When people began to realize they hadn’t made the guest list, they went into overdrive: unexpected dinner invites, insistent suggestions of a quick drink, questions about when would be a good time for a quick phone catch-up all started to roll in. PAs – or lower-tier members pretending to be the PAs she knew they couldn’t afford – began emailing ten times a day just to check there had not been an administrative error, some sort of oversight.
She did have sympathy for these people. She couldn’t have done her job if she didn’t. But equally she couldn’t have done her job if she let herself be swayed by that sympathy. Her loyalty was to Ned and she knew that he trusted her implicitly to make decisions in Home’s best interests. Take, for instance, this actress Annie was on the phone to now, as she paced up and down the cobbled harbourfront outside The Causeway Inn, huge emerald green duvet coat pulled tight around her against the chill October air, smoking first one cigarette and then another.
At the other end of the line? Ava Huxley. British actress, auburn-haired, startlingly thin, Kylie-tiny, next-level posh. Once hotly tipped, she had one very well-regarded Sunday night costume drama on the BBC, then a couple of British thrillers that had not done much at the box office, then starred as a lady serial killer in an HBO series in which she murdered, amongst other things, an American accent. If Ava had applied these days she probably wouldn’t even have been accepted for Home membership – not that anyone who applied to be a member ever really got rejected. Those who did not quite make the cut instead got placed onto a permanent waiting list, queueing in a line that never moved, stuck （as Annie thought of it） in celebrity purgatory. And why was that? Because if this job had taught Annie anything, it was that you could never tell when a career might take off or be revived, and you didn’t want anyone holding a grudge as well as an Oscar.
Even with all that in mind, Ava Huxley was currently nowhere near the level of success that would get her invited. This was not Annie being mean, it was simply the harsh reality of the situation.
Although she would never have remembered it, neither did it help Ava’s cause that she’d been the last interview Annie had conducted before she jacked in her job as a celebrity writer to join Home. A cover feature for OK! – Ava grudgingly fulfilling a contractual obligation to a perfume brand she was the face of – the actress had arrived late and flustered for the fifteen-minute slot, answered every question in a snotty monosyllable and then stormed out angrily muttering something about feminism, after Annie, scratching around for a topic that might engage her, had enquired where her shoes were from. Annie had then been forced to craft a twelve-hundred-word profile piece with precisely thirty-two words from the talent, twenty-three of which were no. ‘Not your finest work, Spark,’ was her editor’s offhand verdict, before she cut it down to a single paragraph and ran an ‘Ava Huxley in One Hundred Dresses’ picture special instead.
Ned had offered Annie the job as Home’s Head of Membership just a few days after the debacle, and it is no exaggeration to say Ava was the reason she’d accepted.
Annie had always been obsessed with shrugging off her utterly unspecial, perfectly pleasant, suffocatingly suburban upbringing and accessing the glossy world of the beautiful, talented, famous few. She had never really interrogated why proximity to celebrity was so appealing – in fact, the only thing she had ever really questioned was why you would not want to be surrounded by stars. But with no discernible skills in that direction – she couldn’t act, dance, sing or play anything at all, although she had tried her best – she decided simply being around them would do. Now she knew there were any number of jobs that got you close – agent, assistant, stylist, florist, masseuse, clairvoyant, life coach, dog walker – but brought up on a diet of Heat and Hello!, journalism was the only way in that she could think of with the talents she had available. What nobody had told her – what was not at all obvious from the outside – was that although an interviewer did get within touching distance of the beautiful people, the beautiful people considered the press an ugly, irritating imposition, to be grimly tolerated at best.
At first it had winded her, how mean they could be. That instead of hanging out on red carpets and being on first-name terms with her subjects, Annie was patronized and ignored, reprimanded and ranted at, treated as if they’d just peeled her off the bottom of their high heels, as if she personally had been following them around shoving a camera in their faces, rifling through their bins or hacking their phones. All those junkets she’d been sent on back in the late nineties at the start of her career, often in a suite at Covent Garden Home, those awful awkward chats, with the agent or press officer lurking in a corner the entire time, ears pricked （‘Oh don’t mind me, I’ll just be here on my laptop, hardly even listening . . . Excuse me, NO! That topic’s off limits. And that one. And that one’）。 It had shocked her how dull they were too – that people with such astonishing lives were so crushingly bland, had so little to say, so few opinions and anecdotes and interesting quirks （now she knew, of course, that the person she was sent to meet was often as much of an invention as the one she’d seen on screen）。