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“Did you have a good time?” I ask Toby.
“It was productive,” he replies. “I actually find these kinds of things exhausting, but I got a lot of bookings out of it, so the studio is off to a good start. Someone also suggested I should do studio lighting and posing courses, which I hadn’t thought of.”
“How can you not have thought of it?” Paul asks, incredulously. “You cut your teeth doing stuff like that with me. It’s a money-spinner too. Get eight or ten people in, charge them a hundred, hundred and fifty each, and you’ve got a healthy profit even after you’ve paid the model.”
“I’ll think about it. I’m not sure that teaching is my thing,” Toby replies. “Maybe I can rent the studio out to someone else, and they can do the teaching.”
“Not as lucrative though, mate,” Paul counters. “All you’ll get then are the hire fees.”
“He’s got a point,” I chip in. “And you were a pretty good teacher in Courchevel. My photos are loads better already, and that was after just a few minutes of your time.”
“I said I’d think about it, OK?” Toby replies, smiling. “Stop ganging up on me!”
“Talking of Courchevel, I had a chat with Mark earlier,” I tell him.
“Oh yes?”
“He loved the article, the CEO loved it, and they want more. How do you feel about that? He asked whether we could do Corfu in April.”
“Does that mean I’m definitely going to see the famous Bellavista?”
“Yup. In all its glory.”
“Will all the rooms have separate bathrooms? My therapist will want to know,” he says, and his eyes twinkle with mischief.
“What’s all this?” Paul asks.
Toby and I fill him in on our stay at La Residence, and he guffaws. “I’d love to have seen that!”
“What are you, some kind of voyeur?” I ask.
“No, it’s just the thought of Toby having to cope with a naked woman without the comfort blanket of his camera to hide behind.” He turns to Toby, still laughing, and puts his arm round his shoulder. “Are you OK? Do you need to talk about it?”
“Piss off!” Toby replies, good-naturedly. He gets his phone out of his jacket pocket and we compare diaries. With a bit of humming and hawing, we manage to find a week in April that we can both do.
As I drive home, I reflect on the conversation at the end of the evening. Toby is a very closed book where his private life is concerned, and I’m starting to wonder if he hasn’t openly come out of the closet yet. Paul obviously knows, or has worked it out though, because he found the whole idea of Toby being naked with me hysterically funny. From what I know of Paul, if he thought there was even the faintest possibility of chemistry, he would have taken a very different tack.
