The Club(37)

‘Or set their hair on fire,’ Adam had added.

It was a very Adam move, in meetings, to repeat or closely paraphrase what the previous person had said. What the previous woman had said, usually, as if he were translating from the original Oestrogen. For years, Nikki had watched him do it, generally blunting the joke or missing the point or demonstrating he had not understood either the problem or the proposed solution. And for years, Nikki had wondered what was going through his head as he did so. Because she was always taking the minutes, writing his words down and therefore giving them a weight they did not often deserve. She could count on one hand the number of times, in her twenty-five years there, that he had made an insightful comment or useful suggestion. She did not dislike Adam Groom – not especially – but it was hard to see the point of the man, professionally speaking. Nor was it any wonder, in career terms, that he had never left Home.

‘And what do you think?’ Ned had asked her. Nikki checked the minutes she had been typing on autopilot for what he was actually proposing, then waited a beat. She told him she loved the idea.

And sitting here on a bright October afternoon, sunk into one of the circle of low outdoor sofas surrounding the fire pit at a safe-ish distance, watching the sparks spiral upwards, the great logs creak and glow and settle, she had to admit once again that when Ned was right about something, Ned was right about something. And she had always thought herself lucky in life to have the benefit of that, the proximity to it. Little could she have imagined, when she landed a job behind the coat check of Covent Garden Home, where it would take her, how it would end up.

A movement caught the corner of her eye and Nikki became aware that she was not the only person to have drifted down to the lawn in this brief lull in the afternoon’s activities. Someone else had already been sitting here when she arrived, staring into the flames, their blanket pulled up around their shoulders and over their head, like a shawl. Only now that the figure coughed, and raised a closed fist to catch it, letting the blanket slip, did she realize it was Kurt Cox.

He looked just as startled to see Nikki as she was to see him. Evidently, his first reaction was to get up, to get away, but as she half rose to her feet at exactly the same time as he did, he then sat back down again – and she did the exact same thing.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘No, no, I’m sorry.’

She rose to leave and did so, gesturing with her hand for him to remain seated. He was, after all, the guest.

Nikki neatly folded her blanket and placed it back where she had found it.

Kurt glanced up at her.

‘My head was somewhere else – that was rude of me.’ He shook his head as if to wake himself out of a daydream and gave her an apologetic look. ‘I wasn’t ignoring you. Nikki, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, and don’t worry! I’m sorry for intruding. It’s hard to get a second to yourself on one of these weekends. I should know, I’ve been to all of them. Look, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you this – it must have been hard, listening to people talk about your father last night and now you seem . . . it’s just . . . are you okay?’ she asked.

‘To be honest, I was thinking about my mother,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’m sorry . . .’ she said again. ‘I shouldn’t have . . .’

‘That’s okay,’ he said softly. ‘It was, you know . . . She was . . .’ He rubbed his nose with the back of his sleeve, stared into the fire. ‘Pretty amazing, actually.’ Kurt took a deep sniff. ‘Sometimes it’s hard.’

One of the things Nikki always found disarming about people who had lived their entire lives in the public eye was how open they seemed, how swiftly someone like Kurt slipped into talking about his mother, telling you about his feelings. It was something that had struck her the first time she’d met Kurt’s father too, the way his anecdotes were peppered with references to things Robin had told him, or his friend Jack, as if you also knew Robin Williams and Jack Nicholson. And of course in a sense you did. It would be disingenuous, tiresome, kind of creepy to pretend that you did not know who Ron’s wife, Kurt’s mum was, had been. That you had not seen her films and watched her interviewed and knew the whole story, how she had given it all up to raise the children, all six of them, on that ranch. The refusal ever to confirm to the media – some said even to the kids themselves – who was and who was not a biological Cox, the denial that it mattered. And what a gift they had been given, considering the challenges and pressures that came with having those parents, that life – how normal they’d turned out, how down to earth, perhaps because they did grow up entirely out of the limelight.

Not that she’d ever been a recluse, Marianne; that was a common misconception. She had always continued to give interviews about the conservation issues close to her heart, talked about life on the ranch. Nikki could still remember a TIME magazine cover, Marianne on horseback, the morning light on her face, her golden hair. Those wonderful pictures of all the kids sitting around a bonfire under the stars, Kurt and his brothers and sisters splashing each other in a stream, all of them watching a movie together on a proper projector under the stars, various enormous shaggy dogs lolling around. And of course Nikki also knew – no pretending she didn’t – how Marianne had died, so young, the precise type of cancer, the rapidity of her decline.

‘Did you ever meet my mom?’ Kurt asked Nikki.