The Club Quotes
"It would be hard to exaggerate how much she had wanted this, or for how long."
"There was still a very small part of Jess that worried this was all going to turn out to have been a terrible mistake."
"It was hard to believe that had only been a week ago. The past few days had been manic."
"She would have been a fool not to be a little nervous."
"It was a bright October afternoon, the cloudless blue sky criss-crossed with vapour trails."
"She could do this, Jess told herself. She had been in hospitality ever since she left school."
"That was the vision. That was the dream. That was fifteen years ago."
"There was no doubt that this was the opportunity of a lifetime."
"Maybe that was what it did to you, buying an island."
"It was literally going to kill him one day, this job."
"All around the world, people who, a few days earlier, had barely heard of Home, sat glued to their phones."
"This was not how Jess had envisaged her first evening on the island: babysitting a tiny gatecrasher."
"It always begins the same way, the dream."
"You mean a lot to him, Jackson. You too, Ned – Home feels like a true home to me."
"It was going to be strange for Ned, after this weekend, not having his little brother around to palm off all the shittiest jobs on."
"The thing was, once upon a time, Adam would have thought of this kind of assignment, this sort of special bloody project, as a chance to impress his brother."
"But then something had changed. And instead of getting ever bigger, the tasks, the responsibilities had started getting smaller, more demeaning."
"It was something he found hard to talk about, even with Laura."
"Adam Groom did not want to be a piñata any more."
"‘I have an idea . . .’ he heard himself saying."
"Sure they would come, and being the kind of people they were, they would make a point of not being impressed or overawed by anything about Island Home."
"All in all, under the circumstances, Adam was proud of how he had acquitted himself this evening."
"It was at precisely the moment Adam was thinking this that the brick came through the window."
"Annie, as always, found reasons to constantly shift position."
"Keith had stirred himself up onto his elbows briefly to announce that ‘all great art is either about sex or death, yeah?’"
"Nikki and Georgia were probably fast asleep by now, tucked up in their emperor beds with the thousand-thread-count sheets."
"‘You get the point,’ he had concluded, with a wave of his hand."
"Ned, standing by the fire, one elbow on the mantelpiece, was telling the story of how he’d first heard about this island."
"‘This house itself is 1723,’ Ned continued. ‘Modelled on Chiswick House, but without the dome, built by the family who used to own the whole place.’"
"‘And by the way,’ Ned told them, face uplit by the flickering flames. ‘Just in case any of you are thinking about leaving the island early, or planning to turn this offer down, there’s one more thing I should mention, about this weekend.’"
"‘I was invited, of course,’ explains Ava Huxley, ‘The truth is, I just had a sixth sense from the start that I shouldn’t go.’"
"‘I resigned my membership when I heard about it all – too much bad karma in those clubs now. I haven’t stepped inside one since.’"
"Founded in 1887, named after the great Victorian actor-manager Henry Home, intended as a place where theatrical professionals could meet."
"The walls of the library were decorated with lithographs and drawings and paintings of Henry Home in the roles that had made him famous."
"‘The Home Club,’ Ned Groom told an interviewer, ‘was the kind of place that everyone gets nostalgic about now, but you would feel less misty-eyed if you’d been there at the time.’"
"Ned wasted no time in trying to shake things up."
"‘He loved the law, and he was bloody good at it, too. Bloody good. The number of cases Ned Groom won before he left the bar – celebrities, CEOs, oligarchs – was almost unheard of at his age.’"
"‘This shouldn’t hurt,’ she said as she unsheathed the needle from its tube, tapped the inside of Nikki’s elbow and inserted it into her arm."
"Working for Ned, even when you knew there was going to be a tantrum, you had to get on with your life as though you did not."
"Annie had once shared a lift with Jackson and Georgia at Manhattan Home, all the way from the lobby to the rooftop bar."
"‘Bear in mind, most of us normally have a security detail, but that’s never been the vibe at Home – you leave your bodyguard at the door along with your phone,’ recalls one party guest."
"It was not until every guest was off the island – a full thirty-six hours after the last confirmed sighting of him – that police began their full-scale search for Ned Groom."
"Just a decent-sized glass of it would have been enough for a human being."
"It was not until she was halfway back to the staff block that she realized she still had Jackson Crane’s memory stick in her pocket."
"Best-case scenario, a member will try to light a fag off it and lose their eyebrows."
"It was a very Adam move, in meetings, to repeat or closely paraphrase what the previous person had said."
"I don’t know what game it is we’re playing, and it’s making me really anxious."
"I don’t think what I’m asking for is unreasonable, given what I’ve done for this company."
"We were far more concerned about people trying to get onto the island than about anyone leaving it."
"Home members are used to getting what they want, the second they want it."
"How could Home’s security have let it happen? That was the question people kept asking."
"I can hear you. I can’t respond but I am listening. Keep talking. I am here and I can hear you and I love you."
"Not to mention her headache, which this helmet (her normal size, but far too tight today – had her hair extensions added an inch to her head’s girth?) was doing nothing for."
"What would she do in their shoes, she wondered?"
"The douchebag tax, that’s what Ned called it."
"There was nothing they could say without incriminating themselves: I too have a nasty habit, a dirty secret, an unpleasant little career-killer I need to hide at all costs, so I know that Home is not the place to do things you wouldn’t at home . . ."
"It could be tricky for Keith, perhaps, raising that amount of money, every year, indefinitely."
"The sad part was that – Ned had never showed her the actual footage, but she had pieced it together from hints he’d dropped – in the grand scheme of things, Freddie’s showreel of shame was very mild indeed."
"‘This ain’t a members’ club, is it? It’s a fucking racket with a reception desk.’"
"‘I might as well fucking kill myself,’ Freddie said. ‘I’d rather fucking kill myself than live the rest of my life like that.’"
"‘It’s okay,’ he told her, still patting her on the back. ‘It’s going to be okay.’"
"‘Gone to London.’ Those three words, emailed by Ned Groom to his PA Nikki Hayes at 2.36 a.m. on Saturday, 30 October, have prompted perhaps more speculation than almost any other single aspect of the events at Island Home."
"And thrilled when their little convoy made it to the circular drive in front of The Manor – where all the guests had been instructed to gather for the start of that evening’s performance – to spot Georgia (and it was unmistakably Georgia, that long pale neck, those clavicles, that glossy dark hair), with her mask on but her hood back, being assisted onto the gravel by her driver."
"It was the idea of the overdose that came to her first, the idea of spiking his drink."
"‘The mask – comedy or tragedy? Which one?’ ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Jess had told him."
"How strange a sensation this must be, for some of them, to be moving through the world unrecognized."
"‘I’m sorry?’ Their eyes met. Impossible to tell what expression was on Georgia’s face, beneath that grinning mask."
"‘You’re a liar.’ Of course, Jess had checked Georgia’s whereabouts that night."
"‘Listen,’ Georgia said. ‘I don’t know what this is but if it’s part of the performance I think it’s in very bad taste.'"
"‘I saw you with my own eyes, that night in the car. I saw you in the car.’"
"‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ she said, with equal emphasis on every word."
"‘There is a reason we always have separate hotel rooms. My husband and I. It’s not a normal life we lead.'"
"‘I love my husband. He is a flawed person, and ours is not a perfect marriage.'"
"‘It’s on tape, you know. Recorded. At Country Home. That was where you were driving to, that night, wasn’t it?'"
"‘I didn’t want to. I’ve never wanted to. There was a journalist. A friend, I thought. A lover, once upon a time.'"
"‘You can’t just kill another living human being because it’s convenient.'"
"‘He’s dead?’ ‘He’s dead. You made me strangle Adam Groom.'"
"‘Listen,’ she said, ‘let’s just slow down and take this step by step.'"
"‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ Keith announced, ‘I’ve got to get off this fucking island.'"
"‘There is something else I need to explain to you, though, before I start screaming, really screaming.'"
"‘You must have thought you’d won the lottery when you found out I was pregnant.'"
"‘DNA,’ he said. ‘If you’ve lived your life the way Ron Cox has lived his, it must have been a pretty scary time when all that paternity testing stuff started coming in.'"
"‘He was evidence,’ Nikki said softly. ‘Kurt. To Ron.’"
"‘It’s still hard to talk about. I think a lot of us, we’re still coming to terms with it, the idea that he isn’t coming back.'"
"‘It was a favour, really. A favour to Ron. He was giving me, giving Home, a lot of money to keep it all quiet.'"
"‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Why do Ron a favour, when you already had him over a barrel?'"
"‘Because that’s how this works. That’s how this all works. Give and take. You scratch my back . . .'"
"‘Sometimes you engineer a situation . . .' said Nikki, understanding."
"‘It wasn’t him. It was Adam. You made me strangle Adam Groom. And because that spineless fuck Freddie ran off down the corridor like a little girl, I had to hide the body myself.'"
"‘I want to know why you did it.’ ‘Did what?’ ‘You knew how old I was when I started on the coat check. The kind of girls Ron Cox went for.'"
"‘I was fifteen years old, Ned. There’s a word for what he did.'"
"‘I might have had his balls in a vice, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t also do the guy a favour.'"
"‘I never broke my word, you know. I promised I would give you a way of giving him a better life than you could offer him, and I did.'"
"‘He’s a human being. You can’t just kill another living human being because it’s convenient.'"
"‘You look well, Laura,’ she informed her daughter-in-law, sounding thoughtful."
"‘Gone to London,’ he wrote, in that last, cryptic, mystifying email – but all the evidence suggests he never left the island alive."
"‘It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Ned. I don’t know what happened. We followed him, like you told us.'"
"‘I didn’t see.’ ‘You didn’t see?’ ‘Jackson turned up, all weird and crazy-eyed, demanding to see Ned.'"
"‘The twelfth of December, 2001. Does that date mean anything to you?’"
"‘Try harder,’ said Jess. ‘Have a think.’"