The Right Man (34 page)

I put
my feet up and riffled through the
Herald Tribune.
The coffee .was good.
Now I needed a smoke. In a hotel this good they didn’t question or even pause
at my old codger’s request for half an ounce of rolling tobacco, some Rizla
reds and a box of Swan Vestas. It did take nearly twelve minutes to arrive,
though. Tut tut. I must remember to complain to the manager next time I invite
him on to my yacht.

The
only spoiler was the ringing in my head, which persisted. I supposed I must
have tinnitus. That’s incurable, isn’t it? I could ring down for an
acupuncturist, or for Mr Saravan’s personal masseuse. I felt like having an
enormously unhealthy breakfast as one does after an enormously unhealthy
grapple with the demon alcohol. As if the heart were competing with the liver
to see which can collapse from abuse first. I also felt like company with whom
to share this temporary luxury. Tony wasn’t on the phone and in any case was
probably at this moment happily cooking up a Thai breakfast with Sally in some
Soho kitchen. Kemble Stenner would know how to enjoy this, but heaven knew
where she was. I rang reception and asked to be put through to Irving Tellman’s
room in case she had ended up there, but there was no reply. So I rang Stella,
my new business partner. She was in.

‘Hotel
visits are a hundred and fifty plus cab fare,’ she said, and anyway I’m too old
for all that lark. You need a younger girl with all the right clothes, and it’s
early in the morning. I can find yer one, Big Jim.’ For a moment I toyed with
the idea of hiring five hundred dollars’ worth of dolly birds to come and
cavort, but Stella was right, it was early in the morning and cavorting sounded
too much like hard work. I told her that what I had in mind was more of a
business meeting over breakfast. She still wasn’t interested. I said I’d pay
her sixty dollars for the pleasure of her company, and with a laugh, she agreed
to come and brunch with me at my Park Lane address.

Twenty-five
minutes and several more Nurofen later, there was a call from reception. Stella
had been intercepted on her way to the lift and they were calling me for
verification of her claim to be visiting a hotel resident. They seemed to think
she was some street hooker! Suitably appalled, I went downstairs to fetch her.
When I got there I could see what they meant. She was got up like a parody of
herself fake eyelashes, short red leather skirt, bosom plopping out of
exceedingly low-cut black bra and a see-through turquoise macramé top.

‘Erm …
sorry, Mr Saravan, but this lady claims to be a business associate of yours,’
said a nervy young man in a bottle-green uniform. Stella was standing a couple
of yards off with one of the concierge women.

‘It’s
just ‘cos I got a brown skin,’ she announced in loud Brummy to the lobby in
general.

‘We’ll
eat in the Parkside Lounge,’ I said, fobbing off the anxious man with a
fifty-dollar bill, and, taking Stella by the arm, I swanned through the marbled
hall down plush steps to dine.

After I’d
eaten scrambled eggs with everything except the black pudding, and Stella had
had a croissant which she filled with plum jam, she went to the ladies’ loo.
Talking in a sort of invented code which included ‘overseas gentlemen’ for
Arabs and Americans, and ‘newer girls’ for anyone under thirty-five, we seemed
to have come to certain agreements over prices and practice: no phone-box
advertisers, no fifteen-minute ‘tricks’, always a call to say when they’d
arrived safely, and one when leaving, like a mini-cab driver’s
passenger-on-board POB call. We would be dealing with independent women who had
their own flats and mobile phones. If Stella was to be believed there was an
astonishing amount of trade to be tapped. A working girl — new or otherwise —
with a room and a maid could provide services to as many as fifteen clients a
day or night. But that was an end of the market Stella was keen to leave
behind, and I had no need to enter. We would have girls who preferred to work
only once a week or so, but to spend several hours or even days on one job for
fees which would make an established voice-over artist turn puce. Girls who
could talk on a range of subjects, could be topical, could have an opinion. And
the sex would be what Stella called a ‘further negotiation’. These would be
girls who could sit and stand and walk right, and wear elegant clothes to
impress and instil envy into a rich man’s business associates. Trophy girls. We
were going into the escort business.

I would
retain certain Mullin and Ketts phone lines and apart from providing both
clients and escorts from the exciting and ravenous world of showbiz, would place
ads in hotel entertainment guides, the
Herald Tribune, Harpers and Queen,
The Lady, Marie Claire
and also, bizarrely, in the
Yellow Pages.
Apart
from this, my outlay would be minimal. I was amazed at some of the figures
Stella mentioned, and, as I’ve said, although my mental arithmetic is slow and
I didn’t have my calculator with me, even I could manage a few ball-park
estimates of probable weekly income, and made a swift decision about how much
of this business, if it thrived, it would be possible to accept on plastic and
how much would have to remain cash. I’d have to do my own book-keeping though,
I couldn’t imagine someone like Tania being able to square up to all this. I’m
not so naive as to suggest that the necessity of providing for Grace, and for Liz
and her lawyers, justified the ethics of my new career move, but this is life,
not art. All of life is gratuitous; it is only in politics and art that we have
to kid ourselves otherwise.

Stella
and I had decided to give each other a month’s trial period, and agreed a time
and place for a second power breakfast in four weeks’ time — Marco’s in
Shepherd Market. Sartorial matters were gone into, and we had both undertaken
to change our image. Stella would get some maturer outfits befitting a woman of
her age and stature. Clothes in which she could pass in the Soho club milieu:
some suits, scarves, maybe a turban. In fact she would look remarkably like a
casting director or agent. And I was to flash it up a bit, de-fogey myself. Use
hair gel, maybe a blazer, maybe shiny ties. I poured myself some more coffee
and rolled a fat one to celebrate the clinching.

I took
a
Daily Mail
from the rack where they were stacked in long wooden clasps
like in a gentlemen’s club, and stretched my legs. On page sixteen there was a
small piece with a photo, which was what set me off. Neil was dead. He’d bloody
well gone and done it, the little shit. It wasn’t clear from the article how
deliberate it had been. The photo was a rather silly and dated shot from, the
first series of
Every Other Weekend.
Obviously all the
Mail
had
on their files at such short notice. What had been a look of dopey innocence
then, and had been cute and had probably got him the job in the first place,
seemed, in the light of his behaviour of the last few months, to be more one of
confused desperation: a deranged and deluded ingenue. Evidently he had drowned
in his own vomit and as such was joining a hall of notoriety peopled by far
raunchier folk than he: Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. No light-ent
sit-com players on that list. Except possibly Hancock. However, all people who
possibly, just possibly, if they had remembered in their stupefied state to go
to sleep lying on their sides in the foetal position instead of blanking out
lying on their backs, might just have survived. When chucking up, passed out on
pills and alcohol, the breathing passages sometimes clear themselves if the
up-chuck goes over the pillow rather than in your face. On your back it just
falls back down your throat and chokes you. A sad accident unless the savage
cocktails taken were deliberate attempts to finish the cycle, end the pain. But
we can never be dead-cert sure what the intentions may have been when the whole
lot’s gone down, can we?

I
pictured Neil’s beard all tangled and sodden with the contents of his
rebellious stomach, and wondered what colour it all would have been. This image
of Neil as an ancient gargoyle with green sprouting out of his gob would, no
doubt, play on my guilt for ever after. The back of my throat felt clarty from
the eggs. The article was under one hundred words long — about the size of two
postage stamps — and after mentioning that he had not managed to revive his
career since EO
W,
ended with the sentence: ‘Neil James was unmarried
and leaves behind no children.’ A teeny layer of sweat zipped up to the surface
of my skin under my shirt. Stella came back from the loo.

‘Y’e
alright, me duck?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’
I said. I showed her the newspaper. ‘Except one of my clients has just snuffed
it. He topped himself. Sort of all my fault.’

I was
what you’d call crying a bit now. By which I mean I had watery plates in my
eyes and my throat felt restricted and gluey. But then something awful and for
an Englishman completely embarrassing happened. It took over and it came from
down below my stomach. Bloody Neil James had lobbed a pinless grenade into the
recesses of my intestines where half-digested feelings lay fermenting. Its
arrival involuntarily detonated the loudest noise I have ever made. A sort of
ogre’s belch, or the rutting call of an overweight impala.

When a
baby is going to really bawl its head off, there is sometimes that ominous
two-second silent hiatus of hypertension before the racket begins in earnest.
In this tiny pausette, Stella said, ‘Oh right. Here we go then.’

And
then came a torrent of heavy weeping, right there in the Parkside Lounge. Most
un-Hugh-Grant-like, most un-Cary-Grant-like, nothing at all to do with any
self-effacing British movie stars called Grant. A blubbering splatter of honking
and salivating and gasping. I felt like a foaming racehorse or Juliet Stevenson
in
Truly Madly Deeply.
This couldn’t all be for Neil. The little dying
bastard had hacked into my central system and was making all my programmes
crash like the narcissistic virus he was. I was quaking all over now and out of
control, as one by one Neil triggered all my nerve centres like a laughing
clown with a big plastic master switch: the drowning man, Grace, Liz, Naomi Ketts
all slammed into me like oncoming trains. My fear was that this would be
never-ending, that once unleashed this state of affairs would reign forever:
the real me at last.

Stella
did not try to comfort me, touch me or say anything. Just as well, she would
have been thrown off in an instant. She knew when to leave well alone. I’d
managed to wail, ‘I’m sorry about this’ a few times before the oleaginous man
in the green suit arrived at our table with a concerned but irritated
expression on his face. He took Stella’s elbow and was trying, with hotel decorum,
to usher us away from the dining room and from the disturbance to his other
customers.

‘Go
fuck yourself, buster,’ said Stella to him. ‘We’re leaving anyway.’ And then, ‘I
think it’s your milk that’s off, mister.’

She
half picked me up, still howling, and led me to the street exit. On my way I
managed to peel off some dollar bills and shove them in the fist of the
bottle-green man, who was now holding the door open for us to leave as soon as
possible. I could have given him hundreds of dollars for all I know. Outside,
the air and the traffic slowed me up a tad, but there was still a yeasty ball
of pent-up dough in me, waiting to rise.

‘I’m
sorry about this,’ I sobbed. ‘It’s my father. He died last month and I hadn’t
really come to grips with…’ but then I was off again.

‘Did
you love him specially?’ Stella asked, leading me to a pedestrian traffic-light
crossing.

‘No,
hardly at all,’ I said, ‘that’s the point. Hardly ever …’ I was bent double
now and tottered with Stella across the road and unto Hyde Park, where she took
us to a bench. She was not being tender or using any expressions of care,
merely getting on with her job. She sat beside me for a minute or two while I
retched like a cat vomiting grass. I was thankful she didn’t pat my back or
touch me in any way.

As a
chap there are two things you learn by the age of five. The first is that if
there is a war — whether your side’s fault or the other’s — you can be forced
to go and have your skull shot at. And the second is that to blub where other
people can see you is suicide. Your conkers will be stolen, your business
sequestered, your girlfriend gang-raped. A discarded page from yesterday’s
Daily
Mirror
flapped at me mockingly from the path: ‘Eastenders star shows his
soft side’ below a picture of a tough guy holding a baby. Alright for him, he’s
the one who head-butts people for fun, he can afford to do a bit of
designer-infant publicity. If you’re male, it’s OK to cry so long as you do it
nobly like Ralph Fiennes or Daniel Day-Lewis.

‘Are yer
done, mate?’ said Stella matter-of-factly.

‘Just
about, I think so,’ I snivelled, and wiped my nose on my sleeve. I apologized
again. ‘I didn’t know there was anything there,’ I said. ‘I mean, about my dad.’

‘Don’t
worry. Happens every day. I seem to have this effect on men. They can’t do it
in front of their wives, can they?’

‘You
mean guys pay you just to sit with them while they have a bucket?’

‘Oh,
yeah. All the time. Half of those women don’t know what they put their fellers
through.’

‘Do you
charge a normal rate for that, or is it extra?’ I snorted a laugh.