Friends and Rivals

Kendall looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know. Thanks for the offer, but I wouldn’t want to impose on your family time. Besides, I’m not exactly what you’d call a country girl. I’m high maintenance.’

Ivan raised his glass to hers. ‘So am I, my dear. So am I.’

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Oh Jesus. I can’t go out there. Seriously, I can’t.’

Kendall hovered backstage at the Hammersmith Apollo, holding Ivan’s hand so tightly she’d cut off the circulation to his fingers.

‘The place is half empty. No one knows who the fuck I am over here.’

It was strange, but for some reason the smattering of vacant seats made Kendall feel infinitely more nervous than the packed stadiums she was used to back in the US. Having ten thousand people watching you was like being alone. With that size of audience, and the stage lights blinding you, there were no individuals to worry about, just a screaming, adulatory wall of noise. Here, in this gloriously old-fashioned 1930s theatre, you could look out from backstage and see individual faces. A middle-aged woman here, a pair of teenage boys there. Real people, who’d paid real money to hear you sing. It was terrifying.

‘Everyone knows who you are,’ Ivan reassured her, not entirely truthfully. ‘And remember, you’re here to support Adele. You think people don’t know who she is?’

‘I guess not,’ said Kendall through chattering teeth.

‘Exactly. The venue’s sold out, with a line outside as long as your arm. It’s only ten to eight. Trust me, there’ll be no empty seats by the time they call you.’

He’s right, Kendall told herself. Calm down. Pacing up and down in a skintight PVC leotard and thigh-high silver boots, a tribute to the great Ziggy Stardust, who’d performed his final concert at the Apollo back in 1973, she knew she looked the part. Adele might be a mega-star with the best voice since Aretha, but no one nailed superstar raunch like Kendall Bryce. If Jack were here he’d have expressly forbidden her outfit. ‘Don’t cheapen yourself,’ was one of his favourite catchphrases. ‘You don’t have to dress like a hooker, or a poor man’s Britney, to get people to buy your records.’ But Jack, thankfully, wasn’t here. While it was true her profile was lower in the UK, the purpose of tonight’s concert was to raise it. She wasn’t going to do that by dressing like Karenfrikking Carpenter.

Suddenly the lights dimmed and the low bass boom boom boom of Kendall’s backing track began to thump around the auditorium. Ten minutes had passed already? How was that possible? She turned around to look for Ivan but he was gone. In his place were two distracted-looking sound-check guys and the four male backing dancers Kendall had been rehearsing with all week. All of them looked white as sheets, but ironically their nerves calmed Kendall’s own.

‘Smile, guys,’ she said confidently. ‘We’re gonna have fun out there, right? Right? Because if we don’t, nobody else will.’

The curtains lifted. There were a few whistles and whoops from the audience as, still in pitch darkness, Kendall and her dancers took their places. Kendall just had time to tap her headset and nod curtly to the sound engineers that her mic was working properly when the lights exploded into life and the track to ‘Shake It Loose’, her biggest hit to date, erupted into the theatre to wild shrieks of applause.

After that it was easy. Leaping and gyrating her way through three tracks straight, belting out the lyrics that were as familiar to her now as breathing, Kendall drank in the high of the crowd’s approval like a drug addict plunging the needle into her vein. Watching from backstage, Ivan was entranced. She was a different person onstage, radiating energy and excitement and joy like a one-woman power plant. The music was unremarkable – basic, hip-hoppy, commercial pop of the sort that hundreds of young artists were churning out all over the world. But in live performance, Kendall took it and transformed it into something unique. Her voice, her body, her angel’s face, but most of all her stage presence, screamed one thing and one thing only: star. No wonder Jack was so focused on her as a client. Managing her must be like trying to hold a flame in your hand.

‘Good evening, London!’ Kendall shouted hoarsely after the third track, leaning on her mic stand for support and swigging from a water bottle. ‘I gotta tell you, it is wild to be here.’

The audience cheered and wolf-whistled loudly, although at this point Ivan suspected that they would have applauded the shipping forecast if it had come out of Kendall’s ridiculously sexy, rosebud mouth.

‘I know you’re all here to see Adele.’ More applause. ‘So I won’t keep you in suspense too much longer. But I’m gonna perform one more track. It’s from my last album, and some of you may know it. It’s a little song called “Whipped”.’

The most explicit track she had yet released, ‘Whipped’ was famous largely due to the fact that it had been banned from the airwaves in a number of US states due to its risqué lyrics. In her live routine, Kendall and her dancers hammed up the ‘naughty’ element, with Kendall at one point engaging in a simulated orgy with all four of her leather-clad boys. Yes, it was cheesy, but it was also sexy as all hell. The audience lapped it up like cats in a room full of cream. Even Ivan got a hard-on watching her. When Kendall finally bounced backstage, her faced flushed with adrenaline and triumph and her hair tangled wildly down her sweat-soaked back, it was all he could do not to jump on her then and there.

‘What’d you think?’ she panted, her green eyes gazing up into his, searching for approval. ‘It was good, right? They liked me?’

‘They loved you,’ said Ivan truthfully. Pulling her into a bear hug, he started to laugh. ‘Poor old Adele. Talk about upstaging the star! I’ll bet her people are spitting blood right now.’

Despite herself, Kendall grinned. ‘D’you really think so?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Jack would have hated all the sexual stuff,’ said Kendall. ‘But I think it worked, don’t you?’

‘Everything worked,’ said Ivan. ‘And if Jack can’t see that, he’s an idiot.’

He’s an idiot anyway, for leaving you here with me.

Tonight confirmed what Ivan Charles already suspected. Kendall Bryce was more than just a pretty face. The girl had something very, very special. Something Ivan wanted, very, very badly.

Boy was he looking forward to this weekend.

‘I don’t understand it.’ Ned Williams ran a hand through his floppy brown hair and sighed. ‘How can she prefer that tosser to me? The new bloody Pavarotti indeed! Just because he’s fat. Badger can do a better Don Giovanni, can’t you boy?’

The scruffy springer spaniel thumped his tail loyally on The Rookery kitchen floor.

‘Armando bloody Lucci, I ask you, Cat. He’s a lard-arse, he’s boring and he’s as old as the hills.’

‘He’s forty, Ned.’

‘Exactly. What on earth does Diana see in him?’

‘Erm, well …’ Catriona was too kind to say that perhaps Diana Grainger, Ned’s ex, saw a private jet, an exquisite palazzo in Tuscany and a Tiffany diamond the size of a cobnut on her finger. Whereas Ned’s idea of a romantic gesture was a day spent in the woods gathering actual cobnuts. Catriona had never much liked Diana. She was very beautiful, of course, but she’d always seemed to be on the lookout for what Jack Messenger referred to as a BBD – Bigger Better Deal. Apparently, in Armando Lucci, the biggest-selling tenor in the world, she’d found it. ‘I expect she just wasn’t ready to settle down, darling. She’s only twenty-two, after all.’

Ned nodded glumly, helping himself to another industrial-sized slab of Catriona’s home-made fruit cake. A broken heart did not appear to have put him off his food.

Only twenty-four himself, Ned Williams was another of Ivan’s clients, one of the few who lived locally. An immensely talented tenor, Ned was still in the early stages of a promising career. He was already well known in England as a pretender to Alfie Boe’s crown, and his debut CD had peaked at a respectable number six in the UK classical charts. But he was not yet in Armando Lucci’s league. So far his modest success had afforded him a charming but distinctly tumbledown cottage in Swinbrook, a battered old MG sports car that was older than he was, and Badger, his wildly unkempt and poorly trained springer spaniel, which accompanied him absolutely everywhere. Handsome in a dishevelled sort of way, Ned’s most striking feature was his height. At almost six foot five, he towered above other opera singers, and never seemed to quite know what to do with his ridiculously long limbs on stage – or anywhere else for that matter. Catriona adored him, but even she could have done without playing agony aunt this afternoon.

It had been a long day. Starting at eight o’clock this morning, when Rosie had announced she didn’t feel very well then, seconds later, projectile-vomited Frosties right across the breakfast table, Catriona had been fighting one fire after another. In between frantic trips to the doctor’s surgery in Burford and Waitrose in Witney, she’d been called in to Hector’s school for the second time in a month after he’d super-glued a sleeping classmate’s hair to his desk and the boy had ended up having to have a crew cut.

‘Why do you do these things?’ an exasperated Catriona asked her son on the short drive home. ‘Do you want to get kicked out of St Austin’s?’

‘Wouldn’t mind,’ Hector shrugged. ‘Have you told Dad?’

‘Not yet.’

Catriona couldn’t tell if Hector wanted Ivan to know, or dreaded it. Certainly his attention-seeking antics seemed to be aimed more at his father than at her. Now that Ivan spent so much time away in London, and increasingly took work calls and meetings even when he was home, he had less time than ever for the children. Rosie, at nearly thirteen, had bigger fish to fry than hanging out with her old man. But eleven-year-old Hector clearly missed his dad. Ivan knew it, and felt guilty, but as a result both he and Catriona were loath to punish the boy, and the bad behaviour got worse. This weekend, Ivan had absolutely promised to take Hector fishing, and assured Cat that he wouldn’t pick up his BlackBerry or see a single work-related person for two whole days. But at two o’clock this afternoon, he’d blithely rung home to announce that he was bringing Kendall Bryce, Jack’s problem client, back with him, and could Catriona please make up the blue bedroom?

‘You arse!’ she shouted at him, losing her rarely seen temper. ‘You promised Hector it would be just the two of you.’

‘Oh, Hector won’t mind,’ breezed Ivan. To his astonishment, Catriona hung up on him. Then Ned had arrived, slump-shouldered and morose, and before Cat knew it was six o’clock, she hadn’t even begun making supper, and the blue bedroom remained as sheet-less and towel-less as it had been four hours ago.

‘Can I stay for supper?’ asked Ned, through a shower of cake crumbs. ‘I can’t face going back to the cottage on my own. All Diana’s horrible vegan food’s still in the fridge.’

‘Well throw it out,’ said Catriona, ‘and of course you can stay for supper, as long as you help me make it. Ivan’s bringing someone up from London with him so we’ll be six with the children. Do you know how to stuff a chicken?’

In the end, inevitably, Friday-night traffic on the M40 was grizzly and Ivan and Kendall were more than an hour late. By the time they staggered through the door at nine, Catriona and Ned had already polished off a bottle of Montepulciano and ‘tested’a good half of the roast potatoes. Rosie – who’d made a miraculous recovery once she heard Ned’s voice in the kitchen – and Hector had both decided they were too hungry to wait, and had polished off a family pack of Hula Hoops in front of The Simpsons. Despite the beautifully laid table and enticing smell of rosemary chicken wafting down the hall, the overall atmosphere that met Ivan and his young VIP guest was one of semi-drunken chaos.

‘Oh, there you are,’ Catriona giggled, tripping over a snoring Badger as she came out to greet them. ‘We’d almost given up hope. You must be Kendall. Welcome.’

‘Thanks for having me.’ Kendall smiled sweetly. ‘I’m sorry to gate-crash your weekend like this.’

‘Not at all, we’re thrilled you could come. I hear your concert was a huge success.’

Kendall smiled, gratified. ‘Thanks. I’m relieved it’s over, but I actually really enjoyed it. Ivan’s been so supportive.’