From where she was now standing, leaning against the railing of the yacht’s top deck, Annie – champagne coupe in hand, dressed in a diaphanous leopard-print kaftan with a gem-encrusted neckline （thermal vest and leggings underneath, of course） – could look down and, in a single glance, take in pretty much the entire party.
Jake Price, an extravagantly eyebrowed, absurdly muscled actor with thick dark hair scraped back into a long plait – no doubt grown for his role as a bloodthirsty Viking in the HBO series he’d just started shooting – had already made the entire party audibly gasp by disrobing to reveal a tiny pair of pale pink Speedos, then executing a perfect twisting dive into the sea. There were barely concealed sniggers when, after floundering in the waves for a few minutes, he started shouting for assistance and was hauled back onto the boat, goose-pimpled and visibly shrivelled, and handed a Home-branded bathrobe. Annie could hear the captain, standing a few feet away from her, muttering under his breath. ‘Action hero idiot – that undertow will drag you down in a second!’
The waiters ignored the drama as Annie had trained them to do, circulating with their trays, ever discreet, ever watchful for anyone trying to attract their attention. Casting her eyes around, all she could see were familiar faces, some catching sight of her and smiling, waving. Any direction you looked, members, probably fifty in total now, were checking – while trying not to look as if they were checking – who else had been invited, who that was over there.
‘Champagne?’ Annie gave a start as a waitress appeared behind her holding a bottle, its neck tightly wrapped in a crisp linen napkin.
‘Thank you darling girl, good work noticing me up here. Gold star for you,’ she smiled, proffering her glass. The girl tipped the bottle forwards, her face falling as she and Annie watched the liquid dribble into the glass, refilling it by barely half an inch. Annie raised an eyebrow.
‘Well that’s not very good now, is it, sweetheart?’ she said spikily. ‘Have we taught you nothing? Never, ever pour from a practically empty bottle. Do these look like the sort of people who like to drink dregs?’ She gestured down to the party. ‘Get someone who actually knows what they’re doing to bring up another bottle please. I think you should stay below deck and polish the glasses now, don’t you?’
Harsh? Maybe a little. But Annie’s entire job was making sure every member interaction was faultless, and it was something Ned trusted her implicitly with. Members had to feel as though their monthly fees bought them something special or else Home was just a fancy pub you paid to get into. In other words: she was a dick so members didn’t have to be.
With a deliberately audible sigh, Annie turned back to the balcony.
A neat visual illustration of Home’s hierarchy, that’s what she got from this vantage point. Observing who made a beeline for whom, noting who stood still and expected others to orbit around them. Watching who held forth, loudly and at length, about their latest philanthropic project without noticing eyes slowly glaze around them – it had been half an hour now, and Georgia Crane, waving her slender, manicured hands for emphasis, had barely drawn breath.
Seeing the members that hovered on the periphery of a group, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot and laughing a little too loudly （Freddie Hunter a major offender in this regard）。 Knowing that they all consumed the same media as the rest of the world and understanding the awkwardness around that – congratulate Jennifer on the engagement reported by BuzzFeed or Monica on her pregnancy leaked to The Times, or piously pretend not to read the papers? That was a dance Annie had to do herself. She could feel their excitement, understand their anxiety; she realized, from years of observation, that being famous yourself did not inoculate you against others’ celebrity.
She did not like that word really. Celebrity. It irked her when people described Home as a club for celebrities, their events as celebrity parties. That interviewer from ES Magazine had used it repeatedly, and Annie had winced a little, internally, every time. It had been strange, that whole experience – she was not used to being the one asked the questions. She had corrected him on that point – she preferred to think of their members as celebrated people. Annie had read once, back in her journalist days, that that was what it had meant, originally. Back in the nineteenth century, ‘celebrity’ was simply used to describe someone recognized in their field. Charles Darwin was a celebrity, Florence Nightingale was a celebrity, George Eliot, just as much as an actress like Ellen Terry or an actor like Henry Home. It was only quite late in the twentieth century that the word had begun to take on negative connotations, to carry a suggestion of superficiality, to be associated increasingly with undeserved fame, someone to whom society paid unwarranted attention. All of which happened at exactly the same time as the word began increasingly to be used to describe young women in the public eye. Well I never, Annie had thought. What a coincidence.