Maestra

by L. S. Hilton

  “Honestly, Judith,” Laura remarked, “you’ll never make any progress if you’re haring about town when you could be looking at the works.”

  Twitches on invisible threads aside, maybe it wasn’t all that surprising that when I came across Leanne at the Tube station a little later, I really did feel like a drink.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MY INTERVIEW AT the Gstaad Club that night consisted of Olly, the giant, morose Finn who was proprietor, maître d’, and bouncer, looking me over in the lacy nude blouse I’d hastily shuffled on in the loos at the Ritz.

  “Can you drink?” he asked me.

  “She’s from Liverpool,” giggled “Mercedes,” and that was that.

  So for the next eight weeks, I worked Thursday and Friday nights in the club. Not hours that most people my age would welcome, but after-work drinks with the team weren’t really a big feature of my career. The name, like everything else about the place, was a dated stab at fake class; the only thing that was real about the club was the truly eye-watering markup on the champagne. In fact, it didn’t look much different from Annabel’s, the has-been nightclub a few streets away in Berkeley Square. Same eighties yellow walls, same bad-good pictures, same collection of tragic paunchy older men, same lounging gaggle of girls who were not quite hookers but who always needed a little help with the rent. The job was simple. About ten girls gathered half an hour before opening at nine for a pick-me-up dispensed by Carlo the bartender in his immaculately pressed but slightly fusty white jacket. The rest of the staff consisted of an ancient babushka who took the coats and Olly. At nine sharp he unbolted the street door and made the same solemn joke.

  “Okay, girls, knickers off.”

  • • •

  AFTER OPENING, we sat about chatting, flicking through celebrity mags or texting for an hour until the customers started to drift in, almost always alone. The idea was that a customer would pick the girl he liked and take her to sit in one of the pink-velvet-swagged alcoves, which was known rather bluntly as “getting booked.” When you were booked, your objective was to get the punter to order as many ridiculously overpriced bottles of champagne as possible. We got no wages, just ten percent on every bottle and whatever the customer chose to leave. My first night, I reeled away from the table halfway through the third bottle and had to ask the babushka to hold my hair while I made myself throw up.

  “Stupid girl,” she said, with gloomy satisfaction. “Is not for you to be drinking it.”

  So I learned. Carlo served the champagne with huge, goldfish bowl–sized glasses, which we would empty into the ice bucket or the flowers as soon as the customer left the table. Another strategy was to persuade him to invite a “friend” to share a glass. The girls wore pumps, never open-toed sandals, as another ruse was to teasingly persuade him to sip some out of your shoe. You can pour a surprising amount of champagne into a size 39 Louboutin. If all else failed, we just tipped the stuff on the floor.

  At first, it seemed miraculous to me that the place stayed open at all. It seemed positively Edwardian, all the heavy-handed flirting and the exorbitant fee for our company. Why would any man bother when he could order up whatever he wanted on his I-Hooker app? It was all so painfully old-fashioned. But I gradually realized that this was exactly what kept the guys coming back. They weren’t after sex, though plenty of them could get a bit frisky after a few goldfish bowls. They weren’t players, these guys, even in their dreams. They were ordinary middle-aged married blokes who for a few hours wanted to pretend to themselves that they were on a real date, with a real girl, a pretty girl, nicely dressed, with decent manners, who actually wanted to talk to them. Mercedes, with her talons and her extensions, was the official naughty girl, for customers who wanted something a bit more racy, but Olly preferred the rest of us to dress in plain, well-cut dresses, not too much makeup, clean hair, discreet jewelry. They didn’t want risk, or mess, or their wives finding out, or probably even the embarrassment and trouble of having to get it up. Unbelievably pathetic as it was, they just wanted to feel wanted.

  Olly knew his market, and he catered to it perfectly. There was a tiny dance floor in the club, with Carlo doubling as DJ, to give the idea that at any moment our chap might spin us off into the disco night, though we were never to encourage this. There was a menu, with perfectly acceptable steak and scallops and ice-cream sundaes—middle-aged men like to watch girls eat fattening desserts. Obviously, the knickerbocker glories stayed down just as long as it took us to make a discreet trip to the loo. Girls who took drugs or who were too obviously slutty didn’t last a night—a Polite Notice by the gents proclaimed that it was Strictly Forbidden to offer to Escort any of the Young Ladies Outside the Club. They were meant to aspire to us.

  I found myself looking forward to Thursday and Friday nights. With the exception of Leanne (I couldn’t really think of her as Mercedes yet), the girls were neither friendly nor unfriendly, pleasant but incurious. They didn’t appear interested in my life, perhaps because none of the details they revealed about their own were real. The first night, as we swung a little unsteadily down Albemarle Street, Leanne suggested I choose a name to use in the club. My middle name was Lauren: neutral, untelling.

  I said I was studying the history of art part-time. All the girls seemed to be studying something—business administration, mostly—and perhaps some of them were. None of them were English; clearly the idea that they were working in the bar to try to better themselves struck some sort of Eliza Doolittle chord with the punters. Leanne was flattening out her raucous Scouse—cushion came out as “cashion”; I modified my own accent, the one I used at work, which had become the voice I dreamed in, to make it a little less obviously Received Pronunciation, but to Olly’s evident satisfaction, I still sounded relatively “posh.”

  At my day job, in Prince Street, there were those million tiny codes. Anyone’s placement on the social scale could be calibrated to the nth degree at a single glance, and learning the rules was a lot more difficult than identifying paintings, because the whole point of those rules was that if you were on the inside, you never had to be told. Those hours of carefully teaching myself how to speak and how to walk might have passed the test with most people—Leanne, for instance, seemed bemused and grudgingly impressed by my transformation—but somewhere inside the House was a hidden casket of Alice in Wonderland keys that I would never possess, keys that unlocked ever tinier gardens whose walls were all the more impregnable because they were invisible. At the Gstaad, though, I was the token “toff,” and the girls, if they thought about it at all, believed there was no distinction between the soccer players’ girlfriends and the superannuated debutantes who occupied adjoining pages in OK! magazine. Of course, in a deeper sense they would have been right.

  The chat at the club was mostly about clothes, the acquisition of designer-brand shoes and handbags, and men. Some of the girls claimed to have steady boyfriends, many of them married, in which case it was the done thing to complain about their boyfriends endlessly; others were dating, in which case it was the done thing to complain about their dates endlessly. To Natalia and Anastasia and Martina and Karolina it seemed a self-evident truth that men were a necessary evil, to be endured for the sake of shoes, handbags, and Saturday-night trips to Japanese restaurants in Knightsbridge. There was a lot of analysis of texts, their frequency and affection, but any emotional response was reserved for the possibility that the men were seeing other women or failing to provide sufficient gifts. Plots and counterplots—with elaborate iPhone ruses—ensued, there was talk of men with boats, men with planes, even, but I never got the sense that any of this involved pleasure. Love was not a language any of us dealt in; fresh skins and tight thighs were our currency, only of value to those too old to take it for granted. Older men, it was generally agreed, were less bother on the whole, though they came in for a good deal of raucous shrieking about their physical deficiencies. Baldness and halitosis and the Viagra-g
rind was reality; though you would never have known that from the coquettish messagings that formed communication between the girls and their men. This was the way of their world, and they kept their contempt and their occasional tears for the other girls.

  For the first time, in the Gstaad, I had what felt like girlfriends, and I was a bit ashamed of how happy it made me. I hadn’t had friends at school. I had had quite a few black eyes, an aggressively haughty attitude, a truanting issue, and a healthy appreciation of the joy of sex, but friends I didn’t have time for. Beyond explaining that we had met up north, Leanne and I had an unspoken agreement that we had been teenage chums (if not actively taking part in holding someone’s face in the lavatory cistern could count as being chummy) and never referred to it. Apart from Frankie, the department secretary at the House, the only constant female presence in my life had been my flatmates, two earnest Korean girls studying medicine at Imperial. We had a cleaning rota pinned up in the bathroom, which we all stuck to politely enough, and beyond that there was barely any need for conversation. With the exception of the women I met at the particular kind of parties I liked to go to, I’d only ever expected to encounter hostility and scorn from my own sex. I’d never learned how to gossip, or advise, or listen to the endless rehashings of thwarted desire. But here I found I could join in. On the Tube, I swapped reading The Burlington Magazine and The Economist for Heat and Closer, so that when the talk of men palled I too could fall back on the endless soap opera of film stars. I invented a broken heart (implications of an abortion) to explain my lack of dates, I was Not Ready, and I enjoyed being advised that it was time to Get Closure and Move On. My odd nocturnal excursion I kept strictly to myself. It suited me, I realized, this strange little concentrated universe, where the world outside felt faraway, where nothing was quite real. It made me feel safe.

  • • •

  LEANNE HADN’T LIED about the money. Exaggerated, maybe, but it was still pretty extraordinary. Counting my percentage on the bottles as cab fare home, I was making about six hundred a week clear in tips, crumpled twenties and fifties, sometimes more. A fortnight took care of my pathetic overdraft, and a few weeks later I took the Sunday train to an outlet center near Oxford and made a few investments. A black Moschino skirt suit to replace the poor old Sandro, an achingly plain white Balenciaga cocktail dress, Lanvin flats, a DVF print day dress. I finally had my National Health Service teeth lasered in Harley Street, I made an appointment at Richard Ward and had my hair recut so that it looked subtly the same but five times as expensive. None of this was for the club. For that I got a few simple dresses from the high street and tarted them up with patent Loubie pumps. I cleared a shelf in my wardrobe and carefully placed most of my acquisitions there, wrapped in dry cleaner’s tissue. I liked to look at them, count them through like a stage miser. When I was little I had loved old-fashioned boarding-school stories, midnight feasts in the dormitory, and feats of triumph on the sports field. The new clothes were my gymslip and my lacrosse stick, the uniform of who I was going to be.

  He started coming in after I had been at the club a month. Thursday was usually the Gstaad’s busiest night, before men up on business went back to the country, but it was pouring outside and there were only two customers in the bar. Magazines and phones were not allowed as soon as the punters appeared, so the girls were listless, popping out to crouch under the awning for cigarettes, awkwardly trying to protect their hair from frizzing in the wet. The bell went and Olly came in. “Sit up straight, ladies! It’s your lucky night!” A few minutes later, one of the grossest men I had ever seen swung a vast belly into the room. He didn’t even attempt a bar stool, but thumped down immediately on the nearest banquette, waving Carlo irritably away until he had removed his tie and mopped his face with a handkerchief. He had that slatternly look that only really extraordinary tailoring can solve, and his tailor had clearly been overwhelmed. His open jacket revealed a taut cream shirt stretched over the gut that rested on his splayed knees, folds of neck swagged over his collar, and even his shoes looked overstuffed. He asked for a glass of ice water.

  “Haven’t seen Fatty for a while,” someone hissed.

  The form was for the girls to talk animatedly, with a lot of hair tossing and glances beneath our lashes, looking as though we just happened to be there, unescorted in our smart dresses, until the client made his selection. The fat man was a quick chooser. He nodded to me, the flabby mottled curtains of his cheeks swishing back in a smile. As I crossed the floor I noted the regimental stripe on the discarded tie, the signet ring embedded in the swell of his little finger. Eeew.

  “I’m Lauren,” I said, smiling breathily. “Would you like me to join you?”

  “James,” he supplied.

  I sat down neatly, legs crossed at the ankle, and looked at him, all twinkling expectance. No talking until they ordered.

  “I suppose you want me to buy you a drink?” He said it grudgingly, as though he knew how the club worked but still felt it an imposition.

  “Thank you. That would be lovely.”

  He didn’t look at the list. “What’s the most expensive?”

  “I think—” I hesitated.

  “Just get on with it.”

  “Well, James, that would be the Cristal 2005. Would you like that?”

  “Get it. I don’t drink.”

  I gave the nod to Carlo before he changed his mind. The 2005 was a violent three grand. Three hundred up to me already. Hey, Big Spender.

  Carlo carried the bottle over as though it was his firstborn son, but James waved him away, uncorked it, and dutifully filled the goldfish bowls.

  “Do you like champagne, Lauren?” he asked.

  I allowed myself a wry little smile. “Well, it can get a bit monotonous.”

  “Why don’t you give that to your friends and order something you want?”

  I liked him for that. He was physically repellent, true, but there was something brave about the fact that he didn’t require me to pretend. I ordered a Hennessy and sipped it slowly, and he told me a little bit about his profession, which was money, of course, and then he heaved himself to his feet and waddled out, leaving five hundred pounds in new fifties on the table. The next night, he came back and did exactly the same. Leanne texted me on Wednesday morning to say that he had come to ask for Lauren on Tuesday, and on Thursday he reappeared, a few minutes after opening time. Several of the girls had “regulars,” but none so generous, and it gave me a new status among them. Slightly to my surprise, there was no jealousy. But after all, business was business.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ONCE I’D STARTED working at the club, the daily humiliations of my life in the department were thrown into glaring relief. At the Gstaad, there was at least the illusion that I held the cards. I tried to tell myself that it amused me that my straight life, my “real” life, separated by just a few London streets from Olly and the girls, was bereft of any value or power. At the club, I felt prized every time I crossed my legs, whereas at my actual job, the one that was supposed to be my career, I was still pretty much a dogsbody. Actually, the Gstaad and the world’s most elitist art store had more in common than it was comfortable to admit.

  Working at the House could be disappointing, but I still remembered the first time that I had really seen a painting, and that memory still glowed within me. Bronzino’s allegory, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, at the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square. I still find the picture soothing, not only for the mannered, mysterious elegance of its composition—playful and innocently erotic, or darkly reminiscent of mortality and death—but because no scholar has so far advanced an accepted theory of what it means. Its beauty lies somewhere within the frustration it provokes.

  It was a school trip to London, hot hours in a coach with the smell of sausage rolls and cheese crisps, the popular girls yakking and squabbling in the back seats, our teachers looking strangely vulnerable in unaccust
omed casual clothes. We had gawped through the gates of Buckingham Palace, then plodded down the Mall to the gallery in our navy uniform sweatshirts, just pin on the name badge and you’re ready for the call center. Boys skidded on the parquet floors, girls made loud, coarse remarks at every nude we passed. I tried to wander away alone, wanting to get lost in the seemingly endless rooms of images, when I came across the Bronzino at random.

  It was as though I’d tripped and fallen down a hole, a gasping sense of quickly recovered shock, the brain lagging behind the body. There was the goddess, there her boy child, there the mysterious old man standing over them. I did not know then who they were, but I recognized, blindingly, that I had not known lack until I watched those delicate colors glow and twine. And then I knew desire too, the first sense that I knew what I wanted and what I didn’t have. I hated the feeling. I hated that everything I had known suddenly looked ugly to me, and that the source of that feeling, its mysterious pull and lure, was shining at me from this picture.

  “Rashers is perving on that naked woman!”

  Leanne and a couple of her cronies had caught up with me.

  “Fucking lezza!”

  “Lezzaaaaaah!”

  Their harsh, screeching voices were disturbing the other visitors, heads were turning, and my face burned with shame. Leanne’s hair had been an orangish blond back then, viciously permed and gelled into a peruke on her crown. Like her friends, she wore thick tan foundation and smudged black eyeliner.