The Right Man (31 page)

‘Well,
no, Guy, you can’t. In this country it’s worked out according to what’s known
as the wife’s needs and requirements. You’ll have to submit a full and frank
declaration of how much you’re worth and then what you pay her is worked out
according to that, set against her needs and requirements.’

‘What
about Grace?’

‘Well,
the judge won’t award you custody unless you can prove Liz is unfit to be a
mother, which is unlikely, and undesirable in any case. It is assumed that you
are unfit to be the principal carer of the child because you are a man. But
anyway that’s academic because she doesn’t really work and you do, so the law
assumes you can’t look after a child.’

‘What
if I don’t want to work any more?’

He
laughed. ‘What you want is not going to come into any of this.’ Tony laughed
too. Malcolm went on. He was unstoppable:

‘I
wouldn’t advise you to apply for joint custody either; I tried that. Although
the 1989 Child Act specifically stipulates that joint custody should be
considered except in unusual circumstances, in practice the judiciary ignore
the wishes of Parliament and award residency to the mother in ninety-five per
cent of cases. All you get is contact, which is completely unenforceable if she
decides she doesn’t want to let you see the little blighter, or if she doesn’t
like you any more, or if, like me, you run out of money.

As
before, Malcolm’s zealous fire was consuming all it encountered, and exhausting
me in the process.

‘It all
comes down to money in the end,’ said Tony, and offered me his baccy.

‘I don’t
think she ever did like me, now I come to look at it.’

‘I hate
to sound all negative about this, Guy, but there’s no point in being
unrealistic, is there? You’re in a very bad position not having a home for the
Princess Grace to go to when she’s with you. There are contact centres
nowadays. Awful, depressing places. Heart-rending. I went along at the
specified time, but Geraldine just didn’t bother to show up and there was
nothing I could do about it.’

‘I wish
I’d never married her.’

‘Oh,
no, that’s your main leverage. It’d be much worse if you’d never married,
believe me. You’d have no rights over young Gracie at all, only
responsibilities to pay for both of them.’

He
started to write down some notes for me.

‘So if
I’m going to be in court with you as your lay adviser, you’ve got to get me
your tax returns for the last five years, all your property details,
shareholdings, assets, income and out-goings, gifts received, oh, and a
schedule of your own needs and requirements — might as well bung that in
although it’s not officially relevant — and a full statement of the time you
spend with Grace. And of course any insurance details or other policies you
might have …’

‘I feel
like I’m just a chequebook,’ I said.

‘You
are, you are. That’s all you are, mate, just a way for the Government to avoid
paying single-parent allowance. Let’s face it, people like us who don’t have
total financial security shouldn’t really go around having children. A couple
of rock stars could keep the human race going, sperm-wise. We’re just spare
pricks, old son.’

Tony
concurred. ‘Sounds a bit like the Egyptian system really. The pharaoh had a few
hundred wives and thousands of children, while everyone else had to settle for
a shag once every couple of decades and then back to hauling the stone slabs
around to make his pyramid for’ him.’

I
imagined big Hendo, Bob Rameses Henderson III, and the photo of his three
young, expensive sons in tartan ties that had been shown to me by his wife Saara.
It was true, a man like that can afford to have as many children as he likes. High
priest of the temple, investment and contractual litigation, two hundred and
fifty pounds an hour. The wallet-photos of his potential offspring unfolded
into infinity like a credit-card concertina.

At last
I got through to Liz. I was standing in the bar at the Bricklayer’s Arms, shovelling
coins into their tabletop payphone. A large, sweaty man who was called Bill was
nuzzled with his back up against me. They didn’t really want customers having
private conversations in here and so the phone was annoyingly placed.

‘Where
are you?’ said Liz, hearing the beery laughter behind me.

‘In the
pub,’ I said.

‘I see,’
she replied in a told-you-so tone of voice. ‘What do you want?’ It was
difficult to crack her hostility.

‘Well,
to see how you are. Didn’t you get my messages? Is Grace OK?’

‘Checking
up on your property?’ she said.

‘They
told me she hasn’t been in Fledglings for three days. What’s going on?’

‘Don’t
start shouting at me, Guy. And I don’t like you ringing my mother and shouting
at her either.’

‘I didn’t
shout,’ I shouted.

‘There’s
no point in us talking, Guy. I’ll see you at the counsellor’s next time. If you
can still be bothered to come, that is. But apart from that I don’t really
think this is very helpful, do you?’ She hung up on me.

I
looked around the bar. No one was looking at me, but they all wanted me to leave,
I could sense it. I rang her back anyway.

‘What?’
she said, as if I was the stupidest imbecile on earth.

‘Where’s
Grace, Liz? Where is Grace?’

‘She’s
having her bath, and I have to go and supervise actually because she’s had
another ear infection and mustn’t get any water in it.’

‘Have
you taken her to the doctor?’

‘What
do you care, Guy? All you care about is Muffin and bloody Ketts and being the shittest-hottest
agent in town. Go and sign a few deals, why don’t you? Leave me alone.’ She
hung up again. God, it was hot, I had to get outside again. Tony and Malcolm
broke off their conversation and looked up at me together.

‘How
did it go?’ they said jointly.

‘Erm.
Pretty good,’ I said, fidgeting. ‘They’re alive. But not well. Grace’s got
another ear infection, and Liz’s …

‘Has
she been to the doctor?’ asked Malcolm helpfully.

‘Don’t
know that yet.’

‘So
that’s a bit of a result this afternoon, I think it must be your round, sir.’
Tony offered up his empty glass.

‘Just a
tomato juice for me,’ said Malcolm apologetically.

On
returning with the drinks, I found Tony smoking the second half of his big
joint, with his scarred brown legs outstretched over the kerb, while Malcolm
spouted forth on his favourite subject.

‘You
see, the actual cause of the breakdown bears absolutely no relation to the
terms of the settlement and custody arrangements. It doesn’t matter who did
what to whom; all that does is decide whether a marriage has irretrievably
broken down, and once they’ve decided that, they completely ignore it, and
proceed along no-fault divorce lines, which is actually not what’s written down
in the 1979 Care and Proceedings Order Bill. But they ignore that completely.’

‘You
ought to write all this down, pal,’ said Tony, offering me the joint. I
declined. We were in the street.

‘Oh, I
do,’ said Malcolm. ‘I’ve got it all on my Toshiba. So, for instance, it’s
actually irrelevant whether Guy here petitions Liz or she petitions him. It
will make not a jot of difference in the end. He will pay for her and for the
court, and she will get custody, although nowadays it’s called residency, of
course. Fat lot of difference changing the words made.’

Tony
gave me a sad and quizzical look.

‘Oh,
yes,’ Malcolm continued, fishing the lemon out of his tomato juice and sucking
on it hard, ‘you can’t win with that lot. Solicitors. You just can’t win. No
way.

‘Then
why fight them at all?’ asked Tony.

Malcolm
stopped to reflect for a millisecond.

‘I can’t
think like that,’ he said.

‘I’ve
got this woman I see every now and then at the moment, I mean, I’m not sleeping
with her or anything. Yet.’ Tony chuckled. ‘And she keeps trying to get me to
do stuff for her, you know, fix her car, little bit of carpentry, and I think:
hang on, what’s this all about? She’s in love with some big feller in the city
and he takes her out to restaurants and that, and I think: why don’t you get
him to fix your frigging fridge, eh? OK, if a guy’s screwing some woman I think
he should do stuff for her, fair enough, otherwise forget it.’

‘She
obviously knows what she’s doing,’ said Malcolm. ‘She’s got your number, mate.’
We laughed. It was the beer. ‘Oh, yes, Darwin was right, it’s very much
survival of the fittest, I’m afraid, these days.’

‘That
was Herbert Spencer who said that, not Darwin,’ said Tony, with no hint of
point-scoring. ‘Poor old Charlie Darwin’s a very misunderstood geezer.

Tony
started to hold forth about a possible connection between the genetic make-up
and the pair-bonded social behaviour of the kittiwake gull, but I was too
frazzled to take it in. I didn’t know my brother knew about that sort of thing.
I didn’t think he knew about anything, actually. Middle-class snob I am. Get
me.

‘So, my
thespian compadre,’ he said, ‘we going up the West End to some sprauntzy club
to get rat-arsed and ogle some females, or what?’

‘Count
me out,’ said Malcolm. ‘I’ve got Nerily tomorrow, I think.’

When
the Groucho Club first opened up, it was, give or take the Zanzibar and Two Brydges
Place, the only club of its kind in the West End. Before that there had been Legends,
the Embassy, Maunkberrys, the Pink Palm Tree, but these all owed more to the
seventies than the eighties in terms of style. All had dance floors, very loud
music and very expensive cocktails. Clothes were shiny, hair was sparkly,
conversation was kept to a minimum by virtue of the noise, and lighting was
very low, apart from on the dance floor, where it shazammed around in time to
music by the Bee Gees and Chic.

In the
late eighties, along with mobile phones, the deconstructed suit and the
independent production company, a new style of club was needed. The lounge
club. Somewhere television execs could have breakfast meetings with freshly
squeezed orange juice and cafetière coffee. Where women company directors could
lunch on polenta and monkfish and rocket salad. Where theatre designers could
meet for afternoon herbal tea and macaroons and where at six o’clock, the
entire advertising industry could blow all its new-found pots of eighties loot
on bottles of Moët, Chardonnay, Chablis, Sauvignon, Sancerre, more Moët, more
Chardonnay, still more Chardonnay, and smoke cigars and meet impressionable
young women.

The new
thinking on décor was to be strangely paradoxical. In the same way that the
seventies clubs had imported most of their ideas from America — the style of
John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
in particular — the new lounge
club was to emulate the cool style of a Los Angeles residential poolside hotel
(the Sunset Marquee, say) where old-world comfort and grace is the intention,
pastel shades abound, with pale cream and soft turquoise panelling on the
walls, above which hang old prints. Upholstered leather sofas and easy chairs
are strewn casually over the lush and warm carpets and the occasional painting
by someone fashionable will fill any large wall spaces left. The lighting is
subliminal and comes from behind peach-coloured wall lamps. The
air-conditioning is relentless, and a real live musician tinkles away on a
piano unobtrusively. So, it’s a style copied from the Americans, copying what
they, in their turn, had imagined to be English.

More
recently, increasing numbers of these kinds of club have opened up around Soho.
Expensive membership clubs with yearbooks, cricket teams, impenetrable menus
and waiters with exotic facial hair. There’s Black’s and the Soho House and
Green’s and Moscow’s and Sally’s and on and on. Some have log fires, some have
backgammon boards, all have a sign saying, ‘No mobile phones’, for these are
places where the networking is compulsive.

At
night, on the whole, they turn into meat markets. Women who dress to enter the
Most Provocative Outfit contest mingle with sexy upper-class publishing girls
in baggy pullovers and jeans. Guys sprawl around in shirts buttoned to the top
with no ties, seeing who can be the most nonchalant, unshaven and secretly,
discreetly rolling in dosh.

Models,
even supermodels here, dine on scrambled egg with smoked-salmon bits and
chain-smoke their way between courses. Table-hoppers hop tables, and at eleven
the casts of West End shows, hyped up on their own self-perpetuating adrenalin,
arrive with their celebrity guests. Outside, of course, the homeless congregate
in sleeping bags with their dogs. The entrances to these clubs must be prime
spots for those with blankets and a smack habit.

My favourite
in recent years has been the Soho House on Frith Street, but tonight, seeing as
Tony was wearing oily denim shorts and his Despair-Proof Vest, I thought we’d
try Sally’s on Greek. In any case, I didn’t fancy bumping into Jeremy Planter
or any of my other scummy turncoat ex-clients, and for this Sally’s was a safer
bet. It’s the newest and is possibly, if I can say this without offending Sally
herself, a smidgeon more downmarket than the others. Food’s good, though, and
Sally herself is a constant and amusing presence. She’s a large Thai woman who
won’t think twice about throwing certain people out personally with much loud
cursing and insults. This is done, I suspect, mostly for the entertainment of
the other clientele and to make them feel that little bit more exclusive. Her
choice of expellee is very astute. Usually the arrogant young aristo-type in a
yellow waistcoat, who she play-acts taking a dislike to for his attitude. Yes,
she knows her business, Sally, and also I felt she wouldn’t bat an eyelid at
Tony, who might show me up a touch elsewhere. As it happened, she batted both
lids and lashes at him.