Maestra (13 page)

The longer I stayed on the boat, the further I was from that gelid body, that reproachful pallid face. I tried not to think too much about Leanne. Our brief moment of complicity belonged to another world now, yet in many ways, I could have been back at the Gstaad Club. Girls everywhere, ubiquitous on the drag down from Saint-Tropez to Sicily as rosé and bougainvillea. I’ve never met the girl who wasn’t prepared to hawk it when there was a bona fide billionaire in the room, so I realised in a while that in a sense my presence protected Steve. I made sure to be vaguely possessive in company, mirroring Steve’s ‘babes’ and draping a casual arm around his shoulders, which made me an object of irritation and fascination to the girls, but kept them off. Seated next to Steve at dinner, I would overhear them talking gaily like suburban housewives about the terrible cost of things, until sometimes I wondered why he didn’t write them a cheque for a million quid just to buy a bit of quiet.

Tristan’s assiduous messaging produced a facsimile of a social scene – hopping from tender to drinks to restaurant, then the inevitable club or sometimes a house party in the hills above a resort – though we never met anyone who resembled the
figli d’oro
I had spied in Portofino. The men were in funds or banks or property; once we drove up into the hills of the Tuscan Maremma to lunch at the house of an English TV pundit with a terrifying hair weave who’d been big in newspapers in the Nineties, and his crowd of incredibly pleased-with-themselves minor celebrities who spent the whole time trying to cap each other’s jokes in a monsoon of name-dropping. Every guy, no matter how paunchy or bald or vilely cigar-breathed, had a girl. Wives were not what you took to the Riviera, and glittering conversation was not what was required of the girls. They never left their men’s sides, sitting next to them, cutting up and forking in their food for them as though they were babies, not speaking unless spoken to, but laughing at everything their man said just in case it was funny, creating a force field around each couple that no other woman could penetrate. At the pundit’s lunch the only exception was a successful television comedian, a big, ungainly woman who had won several prestigious awards, who began by dominating the talk, matching the men quip for quip, but gradually descended into a bewildered and furious silence as the rosé flowed and her colleagues stopped even pretending to listen to her. I pitied her, as the faces reddened and the noise round the table swelled and her erstwhile civilised, BBC-valued peers reverted to braying Neanderthals, pawing at their harem and, I could see, taking a savage pleasure in besting her at a game she couldn’t even enter.

Our job, the girls’ job, was to wear delicate K-Jacques sandals around our pretty tanned ankles, to swish our pretty hair and sip delicately at our wine, to play with our pretty Rolexes around our slender tanned wrists. We were the prizes, the gold made delectable bronzed flesh, Galateas who unfroze at the touch of money. No wonder she was fuming. She had been stripped of her currency as swiftly as a Neapolitan pickpocket would have relieved her of her boring Mulberry handbag. I should have said something, done something to shut those smug cunts up, but I just smiled and let my hair swing over my collarbone and fed Steve tiny bites of iced coconut soufflé. Watch and learn, baby.

Wealth creeps under your epidermis like poison. It invades your posture, your gestures, the way you carry yourself. From the moment I stepped aboard the
Mandarin
, I don’t think I opened a door. I certainly didn’t carry a heavy bag, or lift a dirty plate. If the price is cosying up to some ancient boor who eyes you in the Jacuzzi like a rutting hippo, the pay-off is being surrounded by young, uniformed men with broad shoulders and clean nails who hold out your chair, fetch your napkin or your sunglasses, adjust the cushions on your sun lounger, pick up your dirty knickers and thank you for permitting them to do it. They don’t look you in the eyes; you are not for them. They clear away the ashtrays and the smeared mirrors, discreetly replenish the aspirin by the bed and the Xanax and Viagra in the bathroom cabinet, repair the insults to your flesh in hundreds of subtle, complicitous ways so that you stalk amongst them immaculate as a goddess, and, in a while, between the brim of your Ray-Bans and the tip of your imperiously tilted chin, they disappear from your sight. But don’t let the accoutrements distract you. If you don’t get the ring on your finger sharpish, you’re fucked. The real difference between the Riviera hotties and the crowd back at the Gstaad was that these girls had climbed to the next tier, which only made the precipice before them all the more appalling.

In Porto-Vecchio, we were joined by Hermann, a reedy, silent German colleague of Steve’s, and his fiancée Carlotta, the diamond on her ring finger as spectacularly disproportionate as her tit job. Carlotta went in for the cooing princess routine when Hermann was present, playing with his earlobes and calling him ‘baby’ every five seconds. In private she took no prisoners.

‘He’s a fucking pig,’ she confided casually as we lay topless on one of the huge orange sun mattresses on the upper deck.

‘Who?’

‘Hermann. Yeah, like I was in St Moritz last season and I was meant to be joining him in Verbier and he sent a car. A fucking car to pick me up.’

Her accent was vaguely European, but I couldn’t place it. I wondered if she still could.

‘Oh God, that’s awful.’

‘Yeah, I made my own bed in the chalet for like a week, and he can’t even be bothered to send the fucking heli for me. You should only fly private, you know,’ she added seriously. ‘Like, don’t let them take advantage.’

‘Are you going to marry him?’

‘Sure. We got engaged when I got pregnant last year, but he already has like six kids from previous, so he made me get rid of it.’

I touched the warm skin of her shoulder sympathetically.

‘That’s awful. I’m so sorry.’

She bit her overfilled lip theatrically. ‘Thanks. But I got a flat on Eaton Place for hoovering it out, so it wasn’t that bad.’

Once I’d started breathing again Carlotta was noodling on her phone.

‘Did you hear about the Swedish girl at Nikki Beach?’

Of course I’d heard about the Swedish girl at Nikki Beach. Everyone from Antibes to Panarea that year had heard about the Swedish girl at Nikki Beach.

‘She was in the pool for, like, a day’ – five hours, two days, it varied – ‘before anyone noticed she was dead.’

‘Gross.’

‘Yeah, gross. She was already, like’ – Carlotta fished for the word – ‘mouldering.’

*

Carlotta shared the vulnerability of the classless; I understood that. But I wasn’t like her; I didn’t want to snag a rich husband and spend the rest of my life as flotsam on the tide of Euromoney. Dressing the part was a different matter. Steve might not have been the cockrocking king of Mayfair, which suited me fine, but his few fixed ideas about women conveniently included their need to shop. The acquisition of clothes was apparently my sex’s highest calling, and since I had the brains never to ask him for so much as an ice cream, I did rather well.

As we glided slowly south through the sparkling breezes, and July slipped into August, whenever we docked, Steve would ask me if I needed to pick up a few things, then solemnly hand me a boggling wad of notes. At first I was careful, keeping much of it back, so that I could at least offer to pay my share of drinks and dinner, but after a few days it didn’t seem relevant. So I bought expensive things, things I would never be able to afford again, a lifetime’s rainbow of cashmere, a hammered linen Vuitton raincoat, a perfect chestnut crocodile Prada tote. I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the boutique windows or the glassy smoothness of a harbour, tanned in my simple white shirt and cut-offs, hair tied up messily in a Dolce & Gabbana scarf, swinging my ribboned bags of loot, and wonder whether I ought to be surprised at my metamorphosis. But I wasn’t, really. I looked in the water and there saw, finally, myself.

*

Philip Larkin once wrote wistfully of a world where beauty was accepted slang for yes. Fucking can be such a very uncomplicated pleasure, as ancient and elemental as the salt-earth taste of an olive, or a glass of cold water after a long, dusty walk. So why say no? Monogamy must be so much easier for the plain.

After a few weeks as Steve’s pseudo-girlfriend, I was climbing the walls. If you’re like me, the trick is to learn to spot the other ones who feel the same. When Jan had given his slightly contemptuous tour of the
Mandarin
that first day, I had made sure my attention remained on Steve, but there had been one other moment, a few days into the trip, when I had passed him on the deck and watched his eyes follow me precisely the way Steve’s didn’t.

I had to let it sit for a while. I wasn’t dumb enough to fuck up my chances for the sake of a shag, but it was a wonder Tris hadn’t noticed Jan’s looks and given him his P45, he was so mercilessly appealing. Thick through the shoulders and tight through the waist, eyes blue and deep as a fjord, framed by thick grey lashes like a cartoon donkey.
Caveat emptor
: I wasn’t complaining. So one afternoon, as we were gliding through the Maddalena archipelago, I asked Steve if he wanted to go for a picnic.

‘We can take the tender, go snorkelling!’ I enthused.

‘Sorry, babe, I have stuff to do. Get Tris to take you.’

‘Of course. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

I barged into Tristan’s cabin without knocking. He was watching porn on his laptop in his underwear, pasty and hungover under his tan. I just glimpsed a POV of Jada Stevens lifting her famous spherical arse to the camera before he flipped the lid shut irritably.

‘Steve says will you take me snorkelling?’ I put just enough spoiled petulance into my voice to get on his nerves even more.

‘Sorry, Lauren, I don’t feel that good.’ What he meant to say was ‘fuck off’. It was a poignant little power negotiation.

‘But I really want to go,’ I pouted.

‘Get one of the guys to take you in the tender.’

‘Great idea! Thanks,’ I chirped brightly. ‘Hope you feel better.’

‘Sure. See you later.’

I found Jan actually swabbing the deck. He was very Scandi like that, always joining in with the dirty work. Still, he looked glad of an excuse to put down his mop.

‘Tris says will you take me snorkelling, please, Jan?’

He stood up slowly, all six foot heaven of him.

‘Snorkelling?’

‘Yes, please. He says to take the tender.’

‘OK. The other guys can manage. I’ll speak to them and get my stuff. Be ready in ten minutes?’

‘Perfect. Thank you.’

*

The spray stung my face as we bounced away from the
Mandarin
, heading round the point of one of the tiny bare islets. Jan steered, I lay back on the cushions and let a hand trail in the frothing water. I was wearing denim cut-offs, a white Fernandez bikini top and a floppy straw hat, bound heavily round the brim with a retro Pucci silk shawl. Jan had swapped his crew kit for knackered khaki Bermudas and a faded navy linen shirt that matched his eyes. I’d fetched a bottle of Vermentino, a corkscrew and a heap of pulsing figs from the galley.

‘Do you like sea urchin?’ Jan called over the noise of the engine.

‘I don’t know.’

He slowed the boat to a putter and began to peer over the side. We glided over cups of white sand, the clarity of the water belying its depth, until we came to a clump of rocks, just protruding from the surface, iridescent with sea lichen in the wash of the waves, gleaming like petrol.

‘Here will do.’ I liked his voice, clipped, precise, the twist of the Norwegian accent. I liked that he spared his words.

‘Open the anchor hatch.’

I crawled, rather ungainly, over the flat sunbathing bed and unsnapped the trap which concealed the anchor. Jan reversed the boat.

‘Throw it when I say. Wait, wait, now.’

I watched the anchor plunge, playing out its chain, as Jan moved the boat away until it held taut.

‘Good. Now you can try a sea urchin.’

He had a battered canvas backpack at his feet, from which he took a mask, a clasp knife and a steel mesh glove like a medieval gauntlet.

‘Put your snorkel on. You can watch. Do you know the difference between the males and the females?’

Oddly, I didn’t.

‘You can only eat the females. They collect little shells, stones, to decorate themselves. They make themselves beautiful, like women.’ He held my gaze for a second too long, then slipped off his shirt and dropped over the side.

I wriggled out of my shorts and joined him. For a moment, the water felt cold after the concentrated heat of the boat. I floated off, bobbing like a starfish, watching as Jan dived, pulling himself down with long strokes. He gripped the base of the rock and, using the knife in the gloved hand, worked away at something fat and black. Then he popped up, placed the thing on the gunnel, inhaled and dived again. I lifted my head to look. The sea urchin was a sinister underwater hedgehog, its spines twitching in the air. Jan retrieved two more, then we climbed out of the water by the short ladder beside the engine.

I opened the wine while Jan used the knife to scrape the spines from the shells overboard.

‘I forgot glasses.’

‘No problem.’ He took the bottle and raised it to his mouth. I watched his throat move as he swallowed.

‘Now, here.’

The cleaned shell was beautiful, hatched in delicate pink and green. Jan worked the knife into the underside, splitting it in two like a mango, showing dark orange flesh edged with black.

‘It’s loose. Take it with your fingers.’

‘Show me.’

He scooped a piece and held it out to me. I opened my mouth and closed my eyes.

‘Good?’

‘Mmmm.’

It was strong, viscous, salty and almost gamey. I took a slug of wine and felt the minerals meld on my tongue. I lay back with the sun on my face and the slick of raw flesh on my lips.

‘More.’

He fed me the rest, then I fed him. Then there was that delicious moment when his face was so close to mine that I could see the salt crystals gleaming on those ridiculous eyelashes. I was wet before he even kissed me. He didn’t hurry, let his tongue find mine, twine, push, twine. Then he sat back, on the seat behind the tiller, and looked at me.