The Exchange (16 page)

The thought made me sad, for a moment, but that evaporated as I came, my nails digging into the fat leather of the armchair with the sheer intensity of it, my eyes fixed on the screen where Konrad too was climaxing. Only he wasn’t looking at me, I realised – his head back, eyes closed, he was in a swoon, moans escaping from his lips as his come pumped out, sliding through his fingers and oozing out onto his six-pack belly.

There was silence as we sat up and collected ourselves. Then Konrad stretched out, reaching for his bathrobe, and ran his fingers through his hair.

‘Mmmm, that was good,’ he said, then he winked at me. ‘Did you call for anything particular?’ he said with a chortle.

‘Ha ha,’ I retorted, and then I thought it was probably best to wind up the call anyway, before he did remember to ask me about my evening on Park Lane. I still hadn’t decided what to tell him. Part of me felt that he really didn’t need to know what I had got up to in the penthouse and that I shouldn’t risk what we had together for the sake of honesty. Another part thought that he wouldn’t actually mind, and I wasn’t sure that I liked that idea. And what if he actually found it a turn-on?

Of course, Konrad had to live with the knowledge of what I did for a living, which was essentially to take most of my clothes off for the gratification of strangers. But he’d known I did that when we met, and had he had any issues with it, I could justifiably have pointed out that he lived by his body too, and indeed often posed with few clothes on. One of the reasons he was currently so loaded was that he’d scored a big ad for a designer underwear campaign, posing alongside one of the world’s most famous supermodels.

But it just wasn’t an issue. We’d met in a nightclub just off the Champs-Élysées, when I was dancing away on a podium, in a white tutu and silver leotard, revelling in all the attention that was being paid to me. You’d have thought the last thing I wanted after strutting my stuff on stage was to show myself off some more, but it seemed I had an insatiable appetite for showing off.

Konrad was in the crowd and I kept seeing him glance up at me. His attention counted for that of a hundred others. I knew who he was from the magazines and I was flattered that he had noticed me.

He was out with a supermodel that night, and afterwards I found out that they’d been sleeping together for a while. Had I known, things might not have happened the way they did. Not that I had any moral scruples – if someone wants you, it’s their choice if they cheat on an existing partner. It’s not as if I forced other people’s boyfriends to sleep with me.

But Deedee Knowles was breathtakingly gorgeous in every way, whereas I was good-looking in a kooky way. She was perfect, and I was interesting. For Konrad, however, it was a no-brainer. When I went off to the toilets, I guessed rightly that he was following me and, when I came out, I wasn’t surprised to find him waiting in the corridor for me. We left without saying goodbye to the people we were with.

That first crazy night set the scene for everything that was to follow. It was a bit like Gainsbourg and Birkin, who got together by taking off from the film set they met on and launching themselves into the Paris night, touring the clubs until dawn. Only unlike Gainsbourg, Konrad wasn’t ugly. And unlike Gainsbourg, Konrad didn’t pass out drunk.

We danced all night, and it was partly a competition and partly a mating ritual. We both knew what was going to happen and I think we both wanted to draw it out, build up the anticipation until we couldn’t bear it any more and couldn’t keep our hands off each other a moment longer.

At dawn we stumbled into my apartment, and there was the urgency and the sense of high drama as Konrad threw me down onto my big double bed and tore my clothes off. Though he must have seen bodies technically better than mine, for several minutes he just feasted his eyes on me. Then he went down on me, one hand on each of my breasts, and it was pure delight.

When he entered me, it felt like something wonderful had begun for me, and I let myself be carried along on that wave until I felt him start to buck and moan. I squeezed my internal muscles and pushed up to meet him, but he was lost to his own pleasure and didn’t seem willing to help me share it. Not that one could ever count on coming at the same time, of course, especially the first few times with somebody. But all that night we’d felt so close, mentally, like two soul mates who had found each other at last, that I felt an urgency to climax with him.

He came with a yell and I didn’t come at all. Watching him fall into an exhausted sleep, I tried not to care. There’d be next time, I said to myself. There’d be lots of times. I was both right and wrong.

***

Tatiana and Alice had been rifling through my clothes on Rachel’s rail as I got changed. I could tell they found my style bizarre and amusing, and part of me wanted to tell them to just piss off.

I’m not some toy, some doll for you to play with and then cast off, when you’ve had enough of me
, I wanted to yell at them. But I ignored them, focusing on tonging my hair into loose ringlets around my face, trying to channel Sara Stockbridge. Vivienne Westwood’s favourite model was my style icon; one of my most prized possessions was a late 1980s ad Stockbridge and Westwood did for Courtaulds Tricel, with the model on tiptoe in a burgundy dress with a low-cut bodice top and a flounced mini-skirt, and black shoes with wooden platform bases and satin ankle ties that wound all the way up to her knees. Another constant stylistic reference point was Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s
Marie Antoinette
, with a bit more cleavage. In fact, before I’d left Paris I’d been thinking of devising a new act featuring my burlesque version of the French queen.

Rouging my cheeks and applying a fresh layer of lipstick, I turned to Tatiana and Alice. The latter was holding up one of my basques and the other was looking at her mock coyly. I wondered what these faux lesbians had in store for me that evening. But then I told myself it didn’t really matter what they planned. Tonight I would remain firmly in control. I’d drink little and I’d maintain the upper hand. I’d use them as a way of getting out and of seeing parts of London I might not have easy access to, but that was all.

We left the flat in the direction of Park Lane, which made me uneasy. I didn’t want to return to the scene of the crime of a few evenings before. Or rather I did, but not in the company of the criminals themselves. I thought of the barman at The Hilton and hoped we might go there. Who knows? – if he was as interested in me as I was in him, I might be able to go off with him and ditch these witches.

But we didn’t head for The Hilton, or, thankfully, the penthouse where I’d allowed myself to get so carried away. We went to the northern end of the long road, just by Marble Arch, where we headed into the bar of the boutique hotel 140 Park Lane for champagne cocktails. There, perched on a bar-stool, I cringed as Tatiana and Alice flirted with the male and female waiting staff and decided that it was going to be a long evening, especially if I wasn’t going to drink.

But me being me, and they being them, my resolution didn’t last long. Once I’d cottoned on that they aimed to drink their way down Park Lane, stopping at every hotel bar en route, I perked up. It was my lifelong dream to even be here at all, never mind with two rich bitches who wouldn’t even hear of me paying my way. And we were sure to meet at least a few interesting people in the course of the evening. Some of them would be sufficiently interesting that I’d be inspired to make a break for it and lose Tatiana and Alice. In the meantime, and on the promise of another drink at The Hilton bar towards the end of our tour, I was happy to go with the flow.

Luckily, the women didn’t seem to want me to talk to them. I’d expected a barrage of questions about myself and my life in Paris, but they didn’t appear that interested in me as an actual person with a life beyond the scope of their own existences, and I was grateful for that. All they really seemed to want to do was lech after the staff at each hotel that we visited, giggle, and spend their husbands’ money at an obscene rate.

Next up was Grosvenor House, now owned by the same multi-national chain as 140 Park Lane but with a much more traditional ambiance. As a Park Lane geek, I also knew some of its interesting history: that, for instance, it opened as a hotel in the 1920s and was the first in London to have a bathroom in every bedroom; that it once had an ice-rink where the Queen learnt to skate as a girl; that in 1943 it served as the world’s largest US officers’ mess; and that in the 60s the Beatles once played there. I relayed all these facts to Tatiana and Alice as we supped another cocktail in its Bourbon Bar, but beyond surprise that a Parisian should know more about an historical hotel in their city than they did, they showed very little interest in this too.

We moved on to The Dorchester, which I’d been particularly looking forward too. Though this time I kept my nerdy facts to myself, I knew that this hotel opened just two years after its close neighbour Grosvenor House and that it was here that Prince Philip hosted his stag night. Other famous guests and visitors over the decades had included Marlene Dietrich, Louis Armstrong, Maria Callas and Brigitte Bardot. To Liz Taylor it became virtually a second home from her days as a child star – indeed, she’d even had a pink marble bathroom installed in one of the suites, and she and her husband Richard Burton were rumoured to have carved ‘RB xxx ET’ into the marble one night. They’d also spent one of their honeymoons in the hotel. Sylvester Stallone had married here, while Brad Pitt was rumoured to have split from Jennifer Aniston at the hotel.

Walking past the hotel’s famous fairy-lit tree towards the uniformed doormen, I felt my heart flutter in anticipation. This, for me, was what Park Lane was all about – glamour, history and romance. Though I did get turned on by sleaze and darkness, I thought that sometimes I was a romantic at heart. Perhaps I just needed the right man to bring that side of me to the fore? Or maybe it was a case of growing up. It struck me that I was twenty-two years of age but had been living much as a teenager.

Like The Grosvenor, The Dorchester has more than one bar, but The Bar at The Dorchester is the best of them, with rich colours – black, browns and aubergine – combined with lacquered mahogany, mirrored glass and velvet. We headed for the long curved bar and I studied the cocktail menu in an attempt to distract myself from the by-now extremely tedious flirtations that the others were engaging in. They were like schoolgirls, I thought. Elsewhere, it might have been funny. Here, in this opulent setting, it was tragic.

I was pleased to see that, in celebration of its eightieth birthday, The Bar had reintroduced an original 1930s cocktail, ‘Dorchester of London’, which, my inner hotel geek noted, had been created by the world-famous bartender Harry Craddock. After ordering one, I found a seat and waited for Tatiana and Alice to join me from the bar. When the concoction was placed in front of me on a coaster, I picked it up carefully and inhaled its heady scent. The Dorchester’s interpretation of Forbidden Fruit, a liqueur the recipe for which disappeared in the 1950s, was an intoxicating blend of cognac, pomelo fruit, citrus and honey. I took a sip. Though the honey was predominant in the smell, the flavour was more like liquorice and grapefruit combined, and it had a powerful kick to it.

The others, meanwhile, had a Vesper martini and a Brooklyn. This was our third cocktail, but we were taking our time. By now I was managing to virtually screen out Tatiana and Alice from my consciousness, so unless they were actually talking to me or paying me direct attention, I was able to just sit and take in the surroundings and the fascinating mix of people.

I could have stayed in The Dorchester all night, getting drunk on the glamour and the atmosphere as well as the alcohol. But the rule was ‘one bar, one drink’, so soon it was time to move on.

We carried on down the road, bobbing into the new hotel whose opening I’d attended with Tatiana and Morgan, and then heading to another recent addition to the scene, 45 Park Lane, where I enjoyed a Show Me Love with vodka, Saint Germain, lychee juice and lime, lining my stomach with some of the mini Kobe sliders and tempura onion rings that Tatiana ordered, telling us that we needed to ‘line our stomachs’. For the first time that evening, I thought she was probably right.

We tripped down the street, and even I was giggling at nothing now. Perhaps it was the excitement of seeing the horny barman at The Hilton again, but I was in for a disappointment: he wasn’t working that night. Trying not to feel too deflated, I resolved to come back another time.

It was 11 p.m. and we were very drunk when we left Windows at The Hilton and wobbled a few doors down to the Met Bar at The Metropolitan. I was still lucid enough to know that it really was time to call a halt to proceedings, that we were going too far and would regret it, but I also knew that Tatiana and Alice wouldn’t hear of dropping out of our ‘challenge’ early. So I hung on in there. After this there were only two bars to go, and then I would jump into a cab and get myself home to bed, whatever their intentions. For once in my life, I’d have an early night. I promised myself I’d be home by 1 a.m.

The Met was no longer in its heyday as a celebrity magnet, but newly refurbished it was busy and buzzing. Intent on not getting too much drunker, I insisted on ordering some more food – some kedgeree cakes and crab cakes. The potato in each would help me soak up the booze – which this time took the form of a Park Lane cocktail of elderberry purée, cloudy apple juice and gin, served with elderberry and gin caviar on an apple, vanilla and cardamom foam. It was lush. My mood brightened again. If only, I thought, Konrad was here to enjoy this with me. Or any of my Paris crowd. We’d burn the place up. Still, just being here was in many ways enough, at least for the time being.

The potent alcohol certainly left me feeling too drunk and disorderly for the Four Seasons, which had also been newly refurbished and now housed a clubby Italian bar, Amaranto, with smouldering red velvet chairs and sumptuously padded walls. There was something provocative and even a little devilish about it, something of the bordello. I felt at home and, as at The Dorchester, could have stayed there all night.