Surrender to Mr. X Read online

  As I left 402 I passed La Weiss going to her own suite. She looked right through me as though I were not there: hotel staff are often invisible to the guests, like the wallpaper. She seemed quite pleased with herself. Perhaps she had managed to beat Alden’s fee down in whatever project they were jointly involved in. I worried for him: I wasn’t sure he was necessarily tough enough to look after his own interests. I was feeling sorry for him again. I remembered the way the stored energy had leapt between him and me—and the feeling of repletion that usually follows the closure of a successful sexual act had gone into abeyance before I even made it to the lift. I wanted Alden, though in what manner and with what choreography I could not be sure.

  The stocky personal trainer, with neck almost wider than head, who was booked into 314—a much cheaper room—opened the door of Suite 406 to Mrs. Weiss, and he wore no clothes. That must have had plenty to do with her earlier reluctance to meet Alden for lunch. Nothing will do for some people, when they first set eyes on an hotel bed, but that they use it for sex. And some women become foul-mouthed while they’re in rut.

  Max held out his hand as I came down into the foyer and I gave him the two tickets. I don’t do eBay. A friend of mine had her identity stolen from using it, and I am more computer-illiterate than she. Anyway, I can’t stand a bargain: I like to pay full price. Show me two similar objects, one cheap and one expensive, and I go for the dear, investing it with some extra magic. If eBay has magic, I don’t know what it is. And Max was expecting the tickets. That was why he had given me no choice but just told me, by inference, to get on up there quick before someone else got hold of them. Max is a Wimbledon junkie; he saw his opportunity and moved quickly. He would probably hand me, what?—probably a grand in cash in his own sweet time. We were, after all, partners, in a team.

  I got off home as quickly as I could, with less time now to make myself “pretty” for Alden.

  Home

  I LIVE ALONE, BETWEEN PADDINGTON and Maida Vale, in a much too expensive apartment looking over a canal. My London telephone prefix is 286, which in the old days when it was represented by the letters on the instrument dial was “CUN”: some wag must have been in charge of the allocation of codes a hundred years ago at the telephone’s inception, because newly built Maida Vale was then where the grand pubs had music-hall acts on their cavernous ground floors, and more or less discreet brothels on the first and second, and the mansion blocks contained spacious apartments where gentlemen kept their mistresses.

  I have tried sharing with other girls, but it never seems to work very well. I like my own space, and I don’t put things away very often, except in the kitchen where everything is clean and orderly. Elsewhere you can’t see a surface for the mass of discarded, once worn, or about to be worn garments, shoes, scarves, pashminas, beaded jackets and bags—I just love beads—promiscuous jewelry and all the trappings of an admitted fashion shopaholic. But I like to think that all the mess that the eye falls upon has an aesthetic to it. Cosmetics, creams and scents are bought for the beauty of their containers—the contents, I find, are much of a muchness, but somehow if you buy the most expensive in the range it works best.

  There are some good paintings on the wall, left to me by my grandmother Molly, the one who was married for a time to Lord Wallace F. They include a minor Picasso, a good Klimt and a tiny Chagall. I have managed so far to get by without selling these, though I am always in debt and persecuted by credit companies telling me what I know perfectly well already: that I owe them too much and am late paying. I just about keep things in balance as they are, but if I fell ill, or lost my looks, I’d be in trouble; the paintings would have to go. My problem is that I want to have it all—lots of money to spend, lots of time for my thesis, frequent thrills and plenty of security, sex on demand and respect from everyone—but there’s neither time, space nor money enough for all of it. You have to choose, any idiot knows, but I can’t bear to. To some extent I pretend otherwise: at least sex stops you thinking, and temple offerings pay the rent.

  I like to think that the small room which I use as an office demonstrates the other more rigorous side of my nature. It is thoroughly Spartan, decent and plain. Stationery is stacked in neat piles, pencils are sharpened, notebooks placed in size order; the computer is state-of-the-art, the keyboard wiped with a cloth after every use. The lighting is efficient and the works of Wittgenstein, Jung and Kant and relevant others are to hand on custom-made adjustable Douglas fir shelves. It is my ambition to finish my thesis by the end of the Christmas holidays—I will go home for the season—and present it to my supervisor, Professor Freddie Wilques, first thing in the New Year.

  I am quite a family person though you won’t have observed much evidence of that so far; indeed, a Home Counties person. I was brought up in a country vicarage with Wellington boots and sit-up-and-beg bicycles in the hall, and an Aga in the kitchen to warm your bottom on. I always had a bottom that needed warming. My mother took Holy Orders some twenty years ago: my father the classical scholar, who has a private income much eroded by taxes, such being the way of the times, tutors children at home in math and Latin. I have two younger sisters, Katharine and Alison, identical twins of seventeen, and child prodigies, both already at Oxford doing classics—prodigal like myself—and a little brother Robert, sixteen, who is no prodigal and still at school. My Joan Bennet family, the social worker mother, the redundant father, the call-center sisters, the boy-in-the-hood brother, is their Essex equivalent. When telling lies I try to keep as near the truth as possible.

  I read philosophy, and was the only woman in my year to get a First. I graduated when I was twenty-one, four years back. Men usually get the firsts, not because of male discrimination against the female, or so Professor Wilques assures me, but because the bell curve which relates to academic intelligence is flatter in men than in women. Women cluster together in the middle ability ranges: men stretch out to either side, so you get both more brilliant and more stupid men than you do women. Sometimes I think that there is something rather male about me: I am somewhere stranded out on a limb. It doesn’t show in my body but perhaps it does in the way my mind works. This is probably a delusion: I may have no idea of how men’s minds work. And if I were to be male I would want to be gay, so perhaps that puts me back in the female camp? I would be happiest, I think, as a she-male: one of those people with male genitals and female breasts you see in Brazilian porn films.

  Out to dinner with the haute bohème of Hampstead! I wondered who the other guests might be—who would a man like Alden see as fit company for a pretty hotel receptionist/nursery school teacher called Joan from Essex? We would see. Though I had a fair suspicion that I would get to his place and find no other guests except possibly Lam, who might be needed for practical purposes.

  I dressed for the occasion in Vanessa mode, which might confuse Alden, but that couldn’t be helped: I dreaded to think what Joan might wear for an evening out. Anyway, should the relationship lead anywhere I would have to admit to being Vanessa soon enough. The evening was warm. Down on the canal someone was giving a party on one of the narrow-boats. I heard chatter and laughter drifting up through the summer air. I almost wished I was more like other people: had a regular boyfriend, a regular life, a proper job, a pension fund, and wasn’t cursed with a mind that went round and round like a whirligig, and a body that exacted sex from the unsuitably all and sundry; that I was not a vocational girl, a priestess of the Temple Olivier, but somebody who worked in a bank. But not to the extent that I was going to let it spoil my evening.

  I wore a pale green chiffony dress of little substance, by Marc Jacobs, the cream Lacroix jacket—rather more substance—and red Jimmy Choo sandals with straps winding up nearly to the knee. Some shudder at green-and-red but I’m not one of them.

  I don’t do matching underwear if only because I can so seldom run it to earth in the pile. I ended up with a pink lace bra, low cut with wide apart straps, and—rejecting thongs on the grounds of comfort�
��French knickers in red silk which fortuitously matched the shoes exactly. Really quite demure, and un-alarming to a man in a wheelchair whom I knew very little about. Rather over-decent, I thought, almost Joan-ish—but at least my pink diamond navel-stud was on display. It was a good diamond, if to my mind rather small, and had cost its original owner more than £5,000. Another investment against the rainy day I told myself, but couldn’t quite believe, must surely come.

  A retired admiral staying at the Olivier for the Trafalgar Day celebrations had given the diamond to me. It had belonged to his wife, recently deceased. He was going to have to sell his house to pay off the taxman: he did not want to have to sell the diamond too. Rather, he said, that a latter day Emma Hamilton had it.

  I had the diamond made into a navel ring, platinum mounted. The piercing somehow became infected but I persisted, despite the temptation to pull the ring out and throw it away from suspicion that either the wife or the Inland Revenue had laid a curse on it; after two courses of antibiotics the infection subsided, and now the gem glitters magnificently, and wholesomely, when revealed—those who know no better assume it to be false. It was not a Joan Bennet kind of thing to own, but I would meet that problem when I came to it.

  I felt restless as I waited. A fat oyster-shell moon was hanging low over the roofs and unlit streetlights; it seemed to want to suck me out of my dwelling, and my identities as Vanessa, Joan or any others I’d ever known, and there was a pervasive miasma of expectation lingering in the city air. It was the summer solstice, and it seemed that the world was waiting impatiently for the moonlight which it knew would barely even come before it passed, so short were the hours of darkness. Perhaps one day after all I would meet Mr. Right, and fall in love, and all things would be certain and explained. But even then there might well be a bit of restlessness left on an evening like this.

  The door bell rang. I closed the gaping windows, and was halfway down the stairs before I remembered about getting home. I climbed back up, and fetched a £20 note from the Wittgenstein to fold into my Lacroix pocket. If people pay for your fare to them they will in all likelihood pay your fare back home again but you never know, you might not want to be further beholden.

  It was a black London taxi. I saw the sky mirrored in pale-blue patches on its over-polished paintwork, and the disc of the moon on one of its unexpectedly dark-tinted windows; I noticed no license number on the back too, as if it were privately owned. I’d heard that the millionaire Gulbenkian was chauffeured around in his own taxi in the sixties, and that the Duke of Edinburgh puts on a cloth cap and drives himself around in one of his own, but the driver wasn’t him. As he held the door open for me I found him to be young and handsome, with a smooth black skin which looked as if it had been French polished. On the way he told me he came from Somalia. I thought he was probably gay.

  Dinner With Alden

  HAMPSTEAD WAS ONCE A separate village on a hill overlooking London. It’s always had arty associations since Constable lived up there a couple of hundred years ago and painted serene watercolors of the city in the distance below. There are inns near the Heath where decades before his time highway robbers would retire of an evening to count what they had plundered from their prey among the meek majority of the population who had come about their goods and cash more conventionally, by honest toil.

  Alden lived in a substantial, but not the largest, house in a short leafy street that curved in a shallow crescent out of a busier thoroughfare and back to it again so sleepily that you could pass by and miss it. It was part of the late-Victorian expansion of the village when successful painters, architects, writers and industrialists more mundanely enriched from the manufacture of civilized requirements such as stained glass had built sedate red brick mansions from which to enjoy its healthy breezes and views. Nowadays you have to be hedge-fund-manager, or Russian-mafia rich to live in them, as if the ghosts of the highwaymen had come back in their benevolence toward their successors in thievery to reclaim it for them. I wondered how designing art galleries and writing scraps of minimalist music for the BBC’s classical radio station could vouchsafe such luxury.

  But the real shock awaited the opening of the heavy, paneled door, like the rest of the house a strange mixture of the gothic, the rustic and the Georgian. For inside was another world, all whiteness and steel and frosted glass and creamy-gray ash wood panels, like some sort of semi-organic po-mo space station. The place reeked of money. Not inherited wealth, but new wealth trying to prove its lack of vulgarity with stripped-down, unfussy but user—in the sense of owner-friendly functionalism, and as wealth will, succeeding in its goal—a seamlessly inverted form of ostentation. To gut a house like this and refit it thus would cost more than building from scratch.

  How? But it was not my place to inquire. Alden would tell me in his own good time, as he might tell me about his physical impairment, or otherwise. Anyway there was neither time nor opportunity, for it was Alden himself I found opening to me. There was no sign of Lam, nor, it became quickly obvious, of any other guests.

  I didn’t miss Lam’s attendance, creeping around watching everything, and was not too surprised about the other guests, whose existence I had discounted as possibly notional. It was a house without switches and doorknobs: curtains opened and closed at the press of a pad, lights switched off and on as if they read somebody’s desires: the lift played the almost imperceptible tinkling song of ascending larks, the bathroom the distant roar of Icelandic waterfalls; the fridge conversed softly with you, the bar told you what it had in stock in the camp voice of Hal from 2001—but only if asked—and never tried to lock you out.

  A central computer, with a console on Alden’s wheelchair arm, controlled the workings of the whole house. It was a futurologist’s wet dream, and Alden had somehow made it happen. I didn’t actually like the house at all: it seemed to me without soul. I was accustomed to the clutter and color of Little Venice living space. It was my own office writ large, expanded to drive out all else; too orderly, too willfully so. But awe pushed my reservations to the periphery of vision, so I saw them without affect, small as through reversed opera glasses, like some other person’s altogether. I felt the emptiness; I knew I didn’t like it, and I didn’t care.

  As I waited for whatever was going to happen next I watched Alden’s stealth wheelchair move swiftly and quietly as if it had a mind of its own, programmed to interpret Alden’s will before he knew it himself. His living area was vast, multi-leveled, bleached of color, empty, tidy and full of space-enhancing perspective tricks, designed to be photographed, filmed, not lived in. Lighting make soft, calculated patterns on walls and ceilings. There were no paintings: low sofas and chairs were hard edged: this to my mind was a temple to a stylish discomfort: inverted Gemütlichkeit. Other than the patch of brilliant color on Alden’s shirt, and the flood of soft evening light through the vast angular windows, I could have been back in my step-grandfather Wallace’s studio. He was a disciple of Corbusier and liked nothing better than all things ugly, brutal and plain.

  Trying hard, I managed to find something I rather liked: a cabinet made in bur oak, or at any rate veneered with it—a cool, poised, modern design, if perhaps too ornate for its setting. A frieze of naked wooden caryatids stretched up along the front panels as if to the skies of Mount Olympus, half in and out of the wood. It was very clever. I said so. Alden’s face lit up. It had been especially made for him by Lukas—what, didn’t I know the name?—a very distinguished Czech craftsman, who interpreted the inorganic through the organic—I looked puzzled—“Wood and wires,” Alden explained, “wood and wires and these days Bluetooth”—which didn’t help much. He told me he had paid £18,000 for it two years back, and already it had increased in value by one third. I was a little disappointed in him showing himself to be so mercenary. Should not a beautiful piece be valued for its quality? But Alden could be excused: he was in a wheelchair: it was okay, surely, for him to marvel at his own successes, no doubt so dearly and nobly achieved
?

  He was a piece of work himself: most decorative in white chinos and a black silk shirt exploding with hand-painted scarlet roses, on leafy stalks complete with pointed thrusting thorns. I had not been wrong: he was decidedly exciting—trapped by his physical disability but also enhanced by it. He exuded energy and the erotic charisma of those who know what they want, mean to get it, and show no doubt. Of course Mrs. Matilda Weiss had come down to apologize. Of course he had picked me up, fate having put me in his way to save his face; he induced opportunities as he progressed through the world.

  “I like the shoes,” he said, and took my jacket, and the chair whizzed off gracefully, and without apparent instruction, so he could hang it on a peg. There was no sign of a proper clothes hanger, and I was nervous that the peg would stretch the wool fabric and leave a mark. I didn’t say anything.

  Now was my moment to say that I was Vanessa not Joan, but I missed it. “O what a tangled web we weave,” as my grandmother used to quote, “when first we practice to deceive.” But as Joan this evening I felt summery and alive and light, and free to hate his domain, and say so. Intellect, doubt and the habit of analysis can be a burden. Just to live here in the present, without relating it to past or future, is to be happy. A garment is only a garment. I would not sulk. Let it be. Let it spoil.

  “It’s not exactly cozy in here,” I said. He laughed and said it wasn’t meant to be, it was to impress clients. I could come into the kitchen if I felt more at home in the real world, and so we went through. It looked like the Pompidou Centre but human scale. Pinky gray granite and interlacing pipes, but at least there was a pot or pan or two.

  The table was laid for three. I was afraid that meant Lam, but Alden said his friend was coming by with take-out Japanese on the way home from an evening class. I wondered if the friend was male or female. Takeaway Japanese seemed rather a come down but Alden was clearly a busy person and complicated food, as I had noticed when he devoured the chicken sandwich with the over sour mayo at the Bound Beast, was not high on his list of priorities.