Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (9 page)

But now I see that Alain, like some very thin and apparently perma-white-and-exhausted people, is capable of very fast movement indeed. In one minute this skeletal
Bout-de-Souffle
figure (OK, Howie's crowd used to go to the NFT; what a long time ago it seems—and was—and we choked up on Alain Delon and Alphaville and all the rest)—the other Alain,
my
Alain, is standing on the pavement by our table and I can see he's trying to decide whether to sit down or not. There's only a small
window now between a viewing with all the possible excitement of an offer (and oh my God I haven't called Crookstons, suppose the offer on my flat has expired and I'm down to what I actually have in the bank, i.e. overdraft £254, owe on credit cards £1,670) but isn't the market still going up and up … Stefan Mocny said I'd get more next week but I might as well stay with Mr Nyan, he's a cash buyer …

‘We should go', Alain is saying in a surprisingly grown-up (not a word I've used before) tone of voice. ‘We'll be late for Maygrove Road.' And, as Henrietta stares up at him in astonishment—after all, he's the man who couldn't even fix the colours on a tile—he recognises her and gives one of his incredibly sexy smiles and I see her melt, a cliché I know, but you can almost notice her face turn to candle wax and run down the front of her (unbecoming) striped top.

‘Hi Alain', says this pretend young girl, and shrugs in a Gallic way so we can all clock her boobs as they peek out from the folds of an unsuitable-for-her-age bra.

‘So what are you doing these days?' Alain says. I register the fact I'm glaring at him, just like an exasperated wife who has to stop in the street again
and again for her celeb husband to say ‘hi' and receive compliments. All this is putting me off the viewing, I can tell you that for sure.

‘Maygrove Road?' says Henrietta brightly. ‘Is that where people are over-spilling from Queen's Park these days?'

Again, I have reason to admire Alain even though I'm furious with him. He knows not to give away our secret—well, that's how I felt about it—and I still do, ass that I am. ‘Our secret' indeed! It's only giving away hard-earned money (as I now see the increase in value on my flat: after all I was struggling to earn a living all the time I've lived there and I've had stress illnesses as a result: I
deserve
the huge sum I'm about to be paid).

So, as I just said, Alain doesn't reply to Henrietta's question and we leave her there, sitting at the table with a blush still on her face and a sagging jaw, and a puzzled waiter, Italian-looking and young, bending over her as if he can't resist staring right down past the Agent Provocateur Spank-me-I'm-a-Naughty-Schoolgirl bra at her old grey tits.

They say you only have to think something bad about a person for exactly the same thing to happen to you.

So here it is. I just never felt in my life anything like the sheer charge, the electrical communication … the sexual chemistry … it's like being on a shared drug and at an opposing voltage so his High meets your Low and you're both floating, diving, soaring …

I can't do better than that. Alain's profile in the little red car is unchanging and we drive along at the speed of old-age pensioners out for a spin in Torquay. I don't think we ever stopped at a red light—but we aren't run into or vice versa, either. We are on another plane: perhaps we have actually become invisible.

Clearly, these are signs a Sugar Mummy should counter with the strictest caution. Sixty-nine Maygrove Road, a house puffed by the agents as ‘West Hampstead', a fine family home in need of modernisation, private rear garden' etc. had become Nirvana. Whatever it was like, I would buy it—and for however great a sum was demanded of me.

But first—and this I had ascertained in a phone call earlier to the offices of Hengrove, Layward & Bull and so I knew 69 Maygrove Road to be uninhabited but still furnished—first I would seduce Alain there. On the top floor … it feels more protected and sexy; and we can look out on the
private rear garden without anyone seeing us in return.

My sole piece of advice to an aspiring Sugar Mummy in these circumstances is: turn round and go home. And don't throw yourself at someone else out of pure frustration.

Remember that a man who actually believes a relative stranger is happy to give him a sizeable lump of equity in a property in order for him to house himself and his wife is not the most sensitive of mortals. He won't even notice what you're trying to do.

None of which makes any difference to me.

The house in Maygrove Road—well, have you ever been in a place you knew was evil, where there must have been a murder or at least a succession of property deals that were crooked and wrecked people's lives, or maybe just a lot of unhappiness and abuse, that kind of thing?

No. 69 Maygrove Road stank of everything. You wouldn't want to put your bag down in the hall, let alone enjoy sex for the first time with the Object of Desire. In fact, you'd rather enter a nunnery than indulge in carnal romps in this House from Hell, all three floors and a basement too terrifying to try and go down to. Ping! That was the fireplace on the ground floor as we walked past: our mere presence
dislodged a fall of soot that would bury Santa Claus. Pong! That was the smell of rotting goldfish from an abandoned tank on the half landing as we went up. Pang! That was what I felt as I climbed and climbed and Igor the estate agent extolled the wonders of the place.

I had a pang because I realised that Alain, with a past lived in Provençal splendour and no notion of the dumps people are forced to buy and ‘renovate' these days, must think this is the kind of house I actually want to live in. To him, I'm a Woman Without Qualities, a tasteless commonplace piece of suburban sadness—an interior decorator who has demeaned the glory of his tiles by asking to include one in some ghastly flat I'm doing up, probably in Balham.

To Alain I must be shit.

‘Three floors!' Igor is saying; and I clock the fact he's checked out that I'm selling two floors, i.e. my maisonette in W9 and looking to trade down into a bigger place in a less fancy area. ‘Loft extension a possibility', Igor wheezes—and it's when I turn a gaze of deadly hatred on him (if they froze me now I'd be the Gorgon, the Medusa with my victims petrified by my glare) that I notice the absence of Alain. He's nowhere to be seen, and my tinny calls,
shrunk to a mouse squeak by the infernal vibes of the house, raise no reply at all. (I just hope, for his sake and for his lovely wife's sake, that he hasn't gone down to the cellar, undoubtedly the bourn from which no traveller returns.)

‘Roof terrace', pants Igor, opening a window leading out to a collapsed water tank and an area of dented and uneven creosote. ‘Conservatory extension may be added from kitchen below …'

I really believe the garden attached to the rear of the house would be enough to give a rational person nightmares for many years. Coils of rope hang from the single tree, suggesting recent hangings (is it an accident that kicked-off shoes and a three-legged chair stand beneath the tree?) while the remains of a dog stick out from a flowerbed.

It was one of those Labrador/ golden retriever/ collie crosses by the look of it that start life in Notting Hill, run north of the bridge on a night when the full moon shows up the train carrying nuclear waste from east to west London, while the property-investing bourgeoisie sleeps happy in the knowledge of today's percentage gain, and ends up (the mongrel, that is) just where the budding capitalists don't want to be—on the wrong side of the tracks.

‘There's a lot of interest', Igor says. It's hard at first to believe he means the interest is in the house and not just the interest he imagines to be building up in my bank account. (Of course: he's from Crookstons too—who isn't?—and he knows about my offer. Probably thinks I'll run off to Rio with the cash if he doesn't nail me down in Maygrove Road.)

‘I'll think about it', I say, as I reach the hall, with its ‘original tiles' (Igor) chipped, stained and with cat poo doing the grouting, if you look closer.

And here is Alain. Someone has left a semi-functioning, brown leather armchair in the bay window, and behind it though the dust and what look like semen stains on the (miraculously unbroken) glass I can see the garage opposite and next to it a brown kind of pebble-dashed building which must provide just about the most horrible view you could find in all of London.

Alain sprawls in the leather chair, a bunch of stuffing protruding just above his ankles, giving him the air of an abandoned scarecrow.

Alain sees me—I suppose he does: he has this weird way of staring at you so at first you're flattered and then you're annoyed and finally worried—and he says nothing at all.

Then it hits me. Alain thinks this shitty house is
where I want to split my famous seven hundred thousand etc. etc. into two dwellings, one for myself and the other for him and his wife. Even if we're out in the street, his lazy-but-defiant pose in the broken chair seems to say, we'd rather
be
in the street than living here. Even if you—that is, me—spend all you've got on it we don't want it. Sorry, this has all been an embarrassing mistake.

I never felt so humiliated, so wretched, so unhappy, so murdered as I did then: all the feelings the house enjoys bringing out in viewers, I daresay.

‘I didn't even want to come here', I begin.

Then I see, as a ray of deep yellow, climate-change sunlight comes into the ground-floor space (‘double reception, open-plan kitchen', Igor snorts behind me) that there's a good reason for Alain's stillness at 69 Maygrove Road.

He's asleep.

One minute later and we're on the road (he's awake, even quite alert. Pathetically, I'm impressed.)

‘Where shall we go?' Alain asks as Igor waves us a miserable goodbye and the little red car heads back to comparative civilisation. ‘I need a drink.'

‘How about La Speranza?' I have to say.

So here we are again. Be patient: it won't be for long. But while I wait for Simone to come up with the menu (newly encased in expensive suede: with a regular patron like me, they can afford to splash out), I'm going to give some tips for Sugar Mummies on how to avoid jealousy—or at least not give away the existence of the green-eyed monster just above the Harvey Nicks under-eye bag remover for Old Bags who want to look dewy and young.

Do not stare at the girl
(seldom
woman)
who has clearly just become the Object of Desire of your Object of Desire. She will be thrilled to see your obsessive interest in her, and before you can say
Desdemona she'll have dragged the man you call your protégé into the back room (in this case, at La Speranza there is no back room, only a bar and openly visible wood oven and gas hob. But she'll manage somehow: there's always the tiny, all-glass loo where it's hard to differentiate the hand-basin from the WC. But she'll find a way).

This advice, I may say, is hard to follow and I failed dismally. Because (so I believe) you can tell if people have had or want to have sex together by the way their backs and especially their bums hang while their owners are apparently innocently engaged in small talk. A man cocks his bum (so to speak) so it tilts sideways, neither ready to join in sex nor yet sure of further thrusting potential. A woman clenches her buttocks, ready for courtship dance or refusal. A jilted bottom is easy to pick out by its droop and awkward positioning.

And the reason I flipped was because Alain, who had risen (apparently innocently) to go to the toilet at the back of La Speranza, had ‘bumped into' (here both bums make a furtive tryst) Esther Crane (who else?) and now stood at the far end of the room with the casual stance of a laid-back man without a thought of sex—while Esther, standing and laughing up at him, was drawing in both front and
back bottoms as if she feared she might never breathe again.

Next piece of advice: if you suspect an assignation is being made,
do not try to follow the about-to-be lovers. This will result in humiliation and possibly a traffic accident.

Well, there was no car crash, but when I saw Alain, as strangely animated now as he had been lethargic on our property-viewing expedition, slip along the far side of the restaurant and (so it seemed) out into the street, I just had to push my way past the ladies discussing the shortcomings of their offspring: ‘They never get in touch', ‘At least they're not divorcing', ‘No what I mean is they never get in touch with
me
', and find out if Esther, by some magic means or another, was joining him out there (after climbing through the loo window perhaps. This brings me to the next tip: if your new rival is slimmer than you, don't try out her escape route. A stuck Sugar Mummy is an unattractive sight).

Yes, they're both there. But not in the street: in the small lobby, where an outdated cigarette machine stands, as décor I suppose, with ancient Marlboro Lights arranged in a dusty parade behind the Perspex screen.

Esther, unseen by me as she made her way
through the room, is with Alain and both are banging the machine and laughing: she must think it wildly humorous that a man can show himself so desperate for a fag in this day and age that he'll attack a piece of dead metal.

‘I'm hunting for Gauloises.' Alain has seen me and immediately both he and Esther re-align their bums and adopt the posture of the vicar's wife at a tea party. ‘You might get them at Rococo, the newsagent', Esther says, as if she really wants him to run down to the corner—and it works, off he goes.

Now just at that moment, as Esther and I in a confused after-you play make our way into the restaurant again, a motorbike roars up outside and a tall, anonymous figure (helmet visor down, black leather armour all over) pushes his way in. Everyone looks up. Then the unknown warrior, spurs brushing the Knightsbridge court shoes of the lunching ladies, makes for me with huge, leather-clad fingers as Esther stands back in amazement. He calls my name, which emerges from beneath his Iron Cross and beaten silver breastplate as a muffled roar.