Maestra (2 page)

‘No, Judith. That’s Rupert’s job. Go to the Heinz and see if you can identify the subjects.’ Rupert was the head of department, who seldom appeared before eleven.

The Heinz Archive has a huge catalogue of named images – I was to look up which particular English lordlings on their eighteenth-century gap year gaieties might have sat for Longhi, as identification of particular individuals could make them more interesting to buyers.

‘OK. Have you got a set of photographs, please?’

Laura sighed. ‘In the library. They’re marked as Longhi-slash-Spring.’

Since the House occupied a whole block, it was a four-minute walk from the department to the library, and it was one I did many times every day. Despite rumours of it being the twenty-first century outside, the House was still run largely like a Victorian bank. Many of the employees spent their days plodding round the corridors delivering scrips of paper to one another. The archive and the library were hardly even properly computerised; often one stumbled across little Dickensian ghosts wedged despairingly into obscure cubby holes between mounds of receipts and triplicate photostatted accounts. I retrieved the envelope of pictures and went back to my desk for my bag. My phone rang.

‘Allo? It’s Serena onna desk. I’ve got Rupert’s trousers here.’

So I schlepped to reception, picked up the vast bag from Rupert’s tailor, couriered over the 500-odd metres from Savile Row, and took it back to the department. Laura looked up.

‘Haven’t you gone yet, Judith? What on earth have you been doing? Well, since you’re here, please could you get me a cappuccino? Don’t go to the canteen, go to that nice little place in Crown Passage. Get a receipt.’

Coffee fetched, I set off on foot towards the archive. I had five photographs in my bag, scenes at the Fenice theatre, the Zattere and a coffee house on the Rialto, and after working through the boxes for a couple of hours, I’d made a list of twelve positive identifications of sitters who had been in Italy contemporaneously with the portraits. I cross referenced the Heinz index with the pictures so that the attribution could be checked for the catalogue and took them back to Laura.

‘What are these?’

‘The Longhis you asked me to do.’

‘These are the Longhis from the sale six years ago. Really, Judith. The photos were on my email to you this morning.’ That would have been the email with no content.

‘But, Laura, you said they were in the library.’

‘I meant the electronic library.’

I didn’t say anything. I logged on to the department’s online catalogue, found the correct pictures (filed as Lunghi), downloaded them to my phone and went back to the Heinz with a flea in my ear from Laura for wasting time. I’d finished the second lot of attributions by the time she was back from lunch at the Caprice, and got on with cold-calling invitees who hadn’t RSVP’d to the private view for the sale. Then I wrote up the bios and emailed them to Laura and Rupert, showed Laura how to open the attachment, took the Tube to the Applied Arts depository near Chelsea Harbour to check on a silk sample which Rupert thought might match with a hanging in the Longhis, discovered to no one’s surprise that it didn’t, walked most of the way back because the Circle line was stuck at Edgware Road and detoured to Lillywhite’s on Piccadilly to pick up a sleeping bag for Laura’s son’s school camping trip, reappearing exhausted and grimy at 5.30 to another reprimand for missing the departmental viewing of the paintings I’d spent the morning working on.

‘Honestly, Judith,’ Laura remarked, ‘you’ll never make any progress if you’re haring about town when you could be looking at the works.’

Twitches on invisible threads aside, maybe it wasn’t all that surprising that when I came across Leanne at the Tube station a little later, I really did feel like a drink.

3

My interview at the Gstaad Club that night consisted of Olly, the giant, morose Finn who was proprietor, maître d’ and bouncer, looking me over in the lacy nude blouse I’d hastily shuffled on in the loos at the Ritz.

‘Can you drink?’ he asked me.

‘She’s from Liverpool,’ giggled ‘Mercedes’, and that was that.

So for the next eight weeks, I worked Thursday and Friday nights in the club. Not hours that most people my age would welcome, but after-work drinks with the team weren’t really a big feature of my career. The name, like everything else about the place, was a dated stab at fake class; the only thing that was real about the club was the truly eye-watering mark-up on the champagne. In fact, it didn’t look much different from Annabel’s, the has-been nightclub a few streets away in Berkeley Square. Same Sloane-Ranger yellow walls, same bad-good pictures, same collection of tragic paunchy older men, same lounging gaggle of girls who were not quite hookers but who always needed a little help with the rent. The job was simple. About ten girls gathered half an hour before the club opened at nine for a pick-me-up dispensed by Carlo the bartender in his immaculately pressed but slightly whiffy white jacket. The rest of the staff consisted of an ancient babushka who took the coats, and Olly. At nine sharp he unbolted the street door and made the same solemn joke.

‘OK girls, knickers off.’

After opening, we sat about chatting, flicking through celebrity mags or texting for an hour until the customers started to drift in, almost always alone. The idea was that they would pick the girl they liked and take her to sit in one of the pink-velvet swagged alcoves, which was known rather bluntly as ‘getting booked’. When you were booked, your objective was to get the punter to order as many ridiculously overpriced bottles of champagne as possible. We got no wages, just ten per cent on every bottle and whatever the customer chose to leave. My first night, I reeled away from the table halfway through the third bottle and had to ask the babushka to hold my hair while I made myself throw up.

‘Stupid girl,’ she said with gloomy satisfaction. ‘Is not for you to be drinking it.’

So I learned. Carlo served the champagne with huge, goldfish-bowl sized glasses, which we would empty into the ice bucket or the flowers as soon as the customer left the table. Another strategy was to persuade him to invite a ‘friend’ to share a glass. The girls wore pumps, never open-toed sandals, as another ruse was to teasingly persuade him to sip some out of your shoe. You can pour a surprising amount of champagne into a size 39 Louboutin. If all else failed, we just tipped the stuff on the floor.

At first, it seemed miraculous to me that the place stayed open at all. It seemed positively Edwardian, all the heavy-handed flirting and the exorbitant fee for our company. Why would any man bother when he could order up whatever he wanted on his I-Hooker app? It was all so painfully old-fashioned. But I gradually realised that this was exactly what kept the guys coming back. They weren’t after sex, though plenty of them could get a bit frisky after a few goldfish bowls. They weren’t players, these guys, even in their dreams. They were ordinary middle-aged married blokes who for a few hours wanted to pretend to themselves that they were on a real date, with a real girl, a pretty girl, nicely dressed with decent manners, who actually wanted to
talk
to them. Mercedes, with her talons and her extensions, was the official naughty girl, for customers who wanted something a bit more racy, but Olly preferred the rest of us to dress in plain, well-cut dresses, not too much make-up, clean hair, discreet jewellery. They didn’t want risk, or mess, or their wives finding out, or probably even the embarrassment and trouble of having to get it up. Unbelievably pathetic as it was, they just wanted to feel wanted.

Olly knew his market, and he catered to it perfectly. There was a tiny dance floor in the club, with Carlo doubling as DJ, to give the idea that at any moment our chap might spin us off into the disco night, though we were never to encourage this. There was a menu, with perfectly acceptable steak and scallops and ice cream sundaes – middle-aged men like to watch girls eat fattening puddings. Obviously, the knickerbocker glories stayed down just as long as it took us to make a discreet trip to the loo. Girls who took drugs or who were too obviously slutty didn’t last a night – a Polite Notice by the gents proclaimed that it was Strictly Forbidden to offer to Escort any of the Young Ladies Outside the Club. They were meant to aspire to us.

I found myself looking forward to Thursday and Friday nights. With the exception of Leanne (I couldn’t really think of her as Mercedes yet), the girls were neither friendly nor unfriendly; pleasant but incurious. They didn’t appear interested in my life, perhaps because none of the details they revealed about their own were real. The first night, as we swung a little unsteadily down Albemarle Street, Leanne suggested I choose a name to use in the club. My middle name was Lauren; neutral, untelling.

I said I was studying history of art part-time. All the girls seemed to be studying something, business administration mostly, and perhaps some of them were. None of them were English; clearly the idea that they were working in the bar to try to better themselves struck some sort of Eliza Doolittle chord with the punters. Leanne was flattening out her raucous Scouse – cushion came out as ‘cashion’; I modified my own accent, the one I used at work, which had become the voice I dreamed in, to make it a little less obviously Received Pronunciation, but to Olly’s evident satisfaction, I still sounded relatively ‘posh’.

At my day job, on Prince Street, there were those million tiny codes. Anyone’s placement on the social scale could be calibrated to the
n
th degree at a single glance, and learning the rules was a lot more difficult than identifying paintings, because the whole point of those rules was that if you were on the inside, you never had to be told. Those hours of carefully teaching myself how to speak and how to walk might have passed the test with most people – Leanne, for instance, seemed bemused and grudgingly impressed by my transformation – but somewhere inside the house was a hidden casket of Alice in Wonderland keys that I would never possess, keys that unlocked ever tinier gardens whose walls were all the more impregnable because they were invisible. At the Gstaad, though, I was the token ‘toff’ and the girls, if they thought about it at all, believed there was no distinction between the WAGs and the superannuated debutantes who occupied adjoining pages in
OK!
magazine. Of course, in a deeper sense they would have been right.

The chat at the club was mostly about clothes, the acquisition of designer-branded shoes and handbags, and men. Some of the girls claimed to have steady boyfriends, many of them married, in which case it was the done thing to complain about their boyfriends endlessly; others were dating, in which case it was the done thing to complain about their dates endlessly. To Natalia and Anastasia and Martina and Karolina it seemed a self-evident truth that men were a necessary evil, to be endured for the sake of shoes, handbags and Saturday night trips to Japanese restaurants in Knightsbridge. There was a lot of analysis of texts, their frequency and affection, but any emotional response was reserved for the possibility that the men were seeing other women or failing to provide sufficient gifts. Plots and counter plots – with elaborate iPhone ruses – ensued, there was talk of men with boats, men with planes even, but I never got the sense that any of this involved pleasure. Love was not a language any of us dealt in; fresh skins and tight thighs were our currency, only of value to those too old to take it for granted. Older men, it was generally agreed, were less bother on the whole, though they came in for a good deal of raucous shrieking about their physical deficiencies. Baldness and halitosis and the Viagra-grind was reality, though you would never have known that from the coquettish messaging that formed communication between the girls and their men. This was the way of their world, and they kept their contempt and their occasional tears for the rest of us.

For the first time, in the Gstaad, I had what felt like girlfriends, and I was a bit ashamed of how happy it made me. I hadn’t had friends at school. I had had quite a few black eyes, an aggressively haughty attitude, a truanting issue and a healthy appreciation of the joy of sex, but friends I didn’t have time for. Beyond explaining that we had met up north, Leanne and I had an unspoken agreement that we had been teenage chums (if not actively taking part in holding someone’s face in the lavatory cistern could count as being chummy) and never referred to it. Apart from Frankie, the department secretary at the House, the only constant female presence in my life had been my flatmates, two earnest Korean girls studying medicine at Imperial. We had a cleaning rota pinned up in the bathroom which we all stuck to politely enough and beyond that there was barely any need for conversation. With the exception of the women I met at the particular kind of parties I liked to go to, I’d only ever expected to encounter hostility and scorn from my own sex. I’d never learned how to gossip, or advise, or listen to the endless rehashings of thwarted desire. But here, I found I could join in. On the Tube, I swapped reading the
Burlington Magazine
and
The Economist
for
Heat
and
Closer
, so that when the talk of men palled I too could fall back on the endless soap opera of film stars. I invented a broken heart (implications of an abortion) to explain my lack of dates. I was Not Ready, and I enjoyed being advised that it was time to Get Closure and Move On. My odd nocturnal excursion I kept strictly to myself. It suited me, I realised, this strange little concentrated universe, where the world outside felt far away, where nothing was quite real. It made me feel safe.

*

Leanne hadn’t lied about the money. Exaggerated, maybe, but it was still pretty extraordinary. Counting my percentage on the bottles as cab fare home, I was making about 600 a week clear in tips, crumpled twenties and fifties, sometimes more. A fortnight took care of my pathetic overdraft, and a few weeks later I took the Sunday train to an outlet centre near Oxford and made a few investments. A black Moschino skirt suit to replace the poor old Sandro, an achingly plain white Balenciaga cocktail dress, Lanvin flats, a DVF print day dress. I finally had my NHS teeth lasered in Harley Street, I made an appointment at Richard Ward and had my hair recut so that it looked subtly the same but five times as expensive. None of this was for the club. For that I got a few simple dresses from the high street and tarted them up with patent Loubie pumps. I cleared a shelf in my wardrobe and carefully placed most of my acquisitions there, wrapped in dry-cleaner’s tissue. I liked to look at them, count them through like a stage miser. When I was little I had devoured Enid Blyton’s boarding school books, St Clare’s and Whyteleafe and Malory Towers. The new clothes were my gymslip and my lacrosse stick, the uniform of who I was going to be.