One of the things he had looked forward to most, going away to university, was not the chance to reinvent himself, but to meet people who would not realize quite how many of his mannerisms and interests and even turns of phrase were borrowed from someone else.
This was the sort of thing he had not really discussed with anyone, before he met Laura.
That his wife and his brother did not get on better had always pained him. The problem was, he supposed, that they both had very different perceptions of who Adam was, of what he could be, of what he was capable.
Adam was pretty sure he knew how Ned was going to react to the news that he was leaving. As for the idea that he wanted Ned to buy him out so he could be free of the place entirely? This was the part of the conversation Adam had been dreading. He was one of the few who knew how the whole operation functioned, because he was one of the few who had been with Ned right from the start. Extracting his share would be like unmaking an omelette.
The main thing was to choose his moment.
Kicking off Friday with a leisurely sail around the island on a 1930s motor yacht, bought and restored at astonishing expense, had always been part of Ned’s plan for this weekend. It was an unrivalled opportunity to show off the size of the place, to underline the scale of what he had achieved. There was the old water tower, at the top of which was now an Italian restaurant, Torre dell’acqua. There was the little bay on the sheltered side of the island that, come summer, you’d be able to paddleboard around. There was the private jetty near The Manor, reserved for Ned himself.
It felt like as good an opportunity as he would have, this weekend, to get Ned on his own.
Nor would Adam ever be likely to catch Ned in a better mood.
‘We did it,’ he kept muttering to Adam, every time they were the only people in earshot. ‘We actually fucking did it.’
And for a moment it would feel like they were a team again, as it had in the old days.
‘What do you reckon to my island?’ he kept asking people, as he and Adam circulated. ‘Not bad, eh?’
His boat. His island. His party. Slapping backs, cracking jokes, exchanging nods of recognition across the room, scoffing canapés by the handful, the centre of attention – this was Ned Groom in his element, at his happiest. Triumphant, that was probably the best word to describe his brother at that moment.
Then Ned checked his email.
Annie
It seemed to be going well, so far.
After they had all been ferried over on speedboats from The Causeway Inn, and been checked in at The Boathouse, Annie had welcomed the weekend’s new arrivals up the gangplank and onto Island Home’s very own yacht. As for the guests already on the island – Jackson and Georgia, Freddie and Keith, Kurt, Kyra and her daughter Lyra – Ned had insisted on riding along personally in the golf buggy that had collected them from their cabins, just in case they tried to wriggle out of this cruise.
It had taken them about forty-five minutes to circle the island the first time. They were due to do so twice more before they all disembarked for lunch.
As guests mingled, chatted, tried to work out who was here and who was not, Annie had been circling the wraparound terrace making introductions, dropping in, as she always did, the flattering snippets of information she’d spent weeks researching and memorizing about every single guest （‘You must meet Alicia – did you know this angelic human has just got back from a humanitarian mission in Syria?’ or ‘Johnny, I hear you are 95 per cent plant based now – and positively glowing, if you don’t mind me saying!’）。
They took themselves, their own celebrity, very seriously, Home’s members, and they expected everyone around them to do the same. That was something you needed to remember in this job. After all, these were people who, straight-faced, spent whole months in front of a green screen pretending to fight aliens. Thirty-year-old multi-millionaires who sang to crowds of thousands the love songs they’d written in their teenage bedrooms. And maybe you did need to believe in yourself, for all of this to happen, for other people to buy into you too.