One Day in Cornwall

4

Park Lane was as busy as ever, six lanes of traffic coughing out hot fumes into the hazy blue sky. Hyde Park was filled with the usual mixture of tourists meandering and office workers rushing on their way to work. As Lucy stepped out of her Addison Lee car in front of the Metropolis Hotel she had an unwelcome flashback of last year’s awards ceremony and the A-list – well, lower A-list, maybe B-list, really – celebrity getting papped, up-skirt, by the scummy photographer who lay on the floor as she got out of the car. The fallout from those pictures breaking in the red tops the next day had led to some seriously awkward calls from the agent about Spectrum’s ‘failure to safeguard’. Lucy entered the hotel, smiling at the doorman, and was greeted by the familiar smell of marble, dark old wood, and something she couldn’t pinpoint but which, judging by the surroundings, might well have been the smell of money. The atmosphere of the Metropolis still excited her, even after all these years of working on Spectrum’s televised events at the hotel. The bar was littered with small groups of ladies drinking tea, with fine china plates of pastel-coloured cakes decorating the tables, their feet obscured by an assortment of sturdy, ribbon-handled shopping bags from New Bond Street’s boutiques. It felt like a place full of possibilities, of secret meetings, and of a life she’d probably never be able to afford.

In the production suite people had dumped piles of coats and bags in the corner, and a rail of evening dresses was already nearly full. Lucy hung her black-lace dress, grabbed a copy of the running order, a polystyrene cup of grainy coffee from the machine and headed to the script meeting in the ballroom. It was Lucy’s third awards ceremony as Emma’s PA, and it became more and more difficult to concentrate during the longwinded script read-through. It was a point of pride for Emma that she ran this meeting in such a unique way. She insisted on a full run-through in which she took the role of both the main presenters, all of the individual awards’ presenters and every winner, often delivering Oscar-worthy acceptance speeches, which, it struck Lucy, seemed to roll off her tongue as if practised in advance. By the time the final award was played out, culminating in Emma’s impression of a middle-aged Swedish male winner (not one of her finest), Lucy’s mind had wandered and she was taken by surprise at the sound of her name.

‘I asked if there was anything I’d forgotten’, Emma looked at her with the familiar look of disdain and disappointment. ‘What was I meant to remember?’ she asked Lucy.

‘I think that was everything,’ Lucy smiled hopefully, trawling through her brain for anything she was supposed to be prompting her boss with. At that moment a commotion of suit carriers and blonde hair tumbled through the door, met with sniggers and a collective chorus of ‘Oh, Warren!’ from the Spectrum team sitting around the large table.

‘Oh my GOD, I’m so sorry I’m late!’ Warren did, in fact, look sorry enough that he might actually cry. A flamboyant, yet sensitive, character, Warren had been at Spectrum media for a couple of years before Lucy had joined, and had worked his way up to the coveted role of Entertainment Producer, meaning his job was to book celebrities to appear on the company’s shows. Being outlandishly emotional was apparently a necessary characteristic for anyone working on the Entertainment team, who dedicatedly lived up to their job titles and entertained the office with their many dramas, fallouts, reconciliations and public breakdowns. One of Warren’s particular character traits was to seek Emma’s approval at all times and at almost any cost. Arriving late to the production meeting of the biggest awards show of the year was probably up there with Warren’s worst nightmares, met only, perhaps, by an international Dermalogica shortage, or his cleaner accidentally machine-washing one of his ‘statement’ cashmere jumpers.

Emma cast her eyes up and down Warren’s body, from the toes of his gleaming patent loafers, to the highest point of his highlighted quiff, and Lucy recognised the flash in her eyes of something noted and worthy of comment.

‘Warren,’ she started, ‘I can overlook the late arrival, given the fact it is entirely out of character and, I’m sure, due to circumstances beyond your control.’

Lucy watched Warren half relax before sensing that the exchange was not over. ‘What I can’t overlook is the fact that you are the colour of an imitation mahogany table. What the HELL have you done to yourself?’

Now that she looked properly it was true that Warren had been a little heavy handed with the fake tan, but Lucy still cringed internally at the public remonstration, recalling their conversation a few nights ago in the pub, when he’d listed the many beauty treatments he was going to undergo in preparation for today. He had only wanted, Lucy remembered clearly, to look his very best for the occasion. She wanted to say something in his defence, but there really was no denying he looked totally, ludicrously brown the more she looked at him.

‘It’s developing,’ Warren explained, ‘I can’t stop it. I don’t know what to do. I’ve showered, I’ve exfoliated, but I’m sure it’s still developing. I wasn’t this brown an hour ago.’ His voice wobbled at the end of this statement, threatening tears. Emma had already lost interest in this conversation, however, and was piling papers and pens into her oversized Prada bag.

Warren took the seat next to Lucy as Emma left the room, his big eyes searching for comfort.

‘It’s okay,’ she lied. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not that bad.’

It was dreadful. Up close, particles of tan were sitting in each pore, line and blemish; his face reminded Lucy of those olde-worlde maps you made at school by staining a piece of paper with instant coffee and burning the edges.

‘I have the keys to make-up anyway,’ Lucy offered. ‘We can go and find some foundation.’

Warren held out his arms and grabbed Lucy in a bear hug. She patted him on the back and tried to wriggle down away from his face slightly to avoid any possible staining.

Awards ceremonies at the Metropolis were always fun; they had an atmosphere that Lucy never felt anywhere else. It was all about getting through the ceremony itself and then the party really began. Lucy had been allocated a role that only Emma’s most valued staff were trusted with on the night; she was to be, yet again, a spotter. A spotter’s job was perhaps the least dignified role you could be given at a glitzy event, consisting of crawling around on the floor with a camera crew, pointing out the beautiful people to be filmed. Each year when the roles were being handed out Lucy prayed that she might be spared, and each time she was painfully disappointed. In Emma’s eyes it was such an important role that it needed to be carried out by experienced, responsible people like Lucy who had spent years working fourteen- hour days in hope of one day being taken seriously in the TV world. As Lucy changed into her short, black, bodycon lace dress and tried to fix her hair up with Kirby grips and hairspray, she raged momentarily at the absurdity of the ‘cocktail dress’ dress code for all Spectrum staff, and realised that the only thing less dignified than crawling around on the carpet all evening was doing so dressed as if you were expecting to be sitting at a table drinking champagne.

Lucy was surprised each time at how quickly two hours of spotting passed; it actually became quite addictive trying to make it round to the next table in the twenty-second VTs played on screen between each award. She was quietly delighted to have avoided being yelled at over the headset each spotter was wearing. Emma’s scream of ‘Sophie, that’s NOT Paul Mulryan, that’s a short-haired WOMAN’, was probably a highlight for everyone on talkback except Sophie. In her defense, that woman did look a lot like crime writer Paul Mulryan; Lucy had checked afterwards when crawling past to get to the star of an International Series of the Year contender after the mishap.

The final award of the evening was the Lifetime Achievement award and the winner was Lucy’s to find and get a camera pointed at in time. She was already at the right table, with her target in view, hanging back until the last minute so as not to give the game away. As the music fired up Lucy moved in with the camera crew following behind waiting for her instruction. As she reached the side of Mrs Dorian Briar, ninety years old, an OBE, writer of over fifty novels and twenty adaptations for the small and big screen, Mrs Briar spotted her and turned away from the table towards Lucy. Lucy tried to make herself invisible, the presenters were about to announce Mrs Briar’s name and she needed to be looking up at the room, not down at Lucy on the floor. But Mrs Briar wouldn’t give up. ‘There’s a girl on the floor!’ she exclaimed remarkably loudly to the rest of her table, pointing at Lucy. ‘Excuse me, young lady, are you okay down there?’

Lucy felt her face burn with panic. ‘Fine thanks,’ she mouthed, and prayed that this would appease the legendary author about to be honoured with the most prestigious award of the night.

‘Would you like some wine, dear?’ Mrs Briar leant across the table, picking up a glass of, surely someone else’s, wine, and stretched down and sideways to try and reach Lucy on the floor.

‘THE INIMITABLE DORIAN BRIAR’, boomed one of the presenters, and Lucy felt the room around her, all 400 guests, getting to their feet with applause, as the big screen flashed to a live picture of Dorian Briar stretching away from the table, then falling off her chair clutching a glass of cabernet sauvignon, squealing in horror. The other guests at her table leapt into action, scooping her off the floor, horrified at the sight of this little old lady now drenched in red wine. Dorian was, to her credit, still smiling, but looked a little confused by the whole thing. Lucy moved, quicker than seemed possible on all-fours in a skintight dress, away from the scene, glaring at her camera crew with a look that she hoped conveyed ‘let’s never talk about what happened at that table’.

5

The production office’s transformation into a fully laid-out dining room marked the end of the Spectrum team’s working duties. There were already ten people scattered around the tables eating plates of roast chicken and vegetables, and pouring large glasses of wine. Lucy walked in with Warren and Sophie, fellow spotters, laughing about the Paul Mulryan confusion, and she placed a concessionary piece of chicken on her plate from the large silver warmer on the buffet table.

‘Is that all you’re eating?’ Warren asked, filling his own plate with potatoes, carrots and chicken thighs before drowning it in gravy. Lucy didn’t answer, but just smiled and took a seat at an empty table. Picking up a bottle of white wine that wasn’t quite as cold as she’d have hoped, I deserve this, she thought, and poured out three glasses.

‘What the hell happened with poor Dorian?’ Sophie asked, her little brown bob tipping quizzically to the side, like a Cairn terrier, Lucy always thought.

‘No idea,’ Lucy took a first blissful swig of wine. It had dawned on her very quickly after the incident that no one else on the production team actually had any way of knowing why ‘poor Dorian’, as she was quickly becoming known, had fallen off her chair. Anyway, Emma had already been overheard rejoicing about what fantastic television it was seeing a national treasure tumbling to the ground in a fountain of red wine, so Lucy didn’t feel too bad about keeping quiet about her role in the scene.

The room filled quickly with colleagues removing high heels and rubbing their feet between glasses of wine, and exchanging Emma stories in a sort of top trumps game of ‘well you think that’s bad, wait ‘til you hear what she did in the green room when I was working on Catch it, Cook it, in 2010…’

Lucy retrieved her mobile from her bag and read a message from Scott sent an hour earlier: Hey you, hope it’s all gone well. You coming to mine tonight? Lucy sent a quick reply saying she’d call him later; she half wanted to leave there and then and get back to his place. It would, she knew, be the most sensible thing to do; these nights always got so bloody messy. But the first two glasses of wine had slipped down easily and she was in that early wine daze, where everything felt slightly wonderful and it felt too early to leave.

Dinner was followed by the traditional ‘sweep’ of the ceremony room for bottles of wine that had been purchased by TV big-wigs to impress their tables, but which hadn’t been drunk. Emma didn’t like wasting money by, say, paying for wine for her staff, and the sweep was one of her ways of ‘winning’, as she saw it. Lucy hung back slightly after the incident last year where she and Natalie from the Entertainment team had swiped a bottle of champagne from the Sherbet TV table only to be stopped on their way out by the purchaser of the bottle on his way back to retrieve the fizz, who accused them of stealing: awkward didn’t really cover it.

Emma was already deep in the after-party – Lucy kept catching glimpses of her up the stairs though the glass doors. She was working the room like a pro. It was a quality you couldn’t help but admire; she was truly fantastic at making people listen to her and then give her what she wanted. She was also, Lucy knew, notorious for drinking far too much at events, and it looked like she was on her way already. She had changed into the red Donna Karan dress that Lucy had collected two days previously from Harvey Nichols and which Emma had taken great pleasure in telling the whole office the extortionate cost of. ‘I suppose you could say that £1,800 for a dress is too much…’ she’d mused loudly, before asking Lucy to bring it up on the Harvey Nicks website and show everyone just how beautiful it was. And it really was beautiful. Lucy had stroked it when she collected it from the store, before it was packaged with flair and precision into tissue paper, a box and then a bag for transfer back to the office. But Emma had a knack for making really expensive clothes look incredibly tacky. Lucy watched her move over to her next companion at the bar, clutching a glass of champagne in one hand and a fistful of the skirt of her dress in the other, struggling to work with the combination of billowing red fabric at ankle level and the high-heeled Prada shoes she’d opted for. It didn’t look to Lucy as if Emma was wearing a bra, which made the dress sit strangely across her chest and gape slightly at the side. Lucy could already see the potential for another breast-based moment later in the evening. These had become something of a signature for Emma, who had fallen out of more designer dresses in public than Lucy could remember. She recalled the time, a few years ago now, that Emma had conducted an entire conversation with an author at a book launch with her left nipple sitting proudly outside the ridiculously strappy low-cut dress she was wearing. The author’s eye had kept wandering down, and Lucy, standing next to Emma at the time, had wondered just how the hell Emma couldn’t, at the very least, feel the difference between the right side – cloaked in All Saints (God, she was far too old to be wearing All Saints), and the left side – hanging out free as a bird. It had never become clear at what point Emma had finally noticed, and later on everything was back in place, but nothing was ever mentioned.

It was impressive how much wine could be swept from a room after an awards ceremony; the team was laden with bottles and bottles of red and white, and a few had found the ultimate prize – unopened bottles of champagne. As it was strict hotel policy that no wine should leave the room after the ceremony, the smuggling out to the after-party had to be conducted with confidence and poise to avoid any suspicion amongst the Metropolis’s staff. Lucy considered herself an expert at this and took two bottles from Jenny, one of the runners, slipping one upright into her handbag, and the other under the flap of her black jacket before heading up the stairs and through the huge doors. Inside, the party was in full flow, a few merry authors and agents were dancing in the middle of the room while most people opted to continue their drinking and were gathered in groups around the edge of the dance floor, or sat in the crushed- velvet booths along the walls.

Lucy, Warren, Camilla and Katie stationed themselves at a booth at the far end of the room. Lucy skimmed across the plush fabric and sat next to the window, looking onto the twinkling car lights and street lamps of Park Lane. A stream of orange beams flowing one way, blinking red the other. An assortment of wine bottles was magicked onto the table and Katie passed around glasses. Lucy settled into the back of the cushioned bench, her back aching in appreciation of the support. Warren began his usual commentary on the scenes unfolding on the dance floor. A well-known screenwriter was performing an elaborate, and puzzling, finger dance, and an ageing agent, who Lucy had earlier seen stroking his neighbour’s leg as she crawled past their table, was now dancing up against her in what was presumably intended to be an erotic style.

More wine was poured and Lucy shut her eyes briefly, remembering she had promised to call Scott. It was nearly midnight and the drinks were filling her with a warm sense of impending fun, so she pushed away the thought of her boyfriend waiting at home and finished her glass. She’d pop to the toilets in a while with Warren, who’d brought a supply for a few of them who were always ready for a party. She fancied a little pick-me-up.

‘Dancing time?’ she suggested, and the group, which had now grown to eight of the Spectrum team, left their bags and coats in ownership of the booth and moved a few yards into the room to start dancing to the R&B set the DJ was playing.

The noise in the room was growing louder with each song, more and more bodies joining them on the dance floor. Camilla appeared with a tray full of glistening shot glasses and the team expertly applied salt to the base of their thumbs, downed the sour liquid and squealed for lemons, which Camilla had forgotten to bring. Lucy slipped back to the table and downed a large glass of wine to wash away the taste. Her head spun as she turned and made her way back to the group, who were having a dance-off, throwing her hands in the air and shimmying in to join them. She flung her head back, laughing at Warren’s moves, and feeling the rush from the alcohol.

6

Hideaway Bay, 2003

Nina and Kristian were on another break, and Nina could barely stand being in the same room as her on-off boyfriend of two years.

‘I hate him, Lucy,’ she whispered in Lucy’s direction, eyes locked on Kristian and loud enough for him to hear her across the table. They were sitting on the small terrace at the back of the Beach Café, Tom’s parents’ place.

‘I know, he’s been a prat,’ Lucy comforted Nina. She’d learned a long time ago that it wasn’t worth pointing out that they were both at fault.

‘I can hear you both,’ Kristian said, pulling away from his conversation with Tom, probably about surfing. Tom grinned at Lucy, who tried to make a face at him that told him to look like he was taking this seriously.

‘Oh why don’t you text your little girlfriend about it, then, poor little Kristian,’ Nina said mockingly.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ Kristian rolled his eyes. Not a good move, thought Lucy.

‘She is a friend,’ continued Kristian. ‘In fact, she’s not even a friend, she had a surf lesson. She texted me to say thank you. You’re out of your mind!’

This was not going to end well, Lucy realised. She made eyes at Tom to signify that they should extract themselves from the impending explosion.

‘Oh you are SUCH A GENTLEMAN!’ Nina shouted, causing other customers to stop their conversations and pretend not to look at them all.

‘Hey, calm it down, okay?’ Lucy tried to reason with them. ‘It’s not fair on Tom’s folks to make a scene here.’

The café was their regular hangout and they’d already pushed their luck this summer with Tom’s parents. Sarah and Neil were far more laid-back than any of the other parents, having recently forgiven them for breaking in one evening after a drunken barbecue on the beach. Tom had been instructed to pay for the broken glass by working an extra few shifts, and the embarrassment of Tom’s mum looking at Lucy and Nina with surprise and disappointment had been the hardest punishment they could have been dealt. Sarah was wonderful, especially to the girls. Tom was her only child and she made no secret of how much she had longed for a daughter. She’d swept Lucy and Nina into their family within a few months of year seven and their friendship with Tom and Kristian. Lucy had known Sarah and Neil vaguely for years. They owned a few places around Hideaway Bay: the café, the fish-and-chip shop and the pub across the bay at New Hideaway. They were friendly with her parents and she’d heard Sarah’s laughter ringing out over dinner-party chatter a fair few times. And then she’d met Tom. They had been at different primary schools; Tom at the private school half an hour away and Lucy at the village primary. Her dad didn’t see the need to pay for primary school. It was when she joined Davenport Heights Independent at age eleven that they first met. Tom had been instantly friendly: Lucy terrified of the new surroundings and at a real disadvantage to the children who were already familiar with the senior school from their primary days. They both got the number 121 bus from the top of the hill to school, and each day Tom sat next to Lucy and asked her questions while she blushed, laughed and eventually looked up at him and realised he was rather lovely.

At sixteen they were best friends and totally in love. They felt unbreakable to Lucy, unlike Nina and Kristian, who had a relationship so volatile that Kristian sending a message to another girl sent them into a tailspin. Lucy often wondered whether Nina, her best friend since they were five, had been almost forced into a relationship with Kristian because of their proximity to her and Tom. Kristian was a lovely, lovely boy, but he was totally hapless when it came to managing Nina’s fierce temper and tendency for jealousy. Even Lucy had fallen foul of Nina’s wrath when it came to Kristian, although she had surprised herself at the ferocity of her defence when Nina once tried to imply she had flirted with Kristian at a party. The idea was totally absurd and had shown Lucy how bloody hard it must be being Kristian at times. She looked at him now, the same look of disbelief and confusion that she’d see on his face a hundred times before as he watched his girlfriend twist herself into a venomous tangle of rage over almost nothing.

‘What are we doing tonight?’ Tom asked, trying to break the tension.

‘Can we come to yours, mate?’ Kristian asked. ‘A few beers, a game of pool, swim?’ Tom’s house was the largest not only of the group’s but also in the whole town. Neil and Sarah were widely considered to own Hideaway, their house sitting at the top of the Bay, overlooking their business empire. Their landscaped gardens sprawled out from the back of the huge property, gradually sloping down to a lower level with a huge infinity pool, which looked straight out across the sea.

‘Sure,’ Tom replied. ‘My dad will probably want us to help with something, though. You know what he’s like.’

‘That’s fine,’ Lucy said, perusing the menu on the table, wondering whether to order another coffee. ‘It’s the least we could do, really.’ She didn’t mind helping Sarah and Neil, and in fact she quite enjoyed folding napkins, helping Sarah to design sandwich menus, and deep-cleaning the pristine white coffee cups ahead of the impending summer high-season.

It was hot already in Hideaway, the sea just about managing to take the edge off the midday scorch. Lucy was tanned and happy; this was how she liked it. All of them together, good weather, lots of time and no school. GCSEs were done and she didn’t need to think about her results for a while yet. The summer stretched out ahead of them, full of promise. She looked across at Tom and met his eyes. He smiled and winked at her. Kristian was out of his seat and had moved close to Nina, attempting to cuddle her. Nina almost gave in to him, before standing up and storming off, tears in her eyes.