Hot Breath

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘I think that’s charming,’ I retaliated stoutly, though actually I shared her misgivings.

  ‘You’re a fool to yourself, Blair,’ said Bernice without rancour. She surged over to the desk where sat the Hideaway’s receptionist, a smooth, foal-like girl in a white overall and childish white sandals.

  Bernice laid her bust on the counter like a challenge. ‘Mrs Potter and guest for two hours, my dear,’ she announced.

  ‘Right you are, Mrs Potter,’ said the girl, glancing at Bernice’s membership card, and giving her a beige leather book in which to sign her name. Her voice was soft and remote, her face expressionless. It was hard to accept that she and Bernice were of the same species, let alone the same gender. It occurred to me that if I could only steer Clara through her schooldays without mishap she would be well suited to this type of work.

  ‘Just carry on through,’ she murmured. ‘Enjoy yourselves.’

  The foyer of the Hideaway was like one of those up-market futuristic fitted kitchens—white, shiny, glacially antiseptic. But once Bernice and I had stowed our clothes in lockers and changed into voluminous towelling robes, we entered a very different environment. The decor of the club proper was designed to persuade careworn females that they had been lifted from their mundane worlds of work and family by a benign omnipotent hand, and set down on an island paradise in the Caribbean. Murals depicted azure sea and silver sand, lianas drooped from the ceiling and palms and hibiscus sprouted from artfully disguised pots on the floor, finches cheeped and fluttered in glass enclosures. The only thing missing from this idyllic picture was the presence of an indigenous tribe of delicious and suggestible young men who would be seen and not heard. But it was the raison d’être of the Hideaway to provide a womanly haven, serene and secure from the predations of male swine, and one can’t have everything.

  We headed first for the Jacuzzi. This was Bernice’s favourite spot because, she said, it was like being touched up by an octopus. We got in and sat down with our backs against the side. Our companions in the pool were a scaly, weather-beaten woman in bifocals who was reading F. R. Leavis, and a breathtaking white-skinned redhead who sat motionless, head back and eyes closed, responding, I reckoned, to the octopus.

  ‘Ah …’ sighed Bernice. ‘This is the life. Who needs sex?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, in that case you really must come on a bit stronger to your bashful intern.’

  ‘He’s not an intern—’

  ‘Don’t nit-pick. On your own admission you let him slip through the net the other night. I can scarcely credit it.’

  ‘It’s all very well,’ I said plaintively, ‘but I do have to be a little careful. After all, doctors can be struck off.’

  ‘That’s his problem, not yours.’

  ‘And I am a married woman.’

  ‘That’s your problem, certainly. But then who started this whole thing?’

  ‘Bernice, it hasn’t started.’

  ‘That’s an extremely nice point. It’s all up here, you know,’ said Bernice, tapping her temple with her forefinger. ‘He knows you’re married, the worst thing he can do is turn you down. If he goes along with you then his reputation’s his affair.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I raised my feet off the bottom of the pool and watched them bobbing on the surface like a couple of ghostly hands. The F.R. Leavis lady looked at us from beneath her shaggy eyebrows. I was sure she would have been a lot more shocked to be sharing the Jacuzzi with the author of LDG than with an unscrupulous adulteress.

  ‘Now I’m going to give you some advice,’ said Bernice.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied humbly.

  ‘It’s your environment as is holding you back,’ she went on. ‘It’s all those kids of yours—’

  ‘I—’

  ‘—and those droves of benighted wildlife, and that one-horse place you live in with all those cross-eyed villagers, and those awful people who work for you—’

  ‘Now look—’

  ‘No, you look! Take a bloody good look. I mean what does someone like Damon do for a girl’s body image. When you see him wiping the worktops does it make you feel like a pampered female animal? Does it? Or like one no-hoper employing another?’

  ‘That’s hardly the point!’

  ‘Pardon me, but I think it is!’ cried Bernice, who now had the full attention of both scaly-skin and the redhead.

  ‘And your books—I mean there’s nothing the matter with them, but they don’t help, and in that rural slum of yours there they are all the time reminding you of who you are.’

  This was too much. ‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘I like them doing that. In my rural slum, as you put it, they are one of the very few self-affirming factors!’

  I was pleased with this. I could almost feel a ripple of sisterly appreciation emanating from Scaly and Red at this brave talk of self-affirmation.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes,’ snapped Bernice dismissively. This was the first time in all the years of our friendship that there had been even a breath of criticism from her, but she was really making up for lost time. ‘ I know all that, but they’re just trappings, it’s all trappings, keeping you in your place. And il dottore, too, for that matter. What you need, both of you but especially you, is a bit of anonymity. Escape the mental and material clutter. Cut the cackle. Just be two free spirits on a foreign strand or whatever.’

  She sounded just like one of my books. ‘Oh, you mean a dirty weekend.’ From the corner of my eye I caught the redhead nodding encouragingly.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Bernice.

  ‘And how exactly do you propose I set about arranging it?’ I enquired. ‘Just breeze into surgery with an Awaybreak for two in Brighton clutched in my sweaty hand and suggest he keeps me company?’

  With a leviathan-like slurp, Scaly rose from the pool, reclaimed her robe and flip-flops and stumped off.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said.

  ‘There you go again!’ bellowed Bernice. ‘ What the hell does it matter what she thinks? You’re just one more naked punter in here, dear, so what’s to lose?’

  ‘Quite right,’ put in the redhead.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bernice, and turned back to me. ‘Don’t ask me how to do it, you’re the one who’s paid to cook up plots. Use your ingenuity, work it out. I mean aren’t those disreputable publishers of yours sending you anywhere, or anything?’ She must have read something in my face. ‘Of course they are, they’re always packing you off on to these ghastly pop music programmes so that you can plug between discs, and so on, you see I know all about it!’

  She had struck a chord, I had to admit. It was not the first time that the Buchfest had occurred to me as a possible trysting-place. But even were I to succeed in getting Constantine to Fartenwald the possible pitfalls were legion.

  ‘They never let me out of their sight,’ I said. ‘ It’d be like trying to touch each other up under the noses of half a dozen chaperones.’

  ‘Fiddle-de-dee,’ said Bernice. ‘There’s nothing like a hotel for illicit liaisons, I’ve read all about it in books.’

  The redhead gave a tinkling laugh, said ‘Good luck!’ and left. Her body was absolutely flawless and temporarily distracted us so that we sat, like a couple of female Marats in the quivering water, gawping enviously.

  ‘Okay,’ I said at length. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  We moved on via gymnasium, massage and swimming pool, to the sauna. This was occupied by some very old, probably rich, scrawny ladies from a north London garden suburb. They seemed so stringy and desiccated and so exaggeratedly tanned that I was sure further loss of moisture would result in their turning into wizened husks on the benches. But they cast a look of waspish disdain in the direction of us well-larded people, so the mistrust was mutual.

  In the boiling steam and enforced languor of the sauna Bernice and I conducted a more sporadic and desultory exchange than the one we’d had in the turbulent waters of the Jacuzzi.

  ‘Arundel’s got
that telly,’ said Bernice.

  ‘He’s pleased?’

  ‘He affects indifference, but you know Arundel, vain as hell.’

  ‘What programme?’

  ‘Ummm …’ Bernice shifted on the slats with a squeak and a slap, like a juicy steak being turned on a barbecue. ‘Can’t remember the name. Some arts thing … culture for the horny-handed.’

  ‘He doesn’t mind that?’

  ‘You must be joking. Think how brilliant he’ll look against a background of cartoonists and break dancers and paperback hacks. Saving your presence. In fact,’ she continued dreamily, ‘I think we are both entering a new phase in our lives. You are about to become a mistress, and I am going to be a glittering media hostess, my board graced nightly by producers, casting directors and rising young actors …’

  I glanced at Bernice’s stupendous bosom and reflected that if the young actors were not already rising they certainly would be when they dined chez Potter.

  ‘Yes …’ she mused. ‘And Barry will buttle.’

  After the sauna we had a cool shower, got dressed, and wound up in the club’s health food bar, munching manfully on wholewheat quiche and sipping flat cider. The tropical motif had here been carried to extremes, with triffid-like vegetation on every hand to trap the unwary diner, and a miniature aviary full of glum parakeets who sat pecking their plumage and dropping the occasional faeces on to the sawdust below.

  ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ enquired Bernice rhetorically in passing.

  ‘Cut the crap!’ came the response, quick as a flash. ‘Peace sister,’ added another, more in keeping with the Sapphic tone of our environment. The flat cider, though unpalatable, proved stronger than one might have thought, and over an hour we systematically replaced the fluid and calories that we had shed in the previous two. Glancing about us and giggling we spotted Scaly (still reading Leavis), Red, and the desiccated grannies, all tucking in to their brown pastry with a will.

  ‘You know,’ said Bernice, ‘every time I come here I hope to be propositioned by another woman, but it never happens.’

  ‘If you’re so keen, why don’t you take the initiative?’ suggested the flat cider airily.

  ‘Yes …’ my friend eyed me speculatively. ‘ Perhaps you and I should give it a go. After all, we know each other already, so we could cut out the chatting up. Absolutely ideal really, and no risk of pregnancy.’

  ‘You’re forgetting something,’ I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘That’s right, you don’t. I knew there was a hair in the custard,’ said Bernice.

  It was in this mood of free-ranging sexual reference that we finally strolled out into the sunshine and made our farewells. Bernice’s last words to me were: ‘Get him on neutral ground—then go for it!’ I pondered this in the cab en route to Southampton Row. It was indubitably sound advice, but nowhere near as easy to implement as Bernice made out.

  At Era Books I found Tristan sitting in the lobby holding wool for the normally hostile elderly receptionist, Vi. His presence absolved me from the usual burden of proof as to my identity, but such was Vi’s sway that Tristan arranged her wool carefully over the back of a chair before coming to my side and bestowing a glancing, antiseptic kiss on my cheek.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, assuming naturally and involuntarily the role the Erans had created for me. ‘Am I late?’

  ‘Late, Harriet? I very much doubt it—I don’t know when we said.’ He meant this to be soothing, but I found it infuriating, with its implication that the arrangement so carefully made was of no real consequence.

  I glanced crisply at my watch. ‘Two-thirty,’ I said. ‘So actually I’m not.’

  ‘Of course not,’ agreed Tristan. He took me by the arm, as do smiling TV hostesses with the bemused participants in game shows, and steered me to the lift.

  ‘We’re going to use the boardroom as it’s not in use at the moment,’ he told me. ‘The others are waiting there.’

  We stepped into the lift and stood side by side, looking towards the door and slightly upwards as one does, for some reason, in lifts.

  ‘You’re looking especially glamorous,’ said Tristan, ‘what have you been doing?’

  I ignored the somewhat backhanded nature of this query, and told him about the Hideaway.

  ‘That does sound absolutely lovely,’ agreed Tristan. ‘ But isn’t it chock-a-block with the anti-depilation lobby?’

  This remark was beneath contempt and I forebore to answer it. ‘Have you had lunch?’ he added, steering me out of the lift.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘Because we could always send out for something. Can’t have our star author fainting from hunger on the premises.’

  ‘She won’t.’

  We entered the boardroom. Vanessa, Marilyn and Chris were clustered at the far end of the conference table, smoking and smirking and exuding that air of indolent, privileged secrecy peculiar to publishers who are cooking things up.

  Now they rose to greet us, still wearing the tail end of their smirks. Chris leapt forward and put his arm round my shoulders, almost setting my hair on fire with his cigarette.

  ‘Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!’ they chorused.

  ‘Come and take a pew,’ said Chris, ‘and we’ll tell you what we’ve got planned for you.’

  I took my seat, and Marilyn spread my programme and itinerary out before me with all the pride and care of a head waiter serving up the specialité du chef.

  It was an impressive document, bristling with headings, sub-headings, names, dates and times. If Marilyn’s document was to be believed I would not have a moment to call my own at the Buchfest, but I knew better than to take it at face value. Though I had never been to Fartenwald before, I was familiar with its reputation, and I understood the working methods of the Erans. When Marilyn wrote of working breakfasts with American editors, of consultations with Swedish agents, drinks with Danes and dialogues with Germans, of meetings over coffee and exchanges over tea, of dinners with the literati at which I should be the still point of a turning universe—when Marilyn referred to this glittering array of appointments I took it with a generous handful of salt. I knew, and the Erans knew I knew, that my presence at the Buchfest was all that was required, and the rest was just so much Dream Topping. Authors at book fairs were de trop, and for Era Books to be transporting me thither at vast expense would be seen for what it was—a gesture of grandiose optimism, or the politics of desperation, depending on one’s point of view. The word would be bruted about over the à la carte menus of an evening: ‘ They must think a lot of Harriet Blair … either that or they paid an arm and a leg for her last one …’

  ‘As you see,’ said Marilyn, ‘we’re putting you up at the Fartenwald Dynamik, as befits your status.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Vanessa. ‘The rest of us are slumming at the Rumpel Inn on the wrong side of town.’

  In this matter too I had a firm hold on publishingspeak. My bestowal at the Dynamik was another exercise in conspicuous expenditure. And they were only too happy to return, at the end of a hard day’s hyping, to the steins and sauerkraut of the Rumpel Inn where they could discuss their triumphs and disasters free from my inhibiting authorial presence.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘ What fun, I shan’t know myself!’

  The Erans beamed. I could almost hear them relaxing. I was, after all, such a nice author. There had been a teeny hiccup in my behaviour a week or so ago, when Tristan had thought he detected a note of rebellion in my telephone manner, but that was all over and forgotten now, they could see that. I was so obviously grateful for the little treats they were meting out, and so ready to repay their investment with the breezy hard-working charm so often remarked upon by journalists in the better provincial newspapers.

  At this moment the boardroom door opened and there before us stood the Great Man of Era Books.

  Now I have said that the rank-and-file Erans were almost exclusively out of the top drawer. Bu
t no such accusation could have been levelled at their leader, whose origins were in society’s shoe locker. Despite his Croesan wealth, his customised Roller, his half-dozen fully serviced luxury homes and his Cheltenham Ladies’ College wife, the Great Man was quintessentially common. No officer he, he had come up through the ranks (from the sales force, to be precise) and he allowed no one to forget it. No matter that what he knew about books might have been comfortably inscribed on the head of an Asprey’s swizzle stick, he had forgotten more about hiring and firing than the rest of them would ever know.

  He was a small, strutting, red-faced bantam-cock of a man with a penchant for the sort of three-piece suits worn by the male Tamla-Motown groups of the late sixties. God knows what his exclusive Savile Row tailor must have suffered in making these monstrosities, with their nipped-in jackets and cropped double-breasted waistcoats, but the GM had one for every day of the month, usually embellished by a watch chain and a foulard tie of striking and expensive vulgarity.

  His thatch of hair and tepee-shaped eyebrows were white, with a strange yellowish gloss, as though stained by the smoke of a thousand Havanas. Though there was never officially a breath of scandal about the GM, it was rumoured that he liked uniforms, and that the CLC wife (who was rarely on public view) was obliged to strut about their mansion in Denham dressed as a member of the Hitler Youth.

  The GM was habitually accompanied by a middle-aged Girl Friday, known as the General Fucktotum, who wore strictly tailored suits which made her look like a nurse in the summer and like a traffic warden in the winter, so there was probably some truth in the rumour. Today, in striped seersucker, with a watch pinned to her lapel, she hovered behind the GM’s left shoulder like an anxious ward sister showing a crusty consultant round minor gyni.

  ‘Good morning, all you happy people,’ said the GM, infecting each tainted vowel and elided consonant with his despised authority. ‘What are you doing with my Mrs Blair?’

  The conference table quivered beneath the combined weights of the Erans as they shot to their feet. But I remained seated and smiled placidly up at the GM. He treated his top management like the naughtiest class in the school, but he approved of me.