Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (14 page)

Now I'm at the top of the plastic spiral and I see the man standing at its foot like a knight in a cheaply illustrated fairy story is—well it wasn't Alain, for anyone who's chosen this book as a romantic turn-on, forget it—it was Alain's colleague Stefan Mocny. And here I am in my nightie, my new deep voice going higher and higher as I ask him what he wants and is Alain OK? (Another sign of
thwarted hope: thinking the Object of Desire has been run over or was in a head-on crash when in fact he's got safely to the airport hours ago and is now relaxing in the plane with an in-flight magazine.)

Stefan Mocny seems surprised by my query, so ignores it. ‘This spiral staircase is unsafe. Highly dangerous', he proclaims as he swings on and then off like an ape. ‘Who put this in?' But then he grows thoughtful when I say Mr Nyan, and concedes that it may be ‘just OK'. Well, thanks very much. Is it safe to use or not, I'm thinking, and how about poor Molly with her arthritis? Suppose it topples over when she tries to come down …

I didn't want to go back in the kitchen, which holds my last memories of Alain, and particularly the way he'd smiled and pulled the roll of clingfilm out of the drawer and wrapped it swiftly and efficiently (yes, those are the words) over the plate with the remains of the ham. ‘I
can
do these things', he'd said, as I took the plate from him and put it in the fridge; and I knew he meant we were going to be together, no nonsense about a compromise. I found it rather sweet (toe-curling, Molly whistles in my ear).

Now Stefan Mocny is sitting where Alain sat. He's not getting the real coffee Alain made, he's
lucky to get a Nescafe. ‘I hope I haven't disturbed you', he says.

Hope on, I say to myself as the last remnants of my own hope—for love, for happiness, for all those things that might exist but probably do not, fly out through the iron grill gate on the window, into the night.

‘Wanna tell ya', Stefan says, ‘Claire—you know her, right?' And, as I nod wearily, ‘She called tonight. I said there was no flat in sight yet, but I knew you'd commit to 29 Hormead Road, right?'

It's taken me two whole days to feel OK enough to go on describing that terrible night—the night Alain left and Stefan Mocny came round, and the world looked set to end pretty sharply (or I wanted it to end, the whole ruddy ball simply coming to a halt with its load of frauds and crooks and murderers and blackmailers).

Yes, Stefan Mocny can be described as a typical denizen of the world we live in today (I sound like my mother) and if you throw in rapist and torturer you're just upping his status, something he wouldn't mind at all, as ‘these days' (my mother again) the more wicked you are, the more you're admired, even photographed and labelled a celebrity. Grind
the faces of the poor? Now there's an old-fashioned concept, the poor don't even
have
faces any more, they're talked of at charity balls or by the chancellor in gold-plated rooms, but they don't exist one by one: they're not
people
any more. Steal and lie? You're a star. And so the list goes on, with hand-wringing and spin making the city like a gigantic washing-machine with all the dirty laundry going round to huge applause.

Mocny, the Bill Sykes of our new Victorian age, came round the side of the kitchen table and started fumbling with his flies (if that's what they're known as if it's a zip). There was an unpleasant bunch of black pubic hair sticking out under the fastener. How could he be a friend of Alain? flashes across my mind as he lumbers towards me, penis upright, a hot dog between the greasy bun of his thighs: why did they ever get on well together, or was it just a case of Me Artisan, You Mocny? Well, when he got to me I was paralysed, I just couldn't move. It's not an excuse, though the new rape judges would say I provoked it and he …

Oh God I can't write this. Suppose someone discovers it's me writing this book—imagine if Alain and Claire are doing a Google on a house in the south of France they might be able to afford to
rent, and they come across my description of their work colleague … And worst of all, if they read about me: my pathetic efforts to pay an innocent husband (have these words ever been linked before?) to live with me, a superannuated Biba girl, in a flat so horrible that when you go there all thoughts of adultery vanish like summer snow.

Because I will have to buy 29 Hormead Road. It's true, and it's my machinations that have led to this. Walk on, Molly: I could kill her for looking smug a few days back. ‘Sometimes it's better to be paying rent', as I agonised over the ludicrous price of Dream House and the apparent ‘bargain' my flat has now become. I'm the old woman in a vinegar bottle indeed, a Sugar Mummy with all the sweetness gone, in a sea of greed and bitterness.

But I'm going to have to buy 29 Hormead Road because Stefan Mocny just blackmailed me into it. You'll just have to imagine my cry of disgust, sitting at the table with his Frankfurter cock just inches away from my mouth and its proprietor (I guess every part of Mocny is valued, surveyed and gains in value by the day) staring impassively down at me. ‘Go on', his voice comes from miles away. ‘Get a move on, I've a refurb in All Soul's Avenue that needs me, the roof collapsed.'

Oh God, where are you? I'm sorry, so sorry … and yet, seeing the jar of Colman's mustard on the kitchen table (Alain had refused it: he must go for those Moutarde de Meaux numbers with little peppercorns and mustard seeds all stuck together in a posh jar) I can't help bursting into hysterical laughter … Maybe it's to keep my mouth busy so I don't have to have oral sex with a repulsive developer … ‘OK then.' Stefan pulls away, treating me to the unedifying sight of a shrinking sausage as it retreats into his jeans. ‘I think I'll give Claire—that's Alain's wife as you know—a ring back. She'll want to know how we're progressing with 29 Hormead Road, won't she? But what she won't know is how you and Alain plan to live there—Claire won't like being a gooseberry, no way.'

Oh God again. So Stefan Mocny knows. But on second thoughts—and there wasn't much time for those just then—what does he know? After all, we're innocent, Alain and I … shamingly, Stefan must simply have seen me slobbering, ogling, whenever his old colleague, the ‘tile man', was near.

Shaming and degrading. It couldn't be worse. But I can't allow Stefan to make that call. I can't lose Alain. I can't and won't.

If I thought I had dark nights of the soul before, they were buttercup-yellow afternoons compared to what I'm going through now.

Alain has gone, I'm blackmailed by Stefan Mocny into buying you-know-where, that shit-hole down by the canal, and for all of the rest of my life I shall have to live there. (‘You'll get a nice rent for the two empty flats', Molly says brightly. ‘After all you've gone through you'll wish you were a tenant like me—a protected tenant.' And she gives the smug little harrumph that makes me want to kill her almost as much as I want to kill Stefan Mocny.

But what Molly says is true. Alain and Claire won't live at 29 Hormead Road—it just won't
happen. I'll be there on my own, ‘celebrating old age' as Virginia Ironside unconvincingly puts it (though she does advise covering the upper arms at all times).

I will be empty, like the other two flats let to interchangeable tenants—so empty in heart and soul. No one will call me, my inbox will be empty as all the people of my age I might count as friends are totally incapable of sending a text message. I will have nothing but my pension—wait a minute …

Stefan Mocny, before leaving with his newly zipped-up member for Willesden (no pun intended), hands me a legal-looking letter (from Crookstons, natch) with a description of 29 Hormead Road (perfect family house, etc.) and a price that seems familiar because—and even I, Granny Bovary with my head full of fantasies, recognise it after a while—because it
is
familiar: it's exactly the sum offered by Mr Nyan, the asking price for my maisonette here.

What the heck is going on?

Here's a brief word of advice to Sugar Mummies with failing memories:

If in a shop and unable to recall the sum mentioned by the salesgirl for your purchase,
rush to the other side of the department, fish an extravagantly priced dress from the rail, run back with it while holding the price tag up to your eyes (see reference to Sugar Mummies with age-related macular degeneration) and ask how much the two items together will cost. Then subtract or add as necessary and the memory of the price of the original item will become clear.

With a house or flat, this is obviously impossible. But a memory—false or true I cannot tell—does come to me of Alain saying after we had left Hormead Road (the time he pretended his hand was a mobile phone; I thought that was terribly funny. Oh stop it, Molly's brisk tones come to me) that Stefan had told him the place was going cheap because the owner was in deep financial trouble; how cheap I certainly don't remember asking him.

So Stefan has bumped up the price! Stefan, together with Crookstons, of course (they will make it worth his while) will indeed wash Nyan's money right through me. I'll be left exactly as I was before, with nothing except a roof over my head—in this case a roof I detest. (‘You'll get the rent, Molly insists. Where you are now is too weirdly laid out to let.')

And there's nothing I can do about it. Alain, I'm doing this for you! I am doing it to show the extent of my loyalty and affection …

‘Oh, stop it', Molly says. This time it really is Molly and she's walked into my squalid bedroom—what's the point of making the bed if you're the only one for ever and ever who will sleep in it? And she's listening to my outpourings of grief with her usual sardonic expression. ‘You're wanted on the phone', Molly says. (Molly hates mobiles and won't have one.) ‘It's Henrietta Shaw. She says you left the last job unfinished and she's not going to settle up until you do it. The flat in Lots Road.'

‘But they're going to demolish it', I groan. Everywhere is either horrible or ruined, each house or flat I've ever done up or lived in is a major disaster. ‘You know', I say to Molly, ‘in the year of the French Revolution the king—Louis XVI—just had one word written on each day in his diary.

‘What was that?' Molly snaps. ‘Not a completion date for his appointment with the guillotine, I suppose?'

‘No', I say. ‘It was “rien”.'

‘It meant he had no sex the night before', Molly says. (She considers herself an expert on the French Revolution as well as
Gone With The Wind
.) ‘I
think that's rather funny, don't you?'

‘I don't know', I say miserably.

‘Well, that woman is still on the phone. She said she was short-staffed and she's got a job for you.'

‘Not in her shop?' I say. The moan comes free with this one.

‘Yes. What's wrong with that, even if they pay OAP rates?' Molly comes back at her sharpest. ‘It's
work
, Scarlett, it'll do you good.'

And as she leaves the room, she flicks the DVD remote. Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable are on a paddleboat going up the Mississippi. She swoons in his arms and the ghastly theme music swells …

It's the first time I've been grateful for the Polish builders when they get the drill going and position it directly overhead.

October. Bits of summer are still sticking around—it's hot and muggy sometimes but getting cooler at night. You no longer feel as if you've been flown to Mauritius and dumped on an island with a rising sea level, a submerged airstrip (you're the last flight in) and only old novels by Jilly Cooper (funny, but you've read them) and Rachel Cusk (life can't be as bad as this, but it is) in the abandoned beach house.

No, a semblance of sanity has returned with the nocturnal chill and falling leaves, and like migrating birds those who can't bear unfairness—those who liked you but didn't know what to do about your terrible predicament (sex and property in West
London)—arrive in their flocks to advise and assist you. After all, we belong in a temperate climate: surely, as my valiant geese and swans say, as they honk overhead, there must be a way to get out of the pickle you're in. And there was. Mrs Xerxes took over the flat I had so intemperately sold (but that was in the hot summer, the global swing away from rationality and into madness) and, as Molly describes her, like a kindly bird in an Aristophanes comedy she dealt with Mr Nyan. The council was informed of his building works, all done without planning permission and he suffered the humiliation and expense of taking out the plastic spiral and replacing the original staircase.

Then, I believe also engineered by Mrs Xerxes, a new company was formed, in which I had the majority of shares, as well as being appointed landlord of the building. All transactions must be above board and approved or vetoed by the company. This got rid of Mr Nyan, who had no wish to be registered as a shareholder, identifiable to the tax office. He moved out in August, young Bill carrying his Buddhas and metal trunks down the reconstructed stairs. Molly and I went down to the new bar ‘W9' in the suddenly fashionable Shannon Road to celebrate.

You may ask who the Hell is Bill? This is how I saw him again I've unkindly referred to him as resembling a Nazi concentration camp guard earlier, and I unreservedly apologise to him. He's an angel, and how he worked all those years for Stefan Mocny I do not know (yes, he's that one). This is what happened.

I'm in the sitting-room just after starting work in Lots Road. I'm exhausted after a day at Henrietta Shaw's shop (not least tiring are her meaningful questions about Alain: ‘What was going on?' ‘You're a sly one', etc., which drove me almost berserk with irritation). If you're trying to forget someone, you don't want their name where you had once hoped their tongue would be, i.e. rammed down your throat. And here, as I'm prone on the sitting-room sofa with a cup of tea kindly brought by Molly, are a few words to Sugar Mummies who are desperately trying to get rid of the memory after an unfortunate encounter with an Object of Desire: