Escort (Three Tales of a Silver Fox)

by Harper Fox

  Escort (Three Tales Of A Silver Fox)

  Copyright © April 2019 by Harper Fox

  Cover art by Harper Fox

  Image licensed through Shutterstock

  ISBN 978-1-910224-36-6

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from FoxTales.

  FoxTales

  www.harperfox.net

  harperfox777@yahoo.co.uk

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Escort (Three Tales Of A Silver Fox)

  Harper Fox

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part One

  The First Client—George

  Chapter One

  I turned away from the window, from the sunshine and racket of the London afternoon. My laptop was on the desk, open and waiting. I sat down.

  The lawyer had sent my papers via email. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting—a tap at my front door, perhaps, and a sombre-suited executive with an envelope in his hand. Well, I might get that yet. Hard copy to follow, the last line of the email promised, and I wondered just how much fucking harder things were likely to get.

  The papers were in an attached PDF. I clicked the document open, my palm going damp on the mouse. Then I pushed my chair back from the desk and looked away.

  This was my brother’s office. The chair I was sitting in, computer, desk, mouse and the very hours I put in here, the air he somehow found reason to pay me to breathe—everything was his, and I had no business conducting my personal life on his time. Instead, as if that was somehow better, I got up again, inched open the sash window and stared out.

  Sometimes in May, you can forget that London’s a city at all. Andrew’s offices, the smart and rising architectural planner’s he’d built up all on his own, overlooked a garden square between Hyde Park and the north side of Knightsbridge. The square was full of cherry trees, their blossom dancing in the warm wind from the buses passing on the street below. If I could just let in the scents and sounds of it all, the sweet air with its tang of diesel and the clatter and chatter of the school-kids on their way to the Natural History Museum, I might be able to catch my breath. I might not mind so bloody much that Melchior wanted a divorce.

  I sank down onto the window sill, which was almost wide enough to qualify as a seat. Fenchurch and Co was a lovely building, a sanctuary in a bustling, overwhelming city. Andrew had offered it as a sanctuary to me, a crash pad when my efforts to sustain my failing marriage had cost me my post with the Civil Service. Too many missed meetings, a bodged planning proposal... I’d have jumped if they hadn’t pushed me. The millions of people in the UK struggling to find and keep a roof over their heads deserved better from the Ministry of Housing, even if I had built up a decent department over the years. Christ knew I wouldn’t miss the job, which I’d only held on to as a rock in the stormy seas of Melchior’s career. If one of us had turned out to be a world-famous concert pianist and composer, the other—if he loved him—had better grit his teeth and be a civil servant. And I’d done it. I’d loved him, after all. I still did.

  The office door flew open. The stairs from the ground floor weren’t carpeted, and I usually got at least thirty seconds warning of Andrew’s approach: despite hours put in on the squash courts, he was a big lad, an unforgotten legend of our school’s rugby pitch. But I’d lost myself in birdsong and self-pity, and the shock served me right.

  Intensified as I looked at him. His nose was bleeding. Bright scarlet drops were still hitting his shirt front. He had the beginnings of a shiner. So far it could’ve been a mugging, but the trousers of his nice expensive suit were wet to the knees. “Christ almighty,” I said, getting up from the sill and grabbing a box of tissues. “What happened to you?”

  “Do you remember how I promised to punch Melchior in the face for you?”

  “Yes. You were drunk.” I held out the box to him. “Do you remember how I begged you never to do anything of the sort?”

  “What can I say? I cut back through the park after lunch and there he was. I thought he’d go down like a wad of wet jelly, but you’d be amazed.”

  I didn’t want to be amazed. I didn’t want to think about Melchior, frail and slight, facing off against my ex-rugger brother. “What happened?”

  “He had his girlfriend with him. Sabrina, isn’t it? I’ll be damned if she’s more than twenty years old.”

  “I know. I told you. She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

  “Blooming. Anyway, Melchior sees me coming. And his protective instincts must have been aroused, because before I could get anywhere near him, he sits her down on the nearest bench, strides over and pops me on the nose. Knocked me on my arse, if you can believe it.”

  “Oh, my God, Andrew.”

  “I know, right? Embarrassing. So I picked him up and threw him in the lake.”

  The breeze stirred the linen-strip blinds. Beyond them, the buses and pigeons continued their chorus. A spasm took hold of me: a weird kind of shudder, and for a moment I thought I might sneeze or throw up. Then I made a sound like one of the pigs in the petting zoo someone had set up in the garden square below. I grabbed a tissue from the box I’d handed to Andrew, buried my face in it and snorted again before bursting into laughter. “Shit. Fuck. Andrew.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure I ought to be sorry, but the little prick really had it coming. Anyway, we had quite a scene, like something out of Mary Poppins. This bobby blows his whistle from across the park, and I help Melchior out of the water. Then the two of us have to stand in front of the copper and shake hands and swear to keep the peace, or he’s gonna arrest us both.” Andrew pulled out a chair on the far side of my desk and flopped down. “The best of it was...”

  “Wait. There’s a best? Something more?”

  “The best of it was, she calls him Mel. The girlfriend.”

  My lungs deflated. The racking laughter died. I’d called him Mel once—in a tender moment of our honeymoon, twenty years ago. He’d called a halt to our proceedings to explain that, given his genius, his blossoming career, the image he was building with his public, he couldn’t allow anyone to shorten his name. Not even me. Then, as if aware that he’d come off as a bit of a dick—he still had such flashes of insight back then—he’d told me in gentler tones that his identity still felt fragile to him, and Melchior supported the composer and concert pianist far better than Mel could ever do. And I’d bought it, though the passionate newlywed fuck I’d been about to lay into him had lost some of its fireworks after that.

  Andrew limped round to my side of the desk. We weren’t much for touching, but he put a hand on my shoulder. “Shouldn’t’ve told you that, should I?”

  “You shouldn’t’ve told me any of it. Christ, Drew—you shouldn’t have done it. Was Melchior all right?”

  “Oh, fine. You know how he loves a wounded-martyr role. He forgave me in front of the policeman—more in sorrow than in anger—and Sabrina loaned him her Versace coat to wear, and the two of them went off to recover their dignity in Knightsbridge.”

  “Is that where he’s living now?
”

  “Yeah, one of those gorgeous Pont Street Dutch redbricks with the curvy gables. Hasn’t he even told you that much?”

  “No. I didn’t ask.”

  “Well, you’re gonna find out when you get those divorce papers read through and signed. It’s apartment sixteen, the Redmayne building.”

  “He hasn’t got the whole house?”

  “Nobody owns a whole piece of Northern Renaissance Revival in Knightsbridge these days. Don’t worry, he’s got the loft space. Fucking fantastic.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Ah, George.” He gave my shoulder a shake. “All our friends know. Everyone from your Civil Service job and everyone here. You’ve got to pull it together a bit, old son.”

  I sat up. Something in my spine clicked: I hadn’t been near the gym in almost a year. Not much point, without Melchior’s critical gaze upon me as I buttoned up a close-tailored suit in readiness for front-row exposure at the Albert Hall. “You’re right,” I said huskily. I dabbed my face, then cleaned a smear of blood off Andrew’s upper lip. “I will. I suppose I just thought, if he actually got away and lived somewhere else for a while, he might get it out of his system and want to come... to come home.”

  “For God’s sake. It’s been a year, and his lady’s about to present him with mini-Mel. He is home.” Andrew shook his head. “God help him, actually—I wonder how the fantasy loft’s gonna look with nappies hanging from wall to wall. How his fragile nerves will cope with baby shit and round-the-clock feeds.”

  “Sabrina will take care of him. She’s nice, Drew. I don’t want anything bad to happen to her or to Melchior, so stop trying to... avenge me, or whatever you’re doing here. Jess and I got divorced, remember, back in the day. If I can change sides, so can he.”

  “Come on. You were just a kid then, and if you hadn’t worked out you were gay, everyone else had, including Jess.”

  “We still had a kid together. I still had that experience. I can’t be mad at Melchior for wanting it too.”

  “Can’t you? Who told you that?”

  Melchior, of course, during the finely nuanced, well-rehearsed monologue with which he’d announced his departure and reasons for going. (I’d found the rough draft among his papers after he’d left.) “Nobody,” I said grimly. “I can just see his point of view.”

  “Well, stop. You and Jess fought like tigers to save your marriage. Melchior just walked out. Your point of view’s the only one that matters now, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s time you turned it away from that mincing little ivory-tinkler and got yourself sorted out.”

  “Don’t call him names, Drew. It doesn’t help.”

  “All right. I’m sorry. He’s a striding bloody colossus, and I... I know he’s a great musician, okay? But I don’t love him. I love you.”

  I twitched. He’d never said anything like it before. I wiped my eyes. “I love you too, you arsehole. I will sort myself out. The first thing I have to do is get a proper job, not this make-work bollocks you’ve invented for me here.”

  “Are you kidding? You’ve been tons of help.”

  “Right. Those flyer envelopes would never’ve stuffed themselves.”

  “Stop it. You’ve got as much talent for this game as I have, if you’d ever given yourself a chance.” Stiffly he turned away and went to lean against the frame of the window behind me. “It’s probably a bad time to tell you this as well, but the planning permission went through for the DigiRev building. We’re gonna be rich.”

  I stared at him. For a man on the make, he didn’t look happy. Maybe it was just that his trousers were still damp to the knee, his shirt rumpled. He was normally so dapper. The DigiRev clients were the biggest on his books. For months they’d been campaigning for their high-tech business block on the site behind Drew’s offices, currently occupied by a few streets of decaying mid-century terraces called Oak Vale. Local conservation groups had fought the monster in vain. The terraces weren’t listed, weren’t Arts and Crafts or even particularly attractive. DigiRev hadn’t cared about the trees that had grown up in their shabby gardens, and nor could Drew. The deal was a killing for Fenchurch Architects. “All right,” I said. “I suppose it had to happen.”

  “I know you wanted to save the houses.”

  “I don’t even know why. I just fell for the place a bit when I first started working here, and I’d wander round the streets and the little shops on my lunch break. It kept me from thinking about Melchior, somehow. It felt human.”

  He visibly pulled himself together. “Well, I’ve got something better to keep you from thinking about all that. We really will make a fortune when DigiRev pays out—enough for me to create a partnership here for you. The Brothers Fenchurch! How does that sound to you?”

  Bloody impossible, actually. I tried for a wan smile. “Like a Russian play that got lost in a Victorian suburb. Look, Drew—I know you’re trying to help, but...”

  “Shush. Do me a favour and don’t make any sudden moves for now. Didn’t we agree that you’d stick it out here until your fiftieth birthday? Fifty’s the new thirty, you know, and you’re almost as handsome as I am, even if you could use a trip to my barber. Oh, and a day at the spa in my club, and a quick whiz through menswear at Harvey Nic’s, and—”

  “Andrew!”

  “What?”

  “You’re right. We did agree that. And my fiftieth birthday’s next week.”

  He actually went white. “Shit. Is it really?”

  “Same date as the last forty nine of ’em. Relax, will you? I’m not expecting anything.”

  “Yeah, but... Melchior would’ve made some big thing of it, and...” He folded his arms and pulled a wry face at me. “I know I call him names, and chucking him into the Serpentine was way over the top. But you miss him, don’t you?”

  I had to take a deep breath before I could reply. Drew’s cheerful hostility towards my ex was proving a lot easier to deal with than his sympathy. “Of course I do.” A shivery chuckle passed through me. “You might find this hard to get your head around, but the thing I miss most about Melchior is the—”

  “Oh, my God! TMI!” He sprang back from the window. His air of awkward kindness evaporated like raindrops off a barbecue, and he stumbled away from me, pretending to gag, all of a sudden my kid brother again. He continued until the far wall brought him to a stop. “Still,” he said, suddenly thoughtful. “It’s natural enough, isn’t it? You know what? You should go to Silver Fox.”

  “What’s that? Another one of your fancy older-gents’ makeover outfits?” Drew had embraced city lifestyle far more than I had. I’d kept myself decent for Melchior, but had so far resisted all Drew’s attempts to lure me into manicures and designer stubble. “I’ll stick with a shower at the community pool, if that’s all right with you.”

  “It’s not an outfitter’s. It’s an establishment.”

  Something in his tone gave me a warning. “What kind of establishment?”

  “Not the kind you’re thinking of. Discreet, upmarket, absolutely top-class service for gentlemen—and ladies—of mature years. Robbie in technical drawing told me about them.”

  “Robbie’s twenty five. And insatiable.”

  “Well, they cater to people who are looking for that more mature partner, too.”

  “Okay.” I shook away images of Robbie in the arms of a lady—or was it a gentleman?—of twice his years. “Partners... Is this some kind of dating agency, or...”

  “No. It’s an escort service. You should see their website! The women are stunning, and the fellas—well, I’d have a go myself, if one gay in the family wasn’t trouble enough.”

  I grinned at him. He’d started to blush, for all his enthusiasm. A nice family man, was my Andrew, and he must have been worried as all hell about me to drive him to suggest something like this. “You know perfectly well I’ve been no trouble at all.”

  “No, you haven’t.” He let go a sigh. “You’ve been my sweet, quiet, faithfully married gay bro
ther, and that shit-for-brains Melchior still dumped you. It’s time you made a bit of trouble, if you ask me. Go on, Georgie. Get out there. Live a little.”

  I shook my head. If the DigiRev deal was really on, I’d better help him out. His secretary was on leave: I could hoover up some of the daily correspondence and calls. That way he could focus on ruining the lives of the few hundred valiant London souls who’d held on to their Oak Vale homes, a task he didn’t seem to relish any more than I did. I opened my computer screen, minimised the PDF and called up the letterhead template. “Bugger off,” I suggested, not without affection. “Go hold your trouser legs under the dryer in the loo. And wash your face—you’ve got clients in half an hour.”

  I was afraid he would argue, but a moment later the office door creaked and clicked behind him. Alone once more, I sat back, letting the sounds of the city afternoon meet and subdue the backwash of my thoughts. Silver Fox, for godsakes! And all I’d meant to tell Drew was that the thing I missed most about Melchior was the chess.

  Chapter Two

  He’d really been a top-notch player. Hardly seemed fair, with all the other gifts Nature had piled upon him, but there it was. He’d played for relaxation at our local amateur’s club, and in between tournaments there he’d used me for practice, a handy foil to his thrusting, merciless game. I’d been clueless at first, the kind of savage who’d pillaged the pieces for draughts in childhood bouts with Andrew. Patiently, over the first few years of our marriage, he’d taught me not just moves and techniques but whole strategies, from opening pawn to mate.

  To my surprised, I’d adored it. At first it had just been the novel sensation of his whole attention upon me as he shared his wisdom, and then I’d got into the game for its own sake. He’d inevitably beat me, but over time I learned to stave off his victories for longer and longer. And even in our last few months, when everything we’d meant to each other turned sour and began to circle the drain—while I’d struggled to make myself right for a man who didn’t want a man anymore, who wanted a woman and another crack at life—we could still come together for a match. We both could be quiet for a while, our tensions and hostilities threading out harmlessly across the board.