Claudia Carroll - All She Ever Wished For

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.

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.’