Foetal Attraction (12 page)

Maddy ungnashed her teeth. It seemed to her that Vigliotto bloke had just confessed another alias. She swallowed her misgivings with a bitter chaser of semen.

The Column

THE NEXT DAY
Alex dashed off in a chainmail websuit to swim with Patagonian killer whales. Maddy faced just as arduous a task – Pomogrification. Like Eliza Doolittle before her, Maddy became a dedicated vowel rounder. Her lips got thinner that week. Not out of contempt for such snobbery, but because of all the extra work of adding ‘ings’ and ‘haitches’ and substituting ‘going to’s’ for ‘gunnas’ … It was jogging for the mouth.

On Saturday, when Maddy rang Gillian to try out her voice transplant, she was disappointed to discover that her friend was on the way to the airport. There was nothing unusual about this except that she was going by train. Rather than allow the new man in her life to see the reduced circumstances in which she was living (for someone like Gillian, her recent move from Knightsbridge to a flat in Fulham was equivalent to the geographical distance between Claridges and
downtown
Calcutta) she had opted to meet him at the Gatwick check-in desk. Maddy agreed to escort her. Which was just as well. Totally unused to public transport, Gillian simply marched up to the ticket booth and demanded in a voice both resonant and imperious, ‘One.’

She was travelling with enough luggage for an entire year abroad; all of it brand new and pristine, except for the battered, world-weary old man awaiting her. Leathery skin hung in folds from his mottled neck. Sucking noisily on his dentures, he gazed myopically around the hall and twiddled absent-mindedly with his hearing aid.

‘Is that
him
?’ Maddy hissed in disbelief from their secret vantage point behind a pillar. ‘But the guy’s bald as a bandicoot.’

‘He’s not
bald
,’ Gillian whispered indignantly. ‘He’s merely challenged at a follicular level.’

‘And no. Christ, I don’t believe it. He’s deaf to boot!’

‘I prefer to say aurally inconvenienced.’

Maddy chortled. ‘Come on, Gillian. Are you really going to tongue-kiss a bloke with falsies?’

‘You’re so crass. He just has alternative dentition, that’s all.’

Maddy peered around the pillar once more. ‘You’re not serious. I mean, have you asked him how old he is?’ She retracted her head in horror. ‘Though, being senile, he’s probably forgotten.’

Gillian disengaged Maddy’s clawing fingers. ‘My
dear
, what does it matter if the
face
has slipped, as long as the
penis
is in the right place?’ So saying, she sidled off to collect her deteriorating piece of human cabin baggage. ‘Dah-ling.’ She kissed the withered cheek hello, then checked her lipstick in a little mirror in her handbag. ‘This is Madeline. My maid.’

As Maddy bug-eyed her in disbelief, the hereditary Member of the House of Lords nodded curtly in her direction before consigning her to the ranks of Lower Life Form and busying himself with their passports.

‘By the way, has That Man of yours renovated his domestic arrangements as promised?’

Since the disastrous dinner party, Gillian simply referred to Alex as That Man. ‘The only thing being renovated at present are my vowels,’ Madeline enunciated.

Gillian’s eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t you dare let That Man tamper with your vowels! Vowels can be a girl’s most precious possession.’

‘But I thought I was supposed to talk at all times as though I had a dick in my—?’

On the pretext of tweaking free a globule of wax welded to the greying tufts of her consort’s ear, Gillian adroitly flicked off the old bloke’s hearing air. ‘Yes, but anything That Man wants you to do has got to be wrong. Besides, if you really want to appear upper class, then learn to speak something remote – Mandarin or Swahili. Upper-class children all speak some dialect or other because, you see, we were
brought
up below stairs. Now,
adiós
. Next time you see me I should be a Viscountess. Why don’t you just give up That Man and find an aged millionaire with a heart murmur?’ She patted the arm of her escort, who was smiling benignly, all at sea. ‘Don’t think of them as
old
, “Experientially enhanced” just about covers it.’ Having switched his hearing aid back on, Gillian left a few fortissimo instructions for the spring-cleaning of the conservatory and the polishing of the brass staircases with the promise of a pay rise, before mincing through the departure gate. She paused to flutter a bejewelled hand. ‘Don’t give him or his lady another thought. Is that clear?’

‘Clear.’

Maddy bought the papers for the trip back in to London. Not knowing which newspaper Felicity wrote for, she bought them all. There were columns on do-it-yourself taxidermy, columns on the famous things that had happened in bathtubs, columns on prominent haemorrhoids sufferers, columns on the difficulty of writing columns. There was an Acropolis of columns, more ironic than Ionic, but finally she found it. Felicity Drake. ‘Woman’s Perspective.’

‘Of course,’
she began,
‘I never go to the Harvey Nichols beauty salon through the front door. I use the Emergency Entrance. Not that I ever have anything done. When you’re as weather-worn as me, dear reader, you only go for an estimate …’

Oh, Christ, Maddy despaired. Maybe she’s funny.

‘Last week each cubicle seemed to house a woman complaining about the fact that her husband was having an affair. Well, we are at that age, I’m afraid.’

Maddy’s heart thumped. Oh God. She knows.

‘Is your marriage going stale? Well, a very good gauge is if the last time you tongue-kissed was when he’d spent too long underneath a wave in the Caribbean.’

The Caribbean? Maddy thought, irritated. When were they in the Caribbean? He had been looking rather tanned lately.

‘Of course, bitching about your divorce is very fashionable. There is nothing more tedious and less trendy than a happy marriage. As others cite affairs and orgies and revenge attacks with scissors on the crutches of hubby’s suits, it’s so embarrassing only being able to wash your clean linen in public.’

Maddy wanted to throw up. He hadn’t told her.

‘But even for those like me, who are happily married, remember, husbands do go through male menopause. Mine had to be rushed off to hospital recently with chest pain. The suspected heart attack turned out to be torn muscles after using the chest expander he bought himself for his forty-ninth birthday.’

Forty-nine! Maddy fumed. He’d told her that he’d just turned forty!

‘ “And how”, a Harvey Nichols Beauty Salon client asked me, “do you know when your husband’s having an affair?” If you wake one morning and find etched into your head the
imprint
of a credit card, and it’s not your own, well, that could be a fairly good indication.’

Credit card? Whose credit card? Maddy didn’t have a credit card.

‘Another sure sign is your husband coming home at odd hours. Or taking a shower before going to bed. Or coming home having had a shower. Does he use mouth wash before kissing you hello? These are all subtle ways of realizing that you’re married to a two-timing worm. In fact, the local Council should issue a fumigation order immediately. But, don’t take revenge. They say revenge is a dish best served cold. Vichyssoise is best served cold. The thing to remember if hubby is philandering is that it’s only sexual. A disease of his nymph glands. And bound to pass if left alone.’

Only sexual!

‘Soon he’ll be back to his old self; writing articles on the importance of quality time with one’s children … while ignoring plaintive pleas from his own offspring to come and lose at Monopoly …’

Maddy was perspiring. Offspring? What offspring? She recalled the
Who’s Who
entry. One s, it read, one d. Of course. She’d been too stunned to decode it properly. What was wrong with hot vichyssoise? Maddy was suddenly seized by a strong, uncontrollable urge to see how long Alex could remain beneath the surface of the Thames before turning blue. She shredded the newspaper on her lap. Oh, what a bloody mug she was. What a stark-raving bonkers, totally moronic numbskull. Loving Alex, she now
realized
, she’d had both feet planted firmly in the air. One of his major attractions had been his bravery. Huh! He might be able to dangle by one leg from his one-man dirigible airship over a Sumatran volcano crater, but he hadn’t had the guts to tell her about his wife, his happy marriage, nor his, the word still choked in her throat … progeny. Sharks like Alex should be tagged, so they were easily identifiable. What to do?

Maddy agonized all the way between Gatwick and Victoria station. Every option was painful. Like taking off a band-aid. Should she do it fast or do it slow? Slow would mean suing him for breach of promise. Very Jane Austen. And fast? She would find him, punch him in the kisser, knee him in his privates and ask him what the fuck he was playing at.

One of the civilized things about living in England is that some trains have telephones. After a surprisingly small amount of pestering, Alex’s assistant gave her the address and number of his country retreat. His voice, when he finally came to the phone, was granulated with irritation.

‘Maddy? For god’s sake, what is it?’

‘How many men does it to change a light bulb?’

‘You’ve got to be kid—’

‘None. Blokes like to keep us in the dark.’

‘You interrupted an important meeting to tell me
that
?’

‘Actually, I rang to draw your attention to some very
interesting
reading in the papers today,’ she said frigidly.

‘What in the hell are you talking about?’ Alex’s tone was terse, impatient.

‘Let’s stop playing silly buggers, shall we? You’ve lied from go to whoa, you lily-livered piss-ant.’ The conga line stretching from the toilet back into the carriage craned and strained to catch each word. ‘Look, we need to talk. You’d better come back to London.’

‘I can’t …’ He finally squeaked, after a fair amount of throat clearing. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow.’

‘I’ll come up then.’

There was a moment of alarmed silence. ‘Believe me,’ he said at last, ‘nothing would give me more pleasure than seeing you, but this seminar. It’s so bloody frantic. Meetings, meetings, meetings, work, work, work—’

‘What? Don’t you think I’ll cut the intellectual mustard?’

‘No, my love, that’s not it. But there are no’ – he paused to search for the right word ‘– partners here. It’s just not the done thing.’

‘Don’t be so English. Once I do it, it’ll be done and then it’ll be the Done Thing.’ Maddy was shredding words like a cheese-grater.

‘Listen, calm down,’ he hissed. ‘I can’t talk now. Whatever it is, we’ll work it out tomorrow. I’ve got to get back. But …’ he lowered his voice, ‘feel secure in
the
knowledge that you’re my lifeline. I cherish you, you know that.’ Maddy watched a sneering skinhead with ‘Made in London’ tattooed on to his forehead roll the products of his picked nose between his thumb and forefinger, then eat it. ‘Love you …’ Alex whispered conspiratorially, ‘shnookums.’

Maddy mused that if screenwriters wrote down what people actually said in moments of high drama, you’d never get a bum on a cinema seat again.

She changed trains at Victoria station. Hurtling in and out of tunnels, her reflection shuddering in the glass windows, Maddy practised flattening her vowels – the opposite of elocution classes. And plotted her revenge. Nothing gave her more pleasure than thinking about the look on Alex’s face when she dived into his television think-tank. That, and the thought of a Rottweiler shag-o-gram, cheered her up considerably.

The Disingenuous Crustacean

IN AUSTRALIA IF
someone says they’re ‘popping off to their little country place for the weekend’, it’ll mean a fibro shack with no running water and a backyard long-drop dunny with resident redback spider. In England it’ll mean a major mansion. We’re talking moats, mazes, the works. Maddy stood in the rolling, green, greeting-card fields, beneath the whipped-cream clouds, knee-deep in daffodils so golden they looked plastic, and surveyed the sixteenth-century manor house before her. This was a ties-and-tiaras-at-dinner type of place; not the humpy shack for which she was dressed. She took a deep breath. England, she had learnt, was a gatecrasher’s paradise. The English, you see, are so polite. Too polite to ask who the hell you are as you wolf down a vineyard of bottled grapes and a school of smoked salmon. Taking one last critical glance at her tartan mini and midriff tank top, she pushed inside.

The strange thing about peering down the barrel of a gun is that your life really does flash before your eyes. Maddy searched for a getaway route. The walls bristled with the antlers of prehistoric elks the span of helicopter propellers. Suits of armour stood to attention along the corridor. The whole hall was obstacle-coursed with antiques. There was even one looming over the balustrade of the minstrel’s gallery pointing a bread-stick at her.

‘Madeline!’ The way England’s leading Feminist Psychologist pronounced her name was not unlike being up-ended in a bucket of cold spew. ‘It’s all right, Officer. It’s friend, not foe.’

The Special Branch policeman sheathed his pistol and evaporated back into the gloomy interior. ‘Well … well …’ Harriet’s smile exposed an acreage of gum, the pink colour of a freshly picked scab. It made her mouth look like a wound, instead of what it was – a weapon. ‘Still auditioning for the role of Alexander’s wife?’

Maddy felt lacerated by Harriet’s low, saw-toothed rasp. ‘What’s with the cops? Jesus Christ … I mean, what exactly are you discussing at this bloody seminar?’

‘Ovular. Seminar connotes a macho thrusting of ideas, don’t you think? But as far as I’m aware, we’re all just having a pleasant break in the country at a tame Rock Star’s expense. With, of course, the odd Very Important Guest.’

‘This is
their
house?’ Maddy’s humiliation was made
all
the worse by Harriet remaining positioned above her.

‘Madeline … it is Madeline, isn’t it?’ Her voice dripped condescension. This was the only country in the world, Maddy realized, where you could be spoken down to by complete acquaintances. ‘Do you know how to tell if a man is going through the menopause? He runs a marathon, buys a long, thin boat or has a Fling with a Young Thing.’