Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (6 page)

Throw away the trappings of Vanity: the Manolo shoes, the Mulberry bag, the Burberry anything. Ditto the eye shadow, the crate fillers, the bag-under-the-eyes concealers—let these be the only bags you possess (apart from the endless carrier bags, which old women can't bring themselves to throw away).

You don't need a mobile phone. The temptation to ring a possible Object of Desire can be great, and as you are becoming increasingly blind and deaf you will be inclined to sit on the very number you pretended to yourself had been erased from Memory, causing upset and embarrassment, or, worse, a resumption of the relationship, to encourage a now (wisely) jettisoned candidate to start calling you from distant resorts in order to tempt you to go out for a stint as Sugar-Mummy-in-the-Sun.

So what did I do?

Just as you might imagine. Before Molly had a chance to come round and hear the extraordinary events of the day, I:

Selected the Emma Hope sandals with lace bands and wedges.

Put on my gold hoop ear-rings (drew blood as I had forgotten that my left ear hadn't taken kindly to being pierced centuries ago and had closed up).

Put on three dresses in succession and ended up with black Ghost trousers and long, beaded top (vintage, Portobello Market).

Tied up hair (dirty, no time to wash) with Sonia Rykiel scarf bought at Agnes B.

Loaded on enough rings to knock out a mugger: antique silver, Peruvian crystal, sham amethyst, memorial Victorian ring with name ‘Alice Turner' inscribed in gold on black background (don't know who she was, bought in Chelsea Antiques Market, but
Alice you're going to see something tonight if you're still hanging around somewhere), eyeliner, Touche Eclat, eye shadow in turquoise and dusty pink wrinkle remover.

You might say that all granny left out was her glass eye. But I don't care. I'm going to find Alain in the house in Notting Hill.

Dawson Place is one of those neighbourhoods—it's too posh to call it a street—with long, low houses painted a glistening white,
Desperate Housewives
gardens and the occasional strolling security guard, Alsatian and all, where you feel you're going to meet David Lynch
(Twin Peaks)
when the female residents of this Hollywood on Notting Hill district emerge with pets and Upper Gold credit cards to go shopping—or at the very least you'll bump into Pedro Almodóvar, ready to film your nervous breakdown.

What the hell am I doing here? Up in W9 I could be Anne Bancroft—music-loving and with a hint of an intellectual inner life—and Alain, hard to get
away with but just possible I suppose, could be the eager young graduate Dustin Hoffman.

Here, you've had to have seriously made it. Stopping outside the most likely house (well, the tile Alain had brought to my flat in his battered Vuitton bag had an address scrawled on the back, so it must be here), it's possible to witness the rewards for an artist in the Saatchi bracket even if it means peering through the Banham gates on the windows to glimpse the Art inside.

Wow! The sheer size of the plaster sculpted baby on view in the window of the raised ground floor! Truculent expression, huge head, mouth like a cavern caught in mid-bellow—who would want that? Don't call me a philistine, I love Rothko and I put my name down for an Ellsworth Kelly at the Serpentine Gallery, but the edition of ‘Red Curve' ran out before my name was reached. It would have looked good in a flat I was doing in Fulham (but maybe that's a bit of a put-down, Kelly is now too accessible).

No, I love Art … but the equally huge, purposely smudged acrylic of the Queen dressed up for a glitzy seaside trip, purple-frosted Dame Edna shades and all—I mean, what's the point? Until you see a tiny Polaroid of Princess Di stuck on the side of the
sunglasses and a tear painted on the powdered cheek of the queen—well, again, what's the point? Then there are the fish tanks and what look like dead dogs (neighbourhood pets?) floating inside … Where's the space for the people here to sit and enjoy themselves?

While I'm standing on the pavement and feeling like a pickled shark in formaldehyde, some movement down in the basement of Claire's cousin's mansion becomes apparent.

I lean over the railings and stare down. A man is walking around a small room which is the antithesis of the showy art gallery above. If it's Alain, I say aloud, if it's Alain I can suggest a drink somewhere (not here certainly) and put my new plan to him. Then we can go on somewhere for dinner—I'll rent a car and we can drive out to the country, it's midsummer after all.

Such are the mad meanderings of a Sugar Mummy with myopia. Because the man in the basement could never be Alain. Short, stocky, almost bald, the only similarity lies in the fact that the stranger wears a pale blue shirt. And on closer inspection the shirt proves to be a mail-order number, not what Alain would wear at all. Then I nearly plunge to my death over the railings, which I
grasp hard before realising they've recently been painted, and drawing my hands across the front of my pretty vintage top I now see I've become an artwork myself, a striped, demented woman all dressed up and nowhere to go. Damn Alain (I can't help blaming him for this) and—why not throw her in for the sake of it—damn Claire's cousin, whoever and wherever she may be.

My Emma Hopes were hurting badly by the time I managed to find my way out of Dawson Place and I waited twenty minutes for a 23 bus to get me back to W9. Yes, everyone stared and some laughed outright. I must have looked like an escaped prisoner with bars painted across my chest! ‘That'll teach you'—one of May's favourite sayings, comes to mind. But I've Molly to contend with yet.

It was worse than I thought—much, much worse.

Molly was there alright, waving to me like a lunatic from the ground floor sitting-room window of my flat. What's the matter, can't she see I'm in pain? Then, tears nearly coming—the real thing—and quite unlike that foolish painting of the Queen's crocodile tear as it stood poised to run down the
royal cheek, I begin to grow properly afraid. What's happened? Is there a fire? Christ, did I pay the insurance? Is this seven hundred thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds going up in smoke? God, the sheer irony of it when I was trying to off-load some of it on to a man who never rings me, doesn't care … Well, too late now, my house has burnt down, ‘ladybird ladybird go away home, your house is on fire and your loved ones have gone.'

Except they haven't. They've come back! Oh God, now of all times while I stand on the pavement a demented figure with black paint on my boobs and streaks across my face where I've tried to wipe away my own distinctly real tears.

‘Scarlett!'

Yes, that's him. To Molly he's worse news than a major conflagration in uninsured premises. That's what she was trying to warn me about: as May would put it, the one who turns up like a bad penny. Howie. My ex.

‘You're looking lovely tonight', Howie says when I've staggered up the front steps and he's striding down towards me as if he owned the place. ‘Shall we have a drink?'

Howie, as you may have gathered, is the very last person I want to see right now. But once a bad penny rolls in, it's very hard to get rid of—and usually it's only come in the first place because there might be other pennies it can tot up with, i.e. some rich young girl, recent widow or divorcée (Howie thinks in old-fashioned terms) or outcast heiress in need of a cause.

The trouble for Howie these days is there just aren't any causes left. But for younger readers of my
Confessions
, let an old woman explain just what a Cause used to be and why every self-respecting girl had to have one or, better still, be teamed up with a Leader of a Cause.

In those distant days when Howie was prowling Dingwalls at Camden Lock for directionless Big Spenders whose daddies couldn't wait to get them out of the house, there was an electrifyingly large selection of initials to choose from. Lefties could be Workers Socialist Party (WSP) or Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) or Trots (Trotskyists) or affiliated to the NLR
(New Left Review).
Girls and women, once the Real 1960s began (commencing 1967 with colour TV and violence in Vietnam on the screen) could join Women's Lib. Even if the New Left was the only New Thing Left for these ex-debutantes and Benenden girls (a posh boarding school), they would not be allowed to join it themselves: they needed a male working-class hero.

Howie was in his element in those days. He stood next to Tariq Ali in the Grosvenor Square riots, he got fired on and squirted with CS gas in the Paris ‘68 Evènements, and he married in rapid succession a Vanderbilt, a daughter of Dow Jones Financial Index, an English Rothschild followed by a French one. (Don't ask why he married me: I think he'd come to realise that the rich had tumbled to the concept of the Pre-Nup early, and he invariably found himself worse off post separation or divorce than he had been before marrying.) On one
occasion, as a mutual ex-friend reported, Howie was able only to afford a stifling walk-up in Harlem and was mugged on the way to the pawnbroker with his one relic of the union, a silver picnic set. (Howie was, like many of the followers of Karl Marx, extremely fond of pretty things, and losing the goblets, fish knives etc. from this relic of early American super-wealth must have pained him considerably.)

So at least, I believe his thinking must have gone, here was a female (that's me) who can type, run a humble business (I co-owned a lease on a small interior decoration shop at the bad end of Fulham Road in those far-off days); I could look after Howie, maybe even take him down to my parents' cottage in Hampshire for fresh air and a reminder of what it is to be English, because for Howie the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard, Cap d'Ail and huge ranches in Mexico and Spain were all he'd seen for years.

It didn't last. Howie turned out to be a bourgeois at heart. Along with the fearless feminist Molly (how things change! Now instead of marching or throwing eggs at the Miss World competition, she sits at home proofreading and endlessly editing a sequel to
Gone With The Wind
, which has been
commissioned but can never be got right), I had taken on pretty well every cause except the BNP, even Oswald Mosley's black shirts in old photos never turned me on. I was too Left for Howie—and I soon discovered I didn't much like him anyway.

So here he is. It's the first time he's visited my flat, as we'd divorced a good few years before I moved here. Sometimes he'd ring from the US—he lived in a caravan in southern California since the last rupture from the ruthless daughter of an even more ruthless Russian oligarch—and he'd sound wistful, saying he'd come round ‘next time I'm over'. To my great relief he never did—and I think it was the neighbourhood that put him off: like many ex-pats he sees London in terms of Princess Diana's funeral route, gentlemen's clubs, Green Park, the City and the Savoy. W9 must have seemed impossibly far out, to Howie—but not in the hippie sense of the word, more that of the Edwardian snob.

Now I'm following Howie into the sitting-room, where the state of the ashtray (shame on you Molly) and the drinks tray bear all the signs of a long chat between my ex and Molly. Christ, I know what they must have been talking about, and now I know why Howie finally got himself north of Notting Hill.

Of course! Even an Eskimo marooned on a piece
of melting ice in the Arctic would have heard by now of London's crazy housing boom, of the City bonuses fuelling the buying of any old dump for squillions …

Molly, I say to myself, is my best friend, who has always liked to hear about Howie: when she's not drooling over Rhett and Scarlett there's nothing she enjoys more than to go down Memory Lane with another Old Leftie and talk about when Lefties were New. Now, the only two ideologies in existence, as Howie would gleefully misquote the great Marx, are property and sex).

The next thought that comes to me is oh God, not that … no … I'm the heiress now. He's come to propose remarriage. Howie always considered any wife of his a wife for life—he could have founded the SM (Socialist Mormon) party …

Molly, how could you have done this to me?

As I glare at Molly, seen now walking unsteadily back into my sitting-room, Howie comes up close, nudges me and winks. ‘How about a little get-together upstairs?' he says. To my horror I see his trousers bulging and I think if that's a gun I'd like to shoot you with it. ‘I'd like a bath first', Howie announces.

‘By the way', Molly chips in as she finally reaches
the drinks tray and pours a gin, ‘Alain rang. Just after you went out. He didn't leave a message …'

I suppose the first time I really started to hate my flat was that evening when I wanted so desperately to call Alain and there was nowhere I could be unheard—or not followed, for that matter—with Howie, bath towel round his waist, resembling a retired boxer, going up and down the stairs in search of me, and Molly with her legs stretched out around her on the sitting-room sofa, getting up at brief intervals and shuffling round looking for me—and, yes, Gloria sans Caribbean husband crying noisily in the downstairs loo.

Oh God, there's nothing worse than waiting for a phone call from someone you want more than anything to be in touch with—and finding you're
just the same inside as you were a whole half century ago, when you waited and waited for Sam from your local comp to ring, and he didn't, he didn't.

Isn't there a newly invented mobile which would take pity on Sugar Mummies and whisper an address or email address or a phone or fax number? There are enough modes of communication, but the vanishing Object of Desire—'he left no message'—is worse than a ghost: he's a reminder of all the thousands of times you weren't rung back and stayed a victim of short-memoried relatives (I think it was him) or spiteful friends—perhaps Molly falls into this category.