit for presentation to the public.’ These pictures are the ones that will make up his show at TiqTaq in February. They’re dark, brooding, atmospheric and unfashionably figurative. ‘I don’t give a toss about fashion,’ says Aidan with unmistakeable pride. ‘You can use traditional techniques and still produce modern work. I don’t understand artists who want to chuck out centuries of painterly knowledge and expertise as if they never happened. My aim is to build on what’s gone before, historically, not start from scratch. To me, that’d feel like arrogance.’

I ask him if the pictures at TiqTaq will be for sale, if he will finally allow people to buy his work. He laughs. ‘I don’t think I’ll have much choice,’ he says, adding on a more practical note, ‘I think that’s kind of the point of the exhibition. Jan [Garner] would have a word or two to say if I refused to sell anything.’ Eager art collectors had better secure their places in the queue. I’ve got a hunch Aidan Seed is an artist people will be talking about for decades to come.

Doohan Champion, 24, actor. Doohan has the sort of chiselled beauty to make young girls swoon. He first came to the great British public’s attention as Toby, the troubled teenage hero of Wayfaring Stranger. The critics raved about him, and he’s been rising meteorically ever since. ‘I no longer have to look for work,’ he says. ‘I can pick and choose. It’s a great position to be in.’ A quick glance at Doohan’s early career and it’s obvious fame and fortune have always been waiting in the wings. Encouraged by his mother, a dentist’s receptionist, Doohan went from playing the lead roles at school in Leeds to the Eldwick Youth Theatre, widely regarded as a rival to the National, where he stayed for four years. ‘It was a good way to dodge homework,’ laughs Doohan. ‘But I soon came to feel passionately about acting.’ His passion was rewarded-he won the Gold Medal for his year. ‘I could tell I was on the right lines when more and more girls started to ask me out,’ jokes Doohan. ‘There was no way I was giving up!’

More than 30 agents wanted to sign him when he graduated. Doohan is sitting back and waiting for the acclaim to flood in when his film Serpent Shine opens next year. He plays Isaac, a young schizophrenic who is threatened with the loss of his family home after his alcoholic father dies. ‘It’s a moving piece, very strong indeed,’ says Doohan. I ask him if the fame game is as sexy as it seems to those of us on the outside. ‘You know what?’ he says. ‘It’s even better. I’m in demand, I’m making a mint. It’s bloody great.’ Then he looks downcast, suddenly. ‘Although I wouldn’t like to get too famous. I like being able to go for a few drinks at my local without being hassled.’ Sorry, Doohan-I fear this won’t be possible for much longer!

Kerry Gatti, 30, comedian. The first thing Kerry tells me is that he’s a bloke, not a bird, though with his large frame and deep voice, I can see that for myself. His name, he says, has embarrassed him since childhood. ‘My mum thought it was a unisex name, like Hilary or Lesley-frankly, either of those would have been just as bad.’ He laughs. ‘Boys’ names for boys, girls’ names for girls, that’s my manifesto.’ So why’s he never changed his? ‘My mum’d be hurt,’ he explains. Kerry has done great things since he wrote his Freudian analysis of Blake’s Seven while studying drama at Plymouth University. One of the stars of ITV’s recent hit comedy series The Afterwife, written by the makers of Father Ted, he has just finished touring with Steve Coogan. On the road since September, with an extended run in the West End, Kerry is surely entitled to look exhausted. ‘I’m knackered after doing the show,’ he admits.

‘Your entire day is geared towards those two hours. It’s easy to go a bit mental afterwards, but the work schedule’s pretty gruelling, so I can’t indulge myself too much, unfortunately!’ Kerry tells me he’s always loved making people laugh. ‘I used to do it at school, when I should have been working. I was one of those irritating kids who never apply themselves, but the teachers can’t come down too hard on them because they’re funny-they make everyone laugh. Yes, even the teachers. Even the headmaster, sometimes, though he’d have been a challenge for even the most talented comedian!’ On the available evidence, that most talented comedian is none other than Kerry himself. While at university, he honed his comic skills in stand-up clubs with the likes of Jack Tabiner and Joel Rayner. Signed up by his agent after a show-stopping open-mike slot at Laugh? I Nearly Died at London’s South Bank Centre, Kerry secured a bit part as Nero the Nerd in the ITV sitcom I Thought You’d Never Ask. The show won an award, and shortly afterwards Kerry found himself touring in Australia and New Zealand with Side-splitters. ‘There we were, paddling in the sea with cans of lager in our hands, saying to each other, “So this is our job? F***ing brilliant!” ’

Born in Ladbroke Grove, at the age of eight Kerry was part of an ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) programme for gifted children. ‘At the weekends I wanted to play football with my mates, but instead I had to go to workshops with Ted Hughes,’ he says. ‘I absolutely hated it.’ Kerry’s mother has never worked. His father was a security guard throughout his childhood, and is now a partner in a firm called Staplehurst Investigations. ‘You mean a private eye?’ I ask, impressed. ‘Yeah,’ Kerry laughs, ‘but it’s all boring financial stuff, corporate and dull. It’s not like you imagine: sneaking up on illicitly bonking couples with a camera-that’d be much more fun.’ Kerry’s parents never had much in the way of educational opportunities themselves and were determined that their son should. ‘They wanted me to go to university and study English literature, but there was no way I was doing that.’ He left school at 16, only to return a year later when he realised unemployment wasn’t the dream of a perfect relaxing life he’d imagined it to be. ‘All right, so I caved in,’ he laughs. ‘I went to university-but I didn’t do English effing literature, though I suppose there was quite a lot of it in my drama degree-but there was also stuff that felt practical and real, which is what I loved about it.’

So what’s next for Kerry? A cameo role in the new BBC sitcom, The Reclining Avenger. Other than that, too many things to list, he tells me lazily. ‘Everyone is going to hate me next year, because I will be everywhere.’ Ask him where it’s all leading and he grins. ‘I’d like to play Blake in a remake of Blake’s Seven. That’s my number one ambition.’

Pippa Dowd, 23, singer. Limited Sympathy is the only exclusively female band ever to be signed to Loose Ship, the ultra-cool label run by Nicholas Van Der Vliet, who also signed Stonehole and Alison ‘Whiplash’ Steven. Pippa Dowd is Limited Sympathy’s lead singer. ‘Don’t ask me who we’re like,’ she says tetchily, when I dare to open with this no doubt predictable question. ‘I don’t care if it’s bad for marketing to say we’re not like anyone else. We’re not. Listen to our album if you want to know what we’re like.’ I already had, and plucked up the courage to tell the formidable Pippa that, in my humble opinion, Limited Sympathy’s music has some things in common with The Smiths, New Order, Prefab Sprout, and other bands of that ilk. ‘What ilk is that?’ she asks. ‘You mean good bands? Yes, I hope we belong in the category of bands who produce good music.’ Already photographed for the front cover of Dazed and Confused, Pippa and Limited Sympathy are expected to be huge when their first single ‘Unsound Mind’ is released next March. Has Pippa got her eye on the number one slot? I ask, hoping it’s less controversial than my last question. ‘It’s important to separate your performance goals from your outcome goals,’ she tells me. ‘The only thing you can control is your own performance-after that, what happens will happen. I want to be the best singer-songwriter in the world. I’m ambitious, and proud of it. I’ve always wanted to be the very best. Being the most successful too would be nice, though that’s less important to me than the quality of my work.’

Pippa has slogged hard for every inch of her success. Born in Frome and raised in Bristol, she has been trying to get her foot in the door of the music industry since the age of 16, when she dropped out of school. ‘Things happen in such a crazy way,’ she says. ‘I’d been plugging away for eight years and was starting to think about giving up, I was so sick of it. Endless student union gigs do nothing for a person’s morale. I was on the point of calling it a day and doing something sensible with my life when I met the girls. By “the girls”, she means the other five members of her band: Cathy Murray, Gabby Bridges, Suzie Ayres, Neha Davis and Louise Thornton. Pippa met them during a recording session at Butterfly Studios in Brixton. Gabby Bridges, who was already signed to Sony and had her foot in the door at Loose Ship, was impressed by Pippa’s voice and asked her to join her fledgling band, which at the time was called Obelisk. The name Limited Sympathy was Pippa’s idea. ‘I thought Obelisk was stupid,’ she says. ‘What is it? Just some random tourist attraction in France? I didn’t want to be part of a band called that, and it turned out none of the girls were keen on it. One day I was bitching to them about my parents, who have never encouraged my music career. I told them my dad said to me when I was really broke that he had limited sympathy for me, because he believed I’d brought it on myself for choosing to pursue my unrealistic dreams instead of becoming a dull-asditchwater accountant like him. That phrase had stuck in my mind-“limited sympathy”-because it was so dishonest. What he really meant was that he had no sympathy at all, so why didn’t he say that? Anyway, I suggested it as a band name and the girls loved it.’ A couple of months later, Limited Sympathy had a three-album deal.

As well as being lead singer, Pippa, astonishingly, manages the band. ‘We had a manager originally,’ she says, ‘but it didn’t work out. He wasn’t as efficient as I am, and I ended up doing the bulk of the work myself. Eventually we decided to let him go.’ Limited Sympathy’s first album, out in January, is intriguingly entitled Why Didn’t You Go When You Knew I Wanted You To? Pippa says she can’t tell me why it’s called that-it’s not the name of any song on the album. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to tell you the story,’ she says. ‘It’s based on something that really happened with our ex-manager.’

Though Pippa resolutely refuses to talk about where she wants to end up-‘outcome goals’, as she calls them-I put it to her that the ultimate accolade for anyone in a band is to have one of your songs playing as background music in EastEnders. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says dismissively. ‘Not until they upgrade to a more salubrious setting. Have you seen the hideous wallpaper in most of those houses? I don’t want my songs associated with that.’ That’s me told!

Martha Wyers, 31, author. Fiction writer Martha Wyers has more awards and accolades to her name than most people twice her age. She won first prize in a children’s short story competition at the age of 11, and has been bagging prizes ever since. How many in total? I ask her, and she looks embarrassed. ‘I don’t know, maybe thirty?’ she says, blushing. These include the prestigious Kaveney Schmidt Award and the Albert Bennett short story prize. Now she’s branched out into full-length fiction, and her first novel, Ice on the Sun, was published in hardback last year by Picador, and is now out in paperback. Editor Peter Straus describes the book as ‘A stunning debut, the best novel by a young author that I’ve read in a long while.’ ‘I suppose it’s a literary novel, but I hope it’s readable too,’ Martha says. ‘I was gripped by the story while I was writing it, and I want readers to be gripped too.’ She is keen to talk about the book, and admits she became ’comprehensively obsessed’ with it while writing it. It’s the story of 27-year-old Sidonie Kershaw, who falls insanely in love with the enigmatic Adam Sands at an interview for a job they’re both after (a job Adam eventually gets). Sidonie can’t get him out of her head, even though she doesn’t know him from… well, Adam! She pursues him relentlessly, ends up frightening and repelling him, and driving herself into an abyss of despair. Sounds a bit depressing, I dare to suggest. ‘The only depressing books are bad ones,’ says Martha firmly. ‘Look at American Psycho-it’s uplifting because it’s art, because it’s so brilliantly written, powerful and memorable. There’s so much pain and horror in the world-emotional, physical, you name it. It’s the writers who don’t tackle these issues that depress me.’

Born and brought up near Winchester, you might say that Martha was born with an entire silver dinner service in her mouth. Her father is an investment banker, and Martha describes her mother as ‘an aristocrat who wouldn’t ever have had to work if she hadn’t wanted to’, though as it happens she always has and she now runs a T’ai Chi school that she set up herself. The family home is an eighteen-bedroom Hampshire mansion. The grounds are regularly used by touring companies for open-air productions of Shakespeare and opera. Martha’s mother is passionate about the arts, and always wanted her only daughter to do something creative. An ex-pupil of Villiers, the exclusive girls’ boarding school in Surrey, she sent Martha there too, in keeping with family tradition. ‘I love Villiers,’ says Martha. ‘If I ever have a daughter, that’s where she’ll go.’ On a novelist’s income? I ask. ‘I’m lucky,’ Martha admits. ‘Money isn’t a problem for me, because of my family. But it annoys me when people assume my life’s always been easy because of this. Financial problems aren’t the only kind. I know other writers who are always flat broke, but they’re happier in themselves than I am.’ Isn’t she happy, then? Most people would be, with a two-book deal from one of the country’s finest publishers and an ecstatically reviewed first novel already out. ‘I worry compulsively about the next book-I still don’t know what it’s going to be about,’ Martha admits. ‘What if it’s no good? I’m scared all I’ll do is write another version of my first book except worse. I could end up being a very public failure by the time I’m thirty-five.’ I ask her about her love life-does she have an Adam Sands equivalent? ‘If you’re asking if I’ve got a boyfriend, the answer’s no,’ she says. ‘But in the past I’ve been through hell as a result of loving a man too much, so in that sense the novel’s autobiographical. See what I mean?’ She smiles. ‘There are some situations where money’s no use whatsoever.’

I have one last question that I’m bursting to put to all of these rising stars, partly inspired by Martha’s closing words, so I round them up for a group session. I ask them what they’d do if they had to choose between professional fame, success, plaudits, fans, applause-all their wildest career dreams come true-but an unfulfilled and unhappy personal life, or a personal life full of love and happiness and all things good, but total lack of recognition professionally-a career down the tubes. ‘That’s an infantile question,’ says Pippa. Aidan is shaking his head. ‘You haven’t asked it right,’ he says. ‘It’s not about fame or success.’ ‘Speak for yourself!’ Doohan quips. I ask Aidan if he’d care to rephrase my question. ‘What matters to me is being able to do my work, not how well it does commercially,’ he says. ‘Yes, it’s great if other people appreciate what I do, but all that really matters to me is being able to paint.’ I ask if it matters more than personal happiness. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘If I had to choose, I’d choose my work over anything else. Creative satisfaction, feeling like I’m achieving something substantial with my art-that’s the most important thing, whether the world notices me doing it or not.’ On the other side of the coin, though, we have Kerry, who is laughing uproariously at Aidan’s response. ‘What, so you’d turn down a rolling programme of bliss from dawn till dusk, even if no one took the blindest bit of notice of your paintings? Not me, mate. I’d choose a happy life over my work any day. No offence to your arts supplement, and obviously I’m pleased to be in it, but I’m only a comedian, for f***’s sake. It’s not like my work’s that important-I’m not some brilliant doctor finding a cure for cancer.’ Doohan refuses to choose. ‘I want it all, me,’ he says. ‘I can have it, too, according to the terms of the dilemma you’ve set out for us. If I’m ecstatically happy, that has to mean I’m happy about all aspects of my life, which would have to include my work. Therefore it must be going well. Right?’ He’s a cheeky boy, that Doohan!

Martha is the only one who seems unsure. ‘Work,’ she says eventually. ‘That’s my official answer.’ She won’t say any more. Obviously, I’m intrigued. I’ll certainly be having a read of her novel, as well as immersing myself in the powerful and varied talents of her four fellow fame-seekers, all of whom are sure to become household names in the very near future. Remember, you heard it here first…