by Ben Foster
‘On your marks, get set – Go,’ Bethany cried.
We dived in and raced two lengths freestyle. Christian turned at the shallow end half a second before me and my competitive spirit kicked in against my will. It’s a man thing. You can’t hold it down. We were neck and neck midway through the home stretch when I stepped up a gear. I touched the bar at the end of the pool a body length in front of Christian and noticed as I looked up that Bethany’s lips were gripped in that tight grimace that comes to people when they are trying not to show disappointment.
‘Well done,’ she said, and turned away.
Bethany knew I was a fisherman from Lowestoft; a nobody from nowhere. The fact that I was on good terms with Vivienne Raynott, Maddy Page and their friends and fellow Committee members, had always puzzled and vaguely annoyed her. Why it was important to her that Christian won the swimming race I had no idea. But it seemed that in this trivial event a seed had been planted and it would come to bear a bitter fruit.
To rub salt into the wound – fertiliser to that buried seed? – when Annabel Lee Hartley waltzed into the spa later that same day, Bethany’s pleasure at being in the presence of a major celebrity, was tempered by irritation when Annabel asked for me personally. She booked a double session.
The staff at Southley were used to seeing soap stars, footballers, politicians. Annabel was several rungs further up the fame ladder. She was cut from the same cloth as Vivienne with fine manners, sparkling eyes, a hit TV series and her face plastered across the media having just signed for a movie set in Paris and starring two of Hollywood’s leading male stars performing together for the first time with Annabel the third strand of a love triangle.
Beauty is power. Youth is power. Annabel was blessed with both. She had class, privilege, connections, talent. She was kind, generous, self-effacing with a trace of vulnerability and an awareness that life is unfair and random. She knew she was lucky and didn’t believe she was ‘chosen’ or special. It was hard to believe she was Angela Hartley’s daughter and engaged to marry Rufus Bradley.
Annabel wanted the Swedish massage with ‘the famous’ Oriental twist – the Ladies’ code for reciprocal oral and vaginal sex. Celebrities seek out gurus in India, trainers with magic formulae, chefs with esoteric diets, financial advisers with the keys to Wall Street, Feng shui masters to bring their apartments harmony and chi energy. I was on the list. My ‘reputation had preceded me.’
Annabel could have sex with any man in the world. She had driven to Southley to have sex with me. I wasn’t fooling myself. I didn’t think I was special, a super stud, God’s gift. It wasn’t like that. Those beautiful upper crust girls like Annabel have prodigious energy, an irrepressible sex drive and a tendency for kink. They like their sex uncomplicated, less an emotional than a bodily function. They have an excess of dopamine, the ‘cuddle drug’ chemical that brings pleasure and the desire for more pleasure. They swim, they ride, they dance from dusk till dawn, they don’t eat and they like to fuck.
It was the best kept secret in Britain, a truth that would be so shocking to working men and women, they would find it impossible to believe or comprehend: yes, the upper-classes enjoy their power and money, but they are addicted to sex. Sex and more sex. Sex in role play, bondage, masks, sadomasochistic sex, discipline and multiple partners. There were exceptions, of course, but all those well-heeled and titled people I met were hyped up, often bored and flirted with drugs. Sex was a safety valve, an obsession. Like all well-kept secrets, they didn’t talk about it. They just got on and did it.
Why was I invited into the secret? I was married with children. I was discreet. I didn’t sell stories to the tabloid press. In order not to say the wrong thing and make an idiot of myself, I didn’t say very much at all. This had given me a reputation for being the ‘silent type.’ Women like to chat. I had learned how to listen.
Annabel dropped her robe. Her demeanour was calm. Her muscles were tense. I dug deep and loosened the knots. She shivered and writhed like a butterfly breaking from its cocoon. The sex was healing and vibrant. Our lips met, a seal of approval, a connection. Prostitutes, I’m told, never kiss the clients. It’s too personal.
The second half of the session we swam, then sat in the sauna. I massaged her feet. Feet are intimate, perhaps more intimate than a kiss. She had gone in twelve months from playing Shakespeare on stage to seeing her face on magazine covers all over the world. She was reading scripts to play opposite Brad Pitt, Hugh Jackman, Robert Downey Jr, stars so big, the contracts so complex, she sometimes felt like ‘walking away from it all.’ I wasn’t a psychologist, even a confidante. I was just a sounding box.
‘What does Rufus think?’ I asked, and she laughed.
‘Oh, he’s the last person I’d talk to.’
She explained that while she was engaged to Rufus, she was protected from the advances of actors, studio heads, ‘greedy’ lawyers and the ‘money.’ It put a hole in my theory that these upper-class girls were sex mad. But not entirely. Annabel, Vivienne, Maddy, were not seeking favours or enhancements like poor girls on the casting couch. They took their sex on their own terms. They were the predators.
Annabel thought Rufus was probably more gay than straight, but didn’t worry about that sort of thing.
‘Gay men make great husbands. They don’t interfere with a woman’s private life.’
‘Don’t you want to have children one day?’ I asked her, and she nodded.
‘That would be nice. One day. You have three, don’t you, two boys and a clever little girl.’
‘Too clever by half,’ I said. ‘You know everything about me.’
‘Everything.’ She sighed as I dug my thumb into her the arch of her left foot. ‘Mmm. I love that. I received a super bronze thingy as a present. Vivienne always does the cleverest things.’
‘I would probably blush if I wasn’t so hot,’ I said. ‘But if Rufus is gay . . . ’
Annabel laughed. ‘All the best people are conceived on the wrong side of the bed sheets.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me.’
‘Ben, you’re becoming jaded, poor thing.’
After she had changed, Annabel did something other women had done and I didn’t really like. She opened her purse, took out all of the cash, dollar bills and £20 notes, and shoved them in my hand. It was patronizing. Not that I complained. My savings were mounting. My plan was on course.
If the Committee Ladies were playing Professor Higgins with the passive little flower girl, or Svengali with Trilby, I could assume now, at the start of 2007, that I was ready to be launched on society. I returned with Vivienne to the store in Jermyn Street. I was fitted out with a dinner suit, winter suits, shoes, a cashmere overcoat, and became what they call a ‘walker,’ an extra man.
I had got to know the rich naked on the massage table. The rich dressed at dinners, art auctions, book launches and receptions were far more revealing and what they revealed, as they saying goes, is the rich are different. Apart from the obvious, that they have more money, and the less obvious, that they are addicted to sex, they have advantages that the rest of us never fully grasp: money creates networks of contacts with others equally privileged. It nurtures self-confidence, a subtle brand of charisma, and a sense of entitlement.
Rich people don’t like waiting. When they want something, they want it now. If they want it badly enough, they don’t care how much they have to pay for it. Money is for spending, for buying the best, for all those pleasures small and large that the meek and humble who, they say, will inherit the earth, can’t even begin to imagine.
The old rich hide their wealth in shell companies set up in tax havens managed by advisers who they went to school with or who someone they know went to school with. Old school ties are pivotal. It is a cloistered world, impenetrable except to the super rich (or nouveau riche, as they say disparagingly with a French accent) who emulate old money by sending their children to the same posh schools where the networks are formed.
Kids when I was growing up thought of school as a place to get away from. For the middle-class, school is where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps in order to distance yourself from the deprived and underclass. For aristocrats, school is where you go to make connections. If a young toff wants to work hard and go to Oxford, the hinges are quietly oiled and the doors slide open.
Money, real money, unearned money, money you can’t pin a number on, gives people the freedom to take risks and offers a continuous array of opportunities and choice. Life is a long road with lots of junctions and every time you choose to go one way, you may just have easily have gone the other. The wrong choice for the poor can be fatal. For the rich it is a learning experience. Self-assurance makes people more daring, more open to new ideas and, in turn, more fun to be with. That day when Annabel entered Southley, we were strangers. In ninety minutes, we made love, we laughed and, by the time we parted, I knew more about her than Rufus did.
Wealthy people enjoy their yachts and high-performance cars. But they are not attached in a sentimental sense to material things. Property is an asset. Today’s new car is second-hand tomorrow. They respect the past, invest for the future, but live in the present.
The rich stay healthier and live on average ten years longer than the poor. Rich men take the adage ‘you’re as young as the woman you feel’ to heart by continually paying off old wives to take on new, fresher young models. Rich ladies love their dogs and horses, often more than their children, a potential asset and a potential disaster, quite aside from the fact that babies can leave unsightly stretch marks. When they find a good nanny, butler, chef, groom, gardener, an ex-special forces sergeant with a gun licence, they pay them well and hang on to them. There are a lot of perks serving the rich, but woe betide anyone who forgets that they are only servants and will always remain so.
The moneyed classes are rarely contented except when they win something or beat someone at something, tennis or golf, the number of shot grouse, a bet or a business deal.
One night at a black tie reception in the Great Hall, Vivienne introduced me to a property developer named Hal Peret. We all shook hands and Vivienne, for my benefit, my education, asked Hal why he kept working when he had ‘a charming wife’ and was already high on the Forbes rich list.
‘It’s just a game,’ he said. ‘I’ve got, I don’t know, $4 billion. If I’m at a party and some jerk’s got two, I win.’
We laughed.
Hal Peret was from Arizona, as wide as he was tall – about five foot six inches – with a shiny shaved head and dark glasses. He had just acquired several buildings from a housing trust in Kensington and planned to ‘amortise the asset’ by moving the residents out in order to convert the blocks to ‘luxury apartments.’ He was well into his sixties with a wife of about twenty-five, a petite Southern Lady with lots of blonde hair who said out of the blue that she had a terrible pain in her lower back.
‘Too much damned tennis, what do you expect?’ her husband told her. He held up his untouched glass of Louis Roederer Cristal. ‘Why is it these people always serve the same monkey piss?’
Again we laughed. Vivienne lowered her voice. ‘I happen to know where there’s rather good whisky. I’ll have one myself,’ she said.
She led him through the throng leaving me alone with Mrs Peret. In her green eyes there was an inquisitive expression.
‘Now, tell me,’ she said, ‘is that right, you are an authority on back pain?’
‘It’s normally caused by irritated large nerve roots,’ I replied. ‘Serving at tennis will do that. But you should really speak to a doctor.’
She was wearing a strapless red dress that quivered like fire as she drew closer. ‘I have been given to understand you have magic hands.’
I glanced at my palms to avoid gazing down the front of her dress. ‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘People tend to exaggerate.’
‘Modesty. I like that in a man.’ She paused, nodding her head. ‘Vivienne tells me you could put the life back into a stone statue.’
‘Now that is an exaggeration.’
Her expression remained thoughtful. ‘She has obliged me with your number,’ she added. ‘May I be so bold as to send you a text?’
‘Whenever you want.’
She held out her hand, as if we had made a deal, and gave a little shimmy. ‘Missy Peret, from Birmingham . . . ’
‘Birmingham?’
‘Alabama,’ she announced, and we shook hands.
‘Ben Foster.’
‘It is an honour to finally meet you.’ She stared into my eyes. ‘Now do tell, Mr Foster, do you enjoy your work?’
I wasn’t sure what to say and was saved as Vivienne and Hal Peret approached, whisky and ice rattling in glass tumblers.
‘Now look at him, we’ve got a happy bunny,’ Mrs Peret continued and smiled for the first time. ‘I will tell you something, Mr Foster, it is my mission to spread a little pleasure wherever I go.’
The way Vivienne held up her glass and raised her eyebrows made it appear as if the two motions were connected.
‘Look what we found, an absolutely charming double-malt,’ she said.
She tapped the rim of Missy’s champagne flute and the women exchanged looks which I understood, although I’m sure Hal Peret didn’t.
He glanced at the glass I was holding. ‘What’s that you’re drinking?’
‘Just water,’ I replied, and he threw up his big shoulders.
‘You know what they say about water, the fish piss in it.’
I’d heard it before, but laughed, of course, a courtesy extended to billionaires. It was my job to be good-humoured and obliging. Like those who sourced rare wines, found yacht berths in Montenegro, supplied helicopters or tickets to sold-out shows, like all the dog walkers, personal shoppers, night doctors, caterers, party planners and coke dealers, I was a service provider, a tiny cog in the wheel of wealth, the money circle, the network.
Kate appeared with Lord Aberstone, a twinkly man like Father Time with a silver beard and a cane with a naked figurine handle in shiny silver. I noticed Kate’s accent wavered back to her native American talking to the Perets. Hal was happy with his double malt and the arrival of Lady Catherine. Just as footballers like chatting with footballers, billionaires are most comfortable in the company of billionaires.
Vivienne took my arm and we were drawn into the ebb and flow of the crowd. A cocktail party is like the universe, trajectories changing continually, the magnetic pull of stars and money drawing others into their orbit. Rufus and Annabel were amusing J-J, shorter in real life and wearing a brown leather jacket, jeans and a Che Guevara tee-shirt. He was one of the two Hollywood A-listers about to appear with Annabel in her new film.
Maggs looked relaxed between her husband, Jasper, a Tory peer, enemy of the health service and the BBC, and her lover, James Chipping, the Government Minister with a partiality for white suits. That evening, he was dressed in a tartan rather than a black dinner jacket.
‘Have we met before?’ James Chipping asked me.
‘Yes, right here, in this hall,’ I replied.
‘I never forget a face.’
‘What a liar, you are, James,’ said Maggs. ‘You have the worst memory on the planet.’
‘But I will never forget you, my dear.’
Maggs turned to her husband.
‘Jasper, Ben Foster, he’s our favourite . . . ’
‘Highwire walker,’ said Vivienne, and the women laughed as I shook hands with Lord something or other.
I was often bored at those parties, although I could see they were indispensable for internet giants, corporate heads and global power brokers. Meeting socially and looking each other in the eye was a tacit pact to protect their own well-being at the expense of the 99 per cent; the rest of us.
It occurred to me that whoever invented the 24-hour day might have thought again and made it 30 or 36 hours. Up on my highwire, I juggled time trying to keep the minutes and hours in the air.
After swearing on my own internal Bible never to take coke again, I slipped on occasions. When everyone’s hoovering up lines of white powder, it seems eccentric not to join in. Just as I had crept into bed at daybreak after the midnight to six shift at The Lodge, the parties or, more accurately, the after party parties, meant I often arrived home as Kelly was stirring ready for another day.
She did not object to my long hours and late nights. If she suspected that it was more than just massages that I gave my clients, she never said so. I suggested she quit the laundry, but Kelly insisted on keeping it up; she even did extra shifts. She enjoyed working with the girls and wanted to add her contribution to the fighting fund mounting in Nationwide.
Like Gran, like my mother, like most working people, Kelly had grown up believing that we ‘are what we are’ and trying to improve yourself was somehow phoney, or dishonest. There had been a time when she made fun of me smoothing out my Norfolk accent. Not anymore. During our holiday in Maspalomas, sparkling wine and dinner beneath the stars, her eyes were opened to another way of being and living. A Canary Islands package tour is not the life of the rich. Far from it. But it is a long step from the poverty of empty cupboards and empty bellies.
Kelly enjoyed buying new clothes in regular stores instead of castoffs in charity shops. In your own clothes, you are in your own skin. It’s a confidence boost. You become who you are. Our kids were smart and always dressed smartly. You had to wonder if the two things were connected. Ollie was reading by the time he started school and came home with rows of ticks in his exercise books. A year before, we’d had no future. Now, we had one.
My main gift to Kelly at Christmas was a course of driving lessons with the British School of Motoring. I tried to ensure my days off coincided with her agenda and the last minute bookings at the spa. Bethany knew when I changed my rest days it was because I was seeing the VIPs in Vivienne’s circle and was sympathetic, or at least obliging, when I had to rearrange my diary. Annabel Lee Hartley and Maddy Page had not visited the spa simply to have a massage. They had come to see me. Both had allowed their photographs to be used in brochures showing they were patrons of Southley. Bethany still had a crush on the Viking Boy. But I was the link to the society set she wanted to belong to.