The Bentley pulled up outside an innocuous-looking place in Soho called The French House. The spot was packed with arty types in eccentric outfits and had an unstuffy atmosphere. Sarah found herself warming to Willy even more for bringing her here: she wouldn’t have thought he, in his chauffeur-driven car, would like this sort of thing. They walked inside and headed upstairs to the restaurant.
Sarah struggled to decide which of the five desserts to choose, so Willy beckoned the waitress and ordered all five.
‘You know, I wanna apologize again for keeping you waiting earlier. I have a new team over here and my assistant’s a great girl, but not a clue. She booked that big car and then sent it to the wrong place, which is why I was so late. She sent it to my house, but it’s not ready yet as my design team and workmen went AWOL, so we’re in a hotel until we can find out where to get new ones to finish the job.’
‘Oh really, don’t worry about it – I’d forgotten already. How are you planning to do up your new home?’
‘Well my wife loves bright colours, I love big, open spaces and we both love contemporary art and furniture, but we gotta think about the kids too. Especially being over here when all my wife’s interiors contacts are back home.’
‘Hmmn … Vast, colourful, modern spaces for all the family … I might have a few ideas for you. Let me do some research and get back to you.’ She made a note to send Willy the information along with her sightseeing suggestions for Oxford and London.
‘So, now tell me about you, Willy. Why did you stop singing? You’ve always been very coy about that.’
Willy stared into his empty dessert wine glass, his eyes opaque and unreadable for the first time that evening.
‘When you’re a man and you have bulimia, you sometimes don’t want to shout it from the rooftops.’
Sarah said nothing.
‘Nobody knows. Apart from my wife.’ He looked up and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Willy, that’s a deeply personal thing and I’m not going to print that.’ Sarah fought back compassionate tears. Her drunkenness wasn’t helping.
‘It was a very brief and strange thing – lasted just a few months. But it said something to me. That all the pressure was getting too much. I was just a kid from Minnesota and I’d achieved this cult status worldwide with one silly, gimmicky song. I couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t strong enough, my voice wasn’t strong enough. And my body was trying to find a way to tell me that. But do, please do, print it. Because I think my story should be told. If I can help one other man out there then I’ve done a wonderful thing. And anyway that was twenty years ago. The key is I’m older, wiser, stronger now. In the interim I’ve grown up. I know about song-writing. I’ve written hundreds of songs for other artists and made a lot of money. I understand the entertainment industry and I know I can help nurture talent. Encourage young musicians in the way I was not. So that’s what I’m going to try to do with the production of Britain’s Next Musical Megastar. It’ll be better than all those other TV talent shows already out there because I feel it in my heart, I’ve suffered for it and I believe in it.’
Wow, thought Sarah. Gazette mission well and truly accomplished. But all she wanted to do was reach out and hug the man. Checking the time, she gasped when she saw that it was nearly 1 a.m. Willy appeared to be thinking the same thing, but before they parted outside the restaurant, he put a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘You’re too good for that place.’
‘Thanks Willy, I’m actually job-hunting now anyhow.’
Politely refusing his offer of a ride home, Sarah climbed into a taxi and they headed to opposite ends of town.
Chapter 6
Sunday was supposed to be everyone’s last day in St Tropez but Tara and Abena had no intention of going anywhere. Tara, having got over the immediate hurt of being used for sex by Dan Donahue, was now feeling rather pleased with her conquest and couldn’t wait to let everybody know she’d pulled him. Since then she’d been having a fabulous time hanging out with the Italians and had barely seen Reza at all. The Italians were flying home on Tuesday morning and she was desperate to stay one more night and try to seduce Alex, who she hadn’t seen since they had been briefly introduced at Nikki Beach. Likewise, Abena was in no hurry to leave and felt it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she called in sick tomorrow.
‘Do you think Reza will stump up for our flights home if we stay an extra night?’ Tara asked.
‘Hmmn, I’m not sure – that might be pushing it. Let’s see if he’s on form.’
Reaching for her phone by the side of the villa pool, where the two were sitting dangling their feet in the warm water, Abena dialled Reza’s number and waited. He still made her nervous.
‘Reza, how are you? I’ve barely seen you in the last couple of days. Not fair! I want to be on the yacht with you!’ she flirted, winking at Tara, who got up and moved away so that Reza wouldn’t hear her hooting with laughter.
‘So you’ve missed me have you?’ Reza leered down the phone. ‘I haven’t been … playing with you, have I? I know you want some Reza time …’ He was talking bizarrely loudly and Abena suspected he had company he was keen to impress. As if on cue she heard excited female shrieks in the background. ‘Oh Reza’, someone moaned.
‘There’s not enough of you to go round,’ Abena sighed into the earpiece as Tara made a puking gesture at her.
‘I wanna make it up to you girls. You can both see me now – I’m throwing a lunch at Club 55 on the beach. Talk to Henry. And look goooood.’
When the girls arrived at Club 55, Reza was already seated, on time for once. Beside him Ciara looked adorable in a short black chiffon dress over a black bikini. Natalya was on his other side and dressed surprisingly demurely, in a white shirt over a white Chanel swimsuit and white linen trousers. Also present were two blondes with dark roots who nobody seemed to know, and who looked as though they could be hookers picked up the previous night. They sat in silence throughout the meal, smiling thinly at Reza. Gradually the group swelled as more of Reza’s business partners and clients arrived with their girlfriends. The seafood lunch was light and delicious and Abena decided to go and thank Reza as an excuse to strike up a conversation. She slid into Ciara’s seat, which she’d vacated to go to the bathroom, and Reza nodded, putting a moist hand on her thigh as he shovelled a forkful of lobster into his mouth.
Abena was just trying to work out how to tell Reza that she would be staying on longer, when she felt scrabbling under the table by her feet. Suddenly Reza dropped his fork and moaned, much to the surprise of his lunch companions. Before he could explain, Ciara returned from the ladies and headed for the seat that Abena had usurped. Reza barked, ‘Go and finish your food. I’ll send a car for you later for the plane.’
‘Well, that’s the thing; Tara and I were thinking we might stay here one more night as a girlfriend of ours is arriving later.’
A flicker of irritation could be detected in Reza’s eyes.
‘OK. You got money?’
‘Umm, er, yep, yeah sure,’ Abena lied, and returned to her seat at the end of the table. She was heartened later, though, when she heard Reza instruct Henry to book flights for them from Nice the following afternoon.
Julia and Anna, who’d not been seen since the flight over, now appeared with a couple of short, fat, balding men. For such unattractive men, their arrival caused a big stir in the restaurant and Reza jumped up to ostentatiously welcome them to his table. Anna was ridiculously dolled up for lunch on the beach, in bright red lipstick and vertiginous heels. An intricate pendant nestled between her cosmetically enhanced breasts. Her forehead was too shiny, as if the skin had been stretched over her skull. She leaned over and whispered something in her man’s ear, but he wasn’t listening. He was staring at Tara, who was eyeing everything but him. Changing tack, the man mopped his sweating brow with a napkin and leaned across towards the more curvaceous of the two hookers. ‘You having a good time?’ he asked. She smiled and giggled.
&n
bsp; Tara watched the exchange out of the corner of her eye and winced. Turning to Abena, she muttered, ‘So painful to see past-it women desperately on the look-out for a rich husband, having to compete with nineteen-year-old models, and even prostitutes!’
‘Come on it could happen to anyone,’ said Abena. ‘We can’t just click our fingers and magic up a soulmate when we feel like it. I guess it just happens, and in the meantime, why not try to have fun?’
She broke off as the two men made as if to leave and Reza tapped one of the hookers on the arm.
‘You two. Go with them,’ he growled.
Wordlessly they followed the two men out of the restaurant, while Anna and Julia pretended to be deep in conversation, affecting indifference that yet another tycoon had slipped their ringless fingers.
As dusk set in and lunch had long since ended, it seemed to Natalya that she had only just arrived, and yet it was already time to leave. Truth be told, she was irritated that Reza had kept such a close eye on her throughout the weekend. It’s not as though he wanted to date her himself. Everybody knew that Reza didn’t do girlfriends; he was too busy making money. But he had still claimed her as an acquisition, a part of his empire, and as a result she had been unable to meet anyone. Married Gregory was small fry, she’d dated him on and off since she was sixteen and he bored her to tears. So what if he paid the rent for her apartment. She wanted someone who could buy her the bloody apartment. Make that the entire apartment block. That’s the man she wanted to marry.
She thought about all the times she’d overheard people, so-called friends, calling her a cold bitch, a gold-digger. Well she didn’t care. It was better than being a sucker. If she never let a man get close to her she would never get hurt. Others called her a ‘Tomb Raider’ for always being with older men. People thought she wanted a father-figure, but how could she want that when her own father was a monster? When her own father, Stan, had taken such horrible advantage of her naive young mother, who’d thought he just wanted to kiss her goodnight and hadn’t known how to stop him going further. And to think he is still out there somewhere. Natalya wanted to kill him. She wanted to find out his full name and where he lived, and she wanted to hurt him as much as he’d hurt her mother. She sometimes felt that the only person she hated as much as him was herself. Over the years she had learnt to suppress these thoughts, but they were always there, burning below the surface. She closed her eyes and pushed them back down to the depths of her consciousness. She cleared her mind of the horrors of her mother’s past and her own conception and returned to the present.
As she entered the lobby at the small private airport, a gleaming, hushed space that reeked of privilege, she glanced at herself in the mirror spanning the width of the room. She sometimes startled herself with her own exquisite looks. In St Tropez, or among some of the girls back home in Latvia, this didn’t happen quite so often, but in the UK she was an exceptional beauty. No wonder her agency sent scouts out to Eastern Europe, Brazil and Scandinavia to recruit models. Of course there were exceptions in Britain – like that stuck-up society girl Tara, who had a certain something, even if it was in that weird, scruffy way that was all the rage with London girls. Stealing one more look at herself she laughingly reflected that she’d become so brown she could almost be mistaken for Abena’s half-sister, were it not for her now white-blonde hair and blue eyes.
‘Yeees, you are very good,’ sneered a soft, Swiss-accented voice behind her. Spinning round to dismiss whoever had the audacity to make fun of her, she found herself face to face with just the person she’d been waiting years for. Standing in front of her was a man in his mid-sixties. His face was pink, puffy and bloated and his thinning hair white-grey. Years of fine wines and sumptuous meals at top restaurants had played havoc with his waistline. His protruding belly fell over the top of his belt, threatening to burst the buttons of his silk shirt at any minute. A very limited edition Lange & Söhne watch that Natalya had read about with interest hung proudly around his wrist. It could change hue automatically according to the wearer’s skin tone.
‘Where are you flying to this fine evening?’ he asked with a wink.
‘London.’
‘My plane is leaving in ten minutes, let me give you a ride.’
‘No thenk you. My plane is leafing now.’ And she turned away and wiggled purposefully off, but not so fast that he wouldn’t be able to catch up with her.
‘Please wait,’ he called. ‘W-w-what’s your name? I am Claude. At least let me have some way of contacting you.’
‘I am afraid that won’t be possible,’ Natalya replied, and tottered to catch up with Reza, pulling the Louis Vuitton trunk she had got for her birthday behind her. Before disappearing completely from Claude’s view however, she was careful to drop her little pocket notebook on the floor as if by accident.
This time round, Reza had filled most of the plane with a group of British catalogue models in their late twenties over whom he had sprayed endless bottles of champagne at the Voile Rouge beach club. In compensation for, according to the models, ruining their designer bikinis, he had offered them a ride back home and a shopping trip once they got there. Henry ushered them oohing and aahing on to the plane. The prettiest one, with long, flaming ginger hair had whipped out her phone and was now yapping down it heatedly, ‘Oh my God, Dave, you should see this plane – I’m actually on a private jet, it’s amazing! Oh, oh yes, I forgot you were leaving tonight. OK have a good trip, Davey baby, love you.’
As they boarded the plane with much shrieking and animation, they gossiped and giggled amongst themselves. Natalya rolled her eyes and went to sit in the back, trying to tune out the ginger girl’s conversation with Henry, who was braiding a lock of her hair.
‘I’m a bit sad, Henry.’
‘Oh, Angie my love, why ever are you sad?’ Henry stopped playing with her hair and pulled a forlorn face.
‘It’s my boyfriend Dave, he’s in the army and he’s been called out to serve in the war in Afghanistan, I ’d forgotten he’s off today, and now I won’t see him before he goes.’
‘Sweet Jesus! You must be worried about him!’ Henry exclaimed.
‘Yes I am – he’ll be so miserable out there, I mean all the poor thing will be able to think about is how many guys must be chatting me up back at home now that he’s not around.’
Natalya smiled wryly, imagining this Dave character dodging bombs and bullets in Afghanistan but unable to give it his all because he was thinking of Angie being bought drinks at her local.
‘Dave once told me, there’ll always be war, but there’ll never be another Angie …’
‘Er … yeah,’ Henry said, ‘you’re certainly very special.’ He glanced at the back of the plane and caught Natalya’s eye.
‘I’m on my own now too,’ Henry added. ‘My boyfriend dumped me on our first night out here and now he’s staying on an extra week with some fancy hotelier. Never mind, plenty more fish in the sea.’
Henry broke off when Reza clicked his fingers and beckoned him over. ‘Sorry, important business to discuss!’ he trilled, and grabbed his Filofax and BlackBerry ready for action.
Reza checked no one was listening before he spoke. ‘We need to update our records for next time.’
‘Oh yes,’ cooed Henry. ‘The girls have all been very happy to be here with you.’
‘Tatiana is fun, very good. Invite her next time.’ Reza’s face broke into a smile and he shifted in his seat as he remembered the zeal with which she had given him head under the table at Club 55: he should drop his cutlery more often.
‘I liked Liliana,’ he continued. ‘And Ciara is sexy. Sexy girl. But those two … um … Abara and Tena, they’re no fun.’
‘Tara and Abena?’
‘Whatever.’ He paused and thought for a moment. ‘Actually, no, my investors liked the look of them. Maybe keep them on the list and see how things go.’
One by one he listed the girls they had partied with that weekend and decided, on the
basis of his singular set of criteria, whether or not they were any fun and would therefore be invited back out. The rules were simple: had they, should they or would they sleep with him. Henry knew the answers to all three of those questions and made organized notes for his boss.
Initially, Reza had been reluctant to hire somebody like Henry as his main PA, finding homosexuality distasteful. After all, he ought to have a woman as his assistant. Men weren’t born to serve, women were. But the problem with women was that if they were young enough to have all their marbles then they were young enough to be banged, and Reza needed to concentrate at work. Play was one thing, but in his office he was all about focus. So he’d decided on a homosexual: neither man nor woman. He then put an advert out on one of the less murky Boys Only dating sites, announcing his quest for the Ultimate Gay PA.
He asked them all to come to the interview in casual dress – he needed to make sure that whoever was chosen wouldn’t turn up in a tutu to a football match where Reza was entertaining clients in his box. Henry had clearly done his research as he arrived in exactly the same leisure outfit that Reza always wore, right down to the brown crocodile-skin belt. As obvious as it was, Reza appreciated the flattery and decided that the boy’s lack of subtlety marked him out as honest.
Henry had astounded Reza by surpassing even his exacting standards. From ordering him the most zealous tarts to scheduling his Botox appointments, Henry attended to Reza’s every need and whim speedily, discreetly and willingly, and made his life a whole lot easier without getting in his hair. Moreover, Reza sensed a certain similarity between them, the foreigner and the fairy, in that they’d both had a rough ride at school. Over the years, Henry had become the only person in Reza’s life for whom he felt genuine warmth and affection. He congratulated himself once again on such an inspired decision.
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