Chapter Twenty-Five
Decades later, Lexy was still unable to look back on the day when she had been locked out of her own home without shivering with embarrassment and shame. She had sat on the balcony of her suite at the Ferry Hotel for hours, bawling her head off, a box of tissues next to her, blowing phlegm out of her nose, wiping her eyes repeatedly so that she could clear the tears away enough to check her phone for messages from Frank.
Unfortunately, the hotel balconies were not only small but linked together. Lexy had had to fend off concerned fellow guests, naturally worried about the continual, heartfelt sobbing, calling over to ask her very politely whether she was all right, or if there was anything they could do. Lexy had managed to snivel a ‘No, thanks’ while waving a hand in a gesture that asked them to leave her alone, but she could hear them still talking in hushed tones, speculating about what on earth could have happened to make her cry like that.
At least they didn’t know who she was. Lexy always carried a baseball cap in her bag, together with a featherweight viscose scarf, so light that it took up very little space. The cap was pulled down tightly on her head, sunglasses covering her eyes, and the scarf wound around her neck, up to her chin, leaving as little of her face visible as possible. She looked eccentric but unrecognizable. Just a crazy woman going through heartbreak, ruining the lovely sunny afternoon for everyone else.
Still, even with her mumbled reassurances that she was okay, that no one was hurting her, eventually Lexy had retreated inside. It was too much not only to field the questions, but to hear the comments as another hotel guest returned to their room, slid open the glass door to the terrace and, shortly after, said in a horrified tone to their companion that it sounded as if someone had just heard that there was a death in the family.
Unfortunately, the decor of the suite was so appallingly depressing that when she compared it with her lovely sea view living room just a short distance away, it made her cry even harder. She joked that the hotel’s rooms looked like a Travelodge, but that would have been cosier; there weren’t even any loose cushions on the sofa. She ended up hugging a bed pillow, crying, waiting, crying, waiting, as texts and calls flooded in. It was like water torture, a near-constant drip, drip, drip of text alerts and buzzing rings, giving her hope every time which was never satisfied: because in all that time, there was not a single message from Frank.
The glorious view of the sea – the waves glittering in the sunshine, the expanse of the Studland peninsula stretching out on the far side of the channel, yachts slipping by, sails beating in the wind – was no consolation. Instead, it was a relentless stream of salt into her wound, because she could be watching the same view from her own terrace, curled up in Frank’s arms, still crying, but knowing that her apologies were being forgiven, that her tears were serving a purpose, helping to expiate her sins.
Lexy was completely lost and lonely. She had no real women friends to lean on for support. Although Sam and Michelle were texting and calling, along with many other female acquaintances, there wasn’t one of them she could trust enough to confide in. If she spilled her guts to them, as she would dearly love to, she knew perfectly well that they would turn around and sell the story to the press. Frank had been quite right to say that Sam and Michelle were best classified as partners in crime.
Having shot to fame at eighteen, Lexy had left everyone she had grown up with very far in her wake. She saw her family at the holidays, of course, had them to stay for the occasional visit, but she was the lone girl, the youngest to boot, and her mother was very disapproving of Lexy’s lifestyle, the sexy photographs, the multiple partners, the babies out of wedlock.
Frank had been, quite literally, the answer to her mother’s prayers: a good, steady man ready to be a father to Laylah, to settle down with Lexy and hopefully keep her at home at least a few evenings a week. So there was no way that Lexy could ring her parents now and expect to hear anything but complete support for her husband and a lecture about how he was a much better parent to their children than Lexy. Even Lexy’s doting father, who found it almost impossible to admit that his baby girl could do any wrong, would have no choice but to take Frank’s side in this situation.
Eventually, as the sun started to set, Lexy had to make a decision. Did she stay here overnight, hoping against hope for Frank to finally ring? Call her manager and ask someone to head over to the Chelsea flat, bundle her up some clothes and toiletries, and bring them down to Sandbanks? Or was she going to give up the wait and go back to Chelsea herself?
For the last hour she had been slumped on the uncomfortable sofa, the bedpillow wedged against her chest, tearstained and smeared with the remnants of her mascara and her tinted BB cream. Looking down at it, the sight made her queasy. She still hadn’t eaten anything; when she had checked in, she had asked for some sandwiches to be brought up to the room, but she had not been able to face them. The tray sat on the small dining table, the edges of the bread curling up now as, like her tear ducts, they slowly dried out.
There was, unbelievably, no minibar in the suite. She had searched everywhere some hours ago, desperate for a drink, but eventually had to concede defeat. How could a four-star hotel not have a minibar? Did they not want to make money? She was in no state to ring down for room service. No disguise would conceal her identity, because she had had to check in under her real name. The waiter would know who she was and immediately try to sell a story to the papers about drunken Lexy, out on a much-publicized binge the night before, now ordering wine in her hotel suite . . .
Not only did Lexy crave a drink: she realized that she genuinely felt as if she needed one. If she stayed here, she would not get through the long dreary evening without ringing down to room service and ordering a bottle or two of Pinot. And knowing her capacity, she would certainly end up finishing one and starting on the second.
It was that flash of awareness that forced her to pick up her phone and call her manager, then ring down to the front desk to request that they get her bill ready. After that, she stood up, dropping the stained pillow onto the sofa, and walked into the bathroom. Washing her face in cold water, she wetted down a hand towel and pressed it against her eyes to take some of the swelling down. As well as the baseball cap and scarf, Lexy never went anywhere without a full make-up kit: carefully, she worked layers of foundation and powder onto her face so that, for the sake of her pride, not a trace of redness from her crying jag could be seen when she checked out.
The drive back to London was even worse than the one coming down to Bournemouth. Lexy was forced to realize that things were much worse than she had imagined. Googling her name and checking her Twitter feed brought home to her just how poorly her actions of the night before were being seen by not only the general public, but even her hardcore fans. Her decision to stay out late after the bathroom tussle with Deacon, rather than rush home, had clearly been the tipping point. Lexy couldn’t blame Sam and Michelle for that, however. They hadn’t tied her down and poured champagne down her throat before squirting coke up her nose: she had chosen to do that all by herself.
Emily and Jason, her manager, would be waiting for her in the Chelsea Harbour flat. Doubtless they would already have brainstormed an idea of how to spin this disaster, redeeming her image in the media. But in the time Lexy had been waiting for her car, and on this ride back to London, she had finally done something sensible, even wise, and come up with a completely unexpected proposal of her own.
‘You want to do what?’ Jason said, staring at her blankly.
‘Brilliant!’ Emily exclaimed, her publicist’s brain working faster than Jason’s managerial one to grasp the PR advantages of Lexy’s suggestion. ‘I love it! That’ll solve everything in one go! You can hole up in my country house in France for a month – it’s in the Auvergne, very quiet, practically no British tourists. If you stay in the house most of the time and just pop to the village when you need to get supplies – no make-up, not calling attention to yourself – no one’ll spot you and blow your cover.’
She considered for a moment.
‘We’ll pick you up some outfits from Boden and the White Company,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Make sure to buy a straw hat at the airport. That way you’ll look like a typical upper-middle Brit on holiday – no one’ll give you a second glance. Seriously, only tourists ever wear those.’
‘Emily, you don’t understand,’ Lexy said patiently. ‘I’m not suggesting this as a PR exercise. I actually want to go to rehab.’
Both Emily and Jason stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses.
‘I don’t get it,’ Jason said, frowning. ‘Why put yourself through that if you don’t have to? We don’t need to brief the press on exactly where you are, just that you’ve realized you have a problem with alcohol and you’re taking care of it so that you’ll be a better wife and mother, blah blah blah . . .’
Emily cracked a smile at the world-weary tone. Anyone used to managing celebs was all too familiar with the wording of the press statement in which a client’s latest scandal was attributed to their addiction to booze, drugs, casual sex or all three. Whether the therapy was real or – as in the case of the husband of the reality star who had staged an affair with her friend for publicity – faked for media coverage, it still counted as a Get Out of Jail Free card which, unlike its use in the Monopoly game, could be played again and again.
‘But I do have to,’ Lexy assured her team. ‘I need to stop drinking, or at least cut way down. If I hadn’t been drinking, I wouldn’t have gone that far with Deacon. It would just have been a snog, and then I would have headed back home with everything done and dusted. I’d have got a great story for publicity, but not so terrible that Frank would have gone ballistic. If I hadn’t had a few shots before Deacon followed me into the loos, I’d never have let it go that far. And if I hadn’t wanted to get my drink on afterwards, I’d have gone home and everything would have been okay, instead of turning into . . .’
She tailed off, but Jason was more than ready to fill in.
‘A total fucking shit storm!’ he summarized. ‘We have to get Frank back on side. Without him, you’re just a single mother slutting about town, and at your age the fans aren’t going to be as okay with that as they were when you broke up with Jamal.’
‘Yeah, what if you break up with Frank, get knocked up by someone else and then you’re a three-by-three?’ Emily said brutally. ‘That’s not the way to sell products and get endorsements.’
Lexy shuddered at the term.
‘Do you really think you actually need to go to rehab, Lex?’ Jason asked. ‘Frankly, clients tend to come back incredibly po-faced after they’ve done a stint there – they can be really hard to work with for ages afterwards . . .’
‘I don’t know,’ Lexy said honestly. ‘I’m not an expert or anything. But I left that hotel today partly because I knew that if I stayed on there, I’d sink at least a bottle of wine this evening. Maybe two.’
‘You did just have a fucking bad day,’ Jason pointed out.
‘Yeah, but at the least I need to cut down,’ Lexy said firmly. ‘Not rely on it. I drink a lot, you know. I drink every day.’
Emily sniffed.
‘So what?’ she said. ‘So do I – it’s pretty much part of the job.’
‘You should at least take a couple of days off a week,’ Jason said, directing this to both of them. ‘Give your liver a fighting chance.’
Lexy nodded.
‘And Frank hates me drinking,’ she said. ‘It’ll make him much happier if I do a detox.’
‘Okay, that settles it. If Frank wants it, we’ll do it,’ Emily said, as if the decision were hers and not her client’s. ‘And yeah, let’s call it a detox, not rehab. It sounds a bit less extreme. I don’t want you at the Priory, though. That’s a cliché now. I think people hear “she’s going to the Priory” and roll their eyes, you know? As if it’s more for PR than anything else, or you’re just going to hang out with other celebs and have a bit of a holiday.’
‘I was thinking not even in this country,’ Lexy said. ‘Somewhere that I don’t know anyone. Like a fresh start.’
Jason nodded.
‘I like this, actually,’ he said, warming to the idea. ‘What about going to America? I know a couple of people who’ve raved about this amazing rehab in Cascabel – that’s in California – Peaches Gold went there and she’s only had one relapse since—’
Lexy shook her head.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Not California. Nowhere that it sounds as if I’m getting a tan or having fun. It should be really serious. Like . . .’
She tried to think of the most serious place in the world.
‘. . . Germany,’ she finished.
‘Eww.’ Jason flinched. ‘I’m picturing somewhere really strict where the Fräuleins and Herr Doktors hose you down every morning and give you compulsory enemas before you go on a ten-mile run.’
‘That’d probably do me a lot of good,’ Lexy admitted.
‘Fuck me, you are not yourself,’ Jason said, pulling a face.
‘Honestly, I think I need to stop being myself for a bit,’ Lexy said. ‘Look what trouble it’s got me into.’
‘Switzerland!’
Emily, who had been staring into space for a little while, wrestling with the question of where Lexy should go to detox, finally came up with the solution.
‘The Swiss Alps! Perfect!’ she said, relaxing back on the sofa for the first time during the fraught conversation. ‘Clean air, detox, early mornings, early nights, lots of exercise, no booze – no one associates booze and Switzerland – totally not the kind of lifestyle that a party girl likes – you’re suffering, you’re atoning – let’s have you come back with not much make-up so we can see how much better you look – actually, let’s get photos of you leaving looking like a total mess so we can do a nice contrast . . . stay for a month, that looks serious, and still gives us nearly three months after that till the book and series come out . . .’
Jason was nodding so rhythmically he could have been a woodpecker drilling into a tree.
‘Love it,’ he said when Emily ran out of breath. ‘Love it. Love it. Ticks every box. It’ll be bloody boring for you, Lexy, a month of no booze and cold showers. Probably enemas in Switzerland, too.’
‘You still don’t get it,’ Lexy said, leaning forward. ‘I’m not joking around. I’m not doing this so Frank agrees to finally answer the phone. I need to see if I can cope with not drinking for a month.’
‘Hey,’ Emily said, shrugging, ‘it’s a whole new story to sell. And now you have kids, it totally works for your audience. I don’t have a problem with this.’
‘Phew, that’s a relief,’ Lexy said with a degree of satire that quite escaped her manager and her publicist.
The intercom buzzed, the doorman saying that the Thai food they had ordered for dinner had arrived. Fishing some change from her wallet for the tip, Lexy opened the door of her apartment and waited for the lift. The enormous Deliveroo box, black and turquoise, was the first thing to emerge as the doors opened, only the legs of the delivery guy visible beneath it; advancing on Lexy, rather than following her back into the apartment, he set the box down on the hall carpet with an audible clatter of plastic containers.
‘Hey, careful!’ she said, reaching out to steady it. ‘There’s soup in there!’
Then she yelped as the delivery man straightened up, and she realized that he was not wearing the uniform black and turquoise jacket, but a dilapidated-looking hoodie and, underneath it, the ironic yellow and red DHL T-shirt, made by a company called Vetements, costing two hundred pounds, which was the latest hot menswear must-have that season. He was so slender that Lexy was amazed he had managed to lug the box this far: no wonder he had almost dropped it.
‘Surprise!’ Deacon carolled gleefully, his eyes bright as he lunged eagerly around the gigantic box. ‘I brought your dinner! Let’s work up an appetite and eat the whole thing afterwards!’
Lexy’s survival instincts told her to duck back inside the apartment straight away. If any of her neighbours heard Deacon’s very recognizable voice, cracked their door and took photos of the two of them together in her building, Frank would probably file for divorce the moment he saw them. Deacon, misunderstanding the reason for her swift retreat, followed her inside the hallway, leaving the delivery box in the corridor.
‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?’ he said gleefully. ‘I’m a genius! I dropped round earlier and waited for you, but you weren’t around, so I thought I’d come back, but the bloody doorman wouldn’t let me in – but then I saw the delivery guy and I bribed him to let me bring in the food so I could get into the building. And then it turned out to be for you! Meant to be, right?’
Lexy could have pushed him out of the door, but then, she knew, he would make a scene in the corridor. Furious, she reached round him and closed it, leaving the food box outside, and as he tried to grab her waist she elbowed him off with a sharp jab to his ribcage, winding him briefly.
‘The reason the doorman wouldn’t let you in,’ she hissed, ‘was that you made a total nuisance of yourself hanging out earlier in the lobby! Thank God the press don’t seem to have got hold of it! I can’t be seen with you after last night – don’t you get that?’
‘No problem!’ Deacon said when he got his breath back. ‘I’m here now, no one saw me, I can nip out of the deliveries entrance tomorrow morning . . . Oh.’
Emily and Jason, hearing the commotion, had by this time emerged from the living room and were standing in the doorway, their expressions identically horrified.
‘Hey, no need to look at me like I’ve got horns and a tail,’ Deacon said rather sulkily. ‘I don’t suppose you’d piss off and leave me and Lexy to catch up?’
‘You little shit, sneaking in here like this when you know you’re banned from the building!’ Jason said furiously. ‘Haven’t you done enough damage?’
‘Hang on!’ Deacon said, outraged now. ‘She gave me a massive come-on at that launch party, plus she kissed me back like a total sexaholic! I don’t go after women who don’t want me – I don’t bloody have to! Ask her – she was totally into it!’
He looked at Lexy.
‘I’m not going to embarrass you in front of your friends—’
‘They’re my manager and my PR,’ Lexy snapped.
‘Oh right, they’re your bosses!’ Deacon said irrepressibly. ‘Come to tell you what a naughty girl you’ve been! They don’t know all of it, do they?’
‘Shut up!’ Lexy said, practically stamping her foot, feeling her face turn red with embarrassment, knowing that he was referring to having made her come.
‘Her husband won’t let her in the bloody house to see her kids!’ Jason said.
‘That’s real?’
Deacon looked back at Lexy, his jaw dropping, suddenly looking very young as the cockiness faded away to be replaced by genuine concern.
‘I thought him locking you out and all that was just a publicity stunt!’ he said. ‘You know, getting as much press as you could out of it, yeah? I didn’t think it was actually –’ he searched for the right word – ‘real.’
Emily snorted.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Under the circumstances, isn’t that fucking ironic!’