Bound to You (10 page)

‘Nichi
mou
, we’ve been through all this,’ he would wobble. ‘I’m like a wounded animal that has climbed too far into its shell.’

‘But Christos, we love each other. We shouldn’t be apart!’

But as far as Christos was concerned, there was no other way. The ‘cracked vase’ of our relationship, as he had allegorised it, and which I had broken, could not be repaired.

About a week after the outing with Bobby I was distracted from my professional, social and romantic conundrums when my mum phoned to tell me that my very elderly aunt had died. She had been 103, and the funeral was the following week. Would I go?

When I was a little girl Auntie Lillian was a figure of baroque intrigue to me. Originally from my home town of Wakefield, she had moved to the twee seaside resort of Minehead in Somerset with her invalid husband Albert, after he suffered a heart attack in his forties. There she ran a bed and breakfast at a time when working-class women didn’t officially run much of anything. Growing up, I had spent childhood summers camping in the West Country, and we always spent an afternoon or two at her house, a stuffy bungalow covered in lace soft furnishings that smelled like boiled fish. It had been the ‘show home’ when she had first acquired it, and there, among Auntie Lillian’s clocks and costume jewellery, I admired her wartime women’s fitness medals and listened as she regaled me with tales of the ‘men friends’ that would take her out dancing while Albert rested up at home. She always wore coloured shift dresses with a cardigan draped elegantly over her shoulders, a tissue tucked up the sleeve, and pale pink lipstick, even well into her nineties.

She had been a handsome, rather than a ravishingly beautiful woman, ‘always getting her knees out’, I remember my late grandma once saying as she tutted over a picture of Lillian that I later ended up with. According to family rumour she was supposed to marry Albert’s brother, but he committed suicide shortly before the wedding. Did that mean she’d lost her first true love, I would often wonder. When she died, among her possessions was a jewellery box full of other people’s wedding rings, both men’s and women’s. I had heard vague stories of how she had acquired or been bequeathed them by her dancing partners.

There was never any suggestion that Auntie Lillian had been unfaithful to Uncle Albert, but she clearly had an allure for men that she wasn’t afraid to exert. The rest of the family dismissed her air of innate superiority and thirst for adventure as arrogance. But her boldness in an age when women rarely escaped the apron strings of motherhood, let alone secured their own financial future, established her as a subversive figure of admiration to me. Plus, she had encouraged me to write letters to her all the way through my childhood, which meant that I owed her, in part, my love of language. There was no question of me not going.

On the morning of the funeral, I stood in a damp towel and examined my wardrobe. I dragged out a dark, double-layered dress with an overlay of off-white polka dots. Then the only smart black jacket I possessed, which was chic but cheap, meaning it was cut a little too tightly about the chest. Black stilettos. I examined a pair of black chiffon knickers. Was it disrespectful to wear sexy underwear to my great-great-aunt’s funeral? Or commemorative? I decided it was commemorative and put them on.

I took a train from London Paddington to Taunton, and a cab from there to the crematorium.

My mum had warned me that there were unlikely to be many attendees at the funeral but as I pulled up in front of the chapel I was still startled. This couldn’t be right. Could it? A distant family friend I had never met but recognised from photographs, and a representative from the care home Auntie Lillian had been living in for the past fifteen years or so, exchanged pleasantries. They were only waiting for me. One hundred and three years old, and only three people at your funeral, not counting the vicar. Already I felt like weeping for her.

The service was short, and the hymns traditional parting psalms that I had learnt at school. ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, forgive our foolish ways’. I sang as loudly and as brightly as if I were leading hymn practice in assembly, as I sometimes did when I was music prefect. I powered through the higher notes, only occasionally quavering. Mine was the only voice filling the airy, sunlit hall.

Though he was sweet enough, the vicar failed to say anything of genuine relevance or poignancy. He hadn’t known Auntie Lillian. And neither, really, had the care-home worker, or the family friend. To be honest, I only knew her through distant, distilled memories, passed on to me by others and herself as an old woman. The real Lillian was the energetic girl from St John’s dairy who had dreamed of escaping south and running her own B&B, the tease with just the tiniest hint of coquette about her, the dancer, the antiques collector, and the indomitable lady who had only given up driving her precious silver Beetle in her eighties.

As the service came to a close, the vicar announced that we would now hear her favourite song. It was a rendition of the old tune, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. Sometimes I passed through the real Berkeley Square on my way to my internship. As the muted brass swelled, I cried properly for her, for a life that had once brimmed with verve and fun. With nobody to recollect them, the memories of her life shrank in on themselves.

I looked back around the empty crematorium. ‘Don’t end up like Auntie Lillian!’ was the familiar cry whenever I told a relative that marriage and children were not my priorities. Was this what was going to happen to me now that I had lost Christos? I imagined myself holed up in a poky little flat, with only my yellowing books and a couple of geriatric sausage dogs for company, lingering by the window every weekday afternoon as I watched young mothers shepherd their children home from school, wondering whether I had missed my chance.

Well, if so, there was nothing I could do about it. Even if you had children it didn’t mean they would turn up when you died, did it? And Auntie Lillian had been married, after all. No, this was simply what happened when you outlived all those that had loved you, the result of having enjoyed your life so that you weren’t entirely run into the ground and only fit to pop your clogs by retirement age.

On the train back home I reflected on my own situation. Funerals should be live-affirming; so how was I to usher in the next positive phase of my life? By focusing on my career, I decided. I have always found salvation in work, not the futile grind (which I’ve done plenty of) but the creative kind; the work that you would do whether they paid you or not, if you could only magic away the bills. I thought again about Auntie Lillian and the social expectations she faced. There were no such strictures on me. I was lucky enough to have the opportunities and liberty to do what I liked. So I had better get on with it.

No sooner had I made my resolution than Lady Fortune’s wheel stopped on an unusual proposition. Life had forked before my eyes.

I got through to the final round of the travel magazine job but was rejected in favour of the other graduate applicant. It would have been a fun and rewarding position but as much as I admired her writing style, I couldn’t honestly claim to want to be the next Martha Gellhorn.

I rang Susan at the hospital and asked her if there was any work. ‘For you, Nichi, of course. Just let me know when you want to come back.’ That was reassuring news. But it was also stultifying. It made me feel defiant. There had to be another way to make money in a city crawling with opportunity.

On Friday, Gina texted to ask if I wanted to go to a Halloween Party that night. Jesus, it was the end of October already. Christmas would be here before I knew it, and before I knew it I would have absolutely no money to buy anybody’s Christmas presents. It looked like I was just going to have to bite on my frustration and return to temping. Tonight though, I was going to dress up and dance and forget about it.

I met Gina in Kensington at 8 p.m. Kensington was a pretty unlikely place for a house party. Well, unlikely considering the kinds of people we usually hung out with. They certainly couldn’t afford to live in Kensington.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said when I raised it with her. ‘We’re going to the seedy part of W-something, not the slick!’

Costume was optional but encouraged, so Gina and I had struck a compromise and decided to only wear clothes that we already owned, and not to go for Gothic overkill, lest the party was dire enough to force us into town instead. Gina was therefore wearing a black jumpsuit accessorised with flat leopard-print boots, while I had opted for red heels and a pinstripe pinafore dress with a plunging neckline and massive tie-behind bow.

For a girl that stands at just five feet and half an inch tall, I have to say, I have inherited a rather generous chest, which the dress certainly enhanced. At my thinnest I had absolutely nothing to fill a bra at all. There is a Van Gogh sketch called ‘Sorrow’ that depicts the artist’s mistress, Sien, allegedly a prostitute, hunched over her distended stomach and tiny shrivelled breasts. For a long time I had it stuck above my desk to remind myself of how I must never mutilate my body again. One of the great things about learning to eat once more was getting my boobs back, and whenever I was feeling anxious about my weight, which sometimes did still happen now that I was no longer the size of a ten-year-old child, I made a point of flaunting my cleavage to reassure myself.

We walked for ten minutes past Holland Park. The area didn’t seem that sleazy to me. Slightly past-its-best decadent, perhaps? Suddenly, I knew where we were. Wasn’t this where sixties seductress Christine Keeler first lived with her West Indian lover, before she moved in on John Profumo? I’d been reading a book about it only the previous week. I told Gina about it.

Gina laughed. ‘You and your wayward anti-heroines, Nichi!’

‘Well, you should read about her! She’s sort of like a proto-feminist! And she didn’t care if anyone thought she was a whore, which was pretty impressive for the time.’

‘If you say so!’ Gina replied. ‘But she didn’t sell sex, did she?’

‘Well, no, I don’t think so. But she was an erotic dancer.’

‘That’s not the same as being a prostitute,’ Gina reprimanded me.

‘It’s still making money out of your sexuality,’ I replied. ‘And she clearly knew how to get what she wanted out of feckless men.’

I surprised myself. Did I really think that Christine Keeler was admirable? Well, yes, I supposed I did.

Gina and I turned into a neat cul-de-sac.

‘Number twenty-three,’ Gina pointed. The front door was flaking purple, with William Morris-style panelled glass above the frame. It must once have looked pretty opulent.

Inside, the flat was disappointingly mundane but it had been very well bedevilled for Halloween. Black billowing sheets drowned the walls and the only illumination in the main room came from a few church candles and strings of iridescent paper skulls, which one of the attendant art students had cleverly interwoven with fairy lights.

‘Hey, Gina, glad you could make it!’ A buxom blonde girl dressed like a bloodied Little Red Riding Hood approached us. Behind her was a rangily handsome wolf, who I took to be her boyfriend.

‘Tina, Jamie!’

Red Riding Hood and her wolf came forward. I saw now that he had a realistically gory wound painted on his furry neck and his head was encased in what was effectively a metal bear trap.

‘Brilliant!’ I said, gesturing at the wolf’s neck.

‘Isn’t it?’ Tina cackled back. ‘And here’s the most brilliant part.’ She held up her hand to demonstrate that she was carrying a lead affixed to the trap, which essentially functioned as a collar. Wolfboy, then, was her prey ensnared, rather than the other way round. ‘I do like a bit of feminist revisionism,’ she said, with a wink. ‘Help yourself to drinks, ladies. There’s some kind of punch, or else wine and spirits on the table over there.’

As we went over to fetch drinks, Gina and I continued the conversation we’d been having outside.

‘I’ve got a friend who put herself through a Masters by pole dancing. She says she’s not a sex worker, but a sexy worker.’

I burst out laughing and shook my head. ‘Well, if that makes her feel better! Isn’t the cock just on the wrong side of the trousers?’

‘Oh, I’d say so,’ offered a knowing voice.

The interjection came from a startlingly made-up woman with glorious bright red hair wearing an elegant black halterneck dress and patent-leather kitten heels. The dress exposed an intricate Japanese tattoo that crept down her back like clematis.

I glanced at Gina. Was this one of her friends? Gina seemed to be shrugging her eyes at me.

The woman immediately sensed our unease, tittered to herself and swept forward, hand outstretched in friendly greeting. ‘I’m Sapphire. Lovely to meet you both. Great party! Haven’t they fixed it up freakily?’

She had a low, contralto voice and spoke with an odd cadence. I couldn’t place the accent. English with a hint of something else. Or maybe that was just her quirky glamour tricking me. I couldn’t tell how old she was either. Something told me early thirties. She had a poise rare among women of my and Gina’s age.

‘I’m Nichi,’ I smiled back, ‘and this is Gina.’ Gina looked at Sapphire warily.

‘So,’ I pressed on, ‘Sapphire . . . that’s an unusual name. Siren-like!’

‘Oh,’ she laughed blithely. ‘It’s not my real name. It’s my domme name.’

Domme name? I could see that she had caught the consternation cross my face. ‘Domme. As in dominatrix. I sexually dominate men for a living.’

‘Ahhh!’ I replied, dropping my intonation so as not to sound too clueless. I knew what dominatrixes, er, no, what was the plural? – dominatrices – I knew what dominatrices did. For a very tidy sum they tied up overweight businessmen who fantasised about being punished for their capitalist sins, didn’t they?

‘How do you find it?’ I asked casually. I wasn’t particularly interested in the mechanics. Besides, she must get sick of being asked inane questions by giggling men and women desperate for lascivious detail.