Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (10 page)

‘What?' I struggle feebly as the vast mitts propel me to the door and past the machine where Alain had found no satisfaction.

‘Hor—', shouts the knight—or denizen of hell. He now holds my arm in a grip that deserves ‘vice-like' as a description. Faces peer from La Speranza: ‘Whore? Who is this? How dare he?' a passer-by, an elderly man pushing a Zimmer frame, has the courage to call out.

Then I am kidnapped by Stefan Mocny, king of West London Marrakech, his blue-eyed assistant waiting patiently by the kerb. I now see Alain, as if a million miles distant, walking at his normal, lazy pace back towards La Speranza. Then a great, black-gloved hand lifts me on to the pillion seat, the engine gives a shattering screeching roar and we're off, down Ladbroke Grove and under the motorway and over the bridge that crosses the canal.

‘Hormead Road', Stefan booms, as I cling desperately to him, his voice muffled by eight layers of protective gear. ‘The perfect investment, the house you're gonna wanna buy …'

Love is blind, so it's the worst thing that can happen to someone who makes their living from ‘seeing' the best way to do up a flat or house, and from a ‘vision' of what it'll look like once you've opened it up/ made a new basement floor/ filled a dreary Edwardian nightmare with what agents call ‘natural light'.

So it's professional suicide to be blinded like Oedipus by previous sins (in my case trying to buy poor Alain) and finding yourself wandering the deserts of Bad Taste and the pinnacles of kitsch without eyes to guide you. (I can tell Maygrove Road is no good because love needs money and the terrifying squalor and ugliness of this ‘fast
improving' part of W9 can never be conquered, even by a Sugar Mummy with pockets deeper than the vaults of the Bank of England.)

But with 29 Hormead Road … here I am thinking, oh well, this is modern, this is smart … and I might as well be fooling myself in the Harrods Furniture Department, somewhere I would of course never go, into buying an imitation Pompadour dressing-table or the like. That's how crazy my unrequited passion has made me. I'll be buying silver fish knives next and getting my crest engraved on them (if I had a crest, that is, but if the nouveau-riches Russes can invent one so can I—how about a sugar bowl with boobs rampant?). Well if you've taken leave of your senses the first thing you need is some degree of respect, a contrast to Molly's brusque remarks and the over-familiar ways of the unbanishable Howie.

Macular degeneration must explain my reaction to what seems to be basement flats on top of one another, identical so you can't tell which floor you're on, which comprise 29 Hormead Road. Floors of imitation pine (now this is something I can spot a mile off). Walls ‘dragged' in crude ‘Mediterranean-style' blues and ochres. Nylon rush-matting stair carpets. Fake chrome ‘steel' worktops that are
already dulling, and wood that isn't even MDF, again with an expiry date all over its bulging, giveaway spill by kitchen cabinet door or low-down in casing of Jacuzzi bath. Mock parquet in open-plan etc. etc., colour of an Irish setter's poo. Shades over windows, frail shutters in ill-disguised plastic … outside, a minute patio stuffed with begonias and a solitary pine. Mosaic tiles like a children's cheap colouring book: I had to be glad Alain missed the boat and didn't come up here.

‘It's lovely', I say.

‘It's what you're looking for', Stefan Mocny says. We're on (I think) the middle floor and as I'm standing by the window I can see the full extent of the modest outlook on offer in this street that's ‘on the canal' but isn't: you can't see it from this side of the road although a small gate is visible opposite which opens on to a stretch of brown water (a few inches can be glimpsed). ‘Just what you're after. I would have told you about it first except the owner wants instant cash, he wants someone who can free up seven hundred grand by the end of today and I'm showing only the most important clients from Crookstons …'

Just as I'm thinking (1) so Stefan Mocny is in with Crookstons, (2) how on earth does he think I
can ‘free up' a sum like that? and (3) hey, wait a minute! This place could in fact be a good investment: Top Floor Alain and Claire; Middle Floor rented out; Ground Floor me. Just when the daydream builds I see Claire up there above me going happily about her shopping and pot-throwing while I'm in bed two floors below with Alain, and money pours in from the middle-floor tenants, I realise something funny is going on, i.e. Stefan has come right up close to me. I can smell a kind of exotic patchouli scent on him. Quite honestly, in the murky non-light of the flat, it takes me longer than it normally would—even for someone as out of practice as I am—to see (we're in the kitchen and I thought it was something to do with cooking, an organic ingredient for a tagine perhaps) that what Stefan is holding is his own cock, and he's nuzzling it up against me, muttering about freeing up the money today and the incredible investment this house is, all the way.

If love is blind when it comes to interior decoration, then it's super-myopic when trying to identify the one who is the Object of Desire. As I push away—grazing a buttock on the sharp corner of a tile ‘island' (ugh! Tiles painted with bunnies and wizards; maybe this is meant to be the nursery
floor)—I see a figure loitering on the far side of the fake mahogany flat door and outlined against ‘teak' banisters and a staircase hung with hunting prints and Indian erotic postures (I can't think what else to call them: did they inspire Stefan Mocny into exhibiting himself in this way?) At any rate, temples and naked humans and a couple of nails stuck in the wall without a picture hanging from them suggest a hurried presentation of the property to those able to free up the asking price by 5 pm today.

The figure is Alain. A Gauloise droops from his lip; otherwise he looks as fresh and adorable as a hero in a fairytale, if slightly bemused by the sight of Stefan and myself in the middle kitchen of 29 Hormead Road. I glance sideways rapidly: no sign of the cock, thank God, to make Alain jealous in these surroundings, and after so short an acquaintanceship on my part with Stefan would have been embarrassing, while to witness a total absence of jealousy (as I suspect would have been the case) simply depressing.

‘Yo, Alain', Stefan says in his most affable tone. ‘This is the property Scarlett here is gonna buy. She can free up the cash now, it's a bargain. Hormead Road is where I'm gonna invest. Tell her she has a great investment opportunity …'

Alain walks to the far end of the flat and holds his hand up to his ear, as if a mobile phone conversation with Stefan is taking place. ‘I'll put it to her', Alain says into his hand, and he smiles at me. Christ! Don't tell me I just bought 29 Hormead Road!

Last night was pretty uncomfortable—and not just because the midsummer weather makes you long for anyone but Rhett. Yes, when I got home after my Hormead experience, and spent a lonely evening phoning round (everyone was out, every self-respecting unattached woman or girl was paired off, even the old ones having found an elderly ass to fall in love with, one must imagine). Yes, Molly had put on the
Gone With
… DVD and I half-woke, almost-vomited all night at Clark Gable as he tortured, smarmed over etc. the scheming Vivien Leigh.

So
not my type, Gable. Too masculine? Does he seem more disgusting since I was put on Tamoxifen
and my female hormones were suppressed? Do I desire Alain because I'm now a homo, a gay man who loves him for his feminine side? Is Alain's apparent passivity feminine, anyway? You can see what kind of night I had. And here I am. I should be sought after by now, after all I'm shortly to be worth seven hundred and ninety-nine thou plus and you'd think the pavement in Saltram Crescent would be as full of toy boys queuing for my favours as the day before Christmas at Hamleys.

Am I to end up in another Henry James novel—that's how Molly would see it, I know—that one they filmed as
The Heiress
, but in fact is called
Washington Square
, a rich old father and the daughter he won't allow to marry the man she loves (because he's a fortune-hunter, natch). The book ends with the spurned lover coming round after yonks away—but our poor little rich girl Catherine just sits there when he knocks at the door and you know she's condemned herself forever to spinster-hood and sadness. Is this what's going to happen to me? Is Alain going to appear in x years' time (Jesus, how old will I be by then!) and I'll just be sitting here, wrinkled as a prune, drinking gin with Molly?

You may ask what Alain was doing last night—and who says he's a fortune-hunter anyway: a slice
of real estate offered by a potty old woman (that's me) is likely to be acceptable to most men, especially if they've been told they've got a matter of days in their home and then it's out they go. But I know that doesn't answer the question: I'm here and he's not. If we're going into business together, shouldn't we be discussing the pros and cons of 29 Hormead Road (I'm still drinking the Titania potion on that one, it's the eccentric but just-possible idea of us all sharing—and after all why shouldn't we—that turns me on. It's not as if we're swingers or anything, just that a man who won't shuck off his wife is somehow to be admired and his plans gone along with. Do you agree?

But it's almost impossible to have that kind of conversation with yourself. Even Howie would have been better than no one: he'd have gone into the dialectics of a threesome and he'd have factored in the identical flats at Hormead Road. His long-finished-with personal interest in my fortune, of course, would have resulted in him advising strongly against the arrangement—or the ‘compromise', as Alain had called it. Does the word make more sense in this slightly shoddy proposition if it's in French?

Then there's Molly. I knew somehow that she
and Howie had become an item while I was either daydreaming about Alain or out property viewing with him—but it came as a shock around midnight, when I'd been tossing and turning for three hours, to hear the front door opening and shutting again as stealthily as they could make it, a sound which invariably wakes me up.

Then I heard them tiptoeing up the stairs to the spare room—a box-sized, in-need-of-replastering cell I should use as a study but never do—and then, inevitably, I heard the sex begin and I can tell you Molly's effort to moan etc. quietly was the most simply awful thing I have ever heard. At the same time, Vivien Leigh is sitting up in bed and ogling Rhett with her ‘I know I've got to fake an orgasm in this scene' look on her face. ‘How the hell do I do that?' And quite frankly I could have committed suicide there and then.

What I do in these circumstances is try to think about practical matters—so here, for desperate Sugar Mummies, is my list of How to Avoid Killing Yourself on a Saturday/ Bank Holiday/ Midsummer Night when everyone's unreachable and you've been left alone at home by the man you had offered half your fortune to so he might at least have taken you out to dinner:

Go through your bills and bank statements in your mind. (Yes, so dreadful that stopping makes you grateful to be alive.)

Calculate how much rent you could get in if you don't sell your flat but stay on with a possibly compatible lodger.

Make a mental list of all the things you've forgotten or postponed: (a) filling in the electoral registration form from the town hall; (b) collecting Nectar points for your electricity bill; (c) changing the direct debit on your mortgage payment to the bank account with the smaller overdraft; (d) forwarding the mail addressed to the previous occupant of the flat, still coming sporadically after eight years.

And so on. If you're not asleep yet, I'm surprised. But I just got more and more wakeful, rehearsing my uncertainties—over Alain, over Hormead Road, over his sweet polite smile when he dropped me off here saying Claire's cousin needs the car tonight and they're going together to a friend's private view
(hurtful: why not ask me?) My rating must have gone right down—he probably despises Hormead just as much as Maygrove Road. He can't live with me anywhere because of my appalling taste in property.

I should have called Crookstons when I came in, I know. But I've no idea what to say to them. I even don't know if I want to sell my flat at all. (Silence from Mr Nyan upstairs: he's probably gone away, maybe he'll change his mind too and withdraw his offer, which would be a relief, oh for God's sake withdraw it, Mr Nyan.)

So pity me, lying here with my eyes shut against Rhett and Scarlett and my brain swirling. I can't bear it, I can't bear it …

A moth or a beetle (all I need really) flies in through the window and my eyes open. And I see the answer in, of all places, Tara. Scarlett kneels on the ground, pulling up lumps of red Atlanta soil. For her, home and land are everything … she will never let them go. I'll never move from my home, I promise myself, after all.

I'm a new woman today. Getting up early is good for you! Growing old is ‘comfortable and friendly'—this from a column in
The Times
by agony aunt Virginia Ironside, who celebrates the hanging folds of skin waiting to cascade down her body when she stands on her head doing yoga. At 62, the only relationship she can trust is with her three-year-old grandson—and she's so happy.

Virginia is right. She doesn't have to dress up for anyone; she kicked off the Patrick Coxes ages ago. No Sugar Mummy she—though we can see she's coloured her hair to hide the Salt and Pepper. Why doesn't she go the whole hog and empty the contents of a crisp packet on to her head and be a Vinegar
Aunt? Because I bet she's really longing for an Object of Desire and she hasn't got the bottle to go out and find one.