by Sue Margolis
Gently Charlie took her arm and Anna allowed him to lead her a couple of yards down the road so that they were away from the orange streetlamp and couldn't be seen from Uncle Henry's house. Then, very slowly, with his hands holding the sides of her shoulders, he began to bring his face towards hers. His lips had come to within a fraction of a millimeter of touching Anna's when suddenly there was an almighty shriek from Uncle Henry's front garden.
Anna and Charlie sprang away from each other to put a respectable distance between themselves, and then stood watching the commotion as people came tearing out of the house. From what they could make out, Aunty Millie, who had probably been following Bunny Wiener to his Roller in order to get a lift home, had tripped on a loose piece of crazy paving and fallen over. She was lying on her back in one of the flowerbeds, screaming at everybody to phone for an ambulance to get her to Stoke Mandeville as she was paralyzed from the waist down. Even goofy Bunny was able to point out that paralyzed people tend not to be able to wave their legs in the air, and offered her a glass of cherry brandy, which one of the lady helpers from down the road had placed in his hand. Aunty Millie knocked it back and said she thought she could manage another, at which point she began clutching her chest, and proclaimed so loudly that she could be heard as far away as Chadwell Heath the onset of a cardiac arrest.
“Look,” Charlie said to Anna, “I'd better go and see if I can help calm the old biddy down. You get going and I'll see you Tuesday—one o'clock if that's OK. Let's meet at the hotel. I'm staying at the Park Royal in Kensington.”
At the very mention of the word “hotel,” Anna almost fell into a Victorian swoon and thought she too could do with a swig of cherry brandy.
Fighting the vapors, she took a deep breath and made an effort to appear composed. She said that would be fine and that she was looking forward to it, but Charlie, who was obviously finding it hard to forsake her in favor of Aunty Millie's hysterics, stayed to watch her as she walked round to the driver's door and got into her car. She had just started the engine when he mimed to her to wind down the window.
“By the way, I almost forgot. I found this on the floor in the hall. At first I thought it might be one of Aunty Millie's sex toys, then I realized it could only be yours.”
Grinning lasciviously, Charlie passed Anna her Tobago brooch, the carved wooden one of the Rasta with the huge erection. It must have fallen off her jacket somehow when she arrived at Uncle Henry's.
“He's certainly a big fella. Reminds me a bit of m'self.”
Anna wasn't sure whether she was about to have an instant bowel movement due to her embarrassment that Charlie had found the brooch, or whether she was feeling even more turned on—if that were possible—by his reference, albeit joking, but then again, maybe not, to the size of his own undercarriage.
There was one thing, though, about which Anna had no further doubts: so long as a state of national emergency wasn't declared between now and next Tuesday lunchtime, and provided the Queen didn't phone her on Monday night to say that she was prepared to give Anna the exclusive on her royal romps with Des O'Connor, she and Charlie Kaplan were going to sleep together.
On the journey home Anna experienced nothing but glorious sexual anticipation and almost frightened herself by the lack of guilt she was feeling, now that she was on the point of cheating on Dan. She realized that she hadn't discussed him with Charlie, other than to mention him fleetingly. She was certain, nevertheless, that when Gloria cornered him at the cemetery, she would have filled him in on everything about her, from the irregularities of her teenage menstrual cycle to her blissfully happy marriage.
What Anna couldn't work out was why, since Charlie must know she was married, he hadn't made some reference to Dan, if only to check that he wasn't a karate black belt or a professional assassin.
She suspected it was nothing more than sheer embarrassment. What had she expected him to say? “I really want to sleep with you. By the way I'd love to hear all about your husband. For instance, has he ever taken a piss sitting down, and where does he stand on the debate about whether those logos on men's polo shirts are tacky.”
Anna did, nevertheless, have some misgivings about Charlie Kaplan. It struck her that he might well be one of those men who only had affairs with married women and preferably ones who had children. They, no doubt, fell madly in love with him, were desperate to run away with him and were probably on the phone to him several times a day, “just to hear your voice,” no matter what continent or time zone he was in. She suspected that he, on the other hand, always bargained on them never having the courage to leave their husband's Amex Gold card, or risk losing their children. This left the charmingly alliterative Captain Kaplan free to fly round the world screwing a different married woman at every stopover, without having to give the remotest thought to offering them anything approaching a long-term emotional commitment.
Still, she realized, she shouldn't really give a stuff what his motivation was for wanting to get her into the sack. If she was a true believer in the gospel according to Rachel Stern, who might yet, if Anna's plan to commit serial adultery succeeded, become St. Rachel, she had to have faith—and keep reminding herself that for a truly clitoris-centered woman, it was the sex and not a bloke's psyche that mattered.
Over the weekend, Anna had conjured up umpteen sexual fantasies about Charlie Kaplan. She'd invented her favorite in the communal changing room at the local swimming pool, where she and the children were getting dressed after their usual Sunday-morning splash-around.
While Josh and Amy fought about whose undershirt was whose, Anna had sat on the wooden bench, pretending to concentrate on rubbing her towel over a particularly stubborn bit of hard skin on the underside of her big toe. What she was really doing was clocking the other women's naked bodies. It wasn't that, in her late thirties, Anna was having fresh doubts about her sexual inclination; it was simply that, as somebody with a rotten body image, she liked, needed even, to play “I spy a woman in worse shape than me.” A pelican neck and the kind of tits which could be tucked into the waistband of a pair of panties could set Anna up for a week. Pert turned-up breasts on a mother of four would, on the other hand, have Anna wanting to dive into one of the private changing cubicles to phone the Samaritans on her mobile.
This had been a good morning. In a couple of minutes she had spotted a set of hairy nipples, the kind of flabby underarms from which you could make a set of curtains and have enough left over for tie-backs, as well as a severe case of pubic alopecia.
Slowly, Anna continued to dry herself off. Previous thoughts of having to sneak her ill-fitting skin in through the emergency entrance of some swanky beauty salon before her Tuesday-lunchtime assignation began to recede for the time being, at least. What took their place was a kinky daydream about her, Charlie Kaplan and a length of silk cord.
This involved him making her lie down naked on a bed, turning her onto her stomach and tying her hands behind her back. In her dream, he then forced her to wear a black leather slave collar and led her into the shower, where he covered her whole body in some sensational body foam from Harvey Nicks. Then, while he insisted she stood absolutely still, he gently stroked her clitoris, while using a razor in the other hand to shave off all her pubic hair. By now, with Anna in a state of some frenzy, he made her lie down on the cold, hard bathroom floor tiles, spread her legs open and then came deep inside her with an erection the size of a zebra's.
But sitting at her desk on Monday morning, she thought that, knowing her luck, the reality would be that Charlie Kaplan suffered from some daft neurosis or other, such as a morbid fear of French onion sellers, and couldn't make love until he'd checked there wasn't one hiding under the bed, or secreted in the chest of drawers. Or he would turn out to have an erection the size of Rodgers and Hamsterstein's.
This latest foray into Charlie Kaplan's putative psychological underbelly was interrupted by the phone ringing. It was the familiar gorblimey voice of the Globe on Sunday's feat
ures editor, Campbell McKee. Campbell had actually studied politics at Oxford, and been the Observer's social services correspondent for several years before moving to the Globe for double the salary and a company Mercedes 190. Desperately anxious that nobody there should think of him as an intellectual middle-class wuss, he affected an almost immediate personality change. The refined chap who used to wear shrunken threadbare Guernseys to work and was the author of the well-received Dial and Dialectic, a Marxist analysis of the role of the telephone answering machine in late-twentieth-century culture, ran over his vowels one night with a lawn roller and took himself to a cheap flashy jeweler in Romford to buy a gold signet ring for every finger. These days he had all the manner and charm of a bent East End boxing promoter. By rights Anna should have despised Campbell; most people who knew about his hypocrisy did. Anna, however, thought he represented a perfect paradigm of human frailty and rather liked him for it.
“Anna, Campbell McKee 'ere. Just fought I'd give you a bell to say what a fucking brilliant job you did on that nit piece. We even managed to find the girl on the cooked meat counter at Streatham Niceprice who refused to serve the family, and got a reaction from their priest. Mine jew, 'aving said that, the mother looks like a complete dog in the contacts I just got from the picture desk—plus she's got jugs as flat as last Christmas's Asti Spumante. Still, it's going to make a bollocking good page eighteen. Listen, Anna, I was wondering if you fancied doing another story for us tomorrow evening?”
Anna hesitated for a couple of seconds. She had imagined spending Tuesday evening at home in the tub, immersed in delicious sexual afterglow and Body Shop bath foam—not chasing round every accident and emergency unit in London on behalf of Campbell McKee because some soap star had been caught shagging a vacuum cleaner attachment.
Campbell immediately picked up on her uncertainty and realized a touch of gentle thumbscrew was called for.
“Anna, don't say no before you've heard me out. Believe me, angel, this is a blindin' story . . . sort of tragi-wacky if you get my drift. Listen, just between you and me, I've had Lucinda Fee Plotter coming into my office every half hour since Friday, begging, just begging me to let her do it, but I said, “Lucinda, you daft tart, get up off your knees, it'll do no good, you're just not up to it. There's only one reporter talented enough to do this piece and that's Anna.' Angel, just listen for a couple of minutes and let me fill you in. . . .”
Anna listened, but not before deciding that she must take Campbell McKee to one side at some stage and point out that if he wished to remain attached to his wedding tackle he really should stop calling her “angel.”
The story Campbell outlined sounded pretty so-whattish. Mavis de Mornay, the seventy-something best-selling romantic novelist who wore Lycra boob tubes and black patent thigh boots, was dying of some mystery illness.
De Mornay was famous for her puerile seventeenth-century melodramas. These usually concerned an amply bosomed parlormaid called Agnes who suddenly discovers she was taken into slavery at birth and is really an Italian contessa, but that's OK, because the swarthy stablehand she has the hots for is really the illegitimate son of a French prince.
They were the kind of twaddle devoured by both office juniors from Upminster and dyslexic Sloanes skipping crème brûlêe class at Swiss finishing schools.
Throughout her writing career, de Mornay had been a publicity junkie. In interviews she always said that her need to mainline on maximum press attention in order to ensure her books sold not just in their thousands, but in their millions, was linked to an overwhelming fear of reliving the poverty she'd known as a child growing up as plain Mavis Truswell in a Nottinghamshire coal-mining village. Mavis had gone into service in a grand house in Leicestershire, married a footman, Harold Chettle, and spent twenty years observing the ways of the aristocracy before writing her first novel, Housemaid No More, and sending it to a London publisher under the pen name she borrowed from a posh soap label. She ditched Harold in 1955, within a month of signing a ten-novel deal, and subsequently married her publisher.
As a consequence of her addiction to publicity, she'd employed umpteen PRs, mainly called Sophie, over the years to pester news desks every time a new de Mornay was about to hit the book shops—which they seemed to do almost every week. This press harassment took the form of incessant phone calls to editors and the mailing of hundreds of press packs, which included black lace garters and ripped scarlet satin bodices. A couple of times a year there were also invitations to champagne receptions chez the de Mornay pile in Chelsea, where the waiters and waitresses would be dressed as her latest hero and heroine and the climax of the evening was always a musical reenactment of the duel in Chapter 8.
Mavis de Mornay was a bore, and as far as journalists were concerned had been one for donkey's years. Where Campbell's story started to get interesting was when he got to the bit about de Mornay deciding that she would turn her own imminent death into some kind of macabre publicity stunt. She had left instructions with her latest PR—a jolly girl called India, which made a change—that as soon as she lapsed into a coma and her death seemed within hours, she was to invite the press and TV cameras to her bedside to witness her departure from this world into the next.
“What we'll do,” said Campbell, “is put a picture of her at the moment of death on page one, and then your obit-cum-color-piece about her final moving moments as she loses her brave battle for life, et cetera, across two and three. Goes without saying none of the broadsheets will touch it, and most of the pops seem to have given it the bum's, so it looks like it's just us, Jennifer's Diary and Panorama. What do you say? India, the PR—nice girl, well, fucking dim, ack-shally—says she's fading fast and tomorrow evening we'll be sure to catch her au moment juiced, as they say.”
Anna thought it was possibly the most prurient, grotesque and obscene idea she had ever heard.
“OK, Campbell,” she heard herself say. “Fax me the address.”
C H A P T E R S I X
THE PANIC SET IN YET AGAIN THAT morning, in the lift at the Park Royal going up to Charlie's room. In the few seconds it took to reach the fourteenth floor, Anna could feel dots of sweat breaking through her foundation and her mouth filling up with saliva as if she were about to be sick. The moment the lift came to a jerky stop, she decided she had to get to a bathroom. She pressed the button for the ground floor and started taking deep breaths in between swallowing fiercely to get rid of the saliva. Anna wondered what the odds were on Charlie having the hots for women who smelled of vomit.
The lift took ages to reach the ground. It stopped at the tenth floor to pick up two American businesswomen wearing big hair, eighties power suits and running shoes, and who were deep in discussion about the best way to get to some dump way out in the 'burbs called Wimple-tahn, a place where, apparently, they had some business meeting set up, but that was famous, Anna gathered from listening to the women, for its tennis. The lift stopped again at the eighth. A Japanese family got in, but not before the father insisted on holding open the lift doors with his forearm and foot while the teenage son stood by a small table in the corridor and spent an irritating few seconds videoing a particularly uninspiring oasis arrangement of pink carnations.
By now Anna had trawled through her handbag and found a half-empty packet of tomato-ketchup-flavor Wotsits, which she'd probably confiscated for some reason from one of the children. It might just come in useful, she thought, when she chucked up.
As the lift reached the ground and the doors opened, Anna barged past the Americans and Japanese, intending to make a bolt for the powder room, but queasy as she felt, she couldn't resist pausing at the doors for a second and turning back towards the Americans. “If you're looking for Wimbledon, I think you'll find your best bet is via Ed in Burrow and Saint Al Burns.”
The next minute she was sitting on a kidney-shaped lavender Dralon stool which had gold legs. She was thanking God that, firstly, there was no bored lady loo attendant on duty raring to provide her w
ith comfort, not to mention a twenty-minute discourse comparing and contrasting the size and consistency of her fibroids with those of all her friends, and secondly, the nausea was beginning to wear off. Getting angry with the two Anglophobic tarts in the lift had probably helped.
Thinking back over the events of the morning, it wasn't difficult for Anna to work out why she had felt so anxious and sick in the lift.
She had been OK first thing, when she was laying out on the bed clothes which she thought were contenders as outfits in which to commit adultery. Not that she intended to still be wearing them during the actual committing. It was the bit leading up to the committing which concerned her.
She had decided black was definitely out because she'd been wearing it at Uncle Henry's funeral and she didn't want to look as if she only ran at one sartorial speed. However, that excluded most of her wardrobe. She was left with a bright-pink imitation Chanel suit from M&S which had a gob of either snot or aioli down the skirt—she couldn't tell which—and a powder-blue dress and coat which was very sixties, very Jackie Kennedy and which Anna wore with matching low, pointy slingbacks. She had bought it last spring for a wedding. Although she thought it was ideal for her tryst at the Park Royal, it crossed her mind that it might be a bit dressy, a bit Moët and nibbles, for Mavis de Mornay's deathbed vigil afterwards. Still, if de Mornay was in a coma, she wouldn't give a toss what Anna was wearing, and if she was vaguely conscious, it might cheer her up.
So the blue dress and coat it was—along with a brand-new fifty-quid bra, which was sexy but not overly lacy and tarty, and matching cream-colored panties.