Maestra (3 page)

He started coming in after I had been at the club a month. Thursday was usually the Gstaad’s busiest night, before men up on business went back to the country, but it was pouring outside and there were only two customers in the bar. Magazines and phones were not allowed as soon as the punters appeared, so the girls were listless, popping out to crouch under the awning for cigarettes, awkwardly trying to protect their hair from frizzing in the wet. The bell went and Olly came in. ‘Sit up straight, ladies! It’s your lucky night!’ A few minutes later, one of the grossest men I had ever seen swung a vast belly into the room. He didn’t even attempt a bar stool, but thumped down immediately on the nearest banquette, waving Carlo irritably away until he had removed his tie and mopped his face with a handkerchief. He had that slatternly look which only really extraordinary tailoring can solve, and his tailor had clearly been overwhelmed. His open jacket revealed a taut cream shirt stretched over the gut which rested on his splayed knees, folds of neck swagged over his collar, even his shoes looked overstuffed. He asked for a glass of iced water.

‘Haven’t seen Fatty for a while,’ someone hissed.

The form was for the girls to talk animatedly, with a lot of hair tossing and glances beneath our lashes, looking as though we just happened to be there, unescorted in our smart dresses, until the client made his selection. The fat man was a quick chooser. He nodded to me, the flabby mottled curtains of his cheeks swishing back in a smile. As I crossed the floor I noted the regimental stripe on the discarded tie, the signet ring embedded in the swell of his little finger. Eeew.

‘I’m Lauren,’ I smiled breathily. ‘Would you like me to join you?’

‘James,’ he supplied.

I sat down neatly, legs crossed at the ankle, and looked at him, all twinkling expectance. No talking until they ordered.

‘I suppose you want me to buy you a drink?’ He said it grudgingly, as though he knew how the club worked but still felt it an imposition.

‘Thank you. That would be lovely.’

He didn’t look at the list. ‘What’s the most expensive?’

‘I think –’ I hesitated.

‘Just get on with it.’

‘Well, James, that would be the Cristal 2005. Would you like that?’

‘Get it. I don’t drink.’

I gave the nod to Carlo before he changed his mind. The 2005 was a violent three grand. Three hundred up to me already. Hey, Big Spender.

Carlo carried the bottle over as though it was his first-born son, but James waved him away, uncorked it and dutifully filled the goldfish bowls.

‘Do you like champagne, Lauren?’ he asked.

I allowed myself a wry little smile. ‘Well, it can get a bit monotonous.’

‘Why don’t you give that to your friends and order something you want?’

I liked him for that. He was physically repellent, true, but there was something brave about the fact that he didn’t require me to pretend. I ordered a Hennessey and sipped it slowly, and he told me a little bit about his profession, which was money, of course, and then he heaved himself to his feet and waddled out, leaving £500 in new fifties on the table. The next night, he came back and did exactly the same. Leanne texted me on Wednesday morning to say that he had come to ask for Lauren on Tuesday, and on Thursday he reappeared, a few minutes after opening time. Several of the girls had ‘regulars’, but none so generous, and it gave me a new status amongst them. Slightly to my surprise, there was no jealousy. But, after all, business was business.

4

Once I’d started working at the club, the daily humiliations of my life in the department were thrown into glaring relief. At the Gstaad, there was at least the illusion that I held the cards. I tried to tell myself that it
amused
me that my straight life, my ‘real’ life, separated by just a few London streets from Olly and the girls, was bereft of any value or power. At the club, I felt prized every time I crossed my legs, whereas at my actual job, the one that was supposed to be my career, I was still pretty much a dogsbody. Actually, the Gstaad and the world’s most elitist art store had more in common than it was comfortable to admit.

Working at the House could be disappointing, but I still remembered the first time that I had really
seen
a painting, and that memory still glowed within me. Bronzino’s allegory,
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
, at the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square. I still find the picture soothing, not only for the mannered, mysterious elegance of its composition – playful and innocently erotic, or darkly reminiscent of mortality and death – but because no scholar has so far advanced an accepted theory of what it means. Its beauty lies somewhere within the frustration it provokes.

It was a school trip to London, hot hours in a coach with the smell of sausage rolls and cheese crisps, the popular girls yakking and squabbling in the back seats, our teachers looking strangely vulnerable in unaccustomed casual clothes. We had gawped through the gates of Buckingham Palace, then plodded down The Mall to the gallery in our navy uniform sweatshirts – just pin on the name badge and you’re ready for the call centre. Boys skidded on the parquet floors, girls made loud, coarse remarks at every nude we passed. I tried to wander away alone, wanting to get lost in the seemingly endless rooms of images, when I came across the Bronzino at random.

It was as though I’d tripped and fallen down a hole, a gasping sense of quickly recovered shock, the brain lagging behind the body. There was the goddess, there her boy child, there the mysterious old man standing over them. I did not know then who they were, but I recognised, blindingly, that I had not known lack until I watched those delicate colours glow and twine. And then I knew desire too, the first sense that I knew what I wanted and what I didn’t have. I hated the feeling. I hated that everything I had known suddenly looked ugly to me, and that the source of that feeling, its mysterious pull and lure, was shining at me from this picture.

‘Rashers is perving on that naked woman!’

Leanne and a couple of her cronies had caught up with me.

‘Fucking lezza!’

‘Lezzaaaaaah!’

Their harsh, screeching voices were disturbing the other visitors, heads were turning, my face burned with shame. Leanne’s hair had been an orangish blonde back then, viciously permed and gelled into a peruke on her crown. Like her friends, she wore thick tan foundation and smudged black eyeliner.

‘They really shouldn’t let them in if they can’t behave,’ I heard one voice saying. ‘I know it’s free, but –’

‘I know,’ interrupted another. ‘Little animals.’

They looked at us as though we smelled bad. I wondered if we did, to them. I hated the disdain in those smooth, educated voices. I hated being lumped in with the others. But Leanne had heard them too.

‘You can fuck off an’ all,’ she said aggressively. ‘Or are you fucking lezzas too?’

The two women who had spoken looked, simply, appalled. They did not remonstrate, just walked calmly away into the deeper galleries. My eyes followed them hungrily. I turned to the girls.

‘They might complain. We might get chucked out.’

‘So what? It’s last here anyway. What’s your problem, Rashers?’

I’d already got pretty good at fighting. My mother, when she bothered to notice me at all, was gentle with my blacked eyes and bruises, but mostly I tried to hide the evidence. Even then, she regarded me as a changeling. I could have started in on Leanne right there, yet – maybe it was the picture, maybe the knowledge of the women behind me – I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to demean myself like that, not anymore. So I didn’t make anything of it. I tried to wrap myself in contempt like a fur coat, to show them that they were so far beneath me that they weren’t worth my attention. By the time school was over, I’d made a pretty good job of convincing myself of that. I had saved for two years for my first trip to northern Italy as a teenager, working in a petrol station, sweeping up bleached worms of hair in a beauty salon, slicing my fingers on foil cartons in the Chinese takeaway, dripping blood into the Friday night drunks’ sweet-and-sour pork. I’d provided myself with a gap year in Paris and later a month’s foundation course in Rome.

I had thought things might be different when I got into university. I had never really seen people who looked like that, let alone a place that looked like that. They belonged together, those beings and those buildings; all those generations of effortless entitlement melded honeyed stone and honeyed skin to an architectural perfection in every time-polished detail. I had lovers at college, yes, but if you look the way I look and, frankly, like the things I like, maybe girlfriends won’t ever be your thing. I told myself I didn’t need them, and besides, between the library and my part-time jobs there hadn’t been much time for anything except reading.

I didn’t stick to the books on my course list: along with Gombrich and Bourdieu I read hundreds of novels, scouring them for details of the customs of the strange country of class, of how to speak, the vocabulary that marks out those who belong to the invisible club from those who don’t. I worked endlessly at my languages: French and Italian were the tongues of art. I read
Le Monde
and
Foreign Affairs
,
Country Life
and
Vogue
and
Opéra Magazine
and
Tatler
and polo magazines and
Architectural Digest
and the
Financial Times
. I taught myself about wine, about rare book bindings and old silver: I went to all the free recitals I could, first for duty and then for pleasure; I learned the correct use of the dessert fork and how to imitate the accent on which the sun has never set. I knew better by then than to try to pretend I was something I was not, but I thought if I became a good enough chameleon, no one would ever think to ask.

It wasn’t snobbery that kept me at it. Partly, it was relief at being in an environment where confessing to an interest in anything apart from fucking reality shows wasn’t an invitation to a cracked jaw. Mostly, when I had skived off school, it was to get the bus into town to visit the Picton Reading Room at the Central Library, or the Walker Art Gallery, because those quiet spaces breathed something more to me than the beauties they contained. They were – civilised. And being civilised meant knowing about the right things. However much people pretend that doesn’t matter, it’s true. Disclaiming that is as foolish as thinking that beauty doesn’t matter. And to get amongst the right things, you have to be amongst the people who possess them. Since one also likes to be thorough, knowing the difference between a hereditary and an honorary marquess always comes in handy.

When I first arrived at the auction house, it seemed to have worked pretty well; the edges were smoothed off. I got on well with Frankie, the department secretary, even if she had a voice that sounded like a memsahib ordering her bearers over the plains and friends to whom she actually referred as ‘Pongo’ and ‘Squeak’. Frankie fitted in a way I never could, quite, but at the same time she seemed to be floundering a bit in the brash new tide of money that was slowly seeping into the House. The art world had woken from its genteel slumbers in a billionaire’s playground, where girls like Frankie were slowly becoming extinct. She had once confided to me rather mournfully that she would prefer to live in the country but that her mother thought she had more chance of ‘meeting someone’ with a job in town. Though Frankie was an avid reader of
Grazia
, she never seemed to follow any of the makeover tips – she wore an unironic velvet hairband and her arse looked like a giant tweedy mushroom. Once I had to steer her gently away from a truly disastrous turquoise taffeta ballgown on a sneaky dash to Peter Jones. I didn’t think her mother needed to worry about ordering the engraved invitations anytime soon, but I admired Frankie’s unapologetic style, her magnificent disdain for diets and her perennial optimism that she would some day meet ‘the One’. I really hoped she would – I could see her in a Georgian rectory, dishing out fish pie in front of the Aga to an adoring and wholesome family.

Sometimes we had lunch together, and whilst I couldn’t get enough of her Pony Club childhood, she seemed to like hearing about the (strictly edited) escapades of my own upbringing, too. Frankie was definitely one of the things I liked about my job: the other was Dave, who worked as a porter in the warehouse. Dave was pretty much the only other person at the House whom I felt actually liked me. He had left a leg just inside the Iraqi border in the first Gulf war and got into art documentaries while he was convalescing. He had a fantastic natural eye and a quick mind; his passion was the eighteenth century. He’d told me once that after what he’d seen in the Gulf it was sometimes the only thing that kept him going, the chance to be close to great pictures. You could see the love in the tender way he handled them. I respected the sincerity of his interest, as well as his knowledge, and I’d certainly learned more about pictures from Dave than any of my superiors in the department.

We flirted, of course, the nearest I ever got to water-cooler banter, but I also liked Dave because he was safe. Beneath his occasional saucy joke, he took a rather old-fashioned, paternal interest in me. He’d even sent me a congratulations card when I got promoted. But I knew he was happily married – his wife was always referred to as ‘my missus’ – and to put it bluntly it was relaxing to be around a guy who didn’t want to fuck me. Aside from rococo art, Dave’s other pleasure in life was garish ‘true crime’ paperbacks. Marital cannibalism was a popular trend, with many a disgruntled wife serving her husband as a pâté accompanied by a nicely chilled Chardonnay, and Dave, whose encounters with weaponry had been efficient and gun-shaped, delighted in the Shakespearean ingenuity of their fatal instruments. It was astonishing what you could do with a pair of curling tongs and a penknife if you put your mind to it. We had many a happy double-fag break in the dusty area of the warehouse, analysing the latest trends in gruesome murders, and I wondered sometimes how his interests connected, whether the prettified gods and goddesses who cavorted delicately through the canvases Dave loved were a solace for the violence he had witnessed, or an acknowledgement in their often erotic beauty that the classical world was as brutal and cruel as anything he had witnessed in the desert. If I was impressed by Dave’s self-taught expertise, he was sometimes embarrassingly respectful of my own specialist status.