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‘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.
chapter Five (#ulink_e489aafe-8a9d-5404-86a6-04ac3284ed81)
visceral couture (#ulink_e489aafe-8a9d-5404-86a6-04ac3284ed81)
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 into fits, but leaving, in the real world, plenty of time to check in and board by quarter past nine.
I dressed comfortably for travelling, in a Clements Ribeiro, and my second favourite pair of JP Todds. There was the inevitable quick panic before I left, and I had to run to the station, wrestling with my smart new Burberry. Even worse, I was forced to finish my make-up on the tube, which always makes me feel like a slut.
I met Penny by the Eurostar check-in. As usual she was sowing chaos around her, pushing where she should be pulling, gesticulating at strangers, and snapping at Hugh, who’d come along to see her off - with, I don’t doubt, a heavy sigh of relief.
As ever, her look hovered somewhere between magnificence and absurdity, generally keeping just on the right side of the border. This time she was doing her film star travelling incognito number, in dark glasses and a mad Pucci scarf, which helped to draw the eye away from the truly magnificent full-length sable coat. She had somehow inherited or otherwise acquired the coat from Hugh’s side of the family, and such was its luxuriance that nobody ever suspected that it was real. The overall effect was very Sophia Loren.
Hugh kissed me hello, and then quickly again for goodbye. Penny managed a condescending peck on the cheek, acknowledging that our Paris trips were not quite work, and not quite play.
The drama reached something of a peak on the way up to the platform. There was the usual choice between squishy lift, and jostly escalator. As the lift queue seemed to be full of Belgians, Penny decided to go for the escalator, a device she habitually shunned. Big mistake. She clung to the rail as though the escalator were a tiny ship caught in a tempest.
‘My feet, Katie,’ she cried, ‘my feet! What do I do with them? Where do they go?’
‘Just close your eyes and pretend it’s a normal stair,’ I said, colouring at the attention we were attracting. ‘O God, let me … hang on … just put that … and that one there.’
People were looking round. The Belgians in the lift queue pulled Magritte faces, and pointed with umbrellas.
And then it stopped.
Stuttered.
And then stopped.
‘We’ll asphyxiate!’ yelled Penny, illogically. ‘Come on, we must go back.’
By this stage we were halfway up, and there must have been fifty people crammed in behind.
‘Penny, we can’t!’ I tried feebly.
But Penny had switched from helpless panic mode, to all-action hero. She swept around, through, or over the hapless travellers, who were all waiting patiently for the wretched machine to get going again. She was like one of those ships that smash through the arctic pack ice on the way to pointless expeditions. First Woman to reach the North Pole without Sanitary Protection sort of thing. I followed shamefaced but, as so often with the indefatigable Penny, not a little admiring.
The lift doors opened just as we reached the foot of the escalator. Penny hesitated not one second, but barged straight in, past the bemused Belgians, waving an arm, and saying, in a tone that forbade any argument, ‘Excuse me, this is an emergency. We are designers. I am Penny Moss.’
A Eurostar lackey bowed. Honestly, he did. He may, of course, have been drunk.
Things settled down a little once we found our seats, and within twenty minutes Penny was relaxing into her second glass of champagne, as Kent or Sussex, or whatever it is, slid by in a happy green and brown blur.
I was facing the wrong way, of course. Penny always liked to see where she was going. But I didn’t really mind. I’ve always thought - and pay attention here, because this is about the only profound thought I’ve ever had - I’ve always thought that life is like facing the wrong way on the train. Because, you see, the present, the bit of countryside that’s exactly equal to where you are, is over before you know it’s there, and then all you have is the dwindling afterwards of it. And though you can guess what sorts of things are going to come rushing over your shoulder, because you can see roughly what sort of terrain you’re in, there’s always the chance of something really unexpected or scary, like a tunnel, or a field with horses, or Leeds.
Oh. I always thought it would look better when I wrote it down. Perhaps I just can’t do profound.
‘Interesting young man, that Milo,’ said Penny, between sips. In the rush I’d forgotten about her dramatic appearance at the party. ‘He said that he would also be in Paris, which was an amusing coincidence. He seemed so sensitive, so … attentive.’
‘That’s the way of the PR, Penny. He probably had you down as a potential client.’
‘Oh no, I really don’t think his interest was professional. I really am rather afraid I may have made another of my tragic conquests.’
I choked on a complimentary peanut.
‘But, Penny, you must realise that Milo …’ And then I stopped. This was really too delicious. Milo was going to love it. ‘You must know that Milo is terribly, um, confused … shy … vulnerable.’
‘Yes, I sensed it. And you feel I would be simply too much woman for him in his present state? Of course, of course. Not that I would ever stray; it’s been so long now. But there’s no law against dreaming,’ she said wistfully, her fingers pulling at the hem of her skirt. ‘And I do so feel for the poor boy, torn between the fatal intensity of possession and the emptiness of loss.’
Already the journey was living up to expectations.
Champagne for Penny was a time machine and eventually Milo was left behind and we found ourselves back in the sixties. Exactly which bit of the sixties was hard to work out, and Penny never specified, as that would have given away too much. I suspect it was a largely imaginary place, a sixties of the mind, a distillation of different times, combining late fifties debutante innocence with the lollipopcoloured, country-house drug scene of ’69.
First, of course, there were the RADA years. She seemed to have been worshipped by Albert Finney, adored by Richard Harris, and fondled by Peter O’Toole (or as I’m sure I heard it, tooled by Peter O’Fondle). In between her white-gloved carousing she flitted from voice production, to mime, to fencing (‘my sabre cuts once reduced Roy Kinnear to tears, poor lamb’), to ballet, to make-up, and back to voice. Her long-dead tutors Ernest Milton, Hugh Millar, Edward Burrage, joined us in the carriage, still graceful, fruity and fey.
She talked of nights in the Gay Hussar or the White Elephant, followed by dancing to Dudley Moore in The Basement. Satire at the Establishment always seemed to go with bizarre passes by comedians: Lenny Bruce offered to share his syringe, Frankie Howerd performed some act of dark obscenity (‘well darling, I was in drag …’).
Most of all, there were the clothes.
‘Darling, I was divine in my white piquet Mary Quant, top-stitched in black, and over it a black piquet coat with a stand away collar … and Ossie Clarke gave me a bias cream crépe with a keyhole neck … and I wore my ribbed yellow wool A-line Courrèges, with the sweetest little pair of silver-buckled Guccis.’
I sat back in my seat, drifting in and out of Penny’s monologue. Every now and then I’d snap into focus to hear her say something like, ‘… and then I looked down and Princess Margaret’s hand was on my knee …’ or ‘… I’d never seen anything like it before or since; I swear it was purple …’.
Who knows how much of it was true? Penny had a way of believing in her own creations, and that gave them a reality, a truth beyond any humdrum business of fact. But there’s something more to it with Penny. It’s as if things only ever exist when they’ve been externalised: talked about, or paraded before you. Nothing happens on the inside with Penny. What she thinks, she says, or rather she only thinks them once she’s said them. And, for all her extravagant displays of affection and loathing, I’m sure she’d have no feelings at all if there weren’t people around to observe them. I suppose that this is just another way of saying that she’s a drama queen. But drama queen is too ordinary and plebeian a concept for Penny. Perhaps drama empress comes closer. And how she loves a drama! I promise, more than once, I’ve seen her place the back of her hand across her forehead and literally swoon, generally speaking onto the first-floor ottoman, which might have been designed for such things.
I dozed and, without even noticing the tunnel bit, I found we were in France. You can always tell by the sudden profusion of small, erratically driven vans on the roads. And then the Gare du Nord. I was sent off to find a trolley, while Penny, swaying gently on the platform, defended our cases from the predatory French porters.
There are two quite distinct sides to our trips. The bad bit is the marathon trudge around the fabric stands that fill the three huge hangars, big enough for airships, of the Premiére Vision exhibition. That consumes days two and three. It’s no fun, but it’s worth it, because it buys me, us, the good bit.
The good bit is Paris itself. I don’t care how much cooler Milan and New York are; I don’t care if the food is better in London, or the weather nicer in Rome. For me Paris has always been my Emerald City, my Wonderland, my place of dreams. As a girl I used to think that if I could just get high enough in the park swings I’d be able to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower peeping over the monochrome, rain-dulled roofs of East Grinstead. I’d get Veronica to push. ‘Higher! Higher!’ I’d shout. But she was never up to the job, and I resented her for it.
And Penny is different, in Paris. Of course, she’s still a tyrant, and a bully; she still imagines that the world exists to pay her homage, or at least to make her life easy, and she still reacts with outrage when her importance is not acknowledged. But in Paris Penny manages to exude a light that warms, rather than dazzles. Somehow the hand thrust into the face of the waiter at L’Assiette charms his habitually pursed lips into obeisance. Somehow her attempts at the language, an extraordinary mixture of underworld argot, finishing-school refinement, and simple error (I once translated her instructions to a taxi driver back to her, with just the merest touch of editorial licence as, ‘Hey, fuck ears, we would be enchanted if you could direct for us your carriage to the front portal of our castle. You have the scrotum of a bat.’), is greeted with indulgent good humour by the snootiest of Parisians.
We always stayed at the Hotel de l’Université, on the Rue de l’Université in St Germain. This may surprise you, but we shared a room: it was another part of the strange intimacy of our Paris times. The payoff, the compensation to me of Penny’s gentle snoring, and to her, for my whatever it is that irritates her, is that we had the grandest room: a Neo-Classical cube of perfection. The Université could not have existed anywhere else in the world. It combined, in Penny’s words, ‘the stately grace of Racine with the panache and verve of Molière.’ The service was attentive, but restrained, and even the youngest of the doormen knew that Penny, and not I, was the one to flirt with.
Most of all, the Université was perfect for the shops. And when in Paris, boy did Penny shop. You see, she never bought other people’s clothes in London: it seemed to her too much like sleeping with the enemy. But in Paris, despite the fact that she chose the same designers that she shunned at home, it was somehow, okay. And for once there was some logic to her logic.
And so, after leaving our cases in our room, we skipped, on that first afternoon, as on every first Parisian afternoon, from Prada, to Paule Ka, to Kashiyama (not that it’s called Kashiyama any more, but Penny could never remember its silly new name, and would look helplessly at me if I used it), to Sabbia Rosa, and then back to Prada again. Leather was on the menu, and we both found something suitable; she in a rich chocolatey brown, me in camel.
Because I’m in fashion you probably think that buying clothes is something of a busman’s holiday for me. Working for fifty hours a week neck deep in the kind of clothes that ninety-nine per cent of the population can only dream about must, you surmise, dull the appetite? Wrong, so wrong. I still feel the near-erotic pleasure, the juddering, ecstatic, transforming joy of clothes. I love the foreplay: the touching, smelling, breathing of beautiful fabrics, before the sweet consummation of trying on, and the sublime climax of the purchase. I shiver still for satin-backed crêpe: cool, like a diamond, to the tongue. How thrilling it was to find out that silk velvet smells exactly as it should, of earth and leaf-mould.
It is still now as intense as the first time, that wonderful afternoon when Dad, for the only occasion in his sad life getting things exactly right, brought me home a perfect princess dress of polyester pink taffeta, studded with rosebuds, with a satin sash and a net underskirt. It was my sixth birthday. At the party Veronica spilled jelly on the dress and I pulled her hair until she cried. She was lucky I didn’t drown her in the jelly bowl.
The first evening we had dinner in a little bistro that Penny claimed to have been coming to since her honeymoon, when she and Hugh had spent a month living in a brothel. Or that was Penny’s story, and a very amusing one it was, full of comic misunderstandings of a classic French farcical kind. Hugh told me it was actually a perfectly respectable hotel, that just happened to have a lot of velvet about the place. But Penny never let truth get in the way of a good story, or, for that matter, a bad one.
The bistro was like a thousand others in Paris, although it claimed distinction by virtue of an assumed connection with an ancient guild of carpenters, or wheelwrights, or hairdressers. (Penny could never get the story straight, and it had a habit of changing depending on which of the waiters you asked, should you have the curiosity to enquire.) In honour of this association there hung from the ceiling an intricately carved something, a kind of gothic parrot cage. Again depending on the whim of the waiter, this could be a model of the vaulting of Notre Dame, a Medieval clock, or ‘une machine pour fabriquer les cigarettes’.
As usual Penny asked me what I’d like, and then ordered something else for me altogether. And as usual it was an unmentionable part of a pig, with a gizzard garnish. Before our food arrived, but well into the second glass of wine, Penny broke off from a rambling monologue on what we should look out for at Premiére Vision the next day, and gave me a long and searching look, her eyes seeming both to widen, and yet sharpen their focus. That look was one of her specialities, and perhaps her single greatest business asset. No man, and few women, could sustain eye contact with her in Basilisk mode for long. It was her complete self-confidence of course, the total absence of those goading, middle-of-the-night doubts that riddle most of us, that gave her gaze its power.
‘Katie, darling, do tell me what’s wrong.’ That was a bit of a shock. It seemed that Penny had had another of those rare, invariably cynical flashes of insight.
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘Katie my dear, I know you. I know how you are. I know your ways.’ None of those things, I must add, was true, or even nearly true. Penny knew Penny; Penny knew the fashion business; Penny may well have known how to dance the Highland Fling, but Penny did not know me. The trouble was that something was wrong. I simply couldn’t stop thinking about Liam. His face was projected onto elaborate eighteenth-century façades; his voice whispered through elegant corridors, his smile glimmered at me from the silver highlights on the grey-brown waters of the river.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
Penny blinked away my objection.
‘Darling, I’m here to help. I know what it is. It’s Ludo isn’t it?’
Ludo? What did she mean? There was no way she could know about anything. Unless Liam had … no, that was impossible. She was speculating, trying to lure me out. Play, I thought, the innocent which, after all, I was.
‘Ludo’s a sweetie. What could be the matter there?’
‘Katie, you’re being brave. But I know you must be in anguish on the inside.’
I wouldn’t have called it anguish. What the hell was she getting at?
‘You must be a bit tipsy,’ I said, without any malice.
‘Darling,’ she said, ignoring me, ‘you must understand that men are different from us. They have stronger … passions. You cannot blame them as individuals; it’s the species that’s to blame. I saw it on the television: their genes make them do all kinds of horrid things. We must learn to tolerate, to turn and face away. Victorian hypocrisy has something to be said for it.’
I was now completely baffled.
‘What do you mean, stronger passions? What horrid things?’ I asked. But as I spoke I began to realise what the old witch was up to. She was suggesting that Ludo was having an affair, or at least indulging in what Hugh would call, ‘a touch of oats, wild, the sowing of’. And that rubbish about not blaming. If poor old Hugh ever did anything more than flirt, she’d be at him with the pinking shears quicker than you could say ‘emasculation’. And why would she intimate that her beloved son was acting the young buck to his prospective spouse? There could be only one answer: she had not yet renounced her goal of driving us apart, of saving the family silver from the counter-jumper. I had no idea if this latest stratagem was devised in advance, or improvised on the spot. Either way, I had no intention of allowing it to succeed.
‘But Ludo hasn’t got any passions, except for the sea eagles, and socialism, and curriculum reform, and things. They are a bit boring, but I don’t really mind them.’
‘Of course there are those … enthusiasms Ludo permits you to know about, and then there are those which are secret.’
‘Penny, enough. Ludo is the most transparent, least secretive, person I’ve ever met. I’m sure you as a mother like to think of him as a roguish blade, irresistible to women, but that’s just not the way he is. I love him, but that’s because of what he …’
‘Has?’
‘No, Penny, because of what he is on the inside.’
I felt a bit stupid because of that ‘on the inside’ stuff, but I knew I had won the moral high ground: not, generally, a terrain I’m particularly familiar with, but a rather satisfying place to find oneself. In any case, Penny was silenced, although that might have had more to do with the arrival of her sole, and my snout, than my redoubtable defence of her son’s honour, and our love.
I wish I could make Premiére Vision itself sound more interesting or glamorous. Of course it’s very heaven if you’re a fabric junkie. Every important, and most unimportant, European manufacturer is there. How many? I don’t know; a thousand, maybe? Two thousand? And that’s an awful lot of luscious silk-velvet, fine wool crépe, and oh-so-wearable viscose. And so it draws the world’s designers. They come here eager for inspiration, desperate to find that look, the same and yet different from the others, strange and yet familiar, unusual enough to be a must-have, practical enough to become a must-wear.
And they come also to eye each other furtively, to chart slyly the course woven by competitors, to kiss and to smile, and to joke insincerely; to cut, occasionally, an old foe, or a new friend; to drink champagne on the terrace bar; to sneer, to snoop, to gossip, and to weep.
As soon as you negotiate your way through the surely exaggeratedly Gallic security (Penny never seems to mind the intimate body searches, offering herself up like those fish you hear about who go to special parts of the sea to be nibbled clean by other, smaller fishes) you find yourself in the first of the three colossal, hangar-like halls. Colossal and yet, because of the oppressively low roof, with its sinister girders and gantries, strangely claustrophobic.
Gliding from stand to stand, her fine head high, her step majestic, Penny was in her element. Penny Moss may only be a little company, but, with Penny in the ring, it punched above its weight. Junior assistants would be imperiously thrust aside, and factory managers summoned from dark corners, from which they would emerge brushing away crumbs and smiling meekly.
My job was to see to it that Penny made no major mistakes, ensuring that her (now irregular) flashes of brilliance were not undermined by (the increasingly common) gaffes. Who, after all could forget the Year of Lemon and Purple? The tactic, as you can probably guess, was to make Penny think that everything was her idea anyway. Flicking through the samples, she’d find something that caught her eye, and she’d make a noise, indicating pleasure or revulsion. I would join in with subtle harmonies, or really quite delicate dissonance. Either way, the right decision would emerge. There may, at some deep level, have been a knowledge that I was contributing to, perhaps even determining, our choices. But at the level of consciousness, or at least insofar as that consciousness found itself transformed into words, the job was all Penny, and my role merely that of factotum, sandwich girl, and drudge.
I was on my best behaviour, and in my worst mood. Penny’s clumsy attempt to prize Ludo from my arms had, if you’ll pardon a moment of melodrama, frozen my heart. And in Paris, of all places, where we were supposed to be friends, sisters, almost, with our shared room, and our suppers together, and the world to be won. I know that revenge is a dish best served cold, but that shouldn’t necessarily limit your range: I planned whole buffets.
But then I’d done that before, and my plans always ended up like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. I always mean to be vindictive, but when it comes down to it I tend to forget what I was supposed to be angry about, or I just lose interest, and so I settle for a good long bitching session with Veronica. And anyway, Penny was a special case. I’d worked too hard to get where I was to risk losing it. Penny being a cow was always part of the deal.
So, over the course of the day, I let slip my plans for punishment beatings, sabotage, slander, and fraud. But, by some weird alchemical process, as these silly thoughts fell away, they left behind a strange residue. That residue solidified into the form of an Irish driver of vans. It certainly wasn’t that I decided to use Liam as revenge against Penny. Penny couldn’t possibly be hurt by that. The opposite, in fact. It would be to offer her my head on a plate. It was more a moral thing. Being treated badly by Penny made it okay to do something harmlessly wicked myself.
Towards the end of the day, as Penny was having a grappa with Signor Solbiati, a sad figure in crumpled linen, happy to escape into nostalgia with an old acquaintance, I noticed a familiar, elegant frame sliding towards me followed by a less familiar, less elegant shadow.
‘So, Milo,’ I said, ‘what did you make of Penny in the all-too-solid-flesh?’ I was expecting viaducts of archness, but I was to be disappointed.
‘She was something of a hit. Added much to the gaiety of what was becoming a rather tiresome party. After all your griping I had no idea she was going to be such a scream.’
‘So,’ I laughed, ‘she was right then.’
‘Right about what?’
‘You do fancy her.’
His reply was more thoughtful than bitchy, ‘Well perhaps if she were forty years younger and a boy. Let’s go for an ice cream. This, by the way, is Claude, Claude Malheurbe.’
I looked blankly at the middle-aged man by his side. He was profoundly unattractive, with one of those faces that looks like it’s been put on upside down. He was wearing a black silk shirt, unbuttoned to show his pale chest, tight black trousers, and a pair of disastrous black pixie boots. His hair was long, and smelled strongly of mousse.
‘Claude Malheurbe,’ repeated Milo, with emphasis.
