‘I’m not the expert, and I’m afraid Sebastian’s in court,’ he explained. ‘But essentially it means that although the loan monies have been received, any repayment is effectively cancelled. It’s quite unusual in general, but something that Ned does fairly regularly, and is certainly the case with all of Ron Cox’s contracts.’ She could hear him flicking through paperwork. ‘There are five or six here, almost identical.’
‘You know what, maybe if you could send them all, please, to be on the safe side,’ she said. ‘I’ll just have to ask him.’
Adam
Even as the words were coming out of his mouth, Adam knew that he had fucked it.
All afternoon he had been trying to corner Ned, get him alone, to engineer a situation in which he might have something like his brother’s full attention, find a moment at which Ned was not greeting someone or other, bellowing with amiable ferocity down the length of the lawn at some new arrival, demanding to know why someone else didn’t have a drink in their hand, roaring at someone’s joke or convulsing with laughter at one of his own. All afternoon Adam had been ignoring texts and phone calls from Laura. Was the timing right for the bombshell he was about to drop on Ned – the first afternoon of the biggest launch party they had ever thrown at the most expensive club they had ever opened? Almost certainly not. Would there ever be a better time? Adam was not sure about that either. He had, after all, spent years waiting for the perfect moment to do this.
At one point, it had looked as if Ned was going to take it surprisingly well.
It was only when guests started drifting off to their cabins before dinner that Adam had finally managed to catch five minutes with his brother, and only then by offering to drive Ned back to his own cottage so he could freshen up too. Even so, for half the journey Ned had been on his phone, staring out of the window and barking instructions about tonight.
It was funny, Adam thought. When the magazines and newspapers wrote about Home they always focused on the stupid row between their grandfather and father, prompted by some of the latter’s ideas for modernizing the club and shaking up its membership policy, a row which had been temporarily resolved and then crackled ablaze again at every family gathering for half a century. When they profiled Ned they always made such a big deal about how much of the father’s vision was shared by the son – and it was always son, singular; how much Ned had inherited from their father: his looks, his ambition, his quick, cutting wit, his temper. As if their grandfather had not left Adam a share of the club too, albeit a much smaller share than Ned’s. As if their father had spent his life sitting around fuming about being cut out of his own father’s will in this particular regard, rather than having pursued for several decades a highly successful and lucrative legal career.
As with most things you read in the media it was all completely garbled, of course, most of it based on a single interview that one of their father’s estranged cousins – Ned said he had met him once or twice as a child, although Adam could not recall ever having encountered him – had given about twenty years ago and had been repeated as fact in every profile piece ever since.
Had his father expected to inherit the club? Yes, probably, eventually. But he would have been a fool to rely on it. Adam’s grandfather’s entire existence revolved around falling out with one relation, while bringing another temporarily back into the fold. Hinting at what his will might hold for this one, or that one, who might get this much share in the club, to whom he might leave the building: if you wanted to identify where Ned had inherited his love of game-playing from, his delight in getting people to dance to his tune, there was one very obvious candidate.
But this nit-picking, this assumption on Ned’s part that unless he did something himself, somebody else would fuck it up? It was their mother from whom he had acquired that particular trait. The way she would fuss. The way she would hover. The way, the afternoon of the Covent Garden Home relaunch, Ned had so proudly shown her around, and all the time, the entire fucking time, you could see her eyes flicking from this thing to this thing, that to that, looking for something misplaced to comment on, something slightly askew to point out, something – anything – so he would be absolutely clear she was not overawed by any of it. ‘That must have cost a pretty penny,’ she would say, jutting her chin at the carpet, or the curtains, or one of the gilt-framed mirrors in the lobby, making it obvious who she thought had been taken advantage of.