CHAPTER 1
Honor
Jackson’s cheating on me. Again.
And Mum is dying.
Though, to be fair to Mum, it’s the first time she’s pulled this stunt.
Unlike my A-list husband. He may be an action movie star, but cheating is his absolutefavouritestunt.
They’re just both such unbearable situations, and I don't have the energy to deal with either of them properly, let alone both of them simultaneously.
I’m already a mother of two (three, if you count my husband), CEO of a cosmetics brand that’s not far off unicorn status, if the next investment raise goes well, and half of one of the highest profile couples in the country.
Make that on both sides of the Atlantic.
And now I have to deal with fresh allegations—not allegations so much as compellingproof—of Jackson’s latest shenanigans, and at the same time I have to somehow shift all the above around to make room for the most important piece of the puzzle: that Mum has months, if not weeks, to live, and I have God knows how little time left to spend with her, andthat she’s deteriorating at a rate that’s alarming if not horrifying, and is going to need some kind of specialist care.
I don’t know what kind of care she needs, but I’ve a horrible feeling I’m going to get pretty well versed in the terrifying world of cancer and hospices and Macmillan nurses and palliative care quickly.
The only answer is to pull in serious reinforcements on both fronts. My sister Ally is already doing most of the heavy lifting where Mum is concerned, a fact that makes me feel sick with guilt, although Ally has more slack in her schedule than I do during the summer holidays.
With Jackson, I at least have professional help: our publicist, Mara, and our ‘fixer’, Alex. Alex is an odious human being who is revoltingly good at his job. Unfortunately, moral bankruptcy and performance do seem directly correlated in his chosen career.
While Alex is technicallyourfixer, he’s never had to fix anything for me.Nada. Happily for Alex’s wine cellar, Jackson’s antics keep him busy. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. I’ve had years to get used to it, after all.
We were married within a year of meeting, and Serena came along a year later, and Rollo two years after that. And the first year was an amazing adventure: heady and crazy and a media whirlwind. It felt like we were a travelling circus: The Jackson James and Honor Chapman Show. But with my first pregnancy came crushing fatigue and seemingly endless nausea, and despite being married to someone whom most red-blooded women would shag in a heartbeat, I did not want to have sex with my husband. Not often enough for his liking, in any case.
As soon as I had Serena, I felt enormous pressure to get my figure back. I’d quashed my nausea with far too many Mars Bars during my pregnancy. I’d quit morning TV when we got married—the wake-up times were too antisocial when marriedto someone as high-octane and sociable as Jackson. But in its stead I launched my own makeup line, Honor Chapman Cosmetics, and found myself juggling a workforce and factories and can’t-make-them-up production headaches. The combination of new motherhood and exhaustion and dieting and work was all-consuming, and there was nothing about that schedule that facilitated having sex as much as Jackson would like: ideally, daily.
The rumours started, small but insidious. I sometimes wondered if the tabloids had given Jackson the green light. His fidelity was constantly being questioned already; what was the point of him keeping it in his pants? Every model he air-kissed at a fashion show, every co-star he worked with: they were all fair game for the press (and, presumably, for Jackson). It caused fights and tears (at my end) and humiliation and millions of occurrences of the paparazzi ruining the few social events we attended together. But under the tears, I was horrified to feel a sort of quiet, guilty relief.
If Jackson really was finding a way to have his considerable needs met, it took the pressure off me. I could sit and rock Serena for longer in the nursing chair that I loved, in the cosy nursery that smelt of talcum powder and lavender and my exquisite baby daughter. I could get up early and do my bootcamp or work without having had to put out the previous night. It became an unspoken, shameful agreement between us.
Things came to a head when I had two kids under three and the business was really taking off and I was in demand as an entrepreneur, and I was so fucking exhausted all the time that my whole life was one enormous contraceptive. I loved him, and he was undeniably gorgeous. And if I had to have sex, I’d obviously want it to be with my husband, but I just didn’t need it more than once a week. Max.
So the rumours continued, and we danced this uneasy (and beyond weird) dance around each other, where we both pretended the tabloids weren’t full of speculation about who Jackson was fucking this week, until the wife of a premiership footballer pulled me aside at an event.
‘You need to decide,’ she told me, ‘whether you’re okay with him sleeping around or not. If you’re not, do something about it. If you are, you and Jackson need to take control of this narrative. Find agoodpublicist and get yourself someone who can do your dirty work for you—pay off the right people, make sure NDAs are signed. You know.’
I did not know, but the conversation, and the business card the woman pressed upon me, marked a turning point. Jackson and I had a frank conversation about what the negotiables and non-negotiables for each of us were in our marriage. It was teeth-grittingly tough, but less humiliating than a trip to a marriage counsellor.
The upshot was this: I didn’t want Jackson to be unhappy or unfulfilled. Neither did I want to have to put out practically every night. And above all, I didn’t want to be humiliated in the press for any reason pertaining to my marriage.
Jackson was clear that he loved me: he adored me. But he loved sex. He needed sex. And he was going to get it from somewhere. I was still the woman he adored, but I couldn’t give him the excitement and frisson that going on the prowl still gave him. And, if I was completely honest with myself, I couldn’t get as upset as I thought I might about the fact that my husband had transactional relations with other women. The relief that it wasn’t all on me was far too great.
The other truth we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to admit was this: as a brand, our family was in the ascendant. We were more valuable together than apart. The press loved us. And so began a new phase in our marriage, one delineated by careful boundaries at home, even stricter boundaries for Jackson’s ‘pastimes’, and a tightly defined, diplomatic relationshipwith the press, where access was offered and accepted in return for privacy in certain other matters. Super injunctions were rarely needed. The press learnt that to turn a blind eye on one front was to be richly rewarded by the James family on the other.
It all went pretty swimmingly until a couple of years ago, when Jackson pursued—and won over—Rollo’s teacher and got stupidly infatuated. Alex paid the girl off and we twisted the headmaster’s arm to fire her. I shuddered to think about how close I’d come to losing Jackson, tearing my family apart and devastating our brand.
Since then, things have calmed down. He’s been stateside a lot over the past few months, filming a US TV series about a veteran. Now filming has wrapped and he’s back in London, but the rumours that have surfaced about him and his gorgeous Iranian-American co-star were seeded in the US press, where we—and Alex—have less sway.
They’re persistent, and they’re worrying, and the paps are hounding us at home and even on the school run. And the worst thing about them is that I would put money on them being true. I have a hunch about this. Filming is so intense. He’s distant now he’s back, I can feel it.
And I have no idea what to do about it.
This shouldn’t even be on my mind. Mum is dying. Mum isdying. The diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer is less than a week old, and Mum and Ally and I are all reeling. It would be nice to think that Jackson’s a big boy and can look after himself, but history has taught me otherwise. Even so, I have to leave this to Mara to deal with. It’s far more urgent to find the right solution for Mum. Whatever the hell that is. Thank God I have a meeting with my girlfriends tonight. I’ve never needed a drink more badly.
