Chapter Eighteen
Lexy’s meeting was in full swing. They had run through the list of media coverage the PR team had already secured: pieces in weekly and monthly magazines, TV and blogger interviews, a ten-city book tour, a coveted guest slot on Loose Women, even a surprise appearance co-presenting a Saturday night dating show. This was a real coup. Lexy was expressing her excitement about presenting on live TV, something she had never done, when Emily, the head of the agency, looked around at the rest of the group enquiringly, clearly asking an unspoken question.
A series of nods greeted her. They were seated in the huge living room that ran the whole length of the back of the mansion, the sunlight so bright as it danced on the sea that the grey and white striped blinds were partially lowered to avoid dazzling the assembled group. The housekeeper had manoeuvred the grey suede sofas and armchairs into a capacious seating arrangement round the central glass coffee table, and was currently setting up in the dining room for the buffet lunch the chef was preparing for the visitors. This was scheduled for two p.m., as a break after the main points had been discussed, leaving time for a further meeting afterwards to summarize their decisions before the publicists left to catch their train back to London.
The subject Emily was about to raise had been extensively discussed throughout the agency. It was controversial, but there was certainly a precedent for it: Lexy herself, when single, had often pulled this kind of stunt to get her name in the papers. Now that she was married, however, the circumstances had altered considerably, as the stakes were much higher. Emily was genuinely unsure how her client would react to the suggestion. But since her job was to garner Lexy the maximum publicity possible, the entire agency had agreed that they would be remiss if they didn’t at least propose the idea.
As Lexy wound down, Emily took a long sip of her lime-infused San Pellegrino.
‘Lexy,’ she said, clearing her throat.
‘Ooh-err!’ Lexy said irrepressibly. ‘Something’s coming! I know that tone of voice! Am I going to have to take my clothes off on live TV?’
Emily favoured this with a small smile.
‘No, you’re a mum now,’ she said. ‘No nudity for mums.’
She took another sip of water.
‘It’s actually about Frank,’ she said.
‘You want him to go full-frontal?’ Lexy asked. ‘He’s already got his bum out a couple of times for charity calendars, you know.’
‘No, Lexy,’ Emily said, and now her voice had a slight edge of impatience. ‘We want him to have an affair.’
Caroline had just entered the living room by the far door, about to take a seat on a sofa next to the central grouping. This statement from Emily, however, stopped her in her tracks. It was so eerily close to the fantasy Caroline had just been entertaining that for a long moment she expected everyone’s head to turn to her accusingly. She felt herself going red, that familiar tingling sensation in her cheeks.
But the attention of the room was entirely on Lexy, whose wonderfully thick dark brows were drawing together in confusion as she stared blankly at Emily. Emily, who had repped Lexy for the last eight years and knew her very well indeed, huffed out a short laugh at Lexy’s reaction.
‘It’s a compliment to me that I can still surprise you with a publicity idea, Lexy!’ she said. ‘We’re not actually saying that Frank should have a real affair, of course. Just that we’ll stage the appearance of one to coincide with the book and series coming out.’
Lexy’s big blue eyes widened so much she was positively goggling.
‘And you think this will sell me?’ she exclaimed in disbelief. ‘It’d make me look like a pathetic loser!’
‘We disagree, actually,’ said Annika, Emily’s second-in-command, leaning forward and pushing her glasses further up her nose. ‘In our opinion, it would make you look very relatable and sympathetic. More like an Everywoman. Right now, you have everything, and our perception is that it’s starting to alienate your core fans. I mean, look around you!’
She gestured at the beautiful room, the terrace outside with its matching furniture, the perfectly landscaped lawn sloping gently down to the expanse of sea beyond.
‘We’ve seen this room plenty of times in magazines,’ she continued. ‘The kids running over the lawn, Frank looking gorgeous as he plays with them, you with your perfect figure after two kids – yes, we know about the surgeries, you’re very open about that, but a lot of people can’t afford to get tummy tucks and lipo from the best doctors. We’re concerned that you may not seem vulnerable enough any more for you to be—’
‘Relatable,’ Lexy said flatly.
It was the word that had been her touchstone ever since she had appeared on Who’s My Date?, the word advertisers and TV executives and marketing gurus had continued to use about her ever since, the key to her success. Her fans could identify with her; she was like them, only better. She had the prettiness of a girl next door, not the otherworldly, ethereal beauty of a film star. Her swift and cutting wit did not rely on obscure references or clever wordplay. Her confidence came from her faith in her own abilities, not a privileged background. In short, she was a working-class girl made good: that was the crucial factor that kept her fans tuning in to her shows and buying the products to which she put her name.
Losing her relatability would, quite simply, be the beginning of the end of Lexy’s career.
‘You have it all,’ Emily pronounced. ‘For the first time ever. Up till now, that’s never been an issue – your life’s always had built-in drama that we could work with. Even after you met Frank and your romantic life settled down, we had the pregnancy, London’s birth, organizing the wedding, plus the battle with Jamal about Frank adopting Laylah. Good job on spinning that out for the show, by the way!’
‘I had to keep changing lawyers every time it looked like we were getting close to an agreement,’ Lexy said. ‘Cost me a fortune. It was worth it, though, for all the headlines.’
Emily smiled nostalgically. ‘My favourite stunt was when you were clever enough to refuse to marry Frank straight away when you got pregnant, so your fans were worried that he wasn’t going to propose and you’d be left stranded with yet another guy who knocked you up but wouldn’t marry you . . .’
‘Frank hated that!’ Lexy said complacently. ‘Of course he proposed as soon as I told him I was in the family way! He’s so old-fashioned, he really wanted London to be born in wedlock.’ She rolled her eyes as she said the last two words. ‘It took me ages to talk him round and explain that we’d get much more publicity if we did it my way. I mean, how many cover stories did you lot manage on if and when he was going to pop the question? “Will Lexy Ever Get Her Dream Wedding?”’
‘I can’t even count them,’ Annika said, her eyes dreamy as she relived the happy memories. ‘That was a really great six months. We literally got you a cover every other week.’
‘But now that’s all resolved, sadly,’ Emily said. ‘We’re gearing up to the first season of your show where everything in the garden’s rosy. There’s no conflict. You’ve even got a book out with a happy-ever-after ending!’
The PR team were looking very grave at this grim summary.
‘So this all puts you in a position where you could potentially be perceived as smug,’ Emily concluded. ‘Up on a pedestal, looking down on everyone who isn’t as successful as you.’
‘I’d never—’ Lexy began, but Emily held up her hand and, to Caroline’s amazement, Lexy actually stopped talking.
Emily started to lay out her idea, but Caroline wasn’t listening: she was too caught up in fuming on Frank’s behalf. How dare Lexy be so cavalier about his reputation, playing fast and loose with the truth just to get magazine covers for herself? He was a good man who had wanted to do the right thing. What was so funny about a man wanting his child to be born to married parents? What gave Lexy the right to mock him for that? She should be – the phrase that popped into Caroline’s mind was one her mother had often used – she should be getting down on her knees and thanking God that she had finally found a man who would put up with her shenanigans and was prepared not only to be a father to the child he had made with her, but adopt her little hellion of a daughter.
And now they were actually daring to suggest that poor Frank, who had already put up with so much – who had allowed Lexy to drag his name through the mud by making it seem as if he were reluctant to take on his responsibility as a father – should fake an affair to get press for Lexy’s latest show? It was outrageous!
But just then, a thrilling thought occurred to Caroline.
What if they want to say it’s me he’s having it with? Here I am in the house, under his nose . . . it would get tons of sympathy for Lexy, just like it did for Gwen Stefani and Jennifer Garner when their husbands shagged their nannies . . . Oh my God – what if they staged that, but then Frank realized he really was in love with me? It would be like those romance novels where the heroine’s hired to pretend to be the girlfriend of the billionaire and they gradually realize that they have feelings for each other . . .
Caroline was quite lost in the fantasy of Frank turning to her, blurting out that what had started out as a stupid stunt had unexpectedly turned very real. She would confess in turn that she had loved him all along, and they would fall into each other’s arms like a final scene from a romantic comedy.
‘. . . So we’ve just taken on Josie Santana as a client – she’d be perfect for this!’ Emily was saying, and the name bounced Caroline back to cold, hard reality.
Of course they’d never think of Ghost Mouse as someone who might possibly have an affair with Frank! she thought bitterly. I’m such an idiot! Josie Santana’s everything I’m not – beautiful, sexy, with a big fanbase of her own . . .
‘She’s going solo, as you probably know,’ Emily continued. ‘Taking a hiatus from the band. And she needs something to get her talked about. Quite frankly, Josie’s not the best singer out there. I’m not saying she’s the Victoria Beckham of the group – they don’t have to turn her mike off, she’s not that bad – but she was picked because they needed tits and ass, not because she could stand in for Adele in an emergency, know what I mean? She’s dying to go on Celebrity Big Brother, and she needs a scandal for that. She’s totally up for this. Don’t worry –’
She twiddled her fingers at Lexy, who had started to object.
‘– it’s all been strictly secret so far. We haven’t named any names to her. But she’s completely willing to play the bad-girl homewrecker. Josie’s only twenty-three, she’s got plenty of time to behave badly in the eyes of the public and then do the whole repentance journey later. She reminds me a bit of you, actually, Lexy, back in the day. Young, hungry, willing to do whatever she needs to get herself in the papers.’
‘Hmm, I’m not sure I want a mini-me around my husband!’ Lexy said wryly. ‘Is she okay with saying afterwards that she did all the running? I don’t want people saying that Frank chased her.’
‘Naturally,’ Annika said, leaning forward once more. ‘No one wants to tar and feather Frank. The setup would be that she threw herself at him while you were neglecting him and the kids a bit with all the focus on your show, and writing the book –’
She glanced over at Caroline, sitting quietly further down the room.
‘– which of course you did,’ she continued, fixing Caroline with a look that required Caroline to nod in confirmation.
‘We don’t want to use that as an excuse for Frank straying, though,’ contributed Brandon, the only man on the team. ‘It won’t go down well if we fall into the trap of blaming Lexy for being a working mother.’
‘Agree one hundred per cent,’ Emily said. ‘It won’t be an excuse, but a sort of explanation. Frank’s lonely, Josie targets him with her tits and arse hanging out, he has a moment of weakness – maybe not even an actual affair, okay?’ she added, reading her client’s body language. ‘It could be a snog, some fumbling around – then Frank comes to his senses, realizes he can’t cheat on you, but Josie sells the story and he’s too honourable to deny it.’
Lexy’s shoulders visibly relaxed.
‘Yeah, that’s more like it,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get Frank to go for the full affair story, and honestly I wouldn’t want to. I don’t want anyone thinking that some little tart can get into my husband’s jeans that easily. I’m being really honest here – I’m not okay with people thinking I’m married to a cheater. I’ve got rivalries going with all those basic bitch reality sluts who want my career, you know? I don’t want them gloating in their crappy columns for the rest of my fucking life because my hubby went outside his marriage for some slap and tickle.’
‘Okay, we hear that, Lexy,’ Emily said, nodding. ‘Josie and Frank meet up a couple of times for drinks, let’s say. All above board, if not great judgement, but then she convinces him to come back to hers when he’s tipsy and not thinking straight – the media’ll want at least one illicit rendezvous . . .’
She made quote signs as she spoke the last two words, indicating that she was speaking tabloidese.
‘She’s the temptress, he’s weak,’ she continued. ‘We open up a great conversation about working women and having it all without blaming you, like Brandon said.’ She nodded at the young man. ‘Our line has always been that though Frank has pots of money, you’re determined to have your own career, Lexy, because you’ve come from nothing and had to battle Jamal for support for Laylah. You’re a modern woman, a plucky survivor—’
‘This really builds the plucky survivor part of the brand,’ Brandon chimed in, emboldened by praise to speak up once more. ‘Her fans respond brilliantly whenever we push that button.’
‘We’ll break the story a couple of weeks before the series and book launch,’ Emily said. Her tone, which had been very measured up till now, was becoming increasingly enthusiastic as it became clear that Lexy was on board with the idea. ‘Initially, we’ll make it sound as if Frank did actually cheat, which’ll get us the most amount of press possible. We run that as long as we possibly can – get Josie to tease that she and Frank shagged without ever actually saying it. Finally, she confesses. She’s always had a huge crush on Frank, she took advantage of you not being around, she snogged him but then he came to his senses and left. She stirred things up in the hope that you’d dump him, Lexy, but now she feels she has to tell the truth.’
‘What about Frank?’ Lexy asked warily. ‘He’d die rather than talk about this kind of thing.’
‘Oh, he never has to say a word,’ Emily assured her. ‘We put out a statement after Josie comes clean, saying that he had a momentary lapse in judgement, you’ve understood and forgiven him, you’re getting some marriage counselling. And maybe you renew your vows next year? That gives us a whole story arc for the next season as well!’
‘Yeah, I love that!’ Lexy sat up straighter, eyes bright. ‘I’ve been worrying about this too, you know? I mean, how much tension can I get from “is my book jacket design on brand enough” or “am I going to make top ten on the Sunday Times bestseller list”? But if I’m having to do signings with a brave smile while my fans ask me if everything’s okay with Frank, and maybe once I break down and have a bit of a cry, or run off, and then get myself together and come back because I don’t want to disappoint them – that’d be brilliant!’
She considered something.
‘Bugger it, Frank’ll never let us film with a marriage counsellor,’ she said gloomily. ‘He’d kill himself first.’
‘What are you cooking up here, you lot? Why am I killing myself?’
Everyone turned to look at Frank, standing in the doorway. He was fresh from the gym, a towel around his neck, his skin glowing from his recent exercise. There was a tangible increase in energy from the assembled group, the women unconsciously grooming themselves in the presence of a very attractive man, pushing back their hair and smiling at him. It was an instinctive response not just to his handsome face, but the amount of Frank’s flesh that was on display. As a professional athlete, he was so accustomed to walking around in a tight T-shirt and shorts that he was sweetly naive about the effect his rock-hard body had on women and gay men.
‘Hey!’
Lexy jumped up from the sofa and dashed across the room to kiss him, something that Caroline had never seen her do before.
‘Emily and everyone’s come up with this amazing idea for getting a ton of publicity for the next season of the show, plus my book publication,’ she said, fluttering her eyelashes. ‘Want to hear it?’
‘Uh-oh,’ Frank said cautiously, taking her shoulders and holding her off a little. ‘Actually getting off your arse and running over to kiss me? Doing your sweet as sugar, I-want-something tone of voice? Bitter experience tells me that means something I’m definitely not going to like . . .’