Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (7 page)

Anyway, I begin to sympathise with Queen Elizabeth the First, who couldn't let herself go in case the man she wanted took advantage of her. Bess had to keep her mind firmly on her status, her wealth, the politics of war and all that. There just wasn't time to sit by a fire in Hampton Court or Greenwich or wherever and wait for a messenger to ride up with a letter in a cleft stick. If she let go for one nanosecond, she'd find herself in the Tower and all her houses taken by one family member or another. If she ever did get free, she'd have lost her homes by the time she was out.

This isn't going to happen to me. Howie, playing
Essex to my Elizabeth, has now changed into a strange blue suit (he must have brought it, banking on staying here, chillingly assuming, as most men of his generation do, that an ex-wife is always up for it and living in my flat was a cert), and he bursts into the kitchen, where I'm on the last digit of Alain's mobile number.

‘We could go down to Notting Hill for dinner', Howie says. The bravery involved in risking W9 cuisine is obviously too great to contemplate.

‘I've just come back from Notting Hill', I say wearily. ‘Thanks all the same.' I try to calculate how great Howie's profit would be if, as he clearly hopes, the dinner ended with an accepted proposal and the ensuing divorce granted him half of my flat: something in the region of three hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and forty-nine pounds, after subtracting £100 for lobster and champagne at La Speranza. Worth a try, Howie.

‘Maybe something local', he hazards, probably regretting that his need for a bath was greater than his desire for a fuck, with the promise of alimony later.

Howie goes into the sitting-room at last and I hear a conversation starting up with Molly. (He's
anxious, I can tell: he'll want to know if there's ‘someone else'.)

Well, only in my head I say silently and despondently to myself. And, Molly, I'll kick you if you start talking to Howie about Alain. I can see the two Old Lefties sniggering together when she explains the grand villa in the south of France—and, revolting reminder of an aristocratic past, the distinctly unproletarian job of producing hand-painted tiles.

My face is suffused with red when the mobile suddenly rings me back, as if of its own volition, and Alain's voice comes pleasantly soft—and masterly at the same time, I might add. (At age thirteen I was the great fan of the romances of Georgette Heyer.) I hardly notice the door of the downstairs loo opening and Gloria emerging into the hall. She's transformed—all lipstick and hair bouffed up so she wouldn't fit into a London cab without squashing the coiffure.

That's all I did register, because Alain is saying he's round the corner and he's borrowed Claire's cousin's car. Claire's cousin has gone away. Shall we go somewhere for dinner?

Now this is where I'm hit by so many conflicting feelings that I feel like a crossroads where, in the old
days, jazzmen played as the moon came up and the songs and the lovely whine of the electric guitar filled the night skies …

Dinner out! Yes, I know I'm invited sometimes by the Porters or by the Howells and always at the last minute because no one wants an extra, older woman mucking up their dinner party, possibly making eyes at a married male guest or simply looking so depressing that there's an early leave-taking.

I know all that and have almost stopped going out to dinner altogether. But a car … dinner in a restaurant …

This is when I either end the (possibly) blossoming relationship with Alain by blurting out my plan, or I stay quiet. In the end, I do both and neither. ‘I thought you might have come along today', I say. ‘I mean, everyone else was here, Stefan Mocny … and … the banker upstairs …'

‘Stefan Mocny', says Alain, sounding amused.

‘Yes. The banker offered seven hundred thousand and …'

Before I can stumble through the figures I hear a whoop of joy from Alain. I love the sound, it's like a child celebrating good news and for a moment I know the most ecstatic aspect of being a Sugar
Mummy. Alain is so pleased for me: like in a fairy story, the kind wizard upstairs has ensured we'll live happily ever after.

‘I'll pick you up in ten minutes', Alain says.

If my flat's been showing all its bad sides—lack of privacy, bad positioning of amenities (why did the ‘renovator' of thirty years ago put the kitchen down a short but excruciating flight of steps, which also restricts its size and cuts out any chance of natural light, when opening up the sitting-room and putting an open-plan kitchen at the far end would have been an excellent option? Why does the door of the downstairs loo, which has to open into the hall for reasons of space, inevitably catch anyone walking past? I've had enough whangs right across the chest to jump the queue for an ultrasound. Why does the front door swing open inwards, giving anyone on their way upstairs the privilege of the view of
occupant of said loo rising from said loo to wipe ‘n' go?)—then it's proving tonight as hard to leave as to have to be stuck in.

It takes me at least seven minutes to discard the paint-ruined dress, go through all my other outfits and end up with the one I picked first, a black linen number at least three years old and giving no hint of expecting an exciting evening. Play it cool, Scarlett, I urge myself as I go down and try to go noiselessly past the sitting-room—but it's hard to be cool when you're in your sixties and people make as much fuss at you going out as they did all those years ago when you had your first date.

‘Where are you going?' Howie is the first to demand, unsurprisingly and annoyingly. I see his blue suit had added to the cockiness the ex-husband appears to feel when entering the ex-wife's premises. And it's infuriating, too, that Howie appears to be checking the china cabinet—some of the plates were given on the occasion of our wedding centuries ago, it's true, but this is no time to turn them over and mutter ‘Longton Hall' or ‘possibly Chelsea'. I could kill Howie.

‘Can you give me a lift?' Gloria asks. She's sitting forward on the sofa, and the bouffant hair is half-crushed. I see Howie eyeing the gold coins at her
neck and on her bangles and wonder if Gloria would relax her Sugar Mummy preferences if there was nothing else, i.e. only Howie, on offer.

‘I'm not going in your direction', I say, as Molly chuckles and goes to look out of the front window. A faint hoot—I can't imagine Alain sounding a noisy horn—shows he's there. He's here! He's outside in a car, waiting for me!

‘I don't know what direction you
are
going in', Molly says. She thinks she's being witty and is even glancing at Howie for approval. ‘I'm from Bromley', she adds unnecessarily. This statement often activates Old Lefties to compare boring/ deprived/ dangerous origins and leads to contentment. It's better, at least, to be in W9 than wherever they were born or brought up.

‘See you later', Howie says as I rush girlishly to the front door. (He's evidently decided against Gloria and her selection of Thalers and Pieces of Eight: the profit on my flat outshines a whole trading post on the Amazon.)

Now I wish I'd remembered Howie's maddening ‘see you later' and hadn't just taken it as the expression used for years now by the young and meaning nothing. Calmed by Molly's complicit nod and assuming she would ensure the imminent
departure of my ex from
my
flat, I'm suddenly chillingly reminded of my friend Suzanne, whose ex, long a professor of mnemonics in Melbourne, came back last year after being kicked out by his third wife. He was suffering from premature senile dementia, and walked into Suzanne's North Kensington flat with the announcement that this was both morally and actually his home. Suzanne's friends all tried to get him out, but various objects recognisable even after thirty years' absence proved to this learned scholar that by employing ancient Roman methods of memorising places and speeches he had as much right to the Oxford Gardens pad as his long-divorced, first wife. Howie had better not try that on, I think grimly.

But all need not be grim. Here, for Sugar Mummies on the brink of embarking on the career, is a summary of its advantages (providing you have, as I will shortly, loads of cash):

The mundane will vanish from your life once you have picked on the Object of Desire and are determined to pursue him to the (frequently bitter) end. Washing left at the laundrette will remain blissfully forgotten until you or maybe a hireling collects it. The forgetfulness and ensuing irritation at having misplaced (a) specs and (b) address of a
doctor for an ill friend will vanish into thin air. You're too engrossed in thinking about the One You Want, to read (specs) or visit the old friend.

You will find an endless source of fascination in tracing the antecedents of the OD—one recipient of a Sugar Mummy's stipend was descended from the family of Virginia Woolf—and although this caused huge boredom at the pub when brought up (again and again), the melting away of an audience was blissfully ignored.

You will find a whole world—that is, the world of younger people—opens up to you and so you buy
Time Out
and watch youthful singers on TV and go to The Nag's Head to see the latest incest melodrama by a twenty-year-old genius, or Glastonbury, where musicians you've never heard of at all play, and you don't even mind when you slip in the mud.

These are just some of the pluses. Of course, Alain isn't really young. I have to pretend he is, or the pleasure of being a Sugar Mummy would evaporate. A girl in her twenties, for instance, would think him an old man. But that goes into the grim category—and
I must say, coming down the steps (all horribly steep in Saltram Crescent, even at a time like this I have to be careful not to fall), Alain in the little red car, which must belong to Claire's cousin and is parked at rather a peculiar angle to the pavement, looks totally irresistible. Everything annoying fades from my mind: Howie, Molly's jokes, Gloria's obvious vulnerability and my casual ignoring of it, even the ruined dress with its unremovable paint stains and all.

When is a scam not a scam? If two people are (apparently) bent on exploiting each other, is the one who walks away with most of the spoils the victor? Or does the loser retain forever the sense of having been an innocent victim, this sense translating into a state of perma-guilt for the winner?

The words moral turpitude come to mind. Not that I feel it at first here at Marga's Bar, not tonight, Midsummer Night, with tables set out by the little garden area with its innocent box hedges and triangular stone raised island, which block out traffic coming into this dainty heart of Notting Hill. There's an air of secrecy and complicity, with the antique lace shop just behind, and a window full of
French casseroles and Vallauris pottery straight from Alain and Claire country—but I don't want to think about that. It's dark, with one fat red candle on each table; for heaven's sake it's a full moon to top it all! This is the time, now or never, for me to outline my plan.

As happens so often when I'm with Alain, however, something both relevant and disturbing comes along. Down the stubby road leading from the posh gardens and stucco houses of the famous crescents come a woman and a man. Behind them, the moon glows ghoulishly in the sky. A Portuguese silver salver in the window of the pot-and-tile shop catches the moon's rays and assumes the proportions of a savage face. I sense a shudder running through me as I see at a distance the female half of this unlikely couple, but I can't say why. They cross the road and stand hesitating on the pavement. And now I take in the full age of the woman, old or even older than old, face obliterated by a net of lines, neck hunched up under the collar of a coat only a very old woman would need to wear on a balmy night like this.

The old woman has a bag—a white paper bag such as old-fashioned sweets, gob-stoppers, bulls' eyes, sherbets used to be placed in—all the old
names from childhood come flooding back—and she stands holding the bag up to the young man at her side. She is half his height and peers imploringly at him: won't he take a sweet from a Sugar Granny who just can't hide her devotion and longing (what if he
is
her grandson? It would give Freud a new slant on the Oedipus complex at least). She wants him to love her, and to show that love by leaning down from his immense height and fishing a sweet from the cheap white paper bag.

But he doesn't, he smiles and pats the top of her messy grey hair and takes her arm to guide her down the dangerous, little road leading to Avondale Park and beyond that out of Notting Hill altogether. ‘That's you and me', I hear myself saying to Alain. To do him justice, he doesn't even flinch (maybe he's been in a similar scenario before and has calmed the nerves of older women destined to pay for dinner and suddenly feeling their age) and he replies, lightly, ‘no, it's not us—we're in property', and looks across the table at me over the grotesque shadow thrown by the candle. I know he waits for me to say what I want to say and he will answer, as in a prewritten and directed script.

‘When I sell my flat', I say haltingly—and Alain's face is like stone now, there isn't a way of telling he's
even listening—'When I sell, I thought I'd split the sale money in half, invest one half in a buy-to-let and live in a flat, somewhere smaller, on the income the other half provides.'

Alain nods. I wonder if he actually knows what a buy-to-let is. ‘I thought', I go on, ‘if you look after the renovation of the investment flat …'

I can hear myself grinding to a halt as a picture of a completely tiled flat, a mini-
riad
(why not add the palms?) swims into my mind.

‘Will I own some of that flat?' asks Alain.

So there you are. It turned out we both had the same thing in mind. I outlined the risks involved in accepting my proposition—that all the renovation work (including tiling, of course: I've always thought grouting one of its more exhausting aspects) would be done by Alain for no pay. But that on resale of the investment property he would receive twenty-five percent of the profits, this is known as Uplift (I'd taken pains to understand all aspects with my accountant).