The Club(6)

Even with all that in mind, Ava Huxley was currently nowhere near the level of success that would get her invited. This was not Annie being mean, it was simply the harsh reality of the situation.

Although she would never have remembered it, neither did it help Ava’s cause that she’d been the last interview Annie had conducted before she jacked in her job as a celebrity writer to join Home. A cover feature for OK! – Ava grudgingly fulfilling a contractual obligation to a perfume brand she was the face of – the actress had arrived late and flustered for the fifteen-minute slot, answered every question in a snotty monosyllable and then stormed out angrily muttering something about feminism, after Annie, scratching around for a topic that might engage her, had enquired where her shoes were from. Annie had then been forced to craft a twelve-hundred-word profile piece with precisely thirty-two words from the talent, twenty-three of which were no. ‘Not your finest work, Spark,’ was her editor’s offhand verdict, before she cut it down to a single paragraph and ran an ‘Ava Huxley in One Hundred Dresses’ picture special instead.

Ned had offered Annie the job as Home’s Head of Membership just a few days after the debacle, and it is no exaggeration to say Ava was the reason she’d accepted.

Annie had always been obsessed with shrugging off her utterly unspecial, perfectly pleasant, suffocatingly suburban upbringing and accessing the glossy world of the beautiful, talented, famous few. She had never really interrogated why proximity to celebrity was so appealing – in fact, the only thing she had ever really questioned was why you would not want to be surrounded by stars. But with no discernible skills in that direction – she couldn’t act, dance, sing or play anything at all, although she had tried her best – she decided simply being around them would do. Now she knew there were any number of jobs that got you close – agent, assistant, stylist, florist, masseuse, clairvoyant, life coach, dog walker – but brought up on a diet of Heat and Hello!, journalism was the only way in that she could think of with the talents she had available. What nobody had told her – what was not at all obvious from the outside – was that although an interviewer did get within touching distance of the beautiful people, the beautiful people considered the press an ugly, irritating imposition, to be grimly tolerated at best.

At first it had winded her, how mean they could be. That instead of hanging out on red carpets and being on first-name terms with her subjects, Annie was patronized and ignored, reprimanded and ranted at, treated as if they’d just peeled her off the bottom of their high heels, as if she personally had been following them around shoving a camera in their faces, rifling through their bins or hacking their phones. All those junkets she’d been sent on back in the late nineties at the start of her career, often in a suite at Covent Garden Home, those awful awkward chats, with the agent or press officer lurking in a corner the entire time, ears pricked (‘Oh don’t mind me, I’ll just be here on my laptop, hardly even listening . . . Excuse me, NO! That topic’s off limits. And that one. And that one’). It had shocked her how dull they were too – that people with such astonishing lives were so crushingly bland, had so little to say, so few opinions and anecdotes and interesting quirks (now she knew, of course, that the person she was sent to meet was often as much of an invention as the one she’d seen on screen).

By the time Ned called to offer her the job, this job, she’d simply had enough – the idea of being the person calling the shots, of being the one they sucked up to, or bothered to engage in conversation with at the very least, was simply too tempting. Ava clearly had zero recollection of an event that had changed Annie’s career path entirely. Funny how life turns out, she thought as she listened to Ava explain, between sobs, that she’d had lunch with a gang of other actresses and they’d got talking about what they were going to wear to the Island Home launch and she had somehow, mistakenly, could-you-believe-it, how-did-it-happen, given the impression she’d be there too.

‘I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking, of course I was never even expecting to be invited in the first place, why would anyone invite me to something like this, I would be embarrassed to be invited probably, assume you had made some terrible mistake, but – I’m such an idiot – I think I might have accidentally given them the idea I was coming – please, please, please could you make an exception as I am just so mortified?’

Annie suppressed a sigh. At least the Americans were upfront. Brits could be absolute torture. Was this an all-girls boarding school thing, this performative self-flagellation? Or was it somehow part of your contract with the public, as a British actor or musician, that if you did make it big you had to pretend like the whole thing was some sort of embarrassing accident?

Ava was still talking.

Passing one of the bow windows of The Causeway Inn, Annie glanced in at the lounge bar, where three of her team were sitting around on sofas, hunched over their laptops. She tapped on the window. They all looked up, saw her, and smiled. Annie crossed her eyes, pulled a face and gestured at her phone. Then she cleared her throat, firmly.

‘I’m sorry, Ava. There’s nothing I can do. But do let me take you out for lunch next week and I promise to give you all the gossip.’

There was no need to be any ruder than the situation demanded. After all, there was still some slim possibility that, via some hard-to-imagine sequence of events, Ava Huxley might succeed in reigniting her career, that she might even become one of those members Annie spent her time chasing after and buttering up, rather than vice versa. Ava had better hurry, though, Annie thought. If she remembered rightly, she would turn forty next month.