Friends & Rivals (41 page)

‘There you are.' Swaddled in a fluffy white towelling bathrobe, Ava padded into the bathroom and put her arms around him. ‘I thought you'd done a runner.'

‘Why would you think that?' Lex hugged her back. ‘Get dressed and I'll take you out for breakfast.'

Fuck it. He couldn't stay single and alone for ever. He was tired of pining for Kendall, tired of having nothing else in his life but work. He and Ava might be good for each other.

Really, what was the worst that could happen?

‘And … action!'

Ava Bentley threw her arms wide as the cameras began to roll, twirling around joyously amid the artificial snowflakes. Or ‘snowfakes', as Lex called them. Thank God he was here. Shooting a Christmas video was a gruelling and thankless task at the best of times. But doing it in LA, surrounded by vacuous Valley-girl runners and swaying palm trees in unseasonably warm eighty-degree sunshine lent the process an even more preposterous, farcical air.

‘Hug your shoulders a little bit,' the shoot director shouted into Ava's headset as she mimed along to ‘Home', the catchy, upbeat track that her record company planned to release as a European Christmas single, to go head-to-head with Kendall Bryce's festive offering. ‘Try to look cold.'

If I were cold
, thought Ava,
I'd have put on a sweater and jeans. I wouldn't be cavorting around in distressed silver leather pants and a studded bra.
But she did her best, cosying up to the fur-clad backing dancers as horrid synthetic blobs of white settled in her silver cropped hair. It was harder than it sounded, miming lyrics while performing a dance routine, and trying to appear happy and freezing cold at the same time. One look at Lex's face confirmed her suspicions, that the effort made her look ridiculous.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, pulling off her headset to groans from the crew, all of whom were sweltering in the open-air set and longing to go home. ‘Can we try something different? This isn't working. It's kitsch as hell and I look like a—'

‘I think “ass” is the word she's looking for.' Lex Abrahams got up from his folding beach chair and walked over to the director. He wished he were directing Ava's video himself, but they'd both agreed they needed some distance between their personal and professional lives, and at the time bringing in an outsider had seemed like a good idea.

‘She looks great,' the director said defensively. ‘It's holiday season, people. It's supposed to be kitsch. Do you know how much money Katy Perry's made out of kitsch music videos?'

‘Ava isn't Katy Perry,' said Lex. ‘She's never done that whole knowing, tongue-in-cheek thing. She's no good at it.'

‘Thanks a lot!' said Ava, cooling herself down in front of an on-set snow blower. But she knew he was right.

‘The outfit says sexy, the set says cheesy, the dancers say gay. What message are we trying to send here?'

‘Oh would you quit it?' the director snapped. ‘Dancers always say gay. That's their job. We already cleared the art direction and the choreography with Columbia, OK. If you don't like the direction we've taken, take it up with them. But for now can we just shoot the damn thing. Ah!' Turning around, he clapped his hands in delight. ‘There they are. Perfect!'

Lex looked at Ava. ‘You have
got
to be kidding me.' They both burst out laughing. There, being led across the blistering parking lot by a bikini-and-Daisy Duke-clad extra, was a team of four reindeer, complete with jingle bell harnesses and little red bows around their necks.

‘Don't tell me,' said Ava, wiping away tears of mirth and hopelessly smearing her eye make-up in the process, ‘they have red noses that light up when you push a button?'

The director scowled. ‘OK, break time's over, people. Let's go again, from the top. Reindeer won't come in till the final chorus.'

Ava tried to get a grip on her giggles while the make-up ladies set to work repairing her face. It was funny, but only to a point. What on
earth
were people going to say when they saw this crap back in England? It made Cliff Richard's
Mistletoe and Wine
video seem positively cutting-edge. At this rate, Kendall Bryce was going to wipe the floor with her.

‘Help me,' she mouthed to Lex.

Reluctantly, Lex dialled Jack's number. They weren't getting on well at the moment, but he needed to bring in the big guns. If they didn't get the record company to tone down the cheese factor, they all stood to lose money, not to mention end up with serious egg on their faces.

‘Don't worry,' he mouthed back to Ava. ‘It's all under control.

Backstage at the world-famous 100 Club on Oxford Street, Kendall shivered in her stage outfit of black PVC hot pants, thigh-high Vivienne Westwood boots and a mesh vest top with an orange silk flame appliquéd across the breasts.

‘You'll be fine,' said Ivan, wrapping a cashmere blanket around her shoulders to warm her and passing her a bottle of Evian. ‘You'll knock 'em dead.'

‘And if I don't?'

‘You will.' He leaned into kiss her and Kendall instinctively leaned back. She could already smell the alcohol on his breath and it was only half past seven. A shiver of fear ran through her.
Please don't let him get loaded tonight. Please don't let him lose his temper. Please let me be OK.

It was November now. Next month, Kendall and Ivan would celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Was it really only one year since that magical, starry night at the Chelsea Physic Garden? So much had happened in that time it felt like a decade ago.

The first six months of marriage had been exciting. Or rather, Kendall's career had been exciting, a nonstop frenzy of travel, performing and promotion that had seen her visit over forty different countries and countless cities. The marriage itself was just something that existed in the background, a part of the Kendall Bryce story to be wheeled out in every interview and feature. Meanwhile
Flame
's sales spread across the globe like wildfire. Despite achieving only modest success in the US, it was a multi-platinum-selling album, and back in the UK, Kendall's star had risen to an all-time high.

Ivan accompanied his wife on as many trips as possible, occasionally taking breaks to see to business in London or to spend time with his children. Now that they were older, his relationship with both Rosie and Hector had blossomed, with the years of tension between Ivan and his son finally appearing to be over. On paper, everything seemed to be going well. A string of magazines did features on Ivan and Kendall Charles's ‘perfect' life together, and speculation was rife as to when the young Mrs Charles would find a window in her schedule to conceive their much-anticipated first child.

It wasn't till the summer that Kendall had first became aware of Ivan's drinking. With hindsight, there had been signs of it much earlier. Every time Ivan returned from spending time with his family, he hit the bottle harder than usual at the endless round of after-parties and promotional events that were his and Kendall's life. But it wasn't until Kendall's record company allowed her a month-long break in August that the scale of the problem truly sank in.

A few things happened in August that didn't help the situation. First, Ava Bentley's debut album,
Pure
, was released in the US to a rapturous critical reception and strong domestic sales. Suddenly an almost unrecognizable Ava was everywhere, her face appearing to mock Ivan from the cover of
Rolling Stone
magazine and her rags-to-riches story being trumpeted by all the British gossip rags that remembered her from
Talent Quest
days. Kendall was sanguine about it.
Flame
had outsold
Pure
globally by almost two to one, so Ava's success was no threat to her. But Ivan became obsessed, scouring the Internet for hours each day, looking for pieces on Ava, cutting out articles that made any reference either to her or to JSM. Often during these computer sessions, Kendall would notice a tumbler of whisky by Ivan's side.

Secondly, Hector flew back to LA to do another month's internship with his godfather's company. Ivan felt deeply hurt by this, but on Catriona's advice he bit his tongue. It had taken so long to get back on an even keel with Hector, he didn't want to risk losing him again. Still, the effort of repressing his feelings of betrayal only served to make Ivan more withdrawn. He refused to talk about it with Kendall or anyone, and spent long hours alone in his study, often drinking so much that he would pass out there and wake up in the morning, slumped drooling over his desk.

And thirdly, an entirely erroneous story came out in the press linking Kendall to one of her backing dancers. For a man who barely talked to her, or interacted with her at all once the cameras were switched off, Ivan remained pathologically jealous and possessive, insisting that Kendall fire
all
her male dancers for the upcoming winter tour, and demanding she send him hourly texts when they were apart, confirming her whereabouts.

It wasn't as if he were always drunk, or always withdrawn and unreasonable. The charming, witty, affectionate Ivan was still there and still made cameo appearances in Kendall's life, showing up with a horse-drawn pony and trap on her birthday to take her to a newly opened French restaurant by the river, and presenting her with an exquisite custom-made diamond charm bracelet the day she went on Radio Four's
Desert Island Discs
. The problem was, you never knew which version of Ivan you were going to get. As the weeks went on, and the drinking intensified, Kendall realized with shame that she had become afraid of her husband. She began to dread going home.

Throughout the entire, turbulent eleven months, her saving grace had been Stella Bayley. Stella had bravely decided that she and Miley would stay on in England after Brett left them, but she no longer had the heart to continue her blog after all the smug, hate-filled ‘so much for her perfect life' comments that people posted once her marriage collapsed. When Kendall offered her a job as her PA, both women had looked on it as a temporary thing. But Stella had proved so astonishingly efficient, and such a cheerful, sane presence through the madness, that Kendall had begged her to stay, throwing money at the problem until her friend finally caved. Although she and Miley still lived up in Primrose Hill, Stella spent most of her days at Ivan and Kendall's Cheyne Walk apartment, and witnessed Ivan's mood swings and incipient depression first-hand. For some reason she was better at getting through to him in these moods than Kendall was. Stella often found herself diffusing what would otherwise definitely have turned into a nasty marital row between the two of them. Recently, it had reached the point where Kendall dreaded Stella leaving at night and refused to travel abroad with Ivan unless Stella could squeeze the trip into her schedule.

‘Remember, it's a small crowd.' Ivan's voice brought Kendall back to reality. ‘There's only three hundred people out there, it's not Wembley. Try to keep it intimate and natural. Don't over-project.'

Kendall nodded mutely. She wanted to be alone to calm her nerves and was relieved when Ivan wandered off. But her spirits sank as she saw him slip onto one of the red velvet stools at the bar. This morning, JSM had announced Ava Bentley's plans for a Christmas comeback in the UK to tremendous fanfare. Ivan had flown into a rage, and spent most of the afternoon locked in a room with his PR people, working out a strategy for a smear campaign to derail his former protégée. Kendall was also worried. Ava being successful in America was one thing, but to have her here, competing head-to-head on home turf, was quite another. Her own new album was set for a Christmas release. Given the history between them, there was no way the press weren't going to turn this into some sort of personal vendetta, some battle to the death between the two of them. When she tried to raise her concerns with her husband, Ivan bit her head off, accusing her of not trusting him (how the hell had he got that?) and stormed out of the flat. Clearly he'd spent the hours between then and now drowning his sorrows in a bottle of Jack Daniel's. How Kendall wished she could do the same! But the crowd were already clapping, calling her name. Taking a last swig of her Evian, she handed it to a runner and walked, smiling, on stage.

‘Good evening, London!'

Wild applause lifted her spirits a little. She tried to forget about Ivan at the bar and focus on the fact that she was here, in The 100 Club, on the same stage that had hosted so many of the greats, from The Sex Pistols to The Clash to The Rolling Stones. Best known as a punk and rock venue, it was rare for mainstream pop acts like Kendall to play here. But the crowd could not have been more welcoming and the stage, as ever, felt like home.

The band struck up the first few chords of ‘Liar, Liar'
.
Kendall leaned forward provocatively in her mesh top, blew a kiss to the audience and, ignoring Ivan's advice, started belting out her best-known hit as if she were trying to fill the whole world with sound. The audience loved it, erupting into screams of approval.

The night was going to be a success.

After forty-five minutes, Kendall thanked the fans and took a fifteen-minute break. Though there was no choreographed dancing in her set – the stage at The 100 Club was barely big enough to swing a cat on – but the close atmosphere and punishing heat of the overhead lights had left her feeling dehydrated and exhausted. Normally Ivan would have been the first to congratulate her backstage and to make sure she was getting the fluids and rubdowns she needed, but he'd been mobbed by fans at the bar and had no doubt hung around to press the flesh. Kendall was glad of his absence and the chance to catch her breath alone.

Gulping down weak iced lemon barley water, her drink of choice during concerts, and dabbing the sweat off her forehead with a towel, she tuned in to a conversation going on behind her. One of the runners was talking to Cassie, Kendall's make-up girl.