‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not taking him up on his offer.’
We board the plane and are ridiculously delighted to discover we’ve been allocated the emergency exit seats. We stretch out our legs, kick off our shoes and wriggle our toes, to the irritation of the man across the aisle one row forward, who is at least six foot four. At five five, I should offer to swap places with him, but Dom is ordering champagne and holding my hand, so sod him. This is our holiday, the trip I’ve been looking forward to for weeks and weeks. I feel giddy, honeymoonish. I’ve sorted things out with Dad, and with Annie Gardner, I’ve made a decision about Aidan, and about the baby – all my ducks are in a row. Bring on New York!
Chapter Fourteen
New Year’s Eve 2005
Oxfordshire
Resolutions:
1. Set up my own production company
2. Buy a flat in London
3. Lose half a stone
4. Go on a road trip with Alex and Jules
5. Write to Dad
WITH DOM AT the wheel and the weather filthy, it was a long, slow drive to Henley and my mood darkened with the skies as we approached. I was exhausted. I’d been travelling almost non-stop for four months and since I’d come back I’d been doing thirteen-hour days in the editing suite. The last thing I felt like doing was spending New Year’s Eve at the Griffiths’ country pile.
Not that I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Alex. I couldn’t wait to see Alex – and Julian, of course. Our paths had barely crossed over the past year. Either I was working or Julian was working or Alex was on holiday … we just never seemed to be in the same time zone any more.
It was just that it had been made clear to me that this was very much Mike’s party, rather than Alex’s affair.
‘He’s been moaning about the fact that we always do whatever I want to do on New Year’s,’ she explained when we spoke on the phone at Christmas. ‘So this year it’s his baby. Well, not that he actually organised the thing, he’s paid some party planner to do it. Karen. Vile woman. I’ll tell you about her when you get here. But it’s mostly his friends. Plus you and Jules.’
Alex and Mike bought the place in Henley a few months after they got married. It was huge – six bedrooms, I think – and had a lovely garden sloping down to the river, but it wasn’t what I’d have chosen, had I had a few million quid to spare. It was newly built, ‘the kind of thing a footballer would buy’, as Julian put it after the first time we went to visit.
‘Or a former rugby player,’ I pointed out.
‘Will you two stop being such awful snobs?’ Karl scolded us. ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. You two are just determined to dislike everything that Mike touches or has anything to do with. It’s not very charitable, is it? Do you think Alex doesn’t notice?’
I had promised myself at the time that I’d make a greater effort with Mike, but in reality I’d barely seen them since. Alex and I emailed, of course, but our missives tended to be fairly cursory: are you okay, where are you, when are you next in London, let’s meet up soon. I really didn’t have any idea what was going on in her life.
As we pulled up to the electric gates at the bottom of Alex and Mike’s driveway, Dom leaned over and squeezed my leg.
‘It’ll be fun,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Stop looking so worried. You never know, something unexpected might happen.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked him, mildly alarmed. I’m not all that big on surprises. He just grinned and pressed the intercom button.
‘Yes?’ came the crackly response.
‘It’s … um … Dom and Nicole.’
‘Sorry? Mister?’
‘Mister
Dominic Taylor and
Ms
Nicole Blake,’ Dom yelled. He shot me an amused glance, I raised my eyes to the heavens.
The gates slid open ever so slowly, making an ominous grinding sound.
‘You’d think we were visiting Buckingham Palace,’ I grumbled.
‘Now, now,’ Dom said with a wry little smile, ‘one has to protect oneself from the criminal gangs roaming the streets of Henley-on-Thames.’ He accelerated gently up the driveway, bringing the car to a halt in front of the house’s grandiose entrance.
Mike came out to greet us, his arms outspread.
‘Hey, guys!’ he called out, ‘welcome!’ He greeted Dom warmly and gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘You okay? Journey all right? Traffic not too bad?’ He fussed around us, helping taking the bags out of the back of the car, clapping Dom chummily on the back, complimenting me on my suntan. This was Mike in host mode, making an effort. He made no mention of Alex.
He showed us up to our room, a small guest bedroom at the front of the house overlooking the driveway. We’d been downgraded. Last time we visited we had an ensuite with a view of the garden and the river.
‘You two get settled and changed, and come downstairs for a drink,’ Mike told us. ‘Unless you’d like me to bring something up to you?’
‘That’s fine, Mike. Is Alex around?’ I was surprised she hadn’t come out to say hello.
‘Somewhere,’ he said cheerily and pulled the bedroom door closed behind him as he left.
I showered and changed into my party dress, a rather tired-looking LBD bought the previous Christmas. I hadn’t had time to do any shopping. Or get a haircut, or my nails done. I looked at my reflection in the mirror with some disdain. Dom came up behind me and slipped his hands around my waist.
‘You look lovely,’ he murmured into my hair.
‘I look old and tired and very last year,’ I said, turning to kiss him, ‘but thanks anyway.’
‘Hey, at least you don’t look like you ought to be serving canapés,’ he said, pulling away from me and indicating his own garb. It was true: Dom was not one of those men who can effortlessly pull off black tie.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe you
do
look a bit more waiter than James Bond, but at least you look like the kind of waiter the sluttier posh girls will want to grab and drag into the library for a quickie.’
‘Darling, you say the sweetest things.’
Hand in hand, we descended the stairs and made our way into the living room, already crowded and hot, filled with loud men in penguin suits and women with big hair wearing Gucci. Dom and I clung to each other, feeling out of place.
‘Everyone seems kind of … old, don’t they?’ I whispered to him.
‘I think they’re just grown-ups,’ he whispered back.
‘I didn’t realise these were the sort of parties I’d be going to on New Year’s Eve until I was like … thirty or something. Are we already too old for clubs and drugs?’
‘Never,’ Dom replied, grabbing a couple of glasses of champagne from a passing waiter and handing one to me. ‘Give me an E and a whistle over this shit any day.’
‘I’m not sure people still have whistles at clubs, Dom. Where the fuck is Alex?’
* * *
We mingled. We mingled awkwardly. Mike’s friends appeared to be a collection of stockbrokers and former rugby players, all of whom now worked in the City. Their wives, manicured to within an inch of their lives, were art history graduates who worked in public relations or at auction houses. Conversations tended to go like this:
Former rugby player turned City boy: ‘So, Dom, what do you do?’
Dom: ‘I’m a solicitor.’
City boy: ‘Oh, right. Yah. Corporate law, yah?’
Dom: ‘Labour law, actually. Employment issues.’
City boy: ‘Right, right. You on the side of the good guys, or the bad? Hope you’re not the kind of guys bringing all these sexual harassment suits, are you?’ Then, in a girly voice, ‘Oh, Mr Judge, my mean boss made me go to Spearmint Rhino. Can I have six million pounds please?’
Dom mutters something incomprehensible, the two of us slink away.
Still, Dom’s conversations lasted longer than mine. Whenever I told anyone I made television documentaries for a living, they just looked at me blankly and walked away.
‘A lot of ITV watchers, I reckon,’ Dom said.
‘Where the fuck is Alex?’ I said.
After about half an hour of painful socialising, I left Dom gamely attempting to engage one of the Gucci girls in conversation and went in search of Alex and Julian. There was no sign of either in the living room, so I wandered back through the house. No sign of them in the kitchen, either, or in the conservatory which led off it. On the opposite side of the house, I remembered that there was a study, which Mike referred to as the library despite the fact that it didn’t appear to have any books in it aside from his collection of John Grishams. The door, which led off the entrance hall, was slightly ajar. I pushed it open a little further and peeked in. I could see Alex standing at the opposite end of the room, dressed in a very short white dress, pouring herself a drink. Mike was standing off to the left, his back to her, looking out of the French doors.
‘You might want to go easy,’ he was saying. ‘After all, you did start at three.’
‘I did not start at three,’ she snapped back at him, ‘I had one glass of wine at three.’
Her voice sounded thick with alcohol, as she turned I could see she was a little unsteady on her feet. She was heavily made up, her lips a deep scarlet. Her mascara had run a little on one side, she looked as though she’d been crying.
‘Well, you look pissed to me,’ Mike retorted, turning to look at her. ‘Christ’s sake, Alex. I don’t know what to do with you.’
‘You don’t know what to
do
with me?’
‘You don’t even try.’
‘I am trying. I
am
trying.’
I inched backwards, not wanting to witness this and yet unable to tear myself away.
‘Well, it doesn’t look like it to me.’ Mike put his own glass down on the desk and took a couple of steps towards the door. I inched back further. ‘You know what, Alex,’ he said, ‘I think it’s a good thing you haven’t been able to get pregnant. Jesus, just look at you. What kind of mother would you make?’
He started walking briskly towards the door and I leapt back, stepping on the foot of the person standing behind me as I did.
‘Ouch,’ the person said. I turned around and there he was. Again. As he always seemed to be, on my every New Year’s Eve: Aidan.
‘And what are you up to?’ he asked me with an amused look on his face. ‘Who are you spying on?’
‘Shhh …’ I hissed at him, pushing him away from the door to the study. ‘We have to get out of here!’ I shoved him out of the front door and onto the porch, closing the door quickly behind us.
‘You know, if you wanted to get me alone, you only had to ask …’
‘Oh, get over yourself. I just didn’t want Mike to see us. He and Alex were having a fight – I overheard them.’
‘Oh dear, trouble in paradise?’
‘I’m not sure it’s ever been even remotely utopian around here,’ I said. ‘God, he’s awful.’ I pushed the door open just a fraction and peered in. ‘I think he’s gone. I have to go and talk to Alex.’
‘Hang on,’ Aidan said, reaching for my hand. ‘You haven’t even said hello.’
I turned to look at him, pulling my hand away and trying to ignore the fact that despite his stubble and usual casual dishevelment, he still managed to look more James Bond than waiter in his tux.
‘Hello, Aidan,’ I said. ‘I have to go and speak to Alex now.’
Alex was no longer in the study. I couldn’t find her in the living room or out on the terrace, where the smokers gathered in huddles around patio heaters. This was where I found Julian and Karl, both wrapped in expensive-looking black coats, easily the best-looking men at the party.
‘Have you seen Alex?’ I asked Jules after we’d kissed our hellos.
‘Not since we got here,’ Julian said, shooting a nervous glance at Karl. ‘We think she might have been a bit … you know …’
‘Pissed.’ Karl finished his sentence.
‘I think she and Mike are having some kind of problem,’ I said. ‘And why the fuck is Aidan here?’
‘Aidan’s here?’ Julian looked incredulous. ‘I thought he was in New York. What’s he doing here? Alex doesn’t even like Aidan. And Mike
loathes
him.’
‘Well, he’s here.’ I took a quick toke off Julian’s cigarette. ‘I really have to find Alex.’
* * *
I found her upstairs in the master bedroom, snorting a line of coke off the dressing table.
‘There you are!’ she said when she saw me. ‘At last! At long last!’ She flung her arms around my neck and held onto me tightly. ‘Thank god you’re here.’ She pulled away and held out a rolled up fiver. ‘You want some?’ she asked.
‘I’m all right, thanks. Are you okay? I’ve been looking for you for ages.’
We kicked off our shoes and sat on her bed.
‘How was Pakistan?’ she asked me. ‘You were doing that thing, the thing on refugees? On the Afghan border? That was it, wasn’t it? Tell me about that.’
‘Alex, that was ages ago. I told you about that, we finished it in May. It was on the BBC a few months ago. I sent you an email.’