All She Ever Wished For

Now normally that last sentence would automatically trigger The Conversation. The same bloody conversation I’ve been having with just about everyone ever since Bernard and I first got engaged. But under the circumstances I let it slide and instead just shove the letter under Mum’s nose, then wait the approximate two-second delay while she processes it.

But there’s silence. A long, bowel-withering silence.

‘Well, this has to be a joke,’ she eventually says, all the blood suddenly draining from her face. ‘Maybe something Monica and Stella would do to get a rise out of you before the hen night?’

Monica and Stella are my two best pals and although they both love a good giggle as much as we all do, there’s no way in hell they’d ever contemplate doing something this cruel.

‘It’s not a joke. This isn’t the girls messing. Look at the headed notepaper. This is legit. Believe me, it’s about as legit as it gets.’

It says a lot about just how serious this is that Mum abandons her Magimix and slumps down wearily at the kitchen table, unable to say much else.

She doesn’t need to though.

The crumpled look on her face tells me everything I need to know.

KATE

Your Daily Dish.ie

October 2014

TROUBLE IN PARADISE?

Here at Your Daily Dish we’re receiving troubling reports from the Castletown House residence regarding billionaire Globtech founder Damien King and his well-known socialite wife, Kate.

The Gardai have said that following a ‘complaint of a most serious nature’, a court order was issued to Mrs Kate King at the property earlier today. A source close to Mrs King says that the order is in relation to a valuable painting, an end-period Rembrandt known as A Lady of Letters, which we’re told, is ‘a source of contention between Damien and Kate King at the present time’.

The painting is said to have been valued at upwards of €95 million. The Kings are well known to have a notable art collection, the jewel in the crown being A Lady of Letters. Sources tell us that Mrs King ‘is cooperating with the police in any way she can’. It’s not yet known if charges are to follow or not.

This of course has our heads spinning at Your Daily Dish. Can our favourite celebrity couple really be warring over a painting? To such an extent that a court order was issued?

Rumours have been rife for some time now that the couple have been living apart and are on the brink of separation. This troubling report would appear to confirm it.

Remember, you read it here first, on Your Daily Dish.

TESS

The present

‘The main thing is not to panic,’ says Bernard, my hubby-to-be, when I call to fill him in on what’s just happened, my imminent heart attack, etc.

‘Try not to panic?’ I say, doing the exact polar opposite. ‘Bernard, I’ve just been summoned for jury service, bloody jury service and you’re telling me not to panic?’

I consult the now half-scrunched letter in my hand for about the thousandth time today. ‘Here it is in cold, hard print. I’ve got to be at the Criminal Courts of Justice at 9 a.m. this coming Monday morning. So forgive me for panicking when this lands on me less than a month and counting before D-Day! Do you realise how much there’s still left to do?’

It’s a rhetorical question; of course Bernard hasn’t the first clue what’s left to do. After all, he’s a forty-three-year-old heterosexual male. What the hell does he know about weddingy floral centrepieces or alternate menu choices for coeliac lacto-ovo vegetarians?

‘Now I strongly suggest you stay calm dearest,’ Bernard says patiently. ‘All this panic is getting you nowhere. A nice cup of tea, that’ll soon set you to rights.’

Bernard, it has to be said, thinks that there’s no drama in this life that can’t be instantly righted with a cup of Clipper gold blend.

‘The thing you have to understand,’ I sigh, regrouping and trying my best to keep cool, ‘is that with a wedding like this, there’s a whole clatter of stuff that you can only leave till these last, precious few weeks. So there’s no way in hell I can handle something as huge as jury service right now. Besides, I’ve got my family and pals all roped into helping me out before the big day, how could I possibly just skive off to court and leave them to do all the heavy lifting for me?’

‘Well, I’m sure they’d be most understanding, under the circumstances—’

‘No, I can’t do it, Bernard, it just isn’t right. I won’t do it to my friends and I certainly wouldn’t put my family through that. I need to be here working around the clock along with everyone else, that’s all there is to it. After all, we’re talking our dream wedding here.’

‘I suggest you just try to put this whole thing into perspective,’ he says calmly. ‘Remember, it’s nothing personal. Being summoned for jury service can happen to any of us, at any time.’

‘I know, but I’ve got my whole life ahead of me to deal with stuff like this! Why does it have to be right now? Landing on me out of a clear blue sky?’

‘Such a pity you don’t live in the UK,’ Bernard muses calmly. ‘Because over there, you know, you’re allowed to turn down jury service twice and only on the third time are you obliged to serve.’

‘But, sweetheart, I don’t live in the UK. It’s totally different here; if you’re summoned, you’ve got to turn up, simple as that. And you know the nightmare I had at work trying to get time off – I can’t have all that precious time eaten into with this crapology.’

‘Now there’s absolutely no need for neologism,’ he chides gently, and it’s all I can do to bite my tongue and ask him to stop using words I don’t understand. ‘The critical thing is to remember that this is how our judicial system works. That’s how our democracy works.’

‘I already know all of that, but the thing is, how am I supposed to get out of it?’

‘In fact, did I ever tell you about the time I was summoned just a few months before I was due to take my doctorate?’ he chats away, sounding perfectly relaxed about this, oblivious to the rising note of hysteria in my voice. ‘I still had reams of research to do on the painting technique of the seventeenth-century Dutch Masters, with particular reference to Vermeer, which as you know is a highly contentious subject which needs a plethora of astute writing, not to mention the most forensic editing—’

‘Eh, no offence, but can we just get back to the point?’

No rudeness intended in cutting across him, but when Bernard gets going on either Vermeer or Rembrandt, you could be on the phone all night.

‘Sorry, sausage. But just remember that when it comes to court service, just because you’ve been summoned, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll be selected.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, both the Prosecution and Defence have the perfect right to turn down any proposed juror on the slightest pretext, you know.’

‘So all I have to do is turn up at the courts, hang around for a bit and then maybe I’ll just be discharged at the end of the day?’ I ask hopefully, for the first time since that bloody letter landed on me this morning, seeing a sudden glint of light in this nightmare. Could he possibly be right? Is that all there is to it? After all, if all this jury service malarkey takes no more than a single day out of my schedule, then maybe – just maybe – all is not lost.

‘Better than that, sausage,’ Bernard chats on. ‘Fact is, there are a whole myriad of reasons why you can plead ineligibility to serve. So go online, check them all out and remember, at all costs, nil desperandum. Now I’ve really got to dash, I’m afraid. I’ve got a tutorial with my MA students at 2 p.m., so I’ll call you later. That alright with you, dearest?’

‘Of course it is,’ I smile, for the first time all day starting to feel the tight constraint that’s been around my chest actually start to loosen a little.

You see? This is why I love Bernard. This is why he and I make the perfect couple. This is why we work, no matter what anyone says. And believe me, in the run-up to this wedding, they’ve pretty much said it all. At stressed-out times like this, I can always rely on him to be the sober yang to my slightly more highly strung ying.

Even if I haven’t the foggiest what his Latin reference meant.

*

Turns out Bernard is absolutely on the money. When I log onto the court’s website, there’s a whole section on who isn’t eligible for jury service, not to mention all the reasons why you can be instantly disqualified the minute a Jury Selection Officer casts their eye on you. My eye greedily scrolls down the page, desperately trying to spot one that might just apply to me. Or if all else fails, one that I can plausibly fake and hopefully get away with.

Bernard, I know, would baulk at my doing anything that even remotely smacks of dishonesty, never having told an out-and-out lie in the whole course of his life. But then, I remind myself, Bernard doesn’t have to organise catering for over fifty guests, get a marquee up, fully stock a bar, scrub and clean this house from top to bottom, then hound all our last-minute guests who’ve yet to RSVP. And that’s just what I’ve got to do this week alone. So it’s actually reasonably calm and quiet compared with the weeks that lie ahead, but don’t get me started.

OK. So far the court’s website is telling me that if you’re in any way involved with the administration of justice, then you’re automatically disqualified, simple as that. I scan quickly down the checklist to find out exactly who they mean, but given that I’m neither the President, the Attorney General, the Director of Public Prosecutions, a guard, a prison officer, a practicing barrister, a solicitor or a court officer, then that’s feck all use to me.

My eye keeps speed-scrolling down, the words almost like a blur in front of me.

‘Those who have been convicted of a serious offence in Ireland, those who have ever been sentenced to a term of imprisonment of five years or more, those who, within the last ten years, have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment of at least three months and have served at least part of that sentence … ’

Silently cursing myself for being law-abiding all these years, I keep on reading, praying that I’ll stumble on some handy little get-out-of-jail-free card that’ll neatly extricate me from all of this shite.

‘Persons aged 65 and upwards … members of either the House of the Oireachtas (the Irish Parliament), members of the Council of State, the Comptroller and Auditor General … a person in Holy Orders, a minister of any religious denomination or community, members of monasteries and convents, aircraft pilots, full-time students and ships’ masters … ’

Bugger, bugger, bugger, I think. The slow, sickening panic I’ve been holding at bay starting to rise again.

‘Those who provide an important community service, including practicing doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, vets, chemists, etc … ’

Important community service? Yes, success! We might just have a winner on our hands here. Finally, this could actually mean all my problems are solved, I think, suddenly feeling calmer. And OK, so maybe working as a personal trainer in a gym mightn’t necessarily be considered ‘important community service’, but plenty of my clients, not to mention my manager, would certainly disagree.

Well, this is it then, I decide firmly. I’m not officially summoned for jury service till next week, so cometh the hour, cometh the woman. I’ll stride into the courts, be polite and professional, but by God, I’ll plead my case. I work in a busy city centre health club, I’ll tell them, and I’ve a long list of clients who are completely dependent on me.

And if that doesn’t work, then I’ll flash the engagement ring, say the wedding is less than a month away and, what the hell, if they’ll only see reason here, I might even invite every single solicitor and barrister, as well as whoever’s standing in the dock in handcuffs along to the afters.

Feck it, I think, firmly snapping my laptop shut, mind made up. I’ll name our first-born child after the judge if it’ll give Bernard and I back our dream wedding day.

Because after what I’ve been through to get here, nothing is going to compromise that. No court case, no legal threats, absolutely nothing.

KATE

The Chronicle (weekend supplement)

January 2001

A SPECIAL REPORT by Maggie Kelly

There’s nothing more headily infectious than being around a young couple, newly in love and with their whole lives ahead of them. So you can imagine my excitement at interviewing Globtech founder and scion of the famous King dynasty, Damien King, along with his beautiful young girlfriend, successful model Kate Lee.

We meet for afternoon tea at the Weston hotel and straight away I can sense that this really is a genuine love match. Damien is courteous, polite and so much taller and more handsome in the flesh than I’d ever have imagined, while Kate is even more stunningly gorgeous than in her photos and on her countless TV appearances – if that’s even possible. She’s just one of those rare natural beauties that it’s impossible to peel your eyes off.

In the past she’s been likened to the late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, but even that comparison fails to do her justice. Kate’s super-tall, as you’d expect, with that famous waist-length, poker-straight blonde hair and cheekbones you could feasibly grate cheese off. She jokes that she stands a shoeless inch taller than her boyfriend and he laughs this off, saying, ‘You see? We’re not even together a full year and already Kate’s got me looking up to her!’

But there’s something more than that. There’s a glow about Kate, an inner radiance that no amount of clean living, Bikram yoga or daily juicing can give; in short, she seems a woman very much in love.

Over tea and clotted cream scones (which I notice Kate just picks delicately around the edges of), I ask the one question we’re all dying to know the answer to.

‘So how did you two lovebirds first meet?’

‘Will you tell it, darling, or will I?’ he asks.

‘I’ll certainly give it my best shot,’ she smiles, taking a sip of Earl Grey tea. She speaks softly, so much so that I almost have to strain to hear her over all the hotel’s chat and clatter in the background.

‘Well, we first met about a year ago.’

‘Eleven months, three weeks and four days to be exact,’ Damien interrupts and she laughs him off.

‘Back then I was working as a model in Paris, you see,’ she tells me, ‘and life was certainly hectic.’

Kate’s selling herself short here of course, because we’re all familiar with just how successful her modelling career has been to date. It’s no exaggeration to say that she’s probably been one of this country’s best-known faces ever since she was first scouted as a teenager on a night out with friends in Dublin.

I ask her a bit about how she first started out modelling and she laughs, claiming she still remembers it vividly.

‘Well there I was, all of seventeen years old, in a restaurant stuffing my face with pizza along with a few girlfriends,’ she says, ‘when next thing this older businessman-in-a-suit type approached our table and asked me for a quick word.’

‘A modelling scout?’ I guess.

‘Turned out that yes, he was. He introduced himself, handed me a business card and made all sorts of wild promises about what would happen if I’d only call the agency he represented.’

‘Now of course Kate is far too modest to say this,’ Damien interrupts, gazing at her fondly. ‘But, in fact, what this guy actually claimed was that his agency could make her a household name in next to no time.’

‘Of course, I giggled about it with my pals afterwards,’ Kate tells me, ‘but I suppose part of me was intrigued by what he’d said, because I did indeed make the call the next day.’

Which as it happened turned out to be one of the more life-changing events in the life of Kate Lee. Within a matter of weeks after that first auspicious meeting, she’d landed not only the top agent in London, but also lucrative catwalk work with Chanel in Paris.

‘It must have been dream come true stuff for you,’ I say, ‘but may I ask, weren’t your family at all worried about you? A young teenager let loose in Paris on her own?’

‘Turned out they were absolutely right to be as well,’ she says with a slight grimace.

‘Because she met someone quite unsuitable over there, didn’t you, darling?’ prompts Damien. ‘Some kind of photographer.’

‘Aurelian,’ says Kate.

‘Yes,’ says Damien. ‘I knew it was quite a girlie-sounding name.’

It’s easy to picture Aurelian as an almost stereotypically Parisian fashion photographer, with a couldn’t-really-care-less, shrug-it-away-and-light-a-Gauloise brand of sexiness. Kate tells me that about two years after they’d met she’d moved over to Paris full-time and not long after, by then virtually a household name with her career flying sky-high, they became engaged.

Which, it seems, is when all the trouble started.

‘You see, the wedding was supposed to take place in Dublin,’ she tells me, while Damien nods along, ‘at my family’s parish church. But, well you see … there was a bit of a glitch.’

‘Yes?’ I ask.

‘The ceremony was just weeks away,’ she goes on, ‘and I flew over to Dublin to take care of some last-minute preparations with my mum. And I’m sorry to say that she and I rowed.’

‘Which actually isn’t such a difficult thing to do if you knew Kate’s mother,’ quips Damien, sotto voce, ‘though of course I know you wouldn’t dream of printing that.’

‘It wasn’t just any old heated disagreement either,’ Kate goes on, ‘this was a full-on humdinger with screeching, yelling, the whole works.’

‘I won’t stand by and watch my only daughter make the biggest mistake of her life with some photographer that we know nothing about!’ says Damien, putting on a high falsetto voice.

Kate doesn’t laugh along though, I notice, instead she quietly tells me that she just turned on her heel, headed straight back to the airport and caught a last-minute flight back to Paris and back to her fiancé Aurelian. Back to their top-floor shared apartment at Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the fashionable 6th arrondissement. Back, she’d doubtless hoped, to a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on.

‘Well, I was in for the shock of my life,’ she goes on, describing how she’d burst in through the door, delighted to be home though not for a moment expecting Aurelian to be there. It was late afternoon and she knew for a fact he was due to be out on a fashion shoot at the Tuileries.

Prompted by Damien, she vividly describes throwing her wheelie bag on the hall floor, kicking off her shoes, about to go into the kitchen when, lo and behold, she heard voices coming from the bedroom.

‘Anyway, let’s just say that I discovered my fiancé was being unfaithful to me,’ she says discreetly, trailing off there and leaving the story dangling.

‘No, darling, the press will want a little more colour to the story,’ Damien insists. ‘Tell how you threw the bedroom door open – and well, there they were.’

‘There’s really no need,’ says Kate demurely. ‘I think anyone who reads this will be well able to draw their own conclusions.’

‘Kate was horrified to see Aurelian in bed with another model who she’d worked with and who she knew very slightly,’ says Damien, ignoring the warning hand Kate places on his arm. ‘There they were, tucked up in bed together, sucking on cigarettes with a half-drunk bottle of champagne on the bedside table beside them, just to really hammer the point home. Must have been horrifying for you, you poor girl,’ he adds, stroking her hand.

‘So what happened next?’ I ask, intrigued.

‘Naturally she did what any woman would do,’ says Damien. ‘Got the hell out of there while he yelled all sorts of crap after her, you can only imagine. “Kate! C’est ne signifie rien! Elle ne veut rien dire!” ’

Kate flushes slightly at the embellishment, and steps in to take over the story.

‘What I actually did after that,’ she tells me, ‘was to jump into a cab and ask to go to Charles de Gaulle airport, mainly because I’d nowhere else to go and no one in Paris to turn to; which of course meant going back home, with my tail firmly between my legs.’

‘Can’t have been easy for you,’ I say sympathetically.

‘So Kate’s mother had actually been on the money about Aurelian all along,’ says Damien. ‘You see, darling? Mother knows best. And I’d like to add for the record that her mum and I get along like a house on fire.’

‘The problem was that when I arrived at the Air France ticket desk,’ says Kate, ‘I realised that I had absolutely no money on me. Not a red cent, nothing. Both my credit and debit cards were completely maxed out with pre-wedding buys, so of course they were of no use to me either.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘Well I hadn’t a clue where to go and I suppose I was still in utter shock. So I gave up pleading with the ground hostess at the ticket desk, went and found a free seat in the middle of the concourse and instantly burst into tears. Mortifyingly embarrassing sobs too, I’m afraid. I made such a spectacle of myself that people started to notice and look my way.’

And one person in particular, it seems. Because there was a bar just adjacent to where Kate was sobbing her eyes out and as pure chance would have it, there had also been a huge Six Nations rugby game on earlier that day, Ireland versus France. The bar was jam-packed with supporters all in high spirits, laying into the beers and whiling the time away before their return flight home.

‘So there I was with a gang of guys from college,’ says Damien, ‘and we were in fantastic form because Ireland had just done the unthinkable and beaten France 22–10 at the Stade de France that afternoon. As you can imagine, there were more than a few pints of the black stuff involved.’

‘And that’s when you first spotted Kate?’

‘Course I did, like just about every other red-blooded male there. You couldn’t miss this knockout beauty bawling her eyes out in the middle of the airport concourse.’

Kate for her part says she barely even took notice of anyone around her, but all of a sudden she was aware of a guy hovering close by and looking worriedly down on her. Tall, classically good-looking, with dark hair and a light tan, dressed in an Irish rugby jersey and with the rugby supporter’s obligatory pint of beer clamped to his hand.

‘So, egged on by the lads, I walked right up to her and came out with probably one of the cheesiest pick-up lines of all time,’ Damien grins.

‘I realise this is probably a stupid question,’ they say together, looking adoringly at one other, ‘but is everything OK?’

It seems that Damien then sat down on a free plastic seat beside her and when Kate looked at him she tells me she had an overwhelming feeling that she could trust this guy. He had soft eyes, for starters, and she shyly confesses that she’s always been a sucker for soft eyes. So she found herself telling him everything. He nodded, and listened to her tale of woe.

‘But he said absolutely nothing.’

‘Instead I just strode over to the ticket desk and paid for her return flight home—’

‘—So of course I insisted that I’d have to reimburse him the minute we got back home, but he was having none of it.’

At this point, the pair of them almost overlap each other in their eagerness to get the story out.