By the time Ned called to offer her the job, this job, she’d simply had enough – the idea of being the person calling the shots, of being the one they sucked up to, or bothered to engage in conversation with at the very least, was simply too tempting. Ava clearly had zero recollection of an event that had changed Annie’s career path entirely. Funny how life turns out, she thought as she listened to Ava explain, between sobs, that she’d had lunch with a gang of other actresses and they’d got talking about what they were going to wear to the Island Home launch and she had somehow, mistakenly, could-you-believe-it, how-did-it-happen, given the impression she’d be there too.
‘I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking, of course I was never even expecting to be invited in the first place, why would anyone invite me to something like this, I would be embarrassed to be invited probably, assume you had made some terrible mistake, but – I’m such an idiot – I think I might have accidentally given them the idea I was coming – please, please, please could you make an exception as I am just so mortified?’
Annie suppressed a sigh. At least the Americans were upfront. Brits could be absolute torture. Was this an all-girls boarding school thing, this performative self-flagellation? Or was it somehow part of your contract with the public, as a British actor or musician, that if you did make it big you had to pretend like the whole thing was some sort of embarrassing accident?
Ava was still talking.
Passing one of the bow windows of The Causeway Inn, Annie glanced in at the lounge bar, where three of her team were sitting around on sofas, hunched over their laptops. She tapped on the window. They all looked up, saw her, and smiled. Annie crossed her eyes, pulled a face and gestured at her phone. Then she cleared her throat, firmly.
‘I’m sorry, Ava. There’s nothing I can do. But do let me take you out for lunch next week and I promise to give you all the gossip.’
There was no need to be any ruder than the situation demanded. After all, there was still some slim possibility that, via some hard-to-imagine sequence of events, Ava Huxley might succeed in reigniting her career, that she might even become one of those members Annie spent her time chasing after and buttering up, rather than vice versa. Ava had better hurry, though, Annie thought. If she remembered rightly, she would turn forty next month.
No sooner had Annie hung up than another incoming call immediately lit up her screen.
Fuck’s sake. Jackson Crane’s PA. No doubt calling – for the third time that day – to update Annie on her very famous, very important client’s progress, his estimated time of arrival, to confirm when dinner was scheduled that evening, to triple-check that Jackson and his wife Georgia had been given separate cabins （they were always given separate accommodation when they stayed at Home, with no questions asked or eyebrows raised）。 And just as she had on the first and second calls, Annie reassured the PA that both Jackson’s and Georgia’s rooms would be set up to precisely the specifications outlined, down to the exact number and type of bottles in Jackson’s drinks cabinet and the exact brand of activated charcoal on Georgia’s bedside table.
She would get all of this right, as she always did, as Home always did – but there was more to a successful launch party than inviting the Very Important People and making sure they had everything they needed. There was an alchemy to it, just as there was an alchemy to who was accepted as a Home member in the first place. In some ways this was very complicated. In some ways it was very simple.
No wankers.
That was Ned’s sole directive, the sole criterion he had offered Annie when she accepted this position, when it came to how to decide who ought or ought not be accepted for membership. No wankers. On Ned’s confidence in her ability to understand that instruction had rested Annie’s entire career at Home. Wankers was, for Ned, a broad and varied category. It included – for starters – all bankers, all consultants, all lawyers （even though he had for several years worked as a barrister himself）。 Nobody barking into their phone about being the CEO of an app while tapping away ostentatiously on their laptop. Bad behaviour in the clubs was fine, encouraged actually, it just couldn’t be naff. He never wanted to see an oligarch waving a platinum Amex, ordering a bottle of chablis from the bottom of the wine list and asking for a few ice cubes in it. Because even though that would undoubtedly have kept huge amounts of cash ringing through the tills in the short term, those sorts of overpriced hot-right-now joints had an in-built expiry date. Home’s long-term reputation lived or died on an ineffable, unforced cool – and on the quality of its members.