The Club(34)
‘You want to know why I told the journalist what my literal, day-to-day job is, Nikki? How hard I work? So hard that I haven’t had a boyfriend in a decade because I’m married to oh, at the last count, five thousand, seven hundred and sixty-one paying Home members? How vital my being on call, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, is to the basic functioning of this business? This business that pays your wages too? How, if I did not know the things I know, remember the things I remember, about all of these people,’ she shout-whispered, gesturing around the room, ‘the entire operation would have ground to a halt long ago? Just so I understand, you’re asking why I told the Evening Standard that I am actually slightly more to Home than a jumped-up coat-check girl?’
She watched Nikki recoil and instantly realized she’d gone too far.
‘Nobody thinks you’re not important, Annie,’ Nikki said quietly, not meeting her eye. ‘But he’s not going to let this go.’
In some respects it was a mistake, as a woman especially, to be really efficient over a long period of time. Because if you made things seem easy, and people had no experience of things not running smoothly, it came to seem that anybody could do it. Especially if you were also as gregarious as Annie was, if your laugh was a boisterous shriek (it was helpful if whenever anyone needed her, they could hear her across a room – and someone always needed her, for something) and if you dressed for maximum impact (so you were similarly easy to spot – although in some ways the elaborate almost-costumes were also a cloak of invisibility, allowing the woman she really was to disappear under sequins and silly shoes).
When she thought of all she had sacrificed. When she thought of the stories she could tell. Except she could not tell any of those stories, and Ned knew that, and it was not just because of the legally binding agreement she had signed all those years ago.
It was just as her mind wandered to Jackson Crane that she heard a shout at the far end of the table, Jackson throwing his napkin onto his plate, waving a finger in Ned’s face, Keith Little eye-rolling over his Aperol Spritz, Lyra huddling into Kyra, Freddie and Georgia and Adam all trying to placate Jackson, persuade him to sit down again. Other members at neighbouring tables trying not to stare but desperate to see.
Jackson would not sit down again. He was not going to calm down. Georgia whispered something in his ear – he announced he did not give a fuck if people were staring.
Had Ned just glanced down to Annie’s end of the table again, to see what she was going to do to sort this out, how she was going to sweep in and smooth the situation over? Well, forget it. What was the point? Annie was history. She had heard the steel in those words. She had seen Ned’s face. This was not the kind of thing about which he changed his mind. You can handle this one, boys, she thought.
Christ, Jackson was drunk, though. The eyes were gone. His balance was all over the place. Admittedly being in a revolving restaurant did not help.
In turning to go, brushing Georgia’s hand from his arm as he did so, Jackson managed to catch the end of his shoe on his chair and send it screeching across the floor, then shin-barge the thing across the Moorish-patterned encaustic tiles again as he stormed off in the direction of the lift. Or what he took to be the direction of the lift. Two or three times he did the circuit of the water tower’s central shaft, muttering to himself, bumping into the backs of other people’s chairs, actors and directors he’d worked with, all the while scowling and glaring, while the restaurant continued to turn. Even after he found the elevator doors, he could not find the buttons. There were no buttons. The lift had a sensor and came automatically. Once inside, he stood there for several minutes, swaying, as the whole restaurant revolved past, before he realized there was a button you had to push to close the doors and go down.
Annie checked the time. It was two fifteen in the afternoon.
At least she now knew which of last night’s diners had been the first to receive their package.
Jess
Three hours, it had taken them. By ‘them’ Jess meant not just herself and her team – although Bex and Ella had both been incredible, totally unfazed, even cracking jokes once the initial shock of seeing the smashed-up cabin had worn off – but the squad of handymen in their Home-branded blue boiler suits and baseball caps in a Home-branded blue van who got to work on replacing all the broken glass in the cabin. The similarly clad guys – she could not even remember calling them – with three new TVs of varying sizes who immediately set about installing them on the walls. The team with a pick-up truck full of furniture who started dragging out and replacing everything that was unfixable; the guy who had driven over in a Land Rover with a new set of identical, unsoiled curtains. It was amazing. It was all so practised, it was like watching ballet. The speed, the efficiency, the lack of fuss, the level of preparedness. The striking absence of chit-chat. You would have thought one of the guys would at least have asked them whose room it was, or if anyone knew what had happened. It made you wonder how often things like this did happen, at Home.
Would Jackson Crane be as impressed by it all as she was? Standing in the doorway of the cabin – she had sent the girls off to get lunch, told them she would follow after one last check of everything – it genuinely looked as if someone had waved a magic wand and returned things to exactly the way they had been before he’d gone on his rampage. Even the book on his bedside table – the original she had found floating spineless in the jacuzzi – had been replaced. When he saw that, when he imagined how much effort and time on the part of multiple people must have gone into doing that, on an island, in three hours, would he feel embarrassed, regretful, a little sheepish? Somehow Jess doubted it.