by Anna Maxted
It was the kind of experience that made you hate and resent the city – oh, and the fact that none of her so-called ‘friends’ spoke to her these days – so she’d fled to an exclusive proper spa on the Sussex coast. It had ‘Gothic mullioned windows … rose-clad courtyard … log fires … moats and streams … an outdoor Californian-style hot tub …’ It was gorgeous and luxurious and kind of castle-like, but she realized she didn’t want ‘California-style’, she wanted California.
So she had booked a flight to LA – commercial, but one had to be financially prudent! She was quite proud of herself! And, feeling the tension melt away, she’d checked into a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont. She was too ashamed to visit Quintin in the Hollywood Hills. She might see pity in his eyes and she would just die. Also, she was in a big huff with her mother. It would be hard to maintain the full huff if Innocence caught her pilfering from the fridge.
The Chateau was a gorgeous, sumptuous mix of old and new glamour, with a never-ending catwalk of A-list stars wandering by the pool and rarely swimming in it. None came over to say hello, so she ignored them, but it was a boost to soak up that privileged environment. Dad had once said that no matter how successful you were, LA would make you feel shit about yourself. No way. To Emily, LA was warm and welcoming, even if it was mainly welcoming her money. Well. Not exactly hers.
Just before leaving Britain, she had taken out five loans in her father’s name, totalling three hundred thousand pounds. Well, what choice did she have? He owed her. Call it reparations. And when Ms Green found out and went ballistic – silly interfering tart – there would be thousands of miles between them. Ha!
The loans had taken care of the horrible, endless deluge of bills and final demands. She deserved a holiday at the Chateau after all her hard work solving her money situation. Sometimes she had dinner in the little courtyard, but she preferred to order room service. The food was yum and their fries were long and thin, like worms. It was a nice, cosy cocoon, and she was, in a fake bubble-life way, happy.
She was ready to smile at the teenage stars – how they thought they were cute, when they were bone-thin and bent over with osteoporosis like old women. She was even ready to be amused by how pleased the management were with their little faux-Gothic lounge. If something was ten years old here, it was considered antique! You couldn’t help but be fond of LA. She remembered Quintin telling her the tale of being stopped by a cop on Ventura. He’d only had an old British driving licence, with no photo. ‘It’s an English licence,’ he’d explained in his haughtiest voice. ‘We all know each other.’ The cop had nodded and let him go.
Emily had purposely put everything bad out of her mind.
The baby kicked, and she stroked its head (or maybe its arse) but she didn’t think about it coming out in three weeks’ time. She imagined Tim attending lectures, riding his bike around the city, punting along the river Cam, missing her. Of course he was missing her – she was his wife and, more importantly, no one fucked as good as she did. Like, they hadn’t done it so much, but men were all for quality not quantity, right? He would never forget Vegas. The thought of Vegas and the poker table would keep his dick in his pants. She hadn’t thought of the red letters: every bill had been paid off. And each loan company was being kindly repaid by the others. She hadn’t read any of the tiny type on the back of the contracts: presumably if it wasn’t in bold, it couldn’t be important.
But, God, the Chateau wasn’t cheap. And today, she had been gently but absolutely booted out of her cocoon.
It had been, like, totally embarrassing. She was lying on her white bed, staring at the white ceiling, thinking of snow. She wished, suddenly, she could build a snowman and slide down a hill on a sledge. The manager had knocked. He was discreet, gentle, charming, but she knew a this-is-IT-buster face when she saw it. Her latest cheque had bounced. She couldn’t believe it. All that money gone so quick!
She’d blushed and asked the manager to bill Ms Green, her father’s secretary. Just this once, Ms Green would take care of it. Not for her sake, but for her father’s. Ms Green was like a king ordering the tides to stop: she battled and battled to maintain a squeaky-clean reputation for her boss even though that reputation had been torn to tatters long ago. Emily had wanted to say to the manager, ‘And hint that you’ll go to the papers if he doesn’t cough up,’ but he didn’t look the type who would, so she hadn’t.
But no worries. She had a plan. Well. She’d think of one.
She paid for a copy of People, to get change for the cab. And by the time she had reached page seven of the magazine, the plan was formed. According to People, her father’s ‘Easter Party’ was taking place the following night. In October! Wow. Jack’s god-sized ego had permitted him to re-schedule the Resurrection. Crazy. No doubt her invitation was lost in a sea of red letters.
Her mother’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills was locked up. Shit. Quintin must be visiting his mother. Innocence was so selfish. Just because she wasn’t using it, she hadn’t thought that Emily might need a bolthole. Emily punched in the code that opened the gates. Innocence hadn’t told her the code but she guessed it: 6969, what else? Then Emily broke in. No subtlety: she hacked through the mosquito screen with garden shears, then smashed a window. She headed straight for the second freezer, where she found a platinum credit card and forty thousand dollars in cash in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag. This bought her two plane tickets: one for her, one for Timmy.
She was going to fly straight to the Paris party and demand that her father bung her some cash. He wouldn’t want to look mean in front of Tom Cruise.
PRIVATE JET, EN ROUTE TO PARIS, OCTOBER 1998
Innocence
Innocence wished that Jack was dead. He was getting on her nerves. He had a lover – some cheap tart who worked in the hotel and was the wrong side of thirty. It was disrespectful and he was so brazen about it. She knew it was his way of humiliating her in public. It was a cheap shot. She supposed that cheap was all he could afford these days … He would never forgive her for appropriating his fortune – even though by doing so she had kept it in the family. She was responsible for his Second Coming; she had forced him to start afresh. And this was how he thanked her.
Innocence did not like to be made a fool of, especially by an idiot. Innocence lived by certain beliefs. She felt strongly that no one stupid should be rich. So the fact that her husband had managed to make a fool of her and millions in one year confounded and obsessed her. She lay awake at night wishing that something seriously nasty would happen to him, just to even the odds. His sudden, not necessarily violent death (she wasn’t a monster) would make things right.
If Jack died, her life would be perfect. It was, almost, but not quite. The world was her bonfire and he was pissing on it. Today’s paper carried a huge snap on page three of her husband kissing the tart across the silver bonnet of a Bugatti. Innocence squinted for signs of work or cellulite. She felt a tight pulsing in her chest and her hands trembled with fury. Her achievements in business were remarkable: her assets verged on a billion and she couldn’t list the awards she had been too busy to collect. On the charity circuit she was regarded as a patron saint. She had spoken on behalf of the United Nations as a Goodwill Ambassador. She was a mother who remained a style icon and didn’t have a fat arse.
And yet all her astonishing successes were reduced to a big fat zero because that scumbag had cheated. He cheated and she looked bad, because if a man plays away, the world pretends horror but is breathless with spiteful speculation: what do you think is wrong with the wife?
She couldn’t stand it. According to the paper, Jack had driven the car around the racetrack at 157 m.p.h. They should have crashed and burned. It annoyed her that Jack seemed invincible. It sickened her that his stupid Paris hotel had been a runaway success, the place to stay, with a three-year waiting list for rooms. She’d sent her hairstylist to check it out; Patrice reported that it appeared to be built ‘from Liberace’s dog-ends’.
How d
are Jack throw a party to celebrate his resurrection? She couldn’t believe that Tom Cruise would actually belittle himself to attend. Jack was a criminal. She’d skimmed through the famous names breathlessly listed by supposedly serious newspapers. Hollywood’s new golden boy, Ethan Summers, an exceptional actor and easy on the eye; and the up-and-coming Mollie Tomkinson, gorgeous creature, enormous talent, lit up the screen – bitch. Why did these bright new stars want to associate themselves with Jack? She clenched her jaw – her smooth, tight (but not obviously tight) jaw. Innocence did not subscribe to the LA fad of signature surgery, where people could ogle your tits and exclaim, ‘Oh, you went to Dr Octopus, I adore his work!’
She threw down the paper and tore off her white kidskin gloves.
She was aware that Jamie, her PA, had replaced the front page of the paper with yesterday’s front page, because of today’s other headline: ‘LLOYD’S CHEAT AND WIFE SPLIT: It’s his-and-hers homes for disgraced tycoon Jack Kent and wife’.
Wife! Wife! Was that all she was? How dare they?
Jamie removed her gloves and offered her a plate of skinned grapes. ‘Sugar,’ she snapped, and waved them away. Age would not thicken her.
How dare Jack not invite her to the bash of the millennium? Innocence would attend regardless, the vengeful godmother, and she would curse the occasion and turn his celebrations to ash. If he were dead (the thought kept reoccurring), she stood to inherit everything. He might have a mistress, but she was the wife. There were now five Hotels Belle Époque and Jack was raking in the profits. According to one gossip page, he and the tart had fucked on a bed strewn with thousands of fifty-pound notes. It enraged her that he was using her trick: that big pussy was a sap for rose petals!
How she would love to take on his quirky hotels and sell them to Travelodge.
Patrice fussed around her pink bouffant. Innocence found the minimalism of the nineties joyless and had stuck to her favourite decade, the eighties. For her, big pink hair would always be in. God knows what she’d do if anything happened to Patrice. She hadn’t washed or dried her own hair for six years. If her husband or her hairdresser had to die – hell, there was no contest! It would be an honour killing. She wouldn’t kill Jack for the money. The money would be a reassuring extra, but she didn’t need the money.
If she killed Jack, she would do it for fun.
PARIS, 13 OCTOBER 1998
Jack
He was on a high. He was winning. He was back on top.
Innocence had been a big mistake, and she had made him pay. But maybe he would have paid anyway. Bad luck had attached itself to him like a cancer, until he felt as if it was part of him and he would never escape. For a while, he hadn’t been able to shift the sense that there was a dark force out there, wishing him ill. Even now, he had four bodyguards, ex-special forces. Maria teased him about it, but paranoia was part of his condition.
The threat felt real. And it wasn’t as crass as someone trying to kill him. He was well protected. It was more of a malign presence, barely visible at the periphery of his life, which, just now and then, bared its teeth and triggered disaster. It was his imagination, of course. His conscience, even. Because he could only pinpoint one event that could have been brought about by an enemy, and that was Claudia falling in love with a stranger who turned out to be her birth father. Some sick bastard, he’d swear to it, had pushed those two together.
Thank God for Maria, watching over her daughter from afar. Disaster had been averted. Claudia had ended the relationship. He had no idea why, or if she knew the truth. The main thing was, she had done it. Now she could start over. These young girls: they bounced back. He couldn’t think about her pain – it was easier to ignore it. The truth was, he couldn’t stand the fact of a child of his in such desperate agony, so he blocked it out. Nor could he face the guilt of having betrayed his first wife Felicia by failing to protect her adored adopted daughter. As a parent, you always failed because whatever you did, your children’s lives would never be perfect. Of course they wouldn’t, but, as a parent, there was something crazy within you that couldn’t accept this.
Meanwhile, Emily – beautiful, talented Emily – had messed up her own life without help. It was one of the greatest disappointments of his existence. As a child she had shown such amazing promise. He remembered reading Cinderella to her, aged four, and she had crossly corrected him when he skipped a few words. He’d omitted ‘trimmed with gold braid’ just to speed things up, and had discovered that his tiny girl could memorize a book after hearing it once. She was so clever. And she had thrown it all away. It was too painful to contemplate. Still, at least Emily had Innocence for a mother. She was genetically equipped to survive anything.
It was, he supposed, a good sign that she was already giving lavish interviews to Hello! in Tim’s luxury apartment in Ecclestone Square and redecorating it. A Damien Hirst painting (if you could call it that) hung on the yellow-striped nursery wall between a charcoal of Tim’s mother by his grandmother and a Suffolk landscape by his father. ‘We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,’ Emily had simpered to the hack. ‘But we don’t mind, as long as it’s healthy.’ They’d held a brash wedding party, paid for by the magazine, attended by a few bedraggled members of the smart set, a clutch of soap stars and various of Emily’s drug buddies. Jack had declined the invitation – he was too hurt – anyway, it had clashed with a polo match.
He sighed. She was her mother’s daughter. No doubt there would be a tenth interview after the baby was born. It was the only way he would get to see his grandchild. The rift was deep, bitter, permanent: the kind that could only be healed by cash. The boy, Tim, had plainly fallen apart after being disinherited. He was neat in a blazer for the photos, but his face had the look of a glazed doughnut. Prozac or Lithium? Jack wondered. According to Hello! Tim had taken his place at Magdalene, Cambridge, this month as planned.
Emily was to take ‘time off’ from nothing to be ‘a mother’. She looked strained. Jack would wait until she was desperate, then sweep to her rescue like Richard Gere in that charming film about the prostitute: gratitude would make his daughter love him again. She would need money, if the husband wasn’t working. It made Jack shiver, to think that Emily still craved social position – the same desire that had ruined him. She refused to accept that those ghastly people would always judge her unfit to be a Fortelyne, even if she’d kept her legs shut until the ring was on her finger; she was not and would never be one of them. That castle would never be hers: the Earl would commit murder before he allowed it.
Jack ran a hand through his hair and puffed on his cigar. He cared more than he wished about his children, but, Christ, they made it hard. Tough love was the best option – his opinion wouldn’t change. What didn’t kill you made you stronger … perhaps.
He wondered if the kids would show tonight. He prayed they would, even if Emily turned up for the goody bag and Claudia for a mope. He didn’t care, he just wanted to see his girls. And he had promised Maria that tonight would be the night she would meet her blood daughter for the first time. He’d doubled his meds to crush the anxiety. What if Claudia freaked out? What if Maria couldn’t cope? Every time the subject of Claudia came up, Maria turned into a twittering wreck. At least he had persuaded Maria – well, begged her – that the introduction should wait until much later. His excuse was Claudia would be more relaxed, but the simple reason was, he was scared and wanted to delay the reunion as long as possible.
Meanwhile, it was inevitable that Innocence would turn up and make a scene. Still, publicity was publicity. And a photo of her being escorted out by security – preferably with a flash of nipple or red knicker – would sell to every trashy magazine in the western world.
Innocence had used him as her own personal piggy bank. She had risen to glory on the back of his failure. If he didn’t hate her so much, he’d have admired her cheek. The only thing that made the situation bearable was that he held the trump card and, one day, she would discover this and real
ize that he, Jack, had had the last laugh. They still fucked, occasionally. And when they did, he always thought, This fuck was brought to you by the knowledge that you are the loser. In other words, he was sticking it to her. To most people, sex was an indication of love, liking or, at least, appreciation. To Jack and Innocence, it was an expression of mutual loathing.
He adjusted his bow-tie and checked his watch. The swarms of paparazzi were crowding the pavement either side of the red carpet outside the hotel and the showbiz reporters were already doing their pieces to camera. Helicopters buzzed overhead. There must be at least six hundred TV and press out there. His head of press had reserved prime spots on the pavement for the channels or programmes with most sway: AP, MTV, Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood got the front row, right up against the barricades. The police had blocked off the road, but it was his security maintaining order – the gendarmerie couldn’t care less. He was going to greet his guests inside the front door: he was an egotist but he wasn’t an idiot. They wanted the established names: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt; they wanted the new kids on the block: Ethan Summers, Mollie Tomkinson; they wanted the superstars next door: Will Smith, Sandra Bullock, Matt Damon. Jack knew better now. He would be the perfect host and allow his guests to shine; he would let the glamour happen.
Prince was playing live: he was the one guarantee of a good party. Elton John was a pal – and he couldn’t resist a decent piano. The food was fusion; it was incredible how much these celebrities ate. There were always bleats of ‘Atkins’ and ‘the Zone’ but you couldn’t skimp on the food or the A-list left and next day at least one of them would turn up in The Sun inhaling a McDonald’s.