What a revelation, what a relief it had been to realize, at the age of about twelve perhaps, that her mother’s tempers were not actually something you could prevent. That no matter how quietly you walked or how carefully you cleaned up after yourself, or how studiously you tried to avoid attracting her attention, she would always be able to find something to lose her rag about. That did not make it any more pleasant to be in the eye of the storm of course, but what it did mean was that you stopped internalizing any of it.
She heard a slam, looking up to see the girl who had been blinking back tears upstairs run out of The Manor’s front door, skidding to a halt when they locked eyes. Nikki smiled and beckoned her over. ‘I’m sorry, I should know this, but there are so many people on this island – what is your name?’
‘It’s Chloe,’ she said, almost whispering. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. This is only my first month here. I was so excited. I thought I would be really good at this.’ She sniffed. ‘Do you think he’s going to fire me? Should I try to apologize?’ Nikki put an arm around Chloe’s shaking shoulders and gave her a squeeze. No, she thought, you’re safe. He doesn’t often sack the pretty ones. He even joked about it, paraphrasing a pretentious and long-sacked Home architect: ‘It’s like William Morris said, Nikki, right? Have nobody in your Home you do not know to be beautiful or believe to be useful.’
As it happened, Nikki was quite aware that her own looks were one of the reasons she’d been a fixture at Home so long. That wasn’t arrogance, it was simply a fact. Because if there was one thing a modelling career – even one as short-lived as Nikki’s – gave you, it was independent confirmation of your attractiveness, a clear-eyed sense of the doors that it opens and the problems it brings with it.
Nikki was also extremely good at her job.
She enjoyed it too, mostly.
Because if Ned could be vicious sometimes, he could also be incredibly generous, remarkably thoughtful. Some of the birthday and Christmas presents he had given her – ‘Sorry for being such an arsehole the last twelve months’ – had been ludicrous. The wardrobe in her little Victorian terrace in south London was stuffed with expensive apologies: Celine bags, Louis Vuitton boots, Hermès bangles. Ned could be funny and charismatic too. His impressions. His turns of phrase. He was the kind of person you had to literally beg to stop, because you were laughing so hard you couldn’t catch your breath. Chloe would see all that eventually, if she stayed at Home.
‘Oh sweetheart, don’t cry. You’ve done an incredible job, your team – I mean, look at this place! It’s beautiful.’ They both looked up at the perfectly symmetrical house with its imposing Corinthian columns, the honey-coloured stone dripping with the wisteria that Ned demanded be stapled to the front a week ago, at astonishing expense.
‘Deep breaths now though, back in the room – go and ask one of the barmen for a brandy to calm your nerves – Ned will notice if you’re gone a long time and he won’t like it. He wants people who work for him to have a thick skin, to be able to take a joke. We’re all tired, all on a short fuse. It’s nothing personal. He’s always like this in the run-up to a new club,’ she reassured Chloe, the usual platitudes, the familiar excuses, tripping easily off her tongue.
But even as Nikki was saying it, she knew that wasn’t quite true. Ned was different this time. His anger less focused. His triggers less predictable. His patterns of behaviour, the swoop and swerve of his annoyances, far more erratic.
Maybe that was what it did to you, buying an island.
Maybe he was squirming, mentally, under the pressure of how much this place and its redevelopment had cost, how much it had been delayed. The endless emails from contractors demanding payment, the legal letters they’d started getting from suppliers. Ned the perfectionist ignoring them all and spending more money Home did not seem to have getting the details just so.
Maybe.
What Nikki was sure of, when it came to Ned, was that something was spiralling seriously out of control.