‘Anyway.’ My wife picked at the salad and I could tell from the casual tone in her voice that a small conversational hand-grenade would soon be on its way. ‘I’ve always thought that people who end up paying for it are particularly sad, requiring some sort of agency to find women for them.’
I looked across the table and she stared back and briefly. We both forgot that Doug was there. I must have blushed at her careful deployment of the word ‘agency’ because she laughed angrily. ‘Or maybe they’re just writers,’ she said.
* * *
Affirmation
This is the day when I shall give myself permission to explore the rugged edge of my being. I shall release my positive anger into my work.
* * *
19
There are times in the life of a writer when mere written words are no longer enough. The inner turmoil is such that brisk, externalizing action is needed. Some set off on a perilous solitary journey; others go scuba-diving or plunge down a pot-hole. Doubtless, Martin plays a couple of vigorous sets with Fent or Hitch or another of his brilliant pals.
None of these things work for me quite as well as Bayswater and the Agency.
Until three years ago, I had been in the habit of turning in these moments of crisis (decision, indecision, exhaustion from over-production or under-production) to the lover of the moment. There would be a brief call to her office or library or classroom. She would have learnt quickly enough that a writerly cry for help brooks no delay. Moments later, we would be falling upon one another, escaping into the one act, so simple yet so complex, so pure yet so unutterably filthy, with which humans have, since time immemorial, consoled themselves at moments of stress, conflict and pain. The Novotel, Hammersmith, was a favourite meeting place.
That, at least, was the fantasy. In fact, only one of my lovers, a witchy mature student with long dark hair and a taste for various subtle forms of masochism truly understood that the entire point of these occasions was their cold, infuriated anonymity. The others would, after a few moments of half-hearted role-playing, descend into motherly mode, expressing concern, offering wine or back massages, talking and talking and talking as if it were not words that had caused the problem in the first place. Sometimes they would even suggest that it would ‘nicer’ if we met at their place. It is in the nature of the artistic life that what D. H. Lawrence called ‘the dark side of the moon’ is rarely understood.
I discovered the Agency by blessed accident. A young and indigent Polish student at the Institute had tearfully revealed to the Institute’s Student Counsellor Mike Summers that she was paying for her tuition fees in Design Technology by selling her body once or twice a week on a part-time basis. Chatting with Mike in the staff room, I learnt the existence of several organizations which, under the guise of friendship or penpal agencies, provided the services of foreign students who needed to supplement their incomes. The Agency was not the one used by the compromised Pole, but might well have been. Some time after the fuss had died down, I made further enquiries.
An ordinary civilian, failing to understand the affinity between those who give themselves to art and those who give themselves on a double bed in Bayswater, might regard my visits to the Agency as tawdry and humiliating but to my fellow writers there will be no mystery. It was Flaubert who pointed out that within a house of sin are found precisely the elements that appeal to the novelist: ‘lechery, frustration, negation of human relationships, physical frenzy, the clink of gold’.
Not that I have ever been attracted to the traditional ‘brothel’, the time-honoured ‘prostitute’. The Agency exists in the moral grey area between love and commerce; to put it in literary terms, the questions that provide key subtexts for the average date (Will I get sex? What is in this for me? How much money will it cost me, or make me?) become, gloriously and unavoidably, the thrust of the main narrative. Its setting, a three-storey house in a small square off Lancaster Gate, is dignified, understated and Georgian. Its administrator, Annabel Beauchamp, is in her early forties, a greying blonde with a comfortable figure and the air of a woman whose racy past had given way to a passion for cooking and gardening. By some cunning piece of design, the rooms at the Agency, as neat and welcoming as a girl-bachelor flat, are so organized that male visitors are never in danger of encountering one another while furtively making their way up or down the stairs. All in all, the establishment provides a perfect illusion of normality, shot through with the merest hint of the forbidden.
There were, admittedly, complications in my arrangements with the Agency. The small influx of funds from Marigold’s business earmarked ‘living expenses’ restricted me to a monthly visit. Then, despite not being by nature a pluralist in amatory matters, I have had to come to terms with the notion that, either I must sacrifice my need for spontaneous expression or on occasions ‘make do’ when my girlfriend Pia is unavailable. Charming and good-looking as Annabel’s girls were, Pia and I had come to understand each other so well that, in the end, I took to making reservations. At first, planning weeks in advance in Annabel’s study made me feel bourgeois and trammelled, like a businessman booking his next check-up at a clinic, but the indiscriminate, any-girl-will-do promiscuity of the alternative was worse.
Gloucester, Martin, Peter, marital and parental unrest at home: suddenly, four days after my weekend away, I knew that I was unable to wait the fortnight until my next appointment with Pia. I needed reassurance – soft, female reassurance, a reminder of my essential manliness. After a morning spent listing redhead writers, I picked up the telephone and dialled the number of the Agency. I was so agitated that I almost, but not quite, forgot to introduce myself by my nom de boudoir.
‘Tim.’ There was the merest hint of surprise and disapproval in Annabel’s voice. She ran an establishment where certain proprieties were observed. For regular visitors to cast their diary aside and ring, breathless and on the hoof in search of immediate romance was regarded as a breach of etiquette. ‘Are you changing your appointment?’
‘Is Pia there?’
‘Pia?’ Cruelly, she hesitated long enough for the sickening possibility to occur to me that Pia had left, returned to Macedonia or whatever miserable part of East Europe she belonged. ‘Pia’s at work, Tim. She’s got exams after Christmas. I’ll see if I can find Svetna for you. You know her, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I remembered a trim, hard-eyed Serbian with brisk, knowing hands. ‘I’ve met Svetna, but I really would prefer Pia.’
‘Tim, I told you –’
‘I’ll pay double.’
Annabel sighed and pretended to check in her diary. ‘I can make no promises,’ she said. ‘Be here in an hour and I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Would a credit card be all right?’
Annabel laughed. It seemed she had overcome her misgivings. ‘It will do very nicely, Tim,’ she said.
Gasping my thanks, I hung up.
An hour. I considered killing some time in a pub, calming myself with alcohol, but then I realized that calm was not what I needed, that the company of ordinary, non-writing people with their dull, inane chatter would take the edge off me. I wanted edge. Edge was part of the deal, part of being a writer. I drove east, parked in a side street and waited, my breath shallow and feverish, my entire being abuzz with anticipation.
‘Tim.’ When, after an interminable 45 minutes, Annabel Beauchamp opened the front door to me, she was actually wearing an apron. ‘Sorry I can’t touch you.’ She held up two plumpish hands on which there seemed to be traces of flour. ‘I’ve been baking.’
‘Right.’ I smiled, playing the game. ‘Very nice too.’
‘Hope so.’ She went ahead of me through the hall, her hands held out comically from her sides, like a penguin. I followed her into the kitchen. ‘Help yourself to some Chardonnay.’ She nodded in the direction of an opened bottle on a sideboard. ‘Glasses are in the cupboard.’
On every visit to the Agency, I would be startled by its proprietor’s brilliant faç
ade of ordinariness. To a non-expert eye, she could pass as the wife of an estate agent, living in one of the smarter suburbs of west London. With that comfortable figure, going but not quite gone, the short blonde hair around a pretty, mature, carefully tended face, she belonged to the Volvo brigade – hubby, dinner-parties, part-time job, kids, a carefully controlled affair with someone who posed no social or emotional threat (a tennis coach, a small-time actor). Only those attuned to such things, fellow misfits and hooligans, would discern the direct, predatory eyes ever alert for sexual weakness or opportunity, eyes which, at some time or other, had seen virtually every indignity man and woman inflicted upon one another in the name of pleasure. If she had any private life, I assumed, from the flash frost which descends on her features at the merest hint of flirtation, that it was of the sapphic variety.
‘Now, don’t sit down, Tim,’ she said, taking up a position behind a breadboard on which there was an unsavoury lump of dough. For a moment, I thought she would ask me to help her in some kitchen chore, to be a love and peel those potatoes for her, but now, as she briskly grated some turnip-like object, I sensed a certain displeasure. ‘Don’t make a habit of this, Tim.’ Without looking up, she spoke quietly, a reproving schoolteacher disappointed by a normally reliable pupil. ‘We’re not officially open and Pia has her exams to think of. It was only because she likes you that she agreed to come over.’
I wanted to believe her – my more innocent nature did believe her – but I was not in the mood to be patronized and lectured by an up-market madame. I smiled, resting my eyes upon her busy right hand so that she knew that I was not taken in for one moment by this housewifely charade. ‘Some plastic,’ I said, taking a card out of my wallet and laying it on the kitchen table.
Annabel darted a beady glance in its direction. ‘I can’t deal with that now. Leave it here and you can sign on the way out.’ She wiped her brow with the back of her hand in a manner which reminded of my wife. ‘Why don’t you watch some TV in the sitting-room? I’ll tell you when Pia arrives.’
I made my way to the small, tidy sitting-room next door and switched on the television. On some loud and vulgar confession show, a row of plump, unlovely disgruntled women with their menfolk in unconvincing drag were shouting and pointing at one another while an audience whooped and hollered in almost ecstatic disapproval. ‘LOSE THAT COCKTAIL DRESS OR LOSE ME!’ read a banner in one corner of the screen. I turned down the sound and watched the freak show in silence.
Annabel had done a good job with this room; it had the air, relaxed yet slightly impersonal, of some sort of waiting-room or, at best, the lounge bar in a second-rate club. Just the right number of just the right magazines, all this month’s, lay on the low table in the middle of the room. The sofa and two chairs were comfortable and elegant enough to grace any normal middle-class home. The Victorian reproductions on the wall cleverly combined respectability with an unmistakable, repressed, pent-up longing. The Lady of Shallot. Ophelia. Love Locked Out. Only the absence of photographs, invitations or other indicators of family life gave any clue that those who sat in this room were within minutes of the most intimate relief.
Catching a glimpse of myself in a small framed mirror on the wall to the right of me, I looked away. Then, irritated by my own furtiveness, I stared myself in the eye. A man in a room. Love Let In. I looked all right: there was something taut and drawn up and ready about me. The figure that I sometimes saw in the reflection of shop windows during my afternoon walks (dishevelled, lost, so anonymous as to be almost invisible) had given way to someone firm, purposeful, strong – a man about to fulfil the erotic purpose which was his right and duty. On an impulse, I reached for my wallet and took out the Snowdon shot of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists which I like to keep with me. It seemed to me now that, to the perceptive viewer, I had already been showing signs of being out of place in that august gathering. Never good-looking in the traditional sense, I had acquired in my mid-thirties the first traces of a general spread and slackening of muscle tone which unhappiness and lack of exercise would later exacerbate. My front teeth had begun to obtrude as if they had had enough of my mouth and were making a break for freedom, and I was smiling for the photograph, innocently unaware that any serious writer should scowl when cameras appear. Beside the faces of those around me (Salman’s sleepy eagle, Martin’s sneering bad boy, Julian’s head prefect, Graham’s bank-clerk intellectual) I cut a jovial, goofy figure, like someone who had blundered into the shoot from a nearby rugby club dinner.
I wondered how, after all my adventures, I had ended up here. Once I had thought that I was cutting down on the time, the lying and excess emotion demanded by an affair, but now I knew that a different form of economy was at work. ‘A sexual act leaves no memory. There are no sexual madeleines,’ D. M. Thomas has written. Nothing, in my experience could be further from the truth.
It was not the social or conversational hinterland of the women of my past which had remained with me – not what they said, or believed, or what made us laugh together. It was the moments of true, inescapable nakedness and erotic self-exposure which, to this day, startled me with their vivid immediacy: the moment when Anna returning to her flat from the Institute slowly raised the skirt of her dark suit to reveal that she was knickerless and ready; the way that Caitlin would turn her head away from me and whisper, as if talking to a child, ‘Push, push’; the tears that, for reasons she could never explain, filled Maria’s eyes when we made love; the almost clownish blush that suffused Ruth’s face seconds before, chewing her lip like a child with a maths problem, she came; the sighs, the words, the looks, the shameful little secret desires and tricks and peculiarities which, unique as a fingerprint, express more truly and eloquently a woman’s character than any words. For me, it was only the sexual act which left a memory – sharp, erotic and discomfiting. The rest (jokes, conversations, rows, even names, sometimes) was faded and indistinct.
At the Agency, the extraneous life of conversation and feeling had no place. Once, in the early days of my arrangement with Pia, I had asked her if for women, past acts of sex remained as snared in the memory as they do for men. Vaguely puzzled, she replied in her harsh cockneyed East European accent that ‘A man’s a man. Some good, some bad, most are in the boring medium. It is not interesting.’ Verbal communication now played little part in our dealings.
I was already afraid of the way I was heading, of this segregation of the sexual from everything else within my life. Where would it end? In furtive, tottering visits to massage parlours in Mayfair? In, after some kind of traumatic Cheeveresque realignment, a desperate search for relief with hard-eyed rent boys on heaths and in public lavatories?
There was a knock on the door. ‘She’s here,’ Annabel called out. ‘You know the way.’
I knew the way.
* * *
The shoes were wrong. It was the first thing I noticed when I entered her room, having knocked twice (my only and last concession to the intimate hierarchy in which we were both involved) to find her sitting on the bed. Great, clumsy, platform-soled things utterly at odds with the impression of lightness which I require. The skirt was too short: it was almost tarty.
She looked up, dark moon eyes in a pinched, pale face peering, reluctant, almost resentful. It took my breath away. I felt a knot of anger within me. Then I remembered that my visit had been unannounced, that moments ago she had been living her life rather than playing a part in mine. If she was breaking the rules now, then so was I.
‘Wash your face.’ When I spoke, my voice was husky, more imperious than I had intended.
She shrugged, stood up and walked in a casual, slatternly way to a wash-basin. I closed my eyes briefly, hating that lazy amble, wondering why so consummate an actress in bed betrayed herself so obviously, swinging her arse in lazy invitation, when out of it. She washed her face, carefully with soap, rinsed and dried it. With both hands on the basin, she looked at me in the mirror.
‘Better,’ I s
aid and nodded in the direction of the bed.
She gave a sort of sigh and seemed, briefly, to be about to say something. Then, thinking better of it, she turned and wandered towards the bed, kicking off her absurd shoes and reaching back to unzip her dress. As if I were not there, she undressed, folded her clothes on the chair like a well brought-up child, then lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
I asked her to look at me. Slowly, she turned and gazed at me, one eye hidden in the dark profusion of her hair. It might be the tilt of the chin, or the hint of downward curl to the thin lips, or maybe something in those dark eyes. Whatever it was, the likeness took my breath away every time I saw her.
No, we don’t converse any more. In the early days, when I had discovered her, we used to share a few pleasantries but her hard, Eastern European accent and the banal, obscene vocabulary she employed fatally undermined our fiction with faulty dialogue. I talk now and then. She listens.
So, moments later, lying together on a double bed in Bayswater, my body pale and bloated beside hers, I talked about Cheltenham and McWilliam and Martin as I caressed her hair, her face, her breasts, allowing my hand to work its way slowly downwards, murmuring all the while. Did I mention Peter? Of course not. Like writing fiction, making love requires the maintenance of a deft balance between passionate commitment and cool, controlling distance. I reached between her legs and, to my surprise, an involuntary gasp escaped her lips, followed by a few muttered, angry words in her native language. She had not been working for her exam when the call had come but had been in bed with some oikish young lover. I felt the knot of pain and anger tighten within me. I lifted a shoulder and she turned over, her eyes closed, her face against the pillow. Above her, I massaged her narrow shoulders, her muscular back, running my hand over the sweet curve of her buttocks, reminiscing about the times we had had, our feelings for one another, about the past, words only dying when, arching her back, she lifted herself to my lips, moving at last, unable to resist the tide of her own pleasure. Soon, too soon, I felt her shudder beneath me and slowly relax, until she lay still, breathing heavily.
Kill Your Darlings Page 15