by L. S. Hilton
‘OK girls, knickers off.’
After opening, we sat about chatting, flicking through celebrity mags or texting for an hour until the customers started to drift in, almost always alone. The idea was that they would pick the girl they liked and take her to sit in one of the pink-velvet swagged alcoves, which was known rather bluntly as ‘getting booked’. When you were booked, your objective was to get the punter to order as many ridiculously overpriced bottles of champagne as possible. We got no wages, just ten per cent on every bottle and whatever the customer chose to leave. My first night, I reeled away from the table halfway through the third bottle and had to ask the babushka to hold my hair while I made myself throw up.
‘Stupid girl,’ she said with gloomy satisfaction. ‘Is not for you to be drinking it.’
So I learned. Carlo served the champagne with huge, goldfish-bowl sized glasses, which we would empty into the ice bucket or the flowers as soon as the customer left the table. Another strategy was to persuade him to invite a ‘friend’ to share a glass. The girls wore pumps, never open-toed sandals, as another ruse was to teasingly persuade him to sip some out of your shoe. You can pour a surprising amount of champagne into a size 39 Louboutin. If all else failed, we just tipped the stuff on the floor.
At first, it seemed miraculous to me that the place stayed open at all. It seemed positively Edwardian, all the heavy-handed flirting and the exorbitant fee for our company. Why would any man bother when he could order up whatever he wanted on his I-Hooker app? It was all so painfully old-fashioned. But I gradually realised that this was exactly what kept the guys coming back. They weren’t after sex, though plenty of them could get a bit frisky after a few goldfish bowls. They weren’t players, these guys, even in their dreams. They were ordinary middle-aged married blokes who for a few hours wanted to pretend to themselves that they were on a real date, with a real girl, a pretty girl, nicely dressed with decent manners, who actually wanted to talk to them. Mercedes, with her talons and her extensions, was the official naughty girl, for customers who wanted something a bit more racy, but Olly preferred the rest of us to dress in plain, well-cut dresses, not too much make-up, clean hair, discreet jewellery. They didn’t want risk, or mess, or their wives finding out, or probably even the embarrassment and trouble of having to get it up. Unbelievably pathetic as it was, they just wanted to feel wanted.
Olly knew his market, and he catered to it perfectly. There was a tiny dance floor in the club, with Carlo doubling as DJ, to give the idea that at any moment our chap might spin us off into the disco night, though we were never to encourage this. There was a menu, with perfectly acceptable steak and scallops and ice cream sundaes – middle-aged men like to watch girls eat fattening puddings. Obviously, the knickerbocker glories stayed down just as long as it took us to make a discreet trip to the loo. Girls who took drugs or who were too obviously slutty didn’t last a night – a Polite Notice by the gents proclaimed that it was Strictly Forbidden to offer to Escort any of the Young Ladies Outside the Club. They were meant to aspire to us.
I found myself looking forward to Thursday and Friday nights. With the exception of Leanne (I couldn’t really think of her as Mercedes yet), the girls were neither friendly nor unfriendly; pleasant but incurious. They didn’t appear interested in my life, perhaps because none of the details they revealed about their own were real. The first night, as we swung a little unsteadily down Albemarle Street, Leanne suggested I choose a name to use in the club. My middle name was Lauren; neutral, untelling.
I said I was studying history of art part-time. All the girls seemed to be studying something, business administration mostly, and perhaps some of them were. None of them were English; clearly the idea that they were working in the bar to try to better themselves struck some sort of Eliza Doolittle chord with the punters. Leanne was flattening out her raucous Scouse – cushion came out as ‘cashion’; I modified my own accent, the one I used at work, which had become the voice I dreamed in, to make it a little less obviously Received Pronunciation, but to Olly’s evident satisfaction, I still sounded relatively ‘posh’.
At my day job, on Prince Street, there were those million tiny codes. Anyone’s placement on the social scale could be calibrated to the nth degree at a single glance, and learning the rules was a lot more difficult than identifying paintings, because the whole point of those rules was that if you were on the inside, you never had to be told. Those hours of carefully teaching myself how to speak and how to walk might have passed the test with most people – Leanne, for instance, seemed bemused and grudgingly impressed by my transformation – but somewhere inside the house was a hidden casket of Alice in Wonderland keys that I would never possess, keys that unlocked ever tinier gardens whose walls were all the more impregnable because they were invisible. At the Gstaad, though, I was the token ‘toff’ and the girls, if they thought about it at all, believed there was no distinction between the WAGs and the superannuated debutantes who occupied adjoining pages in OK! magazine. Of course, in a deeper sense they would have been right.
The chat at the club was mostly about clothes, the acquisition of designer-branded shoes and handbags, and men. Some of the girls claimed to have steady boyfriends, many of them married, in which case it was the done thing to complain about their boyfriends endlessly; others were dating, in which case it was the done thing to complain about their dates endlessly. To Natalia and Anastasia and Martina and Karolina it seemed a self-evident truth that men were a necessary evil, to be endured for the sake of shoes, handbags and Saturday night trips to Japanese restaurants in Knightsbridge. There was a lot of analysis of texts, their frequency and affection, but any emotional response was reserved for the possibility that the men were seeing other women or failing to provide sufficient gifts. Plots and counter plots – with elaborate iPhone ruses – ensued, there was talk of men with boats, men with planes even, but I never got the sense that any of this involved pleasure. Love was not a language any of us dealt in; fresh skins and tight thighs were our currency, only of value to those too old to take it for granted. Older men, it was generally agreed, were less bother on the whole, though they came in for a good deal of raucous shrieking about their physical deficiencies. Baldness and halitosis and the Viagra-grind was reality, though you would never have known that from the coquettish messaging that formed communication between the girls and their men. This was the way of their world, and they kept their contempt and their occasional tears for the rest of us.
For the first time, in the Gstaad, I had what felt like girlfriends, and I was a bit ashamed of how happy it made me. I hadn’t had friends at school. I had had quite a few black eyes, an aggressively haughty attitude, a truanting issue and a healthy appreciation of the joy of sex, but friends I didn’t have time for. Beyond explaining that we had met up north, Leanne and I had an unspoken agreement that we had been teenage chums (if not actively taking part in holding someone’s face in the lavatory cistern could count as being chummy) and never referred to it. Apart from Frankie, the department secretary at the House, the only constant female presence in my life had been my flatmates, two earnest Korean girls studying medicine at Imperial. We had a cleaning rota pinned up in the bathroom which we all stuck to politely enough and beyond that there was barely any need for conversation. With the exception of the women I met at the particular kind of parties I liked to go to, I’d only ever expected to encounter hostility and scorn from my own sex. I’d never learned how to gossip, or advise, or listen to the endless rehashings of thwarted desire. But here, I found I could join in. On the Tube, I swapped reading the Burlington Magazine and The Economist for Heat and Closer, so that when the talk of men palled I too could fall back on the endless soap opera of film stars. I invented a broken heart (implications of an abortion) to explain my lack of dates. I was Not Ready, and I enjoyed being advised that it was time to Get Closure and Move On. My odd nocturnal excursion I kept strictly to myself. It suited me, I realised, this strange little concentrated univ
erse, where the world outside felt far away, where nothing was quite real. It made me feel safe.
*
Leanne hadn’t lied about the money. Exaggerated, maybe, but it was still pretty extraordinary. Counting my percentage on the bottles as cab fare home, I was making about 600 a week clear in tips, crumpled twenties and fifties, sometimes more. A fortnight took care of my pathetic overdraft, and a few weeks later I took the Sunday train to an outlet centre near Oxford and made a few investments. A black Moschino skirt suit to replace the poor old Sandro, an achingly plain white Balenciaga cocktail dress, Lanvin flats, a DVF print day dress. I finally had my NHS teeth lasered in Harley Street, I made an appointment at Richard Ward and had my hair recut so that it looked subtly the same but five times as expensive. None of this was for the club. For that I got a few simple dresses from the high street and tarted them up with patent Loubie pumps. I cleared a shelf in my wardrobe and carefully placed most of my acquisitions there, wrapped in dry-cleaner’s tissue. I liked to look at them, count them through like a stage miser. When I was little I had devoured Enid Blyton’s boarding school books, St Clare’s and Whyteleafe and Malory Towers. The new clothes were my gymslip and my lacrosse stick, the uniform of who I was going to be.
He started coming in after I had been at the club a month. Thursday was usually the Gstaad’s busiest night, before men up on business went back to the country, but it was pouring outside and there were only two customers in the bar. Magazines and phones were not allowed as soon as the punters appeared, so the girls were listless, popping out to crouch under the awning for cigarettes, awkwardly trying to protect their hair from frizzing in the wet. The bell went and Olly came in. ‘Sit up straight, ladies! It’s your lucky night!’ A few minutes later, one of the grossest men I had ever seen swung a vast belly into the room. He didn’t even attempt a bar stool, but thumped down immediately on the nearest banquette, waving Carlo irritably away until he had removed his tie and mopped his face with a handkerchief. He had that slatternly look which only really extraordinary tailoring can solve, and his tailor had clearly been overwhelmed. His open jacket revealed a taut cream shirt stretched over the gut which rested on his splayed knees, folds of neck swagged over his collar, even his shoes looked overstuffed. He asked for a glass of iced water.
‘Haven’t seen Fatty for a while,’ someone hissed.
The form was for the girls to talk animatedly, with a lot of hair tossing and glances beneath our lashes, looking as though we just happened to be there, unescorted in our smart dresses, until the client made his selection. The fat man was a quick chooser. He nodded to me, the flabby mottled curtains of his cheeks swishing back in a smile. As I crossed the floor I noted the regimental stripe on the discarded tie, the signet ring embedded in the swell of his little finger. Eeew.
‘I’m Lauren,’ I smiled breathily. ‘Would you like me to join you?’
‘James,’ he supplied.
I sat down neatly, legs crossed at the ankle, and looked at him, all twinkling expectance. No talking until they ordered.
‘I suppose you want me to buy you a drink?’ He said it grudgingly, as though he knew how the club worked but still felt it an imposition.
‘Thank you. That would be lovely.’
He didn’t look at the list. ‘What’s the most expensive?’
‘I think –’ I hesitated.
‘Just get on with it.’
‘Well, James, that would be the Cristal 2005. Would you like that?’
‘Get it. I don’t drink.’
I gave the nod to Carlo before he changed his mind. The 2005 was a violent three grand. Three hundred up to me already. Hey, Big Spender.
Carlo carried the bottle over as though it was his first-born son, but James waved him away, uncorked it and dutifully filled the goldfish bowls.
‘Do you like champagne, Lauren?’ he asked.
I allowed myself a wry little smile. ‘Well, it can get a bit monotonous.’
‘Why don’t you give that to your friends and order something you want?’
I liked him for that. He was physically repellent, true, but there was something brave about the fact that he didn’t require me to pretend. I ordered a Hennessey and sipped it slowly, and he told me a little bit about his profession, which was money, of course, and then he heaved himself to his feet and waddled out, leaving £500 in new fifties on the table. The next night, he came back and did exactly the same. Leanne texted me on Wednesday morning to say that he had come to ask for Lauren on Tuesday, and on Thursday he reappeared, a few minutes after opening time. Several of the girls had ‘regulars’, but none so generous, and it gave me a new status amongst them. Slightly to my surprise, there was no jealousy. But, after all, business was business.
4
Once I’d started working at the club, the daily humiliations of my life in the department were thrown into glaring relief. At the Gstaad, there was at least the illusion that I held the cards. I tried to tell myself that it amused me that my straight life, my ‘real’ life, separated by just a few London streets from Olly and the girls, was bereft of any value or power. At the club, I felt prized every time I crossed my legs, whereas at my actual job, the one that was supposed to be my career, I was still pretty much a dogsbody. Actually, the Gstaad and the world’s most elitist art store had more in common than it was comfortable to admit.
Working at the House could be disappointing, but I still remembered the first time that I had really seen a painting, and that memory still glowed within me. Bronzino’s allegory, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, at the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square. I still find the picture soothing, not only for the mannered, mysterious elegance of its composition – playful and innocently erotic, or darkly reminiscent of mortality and death – but because no scholar has so far advanced an accepted theory of what it means. Its beauty lies somewhere within the frustration it provokes.
It was a school trip to London, hot hours in a coach with the smell of sausage rolls and cheese crisps, the popular girls yakking and squabbling in the back seats, our teachers looking strangely vulnerable in unaccustomed casual clothes. We had gawped through the gates of Buckingham Palace, then plodded down The Mall to the gallery in our navy uniform sweatshirts – just pin on the name badge and you’re ready for the call centre. Boys skidded on the parquet floors, girls made loud, coarse remarks at every nude we passed. I tried to wander away alone, wanting to get lost in the seemingly endless rooms of images, when I came across the Bronzino at random.
It was as though I’d tripped and fallen down a hole, a gasping sense of quickly recovered shock, the brain lagging behind the body. There was the goddess, there her boy child, there the mysterious old man standing over them. I did not know then who they were, but I recognised, blindingly, that I had not known lack until I watched those delicate colours glow and twine. And then I knew desire too, the first sense that I knew what I wanted and what I didn’t have. I hated the feeling. I hated that everything I had known suddenly looked ugly to me, and that the source of that feeling, its mysterious pull and lure, was shining at me from this picture.
‘Rashers is perving on that naked woman!’
Leanne and a couple of her cronies had caught up with me.
‘Fucking lezza!’
‘Lezzaaaaaah!’
Their harsh, screeching voices were disturbing the other visitors, heads were turning, my face burned with shame. Leanne’s hair had been an orangish blonde back then, viciously permed and gelled into a peruke on her crown. Like her friends, she wore thick tan foundation and smudged black eyeliner.
‘They really shouldn’t let them in if they can’t behave,’ I heard one voice saying. ‘I know it’s free, but –’
‘I know,’ interrupted another. ‘Little animals.’
They looked at us as though we smelled bad. I wondered if we did, to them. I hated the disdain in those smooth, educated voices. I hated being lumped in with the others. But Leanne had heard them too.
�
��You can fuck off an’ all,’ she said aggressively. ‘Or are you fucking lezzas too?’
The two women who had spoken looked, simply, appalled. They did not remonstrate, just walked calmly away into the deeper galleries. My eyes followed them hungrily. I turned to the girls.
‘They might complain. We might get chucked out.’
‘So what? It’s last here anyway. What’s your problem, Rashers?’
I’d already got pretty good at fighting. My mother, when she bothered to notice me at all, was gentle with my blacked eyes and bruises, but mostly I tried to hide the evidence. Even then, she regarded me as a changeling. I could have started in on Leanne right there, yet – maybe it was the picture, maybe the knowledge of the women behind me – I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to demean myself like that, not anymore. So I didn’t make anything of it. I tried to wrap myself in contempt like a fur coat, to show them that they were so far beneath me that they weren’t worth my attention. By the time school was over, I’d made a pretty good job of convincing myself of that. I had saved for two years for my first trip to northern Italy as a teenager, working in a petrol station, sweeping up bleached worms of hair in a beauty salon, slicing my fingers on foil cartons in the Chinese takeaway, dripping blood into the Friday night drunks’ sweet-and-sour pork. I’d provided myself with a gap year in Paris and later a month’s foundation course in Rome.