Don't You Want Me?

by India Knight

  I met Dominic Midhurst when I was thirty-four, through my poofy father, who has always had a fondness for contemporary art (at one stage during my childhood – this would have been the late Sixties – he decided we should live in a bare white house with white rubber flooring and huge disturbing, nightmare-inducing canvases of what I remember to be carcasses, though surely they can’t all have been, adorning the double-height walls. We also had a small, graphically realistic painting in the downstairs loo of an erect, perfectly pink penis called, not unreasonably, Le Penis, artist unknown, though I always suspected Papa had sketched it).

  When we met, Dominic, who was a couple of years younger than me, was just beginning to create his empire: he understood the importance of PR and publicity before anyone else did, and had a stable of young conceptual artists (what does this mean? Don’t all artists have a concept? It’s like the houses you see advertised for sale, proclaiming themselves to be ‘architect-designed’); artists who could all be relied on to grace the gossip pages of the tabloids on a regular basis with some outrage or other.

  My father bought some works – you could hardly call them paintings – for his XVIième apartment, and after a few months it turned out that Dominic needed someone to translate his increasingly hefty, wordy catalogues for him. Oddly, since he’s never claimed to actually like Dominic much, Papa volunteered me, and although neither the idea of my daddy getting me a job, nor the art, nor the pale, blond, effete Dominic was exactly my cup of tea, the alternative career-wise would eventually have involved something like moving to Brussels to translate at the European Commission. Working for Dominic meant I could keep my beloved flat, keep taking the onion soup, and continue my affair with a Parisian bookshop owner with a foot fetish (inexplicable, as fetishes go. I mean, feet). So I took the job and started translating the quasi-nonsensical catalogues.

  Eventually Dominic decided it would be easier for everyone concerned if I worked from his Paris gallery rather than from home (there were then two galleries, one in Paris and one in London: he divided his time between them) with, in many cases, the art hanging in front of me, for clarification purposes. As well as translating the catalogues, in which ludicrously pseudy sentiments were expressed in award-winningly ludicrous pseudy sentences, I began involving myself with the general day-to-day life of the gallery; this occasionally involved going to lunch with Dominic and some potential buyers.

  Dominic, like my mother and Jane Birkin, spoke only the most rudimentary, heavily accented French: very charming, boldly fast, but not quite up to a serious discussion of the various merits of our various artists. After the clients had left, we’d sit and drink a cognac companionably, and slowly came to realize we quite enjoyed each other’s company. ‘You make me laugh, Stella,’ he once said, with the sense of shocked, not entirely delighted wonder one might use if saying, ‘You make me poo.’

  So yes, obviously, we started dating, but it took two years: hardly the old coup de foudre. Sitting in the back room of the gallery, I’d noticed he had a predilection for vacant-seeming leggy blondes with artfully striped hair: the kinds of women who look best in sports cars (Dom had two, both red: if big car = small dick, I thought to myself, does big car × 2 = ‘Is it in yet?’ proportions?).

  I had the legs, but that was about it: in every other respect, I was the physical antithesis of what he usually went for. I’m tall, have shoulder-length dark brown hair, once poetically described by Dominic as being the colour of bitter chocolate, and matching eyes. I’m OK – I really like my eyelashes – but you wouldn’t necessarily think ‘polo and champagne’ if you looked at me, and polo and champagne were very much what Dominic seemed to be about deep down: he was about those women who you think must have micro-manicurists, invisible to the naked eye, permanently welded to their immaculate fingernails. My fingernails were bitten and, at the time, I wore no make-up and no heels: I dressed out of (French) thrift shops, in fourth-hand old dresses by Dior and Balenciaga. I looked remarkable, I’d always tell myself, but in the capital of style, I must have also looked pretty peculiar.

  He was hardly my type either: he was like my school friends’ brothers. You know the look: sort of Bleached English, complete with floppy former public schoolboy hair and a pronounced liking for scuffed Chelsea boots and frayed pale pink shirts from Turnbull & Asser. Being an art dealer, though, this look was accessorized with a perfect mockney accent and a selection of sharp black Prada coats that deliberately confused the issue class-wise: his artists, it seemed to me, appeared to believe that Dom was a geezer done good. He didn’t disabuse them.

  But then, two years after I’d first met him and six months or so into those lunches, Dominic lunged (the English always lunge, as if they want to pin you down before you run away). It was easy not to resist. The amount of time he spent in Paris convinced me that he was not problematically English, especially when it came to sex: he didn’t want to spank me, or be spanked, for instance. Dominic was charming, witty, spoke French fearlessly badly and was always whisking me off to some m’as-tu-vu new restaurant where, very occasionally, people would recognize him. How could I resist him?

  We got Not Married, which is to say official cohabitation began, in 1999, which was also the year we moved to London. I was thirty-six and hadn’t spent time in the capital for over a decade. In my heart, I knew even then that he was hardly the love of my life; but then surely that was the point of getting Not Married: you could always walk away without too much debris. In theory, at any rate. Even then, though, the theory seemed a bit half-arsed: I mean, either love someone and marry them, or don’t, and keep your own apartment. (I didn’t, sadly: my Marais flat went up for sale, and all my stuff got packed into boxes and shipped to London.)

  To his credit, Dom didn’t claim that I was the love of his life either: what he said was, ‘We’ll have such good fun, Stella. We’ll have everything we want. You’re the only woman I know who doesn’t bore me.’ I was charmed by this last sentence, as you would be. And then, even though we were from the generation that didn’t get married – too bourgeois, which is a laugh, considering our circs – he clicked open an old box from Cartier and presented me with a Thirties emerald, when I’d expected either nothing or a ‘contemporary’ number with metal spikes and stones that looked like ploppety pellets. So that, conclusively, was that.

  He was right: we did have fun, we liked each other, and if the bed-action quickly became unremarkable, we never discussed it. He kept his promise, too: our life by then was, I suppose, really quite glamorous from the outside: dinner invitations arrived by their dozen every week at our big, leafy Primrose Hill house; there were two or three parties a night; and Dominic’s growing fame meant that, although we still hung out with his posse of artists, our social circle grew increasingly large, with all sorts of creative types lounging about our drawing room, as well as the odd promising young MP, media tycoon or on-the-up actor.

  By the time Honey was born – a year later, making me, as my obstetrician kindly pointed out, an ‘elderly’ first-time mother – it would not be an exaggeration to say that we knew what passes for ‘everyone’. The world, or at least London, was our oyster, and if every now and then I wondered why the oyster had no pearl – well, that was just me being spoiled. And if a part of me wondered why pregnancy hadn’t spurred us on to tie the knot – it seems incredibly rude to me not to marry someone when they’ve gone to the trouble of carrying your child and pushing it out of their poor vagina – well, ditto.

  I was never entirely comfortable with the boho notion of Not Married: it seemed a bit of a swizz from the female standpoint, and once Honey came along the feeling just got exacerbated. It’s all very well to lie about how ‘It’s only a piece of paper’ and to make jokes about balls and chains, but really – who, given the choice, wouldn’t swish around Mayfair with a twenty-foot train? But having done it once, I told myself that wanting to do it again was just greedy. I told myself a lot of things in those days.

  The real problem
s started occurring shortly after Honey’s birth, when I finally pointed out to Dominic what had become painfully obvious to me over the past year: namely that the social circles we moved in may have been glittering, but the people in them were fantastically dull. Most of his artists were what Dom, in his nastier moments, freely described as ‘barely literate oiks’ (secretly despised) who believed their own publicity so much that they found their own unintelligent boorishness potently, dizzyingly charming. They all drank like fishes and would end many an evening vomiting and exposing their cocks, like unattractive adolescents with an interest in being ‘outrageous’. The problem was that some of these Bright Young People were by now in their forties, and you just died of embarrassment on their behalf, or at least I did. Dominic pretended to look amused, and then rang the gossip columns.

  I never got on especially well with them once I knew them properly (which took seconds: there often wasn’t anything to know). Sometimes I’d wish someone would point out that this particular Emperor or that had no clothes. Hard to do, though, when you’re the agent’s wife: instead, you had to smile and say things like, ‘I adored ShitMan. So clever of you to create beauty out of your own, er, waste,’ and then look enthralled as Artist A or B haltingly, as if translating simultaneously from Xhosa, explained the (literal) ins and outs of the creative/lavatorial process. That was when I started developing internal Tourette’s: the words that came out of my mouth were perfectly reasonable; but the words galloping around my head were dementedly not.

  There wasn’t much more luck elsewhere. Dominic’s handful of old school friends, now MPs and journalists, seemed oddly ingratiating: I think it’s fair to say that, residual fondness aside, they only really liked Dominic and me because of our so-called friends. ‘One meets the most extraordinary people at your house,’ the Member for Acton’s wife once told me, with the kind of sniff, familiar from my mother, that meant, ‘It may very well be fun, but it isn’t quite cricket.’ My own school friends were now married women running large households in the Home Counties: sweet, but hardly soul-mates, banging on about Pony Club, pressing jam recipes on one and moaning about their lack of sex lives. They, too, considered me a curiosity: having thought of me for years as bad French Claudine from Mallory Towers, they were interested enough in the superficial gloss of my life to remain in touch, but the gloss, such as it was, was so alien to them that any conversation would end with them faux-shuddering and saying, ‘Oh, Stella. What a funny life! I don’t know how you do it.’ I wanted them to envy me; it was clear they didn’t.

  I suppose what I am trying to say is that I was lonely. Not pitiably lonely, certainly, and the old thing about making your bed and lying in it certainly applied. But once my darling little Honey came along, I started asking myself what kind of a household she was being brought up in. Our five-bedroomed Primrose Hill house was a sort of upmarket dossing place for Dominic’s clients, friends and assorted hangers-on, even when Dom wasn’t there (he still spent half his time in Paris): I’d come down with her for the early-morning feed, nightied and leaky-breasted, and find strangers lying across the brutal and frankly ugly designer furniture. I was too old for this, I kept telling myself, and besides had never had any kind of yearning for this rock ’n’ roll lifestyle: I wanted hardcore domestic, in the way that you always want the opposite of your own childhood. Something, it became clear, had to give, and since Dom was either unwilling or unable to abandon – well, his life, it made sense to remove myself from it. We separated a year ago, when Honey was eight months old. I wasn’t sorry: disliking Dominic’s life was one thing, but I’d also begun to dislike him.

  Dominic, who is so freakily controlling professionally, was pretty much exemplary about the split, which is more than I can say about our friends. Not Marriage notwithstanding, he gave me the house, a decent amount of alimony – which I supplement with the odd translating job – and moved, conveniently, to Tokyo, where gallery number four was about to open (number three’s in Los Angeles), his Japanese girlfriend in tow. Dom surfaces for a few days once a month. It’s not ideal as far as Honey is concerned – her main contact with her father is via Hello Kitty parcels from Japan, faxed drawings and little notes – but he claims to be devoted to her and I see no reason to disbelieve him. On the other hand, the house is now a haven of blessed peace and calm, there are no horrible surprises in human form when we come down to breakfast, there is no dirt, and Honey is the cheeriest, chirpiest eighteen-month-old imaginable, so we must be doing something right.

  I’ve completely redecorated the house, funding myself from the sale of a couple of the more hideous art works which Dominic had given me during our marriage: a giant sculpture of a seven-foot-tall man that looks just like Morph’s spastic brother, excreting the world while screaming with bottom-ache (This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You, plaster and cigarette ash, 1996, sold on by me for – seriously – £20,000); and a drawing by Kevin Autan, who may or may not have limbs – I’d guess he held the pen in his mouth – of a woman with the face of a mosquito (Stung, crayon and biro, 1998, £8,000).

  So where there were concrete floors and stainless steel, there’s now reclaimed oak flooring and cherry-red cupboards (the kitchen); where there were hideous Seventies love-seats, hard lines and pale grey walls, there’s fresh yellow paint, squishy sofas, flowers and faded patchwork throws (the living room); and our bedroom, formerly an angular minimalist nightmare, is a softly lit, hot-pink den of sin: I took my inspiration from the New Orleans bordello look. Except, of course, that I have no one to sin with.

  I didn’t like many of the people Dominic and I hung out with, but I never let them know it: I fed them, watered them, gave them beds to sleep in and cooked them eggs in the morning. I went to their boring dinners and spent weekends in their country houses, I talked to them. I was as gracious as I am capable of being. I bought their children presents, even though most of their children behaved like monsters and were so plain that really the best present would have been a brown paper bag. I even went on holiday with a few of them, an experience reminiscent of finding oneself in a Victorian freak show, sandwiched between the Pinhead and the Bearded Lady, with their child the Torso, writhing about on the floor, making subhuman noises: it would always take me weeks to recover.

  Now, I’m not saying these friends of Dominic’s should have sworn eternal allegiance to me when Dom and I split up. But they vanished, proving that some clichés only endure because they are so true. Sure, a few of the men took me out to dinner, were affronted when I wouldn’t weep prettily, bemoaning my fate, let alone bitch about Dominic, and lunged just before pudding, with varying degrees of crudity. And yes, a couple of the women rang me to see whether I was ‘all right’, and seemed disappointed to hear that I was (just as a few women became oddly watchful of their husbands when I was around, as though their portly, balding partners were all Brad Pitt, and as such irresistible to me). But that was all.

  I can’t say I miss them, exactly, but you’d think that in 2001 people would understand that an amicable separation doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole world has to take sides. But take sides they have: Dominic is rich, successful, knows everyone and throws great parties. I’m a non-working housewife of sorts, left in my big house, barely knowing anyone really – not properly – and although the invitations haven’t quite dried up, I sometimes feel like a horrible kept thing, rattling about my cage, beholden.

  Frank, bless him, was the only one who really stuck by me. I met him a couple of years ago in Paris: Dominic had meetings all day and Frank, already a star client, needed to be entertained (he paints giant, twelve-foot-plus canvases of cows: not quite my thing, but at least he can draw – the cows do look like they’re about to come up to you and moo). I took him to lunch at L’Ami Louis, where we ate perfect roast chicken and drank perfect white Burgundy well into the afternoon, and then we went shopping for candles at Diptyque on the Boulevard St-Germain, and then we went to look at Marie Antoinette’s sad cell at the Conciergerie. ‘Do
n’t start,’ I said as we ascended the dark, narrow stairs. ‘What?’ asked Frank. ‘I know the revolution was a good thing et cetera et cetera,’ I said, ‘but I won’t have you making jokes about nobs all deserving to have been dragged to the guillotine. Not while we’re actually looking at her things.’

  He didn’t, and later he said he’d like to see Versailles, and this seemed so unlikely, so improbable – Francis Keane, artist as pop star, wearing his working-class credentials like a badge of honour, wanting to see the prettiest, richest, most glittering thing he could see in Paris – that I was enchanted.

  We became firm friends, and when Frank needed somewhere to live upon coming back from Berlin, where he’d been working for the past six months as a consultant to some German museum of modern arse, I offered him a room in my house. He’s been here three months and is, in many respects, a marvel: he’s a domestic god, and not only on the cooking front – within two weeks of arriving, he secured the services of Mary O’Connor, an old friend of his mother, to look after Honey. There’s clearly something not quite right with Frank in the commitment department – the number of women who have been up my stairs are testament to that. Still, so what, really? Each to his own: I don’t see that it’s actually any of my business. I just wish that I could view his slapperiness with the amused detachment I would probably muster up if I were with someone myself. But I’m single, and the amount of sex Frank gets is getting me down, and if I’m not careful it’ll make me bitter. I must find some of my own.

  2

  I know I bang on about the English being strange, but clearly a little part of me isn’t quite convinced, since I’ve sort of married two of them. I must make more of an effort, I resolve, and be less condemning, and here, in this morning’s post, is my chance: a postcard from Isabella Howard, one of the former friends, not sighted for months, asking me to dinner on Friday. Which is tomorrow – rather impolitely short notice, but I am not in a position to mind. Surely Frank or Mary could baby-sit.