Perhaps what was going to hurt most of all was not that she would not be doing this any more, but that someone else would. And though she was confident they would not be able to do half as good a job for anywhere near as long, the sad fact was that it was irrelevant. All that mattered at Home was not how effective you were, it was how much Ned wanted you around. And the obvious fact was that Ned no longer wanted her around. For an instant all the lights in the room flickered. Annie blinked, blinked again, sniffed.
Through the double doors, The Manor’s ballroom had been transformed, with elaborate arrangements of roses and ivy, clusters of claret velvet sofas in the four corners, oversized gilt candelabras throwing warm light onto the trays of crystal champagne coupes.
On a leather banquette along one wall, Keith Little had positioned himself under one of his celebrated collage pieces: a giant black-and-white photograph of a headless nude, the nipples covered, bikini-fashion, with real tarantulas, the crotch area decorated with a shimmering Swarovski spider’s web, multi-coloured gemstone insects trapped in its threads. He clocked Annie, gave a little ironic salute, and continued explaining the work enthusiastically to the group of young women surrounding him, constantly topping up their glasses with a bottle he must have commandeered from a waiter, occasionally tipping his own half-full glass into the champagne bucket when they weren’t looking. Despite the hubbub, despite their distance, Annie knew exactly what Keith was saying, precisely what he was telling them his art was all about, raising, as he did so, both his hands and fondling a pair of imaginary breasts.
She stopped and, scanning the room, caught the eye of one of her team, also doing the rounds. ‘Darling, can you keep an eye on Keith for me tonight? And if you see him leave with anyone’ – she gestured over at the crowd of women surrounding the artist – ‘make sure you find me and let me know, right away. Okay?’
Her colleague, Andre, glanced in Keith’s direction, appraised the situation, and nodded.
Even across the room, she could make out fragments of the anecdote （she had heard it before, many times） that Keith was currently recounting.
‘And so I said to Damien – you can ask him this yourself, he’ll tell you the same – I said to him, there just isn’t enough synergy for us to collaborate, you know?’
My God, what did he think he looked like, these days? It was all part of the schtick, of course, but still. The silk Dolce & Gabbana shirt unbuttoned almost to the navel. The jet-black chest hair he obviously dyed. Wrinkled, crepey skin that had spent far too many summers lounging on one art collector’s yacht or another. Whippet-thin but with Popeye muscles. The black leather trousers that bunched at the crotch. Maybe that was the point: that at a certain level, certainly as a man, it became a literal expression of your power, that you could wander around looking like that and people would still hang on your every word.
Despite appearances, he was no fool, Keith. A nasty piece of work, yes, but no fool. His art was no better and no worse than the kind you could pick up pretty reasonably at any graduation show. But he had been smart enough early on to realize that lending Ned work to hang on the walls at Home was the best advertising he could get, and falling out of the club with his celebrity friends would help build his hellraiser brand. Success snowballed. And snowballed. How much was he worth now? Tens of millions, definitely. More, no doubt, after the big retrospective of his work being held at MOMA next spring.
Ned calibrated these things perfectly, and his timing was impeccable. How much was he squeezing Keith for? Annie wondered. From Keith’s general mood today, enough for him to feel it. A couple of years ago, she’d asked Ned what his policy was, with this sort of thing, and he’d said that initially he used to think of a figure that they wouldn’t miss and ask for that. Because nobody ever said no, however, he realized he could double that figure, that even if it stung they still coughed up. It had dawned on Annie then that what had started out as a means to bolster Home’s finances was now as much about control as it was about cash （although thanks to Island Home, he certainly needed that right now too）。 It had become a game – seeing how far he could push members until they snapped. That was why, this weekend, his grand wheeze was letting the charade play out over days, and in front of an audience. He wanted to watch them realize, one by one, that he had them completely at his mercy – each one understanding they were all in the same boat.