Ambition (4 page)

Zero said that Matthew was a big
girl
, and when would men discover the obvious fact that strong women wanted strong men, or real girls, but certainly not some tepid hybrid of the two?
Sometimes when Susan was drunk, she agreed. Occasionally, when she was seriously drunk, she said it to his face.

Tonight was not one of those nights: why waste time tweaking the monkey’s testicles when the organ grinder’s got his foot on your neck? As men went he looked decent if dull from
where she was sitting. She had been brooding over the object of her hostility while making three-quarters of a bottle of Stolichnaya disappear since leaving the office in a state of shock this
morning and now, when she jumped up and began to pace the room, cursing, Matthew was not the target, or even the target practice, of the poison arrows shot from the bow of her wounded pride.

‘
Everyone
will be
talking
about me!’ she said yet again, and was struck unpleasantly by how little removed this major fear of hers was from her mother’s
concern to keep the neighbours from talking. You’ve come a long way, baby, but you can’t escape the long armlock of the neighbours, even if they do go under the name of your peer group
in this tax bracket. ‘
Laughing
at me.
Me!
This is just what they’ve been praying for, those miserable bastards.’

‘Come on, Sue,’ Matthew said soothingly. ‘That’s called paranoia.’

‘It’s called an educated guess where I come from.’ She flung herself down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. ‘Why in hell did this have to happen
now
? Just
when everything was going so wonderfully.’

‘Susan,’ he reprimanded her quietly. ‘The sudden, painful and early death of a man who advanced your career beyond all others can hardly be described as wonderful.’

‘You know what I mean. Objectively. Career-wise. Oh, don’t go getting all Hippocratic on me, Matthew. And then there’s the son – this is the
real
joke. The
Best
is going to be used as some sort of sacrificial lamb, some sort of fatted calf killed to tempt the prodigal son back into the fold – a toy, stuffed into the toe of some rich
brat’s Christmas stocking! A toy –
my
life,
my
paper!’

‘Yours?’ He smiled.

‘You talk about “my hospital”! Anyway, it
would
have been mine – in every sense of the word. I’d be editor right now, if not for Pope. You know
that!’

He looked at her and thought how true it was that some women were beautiful when they were angry. Drink and temper had flushed her face and swollen her lips, and her eyes flashed like neon. He
leaned over and stroked her hair. ‘Hey. Calm down. It’s not the end of the world.’

‘I can’t calm down.’

‘Maybe I can help you.’

He slid down the bed, peeled off her tights and parted her legs.

She sighed inwardly. Oh, no, on top of her other troubles, Matthew had chosen this moment to be Good In Bed. She had heard of a time before the Seventies when women were always complaining to
each other about how Bad In Bed men were – and Bad In Bed, it always transpired, was polite English for a refusal to contemplate cunnilingus. Oh, ignorant bliss.

Then suddenly it was the Seventies and, ever since Susan Street could remember, men were launching themselves like ground-to-air missiles at your groin with their tongues hanging out the second
after they’d first shaken hands with you. Some sort of mass, subliminal brainwashing seemed to have convinced them that a quick lick won them instant promotion to the Demon Lover league and
elevated their victim to the realms of convulsive ecstasy.

How shocked they’d be if they knew how bored most girls were by it! And the ones who really liked it usually became lesbians – because when you got down to it, or went down to it, no
one knew better than a girl what a girl liked.

Her mind wandered as he got stuck in. That was the one good thing about cunnilingus: like ironing, it freed your mind to dwell on higher things.

Just a small corner of her consciousness remained tethered to the bed, and there she felt just a faint irritation; the physical equivalent of hearing a fly buzzing to get out against a closed
window on a hot summer’s day when you were laid up in traction and couldn’t move a muscle to free it. Neither heaven nor hell but one long, annoying limbo, that’s what the act had
become. She fought the temptation to swat at his eager little head, as if he was that poor pesky fly.

Cunnilingus is the waiting-room of sex, she decided, and felt a flash of nostalgia for those days she had never known, when men thought it was disgusting. Men who were Bad In Bed were no bother:
two minutes’ acting, five minutes’ reassurance and you could go on to do something more fun. Men who were Good In Bed were another matter: five hours’ acting, two hours’
rave reviews and by then they were ready to go again. People made a fuss about Bruce Springsteen doing four hours on stage – big deal! The level of showmanship and stamina a modern girl
needed nightly in the sack made him look like a two-minute wonder.

She wondered once more just why she kept Matthew on in there when he could be out sticking his tongue up some deserving and grateful girl. And she knew that it was because once you had a man
these days, you hung on to him until something better came along. You didn’t just throw the paddle out of the boat and leave yourself up the creek waiting for something else to float by.
Because the chances were it wouldn’t.

Susan knew that there wasn’t officially a man shortage; she had run a survey in the paper only two weeks previously which told her that there was actually a glut of young men in the
developed countries of the West, an extra one million in the USA alone. The trouble was that half of them were called Jasper – and the other half weren’t good enough. There wasn’t
a
man
shortage, but there was a Superman shortage.

Ingrid Irving had a theory that there had been a war that no one had told them about, in which all the heterosexual men under forty, over six foot and earning more than fifty K a year had been
wiped out. ‘They used this weapon which was sort of a very sophisticated version of the neutron bomb,’ explained Ingrid. ‘You know – that left buildings standing but wiped
out people. Well,
this
bomb – the Talent-Taker – wiped out all the hunks and left the jerks standing. The sort of men that used to be called 4F: fags, failures, fatsos and
freaks.’

Women, unlike men, were raised on the pornography of perfection; first pop stars, then romantic fiction heroes. The higher they climbed, and the more they were told they could have it all, the
less inclined to compromise they became; an inferior man would cast doubts on their hard-won status. Sexually speaking, successful women had become fussy eaters.

Men, on the other hand, learned early to make the best of things. They had a dream girl, but until that came along, their hormones urged them to look on the bright side. There were no female
counterparts of such pragmatically obscene sayings as ‘Who looks at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire?’ and ‘All cats are grey in the dark’. Long before they
graduated to the stapled
smorgasbord
of the centrefold, they learned to appreciate the cheap and cheerful girls of the downmarket end of so-called adult books (which might be more
accurately described as magazines for masturbating juveniles). They learned sexual compromise: she’s got cross eyes, but great legs! No teeth, but look at the tits on it!

They were lucky, Susan thought as she lay on the bed. Every time she considered leaving Matthew, she only had to look at him to realize what a bargain he was. He was handsome, successful,
intelligent and solvent; she couldn’t settle for anything less. She’d just have to wait until she could get something more.

The phone rang and automatically she reached across the bed to answer it.

‘Ignore it,’ begged Matthew, raising his head for a minute before carrying on where he’d left off.

She ignored him instead. ‘Hello?’

‘Susan?’

‘Who is this?’

‘This is Tobias Pope. I was wondering whether you would like your job back. Or even your dead boyfriend’s job.’

A whimpering noise escaped her, which was more than Matthew’s mouth had achieved in a quarter of an hour. What could she say? Yes sounded pathetic, no sounded suicidal. She was literally
speechless.

‘Hello? Are you there, Susan? Speak up, girl. Do you want the job or don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said sulkily.

‘Good. I’ve booked a table at Le Drive for ten; actually I’ve booked all the tables. Can you be there in time? If not, I’ll ask someone else.’

‘I can be there.’

‘Good. I like black dresses. Make sure you wear one.’

She gaped into the vacant phone.

‘Who was that?’ asked Matthew softly. Oh, he’d stopped. She hadn’t noticed.

‘A friend.’ She swung her legs gracefully over his head, got up and walked over to her wardrobe, throwing open the door and gazing at her row of clothes without seeing anything.
‘A friend and benefactor.’ She grabbed at a black Rifat Ozbek and pulled it over her head. Snatching up her Mason-Pearson hairbrush and her Etienne Augier briefcase, she ran down the
stairs.

At the front door it occurred to her that she hadn’t said goodbye to Matthew. She yelled it up the stairs. But it was a big house, and she couldn’t be sure he’d heard her. And
she didn’t have any time to waste.

‘Punctuality! One of the great virtues!’ Tobias Pope smiled at her across the table as though she was the entrée and he planned to have her flambéed
in brandy. ‘And so much more important than all those milk-and-water so-called virtues like honesty, decency and loyalty. On the contrary, I call those vices: soul-sapping things only to be
indulged in by those who’ve cancelled their subscription to the human race. Don’t you agree, Susan?’

‘Absolutely.’ She looked at his face with interest; it was an unmistakably American face of the type that can be traced from Mount Rushmore to American soap opera patriarchs. It was
stubborn, obsessively individualistic and it led with its jaw; his hair was a shade best described as Pentagon Pewter, and his eyes were bright blue, too blue, bright and beautiful in his
weather-beaten and wolverine face. They looked unreal, transplants stolen from a screen idol, and they made her uncomfortable. She pretended an interest in the decor of Le Dive, done out in the
matt black and lacquered red of a designer opium den; those colors which the rag hags predicted would be replaced by pastels every year, and which never were.

It really was empty, for the first time in the three years since it had opened. He really had booked all the tables; it must have cost him thousands of pounds sterling. Just a tip in the ocean,
she guessed.

‘Really, Mr Pope, a Big Mac would have done nicely.’

‘A cheap date, too!’ He laughed. ‘Oh, that’s a good one. I like that. I like
you
, Susan. I like you so much I’ll level with you.’

He leaned across the table, close. She could smell his aftershave, something very old and expensive that made her think of the time when New York phone numbers had been preceded by codes like
‘Rhinelander’ and ‘Plaza’. She couldn’t place it, and not being able to place a man’s aftershave for once – and thus not being able to write him off with
one pertinent put-down – made her feel oddly disorientated and powerless.

‘I can get a lot of women,’ he said. ‘Too many, in fact. There is such a thing, believe me. In some countries, though I shan’t say which, I can literally get any woman I
want, from the strutting little generalissimo’s wife down to the last sad
muchacha
in shanty town. Here in your fine country, where the women are fair, the policemen are wonderful
and the guys like nothing more than to dress up in frocks and play football, I can get up to – let’s see, arriviste minor royalty. Easily.

‘But they’re just blue-blooded bimbos, basically, and once you’ve had them they’re as much fun as some dumb wetback wench who can’t speak a word of American.
They’re worse, because you can’t pretend you don’t speak their language. And I’m so sick of bimbo talk, and bimbos. Do you know why, Susan?’

‘Because you want an old-fashioned girl?’ She gulped at her vodka martini.

He laughed again. ‘Well caught. But no. It’s because I’m bored with breaking bimbos. It’s no fun, no challenge, no sport – it’s like putting Sugar Ray in the
ring with a crippled midget. No. Strong, hard career girls – they’re the new
filet mignon
of females. They’re the new frontier for a man. Girls like you. Oh, I’d
have fun breaking you, Susan.’ He frowned at her plate. ‘Eat your dinner, you’re too thin.’ His tone was grotesquely paternal.

She poked at her sautéed chicken in bourbon. Her throat was so tight she couldn’t have swallowed a peanut. She wondered if it would be bad form to ask for her next martini
intravenously.

He was mad. He wanted to hurt her.

She wanted to hear more. She must be mad, too.

She looked at him. ‘I don’t think I understand you.’

‘Oh, I think you do.’ He took a pecan from her plate. ‘I’ll tell you how I see the schedule. You’ve read about the twelve labours of Hercules, I suppose?’ He
laughed. ‘I take it you can read?’

‘Oh yes. Especially between the lines.’

‘Good girl.’ Bourbon from the pilfered pecan ran down his chain. He looked even more like the king of the concrete jungle at feeding time. How do you like your blood sacrifice, sir?
Rare, please. ‘Well, let’s think about this proposition in a classical vein. Let’s call it the six labours of Susan. See how modest my demands are? And believe me, my imagination
runs well into telephone numbers. International calls at that. But you have only six tasks to complete. Of course, there is no logical reason at all why I should give you your job back, let alone
your victim’s. Your conduct was disgraceful, unprofessional and indefensible.’ He sighed ‘Yet you have a dream and I have a whim.’

She laid down her knife and stared him straight in the eye. ‘What is it?’