Chapter Twenty-One
Lexy made the biggest mistake of her life that night, but it wasn’t the fumble with Deacon in the toilets of the Camden Club. It was how she acted directly afterwards.
In her defence, she had hit her head fairly hard against that mirror. While not concussed, she was genuinely dizzy and sore from the impact. So, making her way out of the toilets, she was in no condition to summon her driver and be taken back to Sandbanks. Although her head was spinning with the blow it had taken, she was also buzzed on vodka and dizzy from the high of her amazing encounter with Deacon. She could still feel his fingers between her legs, remember vividly the intoxicating sensation of coming all over them.
So she was physically and mentally dazed, and quite unable to make good decisions. If she had managed to calm herself down, she would have known that it was essential that she go home straight away and break the news to Frank before the papers could get hold of it. That way they could wake up the next morning and present a united front to the journalists who would be camping outside the house.
In her dizzy, over-stimulated state, however, there was no way that Lexy could contemplate docilely climbing into a car and being driven home so early in the night. It was barely eight-thirty, and she simply wasn’t ready for a two-hour drive home. Of course it would look terrible if she went back to the launch. She definitely needed to avoid Deacon, so that she could spin the story of their encounter as a one-off moment of madness. So while Deacon was cursing, splashing water all over his crotch, and speculating loudly about whether he could go back to the party without his trousers on, Lexy, with Brandon by her side, had taken the lift upstairs to the roof terrace, where she planned to have another drink or two to calm herself down and get a grip on her roiling emotions before she headed home.
Even if she drove back to Sandbanks straight away, she reasoned, Frank would be tucked up in bed and snoozing when she got home; he liked to be asleep by ten at the latest. So what was the point in rushing to give him the bad news? Couldn’t she get home at midnight, say, climb into bed next to her sleeping husband and let him have a good night’s sleep so he was nice and fresh tomorrow morning to deal with the mess she’d created?
The plan had been to find a quiet corner on the sprawling terrace, curl up there with Brandon and go over the plan for how they would spin the scandal. But that idea had been scuppered when Lexy was spotted by a couple of her frenemies on a girls’ night out, women she posed with regularly on red carpets and at parties, gossiped about behind their backs, sniped at in her column and feuded with on Twitter. They might have been part of the cast of a larger reality show, generating endless reams of press to keep them all in the news.
Sam, a TV presenter who specialized in bubbly commentary on recap shows, diving into a studio audience to giggle and flirt with them while coaxing saucy observations from them about the people they’d just seen compete, and Michelle, a reality star who was not as quick-witted or charming as Lexy, but had worked her way up the greasy pole from cast member to household name partly by having sex with her fiancé live on camera, were in a corner banquette, a champagne cooler set up beside them. Their seating choice was highly strategic: everyone could see them, but no one was close enough to hear what they were saying, so that they could let their hair down in privacy, chattering about topics that would never, ever, make their way into the press.
The sexy pink lighting, palm trees and black-upholstered banquettes of the terrace were more Miami Beach than NW1. Candles glimmered on the low glass tables, uplighting below the trees cast dramatic shadows: the entire atmosphere was of a wonderful, enticing party, and Lexy was delighted to see Sam and Michelle, at one of the best tables, beckoning her to come over and join them. She was promptly ensconced between them, giggling about how naughty she had just been, teasing them with the prospect of gossip to come and telling Brandon to order more champagne.
No matter how much they begged, she wouldn’t tell them what had just happened. She didn’t trust them for a second, knew that they’d be sneaking out to try to ring up gossip bloggers. They wouldn’t make any money from the tip-off, but they’d earn themselves credit for future positive mentions and definitely some plugs for whatever brand they were pushing that month.
Sam and Michelle had planned the evening well ahead, ordering in some extra goodies to make the evening go with a bang. Ten minutes in, one of them was palming Lexy a wrap of cocaine under the table. Ten minutes after that, the pain from her head had magically disappeared; and after that, the hours positively flew by.
Lexy was, after all, celebrating. Things with Deacon had certainly gone much faster, and much more crudely, than she had planned. She had intended to be photographed kissing him in infinitely chicer surroundings than a women’s toilet. A secluded corner up here on the roof terrace would have been perfect, the two of them half-concealed behind one of the palm trees, fronds throwing dramatic shadows over the picture. But at least in the mobile phone photographs snapped in the loos, her body had been concealed behind Deacon; she was comfortable that nothing too incriminating could make it to press.
Lexy had no idea, of course, about the second set of photographs, the very explicit ones of Deacon in his stained jeans, of her on the sink with her legs in the air, then staggering down again with her skirt hoicked up high on her thighs. If she had known about them, her reaction would have been very different indeed.
So Lexy was under the mistaken impression that she had got exactly what she wanted. A scandal that would hit the papers and be kept there by her PR team spinning it out; stories about her making heartfelt apologies to Frank; photos of her dressing as demurely as a nun on day release from the convent as she picked up her kids from school and daycare; her and Frank photographed looking tense, heading out for a meal in a staged photo opportunity that would be labelled ‘Crunch Time’ or ‘Crisis Talks’; ‘sources close to the couple revealing’ that Lexy and Frank were close to divorce; Lexy visiting a counsellor, perhaps, since Frank was very unlikely to agree to fake visits to Relate with her; then a visit for the whole family to a theme park, the nanny staying well out of shot, which would be the first hint that the couple might be reconciling and putting the past behind them . . .
It was straight out of any reality TV star’s basic playbook. Emily’s firm would know how to handle it for maximum effect. Ideally, if Frank could bear it, a story about the two of them spicing up their sex life would run in the week that the series and the book both launched. That would chime in with the narrative that they were pushing: that after a child together and a few years of marriage, Frank and Lexy had made the all-too-common mistake of taking each other for granted. Their different tastes had led to largely separate social lives, their once-passionate sexual connection had grown stale; they needed a shake-up.
The classic next move was to sell the exclusive rights to an article covering a romantic weekend getaway, comped by an upmarket resort, at which Lexy would pose in a series of outfits currently available from her supermarket line. The kids would be looked after by Frank’s mother back home as the couple reconnected with each other in a swimming pool, over cocktails, on a beach at sunset; at the end of the piece they would hint coyly at the possibility of a vow renewal, whose organization would occupy a large part of the next season of Lexy’s show . . .
But Lexy couldn’t be sure Frank would go for all this. Much as she loved him, sometimes she regretted not having married a partner who was as committed as she was to the process of moulding their lives into a narrative that would keep readers and viewers hooked. And, tipsy and coked up, she found herself spilling some of this frustration to Sam and Michelle. The latter was engaged to another reality star with whom she had very little in common apart from their active sex lives and their ambition. However, since Michelle and her fiancé Jake spent their entire time either shagging or planning out new stunts to get them into the papers, the couple that worked together seemed, so far, to be staying together.
‘I really should be doing pieces about mine and Frank’s sex life, like you and Jake do!’ Lexy slurred enviously to Michelle. ‘You’re so lucky that he doesn’t mind that!’
‘Oh, Jakey’s a total slag,’ Michelle said, hoisting the empty bottle of champagne out of the ice bucket and waving it to signify to the waiter that they needed another one. ‘Likes it every way to Sunday and doesn’t mind me spilling all the deets! The only thing I can’t talk about is the threesomes, for obvious reasons –’
She grinned at Lexy, waving her hands as if conducting an orchestra as the two of them chorused together that refrain repeatedly nagged into them by their publicists: ‘Not family friendly!’
‘We’d lose every single endorsement overnight, can you imagine?’ Michelle said, as the waiter came over. ‘I don’t even want to think about what that’d cost us!’
Her pretty face, plump with fillers, contorted as she squinched up her eyes, trying to calculate how much she earned from her eyebrow kits, being the face of a suntan line, and endorsing diet supplements, then adding on Jake’s protein powder, fitness equipment and men’s underwear deals.
‘Err . . . basically so much dosh,’ she eventually concluded. ‘But we worked out a good way to hide it. Everyone knows what a fitness freak Jakey is, so people take it for granted that we’ll always have a personal trainer around. Even on holiday. So we can travel with whoever it is we’re playing with.’
She winked at Sam.
‘Or, when Sam was having it off with us, we said that she was lonely ’cause she just got dumped and that’s why we took her to Marbs on holiday. Got some nice pieces out of it too – Jakey got a few articles about him being grumpy that he wasn’t getting enough alone time with me because I was having cocktails with Sam, and I got three weeks’ worth of columns about how friendship’s so important because men can come and go, even the best ones, but friends are forever—’
‘That was a good week!’ Sam said nostalgically. ‘And I got loads of publicity off it too – honestly, I don’t think I’d’ve got Strictly Come Dancing without it. They were really keen on me being single so they could run stories about me getting off with my dancing partner – as if, he was a total gayer – and all the wives worrying about me being a danger to their marriages because of the Strictly break-up curse. All bollocks, of course. You know me – I never want just a guy in bed.’
‘Yeah, poor Jakey!’ Michelle said, grinning. ‘In Marbs he was all, like, I wanna just fuck Sam this afternoon one-on-one and she’d be, Yeah not feeling that so much, Michelle needs to sit on my face while you do it, okay?’
She hiccupped as the waiter came back with the new bottle of champagne.
‘Need the loo again,’ she said significantly, picking up her bag and heaving herself to her feet. ‘You wanna come, Lex?’
‘Just one more time,’ Lexy said, a statement she had made several times already that night. ‘Then I’ve really got to get going – where’s Brandon, I need him to sort my car out . . .’
‘You told him to piss off a couple of hours ago!’ Sam said, giggling. ‘What are you, mental? Don’t you remember? You said he was doing your head in, hovering around telling you that you ought to get going!’
‘Oh! Did I?’
Lexy had no idea how much she had drunk by now. They had been joined for a while by the Clearly Cloudberry PR, who had made a big deal of ordering rounds of shots for the table, cleverly extending the promotional evening to the club terrace. Lexy had been entirely genuine when she said she liked the cloudberry flavour, and had put away more shots than anyone. She had a legendarily hard head, but everyone had their limits, and the amount she had drunk meant she needed to do more lines so that she didn’t fall over, and then the lines made her want to drink more to balance herself out. It was what she had once heard Sam call a viscous circle.
‘I need to get a car,’ she heard herself say, and realized that she was starting to slur. ‘Got to get home to Frank.’
‘He’s in London?’ Sam looked surprised. ‘I thought he never stayed up here.’
‘No no, Shandbanksh,’ Lexy said. ‘Sandbanks.’
‘Lex –’ Michelle plopped back onto the banquette again. ‘No way can you get back there tonight! You’ll puke all over the fucking car and then pass out in the mess!’
This frank assessment was so accurate that both Lexy and Sam erupted into laughter.
‘Okay, when you’re right you’re right,’ Lexy admitted. ‘I’ll crash at the flat tonight and then go back at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning . . . come on, then, Mish, just one more trip to the ladies, then I’ll head off . . .’