The Club(5)

She could do this, Jess told herself. She had been in hospitality ever since she left school – before, if you counted that first weekend job, making beds in a local B&B. She’d spent ten years at The Grange, steadily working her way up to Housekeeping Manager. She had always got on with her team, always taken pride in her job. She could do this. People were people. Guests were guests.

The rest of the invitees – Annie had reeled off more names, some familiar, some Annie obviously expected to be – would arrive in carefully coordinated waves from Friday morning onwards, and there was a packed schedule to keep them occupied all the way through to Sunday afternoon: boat trips, horse rides, brunches, lunches, dinners, movie screenings. Every cabin would be occupied, every guest one of Home’s most valued members. Nothing – Annie’s tone was gently emphatic, her expression encouraging – would be too much trouble.

While she spoke, Annie’s phone kept pinging and ringing. Every so often she would inspect it and smirk or frown. The instant the induction was over, she had it clamped to her ear and was talking loudly in a bright voice before she was even out of the room.

How Jess envied Annie her confidence, her air of unflappability, the boldness of her style. All that scarlet hair, gathered in a twist over one shoulder, the heavily kohled and fringe-framed eyes. Those great crimson talons. Perhaps it was easier to be confident when you were as tall as Annie was – six foot something, easily. Jess wished she had introduced herself a bit more forcefully, or that she had been brave enough to put her hand up during Annie’s talk and asked just one of the hundreds of questions she had about this island, this weekend, this job.

She was going to need all the confidence and boldness she could muster to get through the next few days.

‘Nearly there now,’ their driver – he wore a tight blue polo shirt and mirrored sunglasses – announced over his shoulder. He gave a little tap on the horn as they neared the end of the causeway. Someone emerged from the glass-fronted Boathouse holding a clipboard, and waved.

This was it.

If only her parents could see her now, Jess thought. All those girls at school.

There was no doubt that this was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Now all she had to do was stick to the plan.





Annie

It could be brutal, this job.

‘My darling, my angel, my love. You know if there was space, I would have you here in a heartbeat! No, no, don’t cry . . .’

For months now Annie Spark had been having conversations like this, or avoiding them. For the past week her phone had literally not stopped ringing from the moment she got up in the morning until she crawled into bed at night. The texts. The Instagram DMs. The voicemails. The texts to see if you had got their DM or had a chance to listen to their voicemail yet. The emails to see if they still had your mobile number right.

At the last count, there were five thousand, seven hundred and sixty-one Home members worldwide. There could only ever be a hundred and fifty of them, give or take, at a launch.

The invitation to Island Home’s Halloween weekend opening party had been couriered to the chosen few on 14 August. For weeks before that, Annie had been adding names, rethinking, removing, making the final adjustments. As soon as the coveted gilt-edged cards had been sent out, nestled in custom monogrammed cashmere bathrobes and silk pyjamas, she braced herself for the onslaught. Annie occupied an odd space in members’ minds – a hybrid of super-fixer, paid best friend and put-upon PA. Somebody you could stay up until 2 a.m. drinking espresso martinis with, someone on whose shoulder you might cry in the midst of a bitter divorce. But also the person you’d bitch to if you couldn’t get three extra friends into Malibu Home for drinks on Labor Day. Or shout at if the roses in your room were droopy, or the table you’d been given on the rooftop in Venice Home was draughty.

When people began to realize they hadn’t made the guest list, they went into overdrive: unexpected dinner invites, insistent suggestions of a quick drink, questions about when would be a good time for a quick phone catch-up all started to roll in. PAs – or lower-tier members pretending to be the PAs she knew they couldn’t afford – began emailing ten times a day just to check there had not been an administrative error, some sort of oversight.

She did have sympathy for these people. She couldn’t have done her job if she didn’t. But equally she couldn’t have done her job if she let herself be swayed by that sympathy. Her loyalty was to Ned and she knew that he trusted her implicitly to make decisions in Home’s best interests. Take, for instance, this actress Annie was on the phone to now, as she paced up and down the cobbled harbourfront outside The Causeway Inn, huge emerald green duvet coat pulled tight around her against the chill October air, smoking first one cigarette and then another.

At the other end of the line? Ava Huxley. British actress, auburn-haired, startlingly thin, Kylie-tiny, next-level posh. Once hotly tipped, she had one very well-regarded Sunday night costume drama on the BBC, then a couple of British thrillers that had not done much at the box office, then starred as a lady serial killer in an HBO series in which she murdered, amongst other things, an American accent. If Ava had applied these days she probably wouldn’t even have been accepted for Home membership – not that anyone who applied to be a member ever really got rejected. Those who did not quite make the cut instead got placed onto a permanent waiting list, queueing in a line that never moved, stuck (as Annie thought of it) in celebrity purgatory. And why was that? Because if this job had taught Annie anything, it was that you could never tell when a career might take off or be revived, and you didn’t want anyone holding a grudge as well as an Oscar.