by Sarah Dunant
There was a nasty silence on the doorstep. From the way her jaw was clenched I got the impression Kate was trying not to cry. It made me anxious just to look at her.
“Are you guys, OK?” I said. Stupid question.
She frowned. “That’s where Amy gets the word from.”
“What?”
“Guys. She keeps calling us guys.”
“Kate!”
“Hannah, listen, will you just go away. I … I can’t talk to you now.”
“OK. I’m out of here. But I’m at home all weekend. If you need me.”
I walked down the steps. But when I turned she was still there. And she looked so awful, so bereft, that I decided to give it to her anyway. “Here,” I said, digging it out of my pocket, “this is for you.”
She took it frowning. “What is it?”
“It’s a holiday,” I said, but somehow I knew she wouldn’t take it.
Chapter 7
Itook the next day quietly—watered the window boxes, scoured the ring off the bathtub, and caught up with some movies that weren’t cartoons—or at least not intentionally. I made sure the answering machine was on, but Kate still didn’t call. Families. Who needs them? Not me.
Sunday morning I stayed in bed. Why not? Outside, winter was making an unexpected comeback, the wind moving the rain horizontally against the windows. At 1:00 P.M. the doorbell rang. I had to open it in my bathrobe. Not the way to impress a client. Special delivery from the lady herself, the lovely Olivia dapper in full-length black PVC mac with hat to match. She looked like a designer fisherman. She was bowed down under a box of files. Such manual labor seemed rather out of place, but then we were talking sensitive material here, not the kind of thing you could leave to a courier service. Given the humbleness of my abode, I didn’t invite her in. She didn’t seem to mind. Presumably she must have given her husband some kind of excuse as to what she was doing with her Sunday afternoon. Her business, not mine.
I humped the box upstairs and unpacked it on the kitchen table. It contained a set of maybe fifty big brown envelopes. Not a lot if you consider it was a trawl through over a thousand operations, but still enough to reintroduce me to caffeine.
Inside each file there were four or five pages of notes and the odd set of pictures, all photocopied from the originals. I settled myself down and spent the rest of the day working.
By late afternoon I had been through the lot and had three stacks arranged on the table with a list of names tacked to the wall. It’s called strategy. One pile contained the discards—the people who’d come, complained, and left apparently reassured; next came the ones who had been mollified by further treatment (some at Marchant’s expense, some at their own); and finally those who were either still unhappy or appeared to have gone elsewhere.
I can’t tell you how much fun it had been. Like having your own proof copy of Hello before they cut out all the nasty bits. Those who had returned for further treatment included a very minor member of royalty needing a nip and tuck after too many big babies in quick succession, a rock star who had trouble losing weight, a politician who’d spent a number of years telling us how safe the health service was in his party’s hands but obviously couldn’t get his eye bags removed on the NHS, and two TV personalities, one of whom had been growing noticeably younger over the years. Her complaint was that her mouth was now too tight and she had trouble talking. Maybe somebody had paid Marchant to get it wrong.
Sadly for me only one of the seriously famous had continued whining. And the final pile of those who were still dissatisfied wasn’t that big at all. It seemed that Maurice Marchant was indeed good at his job. There were some fairly amazing body photographs to prove it. The most extraordinary were those of fat and its deadly enemy—liposuction.
Liposuction—it’s one of those terms, such as collateral damage, that have wheedled their way into the language, like confident gate-crashers at a party, so confident that it takes a while to realize who they really are and how much you don’t want them in your house.
The pictures showed “before” and “after.” Or rather stuffed and sucked. Like porn they were deliberately not glamorous, but then also like porn this was flesh without personality. For lipo read hippo. The most common view was of the buttocks and the upper thighs, circus-lady rolls of flesh above or below the hips. Of course I’m a child of my ideological age. I know fat is a feminist issue and diets only cause you to put on more weight, but whatever the orthodoxy it seemed to me that walking around with that much extra weight could hardly be perceived as a liberating experience. On the other hand, I wasn’t that crazy about the “after” photos either. There was less fat, certainly, but the bodies just looked as if they had lost something rather than gained any natural shape of their own.
Marchant’s notes carefully recorded his conversations with the owners of the excess fat (did it still belong to them after it was out, or did it become the property of the extractor?). He was scrupulous in pointing out the limitations. Although liposuction could drastically reduce the amounts of fat, what it could not do was to totally reshape your physique. In other words, once a pear still a pear, or at least not quite the hourglass you had hoped to become. Two ladies, and one man, had found this a considerable problem.
I was most interested in the man, not least because he was the rock ’n’ roll star. Well, sort of. He’d been fairly big in the early eighties and had recently tried to make a comeback. I vaguely remembered seeing him on a retro music show a couple of months before. I tried desperately to remember how much of him there had been inside his trousers. Ugh. Interesting how something that was becoming almost acceptable for women spelled instant death to masculinity. On second thought, maybe I could actually wait to meet him.
Of the two women, one was definitely more promising than the other. Her notes read like the denouement to a slasher movie. According to Marchant, by the time she had arrived on his doorstep there wasn’t much of her left that hadn’t been under the knife already, and Marchant was careful to stress the limits of what was possible. Even from his notes she sounded sad, and he believed in this stuff.
The next complaint was noses; and most interestingly the one that had started off as West Indian and ended up, well, not as near to Anglo-Saxon Britain as its owner, a young model, would clearly have liked. Marchant’s observations were mainly technical—a lot of stuff about the difficulty of rebuilding sufficient height structure and cartilage. I got the impression that he had treated it less as a cultural than an architectural challenge and for that reason had no way of understanding why she was still dissatisfied.
Other complaints involved droopy eyelids that had closed rather than opened and several pairs of breasts. The most promising of these, as far as I was concerned, was a suspected silicone-implant leak, but Marchant’s notes showed that the removal operation had been immediate and without charge, and that the implant had been found intact. The client (did she now have one tit bigger than the other or had she gone for double deflation in the interests of sym-metry?) had gone away apparently content.
In another case the complaint was less from the owner of the breasts than from her boyfriend. They might look great (he’d been the one to suggest the operation in the first place), but he didn’t like the feel of them—like trying to knead an overfilled waterbed. This comment was in quotation marks to show it was reported speech and not Marchant’s own assessment. Nice boyfriend. I could think of at least one operation that he would benefit from.
The last mammary problem was to do with size. The lady in question had been hoping for something more substantial. And her disappointment had made her pretty angry, to judge from the notes. I looked at the pictures and thought back to Olivia and her spirited attack on my sense of physical adequacy. The “before” photos were definitely on the pancakey side, otherwise she seemed to have a rather beautiful body. Whether it had been enough to blight her life—well, presumably I would find out.
One disgruntled client stood out above
and beyond the rest. Marcella Gavarona had come all the way from Milan last summer to have a face tuck and was not at all happy with the result. She had made two subsequent visits four months ago and was still whining loudly. She was also still living in Milan. It was only an act of unbridled self-denial that prevented me from putting her at the top of the list. Instead, she ended up about halfway down a group of ten.
Now that I had a short list I thought about how I might reduce it further. The most obvious way would have been to compare the handwriting of the patients with that of the anonymous note. But in this computer age no one does with a pen what can be done with a keystroke, and although presumably they must have signed a consent form, or at least a check, there was no record of such anywhere in the files. No matter. I could always ask them to write something down when I saw them.
After a Chinese takeout and two lagers I had such an obvious idea that I was almost too embarrassed to ring in case she realized that I had failed to notice earlier. Blame it on the alcohol. The number she’d left for emergencies was a London one. She answered, then took the call in another room.
“I’m not sure what you mean …”
“Well, whoever sent the notes to Lola obviously knew the health farm well enough to target it pretty precisely.”
“Yes.”
“So it’s likely that at some point this person might have stayed there, even perhaps talked to Lola, got a sense of how unhappy she was.”
“It’s possible, though they could probably have got all the information they needed from the brochure.”
“But you do do referrals from the health farm to your husband’s clinic? Or vice versa?”
There was a slight pause. Maybe it wasn’t allowed. I thought of all that free advertising on the walls of the beauty salon. Olivia Marchant was nothing if not a businesswoman. “We don’t directly refer, but we can recommend, yes.”
There’s a difference? “So there’s a chance that the person we’re looking for might also be in your files?”
“Yes. I see what you mean.”
“How soon can you get me a list of those names?”
“Well, we make a note on their files on the computer, but we don’t keep them separately, so it’ll mean going through them all. I have to go up there tomorrow, anyway. I could fax it to you around lunchtime or drop it off later.”
I was tempted to ask her to deliver it in person to the office. Since Frank recarpeted the stairs, he’s always whining about how he’d like more clients to see the place. And Mrs. Marchant was just the kind of client he was talking about. But what the hell. There may be a new carpet, but I’m still getting backache from the same secondhand chair. Let him find his own long-legged beauties. This one was mine, bonus and all.
Chapter 8
Next morning I took a long, hard look at my body and called my aesthetic surgeon.
The receptionist at his Harley Street office was awfully nice, and devastated that she couldn’t get me an appointment any earlier than the seventeenth of next month, only he was so frightfully busy and away at conferences in Amsterdam and Chicago from Wednesday. But when I mentioned that Castle Dean had referred me, hey presto, she managed to find me a last-minute cancellation for tomorrow afternoon during his Embankment Hospital clinic. She gave me the address. “Looking forward to seeing you, Miss Landsdowne.”
My body, but somebody else’s name. Well, it wouldn’t do to have my own coming up on the computer screen when Olivia Marchant looked for more Castle Dean to Harley Street. I had thought my way around my table at the lettuce banquet a few nights before and alighted on the television producer. She was younger and cuter than me, but she had left the same day and her bill (which I had caught sight of in the register) betrayed a fairly intense relationship with the beauty salon. Who knows what sweet words of poison Julie had poured into her ears?
There was still no sign of Olivia’s fax, so I used the time to check out a few names on my list. Since I was into media territory I decided to stay there, using the old journalist’s approach: I was doing a story on problems with the cosmetic surgery industry and I had heard from a friend of a friend that they might like to contribute.
The model with the faulty nose job, otherwise known as Natalie West, was no longer at the same address—her old flatmate told me that she now lived in Bermuda with a record producer. I pretended to be a friend who’d been away and she happily filled me in on the bits of her life that I’d missed. Natalie, it turned out, had given up modeling just under a year ago, and was now helping to run a recording studio with some guy she had met on a shoot there. When I asked her how about the trouble with the cosmetic surgery she was surprised I knew about it, but told me Natalie had had another operation done with someone else that hadn’t been that much better. On the other hand, you know Natalie. Most girls who looked like her would have been thanking the gods for their looks rather than trying to stretch the envelope of perfection. I agreed and took down a Bermuda address, anyway, like a good pal should.
Then came Elvis’thighs. His answering machine referred me to a manager. When I spoke to him, I pretended to be a music journalist and put in a request for an interview. He said he’d let me know.
So to the breasts. The woman with the implant problem had emigrated to Australia with a new husband who presumably had no trouble with the size of her tits. The lady with the dissatisfied boyfriend was happy to talk, but no longer complaining. She’d kept the breasts but dumped the man, which I suppose under the circumstances qualified as a small triumph for feminism. She certainly seemed content with the arrangement.
The last and most dissatisfied breast customer, one Belinda Balliol, turned out to be a message on an answering machine. Still, she had a nice voice—young and energetic, as if life was holding on the other line and she had to get back to it quickly. If I wanted to join in, I could leave my name and number after the beep. I did so. Then, just in case, I went back to her notes. There was a second number jotted down in brackets with a little w by the side. It turned out to be a recorded message for the Majestic Casino near the Strand. Opening hours 2:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. Exciting. This was going to be a job with some nightlife at least.
Egged on by images of glamor, I called Milan only to get another answering machine, this time in glorious, speedy Italian. I left a message in dull, slow English. Let’s just hope she’d remembered to tell her husband about the facelift.
I was about to try Mrs. Muriel Rankin, the walking case of scar tissue with serious liposuction trouble, when the fax activated. Hold the front page. And the next call. When I’m rich and successful, I’m going to have a separate line for the fax, so I can talk and read at the same time.
I lay and watched it chuntering its way over the machine and onto the floor. The minute it stopped the phone rang.
“You haven’t broken the portable already, have you?”
“No. It’s switched off.”
“Good. Cos I’ll want it back when you leave. I presume you’ve written your letter of resignation?”
“What?”
“Well, you’re no longer at Castle Dean and you’re not at the office. And this is 11:33 A.M. on a working day. Do you want me to send on your P forty-five?”
“Sod off, Frank. I worked all weekend. And how the hell do you know I’m not at Castle Dean anymore?”
“Because I’ve just spoken to them, that’s how. If you remember, Hannah, employees are supposed to call in every two to three days with a progress report. That is what we decided.”
For “we” read Frank. And for “employees” read me. He has these brainstorms sometimes. They usually don’t last long. Truth was I was going to leave a message on the office answering machine yesterday, but then I’d got my head caught between a couple of overweight thighs and everything else had been wiped from the back memory. “What’s your problem, Frank? You got nothing better to do on a Monday morning than whine?”
“Au contraire, my little frog bait. As of 9:30 I’ve got a custody sn
atch case in Madrid and a tasty computer fraud job in Newcastle, both jumping up and down on my desk calling for volunteers.”
Madrid versus Newcastle. No prizes for which one I was being offered. Computer fraud in Geordie country, eh? More macho than tracking down women whose fat has been sucked out from the wrong bit of them, certainly, but in my experience regional detecting is like local radio—it’s a liability having a London accent. “Sorry, Frank. I’m afraid I’ve already got a job.”
“Oh? Have you formed your own company, or is this strictly moonlighting?”
“Frank! It would bloody well serve you right if I had. I haven’t noticed my name going up on the door yet, despite all those promises.”
Comfort and Wolfe: there was a time when I used to play with the sound of the words, like teenagers testing out rock stars’ surnames in place of their own. Fantasy. Good fun as long as you know that’s all it is. Of course it’ll never happen. I know Frank. He doesn’t want to lose the pleasure of bossing me around. And if I’m honest with myself, I’m not that keen on becoming the kind of person who runs the business rather than just does it.
To placate him I told him a bit about the job and asked his advice. He was sulky but not unhelpful. He pointed out the obvious connection of the handwriting, though said in his experience anonymous-letter writers could go to untold lengths to disguise themselves, using left hands instead of right, or even holding the pen with their toes. He also found the fact that Olivia Marchant had kept everything from her husband a bit odd. But then that’s Frank for you. As he never fails to mention, he probably wouldn’t have employed me in the first place if he could have got a man cheaper. It is, of course, bluster. I tell you for nothing if I were in a tight spot and was offered a choice between Cat Woman and Frank Comfort I’d ditch my feminism any day.