The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  The river was glowing in the dusk like molten lava snaking from a volcano. Back in the living-room I sat at my telescope and focused it on the Houses of Parliament upstream in Westminster. The towers and spires were now as black and jagged as a tramp’s teeth. I decided it was time to think about dinner.

  I ate some sardines and a medium-cut slice of wholemeal bread, toasted but unbuttered. It was an austere meal but the very act of eating reminded me of the dinner-party which we were planning to give at the end of the week. To crown Mrs. Thatcher’s troubles, the beef market had collapsed. Could I really foist portions of a potentially mad cow on my guests in the manner of the Minister of Agriculture who had recently attempted to proclaim the safety of British beef by ramming a hamburger into the mouth of his four-year-old daughter? No. I tried to console myself by thinking that all over England menus were being reduced to chaos by bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but this hardly made my ordeal easier to face. It would be the first dinner-party Kim and I had given since our wedding, and although I had researched the subject of etiquette with a lawyer’s attention to detail, I still felt that the whole exercise resembled sitting an exam where one small slip meant total failure.

  In addition to the menu I was worrying about the wine. I knew a good claret had to be at least ten years old, but Kim had said we could serve a 1985 St. Julien. I realised that ’85 was a good year, possibly the best year for claret in the eighties, but could we really get away with cutting such a corner when at least one of the guests was an oenophile? It was all very well for Kim to glide around the conventions; everyone knew he was only a naturalised Englishman and allowances were always made for foreigners, but as a woman I had to get everything not only right but perfect. That was how I had survived in the City among all those sabre-toothed male predators. Survival meant being in control of every single detail of every single project—and I was still a long way from being in control of this dinner-party looming at the end of the week.

  Having reached this conclusion I felt so stressed out that I gave way to the urge to binge on cornflakes. Before meeting Kim I had kept my kitchen a cereal-free zone but Kim liked cornflakes and I had fallen into the habit lately of snitching three or four flakes at a time to soothe my nerves. However, at least flake-snitching was an improvement on smoking. I had given up cigarettes two years, six months and fourteen days before.

  Still munching I slumped down on the sofa, grabbed the television’s remote control and zapped my way into Panorama in the hope of diverting myself from any further thoughts about the dinner-party.

  The pest who had made the first phone call that evening remained silent but I felt no spasm of curiosity because I knew very well who she was.

  I had long since begun to wish that legislation could be introduced to curb ex-wives who turned into stalkers.

  III

  Before I say more about Sophie I need to say more about Kim.

  I had met him seventeen months ago at Heathrow Airport before he had made the move to Graf-Rosen and I had made the switch to Curtis, Towers. In consequence neither of us was travelling first class, but as the airlines had already started to pamper business-class passengers, we were allowed to congregate in a private lounge where even a barman and waiter had been planted to spare us the effort of mixing our own complimentary drinks. Passengers destined for other flights on that airline were also milling around and taking up too much space, but just as I was thinking I would have to drink my vodka martini standing up I noticed a man relaxing alone at a seating arrangement for two on the far side of the lounge.

  What happened next may seem hard to believe, but our glances really did meet across that crowded room. I suppose this situation became a cliché simply because it does happen so often, but my first reaction, I have to admit, was to think cynically of those implausible 1950s movies starring Doris Day.

  Kim’s glance travelled idly over me, moved on, halted and swivelled back. At another time I might have adopted a remote air and gazed at the ceiling, but at home there was a letter from the lover who had just dumped me, and I had certain things to prove to myself in order to heal my bruised self-esteem. Gliding over to this well-dressed stranger, who I at once recognised had the poise of a successful businessman, I indicated the empty chair and said two words. They were: “May I?”

  “Make my day.”

  This response naturally triggered memories of Clint Eastwood, but not for long; I was too busy feeling like Grace Kelly about to vamp Cary Grant, and the next moment I was taking a closer look at this big fish whom I was busy teasing with a shrimping-net. I might have been acting out a romantic cliché, but I was well aware that Kelly and Grant had been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a genius much admired for his depiction of psychopaths.

  But this big fish seemed more like a dolphin than a shark. He had dark hair, silver at the sides, blue eyes, deep grooves at the corners of his wide, subtle mouth, and a furry-purry voice guaranteed to reduce a Rottweiler to a lap-dog. I judged him to be in his late forties, certainly in the prime of middle age, and I knew I had not mistaken the shimmer of success which gave his blunt-featured good looks such a glitzy sheen.

  “Going far?” he said as I sat down.

  “Only three thousand miles.”

  “The New York flight?”

  “Uh-huh. You too?”

  He nodded. “Staying at the Pierre?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Too bad!” He smiled again. His teeth were slightly uneven but I liked that. I was bored with capped teeth which had had all the individuality tortured out of them. By this time I was aware that although he spoke with a faint American accent there had been something European about the way he pronounced “Pierre.”

  “Business or pleasure?” he was asking idly.

  “Both, I hope!”

  He finished his Scotch and gestured to my glass. “What are you drinking?”

  I told him. He snapped his fingers. The harassed waiter stopped dead in his tracks and took the order for another round.

  “Well, thank you,” I said, “Mr.—”

  “My name’s Joachim Betz, but you don’t have to get your tongue around that first name—or the last. Kim will do.”

  “German?”

  “Not exactly. I’ve been English for a long time now.”

  “So have I.”

  “You’re not English?”

  “Not exactly.”

  We smiled, savouring our inexactness, before I said: “I’m British but not English. I’m a Scot. My name’s Carter Graham, Carter as in President Jimmy.”

  He asked no questions but accepted the odd first name as if it were commonplace. “I was born in Argentina,” he said. “My father was smart enough to escape from the Nazis before the war.”

  “Your parents were Jewish?”

  “Only my father. So by Jewish rules I don’t qualify, but I confess that in New York it often suits me to let people assume I’m a Jew.”

  “I’ve never found there’s much mileage in being a Scot in London.”

  “How about all those Scots who have made it to the top of the British Establishment?”

  “Yes, a great bunch—and all of them men!”

  He laughed. “Res ipsa loquitur? ”

  “Res ipsa loquitur!”

  It was as if we had exchanged the password which signalled membership of a secret confraternity. That Latin tag, “the matter speaks for itself,” is one of the first phrases any lawyer learns.

  “What’s your field?” he demanded.

  “Tax. And yours?”

  “Investment banking . . . But is being Scottish really such a handicap for a woman practising law in this enlightened day and age?”

  “What enlightened day and age?”

  “Well, since we now have a female prime minister—”

  “She’s a goddess. That’s different.”

  “Explain!”

  I sized him up and decided to risk a touch of satire.

  IV


  “The English dinosaurs who roam the City of London,” I said, “divide women into four groups: trash, tarts, girls and goddesses. Trash is anything which fails to speak with a Home Counties accent, and Scots trash, if it aims to be a lawyer, should qualify in Scottish law and stay north of the border. Trash can’t be taken seriously. Tarts, on the other hand, can be taken seriously, but dinosaurs only do one kind of business with them— if indeed they do business with them at all. The women in the third category, the girls, speak with a Home Counties accent and are allowed to be businesswomen (a) because they look sweet with their briefcases, and (b) because they can’t possibly be a serious threat—they remind the dinosaur of his mother and sister, and all dinosaurs know how to control the females in their families. Goddesses alone are beyond control, but that’s all right because they appeal to the dinosaur’s primitive need to worship the powerful, and when worshipped the goddess is usually benign towards males and indifferent to females. Very occasionally tarts and trash can be reclassified as girls who may one day be goddesses, but only if their speech is flawless, their manners impeccable and their looks fit to qualify them for the frontispiece of Country Life.”

  My companion was clearly amused. “And how would you define the dinosaurs?”

  “They can be any age between forty and ninety, although nowadays they’re usually exterminated from the boardrooms before they hit sixtyfive. They’re in all the major professions, but the law provides them with an ideal environment. The legal dinosaurs talk loudly about modernising attitudes and they make token gestures when it comes to employing women, but this is yet another case of ‘the more things change, the more things remain the same.’ Even today the dinosaurs with the most power all went to the same schools and they all belong to the same clubs and they all share the same lifestyle—”

  “Which is?”

  “A pied-à-terre in the Temple or Clifford’s Inn or the Barbican. A plush home in leafy Surrey which is serviced by a Home Counties wife encased in pearls and twinsets—”

  “You’re describing the 1950s!”

  “As I said, the more things change, the more things remain the same. Anyone who’s truly ambitious soon finds he has to adopt a dinosaur’s lifestyle in order to make his dreams come true, so the lifestyle gets passed down intact from one generation to the next.”

  “But supposing,” said Kim, “a dinosaur gets bored with this fossilised English lifestyle? Supposing he wants to ditch the leafy lanes of Surrey and try something new?”

  “The desire to ditch would probably be just a passing whim. But there’s no reason, of course, why he shouldn’t occasionally take a holiday from all those leafy lanes.” Raising my glass I paused before saying blandly: “Cheers,” and as he smiled again, his eyes now a steamy blue, I knew at once that I’d hooked him.

  V

  I hardly need say that I was not a goddess. To have accumulated the necessary power, prestige and influence, goddesses had to be over fifty, and for me that milestone was still many years away. But my prospects were good. Having become a partner in my firm of solicitors I had now manoeuvred myself into a position where I could afford to take time out—briefly—for domesticity. According to the life-plan which I had designed for myself before my arrival in London, I had to marry at thirty-five. When I met Kim I was nearly thirty-four and already looking around so that I could complete the assignment on schedule. I supposed it was too much to hope that I would manage to follow Mrs. Thatcher’s example of having twins, a move that completed childbearing in a single nine-month tranche, but I certainly expected to be finished with pregnancies before I was forty. Then I would be free to focus on my career again in what would be the most challenging years of my professional life.

  The trouble with life-plans which look so neat on paper is that life itself is always trying to poke holes in them. As soon as I started to look around for a husband I realised there was a big problem: marriageable men were in short supply. My recent lover had spelled this out to me in no uncertain terms before ditching me for a nineteen-year-old fluffette. Unmarried career women in their mid-thirties were pathetic, I was informed, particularly when they were unable to figure out why no man wanted to be stuck with them on a permanent basis. Did they never once realise that there was always a new crop of nubile feminine flesh flowering for the delight of the older male? No man in his right mind, I was informed, wanted the kind of successful woman who had more balls than all the men in the boardroom.

  I did manage to laugh as I accused him of whipping himself into a frenzy of jealousy over the penis that I didn’t have, but after his departure I found myself fighting a major depression, and although I won through I emerged debilitated. I almost decided not to bother with marriage, but found this was a goal I was unwilling to abandon. The dinosaurs never truly respected a woman unless she had been a wife and mother. Society did appear to have changed in its attitude to unmarried women, but I often suspected the change was no more than a fantasy hyped up by the media while the attitudes of the men in power remained much as they had always been.

  A successful woman, it seemed clear to me, had to achieve both a career and a faultless domesticity; it was not an either/or situation, and in order to maximise my success I had to stick to my life-plan and net the right husband. Celibacy was just as much for losers as chastity was. That was the dogma. Those were the rules. One conformed or else one was consigned to hell as someone who had failed to make it to the heaven of “having it all.” Occasionally, very occasionally, I did think this ideology was as rigorous as the crackpot lifestyle of some fundamentalist religious sect, but I always eliminated that heretical thought by reminding myself what agony it would be to wind up a loser, with everyone breathing contempt on me from all sides.

  The irony was that when I first met Kim in that airport lounge I did not see him as a potential husband. I merely saw him as a male who could boost my shattered self-esteem, and besides I had by that time given up hope of marrying a fellow lawyer. Successful lawyers all seemed to gravitate towards the traditional wives who would slot easily into the dinosaur lifestyle, and although I had cast my net wider, trawling among the stockbrokers and the bankers and the various other businessmen who flourished in the City’s Square Mile, I had found only the unsuitable and the unavailable.

  I had wondered if I was being too fussy, but thought not. It was no good marrying someone unsuitable; I would have been written off as pitifully desperate. It was also no good angling for someone who was already married; that would have been a very unwise move, no matter how desirable the husband was, because people would have said I was reckless, hormone-driven, incapable of ordering my private life properly, and I could not afford to make any move which would have been detrimental to my career.

  “My wife’s ideal for a dinosaur,” said Kim on the flight to New York, “but the trouble is I’m not the dinosaur I appear to be. I’ve always been the outsider, acting a part in order to get on.”

  “Me too. So are you saying—”

  “I’m saying Sophie and I have recently decided to go our separate ways. There are no children and no other people involved, so the divorce could hardly be easier.”

  “How civilised,” I said politely, but despite this information that he would soon be single I still did not see him as a potential husband. I was too busy massaging my battered ego with erotic thoughts of a one-night stand.

  VI

  According to romantic convention and modern urban myth a torrid sex-scene should have unfolded when Kim and I went to bed together that same night in New York, but fortunately real life is rather more unpredictable. The last thing I wanted was a torrid sex-scene. Erotic, yes, but not pornographically torrid. In my experience (which was well up to the modern average as established by earnest sociologists) torrid sex-scenes indicated the presence of either male bastards or male perverts or both, and were conducted as if the woman’s body were a plastic machine designed for unspeakable experiments. No woman in her right mind could enjoy that ki
nd of rubbish. Torrid sex-scenes might have been fun in the 1960s when everyone was so innocent and the weirdos were still hiding in the woodwork, but now, when everything is not only permitted but expected, they have degenerated into a big bore which is not only repulsive but occasionally frightening.

  I sound jaded. I was jaded. Sex as a leisure activity is great fun when one’s young, but as the years pass, one’s horizons alter, one’s needs change and one becomes more complex, less easily satisfied. One simply cannot, if one wants to be a mature human being, continue to think of sex as being in the same league as getting drunk in a pub on a Saturday night. The whole subject then becomes murky, fraught with ambiguity and eventually painful. Yes, I was jaded. I was sure too that I was not alone in harbouring jaded feelings, but of course secular society has decreed that one can never admit to feeling less than ecstatic about sex. This is a key dogma, and to deny it is heresy.

  However, despite my jaded attitude to sex—despite the fact that I was pursuing Kim not primarily for culturally sanctified thrills but for an ego-boost—despite the fact that I expected little physical pleasure from the encounter but only the emotional satisfaction arising from a power-play successfully executed—despite all these things I had the most welcome surprise. Kim was astonishingly normal. No weirdo came crawling out of the woodwork. No ego-crazed Don Juan treated me as a collection of apertures while watching himself dotingly in the mirror. No tormented masculine psyche worried itself silly about female orgasms. And no flagging middle-aged bodypart flunked consummation amidst a rising tide of embarrassment. He just said casually after we had had a passionate smooch (well worthy of Grace Kelly’s famous smooch with Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief): “Anything you don’t like?” and when I retorted: “Yes—endless foreplay!” he laughed before murmuring: “Sure—why waltz when you can tango?” Then I laughed too and suddenly I thought: this is fun! And I was so surprised because I had quite forgotten how amusing ordinary, straightforward, no-frills sexual intercourse could be if only one had the right partner.