by Ben Foster
The road was busy, cars weaving in and out of every space like needles stitching cloth. One day, I thought, London would seize up in total gridlock and it would take months to uncoil the snakes of jammed metal. Darkness fell slowly like a dimmer switch being turned down. I curved through the gates. The house at night was lit up with lights marking the drive and beamed on to the stone façade. I brushed my hair back and straightened my tie.
A servant I had not seen before opened the enormous door and led me through to the Great Hall. Lady Catherine was waiting. She wore a fitted white dress with long sleeves and a square neck trimmed in green, emeralds in a string at her throat and glittering from her ears. Her pale blonde hair curved about her cheeks and her legs were slender and shapely in white heels. It was not the way a woman – not the women I knew – would normally dress to go to a pub. But Lady Catherine wasn’t like any woman I knew and the Cock and Bull was not the sort of pub where I had ever been before.
She stood and dropped the magazine she had been reading on the coffee table. She touched her hand to the stones at her throat.
‘You’re here. How lovely. Do you need anything?’
I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but it sounded so formal I gave a little bow.
‘No, we can go. We have a reservation.’
‘How wonderful. You’re so very kind.’
She slipped a dark green jacket over her shoulders and the same servant led us back to the entrance. His face never cracked and gave nothing away. I opened the car door. Lady Catherine was unable to attach the seat belt and I did it for her.
‘Thank you, I’m so useless at that sort of thing.’
She seemed to have shrunk into the seat, her knees and ankles rigidly together. She was five feet six in high heels. Sitting she was small, delicate, like a very old child. Our eyes met. I wasn’t sure what was expected of me, but I plunged ahead and kissed her cheek. She moved back with a faint smile as if she had never been kissed before.
‘Shall we?’ I said, and started the engine.
Like teens on a date, Lady Catherine acted as if she wasn’t sure how she should behave when, really, it was me who should have felt uncomfortable. There are no guides on how to be a gigolo. It was the first time I had escorted an older woman to dinner and had to make it up as I went along. My heart drummed. I slipped through the gears and accelerated up the drive.
I had left Frowley Manor feeling as if I had been turned inside out and put back together with wings that held me suspended just above the ground. Maggs was right. People take sex far too seriously. Sex is the greatest of gifts. The pleasure of all pleasures. Only at the point of orgasm do you feel your soul shaking off its chains and becoming one with the universe. That’s why the Indian mystics had formalised the quest through yoga and meditation. If every woman was as free and open as Maggs, I am sure the world would be a better place. Sex with Vivienne was like a violent dance, like performance art. It left scars and illusions. Sex with Maggs was visceral, animal, sheer undiluted lust. I felt a soft tugging between my legs just thinking about her.
The night was warm still and close. Clouds billowed across the darkening sky and I remembered old fishermen on nights such as these looking up and warning that a storm was on the way.
‘The weather’s going to change,’ I said for something to say.
‘We do need some rain.’
‘You’re telling me,’ I replied, and realised immediately it was the wrong thing to say. What do you say when there’s nothing to say?
We drove through the country lanes until the headlights picked out the sign for the Cock and Bull. I parked. I released Lady Catherine from the seat belt and hurried around the car to open her door.
The pub was an ancient coach inn, hundreds of years old, perfectly conserved, stone shiny with age, wood waxy with polish. I had watched new buildings going up all over London. The haunts of the rich were dutifully maintained. At the same time, the council estates were getting rundown, the roads were broken, sports halls and youth clubs were closing.
I gave my name, my false name, Alan Ingram. I had no idea why the subterfuge was necessary and didn’t ask. I had a feeling that this was all a game, that I was an extra in a film screening in Lady Catherine’s imagination. The Maître d’ led us to a table in an alcove and handed me a wine list encased in an oxblood leather folder. He clearly knew Lady Catherine, but acted out the charade that he didn’t. I assumed this was a regular occurrence, the titled lady, her young lover, an assignation while Lord Bradley was running the country or seeing his mistress. That is if his name was Lord Bradley. Lords often have a different surname when they are elevated to the peerage and women with that special quality impossible to put into words marry many times. It was all new to me and I had to pick up these society intricacies as I went along.
There must have been a thousand different wines on the list ranging from £20 to £2,000 a bottle. We ordered champagne. The waiter poured two glasses. We clinked rims and finally Lady Catherine relaxed.
I am sure that if Rudy Johnson had been sitting there at the Cock and Bull that night, he would have found any number of things to talk about. He would have been witty and charming. I racked my brain. The weather. Pirates of the Caribbean. England getting knocked out the World Cup?
‘I tried a new massage on Rufus. He seemed quite pleased.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Rufus’s back. There’s something wrong with Rufus.’
‘I didn’t realise . . . ’
‘He imagines he’s going to be happy with Annabel. But I don’t see it.’ She took another sip of champagne and looked back into my eyes. ‘Let’s not talk about Rufus. Tell me about you.’
‘There’s nothing much to tell, really.’
‘Everyone has a story, even if it’s cock and bull,’ she said, breaking the ice, and we laughed.
I told her about my career as a fisherman. People were always interested in that. We were on common ground when I said EU quotas had killed the fishing industry. I avoided mentioning Kelly and the kids. This was a date, after all. What I did do after we had ordered the first course was ask Lady Catherine – Kate, she insisted – where she had originally come from. The upper classes don’t like direct questions. But I had refilled her glass, her pale cheeks had a flush of colour and she let her story unfold like a romance novel as she picked at her green salad.
Kate Lingren had run away at nineteen from the stony Swedish community in Minnesota where she had grown up to marry a handsome golf instructor. She had known the moment he slipped the ring on her finger that she had made a mistake and rectified the error when she met one of his clients, her second husband, a steel tycoon, Rufus’s father. Al Bradley was a ‘sweet guy’ thirty years older than her who died suddenly of a heart attack on the golf links at Archerfield in Scotland, leaving her with a young son to care for and a billion dollars with which to do so.
Kate was forty, refined and familiar with all that England had to offer a single woman with a very large sum of money. She moved to London, bought a house in Knightsbridge and married Lord Aberstone. He was from a distinguished family of whiskered ancestors (scowling from portraits in the Great Hall), a First World War spy and an adventurer who discovered a Mayan burial site in the Yucatán. With so many ancestors carving out the Empire and exploring the world, the present Lord Aberstone had inherited nothing but debts, a title, the estate with the grand house Kate called ‘the castle,’ and which she had restored to its former splendour. She had sent Rufus to Harrow and turned him into the textbook English snob.
Lady Aberstone, Catherine, Kate, had the softest, palest skin I had ever seen, blue-green eyes and small, dainty features. She appeared vulnerable but had an iron will that acknowledged no bars or barriers. The aristocracy is not a club you can join. You are born into it or you are beautiful with a billion dollars.
The Maître d’ suggested a red wine with an unpronounceable French name to go with the roast lamb and mint sauce. I was starving. I at
e everything on my plate and watched Kate eat a couple of peas and half a potato. I took two sips of wine and understood for the first time what all the fuss was about, what a ‘fine wine’ actually meant. It took all my will-power not to drink more. The last thing I needed was to lose my licence.
I stuffed down baked apple with cream for dessert, or pudding, should I say. Kate snapped a few dry biscuits and slipped a piece of Cheddar between her lips. The bill with fifteen percent added on for service came to almost £180 and I paid with my debit card, as I had been instructed by Angela Hartley.
We drove back the way we had come, through the tall gates and up the drive. The same expressionless servant opened the door and I felt his eyes on my back as I followed Kate up the sweeping staircase to her bedroom at the back of the house. It was not actually a room, but a network of rooms in pale green, full of flowers in tall vases, sofas and tasselled armchairs, table lamps with flower-patterned shades, a black piano, the top crowded with framed photographs of Lady Catherine with various people I recognised including one with Margaret Thatcher, and another with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
We kissed. It wasn’t a tongue and teeth passionate kiss, it was a cold Swedish kiss like we were two birds pecking at a bowl of water. She loosened my belt, ran the zip down my fly and slipped down to her knees to take me into her mouth. She was slow, methodical, well-practised, I thought. I gripped the side of her head, and she eased my hands away. As I was about to ejaculate, she took my cock into her hand and sprayed her face. I looked down and watched in the mellow light of the table lamp as she spread my semen with her fingertips over her cheeks, around her eyes, over her brow and neck.
She came to her feet, kissed me lightly on the cheek and left the main room, closing the door behind her.
After that first night, I visited Lady Catherine once a month, occasionally twice. On occasions we went out to dinner, mostly we stayed in her rooms. Sometimes she played the piano, not particularly well, I thought. Our meetings always ended the same way, with oral sex and a semen face mask.
A few days after our dinner at the Cock and Bull, a deposit of £500 from Coutts Bank appeared in my account. That same sum was added by direct debit every month for the next two years.
17
EXTRAS
The rich are always busy. In the early months of summer they attend Ladies Day at Ascot, the Henley Regatta, opera at Glyndebourne. There are parties and barbecues. They throw up the portcullis at their historic houses on Heritage open days when the hoi polloi get the chance to run their grubby fingers over the family heirlooms. The debutante balls may have lost their significance, but not their importance. Privileged young girls at eighteen are not looking for husbands, but an internship at Vogue, a place at Oxford, a literary or theatrical agent.
All this pleasure is exhausting and in August, when the rich need to recuperate, they decamp to the Mediterranean – their villa in Tuscany, the chateau in Provence, the converted monastery on the hills above a Spanish village, the yacht cruising the calm seas around the Greek islands.
While the Ladies of the Committee were away sailing and sunning, husbands in tow, I was able to concentrate on my trial period at Southley. Vivienne and Maggs, even Angela and Kate, had each in their own way boosted my confidence. I had the skills. Now I had the opportunity to prove myself.
I joined a team of three therapists. Denny Doyle was Irish, a gym fanatic rippling with muscles, curly red hair, a lyrical voice and the gift of the gab. Anastasia was his polar opposite. She was tall, thin, cold, a Russian brunette with unsettling dark eyes and an abrupt way of speaking that didn’t seem to bother her clients, quite possibly the reverse. Rachel, the third member of the team, was on holiday in Ibiza.
We worked eight hour days – which often extended to ten – on a five day rota that gave me one weekend off in three. Massages were set at forty-five minutes, providing a fifteen minute break between sessions, with an hour for lunch. When clients booked a double session, ninety minutes, it usually inferred that massage wasn’t the only thing on their mind.
Unless they indicated a preference, male or female, new clients were assigned to whoever was available. Regulars tended to return to the same therapist. Once they had overcome the discomfort of being naked, they felt more at ease in the intimacy of the massage room.
Clients had to fill in a form detailing past illnesses and injuries. We then had to ask them what they wanted to achieve from the treatment, which was never easy for people to define except to say they wanted to feel great. It was serious, formal. More than mere therapists, we were expected to behave like doctors, consultants, psychologists. We were healers taking broken souls and making them stronger as, with our bare hands, we put people back together again – a snip at £120 a session.
After taking off their clothes, clients wrapped themselves in a towel and stepped into the green flip flops provided. They kept themselves warm in a towelling robe with the spa insignia on the top pocket, a mature tree in a loop of green letters spelling the word Southley. Some kept their underwear on. Most didn’t.
Once the client entered the massage room, I slid the bolt into place and lowered the table from the control panel. They stretched out on their stomach, face resting in the aperture, eyes closed. It’s odd, but now they were unable to see me, they forgot their embarrassment at being naked. They lifted themselves up so I could remove the towel, which I folded in half length-ways and laid over their bottom to contrive a degree of modesty. I finally raised the table to the appropriate level for my height.
The massage rooms were the area of the spa that had impressed me most that day when Bethany took me on the tour. They were warm with pale green light and hazy with wafts of steam rising from the heated water churning in the rock pool. The flickering light and heady fragrance of the aromatherapy candles was mesmerising. The music was ethereal, haunting rhythms that lulled the senses. Everything was calculated to be serene and sumptuous.
When Denny first showed me how to work the console on the massage table, he told me not to go over time, or there would be a backlog of ‘impatient patients.’
‘They’re all richer than God. They don’t like waiting at all,’ he warned.
He had helped me register my first client and I entered the calm of massage room 3 with an elderly French woman with a replacement hip and stooped back. She moaned softly all the time I was rubbing her muscles and took £20 from the pocket of her robe when I had finished.
‘You are here tomorrow?’ she asked, and pressed the money into my hand.
‘I am.’
‘Then I shall see you again.’
I went back into the room to turn off the music and punched the air when no one was looking. I had started. I was a professional masseur. I would have liked to have had a few minutes to reflect on my début massage, but another client was already waiting in the reception area, one long smooth leg rocking restlessly over the other. She had signed without filling in the admission form.
‘Would you like some water?’
‘No, not now.’
I filled a cup for myself, sat, reached for a pen and asked her name.
‘Caroline,’ she said.
‘Have you had any illnesses in the last five years?’
She look a long breath through her nose and pointed at the signature at the end of the form.
‘Write whatever you want,’ she said. ‘It’s legal twaddle to say the spa takes no responsibility – for anything.’
‘It’s just the procedure,’ I explained.
As she re-crossed her legs, her robe opened. She had not wrapped a towel around herself and was naked beneath.
‘You’re new, aren’t you, Ben?’
‘First day.’
‘Then I’m going to let you into the worst kept secret at Southley: the procedure is a smokescreen. Now, shall we . . .?’
She stood and led the way into the massage room. She dropped the robe and turned hands outstretched to face me. Her eyes were twin
kling in the spectral light and she wore an expression that said: come on, are you a man or a mouse? Look at me if you dare.
It was new to me, but I was coming to understand that some women – Maggs was one – like being naked. They want to be seen naked, and used nudity as a form of empowerment. Women strip to highlight causes: human rights, women’s rights, anti-war, anti-fur and innumerable injustices often inflicted on them by men. Most famously, Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets of Coventry a thousand years ago to protest a tax increase imposed, ironically, by her own husband. Men are less at ease being naked, but are more likely to be Peeping Toms, watchers rather than doers. Southley was my university. Caroline my first teacher.
I looked into her eyes and must have sounded like an automaton as I continued to follow the spa’s process. This was, as I had said, my first day, and it occurred to me that Caroline could have been a plant, there to test my professionalism.
‘What do you want to achieve from the therapy today?’ I asked, and she sighed.
‘Just work your magic.’
‘Did you have something in mind? Did you read the list?’
She glanced at the rock pool. ‘Hot stones. My back’s killing me from tennis.’
‘So you do have an injury?’
‘Now you have something to write on your form.’
She wore dangly earring that she removed and placed on the shelf. As she turned, her deep tan was emphasised by the whiteness of her bottom.
‘You’ve spent a lot of time in the sun. You have to rehydrate the skin and use plenty of screen.’
‘Thank you, doctor.’ She paused. ‘It’s been so hot this year. We have a place in St Tropez, a bar. We’re selling up. My husband’s with the lawyers today.’
‘And you’re here.’
‘I am, indeed.’
Finally, she smiled. Caroline was tall and slender with a wide face, dark hair, green eyes and that special kind of poise that belongs to beautiful women used to getting their own way. She sat on the side of the table and raised her knees before rolling over.