Apart from anything else – despite the thermals – Annie was fucking freezing. She ran a manicured hand over the soft ridges of the cable knit blanket on her lap, identical to the monogrammed ones she’d placed on each member’s chair, a place setting you could cuddle up in. It might look pretty at this time of year, the island, and it might still be just warm enough to get away without a coat in the sun, but once you were in the shade . . .
Which was pretty much a metaphor for how it was going for her, this weekend.
It was not just what Ned had said, on the boat, it was the way he’d said it. Spat it. Hissed it. Meant it. Annie Spark is fucking history at this company. For what? For an interview in which she had dared to suggest there might be more to Home than one fifty-nine-year-old man and his singular vision?
Throughout the rest of the yacht tour and on the trip up here to the restaurant, Ned had been ignoring her, apart from the eye-roll he had aimed at her dress as she was climbing out of the golf cart, and the snort he gave when she was having trouble with her heels on the gravel as they were waiting for the lift.
‘Annie, Ned’s trying to catch your attention.’ Nikki nudged her, gesturing towards him. ‘I think Jackson might need some . . . assistance over there.’
For Nikki’s benefit, Annie flashed a forced smile at Ned.
‘I’ll see what I can do to get Jackson out of here once everyone’s eaten. He’ll just make a scene if I try now, the state he’s in.’ Annie beckoned the waiter over. ‘Pour slowly, okay?’ she whispered to him, with a subtle nod in the extravagantly inebriated actor’s direction.
Then she turned to face Nikki fully.
‘You sent it to him, didn’t you? That article. Flagged it up for his attention.’
‘I had to, Annie. It’s literally my job to keep him in the loop. You must have known he’d see it this weekend. I mean, talk about a guaranteed way to wind Ned up . . . taking credit for his entire island on the cover of a magazine? Your launch party? Your members? “Honey I’m Home?” What on earth were you thinking?’
What had she been thinking? Probably, in retrospect, that it was nice to be asked her opinion for once. On what she thought made Home so special. About how it was to work there and what she actually did all day. The delicate diplomacy of it all, the power dynamics, the practicalities. The things she had thoughtfully, painstakingly planned for this weekend. She had not set out to boast. Annie had worked at Home long enough to understand that getting too big for your size sixes was a sackable offence. She felt stupid and ashamed for slipping up so badly, especially as someone who started her career posing the leading questions for exactly the same magazines. But it was the first time in a long time – ever, perhaps – that someone had asked a question and listened to her answer.
‘You want to know why I told the journalist what my literal, day-to-day job is, Nikki? How hard I work? So hard that I haven’t had a boyfriend in a decade because I’m married to oh, at the last count, five thousand, seven hundred and sixty-one paying Home members? How vital my being on call, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, is to the basic functioning of this business? This business that pays your wages too? How, if I did not know the things I know, remember the things I remember, about all of these people,’ she shout-whispered, gesturing around the room, ‘the entire operation would have ground to a halt long ago? Just so I understand, you’re asking why I told the Evening Standard that I am actually slightly more to Home than a jumped-up coat-check girl?’
She watched Nikki recoil and instantly realized she’d gone too far.
‘Nobody thinks you’re not important, Annie,’ Nikki said quietly, not meeting her eye. ‘But he’s not going to let this go.’
In some respects it was a mistake, as a woman especially, to be really efficient over a long period of time. Because if you made things seem easy, and people had no experience of things not running smoothly, it came to seem that anybody could do it. Especially if you were also as gregarious as Annie was, if your laugh was a boisterous shriek （it was helpful if whenever anyone needed her, they could hear her across a room – and someone always needed her, for something） and if you dressed for maximum impact （so you were similarly easy to spot – although in some ways the elaborate almost-costumes were also a cloak of invisibility, allowing the woman she really was to disappear under sequins and silly shoes）。