‘I was worried about you, Frances. I came home especially early, planned to take you and Magda out to dinner. I’ve booked a table at Valchera’s.’
‘I’m sorry, darling, but I don’t think we could manage it. We’ve been eating all afternoon.’ A second Valchera’s table swept away. Vichyssoise and crêpes suzettes dethroned by candy-floss and Dayville’s. Her three-scoop Strawberry Fizz nudged her in the guts.
Magda was hiding behind her scowl again, had re-erected the barriers. Charles did his best to bring her out, his voice trampling on the Orpheus, frail, limpid music which couldn’t fight with conversation. Frances listened anxiously as an ostinato screwed the room tighter and tighter in its relentless circling.
Charles turned to her instead, since he could get no word from Magda. ‘Pleasant afternoon?’
‘Very pleasant.’
‘Bought the clothes?’
‘Some.’
‘Why the black?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Well, it’s a little funereal for a child, isn’t it?’
‘She likes black.’
Silence. Black silence. ‘How was Oppenheimer?’
‘Fine.’
‘Would you like a chop for supper?’ God I’m going to scream.
‘Thank you. Nice.’
Not nice. Not nice at all. Ridiculous. Unbearable. ‘I’ll just have a salad. I’m not hungry. Magda?’
‘Yeah?’
‘A chop for you?’
‘Nope.’
‘Salad?’
‘Nope.’
‘No, thank you,’ Charles said tersely. Frances winced. Christ, not again, she prayed, not the whole stiff, funereal, screaming farce again: Magda slouched at the table, fiddling with a fork, Charles chewing a pork chop, no talk except the odd strained monosyllables. She suddenly remembered Ned’s scrappy piece of paper, stuffed in her jeans pocket. She’d forgotten all about it, hadn’t even looked at it. It might have fallen out … ‘Excuse me a moment, would you?’
‘Of course.’
Always so damned civil, she and Charles. She rushed out to the hall, rummaged in the shopping bag, found the piece of paper still crumpled in the pocket. ‘Rilke is flattered you remembered him. His business phone number is 749 2348, extension Ned. P. S. Swap my ice cream cornet for your eyes.’
Crazy, puerile Ned, she thought, suppressing a broad grin. It wasn’t even funny.
Chapter Eight
Charles washed his hands with the yellow scented soap in the marbled hotel basin. Five matching yellow towels in assorted sizes hung neatly on a heated rail. He pulled crossly at the smallest one, dried between his fingers. He hated hotels – too many bloody mirrors. The bathroom itself was like a mirrored coffin, reflecting him full length, in parallel. Six separate Charleses dried their hands; twelve hands replaced the towel, dead centre, on the rail; six double faces grimaced at themselves.
If he moved a fraction to the right, Laura edged into the mirror, reclining on the bed in the adjoining room, naked except for the fine silver necklet he had bought her.
‘Charlie.’
He wished she wouldn’t talk – she was getting as tedious as Frances. And he’d told her a hundred times about the Charlies.
‘Charles …’
‘That’s better …’
‘Come here, sweetest.’
‘Just a moment.’ Christ! She couldn’t want it again. He had a heavy afternoon ahead of him. One of Laura’s attractions was that she was a short-and-sharp girl. None of that nonsense about multiple orgasms and the earth moving. Laura was more like a man – one big bang and all over. Though her face and figure were anything but masculine – thank God. He inched to the right again, eyed her in the mirror. She was a female you were proud to be seen with: voluptuous, fleshy, elegant; neither her auburn hair nor her scarlet talons quite what God had given her, but striking none the less.
And a sharp and witty woman who understood his work, respected him for being who he was.
He needed that respect, sometimes wondered whether Frances really fathomed the cruel pressures of his job. He could hardly afford to be a person any more. His profession had set him up as a deified decision-machine, cold, efficient, steely. His day existed only to solve other people’s problems and survive other countries’ crises; his evenings and weekends merely to keep up with the crippling burden of research. If a client quizzed him on custodial charges in Nauru, or Copper Futures on the Tokyo Exchange, he had to know – and instantly. And there were thirty-eight important clients, all pushing him for data. Multi-million banks and multi-national corporations picking his brains and probing his judgements; off-shore banana republics demanding instant fiscal programmes; oil princes expecting razzmatazz and homage with their ten-year economic plans. His own life was squeezed between them. Even a mistress had to be slotted into a lunch hour, and then paid for with half a night of homework. The same with music. If he listened to a concert on the radio, he had to make up lost time by swotting through the early hours. Sometimes he only snatched the last movement of the final piece, or taped the programme while he studied in another room, hoping to play it back in his car, or during meals.
Even in his sleep, strange jumbled images of dollar signs and silicon chips howled in the cold factory of his head; accusing columns of figures hurled themselves out of their tidy phalanxes and multiplied each other over and over, until their seething numbers spun into infinity. Some nights, he dared not sleep at all. One miscalculation could cost him half a million pounds and all his self-respect. Even in his so-called rest hours, he must remain constantly, relentlessly alert.
It wasn’t easy. If he were irritable or tense, it was only because he had been forced to divide his mind into thirty-eight pieces and give each one simultaneous attention. That’s why he needed a Laura in his life – a retreat, a haven, somewhere he could move out of the jangling computer of his mind, back to the solid base of his body, and remind himself it still existed.
It would be hellish, giving her up. True, she was already more demanding, and the ‘Charlies’ were intolerable, but she was still a prized possession, something luxurious, unique, like his Bristol 411, and his eighteenth-century office with its Adam ceilings and its Goya aquatints.
He replaced his underpants, to rule out second helpings, returned slowly to the bedroom.
‘Lover …’ Laura whispered.
‘Mmm?’
‘You don’t really mean it, do you?’
‘Laura, I’ve got to mean it. I can’t inflict any more on Frances at the moment.’
‘Frances doesn’t know.’
‘She might get to know, darling, and I just can’t take that risk. Not now. Not with Magda.’
‘So, I’m to be sacrificed for Magda?’
Charles kissed her heavy breasts. ‘It would have ended, anyway. These things always do.’
Laura pushed him off. ‘Don’t be a bloody hypocrite! You had no intention of ending anything, until that godforsaken brat turned up. Look, I’m sorry, Charles, but …’
‘It’s not for ever, sweetheart. It’s just a break, that’s all, until things are better organized. I’ve got plans for Magda. Boarding school, for instance.’
‘Frances won’t agree to that. She’s against boarding schools on principle, for girls. I’ve often argued with her over it. She thinks …’
‘She may think rather differently, when it’s in her own interests.’
‘Charles, you’re such a cynic. Just because your own principles are sandwiched between your interests, it doesn’t mean that Frances’ are as well.’
He removed Laura’s groping fingers from his thigh. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I’ve already written to the Sacred Heart at Westborough.’
‘A convent school? What a load of humbug, when you don’t even believe in God.’
‘I’m not the one who’s going.’
‘Well, is Magda religious?’
‘I can’t say I’ve noticed. But her mother’s Roman C
atholic.’
‘Ah yes, I know the type – it’s quite OK to screw, so long as you don’t prevent the babies. I suppose that’s how Magda arrived on the scene.’
‘No.’
Laura laughed, slid her hand down Charles’ leg again. ‘Don’t sulk, it doesn’t suit you. Poor Frances – you knocked all the God out of her when she was a pious young thing carolling away in the church choir, and now you reinstate religion just to wrap your daughter in. She won’t like it, Charles, you know. Frances agonizes over that sort of thing – indoctrination, freedom of choice. She’s got quite a hefty conscience.’
Charles sat up on the bed. ‘You seem inordinately fond of Frances at the moment. I can’t say I’ve noticed it before.’
‘Well, screwing your best friend’s husband never does the friendship any good. Nor the screwing, really.’
‘So you’re complaining about my performance, are you, now?’ Charles eased up to his feet, drifted to the window and stared out at the garden spread below. Two spaniels were copulating underneath a willow tree. Bitches didn’t criticize their dogs.
‘Oh Charlie, don’t be so paranoid. You don’t think I’d put up with you if you weren’t a fantastic lover, do you? I’ve no complaints as far as bed’s concerned. I just don’t want to be turfed out of it.’ Laura snaked her long legs farther down the covers, as if to stake her claim. ‘You always suit yourself, Charles. When I had scruples about Frances, you kissed them all away with a load of balls about self-fulfilment and post-Freudian morality. But now you’re wrestling with your own guilts, they …’
‘No one said anything about guilt, Laura.’
‘You hate the word, don’t you? Guilt demeans a man, so you call it something else. Principle, convenience …’
Charles walked slowly to the wardrobe, where he had hung his clothes on hangers, whereas Laura’s strewed the floor. He dragged on his white lawn shirt, immaculately laundered by Apex Valet Service. Perhaps he wouldn’t miss her, after all. When they’d started their affair, she’d saved her astringency for the Labour Government, or her husband, instead of turning it on him. She had never nagged or grumbled in the early days, just thrown off her clothes and opened her legs, always ready for him, purring. He didn’t have to waste an hour or more, coaxing her, preparing her, as he always did with Frances. There was no need to say he worshipped her, or that life was dust and ashes in her absence, or all the other crap his wife expected. Laura would have laughed, said, ‘Shut up and get on with it,’ and then come quickly and efficiently. Other women’s orgasms were something of a nightmare. Half the time you suspected they were pretending, and the other half they didn’t even have one, though they still made those wild noises, so that you feared you’d ruptured them, until you discovered they were only crawling along to ecstasy in bottom gear and were never going to make it. Even with Frances, there were doubts. She seemed to come – sometimes – and so she bloody ought to, after all the time he lavished on her, but there was no full stop, end of paragraph. It took him an age to get her there, and then twice as long returning her to base. Laura didn’t need all that after-sales service; soothing and reassuring and saying, ‘Yes, wasn’t it wonderful,’ but just rolled over and went to sleep, or got up and poured them both a Scotch.
But things were changing. Already Laura had started interfering and complaining. If she refused to lie low for the moment, well, there were always other Lauras. His home life was far too precious to be sacrificed. He tensed, felt her prowling hands again. She’d come up right behind him, and was trying to ease his Y-fronts down.
‘No,’ he said abruptly.
She knelt in front of him, rubbed her head against his thighs. She was teasing him now, kissing everything except his cock. It annoyed him, really, the way it always responded to her, even now, when they were meant to have finished, and he had an investors’ meeting to attend in half an hour. He was stiff again and she was sucking him, at last, with as much relish as she sucked an ice cream cornet. Frances didn’t like ice cream, and frankly, he understood the way she felt. With Laura he got the best of both worlds; she tongued him (to perfection), but didn’t demand it back. Laura wasn’t mercenary, except out of bed. Maybe some other guy sucked her off – certainly not her husband, who preferred horse-racing to sex – but he didn’t want to know. So long as he didn’t have to push his own face into some steamy, strange-smelling thicket, he wasn’t complaining. Laura thrived on thickets, and he could always pay her in silver.
The silver chain he had bought her dangled against his thighs and distracted him from the wilder sensations between them. He let his head fall back against the wardrobe, gripped the wooden doors.
It was hard work, a second climax. Once, the sight of Laura’s naked breasts had been enough to make him come, but even mistresses palled. He shut his eyes and summoned the new office secretary from her typewriter. Obediently, she slid out of her dress and took him in her mouth, her lips taking over from Laura’s. It was a slow, arduous climax, demanding every ounce of concentration. But the more effort he put into it, the more gratifying it was – he found that with most things in life. His entire body was joining in. His head felt light and spinning, his hands and feet had disappeared. He was only a pillar, thrusting and thrusting, reduced to one wild stab of pleasure. He was no longer being gentle, or sparing the new secretary’s small, shy virgin mouth, no longer cared if he choked her. She was only a slot, a socket, something he controlled. He slid almost out and felt the air cold for a second against his cock, then in again – warm and burning-wet. Out, then in; cold, then hot. His body was a force, a rhythm, reduced to six inches of sensation, yet those six inches bigger than the six-storey hotel.
He hadn’t believed he could come another time – there was nothing left inside him – but Avril-from-the-office had turned nothing into a tidal wave. Her prim lips were dragging out of him the entire Atlantic Ocean. Everything he owned was in her mouth – his sperm, his guts, his money, power, spurting down her throat. He had grabbed her head, and his fingers were digging into her scalp, as he thrashed out the last dregs. Then, suddenly, there was only an empty bag between his legs and Laura’s auburn hair twisted between his fingers, and his own breathing, dangerously loud.
Avril had tripped back to her IBM Executive. It was Laura who was licking her lips, as she knelt back on her heels. She was a swallower, thank God. After a climax a man felt foolish enough, without the woman spitting him out or washing him off. Laura made the whole thing acceptable, bridged the aching gap between ecstasy and self-disgust. She gulped down sperm in the no-nonsense way she ate oysters at Wheeler’s; wiped her mouth, re-applied her lipstick, and ten minutes later, she’d be discussing the retail price index like an intelligent colleague.
It certainly made it easier. He could zip up his pants and return to more important things, cross sex off the list and put it away till next time. Frances expected full-scale action replays with commentary and flashbacks. You couldn’t fit her in between a hectic morning with a bankrupt shipping company and a three o’clock investors’ meeting. And she wasn’t one for mouths.
‘It’s such a waste of sperm,’ she objected, on one of the rare occasions they’d lifted their veto on oral sex. ‘You can’t have a baby that way.’
Christ! Those bloody babies, they got in the way of everything. That was the reason he’d first escaped to Laura. Sex for Laura was an end in itself, not a baby-manufacturing process. She didn’t keep bleating on about embryos or oocytes, or litter the bed with charts and turn the whole performance into dreary paperwork. For Frances, he’d become a stud, a prize stallion to fill her belly, rather than her cunt. Thank God, it didn’t fill. He didn’t want another Magda.
He slumped down suddenly on the edge of the bath, had returned to the bathroom for the third shower of the lunch-break. Magda – beautiful and terrifying. A stranger made out of his body, with his own chromosomes staring out at him through her dark, angry eyes. What he felt for Magda must be somewhere near love, whatever lo
ve was. Yet the child had brought only misery – not only to himself, but now to his mistress and his wife. He had hurt all three women, and yet he loved them all, to some degree. Better not use the word ‘love’ – he couldn’t define it, and he suspected words that resisted definition. Besides, how could you love someone and destroy her in your own mind, as he did with Frances? Ripped her to shreds and served them up to Laura as a peace-offering; criticized her maternal urges and then expected her to mother the child he’d had by another woman. He closed the bathroom door. He wanted the mirrors to himself, not half a dozen Lauras sneaking into them, fishing out stockings from under the bed, or stubbing out fag-ends in dirty coffee cups.
Frances folded her clothes and didn’t smoke. Frances was neat, reliable and punctual, and he had made her so. One of the reasons he loved Frances (that forbidden word again) was that he had helped create her, built her up from small, promising beginnings, like his practice or his garden. All three of them were blooming, and it was credit to him. But now he had blighted Frances – with Magda. The whole tidy garden had been trampled on and bulldozed.
For years, Magda had been only a faded photo in his double-locked office drawer; a monthly cash transfer from his bank to Piroska’s; expensive presents for birthday and Christmas, ordered by phone from Harrods and sent direct. Plus some small, sticky residue of guilt, pride and fear, locked away even more securely than the photograph. Piroska had hardly bothered him for months – the odd letter, the occasional gift, school reports duly forwarded and returned. He kept her now only as a standing order on his bank account.
Then everything had changed. Piroska sprouted teeth and claws, and a Hungarian lover with a good line in invective. He couldn’t refute their joint accusations. Yes, he had neglected Magda, left Piroska to tarnish in a Streatham backstreet, while he shone centre-stage in Surrey. For a nightmare week, he wrestled with past and present, trying to square duty with expedience.
And then he saw his daughter. Eleven years had turned her from a faded photo into a woman with all her outlines sharp. He felt something dangerously like desire, struggled to change it into pride. This dazzling creature was his own flesh, his own achievement. He had fashioned her out of his body, and was experiencing the thrill of ownership. He wanted the world to bow down and acknowledge her as his. She was a priceless possession which must be restored and overhauled, moved into a more favourable environment. She would only lose value, rusting where she was.
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