The Club(26)
Working for Ned, even when you knew there was going to be a tantrum, you had to get on with your life as though you did not. You simply had to make the most of whatever moments of peace and quiet and restfulness were available to you. This was the perfect setting for that – it was, for one thing, one of the very few places on the island where you could be guaranteed not to bump into Ned. He did not like to sweat or swim; still less was he interested in lying down for long enough to enjoy a hot stone massage or a healing quartz facial.
A shame really, as it was a beautiful place to be, even for treadmill-phobes. Housed in a U-shaped collection of outbuildings set in a dip in the island, it had a freshwater pond in the centre, which had been transformed into a heated natural swimming pool that belched clouds of steam into the cold air. The pool was half covered by a wrought-iron greenhouse from the twenties, repurposed from another part of the island, which dripped with clematis, still flowering in October, with swaying reeds lining the banks and weeping willows trailing their branches into the water. Surrounding the pool, what had formerly been stone barns and corrugated-iron sheds had been transformed into a gym, yoga studio, nail bar, cryotherapy chamber, meditation room, hair salon and treatment rooms with one-way picture windows perched out on an overwater deck.
‘We’re ready for you now,’ the therapist whispered as she ushered Nikki into one, which felt like it was floating out above the pool.
‘This shouldn’t hurt,’ she said as she unsheathed the needle from its tube, tapped the inside of Nikki’s elbow and inserted it into her arm. ‘The infusion will take half an hour, and I’ll give you a head and shoulder massage while it does.’
Nikki allowed her breathing to slow and focused on the scene outside – the one-way glass protecting the privacy of those being pampered was framed in brass, making the whole scene look like an oil painting. Tomorrow, the pool would be packed with members posing in Lycra and swimming off their hangovers, but right now, it was as still as a mirror.
The therapist made awkward conversation about how excited she was for guests to start arriving, asking how dinner had gone last night, if Nikki had been there, expressing her excitement at the news that Jackson Crane – Jackson Crane! – was on the island. Had Nikki met him? What was he really like? Nikki pondered a variety of answers before settling upon an enigmatic smile.
As the cocktail of vitamins flowed into her bloodstream, she started to let her vision slip into an unfocused haze. She hadn’t slept well, after dinner. Perhaps it was the rich food so close to bedtime. Perhaps it was the knowledge of how intense this weekend was going to be. But all night she had been thinking about the past, thinking about Ned, thinking terrible, impossible thoughts, feeling as though her brain was just on the cusp of solving a problem, of fitting everything together, and just as she was about to do so, the pieces would scatter or change shape.
Everyone was feeling a little frayed. That was what she had to keep reminding herself. It was just the stress getting to her. Her eyes still half closed, her lashes clouding her vision, Nikki noticed movement outside.
Kurt Cox had wandered out onto the deck and, unaware that anyone was watching, had stopped, dropped his towel, slipped off his robe and stepped out of the Home monogrammed sheepskin slippers – to reveal a pair of terrible knee-length Bermuda swimming shorts. Carefully, with his feet, Kurt arranged his discarded slippers so they were precisely aligned. Then he placed his neatly folded towel and robe next to them on a wooden bench.
Nikki allowed herself a gentle smile.
It was then she noticed Kurt’s tattoo – just one, unusual for someone of his age in his line of work, in her experience: his parents’ initials, RC and MC, in copperplate – on his shoulder blade. Directly underneath it, a large darker patch of skin which the script wrapped around. The same kind of dark brown patch crept around his left shin.
‘Hey, are you okay?’ asked the therapist. ‘Pressure too firm?’
‘No, no. Keep going, I’m fine,’ Nikki answered.
It wasn’t the firmness of the massage that had caused her to gasp, or set the tears quivering in her eyes.
Jess
When you had worked in hotels for as long as Jess had, after a while you got used to how thoughtless people could be. How weird. How disgusting. It wasn’t designed to give you a rosy view of human nature, witnessing morning after morning the sorts of things some guests thought it was okay to expect somebody else to clean up.
She had never seen anything like this.
It wasn’t long after everyone had departed on a yacht trip around the island – the very first official event of the launch party weekend – that the call had come in, something about an incident in cabin ten.
‘An incident?’ she had asked.
‘You’re going to need to come and see this for yourself,’ they’d told her.
They were not joking.
When she got to cabin ten, two of her team were standing outside on the wooden veranda, next to the stand of upturned pristine navy blue wellington boots, looking faintly shell-shocked. One of them – Bex – was a local girl from Littlesea. They had spoken yesterday in the staff room, and Bex had said something about how keen her boyfriend was to get a job here (he was going to keep applying; he worked in the kitchen of the other pub in the village). The other, Ella, was an old Home hand who had spent three years at Highland Home, then a year with the company in London. She’d been one of the girls with a question about changing her rota. The closer Jess got, the more upset they looked. Bex was blowing her nose into a little scrap of tissue. Ella was shaking her head, muttering, pacing up and down the deck.