Foetal Attraction (4 page)

Gillian snorted with approval. ‘Oh no. I’ve been a
mis
fortune hunter for most of my life. Honestly, if there’s an unemployed dishwasher within fifty miles, I’ll find him. Any man with a portrait of James Dean in needle-tracks on his inner thigh definitely has my name on him. But not any more. Oh, no. I’m changing tactics. Hence the acquisition of a cooking course certificate. Not so I can
cook
. But for prominent wall
display
. I’m trading in the “rough trade” for a man with holes in the backs of his hand-stitched driving gloves.’

Maddy, against her better instincts, found herself intrigued. Gillian was a rich, handmade, dark-centred chocolate which was proving irresistible. ‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Good car means good cash flow.’ Gillian examined her full canteen of knife-sharp red nails and shuddered. ‘One must be rich enough never, ever to have to do any housework. As Daddy used to say, the only bucket a woman should ever handle is the one with the champagne in it. And what’, Gillian folded her arms across her Armanied breast and leant forward intimately, ‘about you? Doesn’t your mother want you to find a suitable husband?’

The remote bits of animal anatomy that Plum had dismembered and deep-fried were now doing the rounds of the class. Teaspoons were provided for samplings. The platter was passed into Maddy’s hands. She scrutinized it with fascinated loathing.

‘It’s important in life, gels,’ pontificated Plum in a bad Miss Jean Brodie impersonation, ‘to have new taste sensations.’

Maddy took a tentative nibble. She chewed meditatively. The offal wasn’t awful at all. If she could stomach such a zoological experiment, Maddy rationalized, she could stomach Ms Gillian Cassells. Swallowing, she turned to her neighbour. ‘I think
Mum
would be pleased if I found an
un
suitable one.’

‘And?’ Gillian insisted. ‘Is there a Mr Right?’

‘Well, I’ve encountered endless Mr Wrongs. One or two Kinda OKs and a couple of Everyone-Else-Has-Gone-Home-So-You’ll-Have-To-Dos.’

‘Haven’t we all?’ Gillian brayed. The other women at their preparation bench issued curt ‘ssh’ noises and exchanged sideways glances.

‘Until …’

Gillian’s eyes lit up eagerly. ‘Spit it out. Name, rank and bank account number.’

Plum was now beating a pudding mixture with a hypnotic regularity. Maddy found it surprisingly soothing. ‘He’s a naturalist. On the telly.’

‘Oh,
him
. That diving-into-piranha-infested-rivers type? Exciting.’

‘It’s not
that
exciting. It just means he’s either in the television studio or away a lot.’

‘Rich?’

‘No. Well, I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Well, what the dickens do you see in the man?’

An oven buzzer rasped. The students craned forward. Plum held aloft a tray of accordion-pleated pastries. A warm cinnamon scent penetrated the room, sweet and intoxicating. The smell of bruised coffee beans and warm cake prevailed over all other odours. The copper pots and flan pans no longer looked lethal, but friendly, jockeying for position on the bulging walls with rows of round-bellied preserving jars. The
rain
pattering on window panes added to the cosiness inside. Maddy leaned back and thought lovingly, tenderly of her darling. ‘His curiosity, his politics, his passion and his lips,’ she answered.

‘Mmm,’ Gillian’s brow raised sceptically, ‘sounds as though he’s got everything but the duelling scar.’

‘His determination, his humour, his impetuosity …’ It’d been weeks since she’d had any Girl Talk. Maddy couldn’t contain her urge to confide. ‘And the fact that the sex is to die for. Saturday, we made love for three hours and the only position I recognized was standing up backwards.’

‘Ah yes, taking the phallic cure. Know it well.’

The sample tray of cinnamon slices, macaroons and meringues reached their table. All sophistication faded, as Saskia and Clarissa and Octavia, flicking crumbs and licking fingers, fell gluttonously upon the food.

Gillian seized two cakes, one in each hand. ‘I imagine you’re so in love you’ve lost your appetite?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Maddy snatched one from between her companion’s varnished talons. ‘I’m in love … but I’m not
that
in love.’

All week long, in between snipe-trussing, pheasant-plucking, steak-tartaring, tongue-potting and vol-au-venting, Gillian Cassells took Maddy on a guided tour of
her
love life. There was Archibald, whose underpants size was bigger than his IQ. ‘And’, added Gillian, ‘we’re
not
talking well endowed.’ There
was
Montgomery, who was chronically stingy. ‘Dahling, he made me go Dutch. At McDonald’s.’ She dismissed lovers, exes and suitors with the casual nonchalance of somebody ordering lunch.

Gillian, in her polished pearls and designer suits and Maddy, with her wild red frizz of hair and chewed cuticles, delighted in the unsuitability of their alliance. Although Plum was busy teaching them that two strong flavours put together can often curdle, their unexpected friendship was setting nicely, like a custard.

‘Gosh, you are tall, aren’t you?’

‘And you’re … well …’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Go on. Say it.’

‘Wrinkle-resistant.’

The two friends were facing each other wearing only their knickers; blotches and blemishes, crevices and creases magnified by the changing room triplicate mirrors. Gillian unrolled her ‘stay-up’ stockings. Apart from the fine silvery lines spidering across her breasts and abdomen, she did not look her thirty-five years. ‘Liposuction,’ she volunteered, slapping her flanks. ‘Vacuums out all the
crème brûlées
and profiteroles and
petits fours
you shouldn’t have eaten. Only problem is, I have no feeling on my inner thighs. When they sucked out the fat cells, it killed all sensation.’

‘But it worked?’

‘Well, in a fashion. The fat no longer deposited itself on my
thighs
, but on to my
derrière
. So, I had
that
liposuctioned.’ She displayed the part of her body in question. ‘So, now the fat has made its home on my midriff.’ With the detachment of a guide among the Pompeii ruins, she took Maddy on an archaeological exploration of her anatomy. ‘Basically, surgeons have removed more blubber from my body than gets harpooned by the Japanese – if we’re to believe everything your precious Alex tells us. I’m having the tummy done next. But the reality is the fat must go
some
where. Pretty soon I’ll have the fattest ear lobes in the world.’

Maddy surveyed her own reflection. Twenty long and lanky cloned images mocked her. ‘They don’t have an operation to shorten people, do they?’

‘My dear. You’re sleeping with Alexander Drake, the Thinking Woman’s Crumpet. You’re about to rub shoulder pads with London’s Caviar Left. They’ll soon be cutting you down to size. Especially if you remain so, how shall I put it, sartorially challenged. Here, try this.’

They’d been in class that morning when Gillian had suddenly turned to Maddy and enquired if she really thought red was her colour. Maddy, her hair unravelling in the steam, had wiped her wet hands on her tie-died, vermilion top and shocking-pink shorts and replied curtly, ‘Hey, Armani and I aren’t on first-name terms. I’m just going to have to get by on French Connection and charisma.’

Gillian had immediately marched her out of the classroom, mid lamb-basting, up to Bond Street and into the most exclusive boutique where the clothes were displayed in glass cases like rare specimens.

‘Put it on!’ she ordered, handing Maddy an alpine knit doublet with detachable plaits, velvet hot pants and a lime-green hiking jacket. It looked not unlike an outfit to be worn when competing in the Eurovision Song Contest. ‘You’ll need something to go clubbing.’

‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’

‘I speak as your native guide to the mysterious tribe called the English. Dress code is everything. You can be a card-carrying Nazi, you can pay gigolos to eat gnocchi out of your naval and you won’t be pilloried – as long as you never, ever wear linen with tweed.’

Maddy put her arms up in surrender and scowled as her head disappeared into the knitted neck-hole. ‘They’ll probably put us on cooking detention. We’ll be peeling potatoes below the stairs for the rest of our natural …’

‘I told you. We’re not truanting. It’s business.’ Gillian’s theory was that if men can play golf all day and call it ‘business’, why couldn’t women do the same thing with clothes-buying? Competitive Shopping, she called it. First hole, Harrods. Second, Harvey Nichols. Gillian had plans to employ Imelda as a little caddie to run along behind carrying her shopping bags.

She rammed Maddy’s feet into unpitying black
leather
ankle boots, then stood back to appraise the finished product. ‘VPL – visible panty line.’

Just as Maddy was stepping modestly out of the offending undies, a streaked head torpedoed into their cubicle. Why was it, Maddy pondered, that the shopping urge always struck the day you were wearing your most moth-eaten panties with questionable elastic and hadn’t shaved your pits? ‘Oooh, it looks faaaa-bulous,’ the head parroted, mesmerized by the splintery elegance of her own reflection. It was the same assistant who’d spent the last half an hour lying to Gillian that she looked ravishing, trendy and totally chi-chi in garments that flattened, fattened and distorted every part of her. ‘It’s so
you
.’

The assistant finally focussed on Maddy with a look both aloof and malicious. ‘But perhaps a little small … I don’t think we have anything quite your size.’

Maddy felt as crushed as the velvet hot pants currently around her ankles.

‘I take it you failed your O levels,’ Gillian rallied to her friend. ‘That’s why you work in a
shop
.’

‘Gillian, what the bloody hell are we doing here?’ Maddy jerked the curtain closed and surveyed her new friend’s latest sartorial suggestion with alarm. ‘Jodhpurs?’

‘We’re here because I want you to come out fox-hunting with me. And to the polo. Places where you can meet other men.’

Maddy stood firmly, arms folded across her bare
chest
. ‘Not only am I allergic to blood sports, but I don’t want to meet other men.’

‘Listen, take it from one who knows. This Alexander Flake …’

‘Drake,’ Maddy amended wearily.

‘… is not serious about you. No sooner had you flown in, than he flew the coop. Yes?’

‘He’s on assignment.’

‘Trust me. With English men, it’s a case of “in, out and wipe” or marriage.’

‘You’re unbelievable.’ Maddy hauled her legs into one of Gillian’s silk lingerie rejects. ‘You’re a kind of cross between Madonna and Barbara Cartland. Do you know that?’

‘What a woman needs is to marry a rich old boy, the sort of human handbag you can put down by the door at parties and pick up on the way home for the cab fare. With a complementary toy boy on the side. I’ve got my eye on one now. He’s fifteen. Far too young. I’m saving him up for later.’

‘What? A kind of lay-by?’

‘Exactly.’

Sales assistant number two catapulted her head into their cubicle. ‘Everything all right?’ she asked, in a tone conveying that everything was definitely not. She examined the designer lingerie Maddy was trying on, with deep suspicion. Maddy thought she was going to be arrested for wearing underwear above her station.

‘Get used to it, darling,’ Gillian cackled. ‘In England, it’s service with a snarl.’

Ignoring the gaping assistant, Maddy jumped up and down, tugging ferociously until her thighs were eye-wateringly squeezed into the jodhpurs. To wear clothes like this required the figure of someone who had a long-term drug habit. ‘Gillian, if the good Lord had meant us to wear jodhpurs,’ she gasped, ‘he wouldn’t have given us internal organs.’

‘If tha gud Lawd …’ Gillian mimicked nasally. ‘After the clothes we’ll work on the voice.’

‘I can’t talk posh!’

‘It’s quite easy, really,’ Gillian articulated for the benefit of the sales assistant. ‘You just talk at all times as though you’ve got a dick in your mouth.’

The assistant’s pallor went a lovely autumnal maroon, clashing with her Coutier-Hell’s-Angel, orange studded leather look. ‘Perhaps I’ll get the manageress, shall I?’

Maddy had just wrestled the wretched jodhpurs down her legs when the manageress, a juiceless woman with a double-glazed face, flicked open the curtain to their cubicle, giving every passer-by in Bond Street a full view of Maddy’s private merchandise. This misplaced concentration camp supervisor eyed her with contempt.

‘What?’ Maddy said. ‘Let me guess. I don’t do anything for them?’

‘Would you mind keeping your voices down?’

‘Like your prices?’ Maddy flicked at Gillian’s ripped fronds of exquisitely hemmed chiffon. ‘There doesn’t appear to be any price tag. This is free then, is it?’

‘That particular evening dress is five thousand pounds.’

Her eyes grew wider than the lapels on the manageress’s designer jacket. ‘Five thousand pounds! You can’t be serious. That’s the down payment for a house!’

‘Not’, came the curt reply, ‘in
my
neighbourhood.’

Behind her, a cabinet full of leather gloves sat clenched, ready for fisticuffs. Below them, an entire division of high-heeled bovver boots awaited their marching orders. Maddy had not yet learnt that, in shops like this, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

The sales staff flanked their mistress, cosmetic orthodontistry collectively gnashed. But the appearance of Gillian’s credit card curled their lips into laminated smiles. As she piled her purchases of long velvet siren gowns and thigh-high fabric boots on to the counter, Gillian addressed the skulking figure of her new friend.

‘Come home and I’ll find something for you to wear to a cocktail party at Kensington Palace on Friday night. It’ll be positively bursting at the social seams with my favourite type of men – tall, dark and bankable.’

‘Come off it, Gillian. I have no idea how to talk to those people. I don’t even know who they are.’

‘That’s easily fixed.
Debrett’s
. I’ll give you a copy. You can swot.’