Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (3 page)

‘Alain, would you like a drink?' Molly said. At the same time I could see her looking round the room and spotting an overnight bag, a battered Louis Vuitton, by the door. ‘You've had a long journey', she went on, this time sounding just like a nursing Sister who cannot be disobeyed, ‘would you like a shower?'

Before I could glower at Molly—how dare she offer my amenities to a stranger, is she suffering from Sugar Mummy syndrome without knowing it?—Alain had risen to his feet and was standing in front of the drinks table, still laden pathetically with the margarita preparations of the night before, including the gardenia I'd spotted at the Notting Hill flower stall on an excursion to buy tequila. I got
up quickly—more quickly than I'd been able to recently, I may add, which just shows that abstinence makes the heart grow fonder—and ended up just behind Alain.

I didn't dare touch him, as I tried to explain to Molly later when the full emptiness, nothingness and disappointment of that first evening in London had been reduced from a searing wound to a throbbing which could only be assuaged by discussion.

‘But why not?' Molly said. ‘He did give off a weird pong, if that's what you mean …'

But I couldn't tell Molly that I loved the slept-in smell of Alain's shirt and the whiff of stale alcohol that hung around the stained white trousers. (How I longed to pull them off him; why the hell was Molly here anyway, it was meant to be our first romantic meeting, Alain's and mine …)

I didn't want to tell Molly, either, that I saw a glass on the table which had clearly been recently used. And I saw the bottle of tequila was half empty. She would have been I-told-you-so about it and I couldn't have stood that. Not then—hardly even now.

‘Shall I make you a margarita?' I said in a bright, girlish voice I couldn't believe was actually coming
out of me. ‘Or would you prefer wine?'

But Alain had clearly had enough already. He swayed slightly on his feet in those diarrhoea-colour cheap shoes and I saw his eyes were like a fruit machine, with his pupils rising slowly and then falling so I began to feel dizzy myself.

No, Alain had to go. He would call tomorrow. Where was he staying? Oh, with a cousin of Claire's, she is married to a famous artist, I can't remember the name, not Damien Hirst but someone like that.

‘It won't be too far to walk', Alain said. Claire's cousin lives in Notting Hill.

Molly and I stood by the front door of the flat and pretended not to watch as he ran down the steps and turned left into the grey streets of W9. We said nothing as the vacuum closed round us, and Molly opened a bottle of red wine.

Later, when we'd drunk that and another as well, I saw that Alain had left his Vuitton bag behind and we opened it as if it would somehow provide the answer to the aura of mystery which seemed to hang around him. But there was nothing inside except one poxy tile.

I am called Scarlett because my mother was reading the interminable Mega-Bore on Christmas Eve (When? We all know it was a long time ago) and, so she's told me about a thousand times, I came out just as the (‘I don't know nothin' about birthin') scene began. I am the product—by osmosis, you might say—of the most embarrassing and loathsome sexual coupling in history, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

I was the result of the coy glance the hateful Vivien Leigh threw in Clark Gable's direction when he came in drunk and ready to rape the genteel tart under the sheets (which, as everyone knows, he did). His reward was another coy glance across the
breakfast tray on Scarlett's bed.

So, with that monstrous pair as my virtual parents, what would you do in my place when the visitor you thought was coming to make you feel young again turns up a day late, drinks the booze without even pouring you a drink, and shows he's been in trouble by wearing cheap clothes from Primark or, even worse, the property of a recently dead man and acquired under the bridge in Ladbroke Grove?

Would you decide never to see him again? Or just put up with it along with the prospect of a restless night and a counting of hours until it's decent to make a phone call. (When's that? To someone in Alain's condition, it's never the right time to call: mornings he's stuffing down the pills to kill the pain of the hangover; midday, more pills to counter the depression brought on by wasting the morning; afternoon, the vodka, the red wine; evening Irish whiskey—if there's the money to buy it with, Paddy doesn't come cheap in the Harrow Road.) And what if this ‘cousin of Claire's' answers the phone? How do you get out of that one? Suppose he was lying and Claire herself is enjoying the amenities of her cousin's posh pad in Notting Hill?

Then the horrible thoughts begin. Is Claire about to throw that coy look at Alain? Did he sober up on the walk back from W9 and give his wife the best time she's had for years—liberated, as she must be, by freedom from running the house in the south of France and from the niggling worries that her brother-in-law is about to throw them out in the street? Has she let herself go for the first time in years?

Advice to would-be Sugar Mums

Don't speculate on the sexual activities of the object of desire. He is either doing what you most dread, or something that wasn't invented when you were young.

Do call him—but only when
you
feel like it—drunk will do, midnight will be fine, on a Sunday morning with the sound of church bells is perfectly OK. It's his fault for not being with you at the time.

Never ever try to contact his current girlfriend, wife, incestuous half-sister or suspect male best friend. He needs time off from the endless stream of gifts, £50 notes,
artworks or whatever you're pushing on him. And if he's in the middle of an orgy when you call it's none of your business. Just reflect on why you haven't been invited.

Of course it's easier to give advice than to follow it. Sometimes, as my friend Molly knows well, comparisons are easier to understand than hard-and-fast rules of behaviour. If the difference between what is considered in life or in fiction to be winning or acceptable conduct contrasts badly with the deal you seem to have set up for yourself in real life, then this is the time to think really hard about your relationship. Is it all one way? Are the times you can see yourself as another human being in a couple almost non-existent? If so, aren't you wasting your time as a Sugar Mummy, because this is precisely what it's all about. You're better off joining the Gaga Third Age University
now
and forgetting about the life of the elderly geisha, where service is unpaid and seldom met with a smile.

I shut my eyes—we're back in last night now—and when I open them I see that the giant plasma screen on the wall at the end of my bed (my one great extravagance) is activated. Its pinkish glow makes me feel better and younger, and I prop myself
up while still half asleep.

Molly has put on something—a DVD or one of her home-made videos (pray God NOT that)—and it's some time before I see it's
Gone With The Wind
, and I realise (I hate you, Molly) that she's interested in showing me the difference between the kind of gorgeous, wicked time that original Scarlett could have and the miserable fate of her namesake (that's me). Never mind.

I drift off as Scarlett goes into one of her famous tantrums and Rhett showers her with expensive gifts …

It turns out the first Scarlett was right—tomorrow
is
another day. In my case, with the sleeplessness and denial of sex, it felt like two days—and that's because, I suppose, my memories are of having sex at night and waking up the next day.

First things first.

I come down from my room with the endless replay of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in their primeval relationship (Molly's idea of a joke, but it might have driven me mad) to find my friend sitting in the kitchen with a guest, a woman in what used to be called late middle age, wearing a lot of gold jewellery and a bright floral-patterned dress. I almost groaned aloud, except it would have been
rude in front of Molly's guest.

Molly is looking tremendously pleased with herself—that's the first thing I thought—then, dimly (and without even a cup of coffee) I work out why. The story of the uninvited (by me) guest in my kitchen is another of Molly's teases, and boy am I growing tired of them.

So here we have it: this woman of about sixty with hair dyed the bright red you sometimes see in Kilburn High Road and I wonder just how drunk the dyer was when it went on—henna-ed hen-night perhaps?—is sitting right up close to the kitchen table and smiling all over her face (yes, at this hour, if it really is as early as it feels). Her smile is sort of triumphant, as if she's just heard she's been left a packet—and this is in W9 of all places! Maybe, I think in my still groggy way, she's heard how much her flat has been valued at. Perhaps everyone in W9 is smiling like this when they wake up, except for those who never got the sex they were hoping for and found themselves instead watching the millionth replay of
Gone With The Wind.

‘Scarlett, this is Gloria', Molly says. ‘… You remember … I told you … she's just back from Barbados?'

So what's great about that I am thinking, when
the doorbell goes and Molly bustles out to answer it.

Go ahead, throw parties if you want to, I say to myself a touch viciously, because Molly is a sitting tenant in the basement of a crumbling ex-mansion off Shirland Road and her German landlady is down on her like a ton of bricks if she so much as puts on an old 78 and dances alone up and down the garden.

Before I can go on cursing my best friend under my breath, she's back and there's a young black man following her. OK, call me racist, but I freely admit I thought he'd come to read the gas meter and I pointed to it on the wall. Well, why shouldn't I think that? I'm made to feel like Alf Garnett in the replay of
Till Death Do Us Part
, though, since it's clear what I'm doing, and while I'm glowering at Molly across the kitchen she's doing the introductions at the same time, which makes it doubly embarrassing.

‘Gloria's husband Wayne', gurgles Molly.

‘Yo Scarlett', Wayne booms. ‘How ya doin'?'

Of course it became clear (just as I heard to my astonishment the chime of the beaten-up old church clock at the end of Saltram Crescent, as it marked twelve noon) that of course Molly is introducing me to one of my own breed—although I must say Gloria looks considerably happier than I do.

To be charitable to Molly she's trying to show me the dangers of being a Sugar Mummy. But it's hard to see what they are. Wayne appears delighted with his new marital status, and Gloria, shaking her gold bangles like she's a walking bank, beams at him when he joins her at the table.

‘We're going to the shops', Gloria announces, ‘the new deli on Fernhead Road. Anything I can get you two ladies?'

But both Molly and I are silent, I because I am now cleaned out—I will have to plead at length with the bank to get to the end of the day—let alone the month—and Molly because she is living on her pension and a small editing fee, which means she never has any money at all.

We're sitting there while Gloria gathers up a Planet Organic carrier-bag and another even bigger bag from which the handles of a Mulberry leather bag protrude. Then the telephone rings.

‘I'll take it', I say, remembering at last that I can do what I want here. Somehow, Gloria and Wayne and Molly have made me feel a stranger in my own home. ‘Yes', I say into the 1970s bakelite receiver, conscious that three pairs of eyes are focused on me—what on earth has Molly been telling them about me?

‘It's Alain here', a pleasant but masterly voice comes out to me. ‘Did we arrange to have lunch today?'

‘Yes, of course we did', I hear myself saying in the same agreeable, orderly tone. ‘Let's go to La Speranza in Westbourne Park Road, that OK with you?'

The voice that was Alain said that would be fine.

So it was under the bemused gaze of Molly, Gloria and Wayne that I left the kitchen and set off in the direction of Notting Hill.

This is all a new experience for me. It's funny how one can remember all kinds of practical—and severely boring—things about life as one grows old, but sheer pleasure is not included in the agenda.

I know that I should go to the doctor if I have a sore throat and especially if the glands in my neck are up (it takes ages to learn that when one is young). I know I should keep some stamps and a small amount of money in my bag ‘in case' (in case of what I've never discovered).

I should remember to ring sick friends and listen to all the details of what the illness is doing to them, even if it means missing (a) a favourite TV programme or (b) a possible call from someone who
wants me to come out for a meal or make a visit to an art gallery, or, better still, the cinema.

Before you become a Sugar Mummy you have to get rid of all this.
You
come first (except for OD, of course, which stands for Object of Desire as well as OverDraft).

It's like learning how to be young and selfish again. And, as you haven't got long, why not go all out to be a granager—a woman without a care in the world except where the new s tights are on sale, and a good knowledge of today's music scene … but there, I'm afraid, I just can't keep up. Maybe being the same age as the Stones makes that OK—yet somehow I know that it doesn't. Ditto Bob Dylan, although that's about where I stop.

Back to Pleasure. It's a hundred years since I went out to lunch with someone I actually fancied and who might, might I repeat—like me enough to suggest another meeting. More SM rules:

Don't plan in advance as if you were going to the Gaga Reading Group or Bingo Over Eighties Club.