Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (2 page)

The cosmetics bill was just under two hundred and fifty pounds. Christ—I'm going to be clean out of funds before Alain even arrives—after all, my flat isn't even on the market yet …

‘I'm leaving you a free sample of the eyelid-strengthening cream', Georgina says before she leaves.

Everyone has a friend who's there to remind them of reality, or, as it usually feels at the time, put them down generally, stop them having any fun and (when in a grumpy mood themselves) rain on their parade to such an extent that they feel like breaking up their umbrella and walking away. ‘Oh Scarlett', says my mentor and guide through life's rocky moral paths, when she comes into my flat (and has seen me peering through the spyhole with a pencilled, shadowed and mascara-laden eye), ‘What
do
you think you're doing? You don't imagine we're going to have sex with this man, do you? He's probably incapable anyway.'

By this time I'd let Molly in (she suits her name,
she's Irish and has a bob of dark hair she doesn't dye often enough so she appears to have grey handles at the side of her face like a jug), and I admit I was grateful that at least the new occupant of the upstairs flat had been spared from hearing this. He's a banker, part of the new gold-rush of gentrification, and I wouldn't want him to reflect on my preference for impotent men every time he sees me emptying the rubbish bin. ‘Of course he can do it', I said, aware I sounded like a ten-year-old, ‘I mean, why should he be …?'

Now the thing about Molly is that she knows everything. Even if she doesn't actually know the people involved—and there was no way Molly would have known Alain
and
Claire: she works as a copy editor with a big publishing firm, is always about to be promoted to an editor but never is—even if, as I say, she'd heard of them (extremely unlikely), there would be no connection whatever between her life and the dreamlike existence of Alain and Claire. This time, Molly wasn't going to know best.

‘I saw his tiles in
Interiors
', Molly comes up with an unfailing trump. ‘Honestly, there isn't a chance …'

‘You mean he's gay', I almost shouted, careful to
spare the banker as he shuffled around upstairs, getting ready for an evening out. ‘What part of prehistory are you living in, for God's sake? He's not an interior decorator …' Here I knew Molly had really got me so I was unwittingly bringing out the old chestnut about interior decoration. For God's sake, indeed.

At the same time, I felt a wave—the first, but there were and doubtless will be many more to come—of total desolation. I'd found all day I couldn't summon up Alain's face (it's a sign you're in love, so I've been told, if you just cannot remember what your inamorato looks like, but at my age it's probably Alzheimer's and nothing premature about it).

I just couldn't help seeing him, faceless though he might be, as he walked to the end of the drive of the perfect house at Bandol and stood waving to me over the banks of lavender that line the road. He was in his romantic-hero outfit, as I like to think of it: open-necked, sea-island cotton, blue shirt, sprayed-on jeans (he's rake-thin, did I say?) and a great, worn-looking, studded, brown leather belt.

‘That's why he's so thin', Molly is saying. She has the irritating habit, found often in people you see a lot of, of knowing exactly what you're thinking.
‘Because he's ill, he's a big drinker, it's not cancer, wait a minute I'll try and remember what it, the disease is called …'

I confess this came as a shock. Like being in a self-satisfied state after a shopping trip and glowing with joy at your wonderful new purchase and then finding you've been landed with damaged goods.

‘Christ, a seriously ill, homeless man is about to throw himself on your mercy', Molly panted when I'd come out with the whole story.

‘He'll want to go private—it's three thou a night at the Princess Grace.'

But I wouldn't believe it. Alain is so lively—he may have had a short bout of something or other, and then Claire (but I didn't want to think about this) had cared for him and he was better. He couldn't have come on to me the way he did at Bandol if all the energy had been drained out of him by illness.

Then I thought maybe it was meeting
me
that had suddenly made him well. That's how seriously mad you can be when you're in the first throes of being a Sugar Mummy.

Molly said what I knew she'd say when she'd looked round my ground floor sitting-room and noticed the polished boards and the vases full of
tasteful grasses and the drinks table with the bottle of tequila and a whole bowl of finest sea salt.

‘So where is he?' Molly said.

This is the kind of time when you evaluate yourself (nothing else to do) and find you're badly lacking in pretty well all of the human attributes that can save you when you get to the Pearly Gates (not far off). I'm suffering from sexual frustration when I ought to be collecting for Save the Children. How gross is that? I'm trying to turn Alain into a Romance rather than a simple fuck, so I'm a hypocrite as well.

I've already taken out my calculator and estimated what I can spend on Alain: holidays (luxurious, for the first one at least); outfits (nothing but the best until they wear out, and then it's mail-catalogue lambswool sale sweaters); restaurants (if the evening turns out as I hope, the Kwai Chi in
Fernhead Road will become our local, with all that fresh seafood to assist the libido).

But wait a minute. Alain may have lost his libido altogether if Molly is right—she's sitting opposite me in the basket chair and has been since last night passed without a glimpse of Alain. She came back this morning at dawn, yelling ‘let me in' into my intercom so the banker upstairs definitely must think I'm a lesbian.

I'd tell Molly to go, except I feel quite desolate, totting up my sins and misdemeanours. Do men do this? Only Donald Trump, I suspect, but not men who work part-time on rich people's flats like I do and sometimes forget to get in food because it's so stressful when the money runs out. I'm the only self-obsessed sexagenarian (a good word, it cheers me up) that I know and it's only sensible to work out what you can spend on a Sugar Mummy's boy. Sensible because somehow I can see Alain's back-view vanishing down the street if I don't keep an eye on the finance. After all, he's in a desperate situation himself—he doesn't need another casualty of what Molly and I call ‘late-Thatcherism-without-hope'.

Still, where the hell is he?

That voice on the phone: it was sweet and soft and I could smell the lavender as he spoke, and at
the same time he had a perfectly organised ‘everything-is-all-right' tone as if the meeting in the boardroom is the only thing holding him up.

Of course it can't be. I try to imagine him and his wife—poor Claire weeping and saying where are they going to go—and then I try to unimagine it because it's none of my business (so I do have a nice side, really) … and then I think perhaps this is my business after all. Perhaps it's the point.

‘Let's go for a walk', I say to Molly, ‘and pick up a takeaway from Kwai Chi.' (The fact is that thinking about the sex I never had last night and the scallops and raw tuna and prawns and shellfish has made me hungry.)

So that's why we're two of the most expendable human beings on earth—that is, ‘women of a certain age', as we oldies used to be called (what's certain is that most people, and that includes younger women, would gladly administer euthanasia to women heading for the big three-score-and-ten, or over: we just take up too much room on the planet). Think of the Gaga Travel tours, with all those old bags in buses, heading for foreign destinations. We are bags, Molly and me, with a bit of money jangling where the exciting bits used to be.

It's good to be out, though. I look around
fervently, expecting to find signs of the new prosperity that has visited our pocket of north London, but everything is quiet, just as glum as ever, with an underlying menace. You can't relax in these long, drab streets because someone might skip out from an alleyway and mug you to death just for fun.

You honestly can't imagine, behind these net curtains (and the odd upmarket Cath Kidston chintz curtain) that an army of new millionaires is preparing for another day. True, the odd Barbados brochure lies in the gutter—but no limos are collecting club-class airmile holders, no Harrods carrier bags have been placed in the recycling bin.

Whatever do they plan to spend all the money on, once the estate agent's board is taken down and the money rolls in?

‘When did he say he was coming?' Molly asks at the bar in the restaurant as we decide on eggs Benedict because it's cheaper—I spent all my money on make-up like a crazy teenager, and Molly isn't one to sock you a meal if you're low in funds.

‘Soon', I say, knowing I sound pathetic. ‘Soon, he said.'

The silence between us says it all. We walk back along the street of tight-fisted Midases and don't even stop to buy a newspaper at Patel. (What's the
point? The civilians and children you saw being murdered on last night's TV won't look any more alive today.)

We stop at the foot of the chipped stone steps leading up to our front door. On the bottom step is the dog shit visited on us daily by the Belgian Shepherd that that daft old man keeps in his flat in what was once the big redbrick Victorian church just behind us. Flats now were a place to worship God in the old days; dogs wouldn't even have been allowed in.

But what right have I to hanker after a church? I'm a woman who's desperate to be taken in adultery (or would that be Alain, as I'm not married?) and I'll be unintentionally chaste for the rest of my life.

‘Good Lord', Molly is saying, as I puff up past the poo. ‘I call that chutzpah.'

But she sounds admiring, so I know something not so bad has caught Molly's eye. Sure enough, the irresistible form of Alain can be discerned in the low chair by my sitting-room window. He looks weary … wonderfully in need of a bath and a rest …

‘That banker upstairs must have let him in', Molly says as I stand gaping on the steps. ‘And you must have left the flat door open. Honestly, what's come over you today?'

Oh God, he really fancies me!

How can I tell? Because of the smile: I have genuinely never seen anything quite so sexy as Alain's smile on that day, which seems a Sleeping Beauty century ago … before it grew so hot you'd offer sex to anyone—in the park, in the ice-cream deli, in the Electric Cinema, where the chairs are so easy you just surrender to lust before the credits roll …

Because the smile hung on a long time, I saw it was a clever way of telling me he loved me, while Molly rattled on about a piece she'd read in the
Daily Mail
about his tiles and his wife's recipes (are you my friend, Molly, or what?) and it looked as if
we were having an ordinary conversation with me saying ‘mmm … how interesting' and Alain even filling in details of their autumn range, speaking
through
the smile, which I thought was sexier still.
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
I can't remember where those lines from a French poem come from, but even as we sat all three in a sort of enchanted circle, with Molly the elderly chaperone (sorry pal), Alain the suitor and myself—I'm too modest to say it—I knew somehow that I'd never forget that first evening. Just how I'd remember it, I didn't know.

Smiles are free, aren't they? Not that I cared then that Alain hadn't brought so much as a bottle of wine or a present of some kind—after all he was in terrible trouble, what with his housing situation and (presumably) an about-to-be-vacated porcelain factory. He saw me as a saviour—that's what I thought then—and isn't that just what a Sugar Mummy wants to be?

She has to get some kind of payment in return, though, doesn't she? And we all know what that is, to put it crudely. Well, why not? Men have been Sugar Daddies since the Pharaohs; it's our turn now to pay for what we want.

‘So where will you re-locate?' Molly is saying to Alain as she swivels round in the low chair and
looks at him properly for the first time (the smile, I note with admiration, dwindles gradually and then disappears).

But Alain didn't answer her question, and if I'd been on full alert then I'd have wondered why. After all, he's grown-up, however hard I try to see him as a boy, and he—and, OK, his wife—must have decided where they're going when they have to leave the Bandol Dream House and let the horrible brother-in-law move in. They're hardly going to sleep rough, are they?

Then it occurred to me that that's what Alain looks as if he's been doing. Same blue shirt but distinctly grubby round the cuffs and neck, sprayed-on-jeans replaced by a pair of white trousers that sag promisingly at the crutch but show how painfully thin he is where the belt—a thin strip of plasticised leather this time—holds them up, and shoes you could quite honestly expect to see on a
clochard
dossing down by the metro in Paris.

Where has Alain come from? What happened to Alain?

Of course you'll know by now that I'm a bit of a fantasist when it comes to Alain and Romance. I can't help picturing the terminal battle between him and his wife—all of a week ago to judge by the state
of his clothes—and equally I can't resist imagining it's because of me that he's been kicked out of Claire's family home. She's seen that he's fallen madly in love, just as I have. It's one of those great love stories like Paul and Virginie and Héloïse and Abelard (I must be thinking of French examples because Alain is French, I could just as well say Troilus and Cressida), and he has proclaimed his undying devotion to me, despite the rage of the wife he married all those years ago. He wouldn't deny his feelings for me, so she threw him out.