The Club(10)

As it happened, Nikki was quite aware that her own looks were one of the reasons she’d been a fixture at Home so long. That wasn’t arrogance, it was simply a fact. Because if there was one thing a modelling career – even one as short-lived as Nikki’s – gave you, it was independent confirmation of your attractiveness, a clear-eyed sense of the doors that it opens and the problems it brings with it.

Nikki was also extremely good at her job.

She enjoyed it too, mostly.

Because if Ned could be vicious sometimes, he could also be incredibly generous, remarkably thoughtful. Some of the birthday and Christmas presents he had given her – ‘Sorry for being such an arsehole the last twelve months’ – had been ludicrous. The wardrobe in her little Victorian terrace in south London was stuffed with expensive apologies: Celine bags, Louis Vuitton boots, Hermès bangles. Ned could be funny and charismatic too. His impressions. His turns of phrase. He was the kind of person you had to literally beg to stop, because you were laughing so hard you couldn’t catch your breath. Chloe would see all that eventually, if she stayed at Home.

‘Oh sweetheart, don’t cry. You’ve done an incredible job, your team – I mean, look at this place! It’s beautiful.’ They both looked up at the perfectly symmetrical house with its imposing Corinthian columns, the honey-coloured stone dripping with the wisteria that Ned demanded be stapled to the front a week ago, at astonishing expense.

‘Deep breaths now though, back in the room – go and ask one of the barmen for a brandy to calm your nerves – Ned will notice if you’re gone a long time and he won’t like it. He wants people who work for him to have a thick skin, to be able to take a joke. We’re all tired, all on a short fuse. It’s nothing personal. He’s always like this in the run-up to a new club,’ she reassured Chloe, the usual platitudes, the familiar excuses, tripping easily off her tongue.

But even as Nikki was saying it, she knew that wasn’t quite true. Ned was different this time. His anger less focused. His triggers less predictable. His patterns of behaviour, the swoop and swerve of his annoyances, far more erratic.

Maybe that was what it did to you, buying an island.

Maybe he was squirming, mentally, under the pressure of how much this place and its redevelopment had cost, how much it had been delayed. The endless emails from contractors demanding payment, the legal letters they’d started getting from suppliers. Ned the perfectionist ignoring them all and spending more money Home did not seem to have getting the details just so.

Maybe.

What Nikki was sure of, when it came to Ned, was that something was spiralling seriously out of control.





Adam

Me or the job, that was the ultimatum. In other words: either Adam Groom told his brother Ned by the end of this weekend that he was quitting, that he wanted to be bought out of his share in the Home Group, that a working partnership which had lasted a quarter of a century was over – or his marriage would be.

‘Am I being unreasonable?’ Laura had asked him.

She was not, he had told her. She was not an unreasonable woman, his wife. She had been very patient. He could remember telling Laura on their very first date – dinner at The Ivy (back when it was still cool) followed by a nightcap on the roof terrace at Covent Garden Home – that he was keen to strike out on his own eventually, emerge from Ned’s shadow, cash in his stake in the business and start up his own place – a little gastropub somewhere, near the river maybe. Perhaps a local wine shop, with a couple of candlelit tables for evening bookings. Get fitter maybe. Take up golf, or tennis.

That was the vision. That was the dream. That was fifteen years ago.

Ten years ago, on holiday, he could remember them sitting up late with a bottle of wine one warm evening and discussing how much his share of the business might now be worth, who might buy it, what they could do with the money, getting excited about the possibilities. The great thing about life coaching, she had pointed out, was that she could practise anywhere. The restaurant scene back home in Melbourne was amazing. She still had contacts who could help her set up over there, find clients. Why not start up something of his own, out of Ned’s shadow – or if Adam wanted to be further away from her parents, maybe Sydney?

It was now a decade later, a decade in which Home had been steadily opening clubs all over the world, and he still had not extricated himself. Adam could understand why Laura was starting to get impatient. He could understand why she was annoyed. She had also been woken up at seven that morning by a grumpy taxi driver ringing their doorbell. ‘Adam Groom?’ the man had asked. He’d been waiting outside for half an hour, he said. He had been calling and calling. The problem was that the phone he had been calling was Adam’s phone, and Adam’s phone was in the pocket of Adam’s jacket, which was hanging on the back of a chair in the suite nine miles away in Covent Garden where Adam was still fast asleep.

‘Where are you?’ Laura had asked, angrily, when eventually Adam had answered his phone.

‘Home,’ he said, not meaning for it to sound like a joke. ‘Look,’ he told Laura, reflexively checking the time on his watch and flinching as he did so, ‘it got late. I didn’t even sit down to eat until almost ten thirty, and then people wanted one more drink afterwards. I know. I’m sorry. I did promise, and I’m really sorry.’