Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (15 page)

Do not discuss the relationship and how you know it has ended or whether he wants/ does not want/ to end it. Doing so will produce pangs of regret, and these can be the worst pangs of all.

On the same level, do not write/ ring/ text/ fax/ email your decision to shake the sugar from your shoes for once and for all and head for retirement in Torquay/ Tangier/ ex-council flat in Clacton. As you speak you will probably cry—only to discover his new Mummy/wife/fiancée/hooker answered the phone anyway and is lying on a comfortable bed in the flat she has worked so hard to furnish, watching
To Die For
for the hundredth time (you can hear
Season of the Witch
as it builds in the background.)

On no account give a payoff/ goodbye present/ photos of you both together to the departing Object of Desire. It is hurtful if they return for more, and devastating if a photo album is found in a local car boot sale.

So here I am. I'm in my flat and I'm not going to sell it, a huge improvement on when Alain was here and midsummer grabbed us both and wouldn't let us go. I now know that even if I'm offered the same price or more for it, it's fairy gold. I mean, where am I going to go? (OK, I'm one of the lucky ones, you
may say: I don't
have
to sell, to get rid of debts, to pay off a mortgage for once and for all.) But after the Hormead Road and Maygrove Road experience, I really can't see where I could live—and anyway what's wrong with where I am?

Bill bangs the knocker (I got rid of Mr Nyan's throttled-budgie door chime as soon as he'd gone) and Molly gives him a beer and he starts in. I wish Bill was my type, but he's not: so Aryan, so unmoving and straightforward—none of Alain's tortured silences for him—but then I don't want to talk about Alain ever again. After trying to call him on the night Stefan Mocny came round and wiggled his thing at me, Claire answered, natch, and I burst into tears, and Alain came to the phone, but all he said was ‘Oh Scarlett' and so I hung up—after all that I will never again say or hear the name Alain. That I promise and it's for keeps.

Bill said he wanted to tell me something before it was too late. So Molly sat forward and I pulled my aching legs off the sofa (are we oldies really meant to retire in our seventies when we paid our National Insurance stamps all those years in order to be looked after when we turn sixty?) and Bill was saying that 29 Hormead Road wouldn't be a good buy for me—and he didn't know where to look
when he said this, because obviously if I ratted on him he'd lose his £100 a day job with Stefan Mocny.

I couldn't tell Bill that his boss had blackmailed me into saying I'd buy the house from hell so I said nothing and there was a long silence.

‘Twenty-nine Hormead Road belongs to Stefan', Bill said at last.

So there you are. Stefan and Crookstons were planning on a massive profit out of me when the sale of my flat to Mr Nyan went through. I had been saved by the skin of my teeth.

‘Alain said you liked that house by the church', Bill went on; and I felt myself go red in the face. I want to recover, I felt like screaming at him—that name cannot be mentioned in this house! (For I knew the path to survival led to simply not caring what Stefan told Claire, what Alain thinks of any of it, what Claire believes.) ‘They're a pack of cards!' I heard myself saying aloud while Molly giggled.

‘I know the house, scouting for Stefan', Bill says, and he too blushes—must be a symptom of Boom Disease.

‘And?' I say. I have to know, I thought of Dream House so often …

‘It's in need of demolition and total rebuilding', Bill says. ‘Been on the market about two years. The owners have emigrated to Ireland and they're thinking of selling just the site.'

‘I see', I say.

It's nearly Hallowe'en and I'm writing this in Henrietta's shop—thankfully she's not here, probably headed up to trendy W9 to see some clients, and I hear the rockets go off early as if to tell us that this is indeed the season of the witch: black nights that come down suddenly in the middle of the afternoon, storm-level rain and hurricane-force winds, every London garden a blasted heath.

I am not a witch; Molly rubbed some witch hazel on my warts and they slunk off. I am not a witch; since Alain left I've had no sense of magic spells (I think they came from Stefan Mocny. Anyone would have felt a pricking of their thumbs when seeing
him
zoom down the road on his Harley Davidson).
I've witnessed the look on the faces of poor people in an about-to-be requisitioned house when Stefan walked in, bodyguarded by two men from Crookstons, holding aloft the contract only the weak and foolish will sign. Stefan, who engineered a fake future for Alain and me in a sham house …

So if I'm not a witch, what am I? The question remains as imponderable as before. Can I be visible when I choose? I hope so, I've booked a makeover at the new beauty spa at the end of Saltram Crescent, and Molly is planning a party—in my flat, as her one-room rental won't fit in all the people from her publishing firm that she wants to invite. (‘You'll find someone else, I'm going to ask Greg to the party', Molly says. I wish she wouldn't.)

What does it mean, ageing gracefully? And is ageing disgracefully just a matter of wearing purple? If so, how sad.

Or maybe we can just be people. Give up our seat in the bus to young pregnant women, mend cars, cook great meals when we feel like it …

I wander round Henrietta's poky little shop, with its kilims and ancient Cypriot earthenware and wall-paint samples in dowdy Heritage greys and greens. And as I do I hear the letterbox in the hall bang up and down: junk mail, letters and bills for
the impractical Henrietta … and a card—an ordinary, small, white card, slightly grubby, such as builders and decorators drop in at possibly promising addresses.

I still don't know what made me pick it up. I put down the mags, leaflets, ads for Rye Linen and Kids' Clothes and hold it in my hand and stare down. The dingy, stately home colours applied in the hall of the little house used by Henrietta as both shop and consultancy for interior design make it difficult to decipher who is trying to persuade us to buy what on this day, as fireworks and gloom and sudden squalls lift the children's pointed, fancy-dress witch hats right off their heads.

But there it is:

Tiles.

Provençal and Tuscan tiles fitted. Best quality.

And his name underneath. I can't help smiling at the amateurish writing and lettering on the card—it reminds me that Alain is French and probably can't read or write well in English.

But where is he?

The phone number, a mobile number, is painted in the right-hand corner of the card.

A cracker goes off outside, so I nearly jump out of my skin.

Henrietta's phone sits waiting on her desk messed up with unanswered letters and unpaid bills.

What do I do?

A list of choices for aspiring Sugar Mummies. Endings—and maybe you'd like to add your own—are just as interesting as beginnings, if you come to think of it.

We're all near our own endings, we Sugar Mummies, and however much wrinkle remover we apply we'll soon be ready to join the other kind of mummy, the kind the British Museum has in its Egyptian department.

So this is how
Confessions of a Sugar Mummy
finishes—or is it?

Hollywood makes a film of the book, showing Scarlett marrying Alain—after the sad death of his wife from a long illness. The extreme old age of the happy couple (Alain has caught up with our heroine by now) results in glowing references to Spencer Tracy and Kathleen Hepburn in
On Golden Pond.

As in Love Story, it has to be the girl who dies. Scarlett's sad demise is shown with supernatural lighting effects, so it is as a young woman that she leaves the grieving Alain to live out the rest of his days with his wife.

Scarlett—as Milly Theale—sells her flat for a colossal sum and then dies, leaving all her money to Alain. His wife Claire, however, cannot fail to observe Alain's new lack of love for her and accuses him of having fallen in love with the memory of Scarlett. He confesses and his marriage breaks up.

Alain overdoes it on booze and drugs, and dies. Scarlett is heart-broken, but able to live in her flat to a ripe old age.

Born in London, Emma Tennant was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and spent the World War II years and her childhood summers at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her family also owned estates in Trinidad.

Tennant grew up in the modish London of the 1950s and 1960s. She worked as a travel writer for Queen magazine and an editor for Vogue, publishing her first novel,
The Colour of Rain
, under a pseudonym when she was twenty-six. Between 1975 and 1979, she edited a literary magazine, Bananas, which helped launch the careers of several young novelists.

A large number of books by Tennant have followed: thrillers, children's books, fantasies, and several revisionist takes on classic novels, including a sequel to
Pride and Prejudice
called
Pemberley
. In later years, she began to treat her own life in such books as
Burnt Diaries
(1999), which details her affair with Ted Hughes.

Tennant has been married four times, including to the journalist and author Christopher Booker and the political writer Alexander Cockburn. She has two daughters and a son, author Matthew Yorke. In April 2008, she married her partner of 33 years, Tim Owens.

Confessions of a Sugar Mummy
Heathcliff's Tale
Hotel de Dream
The Autobiography of The Queen
The Colour of Rain
The Crack
Wild Nights

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain 2007 by Emma Tennant

Copyright © 2007 by Gibson Square

All rights reserved
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make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The moral right of the author is asserted.

eISBN: 9781448210626

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