The Right Man (14 page)

As I
reached the taxi rank, a more familiar feeling surfaced; resentment and anger
at Liz. Just because she felt disempowered, it didn’t naturally follow that I
was empowered, did it? Didn’t mean that I was doing the disempowering, did it?
That I was some irritatingly confident father figure, basking, wallowing even,
in my authority? An easy life inherited through gender.

There’s
room for two people to feel they have no choices, you know. I would love not to
have to work so bloody hard, etc., et bloody cetera. But I put it out of my
mind. I wouldn’t want to be accused of being a misogynist, as well as all my
other well-recorded faults. I suppose I have trouble buying the idea of a
misogynist conspiracy. Maybe that’s because I’ve never had the time to pursue a
competitive sport, but shouldn’t a conspiracy have meetings and special signs?
And aprons?

‘Largo factotem
della citta largoooo.’ The cab driver was a very large man who barely fitted
behind the wheel. ‘Tra la la la la la la la laaaa.’ He was in the chorus of the
taxi drivers’ choir and had played several leading roles in his local operatic
society, including Nankipoo from
The Mikado
and Rossini’s Figaro, the
opening aria of which he was now giving me a rendition. I wish I hadn’t told
him I was an agent. Or maybe this was a treat he bestowed on all passengers. He
offered a running translation alongside the sung Italian version.

‘Basically,
he’s saying like he’s a pimp and a gigolo and everyone in Seville comes to him
if they want a bit of an erotic ding-dong, a bit of how’s-yer-father, right? He
hears all the gossip while he’s doing his haircutting and that, and he passes
bits of it on, and his name is Figaro tra la la la la la la la la la la.’ He
burst into baritone again: ‘V’e la risorsa, poi del mettiere, colla donnetta, col
cavaliere!’ His Italian accent wasn’t bad. ‘Oh yeah, ‘cos they were all at it,
you know, them sixteenth-century Italians. Donnetta, that’s like a young
dolly-bird, and cavaliere, that’s some feller who wants to stomp her one from
behind. Personally I think I was wrong for the part, being a big fellow, even
though as you must know Figaro is usually played by a big fellow. Oh yeah, I
had to stick on the old beard and everything, really tickles. But I think it’d
be better if he was played by a little feller, you know, he’s a sort of camp
sort of hairdresser sort of a bloke. Someone like Peter Stringfellow. But he
couldn’t reach the notes, you see.’ He started to sing again. ‘Stringfellooo, Stringfellooo,
Stringfellostringfellostringfellostringfelloooo.’

After
the habitual exhortation to cheer up it might never happen, I paid the fare,
declining to tip but taking his phone number on a cab card which he pressed on
me. I binned it when he was round the corner.

‘Am I
blonde with big tits?’

‘Well,
you did bleach your hair that time when you got back from Ibiza, and I would
have said your breasts were definitely of the more—than—adequate type.

‘Guy!
Look at me! Am I blonde with big tits?’

‘No.’

‘Then
why are you trying to fuck me?’

The
news of Jeremy’s new career plans had not impressed Naomi Ketts.

‘The
man — if we can call him that any more — has less acting talent than a mollusc,
and he couldn’t write or direct his way into or out of a paper bag. He’s a
frigging game-show host, for frig’s sake, who’s poking the totty! Your client,
Guy. Your problem.’ End of conversation.

We had
these kind of days every now and then at M and K. But I suspect Naomi’s
somewhat hostile and OTT outburst had more to do with her irritation at having
to face my shaving things by our coffee sink than with any of Planter’s
high-flown new ambitions.

It was
a few days after Birmingham, and my little sojourn in Meard Street looked like
turning into a full-scale siege. By the end of the week, I could no longer
pretend that my overnights were for business purposes, and, except for Tania,
the women respected my reticence in not coming forth with any explanations. If
things were bad at home, that too was my problem. Much as they may have
secretly disliked Liz, she was the woman after all, and in any confessional
they would take her side. Tania, on the other hand, pestered me with love and
advice. She left me the phone number of a cranial osteopath by whom she swore,
and tried to convince me that I should cut out dairy products.

On
Friday after work I returned home to Fulham to see parked on the driveway by
our front sitting room window a very recent model Porsche with the cherished
number plate BH 123. All silver and shiny and clean and glistening in the
early-evening light. Sitting there like an overfed shark. No rubbish on the
floor of this car. No sweet wrappers, no kids’ toys. No ice-cream stain on the
baby car-seat. No baby car-seat. Porsche, the car designer lauded and
subsidised by Adolf Hitler. Porsche. Sitting there on my front drive under the
large elm growing out of my front fence, with a humourless and complacent smile
on its radiator grille, while Grace slept inside the house.

Some
time during the next week, while Liz was out, I went home and packed a proper
load of things to bring to Meard Street. I admit it, I did check through all of
Liz’s drawers, but found no incriminating sexy diary, no extravagant receipts,
no raunchy polaroids with which to hurt myself I also went through the mail.
There were various bills to pay and policies to renew. Liz never does any of
that. Maybe there was more to Neil’s right man story than I had thought. Here I
was prowling through this woman’s affairs, making sure her premiums were up to
date and none of the roof tiles had fallen off. I again had the feeling that
Neil was writing my life. I must pay him a visit to find out the end of the
plot. I slunk back to Soho with plastic bags of bumf.

It was a hot Monday night
with many sirens in it, I couldn’t sleep, my feet seemed to have swollen beyond
endurance in the claggy heat. I prowled around the office again slurping a mug
of ‘poo and then, when I’d had enough of fidgeting — and taking a couple of
scripts and a copy of
Broadcast
with me — I nipped over the road to the
Jade Tree to eat.

The
crowded street was full of hard staring faces like a bad acid trip, or at least
what I imagine a bad acid trip would be like. My younger brother Tony would
know more than me about that, of course. I made a .mental note to call in on
him and see how he was. He didn’t have a phone, which meant one had to take
time out to see him. This seemed to have left Tony with a much more
trouble-free existence than us normal people. Bastard. Sometimes I wish I had
his mental problems; everyone accommodated Tony. He hadn’t been to see Mum
since my father died. He never really got involved in family things. That was
my job.

Out of
the Soho fog of strangers there was a face I recognized; Simon Renman, the
producer, coming out of a tacky strip-joint. I smiled at him and instantly
wished I hadn’t.

‘Hello,
how are you? How are you coping with the twins?’ I said without realizing that
he would have preferred a cursory nod. Sometimes my memory for people’s
personal details is a disadvantage.

‘Oh,
hello, Guy,’ he said tensely. ‘I’m researching a script about strippers so I
have to, you know …’ indicating the dive behind him. He paused, lost for
words. I hadn’t asked.

‘That’s
your excuse and you’re sticking to it,’ I said with the nearest I could get to
a boysy chuckle.

‘Sorry?’
he said.

‘These
are my Y—fronts and I’m sticking to them,’ I said, compounding my error and
embarrassing the spunk out of him. He was lying about the script research then.
He was guiltily haunting the wank palaces, and I’d caught him at it. So the
rumours about his marriage must be true. He sloped off into the multinational
night leaving me certain that I must keep any trouble between myself and Liz
under wraps. It’s a tricky old biz, show-biz, and anything that puts you at a
disadvantage —anything — may be taken down and used against you, and don’t say
trousers. I was already logging his domestic troubles in my mental file under ‘Well
Sorted Films’, the name of his production company. Not the right time to
invest, I fear.

After a
meal which was too fatty for ten thirty at night, I returned to the office and
rechecked everyone’s desks, emptied the bins, straightened the noticeboard,
that sort of thing. There was one new message on the answer-phone.

Kemble Stenner,
now there’s a good name. Worth representing just on the strength of it. Nice
voice in the message. Was a child actress for years. Must be all of twenty now.
I looked her up in the
Spotlight
and the photo was pretty gorge too.
Barbara’s granddaughter, although brought up mostly by her dad, who was a
producer I think — big in the seventies — and a series of second, third and
fourth wives of his. I don’t think Barbara had seen her particularly from one
year to the next, and her mum was Sandra Peters, of whom the less said probably
the better. I don’t know if you remember
Crofter’s Way?
Yes? Well,
Sandra Peters was the token totty in that, you know, the one with the plastic
hair? Yes. For five years, and then nothing. Except for a couple of
embarrassingly drunken appearances on
Blankety Blank
or
Celebrity
Squares
or whatever it was at the time. Wise move of young Kemble to take
Grandma’s surname and not Mum’s.

Kemble Stenner,
and a bit of a stunner! And from the answer-phone message, funny and pushy and
clever to boot. I made a note to return her call in the morning.

I sat
on the small cane sofa we have by the window at Mullin and Ketts, partly
because it was the only non-work piece of furniture in the place, and partly
because I’d bought a cigar and I didn’t want to fug the place up and have to
explain myself in the morning. I looked at the phone. It looked back at me.
Grace would be long asleep by now, so no point in ringing Liz again. She had
evidently had a reasonably good day but had scribbled in wax crayon on the
bathroom wall. Personally I can live with her extempore murals, but I’d
promised to do something about it next weekend. I suppose it’d be different if
she’d graffitied the office.

Another
siren two-toned by. I sat in my underpants smoking my cigar and drinking the
rest of the champagne and flicked through my phone book. My own phone book,
which is a much smaller affair than my Mullin and Ketts one. I sat with the
phone in my lap, looking through my black address book. We didn’t even have a
radio in the office. I suppose the phone is more important than sex, especially
since AIDS. No wonder British Telecom just made ten million profit. It was too
late now to ring anyone out of the blue without appearing to be a lonely old
pervert in the middle of the night, which is what I suppose I was. There was an
uncomfortable buzzing in my brain which I wanted to put an end to through
conversation. I would have liked to ring Lottie or Maggie, or even Lesley:
girlfriends of mine prior to Liz arriving on the scene — two actresses and a dental
hygienist — but you can’t just call someone up like that at midnight after
years of silence, can you, and expect to be taken on board as a normal human
being. Actually, that’s a slight fib when it comes to Lottie. I have spoken to
her a few times over the last three years. Not to keep any doors open, you
understand, just to keep in touch. Of course, I never told Liz. She would have
found it intolerable, especially when pregnant, to know that her feller had any
kind of a confidante of the female kind. ‘When a man wants to talk alone with a
woman,’ I could hear her say even now, ‘it can only mean one thing.’ Or was
that her mother who said that?

Barbara
Stenner, she’d be awake, most likely hitting her second or third bottle of wine
by now, and would love to drop everything for a long talk about the seven
chakras of my kundalini and whether my energy paths were being blocked or what
have you, but then the effort required to talk to dear old Barbara was always
greater than the result. In any case, it’s not my place to ring clients when I
feel like it. That’s not the deal. It works the other way round, they ring me
day or night when they need something — usually help in making some decision or
other, like whether to go to Manchester to do a nice part for no money or stay
in London and wait for lucrative but unrewarding pap to arrive. They are, most
of them, under the illusion that I am sitting on invaluable information about
what the future holds for them. I was through to the end of my little book now:

Malcolm
Viner, he was a nice bloke, old, old friend of mine, was an actor once but had
given it up to go on to pastures sensible. I dialled his number but felt
foolish when the ringing started and hung up. What could I say to him now? ‘Hi,
Malcolm, just wondering how it’s been going with you for the last decade. Oh,
me? I’m fine. I’m just sitting in my office in my underpants for the hell of it
and suddenly thought it would be a good idea to wake you up and have a chat
about the early eighties.’

I
flicked through the entertainment listings guide on the little coffee table,
through art, comedy, film, even poetry events. This is how punters find their
way into the stuff I sell. I never use it, of course. I go only to things with
clients in them. The last thing I want to do on an evening off — although I
haven’t had one of them since before the Old Testament was written — is go to
be entertained. Bit of a busman’s holiday, that. I can’t even watch a video at
home for pleasure. It drives Liz to distraction, but to me the most interesting
thing about a film or a TV programme is the credits roll at the end.