The Club(81)

Ned rocked on his heels, took a swig of his drink, lifted his cigar to his lips.

‘DNA,’ he said.

‘DNA?’

‘If you’ve lived your life the way Ron Cox has lived his, it must have been a pretty scary time when all that paternity testing stuff started coming in, back in the late eighties. It stung a few of my clients, cited in some very expensive divorces.’ He made a whistling sound. ‘It was a new reality to adjust to for men like Ron. Not the prospect of child support – it’s the reputational aspect that’s the issue. The damage that a scandal might do to the brand. And you’ve got to remember how much your brand is worth, when you’re someone like Ron Cox. When you’re a director whose name people know, whose movies they go to see, in their millions, a guy who’s known as a family entertainer, a family guy – there’s a lot of money at stake. A lot of money. And it’s not just your brand, either. Marianne’s got her things going on, her public persona to protect. And they’ve got this set-up, the ranch, those kids – their kids, adopted kids – already. It’s always been her dream to have this big family . . .’

Her voice a mere croak, she asked if Marianne had known about Kurt, who his father really was.

Ned snorted softly, exhaling two plumes of smoke from his nose. ‘Not unless Ron told her, God rest her soul. Or she figured it out. Jesus, the state of the guy’s brain these days, he probably doesn’t know himself which kids are his and which aren’t.’

Nikki could remember trying to process this and feeling she was never quite going to manage it. She could remember the crash of the waves, the sound of distant voices, distant laughter.

Ned held up his hands – cigar in one, crystal glass in the other. ‘Look, don’t blame me. It was a favour, really. A favour to Ron. He was giving me, giving Home, a lot of money to keep it all quiet. He asked me to arrange it and I arranged it. I mean he paid, of course. And it wasn’t cheap, the agency, convincing them to adapt their . . . their processes.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Why do Ron a favour, when you already had him over a barrel?’

Ned smiled patiently.

‘Because that’s how this works. That’s how this all works. Give and take. You scratch my back . . . Sometimes you help someone out of a situation. Sometimes you call in a favour in return.’

‘Sometimes you engineer a situation . . .’ said Nikki, understanding.

‘Exactly.’

There is perhaps no rage so compelling as the rage we feel on behalf of other people – or that we convince ourselves we are feeling on behalf of other people.

The final straw was the smirk Ned was wearing. Pleasantly drunk, on a night when a dream had come to glorious fruition, he could not keep that pleased-with-himself smile from his face, reflecting on how clever he had been, how deftly it had all been taken care of. My God, she thought to herself, he’s been waiting years to gloat about it like this.

‘He was evidence,’ Nikki said softly. ‘Kurt. To Ron.’

‘Exactly,’ said Ned, and made a gesture like someone dinging a little invisible bell with his finger. He finished his glass with a gulp. ‘I might have had his balls in a vice, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t also do the guy a favour. A little gesture of goodwill, you might call it. What Ron didn’t want was you popping up too, some hysterical girl, five years down the line, ten years down the line, and making a fuss and having the physical evidence to prove it was all true.’

‘And me, Ned. Why did you keep me around, once you’d got what you wanted?’ she asked.

Ned had actually laughed out loud. ‘A good PA is hard to find, Nikki. And you are a really bloody good PA. You’re polite, you’re efficient, you’re beautiful, but you have so little ego it’s like you’ve made yourself invisible, unlike Annie fucking Spark. And most importantly, I have never met anyone who asked fewer questions. I would have thought at some point in the past quarter fucking century you might have worked out that we’ve been blackmailing members almost since the day I inherited the business. But no. It doesn’t even appear to have entered your pretty little head. Stupid or just naive? I never could work it out. But I know you won’t tell anyone, because who would believe you, my right-hand woman, weren’t in on it?’

It was the laugh that echoed in her head, the tone of his words as much as the words themselves. She thought about all that Ned had done for her over the decades, all that he had done to keep her close, to make her feel part of something, loyal to Home, loyal to him. A father figure for the girl who didn’t have her own. She thought about all she had done, and given up, in return. Still he was smirking and it suddenly hit her that it was because he genuinely could not conceive – and did not care, not one iota – how all of this might make her feel; that after all these years he not only thought of her solely in terms of her value to him, to Home, but also seemed to find it hard to imagine that she might object to that, or see herself differently. That was as galling as anything – the knowledge that he had not just played games with her life, and her son’s life, but with their very ideas of themselves too, their sense of who they were.

There was simply nothing to say. She turned and started to walk towards the shore, glancing back once she was halfway down the jetty to see Ned looking out over the water once more, admiring his boat.