Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (11 page)

It's going to take me time to turn into the cosy old woman people expect and seem to want—like grandmothers are OK but don't whatever you do look like my mother. Maybe that's it, the Caribbeans have got it right, with the kids brought up by grannies and their mums out working all day and going off with whoever they fancy at night.

I'll take up Gloria's invitation to St Lucia (she's gone back there to return Wayne to the shack above Soufrières where he used to pick bananas for a living, but now the Americans have ruled the fruit all have to be straight instead of bendy so he's out of a job, which is why he picked up Gloria on the beach in the first place). I'll go there and just be myself, I'll be as old or young as I want.

It takes me some time to realise that I'm just where I was if I don't sell my flat. I may be feeling pure and reborn, someone who doesn't find they have accidentally tempted an indigent tile designer into an immoral and financially disastrous threesome, but where exactly does that leave me? With my bank overdraft and very little work coming in (no one wants antiques these days, it's the
age of minimalism and who can survive by selling one ceramic bowl with an apple in it to go on the chrome-and-steel kitchen worktop and possibly a single Shaker chair for the media section of the newly refurbished duplex?

We all have to make sacrifices. After my excruciating night I've lost my paranoia (it comes with giving up a thirst for money, for profit, Boom Disease as I now see it), and a wonderful sense of grace flows through me as I remind myself that (a) Howie can take nothing from me (he took my self-respect and optimism for the future years ago anyway) if I don't sell; (b) no one will try and make me buy Hormead Road if I haven't sold here and am therefore penniless; and (c) Alain will disappear as noiselessly as when he came, on discovering I'm as out of work as he is, have no expectations (and thus no lunches at La Speranza to provide), and that a sandwich—or worse, one of Molly's stews—at Saltram Crescent is no fun at all.

A sense of relief greater than any I've known since spraining my ankle on the last day of summer term at St Winifred's and so being spared the swimming race washes over me again.

I rise, mutter a quiet imprecation at the sound of tramping footsteps on the stairs—but they seem to
be going down rather than up so I must be grateful.

I'm a different person today, a woman who accepts her age and will dedicate her life to helping others. (This seems to have slid into the third person: is it because it's a resolution which can't belong to me?)

But maybe I should explain the kind of night I had …

And perhaps that will stop me obsessing about love.

In the words of the great philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, ‘Love is giving something you haven't got to someone who doesn't exist.'

I know what he means. Never was the non-existence of Alain more evident than in the long, dark night of the soul, the agony of my time alone with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, suffered to the accompaniment of Molly's groans and cries and ending (a new one, this) with what sounded like a huge army of Polish builders arriving at 5.30 a.m. and beginning (so it sounded at least) to tear down the upper part of the house. What did I do to deserve this?

And the answer came cool as one part of Lacan's dictum: You didn't have love, you don't have love and you never had anything to give. Only money
and a promise of a property you could never have shared. Lies, lies, lies …

Molly says you never get rid of a Protestant guilt complex—and on top of the Polish yells and shouts, and the sound of sawing wood and doors being kicked in, this was about the last straw. Horrible possibilities suggested themselves: that Mr Nyan, assured by Crookstons of my acceptance of his offer, was rearranging the house to suit his needs (this turned out to be true); and, worse, that my ex, the now snoring and sex-sated Howie, still retained a Power of Attorney enabling him to sign over my flat and all proceeds from the sale and pay them into his American bank account. A third nightmarish thought consisted of a putsch organised by all the men in my life (if they can laughingly be called that) in which I would be committed, first Mrs Rochester style, to the psychiatric unit of the Royal Free in Hampstead and would next be seen swathed in grey blankets, my dead face invisible to my persecutors as I was taken to be cremated and consigned to a soon-to-be forgotten history.

So a Note to Sugar Mummies: before you go looking for youth and love and happiness, ensure your assets are safe and protected from unscrupulous property dealers and ex-ex-Marxist husbands
with overseas accounts and multinational lawyers. Any creditors should be paid off and dismissed; a company should be formed before advantage can be taken of the uncertain status of a Sugar Mummy purchasing gifts for her young lover. The uncertainty of his own duration with her is liable to cause problems when it comes to the return of such gifts in the event of a split.

Is that clear? Keep away from promises and legal arrangements made in the name of love, or you may end up without a roof over your head. Domicile abroad, if you can: a situation where, like me, you find yourself a sitting duck in the middle of a West London property boom, is never to be envied. Move quickly and quietly: repatriate your companion, if necessary to St Lucia or Jamaica (even if this is not his place of origin: the British government will be grateful to you).

At all costs, look after yourself.

It's now ten in the morning and I'm in the sitting-room, chastened and holding my umpteenth mug of tea. The builders have gone quiet upstairs, so I'm praying they were doing a quick job for Mr Nyan and won't return.

Molly, who has the good grace not to look pleased with herself after her night with Howie, is working
as ever on the unpublishable sequel to
GWTW
, and she is smoking energetically as she does so. We've been through the other Henry James novels in which I appear to have been trapped, and after
Washington Square
with the depressed and independence-seeking heroine (she's like anyone would be if they took the advice I just gave earlier: she kept her lolly and her virginity but the human cost was appalling; is it worth it?) we came to
Portrait of a Lady.
‘Alain is Gilbert Osmond', Molly says. She sets her coffee down on the little inlaid marquetry table I found in the market at Bergerac forty years ago (ouch!) and an unremovable stain appears. The Osmonds wouldn't have put up with Molly for long—Madame Merle, that sinister ‘older woman' with a secret, would have banished her from the palazzo in Florence, where poor Isabel Archer discovered the folly of her choice of Gilbert as a husband. As she'd married him, all her money was his. ‘Yes', Molly goes on, ‘like Osmond, Alain worships beauty …'

‘I know', I say miserably. And I must add, to Sugar Mummies one more time: don't be fooled by men who flaunt their love of beauty and rob you of your money as well as any chance of happiness.

‘What on earth are they doing upstairs?' Molly
says, as a series of loud crashes—falling plaster, walls caving in, resound just above our heads. And she gives me a look which reminds me I have a long way to go before I return to sanity. ‘This is in your part of the house—it must be next to your room … on the landing.' And she rushes out into the hall.

So the real world pulled me back in the end, although it took two of Molly's super-strength painkillers and a gulp of rum from the bottle Gloria and Wayne left here before she discovered she was giving him something she hadn't got and he felt he didn't exist.

‘I think they're taking out the staircase', Molly says as she pokes her head round the door from the hall.

‘Mr Nyan is in breach of his lease. I shall send a letter demanding that any changes made to the property by Mr Nyan without your consent as shareholder in the company must be redressed immediately. You tell me the staircase in your maisonette has been removed and an alternative means of accessing the upper floors installed …'

‘A ladder', I say miserably.

I'm talking to my lawyer the splendid Mrs Xerxes on my mobile in the hall while Michael (Polish, bristling moustache, i-pod and phone much in evidence) and his mate Andrew, also Polish, boiler-man (so I presume from the bunch of pipes that dangles from his hands and the unwelcome
sound of gushing water from upstairs) climb and descend the ladder with an agility which will certainly be seen to be lacking at my age.

‘I'm not sure I can even get up to my room', I say wimpishly into my Nokia, while registering that the battery is failing: why does today have to be one of those days, when yesterday was another and the one before as well—black days standing like the witches in Macbeth and twiddling their thumbs on seeing me: ‘This way evil comes!'

But what have I really done to deserve all this rotten luck? I've forgotten the First Rule for Sugar Mummies—don't blame yourself, a habit that comes from all the years of ‘letting people down', i.e. late at school to pick up (Yes, I have a son, but he's in New Zealand, ‘To get as far away as possible from home' as Molly likes to say, and I can't help agreeing with her); and the Second Rule—fight against the assumption you're being scatty. This a disease of old women, who are assumed by every man who meets them to have forgotten their own names, let alone the way to Roehampton or whatever—and generally being to blame for anything unpleasant that comes along.

‘You must call the council at once', booms Mrs Xerxes from my failing phone.

So if all this is not my fault, whose is it? Surely it is I who have dithered and not told Crookstons since my discovery early in the morning that I had no intention of selling my flat, this omission leading to Mr Nyan's madly premature building works? It
must be
my fault that a fabulously valuable property in sought-after W9 is rapidly becoming unsaleable—for many months at least—in the hands of a gang of Polish workers while the lawsuit on which Mrs Xerxes will clearly insist drags on? We might as well rename ourselves Bleak House. I've been ‘scatty' and let everyone down, most of all myself.

But I know what I'm trying to do, and it's not anything nice. I'm trying to pin the blame on someone else.

You must have guessed—it's Alain. Here is a list of his crimes: (1) being vague: hanging around without committing—to me, to a slice of equity in a future place to live; but not committing to me is worse; (2) muddying the waters even more by dragging his wife into the equation. Three into a shoebox won't go; (3) causing suspicion: is he in with Stefan Mocny; are they both about to skin me and, having done so, leave me skint?

Another unpleasant metaphor comes to mind:
that Stefan and Alain (yes, I accuse him: the Gestapo are after you now, Alain) and Mr Nyan are actually planning to launder money through me. I can hear the gurgle of long-neglected pipes on the floor above and it feels as if they're directly connected to my guts.
It's my money you're washing through me
, I want to shout. ‘Turn off the tap. Let me live like I did before any of this happened …'

But you never can go back to the past. This is particularly illustrated by the sudden appearance of, of all people, Howie the Ex at the top of the ladder with only the bath-sheet knotted round him. Both Michael and Andrew, who are hanging bat-like through holes in the ceiling, stop sawing and banging and wait to see what's going to happen next.

‘I was just going down to the kitchen', Howie says as he turns with surprising agility on the top rung of the ladder and descends painlessly (there's one less tragic accident to contemplate, at least). ‘The canteen. The caddy', he continued in a pompous I-was-once-butler-to-Diana-Princess-of-Wales voice, ‘it seemed to me that both had suffered serious losses since—well—since our wedding. The insurance is in place, I imagine?'

This is when I snapped. A voice sang in my ears. I felt myself turning bright red, all the symptoms of
impending stroke and heart attack, so often pored over in the newspapers, threatened to despatch me (and some would say not before time) to the bizarrely positioned undertakers in Westbourne Grove (bizarre because the handbag and perfume shops now surrounding the long-established Kenyons seem positioned to tempt with reminders of worldly follies and extravagances, whereas before the new fashionability of Notting Hill and northwards, the odd bookmaker and fish-and-chip shop in Westbourne Grove served as indicators of the probability of a better life after death than in the years antecedent to it).

‘I'm
off
', I yelled (a threat seldom very worrying from a Woman Past her Prime (unless she is the Sugar Mummy of the Recipient, of course): but neither Michael nor Andrew, chatting and laughing in Polish now that Howie has disappeared into the kitchen to count the teaspoons, have any knowledge of my financial affairs. Of course, Howie himself may have plans to remarry me—except he knows there isn't a chance.

So here I am. I'm
off
—i.e. on my front steps, having banged the front door really hard behind me. My mobile springs to life for an instant, and I can hear the tinny whisper of Mrs Xerxes. Then
nothing. I'm leaving home forever. What am I going to do?

Alain is standing by his red car looking as if he's been there for hours. ‘Are we going out looking for somewhere?' he says.

Now I'm really in a pickle. My home will shortly be uninhabitable—I've heard about these developers, cowboy space-thieves. In Notting Hill they buy two top flats in a building, box in the staircase down to the ground and sell a ‘maisonette' to a City wanker for millions, having bagged the share of freehold space belonging to the other flats on the way down.

People don't sue, they haven't the time or money—and nor, I must confess, have I. (I can see the letter from the bank—there's no such thing as a bank manager nowadays as everyone knows, but my bank seems to have trained up a particularly ferocious virtual example, who throws in extra
charges like he wants jam yesterday and jam the day before and more lashings of jam, all for an overdraft they know I'll pay off one day).