The Club(59)

‘He just drugs them, poses them, and takes photos. And then he puts their clothes back on. And then he fucks off home and leaves them in the suite with a little note saying he was worried they wouldn’t make it home okay, so he just tucked them up and left them sleeping peacefully, along with enough cash for their cab home in the morning. They leave thinking he’s the perfect gentleman.’

Ned had smirked and gestured upwards with his eyebrows to the artwork on the wall above their heads – the giant photo of the headless nude, the one with the spiders pinned on top. She looked upwards and let out an involuntary gasp, then slowly, exhaling, shook her head. Whose stolen modesty, she wondered, was being barely spared by stuffed arachnids?

She had thought of the curtain fabric Keith had created, commissioned by Ned, for The Dining Room at Country Home – that paisley pattern composed, when you got up close, of thousands of bare arses. And then she thought of the photo series he had done entitled All the Women I’ve Never Slept With, in the mid-noughties, those huge blown-up crotch shots, black and white, onto which he’d scrawled his poems, several of which adorned the walls at Homes around the world.

She felt sick.

‘You already have the cloaks and masks in your cabins, and all the men will be in black tie tonight, so you won’t be able to identify Ned by sight alone. There’s no talking during the performance, so you can’t work out who he is that way either. But I’d know him anywhere, so stick behind me and at some point, when I can, I will hand him an Old Fashioned. With an extra ingredient, courtesy of Keith here,’ Annie said, bringing her horse to a halt. ‘I assume you have the stuff with you?’

Freddie looked confused. Keith pretended to.

‘Keith?’

‘Yes. I do. Back in the cabin. I did bring some . . . force of habit. But I wasn’t planning on—’

‘That’s all I need to know, Keith.’

Some other time, she promised herself, he would get his comeuppance. Some other time, when she did not need Keith’s help quite so badly, there would be a reckoning.

‘So when does it happen?’ Freddie asked.

‘At the end of the evening we’re all going to end up back at The Manor for the finale. I’ve already done a walk-through of the performance with Coup de Théatre – they actively encourage everyone to wander off, to explore and experience the actors and dancers alone. So there should be a point where you can get Ned’s attention, pull him aside and . . . I’m going to have to let you come up with that part yourselves.’

Keith nodded slowly, and turned to Freddie, as did she. He looked from her to Keith, and back from Keith to her again. In his eyes she could still see a desperate hope that this was a joke, a prank, that suddenly Ned was going to jump out of a bush laughing.

‘It’s up to you, Freddie,’ she told him gently. ‘Only you know what’s on that memory stick. Only you know if you can afford to pay what Ned is asking, every year. Every single year for the rest of your life.’

‘Okay,’ said Freddie, quickly, sharply. ‘I get it. I’m in. I’m in too.’





Nikki

She was six months pregnant before she realized.

Just turned sixteen and six months pregnant.

It had simply never occurred to her that it was a possibility. She had gone on the pill, as Ron had suggested. Had she forgotten to take it, ever? Absolutely not. He always asked her and the answer was always yes. Occasionally he even made her take it in front of him. ‘I’m only thinking of you, my darling.’

She did not want a baby – not then. Not ever, probably. Perhaps, looking back, that was most likely a major part of the appeal of girls like her to men like him.

Ron would blame her, that was her first thought. Her second was, how would he ever find out? She hadn’t heard from him since filming had wrapped and he’d handed back the key to his Home suite. He’d said something vague about looking him up, but even in her naivety she knew he hadn’t meant it, and there was no way to actually do it even if he had. She didn’t have a mobile phone, or an email address. She could hardly ask Ned. This was just the kind of situation her mother had warned her about getting into: don’t fuck your life up at fifteen like I did. They ruin your life, kids.

Six months, though? Thin as she was in those days, relentless as she was in her efforts to stay that way, her periods had always been irregular. Maybe she’d developed a tiny little bit of a tummy – a couple of casting directors had even mentioned it, her agent calling to relay the ‘helpful’ feedback. But she’d put that down to the carbs – handfuls of chips, thick slabs of bread and butter – she snatched standing up in the kitchens at Home.

When Nikki first went to the doctor – the walk-in, in Soho – it was because she was feeling lethargic, headachy, bloated. He asked her if she might be, if there was any way she thought she could be, pregnant. She had said no, she was using contraception, they’d given it to her at that same clinic, so he took blood to check what else it might be. But she had peed on a stick when she got back to the friend’s flat she was staying at, just to check. I can’t be. That was what she kept telling herself, over and over. I just can’t be. She had not felt nauseous, she had not had cravings. Apart from being a bit run-down she had not felt any different from usual.

She went back to the doctor, completely incredulous. ‘Did you have food poisoning at all?’ he asked her. ‘If you throw up just after you’ve taken your pill, your body may not have had time to absorb it.’ She thought back to the nights she’d drunk too much in Ron’s suite – she never had been able to stomach much alcohol – making herself sick to stop the room spinning, and using one of those little fold-out toothbrushes to freshen up after.