Nikki slid back the bolt and accidentally threw the cubicle door open with such force that it hit the wall before judderingly swinging closed again.
She stopped it with her hand.
‘Hi Lily,’ she said, across the room, perhaps just a little bit too loudly. Over by the sinks, Lily interrupted the conversation she had been having with a slight lift of the hand, and shifted her gaze to Nikki. She smiled about as faintly as it is possible to smile.
‘Lily, darling,’ said Nikki, making a point of the familiarity, grinning more broadly than she would usually have allowed herself. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to have any . . .’ She tapped her nose. ‘Do you?’
Because she was going to need something to get her through this evening.
Because she was going to need something to talk to Ned, to confront him. Something to give her the confidence, the fearlessness to ask Ned what she needed to ask him, and to hear his answers.
But because, also, fuck it.
It’s not every day that you discover your whole adult life has been built around an elaborate practical joke.
Adam
Just before midnight, Adam slipped away.
He passed Nikki in the corridor, and they exchanged nods, and just after they passed, it sounded as if she had shouted something but he did not catch what, and when he turned she did not look back, just kept walking.
Upstairs, behind him, he could hear Ned holding forth, his brother’s booming voice unmistakable and clearly audible even over the general hubbub, the clatter of heels on marble, the chinking of glasses, the bursts of laughter and shrieks of delight.
It was a relief to be out in the cool air. He descended the front steps of The Manor two at a time, unlocking his Land Rover with a press of the button on the key – dip dip – and correcting his angle of travel towards the third of the three identical vehicles lined up in a row.
I’ll fucking show her, Adam.
All the way to Ned’s cottage those were the words ringing in his ears. As he turned onto the private road. As he pulled in at the gate. As he typed Ned’s keycode into Ned’s door and waited for it to click open.
The interior of the cottage was not what anyone would have expected from the outside. Even compared to his penthouse suite at Manhattan Home, even compared to his cabana with its own pool on the roof in the club in Santa Monica, Ned had done himself proud with this place. If the Home aesthetic was a certain lived-in chic, this was the real deal, super luxe. Three separate teams of builders, not to mention all those different head architects it had taken to get it right, to transform it into a study in chilly minimalism, part art gallery, part hotel lobby, all white walls and veined marble, an open-plan multi-layered interior like something M. C. Escher might have come up with after bingeing on too many copies of Architectural Digest, complete with private screening room （a cedar-clad cube suspended from the roof and accessed via a stainless-steel ladder）， a kitchen that would not have disgraced a professional restaurant （and in which Adam was pretty sure Ned had never attempted anything more ambitious than toast）， an enormous, brightly lit bathroom upstairs, with a shower that in itself was almost as big as the bathroom in the house they had grown up in.
Adam closed the front door behind him and stepped into the living room.
Once, this had been a simple coastal cottage, inhabited by tenants of the Bouchers. During the MOD era, up until the early nineties, it had ostensibly served as the officers’ mess. When he and Ned had first inspected the place, all the windows had been smashed, all the frames rotten, daylight visible through the gaps in the roof slates, a layer of pigeon shit over everything.
Adam found himself thinking once again of that first visit to the island more than a quarter-century ago, just after they had refurbished the Covent Garden club. They had driven down together, Ned at the wheel of his Bentley, on a drizzly afternoon one February. All the way Ned had been telling him about the island, its history, how much it was worth and what he was prepared to pay. And still Adam had not been quite sure how seriously to take any of it, how Ned thought he was going to get together anything like the amounts of money he was so casually talking about, even if the present owners were interested in selling, which by all accounts they were not.