Cause Celeb (42 page)

“Ver' true, and as we've bin sayin'. Goin' out there meself, with the books. Bit of a mercy dash,” said Sir William, then looked at me. “Glahum,” he said, nodding at me. “Glahum.”

“Oh. Do you think it's likely you might want to feature Sir William's trip to Nambula on your program?” I said very quickly.

Oliver smiled and winked at me. “It's certainly an interesting angle for us, with the combination of Sir William and Nambula and the books. I take it these are the Keftian camps we're talking about?”

“That's right,” I said, drooling at his knowledge of world affairs.

“Well, I certainly think we should discuss it further,” said Oliver. “When things are a little more developed.”

Afterwards, as Oliver and I stood on the steps of the Ginsberg building with the golden evening light falling onto us through the trees, he said, “Do you want to come for a drink?” just like in the fantasies. I couldn't believe it. I was wildly happy. Then a split second later I remembered I hadn't done my legs and wondered in a panic if there was any way of shaving them in the ladies' loo.

Even in the car it was like a dream, his hands on the wheel, his thigh in soft dark blue suit material next to my knee in its sheer black—tragically—tights. The doors of the car were cream leather and the dashboard was walnut. The instrument panel twinkled and glowed as if we were in an airplane. We didn't go to a pub, we went to the sort of restaurant where if I had asked for a razor the waiter would have brought me one on a white octagonal china plate, without question or comment.

“Oh, Lu-
ee
-gi.”

As Oliver and I were being shown to our table, the actress Kate Fortune was making a noisy flappy entrance, bearing down on the maître d'hôtel, her long dark silky hair swinging everywhere.

“Luigi!
Wonderful
to see you again! Mwah, mwah.”

“Actually madam,” he said, “it's Roberto.”

I'd seen Kate Fortune on television only the night before, in a miniseries about a female explorer who was unexpectedly keen on
lip gloss. She was often to be seen in magazines, dressed as a fairy or crinoline lady with accompanying features called “Fortune at Forty.” The worst was when she had appeared in one of the color supplements made over as a series of famous film stars, one from each decade since the nineteen-twenties. It seemed an unfortunate self-promotional blunder, only stressing the abyss between Kate Fortune and Marlene Dietrich or Jane Fonda. Tonight she was dressed more in Dallas mode. I had long suspected her of hair-flicking and, sure enough, as she bore down on us, cooing, “Oliver! Heavenly to see you,” she took hold of the whole left-hand side of her hair and threw it back into the eyes of Roberto.

Oliver rose gallantly to his feet to receive her kisses, and now had a little circle of peach lip gloss on each cheek. I got to my feet too, but she behaved as if I was the invisible woman, so I sat down again.

“Lovely,” she was saying to Oliver, fingering his lapel. “You will try and come and see me doing the Shaw? Can I leave you tickets next week? You will try and put us on your lovely program?”

“Oh, darling, I don't want to come and sit through some
dreary
play,” said Oliver. “Why don't you take me out to lunch instead?”

Kate Fortune rolled her eyes, threw back her hair, and said, “Ter-rible man. I'll get Yvonne to call Gwen tomorrow.” Then she disappeared off to her table, casting a gay, coy look behind her. I was surprised she didn't flick up her skirt and show him her pants as well.

Oliver ordered champagne. We had just begun to talk about our earliest sexual experiences, as you do, when Signor Zilli burst into the restaurant. Signor Zilli was a big cult figure at the time. He was a volatile Italian buffoon, played by a huge comedian called Julian Alman. It was very strange seeing him in the flesh, out of costume and character.

“Oliver, hi! Blast!” said Julian Alman, lumbering towards us. “Look, can you come and have a word out here, my car's been clamped. Blast!”

“What do you expect me to do about it?” said Oliver, staring at him incredulously. “Unclamp it with my teeth?”

“No. Look, the thing is, I want you to talk to the clamping men.”

Julian Alman seemed completely unaware that everyone in the restaurant was looking at him.

“But if you've parked on a double yellow line you will be clamped. Is this your new Porsche?”

“Yes, the thing is, you see, I was still in it.”

“You were still in it?”

“Yes. I was trying to get out.”

“Julian,” said Oliver. “This isn't making a lot of sense. What was preventing your getting out?”

“Well, you see, it's a bit small for me.”

“So why did you buy it?”

“Well, I really wanted this model. You see, they've just been released so there's only three of them on the road, so, you see—”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Julian, can't you see I've got more important things to do?” he said, gesturing towards me.

“No, that's fine. Go and help him. I don't mind,” I said.

“Oh, great. Look, sorry, that's really good of you,” said Julian, turning to try and peer out of the window. “Blast.”

So Oliver went out to sort out the clampers. He returned ten minutes later looking extremely smug to tell me he'd managed to talk them out of it.

Then we were straight back onto the early sexual experiences. “So the next term I turned up to my Blake tutorial and the tutor was her . . . the same woman I had given the love bite to.”

The food was tiny, which was fortunate as I had no appetite. When Oliver had finished his sexual anecdotes from Cambridge, I told him about getting caught naked with Joel in the sand dunes by a policeman, who then asked if he could join in.

“So who was Joel?”

“He was my boyfriend when I was at college.”

“Where were you at college?”

“Devon.”

“Thank God it wasn't Cambridge,” he said, smiling indulgently. “That explains the horny accent. And what did you study in Devon?”

“Agriculture,” I said, and giggled.

“Agriculture. Agriculture.” He threw his head back and laughed. “You're like something out of Thomas Hardy. Did you ride horses and wear petticoats and frolic in haylofts?” He leaned over and pretended to look up my skirt hopefully.

“No, I read books about crop rotation.”

“And was Joel a farmer as well—no, don't tell me, he was an army sergeant with an enormous flashing sword. No? A schoolteacher? A reddleman?”

“He was a poet.”

“No! This gets better and better. What did he write? ‘She was only a farmer's daughter . . .'”

“He didn't write very much when I knew him. He drank a lot, smoked a lot of dope and went on about patriarchal capitalist societies. My brothers couldn't stand him.”

“How many brothers have you got?”

“Four and one sister.”

“Jesus, I'd better watch my step. So was Joel from Devon as well?”

“No. He came from London and he had a publisher in London. Ginsberg and Fink, actually. I thought he was wonderful.”

“Wonderful? I hate Joel,” Oliver said. “So what happened to the farming? Why aren't you struggling with lamb's afterbirth and moaning about hedgerows and subsidies?”

“I did work on a farm for a few months after my finals, but then I missed Joel and went up to London to live with him in a commune in Hackney. I worked in a pub and then got a job doing market research on deodorants.”

“And what was Joel doing? Knitting lentil stew and smoking joss sticks?”

“Pretty much. He was out of his head most of the time.”

“And you were earning the money?”

“Not very much. Anyway, after I had been there for eighteen months I went to a party with Joel at Ginsberg and Fink and Sir William Ginsberg took a shine to me.”

“I bet he did, dirty old devil.”

“No, it wasn't like that,” I said indignantly. “He asked if I would like a temping job for the summer with the company, so I took it.”

“When was that?”

“Last summer.”

“So is Joel still around?”

“Well, no. It was awful really. My grandmother left me a bit of money so I put it down on a flat. And Joel said I had reverted to my capitalist patriarchal roots and that I was a worthless, superficial trollop.”

“A worthless, superficial trollop,” he said. “I see. And when was all this?”

“I bought the flat in January.”

“Ah, thank you, Roberto.”

Having finished the champagne Oliver had ordered a bottle of red wine. I was feeling light-headed already and couldn't drink any more but Oliver seemed completely sober. People in the restaurant kept looking across at him, and an elderly gentleman came over apologizing lengthily for interrupting us, said he knew this must happen all the time and asked for Oliver's autograph for his daughter who was studying at the Slade. Oliver was charming and gracious but got rather cold when the man didn't have a pen, and then extremely cold when the man started saying that the daughter would like to talk to him about working in television. The man left looking bewildered and sad. I took off one of my earrings, which was hurting.

Oliver ordered us brandies and then he spotted another celebrity, Bill Bonham, sitting across the room and went off to talk to him. Bill Bonham was an actor who usually played intelligent thugs in TV plays. He was a director as well, and was always appearing on chat shows, making it clear he didn't suffer fools gladly and swearing a lot. He was almost bald and had cut the rest of his hair very short to match. He always wore a leather jacket and jeans which fitted below his paunch and often seemed on the verge of showing bottom cleavage. I watched in admiration as Oliver chatted to him intensely. Then the two of them disappeared to the loos together.

*

“I don't think Bill is more famous than you.”

“Well, maybe Bill isn't but Julian is,” Oliver muttered, and sniffed a few times.

“No, he isn't. Have you got a cold?” I said tenderly.

“Oh, he is. It's completely unfair but he is,” said Oliver morosely, sniffing again with one nostril.

“He's a different sort of famous. You're an arts commentator and Julian Alman's a film star.”

Oliver was on his third brandy now. His tie was loose, and the top three buttons of his shirt were undone so I could see his dark chest hair.

“But what you do is far more worthwhile,” I encouraged. “People see you as an authoritative, intelligent figure.”

He wrinkled his nose fondly and squeezed my knee under the table.

The waiter was clearing up the crumbs with a minivacuum, and I realized that he had scooped up the earring I had taken off. I was too shy to say anything to him so I whispered what had happened to Oliver and he roared with laughter and masterfully sorted it all out.

When the bill came I got out my checkbook and offered to pay half, and Oliver leaned forward, tweaked my nose and got out his gold American Express card. He then performed a tour of the restaurant, saying good-bye to all the famous people, with me on his arm.

When we got to my door Oliver stopped the car, turned off the ignition, loosened his seat belt. “So. Are you going to ask me in for a coffee?” he said.

I was nervous and dry-mouthed again as I climbed the stairs with Oliver following. I was proud of my new flat. I thought it rather Parisian. But once inside he burst out laughing. I laughed along gaily trying to join in the joke but it went on too long for me to sustain. “What's so funny?” I said eventually.

“It's so small and twee,” he said.
“Sweet.”
He wandered into the kitchenette. “This gets better and better,” he said. “You have
mottoes
on your wall.” He was looking at a picture my mother had given me which said, “Dull Women Have Immaculate Houses.”

“Hmmm. I see what you're trying to justify.” He was in the living room now. “God. You'd drive me mad with all this mess.”

“What mess?” I said, genuinely puzzled.

“Your cassettes are all out of their boxes and your books are all over the place and what's this?” he said, picking up a hair elastic that was wrapped round itself. “It looks like a ringworm.”

I was crushed. I had been brought up to think that people who had a place for everything, and no buttons and pencils in dishes, were a bit odd. “I'll make the coffee,” I said. I felt oddly depressed when I went into the kitchen. It was all the unaccustomed booze, which didn't seem to have affected Oliver at all. He followed me into the kitchen and, as I was plugging the cord into the kettle, came up behind me and put his arms round my waist. I forgot everything I had been thinking, turned round to face him and we kissed properly. It was ecstasy to be able to touch him, when I had so much longed to touch him for so long. After a while his hand moved to my waist, down my thigh and started to lift up my skirt. I didn't want him to undress me because I was wearing tights with a stout reinforced top, and white knickers which had been in the wash with a blue sock, so I took his hand away and put it on my breast, for want of somewhere better to put it. We kissed some more but I was slightly unbalanced and thought I might lurch over. Oliver brushed his mouth against my cheek and whispered, “Can I stay with you tonight?”