Cents and Sensibility

I groaned inwardly, as I saw that Jericho’s personal diamond cutter was going step by step through the process of selecting the stones. A topic I had only sat through about five thousand times before at jewellery launches.

And I don’t even like bloody diamonds. Too many associations with terrible African civil wars, forced child miners, and environmental devastation – all in pursuit of sparkly bits of carbon.

The whole diamond trade made me sick, actually, but it was my job to be there and to write about it and, by the time I’d got down to the conference room that morning after leaving Jay, I had been very late.

Tara Ryman, the PR, had given me a mystified ‘what’s going on?’ look, when I’d crept in at the back, mouthing apologies to her. Mind you, I thought, as I scrabbled to find my notebook in my handbag, she could hardly come the moral high ground with me; she’d lied shamelessly when she’d promised there would be no darkened rooms and slide shows at the launch – and when she’d told me I had the story as a UK newspaper exclusive.

I could have used that as a counter-attack defence for my lateness, but she was the London representative for a lot of important luxury brands, as well as Jericho’s ghastly trinkets, so I had to tread a bit carefully. Plus, I really liked Tara, and didn’t want to piss her off totally with my poor showing at the launch. Not that Laura Birchwood didn’t try to make maximum capital out of it.

‘Wasn’t that Jay Fisher I saw you arriving with in the hotel lobby late this morning?’ she said in full and deliberate earshot of Tara, during a coffee break on the hotel terrace, before the next brain-numbing presentation. ‘Looked like you’d been out all night.’

I saw Tara’s head swivel slightly to listen better. I just smiled wearily at Laura and shrugged.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘So what?’

‘How do you know him?’ she asked me, her eyes like a cunning little rat.

‘How do you know him?’ I said and walked over to Amy, who I could see was shaking with laughter.

‘So do you know him?’ she said, punching me on the arm. ‘Carnally, I mean.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I like him, though.’

‘I bet you do,’ said Amy, although I didn’t yet understand what she was getting at. I was still at the stage when I thought Jay was just a good-looking guy, with a certain savoir faire beyond the ordinary.

Looking back, it is hard now to see how I remained dumb about his true identity for so long, but the name Fisher is just not that unusual. It’s not like Rockefeller, or Getty, or Onassis, or Rothschild, or Sultan of Brunei, or any of those names that instantly spell huge money. It’s just a general sort of name that lots of people have.

If I’d met somebody called Jay Turner, or Jay Gates, I wouldn’t have instantly presumed he was closely related to CNN, or Microsoft, so I just didn’t twig that someone called Fisher was necessarily part of the legendary American banking family with the equally famous art collection.

And I suppose I just didn’t pay enough attention to the gossip columns and trash mags either, or I would have had an idea who he was, as quickly as loathsome Laura had – i.e. the extremely eligible and cute bachelor and major heir to the family fortune, who had been linked to so many beautiful women.

Speculation about his future wife was not quite as hot as it was for, say, Prince William, or Albert of Monaco, but he was somewhere up there, as I later discovered.

The fact was, even though I was a fluff correspondent and had to keep abreast of fashion and celebrity red-carpet gowns and stuff like that, the first part of the paper I turned to every morning was still foreign news. That was what really fascinated me.

When I was alone in a hotel room, it was CNN I turned on, not E!, let alone Fashion TV. As I’d told Jay, that was why I had become a journalist in the first place – hard news, world events – and even if I had ended up writing about haute couture, rather than coups d’état, my interest in current affairs hadn’t waned.

And in all honesty, I actively avoided reading things like celebrity magazines, as they were too much of a reminder that I had strayed so far from my original career intentions.

I would mug up enthusiastically on interviews with the CEO of Louis Vuitton in the Financial Times, or analysis of trends in the luxury market in The Economist, but articles about film stars’ facelifts in the trash weeklies, and even the tabloid gossip columns, were more than I could bear.

But it was a while yet before the full wisdom of journalists reading broadly around their subject, as I had been encouraged to do since my earliest days as a graduate trainee on the paper, would really come home to me.

As I stood chatting to Amy, on that sunny Riviera terrace, a warm buzz still between my legs from the long ride on the Vespa the night before – and what came after – I was still blissfully unaware of the shark-infested waters I was swimming into.

‘I’m sorry we abandoned you last night, Amy,’ I said. ‘Jay just wanted to escape from “Jerry”… She wants his bones badly.’

‘I’m sure she does,’ said Amy. ‘Don’t worry about it. I was fine. I found your note, pulled Spotter off the dance floor and made him come back in the limo with me. Had to beat him around the head a bit and remind him I’m a happily married mother of two, but it was a good night, wasn’t it? Wonder if Jerry will recognize us at the press conference this afternoon?’

She didn’t appear to, when she was introduced to us later, after keeping us waiting a full two hours before making her entrance.

When she finally showed up, it was hard to see what had taken so long. Her hair was pulled back into a simple chignon and she was wearing a black cocktail dress of Audrey Hepburn simplicity, the better to show off her hideously flashy jewellery – which was even worse than we had braced ourselves for. It was amazing really, how she had managed to make things that were so expensive look so cheap.

While she clearly didn’t recognize me and Amy, she certainly paid us more attention than she had the night before, when we had been just irritating detritus around Jay.

Now in her full professional megastar mode – and with us in the role of temporarily useful journalists – she treated us to the ultra-wide, blinding smile we knew so well from music videos and movie posters, and even a modicum of eye contact.

But while she started off happily enough, as a woman from the US edition of Glow magazine asked her some astonishingly inane and sycophantic questions about the ‘philosophy of the range’ and ‘her deep personal connection with the gemstones’, I could see her mood start to darken.

She sighed her way through the rest of our questions, which were clearly not craven enough for her, getting visibly more restive – unless the queries were brazenly flattering.

Then, when I asked her – reasonably enough, I thought – if she was aware of ‘the startling similarity between her diamond heart pendants and the famous heart design by Elsa Peretti for Tiffany…’, she finally blew.

She glared at me like some kind of terrifying gorgon and then, after slamming her water glass down on the table with a mighty crash, so that the contents spilled all over the microphone and everyone within range, she turned and hissed something at her personal publicist, before standing up, kicking her chair over and stalking out of the room.

I had never heard a door slammed so hard. Then she reopened it – glared directly at me – and slammed it again, so the room shook.

Amy and I turned and gaped at each other, bug-eyed. In all our years of diva press conferences, we’d never seen anything like it: true prima donna-ish behaviour, with an added frisson of violence.

There was a moment of stunned silence and then it was Amy who started the laughter – and to my great relief, everyone joined in. Even Tara.

‘Oh, you’ve done it now, Stella,’ she said, coming over and punching me playfully on the shoulder. ‘She’s probably gone up to get her Christian Louboutins. You do make me laugh, though. Always the one with the tricky questions. Why do you do it to yourself?’

‘I work for the Journal,’ I said, with complete sincerity. ‘It’s my job to ask the tricky questions. And her stupid pendants are identical to the Elsa Peretti ones – they’re a complete rip-off. Someone had to tell her. They’ll probably sue her.’

‘Do you know what, Stella?’ said Tara, lowering her voice confidentially. ‘I’ve been trying to tell her exactly that since the start of this bloody awful project – so thank you. Maybe she’ll listen now.’

After that, the whole launch fell to bits. I was up in my hotel room emailing my news story back to the office for the next day’s paper – a story which was much more interesting than it would have been, thanks to Miss Jericho’s outburst – when Tara called.

The formal dinner planned for that evening had been cancelled, she told me, and we were all being shipped home right away.

Suited me. When I’d got back to my room after the press conference, I’d found a note under the door from Jay, saying he’d had to leave and promising to contact me in London. Result.

Normally it wasn’t an issue. I never answered it, because I’d never have got any writing done if I had. It rang all day long, with people trying to persuade me to put their products on my pages, so I just ignored it and checked the messages twice daily.

Everyone I wanted to speak to had my mobile number, or my email address – everyone, that is, apart from Jay. So every call that came through that morning on my office phone was potentially him and I had to steel myself not to grab the receiver every time it rang, and to limit checking my messages to once every hour.

By twelve noon I’d checked them three times and there was nothing yet. Between that and having to think more about Jericho and her hideous jewellery, I was feeling a bit edgy – and the twenty-four hours at the Cap Mimosa were starting to seem like a dream.

I was almost tempted to email Amy to ask her if it had all really happened. Had I really met someone called Jay Fisher?

I was just about to go to the kitchen to make yet another cup of tea to try and clear my head when I saw a very large bunch of flowers coming towards me. Behind them was the mahogany-haired head of my least favourite colleague, the features editor, Jeanette Foster.

‘I found these in the delivery dock,’ she was saying, plonking the huge bouquet of beautiful pink roses rudely on my desk.

‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, my heart sinking. Jeanette took a dim view of Journal writers being sent flowers – or any other gifts – and as I got plenty of both, it was a source of friction between us. One of many.

I hoped if I didn’t say anything else she’d go away and I wouldn’t have to tell her who they were from, but she didn’t. She just stood there, glaring at me.

‘Well, who’s this bribe from then?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to look?’

I opened the card, but deliberately didn’t read what it said. I knew I couldn’t trust my face not to reveal anything if, maybe, possibly, they weren’t from a PR.

‘Oh, they’re from that young milliner I did the piece about last week,’ I lied, putting the card back into the envelope and throwing it into the bin. ‘How sweet of her. It was the first bit of editorial she’d ever had.’

My heart was pounding, as a result of what I’d really just read on that card, but I wasn’t going to share the secrets of my private life with Jeanette Foster. I stood up and reached for the flowers.

‘I’ll get Moira to send them to the women’s refuge,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said Jeanette. ‘But before you go, I want to talk to you about this bigger Jericho piece. Have you come up with an idea yet?’

Jeanette was always telling us how she liked her writers to generate our own ideas, because it ‘kept us active’. But I knew it was really because she was simply too arse-lazy and boring to come up with any ideas of her own. She was a great one for taking credit where it was not due.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I thought we could broaden it out into a look at the whole concept of celebrity brands. You know, Kylie’s undies, Liz Hurley’s bikinis, Madonna’s children’s books, Ρ Diddy’s fashion ranges, Victoria Beckham’s jeans and the like…’

Jeanette was smiling her anaconda smile. It was a good idea, she should have been smiling.

‘George Forman’s health grills…’ I added, for my own amusement.

‘Yes,’ said Jeanette. ‘I like that. Good photo possibilities, too. That’s good for the layout, lighten the page…’

She got a look in her eye that I knew was advance satisfaction at the prospect of presenting the idea as her own. And from that I surmised she was responding to an order from the editor-in-chief, to have more of the ‘quality fluff’, as he called what I did – hence my office nickname – to lighten that week’s papers, which were looking a bit ‘bum heavy’.

Those were just a couple of characteristic phrases from our editor, Duncan McDonagh – or Doughnut, as we all called him for obvious reasons, although not to his face. Doughnut was a classic Glaswegian short-arse with an equally short temper, a huge personality, a massive ego and a seriously oversized intellect. You didn’t mess with him.

A lot of people on the paper hated Doughnut, or were – like Jeanette – just plain terrified of him, but I understood men like him. I suppose they seemed normal to me. My beloved Ham was no slouch in the monster ego area himself.

And if you worked hard and were passionate about your area, Doughnut would treat you with respect. More than once I had come back to my desk to find a bottle of champagne on it and a note saying he’d liked something I’d written. Probably one of the reasons Jeanette liked to give me a hard time.

‘OΚ, I’ll leave you to get on with it then,’ she said, walking off with her usual lack of charm, then pausing to bark back at me over her shoulder. ‘I want it by Monday.’

I waited a full minute to be sure she had really gone, before I pulled the little white card that had come with the flowers – Moyses Stevens, nice – back out of the bin.

‘Call me… Soon,’ it read, followed by a mobile number and one kiss. No name, just the kiss, but I knew exactly who it was from.

I pondered for a moment how I felt about the presumption of him not putting his name and decided I liked it. It was thrillingly cocky. Then I considered the significance of the one kiss, as opposed to, say, three, or three hundred, and came to the same conclusion. He was clearly a very confident guy. I liked that.

I was just checking the back of the card in case it had more clues on it, when the neat little frame of my friend Tim appeared at my desk.

‘I saw Smiler bringing the flowers over,’ he said, sinking his face into the deep pink roses. ‘Want me to do a rescue mission on them?’

Tim and I had a system to save all the beautiful bouquets which Jeanette expected me to give away, outrageously in our opinion. He’d take them down to his – deliberately cultivated – pal in the delivery bay, on the pretence of having them sent on to a hospital, and then he’d take them home later. He lived quite near me in Westbourne Grove and we’d take turns who got to keep them.

‘These are really nice,’ he was saying. ‘Is that the card you’re holding?’

He reached over to take it.

‘Oy,’ I said, snatching it away. ‘That was addressed to me.’

‘Spoilsport,’ said Tim, but still he didn’t offer me any privacy, getting comfortable on the edge of my desk, with his unusually short arms tightly folded, his face pink and perky with excitement. ‘Go on, then, Princess Aurora, tell me. Which luxury brand are these from?’

I had to smile at him. Tim loved my world. It was one of the ironies of my life at the Journal; Tim had my job and I had his. This squitty little fellow – who adored luxury shopping with a fervour more normal in footballers’ wives and other B-list celebrities, whose every move he followed with glee in the weekly trash mags – was a real-life war correspondent. Award-winning.

He was just back from his most recent stint in Iraq. And the first thing he had wanted to know when he got off the plane home were the latest plot twists in Desperate Housewives.

‘Actually, Tim,’ I said, ‘these are personal. They’re from a boy I met the other night.’

‘Cute?’ he said.

‘Seriously cute,’ I said.

‘So you clearly haven’t done him yet, if he’s sending you flowers.’

‘You’ve got it,’ I said, laughing.

‘Mmmm, I’d like to hear more. Lunch?’ he said, making a gesture as though he was raising a glass of wine to his lips.

‘I can’t do lunch today,’ I said. ‘I have to finish this Jericho thing.’

‘Oh, my GOD,’ he said, his hands flying up to his face. ‘You went on that launch. I’d forgotten. What is she like? Nightmare? Fabulous? Did she hit anyone?’

‘Ubernightmare,’ I said. ‘Nearly hit me. Drink later? Email you at six?’

He nodded enthusiastically and bustled off to his desk, where a bullet which had been gouged out of his thigh in a field hospital in Afghanistan was suspended in perspex and mounted on a silver plinth, alongside a small forest of award statuettes. For a little fella, who had been the mercilessly bullied school swot, he was quite a guy.

Jack was my fallback guy. I didn’t have what you would call a boyfriend – I didn’t want one – but I did have men in my life. I had a little collection of them, to satisfy the various needs of a relatively young and healthy girl around town.

I had several pleasant, amusing and well-dressed chaps who were my human handbags for work events; one or two more intense ones I liked seeing movies, or exhibitions, with; and Tim, who was my work bestie. Jack supplied the sex side of things. That was the deal and we both respected it. We met for sex, nothing more, nothing less. It was great sex, but that was all it was.

I wasn’t particularly proud of the way I had met Jack, but I was happy with the way it had worked out. He’d stepped into my life one day, getting into my carriage when I was on the train going down to Ham’s country place, near Lewes.

It had been a couple of years earlier, when they still hadn’t quite phased out all the old commuter trains and there were still some running which had the separate First Class compartments. Jack had stepped into mine at London Bridge.

From the moment he got into that carriage I had felt like a tuning fork, there was such an instant sexual chemistry between us. He was a big, strong-looking guy. Broad shoulders, big hands, big legs and, I couldn’t help thinking, no doubt a great big… to match. And a very attractive face, in a slept-in kind of a way. But really, the most attractive thing about Jack, was his ease with himself.

He sat right opposite me in the empty carriage, his feet firmly planted in their dusty working boots, his knees wide apart. He owned the space he occupied in a very complete way. He grinned at me. I smiled back, I couldn’t help it.

‘That’s one of mine,’ he said, suddenly, jerking his head towards the window. I looked out. I had no idea what he meant.

‘The church there,’ he said. ‘The steeple. I’m a steeplejack and I did that one.’

‘It’s very high,’ I said.

He grinned at me. ‘I like a challenge,’ he said.

And that was it, we’d picked each other up. Like I say, I’m not proud of it and it’s not something I would recommend doing, but sometimes life just seems to offer things up in such a way that you have to take them.

Either way, that was the start of a very satisfactory arrangement between us, where I would ring him whenever I felt like what he had to offer and if we could meet we did. He never rang me.

We always met at a hotel, the same one, near Victoria Station, not sleazy, not smart, just faceless and anonymous, and if the staff there ever recognized me as I checked in and connected me with the big bloke in dusty jeans who would arrive not long after, they never showed it.

This was definitely a night to see Jack. It was the only thing that would stop me obsessing about Jay and possibly spending the evening trying to piece the jigsaw of that shredded card back together. He answered straightaway.

‘Jack?’ I said.

‘Allo, Posh Totty,’ he replied. That was his name for me. He didn’t know my real name and I didn’t know if Jack was really his. Considering his occupation, I strongly suspected it wasn’t.

‘Can you make it tonight?’

‘Sure can, Totty, darling. Six thirty suit ya?’

At five forty-five I sent a cowardly intraoffice email to Tim cancelling our drink date and promising to catch up with him the next day, then I raced out to get over to Victoria.

It was as good as always with Jack. Not much talking, down to business, great sex. And I fantasized about Jay all the way through it. By nine p.m., as I hailed a cab outside the hotel to take me home, I felt like I had the situation fully under control.

I was very much my father’s daughter.

It was actually the original stable that went with Ham’s very large house and I could get into his garden through a gate in the courtyard behind my place. It was the perfect arrangement. I was close to him, but there were three walls, a hedge and a stretch of lawn separating us.

When I needed solitude – which was often – I could always retreat into my little house. Hardly anyone ever came there, not my friends, certainly no boyfriends, or lovers, and not even Ham. When he’d given it to me, he’d said it was mine alone and he would always respect that, while I was always welcome in the big house.

So while I loved curling up in my own little world, happily reading in my big brass bed, or watching BBC World and the History Channel into the small hours, whenever I felt like a dose of family life, I would let myself through the gate, trot up the lawn and see what the latest generations of my half-siblings were up to.

The morning after I saw Jack, I woke up early – after a pleasantly dreamless night’s sleep – had a quick shower, threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and ran up through the garden gate.

I stood on the lawn outside the glass doors for a moment before any of them saw me, and took in the scene. It was a typical morning in my father’s house.

His youngest daughter, Daisy, who had recently turned three, was sitting on the kitchen table eating cereal dry, from the packet, wearing her Snow White outfit. As I watched she jumped off and pranced around the room a bit, waving a sparkly plastic magic wand. I could just make out the pink shape of Angelina Ballerina on the plasma TV screen on the wall.

Her mother, Chloe, Ham’s current wife, was standing at the steel counter in an old silk kimono, studying a book and yawning. Freddie and Marcus, the six- and seven-year-old boys from his previous marriage – born so close together due to a contraceptive miscalculation by their mother – were playing a video game, squashed together on one big armchair in a corner. And Venezia, the fourteen-year-old glamour queen from the marriage before that, was mixing up some potion in the blender.

Daisy saw me first and came racing to the door.

‘Stella, Stella, Stella,’ she cried, jumping up and down. ‘Look, Mummy! Look! It’s Stella. Pick me up, Stella. I want you.’

I picked her up, burying my face in her fluffy little blonde head and blowing raspberries. She giggled wildly.

She looked up into my face. ‘I like you, Stella,’ she said, nodding earnestly. I kissed her little pink lips and set her down on the floor again.

‘Show me your latest ballet steps,’ I said to her.

‘OK,’ she said and set off round the room twirling on fat little bare feet, while I went to say hello to the others.

I gave Chloe a kiss on the cheek.

‘I see your daughter is more gorgeous than ever,’ I said.

Chloe smiled sweetly at me.

‘She is rather adorable, isn’t she? Would you like some food? I’m making pancakes.’

I nodded enthusiastically. Chloe was a great cook – she wrote cookery books – but even apart from that obvious attraction, I really liked her. She was Ham’s best wife for ages, possibly ever, and I was always pleased to see her. OK, so it was a bit weird that she wasn’t much older than me – only about eight years – but we got on really well and I was long past the stage of resenting my stepmothers.

Fourteen-year-old Venezia was more of a piece of work, which wasn’t a surprise, when you knew her mum, who was really the only one of Ham’s wives who had ever been actively unpleasant to me.

Kristy, as her mother was called, was your actual full-on gold-digger. She’d been Ham’s mistress for years before she was his wife and Venezia had been born while Ham had still been married to the previous wife, Rose.

When Kristy did eventually get him to marry her, she deeply resented any of Ham’s other children having any claim on his resources whatsoever, and she was always doing things like trying to make him take me out of the private girls’ day school where I was in my last crucial year and so happy.

‘If she’s so brainy,’ she used to say, ‘why can’t she just go to a normal school? It’s my children who might need to have serious money spent on their education…’

Luckily for me, Ham had ignored her, but she used to take every opportunity to make me feel like I was only partly attached to the ‘real’ family. It was only Ham’s dogged loyalty to me which had got me through that difficult time.

It was after the hideous Kristy finally ran off with a richer man – her cosmetic dentist – that Ham had given me the mews house.

‘I just want you to know that you are a permanent fixture in this family,’ he had said. ‘Whoever else comes in or out of it…’

‘An oat and fruit face pack,’ she said, glancing up at me. ‘Want some? You look like shit.’

‘No, thank you, dearest half-sister,’ I said, pulling a face at her, as she bent back down over the blender. It was the kind of behaviour she brought out in me.

‘How’s Archie?’ I asked her, sitting on one of the high stools by the counter.

‘Boring, ugly, stupid, whingeing, just the usual,’ she said, without looking up. ‘And why should you care, anyway? He’s not your brother.’

She was right. Archie – or Archimedes, to give the poor bugger his full name – was Venezia’s sixteen-year-old half-brother by Kristy’s husband before Ham. So he wasn’t any kind of a relation to me, in actual fact, but I still really liked him.

I liked him a lot more than I liked her – my half-blood sister – and there was a connection between us, even if it wasn’t blood. I was still very fond of Archie, and I worried about him, because I knew he didn’t get on with Kristy’s new husband at all. Or with Kristy.

‘He’s my ex-stepbrother,’ I said. ‘And I still care about him. Give him my love, will you?’

She just snorted and walked out of the room with her blender of foul gloop. I rather hoped it would bring her out in a rash.

A journalist had once written that you could stand in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall with just Ham and feel it was crowded.

‘Mmmmmm, vittles,’ he was booming, as he strode down the hall. ‘I can smell vittles. A man needs his foooooood.’

I heard a loud thwack, followed by a squeal, which I strongly hoped was him whacking Venezia on her Dieseljeaned bottom, as she slouched past him.

‘Where are all my little ducklings?’ he said, as he entered the room, scooping up Daisy with one hand and throwing her over his shoulder, to her shrieks of delighted laughter. ‘Here’s one… Now let me see.’

He padded round the corner to where the boys were engrossed in their ghastly game and, ignoring their protests, kicked the console out of their hands and on to the floor.

‘Gotcha!’ he said, scooping them up like piglets, one under each arm, and with Daisy still clinging on to his shoulders, he turned towards the kitchen. When he saw me he dropped them all on the floor and strode over with open arms.

‘Duckling number one,’ he said and folded me into his cavernous embrace. He pulled away and had a good look at me. ‘You look OK,’ he said nodding. ‘You’ll do. Caught any fierce handbags lately?’

Before I could answer – he knew I’d rather be writing about terrorists than luxury brands – he had rounded the counter and was embracing Chloe from behind, with the lack of inhibition which I would never cease to find embarrassing, no matter how many wives he had.

‘Hmmmmmm,’ he was grunting, as he buried his face in her neck. I was glad I couldn’t see where his hands were. ‘Most excellent woman. And food as well, marvellous.’

With much booming and clapping from Ham, everyone – including Venezia, who had been summarily summoned back – sat down at the round dining table for breakfast.

Ham considered family meals the very bedrock of civilization and even Venezia knew she couldn’t challenge him on it, although her response to that was to sit through them silently and eat as little as possible.

‘So,’ said Ham, with his mouth full, ‘what’s the plan for this weekend? How many ducklings will be in residence with me at Willow Barn, Chloe darling?’

It was Friday morning and Ham always left for the country straight after lunch, alone in his car – an ancient Morgan, which frequently broke down – so he could ‘think’. It was Chloe’s responsibility, as current wife, to marshal the various brigades of offspring, either returning them to their other parent, or collecting others who were due to be with Ham for the weekend.

As there were different custody arrangements for them all, it kept life pretty interesting for Chloe, but with an excellent system of flow charts on the kitchen wall, she coped.

It was these kind of expectations – and this was just one of many – which had eventually frightened most of Ham’s other wives away, as they grew to understand the full extent of his charismatic selfishness, but Chloe, who came from a big family with a tyrannical father of her own, seemed to thrive on it.

Ham’s previous wife, Nicola, was a high-flying publishing executive, but after producing two boys in such quick succession, she just couldn’t cope with them, the job and Ham’s demands, and had fled.

But apart from her cookery books and occasional contributions to magazines, Chloe devoted her entire life to Ham and his extended family, and it seemed to work for them both.

It certainly kept her skinny – I had never seen her sit through a full meal without getting up since she had arrived in our lives – which was another important factor in the stability of the marriage. If a woman showed any signs of letting herself go in the figure department, Ham would immediately lose interest. He’s a total bastard, as he is the first to admit, just a very lovable one.

As usual, that morning, after just a couple of mouthfuls of pancake, Chloe got up from the breakfast table to consult the chart she had made on a magnetic whiteboard, with coloured pieces representing each child. Ham immediately helped himself to what was left on her plate.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s quite an interesting one this weekend. Obviously Daisy is with us. The boys are going back to Nicola, who will send the au pair to pick them up from school. Venezia is coming with us and she wants to bring her friend, Chanel… and Kristy has asked if we could possibly have Archie as well, this weekend, as she’s just got to go to Paris…’

‘Selfish bitch,’ said Ham. ‘Of course, we’ll have him and ghastly Chanel. That it?’

‘No,’ continued Chloe. ‘Toby and Tabitha want to come down, even though it’s strictly a Rose weekend, because they missed out on their last visit because of her birthday, and Alex has offered to drive them. Is that OK?’

‘Marvellous,’ said Ham. ‘The more the better, and Alex is a great chap, I’d like to see him. Haven’t seen him for ages.’

He paused for a moment, chewing thoughtfully, then he looked at me.

‘Why don’t you come down too, Stella?’ he said. ‘You haven’t been for a while. And you used to be quite close to Alex, didn’t you?’

I nodded, suddenly a little uncomfortable. Alex was the eldest son of Ham’s third wife, Rose. He’d come with her as part of the deal, along with two siblings, when she’d married Ham. I was embarrassed because I’d had the most monstrous crush on him, which had started the moment he’d arrived in our household, building to a crescendo when I was about thirteen.

There was nothing wrong with it – we weren’t related, strictly speaking – but it was still a bit cringe-making for the whole family. Particularly as it had been obvious that he had never felt the same about me.

Mind you, perhaps it wasn’t surprising I had been a bit overwhelmed by the situation. My mother had left before I was one, and Ham didn’t have any children with his second wife, Margot, so I’d been an only child until I was eight.

Then, suddenly, I’d had three glamorous older siblings all of my own, the oldest of them the amazingly handsome and dashing – it had seemed to me – Alex, then aged fourteen.

He had been a rower in his first year at Radley when he arrived in my life, with broad shoulders, a strong jaw and pink cheeks; the whole package. I was immediately smitten and he had to put up with me following him around like a little puppy every school holidays, until the years passed and he’d grown up and gone off to Cambridge and could escape me.

I’d run into him at parties over the years, but not for a while. I was a bit nervous at the idea of seeing him, really, but at the same time, with so many of us there, it would be good fun. And, I thought simultaneously, it would stop me thinking about Jay.

‘I’d love to, Ham,’ I said. ‘Is that all right, Chloe?’

She gave me a big thumbs up and added another coloured piece to her whiteboard. Yellow, that was my colour.

3