Foetal Attraction (6 page)

The women wore black, had Bone Structure and said nothing. Except for Sonia, who was taking them on a compulsory tour of her idealogically sound
clothing
– the organically grown, chemical-free cotton pants, the vegetable-dyed shirt, the buttons made from tropical nuts and reconstituted glass, the earrings and belt made from Third World tresses. ‘Not only better than silk,’ enthused the Fashion Vegan, ‘but humans are not raised on farms specifically for their hair.’

Her famous husband sat next to her guzzling, a little too frequently, at his tumbler of wine. Maddy couldn’t believe she was dining with one of the World’s Most Famous Rock Stars. He was a national treasure. It was like having dinner with the Elgin Marbles. And he was just as stonily silent.

In desperation, Maddy tried to tempt Humphrey with a smorgasbord of topics.

‘I have no small talk,’ came his grunted reply.

‘OK … well, what about some Big talk. Politics?’

‘Not interested.’

‘Literature?’

‘Not interested.’

‘Stellar bodies orbiting the earth and other associated unexplained phenomena?’

‘Not interested.’

His complexion, Maddy noticed, was the colour of the cheese he was eating. ‘Well, we’ve got nothing to talk about, then.’

Humphrey put on his glasses, the black stems curling around the thick rinds of his ears and glared at her. ‘Absolutely fuck-nothing.’

She gulped her champagne. It was warm and flat.
‘You’re
very Grown Up,’ she said on a desperate impulse.

Humphrey’s eyes went all narrow and shifty. ‘In what context?’ he squalled. ‘Explain yourself.’

Maddy sat there feeling unintelligent, tall and totally inadequate. ‘Um …’ She was saved by the appearance of Bryce’s
de facto
wife, Imogen Bliss, a blonde MTA (Model Turned Actress) carrying a baby, Indian-papoose style, against her ample designer-dressed bosom. Imogen was one of those English beauties who make every other female in the room feel like a paper bag full of porridge. They get everything every other woman wants – and without make-up. Despite this, Maddy had never met a woman who was so plastic. She wanted to yank down Imogen’s pants to check whether or not she had any genitals. Imogen Bliss had lain on analysts’ couches, in float tanks and underneath film directors. Women like her never have to worry about what to think, because they don’t. As far as they’re concerned, it’s ‘every man for herself’. They smile warmly at jokes they don’t understand, heads cocked at an angle to indicate rapt attention. It seemed to Maddy that English men mistook this vapidness for mystery and enigma. As far as the male of the species was concerned, Imogen Bliss wasn’t just a L.H.J. (Leave Home Job). She was a L.H.R.F.N. (Leave Home Right Fucking
Now
).

On cue, all the blokes, led by Humphrey, leapt to their well-heeled feet, bowed their heads deferentially,
as
though entering a throne room, then fell over themselves to laugh at her meagre jokes and mindless anecdotes.

Humphrey, whose sole contribution to the dinner conversation to date had been an analysis of pentameter and alexandrine echoes in Homer and Virgil, took a delighted interest in Imogen’s rating of summer holiday destinations by the quality of their toilet facilities. Maddy rocked back in her chair in disbelief. This wasn’t just small talk, this was minuscule. Lilliputian.

‘I’ve just been in a production for Channel 4,’ Imogen replied to the hitherto silent Rock Star’s enthusiastic enquiries. ‘With some black fellow.’

‘
Othello?
’ Humphrey hinted.

‘Yes, that’s it!’ Every time she crossed her legs, her lycra mini went up around her waist. ‘The Ken Russell version.’

Maddy cringed inwardly. She waited for them to demolish Imogen, the way they’d demolished her. But their lips just slapped together in a wet percussion of ‘Oh, really?’s and ‘How
fas
cinating’s.

Sonia had gone uncharacteristically quiet. She shoved her plate away. The only thing she ate was her nail cuticles, upon which she grazed ravenously, before flouncing off to the lavatories.

The Model Turned Actress tickled the back of Humphrey’s hand with her fingers. ‘I’m just so pleased to see you.’ Humphrey squared his shoulders,
tilted
his head and jutted his chin, looking more than ever like someone posing for a postage stamp. ‘I’m just so thrilled to know the man who wrote
Waitin’ for Godot
.’

Now
, Maddy thought.
Now
they’ll do it … But nothing. Not a peep. Smiles all round. Humphrey merely acknowledged the mistake with a slight raise of his eyebrows, as if it were perfectly understandable.

‘Next I’m booked to do that play that was based on
My Fair Lady
.’ In a gesture perfected before hundreds of mirrors, she tossed her meringue of crème-caramel-coloured hair.

Humphrey topped up her champagne. ‘Pygmalion?’

Maddy thrust her glass forward. It remained empty.

‘Oh, yes,’ he elaborated. ‘A scintillating and totally damning indictment of the British class system.’ Suddenly Mr Acerbic’s personality had more natural oil than Saudi Arabia.

The ethereal MTA looked at him perplexed. ‘Class system? In Britain? I’ve never noticed any class system.’

Maddy waited for somebody, anybody, to run this woman over. To roll out the cement mixer with velvet wheels with which they’d crushed
her
earlier. But the men nodded respectfully, as though at the feet of a breakable object. It was total Male Meltdown. Sonia returned from the toilets looking pale and faintly reeking of vomit.

A wire tripped and Maddy lost her temper. ‘That’s ’cause you’re a bloody idiot,’ she said impetuously.
‘And
if you weren’t so bloody beautiful, one of these “Runners Up for the Mr Grovel of the Year Award” would tell you so.’

Humphrey glared at her for a fraction of a second, then decided to laugh it off. ‘Australians …’ he apologized, ‘so refreshing …’

No sooner was it out of her mouth than she regretted her Spitfire attack on the Sex Goddess. It was the
men
she wanted to strafe. These blokes, who could talk about affirmative action and child-minding and were careful not to use the words ‘
tit
bits’ or ‘
master
of all trades’, while secretly harbouring fantasies of getting Imogen into a school uniform and rogering her even more stupid than she was.

But Imogen seemed impervious to Maddy’s angst. She addressed her for the first time. ‘I just adore your accent.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Maddy sulked, ‘there’s a lot of it where I come from.’

Imogen handed Bryce his son and heir. Having draped the child casually over one shoulder, he proceeded to instruct the table on the joys of parenthood. He loved the kid. He loved it even when it cried. He even loved its shit. Filofaxes, portable phones, Porsches, cocaine habits, all had been usurped in the nineties by the Designer Baby. The trigger-happy Sonia cocked her Nikon camera.

‘No photos!’ Bryce harangued, shielding the baby’s face.

Sonia lowered her lens at his snap decision. ‘Why not?’

Bryce looked at her as though she were retarded. ‘Kidnappers!’

As soon as the cake and coffee were cleared away, Maddy prepared to make her escape.

‘And where do you think you’re going?’ Humphrey was still eating. She peered into his wide-open tumble-drier mouth. ‘This is the Serious part of the evening.’

As opposed to the fun and games it had been so far, Maddy thought to herself. By the time the scheduled lecture on the Tory party erosion of the BBC World Service began, Maddy was feeling less in awe of London’s leading playwrights, poets, painters, film makers and journalists. The women in their cocktail dresses, complete with arty appliqués reading ‘Solidarity’ and ‘Workers Unite;’ the men in their Dickensian ruffled frock coats conjuring up images of the Poor House, if you weren’t sitting close enough to glimpse the Jean Paul Gautier labels, listened attentively, their ritual masks of compassion in place. As far as Maddy was concerned, their concern for the poor of the planet was as fraudulent as the Model Turned Actress’s cleavage.

After the agenda of the next soirée was discussed Alex eased her out into the street. They passed Bryce. He was pacing up and down, a screaming, possetting baby held at arm’s distance from his milk-stained
Ozbek
suit. Imogen, looking like a swan, with her long, white neck and orange lipstick, glided into view. ‘I’m back.’ She beamed.

‘About fucking time!’ snapped Earth Father of the Year, propelling the squawking bundle back into its mother’s arms.

The door of the Lotus clicked shut and Maddy raptured. ‘My God,’ she shrieked. ‘I’ve never looked up so many noses in my life. And these are people
shorter
than me! At dinner, that jerk on my left, that agent bloke, asked what university I’d been to. I told him the only thing I’d learnt at school was how to perform “God Save the Queen” in burps.’

‘I hope you provided a demonstration?’ Alex asked, though half-heartedly.

‘Too bloody right I did.’

He gave a hollow laugh. They hit a pot-hole and Maddy jounced closer to him. ‘Don’t worry about
him
. Bryce took a first in Classics at Oxford. Loves an excuse to brag.’ He patted her thigh, consolingly, though he was the one who looked disconcerted.

‘What did he graduate in? Advanced Condescension? And as for that
woman
… Your oldest friend …’

‘Harriet? Oh she hates everyone and everyone hates her. It would be wise of Lady Fielding to travel with an official taster at all times.’ Leaning closer, he squirmed his index finger under her pants elastic.

‘And
then
, having written off small talk, that writer
with
the braces started telling stories about the worst toilets in the world, squatting over holes in Calcutta … Next thing, they’re all comparing bogs. This is during dinner mind …’

‘Braces?’ Alex swerved into a factory-lined cul-de-sac behind King’s Cross. Flying gravel was fleetingly caught in the yellow shafts of their headlights. He cut the ignition. ‘Oh, you mean Humphrey. His main claim to fame, my love, was a brief sojourn in a Catholic hospital with an inflamed rectum. During surgery, doctors retracted a false red fingernail. The nuns, I may add, weren’t too keen on him after that. He’s been anally fixated ever since …’

‘Really?’ Maddy gave a grudging laugh. ‘The trouble is’, she added, plaintively, ‘that I was trying to get along with them. I really was.’

‘It’s not your fault, my love. According to Harriet, being an Australian is currently as
passé
as being an ex-Sandinistan cabinet minister cum poet … Bryce suggested I find myself the mulatto daughter of a Lower Voltan political exile. Preferably one who’s just survived an assassination attempt from whatever jumped-up flight lieutenant is currently running the Government. Or a closet Canadian.’

‘A Can
ad
ian? You
can’t
be serious!’

‘Apparently. Humphrey says they’re
very
popular all of a sudden.’

‘Or … maybe you could find some new friends?’

‘Look, they’re good people basically. Just suspicious
of
anyone new.’ Maddy felt he was saying this more to reassure himself. ‘They probably just found you a little too …’ he unclicked her seat belt, ‘… exuberant. We English denounce all displays of passion as exhibitionism.’

‘Exhibitionism! Those people would think you were an exhibitionist for wearing, I don’t know … shoes without stockings. Jesus. And they’re the bloody left wingers!’

Alex managed a strained smile. ‘Oh, I love it when you talk dirty.’ One flick of his wrist and the passenger seat reclined obediently. This was the third time they’d made love in the car in a week. Maddy had a permanent imprint of a steering wheel on her back. The hazards of sexual intercourse were a nineties preoccupation. For Maddy, the greatest danger was getting too near the gear stick. ‘They’ll get to like you,’ he said hopefully.

Maddy was not particularly comforted by the idea.

‘Perhaps if you toned down just a little … I mean, maybe it would have been better had you not asked Harriet what she
does
.’

‘So sorry, Professor Higgins. I’ll try to be more fucking
refained
!’

‘Ouch!’ Alex bumped his head on the rear-view mirror as he levered her on top of him. ‘They’ve got good points, you’ll see.’

‘Yeah,’ Maddy added, attempting to rest her elbows on the dashboard without activating the hazard lights,
hitting
the horn or up-ending the ashtray. ‘If you like red-belly black snakes.’

She vowed to phone Gillian the minute she got home. Fox-hunting could not possibly be more of a blood sport than dinner with London’s Artistic Intelligentsia.

Schmoozing

MADDY HAD IMAGINED
her sightseeing would consist of the buildings and bridges she knew so well from the lids of biscuit tins and Auntie’s place mats. But over the next few months, the mental snapshots she collected as she oscillated from one end of the social spectrum to the other were very different from what she’d expected.

Until now, Maddy had always thought only animals could be ‘in season’. Not so. Ascot, Henley, Wimbledon, massacring pheasants in Scotland … ‘the Season’ is the time the wealthy British mate. At the Cartier polo, she met ponyless girls in jodhpurs named Lucinda and Lavinia. ‘The Twin Sets’, Gillian called them, because they always went around in identical twosomes. Despite their lack of equestrian prowess, they were very horsey girls. Eligible men had them eating out of their hands with sugary talk about how much
money
they earned and which islands they owned.

Alex had no time for peers at play. Polo, he said, was nothing more than ping-pong with ponies. At the Charter 88 fundraising meetings he took her to, everyone Maddy met was either on a university syllabus or the answer to a question in
The Times
crossword puzzle. Celebrity sympathizers included comedians introduced as being ‘right on’, Socially Aware Popstars and producers of what Maddy called ‘teacup films’ – films where the English are represented as people who run very, very slowly.