Then imagine having to go through that process twice.
Chapter Eight
Saturday Night
Nikki
The unfamiliar sensation of her phone sitting still and silent in her pocket unnerved Nikki.
On any other day, it would have been buzzing with Ned’s constant requests and everyone else asking for five minutes with the boss. But, with all their attention focused on the members, Ned’s absence had gone almost unremarked among the staff.
Still, every hundred metres or so, from sheer force of habit, Nikki pulled it out of her pocket to check for messages. 5.32 p.m. Nothing. 5.52 p.m. Still nothing. It would be dark soon and she should get back to her cabin to dress for dinner.
Nikki had chosen the quieter side of the island for a walk, where the staff accommodation was located alongside the ugly concrete jetty that took delivery of supplies by boat. Feet sinking with each step into the shingle, hood up over her head against the drizzle, she felt a strange sort of calm staring out to sea. Up ahead, there was a small collection of pre-Home beach huts that Ned hadn’t bothered to demolish because nobody important would see them, clumps of tall grass that shivered in the wind coming off the water.
It was starting to look a little strange now, Ned’s absence. Last night, after all, he’d been everywhere: spot-checking espresso martinis and sending whole trays back if the crema was patchy, chivvying waiters to keep a constant stream of small plates coming from the kitchen. Was his constant interference necessary? Debatable. Was it helpful? No. A sensible use of a multimillionaire CEO’s valuable time? Absolutely not. But it reminded everyone who was in charge here, whose party this was, whose club, whose company.
She had been walking this way for half an hour, into the wind, noticing little, as the colours of the landscape faded around her, still no closer to having her head together. It was strange, how your perspective on things changed over time, how gradually. Even after all that had happened, she had still felt a secret pride in her relationship with Ron, a certain self-satisfaction that he’d chosen her. She’d felt a little tingle still when she thought of some of his compliments – he had praised her sophistication, she had teased him that he just meant her English accent. Smart, he’d called her, repeatedly, even though she hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom since she was fourteen. ‘Book learning isn’t what life’s all about,’ he had said, batting away her modesty. These were things she had accepted as truths, things that had gone to make up part of her sense of self, a sort of gift from him, she had thought.
And then she got a little wiser maybe, a bit more worldly. And she looked back at some of the things she’d done, and realized she might have tried to act older, but sophisticated was hardly the word. She remembered some of the things she’d said and cringed, clenched her fists in embarrassment, because smart was definitely not the word.
Her feelings towards him had not shifted in one great flash of revelation, but gradually she had come to see it all in a more uncomfortable light. In her twenties she dated properly, men her own age, nothing ever very serious, but still she let stuff slip – no names, no mention of the baby of course – and was always shocked at their reactions to the things Ron used to like her to do. And now, when she looked at photographs of herself back then, she was struck not just by how reed-thin and pretty she was, but by the realization that no one could actually have believed she was the age she claimed to be.
She thought about things that Ron had said – how patronizing to repeat over and over how smart she was, how he must have been chuckling to himself at this child bursting with pride at the compliment. How you wouldn’t do that to someone you thought had half a brain in her silly little head. How the things that had seemed sophisticated at the time – like lying in his suite in bed, drinking champagne and ordering room service and watching black and white movies – came to feel less so when she remembered they had literally never left the building together, that he made her duck out of his room and bolt for the lift after listening out to make sure there was no one in the corridor, that when room service arrived she had to hide in the bathroom, and when he took a call she had to promise not to make a sound.