‘Oh, please! What’s she going to do? Send me home? Where’s she going to get a replacement for this at no notice?’
She sweeps her hand down her body. Hanne’s body is spectacular. Even more so in the scrap of black Lycra lace Tatiana provided, that clings to every curve. She may be the whitest girl that Gemma has ever seen, but she looks like a Neolithic fertility statue. A stick-thin torso with buttocks and breasts like cantaloupes. And no surgery to get them that way, either, so she claims.
Three men nearby fall silent and stare. One inhales his drink, and has to be slapped about the shoulders. Gemma feels like a little kid beside her. I wish I were more sophisticated, she thinks. I look about twelve in comparison with these girls. People keep asking how old I am. They don’t even ask Wei-Cheng that, and she’s barely as tall as the car.
‘D’you want one?’ asks Hanne.
Gemma scans around. Tatiana encircled on all sides by old men. Sparkling. Wei-Cheng at a table, sandwiched between two gruff salt-and-pepper Russians, laughing at their jokes. Sara at another, gazing in naked admiration at the actress they all recognise but have never actually seen in anything. She’s a producer now. Whatever that means. Tatiana pointed her out when they first arrived. That’s what you could be, one day, she said. By the time she was thirty, she need never have worked again.
‘Oh, go on,’ she says, and turns away from the party into the dark. Hanne pulls a pack of Vogues from her little clutch bag; so long and thin they look like pretend cigarettes. Gemma takes one and lets her light it. Leans on the parapet and enjoys the head-rush.
‘This is something, isn’t it?’ asks Hanne.
‘Christ, yes.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many sapphires in one place.’
Gemma feels inadequate again. These girls are so far ahead of her. Their talent for discerning real from paste, the cut of one designer from another, the gloss of Chanel lipstick from the grease of No.7.
‘It’s amazing,’ she says tentatively. Hopes that one day these people won’t intimidate. That they’ll stop seeing her as a perk and start seeing her as a prize.
‘How many of these have you done?’ asks Hanne.
‘My first, actually.’
Hanne mimes reeling in shock. ‘For real? You serious? None?’
‘Well, some parties, of course,’ she says. ‘In London. And a weekender to Cannes. But not, you know, a trip trip like this.’
‘Ooh, Cannes!’ Hanne wiggles and stretches her arms, and her stunning breasts move up her ribcage as though they aren’t really attached to her body. ‘I did Cannes last year. Fabulous villa in the hills with a two-part swimming pool. You literally swim through a tunnel to get from one side to the other. Did you do any events?’
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘We were on a yacht in the harbour. People came to us.’
‘Nice,’ says Hanne. ‘I love a boat party. Any film stars?’
A hand whose knuckles were covered in hair. Polished wood and shining brass. Bedsheets that felt like satin in a low-ceilinged cabin that smelled of spunk.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Mostly executives. Couple of investors.’
‘Ack,’ says Hanne. ‘Isn’t that always the way? Hey, there’s a film star coming tomorrow, though, isn’t there?’
‘Yeah. Jason Pettit. But I think he’s Tatiana’s.’
A cynical laugh. ‘Oh, come on, that’s his job,’ she says. ‘We’re the compensation.’
As the clock runs down to midnight, their energy fades. Long days followed by a long night, and Mercedes’ stamina is at full stretch. Felix is feeling it too. No jokes now; no flirting or teasing. The entitlement of the crowd, their sulks, their increasingly bleary demands, have worn them ragged. Maria comes from the dwindling table service to help, and they scrape and flip, scrape and flip in silence.
‘I need my bed,’ says Felix. He looks every day of his forty-three years. You can see the old man in him now. What he’ll look like when he’s seventy.
Mercedes grunts in response. Wonders if maybe they can stay upstairs tonight, save them walking up the hill. It’s only twenty minutes home, but the prospect of dragging their weary bodies up the cobbles, skirting round the litter and the vomit and the drunken stragglers who want to dance, fills her with low-level dread.
A man comes to the counter. She doesn’t look up. She’s too tired. If they want her to meet their eye, they can come back tomorrow.
‘What can I get you? Only lamb and halloumi left now,’ she says mechanically. She’s hoarse from talking, same old syllables, over and over.
‘I don’t – Mercedes? I need to talk to you.’
She looks up. Laurence Viner is standing there, his face solemn and urgent. Oh, hell. She’d forgotten about him.