The Club(11)

He had let her down. He had let himself down. He had no excuses, really, or at least none he had not worn out already, years ago. Could he not have called? Could he not have sent a text? He pictured Laura waiting up, reading in bed, checking her phone, alternately anxious and annoyed. Probably mostly the latter.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Adam again.

And he was. He really was. But she knew the drill by now, surely, how stressful a new launch got on the eve of opening.

With Ned on the island – as he had been non-stop for the past month – Adam was not only in charge of signing off every aspect of the still-ballooning budget for the biggest party in Home’s history, he was also making decisions for the whole company. It was a lot of responsibility. It was a lot of pressure. Not to mention that he’d had just three days to find a new Head of Housekeeping for Island Home because Ned had taken it upon himself to sack the old one ten days before they were due to open. And all the time, constantly, he was getting calls from around the world asking for his approval for this expense or that arrangement, calls from Nikki making sure he knew where he was supposed to be next and how to get there.

One of the downsides of having a role as ill-defined as Director of Special Projects was that he never quite knew what special project his brother would foist on him next, or who was going to be on the other end of the line with a request, a question or a problem. Who would suddenly turn up in town and need to be taken out to dinner, or want to discuss something over a drink.

How he used to love this job, back in the early days. How delighted he had been to work alongside Ned, the older brother he had always adored. How privileged he’d felt, being the first person, often the only person, with whom Ned shared his plans, his schemes, his ambitions for the club. How he’d used to enjoy all the parties, the dinners, the impromptu midweek all-nighters. Celebrating with some band their first number-one single. Dancing on tables on a Tuesday evening. Leading the midnight charge to the rooftop pool. Now it was with a distinct sense of dread that Adam forced himself into an ironed shirt, dragged a razor across his crumpled face, forced an affable expression onto it, steeled himself for yet another evening of shouting and drinking, grinning his way through conversations he could only partly hear.

Laura was right. Things could not go on like this. He could not go on like this. He was forty-nine years old. What was it Laura told her clients? That if you really wanted to do it, it was never too late to change your life. To follow your dreams. To be a better person. To start treating the people around you the way they deserved to be treated. That was what Adam wanted. To be. To do. All of those things.

When Adam caught a glimpse of himself sometimes late at night, or on a morning like this, in an unfamiliar mirror from an unfamiliar angle, he felt a genuine jolt of horror and pity, concern and revulsion. At the thinness of his hair, the shine of his scalp under a direct overhead light. At the sort of piggy look his eyes got as the evening wore on. At the vacancy of his own expression, the slouch of his mouth. At the realization his flies were open and his shirt half untucked and he had spilled either several drinks or one drink several times down the front of himself. At the thought of all the things he had said and done, or not done and not said. At how unwell, how unhappy, how bloody middle-aged he looked.

It was literally going to kill him one day, this job.

By the time Laura had called, the cab driver had already departed in a huff. Which was a shame because otherwise he could have brought Adam’s ready-packed weekend bag into town and picked him up at the club. Instead, Adam had to order another cab to take him out to Richmond (precisely the wrong direction) and then proceed with him and his bag to the island. In solid traffic, both ways.

By the time he got to Island Home, waking in the back seat of the car with a jolt, Adam had thirty-two missed calls – most of them from Nikki, some of them from Annie – and was very late indeed. ‘Tell him the cab company fucked up,’ he texted Nikki. ‘Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.’

There was also a text from Laura. It simply read: ‘Good luck.’

He was going to need it. He very much doubted it was going to be a pleasant one, this conversation with Ned. There were good reasons – not all of which his wife was aware of – for why he had been putting it off for so long.

Every time Adam crossed this causeway he remembered his first visit to the island, on a freezing February morning in the early 2000s, thinking at the time how ridiculous the idea of buying this place was, how even if the Home Group had been able to afford it, what would they do with it? This huge, beautiful, overgrown, practically uninhabited island, thickly wooded for the most part, the grass and weeds waist-high when you did pass a stretch of open ground, only one real road, the landscape dotted with abandoned farm buildings and moss-covered, sea-facing concrete pillboxes and roofless cottages and glassless greenhouses, half the manor house derelict, the rest occupied by one eccentric old couple, most of the furniture under dust sheets, the whole place a melancholy study in brown and grey. And just look at it all now. Say what you liked about Ned, it took a certain kind of person to create what he had created.

It was as Adam was removing his weekend bag from the boot of the taxi outside The Boathouse that he heard the helicopter approaching. He turned to scan the horizon in search of it, and spotted it coming in low – concerningly low – over the causeway, a private chopper. Almost too quickly to be believed it went from being a speck in the distance to a great thing thundering overhead, rotor blades spinning, its downdraught bringing faces to the windows, scattering clouds of dust across the gravel. Paparazzi? he wondered, then reminded himself that if anyone was trying to get pictures of the arriving guests, they would hardly have wanted to make their presence so obvious. No, Adam realized, there was only one guest likely to arrive this early and this conspicuously.