The Right Man (26 page)

The
bulkiest document was a Child Proceedings Order which had been filled out
already and was supposed to relate to Grace, although the details, from what I
could ascertain while conducting a phone call, seemed to bear very little
relation to reality.

I
looked through the partition at the vacant state where once had been many busy
women. Nothing seemed to have much to do with reality today. I wanted to ask
Susan’s advice about solicitors, since she was one, albeit of the local conveyancing
kind, but now was obviously not the time. For instance, was it normal for a
contract and investment lawyer to be dealing with a matrimonial issue. Was that
allowed?

‘Thank
you, Guy. Thanks so much for all this.’ Susan started to wind up our
conversation.

‘Give
my love to Liz and little Grace. I’m sorry to lose it just then. I’m sure I’ll
be all right in a while and I’ll see you at about six or seven then. I’d offer
to make you dinner but we don’t want Liz thinking I’m taking you away from her.’

The
phone would start ringing for real in a while. I wondered how many lines they’d
left me. I threw open the window and took some deep breaths. It felt strangely
exciting to be alive. The ringing in my ears had stopped. I didn’t have the
time for it.

Mid-morning
the buzzer went.

I
checked who it was through the window. I didn’t want anyone important seeing
the depletion of my kingdom. I’d had a moderately successful couple of hours
trying to find out, by subtle means or foul, who I might still represent, and
it looked as if they were going to be a pretty sad and small bunch. Most of my
earners had already been approached and sloped across to Naomi and Arabella’s
side of Soho.

Kemble Stenner
was standing in the street carrying a modelling portfolio. She buzzed again, I
let her up.

‘God! I
hate men.’ She came in and threw herself on to the mini-sofa, lighting a
Marlboro. She was wearing a minuscule wraparound skirt and a tight
midriff-revealing top. It was as if, petite as she was, her clothes had all
shrunk in the wash. Nothing joined anything else. At the top of her skinny
thighs, hold-me-up stockings stopped an inch and a half short of her skirt hem.
Her hair was backcomb-frazzled and the amount of make-up she had on made her look
like a piece of jailbait.

‘You
going for a casting?’ I asked, putting the kettle on.

‘Just
been,’ she spat. ‘For some incredibly interesting new Japanese beer promotion
video.’

‘Did
you get it?’

‘Yeeeeeeees.
Of course.’ She sighed. ‘Easy. Bit of lippie, bit of …’ She acted out a
pouting, dumb sex kitten, wiggling her shoulders and fluttering her eyelashes.
She did it very well. I put it immediately on my mental shelf of erotic images
to be enjoyed later, and made her a coffee without asking if she wanted one.

‘Thanks,
doll,’ she said and slumped back on the mini-sofa. The aggression she had
entered with was subsiding now. I took one of her cigarettes without asking.

‘Help yourself,’
she said, as I lit it, and then, ‘Ooo hoo hoo. What’s happened here, then? They
all done a runner on you?’ She looked around the empty room. Our voices had
echoes.

‘Yup,’
I said.

‘Fuuuuuuck,’
she said, smiling. I was smiling too. I don’t know why.

‘You
got anybody left? 1 mean, is there any point in my being here or are you an
ex-agent now?’

‘Oh, I’ve
got a few.’

‘What
about Doug Random? He gone with them?’

‘Actually,
no. I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘He’s coming over from LA this week.’ Doug’s
message had been one of the eighteen on my machine.

‘You’ve
got
to introduce me to him. I want to shag him so much. I think he’s
gorgeous. I want to have his babies.’

‘Yes,
he is, isn’t he,’ I said.

‘So do
all my friends.’

‘Yes,
most women feel like that about Doug,’ I said.

‘Did
you know this was going to happen? I mean, was it planned?’

‘Nope.
Well, they must have planned it but they somehow forgot to tell me. That must
have been part of the plan.’

‘God.
The bitches!’ she said, laughing at the sheer exhilaration of the disaster.

‘Yup,’
I said. ‘They’re all down at Regent Street now.’ For a moment she looked like a
little old lady, heaped there on my sofa, her bony knees sticking up, her
shoulders caved in, waving a cigarette in the air. Child actor, you see, always
a mixture of the immature and the ancient. Cynical in the voice and eyes,
pre-pubescent in the heart. She must have had several years in her early teens
of being the sexy one. The one the boys hit on while her non-professional
sisters and friends looked on in envy and self-crushing admiration. Learning
too early how to control the overactive hormones and hence behaviour of every acne’d
male who came within a ten-yard radius of her. This would have been her first
taste of power. Her best grade at GCSE. How unfair that she had been too young
to do anything with it, other than practise on older and more predatory men now
she was in her twenties. Learning enough of grown-up behaviour and dress sense
to get herself accepted way out of her depth in the business world, where
sexuality is currency.

‘So. Do
you want a fuck?’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette on the coffee table. ‘I’m
meeting a girlfriend at twelve, so we’ve got time.’

‘Well,
I …’ I began.

‘Yeah,
I know you’ve got a lot of work to do, but you must be shattered, you look
really rough. It’d do you good, get rid of some of that pent-up anger.

She got
up and came over to where I was sitting, and straddled my lap, making her skirt
rise even further up her thighs, if that were possible. I had to clear my
coffee cup out of the way and put it on the floor behind me. As my arm became
free, she took hold of my wrist and put my hand down between her legs.

‘Just
because it’s a mercy fuck doesn’t mean I’m not wet.’ She was wet. I didn’t know
how I felt about being given a mercy fuck at eleven o’clock in the morning by a
twenty-two-year old with the scratchy voice of a pensioner. The phone rang. I
let the answer-phone take it. It was Tania.

‘Guy. I’ve
just heard and I wanted to let you know that I didn’t know anything about it. I
promise.’ She sounded distressed. Cleopatra barked in the background. ‘If you’re
there, Guy, pick up the phone, please. They’ve asked me to go and work there
now. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I’ll have time to do both. Are
you there, Guy?’

She
waited a few more seconds and then, asking me to call her back, she rang off.

Kemble
was rubbing herself against my hand now, so I left it there. She lifted up her
top and started to squeeze her little girl’s nipples. ‘You don’t have to kiss
me if you don’t want,’ she said. ‘You can close your eyes and imagine I’m
Michelle Pfeiffer if you like.’ I didn’t feel like closing my eyes and I’m not
that mad on Michelle Pfeiffer anyway, as it happens. I tried to think for a
moment if there was anyone else, the vision of whom would drive me wild with
passion. But, like the woman on my lap, in the end they’re all just actresses
in one shape or form. In any case, if it came to erotic fantasy, you couldn’t
do much better than Kemble Stenner sitting on your lap. But somehow the reality
of it was not doing the trick. All right, I had a mild erection, yes, but it
didn’t pulse with any particular need for fulfilment. It was merely reacting to
stimuli. Merely obliging, doing the right thing.

I
thought of all the times with Liz, when I had wanted sex and she hadn’t. I
thought about Hendo and whether he was any good at it. Well, he must be, he
must know the right things to do. She’d probably never had to bark instructions
at him. With shame, I pictured him fucking her hard, doggie-style, up against
the filing cabinets I could see over Kemble’s shoulder.

‘Oh,
now, that’s more like it,’ said Kemble, smiling wickedly at me. ‘Yes.’ She
moved her hands to my trousers and squeezed my cock through the corduroy.

It felt
bad, but the idea of Robert Henderson, Copyright and Investment Litigator,
roughing up my wife across the filing cabinet was stimulating the manufacture
of semen in my scrotum more than the gyrations or the sight of the very real
girl on my lap.

We did
use a condom. I kept my shirt and jacket on. Afterwards, there was no hug.

‘You
all right, gorgeous?’ she said. ‘You look like you’re miles away.

‘Sorry,’
I said. ‘I was.’

From
her bag, she took a pair of jeans and some clean knickers. I sat, unmoving,
where I was and smoked her last Marlboro Light while she changed.

‘Still
want to represent me, then? Or have you given up that idea? Are you giving up
the business?’

‘I’ll
represent you,’ I said. ‘I said I would.’

‘And
introduce me to Doug Handom, remember?’

‘Yes, I
can do that if you like.’

She
gave me a small kiss on the cheek and took the lit cigarette off me.

‘I like
you,’ she said. And left.

Only parents of children
under eighteen know what the Danger Zone is, because it only started in 1991 and
children over twelve aren’t allowed in. It’s pretty good value and it has its
own burger and chips bar on site. And if you can stand the fluorescent light,
bright-green plastic furniture and constant shrieking of children and blowing
of whistles, you can sit and read the paper for three-quarters of an hour while
your charges disappear into a chaotic maze of rope bridges and climbing tunnels
and sporty youths in matching yellow sweatshirts supervise the letting-off of
steam. Despite the aggressive titles of the games there — Killer Fox, Ultimate
Challenge, Total Destruction — there are virtually no accidents, no broken
teeth, bloodied noses or twisted necks, and tears there are also surprisingly
rare. Zombified mums and dads sit around holding discarded sweaty zip-tops,
unable to converse with each other over the noise. Like sitting in the middle
of a congregating throng of soon-to-migrate birds.

I
looked at my watch for what must have been the sixth time. We could go as soon
as I could get Dave and Polly in the same place for long enough to do up their
shoes. Dave, his cheeks red and his hair hot from running around, was in a
surly and disobedient mood.

‘I
think it’s really stupid in Killer Fox, because I’ll never be able to run
faster than a grown-up, right? So if it was real I’d always get caught.’

‘Silly,’
said Polly. ‘You don’t have to run faster than a grownup if it was real. You
just have to run faster than me. The fox would just stop and gobble up
whichever one he catched first.’

There
we have it, the entire theory of natural selection from the mouth of an
eight-year-old. Survival of the most competitive within the species so that we
can all play our part in the dog-eat-dog world. Like show-biz. Like marriage.
Dave refused to put on his jacket.

‘You’re
not my dad,’ he said, just to make sure I didn’t feel in any way comfortable.

The
hordes of tabloid midges which Susan had described to me over the phone were no
longer outside the Planter residence in Chiswick. There was, however, one lonely
little hack, pacing up and down in a cheap suit. He must have kicked himself,
when I arrived with the children, that his photographer wasn’t with him. Mind
you, I don’t exactly look like hunky new toyboy material. As we approached the
front gate he scampered along beside us, asking if I would like to comment, or
find out if Susan would like to comment, on the crumpled snapshot in his paw
which showed Jeremy with a woman — not Arabella —which could have been snatched
on a telescopic at any time in the past five years. I steered the children to
the front door and rang the bell. I could have given the little junior journo a
story by using the key which I still had in my pocket, but I don’t think I
could have thought of a suitable explanation for Dave of my having the key to
his front door.

‘I’m
sorry about this,’ whined the novice gutter rat, ‘but I’m only doing my job,
and she is blonde.’ Poor little kitten. Sent by his big bad editor to cover a
non-event in Chiswick because it might afford the opportunity of printing a
picture of a woman who happened to have fair hair. I felt sorry for him, all on
his lonesome, no back-up. His colleagues had all obviously been called away to
bigger coups abounding with boobs and bubbly.

Susan
opened the door to us a few inches and we slid indoors. She was in a charred
state, quite literally. My assessment of the quality of the wiring at the
Planters’ had been correct, and a shoddy connection under the upstairs
floorboards outside her bedroom had evidently heated up enough to smoulder on
to one of the joists, causing a small fire. She’d put it out with some dead
flower water about an hour ago, but the place and Susan smelt smoky. She was
wearing dark glasses and was over-cranked, slightly shaky.

Upstairs
there were a couple of floorboards blackened, still glistening wet, and that
was all. What would have come in handy now would have been my inheritance. That
ml cable my father left me in his work cupboard. I did what I could to make the
place safe for the night, isolating the downstairs so that Susan could stick
Dave and Polly in front of a video until a candlelit bedtime. She’d need to
have the house looked over properly as soon as possible.