“Good lord—” She cuts off and forces out a cough as if choked by dust. “At least get your maid in here to hoover and run a rag over things.”
I stand to take the wine remnants to my open kitchen, setting the bottle in the bin and the jar in the sink. Shoving the wine-stained menu into a drawer, I lean against the counter and fold my arms. “Might I inquire as to the reason you’re gracing me with your presence, Mother? Just here to take the piss?”
“No, here to take your art,” she shoots back. “I want your Marguerite Horner. I’ve had my home office redone, and alittle black-and-white dash of drama would be perfect between the south-facing windows. Where is it?” She plants both hands on her hips and scans the room, then takes off for my bedroom when she doesn’t spot what she’s looking for.
“You can’t have that one,” I protest, following at her heels. “I love it. If you’re just trying to match a color scheme, can’t you move your Robert Longo?”
“Already thought of that, dearheart. It’s too big.” She finds the Marguerite Horner and stretches to pluck it off the wall with the brisk efficiency of a bird divesting a branch of its berries. “This will do.” Seeing my scowl, her own expression softens to a girlish pout. “You don’t truly mind, do you, Alekos?”
“You’ll wear me down anyway if I say no, so just have the damned thing.” I push my unkempt hair off my forehead. “Why give me any thought, beyond how I might be of use?”
She squints with amusement, passing me into the hallway. “Whoever’s made you melancholy,don’tbring her to the gala tomorrow. I don’t need you making a scene with some ill-mannered tart. We hardly need a repeat of what happened when you brought the last one to Glyndebourne.”
My stomach roils with a combination of sudden anxiety and empty-stomach cabernet. “The gala’s tomorrow?”
“Tsk!Of course you forgot. If you still had a PA, you’d have remembered. But you enrage the plain, sensible ones until they quit and fuck the pretty ones away.”
“I lack an assistant becauseyou fired me.”
She lifts a towel off the stack on my breakfast bar and wraps it around the artwork before reaching to grasp my chin and turn my head toward the window, inspecting mystubble-shadowed face. “Sort yourself out before tomorrow. You look like a drifter.”
“Surely you know better than to use terms like that, evenat your age.”
She gives a crooked smile and pats my cheek. “Nice try, love. But you’ll need sharper tools to wound me.” She adjusts the painting in her arms before rotating on one stilettoed heel and heading for the foyer. “Go to Guerlain and get a facial, for God’s sake,” she calls over her shoulder. “This will be the first time we’ve allowed so-called influencers at the publishing gala, and I need you in top form, seeing as you’re comfortable moving in that sphere.”
She dips her knees to reach the door knob, then descends my front walk with her sprightly steps clacking away, dying out as she ducks into a black Bentley Mulsanne held open by her long-suffering driver, Ismail. I give him a polite nod, and he nods back.
After closing my door, I peer at myself in the oval mirror beside the coatrack. I’m ghastly—a week of drink has done me no favors. I look like a child who’s smeared on Halloween makeup to appear as a cartoonish approximation of an old man. I try to brighten things with a smile, but it’s conspicuously half-hearted.
Possibly, I admit to myself,because theotherhalf is currently in Jeddah with Sage.
“I’d like a Macallan, please,” I say to the woman behind the bar. “And…?” My voice rises, stopping her as she reaches for the visible bottle of twelve-year.
She looks over her shoulder, stern and silent.
“Not that one,” I specify. “I know there’s a bottle of Macallan 30 hiding back there—Mother wouldn’t settle for anything else.” Seeing the skeptical downturn of the woman’s lips, I shoot a winning smile at her, smoothing a hand down my necktie. “Alexander Laskaris, pet. I’m approved for the good stuff. Now, do let me whet my parched nepo-baby whistle.”
Remaining wordless is one of her only weapons of revenge, and she wields it deftly. She levels a jigger with miserly precision and tips it into a glass—not a drop more than an ounce and a half—then slides it across the bar top.
I lift it and inhale the heady scent before taking a sip. Pulling a £50 note from an inside pocket, I drop it into her tip jar—a Lalique “Bacchantes” vase—as compensation for having to put up with me. I’m an annoying prat, but at least a self-aware one.
My mother wouldn’t suffer a DJ for this event, despite the recommendation by both myself and her assistant, Inez, that the annual gala drag itself into the modern age. A band plays at one end of the huge room, doing classical-sounding covers of current pop songs. Older guests won’t recognize the tunes (does the world need a cello-and-harp version of “Unholy”?); younger ones no doubt view it as corny.
I’m the heir to Laskaris Publications and will one day be at the helm of a global enterprise of—at current count—twenty-three magazines and newspapers. My father assumes I will perform adequately in this role owing to the possession of a Y chromosome and the family name. My mother is more realistic and has been, for the past decade, fortifying the businesswith an army of people who can field the tricky bits. She’s like the grim head of a medieval army, readying the castle for impending siege.
Both parents have asked me never to sell the business. I wish I could promise that, but I’m realistic about how media is evolving. If things look unprofitable when the somber day comes that I must steer Laskaris Publications, I will leap straight off like it’s a gut-shot horse, lest I be pinned beneath its fall.
Badrick has asserted—and I concede he’s not wrong—that part of the reason for me being an incompetence-feigning wastrel is to annihilate my parents’ confidence in me enough that they sell the business. I do live in fear of the eventual responsibility.
When I was at university, there was a time when my mother hoped I might marry the daughter of our company’s CFO and cement a union that would ensure a stable future for the Laskaris legacy. And I did fancy Leyla—we dated for three months. But the last time she directly spoke to me was when she stopped her car on the side of the road during a holiday in Cornwall and directed me to get the hell out, then threw my mobile out the window before screeching off.
At twenty, I already had a well-established pattern with women—lamentably so.
I move to one side of the bar and pull another woodsy-gingery sip of the scotch while my focus drifts across the crowd. I’m not insensible of my duty to chat up this year’s newest attendees and make them feel welcome and all that rubbish, but it would be easier if they were more interesting. To say thisisn’t the worst party I’ve attended lately is actually an insult; thetrulybad parties are far more amusing.
A slim form sidles up next to me in a floral cloud of Miss Dior. I angle my gaze to take in the dress and legs first: textured bronze silk cut well above the knees, perfect calves, and a pair of those dreadful chain-link heels that have for some bewildering reason become fashionable.
“I’ve been looking forward to cornering you,” the woman drawls, low and smoky.
