by Ray Connolly
Stumbling down the steps to the basement carrying two enormous paper bags, he tapped soundly on his own front door. From inside there was a silence, then a stirring and then a quiet patter of feet.
‘Who is it?’ he heard Kate call.
‘It’s all right, it’s only me.’
From inside he heard the bolts being drawn aside, and then the door opened.
Heaving the bags inside he closed the door behind him. Immediately she redrew the bolts.
Pre-empting any questions he might have had stirring in the back of his mind she said: ‘I was frightened. I fastened all the shutters, too.’
Charlie looked around the gloom of his home.
‘They’ve found your friend’s body,’ he said after a momentary pause. ‘It was in the paper. Some old bloke in the house opposite saw her this morning. You must have left the curtains open a bit. Anyway, he called the police.’
‘The peeping Tom.’ Kate was nodding her head.
‘What?’
‘Barbara once told me that there was a peeping Tom in the houses at the back who used to watch her with a telescope. She said she sometimes undressed in front of the window especially for him.’
‘Christ,’ muttered Charlie. There was a silence while Kate took the newspaper from him and read the report. Despite the size of the headline in the later edition there were only the skimpiest of details. ‘We have to call the police,’ said Charlie as she put the paper down. ‘You can’t not tell them what you know.’
‘Please, Charlie. Not yet. Give me time to think. It can’t help now. Give me until tomorrow.’
Charlie shrugged his shoulders. It was true: it couldn’t help now, but somehow staying silent worried him. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ll go first thing tomorrow morning.’ He looked around for some way of changing the subject. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve been buying all kinds of things. We’ll have quiet a meal, and a long talk and we’ll try to work out the best thing to do.’ His face spread with a smile which he hoped conveyed strength and kindness.
She tried to smile back, but the muscles wouldn’t work, so he led her into the living-room and sat her down on the settee while he poured them both a drink.
‘Is that enough soda?’ asked Charlie.
She nodded, but didn’t answer. He passed her the glass. He felt as though he were caring for an invalid.
‘I did a recording session today,’ he said, going towards the shuttered windows and peeping out across the dark lawn. ‘Just a demo record for my agent.’
She didn’t answer.
He tried another tack: ‘Did you sleep?’
At last she seemed to stumble from her secret world. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Not really. I tried to. I lay down, but every time I closed my eyes I found myself thinking about Barbara. I had a bath … is that all right?’
‘Of course … everything is all right. Everything you want to do is fine and okay with me.’
‘I don’t deserve you,’ she said simply.
‘I know,’ said Charlie, and smiled.
Charlie made a midnight dinner for them both while Kate lay silently on the settee. At one point he peeped in on her and for a moment wished that he could join her. But he knew he mustn’t. He had to be strong and sensible and protective at a time like this.
So he went back to grilling the steaks and smearing them with garlic and butter, baking potatoes in their jackets, slicing off the scalps of melons and washing raspberries in the kitchen sink, examining each one to make sure that he was not about to feed her with any kind of maggot. At the end he laid out his dining-room table for two, lit the candles he had bought, and gave the knives and forks an extra polish with his tea-towel. If they could forget about Barbara for a while it would be almost romantic.
They couldn’t. Although Kate had hardly eaten for over twenty-four hours, Charlie’s efforts in the kitchen did nothing to revive her appetite and she just played with her food. At last Kate pushed her half-eaten dinner away from her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s all right,’ said Charlie.
There was another long silence. At last she said: ‘Why did you send me that card?’
‘I wanted to see you again,’ he answered.
‘In spite of what I told you?’
Charlie shrugged: ‘In spite of everything,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to think about what you told me. It doesn’t matter to me. It might to them, to the … the men who pay you. But I never knew that part of your life … so …?’
‘I’m going to tell you anyway,’ she said. ‘I’m going to tell you everything. I have to tell you.’
Charlie knitted his eyebrows. He had already decided that he didn’t want to know about Kate’s other life. He didn’t want it to matter. Now she was insisting that he did know.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell me everything you can think of, but I promise you one thing: it won’t make one bit of difference to the way I feel.’
‘I’d like to think that …’ she said, and then stopped: ‘I hardly know where to begin …’
‘What about Toronto?’ suggested Charlie, and refilled their wine glasses. If she was going to insist upon tormenting them both it would help if they were smashed. ‘Tell me about your background, homelife, school … you know, all the things you didn’t tell me in Sicily.’
‘Toronto seems like a hundred years ago,’ she said, running a finger around the top of her glass. ‘I don’t know what to say… I mean I was the most normal schoolkid you ever saw. I did everything that the other kids did. My parents are both teachers — in a Catholic school. I have an elder sister who is married with three children, and my brother, he’s three years older than me, he’s a doctor. He’s got two children. Everyone back there thinks I’m still a model. Well, they pretend to. I guess they really know the truth, but don’t talk about it. I was a model, you see, for quite a while but, I don’t know, I suppose for some reason at the time this seemed a better way. I went to college at Hamilton, Ontario, for one year when I was seventeen … and then came to London. It was either London or New York, and London seemed more … romantic? Well in those days things like romance, or the idea of romance, must have meant something to me.
‘Anyway after I got here I worked for about three or four years as a model. That was before I met Sarah. I was doing okay … but it was mainly catalogue stuff, you know, girdles and bras. I don’t think I ever had a big future as a model.’
‘But you’re very beautiful,’ came in Charlie.
‘Thank you,’ she said, gracefully acknowledging an accepted fact. ‘But I wasn’t a very good model. I think my face was too even or something … bland, maybe. Anyway, it wasn’t interesting enough to get to the top. I was making quite good money and would go home to Toronto every Christmas and tell them how well I was doing, you know, and take them all presents. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted to meet people outside of a photographer’s studio.
‘And then I met this person called Sarah. I was in the middle of changing agents and I was introduced to her at a party. She seemed nice and efficient and suggested I join her agency. So, I did.
‘She had very good contacts and for a while I began to make more money, and then she suggested that there were ways to make even more money in the evenings by working as an escort… only she didn’t make it sound quite so obvious as that.’
Kate stopped talking for a moment as though trying to recall the events in their exact order.
‘So, suddenly I was working as an escort by night and a model by day. And little by little the modelling side of my life fell away and I found that I was spending more and more time going out to expensive clubs and casinos and parties, and less and less time in photographers’ studios.
‘Don’t misunderstand me. I knew what I was doing. You don’t grow up in a good Catholic home without realizing those sort of things. I knew I was becoming a prostitute, but at the same time there never seemed to be a conscious decision. At first I
was accepting little gifts, and going to better night clubs, and getting a bigger flat and going to all the first nights I wanted to, having nice holidays in Sardinia and the Bahamas … all that sort of thing.’
Charlie said nothing. He waited for her to carry on. She seemed to want prompting.
‘Sometimes men have asked me why I do it,’ she said.
‘Not me, though,’ said Charlie, wanting to acquit himself even before he had been accused.
‘No … I know … but it’s an understandable question. I’m not a drug addict, I wasn’t born in terrible poverty … I don’t think I had any more of an emotionally disturbed childhood than any other girl … what I’m saying is that I’m not making any apologies for what I am …’
Charlie considered pointing out that he hadn’t asked for any, but he said nothing.
‘I knew what I was getting into right from the beginning. I didn’t realize the money I could make, and I didn’t realize the down-side and the loneliness of it all, but I never had any doubts about what I was doing and why. I began doing it because it paid very, very well, and because at first it seemed like good fun to be taken out to the best places, and to have a fantastic apartment. I did it because in a way it was almost like having influence. As a model I was supposed to look pretty and say nothing, and the only men who took me out were dumb fashion photographers. But then all of a sudden I was accepted into a new style of life … meeting powerful men and being accepted by them. Embassy parties may be boring now … and gambling clubs are the end …’
‘Not unlike cocktail bars,’ broke in Charlie, but wished he hadn’t because Kate was still speaking.
‘… but to me, then, it was exciting. I suppose in a lot of ways I fooled myself that I wasn’t really a hooker. But it was ail a delusion. You start off by thinking “well, I’ll just go out for the evening if that’s what he wants”. And that’s all you do. And then the next time you think the same thing, but when he suggests that you go to bed, you think, “well, why not, I like him”, and you do. And quickly, although at the time it seems a gradual, almost imperceptible, thing, you find that you go out expecting it all to end in bed, and knowing that you will be paid very well although at first the payments are more like presents.
‘But there are no excuses. No one forced me to do it. I didn’t have a boy-friend who was living off me, or anything like that. I just became greedy, and, it sounds stupid, but I got into the habit. And also … this will probably sound silly, too, but you know, I was attracted at first to some of the men I went with. Power and wealth can be very attractive, and I did find some of them exciting. Of course some have been repulsive. But that wasn’t at first. Sarah was very careful to make sure that all her girls had a good time when they were starting out. I was always at the best balls and having dinner in the best places. I travelled a lot and it was always first class. And you saw the flat I have … well, the flat I had … I don’t ever want to see it again.’
She stopped as though reconsidering her life. Charlie wanted to ask her about Sarah but he knew it was better to wait. Let Kate tell it her own way first, he thought. She’d probably never been able to say it all before.
‘I know that people have a picture of hookers as being loose women who live off men and have no loyalties. But it isn’t like that. At least it doesn’t seem that way to me. I don’t feel like one of the stereotypes that I read about in the newspapers or see in the movies.’
She considered what she had said: ‘I suppose I’m saying that I didn’t feel like a prostitute,’ she said at last, ‘… not at first, anyway. But then I suppose nobody ever does.
‘And then, gradually, I became … not hardened … that’s the wrong word, but in a way I stopped thinking about what I was doing. Can you understand?’
Charlie nodded, although he need not have done because by now she was conversing with herself.
‘It becomes a job. The nightlife is a job. Looking after your body, taking care of your face, keeping up with all the news and films and shows and everything so that you can talk to anyone about anything … it all becomes a job. And you lose sight of whether it’s fun or not. You stop even asking yourself whether you like what you’re doing, because you’ve become so used to it. I suppose you pretend that you’re having a good time. But the whole thing is so seductive … I guess that’s the wrong word … let’s say it creeps up on you, and one day you realize, without surprise because you knew all the time really, that you’re just a very expensive hooker. And so what? By now you’ve learned what to do, you’ve accepted a lifestyle and so it goes on …’
She stopped. Charlie looked up at her.
‘The only thing you can’t do is let your emotions run away with you. You can’t have any emotions. As soon as you admit that they exist the whole thing begins to crumble around you. I suppose some girls can keep their emotions quite separate from their work … if that’s what you can call it. I know now I can’t do that.’
Charlie didn’t answer. He picked up the wine and poured another glass for himself. She had barely touched hers.
‘Tell me about Sarah,’ he said, after a moment’s pause had indicated that Kate was not going to carry on.
‘Sarah!’ Suddenly her attitude changed. The mood of self-examination had been broken.
‘What’s her part in all of this?’ Charlie asked.
‘She’s the organizer,’ said Kate, simply and without emotion. ‘She sets everything up. She knows everything. She has files and pictures of everyone who ever worked for her, and of all the men who ever went to her for women. She had me brought back from Sicily. She’s had Barbara killed …’
She lapsed into silence again.
Charlie knew he had to get her away from thoughts of Barbara: ‘How does the organization run then?’ he asked.
Kate took another drink before beginning again: ‘A little while after you’ve become involved in the nightlife side of things, and you’ve more or less dropped the modelling, Sarah comes along with this proposition. Basically what she does is to get you to agree to what you are already doing, but of course she doesn’t say that in so many words. She just hedges around it, and you allow it because you don’t want the dirty words like “prostitute” or “hooker” to be used either.
‘And then she makes a sort of business arrangement with you. That’s when all the bills start being paid for by her and you really move into the big time. You get a flat, rent free, and a monthly cheque. It’s almost like working for any straight big company. But what it means is that once you’ve shaken hands on a deal and accepted all the benefits that Sarah can provide she expects complete loyalty. And to make sure she gets it she has three strong-arm boys who go around and make sure that you behave yourself. Barbara never did behave, but she always seemed to get away with things. The one time I looked in the wrong direction … well you know what the result was, because they did it to you.’
Charlie stroked the scar marks around his chin as he remembered his meeting with Daley. Kate went on talking.
‘Sarah sees it all as a business. She has invisible partners. And they invest in us … that’s Sarah’s word for it, anyway. We get introduced into all kinds of society that we would normally never mix in, but we always have to remember that in a way we belong to the company. It makes sense if you look at it from her point of view. She’s very careful about the girls she entrusts with top clients, and she makes sure right from the start that they have everything that’s necessary to go with the job, things like clothes, the right hairdressers, health farms, cosmetic dentistry, medical expenses … all of those things. She particularly chooses girls with a facility for languages. So what she does is provide a very high-priced list of women who men can be seen around with, and who won’t be an embarrassment to them. It works for the men because often they are important and influential and they need absolute discretion, and also someone they can talk to. And the girls like it because normally they don’t have to go with very many men … the man you saw me with was
an Arab called Asid. I’d been with him for about eight months. Apart from him there had been hardly anyone else during that time.’
‘Did you love him?’ Charlie blurted out the question involuntarily. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ask that question,’ he added instantly, embarrassed and yet suddenly feeling again the confusion and jealousy and pain which had engulfed him that first night back from Sicily when he had seen her with Asid.
She shook her head almost wearily, as though she were thinking that Charlie still didn’t understand: ‘No. No. I didn’t love him. I quite liked him, but that wasn’t love.’ She stopped speaking and played delicately with the soft wax running down the side of the candlestick. At last she spoke again: ‘I don’t think I ever loved anyone in my life until I met you.’
‘No,’ said Charlie. He didn’t want her to say these things, because he couldn’t believe them. And he didn’t want to be told lies.
‘It’s true. You don’t have to believe me, but it really is true. When I was a young girl I had the usual infatuations that lasted maybe ten or fifteen days … and then nothing. Perhaps if I’d stayed in canada or I hadn’t met Sarah then someone would have come along. I’ll never know. It’s not easy to fall in love when the only men you meet are photographers who can’t wait to get your clothes off, and it’s impossible to fall in love with someone who’s paying for it. You can feel sympathy for a man, even a kind of fondness, but not love. And very often it’s hard not to feel contempt.’
‘What happens when you want to leave Sarah, or get too old for it, or even if you want to get married?’ asked Charlie.
‘Well, you make an agreement for a number of years … just like you would with any ordinary company … my agreement was for five years … Barbara had been with her longer. And during that time you have to make yourself available to whoever Sarah decides upon. Everything works very well so long as you keep to your side of the bargain.