‘Phoebe. What d’you mean? You were an escort girl. What d’you mean you were an escort girl?’
‘I was an escort girl. At Ess Es – Essential Escorts. You know what that means.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You went on dates with strangers and slept with them for money.’
‘Yup. Sometimes. Now pull yourself together, Martin. Stop carrying on like a bloody…Ah, good evening to you! We’re here for the –’
‘Quick! Ooh, you get yourself out of the filth, my lovely. Come on in here, the pair of you. That’s it! Quick!’
The vast puddles were aglow with the bone-white reflection of the pale hotel, whose beefeater doorman, a dark purply slab in his greatcoat, beckoned and then led them into a kind of sentry booth (with its fug of fagsmoke, Bovril, and BO).
‘This is more like it, eh? Now,’ he said. ‘How can I help you, young lady?’
Phoebe’s carapace (transparent but as steamy as the window of a fish-and-chip shop) was now unzipped and stepped out of…
‘Sweetheart, you’ve barely a stitch on!’ said Bumble the Beadle wonderingly. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
And both propositions seemed true…The pop-art umbrella, tradenamed the Drolly (which would go on being fashionable for another couple of weeks), had obvious design flaws, and Phoebe, with her frizzed hair, and her ridiculously short flower dress clinging to her torso in pockets of damp, looked leggy, wiry, and crazy, like a ravished rag doll. Martin thought that she also looked driven, or cruelly coerced, as if she hated all this even more than he did.
‘And dear oh dear – you’re soaked through!’
‘What nonsense. I’m as sound as the mail. Now. We’re here for the party. The party for the nude mag called…Shit. The party for the periodical called Oui.’
‘Uh, let’s have a look.’ As he frowned over his clipboard (and as Phoebe frowned over his shoulder), Martin stepped back out.
Only three years earlier he had spent a couple of hours in this hotel: an interview with Joseph Heller. Just around the corner, on Piccadilly, loomed the hotel where, three years later, he was destined to interview Norman Mailer. Life would go on, and literary life would go on; Martin’s fourth novel was currently under way, and there was that long essay he had to write on – what was it? – ‘diversity and depth in fiction’…But for now here he stood, in full ordeal readiness (and additionally weighed down by his dripping corduroy suit). Once inside, he confidently foresaw, as Phoebe went about her work and as he himself short-arsed around trying to get himself drinks and then more drinks, he would be smelling of damp dog and chickenfeed.
‘Are you sure you’ve got the correct venue, love?’
‘Positive. I mislaid the actual invitation but this is definitely the place.’
While this exchange continued on its way, Martin was free to receive two complementary thoughts: Phoebe dressing up as Eve after the Fall; and something from Humboldt’s Gift – I never saw a fig leaf that didn’t turn into a price tag…
‘A party for a magazine,’ Phoebe insisted. ‘Oui. French for yes. Christ, how many parties for magazines can there be? Oui.’
‘There’s a party for a magazine,’ said the doorman. ‘But it’s not called We.’
‘…What can you mean?’
‘It’s called IOU.’
Having taken this in, Martin bowed his head and followed her through the revolving doors.
Cocoa
Night.
It had been waiting in their future, perhaps inexorably. Perhaps for a certainty. Phoebe herself might have placed money on it. And here it was – the night of shame.
At one o’clock in the morning, London, as seen out of the windows of the black cab, was trying to look tranquil and blameless; it looked rinsed and brushed, too, as if the city trucks had just come and sluiced it all down; a wispy breath of mist now seeped from the terraced buildings, from the rooftops with their vague crenellations…
The first thing Phoebe did, on her return, was surge virtuously towards the cooker and the cocoa. After a while Martin came out of the bathroom and through the bedroom and across the sitting room and into the kitchen and said, defeatedly, and as he saw it reasonably drunkenly, deservedly drunkenly (and of course he said what he said tritely too, because the idiom of anger is always trite),
‘Phoebe, you surpassed yourself. That was your worst yet. How could you?’
‘What’s all this? I was just being sociable. God.’
‘Mm. And now – yes. After that kind of evening, what with so many changes of temperature,’ he said in the wheedling tone he knew she hated, ‘and you didn’t dress sensibly, as you yourself, Phoebe, were prepared to admit, and, after all that, what could be more wholesome, more restorative, than a nice cup of something hot?’
‘…No, don’t have another one, Mart.’ She had the kettle’s steam in her hair; she folded her arms while he clacked about in the high cabinet. ‘When I saw you on your fourth glass I thought, Well, he’ll go home singing.’ She looked him up and down with her blokeish sneer. ‘Sing? You can barely…It’s like you’re phoning me long distance. Hello, caller? I can’t hear you, caller. Is there anybody there?’
‘What the fuck were you doing down in that grotto? With that, with that, with that Californian wretch? What was his name?’
With her neck held straight she said, ‘Carlton.’
‘Okay. Carlton had your dress hoicked up over your ribcage!’
With quiet matter-of-factness, taking rightful warmth from her cup with both palms, Phoebe said, ‘He wanted to see it. So I showed him.’
‘Yes, completely straightforward. And logical. Carlton wanted to see it, so you hoicked up your dress and showed Carlton your…?’
‘My mandala. Luckily these pants are see-through so I didn’t have to take them down. I’ll explain,’ she said. ‘Now Carlton’s a corporate raider, but you have to understand that he finds himself drawn, he finds himself increasingly drawn, Martin, to Buddha.’
The Oui party had been ideal for Phoebe’s operations, an Ottoman-themed labyrinth of cushions and low
