The next day we got at the truth. One of Anita’s girls was an old bitching partner of Nester, our rather stately manageress. They went off for a coffee, and word came back of the dastardly scheme. The enormous rent existed only on paper. The Anita Zither shop was to be given a two-year rent holiday. After that she could renegotiate something more realistic, or just do her usual evaporating trick. The bogus agreement was the perfect stick for beating the rest of us into submission.
Penny, tough cookie that she is, stonewalled, and Kuyper became more and more aggressive, issuing all kinds of threats, legal and physical, and cursing in Afrikaans.
(Sorry if that was all a bit drab and technical, what with leases and freeholds and things, but it wasn’t completely irrelevant, as you’ll see later. Look on it as being like the half talky bits in operas that fill in between the nice songs, the recitative I think it’s called. Ludo took me to see The Marriage of Figaro when we were first seeing each other. I read the programme, which went on for pages. Too many notes.)
Back to Penny and her mood.
‘Sorry I wasn’t here to help.’ Conciliation seemed a good idea. ‘I’ll call Liberty’s now.’
‘No need to apologise, I am one-third American, after all,’ she said, as if that explained everything.
There was a pause, as I did a quick calculation.
‘Can you be a third anything? Doesn’t it have to go in halves and quarters and eighths, and things?’
‘Of course you can. I’m one of three children. My mother was an American. And everyone knows that American flows through the female line.’
‘Isn’t that Jewishness?’
‘Ah, no, you see, I’m two sevenths Jewish, as well.’
And so the afternoon passed.
Paris meant an early start, and so I was quite pleased that nothing was happening that night: not a dinner party, not a launch, not a soiree, not drinks, not clubbing, not anything. Ludo always loves it when there’s nothing to do: he bumbles about making silly remarks, giving me pointless, spontaneous cuddles. He’ll find a way of nuzzling the back of my neck, and unless I’m very discouraging, he’ll end up carrying me to the bedroom. No, at home I really couldn’t ask for a sweeter boy. It’s the social world he can’t cope with; my world.
But Ludo’s lack of engagement with my world wasn’t why I was contemplating the mad, bad thing. You’re probably wondering what reason there could be. Here I was with a good man; not perfect, but good. Perhaps even very good. Kind, handsome(ish), and just about rich enough. Yet I was setting out on a course that could lead only to disaster. You despair of me, I know. I suppose I’d better try to explain.
It’s all to do with the trouble with people, the fact that all of the different bits of them are connected up. I don’t just mean the knee bone connected to the thigh bone and all that. I mean the different bits of their personality. If you try to get rid of one bit, a bad bit, say Penny’s towering self-regard, you find that it’s attached to a piece of string, and you pull and pull at the piece of string and then out pops some other bit, a good bit, that you don’t want to get rid of at all, like Penny’s drive. People come all jumbled together, and you know you’re supposed to accept them or walk away, although of course there’s always the fashion option of smiling to their faces whilst deftly sinking a stiletto between their shoulder blades.
And so, you see, Ludo’s good bits - all the loveliness stuff- were joined up with the bad bits. And one particular bad bit buzzed away in my mind, like a bluebottle at the window. It really wasn’t the social misfit business. It wasn’t the mess. It wasn’t the obsessions with things that nobody else cared about - the plight of the white-tailed sea eagle, or the rights of reindeer-herding nomads in the wastes of Finland. It wasn’t the brooding or the sulking whenever I did anything a teeny-weeny bit naughty, like putting a CD back in the wrong case, or the case back on the shelf -sin of sins - out of alphabetical order. It wasn’t the way he sometimes licked his plate before putting it in the dishwasher. It wasn’t his habit of tweaking distractedly at his crotch whenever he was nervous, although we are getting a little warmer.
No, the problem was that Ludo, lovely, helpless, hapless Ludo just didn’t have the sexiness gene.
And now you want me to define my terms. Ludo’s always telling me to do that – it’s another of his annoying habits. The only way to shut him up is to say ‘well, define define, then’, a trick I learnt at school for dealing with clever boys. But sexiness is strange, and you really do have to say what you mean. Or at least say what you like.
For me, being sexy isn’t just about being good-looking, although it is, whatever anyone else might tell you, at least partly that. Sorry nine-tenths of the boys out there. And it certainly hasn’t got anything at all to do with being nice. Sorry Ludo. Or buying you presents. And I think you know what’s coming here. Anyone who’s ever read a romantic novel from Jane Austen to Judith Krantz knows what I’m about to say. So get ready for a splash-down in the wide and welcoming sea of cliché - originality is not my aim, but that odd fish, truth. Yes, what we’re looking for is our old friend the ‘element of danger’. Not take-you-down-an-alleyway-and-slap-you-silly danger. More the knowledge that the object of your interest could go off with someone else more or less whenever he felt like it. More that you see the shape of a sneer behind a smile. More that you don’t know what you’d find if you went through their pockets.
I knew exactly what I’d find if I went through Ludo’s pockets, not that I bothered to, any more: two handkerchiefs, both as crunchy as Quavers; a tube ticket from a month ago; the chewed top of a cheap biro; a used plaster, screwed up into a ball; a poem, scrawled on a tissue; and a paperback by someone you’ve never heard of, with a name like Zbignio Chzeznishkiov.
There. I’m a stock character from fiction: the silly girl who, not content with the respectable young man she can have, wants to inject a bit of risk in her life. But fiction makes us what we are; we live in worlds densely populated by characters dreamed up by writers or film directors, or magazine editors, characters more real than the insubstantial ghosts that swarm past us in the street, or drive by in cars, or hang like carcasses in the tube. Often when we think we are being most ourselves, it turns out that our words, our actions, even our thoughts, have been given to us. Sorry, I’m raving.
Anyway, on that evening, however, something like contentment reigned in our household. We had a lovely time, tutting over the soaps, and wincing at ER (it was the one where Doug Ross saves a boy from drowning in a land drain, surely the best ever).
At about eleven I made some remarks about having to pack. Ludo said something stupid about that not taking long. Boys just don’t have a clue about girls and packing. There are things that we need that they don’t even know exist. It takes Ludo from thirty to forty-five seconds to pack, depending on how long it takes him to extract his socks from yesterday’s trouser legs. We didn’t make love, but we kissed, properly kissed, and I went to sleep thinking about all the wonderful things there are in the world to buy, and how most of them were waiting for me in Paris.
The Eurostar left at nine thirty. That meant up at six thirty, tea in bed till seven, bath till seven thirty, dress and tarting till eight fifteen, quarter of an hour to collect myself, leave at eight thirty, tube down to Waterloo, get there by five past nine, just late enough to send Penny