Virtue (8 page)

‘And I see you girls are back in trouble again,’ Roy’s voice drones on. He’s obviously not drawn breath since I went downstairs. Maybe I should have stayed down there.

‘Not in trouble. It’s nothing we’ve done,’ Harriet says wearily, finishing with the ashtrays and rolling her eyes in my direction. It’s pretty clear that this isn’t going to be a good night. I’m exhausted already. I love her, but a night up with Harriet is the equivalent of an Airtours flight to the Caribbean. Well, not as boring, perhaps, and posher, and usually the plumbing holds out for the entire night, but apart from that, it’s close-on the same. That familiar not-quite-there feeling hovers over my cotton wool-wrapped brain and each limb feels like it’s got an exercise weight strapped to it. Jet lag. Why did I have to get a friend who gives me jet lag?

‘Yeah, but your mum’s back in the limelight again.’ Roy isn’t giving up. I really wish Shahin had never let on about our backgrounds.

‘Don’t start,’ says Harriet.

But he does anyway. ‘What beats me,’ he starts, ‘is how someone with your background, all your advantages, has ended up where you have.’

‘I said,’ says Harriet, ‘don’t start, Roy.’

The phone rings. Harriet plunges onto it. ‘Good evening, Chelsea Ladies’ College?’ She listens. ‘Yes, of course. You’re the nine-thirty party, yes? Name of Michael? Sure. Has he been a very naughty boy? How naughty? Well, obviously I can give him a good whacking, but for very naughty boys there’s the blancmange option as well. Only ten pounds. Of course. What time would you like it? Well, I’d suggest we do it pretty soon after you arrive. It’ll break the ice.’

Roy hurries out to the back to tell Shahin that he needs to put a blancmange on.

‘No,’ says Harriet. ‘I’m afraid we’d have trouble with our licence if the serving staff stripped. It’s to do with the fact that we’re all dressed as schoolgirls. But I’ll tell you what we can do. We have an arrangement with an agency. We can get a schoolmistress to come in and do that for you if you like …’

I look at my watch. Forty-five minutes before curtain up.

There’s always a bit of a lull on the food front around ten o’clock; we like to let them polish off their sausages and mash before we put on the show, and try to hold back the puds until afterward. It cuts down on food fights. Shahin, in the kitchen overseeing a vat of sultana-studded semolina, peruses the pictures of Godiva’s purple-rinse fans gathered at the gates of Belhaven in the
Sparkle
and says, ‘Jesus H. Christ. You grow up in this house?’

Harriet, polishing the dishwasher stains off the Arcoroc, nods nonchalantly. ‘Holy sheet,’ says Shahin. ‘What’s it like living somewhere like that? You been there?’ he adds to me.

‘Yes.’ I used to go down and stay there during the vacations after my grades dropped at university and Grace started sending the heavies round to give me talkings-to.

‘So what’s it like?’ he asks again. Like most of the Persians I’ve met, he’s fascinated by the details of other people’s wealth.

‘Not that great. Mostly ghosts and dodging sightseers, and interminable stand-up drinks with the local hunt. And spending thousands of pounds on microfibre longjohns.’

Shahin stirs the semolina, has a taste. I can feel him wishing for rosewater. ‘Longjohns? What is longjohns?’

‘Those long thin trousers you wear under your trousers.’

‘Oh. So was cold, then?’

‘Yes.’ I finish separating eggs for the next batch of the two gallons of custard the restaurant gets through each evening, and glance guiltily at Harriet. Slagging Belhaven off is her birthright, after all, not mine. ‘And damp. It’s below sea level, you know. The kind of cold that gets right through your skin into your bones.’

She gives me a smile of consent under her eyelashes. ‘Godiva wouldn’t go there at all in the winter,’ says Harriet. ‘And I spent my entire childhood dodging from radiator to Aga. The minute you aren’t actually
sitting
on a radiator, clothes start to rot on your body and your fingers start to drop off.’

Shahin looks up from the
bain-marie
. ‘Sitting on radiators? Isn’t that meant to be bad for you?’

Harriet clucks. ‘Of course it is. Why do you think they call them stately piles?’

Shahin pours a gallon canister of milk into a cannibal-sized saucepan, turns on the heat beneath it. ‘So, tell me. If you grown up somewhere like that, why you need to be working here?’

‘Oh, darling,’ she replies, ‘it doesn’t work like that. People like me never have any money. It’s all tied up in land, which you’re not allowed to sell because you’re supposed to be a guardian for the next generation or some bollocks like that.’

He chucks five vanilla pods into the warming milk. Shahin can never quite get his head around the less-is-more philosophy. ‘No,’ he declares. ‘I doane bliv you. English peoples always saying “I got no money, I got no money,” but is not true. Is cultural thing, like when taxi driver in Egypt say “as you like” so he can see how much money you got and double it. You must have money.’

Shahin has a directness that’s difficult to resist. Harriet never can. ‘Of course I’ve got money, doughbag,’ she replies. ‘It’s just that it’s tied up in a trust and I don’t get my hands on any of it until I’m thirty, and that’s only if the trustees approve. It’s quite a common thing, that. No one in Britain thinks their children are capable of handling money before they’re thirty.’

He’s ripping the top of a huge bag of sugar open with a knife better suited to chopping up recalcitrant children. ‘Is no way you can get before?’

‘No,’ she replies. Then, ‘Well, I could get married.’

Then we all laugh.

‘Maybe,’ says Shahin, ‘you need to like men a bit before you get married.’

‘I don’t not like men,’ she protests, ‘it’s just that I’ve never met a man who wasn’t an arsehole.’

Shahin turns and throws her one of his specialist ‘my eyes are velvet cushions, rest on them’ soppy looks, says, ‘You are saying you doan like your Shahi’?’

‘Well, I’m not bloody marrying
you
,’ she replies, and he gives her a flash of gold-capped horse-teeth, laughs.

‘Crazy chicky,’ he says, which is about the highest compliment in his vocabulary, after sonoffabeetch.

Roy puts his head round the swing door, clears his nose. ‘Oi! Any chance of someone doing some work around here?’

We turn. ‘What?’

‘Table eight are ready for their spanking,’ he barks, disappears.

Harriet unpeels herself from the oven doors where she still naturally comes to rest despite ten years away from Belhaven, picks up her cane and her table-tennis bat and stalks towards the ‘Out’ door on her dominatrix’s heels. ‘You ready?’

I nod, collect the blancmanges on their paper plates from the counter and fall into line ahead of her. I always go first; coming up to Harriet’s shoulder, I would never be noticed at all if I went last. We wiggle to work ourselves up to maximum velocity in our Wonderbras, check each other for inappropriate hairs, say our grace. ‘Spanking builds character,’ I tell her.

The response comes, ‘It never did me any harm.’

I turn as Roy drops the volume on the sound system and hits the dimmer switch, I kick the door open, and, clomping forward on my big black Caterpillar boots, shout, ‘Right! Is there a Roger Herriot in the house?’

Harriet raises herself up and inhales until the buttons on her blouse groan under the stress.

‘Have you been a very naughty boy?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’ Roger, her victim, bent over the table, confesses.

‘How naughty?’

‘Very naughty.’

‘What have you been doing, you evil boy? Have you been sneaking off and watching Matron undress with your little binoculars again?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, madam!’ He cries, and his friends snigger with joy: Urk, Urk, he called the waitress madam, Urk.

‘And what else have you been doing? I suppose you’ve been naughty in the showers again, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, madam!’

‘You have?’

This is my cue to step forward. I come round to stand at her side, prime myself with a blancmange in each hand. I always have to avoid Harriet’s eye at all costs at this point in the proceedings, because if there was one moment of communication between us, we would probably both lose it, collapse in hysterical laughter and have to stagger off to the kitchen to recover. It happened once, and Roy docked our wages. But it’s amazing: even after three months of doing it, I still find the prospect of flanning someone irresistibly funny.

‘You’re a dirty, dirty little boy!’ storms Harriet. ‘And you know what we do to dirty little boys around here, don’t you?’

His friends start thumping the table: the drumbeat of the British bully preparing for the kill. Harriet puts a fist on a hip, drops her head to one side so her pigtails bob. ‘Pants!’ cry the mob, and other tables drop their conversations to watch. ‘Pants! Pants! Pants! Pants! Pants!’

‘Stand up,’ orders Harriet. Her victim uncurls to face her, flushed with drink, excitement and being the centre of attention. He gives her a sheepish grin and she pouts bossily. ‘No good smiling here,’ she says, ‘you can’t charm your way out of your punishment. Now, drop your trousers.’

The boys burst into a rapturous cheer. Roger starts to fiddle with his buttons. ‘Hurry up! Hurry up!’ I order.

‘Please, miss.’ He tries to look boyish and appealing, but I can practically smell the dribble coming out of the side of his mouth. ‘I can’t do it by myself.’

Wanker. There’s always one. Every night, someone who fails to distinguish between a novelty waitress and a flycatcher.

‘Sorry, sonny,’ I snarl. There are times when you have to turn on the thumbscrews, put them in their place without putting them off the fun. It’s the fact that we mastered this art so quickly and he was able to save himself bouncer money that keeps Roy employing us despite everything. ‘If you’re after a classy bird, try Stringfellows. We expect our pupils to have mastered their trousers by the time they come to this establishment. Now, drop ’em!’

‘Now!’ repeats Harriet, points her cane at his crotch.

Obediently, he lets his trousers fall open. He is wearing white boxer shorts underneath, cute widdle piccies of dancing pigs popping out from behind his striped shirt tails.

That’s enough for me. I step forward, grab the flap of his trousers and neatly drop a blancmange inside, grind it in, safely keeping hands away from flesh, with the paper plate. As the refrigerated jelly hits his skin, his back arches back involuntarily in shock, as it always does. And I leap into the air and land the second blancmange full in his howling face.

A great bay of male approval. Not approval of what I’ve done, of course, but rather joy at the sight of another man humiliated. The noise always makes me want to duck and hide, but I stand my ground and wait while Harriet steps forward once again to take the spotlight.

‘Time,’ she says quietly once the cheering has died to a gurgling mutter, ‘to take your caning.’

‘Oh, God,’ says Roger, wiping blancmange from his face. ‘Not more.’

‘Any more of that, and it’ll be twelve of the best,’ she snaps. Sometimes I wonder how much acting goes into Harriet’s role. I know this for a fact: Harriet, having grown up in a family where men were little more than tools for women’s advancement, has only a small supply of respect for them. Plus, of course, she was educated by nuns. ‘Now, get over that desk and take your whacking.’

I lead him by the tie to the podium in the middle of the room, bend him over the inky desk upon it and quietly slip the scissors from the pencil slot. Once Harriet’s done, my turn comes.

This is her divine moment, the moment she always makes the most of. Stalking up and down the podium, she slaps the cane into the palm of her hand as the room rustles to the sound of readjusted trousers. Harriet bends over, showing both stocking tops and knickers, and a small groan rises from the assembly. ‘Are you ready?’ she asks.

The question is ostensibly aimed at Roger, but a dozen voices mutter, almost involuntarily, ‘Oh, yes.’ Men. Can’t live with them, but threaten to paddle their arses and they’ll be yours for ever.

‘Well,
get
ready.’ Harriet brandishes the cane under his nose, bends it until you think it must snap, then gets behind him. Places it on his buttocks, and the hairs on his legs stand on end. ‘Count with me,’ she tells the audience. Pulls her arm back to its fullest arc.

‘One!’ they shout. And Harriet, with the deftness of one who has had years of practice, suddenly produces the ping-pong bat in her left hand and brings it down upon Roger’s backside. For this is the secret of public violence: maximum drama, maximum pain, but woe betide the restaurant that leaves a welt in the age of litigation. The crack rings out over the audience, Roger yelps and Harriet pulls her arm back for another shot.

‘Two!’ Whack.

‘Three!’ Whack.

‘Four!’ Whack.

‘Five!’ Whack.

‘Six!’ Whack.

I step forward. ‘Whaddawe say?’ I cry.

‘And one for luck!’ they scream in return, and Harriet brings the paddle down for one last lick.

Harriet is panting as she helps Roger to his feet, plants a thick lipsticky kiss on his left cheek while I do the same on the right, deftly cutting the end off his tie at the same time. We always keep little souvenirs of our victims; Harriet includes them in collages and I turn them into funky little play-toys for Henry. ‘Well done,’ we say.

‘Thank you,’ he mumbles through the tears pouring down his cheeks.

Harriet shakes her head. ‘You truly are a sad individual.’

‘And you are a goddess,’ he replies.

What people don’t realise is that after-hours drinking joints are not actually there to service the coke-addled networking ambitions of thrusting media Turks, but are, in reality, there to provide places where the people who have been servicing them can go for some post-work R&R. All the restaurant and bar staff in central London are members of each other’s clubs, and all the door staff at all of them know the other people on the restaurant circuit. The coke-addled media Turks are there to subsidise the leisure of the leisure providers. You know those people you see waltzing past the queues, the ones who don’t even have to hand over their names to have the velvet ropes snapped open for them? They’re not big faces in the record industry; they’ve probably just got off work at a bar in Mayfair. People dedicate their whole lives to finding out the secret of being on the guest list, and never discover that it’s this: if you want access to all of London’s leisure facilities, get a job as staff.