Foetal Attraction (5 page)

‘De-what?’

‘A book listing everybody who’s anybody. It’ll tell you all about their property and pedigree.’

‘Gillian, in Australia breeding is something we do with sheep. The answer’s no.’

‘And
Who’s Who
. You’ll need a copy of that also.’

‘Why do you want me to come?’

‘Because somewhere out there is a QC with your name on him.’

‘The real reason.’

‘I need an accomplice. A batwoman. Someone to check my teeth, tits, nose and hose before I go into battle.’

‘The
real
reason,’ Maddy pressured.

Gillian uncapped her lip pencil and outlined a mouth quivering with uncharacteristic emotion. ‘The real reason? My old chums are dropping me like flies. Word is out. Not only have I had to let my chauffeur and maid go, but last week I was seen coming out of a shop which buys second-hand designer clothes.’

‘So?’

‘I was seen going
in
with packages and coming
out
empty-handed.’

‘You’re skint?’

‘Daddy left me shares in his company. Then they were priced at fifty pounds apiece. After the property market crash, they are now worth one p each. I am living on credit alone.’

‘What about Imelda?’

‘A contact with Actors’ Equity.’

‘I wondered why she always disappears at washing-up time. But what about all this clobber?’

‘An investment. Like the cooking course. Part of my dowry. So now you understand why I’m husband hunting.’ The safari-park of animal-print clothes disappeared into packages. ‘And why I need you. Law of the jungle dictates that you always hunt in pairs and—’

‘And?’ Maddy pressed.

Gillian’s crimson lips flickered back into their customary curl. ‘And, let’s face it, Maddy, you’re too tall to be a threat.’

But Maddy couldn’t become Gillian’s full-time accomplice. Alex had other ideas.

‘They’ll adore you.’

‘They won’t. They’re far too posh for me.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll get you a High Life Visa.’

‘Alex, I left school young. I’ll feel like a day-tripper on some intellectual asteroid. Spanner …’ Maddy’s long, brown legs were the only part of her protruding from beneath Alex’s Lotus Élan. While he’d been away, she’d checked the plugs, the points, the coil, the condenser, the distributor, tightened the fan belt and doused the carburettor in cleaning fluid.

‘That’s what they’ll love about you.’ He placed the appropriate tool in her upturned palm. ‘You’ll be a
novelty
. Something fresh. A trophy wife.’ He tickled her tummy with his bare toes. ‘Unusual Australians are lionized by London society. It’s traditional. From Dame Nellie Melba to Dame Edna Everage; from Don Bradman to Germaine Greer …’

Giving the exhaust bracket nuts one final twist, Maddy humphed sceptically and re-emerged.

‘God, how I love a woman who knows how to handle her manifold.’ He laid her back across the cold car bonnet and, covered as she was in sump oil, shifted his sex drive into fourth.

With great trepidation, Maddy watched St Pancras station dwindle in the wing mirror. They pulled up in front of a suave eatery in Soho, offering an uninterrupted, panoramic view of the cardboard boxes of the homeless in the square opposite. The woozy sensation in her stomach Maddy recognized from scuba-diving. It happened when you ascended too fast.

Alex squeezed her hand. ‘You’re bright. You’re beautiful. Just be yourself and they’ll adore you.’

Maddy gave a wan smile. She was looking forward to the evening only slightly more than she would look forward to being imprisoned for drug smuggling in the men’s section of a Turkish prison.

The Soirée

WHEN ALEX ENTERED
the room, the gathering of people inched back like a Bondi breaker, then surged forward, engulfing him in one long roar of ‘hello, darling’ and ‘oh, my
dear
!’ All the bright and famous faces of London floated towards them. Maddy was dazzled. She couldn’t believe she was only an appetizer’s-length away from England’s most renowned playwrights, poets, novelists and painters. The men wore regulation black polo necks, with the occasional splash of a pastel brace or technicolour bow tie. The women’s sheared hair exposed spiral ear-rings shaped like elephants’ IUDs. There was a lot of kissing going on – the Double Continental rather than the single peck. Glancing around the room was the equivalent of thumbing through the arts pages of the
Guardian
. A conversation was in progress concerning the ex-Eastern bloc.

‘Thank God for Romania!’ (Maddy smiled, waiting
to
be washed to and fro in warm waves of intellectualism.) ‘My analyst has found this amazing agency which sends you Romanian au pairs for forty quid a week.’

‘The saddest thing about the demise of Russia’ (Maddy tuned in eagerly) ‘is the caviar shortage. This rogue roe we’re getting now. It’s nothing but overpriced fish jam!’

Maddy shifted her attention to two women who’d been salaaming each other since she arrived. ‘Oh, yes. I do all my own housework. I can’t possibly ask a working-class woman to scrub my lavatory bowl. Occasionally when I get really desperate I ring an agency … but I always get them to send me an Australian.’

The waiter handed gawping Maddy a champagne flute. Bubbles gossiped to the surface. Alex was drawn into this select little circle. His eyebrow indicated that she should follow, but there was a luxurious exclusiveness about their badinage which rendered Maddy mute. She felt the way she did in Rooty Hill primary school when she’d been sick the day they did long division and just never caught up again.

Instead, she was swept along in the conversational wake of a man who introduced himself as London’s leading literary agent. ‘Sorry I’m late’, Bryce announced to all and sundry. ‘Have just been with Mel … BROOKS. We were discussing our holiday with Bernardo BERTOLUCCI. And then I had a quick
meeting
with Jeremy IRONS about a David PUTTNAM project we’re interested in …’ Maddy listened, enthralled, as famous names were detonated all around him. This guy was a Name-Dropping Olympic Gold Medallist. The whole time he was talking, his eyes swivelled in his head, searching out More Important People. He was an English bull terrier, small and tenacious, originally bred to go down holes and drag out rabbits. In one breath he destroyed JOHN BRYAN – the balding Texan toy man and ‘financial advisor’ to the Duchess of York – for being a social climber. In the next, he was boasting about his visit with the Aga KHAN.

‘Gee,’ Maddy commented impishly, ‘no one I know has ever fallen
that
high.’

London’s Leading Literary Agent glowered at her over the tops of his multicoloured spectacle frames. ‘Oh, you’re Aust
ral
ian. I’ve always found Australians to be so insensitive.’

Maddy spluttered champagne down her front.

‘An Australian in London. Now there’s an original concept,’ snickered one balding, pony-tailed trendoid with a stud ear-ring to another balding, pony-tailed trendoid with a stud ear-ring.

‘Oh, you’re Alex’s new …
friend
, are you?’ Bryce enquired, superciliously.

‘Yea, well, Juliette Binoche couldn’t make it. Sorry.’

‘Darlings!’ A woman in combat trousers, complete with flaps, pockets, loops, studs, surplus belt and Nikon
camera
round her neck, kissed everyone within lip radius, then introduced herself as Sonia, a film-maker concerned with tree brutalization from a Feminist angle.

‘I should have guessed you were Australian by the sun-tan,’ added London’s Leading Literary Agent disparagingly. ‘Suntans now have the social cachet equivalent to that of a heavy drinker. You’re in the “Feel Sorry For” category, my dear.’

‘It’s my natural colour,’ Maddy lied in the vague hope of embarrassing him. But nothing could crack that shatter-proof complacency.

Sonia, however, focused on Maddy with renewed interest. ‘Of course, most of my films’, she added, smiling sweetly, ‘are about
indigenous
peoples.’ She put her head on one side and hung on Maddy’s every utterance as though Maddy was being terribly brave about some hideous cancer she’d just contracted. But the reason for Sonia’s condescending kindness soon became clear. ‘I do so envy you! We whites are melanin-impoverished. This’, she gushed, ‘makes us less biologically proficient than
your
people.’

‘I knew an aborigine once. Nice fellow. But not all that bright,’ added the Name-Dropper Extraordinaire. ‘He thought that a Poussin exhibition was some kind of stall selling French chickens.’

A volley of laughter rang around their circle.

Sonia tut-tutted, whispering to Maddy that as far as she was concerned there should be a ban on inappropriately directed laughter.

‘Australia …?’ mused the bloke who’d been introduced as the Most Brilliant British Poet of the Late Twentieth Century. Humphrey was a tightly coiled, muscular man, his face set like a trap. Looming over him, Maddy examined the way his hair draped across his bald patch. It reminded her of grape leaves trained over a trellis. ‘That’s where we stash our upper-class English murderers, isn’t it?’

The others showed their tittering appreciation.

For Maddy, being in England was like trying to play a board game minus the manufacturer’s instructions. ‘I’m sorry?’ she asked. The group sniffed at her as though she were a cork from a suspect wine bottle. Maddy didn’t know if she was being rejected because she had tannined or whether she was just too immature for consumption. ‘I don’t get it.’ She shrugged.

‘Lord Lucan.’ It was a shrill, commandeering voice. A voice best suited to using words like ‘rotter’ and ‘imbecile’. Maddy located its source. A woman resembling a hockey stick had joined the knot of people surrounding her. ‘It is best’, she boomed, ‘to think before one speaks. No better still, to
read
before one thinks. That’s always a good piece of advice to a newcomer,’ she decreed.

‘Harry!’ like microbes under a microscope, they reformed around the new arrival. It took Maddy a moment or two to recognize her. For three decades now, she had been a Femocet missile, homing in on
strategic
men and devastating them. Maddy silently mused that Professor Harriet Fielding had benefited quite substantially from a well-placed Y chromosome some fifty years before.

The smile Harriet turned in Maddy’s direction was fastened on like a brooch. ‘And who’, she moved her head as though wearing an invisible neck brace, ‘are you?’

‘Madeline Wolfe.’ She waited for Harriet to volunteer her own name. She didn’t. ‘And who are you?’ Maddy finally asked, peeved at this woman’s presumption that it should be common knowledge. The group exchanged looks of subtle contempt. They were all as cold and bold and treacherous as icebergs; Maddy couldn’t discern what lay beneath their well-educated surface.

‘Professor Harriet Fielding,’ she replied haughtily, before further interrogating, ‘And what do you
do
?’

‘Well,’ Maddy navigated her way through the interlocutionary ice floes, ‘I’m training to become a Pom, actually. Alex is going to get me a job on the road as leg-leecher or lion decoy or something.’ Maddy waited for Harriet to volunteer what she did. She didn’t. ‘And what do
you
do?’ she asked, mischievously.

The light around Harriet shrivelled and her face became even more glacial. ‘I do so admire Alexander … In particular his ability to get on with absolutely
any
one.’

Maddy was scuttled. Totally
Titanic
’d. Open-mouthed,
she
capsized into arctic waters. Alex’s reappearance salvaged the situation. She clutched at him, momentarily life-jacketed.

‘Has everyone met Madeline?’ He stroked her hair. ‘My Bondi Bodicea?’ His arm tentacled around her waist. ‘Maddy, this is Harriet, my oldest friend … Humphrey, who is supposed to be a brilliant writer … though all he’s ever written me are dud cheques. Bryce, London’s leading literary agent. Though it’s mostly my lines of dialogue he’s stolen over the years. Sonia, Eco-terrorist, Recycling Queen and Significant Other of the World’s Most Famous Rock Star …’

‘Alexander,’ Harriet beamed, lacing her arm proprietorially through his, ‘what a charming little apprentice you’ve acquired. Now, come and tell me all about those ivory poachers. Were you there for the coup?’ So saying, she coaxed him towards a table at the front of the oak-panelled room as Maddy’s elbow was simultaneously tugged towards the back. The waiter guided her into a chair between Bryce and Humphrey. They sat on either side of her, sombre as bookends. Maddy’s heart sank. She searched for Alex’s face amid the bobbing heads. She could
hear
his table rather than see it. The one rule about dinners like this is that every other table is sure to be raucous and laughter-laden, while you find yourself seated between a grief counsellor with haemorrhoids and a recently divorced man eager to tell you
all about it
and opposite someone who does something ‘frightfully
important
’ in sewerage. ‘A connoisseur,’ she quipped to the peppermill the size of a fire extinguisher.

On her right, Humphrey sat engrossed in his dinner. This man’s table manners made Henry VIII look demure. She contemplated starting up a conversation with him, but the only time he looked up from his meal was when the journalist behind the bottled water made an impassioned plea for something to be done for the homeless. ‘Hear, hear!’ he enthused, ripping off an entire shank of sheep with his incisors.

On her left, social Siberia was demarcated by Bryce’s shoulder blade which he kept turned towards her at all times. She got to know his Ozbek jacket intimately: the weave, the colour of the check, the musculature of the flesh below. Demoralized, she studied the other diners. With their floppy hair and linen suits, the men resembled extras from
Brideshead Revisited
. But they were far too busy braying their nauseating views across the table even to notice her.

‘My next novel’s going to be a bestseller. I’m going to call it
Fuck the Koran
,’ brayed one.

‘Actually, my biography of Bill Clinton feels like writing an autobiography in a way,’ brayed another. ‘It absolutely amazed me just how much we have in common. We were on the same landing at Oxford, you know.’