The Royal We (26 page)

T
he room reeked of booze and smoke and stale sweat. My mouth felt like I’d eaten a stick of paste, and tasted about as compelling. My head throbbed. My stomach churned. I was clammy and cold, which I quickly realized was because I was naked other than a sheet covering my ankles.

And some guy’s leg was thrown over mine.

His breathing was slow, heavy, rhythmic; whoever he was, he was asleep. I pried open my eyes and saw a very posh hotel room that a cyclone of hedonism had torn to bits. The carcasses of the minibar blanketed the floor alongside heavy glass ashtrays full of cigarette stubs and ashes. Clothes dangled from anything they could; a deck of cards lay scattered as if someone had hurled it up into the air. A trail of powder led to the suite’s second room, where I could see a slumbering couple I didn’t recognize. Carefully, so as not to stir him, I lifted my head and looked my mystery companion in the face.

It was Clive.

New Year’s Eve on Wayne Hanson’s island reawakened a sleeping beast in me that would have given my selective biographer Aurelia Maupassant a stroke. I flirted with inappropriate guys. I gave out absurd fake names like Picasso Von Trapp and lied elaborately about my job—neurosurgeon, buttock-implant technician, party planner—while wearing tight shirts and tighter skirts provided by Joss, who seemed to like me a whole lot more now that I was feeling, as Bea might’ve said, more experimental and psychotic. Clive’s new girlfriend, an old ex of Nick’s called Davinia Cathcart-Hanson, was generous with the perks of her father’s conglomerate and routinely booked us cheap airfare and gratis suites anywhere that had a warm beach, strong drinks, and a throng of people who either didn’t know who I was or didn’t care. And I went, again and again, to escape the memories that were boxed up in my Chelsea love nest along with a great deal of Nick’s stuff. Which apparently he didn’t want. He’d simply dropped away without so much as a note to tell me I should toss the chartreuse tie he left behind, which was a gift from the Queen, and which he hated. Of course, I hadn’t texted him either to return his cashmere sweater that I was still sleeping in, even though it didn’t even smell like him anymore.

Instead, we engaged in a screamingly immature game of cat and mouse. Photos of Nick and Gemma had given way to a mix of reports that he was exceedingly popular at the Royal Naval College, and grainy stills of him inside nightclubs, or leaving them, with a series of pretty women. I insisted I didn’t care, that it was all gossip for sport—and yet, when the paparazzi caught me bodysurfing in Portugal, the surf ripping off my ill-advised string bikini top, I didn’t hate the gloriously carefree shot of me that made the paper. Nor did I mind when the photographers found me in an even more tenuous Joss-designed bikini in Cinque Terre, the week after the press had hotly dissected snaps of Nick at an Eton friend’s wedding reception, his arm wrapped around a gorgeous brunette so that his hand appeared to rest on her breast. And when Nick’s ship docked in Majorca (the last phase of his Naval training) and the
Daily Mail
’s Xandra Deane reported he’d done body shots off a bevy of exotic beauties while shouting, “It’s good to be free,” I was particularly okay with the paparazzi catching me in Cannes perched on the lap of a hot young beefcake promoting his action flick
Venom Has a New Face
. None of it was choreographed—I hadn’t alerted the paps, and Marj would never sign off on Nick publicly licking tequila from a stranger’s clavicle—but it was definitely satisfying.

But once the pictures of me with the actor hit the Internet, the press decided I was a calculating fame addict, trading a future actual king for a future king of Hollywood (or any other title-adjacent guy who dared to be seen near me). In the following months, the paparazzi’s formerly genial tone became toxic: I can still describe with laser accuracy the carpet in Heathrow’s terminals, because of how often I hung my head and plowed over it while they took my picture and hissed things like, “Oi, nasty tart, look up,” and, “Where’s
this
weekend’s shag, you dirty bird?” There was even a new nickname: the Ivy League, a pun on Lacey’s and my Cornell educations and the fact that the press believed we were, in Xandra Deane’s words, “attractive, creeping, climbing, and pernicious,” like the vine itself. Lacey thought this was catchy, but I could hear Lady Bollocks’s voice in my head:
It’s not a compliment.

“Honey, don’t you think you should slow down?” Mom asked about six months into my bender, putting me on speakerphone. “All those trips. That actor. You’re looking peaky.”

“Never believe what you see in the papers, Mom.”

“I believe what I
hear
, which is that you’re exhausted and defensive,” Dad opined. “You’re never home. You’re always with strangers. What the heck are you doing over there?”

“Exactly what you told me to do,” I said. “Finding myself.”

“No,” he said. “All you found was another way to escape.”

The sadness in his voice filled up my chest and exploded in a way that did not look especially good on me.

“You wanted me to come back and stick it to them,” I said. “You told me to act like I don’t care. Mission accomplished.”

“You should still act like you care about
yourself
,” Mom said.

“Oh, please,” I snapped. “I’m just having fun. So is Lacey. Somehow I suspect you’re not calling to tell
her
she’s acting like a skank.”

“Young lady, I don’t care how screwed up you are right now, you will not speak to your mother that way,” Dad said. “We are worried, and we want better for you, and that is that.”

And he’d hung up; in a fit of pique, so had I.

Of all people, it was Freddie who came the closest to getting through to me. Lacey and I often ran into him at various clubs of Tony’s, where it was too loud to discuss anything but our drink orders, and I knew the two of them had stayed in more constant contact. But I was still surprised when, one Monday in August about two hours after I’d called in sick with another abysmal hangover, he showed up at my flat with a restorative bag of Cornish pasties.

“This is obviously a total nonsense suggestion,” he’d said, handing me a warm puff-pastry pocket. “But what if you tried
not
getting pissed off your tree all the time?”

I flopped back onto my sofa and took a bite. “This country’s best quality is its belief in butter,” I said, pastry debris shooting into the air like greasy snowflakes.

“And its worst quality is that its third in line to the throne will not be diverted from the topic at hand,” he said, pulling a newspaper from his bag and unfurling it with a flourish. The front page read
IVY LEAGUE VALEDICTORIAN?
, with five images—styled to look like they’d been torn from an album—of me dashing in or out of clubs, shaky and smeared.

“Hang on,” I said, sitting up and grabbing it from him. “Some of those are from the same night, and one is like two years old. They’re making it sound like I did all of this last
week
.”

“Clever, I know,” Freddie said, nonchalantly propping his feet up on my coffee table. “But you are going rather hard.”

“This from a guy who goes rather hard with a new girl every week, just to piss off his father,” I said. “At least I’m not dragging anyone else into this.”

“Touché,” Freddie said. “But all my relationships are mutually beneficial. Trust me, I haven’t broken a single heart in England.”

“If you say so. But you’ve never had yours broken, either, so you don’t get to tell me how to deal with it,” I said, heating up. “You and Nick have whatever fun you want. You don’t judge your own girlfriends for it. So you damn well don’t get to judge me.”

Freddie let that settle for a second. “I didn’t say I’ve never had my heart broken,” he said calmly. “And I didn’t tell you not to have fun. You’ve always been fun. Just not reckless.”

We chewed quietly until I couldn’t stand it anymore. “How is he?”

“Rather well,” Freddie said. “He’s started training as a warfare officer down near Portsmouth. It’s all weapons and navigation and whatnot. He’s chuffed.”

I’d seen pictures of the parade when Nick finally finished at the Naval College and became an officer. He’d been so hot in his gold-and-red-trimmed black uniform and white hat that I’d fallen into a box of wine and watched
Bridget Jones’s Diary
three times in a row.

“He’d want to know you’re getting on all right,” Freddie added gingerly.

I bristled. “If you’re just here to absolve his conscience or something—”

“Don’t be so testy, Killer,” he said, holding up a hand. “I’m here on my own behalf.”

“Good. Because I would love to tell you that I’m doing great,” I said. “I would love to tell you that I’m seeing someone awesome, and we’re allowed to touch in public, and I’ve never been happier. But it would be lies, and the only thing that helps is getting far away from Nick and pretending I’m Leona Da Vinci, who wears huge hats and doesn’t have any problems. And I’m going to keep doing it until
I
don’t have any problems.”

Freddie looked at me intently. Then he smiled. “I was Jock Weapon once at a hotel.”

“In more ways than one, I bet.”

He chuckled. “Well, Killer, this was a terrible talk,” he said, clapping his hands together and then standing up. “Just promise you won’t go completely ’round the bend. No face tattoos, no running off with a pool boy to Belize.”

“I’ll try, but Leona Da Vinci wants what she wants.”

He chewed on his lip, then added, “Maybe you and Knickers should just have tea and get it over with. Wouldn’t it be worse if you just bumped into him?”

“Probably,” I said. “But I’m not ready to see him, Freddie. Not yet.”

Turns out we were both right: It was way worse, and I wasn’t ready.

That particular drizzly, doomed Friday in mid-October was the red carpet opening of Joss’s new store on Kensington High Street. I’d worn a series of outrageous Soj bikinis in Cannes that had stirred up even more interest in her as a designer, so she and her walking midlife crisis of a business partner decided they should strike while the proverbial iron was still…if not hot, then at least plugged in, and so they rushed the shop and her clothing line to market. She’d invited socialites, pop stars, party reporters, and any of Tom Huntington-Jones’s crew who were still speaking to him—which, for the moment anyway, included his daughter Philippa, who’d recently begun seeing Gaz.

“This is nuts. Cilla is single. I would’ve thought you’d pounce,” I had said.

“Naw, after that smarmy tosser Tony,
any
old git looks good. I don’t want to be Cilla’s any-old-git,” Gaz said firmly. “She needs to realize I’m her destiny.”

“Or, you need to man up and show her,” I said. “She basically once told me to stop wasting time and lock down Nick before somebody else did. She was right. You should try it.”

I’d been anxious about the first real prospect of seeing Nick since the breakup, but Joss texted to say Nick had RSVP’d no. And so, emboldened, I dutifully opened the box containing the other source of my dread: the complimentary clothes Joss wanted her higher-profile guests to wear on the red carpet. Mine were a silky top that read
blouse
around the neck in silver-sequined letters, and white skinny jeans with a foot airbrushed on the ass like graffiti.

“It’s symbolic,” Joss had explained. “You’ve been kicked around, but you’re still standing.”

“It’s heinous,” Lacey had yelped when I walked out of my bedroom modeling the ensemble. “I assumed you were joking about wearing that. You just can’t. You cannot.”

“Joss is counting on me,” I said. “Think of it this way. She gets my loyalty, and you get to look a hundred times better than I do. I’m helping
two
people.”

Lacey downgraded her yelp to a whimper and fiddled with the sequins on my top, as if hoping to make them look less like letters. I did envy her chevron minidress, which she claimed was a sample she’d gotten from work, but which looked more like it came from Harvey Nichols. I suspected a lecture from Dad was coming about abusing her so-called emergency Amex.

“These past few months have been entertaining, and all, but real talk: At some point you need to dress like a rational adult who wants to attract a rational boyfriend,” Lacey finally said.

“But I
don’t
want that,” I said stubbornly. “I just had a boyfriend. Now I want to have irrational fun.”

“Okay, but if Nick starts dating someone first, you’ll wish you’d tried harder to replace him with someone real,” she said.

“Nick’s dating life isn’t my concern.”

Lacey actually laughed in my face, although not unkindly. “Every ex-girlfriend says that, and no ex-girlfriend ever means it.”

“You don’t care about Freddie and Petunia,” I pointed out.

“Persimmon,” Lacey corrected me. “And that’s different. I’ve technically never been his girlfriend.” She smiled. “The clock’s about run out on her, though, and the guy I’m seeing is dullsville, so the timing finally might be right pretty soon.”

She stopped. “Oh, shit. I hope you know I’m not—”

“I know,” I said. And I did. It was awkward that my brutal breakup was a romantic opportunity for my twin, but she’d stepped back when I’d asked, and now it was my turn.

Lacey hugged me. “Let’s just try and enjoy having the Ivy League back on the prowl. You and me again. The package deal.”

Soj turned out to be a retro-punky black-and-neon space that felt like Betsey Johnson crossed with old-school Madonna in a way that confirmed Joss once again had absorbed whatever her boyfriend was into—in this case, Tom Huntington-Jones’s lost youth. I sensed the Ivy League headlines writing themselves as Lacey and I posed for pictures outside Soj, which I wished were not obligatory, because Lacey had been right about my pants. I should never have worn them, because no one else in the press line bothered: not the soap stars, the socialites, nor Special Sauce, the girl group whose hit “Dip It” was blaring both inside and outside the store. Not even Penelope Six-Names, a woman who’d willingly dressed as a llama last week on national television.