Golden Boy

by Rosemary Friedman

  During both the fish soup (accompanied by an excellent Pouilly Fumé) and the steak and kidney pie (with which they had got through two bottles of Chassagne-Montrachet rouge), Freddie had listened patiently while his guest, a serious eater who tucked his napkin beneath his chin and put down his knife and fork for what seemed an age between each mouthful, held forth on the likelihood of a German recession. Having resolved the problems of his own country, Wichmann dealt with the malaise of the British economy, brought about in his opinion, not only by the intellectual paralysis of the British government, but by their refusal to accept that the exchange rate should be left to market forces.

  ‘No ERM currency has ever been revalued upwards against the mark, Freddie. It is therefore quite impossible for you’, he jabbed his fork at Freddie, ‘to have lower interest rates than Germany.’

  ‘There are plenty of countries, surely, with much lower interest rates.’ Unable, out of politeness, to toy with his food any longer, Freddie, an habitually quick eater, put down his knife and fork.

  ‘Outside the ERM, yes! The dollar, the yen, the Swiss franc. “Soft” currencies also.’ The fact that Wichmann’s steak and kidney pie was congealing on his plate seemed not to deter him. ‘If Australia can cut interest rates from 17 to 7.5 per cent, why not Britain? If British interest rates would be only 2 points lower than Germany’s…then would you have full employment and there would be sustainable development of both your current and your capital accounts.’

  Waiting for Wichmann to finish, and wishing that the steak and kidney pie would be despatched with the same alacrity as the Montrachet, Freddie thought privately that if Britain had to suffer a further decade of German-imposed deflation before it could share the benefits of low interest rates and market-determined exchange rates, then the past twelve years of Thatcherism had been in vain.

  They were onto the bread and butter pudding, which Wichmann fell upon with relish and beat Freddie to the finish, before the real purpose of their meeting was broached.

  ‘When we spoke again on Wednesday you were mentioning some “interesting developments”.’ Wichmann leaned back in his chair and wiped his mouth with satisfaction on his starched napkin. ‘That was very good. Very good. What are these interesting developments?’

  Filling Wichmann’s glass, Freddie then poured the last of the Montrachet into his own. Lowering his voice, and leaning confidentially across the table, he said, ‘I have agreed to part company with Sitwell Hunt International. I believe that I can do better for you elsewhere.’

  ‘Ach, so!’

  ‘As far as your proposals for diversifying are concerned, Hans, I have several contacts keen to do business in the CIS, and they are prepared to give you all the finance you need. I am not only in a strong position to help you, on a personal basis, but at extremely attractive rates.’

  Wichmann excused himself from the table. When he returned Freddie opened his briefcase and removed the papers on which he had been working for the past three days. He waited while Wichmann lit his Havana cigar and took an appreciative sip of the special marc Freddie had ordered, then outlined his detailed plan for the setting up of supermarkets, and the guarantees of credit across Eastern Europe.

  By the time he had finished talking it was four o’clock and the restaurant almost empty. Calling for the bill, Freddie realised that it would have to be settled not from the generous expense account which he had always taken for granted, but from taxed income from his pocket.

  ‘The last opera Wiebke and I have seen’, Herr Wichmann said, ‘was Der Ferne Klang. It was in München, nicht war, Liebchen?’

  This announcement, made in Freddie’s drawing-room before they left for Covent Garden, was repeated in German for the benefit of Frau Wichmann, a willowy lady, taller than her husband by an ash-blonde head, whose English was minimal, and whose subject was herbals, on which she was writing a book. She had arrived in a black wool cloak lined with scarlet, bearing an outsized bottle of Kölnischwasser, which Jane, who hated the smell of eau-de-Cologne, mentally priced up for her next bazaar.

  ‘Der Ferne Klang’, Wichmann went on, ‘deals with Art versus Life. The music is divine.’ He hummed a few bars from the opera with his mouth full of smoked salmon. ‘But in the same moment something of a – how you call it – eine Mischung?’

  ‘Mish-mash.’ Rosina, who was learning German, came into the room wearing Ariadne’s sweater, which reached only to the top of her thighs, her sunglasses, and Jane’s fish-net tights.

  Her appearance put Wichmann temporarily off his stride. His eyes widened and the canapé to which he had helped himself remained suspended in mid-air some six inches from his mouth.

  ‘My daughter, Rosina.’ Freddie put an arm round Rosina and hissed, ‘For God’s sake, Rosina, where’s your skirt?’

  Glaring at Freddie, Rosina extended her hand (Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady) to Wichmann as Jane’ eyes went to her best Fogal tights.

  ‘A mish-mash – thank you, my dear – between Strauss, between Debussy, and between the early Schoenberg. Franz Schreker was a composer not popular – for reasons you can imagine – in Nazi Germany. His work starts only now to be revived.’

  Unfamiliar with Der Ferne Klang, and worried about being late, Freddie glanced at his watch.

  ‘I think we’d better be making a move.’

  This remark prompted a torrent of German from Wichmann, followed by a nodding smile of agreement from Frau Wichmann which revealed the lipstick on her front teeth.

  ‘My wife looks forward to your Covent Garden,’ Wichmann said, helping her on with her cloak.

  Rosina looked out of the window to make sure that her parents were not going to return and that James’ Bentley, with Leonard at the wheel, had actually left the terrace. When it had gone she dimmed the lights, polished off the solitary canapé left by Herr Wichmann, washed it down with a shot of vodka, and went up to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

  Catching sight of her face in the mirror above the washbasin, she wished for the umpteenth time that she were blonde, or failing that, brunette. She hated her freckles and deplored the fact that her ginger eyelashes were so sparse. She was not all that keen on the lobes of her ears either. They had been pierced, without Jane’s permission, at Fenwick’s jewellery counter when she was 12. There had been a great to-do about it. To distract interest from them she was wearing drop earrings. Shimmering loops of diamanté. They came from Lilli’s box. Lilli had a vast assortment of jewellery, accumulated during her years on the concert platform when it had livened up her black dresses. She kept her collection, gold chains and cabochon rings and interesting brooches of semi-precious stones, in a Burmese casket, the jumbled contents of which had fascinated Rosina since she had been a little girl. Gazing at her reflection, Rosina imagined that she was Henry and pictured his reaction to her image which she hoped was that of a woman in the age of girls. If she half-closed her eyes, ran her tongue over the ‘Matte Red’ lipstick (‘luscious and forties-looking with masses of staying power’), piled her hair on her head exposing her pale neck…

  Her fantasy was shattered by the double ring of the doorbell. Overtaken by paralysis, she remained rooted to the spot. When the moment had passed, unwilling to entrust her voice to the Entryphone, and feeling the unbidden sweat escape from her armpits onto Ariadne’s sweater, she ran down the stairs and pausing on the penultimate step, slunk along the parquet – in a passable imitation of Kim Basinger being auctioned in a North African slave market by Klaus Maria Brandauer – and opened the front door not to her date but to the spotty youth from Pizza Hut.

  Not keen to have a rerun of the stilted quartet which had accompanied the Piper Heidsieck served in their box after Act One, Freddie led his party to the Crush Bar for the second interval. So far, so good. René Kollo was an outstanding Lohengrin, Ortrud and Telramund in fine voice, the orchestra on top form, and the Wichmanns apparently enjoying themselves, although the same could not be said for Jane. He was about to congratulate himself on t
he way the evening was going, when Jane introduced him to Clare Singleton, the treasurer of her charity committee, and her husband, Sir Patrick Singleton, who were sitting on their own in a corner. At Freddie’s request, the couple joined them in a second bottle of Piper Heidsieck, and he was delighted when Clare Singleton practised her fluent German on the Wichmanns, leaving him free to discuss the evening’s performance with her husband, a fellow opera buff.

  The interval warning bell had just sounded, and they were shuffling their way to the top of the stairs, when Sir Patrick, an industrialist, said: ‘And what line are you in, Lomax?’

  The instinctive response, that he was a banker, was on Freddie’s lips when it struck him, like an icy Mongolian wind, that he was not.

  ‘Sorry?’ Singleton, deafened by the surrounding chatter, and thinking that Freddie had spoken, cupped his ear.

  Wondering just how to answer, unwilling to lie, propelled to the top of the stairs by the jostling throng, Freddie missed his footing. Grabbing the brass rail and assuring Jane, who happened to look round just then, that he had merely stumbled, he regained his balance. Sir Patrick, not bothering to wait for a reply to what had been nothing but a polite enquiry, had meanwhile caught up with his wife and, taking her elbow, helped her down the remainder of the stairs and into the auditorium. The incident, which no one had even noticed, was over, but Freddie could not dismiss it from his mind. He knew that he had been severely hurt by the fact that the bank had seen fit to ‘let him go’. The acknowledgement of just how deep the wound had gone blighted his enjoyment of the last act of Lohengrin and distracted him from its climax.

  Freddie’s was not the only big moment which turned out to be a damp squib. By the time Lohengrin had finally disappeared from the stage and Elsa had sunk lifeless to the ground, Rosina’s evening had reached its own disappointing finale.

  Henry’s appearance on the doorstep bearing a video of Fatal Attraction and a bunch of spray chrysanthemums had been followed by the consumption of the pizza in the kitchen, which was accompanied by desultory conversation which revolved largely around nervous speculation as to what time her parents were likely to return. Afterwards Rosina thought that they could just as well have eaten the cardboard box.

  Sitting primly next to Henry on the sofa in the drawing-room before the gas coal-fire as Michael Douglas bonked Glenn Close on the draining board, she mentally rehearsed what she thought of as her lines, should the evening end in the way she anticipated.

  Her knowledge of doing ‘it’ was based on anecdotal evidence from her friends at school – who had likened the experience to seeing all the colours of the rainbow – and the couplings she had witnessed on the screen in which the groaning protagonists, shot in grainy close-up, seemed to convey all the torments of hell rather than celestial bliss. She had not yet decided, if (and when) her moment came, whether she would be Harriet Walter in The Men’s Room, Joan Collins in The Stud, Diane Muldaur in LA Law, or Uma Thurman being deflowered by John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons. The decision might have been easier had there been romantic sand dunes (The Sheltering Sky) or satin sheets (Don’t Look Now) on which to dispose of her virginity rather than the prosaic sofa in her mother’s drawing-room.

  The video was almost over. Although her head was on Henry’s shoulder and his arm was firmly around her waist, Rosina was thinking, with some relief, that she must after all have allowed her imagination to run away with her, when Glenn Close – who had apparently been brutally murdered in the bath – suddenly sat up. Rosina screamed. Henry pounced. Taken by surprise by the sheer force of his rugby tackle, Rosina rolled onto the floor followed by her paramour who was devouring her with kisses.

  She had wanted to watch the end of the video, but there was no stopping Henry who was making strangled grunting noises as he struggled to relieve her of the Agnés B sweater. Giving up on Fatal Attraction – she could catch up on the last few minutes from someone at school – Rosina applied herself to the business in hand. She had seen enough movies to know that now she was down to her new Janet Reger knickers (with which Henry seemed unimpressed) and he was paying homage to her chest, the ball was in her court and she was scheduled to remove her lover’s clothes. It was not easy. The tight jeans were like iron cladding and she had trouble, caused by the tumescent state of his anatomy, with the zip.

  Rolling on top of one another, now this way, now that, giving and taking, mouths open (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The Comedians) under Henry’s urgent directions, Rosina thought that she had never felt so ecstatic and so close to anybody and that her friends at school were right and this was the ultimate, the don’t-ever-want-it-to-end best. She had no idea how long they had been doing battle in a mutual bath of perspiration when Henry, Fatal Attraction completely forgotten, dealt summarily with Janet Reger and pulled apart Rosina’s thighs. After that there was no more dialogue, no nibblings and giggles and exhortations not to stop, no tender exchange of endearments borrowed from the big screen. Penetrating her, Henry seemed to enter another planet, one which Rosina did not inhabit and onto which he did not invite her. Like a fly on the wall she watched him retreat and advance, retreat and advance in a crescendo of exertion to the music of some private mantra, then all at once, with a grotesque contortion of his facial muscles, it appeared to be over.

  With Henry’s ecstatic enquiry as to whether it had been as great for her as it obviously had been for him, Rosina had some problem. If she told Henry the truth – that she had experienced more heart-stopping excitement running for the bus – he might deduce that it was his fault. He would think that she was blaming him for the fact that far from the earth turning somersaults, it had not shifted so much as an inch, and she might not be invited to participate again. She decided to appear cool, and to dissimulate about what had turned out, after so much ballyhoo about losing it and rainbows, to be a decided non-event.

  Sixteen

  It was Lavender who came across the unopened packet of condoms beneath the sofa. She guessed that they must have something to do with Rosina and thought it better not to mention her find to Jane. Going into the kitchen, where Jane was rummaging in the freezer for the unidentifiable remains of Freddie’s birthday cake, she slipped the incriminating packet discreetly into her handbag.

  Ten minutes earlier, progressing ponderously along Albany Street on her way to Chester Terrace, exhausted after a sleepless night – Tony pestering her for sex, it was all right for him, he had nothing else to do all day; Shaun calling for drinks of water; the new baby kicking unmerciful pockets in her flesh – she had been surprised by the unfamiliar sight of Freddie waiting for a bus.

  Although ominous clouds had been gathering earlier as he jogged, it had not occurred to Freddie – on his way to his crucial breakfast meeting with Wichmann – who was accustomed to stepping straight into the Mercedes where Leonard would be waiting for him, that it might be raining. Putting up the collar of his navy-blue pinstriped suit, he had hailed several taxis, some of which were apparently empty and all of which ignored him. Sliding his worry beads out of his pocket and becoming not only wet but irritated, he joined the knot of people – for whom he provided an unwitting diversion with his futile attempts to flag down every passing cab – waiting for the single-decked Hoppa. When the bus came, Freddie stood back courteously to let the other passengers on first. There was room for only three. As the doors sighed closed, he looked anxiously at his watch.

  The next bus, fully loaded, sped triumphantly by at speed without stopping at all. Five minutes later the third one was almost as jam-packed as the first. Several women, as shapeless as their capacious shopping bags, got on before Freddie. They flashed their passes at the driver before sidestepping their way down the narrow aisle.

  ‘Piccadilly.’ Freddie handed the driver a ten-pence piece.

  The youth did not stir.

  ‘Piccadilly,’ Freddie said.

  The young man, who did not look old enough to be in charge of a bus, explained, as if to an imbecil
e, that the minimum fare was fifty pence – and had been for some time – and that the C2 only went as far as Oxford Circus.

  There were no taxis at Oxford Circus. The rain was now coming down in earnest. Cursing the fact that he had no umbrella, Freddie jumped onto the platform of a Piccadilly bus.

  ‘No standing on my platform!’

  Taking the nearest seat, Freddie watched fascinated as a slim Jamaican with shapely legs and straightened hair, plugged into a Walkman, sashayed down the stairs.

  ‘Thank the Lord for music. If there weren’t no music I couldn’t come to work in the morning.’

  Moving her hips and snapping her fingers in time to the beat which presumably emanated from her single earpiece, the conductress took Freddie’s fare.

  ‘Love Passion!’

  He assumed it was the name of the song to which she was listening.

  ‘You married, darling? Any man I want to share my satellite dish with is always married. Fancy my route, do you? Cheers, darling!’

  By the time Freddie had run from Piccadilly Circus to Carlos Place, his trousers were soaked and his shoes squelching. As an impeccable Wichmann, from whom wafted the delicate odour of aftershave, put down his newspaper and got up from the table to greet him, the German’s hooded eyes briefly registered Freddie’s dishevelled appearance as he motioned him to a chair.

  Freddie offered no explanation for the fact that he was late. ‘Never complain, never explain.’ It was part of his credo. Wichmann was at liberty to think what he chose.

  Dropping the Wichmanns at the Connaught on Saturday night after Lohengrin and a convivial dinner at Scott’s, Freddie had judged the evening an unqualified success. Jane had managed to strike up a rapport with Frau Wichmann and, despite the language difficulties, the two women had got on well. While they communicated with each other in a combination of English, German, and French, Wichmann and Freddie had got down to business. Wichmann had promised to spend the whole of Sunday studying Freddie’s financial proposals for the supermarkets, and as they climbed out of James’ Bentley and said goodbye to each other on the pavement outside the hotel – Wichmann kissing Jane on both cheeks, and Freddie reciprocating with Frau Wichmann – a final meeting was set up for Monday morning.