The Club(43)
And halfway through every conversation, all afternoon, she would remember something else she needed to do or confirm had been done. Had the magazines on the coffee table in cabin fourteen been triple-checked to ensure that none of them featured photographs of the wife from whom the occupant was going through a very messy, extremely public divorce? Had all the alcohol been removed as per instructions from cabin sixty-three?
And then she would remember cabin ten. She would remember the expression – first searching and lecherous, then defiant and contemptuous – on Jackson’s face as he had chugged that whiskey down. And Jess would check the time again, and wonder how another three quarters of an hour had passed so swiftly, and she would wonder: is he dead yet? Are we past the point of no return now? And she would wait for a pang of guilt, a spasm of remorse, some impulse to save the life of the human being lying in that bed. Because he was still a human being, no matter what else he was, no matter what crimes he had committed and got away with, and he was dying, and it was her fault. Jess knew she should be feeling something, feeling bad. But she did not. She could not.
After all, Jackson and Georgia Crane had once done exactly the same thing to her.
Annie
It was a warm night for the time of year and large portions of the glass roof had been wound back on The Orangery, creating a smoking room open to the stars. Plumes of tobacco fog and sickly-sweet Juul vapour rose and mingled in the October air. From the stone steps on which she was standing, Annie could see right across the room, to the bar where Kyra Highway (dragging on a fag) was talking intently to a music producer (puffing away on a cigar), while Freddie Hunter was hovering companionably about, eagerly eyeing a nearby piano. How many nights had Kyra and Freddie and whoever else was up for it gathered around to belt out showtunes and jazz standards at the baby grand in The Drawing Room at Country Home? Or the knackered but irreplaceable old piano on the third floor of Covent Garden Home, with its sticky keys, its dodgy pedals; the one that Bowie was rumoured to have played on once, that Jamie Cullum had been so rude about?
Someone waved at Annie. She smiled and waved distractedly back.
Maybe she could talk to Ned, she thought, coveting the champagne while grudgingly sipping her second Skinny Bitch (nobody actually likes vodka, soda and fresh lime, but they were necessary if she wanted to fit into this weekend’s wardrobe) and starting on her third circuit of the hour. She stopped every few steps, making introductions, laughing conspiratorially at jokes she could only half hear over the music, all the while wondering if maybe she phrased things carefully enough, flattered Ned just right, this situation could be fixable. Even to consider it, she knew, was a symptom of her desperation. Nevertheless, she had to try.
‘Great party, Annie,’ someone else commented, as they were passing.
‘What else were you expecting?’ she asked them, with a grin. ‘Everything’s always perfect when Annie’s in charge, darling.’
This was not just a job, to Annie. She had not been boasting when she talked to the Evening Standard journalist. She had simply, unguardedly, tried to give some sense of the dedication that went into making each Home club what it was. Annie had been head of membership for so long now that she wasn’t sure she knew how to do anything else, be anything else, any more. She had been invited to members’ hen parties, their weddings, their children’s christenings, film premieres, private views. Any Home in the world she walked into, members went out of their way to say hello, to see how she was doing, to make it clear to everyone else that she and they were on first-name terms. The flowers they sent on her birthday, the hampers, the presents. The endless stream of bribes from aspiring members.
Well, that was over now, wasn’t it? She wasn’t stupid – once she was no longer attached to a members’ club with a hundred-thousand-strong waiting list she was fully aware how abruptly it would all stop.
She had seen something like this happen before, when she was a showbiz writer, and a glossy magazine editor she worked for got booted from her glamorous job. Just like that, the tap got turned off – no free handbags, no flower-filled suites at the Ritz for Paris Fashion Week, no tables in the inner circle of The Wolseley. First, her former editor was confused (why is Kathy Lette not calling me back? Why did Karl Lagerfeld not respond to my tweet? Where’s my invitation to the Met Gala?), then she was enraged (how dare Hermès not honour my 40 per cent discount!), then it sent her quite, quite mad. The series of bitter broadsheet opinion pieces she wrote, fuming that her successor was not up to the job, then her novel Back Row, thinly veiled autofiction about an editor sidelined because she’d put on a stone and got crow’s feet. The last Annie had heard of the woman, she was fronting a podcast about intermittent fasting.
That would be her. That would be Annie. Someone former colleagues laughed at, exchanged eye-rolls over, then, eventually, forgot about entirely. Would Ned even let her keep her Home membership? Unlikely. With a sickening thud, she realized that she would instantly become a wanker: the gatekeeper no longer allowed past the gate.
This rainbow jumpsuit, which Annie had taken great care in selecting, felt itchy and constricting. Its sequins reflected shimmying flecks of coloured light onto the wall beside her as she tried to adjust it. Her heels had already started pinching and rubbing.
Perhaps what was going to hurt most of all was not that she would not be doing this any more, but that someone else would. And though she was confident they would not be able to do half as good a job for anywhere near as long, the sad fact was that it was irrelevant. All that mattered at Home was not how effective you were, it was how much Ned wanted you around. And the obvious fact was that Ned no longer wanted her around. For an instant all the lights in the room flickered. Annie blinked, blinked again, sniffed.