Ambition (29 page)

What Susan thought was that if Caroline had welched on her side of the bargain – which had been presumably that she would be the perfect London mistress of a millionaire and that he would
support her accordingly – then she deserved nothing better, and to look at her, welched on it royally she definitely had done. But she knew this sort of thinking was highly unsound and
masculinist, and she tried to think of a sympathetic comment – ‘That bastard!’ or ‘Men!’ But all that came out, true to form, was, ‘Have you got any
money?’

‘A bit, I s’pose. A couple of thou left in trust. But nothing serious – it’s all in here.’ She rubbed her left arm resignedly. ‘I’m staying with a
friend in Clapham – she was an actress too but she married a racing driver. Now they’re divorced and she’s trying to bring up a kid alone.
He’s
legged it to
Lanzarote. I have to sleep on the sofa and babysit in lieu of rent while Camilla goes out on cattle calls.’ She shook her head quickly. ‘It’s
so
depressing, I can’t
tell you.’

Susan thought. ‘Can’t you go back to your parents for a bit?’

Caroline sniggered. ‘Oh,
yah.
It’s really easy to score in Somerset. I mean, you can just walk into a field and pick it – like scrumping for apples when you’re
little. It grows on trees, dontcha know?’ She sighed exaggeratedly. ‘Of
course
I can’t go to the country.’

‘Caroline, I don’t want to sound like a girl-guide leader. But surely the first thing you want to do to get your life back on track is lose your habit?’

‘What?’ Caroline looked confused, then thoughtful. ‘Well, no, actually. I don’t think I do.’

‘What do you mean?’ Though her expression remained concerned and sympathetic, Susan was coming to believe more with each minute that Tobias Pope had his head screwed on, not least of
all where Caroline Malaise was concerned.

‘Well – I haven’t put it into words before, but I’ll try. It’s like – if I kicked the habit, I don’t think I’d exist any more. I shoot up
therefore I am. If I wasn’t a junkie, what would I say at parties when people ask me what I do? I’m not an actress. I’m not a mistress. I’m not even a housewife. I’m
just a thirty-year-old woman with a past and no future.’ She shook her head determinedly. ‘No, I’m not giving up junk. If I do I’ll disappear.’

‘Well, I don’t know what to say.’ She did, but it was very rude.

‘You could offer me a job.’ Caroline almost smiled.

‘I’m sorry. It’s not that easy.’

‘OK.’ She made a show of gathering her gloves, lighter and bag together. Her hands were still shaking. ‘I understand. But you don’t know how lucky you are, coming from
where you did. You had everything: poverty, provincialism, no friends in high places. Everything to kick against. Me, I had nothing except what was given to me on a plate. That’s why
you’re on the bus and I’m under the wheels.’

Susan thought that this analysis was a little blurred around the edges, but she let it pass. ‘Didn’t you ever have an ambition, Caroline?’

‘Me?’ She paused, pulling on a short, dirty white glove. ‘No, I had money instead. The great thing about ambition is that it doesn’t depreciate or end up in your arm:
it’s much more bankable in the long term. Well, shall we join the wedding party?’

Susan looked at Candida, sashaying into the register office on the arms of Washington Brown and Gary Pride. The three of them were chattering loudly in their comically differing accents –
upper-class English, black American Southern and Cockney. They sounded like an idea for a sitcom. But somehow, the three voices were made eerily alike by the same note of satisfaction and
anticipation in each.

‘Look at them,’ said Caroline softly. ‘A few months ago they were ready and willing to blow Pope’s brains out. If he walked in now, they’d pat him on the back and
ask him to be best man. How fast the happy forget.’

As the plane touched down, Tobias Pope looked up from his papers and wondered for a moment where he was. Rio, Munich, London? Sonya, Sigrid, Susan? He hoped it was London.

It was, the weather assured him as he stepped out of the plane, descending the steps slowly with a tall black twin either side of him. When one of his best bodyguards had died after falling out
of a window into an empty swimming pool during a crack party in a Sun City hotel, the chance of getting two perfect physical specimens for the price of one had been irresistible.

And the twins were as quick on the draw as they were on the erection, as good at fighting as they were at fucking. He laughed, thinking of Susan’s face when she recognized them. He had his
line ready: ‘But my dear – I thought you said that matt black went with everything!’

Thinking up little teases for a girl – he must be going soft in his old age. But she was worth making an effort for. He liked her. And her impenetrability was the one thing which
titillated him these days. He had other girls whom he placed in situations, a pawn in every port, and liked to watch, but afterwards they went all quiet and morose. They got what he thought of as
‘the guilts’, a virus like flu. Catholic girls were the worst for that. They usually ended up taking various sorts of sordid drugs because they ‘couldn’t live with’
themselves. Fair enough.
He
couldn’t live with them either. But drug-taking women were so messy and unappealing. For one thing, they stopped enjoying the sex, the banquet of flesh he
placed before them. Then they had outlived their usefulness.

Some talked about respect and how he didn’t have any for them. He didn’t. But not because of what they chose to do with their genitalia. He hadn’t respected his wife, and
she’d been a virgin. He hadn’t respected Caroline and she, despite her habit of shedding her clothes before cameras, had been a faithful girlfriend whom he had never involved in any of
his tableaux. He didn’t respect Sigrid and Sonya, who were by now more or less whores. But the chastity or promiscuity of these women hadn’t come into why he didn’t respect them;
he didn’t respect them because they were
soft.

Susan was hard. Beneath the satin abundance of skin and hair, it was like biting on silver foil; you couldn’t get through. He put her into situations which would have curdled the blood of
any normal white woman and she didn’t just endure them to please him, as the others did; she
took
the situation away from him and turned it towards her own pleasure. He had never
known that before. It was a challenge. But one day . . . one day she’d break. And that would be the greatest thrill of all. Then, and only then, he’d fuck her. And then he would be free
of her.

Pope turned to Warren. ‘OK, boy?’

Warren smiled back frankly. ‘I’ve never been to London, sir. Lots of pretty girls, right?’

‘The prettiest,’ said Pope with a surge of misplaced patriotism. ‘The finest women in the world. As yours are the finest men.’

‘Thank you, boss,’ said Warren, bowing.

Pope laughed. The boy was being sarcastic; he had spirit, and a sense of humour. Even that hellhole he’d grown up in hadn’t bashed it out of him. Unlike that po-faced bastard
he’d fathered
. Pope thought of his son and frowned. His mother’s son, all right.

A thought hit him. Wouldn’t it be a great joke – a
black
joke! – to leave Pope Communications to this illiterate darkie from shanty town when he died? He could just
see the look of horror on David’s face, and Maxine’s when they got through the layers of tranquillizers. They’d soon stop their liberal crap then; they’d soon start talking
about
schvartzes
like the bigoted bourgeois German Jews they were at heart. He laughed again, and turned to Warren to share the joke as they reached the bottom of the steps.

But before he could open his mouth, a shot rang out. And Tobias Pope hit the ground.

‘Yes, I have this man to thank for my life,’ said Tobias Pope, standing up and reaching across the aisle to slap Warren on the back yet again.

‘Well, I’m glad I know who to blame,’ said Susan moodily. He hadn’t told her where they were going, and she was mildly annoyed.

‘He’d pushed me down and blown Montes’s head off before you could say Wetback,’ went on Pope admiringly.

‘Congratulations.’

‘Always aim to please, miss.’ Warren twinkled at her.

‘What did this man Montes have against you anyway, Mr Pope?’ She wondered if he’d tell her the truth.

He shrugged. ‘The outraged papa bit: very big in Lat Am. Some silly girl I asked to a couple of parties – she got a liking for cocaine and fell in with a bad crowd. Bought the
building in some gang war crossfire. They bring it on themselves, these girls, they really do. Drugs. Messiness. Silliness.’

‘I saw Caroline last week.’

‘Oh yes? And is her career as a screen siren progressing apace?’

‘That’s hardly likely, now she’s thirty.’

‘No, Susan. That’s hardly likely now she’s a
drug addict
. Which I certainly did not encourage her to become. On the contrary.’

Susan looked out of the window. ‘I don’t think it was very conducive to staying off drugs, just waiting around a flat for your boyfriend to visit you once a month.’

Pope sighed. ‘Susan. I never
asked
Miss Malaise to do that. When I met her she was a film actress. A bad one, but a film actress. When I started paying the rent on her flat, I
presumed she would continue to be a film actress. I didn’t know she was going to throw in the make-up towel and give me a poor imitation of a mad housewife giving away the best years of her
life, now did I?’ He looked thoughtful. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Do you think I’m a New Man?’

She turned and looked at him, incredulous. ‘What?’

‘A New Man. I’ve been seeing things about them in some of my publications. See women as equals, want women to enjoy sex, want women to work and be tough. All that jazz. Don’t
respect women who are chaste and don’t despise women who are whores.’ He preened. ‘I think that’s a perfect description of my personal self. Yes, I’m definitely a New
Man.’

She fell against his shoulder, laughing helplessly, her bad mood gone. He put his arm around her and pointed at the window. ‘Look.’

The sky was red, like a delight or a warning or both. ‘Where are we?’

He pushed her away, straightened up and smiled. ‘We’re in Bangkok, Susan. Where else?’

In the master bedroom of the suite at the Hotel Oriental, the girl looked at Susan. She was tall for a Thai, a few inches under six foot, but with the distinctive skin; skin
only marginally less golden than Shirley Eaton’s in
Goldfinger.
She had long slender limbs and long, dark, heavy hair cut in a fringe; her eyes were delicately slanted and unusually
pale. She was probably Amerasian, though she wore the traditional Thai woman’s national dress: a shiny black monokini and high black heels.

Susan turned away from the mirror and looked at Tobias Pope. ‘Will I do?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘Do I need contact lenses? Liposuction? A lobotomy?’

‘Who’d know the difference?’ He looked over his copy of
Fortune
at her. ‘You look great. Too beautiful, in fact. Thai women are too short, and most of them are
titless wonders. They aren’t actually the raving beauties that the maladjusted men who frequent them make out. Sure, they look pretty good if no white woman has given you a tumble in ten
years, and of course the Elephant Man himself could find a girlfriend out here if he had the spending cash. But basically they’re for men who want boys or children or both.’ He yawned.
‘And, of course, they’re basically very
decent
girls, which is always unattractive in a woman to any red-blooded man. The majority of them won’t suck cock, for instance.
They say it’s a crime against Buddha.’

‘I thought they did everything. Can I put my raincoat on now?’

‘No, you won’t be dry for another ten minutes. Also your nipples are the wrong colour. Sungita, see to it. No, everything but. That’s why they have these fancy routines,
pulling strings of razor blades and Pershing ground-to-air missiles out of their twats. To distract from the lack of blowjobs. Personally, I know what I prefer.’ He put down his magazine.
‘What do you say, Sungita? Take your hands off that white woman and answer me.’

The chic Thai girl in the black smock was pouting fiercely with concentration as she put the finishing touches of brown body make-up to Susan’s nipples with a small brush. She had already
applied the golden all-over tan with a small damp sponge, and artfully attached the liquid plastic at the temples to Chinese the eyes. Now she smiled at Tobias Pope, politely rather than
flirtatiously. ‘Thai girls always pleased to see friends from West.’

‘You like us
farangs,
Sungita? Why’s that? Our pasty skins? Our paunches? Our hairy legs? Drives you women crazy, does it?’ He smiled slyly. ‘Or is it our
dollars, our
deutschmarks
and our
yens
?’

Sungita laughed. ‘I personally am married Thai man.’ She began to pack away her brushes. ‘I finish. I go?’

‘Yes. Beautiful job. My man outside will settle. I’ve told him to give you one hundred American dollars. Make sure he does.’

Overcome, Sungita left the room backwards and bowing. Susan watched her go.

‘Hey big spender,’ she said sarcastically.

‘You may mock. But I could fuck her for five dollars. As a gentleman and a hygienist, I prefer not to. Have you heard of Vietnam Rose?’

‘What’s that? Disinformation with discharge?’

‘Nearer than you think. It’s a vile Oriental venereal disease whereby one’s organ turns outward, like a rose, and one urinates as from a watering-can.’

‘And they said romance was dead. Can I put my raincoat on now?’

‘Relax, I’ve seen it all before. Come and sit down.’ He patted the sofa beside him and looked petulant. ‘We never talk any more.’

‘You sound like a wife.’ She sat beside him on the paisley
eau de nil
satin sofa, an Oriental idea of English restraint.

‘Is it any wonder I sound like a wife when all you’re interested in is that career of yours?’