The Right Man

For
George and Lesley

ONE

OH DEAR, I’M
not yet forty, and I seem to have gone straight from my adolescence
into my mid-life crisis without a pause for the prime of my
life.
There’s
never been a bit where I felt, if not exactly in control, then at least at
ease. The last two thousand years of much-publicised male supremacy are meant,
surely, to have rubbed off on me somewhere along the way. Surely I should be
basking even. But it hasn’t felt like that at all. Blimey dimey no. Even now, I
am aware how difficult it is for me to admit that there are problems. I am
meant to solve problems, not bleed them on to a page.

People
always say, ‘You must have known. Some part of you, inside, must have known.’ I
contest this. Why must I have known? I did not know. Maybe all the signs were
there but I did not go looking for them, maybe I even ignored them. I hate
being undermined by those who talk of ‘knowing somewhere inside yourself, as if
it was Muggins’s fault not to have been more introspective, more self-doubting,
more bloody Freudian. Accidents happen. You walk in front of a bus — maybe your
mind is on other things — you don’t know somewhere-deep-inside that it’s going
to accelerate and break your pelvis. Sometimes it just isn’t possible to tell
whether to feel extraordinarily buoyant, or the other thing. Especially in
this business. I didn’t think about it. That I accept. I just didn’t think.
Actresses are notoriously promiscuous. Of all people, I should have known that,
of course. Liz was not happy, I knew that, and I had redoubled my efforts to
make her life more fulfilling. I’d tried to spend more time at home. To switch
off work. But our special mornings set aside for romance had been a disaster —
difficult when you’ve both been up sharing the feeds — and of course even with
all the phones turned down, you can still hear the answer-phone click. But Liz
had gone off me sexually well before Grace was born. She no longer bothered to
go through the motions, and flinched like a scalded mongoose if I touched her.
And when I tried to put my arm around her she would say, ‘I’m not your puppy,
you know.’ The underwear I bought her after the birth went down like a serrated
steak knife. I was doing my best to change but these days it seemed I couldn’t
do anything right.

I just
put it down to what she told me to put it down to: that she was worried about
getting pregnant, that she was pregnant, that she was breast-feeding, that it
had been too late at night, that it had been too early, that it had been too
quick for her, that it had been too slow. When we did make love, she used to
bark instructions at me, up a bit, down a bit, harder, softer, don’t stop,
stop. She chinned me once with her knee, when trying to find a suitable position
in a small hotel bed. She’d laughed then and I’d had to go to the doctor with a
split lip. After a couple of years of it, I have to admit, I had turned into a
bit of a Freddie Fumble and could have won a gold at the Olympics if they had a
premature ejaculation event. But I still don’t see how I could have actually
known.

‘Hello.
You don’t know me. My name’s Sara Henderson. I’m Bob’s wife.’ The voice had a
husky waver to it, with the faintest hint of a European accent. Sara was
pronounced with a long ‘aa’. As soon as I was sure I’d made the connection, I
transferred from the ‘announce’ speaker to line 3, my personal one, cutting out
all the warring sounds from the busy office, and Joan, who had taken the call
for me, returned her attention to others.

Bob Henderson,
Bob Henderson. The slight pause that followed allowed me to run through the two
hundred or so names in the immediate-recall part of my brain. Nothing. Either
Bob Henderson was not directly connected to me, my clients or any public
broadcasting or independent production companies, or my memory was indeed
beginning to hit overload. Premature dementia how do you do.

‘Oh,
Mrs Henderson. Yes,’ I said with a smile in my voice. This is where I live, in
the one-on-one world between mouth and earpiece. This is where my waking hours
are spent. ‘What’s this in connection with?’ I didn’t want to let her know that
I hadn’t a wit-not-wot who she or her husband were, in case I should have
known. It worried me that nowadays, Naomi — the Ketts half of Mullin and Ketts
— was right; I was beginning to lose my edge.

I
pushed up ‘Henderson R.’ on my Psion.

‘I
would like to talk to you, Mr Mullin. I’m sorry to ring you at work like this.’

‘That’s
all righty. It’s what I’m here for.’

The
only thing to come up was Henderson and Giggs, a company of solicitors who had
represented the Elephant film studios in that breach of copyright case with
Carlton TV two years ago. Nothing really to do with me, I don’t even know why I
had them there.

‘It’s
about Bob and Elizabeth.’

Elizabeth
Heyton. One of my lesser actress clients was a few names down the list on my
Psion. She’d done a fair amount of voice-work, some of it must have been for
Elephant; my mind was making wild connections. Had Elizabeth Heyton been
uncharacteristically inebriated in a dubbing session and wrecked the joint?

‘Could
we perhaps meet for a cup of coffee or something? I can’t go into all this on
the phone. I’m round the corner from your office at the moment actually. I’m
sorry,’ the Saara woman purred.

In the
main office, Naomi and Tilda, our trainee, had the champagne out early —
celebrating some minor revenge they’d wreaked on the BBC. I declined to join
them for a plastic beakerful, put on my coat and went out into the raging
cacophony of the Soho day. Like an unbearable unstructured concrete jazz piece
with an intrusive brass section. I’m very sensitive to noise.

It was
surprisingly warm, with a breeze. The outside world disappears when at work in Meard
Street, suddenly to hit you in the face on descending into Soho. London was
gearing up early for the tourist influx. Up in the control tower of Mullin and Ketts
one might as well be on the moon or in an arctic shelter for all one is aware
of the seasons, or the natural world. When it’s cold, we all say it’s cold and
turn up the heating. When it’s hot, we curse and open the windows. It’s not a
frightfully modern building and so doesn’t possess air-conditioning, which is
just as well as far as I’m concerned; the constant sound of humming gets on my
nerves.

I
suppose I love Soho, but more from a sort of protracted osmosis than any actual
passion. I’ve been squeezing a living out of it for more than a decade now.
Tucked up behind Shaftesbury Avenue, its narrow buildings — some of them like
ours at Meard Street dating back to the eighteenth century — heaped on top of
each other in a jumble of opposites. Old Soho ironmongers and delicatessens are
the off-beats to a rhythm of changing restaurant fronts. The gay and street-bar
scene co-exists with traditional prostitution and strip-joint businesses. Below
grimy plastic signs saying ‘Model’ open doors lead to uneven narrow staircases.
Outside skin-flick houses, bored and over-made-up women say ‘Live girls, sir’
to the street in general. It would be no place to bring up a child.

Patisserie
Valerie was crowded as usual and I had to squeeze in between two pony-tailed ‘indie’
execs to get one seat and hold another. In here the sharp edges of the hubbub
were dampened by the cakes and bread on the shelves which lined the walls. I
scanned all the faces of women on their own for a possible Sara Henderson. No
one reacted particularly. I ordered a coffee.

An
expensive- and theatrical-looking woman found the door and after peering
through the window, came in and stood anxiously by the crowded counter, looking
for someone inside. For me. She was wearing unnecessary dark glasses and had on
a considerable amount of jewellery. I waited a couple of seconds, taking her
in, before lifting my hand to draw her attention. She turned her gaze rather dramatically
in my direction and started shaking her head. Puzzled, I stood up and squeezed
back past the pony-tails.

‘Mr
Mullin? We can’t talk here, it’s far too public,’ she said and plucked at my
sleeve. She had too much lipstick on and little deposits of it had clustered at
the corners of her mouth. There was an enveloping scent as well.

‘Well,
I … Let’s go somewhere else then,’ I said. And without thinking, held the
door for her. She seemed to expect it.

If this
woman hadn’t been, or at some point aspired to be, an actress, I would have
eaten my Filofax.

‘Where
will you take me?’ she whispered, like a slave girl in a Spartacus movie, as if
it was a foregone conclusion that I wanted to ravish her.

We were
heading towards the Groucho and the Soho House but somehow I didn’t fancy
taking this unknown Bette Davis figure among the biz-folk. Who knows how
embarrassing she might turn out to be?

I
turned into the first sandwich bar we came across and sat her down in the back,
away from the window, on a little black wire chair.

‘Is she
very beautiful, your Elizabeth? Tell me. Do you love her a lot?’

‘Listen.
Mrs Henderson. You’re going to have to go previous a bit with this. I really
don’t actually know who you are, or what I’m doing here.’

‘I am
Sara.’ Again, with the long Russian-sounding ‘aa’.

‘Well,
I’m Guy. How do you do?’

‘You
have a child, Guy?’

‘Yes,
we have a child, Grace, but …’

‘This
is very difficult for me,’ she said and went quiet as my coffee and her mineral
water arrived.

We sat
in our own pool of silence for a few seconds in the middle of the shouting
sprawl, during which she looked at me all the time, and then she picked up her
tiny black designer handbag and, with unsteady hands, picked out a tissue and a
photograph.

She
dabbed at her nose with the tissue. Her nails were perfect and painted. She
passed me the photograph, putting the tissue back in her bag, which she left
open on her lap.

The
photograph was of three rather ugly boys in white shirts with matching tartan
ties, aged probably between eight and eleven. It wasn’t a relaxed home pic but
a formal studio job, with the boys lined up in size order, on a bench. Their
faces professionally angled in three-quarter profile, their hair neatly parted.
I nodded and handed it back to her. It went into the bag with a snap.

‘I don’t
like to do this,’ she said, ‘but these are my boys.’

Momentarily,
I considered taking out the photo of Grace, standing with no knickers in a
bucket in the garden, which lives in my wallet. But it seemed inappropriate.

‘He has
a family from before as well,’ she said. ‘He has done this before.’

She had
taken out a ten-pound note and put it on the table under her glass. She rose.

‘Forgive
me,’ she said. I stood and sat again. At the door of the sandwich bar she gave
me a long, intense look, the meaning of which was obscure and then turned away
swiftly and left. Perfect timing had we been in a black-and-white 1930s movie;
somewhat camp for Soho in 1998.

I sat
finishing my coffee. I took out the photo of Grace in the bucket and put the tenner
in my wallet. I paid with change from my pocket and walked back towards Mullin
and Ketts.

Without
really thinking, I walked past our door and all the way up Frith Street to Soho
Square. I walked around Soho Square. I walked into Soho Square and sat on a
bench, just across from three cider drinkers. One of them started to approach
me so I left Soho Square and walked north.

The
entertainment business fizzles out somewhere beyond Great Titchfield Street,
although I did have to smile hello at a video editor I know, and at Johnnie
Starkey, an elderly agent, who must have been on his way back to Golden Square
after a Greek lunch.