I did. It was like one of those stories, about the father who takes his young son to the whorehouse at the edge of town. He leads the boy to the pro, pays her handsomely, and instructs her to give the boy a birthday rite of passage he’ll never forget. Afterwards, the father takes his son back, tips and woman and says: “Thank you for turning my boy into a man.” And, in the old, old story, the boy glows with spent pride.
Aunty Anne and Serena led me into Piccadilly, then Knightsbridge, with fatherly care. They took me to the correct glass altars and made me spend. Aunty Anne did her own spending, collecting valuables for her new home. She was like the father who, to pass the time, diddles the brothel-keeper, an old friend of his.
I couldn’t get very excited about all of this. You were meant to come out of the revolving doors swinging your heavy shopping bags by their gold braid handles and you were meant to be ecstatic. I couldn’t keep up the ardour. My excitement—and I did try hard, for the sake of the others—pretty much flopped.
While Aunty Anne and Serena tried on clothes I slunk off to a gleaming coffee bar and wrote out large cheques to Mandy, Linda and Timon. I told Mandy to leave her Professor, Linda to leave her boring new husband, and Timon to come with Belinda to see me. I posted them off and decided I wasn’t going to spend another penny that day.
I would try to think more clearly about the whole thing. About the next thing.
The ladies found me sitting at a table at a Rennie-Mackintosh fountain, following the iron curlicues of a peacock’s tail with my gaze, completely absorbed, and to them I looked morose. I was so out of step with them. They were in their glory days, I realised. Aunty Anne’s independence had come at last. They were free to live the high life they had always wanted, and had goaded each other into finding. In an old Hollywood film, this period in Aunty Anne’s life would be represented by a breathless, luminous montage of her having a whale of a time: riding in taxis, pointing impulsively out of the window, measuring new, vast windows for curtains, instructing removal men and artisans, trying on a range of fabulous hats, going to the races and stepping out of those eternally revolving doors, swinging her shopping bags.
The first thing that came back from Timon and Belinda was a
spray of pink lilies, delivered one morning to Serena’s flat in Kilburn. A tight, frosty morning, newly February. The man carried the flowers to Wendy like they were a baby, swaddled in polythene. The outward furling petals looked so exotic, bobbing on their stalks. The orange stamens goggled as Wendy took the prize.“Lilies are for funerals,” said Aunty Anne. “Haven’t we had enough of those?”
Serena fussed around Wendy. “Oh, they’re for any time. These are magnificent. So fleshy and cool. Who sent them?”
Wendy read the card. “Timon and Belinda. They found a florist in the Western Isles.”
She read:
We’re coming to see you! And we’re bringing back the cheque so you can rip it up—very kind of you and all, but—well, anyway, we’ll talk about it when we get there—in the wicked city—we’re going to be famous, Wendy!—we’ve got some footage!—breath-taking world-shocking mother-fucking footage!—This will be as big as the 1967 Big Foot home movie, when the lady Big Foot was filmed running back into the snowy woods through the fallen logs—and as talked about as the alien autopsy at Roswell in 1947—oh, boy—you’ll see, Wendy—you’ll see what we’ve seen!—Just wait!
Love to you,
Timon and Belinda.
Wendy looked up. “They’ve filmed some UFOs.”
Aunty Anne tutted.
“They’ve got evidence?” asked Serena sharply. At Christmas she had heard all about Belinda’s preoccupations.
“Apparently. They’re bringing it to show us.”
“They’re coming here?”
“To London. I don’t know where they want to stay.”
Aunty Anne looked at Serena as if to say, see? Now you’ll see. Here come all of Wendy’s funny friends.
Aunty Anne was about to move out to Putney at last.
Anne had ridden all over London on the tops of buses and in her taxis, her A to Z flat on her lap, spying out her perfect house. “And it has to be perfect,” she said, “because this is me, now. This will be the place where I will eventually drop. I mean, I’ll stay there—in bliss—until my dying day. No compromise this time. I’ll know exactly what I want when I see it.”
It turned out that the best she could imagine for herself was a tall, narrow house in Putney. It was just across from a florist and a chain French restaurant, here she soon enjoyed going for late breakfasts. Serena was gently scornful of Anne’s choice of mansion home. But her friend had fallen in love at first sight. “Look,” said Anne. “All these beautiful, empty white rooms. I don’t need any more than these.”
She started to ask Wendy when she would move in with her.
Wendy saw, suddenly, that she was in a tricky position. Serena stepped in. This was over pastries and bowls of coffee in Café Blanc, opposite the new, empty house. “I don’t think Wendy knows what her plans are yet.”
“What are you, her secretary?”
“Perhaps Wendy is going to buy her own home?”
“She isn’t even eighteen. Of course she isn’t. I’m the one looking after her.”
Wendy sighed. There was no use intervening in skirmishes between her aunty and her friend. Wendy and her homelessness were the ostensible subjects, but this exchange had more to do with a host of historical entanglements the two women had got themselves into. They were cool with each other for the rest of that day, rallying only later, when Anne bought Serena a very smart handbag.
It was at about this time that Wendy went through Piccadilly late one night,
