It never ended well.
She used to try to warn people she could see getting too big for their boots, but it was remarkable how little some people thought of a PA, that it didn’t always occur to them she might have insight to offer. The inner circle – her, Annie, Adam – were the only ones that remained after a quarter of a century of this endless conveyor belt.
What was completely baffling about this interview was that Annie had watched the same thing play out on repeat too.
But the article itself wasn’t the worst of it.
On the cover of the magazine – the actual cover – there was Annie, standing outside the famous black front door of the original Covent Garden club, popping paparazzi flashbulbs reflected in the glossy paint, her head thrown back in laughter.
Their big cover line? ‘Honey, I’m Home!’
She considered deleting it, but Ned would inevitably find out and it would become her problem. She started typing an email to prime him before his eyes alighted on the piece, stopped, started again. But there was nothing to say that would save the situation. Nikki took a deep breath and hit forward, then set her laptop down on the coffee table in front of her, picking up her mug and cradling it in both hands, looking out of the window at the tranquil landscape.
Working for Ned, even when you knew there was going to be a tantrum, you had to get on with your life as though you did not. You simply had to make the most of whatever moments of peace and quiet and restfulness were available to you. This was the perfect setting for that – it was, for one thing, one of the very few places on the island where you could be guaranteed not to bump into Ned. He did not like to sweat or swim; still less was he interested in lying down for long enough to enjoy a hot stone massage or a healing quartz facial.
A shame really, as it was a beautiful place to be, even for treadmill-phobes. Housed in a U-shaped collection of outbuildings set in a dip in the island, it had a freshwater pond in the centre, which had been transformed into a heated natural swimming pool that belched clouds of steam into the cold air. The pool was half covered by a wrought-iron greenhouse from the twenties, repurposed from another part of the island, which dripped with clematis, still flowering in October, with swaying reeds lining the banks and weeping willows trailing their branches into the water. Surrounding the pool, what had formerly been stone barns and corrugated-iron sheds had been transformed into a gym, yoga studio, nail bar, cryotherapy chamber, meditation room, hair salon and treatment rooms with one-way picture windows perched out on an overwater deck.
‘We’re ready for you now,’ the therapist whispered as she ushered Nikki into one, which felt like it was floating out above the pool.
‘This shouldn’t hurt,’ she said as she unsheathed the needle from its tube, tapped the inside of Nikki’s elbow and inserted it into her arm. ‘The infusion will take half an hour, and I’ll give you a head and shoulder massage while it does.’
Nikki allowed her breathing to slow and focused on the scene outside – the one-way glass protecting the privacy of those being pampered was framed in brass, making the whole scene look like an oil painting. Tomorrow, the pool would be packed with members posing in Lycra and swimming off their hangovers, but right now, it was as still as a mirror.
The therapist made awkward conversation about how excited she was for guests to start arriving, asking how dinner had gone last night, if Nikki had been there, expressing her excitement at the news that Jackson Crane – Jackson Crane! – was on the island. Had Nikki met him? What was he really like? Nikki pondered a variety of answers before settling upon an enigmatic smile.
As the cocktail of vitamins flowed into her bloodstream, she started to let her vision slip into an unfocused haze. She hadn’t slept well, after dinner. Perhaps it was the rich food so close to bedtime. Perhaps it was the knowledge of how intense this weekend was going to be. But all night she had been thinking about the past, thinking about Ned, thinking terrible, impossible thoughts, feeling as though her brain was just on the cusp of solving a problem, of fitting everything together, and just as she was about to do so, the pieces would scatter or change shape.