The Club(45)
And in that moment she realized there was really only one thing left for her to do.
Nikki
It was almost midnight, and the elegant Powder Room – oak panelling, chequerboard floor, gilt-framed mirrors and veined Carrara marble sinks – was more than living up to its nudge-nudge name. All around her, members lounged on pale pink sofas, retouching their lipstick or patting their nostrils in their mirror, readjusting their dresses. Designer clutch bags were discarded everywhere – detritus left by drunk girls so used to someone picking up after them that they could no longer be trusted to keep hold of an accessory for an entire evening.
Three actresses came stumbling out of one of the cubicles together, and Nikki slipped into it.
If she was honest, for all their glamour, these launch parties could be unbearable. All the air-kissing. All the arse-kissing. All the tedious, performative debauchery. Men shouting. Women cackling. Annie dressed as a disco ball. Adam eyeing up every woman under thirty.
Five minutes’ peace, that was all she needed. Five minutes away from Ned, from having to hear his voice, see his face, pretend nothing was wrong, from every second wanting to hurl herself at him and demand to know the truth. What he had done. Why he had done it. How he could live with himself. Every time he’d smiled at her, every time he had rested his hand gently on her arm to move her out of the way of something, every time he had invited someone they were talking with to notice how fantastic she was looking tonight – ‘Home’s staff supermodel!’ – Nikki had felt her skin tighten.
Having locked the cubicle door, she removed her tuxedo jacket and hung it on the large brass hook. She felt flushed, shaky. Too hot even in only the thin, pale blue silk slip dress she was wearing. Ned would no doubt have something to say about the abrupt manner in which she had excused herself, the peculiar way she had dashed off when Ned beckoned Kurt over from across the room to join them. Not least since Georgia Crane had been in the middle of an endless anecdote, and one of the unspoken rules at Home was that you never interrupted or excused yourself or gave the slightest hint of your attention flagging when a member was talking. Even if it was a story you’d previously heard verbatim, recounted in the bored and detached style of an actress two years into a West End run, who had outgrown the role long ago.
The story Georgia had been halfway through telling was how she and Jackson had got together, what it had felt like to be on stage your very first night in your very first professional acting role after graduation (Cassandra in a modern-dress version of The Oresteia at the Almeida) and to look up and see someone you’d admired so much for so long sitting right there looking up at you from the front row. About the flowers he had sent her backstage, the note. About their first date, at The River Café, and how nervous she had been, her panic about what to wear. Nikki wondered how rude it had looked, just turning and walking away while Georgia was still talking.
She didn’t usually drink, but the first thing she had done this evening was stride straight up to the bar, order a double brandy, and gulp it down in one. She hadn’t taken drugs for decades, either – when she’d started at Home, the girl she did shifts with on the coat check would offer her a little bump to help her stay awake – but there was pretty much nothing she wanted so much in the world now as a fat white line of coke to sharpen her senses.
She couldn’t stay in here all night, she knew that. Taking a deep breath, then letting it out slowly, she rose to her feet and reached for her jacket.
She was just about to open the door when she heard Lily McAlister’s voice outside.
Oh God. Of all the people.
Of course, Nikki had known she would be here. Lily McAlister was always at Home’s parties, always did that thing of frowning and pretending initially to have to think where she knew Nikki from. Always – if someone important was there too – then told the story of how she and Nikki knew each other as if that fact itself was innately comic, that one of them had ended up as a PA and the other one . . . well, the other one was Lily McAlister.
How often, back in the nineties, when they were both teenagers (Nikki was sure she was once a year or two younger than Lily, even if Lily’s Wikipedia page now claimed the opposite), had they bumped into each other, each with a portfolio clutched under one arm, at the same model castings? Not that they had exactly bonded, even then. It was a solitary job, modelling, so there was rarely a lot of small talk, but even by model standards, Lily was icy – barely nodding in acknowledgement on the stairs of walk-up magazine offices, occasionally deigning to nick a Marlboro Light as they waited outside some self-consciously edgy designer’s Clerkenwell studio, perhaps enquiring who Nikki had seen that week while working at Covent Garden Home. Both scouted for the same agency by the same guy (Nikki in McDonald’s on Oxford Street, Lily shopping in Fenwick with her mum), both tall (although only Lily quite tall enough for a catwalk career), flat-chested and narrow-hipped, both dark-haired, both similarly pillow-lipped and high cheekboned, it was no wonder they had crossed paths so often, had frequently found themselves in direct competition for the same jobs. That was a strange thought. It was almost always Lily who actually got the jobs. Who had just got back from a shoot in Budapest or Tokyo or Berlin. Who was heading off straight after the casting to be in a music video.
It was also true that their lives had followed very different trajectories since. The thing was, whatever Lily or anyone else assumed, never once had Nikki felt the slightest sliver of envy of her – or of any of them, really, these members, the famous ones. What more obvious proof did you want of how horrible life in the public eye must be, how happy they were to avoid that harsh glare, than the very existence of somewhere like Home? No, she had never envied Lily any of that. The phone taps. The cloud hacks. The guy who’d got over the wall of her Brooklyn brownstone and into her backyard with a backpack full of duct tape and cable ties.