by Ray Connolly
Charlie stopped again. In his mind he saw Kate, but on the bed lay this girl. She wasn’t unattractive, but her body promised no delights for him. He wondered how she would behave when she was on holiday. Would she find a man, and fall in love, make him believe her to be one thing while in reality she was something quite different? He wondered if this was the way that Kate behaved, in this brusque and businesslike manner. Somehow he didn’t think so.
Again the girl had noticed that he had stopped undressing, and was staring at her. Again he noticed the wary look in her eye. He hoped she wasn’t frightened of him.
She sat up and ran a hand encouragingly down the inside of his shirt. He was now sitting on the edge of the bed looking at her.
‘You all right?’ she asked. ‘You don’t lock very happy.’
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Jill.’
‘Jill…’ he didn’t know what else to say. He knew now that he couldn’t go through with what Jill was expecting and for what she had been paid. He felt embarrassed. Would she be insulted? He had to say something: ‘Jill … I had a shock today. I was upset. Something happened … I really don’t think I should have come here with you.’
‘There’s no refund, you know,’ she said, leaning forward, and resting her weight on one arm.
‘Oh, no … no … it’s not that. You’re welcome to the money.’
She sat up: ‘Are you sure you don’t want it? I’m quite clean you know … take precautions. Nothing to worry about there. I look after myself.’
‘It’s not that. I’m sorry … it’s difficult to explain.’
With that she scampered off the bed and began to dress again. Quickly the whiteness of her body disappeared under the T-shirt and pants and jeans. For the first time he read the message on her T-shirt: ‘Will you still love me tomorrow?’ it said.
She noticed him reading it and smiled sourly.
‘Like it?’ she said.
‘Do you?’ he asked.
‘Would I wear it if I didn’t?’
‘No … I mean, do you like what you do?’ He was fastening up his shirt again now.
‘It’s not as bad as you might expect.’
‘I mean so you enjoy it?’
‘Sometimes. Yes. Sometimes I love it:.’
‘And other times?’
‘I close my eyes and think of the Algarve.’
He smiled: ‘Does this happen often?’
‘What? You mean a punter changing his mind?’
Charlie nodded.
‘Not often. But it happens. Sometimes they can’t, know what I mean? They want to, but they can’t. That can be difficult. Sometimes, quite a lot in fact, men just want to talk. I charge them the same whatever they do … except they have to pay a bit more for extras.’
‘Would you charge a bit more for a cup of tea?’
‘You’re a funny bloke, aren’t you? Twenty quid for a cup of tea,’ she said, as she opened the door into the kitchen. While she was out filling the kettle and turning on the gas Charlie finished dressing. His shoes were still wet.
‘Why do you do it?’ he asked as she returned.
‘That’s what they all ask,’ she said. ‘Let’s say … it’s easy money. Particularly now. There are so many rich tourists in London. I mean, you can make a real killing. A couple of years on the game and you can be nicely set up. I used to work in what they called a massage parlour. They taught me how to use my hands … you know, how to get them nicely worked up and then give hand relief …’
Suddenly Charlie had an image of Kate sitting on the beach in Taormina staring bleakly at her hands after rubbing sun-tan lotion into his back. Now he understood.
Jill was carrying on talking: ‘… it was really a clip joint, that place. I mean they’d come in expecting to get everything … and we’d get it all over before they’d started. Just a bit off the wrist and they’d finished. And, you know, they never complained … it’s the guilt, you see … that and with them being suddenly knackered. Twenty-five pounds a time they were being charged … we could get another five in an hour sometimes … no trouble.’
‘But wasn’t that safer than hanging round the streets?’
Jill thought about this for a minute as she brought two mugs of weak tea through from the kitchen: ‘Safer … yes … but we were giving twenty quid a time to the bloke that ran the parlour. That meant five quid a time for us … and you couldn’t choose who you got. Me, I’m on my own now. Usually I sit in the cocktail lounges in the hotels. You can size people up there … the Arabs are the best. They’re by themselves, they’re lonely … them and the Germans … If you meet them in a hotel it’s back to their room … and a few drinks. Sometimes I do the car trade. You know, look available by the side of the road. And wait for the big cars to pull in. Only ever go in the best cars. I always say that if a girl lets herself get picked up by a bloke in a Ford Cortina she’s looking for trouble. Rovers usually have a nice class of bloke … and some of those big French cars … they’re best, because the front seats go right down to make the inside into something like a bed. Then all you got to look out for is the law. I suppose I get a buzz out of the element of risk there is now. Know what I mean?’
‘What about tonight?’
‘I was going home. I saw you coming along the underpass. You looked a bit depressed … but I could tell from your suit that you weren’t a scruffy herbert. You get to look out for things like that in this line. I’d been sitting in the Kensington Hilton, but the law had been in and they’d sort of suggested I move on. I thought about the cars, but then you turned up. Lucky really, wasn’t it?’
Charlie drank his tea: ‘Will you go out again tonight?’
‘No … I’m seeing a regular client at his place in Bayswater tomorrow morning … need my beauty sleep tonight. He doesn’t always want it either, you know. He likes to draw me. Honest. He’s about sixty … all he wants is a girl to draw. I get forty quid for the morning. Two hours. I’ve told him he’d be better off getting a regular model, but he thinks it’s more real with me. Then sometimes he does put his pencil down for half an hour … you know …’ She smiled. ‘That’s one of his drawings over there.’
She pointed to a small ten by twelve inch pencilled sketch Sellotaped to one wall. Charlie got up to examine it. He didn’t know anything at all about art, but he could see that a lot of effort and care had gone into the drawing. He could also see why the artist didn’t go after the regular models they used at the Royal College of Art. The man obviously had a vivid, not to say lurid, imagination.
‘Kinky, isn’t it!’ she said.
Charlie didn’t answer. He looked at his watch. He had been there for nearly three-quarters of an hour. Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, he thought.
The girl was watching him again: ‘You know, the real reason I do it … is because of blokes like you and him and all the others. People look down their noses at girls like me … Well all right, I say, but at least we’re honest. I’ve known an awful lot of girls who only let a bloke have it after he’s taken her out and spent a fortune on her. I used to do it myself. What’s the difference? There isn’t one. A lot of blokes these days can’t find a girl to take out and hope that she’s going to come across. With someone like me there’s no messing around, no phone calls afterwards, and satisfaction is guaranteed. You know for every girl who’s on the game there’s probably ten blokes been with girls on the game. I read that somewhere. So think about it. A lot of people call us scum. All right, maybe we are … but what does that make all those fellas out looking for us?’
‘I’ve got to go now,’ he said.
‘Right … well, it’s been nice meeting you. Don’t make a noise in the hall, will you. One of the kids has asthma and doesn’t sleep very well.’
She walked with him through the hall and opened the front door for him.
‘Have a nice holiday,’ he murmured as he walked slowly away from her down the neat front garden path.
‘Hey,’ she hissed after him. ‘You want my advice? Forget about her. She’s not worth it. None of them are.’
He nodded. He would try.
Chapter Ten
At five in the morning Kate lay silently alongside the sleeping Faroom Asid, one leg lodged uncomfortably under his smooth body. She could not sleep.
The evening at the Cheltenham had been like many others she had known. Tonight Asid had been in an expansive and generous mood and after a dinner at the White Elephant on the River he had happily agreed to take Kate to this new casino of which she spoke so highly. Kate was under no delusions that Asid was unaware that she had been instructed to take him there, but she knew also that he was too much of a gentleman to complain. It mattered little to Asid where his money was burnt.
In every way that Kate found meaningful the Cheltenham was no more than a façade, a sham of mock English which hid an airconditioned emporium of greed and random chance, a place of soft voices and icy politeness where the parting of the foolish rich from their money was lubricated with the honey of sex.
Like so many of these places the Cheltenham looked eminently respectable and conservative from the outside, a double fronted Queen Anne house in the heart of Mayfair, secured from the property developers by an architectural preservation order. Inside the preservers had been less dutiful, and with a wilfulness known only to planners and gamblers the building had been disembowelled of everything which made it honest, and reshaped around plastic chips, iced drinks and the disorientation of permanent night.
It was an English place without the English, too brash for the young blades with money to burn, too expensive for the casual flutterer. Indeed the only indigènes ever present were the mechanics of wealth, the men and women who oiled and serviced the spending machines; snub-nosed models from Bletchley, fawning on the arms of men whose names they could hardly pronounce, and hard, sharp young men skilled in the discreet pressures, gifted with the quiet art of vigilance and violence, men who made it safe for a maharaja to squander a million and dangerous for anyone to get in his way.
Usually Kate neither enjoyed herself nor was completely bored on evenings such as this. It was enough that her escort had a good time and spent lavishly. This night had been different. Try as she might she had been unable to rip the picture of Charlie’s bewildered face from her mind.
It had been specifically at the request of Asid that Kate had been so precipitately summoned back to London from Sicily. The two had met several months earlier at a banquet organized to celebrate a new concordat between the members of OPEC, and Asid had not been slow to make a bid for the services of Kate — a bid which had been negotiated with speed and discretion by the ever-smiling Sarah. For some months after that Kate and Asid had spent several evenings and nights a week together, had travelled to Las Vegas for better gambling and more sun during the autumn and been an attractive and envied couple on the ski slopes during the winter. Only when Asid had returned to Qatar for an extended period of business meetings in May had Sarah allowed Kate the luxury of a holiday alone: a holiday in Sicily.
Had Kate answered Sarah’s telegram or phone call a lot of unpleasantness might have been avoided, Sarah had later pointed out. But finally after two rebuffs she had sent Daley the minder to bring her home her most prized and errant asset, after Asid had suddenly returned to London and demanded to be reunited with Kate. Men of Asid’s wealth expected to get the best of services.
Like so many of the new Middle Eastern aristocrats of London, wealth, and the freedom that wealth brings, had come to Asid at the relatively late age of thirty-eight when, on the recommendation of a relative, he had suddenly found himself posted to the Qatar Embassy in London.
But it was not, as he and other Middle Easterners had told Kate many times, a London with which he was familiar. As a boy his school had been spartan and the English unfriendly, while his years at Oxford were memorable mainly for their loneliness. Arabs were not particularly welcome (nor even unwelcome) visitors to Britain in the late fifties, and he had seen nothing of the night-life which was to play such a major part in his middle years. The second time round Asid did not intend to be lonely.
It had been no accident that Kate had met Asid at the OPEC banquet. Sarah, as always, had engineered the right invitations and, almost as though he were acting to a preordained plan, Asid had toppled instantly under Kate’s spell. That was what she was paid for. Kate was everything that Asid might have dreamed about when he had been a lonely student, and now she could be his if he so wished. And he wished it very much.
Asid knew exactly what Kate was, but he also knew that his money brought a temporary fidelity to her relationship with him. During on uncharacteristic moment of self-debasement Kate had asked Asid why he wasted so much time, money and affection on a whore. His answer would have delighted Sarah.
‘Not a whore,’ he had replied. ‘Don’t use that word. You are a courtesan, perhaps. But there is a very great difference. A whore I could find on the streets for ten pounds: you are something different. I am proud to be seen with you.’
Kate had understood his insistence upon the difference between being a whore and a courtesan, but in her own heart she wondered which was the more honest description. To Charlie she had described herself in terms of self-revilement, as though she could be any man’s plaything. That was not true. Her body was, as she had said, her currency. But it was a highly valued currency which had never been devalued by being too available. She had learned early that the secret of the successful courtesan was careful rationing.
In the opalescent glow from the outside street lamp Kate peered at the sleeping profile of her lover. He was not a young man, but his skin was smooth and his body as free from hair as that of any youth. Indeed there was something innocently boyish about Asid, despite his much contrived air of sophistication.
‘What are you thinking about?’
Asid was suddenly awake and watching her.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, and turning her head towards him she kissed him delicately on the chest.
‘I think it must be something,’ he said, allowing one arm to fall around her shoulders so that he might pull her body protectively against his own.
She kissed him again. It was usually the most certain way of ending unwelcome conversation.
He would not be put off: ‘I want to know,’ he said.
She turned the tables: ‘Asid, you never talk about your wife to me, do you? Sometimes there are things I can’t tell you.’
There was a silence. She half expected him to be angry. With other men, at other times, mention of their wives and children had provoked violent reaction as their guilt bubbled over into rage. But Asid remained calm.
‘My wife was a childhood friend,’ he said quietly at last. ‘We played together. And I think I always expected to marry her. She is happy now in Doha. She has the children, and has no desire to come to England or to leave the home. In many ways I’m lucky. The wives of some of my friends are confused by the changes that have taken place in their homes. They belong neither to the past nor the future.’
‘Does she know about me?’ asked Kate.
A pause: ‘She knows I have … that there is a woman … and that there have been other women.’ He paused again.
‘Isn’t she ever jealous?’
‘No. Of course not. Why should she be?’
Kate considered this piece of information and fell silent. She wondered whether Asid understood his wife as well as he thought he did.
‘You didn’t tell me what you were thinking about.’ Asid was persistent.
Was tonight a time for confessions, Kate wondered. Whores get lonely, too. They need to talk now and then.
She drew a breath and plunged in: ‘When I was on holiday … in May … I met someone …’
Asid didn’t answer. His silence encouraged her. She had no idea what he was thinking. His face was impassive.
She went on: ‘He didn’t know anything about me. I saw him
again today. He came to see me …’
At this moment she thought she heard a gasp escape softly from the lips of Asid, but he said nothing.
‘I sent him away. I didn’t want to, but I knew that it was the best thing …’
‘Stop!’ Suddenly Asid’s voice was firm and quite loud. ‘I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want you to lie to me.’
‘No. I’m not lying to you.’ Too late she realized that she shouldn’t have told him.
Asid stared at her coldly: ‘When did you not lie to me?’ he said.
She looked at him in the yellow light. His face was drawn. She knew that she had injured his pride. He had bought her fidelity and now he felt cheated. Nothing she would be able to say would convince him otherwise. Men were always convinced that whores lied to them. Usually they did. But when they told the truth no one ever recognized it. It was easier for Asid at home, she thought. He knew where he stood when he was in Qatar. But for her it wasn’t really easy anywhere. But then that was the life she had chosen for herself.
Asid left her at six o’clock, long before the other residents of the block would be up and about. She offered to make him coffee before he went, but he didn’t answer. She had never seen him so withdrawn. She knew she would not see him again. He would not want her now. He would find another woman to accompany him on his wild spending sprees. She should have known better, she thought. Whores were there to comfort men, not to be comforted. Wasn’t that why they were so well paid?
At around four in the afternoon Sarah telephoned. Kate had been expecting the call all day.
‘Kate, darling …’ the perfectly enunciated consonants of Sarah seemed to spit from the phone, ‘… I’ve just had the most extraordinary conversation with Asid’s secretary. Apparently he wishes to terminate our agreement with him.’
Kate said nothing. She waited, knowing that Sarah would try to tempt her into talking. She was certain that Asid would not have explained the reason for his abrupt change of emotion. That would only have further crippled his pride. But Sarah obviously suspected something.