What Nikki kept telling them, those people with their questions, their offers, was that she was just not sure she was ready to jump into another position like that with someone else right now. And so the offers kept escalating, the terms getting more and more generous. And still Nikki kept politely declining, or deferring a decision. And people kept asking what she was doing with herself, and didn’t it all seem terribly quiet after her glamorous life with Ned? And the truth was she was just pottering around the house, mostly, or in the garden, and seeing people for dinner, and reading, and thinking about Kurt.
Her son.
Sometimes, when she was sitting in front of the TV in the evening or cooking herself dinner or running in the park, she would look at her watch and work out the time in LA and wonder what he was doing, Kurt, how he was processing what he had learned on the island. And it did cross her mind to call him, tell him the truth, the whole truth. And she found herself asking herself whether that would be a kindness or just selfish, whether if she were him she would want to know, and whether she could really trust the promptings of her own heart. And still the job offers came in. From London. From New York. From LA.
A good PA is hard to find.
It had always been one of their traditions, at Home, to throw a viewing party the night of the big awards ceremonies. The Oscars. The Emmys. The Grammys. The Brits. Everyone in one of the screening rooms with popcorn, sunk deep into those enormous leather sofas, applauding or laughing at the clips, catcalling, all stamping their feet and cheering whenever anyone that was in the room got mentioned, all throwing their popcorn at the screen and booing whenever the wrong person won. And it was fun, and funny, to see the people you knew up there, pretending to smile, pretending happily to clap whenever someone else beat them to an award, and know exactly what they were actually thinking and what they would say the next time you saw them. It was fun, and funny, seeing if any of the winners would mention Ned, mention Home, watch him growl and pretend to sulk if they did not.
She hadn’t been intending to watch any of the awards this year. Why would she? She wasn’t in that world any more. But occasionally, after a bath, as she was getting ready to go up to bed, she would just flick the TV on, and one night when she did so, it was one of the awards shows she happened to catch, right at the end of a video-montage tribute to Jackson Crane, Georgia Crane in the front row, brushing away a single tear, receiving a consoling hand on her bare shoulder from the actor next to her. Then the announcer said something about Ron Cox. If the remote control had been closer to hand, Nikki would have switched the TV off before she even recognized the man in the tuxedo approaching the stage, taking the steps up to the stage two at a time, making his way to the podium, clapping the announcer on the back as they ceded the podium to him.
It was Kurt Cox.
There was a hushed silence, a couple of swallowed coughs as he unfolded a piece of paper and retrieved from the pocket of his tuxedo jacket a pair of reading glasses, made some crack about them. Then his face grew serious, and he began to speak about his father: ‘A man known to many of you personally, and to millions more through his films.’
He was dead. Ron Cox was dead and Nikki hadn’t even noticed, had missed the news somehow. How odd it felt, his absence from the world, the man who she had once thought she had loved.
Kurt was talking now, with feeling, about the kindness his father had shown to him growing up, about being taken onto the set of all those much-loved, wonderful movies, being the first to watch them sometimes, his dad noting his reactions, asking his opinions. He spoke about the generosity of his father, his charity work, his love of his family – second only to which came his love of golf. Laughter had rippled around the room. That was the father he knew, he said.
But there was also the man that some of them knew. That some of them had helped enable. Accusations that had been hushed up, and hushed up, and hushed up again, but that everyone in this room, in Hollywood, knew about. About the girls, young girls, threatened into silence or paid off, the vast machinery of fear and manipulation and exploitation on which his father’s career had depended. And at first the camera kept cutting back and forth to faces in the audience. Angry faces. Frightened faces. And you could see the host standing in the corner of the stage, not knowing what to do or say, voices no doubt screaming in his ear. You could hear Kurt speeding up as he spoke – he even made some reference about needing to get this said before they cut him short and went to a commercial break. And he was talking now about how women who tried to tell the truth were ground down, gaslit. How chat-show hosts made jokes about them, how the media dug dirt on them, how they were advised to settle out of court. And how that was wrong. How what his father had done was wrong, using his wealth and his power first to pressure girls and then to silence them. And that was what he had wanted to say about his father and other men like him sitting in this room. That now he knew, although he had loved the man with all his heart, he could not stand here on this stage and let his father’s memory be buffed and burnished like a gold statuette.