There’s only one thing worse than having a boyfriend with no money – and that’s having an incredibly rich one. But I didn’t understand that until I had known Jay for quite a while.
I’d had no idea just how rich he was when I first met him, or perhaps I would have been more wary. I mean, I knew right away he wasn’t exactly short of cash, because of where we met, at the Grand-Hotel du Cap Mimosa, on the Côte d’Azur. It’s a seriously jet-set sort of place. You can’t get a room there for less than £300 a night and I knew that he was there just for the hell of it, paying his own way – and in the middle of the week, too – whereas I was there strictly for work.
I was on a press freebie, to do an interview for the newspaper I worked for with the ‘legendary international megastar’ Jericho (that was her publicist’s description, by the way; I would have said more ‘singer-turned-actress-turned-nightmare’), about her new line of diamond jewellery.
She was launching the range there because ‘the sparkling light and laughter of the South of France was a major inspiration for the Collection’. Or, at least, that’s what it said in the press pack the PR had given us in the Business Class lounge at Heathrow, where we were waiting for our midday flight to Cannes.
‘Listen to this bit,’ I said to my friend Amy, the editor-at-large of society magazine Pratler, and my favourite partner in crime on such trips.
‘ “I have always loved Diamonds…” ’ I read out. ‘ “To me, the spark of light in Diamonds is like the celestial flash of Brilliance that inspires my Work. Diamonds are nature’s Music.’”
We snorted with laughter.
‘And what’s with all those capital letters?’ said Amy, looking at her own copy.
‘Rampant ego?’ I suggested. ‘Extreme pretentiousness? Bullshit overload?’
‘All of that,’ said Amy, slamming the press pack shut, with a shudder. ‘Reckon this could go one of two ways, don’t you?’ she continued, in confidential tones, as Tara – the PR who was organizing the trip – walked past us. ‘Could be totally divine – spa treatments, poolside drinks, minimal shite about the product; or it could be two days of illustrated lectures in darkened rooms and a four-hour wait for a group interview with Miss Jericho, as they call her. What do you reckon?’
‘No darkened rooms,’ I said. ‘I checked it out with Tara before I agreed to come.’
Amy laughed.
‘You’re hilarious,’ she said.
‘Just bitterly experienced,’ I said. ‘But there’ll be no avoiding the wait. We all know how famously late Miss Jericho is. And it is a stupid group interview, you’re right. Then they expect us each to write an original piece…’
Amy rolled her eyes. ‘Oh well, at least we’ll have each other – and we’ll need some good company, look who’s just walked in.’
She nodded towards the entrance, where Tara was effusively greeting a woman with a severe bob haircut and heavy-rimmed statement spectacles. It was Laura Birch-wood. My equivalent from a rival broadsheet newspaper.
‘Now that is annoying,’ I said to Amy.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘She’s so over-focused, that girl, I find it exhausting. She takes work much too seriously. Sense of humour: nul points.’
I agreed with Amy about all that, Laura was infuriatingly competitive, but I was annoyed for another reason: I’d made Tara tell me who else was going on the launch before I’d agreed to cover it and Laura’s name had definitely not been mentioned – while the words ‘British newspaper exclusive’ definitely had been.
But with the prospect of two nights in my favourite hotel on the French Riviera and further larks with Amy, I decided to put such irritations aside and just enjoy myself, exclusive story or not.
The Cap Mimosa was certainly as gorgeous as I remembered it, when I was shown to my room later that afternoon. The white lawn curtains were blowing gently in the breeze, and when I stepped out on to the balcony, the Mediterranean was intensely blue and sparkling, just the way it’s supposed to be – although even Jericho couldn’t have arranged that in advance. Not even by yelling at it, as she was famous for doing to her personal assistants. Rumour had it, she’d had to pay one of them off, after attacking her with a Christian Louboutin stiletto heel.
Back in the room there was a huge vase of heady tuberoses, and six mini-bottles of Pommery ‘Pop’ in an ice bucket on the table, with a welcome note apparently signed by Jericho herself, although on close inspection I could see it was printed.
A few more little touches laid on to put us in the right frame of mind for her latest ‘oeuvre’ – as it said in that dreadful press release – included a large floppy hat (from her accessories line) and a pair of large black sunglasses (likewise), in a charming local basket. A particularly nice touch, I thought, the basket, a little low-key accent to counterpoint all the luxury.
And luxury was something I knew plenty about. I was a senior feature writer on the Daily Journal – which was considered London’s most prestigious broadsheet newspaper – and luxury was my special area of expertise.
While my colleagues specialized in the Middle East, or crime, or parliament – for me it was crocodile-skin handbags, inlaid backgammon sets, bespoke shoes and couture fragrances. All those little areas that add up to the modern ideal of the luxury lifestyle.
And the Cap Mimosa pretty much summed that lifestyle up, I thought, as I looked around the exquisitely elegant cream and gold room. Then, after checking the schedule in the press pack, I saw I had time to enjoy a bit more of it, before the first official event, a welcome dinner for all the journalists, with Tara and the rest of Jericho’s global publicity machine.
Eager to make the most of my stay, I headed straight down to the hotel’s heavenly swimming pool to do some laps. There was only one other person in there, powering up and down, while I took it a little more gently, pausing each time I reached the end to gaze out over the Med, and the huge white boats bobbing in the hotel’s private marina.
When I felt I’d swum enough, I sat at the top of the pool’s elegant curving stone steps, with my feet in the water, just breathing in the garden-scented air and enjoying the feeling of sun on my skin.
The other swimmer stopped for a moment at the other end, to let the water out of his goggles, giving me a tantalizing glimpse of well-muscled brown shoulders. Then he resumed swimming and I stood up to leave the pool.
I headed off towards the steam room at the hotel spa, but before I got there I ran into Amy, who was en route to her idea of a rejuvenating Riviera afternoon: the outdoor bar.
The prospect of Amy’s company was irresistible so, with my healthy intentions immediately abandoned, we were soon installed on the rattan sofas set among orange trees in pots, the wisteria in glorious full bloom along the loggia next to us, drinking champagne and roaring with laughter. That was where she introduced me to Jay.
I noticed him immediately when he walked on to the terrace. He was startlingly tanned in a white linen shirt, which was flapping open, a towel around his waist, his black hair wet and elegantly slicked back. He had very brown bare feet.
It was the guy from the pool, I realized. Class Euro-trash, I thought to myself, now I had a chance to look at him properly, and I saw his eyes – strikingly dark blue – rest on me for a moment as he walked over to the bar.
He didn’t notice Amy immediately, as she had her back to him, and it wasn’t until she shrieked with laughter – at a story I was telling her about my last, disastrous press trip to a Bavarian schloss for the launch of a solid silver pencil sharpener range – that he came over.
‘Amy?’ he said, standing behind her, but looking at me, making me suddenly aware of the wet T-shirt competition effect of my wet bikini through the kaftan’s semi-sheer fabric.
She turned round and then jumped up to hug him, with her customary enthusiasm.
‘Jay!’ she squealed. ‘Darling one, what a heavenly surprise, but of course you’re here. This is your natural territory. Are you with anyone? Come and join us. This is my gorgeous friend, Stella Montecourt-Fain. She works for the Journal. She’s terribly clever.’
So he did join us and, fuelled by more champagne which he insisted on buying, the chemistry between us was instant and vivid. Amy chatted on in her infectious way, telling long involved stories that somehow never got boring, with Jay and I interjecting the odd one-liner, our eyes meeting with increasing frequency.
I was just trying to stop mine sliding down to his chest and stomach, as he slowly did his shirt buttons up, with elegant fingers. I’d never seen anyone look so sexy putting their clothes on.
‘So, Jay,’ said Amy, having come to the end of a hilarious anecdote about a trip to the Arctic Circle, when she had been bounced out of a reindeer sleigh at high speed and no one had noticed for five minutes. ‘We’re here for a riveting jewellery launch with international megastar, Jericho. Are you here for any particular reason, or just because it’s rather nice?’
‘Well, I’m here for the launch too, actually,’ he said in his strange accent, a weird mixture of Posh London Mockney and Cape Cod American. ‘I ran into Jerry in Aspen and she said I should come hang out for the launch.’
Amy’s eyebrows shot up.
‘Jerry, is it?’ she said, archly.
‘That’s just what people call her, Amy. Nothing more than that. She’s kinda fun, so I thought I’d come and see what happens at these things.’
‘Maybe you should launch a range of jewellery too, Jay,’ said Amy and he pretended he was going to throw his drink over her.
‘What do you do?’ I asked innocently, having no idea that was the very worst question I could have asked a money bunny like him.
I knew I’d made a mistake, when I saw Amy’s face freeze, but Jay kept his cool, in a way which would have amazed me when I knew him better.
‘I’m an investment manager,’ he said smoothly, shooting Amy a look which I didn’t understand at the time. ‘But mostly, I like to have a good time. Would you girls like to come out dancing with me tonight?’
‘Not if you’re driving,’ said Amy, prompting another near miss from Jay’s drink. And then she added, glancing quickly at me, ‘And only if you’ve got a friend for me to play with.’
‘Spotter?’ said Jay.
‘Oh, brilliant,’ said Amy, delightedly, beaming at me, although I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about.
‘Who or what is Spotter?’ I asked her, when Jay had gone back into the hotel, after arranging to meet us in the lobby at ten.
‘Oh, he’s really great,’ said Amy. ‘Such a funny guy. Great friend of Jay’s, ex-army boy, you’ll love him. Shall we go in and change? We can bolt down the welcome dinner and then plead exhaustion and sneak out to meet Jay. Plan?’
‘Plan,’ I said, nodding.
‘Er, Stells,’ said Amy, with an unusually serious tone in her voice, as we stood up to leave the bar. She touched my arm gently. ‘Wear something pretty tonight. We’ll be going somewhere nice with Jay.’
She looked at me intently, and nodded quickly a couple of times, as though she was giving me some kind of coded message. I wished she would just come out and say it, whatever it was, but I sensed she wouldn’t be comfortable to spell it out, so I just smiled and nodded back.
Fortunately, I did have something really pretty to wear. My years of press trips had taught me always to pack one killer dress, because you never knew where you might end up going.
And I knew I could go anywhere in the blue silk Lanvin number I had just slipped over my head. With my favourite gold Prada wedges and a nice tan left over from my January holiday in Goa, I was pretty happy with the way I looked.
When I stepped out of the lift into the hotel foyer, after a quick trip back up to my room to check my make-up after the hurried dinner, I could see that Jay was too.
His face broke into one of those spontaneous smiles that signals a man is relieved to find that you are no less attractive than he remembered. And I’m very good at reading men in that way – because with a father like mine, I’d had expert tuition.
So far my dad has had six wives. And his name is Henry, which is pretty funny. Unlike his royal namesake, though, he has no problem producing heirs. I think it was seven, the last time I totted us all up.
What makes it really confusing is that some of his wives already had children of their own when they arrived in his life, or have had more subsequently with new husbands. So as well as all my half-brothers and sisters, I have swathes of stepsiblings and semi-steps, which is what I call the ex-wives’ subsequent children.
On top of that, Venezia, one of my half-sisters – the daughter of wife four – was born while my father was still married to wife three. Sometimes, I think even he loses track.
Henry Alexander Montecourt-Fain – I call him Ham – is an architect. He just likes to build things, whether it’s a palace for a president, a major museum, affordable housing for the masses, a tree house for his children, or a dynasty. He’s a true creative, physically incapable of not producing things.
I remember watching him once when he was talking on the phone in his London house. As he droned on – the sound of his own voice is the only thing Henry likes more than the glug of a newly opened bottle of claret – leaning against the stainless-steel countertop, his big strong hands were constantly fiddling with something.
When he eventually hung up the phone, having told the person on the other end that they were a wicked little flirt who needed a good spanking in the very near future, I saw what he had been fiddling with.
Propped against the digital scales was a tiny little man made out of about two inches of electrical cord and a matchstick. He’d pared back the cable so that the earth and live cables were the limbs, with the revealed copper wire bent to make hands and feet. The pink top of the match was the head.
I stood and gazed at it for a while, then I put it in my pocket.
I am the oldest of Henry’s children, from his first marriage, although my mother was definitely more the Anne Boleyn type than a loyal Catherine of Aragon. She was a wild thing, by all accounts, but she died before I was two, so I really don’t remember her.
I know what she looked like – rather beautiful, in a centre-parted kind of way, with long dark wavy hair and high cheekbones, which I am told I have inherited – but that’s just from photographs and a few reels of cine film which Ham has occasionally shown me, but only when he’s been between wives. And on the wrong side of a few bottles of claret.
If I sound casual about it, it’s just because my mother never featured in my conscious life. She’d bolted away from us before my first birthday, to live in Marrakech with some painter she’d taken up with, where she’d caught the flu and died. Just like that.
‘A very mundane death, she would have thought,’ Ham had said about it once. ‘She would have preferred to go like Isadora Duncan, or to have had a wasting disease that made her even more elegantly beautiful, ending in a heartrending deathbed scene, where I would have come and begged her forgiveness. Which I would have done, of course. Even though she left me, the cow.’
Then he’d look at me sadly. He never quite said it, but whenever he spoke about my mother – which was very infrequently – I had the strong impression that he still missed her.
Maybe I was kidding myself, because I wanted to feel special, rather than just abandoned, but I did wonder on those occasions whether she really had been the true love of his life and whether the procession of women since had just been a futile search to replicate what they’d had together.
But while that carousel of stepmothers and assorted siblings had made for a fairly unusual childhood, I’d always had my Ham, like a great immovable mountain at the heart of it all. He may have been flighty and fickle with his lovers, but he was solid as a rock for me. He was my dad and my buddy and my very best friend – and the most marvellous tutor in the ways of men.
‘Men are appalling,’ he’d told me from early childhood. ‘We never really mature, not on the inside. It’s all just an act. Don’t ever trust men, Stella, my darling. We’re dreadful. Enjoy us, use us, abuse us, but never ever trust us.’
‘But you’re not dreadful, Daddy,’ I’d say, gazing up at my hero, all craggy six foot three of him.
‘Not to you, my little duckling,’ he’d reply. ‘Not to you.’
Just before I’d left my hotel room that night at the Cap Mimosa, to meet the others downstairs, I had taken Ham’s little electrical cable man out of my sponge bag – I never travelled without it – and given him a kiss. He was my get-lucky charm and after having a glimpse of Jay’s chestnut-brown chest earlier on, I was definitely in the mood for it.
And right from the start of that night, the charm had seemed to be working its magic. As Jay kissed me on both cheeks in greeting, holding me with very attractive confidence by my bare upper arms, I was enveloped in a wonderful cloud of Acqua di Parma, my favourite male smell.
Then he had quite naturally taken my hand and led me out to a ridiculously long, white stretch limo that was idling by the entrance. Amy and a large red-haired person I assumed was Spotter, were already in it.
‘I’m sorry it’s so crass,’ said Jay, as we got in. ‘They couldn’t get me a black one at short notice. But Amy doesn’t care for my driving and it would have been too cramped in a town car.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ boomed Spotter, who was clearly an Englishman of a central casting kind I had thought were dying out. ‘Might have been fun.’
He leaned across and slapped me heartily on the leg, then shamelessly squeezed my thigh. Under my dress.
I forced myself to smile at him, and moved discreetly away as soon as I could.
‘Settle down, Spotter,’ said Jay, firmly.
I found his casually proprietary air thrilling and the evening went on in the same vein, as we seemed to go on a bar crawl of the Côte d’Azur’s chicest private-member establishments, with me making every entrance on Jay’s arm.
As we moved from venue to venue – he seemed to be a member of all of them, the way they let him in with no hassle – I gathered that we were somehow looking for the action, although the walking into each place always seemed to be the best part, as heads swivelled to check out the latest arrivals.
Jay seemed to know people wherever we went, as did Amy, and my head whirled with introductions, but we never stayed long enough anywhere to get attached to any other group. It suited me, as all the – universally ravishing – women who greeted Jay seemed to come particularly brightly alive when they saw him. I was not welcomed so warmly.
After we’d been to four different places I realized I was actually enjoying the rides between them more than the clubs themselves, particularly the corners, which threw me and Jay against each other, because none of us were wearing seat belts.
I had been about to put mine on when we got into the limo, but when the others didn’t, I remembered that seasoned limo passengers were above such banalities. This was not real life and, for the elite few who inhabited that elevated realm, the normal rules did not apply. Or so they thought. I just wanted to fit in.
When we got back in for what turned out to be the last leg of our tour, I was particularly glad I wasn’t wearing any kind of restraint, as the corners seemed to get so extreme I was practically sitting on Jay’s knee half the time. I even wondered whether he had secretly told the driver to lurch around as much as possible.
It was just the kind of caper Ham would have come up with in his endlessly inventive seductions, and it worked, because after I had shot along the cream leather upholstery a few times like a speeding pinball, it seemed quite natural for Jay to put his arm around me and pull me close. I really didn’t mind.
Amy thwacked Spotter with her handbag when he tried to pull the same stunt with her, and braced herself by clinging on to the ceiling strap.
But all too soon, as far as I was concerned, we arrived at our destination, an imposing white edifice with a large crowd of people standing outside it, waiting on the wrong side of a barrier patrolled by two enormous bouncers. They all turned to gawp when we pulled up in what Jay had christened the Pimpmobile.
‘Oooh,’ said Amy, like an excited small child, looking up at the huge neon sign on top of the building. ‘Wonderland. I’ve heard so much about this place. There was a big piece in the mag about it when it opened. Is it as good as they say, Jay?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never been here before either. It’s not really my kind of a place, but I thought we should check it out, as there’s so much hype about it.’
He wasn’t kidding. It was supposed to be ‘the hottest club in Europe’, with so much publicity about its ridiculously fearsome entrance vetting nonsense, I actually felt quite nervous as we approached.
The initial two Incredible Hulks had taken one look at the car and let us straight through their velvet rope to the next checkpoint, which was policed by two more tuxedoed Gigantors and a simply terrifying drag queen, who was surveying the crowd through opera glasses from the top of a small flight of steps.
She was wearing a one-shoulder dress made from what appeared to be an entire crocodile skin, dyed emerald green and complete with head. Combined with towering platform shoes and vertical hair (well, wig), she must have been eight feet tall. Her lips were like a couple of red patent-leather bananas.
‘Scary Mary,’ said Jay, taking my hand again. ‘I thought King Kong killed Godzilla.’
She turned to look down at us imperiously through the opera glasses and then nodded at her guards. We were in. The crowd roared with approval.
As we approached her final silk rope, she smiled broadly.
‘Hey, Jay, honey,’ she said, in a voice as Southern as the Mississippi, and kissed him warmly on both cheeks. ‘Good to see y’all. I’ll radio ahead so you can go straight up to the private rooms.’
I was impressed – very impressed – but I still didn’t twig that there might be rather more to Jay Fisher than just the charming, good-looking playboy I had taken him for.