‘Gotta go,’ they’d say, hopping about zipping their trousers and cleaning their teeth at the same time, like characters in a bedroom farce. ‘Unfortunately, I’ve got a very, very early appointment in the morning. Is this soap scented? It’s not bluebell or something?’
‘All my conquests are either undead or office cleaners,’ she would tell her mates, by way of brave humour. But in fact her conquests were fathers of small children, of course; fulfilling some sort of universal genetic imperative to cheat on the wife during the first year of parenthood. Maggie made a point of meeting the wives of her Undead Office Cleaners as soon as possible – not to cause trouble but simply to prevent her from becoming ‘the other woman’. Meeting the wife had this curious way of dispelling any self-deluding fantasies about adultery. Before you met the wife in the living flesh, you could imagine you were the real person and the wife was the anonymous incorporeal phantom. Whereas after you met her, the mirror swivelled to offer a truer perspective, in which the wife was the real person and you were the lump of garbage.
Anyway, ask any of her friends, and they could tell you Maggie’s exact emotional pattern on these wham-bam occasions, because she’d described them often. As the taxi roared off at two a.m., she would wave gaily from the doorway in her dressing-gown, feeling all jelly-legged and warm. Then she’d go back to her tousled bed with Ariel and Miranda (the cats), Hello! magazine and a hot cup of something brown and chocolatey called Options (nice touch), and as she brushed the condom wrapper from the sheet, she’d tell herself that no scene could better sum up the freedom of modern womanhood.
Oh yes, Simone de Beauvoir would be so proud. Look, all that money, yet Barbra Streisand still had a hideous home! On the verge of sleep, she might decide it was high time a sexy woman of her calibre had her navel pierced. And then, seemingly a minute later, she woke alone in broad daylight. The room looked dusty; her pillow was caked in dribble and cat hair; she felt ravaged and cheap. The man in question was by now several miles away playing with baby in the bath, and would doubtless ignore her the next time they met, making her feel she’d been punched in the stomach. ‘What have I done?’ she would wail, then burst into tears and phone Belinda.
‘Shouldn’t you be getting home?’ (translation: ‘Get out of my house’) she asked Leon. She kicked his bum, which wobbled. Although she couldn’t now remember all the details, it had not been a terribly successful night, and it was annoying to find him still here. Evidently in Formula One they can refuel a car in under seven seconds – a statistic that was now proving hard to dislodge from her memory. Good grief, she still had her bra on.
Quite rightly it offended Maggie that while she was fit, pretty, clever, a bit famous and had screen-tested for Titanic, she’d still allowed herself to go to bed with Leon. It was so obvious she was too good for her sexual partners, yet strangely, there was no system of justice governing such matters, no god of eugenics who intervened on her behalf. ‘Stop!’ a voice should have said, as Leon gently placed his big paw on her neck in the car. ‘This coupling goes against nature, and must not proceed. This woman is reserved for clever, attractive males who write poetry and stuff. Kenneth Branagh, at least.’
But Maggie knew that the voice saying, ‘Stop!’ would never be hers. While she waited for Stefan to stop loving Belinda, she made the best of things; responded to advances from all directions; made quite a few advances of her own. Not that she was blind to male imperfections; far from it. But in sexual matters, you are often obliged to take your partner at his own estimation, and it’s a sad fact of life that many ugly, bald men look in the mirror and see Kevin Costner. Consequently, Maggie’s romantic career had encompassed sexual partners who, in former, more brutal, God-fearing eras, would have been stoned to death by mobs.
Leon snored and flapped a big white arm, but otherwise showed no sign of life, so she got up. She could have snuggled down, growled an erotic Murray Walker impersonation to rouse his ardour (she was good at accents). But on second thoughts, a bacon sandwich was more appealing. It was nearly lunch-time. So instead she made unrestrained noise having a shower, getting dressed, playing an oldies programme on Radio Two, and singing. She switched off half-way through Abba’s ‘Take A Chance On Me’ – it reminded her too painfully of her first-in-line feelings for Stefan.
She checked Leon wasn’t dead, of course. Remembering her duty as a hostess, she held a mirror to his lips until she saw vapour. But he wasn’t dead, and he wouldn’t wake up. So, humming ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (A Man After Midnight)’, she left him a note with directions to the Gemini corner café, and went out.
At college, Stefan was having coffee with Jago in the library canteen. They had arranged it the night before, when Jago overheard Stefan on the subject of killer tomatoes. ‘We’ll do a genetics supplement and you can be consultant editor,’ he’d told Stefan. ‘I’ll see you at eleven.’ The trouble with journalists (as Stefan had often said to Belinda) was that they couldn’t help regarding you not as a person but as a source.
‘I need some Swedes quick,’ Jago might ring up to ask, mid-thought in his scurrilous weekly column in the Effort. No preamble, of course. Busy man, Jago. Part of his charm.
‘For sure. Ingmar Bergman, August Strindberg, Björn Borg.’
Jago could be heard tapping his keyboard in the background. ‘B-U-R-G?’
‘Well, B-E – which one?’
‘All of them. You tell me.’
‘Ingmar is B-E-R-G, August is B-E-R-G, and Björn is B-O-R-G. The reason for such a high incidence of the name Berg and its variants, of course—’
‘Great. You sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘One more Swede who isn’t a Berg, in case the subs don’t take my word for it?’
‘Abba?’
Four more emphatic taps.
‘Good man, gotta go.’
‘That was Yago,’ Stefan would tell Belinda, still holding the dead receiver in his hand.
‘How did I guess?’
The phrase ‘need-to-know basis’ had been invented for Jago. He was only interested in anything when he needed to know. Tell him a fact at an inappropriate moment (when he wasn’t writing an article, or commissioning one) and he literally screwed up his face to prevent it getting in. He was a tabula rasa with a straining Filofax, and other people were the fools who stored primary material until he came along to nick it. Not that your help would earn you any loyalty from him, let alone thanks. You could help him a hundred times, and he’d stitch you up on the hundred and first. The curious thing was, when Jago looked in a mirror he saw George Washington.
‘So how big is this supplement in the Effort?’ Stefan sighed, playing with his specs in a professorial manner.
‘Twelve pages. Minus ads. That leaves room for about three articles and a dozen pics.’
‘Why do you think I’ll contribute to it?’
‘Um, because if you don’t, I’ll go straight to Laurie Spink?’
Stefan smiled but didn’t reply. Laurie Spink made television programmes about genetics. He had a column in The Times.
‘OK, forget that Spink blackmail thing, that was tacky. If you do this for me, Stefan, I promise never to tell Belinda how I know you’re not a natural blond. What more can I say? Copy is by next Friday. A thousand words on anything. Is there a gene for monstrous boobs? Could you look for it between now and next Friday? I’m only thinking of the picture desk.’