Ambition (13 page)

‘What exactly do you want them for?’

‘For my little place in Sun City. That brave and independent homeland has many things, including ceaseless sunshine and more darkies than you can shake a stick at, but it doesn’t
have a glut of Peerage berks. And there’s nothing the new rich love more than seeing the old rich cavorting for their pleasure.’

The band were onstage. ‘Thank you, oiks!’ The crowd cheered. ‘Our first number is called “Revolt into Style”. ONETWOTHREEFOUR!’

Pope laughed. ‘WHAT DO YOU THINK?’

‘VERY NICE.’

‘SUSAN, YOU’RE SUCH AN OLD FASHIONED LITTLE MERITOCRAT!’

Caroline smiled vaguely and tugged at Pope’s sleeve as the volume of the band was mixed down a fraction. ‘Toby, what time is it?’

‘It’s five minutes later than when you last asked me. And two hours till your next medication. Please try and control yourself, my dear – use a little bit of that stiff upper
lip that made your people great. And don’t interrupt my conversations with Miss Street again or I’ll have your other eye out and give them to her as earrings.’

Caroline snivelled.

‘God, I hate these women,’ he whispered. ‘Upper-class women, they’re either like horses or rag dolls. This one’s a doll with its wind-up gone wrong, Junior out
there is a prancing pony. I much prefer women like you. If there
are
any others like you.’

‘But I’m pretty malleable too, aren’t I?’ She wondered what he was up to, and why he was flattering her. Or was he just telling the truth? She
was
pretty fucking
special, when you came down to it, especially compared with these privileged pains.

‘Malleable, you!’ He laughed at the idea.

‘I do what you want, don’t I?’

‘Oh no. You do as I
say.
But you do as you
want.
Otherwise you wouldn’t do it. Watching you go through your paces is like watching a beautifully oiled machine go
through its programme. I noticed that at the tattooist’s, and more so in Rio. You’ve got guts. My kind of girl. I’ve been thinking about you since Brazil, and I like what
I’ve seen.’ He turned his head abruptly. ‘Well, shall I sign this shower or not?’

She didn’t know. She was too busy fighting the insane temptation to reach out and touch his hand. ‘Whatever you want,’ she said slowly.

The sun shone brightly on South Africa House as the five member of Fuck U lined up to sign the contracts laid out on trestle tables. The press photographers were out in full
force. Police held back lines of angry young demonstrators, radiant in their righteousness, and among them Susan saw Joe Moorsom, standing silently with a banner which read POPE=APARTHEID. She sat
with Caroline in the limousine, watching through smoked windows.

Suddenly a fracas erupted from
within
the cordoned space. It was Gary Prince, born-again businessman, reverting to type and screaming ‘Fuck you! FUCK YOU!’

‘Yes, that’s the name!’ mocked one of the band boys. ‘Keep it up, Gazza! The more publicity the better! Remember the Sex Pistols!’

‘Fuck you! I’ve been conned, you bastards!’

‘These young people need a chaperon no longer, Mr Prince,’ intoned Tobias. ‘From now on, they have me. I shall look after them as though they were my own.’

Caroline laughed. ‘Have you met his son?’

‘Next week.’

‘Have
you
got a treat in store.’

‘I’m their manager! I got a contract!’

‘No you haven’t, Gaz,’ said Candida contemptuously.

‘A gentleman’s word is his bond! You said so, Nick!’

‘But only if he’s talking to another
gentleman,
Gaz!’

‘Officer, please take this man away. He’s bothering my artistes.’

‘I’ll ’ave you, Pope! You’ve picked the wrong man, sonny!’

‘Officer, please take this down in your notebook. This gentleman appears to be threatening me with violence.’

Susan watched the police take Gary Pride away. It took five of them, he was so angry.

She turned to comment on this to Caroline and saw her staring straight at Pope, her good eye so dead and livid with loathing that it was indistingishable from the false one.

She turned back to the street and watched as Pope shepherded his latest acquisitions into limousines. Would he have them tattooed, too? Would he kill any of them, or just dump them? Whatever, a
lot of people already appeared to have both the motive and desire to wish Pope dead.

She wondered if she would ever be one of them.

Or was she already?

The hallway was full of red roses when she got home from work, and she sighed because she knew they were from Matthew. Matthew
always
sent red roses, which showed such
a chronic lack of irony and imagination that it was like walking around with a sign on your back saying I AM A SENTIMENTAL SAP. Charles had always sent daisies and orchids mixed, which she supposed
was a knowing nod to her youth and decadence while Zero, when she remembered, favoured lurid red tulips – ripe, open and unmistakable in their insinuation.

‘Do you send them to all your girls?’ Susan asked her.

‘Only the ones that won’t sleep with me.’ Zero batted her long eyelashes innocently.

But
roses.
She sighed again. These days every thing about Matthew made her sigh, from the noise he made eating his Wheati-Chomps (not to mention the grotesque glee – which she had
once found so adorable – he invariably displayed upon finding the free green plastic battleship within) to the amount of money he earned – pathetic.

For a long time now she had been earning more than twice as much as him, a fact which, especially considering her gender and origins, never failed to amaze and delight her – and which,
when intoxicated by drink or success, she never failed to tell him about.

‘You know the Speak Your Weight machine?’ Matthew said one night after a particularly verbose bit of boasting on her part. ‘You’re like a Speak Your Salary
machine.’

Jealous jerk. Yes, taunting a man about the money he made was the Nineties’ equivalent of teasing him about the size of his penis, she decided – it hit him where he lived. And the
penis-tease wasn’t
half
as effective since those killjoy sexologists had come up with the glad tidings that penis size was unrelated to providing pleasure. Though personally, Susan
believed that
that
one should be taken with a good-sized Siberian salt-mine: the only girls
she’d
known who didn’t like a big one were the girls who didn’t
particularly like sex. They probably liked tiny ones because it made it that much easier to pretend the dirty deed wasn’t happening.

But no one, in the Nineties, could pretend that a small salary was as sexy as a big one.

Matthew, even, didn’t have a good answer. Usually he tried the strong, silent and superior act but once in a while he would rally with a lame comeback. ‘Isn’t it true, Susan,
that
anyone
can make a lot of money in this society if they’re prepared to sell out?’

‘Ah, Matthew. The Sell Out. That popular fallacy put about by failures. No, dear,
not
anyone can sell out. Only the chosen few ever get the opportunity, because you can’t
sell out unless you have something that someone is prepared to pay a high price for. Show me someone who hasn’t sold out and I’ll show someone who hasn’t got anything anyone wants
to buy.’

‘It’s people like you who are destroying the National Health Service!’ he shrilled before slamming the door – a sound which more and more had replaced the full stop as
the culmination of their conversations.

But after a spot of deep breathing and shallow thinking he was back with a smug smirk and a second wind. ‘You’re so mercenary, Susan. Yet I thought you were a feminist.’

‘Oh, I am, Matthew.’ She stared at him blankly, already anticipating his new line of attack and relishing her counter-thrust.

‘Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought feminism was about creating a more
humane
society. Not a more mercenary and brutal competitive one.’ I’ve put in my
thumb and pulled out a plum, you bitch, said his smile. Top
that.

She shrugged and narrowed her eyes, looking at him lazily, ready to pounce. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I like to think feminism’s a broad church. For instance, there are Christians who
burn crosses on Negro lawns in the southern states of the USA and there are Christians who follow Karl Marx in Latin America. The only thing they have in common is that they are Christians.
Feminism is like that now. There are moustachioed milch-cows who sit in the mud around airbases insisting that women are peaceful and loving and nurturing and that all the trouble in the world is
caused by men – an idea of women very compatible, don’t you think, with that of the Victorians, who idealized women as angels of the hearth? Angel of the airbase is just as constricting
and stifling the way I look at it.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘And what will I get, pray, if I
am
nuturing and passive – my reward in heaven? No go, Jack. No – the reason for the emergence of free-market feminism in the Eighties
is the fact that to be ruthless, competitive and individualistic is the most rebellious thing a girl can do; it denies every theory from right and left, about our weakness. Quite frankly, if any
well-meaning Earth Mother tells me that because of the shape of my genitalia I am automatically nuturing and caring, I’m going to take her face off with a Sabatier filleting knife to prove
her wrong.’

‘Didn’t you used to be a socialist?’ he said accusingly.

‘Certainly. Before I woke up to the fact that socialism has become a male weapon to divert women’s energies from feminism. Who’s more frightening to men, and free – Mrs
Thatcher or Mrs Kinnock? Is
that
socialist woman these days – jam tomorrow, so long as
you
pick the fruit and stand by your man? Then give me the free market any time
– I’ll take my chances and find my own way, thank you very much. And I’ll get there a long time before these women who shout so loud about feminism and waste all their energies
working for socialism. For men.’

He stood looking at her, shaking his head. ‘It’s very frightening, the way you talk these days, Susan. It’s like hearing one of those crazy Olympic athletes who’d do
anything, take any drug, just so they can
win.
Winning is all that matters to you.’

She laughed. He sounded like some neurotic wife of a hotshot executive in an American soap opera. ‘That’s silly. I
never
think about winning. I never
plan
any of my
career. It just
happens.
Things just come to me.’

‘I know.’ He nodded. ‘You never think about winning because it doesn’t even occur to you that there’s any other option. Don’t you see how scary that is in a
human being?’

She shrugged. ‘No, not really.’

‘Do you know what Napoleon said?’

‘Not tonight, Josephine?’

‘Napoleon said, “I have no ambition.” And in a way, he was right. Because Napoleon
was
ambition. He and you didn’t choose or think about it – you
are
ambition.’ He finished with a flourish and stood looking at her proudly, no doubt expecting her to fall to her knees and thank him for revealing her innermost desires to her at
last.

Instead she puckered up her luscious lips and blew an enormous raspberry.

Her laughter had echoed after his Bruegelian scream as he ran from the room in furious frustration.

Now she picked up the florist’s card from the telephone table.

SORRY ABOUT THIS MORNING. LOVE, MATTIE.

Mattie! She was going to throw up.

They were at that stage of a relationship where monogamy is shading slowly but surely into celibacy, and with this development go a million reasons to argue about everything but the real thing.
This morning there had been no decaffeinated coffee for Matthew’s breakfast, which signified, according to that indecipherable male logic, that she didn’t love him. Well, she
didn’t – but the lack of coffee had nothing to do with that. It had to do with the fact that neither of them had the time to go to the supermarket any more.

She had watched, both amused and appalled, as he ranted, raved, went red in the face and finally lay down flat on his back on the floor and did his deep-breathing exercises ‘in order to
keep my temper’. Keep his temper! – Talk about bolting the stable door after the horse had hoofed it.

What could she do about Matthew? She hated the idea of being alone, but wasn’t this worse? They hadn’t slept together in months; no wonder she was such a sitting duck for Tobias Pope
and his perverted plans for her. Sitting on the stairs she shivered as she remembered Rio, and then the phone rang. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello? Miss Street-Walker?’

She gasped. Lejeune. ‘How did you get my number?’ They were in the book under Matthew’s name, and the office would never be so irresponsible.

‘The same way I get everything, Miss Street-Walker. With my Gift.’ He sounded very pleased with his gift, she thought, as indeed he had every reason to be. But the smug malice in his
voice and the degree of fear she felt made her angry.

‘The same gift that tells you how to play the stock market, you mean? Is that the one?’

‘One and the same.’

God, but he rubbed her up the wrong way. ‘Excuse me, Mr Lejeune, but is this the same famous gift that isn’t strong enough to tell you when a tart’s recording your sordid
little orgasms for posterity and the front page with an obvious little machine under the bed?’

He didn’t like that. There was an intake of breath, then a forced relaxation. ‘A little oversight, lass. But I’ll tell you one thing . . . ’

‘What?’ she sneered shakily.

‘It’s strong enough to pass through time zones undiluted. Did you have a nice time in Rio?’

‘I haven’t ever been to Rio,’ she said quickly.

He laughed horribly. ‘Silly, silly, Miss Street-Walker. Your passport could tell another story. And so could my Gift. Don’t die of ignorance, will you? I’ve got lots of treats
in store for you. And give my regards to the boyfriend – I’ll have a big surprise for you both soon.’