Upgrading (4 page)

They went uptown until they came to 40th Street. There his cab dropped him off on a corner where he looked around quickly before setting off down the street. Her cab followed him along a bit further as he walked along quickly until he went into a shabby hotel. She got out and paid the cab and was just wondering what to do next when she saw one of her best friends slip into the hotel entrance as well. What would she be doing in a dive like this? Marion did not hang around to do any more detective work. She went home and waited quietly for him to return that evening.

Just then our main course arrives and Marion smiles weakly at the waiter in gratitude. He is slightly surprised but mutters “Prego” and leaves us.

When Edward did return he was obviously drunk. Marion told him what she had seen and they had an enormous fight. He did not bother to deny it. How could he? She respected him for that at least. He said he did not know how it had started or why. He promised to end it immediately and never see the woman again. Marion was so desperate to keep him that she took him at his word. After a few weeks things were almost back to normal. In fact she was beginning to forget the whole affair when inside the pocket of a suit she found a receipt for a hotel room. That was enough!

She confronted him with it but he simply told her to leave him alone. He took a bottle of whisky from the side board and stayed in the guest room that night. And so it continued until he hardly bothered to hide his liaisons. Sometimes when she answered the phone someone at the other end would hang up. Once the caller even asked if she would have him call Julie but would say no more than that. Some nights he would come home in the early hours or occasionally not at all. Finally she could stand it no more and they were divorced two days short of their second wedding anniversary. At the end of it she just rolls her eyeballs, looks at me and shrugs her shoulders as if to say, “What can you do?”

“I’m very sorry,” is all I can think of to say.

“My mother was distraught but I had no alternative,” she says, putting her fork down on her almost untouched veal escalope and wiping the corners of her mouth with a napkin.

“And did you marry again?”

“I did, yes,” she says, slowly. The waiter takes our plates. “He was much older than me, Andrew. I think I wanted some security, some stability.” I nod, understandingly. “He was originally South American but had lived in New York for many years. He was a kind man and we had a beautiful home in Sutton Place and another in the Hamptons. Life was very good to us and I can’t complain but he soon developed a terrible insecurity and became obsessively jealous. It was simply dreadful.”

She squeezes my hand. “Andrew, I could not
look
at another man, be it in a restaurant, at a party, even at the theatre without him flying into a rage. I think on reflection that a man of his age with a pretty young wife begins to feel that he has something he cannot control as easily as he controls money and employees, objects and possessions. I was like a bird in a gilded cage, I couldn’t go out on my own, I wasn’t allowed friends or interests. After a few years of this I felt I was going crazy. He wanted to put me in therapy, but the point was I would never get better while he was standing over me, trying to control me like, like a puppet master.” I nod again, realizing what a good listener I must be. Then I look down very discreetly at my watch. Shit! It’s two forty-five. Debbie will already have clocked that I’m not there. The Tube! I popped into town to do some shopping and there was a delay on the Tube. That’ll do. Back to Marion.

She divorced husband number two and became a free woman, which is what she is today. “I choose my friends, where I want to live, how I want to use my time and I am beholden to no one, you see? No one.”

“Very good idea,” I say, assuming we won’t have pudding which, given the time, is probably a good thing. While we wait for the bill she signs my credit card slip for Jonathan without any embarrassment and then adds: “You’d better give me your numbers. We don’t need to trouble Jonathan any more, I don’t think, need we?”

I think about it for a moment. Freelance. Well, Jonathan introduced us, which is what the agency is all about but we can’t keep going back to him every time we want to meet, can we? OK, so I won’t get paid his £200 or whatever for the next time we meet but there could be greater rewards here than the occasional cheque. You’ve got to look at the bigger picture, I decide.

“Up to you,” says Marion, obviously slightly annoyed that I haven’t responded immediately.

“Sorry, of course, here you are,” I say and give her both my numbers—home, work and mobile—what the hell?

“I can still make it worth your while financially,” she says, reading my thoughts as she puts her tiny gold notebook back into her handbag. “I don’t want you to be out of pocket because of me.”

“No, I mean, yeah, don’t worry.”

“Why are you English so coy when it comes to talking about money?” She laughs disapprovingly. “If you’re going to be a gigolo you’d better get used to it.”

Is it just me or did she say that rather loudly? Two people at the table next to us suddenly stiffen and half-turn round.

We leave at a quarter-past three. I’m now so late back it’s ridiculous but somehow, after this lunch and the promise of a few more, I just don’t care. As we walk outside the rain has stopped. I thank Marion.

“You’re very welcome,” she says coolly, her nose in her bag again.

“Do you need some money for a cab?”

“Erm …” I realize that I had better get used to this. Besides, I have one fiver in my wallet which won’t quite get me back to the office so I say: “Well, that would be very nice,” and immediately, without saying anything, she hands me a twenty. She offers me both cheeks which I kiss, feeling her super soft skin under my lips and smelling her perfume.

She says: “I may call you this evening, I don’t know what my schedule looks like yet.” She adjusts my tie for me and then smiles. “You never know, though, I might get a cancellation.”

“Sure,” I say with what is supposed to be cool enthusiasm but comes across as puppy-like excitement.

m
arion doesn’t call me that evening so I spend it watching TV with Vinny and thinking about her and this new business, if that’s what it is, that I seem to have got myself into. I keep thinking about that brief, business-like kiss on the cheeks as we left the restaurant. I remember her perfume and how different it smells from any perfume I’ve smelled on my mum, in the office and even on Helen.

I’ve been wondering what it would be like to go out with someone like her, someone so exotic, exciting, so much older, so rich and just so very, very different from anyone I’ve ever met before. What is she doing tonight? I doubt she’s watching telly like me—do the seriously rich watch television? Probably something to do with finance or luxury travel on cable. More likely she is out at a dinner party with other rich people. Maids serving, champagne flowing, heavy silver cutlery clattering on thin china plates, cars waiting outside with chauffeurs sitting on bonnets gossiping, ready to leap up and open doors for the rich people who will shortly sweep out of the party and silently get into their cars to go home.

I’ve been thinking as well about Marion and me going places together, other posh restaurants, smart shops, casinos, hotels. Places I’ve never been before and would never get to even see the inside of as a mere Media Sales Executive from Reading.

I’ve also been imagining what it would be like to go to bed with her. Smell her strange, different perfume again as I rub my face through her hair and feel those long, slim arms around my neck. Feel the woman with the Belgravia house, two ex-husbands and the BMW Seven Series lie back and give in to me.

“How’s it going?” says Vinny as we watch
Emmerdale.

“What?” I ask over my Marks & Spencer stir-fried salmon with courgettes and Mediterranean peppers.

“Your new job,” says Vinny. “Mr. Lurrrve For Sale.”

“All right,” I say after a while. I’m not really sure that I want to discuss it with him.

“Well?” He looks at me. I look back at the screen where two women are holding mugs of coffee and talking across a kitchen table. Then he switches off the telly and stares expectantly at me, controller in hand.

“I was watching that.”

“So? Answer my question.”

“It’s going very well indeed, thank you for asking. Now can you put
Emmerdale
back on.”

“Details, please.”

I laugh, exasperated. “Oh, all right, for fuck’s sake. Yes, I have met some interesting women. No, I have not kebabbed them. Yes, I have earned some money … well, a bit … not that I’ve actually got it yet. No, they have not kidnapped me and dragged me off to an exotic love nest on a tiny island off the coast of Mustique, which is why I am sitting here, eating this muck and trying to watch
Emmerdale.
Now will you put the bloody thing back on again?”

Vinny looks at me sceptically for a moment.

“Mmmm,” he says, a smile playing over his lips.

I shrug my shoulders and gesture towards the TV screen.

On Monday she rings me at work to tell me, all in one breath, that we are going to a ball that night at Claridges—do I have a dinner jacket? I say “No.” She tuts and says she can’t believe it. I say I am very sorry but I just don’t have much reason to wear them. I wonder if she’ll offer to buy me one but she just tells me to get one and be at hers by 7:30 p.m.

I nip out at lunchtime and try a few hire shops in the West End until I find something that doesn’t make me look too much like a night club bouncer or Jimmy Tarbuck at a Royal Variety Performance. As I walk into the building, Ted, the mad security guard, strikes up a conversation with me as he often does.

“You see that? Cor, bloody hell.”

I laugh. There is no point asking Ted what he is on about—you only get dragged further into it. It’s like sinking sand. The best thing to do is not to struggle so I laugh knowingly.

“I tell you, I thought I needed my eyes testing,” he adds, shaking his head and rocking on the balls of his feet. Fortunately the lift arrives. I laugh again and mutter something about new glasses as I get into it. I press the third-floor button and then jab frenziedly at the “Close Doors” button. Ted starts to tut and turns round to look out across the empty lobby for the next four hours or so, which is probably why he is so bonkers.

I try to sneak my dinner suit into the office but Sami sees it through an irritating little clear plastic window in the bag and asks, “Oooh, where are you off to tonight?”

“Er, nowhere,” I say quietly.

“Quite formal at home are you, then?” says Andy, a Scouse comedian who has recently joined what is laughably called “the team.” “Always black tie and canapés for
EastEnders?”

“Oh, sod off,” I tell him, not unkindly. Just at that moment Debbie storms out of her office, sees me with the bag and looks up at the clock on the wall. She had not bothered to say anything about my late return on Wednesday but I know she noticed it. “Oh shit,” I say softly and sit down. Sami is leaning across her desk, her face lit up with innocent wonder.

“Are you going somewhere exciting tonight?”

I love Sami. She had been here three months when I arrived. She is just so good. Her parents came across from Uganda when Idi Amin threw the Asians out of the country just before she was born. They don’t speak a word of English—the first time I saw Sami talking to her mother on the phone I thought she’d gone mad. It was like she had turned into another person in front of my eyes. Then she put the phone down and said, “Christ! Parents! Who’d have ’em?”

She works in the family shop on Saturday and Sunday and looks after her grandmother most evenings. She’s got millions of A-levels and O-levels and she always empties the dregs of her plastic coffee cup in the Ladies instead of just chucking it in the bin half-f and watching it leak onto the floor like I do. She’s so virtuous that I should hate her but actually, like I said, I love her.

“Oh, Andrew, where are you going? Tell meeee,” she begs now in her little girl’s voice. I laugh.

“Oh, God. Look, it’s just a ball.” Wrong answer.

“A
ball!
How exciting.”

A few other people look across, including Debbie, who clearly thinks I am trying to make myself and my new exciting social life the centre of attention, whereas nothing could be further from the truth.

“Don’t tell everyone,” I say.

“I won’t,” she says, missing my sarcasm. “Where is it? Who are you going with?”

“It’s at Claridges.”

“The hotel?”

“No, the pub,” I explain.

Sami pulls a face and then asks again, “Who are you going with?”

“Er, I’m just going with a friend.” What else can I say? Girlfriend? No. Partner? Definitely not. Lover? Older woman? Benefactor?

“Ah, waiter!” says Vinny from Couch Position B in front of the telly.

“You can sod off. Is this thing straight?” I ask, fiddling with my bow tie.

“Left hand down a bit,” he offers, squinting at me. I try and do what he says.

“Why the hell did I let you talk me into getting a real one? That ready-tied thing would have been so much easier,” I moan. Vinny said I looked like a footballer off to Stringfellows when I appeared with a neat little pretied bow tie five minutes earlier.

“Yes, but are you a ready-tied bow-tie person?” asks Vinny with deep sincerity. I think I know what he means. “Oh, Christ. Here, let me have a go.” He hauls himself off the settee, which I do appreciate—other than a naked Jennifer Lopez or a serious housefire, there isn’t much that will persuade Vinny to leave his sofa. He fiddles with the tie, grimacing with concentration and then stands back to admire his handiwork. “There. That’s better. You know you could have borrowed my pistachio- and salmon-pink-spotted number—genuine Crolla circa 1983. Quite a style icon.”

“Either that or the revolving one.”

“Great conversation piece.”

“Yeah, but what kind of conversation?”

“Where is it tonight, then?” he asks but I smile enigmatically and slip out of the door without answering him.

It is nearing the end of the month and the suit cost a fortune, considering that it was just for one night—the bastards must have known I was desperate—but I can’t get the bus to Marion’s so I invest in a mini cab. Sixty-five pounds outlay so far. Sitting in the furry seat of an old Nissan Cherry I realize the bus might have been more stylish. The driver looks me up and down out of the corner of his eye and asks where to.

“Eaton Terrace Mews,” I say. He drives in silence and I begin to wonder how much this guy will earn for driving all night and putting up with drunken abuse while his wife lies in bed at home wondering whether tonight’s the night she’ll get the call from the casualty department or a visit from the police. I feel like a stuffed shirt, a Sloaney pratt sitting next to him.

So I am glad to get out at Marion’s. Anna Maria answers the door and giggles.

“Good eebning, Mr. Andrew,” she says.

I say, “Good evening, Anna Maria, what do you think?”

Before she can say anything Marion’s voice calls down, “Anna Maria, fix Mr. Andrew a drink. I’ll be right there.”

She pours me a glass of ice-cold champagne and I sit down on a tiny chair and fidget with my tie again. Then I get up because I must look ridiculous perched on this piece of dolls-house furniture. I find another chair with its back to the stairs. This means that I can listen for her approaching and can spin round dramatically. After about half an hour I hear her coming down the stairs. I turn round and shoot her a cool, narrow-eyed James Bond look which she completely ignores.

She does look great—a simple black dress with a thin gold chain and a small diamond broach. I whistle, almost accidentally, and she tuts, “Don’t
do
that, it’s vulgar.” But she can’t help smiling. Since we’re both loosening up I wonder whether to kiss her but decide to play it safe. I’m still her escort, her walker, after all, well technically, anyway. Besides, she actually looks too good to kiss, like I might break something or mess something up.

She looks at me for a moment with her big dark eyes, almost embarrassed, and then stands back and checks her lips in the mirror over the fireplace.

“Let me look at you,” she says. “Not bad.” Then she sighs. “We’ll need to get you a proper one, though.”

“OK, thank you,” I say, not sure how to react to this offer.

It does sound like a very good idea, though.

*   *   *

Moving through the Park Lane traffic up towards Upper Brook Street I begin to feel that this is what it’s all about. A family in a Volvo turn to look at us as we draw along side them at the lights. It makes me think of our trips up to London when we were children: shopping at Hamley’s (one present each to a value of ten pounds, according to my mum), sightseeing at Madame Tussauds or the Tower of London, sometimes a film at the Odeon, Leicester Square and then tea at Fortnum & Mason or McDonalds—both were equally exciting somehow back then. My sister liked the milk shake at Fortnum’s but I preferred the ones at McDonald’s and besides you could dip your chips in when Mum and Dad weren’t looking.

I sensed my mum’s unease in town and her general disapproval of everything around her, which she saw as dirty, expensive, noisy and foreign. “You never hear another English voice in London these days,” she would say—still says. My dad still wears his discomfort like a badge bearing the inscription “I’m from Berkshire where we still do things properly.” God, I just wanted to get away from them and disappear into the crowd, integrate myself into London. I wanted to exchange my self-consciously up-in-London-for-the-day clothes for what the hip Londoners were wearing.

When we reach the hotel a doorman opens Marion’s door and I leap out of my side and nip round to meet her on the pavement. For once the chauffeur sits tight. Got you, you bastard. We join the throng of dinner suits and evening gowns in the lobby. Marion is frowning, looking round for people she knows.

“What’s this do for?” I ask her when I catch up.

“It’s a charity thing,” she says, still looking round.

“Which charity?”

“How should I know? Some charity.”

We deposit our coats and go further in. Finally an old couple appear through the crowd and Marion says “Hello.” They exchange a few “How are you’s” and then Marion introduces us. They are old friends from New York.

We meet other old friends of Marion’s. Handshakes and names and “Nice to meet you’s” merge into one another as Marion advances through the crowds, like a whale sucking in the waves of people and filtering out the plankton she feels it worth acknowledging.

I quickly learn that my place is just behind her left shoulder. We encounter another older woman with a younger man, a tall dark-haired guy. The two ladies kiss, and we men shake hands very firmly with each other. As the two ladies talk animatedly above the hubbub we watch them. It is something of a relief to see another couple in a similar configuration but it’s also a bit unnerving. I can’t help making comparisons. He is good-looking, but better looking than me? She is obviously rich, but richer than Marion? She clearly enjoys being on his arm, is Marion as pleased to be seen with me?

After a while I feel a prickling of sweat around my hairline. It
is
hot in here but more than that I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable, increasingly under pressure. I realize that I am here for one thing and one thing only and everybody we say hello to knows the score. We meet an Arab guy with his pretty, dark-haired daughter. It would probably be more normal if she were my date, not this woman old enough to be my mother. The dark-haired girl ignores me.