The Club(50)

It was an impossible situation Ned had put him in. That was the conclusion, down in the bunker, Adam had eventually reached. Fail to leave Home and he would lose Laura. Leave and Ned would make good on his promise and Adam’s marriage would be over anyway. And Ned would make good on his promise. Of that Adam had no doubt.

And as the minutes passed, as the hours went by – he knew he had until two in the morning, that Ned would not leave the party until at least then, and that he would probably find some quiet corner of the gardens on his way and stop to smoke a cigar after that – it had become clearer and clearer that this was a fool’s errand, that if whatever he was looking for was down here, it was filed in some special fashion that only Ned understood. Aside from the very expensive, very discreet, rather shady Caymans-based private intelligence agency who installed and maintained the cameras and the server in the clubs around the world, only three people (Ned, himself and Annie) even knew about Home’s lucrative sideline – and only his brother had ever watched most of this stuff. How clever Adam had felt, making a mental note of the combination code to the bunker door. How pleased with himself, to have worked out that if he sloped off early from the party he would have a clear stretch of time to identify and locate what he was looking for.

The problem was, there was just so much of this stuff. Room after room of it. Corridor after corridor. Those early audio recordings, from the devices Ned had installed in the rooms of The Home Club, before the refurb even, before the relaunch. The grainy footage from those early years at Covent Garden Home. The slightly crisper images and sound recordings from the multiple cameras at Manhattan Home, the first time Ned had splashed out on having the video and audio surveillance equipment professionally installed.

Was Adam a fool, knowing all this stuff was there, knowing how many of their suites were wired and bugged, to have done what he had done? Well of course he was. He was a fool to be fucking around at work in the first place. He was worse than a fool for cheating on his wife, the wife he adored. But in the heat of the moment somehow it was easy to forget about the cameras, the recording equipment, especially after a couple of drinks, especially in those early years when the technology was less sophisticated and there was none of the automatic triggering software they had now, and to go through what they had got took so much longer, and the stuff itself was so much grainier, visually, the audio so much cracklier. Never in a million years had he ever imagined Ned keeping any of that footage. Not of his own brother.

It was their guests that the cameras were there to keep an eye on; Ned’s plan – only hinted at to begin with, revealed to Adam only in stages – to build up an archive, to slowly acquire enough material on any given member (not just the established stars but the up-and-comers, the carefully selected next big things that Annie was so good at identifying) that all he had to do was pick the right moment to reveal its existence, to hint at the scale of what he had, and tell them how much – or what – he wanted from them to keep it all a secret.

And of course, the beauty of the whole business, as with all blackmail: there was no one you could go to for help without revealing to them exactly what it was you were so desperate to keep secret in the first place.

The dates were the thing that would screw him. The starkness of the dates, and times, that would make the indiscretions unforgivable. For Laura to cross-reference her diary and know that the evening of the day they’d had that lovely lunch at Claridge’s, a belated birthday present, he’d screwed a soap actress at Covent Garden Home. To know that five minutes after getting off the phone from Laura in LA – a serious conversation, about her mum’s diagnosis – he’d honked a fat white line from the glass coffee table and been huffing and snorting like a naked bull and doing that horn thing with his fingers and pretending to chase a twenty-one-year-old around his suite. Even if he knew that did not actually mean anything, it would be very hard to convince Laura of that.

Nor, he imagined, would it be any consolation to his wife that no matter how badly Adam had behaved, there were members who had done so much worse. Take Ron Cox, for example, hitting on girls young enough to be his daughter – God, young enough to be his granddaughter. A guy who had famously been married to the same woman for decades, nursed her as she was dying of cancer, spoken heartbreakingly in interviews about what it felt like to watch someone you love wither away before your eyes. A devoted husband. A beloved father. The director of the most popular family comedies of his time. His chat-up line? ‘What’s your favourite Christmas movie?’ Knowing that half the girls he asked, in the age range he targeted, would immediately name one he had directed. That guy you saw with his arm around his wife – the same wife, all these years – at all the premieres, all their kids in tow in matching plaid shirts and jeans. That guy who insisted on giving himself some goofy cameo in every movie – a bewildered Christmas shopper, a man being interviewed on local news about being saved by Captain Aquatic. One of the most recognizable directors in America. One of the nicest men in Hollywood . . .

She was also going to have questions, Laura. ‘How long have you known about all this?’ she would ask. ‘How long has it been going on?’ And he would tell her. Since the start, practically. Since before he had even known her. She would demand to know how he had persuaded himself to go along with it, whether he had ever tried to stop it. And none of his answers were going to satisfy her. And he was going to have to watch the look of disgust on her face deepen, with his every answer to her every question.