The Right Man (19 page)

We went
to a little-used Lebanese, off Broadwick Street, which was just as well,
because Kemble Stenner’s sense of fun extended to throwing bread rolls at me
and saying lewd things in a very loud voice.

‘That
was so good, when you went down on me yesterday morning, You’ve got an
amazingly long tongue,’ she shouted, as the waiter brought us our starters. Men
at other tables goggled at us. Throughout the meal, we were on the edge of
being asked to leave as Kemble pushed harder and harder to embarrass me out of
my skin.

It was
as if she was testing me, auditioning me for some role which I had no idea how
to play. I kept smiling and quietly sat through all she threw at me. When the
bill came and I put my card on the table, she said, ‘Thanks, Dad, that was
great. I won’t tell Mum I’ve been seeing you.’ Maybe she was auditioning
herself She was certainly being very funny. I kept laughing and smiling and we
shared a cigarette. She took all the mints from the saucer and blatantly shoved
them in her bag.

‘Aren’t
you going to spank me then?’ she said as we were leaving.

‘I
would never hit a woman, my angel,’ I said, playing along.

‘I bet
I could make you.

Did she
want me to get angry with her, shake her by the shoulders, tell her to behave
herself? I wasn’t going to. For some reason, in my present state of mind, I
found her antics entirely engaging and I followed her back to my own front
door.

‘Can I
stay the night with you?’ she asked, in a pouty, little-girlish way.

‘Well,
there isn’t much room, as you saw,’ I said.’

Upstairs,
we finished the wine and smoked more.

‘Do you
want me to be your agent?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m very happy to take you on. I
mean, you don’t have to do all this, you know. I think I could get you work.’

‘Oh, I’m
giving up the business tomorrow anyway,’ she said casually. And then, ‘Do you
want to see my tattoo?’

‘Well.
That depends …’ I started, but she’d already pulled down her leggings to
reveal a rose on her left buttock. She wasn’t wearing any knickers.

There
is a certain breed of actress, known in the business as a ‘no-knickers actress’.
Their performances are usually strident and assertive, with a lot of
saliva-spraying. Sometimes, when in a Greek tragedy, for instance, they will
actually wear no knickers, but generally the term refers to their brassy and
worthy approach to their work. Kemble was not of this type. She was simply not
wearing any knickers.

‘It’s
very nice,’ I said. ‘Did it hurt?’

‘Yeah.
It was agony, but I’m used to pain. My dad used to beat me up on a regular
basis. Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick,’ she said, and raced to the
toilet. I followed her to the door and listened while she retched rather
unconvincingly. When she came out I rubbed her puny shoulders and made her a
cup of tea, which she never drank.

Despite
my best intentions I found it hard to lie on the camp bed squashed up against a
naked twenty-two-year-old and not get an erection. She folded herself around me
and pulled the unzipped sleeping bag up tight around our shoulders. I lay
there, stiffly, wondering what to do. I kissed her ear.

‘Can’t
we just cuddle and go sleep?’ she said. I’d love to do that, I thought, but
erections and sleep don’t go together. The blood is confused. I lay there for a
bit longer, listening. to her breathing. She had fallen asleep, spread over my
chest. I tried to sleep, but inside my scrotum the two sperm factories had
received the message to manufacture and they weren’t going to stop now. I
wondered how many millions had been created since Kemble had whipped down her
leggings to show me her tattoo. Counting sperm is not a recommended soporific,
they somehow lack the placidity of sheep. Especially since, as has now been
discovered, not all sperm are the same. There are sprinter sperm, the ones who
race straight up the tube for the egg, ready or not. There are slow-burn sperm,
who hang around the darker fallopian corners for a few hours, waiting for a
later opportunity. And there are rear-guard killer sperm, who don’t go for the
egg at all, but lurk at the entrance in case another man’s sperm should happen
by, in which case they explode themselves, kamikaze-style, killing their
rivals. Sperm are, in fact, rather like an army, or a football formation.
Thoroughly chap-like. I wondered what kind I would be, were I a sperm. Not the
right kind, I had no doubt. Not the one who scores the goal. I wondered whether
sperm are aware of what kind of sperm they are anyway. At least my erection was
gone by now. With great delicacy, I extricated myself from the camp bed and
from Kemble’s embrace, and tiptoed into the office. I rang for a 7.00 a.m.
alarm call. She’d have to be out by the time the women arrived. I tidied up the
office and curled up on the sofa.

‘I just didn’t think it
was going anywhere. I woke up one morning and thought — I’m not in love with
him any more, so what’s the point?’ Maureen Beauley slammed the door of her
bright-red VW golf, and started it up with the keys which she’d casually left
in the ignition. ‘He never really loved me properly, I mean, he was a great guy
and everything, sweet, but he didn’t know how to really cherish a woman.

Why do
women always tell me their stuff? What is it about me? Or do they tell anyone
and everyone, and I’m one of the few who actually listens to it? As she changed
gear aggressively, the tight skirt of her green business suit slid up the
lining slip a couple of inches to reveal the top of a stocking and a
quarter-inch triangle of white thigh.
1
clocked it in a blink of my eye
without letting my neck muscles move an iota. She noticed that I’d noticed
nevertheless.

‘Yes, I
see,’ I said. ‘I understand. Do you think he even knew what loving you properly
would be, or did he just not care?’ I could have said, ‘Wwwooooaaa! Stockings!
Nice!’ or words to that effect, but I’m not made like that, and anyway we were
supposed to be looking for a flat for my mother. It seemed inappropriate.

‘I just
want to be loved by a man above all else. To know that I come first. I think
most women do. And I was earning more than him anyway, so …’ She jumped a
light and hung a left without indicating. Someone hooted at us. I gripped the
seat-belt holder; she was driving much too fast. ‘What did you think of that
last one?’ she asked.

‘Too
many stairs.’

‘Yes,
and it needed a lot of work. I think they’d come down, though, if you wanted to
make an offer.’

I
sifted through the estate agent’s details. All with small glossy photos pasted
on the front. All virtually identical, rather like a casting directory.

‘And
what about your son? You said you had a son,’ I asked.

‘Oh, he
comes first. Always. I love him more than anything. Here we are.

We
pulled up outside a terrace of houses with double front doors. Cottages built
originally for the river-dock workers at Hammersmith. Most have kitchen
extensions now and a small yard out the back. After fumbling with her huge
assortment of keys, she opened the door and we entered the ground-floor flat,
which had piles of junk mail in its narrow front corridor. This one was
unoccupied, a recent conversion. The builders had tried to stretch a two-bedroomed
self-contained granny flat out of what must once have been a living room and
pantry, so the rooms were tiny and wedge-shaped and smelled of emulsion paint
still. Most of the doors, when swung open, missed the opposite walls by only an
inch or so, making one have to step back and round before entering, like a
lovers’ gate.

Maureen
Beauley and I were squeezed close together in the corridor momentarily and
entered the tiny front room with its authentic mini-fireplace still intact,
although unusable in this now smokeless zone. She watched me looking round the
place in silence, occasionally putting in remarks such as: ‘I don’t know what
the service charge is on this one.’ I wondered whether she was expecting me to
make a pass at her. Her beige silk blouse was certainly unbuttoned to reveal a
slice of bra. [wondered if it was one of the things about her job that she got
to have dubious sex in other people’s houses whenever she wanted. Or whether men
making erotic suggestions to her was actually the bane of her life. What did
she want? She seemed to be signalling something, but not in a language I
understood. Women dress, I am assured by Liz and by others, to please themselves.
It is nothing to do with catching male attention, that is merely an
inconvenient by-product. Jeremy Planter would most likely have done it already
with the breezy estate agent in every room. He would have known the right thing
to say.

I’ve
never been very good at reading signals. Sexual signals, I mean. Through my
early twenties, when I suppose I should have been out rutting with the best of
them, there were countless occasions when I only realized afterwards that I had
been come on to, and was expected, as the man, to make a pass, or at least a
suggestion of a pass, if only for tradition’s sake. An incident — or rather, a
non-incident — with a girl in a towel from the room opposite when I was a
student springs to mind too often to haunt me as an example of a lost
opportunity. The hint was there and obvious, she couldn’t fix her lights or
something, and knocked on my door half naked. What did I do? I fixed up
whatever it was that was broken, and said good night. Presented with the
possibility of passion, I spluttered like a rabbit frozen in the headlights to
regret at leisure over the ensuing years. Why on earth this girl of my memory
couldn’t have done the asking, if that was what she wanted, I don’t know, but
as
a man one is meant to be constantly up for it, a randy, thoughtless pumping
machine, and therefore girls wouldn’t have quite the same fear of rejection as
boys. At least when it comes to casual sex. I’ve often had this argument with
Liz. Me claiming that it’s easier for a woman to go out and get immediate sex
if that’s all she’s after than it is for a man. This is why men always make out
that they’re more interested in sex than affection, because sex is harder for
them to come by. Whereas it’s the other way round for women. That’s the idea
anyway. Someone should write a book about it. Oh, they already have done, haven’t
they? And done, and done to death. Another saturated market area for Neil to
fail in. The point is that I don’t see myself so much
as
sex on legs as
a soft git with a permanent bewildered expression on his face like the sidekick
to a TV glove puppet. Easy prey.

Of course,
when I became an agent things changed quite a bit, and I got used to younger
actresses ruffling their hair a lot in my presence, or laughing too much at my
remarks, or just plain pushing their bodies up against me. In the first couple
of years I did take advantage of this once or twice, with disastrous
consequences. It’s not good to mix sex and business. Maybe it’s different in
real estate.

I
couldn’t see Mum in this place. Mind you, it was difficult to picture her
anywhere but in her own kitchen, reading out-of-date colour supplements or
watching her TV with the sound turned up too loud.

‘I just
wanted to be touched — held, you know?’ said Maureen Beauley.

‘Well,
quite. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’ I agreed vehemently
as
we
pulled back out, too fast, on to the Fulham Palace Road.

‘My
little boy misses his father all the time now, of course. But he’ll get used to
not seeing him. He’ll have to. His dad loves him to bits. Sometimes I think he
loved his son more than me.

‘And
you wanted to be loved above all else,’ I said sympathetically.

‘Still,
children are very resilient, you know,’ she said, as people always do when they
mistreat them. If children are so resilient, I thought, how come the world is
peopled with fucked-up adults?

‘Yes,’
I said, ‘I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.’ As we stood outside the estate
agent’s office she gave me a professionally warm smile and said, ‘Well, we’ve
got your details, so we’ll send you anything new that comes in, and as I say,
that first one we looked at are in a hurry to sell, so I think they’d be open
to an offer.’

Of
course, I had no right to be depressed. Others have far worse problems than me.
Neil, for a start. Half my clients, come to think of it. Everything about the
day confirmed that I could make no claim on sadness. It was June and
deliciously warm. The plane trees of Fulham were brightening like bells in the
new light. You could feel their pleasure, hear their freshness in the breeze, almost
smell the sexuality of their photosynthesis.

I could
go and see my brother Tony. Apart from the funeral, we hadn’t seen each other
since my father died. I might find him in Bishop’s Park where he sometimes
worked. Trouble was, it was dangerously close to where Grace’s first
childminder had been, and I didn’t want big whooshes of sad. I checked my
mobile for messages. Simon Eggleston called to thank, and Barbara Stenner
wanted to speak ‘urgently’. For some reason I punched off the power button and
put my mobile back in my pocket. I wandered down Queensmill Road without a
sense of purpose. I became anxious at the thought of being off schedule, of
being unaccountable. What was I thinking of, what was I doing? As I reached the
river walkway by Fulham football ground it occurred to me. I was taking a walk,
that was what I was doing. That’s what people do, isn’t it? They go for walks. Sometimes
even just because they feel like it. Sometimes even during working hours. What
a little ‘aholic’ I seemed to have become.