Claudia Carroll - All She Ever Wished For

‘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.

‘Anyway, I invited Kate to join my friends at the bar and they instantly took her under their wing. As you can imagine only too delighted that this stunningly beautiful, leggy blonde model had deigned to join us—’

‘—Damien had even managed to wangle seats on the flight so we were beside each other the whole way home.’

‘And when we’d landed safely—’

‘—Ever the gentleman, he insisted on dropping me right to my parents’ house – and he even managed to charm my mum over a mug of tea—’

‘—Like I always say, get the mother onside and it’s all plain sailing from there!’

But after I’ve switched off my tape recorder, Kate confides what really happened next. Befuddled and still punch-drunk from her emotional roller coaster of a day, it was only when her handsome saviour was leaving that she finally got around to asking him his full name.

‘It’s Damien King,’ he apparently grinned at her. ‘A lovely, warm, open smile too,’ she adds in that soft voice. ‘And I can’t tell you, after the day from hell that I’d just been through, how grateful I was to meet such a gentleman who looked after me and took care of me and who was … just so completely wonderful, really.’

Then came the clincher.

Instead of letting her pay him back for the ticket, Damien apparently insisted that instead she let him take her out to dinner. Only it had to be the following night and that wasn’t negotiable.

‘Before she’d time to change her mind.’

‘And he wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

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