Clause Nine

They’d agreed to meet at Corvo, an hour before service, because Kemi wanted Hattie somewhere Luca was comfortable and Luca, it turned out, did not consider anywhere else worth using. The private dining room had four chairs, a single long window onto Clerkenwell, and a smell of browning butter drifting in from the pass that made Hattie’s stomach growl through the whole first read of the contract, which she thought was probably deliberate and did not hold against him.

Kemi Balogun set the contract on the table between them with the care of a woman laying down a card she already knew would win the hand.

“Twelve appearances,” she said. “Public, scheduled in advance, nothing you haven’t approved forty-eight hours out. You’d be listed as his partner. Steady. Happy. The exact opposite of the headline currently sitting at the top of his investor deck.”

Hattie did not touch the contract. She had learned, from forty-one weddings and one spectacularly litigious divorce consultation two years back, never to touch a document before she understood what it was actually asking her to agree to.

“You want me to fake-date a chef.”

“I want you to date a chef, publicly, for a fee, under terms both of you control completely.” Kemi said it like she’d rehearsed the distinction, which she probably had. “He needs the season’s audience to see someone steady standing next to him instead of the version of him currently trending under ‘chef sobs into micro-greens.’ You write other people’s love stories for a living. I’m asking you to be in one, on paper, for four months.”

Across the table, Luca Bassani hadn’t said a word since Kemi sat them down, which Hattie found more interesting than anything in the contract. She’d seen the footage everyone had seen — the launch party at Ansa, his business partner’s hand on his fiancée’s waist in a shot someone’s phone had caught with unforgivable clarity — and she’d expected, she realised, someone smaller than the man actually sitting across from her. He wasn’t smaller. He was a man not performing anything at all, which after two years of writing toasts for people who couldn’t stop performing even at their own weddings, read to her as almost aggressively honest.

“You haven’t asked me anything,” she said, to him directly. “You’ve let your publicist do the whole pitch.”

“She’s better at pitches than I am.” His voice was lower than she’d expected, unhurried, a kitchen voice, the kind that had learned to carry over six burners without ever needing to be raised. “I’m better at knowing what I actually want out of it. Which is: nobody gets embarrassed. Not you, not me. If any part of this contract embarrasses either of us, it isn’t worth the exposure.”

“That’s not a pitch. That’s a boundary.”

“I’ve had a year of people deciding what’s true about me in public,” he said. “I’m not interested in doing that to someone else.”

She looked down at the contract, finally, and started reading, because she had one professional rule that had never once failed her — read every document twice before you decide what you think of the people who wrote it — and by the third clause she understood this one had been written by someone smart and a little desperate, which was, in her experience, the most dangerous possible combination in a client.

Somewhere at home, in a drawer she didn’t open, was a document nobody had ever read, three years old, that she’d started the night after a bridesmaid asked her, not unkindly, whether she’d ever say any of it about somebody real. She had written four lines and never gone back. She thought about it now for as long as it took to turn a page, because it was easier to notice other people’s unspoken things than her own, and that was, she supposed, the whole of her career in one sentence.

“Clause six,” she said. “Physical contact ‘as reasonably required for public credibility, at the discretion of the talent’s publicist.’ That’s not a boundary, Kemi. That’s a blank cheque with your signature on the discretion.”

“It’s standard—“

“It’s not standard, it’s lazy, and I’m not signing a clause that lets someone else decide when I’m getting kissed on a red carpet.” She uncapped her pen, which she’d brought for this purpose, having learned the hard way at wedding number nineteen that nobody hands you a pen when you need one. “I’ll write you a better clause. Nine, say. No kissing, staged or otherwise, without both of us initialling that appearance in advance, by name, on the schedule. Not a blanket yes. Every single time, on the record, or it doesn’t happen.”

Kemi opened her mouth, closed it, and looked at Luca, who was watching Hattie with an expression she couldn’t immediately file under anything she’d seen from a client before — not quite amusement, not relief, something closer to a man recognising, with real surprise, that someone else in the room had thought of the thing he’d been too tired to insist on himself.

“Add it,” he said.

“You haven’t seen the wording.”

“I’ve watched you object to a clause about my own comfort more forcefully than I’ve objected to anything about myself in two years.” He almost smiled, the first real crack in the careful nothing he’d been performing since she sat down. “Add whatever wording keeps you comfortable. I trust your instincts more than mine, apparently, and we’ve known each other for eleven minutes.”

“Twelve,” she said, checking her watch out of pure reflex, and something in the dry, clipped way she said it made him laugh — a short, surprised sound, like it had got out before he’d decided whether to allow it.

“Twelve,” he agreed. “Noted for the record.”

She wrote the clause out longhand in the margin, in the small, exact print she used for cutting a bride’s overlong toast down to the two minutes that would actually land, and slid it back across the table to Kemi, who read it with the stillness of a woman recalculating how much control she’d retained in the last ninety seconds.

“Anything else you’d like to add,” Kemi said, not quite managing to keep the dryness out of her own voice now.

“One more.” Hattie looked at Luca instead of Kemi. “An exit clause. Fourteen. If this ever requires me to lie to a client — actually lie, not just keep a schedule quiet — I walk. Full fee, no penalty, no negotiation.”

“Why would it require that.”

“I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “But I write other people’s weddings for a living, Mr Bassani, and I’ve learned that the version of a story everyone agrees to tell in public and the version that’s actually true rarely stay separate for very long. I’d like it in writing that when they split, you’ll be on the side of true.”

He was quiet for a second, and in that second something passed over his face that had nothing to do with the contract at all — something closer to a stairwell than an interview, gone again before Kemi could have caught it, but Hattie had built a career on catching that kind of thing before people knew they’d shown it.

“Add it,” he said again, quieter. “I’d rather lose the deal than lose that.”

She initialled her own copy first, which she never did — she always made the client go first, another small armour built out of forty-one other people’s weddings — and slid the pen across the table towards him.

He signed without reading it twice, which contradicted everything Kemi had told her about how much he vetted anything with his name on it these days, and when she said as much, he shrugged in a way that took his whole shoulder with it, a chef’s economy of movement even sitting down.

“You already read it twice for me,” he said. “That’s rather the point of hiring someone better at this than you are.”

“I’m not hired to protect your interests, Mr Bassani. I’m hired to make you look happy on a red carpet.”

“Turns out those aren’t as separate as I assumed.” He capped the pen and set it down, precisely parallel to the edge of the contract, a small unconscious tidiness she’d later learn he brought to a plate, a countertop, an argument. “Call me Luca. If we’re doing this, I’d rather not spend four months being Mr Bassanied at across a table.”

“Fine. Luca.” She closed her folder. “For the record, I don’t actually think you’re going to need clause fourteen. I think Kemi built you a contract to survive a bad season, and you’re going to survive it whether or not I ever use it.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then you’ll be glad I write things down for a living,” she said, and gathered her copy before either of them could see she’d meant it as more of a comfort than she usually allowed herself to offer a client on a first meeting.

· · ·Scene break

She told Rae about the clauses before she told her about the fee, which should have warned her how this was going to go.

“You added a no-lying-to-clients clause,” Rae said, delighted, from the other side of their shared desk, where she was supposed to be reviewing venue quotes and was instead watching Hattie with the focus of a woman who’d known her since Hattie was twenty-four, nine years and forty-one weddings ago, and could smell a complication forming before Hattie could name it. “To a fake-dating contract. For a client.”

“It’s good practice.”

“It’s you building an exit before you’ve walked through the door.” Rae leaned back. “I’m not saying don’t do it. God knows the exposure’s worth it — three papers ran his name this week and none of them ran yours yet, which is the kind of unpaid advertising this agency’s been begging for. I’m saying I’ve read your face for nine years, Hattie Ellison, and that is not the face of a woman who’s just negotiated a business contract.”

“It’s that face.”

“It’s the face you make when you’ve found a sentence in somebody else’s speech that’s actually true, and you’re annoyed you have to hand it back instead of keeping it.” Rae smiled, entirely too pleased with herself. “Twelve appearances. Say goodbye to your Saturdays.”

“It’s for the venue pitch,” Hattie said, which was true, and which she said too quickly. “You’ve been telling Halden’s people for a year that we’re bigger than a speechwriting outfit. A client list with a chef on it who’s in three papers a week does that for us without either of us having to say it out loud.”

“I’ve been telling Halden’s people that for a year because I believe it,” Rae said. “I didn’t ask you to date one of them to prove it.” She tapped her pen against the venue quotes she wasn’t reading. “I’m not against the stake. I’ve wanted the stake since we were doing this out of my spare room. I just noticed you didn’t mention the exposure until I did.”

Hattie didn’t answer, because Rae wasn’t wrong about the order she’d said things in, and because some private, professionally cautious part of her was already, against every rule she’d ever written into a contract for someone else’s protection, wondering what it would feel like to mean something she said out loud for once, instead of writing it beautifully for somebody who’d say it for her.

She didn’t tell Rae about the two minutes in that meeting room when Luca Bassani had looked at her like she’d said something worth remembering, for once, instead of the other way round. She logged the fee under “exposure” in the agency accounts that night, the way Rae wanted, and said nothing out loud about the rest of it, which was, she’d learn within the month, the kind of arrangement she’d built a whole career warning other people against.

The first appearance was in twelve days. Southbank, a food festival, cameras confirmed. She wrote it into her diary in the small print, checked the box beside clause nine out of habit, and found it was already, absurdly, the entry she was most curious about all month.