The Devil Rides Out (24 page)
Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
‘Not until he’s finished polishing my boots,’ Himmler roared, adding something in German which made them all laugh. I mumbled something about getting more drinks and fled to the kitchen to have a drink and a fag while I assessed the situation. The money was good and I was only required to stay for two hours – obviously things spiced up as the evening progressed and they didn’t want me around to
witness them, which suited me just fine. I could only guess at the history that spawned this peculiar reunion and the motives behind it, and the sight of two pensioners, one dressed in the uniform of the concentration camp and the other in full Gestapo drag, indulging in an act of sado-masochism on the dining room floor made me feel more than a little uneasy. However, it had taken two buses to get here and I was buggered if I was leaving without my money.
Judging by the number of times the front door bell had rung the party must be hotting up, and fortified by a couple of glasses of champagne I made my way back upstairs with a tray laden with drinks. If you ignored the fact that a lot of the male guests were dressed like extras from the History Channel’s
Hitler in Colour
and that a woman was bent across the knee of an SS officer having her bare buttocks repeatedly whacked with a riding crop to a chorus of cheers from enthusiastic onlookers, I could’ve been passing the drinks around at any other gathering in a wealthy north London house amongst a group of elderly guests enjoying an aperitif before dinner and bridge.
As I washed glasses in the kitchen I mulled over the antics above. If the Adelmans were Jewish, and I knew they were by the presence of a mezuzah on the front door frame, and assuming there was a possibility they might at some time have been prisoners in a concentration camp, why would they want to revisit the horrors of the past? If they had experienced the nightmare of Belsen or Dachau, how could they now be making polite small talk in their dining room with a group of people who quite possibly might have been their captors? The notion was disturbing to say the least and not something I wished to dwell on. ‘What they want to get up to is their own business,’ I told myself, knocking back another glass of champagne quickly as Mr Adelman came down the stairs
with my wages. ‘Off you go now,’ he said, pushing fifty quid and a bottle of wine into my hand. ‘You’ve been marvellous.’ Fifty quid for two hours’ work! Jesus, at these prices I didn’t care if they started experimenting on each other on the dining room table. Letting myself out, I staggered down the drive, slightly squiffy, in search of a cab.
Mr Adelman rang the agency the next day and sang my praises, prompting Pat to send me on more catering jobs. Mrs So-and-So of Chelsea Park Gardens would recommend me to her friend in Overton Square who would then enthuse over the telephone to her friend in Eaton Place and pretty soon I’d built up a list of regular clients. I’d even cook if required, thanks to a former client in Holland Park who taught me how to prepare and serve a three-course meal. She was a smart American who quickly realized just how inept I was around a kitchen and dining room, and instead of getting rid of me took me in hand, teaching me how to wait at table and how to rustle up with comparative ease a succulent roast leg of lamb, a simple New York cheesecake and, as a starter, smoked haddock and spinach soufflé, meticulously timing the cooking of this unpredictable dish with the seating of the dinner guests to ensure that it would arrive at the table in all its inflated glory and not in a state of wizened collapse. Thanks to word of mouth again I was kept pretty busy in the neighbourhoods of Knightsbridge and Chelsea, serving up the same menu of soufflé, lamb and cheesecake to each respective client and their guests. Gene Wilder was at one dinner party. He was an affable fellah who didn’t seem to mind in the least when my slightly runny cheesecake slid off the serving spoon and, missing his plate, bounced off the table and on to his lap. ‘Jeez, Paul, and here’s me thinking you were a class act,’ was his only comment.
It was at a small cocktail party in St John’s Wood that I met Amy, a strikingly beautiful young woman who told me that she worked as an escort for an exclusive agency off Park
Lane, as indeed did all the other female guests at the party. I’d sort of guessed that they were on the bash, sensing that the incentive driving these beauties to act as if their corpulent Saudi Arabian companions were the most fascinating men on earth could only have been monetary.
‘Do you have a fairly decent suit?’ Amy asked me in the kitchen as I dragged more bottles of champagne out of the fridge to satisfy a never-ending thirst for booze brought on by the absence of the prohibitive laws of the gentlemen’s own country. ‘You see, sometimes we get a lot of hassle from doormen and security in certain hotels,’ she said, lighting an ultra-slim cigarette. ‘They are under the misapprehension that just because we are unaccompanied we must obviously be prostitutes.’ She smiled slyly and winked, responding to my quizzical look by adding, ‘I’m not a prostitute, I’m an escort. Prostitutes come down from the north on cheap day returns and give five-pound blow jobs behind King’s Cross Station. I escort wealthy and powerful men to fabulous restaurants and night clubs and if they choose to repay my attentiveness with a gift of money or a nice piece of jewellery, well, it would be bad manners to refuse.’
‘Yeah, but you’re still flogging the same thing when all’s said and done.’
‘Different shop front, darling, and a more select clientele. Do I get the impression that you disapprove?’
A line of a song sprang to mind – ‘Is it wrong if a girl takes pay for something she would do anyway?’ – and I sang it to her to show I was far from disapproving.
‘Look, love,’ she laughed, sitting on the edge of the table, making herself comfy with a drink and her fag. ‘This time last year I was living – no, barely existing – in a flat in Camberwell that the council were threatening to evict me
from because I couldn’t afford to pay the rent. My pig of a husband had walked out on me leaving me on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood and up to my ears in debt with two little boys to support.’ Swigging her champagne back defiantly she slammed her glass down on the table and shuddered violently for a moment, whether from the shock of slugging back the champagne so speedily or from the memory of life back in Camberwell I could only guess.
‘Look at me now,’ she said, waving her empty glass at me for a top-up. ‘Mine isn’t a sad story. I live in a beautiful little house in Barnes, my two boys are being educated at one of the best schools in the country and I have a wardrobe of designer clothes – a mink coat for Christ’s sake! – and, for the first time in my life, money in the bank, and lots of it. Let my detractors look down on me and call me a common prostitute. I prefer to see myself as a self-employed, highly successful businesswoman.’
She raised her glass, saluting the air before draining it in one, only this time without the shudder. So it must have been the Camberwell memory then that had caused it, I thought as I tried to visualize this sophisticated beauty standing in a mean little kitchen spreading the last thin scrape from a tub of margarine on to a slice of cheap white bread, failing to hold back tears of frustration at finding herself in hopeless circumstances that rendered her unable to provide a decent meal for her kids. I admired her refusal to accept her lot. Instead of spending her days in a Valium-induced stupor watching daytime telly and getting plastered on supermarket lager she’d chosen instead an enterprise that had turned out to be not only highly profitable but one that obviously suited her.
‘What is marriage for some women anyway?’ she asked defensively. ‘Nothing more than a way of being kept in return
for services of a sexual and domestic nature. Not for me, darling, not any more.’
I had to disagree with her on this, recalling my own parents’ long and happy marriage.
‘Then your parents were very lucky,’ she sighed. ‘Unfortunately for me I married a wife-beating drunk. Now let’s get back to business. It’s easier for a working girl to get into a hotel if she has a male companion with her, so how do fancy making yourself available to walk a few girls in? You’ll make lots of money.’
‘Wouldn’t that make me a pimp?’ I asked her in all honesty.
She laughed so hard she spilled her drink. ‘Heavens no. Pimps are the scum of the earth. They’re violent parasites who force their women on to the streets to work and then take all their earnings off them, frequently beating them up if they fail to bring home the bacon. No, you’ll be a walker, an escort’s escort if you like. Beats washing glasses and serving drinks. It’s only a suggestion, but do think about it.’
I didn’t need to think about it and wrote down my phone number for her. Wait till I get home and tell Vera about this.
O
N DAYS WHEN NEITHER OF US HAD ANYTHING TO DO AND
not much money to do it with Vera and I would play games to amuse ourselves. Sometimes we’d be the women who help out at funerals, neighbours usually, the type who volunteer to make the tea and sandwiches for the recently bereaved on their return from burying their loved one, a pair of busybodies relishing their roles as indispensable citizens, waiting anxiously behind the net curtains for the funeral cars to return, the first glimpse of a chrome headlamp sending them hurtling into the kitchen to ‘get that kettle on’ or rushing to ‘take those damp tea towels off the sarnies’ in the parlour.
Vera and I would act out extremely lengthy and complicated scenes with the intensity and concentration of children at play, pottering anxiously about preparing for our pretend party of funeral-goers to return, re-enacting the rituals we’d witnessed when we were growing up that went on between ‘the ladies who made the tea’. We’d peer out of the window waiting for the imaginary mourners to pull up in imaginary Co-op funeral cars, rushing to put the kettle on and standing
in wait at the open door to offer a solicitous arm for the grieving widow to lean on, greeting her with a sympathetic ‘Are you all right, girl? Get yourself sat down and I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea and a little drop of whisky’, enquiring further of the poor woman if she thought she would be able to ‘get a little boiled ham sarnie down her’? It was all very funny and extremely well observed. Mike Leigh would’ve loved us, and no doubt if such behaviour were carried out in a theatre workshop or comedy club it might be considered ‘improv’. We simply thought of it as ‘playing’, two daft young queens indulging themselves with a camp couple of hours’ worth of re-enacting a Liverpool working-class funeral seen through the eyes of two old women.
Another game we enjoyed was factories. Based on Vera’s extensive knowledge of factory life gleaned from his time employed as a machinist making pillow cases we’d rearrange the front room, putting two tables and chairs one in front of the other with Alma and Anne’s sewing machines on them. Winding some of Angela’s scarves round our heads we became factory girls, competing with the noise of the sewing machines and a transistor radio, blaring away on top of the sideboard as a touch of authenticity, to have a conversation. Vera once worked for a firm but fair supervisor called Joyce Forshaw, whom we resurrected to keep us in check. The imaginary Joyce would examine our work and tell us when to go for our break, which we’d spend in the kitchen, putting the factory to rights over a sausage roll and a mug of tea, discussing nonsense such as the finer details of Vera’s daughter’s forthcoming nuptials and whom we considered the prime suspect in the theft of the Christmas Club money.