The Club(46)
Given all the creeps and crooks and slimeballs that Lily had spent her career dealing with – the photographers, the managers, the bookers, all those other middle-aged men who made your scalp tingle and on whose approval the careers of young, hungry, hopeful girls depended – Nikki had always thought she was pretty lucky, only having to put up with Ned. She had certainly felt lucky he’d taken a chance on an unqualified teenager whose only proven professional ability was putting coats on hangers and handing them back – had always wondered what it was about her that had made her seem perfect for the job.
People often joked about Ned being married to the club, and it was striking how few of his inner circle had partners, children. But it did also mean something to have watched Home grow from one club to two, from two to ten, each new project better, more ambitious than the last. Also just to have worked for so long, at such a high degree of intensity, with these people. No one would ever have been cheesy enough to compare Home to a family, but there were similarities. Not similarities with her own family, of course – the mother she hadn’t spoken to since she’d been kicked out of home aged fourteen for daring, finally, to hit her back, her bags drunkenly packed and furiously thrown over the concrete balcony of their tenth-floor Margate flat with the farewell, ‘Fuck off then, Nicola. Let’s just see if you can make more of your life than I did.’ No, her own family was the sort where nobody cared if you ran away and sofa surfed with people you barely knew, spent weekdays shoplifting in Topshop just for something to wear. In comparison, Home felt like the sort of big, complicated family you saw on TV and there had always been something comforting about that. The weird intimacy of it. The shared jokes. The ebb and flow of warmth and resentment. The way you felt you knew exactly how everybody’s brains worked – even though it turned out she had been very wrong about that.
Nikki slid back the bolt and accidentally threw the cubicle door open with such force that it hit the wall before judderingly swinging closed again.
She stopped it with her hand.
‘Hi Lily,’ she said, across the room, perhaps just a little bit too loudly. Over by the sinks, Lily interrupted the conversation she had been having with a slight lift of the hand, and shifted her gaze to Nikki. She smiled about as faintly as it is possible to smile.
‘Lily, darling,’ said Nikki, making a point of the familiarity, grinning more broadly than she would usually have allowed herself. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to have any . . .’ She tapped her nose. ‘Do you?’
Because she was going to need something to get her through this evening.
Because she was going to need something to talk to Ned, to confront him. Something to give her the confidence, the fearlessness to ask Ned what she needed to ask him, and to hear his answers.
But because, also, fuck it.
It’s not every day that you discover your whole adult life has been built around an elaborate practical joke.
Adam
Just before midnight, Adam slipped away.
He passed Nikki in the corridor, and they exchanged nods, and just after they passed, it sounded as if she had shouted something but he did not catch what, and when he turned she did not look back, just kept walking.
Upstairs, behind him, he could hear Ned holding forth, his brother’s booming voice unmistakable and clearly audible even over the general hubbub, the clatter of heels on marble, the chinking of glasses, the bursts of laughter and shrieks of delight.
It was a relief to be out in the cool air. He descended the front steps of The Manor two at a time, unlocking his Land Rover with a press of the button on the key – dip dip – and correcting his angle of travel towards the third of the three identical vehicles lined up in a row.
I’ll fucking show her, Adam.
All the way to Ned’s cottage those were the words ringing in his ears. As he turned onto the private road. As he pulled in at the gate. As he typed Ned’s keycode into Ned’s door and waited for it to click open.
The interior of the cottage was not what anyone would have expected from the outside. Even compared to his penthouse suite at Manhattan Home, even compared to his cabana with its own pool on the roof in the club in Santa Monica, Ned had done himself proud with this place. If the Home aesthetic was a certain lived-in chic, this was the real deal, super luxe. Three separate teams of builders, not to mention all those different head architects it had taken to get it right, to transform it into a study in chilly minimalism, part art gallery, part hotel lobby, all white walls and veined marble, an open-plan multi-layered interior like something M. C. Escher might have come up with after bingeing on too many copies of Architectural Digest, complete with private screening room (a cedar-clad cube suspended from the roof and accessed via a stainless-steel ladder), a kitchen that would not have disgraced a professional restaurant (and in which Adam was pretty sure Ned had never attempted anything more ambitious than toast), an enormous, brightly lit bathroom upstairs, with a shower that in itself was almost as big as the bathroom in the house they had grown up in.
Adam closed the front door behind him and stepped into the living room.
Once, this had been a simple coastal cottage, inhabited by tenants of the Bouchers. During the MOD era, up until the early nineties, it had ostensibly served as the officers’ mess. When he and Ned had first inspected the place, all the windows had been smashed, all the frames rotten, daylight visible through the gaps in the roof slates, a layer of pigeon shit over everything.