‘Housekeeping,’ comes a disembodied voice from the other side of the lustrous wood laminate.
Howard looks at the bedside clock. He is shocked to see it is already 6 p.m. and the maid is coming to do the pre-dinner turn-down. He opens the door. A black face smiles at him broadly.
‘I can come back later if you like,’ the woman says, her voice lightly accented. Howard takes in the smoothness of her skin, taught over high cheekbones, and the compactness of her diminutive frame, clad in a fitted black blouse and black trousers. She is carrying a moulded plastic basket, filled with cleaning products and mini-packets of shortbread.
‘No, no,’ he replies, loosening the belt of his robe ever so slightly. ‘Come on in.’ He holds the door with his arm so that the maid has to bend under to walk through. She giggles as she does so. Howard is encouraged.
The maid checks the tea tray and replaces a sachet of hot chocolate, then goes into the bedroom with a quick economy of movement. When Howard follows, he sees she is piling the purple and brown cushions neatly at the foot of the bed. She glances over her shoulder, catches his eye and giggles again. He laughs lightly, then takes two steps towards her. She is bending over the bed and her backside is pressing against the fabric of her trousers. Howard, who knows how these things are done, who has successfully initiated a handful of similar transactions in high-end hotels across the globe, comes up close behind her, puts his hands on either side of her waist and nudges the knot of his robe belt against the maid’s haunches.
For a second, she tenses and does not move. Then, without looking at him, the maid straightens up, letting the pillow she is holding in one hand drop onto the Egyptian cotton, 450-thread count sheets.
‘Sir … I …’
‘Shhh,’ Howard says, nuzzling her neck, smelling the sweetness of cocoa butter. He does not like to talk in these situations. Talking would make it more real.
With the maid still turned towards the bed, he unbuttons her shirt with the quick fingers bequeathed him by generations of Finks. He slips his thumb underneath the wiring of her bra, easing in his hand until it cups the maid’s right breast. He groans, in spite of himself. With his free hand, he undoes his belt, lets the robe fall open, and grips his erection. He starts slowly, rhythmically, moving up and down the shaft, all the while holding the maid’s breast, feeling the nipple turn hard underneath his touch. She is breathing more quickly now. He cannot see her face but he knows, without needing to have it confirmed, that she is smiling, that she is enjoying this, that she is loving the attention, that she is gagging for it, that she needs him to thrust against her and take her and spill his white seed across her skin … He comes with a half-suppressed sigh and a feeling of disgust. It is all over in a matter of seconds.
He is aware, even in the midst of his supposed abandon, of the need not to stain the maid’s dark trousers.
Once a tailor, always a tailor, as his mum might say. God rest her soul.
Esme has started walking to the office as part of a springtime health kick. She lives in Shepherd’s Bush and works on High Street Kensington, so admittedly, it’s not the most arduous walk and, according to those miserable cut-out-and-keep fitness guides in various women’s magazines, it will hardly burn any calories at all (something called spinning does that, she has discovered, and she imagines a stuffy room filled with Victorian peasants frantically producing exercise leotards from their super-fast spinning wheels). Anyway, apparently spinning gets rid of 450 calories an hour. A Mars bar contains 280. So the chances are that her forty-five-minute walk will allow her to eat approximately half a molecule more chocolate than she would do otherwise.
But the walk makes her feel better, mentally. It makes her feel she’s doing something, at least, instead of sitting on her arse all day, either at her desk or in the train on the way to another futile doorstep on editor’s orders. Esme doesn’t need to lose weight. She possesses the natural slenderness of the terminally neurotic. But, being a woman, she feels guilty about not exercising. And her colleague Sanjay once told her that your metabolism slowed down to a crawling pace when you hit thirty. She’d been eating a baked potato at the time.
‘You won’t be able to do carbs any more,’ he’d said, flicking an elegant wrist in her direction. ‘You’ll want to be eating seeds and grains.’
‘Seeds and grains?’ She pushed the baked potato to one side, regretfully. ‘What, like birds?’
Sanjay nodded knowledgeably. He was the health editor and abreast of such things.
‘Keen-wah,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’ll need.’
‘Bless you.’
‘Ha-de-bloody-ha. I’m only telling you this for your own good, missy. This’ – he flapped a hand in front of her torso – ‘doesn’t come for free.’
When she’d turned thirty last December, Sanjay’s words had jangled in her head like a drawerful of mismatched cutlery. She was terrified that she’d pile on unwanted pounds purely by eating the same as she’d always done. For about a week, Esme had stuck faithfully to the recipes provided by a ‘Low-GI’ website but, by the end of seven days, she was heartily sick of egg-white omelettes and slow-release oats. Then it was Christmas anyhow so there was no point in thinking about calorie control, and after a few months she realised nothing had changed. She still hovered around nine stone and ideally wanted to be eight, like Liz Hurley, but there were some things you just had to live with.
If only she were more like Robbie. Her brother had an innate capacity for getting on with life. He never worried too much about anything and, as a result, he seemed to love exercise purely for the uncomplicated physical motion, as if the pump and pound of each straining muscle could push out extraneous thought. He’d done the London Marathon last year in under five hours without even trying. She’d been there to cheer him on past the finish line and he’d given her a huge, sweaty hug from underneath a crinkly silver blanket that was meant to help his muscles relax.
She hates running. The walking though … the walking was a good thing. Esme liked the routine of it. She liked putting on her trainers (last worn when she tried out – unsuccessfully – for the university hockey team) and packing her smart shoes in a bag to change into later because it prolonged the morning, delaying the inevitability of work just that little bit longer.
The trainers make her feel she is bouncing along the pavement. Today, the bounce is accentuated by her good mood. She’d had a page lead-in on Sunday about the power of optimism that was followed up by most of the dailies including the Mail, which carried a substantial op-ed piece by a ‘self-confessed Victor Meldrew’ headlined: ‘Optimism? Bah humbug!’ For the Mail to follow you up was a considerable feather in your cap. Dave, the news editor, would be pleased.
She reaches a stretch of Holland Park Road lined by upmarket shops. There is a butcher’s here that is rumoured to be patronised by the Queen. Esme once bought a chicken from them in an emergency (she’d forgotten the main part of a roast she was meant to be cooking) and was charged £16 because it had been ‘corn-fed’. At £16, she would have preferred it to have been fed the sacrificial entrails of small human babies, but she didn’t complain out loud. Most of her fury was internal. She was that kind of person.
She crosses the road at the traffic lights, upping her pace to fit in with the rhythm of a new boy-band hit that is storming the charts. It is a saccharine number about finding teen love and although Esme knows she should hate it, knows that any journalist worth their salt would pour cynical bile over the lyrics and the sentiment, secretly she loves it. At work, Esme tries to keep her naïve idealism under wraps, but it’s not easy. When they’d covered the Royal Wedding last year, she’d cried a little watching the service on the big screens in the office – just at the bit where William saw Kate in that amazing dress for the first time – and Dave had caught her.
‘Time of the month?’ he said, patting