The High Flyer (2 page)

IV

“The English dinosaurs who roam the City of London,” I said, “divide women into four groups: trash, tarts, girls and goddesses. Trash is anything which fails to speak with a Home Counties accent, and Scots trash, if it aims to be a lawyer, should qualify in Scottish law and stay north of the border. Trash can’t be taken seriously. Tarts, on the other hand, can be taken seriously, but dinosaurs only do one kind of business with them— if indeed they do business with them at all. The women in the third category, the girls, speak with a Home Counties accent and are allowed to be businesswomen (a) because they look sweet with their briefcases, and (b) because they can’t possibly be a serious threat—they remind the dinosaur of his mother and sister, and all dinosaurs know how to control the females in their families. Goddesses alone are beyond control, but that’s all right because they appeal to the dinosaur’s primitive need to worship the powerful, and when worshipped the goddess is usually benign towards males and indifferent to females. Very occasionally tarts and trash can be reclassified as girls who may one day be goddesses, but only if their speech is flawless, their manners impeccable and their looks fit to qualify them for the frontispiece of
Country Life
.”

My companion was clearly amused. “And how would you define the dinosaurs?”

“They can be any age between forty and ninety, although nowadays they’re usually exterminated from the boardrooms before they hit sixtyfive. They’re in all the major professions, but the law provides them with an ideal environment. The legal dinosaurs talk loudly about modernising attitudes and they make token gestures when it comes to employing women, but this is yet another case of ‘the more things change, the more things remain the same.’ Even today the dinosaurs with the most power all went to the same schools and they all belong to the same clubs and they all share the same lifestyle—”

“Which is?”

“A pied-à-terre in the Temple or Clifford’s Inn or the Barbican. A plush home in leafy Surrey which is serviced by a Home Counties wife encased in pearls and twinsets—”

“You’re describing the 1950s!”

“As I said, the more things change, the more things remain the same. Anyone who’s truly ambitious soon finds he has to adopt a dinosaur’s lifestyle in order to make his dreams come true, so the lifestyle gets passed down intact from one generation to the next.”

“But supposing,” said Kim, “a dinosaur gets bored with this fossilised English lifestyle? Supposing he wants to ditch the leafy lanes of Surrey and try something new?”

“The desire to ditch would probably be just a passing whim. But there’s no reason, of course, why he shouldn’t occasionally take a holiday from all those leafy lanes.” Raising my glass I paused before saying blandly: “Cheers,” and as he smiled again, his eyes now a steamy blue, I knew at once that I’d hooked him.

V

I hardly need say that I was not a goddess. To have accumulated the necessary power, prestige and influence, goddesses had to be over fifty, and for me that milestone was still many years away. But my prospects were good. Having become a partner in my firm of solicitors I had now manoeuvred myself into a position where I could afford to take time out—briefly—for domesticity. According to the life-plan which I had designed for myself before my arrival in London, I had to marry at thirty-five. When I met Kim I was nearly thirty-four and already looking around so that I could complete the assignment on schedule. I supposed it was too much to hope that I would manage to follow Mrs. Thatcher’s example of having twins, a move that completed childbearing in a single nine-month tranche, but I certainly expected to be finished with pregnancies before I was forty. Then I would be free to focus on my career again in what would be the most challenging years of my professional life.

The trouble with life-plans which look so neat on paper is that life itself is always trying to poke holes in them. As soon as I started to look around for a husband I realised there was a big problem: marriageable men were in short supply. My recent lover had spelled this out to me in no uncertain terms before ditching me for a nineteen-year-old fluffette. Unmarried career women in their mid-thirties were pathetic, I was informed, particularly when they were unable to figure out why no man wanted to be stuck with them on a permanent basis. Did they never once realise that there was always a new crop of nubile feminine flesh flowering for the delight of the older male? No man in his right mind, I was informed, wanted the kind of successful woman who had more balls than all the men in the boardroom.

I did manage to laugh as I accused him of whipping himself into a frenzy of jealousy over the penis that I didn’t have, but after his departure I found myself fighting a major depression, and although I won through I emerged debilitated. I almost decided not to bother with marriage, but found this was a goal I was unwilling to abandon. The dinosaurs never truly respected a woman unless she had been a wife and mother. Society did appear to have changed in its attitude to unmarried women, but I often suspected the change was no more than a fantasy hyped up by the media while the attitudes of the men in power remained much as they had always been.

A successful woman, it seemed clear to me, had to achieve both a career
and
a faultless domesticity; it was not an either/or situation, and in order to maximise my success I had to stick to my life-plan and net the right husband. Celibacy was just as much for losers as chastity was. That was the dogma. Those were the rules. One conformed or else one was consigned to hell as someone who had failed to make it to the heaven of “having it all.” Occasionally, very occasionally, I did think this ideology was as rigorous as the crackpot lifestyle of some fundamentalist religious sect, but I always eliminated that heretical thought by reminding myself what agony it would be to wind up a loser, with everyone breathing contempt on me from all sides.

The irony was that when I first met Kim in that airport lounge I did not see him as a potential husband. I merely saw him as a male who could boost my shattered self-esteem, and besides I had by that time given up hope of marrying a fellow lawyer. Successful lawyers all seemed to gravitate towards the traditional wives who would slot easily into the dinosaur lifestyle, and although I had cast my net wider, trawling among the stockbrokers and the bankers and the various other businessmen who flourished in the City’s Square Mile, I had found only the unsuitable and the unavailable.

I had wondered if I was being too fussy, but thought not. It was no good marrying someone unsuitable; I would have been written off as pitifully desperate. It was also no good angling for someone who was already married; that would have been a very unwise move, no matter how desirable the husband was, because people would have said I was reckless, hormone-driven, incapable of ordering my private life properly, and I could not afford to make any move which would have been detrimental to my career.

“My wife’s ideal for a dinosaur,” said Kim on the flight to New York, “but the trouble is I’m not the dinosaur I appear to be. I’ve always been the outsider, acting a part in order to get on.”

“Me too. So are you saying—”

“I’m saying Sophie and I have recently decided to go our separate ways. There are no children and no other people involved, so the divorce could hardly be easier.”

“How civilised,” I said politely, but despite this information that he would soon be single I still did not see him as a potential husband. I was too busy massaging my battered ego with erotic thoughts of a one-night stand.

VI

According to romantic convention and modern urban myth a torrid sex-scene should have unfolded when Kim and I went to bed together that same night in New York, but fortunately real life is rather more unpredictable. The last thing I wanted was a torrid sex-scene. Erotic, yes, but not pornographically torrid. In my experience (which was well up to the modern average as established by earnest sociologists) torrid sex-scenes indicated the presence of either male bastards or male perverts or both, and were conducted as if the woman’s body were a plastic machine designed for unspeakable experiments. No woman in her right mind could enjoy that kind of rubbish. Torrid sex-scenes might have been fun in the 1960s when everyone was so innocent and the weirdos were still hiding in the woodwork, but now, when everything is not only permitted but expected, they have degenerated into a big bore which is not only repulsive but occasionally frightening.

I sound jaded. I
was
jaded. Sex as a leisure activity is great fun when one’s young, but as the years pass, one’s horizons alter, one’s needs change and one becomes more complex, less easily satisfied. One simply cannot, if one wants to be a mature human being, continue to think of sex as being in the same league as getting drunk in a pub on a Saturday night. The whole subject then becomes murky, fraught with ambiguity and eventually painful. Yes, I was jaded. I was sure too that I was not alone in harbouring jaded feelings, but of course secular society has decreed that one can never admit to feeling less than ecstatic about sex. This is a key dogma, and to deny it is heresy.

However, despite my jaded attitude to sex—despite the fact that I was pursuing Kim not primarily for culturally sanctified thrills but for an ego-boost—despite the fact that I expected little physical pleasure from the encounter but only the emotional satisfaction arising from a power-play successfully executed—despite all these things I had the most welcome surprise. Kim was astonishingly normal. No weirdo came crawling out of the woodwork. No ego-crazed Don Juan treated me as a collection of apertures while watching himself dotingly in the mirror. No tormented masculine psyche worried itself silly about female orgasms. And no flagging middle-aged bodypart flunked consummation amidst a rising tide of embarrassment. He just said casually after we had had a passionate smooch (well worthy of Grace Kelly’s famous smooch with Cary Grant in
To Catch a Thief
): “Anything you don’t like?” and when I retorted: “Yes—endless foreplay!” he laughed before murmuring: “Sure—why waltz when you can tango?” Then I laughed too and suddenly I thought: this is fun! And I was so surprised because I had quite forgotten how amusing ordinary, straightforward, no-frills sexual intercourse could be if only one had the right partner.

Yet I did not expect afterwards to see him again. I had no illusions; this had been a one-night stand in which I had soothed my damaged pride and he had taken a break from the Home Counties wife whom, I was willing to bet, he had no real intention of divorcing. A woman hardly expects to see a man again after a freakish connection like that, and most of the time she has no desire to see him again either. Sensibly I told myself I had achieved the goal of numbing my pain by means of sophisticated behaviour—although I knew very well that there was nothing particularly sophisticated about using sex in this way. Analgesics, after all, hardly constitute a banner of the beau monde; no one has ever suggested that taking aspirin is the last word in cosmopolitan chic.

On the morning after the night before Kim said: “I’m booked to the hilt for these three days in New York and I’m going to be unconscious every night as soon as I hit the sack, but I’d like to see you again in London. Can I call you at your office?”

But I rejected this suggestion. Personal calls at the office create mess. Word gets around. A woman can never be too careful, particularly when there are male rivals panting to see her bite the dust. “Call me at home,” I said and gave him my number, but still I did not expect to see him again.

When he recorded my number carefully in his organiser I noticed again that he was left-handed. I had noticed this earlier when he had made love, and suddenly I had the impression of a mirror image, as if this off-beat outsider who so skilfully played the system was far more like me than I had previously begun to imagine.

He phoned a week later from his City pied-à-terre in Clifford’s Inn.

VII

“It’s Kim Betz,” he said. His faint American accent seemed more noticeable on the phone and so did his even fainter European inflections. “Just checking to see you got home safely from the Big Apple. Still in one piece?”

“Apparently. And you?”

“Very definitely in one piece, all systems go. How do you feel about dinner?”

“I eat it every now and then.”

We dined together for three nights in succession and spent the following weekend in Paris.

“What about your wife?” I enquired when this cross-Channel spree was proposed.

“She’s visiting a sick friend in Nether Wallop.”

“There can’t possibly be a place called Nether Wallop!”

“Check the map!”

I was astonished, but the truth was I knew very little of England. Since coming to London I had poured myself into my work, and on my limited time off I had gone abroad to beaches where I could lie on the sand and do nothing. I arrived too exhausted for sight-seeing and left just when I was sufficiently recuperated to fancy it. The idea of expending precious energy on exploring the south of England was one which had never occurred to me. Even my knowledge of the leafy lanes of Surrey was based on hearsay.

I had always lived in cities. I had only bitter memories of Glasgow, but I could remember Newcastle without wincing and later there had been Oxford, beautiful, honey-coloured Oxford, the gateway to another life and another world. I had lost my Scottish accent when my mother had remarried and moved to Newcastle, and I had lost my Geordie accent as quickly as possible after reaching Oxford; I was an old hand at acquiring new identities, and so, I learned in Paris, was Kim. After his father had died in Argentina in 1949, Kim’s mother had married an American, a move which had enabled Kim to spend the next four years in New York. When the American husband too had died she had married an Englishman, and at the age of thirteen Kim had finally begun to live in Europe.

As we dined together on our first night in Paris I said sympathetically: “It must have been hard to adapt to yet another culture,” but Kim merely said: “I finally got lucky. The English stepfather was good news.”

“And your mother was happy?”

“Presumably.” He thought for a moment before adding: “My mother was the old-fashioned, European type of woman who regarded marriage primarily as a business arrangement.”

Cautiously I said: “She didn’t mind your father being Jewish? I thought anti-Semitism was rife in Germany before the war.”

“He had money, he didn’t practise his religion and he was confident when they met in 1935 that he’d never be targeted.”

“I see.” I found I was unsure what to say next, but Kim remarked easily in his wryest voice: “Although my father died of drink and the American husband got himself shot, my mother finally hit the jackpot with Giles the Brit. He was heavily into money and class but of course, being British, he never discussed them.”

“Surely in the 1950s the British were still poor in comparison with the Americans?”

“My mother wanted to get back to Europe.”

“But didn’t it bother her, marrying a Brit less than ten years after the war?”

“Giles was offering her a beautiful home, a generous dress allowance and an interesting social life. It was obviously time to consign the war to history.”

“Sensible lady!” I said, playing safe by mirroring his ironical tone.

“The real problem was that most of the Brits didn’t feel quite the same as she did, but she faked a great Swiss accent and was soon living happily ever after.”

“How resourceful. But what about you?”

“I was more of a problem, but before I was dumped at public school Giles told me to say I was American. Giles had worked in both Germany and Switzerland before the war, and he realised I’d never succeed in passing myself off as Swiss to anyone who knew anything about the German language. A lot of Americans have German names, and having spent four years in New York I spoke American English anyway.”

“But with a German accent.”

“Believe me, I toned that down in double-quick time once I was incarcerated with several hundred English boys! And any European inflections I passed off as New York yiddish. That was Giles’s idea too.”

“He sounds as resourceful as your mother.”

“Well, he played his cards close to his chest, and I was never sure what he really thought about being saddled with another man’s child, but I realised very early on that I could trust him to do right by me. That was important. It made my life easier because I always knew where I stood with him.”

“Did he officially adopt you?”

“Good God, no, we were never on that kind of footing, but he was the kind of old-fashioned, upper-class Brit who was very good at meeting his responsibilities and he saw to it that I had a first-class education. In return I worked like a Trojan and never gave him a spot of bother. After the years with my father, who was a bit of a bastard, and my first stepfather, who was a complete shit, I knew when I was well off, I assure you.”

I asked if Giles was still alive, but learned that he had died in 1969. At that point Kim’s mother had finally returned to Germany, where she had died of cancer twelve years later.

“Do you have any other German relations?” I asked.

“None survived the war.”

“Not even anyone from your mother’s family?”

“Cologne was heavily bombed.”

I fell silent, glimpsing in that single sentence all the suffering he had glossed over with so little emotion: the exile in foreign lands, the stepfather who had done his duty but refused to adopt him, the ordeal of having to lie at school about his origins, and finally the pragmatic decision to adopt the nationality of the men who had dropped those bombs on Cologne.

I heard myself say: “Did you ever think of settling in Germany with your mother after Giles died?”

“No, by that time I was twenty-nine and my future, thanks to Giles, was quite obviously in England.” He refilled our coffee-cups. In the restaurant around us plenty of people were still dining but our corner table was quiet and secluded. “Well, so much for my secret history!” he said with a smile as he set down the coffee-pot. “Now let’s hear about yours.”

But although I had been anticipating this demand for some time, I found I still had not made up my mind what I was going to say.