The Right Man (18 page)

This
was a mistake. Susan was not in the mood for a balanced appraisal of the
trickiness of my position.

‘Mrs Arabella
Planter,’ she said again, with painful relish. ‘Dave and Polly Planter. Every
fucking thing Planter. I should have given them Christian names like “Beloved
First Wife”, or “Betrayal”. That would have given the fucking bitch problems at
cocktail parties. Here are my stepchildren, Betrayal Planter and Beloved First
Wife Planter. Ha!’

Her
laugh was gluey and set her off coughing because of the chocolate. She caught
herself in the mirror and sat up straight, tucking in her waist and pushing out
her tits.

‘I
suppose she’s got a perfect figure?’ she sneered. 1 decided to remain silent.

‘He’s
not even a good game-show host, he’s just a Catch-phrase Charlie.’

‘It’s
an unfair business. You don’t necessarily need talent to get to the top.’

‘You do
need to be a complete bastard, though, and Jeremy fits that bill.’

We were
sitting on the sofa together now. It was quite warm and relaxed and, as usual
with Susan, not sexually charged. My leg could be alongside hers, for instance,
without either of us particularly being aware of it, without any subtle flicks
of eye contact. To try and join in with her mood a little, I told her about the
list of names I’d seen on the wall of the casting director a couple of months
before, in which Jeremy’s name had appeared in heavy print. When I’d asked what
the heavy print meant, I was told it meant ‘book ‘em even if they’re crap’.
There are a select few artists who get all the offers because, in theory, they put
bums on seats. Everyone in the business knows that they’re crap but everyone
also knows it’s a business. This is why you see people like Mick Jagger trying
to act in films or tennis players making pop records. Or, indeed, why someone
like my Neil was hired to write a novel.

I
thought Susan would be pleased to hear that Jeremy did not have the respect of
his peers, but this was another mistake because, of course, it was a measure of
his success and popularity and power.

‘I hope
his new show plummets and he ends up having to do sports links for local radio,’
she said. ‘I know that would be bad for you, Guy, but can’t you afford to have
one client’s career go down the toilet in a humiliating way? You could arrange
that, couldn’t you, just for me?’

This
wasn’t put seriously, and we laughed. She leaned her head on my shoulder,
fanning the smoke out of the way. Dave came in. I don’t know how long he’d been
standing at the door.

‘Is Guy
staying the night, Mum?’ he asked.

‘No, of
course not, Dave, go back to bed,’ she said, and instinctively pulled away from
me. ‘He’s got his own family to go to.

Actually
I would have liked to have stayed the night. It was warm. I could have curled
up on the sofa or put cushions on the floor. Anything rather than go back to
the office, where the flashing light from the strip-joint on the other side of
the street wheeled across my ceiling every other second and where the noise of
the street crept into your dreams.

Thoughts
of that and of Liz, and then of the gap where Grace should be, escaped into my
body, making me cold. Susan seemed to mistake this for some kind of sexual
frisson, and she shivered and got up to close the door. She wouldn’t risk an
intimate chat with me if she thought I might respond physically to her.

I got
up and made leaving noises. Dave obeyed his mum and went back upstairs to bed,
though no doubt not to sleep until he had heard me leaving. Quite right. Seeing
me off the premises at ten years old. Territorial. Proprietorial.

I
called for a cab and said Fulham, changing the destination to Soho only when I
was in it and Susan had closed her front door behind me. I was drunk again. The
mini-cab driver was completely silent. His car radio calling out jobs was the
only noise between us, and outside the roads were almost empty. It must have
been quite late. My head lolled against the seatbelt strap.

Once,
as a godfatherly thing, I’d taken Dave to the Natural History Museum to see the
moving dinosaur models. Grace must have been a baby at the time because it had
just been me and Dave one Sunday afternoon. Like most children under eight, he
knew more about dinosaurs than any adult does.

Dinosaurs
is standard nursery school project fare. After the dinosaurs, we got lost
trying to find the exit and an ice-cream, and found ourselves wandering through
the primate room with models of gibbons, chimpanzees and gorillas from floor to
ceiling. There was one model which fascinated Dave.
it
is only small,
about a foot in diameter. It is of a group of orang-utans sitting around a
rock.

The
king orang-utan has a few of his wives sitting around him but one of them, one
of his wives, is just the other side of the rock. He’s looking at her, she’s
looking back at him over the top of the rock. Unbeknown to the king, and hidden
behind the rock, is a young male orang-utan, shagging the wife as she smiles at
her husband. The little label by the side of the glass case containing this
model explains that it is in the interests, genetically speaking, of the female
to have as husband and protector the biggest, strongest old orang-utan, the
king. He will fend off predators whilst she rears her young, his mortgage was
paid off long ago. So he’s the best bet as a permanent mate, he’s the king, he’s
big daddy. But it is also in her interests, genetically speaking, to have sex
with younger, more genetically varied males. This of course must be kept secret
from the king, lest he kill her adulterous offspring. It is in the genetic
interests of the male orang-utans to sleep with as many of the females as is possible.
if not by being king, then through affairs behind rocks.

I had
to pretend to Dave that the shagging orang-utans were from another family down
the way, just visiting from the land beyond the rock, so there I was,
perpetuating the myth of the family with my godson.

Funny
things, genes. I wonder if our behaviour is really dictated to us genetically,
as it is currently fashionable to think. As the mini-cab bumped up over the Hogarth
flyover, I imagined what it would be like to be a digitally reincarnated gene.

‘Hmmmmmm.
Which gender is the body I’ve found myself in this time? What’s my ammunition?
What balls, what racquets?’

‘Well,
you’ve landed in a female this time, so you’ve got a limited number of
food-rich, high-investment eggs which, if fertilized, are going to take two
years of your life, so it’s quite labour-intensive. So you’ve got to find a
good specimen worth mating with who’s going to stick around and help bring up
the kids, and fight off enemies. Oh, and can he have a nice bum, please?’

Apart from
the bum, Susan was right, Liz had picked the right man in me. A right mug. The
thought made me angry. So what about my genes? The ones who found themselves in
my male body, poor bastards.

‘Well,
you’ve got sixty million chances a day to replicate yourself, so go for
quantity of women but make sure they’re fertile. Thin waist and wide hips would
probably be a good indicator. Oh, but there’s one problem I forgot to tell you.
There are seven billion other guys around like you, who want to have access to
the limited supply of eggs, and they are all going to try and stop you
replicating. Same as you’re going to try and stop them. So there may well be a
few wars. Also, even if you do manage to get a woman pregnant, if you don’t
hang around to help her bring the kid up, these other guys may move in on her
and kill your kid. All part of stopping you replicating. More room for them and
their issue. So your best bet is probably to find a good one as a wife and then
shag around in secret.’

Either
way it seems we are all genetically programmed for infidelity. Better not let
Liz know, she’d think that lets her off the hook.

Half an
hour later I was lying on my back on the camp bed in Meard Street, staring at
the ceiling, when the buzzer went.

‘Hi,
gorgeous. It’s Kemble Stenner.’

I
buzzed her up. In the minute or so it took her to climb the stairs, I put my
trousers back on and tidied up a bit. Closing the curtains on the now rather
sordid-looking kitchenette which contained my camp bed.

‘Hello,’
I said as she breezed past me into the main office area, carrying an already
opened bottle of red wine. ‘Did you ring earlier?’ I asked.

‘No.
Saw your light on. Thought I’d ring the bell. See if you fancied a drink.’

She
went to the window and peered out through the blinds. The buzzer rang again.

‘Oh my
God! He saw me coming in here. Don’t answer that,’ she squealed. ‘Pleeeeeeease.’

It
buzzed again, more insistently. She sat down on the floor by the window and
took a slurp from the wine bottle. She offered it to me. The buzzer went again.

‘Ignore
it. He’ll go away in a minute.’ She giggled. ‘Nice wine, though — it cost him
sixty quid.’

I took
the bottle and drank from it. It was bloody good.

‘Well,
it’s nice of you to pop round on the off chance. I’m Guy Mullin. Er, how do you
do. Lucky I happened to be working late.’ The buzzer went again, this time more
insistently. ‘Is everything alright?’

‘Oh, yeeaah,’
she said, stretching her vowels like a teenager. ‘He’ll give up in a minute. He’ll
probably call me in the morning, or try to give me something again.’ She took a
mobile phone out of her bag. ‘He gave me this last week. Good, eh?’ she said,
while dialling. And then, into the phone, ‘Look, fuck off, OK? Leave me alone.’
She switched the phone off and popped it back in the bag and, laughing, took
the wine bottle back off me.

‘Who is
he?’ I asked.

‘Oh,
just some bloke. Record producer. Took me to Silverstone last week. I met these
really interesting guys, they let me drive one of the cars. I smashed up a
whole fence and a hot-dog stall. It was fun.’

She got
out an empty packet of ten Silk Cut and chucked it on the table. I offered her
one of my Dunhills. We lit up. I didn’t know what to say. She noticed the
Z-cards of model boys plastered on the corkboard and went over to it.

‘Pfooaarr!’
she said. ‘Oh yes, we like him! Gorgeous. Look at those thighs!’ Then she
noticed a recent Walker-print of Doug Handom on Joan’s desk. ‘Oooh. Doug Handom,
I’m in love with him. I’d like to tie him to a seatless chair and use him as a
gear stick.’

‘Yes,’
I said, ‘he seems to have that effect on women.’

She
picked up the photo and put it in her bag.

‘Can I
keep this to have a wank to later?’

‘Yes,
of course,’ I said, ‘we’ve got hundreds.’

From
the street below, a man’s voice was shouting her name up at us.

‘Kemble!?’

‘Don’t
answer,’ she said, and then, ‘He wants me to go away with him next weekend, but
I’m not sure I want to go to a hotel in Monterey with him.’

‘Is he
your boyfriend?’ I asked, and she looked at me
as
if I was about seventy
years old and needed putting in an institution.

‘So,’
she said, sizing me up, ‘you look like you need a damn good shagging.’ And she
walked towards the kitchenette and pulled back the curtain. ‘Working late, were
you? Kicked out by the wife and sleeping in the office, more like.’ And she
laughed like a ten-year-old. There seemed to be many extra decades between us.

I
smiled along with her, trying to hide my embarrassment.

‘Well,
it’s difficult sometimes to…’ I mumbled, wondering whether her observation
about my needing sex had been a suggestion, or merely a statement of fact. It’s
true, I must have looked as if I needed a damn good shagging, but I wasn’t sure
whether I needed one with her. If that was indeed what she had in mind.

She
went back to the window and peeped out. She was wearing tight black leggings
over her skinny legs, a skimpy T-shirt and a man’s leather jacket, far too big
for her. Another gift, no doubt.

 ‘Good,
he’s gone. I’m starving, do you want to take me out for a meal?’

I
reflected to myself for a moment. Yes, I did want to take her out for a meal.
That would be fun. To get out of the office. I put on my jacket. I could be one
of those tom cats who dines in several different households every night.

Out in
the street, she linked her arm in mine, as if we were old friends, and rested
her long auburn hair on my shoulder. I stood up straighter. Feeling
uncomfortable with her uncalled-for familiarity and yet secretly enjoying the
warmth.

‘By the
way, I don’t do sex,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Not with people I like.’

‘And
you like me?’ I asked, trying not to sound disappointed, which I suppose I wasn’t
really.

‘Oh,
yeah. Anyway, you’re old enough to be my father.’ And she snuggled up closer. ‘Not
that that’s made any difference in the past.

I
steered us past the Soho House and the Groucho and anywhere where biz-folk
might be. I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, or the right idea come to
that. I didn’t want anyone to have any ideas. I just wanted to be with company.
There was a frisson of excitement too, I suppose.