My Fair Man

Chapter Three

In the days that followed, Hattie made it a habit, on her way home from work each evening, to detour via the streets of Covent Garden on the off chance of running into the boy called Jimmy.

But he seemed to have moved on or moved pitch because although she saw many other homeless people camped out in doorways near the big theatres she didn’t see him.

She did, though, encounter one of the two men who had been with him on the day of her ill-fated proposition and she attempted to persuade him to pass on a message asking Jimmy to contact her.

But still there was no sign or word from him. In desperation on the Thursday afternoon she took two hours off work in order to visit the offices of the Big Issue in the hope that they might be able to help her to reach him. But they were very nearly as suspicious of her motives as Jimmy had been himself, although they did eventually agree to leave a message pinned on their notice board.

Her mood of desolation was beginning to irritate Toby who was, in any case, totally against the idea of her rising to the bait of Jon’s bet. Her tender-hearted concern for others had been one of the things that had drawn him to her when they had first met, but nearly six years on, at a time when he was beginning to enjoy unexpected professional acclaim, he regarded her continued devotion to lost causes as naïve and unrealistic. Lord knows he was himself a devoted socialist – well, at any rate an ardent supporter of the ideals of New Labour – but he did not relish the idea of cluttering their lives – let alone their flat – with this latest sociological experiment of hers.

Besides, he was in the middle of a major case involving one of the biggest corporations in the country and he felt that he was in far greater need of support and sympathy than Hattie. Although they enjoyed what he claimed to be an equal relationship he secretly retained many of the attitudes and values of his own middle-class parents and believed that the female role in a partnership should be far more domestically rooted and nurturing than that of the male. He shouldn’t have to come home, as he had tonight, to an empty flat and fridge. Some innate sense in him thought that Hattie’s priorities were wrong, that she should put his comfort before that of the redemption of some hopeless stranger, and that his life should be more like that of his father’s – a man whose role at the head of a respectful household Toby now privately envied.

He recognised, of course, the dramatic difference between his father’s circumstances and his own. Their flat did, in fact, belong to Hattie, having been bought, several years before, with some of the income from her trust fund. His own flat – kept on but rented out after they had moved here – was a substantially less impressive property, so unimpressive that currently he was having trouble finding a tenant for it. So while his own mother had been dependent on his father (which probably did encourage a greater degree of respect) Hattie was a woman of independent means. But just because she wasn’t dependent on him for a roof over head didn’t mean that she could ignore, as she persistently did, the domestic details of their life. That weekend he was hosting, at Hattie’s apartment, a small dinner party for the more important people involved in the important case at work. And although the food was being prepared by discreet caterers – Hattie had no interest in cooking – he was concerned that in her present distracted state the dinner would be a disaster.

This feeling of doom was compounded by her arriving home, that Thursday night, at nine thirty with a bleak expression on her face, after having been on yet another hopeless search for her homeless boy.

‘Oh Toby,’ she said in a dejected voice, ‘it breaks my heart to see all those poor people with nowhere to go. I must have spoken to a hundred of them tonight and some of them looked so lost.’

‘Hattie, at the risk of sounding like Jon I really do think it’s time you gave the homeless issue a rest. I appreciate your concern, I know you’re anxious to prove him wrong, but for Christ’s sakes can’t you just get a life?’

‘I have a life, Toby,’ Hattie said coldy as she made her way through to the stainless steel kitchen in search of food.

‘There’s nothing in the fridge, Hattie. It might have been nice – after the day I’ve had – to have come home to something. A piece of hard cheese, a crust of stale bread, a rotten apple …’ he sulked.

‘Look, Toby, I just haven’t had time for any of that this week. And actually I haven’t had such a brilliant day either. I’ve got a particularly difficult case on my hands at the moment,’ she said, thinking of the little girl, Lisa, who had – when she wasn’t searching for the homeless man – occupied her thoughts in the past week.

‘Spare me the details, Hattie. The only way I could have got your attention in the last few days would have been to turn up at one of those soup kitchens with a sign round my neck saying “Homeless and hungry”. That way you might have offered me a little sympathy and I’d have got a hot meal …’

It wasn’t difficult for Toby to make Hattie feel guilty and inadequate. And even though it did flash through her mind that Toby himself might have nipped into M&S on his way home from work, she turned to him with a remorseful expression and put her arms round him in a placatory way.

‘I’m sorry, Toby.’

‘Look, Hattie, I’m going through a bad time myself at the moment. Saturday night’s very important to me and I want you to help me with it—’

‘Saturday night?’ Hattie asked blankly.

‘The dinner, darling. For the Chairman of UCO and all those involved in the case. You know how important it is to me – the first time I’ve hosted something for business at home. Surely you haven’t forgotten?’

‘Of course not. I’m sorry,’ Hattie said, although, in fact, the events of the last week had put his dinner completely out of her mind.

‘I want you to be the perfect hostess on Saturday, Hattie. In the morning we’ll have to go shopping – flowers, candles, a dress that will fit the occasion. You will be co-operative, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ she said, offering him her most radiant smile.

Toby ordered a takeaway and they ate it whilst he gave her brief biographical details of the guests he had invited to the dinner and offered her – in a ten-point note he had carefully written out – various suitable topics of conversation. Hattie looked at the list with growing alarm. She knew very little about any of things Toby had deemed acceptable – the Millennium Dome, the redevelopment of the Opera House, EU economic policy, cars, Bill Gates, cricket, rugby, shooting (hadn’t they banned shooting?), skiing and trout fishing.

‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to say a great deal, Toby,’ she said.

‘Well, try and read up on those things. The Chairman is a member of Lords and heavily into field sports,’ he said commandingly.

He was very relieved that Claire was going to be there, in her capacity as the corporate PR for UCO, to help him keep an eye on Hattie. He had also invited Jon, not as a partner for Claire (heaven forbid) but because he had, of late, become something of a celebrity in business circles. He was the current enfant terrible of advertising, responsible for a series of shocking campaigns – most famously the nineties relaunch of a fifties-style uplift bra that had featured a number of provocative posters that had been outrageously successful. His presence round the table would impress the Chairman (who would probably also be happy to talk about uplift bras).

Toby was a little worried that Hattie might get into some awful philosophical debate with Jon that might cause problems but he felt sure that Claire would be able to deflect any trouble.

Hattie was so keen to make amends for her behaviour that week that she offered, when they had finished their meal, to run him a hot bath and give him a massage. Whilst he sat in the bath she warmed some aromatherapy oil and turned down the lights in their bedroom.

Sensuality did not come easily to Hattie. She had been, her mother had always said, a late bloomer sexually. Her periods had not started until she was nearly sixteen and she had never had the kind of teen crushes enjoyed by her female peers. Toby had been her first serious boyfriend. Her obvious lack of experience and confidence – she had grown up in the shadow of her mother’s legendary beauty – had never really left her, and at times like these – massaging her man as an obvious prelude to sex – she felt as if she were only playing at being grown-up. She was doing – out of a sense of duty really – what she had read women should do in the women’s magazines she occasionally, rather furtively, bought. It didn’t give her any sense of pleasure. In fact she felt rather absurd, sitting astride Toby’s back, working warm oil into his well-toned body. But even though she doubted the skill of her touch he seemed to like it and within a very few minutes he had turned over and grabbed her so that, feeling even more awkward and ill at ease, she was sitting astride Toby’s front working his cock into her pale, slender body.

Because of the seriousness of the crime that Lisa had committed – the actual charge was attempted murder – Hattie was seeing her three times a week. It was, she thought, probably the most difficult case of her career. Generally her patients tended to be either adolescents involved in less severe criminal cases (referred on by juvenile courts) or young children who were the victims of some kind of abuse. It was unusual to encounter a child of Lisa’s age – she was just nine – who had been involved in a violent crime.

They had already fallen into a routine in their sessions. The first half an hour or so they would sit together on the little sofa in Hattie’s office and look at the books. Lisa loved books, probably because they had been denied her by her parents. Each time she came she would pick a book for Hattie to read. And then, if it was progressing well and Lisa was relaxed, they would try to talk about those things that might have a bearing on her behaviour – her parents, her siblings, their Church, her isolation at her school.

Today she had picked out a Roald Dahl book for Hattie to read – The BFG – and, as she had opened the first page, Lisa had crept up and sat on her lap looking uncertainly at Hattie, fearful that she might – like so many other people who knew the details of her crime – recoil from her.

Hattie smiled at her, eager to encourage the trust she was building up with the child. She had come to see Lisa as she might any other patient – as damaged, vulnerable and in desperate need of affection and acceptance. She put one arm around her as she read and Lisa laid her head against Hattie’s shoulder.

She seemed genuinely absorbed in The BFG, smiling at the funny bits, looking a little concerned about the frightening moment when the heroine, Sophie, was snatched from her bed by a twenty-four-foot giant.

‘He’s like Goliath …’ she said.

‘Who, Lisa?’

‘The BFG,’ she said eagerly, ‘and Sophie is like David.’

Lisa’s allusion to the story of David and Goliath was the only indication in her reaction to Roald Dahl’s sometimes sinister story that gave Hattie any inkling that she was at all different from any other child of her age. Most nine-year-olds had a fascination for the macabre, the gruesome and the grotesque. It was just that for Lisa the bloodcurdling stories that had ruled her early life had not been taken from the fairy tales of regular children’s fiction. They had come from the Bible.

‘I’ll have to finish there, Lisa, because we have run out of time. But we’ll read some more next time.’

‘Oh please,’ said Lisa, giving Hattie such a sweet smile that she was suddenly moved to hug her.

‘Are they being kind to you at Linton House?’ Hattie said gently.

Lisa looked down at the floor.

‘Don’t you like it there?’

‘They don’t let me play with the other children …’ she said, tears falling down her face, ‘and when Mummy comes to see me I don’t want her to go.’

It was the first time that Lisa had cried and Hattie leant down and held her, and attempted to offer her comfort. After Lisa had left, led reluctantly away by a social worker, Hattie replayed the tape she had recorded of that afternoon’s session.

Some days, and this was one of them, Hattie found her work emotionally exhausting. God knows, she thought as she prepared to leave the office later that evening, how she was going to cope with Toby’s dinner party. As she put Lisa’s notes in her briefcase to take home to study further, she wondered if she would be able to put aside her work – the fate of this little girl – in order to be that weekend the woman Toby wanted her to be.

Hattie emerged from the changing room wearing the dress Toby had chosen. The way in which she hunched her shoulders made it quite obvious – at least to the sales assistant – that she wasn’t comfortable in the tight cream sheath, but Toby loved it. Although it would never have occurred to Hattie to buy such a dress (and she was nervous of looking at herself in the shop mirror) it was, in fact, perfect on her.

Hattie’s lack of sexual confidence extended to her choice of clothes, and she felt now, as she finally examined her reflection in the softly lit mirror, like a little girl wearing her mother’s clothes, a ridiculous impostor pretending to be a woman.

Claire, who spent a great deal of time, money and artifice on her own appearance, was often amazed at Hattie’s disinterest in clothes and make-up and astonished by her lack of vanity. Claire had long since given up trying to persuade Hattie that she was beautiful. She understood that her friend had some deep-seated physical inferiority complex prompted by the fact that she was so very different from her infamously lovely mother and her celebrated sister.

While Hattie’s mother had brilliant blue eyes and straight, shiny white-blonde hair (even now at fifty-seven) her younger daughter was born with brown eyes and thick, dark curls that she struggled to control. And while both her mother and her elder sister, Arabella, were tall but shapely (they had breasts where Hattie had the merest hint of pectorals) she was short and skinny.

In company her mother had referred to the teenage Hattie as ‘the changeling’ or would say, when anyone remarked on her daughter’s looks, ‘She is a genetic throwback.’ And as a result Hattie had never been able to see her own particular beauty.

‘It would look good with a high heel, I think,’ the fawning shop assistant now said to Toby as they studied the embarrassed Hattie. ‘Suede stilettos …’

Inwardly Hattie groaned at the thought of having to wear this dress and high heels. Had she been able to get away with a pair of black opaque tights and some loafers she might have felt happier but the idea of being forced to wear a pair of sheer glossy stockings and stilettos made her feel even more the child at a fancy-dress party. But she went along with Toby’s wishes – and the awful sales assistant’s advice – because she just wanted to get the whole thing over with.

As well as Hattie’s dress, shoes and a selection of underwear, they bought various props for her empty home: a vast bunch of long-stemmed red chillis to put into plain glass vases, new cutlery and crockery for the table and a number of large church candles. That evening, before their guests arrived, Hattie felt as if both she and their minimalist flat had been sullied and cheapened by the way in which Toby had chosen to adorn them.

‘Put on a little lipstick and smile, darling,’ said Toby when he saw her. And with a heavy heart she went into the bathroom, put aside her trusty Lipsyl, and painted her mouth the same scarlet colour as the chillis that decorated the table. When she emerged Toby was temporarily stunned by her beauty.

‘You’ll do …’ he said, with so little enthusiasm or expression that instead of suffusing her with confidence his off-hand compliment compounded her conviction that she looked terrible.

She had decided, minutes after the arrival of Toby’s client, Tom Charter, and his lovely second wife, that the only thing to do was to drink. That way, she thought, she might achieve a little of the sparkle Toby desired.

For once she was quite relieved to see Jon, who arrived a little later than everyone else. The other guests – a senior partner in Toby’s law firm and the QC advising them on the UCO case, together with their partners – all seemed to know each other and made Hattie rather nervous. It was her own fault, of course, because she was rarely free to enjoy – or for that matter interested in – the social events that punctuated the working lives of these successful men. And Toby’s own reservations about Hattie’s ability to indulge in the right kind of small talk had made it easy for her to escape the dinners and cocktail parties that came with his now burgeoning legal career.

Toby had long since discovered that the name of his girlfriend – that is, her family name – was of more use to him in his career than the woman herself. Her inability to play the social game was a bitter disappointment to him because he knew that in the circles in which he now mixed – and in which he longed to become further enmeshed – Hattie’s family connections would be an enormous asset.

Still, tonight she seemed to be more the woman he secretly wanted. He could tell that Tom Charter – who had played an important part in Toby’s recent elevation within his firm – was taken with her, and he crossed his fingers under the table and quietly prayed that she kept to the list of subjects he had suggested the evening before last.

Claire was carefully installed on the other side of their most important guest so that she could deflect anything that might offend the great man. Tonight she was in full professional mode, partly because Charter’s company – UCO – was one of her most important corporate accounts and partly because, following the events of the previous weekend, she had vowed (not, of course, for the first time) never to allow herself to be used by a man again.

‘So tell me what you do with your days, Hattie?’ Tom asked innocently and affably.

‘Oh, I work at this and that,’ said Hattie, aware that clinical psychology and the decline of the NHS was definitely not on Toby’s conversation list.

Unfortunately, Jon, who was incapable of resisting a quick jab at Hattie, was not going to allow her to escape closer personal scrutiny.

‘Yes, Tom, instead of being the kind of socialite her parents had expected, Hattie has turned into their family’s social conscience. Instead of living up to their upper-class expectations, she prefers to devote herself to administering to the underclass.’

‘Doing what, exactly?’ asked Tom. ‘I’m a clinical psychologist, specialising in children, although most of them nowadays tend to be teenagers. My patients are usually referred to me by the juvenile courts and I have to make an assessment of them. Jon says I have a social conscience but if I have a conscience about anything it is that I don’t do enough, I can only go so far in my work …’ she said, breaking off as she caught a warning glance from Toby.

‘What did your parents want for you?’ asked Tom.

‘Well, I think ideally they wanted Prince Edward,’ said Hattie, her face flushed by her unusually high intake of alcohol. ‘They didn’t really envisage my wanting to do anything much more than my mother or my elder sister had done. Which was, and still is really, to look good and party.’

‘Which,’ said Claire with enforced gaiety, ‘is great work if you can get it.’

‘And makes your choice of career all the more noble,’ said Tom.

‘Not to the nobility,’ said Hattie with a bitter laugh. ‘I am something of an embarrassment to them. They regard me as a sad eccentric’

‘But your family is famous for its eccentricity,’ prompted Tom.

‘My great-aunt’s divorce case – the citing of the entire English cricket team – and my grandfather’s insistence on sleeping in a silk-lined coffin for the last twenty years of his life – were what you might call conventional acts of aristocratic eccentricity. What I do – working with the mentally displaced and socially deprived – makes me a much more peculiar animal.’

There was an awkward silence.

‘But surely your parents are at least proud of your academic achievements? Blue stockings match well with blue blood, don’t they?’

‘I think they are much prouder of my sister, whose only qualifications in life are her looks and her ability to attract the attention of the gossip columns.’

Tom Charter and his wife, rather like Hattie’s family really, were far more interested in her sister, Arabella’s, outrageous lifestyle than they were in her own rather dull existence. In fact Mamie Charter clearly found the subject of Arabella’s love life – which only that month had involved an infamous ageing rock star – fascinating. Much to Toby’s relief.

‘You must meet Bella,’ he said enthusiastically.

‘You’d love her,’ said Claire. ‘She’s an absolute hoot.’

Hattie fell silent. Her earliest childhood memories involved cruel comparison with her glittering elder sister. And although she had no desire to compete on any level with Arabella she nevertheless resented the way in which her sister – and of course her mother – haunted her life and made her feel, at least in situations like this, wanting.

Curiously it was Jon who rescued her.

‘Bella has always reminded me of those Persian cats that used to feature in carpet ads. A woman whose lush beauty – vast eyes, wide, full mouth and big hair – distracts the viewer from what lies beneath: a skinny, spoilt creature of very little brain.’

Hattie, rather pleased by Jon’s unusually perceptive description of her sister, began to clear the table in preparation for the entrance of the main course. All in all, she decided when Toby smiled at her, things were going quite well.

Mamie Charter even complimented Hattie on the food, and although such dishonesty was foreign to her she smiled modestly as if in acknowledgement of her culinary skills. Clearly Mamie’s husband, who had taken centre stage at the dinner and was relating a series of elaborate stories to an enraptured (if somewhat obsequious) audience, was enjoying himself enormously. Leaning back in the Bauhaus chair, puffing on a Monte Cristo No. 4, and laughing uproariously at his own punch line – which totally baffled Hattie but reduced the rest of the table to helpless merriment – he declared it a great evening.

It was at that point, as Hattie was beginning to anticipate the departure of her guests and relishing the thought of finally kicking off her horrid high heels, that the doorbell went.

‘It’s probably Tompkins,’ said Mamie nervously to her husband.

‘Didn’t you tell him to just wait in the car?’ said her husband, an edge of savagery entering his voice as he addressed his wife.

‘I must have forgotten,’ she said meekly.

‘Well, let him bloody well wait,’ said Tom before beginning on another of his long anecdotes.

The bell rang again and Hattie got up, despite Tom and Mamie’s protestations. She made her way to the door secretly rather relieved by the interruption.

It was dark in the hallway outside the apartment door. Despite the fact that this was one of the most exclusive developments in west London, the communal areas were badly lit. At first Hattie couldn’t make out the shape of the man who stood nervously before her, although she realised at once that it could not possibly be the Charters’ poor oppressed chauffeur. Opening the door wider to let the brilliant halogen lighting from her apartment flood the hallway she gasped with a mixture of delight and shock when she finally recognised the late night caller who was standing hunched before her.

‘Jimmy!’

He didn’t move for a moment and when he did pull himself up it was clear that there was something wrong. He was hurt or ill.

‘What’s wrong, Jimmy?’ she said.