Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (3 page)

“What’s she done?”

“It’s more like what she hasn’t done.” Victoria paused in stabbing the nib of the fountain pen she liked to use into the blotting pad, which Willow was pretty sure was at that moment a substitute for India’s lovely face. “Anyway, she’s coming in and I’m committed to treating her with kid gloves et cetera, so I think we’ll start with some lovely chocs, something that shows we really care about her, blah, blah, blah . . . okay?”

“Chocolate, okay, if you say so.” Willow started to get up, but Victoria stilled her with the flat of her hand.

“Willow, there is something else, um, something a little bit above the call of duty that I need to ask you, and when I say ask I mean tell.” Victoria’s brows furrowed about as much as the botox would allow, always an ominous sign.

Willow waited, patiently confident after five years with Victoria that her boss would come to the point eventually.

“If this had happened next year it wouldn’t have mattered, but she’s just starting to get in her stride. Now is the crucial time, the time when she’s really valuable. I’m this close to making me,
her,
some serious money and this business . . .” Victoria thumped her desk with her fist, making Willow start back in her chair. “Honestly, I don’t mean to sound harsh, but the silly thickheaded little bitch, you’d have thought that the amount of money her parents spent on educating her would have meant she had a bit more sense than the average fuckwit on the street.”

“You don’t sound harsh at all,” Willow told her mildly.

“She’s fucked up, Willow. She’s been having an affair with Hugh Cranmer, they’ve been screwing and now it’s all come out that he’s dropped her like a lead balloon and run back to his wife claiming he was seduced by a whore.”

“Hugh Cranmer!” Willow gasped. Hugh Cranmer, acting legend, his twenty-six-year marriage to his adorable wife often lauded as an example of how to be married. An adoring father of four, he was routinely referred to as a national treasure, and it was widely rumored that he was only a few short months away from being awarded a knighthood. Willow felt queasy. “But he’s old enough to be her father, he practically is . . . oh my God, doesn’t he play her father in this film?”

“Yes, darling.” Victoria’s face was immobile, which was the nearest she ever got to despair. “Quite. India is absolutely distraught, as you can imagine, heartbroken, devastated, all the misery words. But the worst of it is that the press are about to blow the story wide open. They’ve got photos, with more than a touch of nudity, and some phone recordings, sex talk, that sort of thing. They want her side and they’ve given us forty-eight hours to agree to an interview before it goes nuclear. Of course I’ve taken her off set, popped her into Blakes Hotel for a few days. They are very discreet there—that whole thing with me and that boy band went completely unnoticed—but she won’t even be able to stay there to hide once the story is out.”

“But if she gives an interview, tells her side of the story . . . ?”

“Oh, Will, have you learned nothing, mon petite amore? Of course I’m not going to let her give away her story for free to the blasted tabloid whore-mongers. No, I’m going to let them think that’s what we’ll do, to buy her some time, and then I’m going to tell them to fuck off and make her disappear until A, the shit’s died down, and B, I can make some real money selling her story to the kind of magazine that pays the big bucks.”

“Won’t that make things a bit harder on India?” Willow shifted in her seat. Sometimes Victoria’s ruthlessness unsettled even her.

“Darling, I’m not here to make her life easy, I’m here to make her famous and rich.” Victoria shrugged. “So when the story breaks on Sunday, she’ll be somewhere completely safe, where the press won’t find her.”

“Right, and you want me to find somewhere, a cottage maybe in the country? Ireland?” Willow was already mentally making a list.

“No, darling”—Victoria didn’t miss a beat—“I want you to keep her in your flat.”

“I beg your pardon?” Willow wanted to believe that she had misheard but she knew Victoria well enough to know she had not.

“You have it,” Victoria said. “Look, darling, I thought and thought about it for—well, a long enough time—to make a serious decision. You know what the paparazzi are like. When it becomes clear she’s not going to play ball, they’ll hunt her down. They won’t stop until they’ve got the woman who seduced Hugh Cranmer.” Victoria squared up her padded shoulders, lifting her chin a little. “I know I’m a monster, but I do care about the people who make me a lot of money, and India is one of them. And the thing is she can be a bit fragile. You know how creative people are, all manic-depressive and melodramatic. India went into months of decline over a bad review, so imagine how she will deal with heartbreak and infamy. Anyway, with her parents in Devon, I’m really in loco parentis, and I need to find a person, perhaps the only person who I can truly trust, to care for her.” Victoria pointed at Willow. “By which I mean you. So if you could just pop her in your spare room for a week or two and make sure she doesn’t top herself, that would be marvelous.”

Victoria’s smile was something to behold, something rather similar to the grimace of one of the mummified Egyptians in the British Museum, deathly and utterly lacking in warmth.
Willow wouldn’t have been surprised if her face had actually creaked when she snapped the smile off again as quickly as she’d conjured it up.

“Victoria,” Willow said quietly and calmly, standing up to make her point. “I am not moving India Torrance into my flat. This is worse than when you made me buy drugs for Simeon Burton. Have you any idea what it’s like for a middle-aged woman in a trouser suit to turn up at an illegal drug den at three a.m.?”

“Yes,” Victoria said with some conviction. “And you are not middle-aged until you’re fifty these days, darling. Everyone knows that, it was in the
Daily Mail,
fifty is the new forty, which makes me about thirty.”

“In dog years, maybe,” Willow muttered under her breath. “Look, you’re putting me on suicide watch with a world-famous woman in my Wood Green flat . . . does anything about that make any sense? Why don’t you just rent a flat or something? Get her a caregiver?”

“Willow, you know the sort of person I am.” Victoria gestured regally. “I’m kind. I’m a kind person, which is why I’m asking
you
to keep an eye on India. You don’t want to be responsible for the poor girl slitting her wrists, do you? I wouldn’t want you to have that on your conscience.”

“Me!” Willow fumed impotently.

“Darling, just do this for me. As your boss, I mean friend . . . okay, boss. Look at everything I’ve done for you. I’ve . . . well, I pay you quite well, considering. You’ll have the weekend to prepare for her, tidy up, fumigate. And in a shake of a lambkin’s tail I will have turned the whole situation around to our advantage, washed up that bastard Hugh Cranmer for good and made us all a lot of money. Well, not you, to be fair, but you never know, perhaps I’ll pop a bit extra in your Christmas bonus. Yes?”

Willow dropped her chin and looked at the pointed toes of her shoes. It was fair to say that there had been plenty of ups and downs in her life, to put it mildly. But on the whole working for Victoria Kincade had been one of the ups. Yes, Victoria seemed to think that she owned Willow body and soul, which Willow suspected she might have signed over, along with her weekends and evenings, when she signed her contract in suspiciously red ink. But still, Victoria had been good to her and she not only didn’t mind Willow’s foibles, she seemed to actively like them. Besides, it was pointless fighting Victoria once she’d made her mind up. She was like the black death personified: there was no cure for her.

Willow relented. “Fine. Whatever you say—I’ll go out and get chocolate.”

“Thank you, darling.” Victoria didn’t sound nearly as grateful as Willow thought she should. “We’ll discuss the details along with India when she gets here.” Victoria tossed her a credit card. “Get yourself something while you’re at it. You know you want to.”

Chapter
           Two

T
hings weren’t so bad, Willow thought as she swung her bag onto her shoulder and headed out of the offices and onto Golden Square to take the short walk to Liberty’s. Over the last few years, Willow had come to realize, and mostly enjoy, the fact that working for Victoria was a bit like following a white rabbit into Wonderland on a daily basis, where it was sensible to always expect the unexpected, and beware the Red Queen. In fact, at that moment, the imminent arrival of India Torrance came pretty low down on her list of worries.

Willow was irritated that Victoria hadn’t given her time to think, but then that was Victoria: she didn’t like to give her people time to think in case they took it upon themselves to think that they didn’t like her plan for them at all and wanted to change their minds. Victoria wasn’t a fan of people who changed their minds. It was a trait in her boss that Willow had learned to adapt to early on in her career by ceasing to think unless Victoria expressly asked her to, and it was absolutely fine by her. Thinking, dwelling, wondering were all activities that Willow thought were exceptionally overrated.

No, it was not the prospect of having to play hostess to a cause célèbre that rattled Willow; after all, she worked in one of the world’s foremost talent agencies and part of her job
was to babysit people who either by accident, luck or (very occasionally) talent found that extreme fame had removed them from the rest of the population. Having India Torrance slumming it in her flat would be no different from the time Victoria made her go on a book-signing tour with a socialite who at the age of twenty-four had just finished the first installment of her autobiography. It had been one of Willow’s jobs to clear the toilets of any members of the public and to make sure there were no offending smells lingering by the time her client arrived. Then there had been the time Victoria had woken Willow up at four in the morning and sent her to Chelsea in a black cab to what could only be described as a brothel to pick out a suitable escort for a very shy married male film actor visiting from Hollywood. As Willow relayed the chosen girl (she had to be brunette, curvy and willing) back across London, she had been obliged to make her sign a series of watertight confidentiality agreements and, as Victoria had put it, mildly threaten her as to what would happen to her if she even thought about kissing and telling. Willow had felt sick to the pit of her stomach as she ushered the young woman past the hotel concierge and took her up to the actor’s room, fighting her disgust at what Victoria had asked her to do.

“Why do you do this?” she’d felt compelled to ask the girl, who couldn’t have been much more than twenty, shivering in a sequined shift dress that skimmed the tops of her thighs, as they stood in the lift. The girl shrugged as if she didn’t really know.

“The money’s good,” she told Willow with an absent smile.

“But doesn’t it make your flesh crawl?” Willow asked her, fascinated.

“It’s only sex,” the girl told her. “It’s no big deal. And sometimes something cool happens, like you get to fuck a film star.”

“That’s nice,” Willow had said. She sort of understood, and
there was a little part of her that was jealous of the bravado the girl displayed, of the ease she seemed to have sharing something so intimate for money. Perhaps she really did mean it.

Still, Willow had felt no better as she stood on the other side of the locked door, making some final arrangements with the star’s bodyguard before she finally went and found breakfast. It was the thought, just the thought that that young girl might not want to be there, that she might be frightened or alone or feel helpless or sick, that had made Willow, for the briefest of moments, think of going back through that door and rescuing her. But then she heard a peal of girlish laughter, like the tinkle of glass breaking, removed her hand from the door and left. Not everyone wanted to be rescued.

But there was something that gave Willow pause now, as she pushed open the beautiful oak doors and made her way into Liberty’s, stopping briefly to inhale the delicious scent of polished wood, perfume and chocolate. It was the knowledge that she’d have someone else, another person, staying in her home. Willow did not like people. Perhaps that wasn’t exactly true, she loved some people—approximately four if she were honest—although she’d only openly admit to three of those. She felt obliged to stay in touch with her mother, whom she had not gotten along with in years, and she had a deep respect and affection for the largely terrible human being who was her boss. She enjoyed a friendly relationship with most of her colleagues, was always extremely personable with clients, no matter their foibles or tics, and got on perfectly well with the friends of her one friend away from work. But on the whole Willow did not like people, and she especially didn’t like them too close to her, in her house, using her bathroom—quite possibly for crying and perhaps even slitting their wrists. The only person she’d ever been able to successfully live with was Holly, and she’d always known she’d lose Holly one day. Since
her divorce, Willow liked to be herself in her own home. It was one of the few places where she could really relax, buy a KFC bargain bucket for dinner without anyone judging her, eat an entire box of Maltesers in an evening, sit about with her buttons undone, her bra slung over the back of the sofa and, most crucially of all, where she could breathe out. And then in again, and out again.