‘I’ll be there tomorrow. I’m keen to see Mum.’ Her voice is artificially bright and she darts her head around, but Jackson’s larking around with Rollo and Di’s scanning the room.
‘Of course. See you then, perhaps. Good luck out there.’ I jerk my head towards the doors.
‘Thanks.’ She throws me a weak smile and pulls the brim of her huge hat further over her face before grabbing Rollo and Serena by the hand. She’s reapplied her scarlet lipstick on the flight, and her floaty white sundress is pristine. She’s a knockout. A creature from another world. And in this moment, as she prepares to face paparazzi mayhem with her beyond-famous husband standing next to her, I feel as far away from her as I could possibly be.
That feeling intensifies as their little entourage heads for the doors, and as they walk through them, camera flashes and shouts assault them. It’s feeding time at the fucking zoo, and they’re the prey. I keep a safe distance and walk out behind them.
The press is a solid, writhing bank, and the noise is deafening.
Jackson! Over ‘ere, mate!
Where’s your girlfriend, eh? Where’s Leila? She on holiday too?
You ‘ave a nice trip, Honor? Where you been, then? Family holiday, was it? France? Nice.
Like your dress. Nice ‘at, Honor.
Jackson, you playing the family man this week?
Honor, what d’you make of the rumours of your husband and Leila?
Jackson’s bodyguard leads the way, and Di brings up the rear. They should use those trolleys as battering rams. They could do some serious damage with that many cases. Honor holds her children by the hand, her head dipped. Hopefully, the brim of her hat is affording her some privacy.
I can’t believe these cretins are yelling this kind of stuff at them in front of their children. How anyone can actively seek out this level of fame and media intrusion is beyond me. How Honor can tolerate this in the name of building her family’s brand is a fucking mystery. Not tolerate: cultivate. It’s beyond comprehension.
The paps peel away from the Arrivals doors to pursue their targets and I duck gratefully away towards the anonymity of the lifts to the Underground.
CHAPTER 21
Honor
The airport was a shit-show. Over the years, I’ve acclimatised to the intrusion of the paparazzi, but I dread them most when the press has a particularly juicy scandal to hold over us. And given our success at keeping most of Jackson’s sex life definitively out of the public domain, this scandal is journalistic crack.
Those guys shouted questions at us that my children should not hear. Dickheads. They went over Rollo’s head, to a certain extent, but Serena was upset in the car, and Jackson had to explain to her that the press was once again making up silly stories about his work to sell newspapers.
She seemed to have bought it for now, but she was extra clingy to both of us yesterday evening. Poor little thing. Allowing the press access to a carefully curated edit of our family life is one thing, but exposing Serena and Rollo to that kind of highly stressful, conflict-ridden situation is the part of our fame I wrestle with the most. It’s at times like this that the sensation of having made a Faustian pact haunts me.
Worse, I couldn’t help but see the whole farce unfold through Noah’s eyes yesterday. He’s a normal guy—overachieving, but normal—for whom a charade like that at the airport is just insane. It must have felt to him like travelling with a circus. He’s obviously fully aware of our level of fame, and of the downsides of his getting involved with someone whose personal life is apparently fair game for the public. But I can’t help but worry that having a front-row seat to how events played out yesterday will have been a massive turnoff for him.
I respond, as always, by overzealously tackling the things I can control. I’m up at five-thirty the following morning to work off my French carb consumption in our basement gym. Rider, my ex-military PT, subjects me to a punishing routine of combat HIIT which leaves me collapsed on my gym mat, begging for mercy.
Next, it’s a shower and blow-dry before I pack on as many hydrating and resurfacing treatments as I think my skin can take. The flight and the wine consumption of the past few days have taken their toll—my skin is patchier and less plump than normal. Two years ago, Honor Chapman Cosmetics expanded into Honor Chapman Skincare, and this is the area that really fascinates me.
My love of cosmetics was born out of years learning at the hands of makeup artists when I was on TV, but makeup is the ultimate example of managing symptoms, not causation. Yes, it’s fun to play and to change up my look—I adore makeup—but the more success a woman has treating the underlying condition of her skin, the less makeup she’ll need.
My skincare range is based on the concept of modular building blocks that help women (and the growing number of men who use them) feel confident enough to reduce the amount of makeup they “need” as a crutch to leave the house each day. It’s growing far faster than our cosmetics line, and it could even be a candidate for a spin-off at some point. A dedicatedmen’s skincare line is also in the works—with Jackson as the proposed face of the brand, naturally.
I sit at the kitchen island and work away as Carmen processes the kids for camp, my various facial acids working away equally hard before I put my clothes and makeup on.
Because today, I’m going to need whatever tools are at my disposal.
Today, I need to remind Noah why I’m worth every second of the hassle of sneaking around with someone who’s deemed public property.
Today, I’m going to give him the Honor Chapman of his med school crush.
I can’t waitto see him. It’s ridiculous, and immature, and enormous fun to be sitting in the car as it edges towards Notting Hill. That stomach-churning mix of excitement and lust and will-he-won’t-he is so high-school, and yet that’s exactly how I feel.
Last night, I lay in bed next to Jackson and replayed every heady, decadent moment from the south of France. Chateau des Anges is now burnt on my brain as the backdrop for the most magical thing to have happened to me in years. I arrived there exhausted and under attack, and I left wrapped in the cloak of my delicious secret: a beautiful, talented and thoroughly lovely man wanted me and was extremely skilled at showing me just how much. But since we parted ways in the shit-show that was Heathrow yesterday, I’ve begun to doubt myself. To doubt his commitment.
